The Loney Read Online Free PDF Page B

raised voices. Mummer. Farther. They had tried their best to hold onto the cheerfulness that had been there when we left Saint Jude’s, but it had been difficult not to feel despondent once the rain began pounding the roads and everything had been obscured by mist.
    A stiff wind blew in across the fields bringing the smell of brine and rot as strong as an onion. It seemed that all our past pilgrimages were contained in that smell and I felt a tension start to grow in my stomach. We had been coming here for as long as I could remember, yet I’d never felt completely comfortable in this place. It was rather like my grandfather’s house. Glum, lifeless, mildly threatening. Not somewhere you wanted to linger for very long. I was always glad to see the back of it once our Easter pilgrimage was over and I’d breathed a private sigh of relief when Father Wilfred died and we stopped going altogether.
    The rest of them kept up their spirits with hymns and prayers but at times it seemed as though they were, without knowing it perhaps, warding things off, rather than inviting God in.
    Hanny finished and waved me over to where he was standing.
    ‘What is it?’ I said.
    He pointed at the fence in front of him. A hare had been shot and skinned and its hide splayed on the barbed wire, along with several dozen rats. Trophies or deterrents, I suppose they were both.
    ‘Leave it alone, Hanny,’ I said. ‘Don’t touch it.’
    He looked at me pleadingly.
    ‘We can’t save it now,’ I said.
    He went to stroke it but withdrew his hand when I shook my head. The hare stared at us through a glassy brown eye.
    We were starting to cross the road back to the minibus when I heard the sound of a car approaching. I grabbed Hanny’s sleeve and held him tightly as an expensive-looking Daimler went past us, throwing water into the ditches on either side. There was a young girl asleep in the back, her face against the window. The driver slowed at the corner where we were standing and turned his head briefly to look at me before he rounded the bend and was gone. I had never seen a car like that here before. There was little in the way of traffic at all around The Loney. Mostly hay-trucks and farm wagons and not always motorised either.
    When Hanny and I got back to the minibus Father Bernard still had his hands deep in amongst the pipes and wires.
    ‘What’s wrong with it, Father?’ I asked.
    ‘I don’t know, Tonto,’ he said and wiped the rain out of his eyes with his sleeve. ‘It might be the fly wheel, but I’d have to take the whole thing apart to be sure.’
    He closed the bonnet with some reluctance and followed me back on board.
    ‘Any luck?’ said Mr Belderboss.
    ‘Not so far,’ Father Bernard replied, smoothing his sopping hair back over his head. ‘I think it’ll be a garage job to be honest.’
    ‘Oh dear,’ said Mrs Belderboss. ‘What a start.’
    ‘Well at least it got us this far,’ said Farther.
    ‘Aye, there’s that,’ said Father Bernard.
    Monro was whining. Father Bernard shushed him and he shrank into a white eyed nervousness.
    ‘I think the best thing to do,’ he said, ‘will be for me to walk on to the village and see if there’s anyone there who can help us.’
    ‘In this weather, Father?’ said Mrs Belderboss. ‘You’ll catch your death.’
    ‘To be honest, the walk will do me good, Mrs Belderboss,’ he said. ‘I don’t do well sitting for so long.’
    ‘It’s a fair way, Father,’ said Mr Belderboss. ‘It must be a good three or four miles.’
    Father Bernard smiled dismissively and started to wind his scarf around his neck.
    ‘You’ll go with him, won’t you?’ Mummer said to me.
    ‘Ah, don’t worry yourself, Mrs Smith,’ said Father Bernard. ‘There’s no sense in two of us getting soaked.’
    ‘It’s no trouble, is it?’ Mummer nudged me.
    ‘No,’ I said.
    The wind buffed around the minibus. Monro piped up again and Father Bernard leant down and scrubbed his neck to