22 Britannia Road - Amanda Hodgkinson [39]
Janusz puts the paper down. ‘What’s wrong with the park? We can go for a walk in the park this afternoon and Aurek can meet other children and make a few friends.’
Aurek is leaning against his mother’s arm, and Janusz feels an urge to pull them apart.
‘Or we could walk along the canal. Surely that’s a better idea? Come here, Aurek. Come and sit with me. Leave your mother alone for a minute.’
Aurek doesn’t move and Janusz lifts his newspaper to his face, pretending to read. He lowers it again. ‘What would we do in the woods? People walk their dogs there. We don’t have a dog. We’d look strange just walking around. In the park, people walk with and without dogs.’
Silvana draws circles on the tabletop with her fingers. Aurek is eating the stale bread Janusz put to one side to feed the ducks in the park. The child looks strangely beautiful, his small upturned nose, his neat mouth. Janusz would like to take his dainty chin between finger and thumb. He tries to meet the boy’s gaze, fails and sighs.
‘If you really wanted to, we’d have to get a bus out to the paper mill and walk the rest of the way. It’s up to you.’
Aurek grins. A wide, urchin grin that fills Janusz with a swift and sudden joy.
Well, he thinks. At least I can make the boy happy. That’s a start.
They catch the bus at the bottom of the hill and Aurek sits by the window watching the town, the rows of houses, the shops, the narrow streets and the men and women, mechanical people who walk at the same pace. Aurek can see in at the windows of terraced houses. A woman ironing. A man staring straight ahead. Front parlours full of old people and crying babies. What must it be like to be one of the children living in these streets? To have always had a house to live in and a family sardined into it, full of brothers and sisters and aunts and uncles?
He imagines the noise: the yelling and the banging, the laughing, the lung-pumping cries, thumping of feet, plates, doors. These are the sounds he hears when front doors are ajar and he dares to pause in front of them. His own home is quiet in comparison. Nobody makes a noise there. The enemy says he likes peace. His mother never says much to anyone.
The bus finally arrives at Papermill Lane. They get out beside the mill and are met by the sound of water churning under a small bridge. The enemy is smiling at him. He shows Aurek how to drop sticks over one side and watch the current take them under the bridge, emerging on the other side. It’s a game he could play for days if they let him. In the swirling water below them he can see green algae swaying over pebbles and rocks, all smooth and long and full of crystal air bubbles.
Aurek’s stick is bent in two. The bark is dark and the snap in the stick shows the new wood as pale as bone within it, sharp against his fingertips.
‘It’s so you know it’s yours,’ says Janusz. ‘Ready?’
The three of them stand with their sticks held out over the bridge.
‘One, two, three, go!’
Aurek lets go with his eyes screwed shut, hope boiling up in his body. The stick disappears and then comes under the bridge in front of the others. When he wins, he screams with joy.
Silvana and Janusz join in, laughing. The more Silvana laughs, the more Aurek likes it. Her laughter is warm and safe, like the days in the forest when she used to wrap him in her coat. The game is so much fun Silvana has to drag him away from it, promising him trees to climb, squirrels to find.
Grudgingly he leaves his stick glories and they walk along country lanes, cutting across fields towards the trees. Aurek throws his cap off his head and runs, tumbling through brambles and nettles, splashing through puddles and jumping over fallen trees, screaming with excitement.
Nobody can catch him. No evil spirits or wood sprites or any of the revenging fairies and ghouls that live in ancient forests can touch him. He moves faster than sticks in a river current. He is freewheeling away from everything. Away from school, where the children