the three feet between into three miles.
‘No.’ Moran’d shut his eyes. ‘Don’t look the type, your dad.’
‘But yours doesn’t, either. He’s really friendly and funny…’
An aeroplane glinted, mercury bright in the dark high blue.
‘Maxine calls it like this, she calls it “Daddy’s going dark”. She’s right. He goes dark. He starts…y’know, on a few cans, and gets loud and makes shite jokes we have to laugh at. Shouts and stuff. The neighbours bang on the wall to complain. Dad bangs back, calls ’em all the names under the sun…then he locks himself in his room but he’s got bottles in there. We hear them smash. One by one. Then he sleeps it off. Then afterwards, when he’s all so sorry, it’s all, “Oh, I’m never touchin’ the stuff again…” That’s almost worse…Tell you what it’s like, it’s like this whiny shitty nasty weepy man who isn’t my dad takes my dad over for however long the bender lasts, but only I – and Mum and Kelly and Sally and Max – know that it isn’t him. The rest of the world doesn’t know that, see. They just say, Frank Moran showing his true colours, that is. But it ain’t.’ Moran twisted his head at me. ‘But it is. But it ain’t. But it is. But it ain’t. Oh, how am I s’posed to know?’
A painful minute went by.
Green is made of yellow and blue, nothing else, but when you look at green, where’ve the yellow and the blue gone? Somehow this is to do with Moran’s dad. Somehow this is to do with everyone and everything. But too many things’d’ve gone wrong if I’d tried to say this to Moran.
Moran sniffed, ‘Fancy a nice, cool bottle of Woodpecker?’
‘Cider? You’ve brought cider?’
‘No. My dad drunk ’em all. But,’ Moran fumbled in his bag, ‘I’ve got a can of Irn Bru.’
Irn Bru’s fizzy liquid bubblegum, but I said, ‘Sure,’ ’cause I hadn’t brought any drink myself and Irn Bru’s better than nothing. I’d imagined I could drink from fresh springs but the only water I’d seen so far was that farty ditch.
The Irn Bru exploded in Moran’s hand like a grenade. ‘Shit!’
‘Watch out with that Irn Bru. It’ll be all shaken up.’
‘You don’t flamin’ say so!’ Moran gave me first swig, as he licked his hand clean. In return, I gave him some Cadbury’s Caramel. It’d oozed out of its wrapper, but we picked off the bits of pocket fluff and it tasted okay. I got a hayfever attack and sneezed ten or twenty times into a nuggety hanky.
A vapour trail gashed the sky.
But the sky healed itself. Without fuss.
CRAAAAAAWWWKKK!
I’d slid halfway down the curve of the barn roof, clattering between dreaming and waking, before I got my balance back.
Three monster crows sat in a row, where Moran had last been.
Of Moran there was no sign.
The crows’ beaks were daggers. Their oily eyes had cruel plans.
‘Piss off!’
Crows know when they’re a match for you.
St Gabriel’s bell rang eleven or twelve times, the crows made me too uneasy to keep count. Tiny darts of water hit my face and neck. The weather had turned while I’d been sleeping. The Malverns’d disappeared behind wings of rain, beating just fields away. The crows parascended up and off.
Moran wasn’t inside the barn, either. Obviously he’d decided not to share the front page of the Malvern Gazetteer. What a traitor! But if he wanted to play Scott of the Antarctic versus Amundsen the Norwegian, that was fine by me. Moran’s never beaten me at anything in his life.
The barn smelt of armpits, hay and piss.
Rain began its blitz, tranging bullets off the roof and strafing the puddles round the barn. (Serve Moran the Deserter right if he got a drenching and caught pneumonia.) Rain erased the twentieth century. Rain turned the world to whites and greys.
Over the sleeping giant of the Malvern Hills, a double rainbow linked the Worcestershire Beacon with the British Camp. Ancient Britons got massacred by the Romans there. The melony sun dripped steamy brightness. I set off at a fast yomp, jogging fifty, walking fifty. I decided, if I passed Moran, I wouldn’t say a word to him. Cut the traitor dead. The wet turf squeaked beneath my trainers. I climbed a shaky gate and crossed a paddock with jumps for horses made from police cones and stripey poles. Past the paddock was a farmyard. Two silage towers shone like Victorian Apollo spacecraft. Trombone flowers snaked up trellises and a flaky sign read,