Read Online Counting Stars by David Almond - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: David Almond
Tags: Fiction
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Memory, dream, desire, imagination have mingled through the years. How is it possible to bring this sister truly back to mind?
What I see most of all is a little girl in the window of the pebble-dashed house in Thirlmere. She sits in her pram watching for me to come home from school. As I appear in the street and pass the window and enter through the gate, she sits up tall and claps her hands and laughs and laughs and there has never been such joy.
It is possible, I suppose, that her photographs will be returned, and that the clarity of such images will be enhanced, though none of us expects it now.
We each have our way of seeing her.
We will go on forever remembering her, inventing her.
Jonadab
J ONADAB WAS OUR GRANDFATHER ’ S PLACE, a place more impossible and distant than Timbuctoo.
“Where you going?” we’d ask him.
“Jonadab,” he’d say.
“Where you been?”
“Jonadab.”
“But where’s Jonadab?”
“Timbuctoo.”
I’d seen Timbuctoo on the map, in geography. There it was in the African desert, tiny and exotic, a week’s camel ride through the blazing heat from the nearest town. But Jonadab wasn’t in the index of the atlas. It was nowhere. It was an invented place. It was a place to tease us, to halt our questioning, to silence us.
At school we moved lesson by lesson through the world. We colored in the remnants of the Empire. We traced the routes of great explorers, we followed the missionaries and saints, we marked the places of conquest and conversion. We studied the longest rivers and the highest mountains. We learned the populations of major cities, the names of the seas and the plains. We studied the way of life of the Eskimo, the Pygmy, the Arab, the American Indian. We were shown the fringes of civilization, and we were told that beyond them lay wildernesses of heat and ice and savagery.
And then one term Miss Lynch arrived and our studies came home. She was a small woman who drove a small white Fiat and who had teardrops of silver dangling from her ears. We watched her in assembly and saw how she didn’t say the prayers. We leaned over in our steel-hinged benches and looked at her legs. She told us that we were the center of all geography and the focus of all history. She said we were growing at the most privileged of times. We’d have been crawling through Felling Pit less than a century ago. We had a duty to understand our place in time, to keep History moving forward.
She spread maps on her desk and invited us to stand around her. We gasped to see the names of our streets in print. We stabbed our fingers onto our own houses and gardens, we traced familiar pathways through familiar streets and parks and playing fields. We located the places of great fights and soccer matches. We followed bus and train routes through Gateshead and over the bridges into Newcastle. She showed the shafts going down into the coalfield and the places where ships were built. We saw the great curves of the river as it made its way to the North Sea, and I caught my breath and halted, for there, in tiny letters just beyond Felling’s boundary, was Jonadab Lane and then Jonadab itself: a small empty space on the banks of the Tyne.
When she pinned the map to the wall I sat below it and drew my route. I carefully named the familiar streets I must take: Rectory Road, Chilside Road, The Drive, Sunderland Road. I sketched the graveyard and Memorial Gardens at Heworth. I marked the places where I would cross the railways and the bypass and go beyond Felling into Pelaw and then into the unknown fields below, until at the foot of my page by the crayoned blue river, I came to my map’s most distant and exotic point, whose name I went over time and again. Jonadab. Jonadab. Jonadab.
Miss Lynch came to me and smiled.
“You do this very well.”
“Thank you, Miss.”
Her eyelashes were dark and curved. There was pale lipstick on her lips.
“You come from a Felling family.”
“Yes, Miss.”
I showed
What I see most of all is a little girl in the window of the pebble-dashed house in Thirlmere. She sits in her pram watching for me to come home from school. As I appear in the street and pass the window and enter through the gate, she sits up tall and claps her hands and laughs and laughs and there has never been such joy.
It is possible, I suppose, that her photographs will be returned, and that the clarity of such images will be enhanced, though none of us expects it now.
We each have our way of seeing her.
We will go on forever remembering her, inventing her.
Jonadab
J ONADAB WAS OUR GRANDFATHER ’ S PLACE, a place more impossible and distant than Timbuctoo.
“Where you going?” we’d ask him.
“Jonadab,” he’d say.
“Where you been?”
“Jonadab.”
“But where’s Jonadab?”
“Timbuctoo.”
I’d seen Timbuctoo on the map, in geography. There it was in the African desert, tiny and exotic, a week’s camel ride through the blazing heat from the nearest town. But Jonadab wasn’t in the index of the atlas. It was nowhere. It was an invented place. It was a place to tease us, to halt our questioning, to silence us.
At school we moved lesson by lesson through the world. We colored in the remnants of the Empire. We traced the routes of great explorers, we followed the missionaries and saints, we marked the places of conquest and conversion. We studied the longest rivers and the highest mountains. We learned the populations of major cities, the names of the seas and the plains. We studied the way of life of the Eskimo, the Pygmy, the Arab, the American Indian. We were shown the fringes of civilization, and we were told that beyond them lay wildernesses of heat and ice and savagery.
And then one term Miss Lynch arrived and our studies came home. She was a small woman who drove a small white Fiat and who had teardrops of silver dangling from her ears. We watched her in assembly and saw how she didn’t say the prayers. We leaned over in our steel-hinged benches and looked at her legs. She told us that we were the center of all geography and the focus of all history. She said we were growing at the most privileged of times. We’d have been crawling through Felling Pit less than a century ago. We had a duty to understand our place in time, to keep History moving forward.
She spread maps on her desk and invited us to stand around her. We gasped to see the names of our streets in print. We stabbed our fingers onto our own houses and gardens, we traced familiar pathways through familiar streets and parks and playing fields. We located the places of great fights and soccer matches. We followed bus and train routes through Gateshead and over the bridges into Newcastle. She showed the shafts going down into the coalfield and the places where ships were built. We saw the great curves of the river as it made its way to the North Sea, and I caught my breath and halted, for there, in tiny letters just beyond Felling’s boundary, was Jonadab Lane and then Jonadab itself: a small empty space on the banks of the Tyne.
When she pinned the map to the wall I sat below it and drew my route. I carefully named the familiar streets I must take: Rectory Road, Chilside Road, The Drive, Sunderland Road. I sketched the graveyard and Memorial Gardens at Heworth. I marked the places where I would cross the railways and the bypass and go beyond Felling into Pelaw and then into the unknown fields below, until at the foot of my page by the crayoned blue river, I came to my map’s most distant and exotic point, whose name I went over time and again. Jonadab. Jonadab. Jonadab.
Miss Lynch came to me and smiled.
“You do this very well.”
“Thank you, Miss.”
Her eyelashes were dark and curved. There was pale lipstick on her lips.
“You come from a Felling family.”
“Yes, Miss.”
I showed
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