The Northern Clemency Read Online Free PDF Page A

eyebrows. But he was saying nothing, and she was settling for enchanting the driver and the chief remover.
    “People do this all the time,” she said.
    “Move house?” the chief remover said. “Enough to keep us busy.”
    “No, I meant—” But what she had meant was that people leave London by car, drive on to the motorway, set off northwards all the time, perhaps every day. She never had, and her mother, her brother and she had only ever left London when they went on holiday. She had never had any business outside London. “People either move a lot or not at all, don’t they?” she said. “I mean,” sensing puzzlement, “there’s the sort of people who never leave the house they were born in and die there. Dukes. And there’s the sort of people who move house every year, every two years. I don’t know what would be normal.”
    “The average number of times a person moves house in his lifetime,” the boy said, “is seven, isn’t it?” He had a harsh, grating voice, a South London voice not yet settled into its adult state.
    “Take no notice of him,” the driver said. “He’s making it up. He doesn’t know.”
    “But the figure is increasing all the time,” he continued.
    “He makes up statistics,” the chief remover said. “That’s what he does. Once we were dealing with a musician, moving house for him—a sad story, he was divorcing his wife, and we had to go in and pick out the things that were going and the things that were staying. And we were moving his stuff and he said he’d be taking his cellos, because he had two, with him in a taxi, and wouldn’t let us touch them, though we handle your fragile things all the time. And all of a sudden this one says, ‘There are a hundred and twenty-three parts in a cello,’ as if to say, yes, it’s best you handle it yourself. He’d only gone and made it up, the hundred and twenty-three parts. There’s probably about thirty.”
    “It sounds about right, moving seven times,” Sandra said. “There’s a girl in my class who’s moved house seven times already. She’s only fourteen.” Sandra thought she might have told them she was sixteen: she sometimes did that. Even seventeen. “This was two years ago,” she added. “So she’d used up all her moves already, if you look at it like that.”
    “Fancy,” the boy said.
    “Do you see that sign, young lady?” the driver said. “A hundred and twenty miles to Sheffield.”
    They were clear of London now; the banked-up sides of the motorway no longer suggested the outskirts of towns, but now, behind stunted trees, there were open fields, expansive with scattered sheep. In the distance, on top of a hill like a figurine on a cake, there was a romantic, solitary house. She wondered what it must be like to look out every morning from your inherited grand house and see, like a river, the distant flowing motorway. It was never empty, this road.
    “New home,” the chief remover said sweetly. “Sheffield. And The North, it said.”
    “Have you ever noticed,” the driver said, “that wherever you go, anywhere, you see motorway signs that say ‘The North’? Or ‘The South’ when you’re in the north? Or ‘The West’? But wherever you go, and we go everywhere, you never see a sign which says ‘The East’?”
    “No, you never do,” the boy agreed.
    Sandra felt her story hadn’t made much of an impression. It was difficult, squashed in like this, to push back her shoulders, but she tried.
    “This girl,” she went on, “you always wondered whether it was good for her to move so often. I mean, seven times, seven new schools. She never stayed long, so I don’t suppose she ever made proper friends with anyone. I tried to be friends with her, because I thought she’d be lonely, but she didn’t make much of an effort back. She’d only been in our school for three, four weeks when we found out the sort of girl she was.”
    “What sort was she?” the boy said.
    “At our school,