Read Online Cloudland by Lisa Gorton - Free Book Online Page A

Sitting down on one of the seats, she saw a contraption, like a pair of binoculars, set into the pillar in front of her. It was hard at first to understand what she was seeing: colours, a flickering sheen over a shifting green-grey mass.
The sea!
Seagulls were scattered over it. Lucy imagined their hollow shrieks and the sound of waves, so like the shaking-out of sheets.
    â€˜Daniel, look at this!’ she called.
    Without lifting her eyes, she heard him stand up, sigh, and settle beside her. She heard his raw gasp: ‘Which ocean do you think it is?’ There was no way of telling but she understood why he had asked. It was strange to think they could be anywhere, likesomeone spinning a plastic globe and stopping it with a finger on the Pacific, the Atlantic, the North Sea, the Southern Ocean …
    It was impossible to imagine where she lived from this distance. She kept picturing a toy-sized house surrounded by a plastic forest. The picture made her lonely, as if she was shrinking too. She sat back and rubbed the skin around her eyes.
    â€˜Daniel? Where do you live?’
    She thought he wasn’t going to answer. He was hunched over the binoculars as though he could pour himself through them. ‘Boarding school, really,’ he said at last. ‘My parents keep a place in the Cotswolds but they loathe it, they’re hardly ever there. Except my father says it gives us pedigree. Like horses.’
    â€˜Where do they go?’
    He shrugged. ‘Wherever it’s summer. My mother claims the heat’s good for my father’s lungs. Really, she likes to prove she can still carry off a bikini.’ He blew air through his nose. ‘She wears one to lunch.’
    â€˜But there’s no summer left.’
    He nodded. ‘And the government’s cancelled their travel credits. They’re in the Cotswolds now, no doubt working their way through a crate of whiskey.’
    â€˜What did you do, anyway? To get kicked out of school?’
    He sat back and smirked down at his hands. ‘I set fire to a hedge.’
    â€˜A
hedge
!’ The answer took her by surprise. She had to keep herself from laughing. She thought back to the first time she had seen him: in the bus stop, with rain sliding down the walls and an envelope burning in his hands. ‘Why would anyone set fire to a hedge?’
    Daniel was still watching his hands, folding the fingers in and out. ‘There was this one boy, Peter Watson. He had these pointy little teeth with gaps between them, like a cat. His family had been going to this school for five generations. Everyone thought that was fantastic – that his family had never managed one original idea.’
    â€˜What’s that got to do with the hedge?’
    He shrugged. ‘And the sports songs! They hardly even won a game. Everyone went round pretending they thought the school was so great when really they just thought they were great because they went there.’
    â€˜No-one
likes
school.’ When Lucy looked around the room again, she was surprised to see how small it seemed. Outside, the wind made a hollow soundas it blew across the valley. Night was falling. The wall facing the valley glowed, orange and crimson, in the sun’s last rays. Was the Varactor still waiting out there, she wondered, in the dark? She shrank into her cloud coat.
    Wist and Jovius were slumped against the wall, asleep. Their faces gleamed in the dark. Asleep, they looked more alien, sunk in their strangeness. Daniel was still crouched over the binoculars. She settled on the floor next to him, with her back to the pillar, and closed her eyes.
    At once, she remembered waking at home, the morning after her mother left – how the silence had spread through the house. She had been aware of it even in the far rooms: armchairs and tables floating on it like ships in deep water. That morning, she and her father had faced each other in the kitchen, feeling an almost social