Twisted Winter Read Online Free PDF

Egyptians.” I fingered the looped cross around my neck. My ankh: I never took it off. Sometimes I thought it was an anchor, as well an ankh. Linking me back to the past. My dad had left it with my mum when I was a baby, for me. It was silver. And Dad had loved anything to do with Egypt, she’d told me. He saw it as part of his ancestry: even though my grandad’s family had come from Jamaica, the Egyptians had been a great African civilisation, he’d said. So I felt that the ankh was my link to him.
    But it was no use protesting. I put on some wellingtons and went out through the gate into the orchard, and puddled about in the wet grass. There were apples, but something had chewed holes in them and they smelled cidery, which I didn’t like. I went through the orchard, and found that the end of it led onto a field. There was a small brown pony, so I walked down the slope towards it and the long lineof bushes at the bottom of the field. When I looked back, I was surprised at how invisible the village had become: I’d thought that all the houses and their gardens went back much further, but it was like being in the middle of nowhere. The bushes had long black thorns like iron nails and I didn’t want to get too close. When I reached the place where the pony had been, it had gone.
    I looked around. There was a hollow in the bushes. I thought the pony must shelter underneath them, so I ducked under and saw the pony some distance away, making its way through the maze of bushes without any hurry. At the bottom of the hill was a trickle of a stream only a few feet wide. I could follow it, I thought.
    I could be an explorer.
    Sometimes, I thought my dad was an explorer. Like Indiana Jones, in my mum’s old movies. Off in the rainforest somewhere, talking to jaguars, or finding his way through a pyramid, looking for treasure. But inside I knew where my dad was: in the ground, long gone. My mum had said it was cancer but it wasn’t. I’d found his certificate, which they give you when you die, and itsaid
overdose
. But it made me think all the more of my mum, that she’d tried to protect me, that it had been a struggle. My dad and my nan. It was the same thing, really.
    The stream was winding, twisting through the thorn bushes. After a while, the thorn trees grew less thickly and after I’d climbed over a broken barbed wire fence, I came out into a small, bare valley, with slopes where the sheep had cropped the grass and gorse growing on the hill like sunlight. I kept following the stream, but I kept an eye on the sun, too, like a proper explorer would: it floated through the clouds like a ten pence piece. At one point, I climbed the hill, which wasn’t really a hill, but just the slope of a field, and looked back; I saw the tower of the village church and I knew that as long as I could see it, I could find my way home.
    Twenty minutes later and I could hear water. It was not like the trickle of the stream, but a steady rushing noise and it puzzled me: surely the hills were not steep enough for a waterfall? Then I came around a bend and saw that it was what’s called a sluice. The stream was channelled, it poured through a gate like water out of a kettle into a much wider stream. Exceptthat it wasn’t a stream, really, but a canal: maybe fifteen feet wide, and very still. Past the place where the water flowed in, which was foamy and white, the canal looked like oil. The slope of the fields tailed off onto flat land, banked by willows. There was a path, but it was marshy and reedy, with the tall bulrushes like spears all along it.
    So I followed the path. There was something about the canal, but I couldn’t say what it was. I didn’t like it and yet I did, at the same time, as though it was pulling me on. I couldn’t help thinking about where it would end – maybe at the sea, although later I thought that this was stupid. It would probably join up with a river.
    I