The Crow Road Read Online Free PDF Page A

they’re real; real puppets.’
    ‘But they’re no really real, naw?’
    ‘No, Darren, they’re not really real; the real creatures on the real Wimbledon Common are mice and birds and maybe foxes and badgers, and none of them wear clothes and live in nice well-lit burrows with furniture. A lady made up the Wombles, and made up stories about them, and then people made the stories into television programmes. That’s what’s real.’
    ‘See, ah told ye,’ Darren said, shaking his little brother’s hand. ‘They’re no real.’
    Dean started to cry, face screwing up, eyes closing.
    ‘Oh, good grief,’ McHoan breathed. It never ceased to amaze him how quickly a small child’s face could turn from peach to beetroot. His own youngest, James, was just leaving that stage, thank goodness. ‘Come on, Dean; up you come up here and we’ll see if we can get to the top of this hill, eh?’ He lifted the howling child up - after he’d been persuaded to let go of his brother’s hand - and put him on his shoulders. He looked at the little up-turned faces. ‘We’re nearly there, aren’t we? See the cairn?’
    There was a general noise of agreement from the assembled children.
    ‘Come on, then! Last one there’s a Tory!’
    He started off up the path; Dean was crying more quietly now. The other children ran round and past him, laughing and shouting and scrambling straight up the hillside, over the grass towards the cairn. He quit the path and started after them, then - holding Dean’s legs - turned to look back at Diana and Helen, who were still standing quietly, hand-in-hand, on the path. ‘You two not playing?’
    Helen, identically dressed to her sister in little new green dungarees and staring out from under her precisely-trimmed black fringe, shook her head, frowned. ‘We better go last, Uncle Kenneth.’
    ‘Oh? Why?’
    ‘I think we’re Tories.’
    ‘You might well turn out to be,’ he laughed. ‘But we’ll give you the benefit of the doubt for now, eh? On you go.’
    The twins looked at each other, then, still hand-in-hand, started up the grassy slope after the rest, earnestly concentrating on the business of clumping one foot in front of the other through the long rough grass.
    Dean was starting to cry loudly again, probably because he thought his brother and sister were leaving him. McHoan sighed and jogged up the hill after the kids, shouting encouragement and making sure he trailed the last of them to the top and the cairn. He made a great show of being out of breath, and wobbled as he sat down, collapsing dramatically on the grass after setting Dean to one side.
    ‘Oh! You’re all too fit for me!’
    ‘Ha, Mr McHoan!’ Darren laughed, pointing at him. ‘You’re the toerag, so ye are!’
    He was mystified for a moment, then said, ‘Oh. Right. Toe-rag, Tuareg, Tory.’ He made a funny face. ‘Tora! Tora! Tory!’ he laughed, and so did they. He lay in the grass. A warm wind blew.
    ‘What for are all these stones, Mr McHoan?’ Ashley Watt asked. She had climbed half-way up the squat cairn, which was about five feet high. She picked up one of the smaller rocks and looked at it.
    Kenneth rolled over, letting Prentice and Lewis climb onto his back and kick at his sides, pretending he was a horse. The Watt girl, perched on the cairn, bashed one rock against another, then inspected the struck, whitened surface of the stone she held. He grinned. She was a tyke; dressed in grubby hand-me-downs like the rest of the Watt tribe, she always seemed to have a runny nose, but he liked her. He still thought Ashley was a boy’s name (wasn’t it from Gone With The Wind?), but then if the Watts wanted to call their children Dean and Darren and Ashley, he supposed that was up to them. Could have been Elvis and Tarquin and Marilyn.
    ‘D’you remember the story of the goose that swallowed the diamond?’
    ‘Aye.’
    It was one of his stories, one he’d tried out on the children. Market research, his wife