Life_ An Exploded Diagram - Mal Peet [101]
Win hadn’t opened her curtains, so it was understandable that in the dimly lit bedroom Ruth mistook what lay on the floor for a big gray cat. Understandable, therefore, that she screamed. And understandable when she realized that she was looking at her mother’s chopped-off hair that she screamed again.
“What?” George said, from the doorway.
“Whassup, Mum?” Clem, for some reason holding his dressing gown in front of him instead of wearing it.
But Ruth couldn’t say anything. With her hand over her mouth, she was staring at her mother’s bed, which was empty, the blankets pulled away from the bare and lumpy mattress.
She was too distracted to manage the usual Sunday breakfast. Eventually, George ate a bowl of cornflakes, his silence worse than accusation.
When Clem wheeled his bike out of the shed, Ruth called, “Where’re you gorn?”
“I said I’d help Goz with his paper round. Thas five miles on a Sunday, and them Sunday papers weigh a ton, he says.”
“So you’re gorn down Arnold Pitcher’s?”
“Yeah.”
“Nip round the corner to Angel Yard, Clem, then. See if your gran’s all right. I’m that worried. I espect she’re with Hoseason and that lot, but if she ent, you come back and tell me, orright?”
“Okay, Mum,” Clem said.
He hid his face, making a show of checking his brakes.
It was like he flew to the coast.
Frankie.
The huge white sky smiled down on him. His legs were effortless.
Frankie.
Freewheeling the slow downhill out of Napton, he took his hands from the handlebars and put them in his pockets and fiddled with himself.
Frankie.
The sign that said HAZEBOROUGH was deceitful; there was nothing for an uphill mile. He stood on the pedals.
Frankie, Frankie!
Then the sea spread itself in front of him, like restless metal. A car, a bulbous little Austin A30, passed him with a clergyman at the wheel, who smiled and waved. Perhaps he had mistaken Clem’s incandescent halo of lust for something more spiritual.
A road sign: NORWICH 21 MILES. NORWICH. People wrote it on the back of love-letter envelopes as a joke. It stood for Knickers Off Ready When I Come Home. Should be KORWICH, anyhow. The k is silent in knickers. The phrase struck him as funny, and he laughed aloud. Then something, someone, an older version of himself perhaps, told him that he was laughing because he was scared. Made him stop at the top of the low hill, the sea cliff dipping down to his right. He set his feet on either side of the bike on the tar-and-gravel road. He didn’t know if he stunk when he was sweaty. Some boys did. Goz did, a bit.
The thought he had tried to smother rose up again: It’d be better not to do it than be no good at it.
The electrical thrill of anticipation changed polarity, became something closer to dread. He was trembling; his watch shook when he looked at it. Ten to eleven, nearly. The strident calling of herring gulls sounded like mockery.
Where, exactly, do you put it in?
The railway that brought holidaymakers clattering to Cromer and Sheringham did not reach Hazeborough, despite the fact that the little hamlet had a beach superior to those of its jollier neighbors. But that was not the only reason that it remained unpopular, almost, in fact, desolate.
In 1940, after the heroic disaster of Dunkirk, the Ministry of Defense made a hasty survey of England’s south and east coasts to work out the likeliest places for Hitler’s forces to come ashore when they invaded. It was fairly unlikely that they’d choose north Norfolk, as opposed to Kent, say, or Sussex. But if the sneaky Nazi swine did decide to come across the North Sea rather than the English Channel, Hazeborough was exactly the kind of place they might fancy. The cliffs there were lower than at any point for miles and miles. The sea was shallow for some considerable distance from the shore, even at low tide. So the Royal Navy tethered sea mines — big buoyant spheres of explosive with detonator spikes — a mile or so offshore. The Royal Engineers garlanded the beach, all three miles of it, with coiled barbed wire and built “pillboxes”— concrete gun emplacements