Not As We Know It Read Online Free PDF

bike a few times.
    Last time Ned went up, he came home with both his knees dripping blood and his right eyebrow split open. Ned is fearless. He’s banned from the prison road now.
    I agreed to go with Tibs. I couldn’t stand and listen by the closed garage door all morning. And I couldn’t go in. No Kirk to go before me.
    I went to check with Granddad. He was asleep. I was pretty sure he’d be fine with me going, though. I fetched my bike from beside the garage and checked the latch. It was as far across as it could be.
    I turned away from Tibs, who was waiting by the gate, and whispered through the door, “I’ll bring some more fish later.” I would, when Ned was back. Then I remembered my brother laughing at me. Leonard can’t speak English.
    As we mounted our bikes outside the gate, Mrs. Clarke appeared, a broom in one hand and a cigarette in the other. “Shouldn’t you boys be learning something somewhere?” she called.
    It was usually Ned who spoke for us when needed. I tried to think what my brother would say.
    “We’re going on a field trip, Mrs. Clarke” was the best I could come up with.
    As we cycled away, little Peter, Peewee, waved from his front garden and shouted at us, “Hello!”
    We waved back.
    —
    Tibs is fast going downhill but slow on the way up. He spends his Saturdays in the post office selling stamps and nicking sweets off his dad’s shelves. He’s a bit rounder than most of the boys at school.
    “Slow down, Jamie,” he called to me as I pedaled away up the hill.
    I was used to waiting. Ned was getting weaker all the time. I remember when we were little, apart from the cough and all the doctors, there wasn’t much difference between me and my twin. He’d stopped growing, though, while I’d shot up taller than Mum.
    We went as high as we could, all the way to the
No Entry for Unauthorized Personnel
sign. We stopped and stared down at Portland, the beach and the coast of the mainland spread out before us.
    “So, how is Ned?” Tibs asked.
    At school, sometime before we’d left, they’d had this assembly about considering people’s differences and not asking about things you did not understand. Everyone knew it was about Ned. People weren’t supposed to ask how he was.
    Ned didn’t like it. He’d rather just tell people to shut their mouths, whenever they asked.
    That instruction made me happy, though, because people asked me more than they asked Ned. I had nothing to tell them; no one talked to me about the illness.
    I had nothing to tell Tibs now, nothing that wasn’t about a fish-man, living in our garage. I shrugged. “Let’s go,” I said, and set off fast. I soon slowed. I was Leonard McCoy. I didn’t go anywhere boldly.
    “Damn it, Jim. I’m a doctor, not a stunt cyclist.”

Granddad was pleased I’d gone out with Tibs. He worried about us being cooped up too much. He had argued with Mum and Dad when they took us out of school. But as Ned grew weaker, so did Granddad’s arguments. Now he wanted my brother
in
as much as our parents did. He still wanted me
out,
though.
    Granddad and I had cheese on toast for lunch. Granddad ate his with a raw onion. I had mine with tomato. Then we played Risk.
    Granddad says you can learn a lot of history and geography from Risk: The World Conquest Game. You have a map of the world split into territories, not all real countries, then you have your own little army and have to conquer the world.
    In Granddad’s version, you can’t conquer a territory unless you can answer a question about it. If you want to conquer Western Australia you might need to know that Willem Janszoon was the first European to see its coastline. Or that Australia was called New Holland when it was first discovered. If you want to conquer the Urals, you’d need to know that their highest point is Mount Narodnaya or, an easier one, that they form the border between Europe and Asia. If you want Argentina, you’d need to know why we had just been at war