Wolves

Wolves Read Online Free PDF Page B

Book: Wolves Read Online Free PDF
Author: Simon Ings
Tags: Science-Fiction, Science Fiction & Fantasy
persuade Michel onto the playing field, where his speed was desperately needed. If this was true, he may as well not have bothered – Michel never had and never would see the point in team games.
    Each Wednesday afternoon we left the other cross-country runners to their muddy zig-zag and slipped away to assault courses of Michel’s own devising. No one knew about this. At least, no one said anything. Hill, our games teacher, had his suspicions. He once asked me why I ‘of all people’ had signed up for cross-country in the summer term. ‘I was counting on you for the cricket.’
    ‘I’ll come to evening practice,’ I offered. ‘I want to do something to stretch my legs.’
    Michel counted cadence as we worked through the exercises his father had taught him. Press-ups. Squat-thrusts. We pulled ourselves up on low-hanging branches. We climbed trees. Passing a patch of scrub, we set ourselves at the undergrowth. Sometimes the route was obvious and clean enough – a sheep run, a fox-scrape. Otherwise I sat this particular game out, waiting for Michel to pick and tear a path through to me, pace by pace, inch by inch, through thorns and briars. He emerged at last, scratched, bleeding, grinning, riding a strange, flagellant high.
    Past Michel’s ‘redoubt’ of abandoned fridges the ground got easier, littered with tissues and condoms, crushed cans, charred fire circles. The bark-chip track, come upon so suddenly, the feel of it through my boots, was baffling. ‘But this is my way home.’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘The hotel’s down that way.’
    ‘Yes. There you are. Jesus, Conrad, have you never tried to follow the river before?’
    I looked back the way we had come. There was no sign of where we had emerged from the undergrowth. No path, no break, no clue.
    I had gathered, in my usual vague way, that Michel’s father was an Army man and that he was no longer around. What I didn’t know was that, a few months before Michel had arrived at the school, his father had returned home, or most of him had, on a military plane.
    I can’t remember who first told me the story. It wasn’t Michel. He assumed I already knew. How could I not have known? The kids haunting the streets where his father was ambushed had used his head as a football. The video had been pulled, but a couple of boys claimed to have seen it. (They never said so to Michel’s face.)
    Michel’s dad’s death and repatriation occurred before he came to the school; they were, indeed, why he moved here, his education paid for by the pension the military gave his mother. Michel and I attended different classes, and it took a while for our orbits to cross. By then the gossip must already have stalled.
    The point is, once I knew about his father, Michel came into focus for me. His loneliness. His cult of self-reliance. These were scabs over a psychological wound. I understood that he was hurt, and I imagined I might be able to help him. At the very least, I could keep him company as he healed. I wanted to do that for him. I wanted to be with him. The truth is, I wanted him, and it pleased me to couch my desire as care.
    And all the while Michel went on preparing me for our civilisation’s collapse. The Fall, he called it. He was very convincing. It was just around the corner now, he said: the battle of all against all.

SIX
    A t full pelt – we can’t be doing more than thirty miles an hour – the train makes too much racket for Michel and me to talk. It is awkward to sit like this, pressed against a past I am afraid will swamp me. I smile, and with some dumb-show to acknowledge my awkwardness, I open the window and lean out to watch the fields skid by.
    The road, fag-end of the famous north coast highway, tails off near here. Clogged with caravans and mobile homes, it turns wearily inland to feed holiday parks, resort camps, an army firing range, a summer water sports school, a private airfield and, off on an eerie shingle limb of its own, an old power
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