Those We Left Behind Read Online Free PDF Page A

strange on his skin. And the light. Ciaran can feel the light, as if he could split apart the colours, his skin knowing one from another. He is outside in the world, and he doesn’t know how to feel.
    They approach a small car. The badge says Nissan. He can’t tell which model. He doesn’t know anything about cars. Thomas does. Thomas likes cars. Thomas has bought one. He told Ciaran two weeks ago. He promised to take Ciaran for a spin.
    ‘To the seaside?’ Ciaran had asked, hope bursting in him.
    ‘Maybe,’ Thomas had said, and Ciaran had gone all dizzy and floaty behind his eyes.
    The probation woman digs in her handbag, cursing under her breath, until she finds a key. She presses a button. The car makes a mechanical clunk. She opens the boot, and he drops his bag inside.
    ‘Get in,’ she says, pointing to the passenger door.
    Ciaran does as he’s told. He almost always does. He’s a good lad. All the guards say so. The dashboard presses against his knees. The car smells clean, but litter has been stuffed into the pockets and cubbyholes.
    The woman lowers herself into the driver’s seat.
    An important question occurs to Ciaran. ‘What do I call you?’ he asks.
    ‘My name,’ she says. ‘Paula.’
    ‘All right.’
    She starts the engine, and the radio shouts all blaring loud before she reaches for the volume control.
    Ciaran looks out of the passenger window, back towards the buildings he has left for the last time. He supposes he should feel something more, something big, as they drive away. Happiness, excitement, anything. But he doesn’t. Even as the car cuts along the tree-lined driveway towards the main gates, and all he can see is wood and the leaves going brown and yellow and orange, even then he feels nothing.
    The gate to the main road comes into view.
    And the men with cameras.
    Paula says, ‘Shit.’
    She slows the car to a stop.
    Ciaran winds his fingers together in his lap. He sees the men gathering on the other side of the gateway, huddled in groups, chatting. Some of them smoking cigarettes. He remembers seeing men like them years ago, through the windows of the police van.
    They notice the car. Just a few at first, but soon they’re all crowding towards the opening, pushing and shoving. Ciaran thinks of piglets fighting over their mother’s teats. He wants to laugh, but he holds it in.
    ‘It was supposed to be kept quiet,’ Paula says. ‘Someone must have tipped them off. They weren’t here when I came in. You can cover your face if you want. Maybe put your hood up.’
    He raises the cardigan’s hood and drops his gaze to his hands.
    The car moves off. The men swarm as it pauses in the gateway. Camera lenses clatter on the glass. Lightning fills the car. Ciaran gathers the fabric of the hood around his face, the flash-flash-flashing cutting through the weave.
    Paula sounds the horn, inches the car forward, curses the photographers.
    One of the men shouts Ciaran’s name. Asks if he has anything to say to the family of David Rolston.
    That laugh is still pushing to escape him, making his lips all stretchy, swelling up inside his chest. He pinches the hood together to cover his mouth.
    The car lurches forward onto the road. Paula accelerates hard, jerks the steering wheel, straightens their course.
    ‘I’m sorry about that,’ she says.
    Ciaran says nothing. He fears if he opens his mouth the laughter will spill out of him, and she will think bad things about him. When the urge dissolves in his throat, he pulls the hood back and watches the road ahead.
    Within a few minutes, they have passed through the avenues and crescents of semi-detached houses that Mr Lewis had called the Four Winds. That name put a picture in Ciaran’s head, of walls of air rushing through the streets, going north, south, east and west. It made this cluster of houses sound like somewhere strange and far away when really they were just ordinary homes for ordinary people. That had been a month ago, the last time