Life_ An Exploded Diagram - Mal Peet [63]
“It’s simply ridiculous,” Frankie said, refusing to lie down on the thick bed of tea-brown pine needles.
“Frankie, I said just look for —”
“I know what you said. That’s not really the point, is it? The whole thing is ridiculous. I must be mad.”
She was still angry, or pretending to be, when she unbuttoned her blouse.
Then he found the perfect place.
He was in misery at the time. Three whole days had passed without a call. He’d spent them getting nowhere with his holiday homework.
Is Keats “half in love with easeful Death”? Cite evidence from two of the poems.
Explain the consequences of the Treaty of Utrecht, 1713, in terms of subsequent European history. Quote your sources.
Produce a piece of work entitled The Intensification of Red. It can be either representational or abstract.
When Frankie lets you put your hand Down There, which soon she will surely do, what will you do with it? Show your work.
On the morning of the fourth day, he rode to a telephone box on the far side of Borstead and dialed Bratton Manor. His finger in the dial shook, then slipped. He had to start again. A woman answered.
“Bratton Morley 239.”
As if it were a question. A Norfolk accent, the t’s of “Bratton” gone missing. He hung up and pressed the button to get his coins back.
He mounted his bike and rode nowhere in particular. He found himself on the Gunston road and regretted it: it was a long, slow, undulating climb. He thumbed the gearchange and leaned down on the pedals, lifting himself from the saddle. The effort of it, if he focused on it, almost drove the hurt away. It was not a road Clem knew well. There were no fruit fields in this direction, and Gunston was nothing. Borstead was Las Vegas compared to Gunston. At the top of the rise, he stopped to rest for a minute, intending to turn back. There were no hedges alongside this stretch of road, just low banks of fading grass punctuated by stunted hawthorns.
He was surprised how vast the view was from this modest elevation: almost three hundred and sixty degrees, although the horizon was blurred by heat haze. Ahead and off to the left, he could make out the stumpy tower of Gunston church. On either side of the road, fields of wheat stubble stretched into the distance. Huge fields, bigger than any he had ever seen, uninterrupted by hedgerows. Alien, somehow. Had it always been like this? It had been a couple of years, maybe, since he’d been out this way, but Clem was fairly sure it hadn’t been possible to see such distances back then. What had happened? Where had all the trees gone?
He became aware of a faint, uneven rumbling. Shading his eyes, he could just make out the lumbering bulk of a combine harvester. No, three combine harvesters, working side by side in a wide cloud of dust. He’d never seen that before, either.
The openness of this landscape, its bareness, confused him. Spooked him slightly. It was as if he’d accidentally cycled into another country. He climbed onto the bank to his right and gazed around, trying to get his bearings. He’d been riding south, so he was facing westward. He’d come about three miles, so he was looking toward Bratton Manor. And Frankie, perhaps. About two miles away? He could just make out the gray-green hump of Skeyton Woods, but the house was hidden by a fold in the brown and naked land.
Clem remounted the bike and turned toward home. He reckoned that after a few shoves on the pedals, he’d be able to freewheel downhill for the best part of a mile. It was the first pleasant thought of the day. Then in the afternoon there’d be the hour of waiting for the phone to ring. The hour willing it to ring.
He coasted down the dipping road for five minutes,