Out of Time Read Online Free PDF Page B

leaves, closing the door firmly behind her. Susie listens to the familiar sounds of a large cupboard being placed against it.
    Once she is alone, she picks up the doll her mother has made from a wooden spoon. She is called Susie Two and is dressed in a wide blue skirt and yellow top. Susie tucks her in beside her, cradles her in her arms and goes to sleep.
    In the morning, when light filters through the roof, Susie looks at her for a long time. Susie Two is smiling today. Susie removes a brick from the wall under her bed, pulls out a sheet of parchment and a stick of charcoal. She draws lips that curve down at the corners. Susie Two is no longer looking happy. She is put into the bed and covered up.
    Susie begins to write on the parchment. She has never been taught but she has invented her own symbols. These follow a simple pattern with an upright stroke and one, two or three shorter horizontal strokes added respectively for different sounds. In some cases the horizontal strokes run left to right, in others, right to left of the upright. Over a period of time Susie has added circles and diamonds for vowel sounds. She is now able, though it is a laborious process, to express her thoughts and feelings with some sophistication. Susie is as resourceful as Joe is courageous.
    *
    Joe woke at sunrise. The forest still cast its looming shadow but he ignored it and set about catching fish in the now turbulent water. He was lucky. Two were idling in a pool formed by the eddying water and he scooped them up with his net, cooked and ate them, doused the fire with water from the stream and dispersed the ashes. He set out again, still anxious to put greater distance between himself and the town. The land was rising sharply and the trees were thinning. By mid-morning he had seen the last of the conifers.
    The comforting greens of deciduous trees, now in the full bloom of summer, welcomed him. He threw himself down gratefully under the generous branches of an ancient elm, exulting in the terrors vanquished. Later, as the sun reached its noonday height, he caught more fish and hung them from a stick to dry, he picked berries and what he hoped were harmless mushrooms which he ate raw. Then he pushed on, uphill. The stream increased its force with every rise, cascading over boulders and stones, its roar dominating the landscape. By mid-afternoon he had reached its source, wilder and more fierce than when he and Martin had last seen it. He sat beside it and dangled his feet in the water, regretting that he had to move on and away. The stream had been his friend, it had given him food and water, it had saved his life.
    In the late afternoon the tree-line stopped abruptly as though drawn with a ruler and he emerged onto soft springy turf on the green summit of a chalk escarpment studded with thorn trees, shrubs and gorse. On either side hills rose in long undulations, some wooded, others bare. Birds of prey, harriers and hawks wheeled overhead. Tired but triumphant, he surveyed a broad valley stretching into the distance, blue hills rising at its furthest edge. Of human habitation there was no sign. He was alone, the only person in this lush countryside.
    Joe climbed down the cliff, using sparse bushes and stunted trees as footholds on the steep incline. A grassy plateau a little lower down, a sapling beech growing at its edge, offered an opportunity for pause. He rested, lost in contemplation of the luminous perspectives below. Here, safe from predators, he would stop for the night and press on in the morning.
    The plateau was damp from a thin ribbon of water trickling out of the rock. He put his face to it and drank thirstily and, stripped bare, showered with a sense, if not of happiness, at least of satisfaction and relief. Behind the waterfall a narrow fissure opened in the rock. He moved closer and, on hands and knees, crawled through. Inside was dark but as his eyes adjusted he saw that it concealed a bigger cave, high enough to stand in,