Nowhere Child Read Online Free PDF

are looking for you now?’
    We both knew Emma wasn’t the only one asking about me, and although I tried to pretend the police are looking because I’m a runaway, that isn’t very convincing given the number of other kids there are on the streets. Why single me out for special treatment?
    ‘They want me because of what I did.’ I said it out loud; I admitted I had done something terrible. And I knew I would have to tell Andy the rest.
    He waited. He was good like that. So I told him I had stolen Ollie – my cute, lovable, baby half-brother – that I had walked out of the house with him, and handed him over to Rory. I just stuck to the facts; I kept to myself the way I had felt, but the memories came flooding back.
    At first, the planning had felt good. I wanted to punish my dad for betraying me and for setting up the abduction that had killed my mother all those years earlier. But Ollie had made me feel soft inside, and I wasn’t expecting that. I kept telling myself to stop being weak, that my dad deserved the pain and that I had to save myself from the alternative life I knew was my only other option.
    Walking out of the house with Ollie had been easy. I had felt quite clever for a moment. But when I picked his warm little body out of his pushchair and held him out to Rory – a man who stank of stale booze and cigarettes – I had felt sick. Ollie had turned back to me, stretched out his arms towards me, wanting me to take him back from the horrible man who was squeezing him too tight. He had looked frightened, his eyes wide and his mouth open, ready to scream. Rory had put his hand over Ollie’s mouth and I’d shouted then. ‘Don’t hurt him,’ I had cried. ‘He’s just a baby.’
    At that moment I had wanted more than anything to take Ollie back – to pluck his chubby body in its cuddly down romper suit from Rory’s arms and run as fast as I could.
    But I didn’t tell Andy any of this. I only told him what I had done.
    He stared at me with his mouth open like a goldfish. I had to carry on. I didn’t want to make it sound less than it was: evil, mean, destructive. I had thought then that it was the only thing I could do, but how could I explain this to a kind, thoughtful boy like Andy? That Finn had given me no choice? That he had planned it and made it clear what my options were?
    I rushed to finish my story, swallowing my words as they spilled out, telling him stuff I hadn’t wanted him to know, but feeling I had to somehow make excuses for myself.
    ‘Finn told me if I didn’t take Ollie, I would have to go to Julie’s, the place my friend Izzy – the one who killed herself – escaped from. It wasn’t a good place, Andy. Anyway, I hated my dad. I still do, for what he did. I wanted to make him suffer.’
    But never Ollie, I thought to myself. It should never have been Ollie. My baby brother.
    Andy was quiet for a moment, thinking. He picked up a pebble and threw it up and down in the air, catching it and tossing it up again, as if he was weighing everything up.
    ‘So why does Emma want you back, do you think, if you stole her bairn?’
    ‘I don’t know. It doesn’t make sense to me. That’s why I had to leave. The police would have arrested me, Emma hated me, my dad was a useless piece of crap – and I couldn’t go back to Rory because I’d grassed on him and the rest of them. He’d have killed me. What else could I have done? So I came here.’
    ‘What happened to Rory and Finn, then?’ Andy asked.
    I didn’t know the answer. I’d been trying to find out – to track down some of the other kids from the Slaters’ house. I’d hung around their school for a while at the beginning, hiding in the door of a derelict house that had obviously been the victim of a fire, because everything I touched turned my fingers black. But none of the kids ever came. They musthave been taken somewhere else. I didn’t know if Rory had done a runner with the lot of them, or been locked up for keeping