Read Online Counting Stars by David Almond - Free Book Online Page B

her our house in Coldwell Park, then the other places we’d lived: Felling Square, Thirlmere, Felling Square again. I showed her our grandparents’ homes in Ell Dene Crescent and Rectory Road.
    “And where were the family before?”
    “Don’t know, Miss.”
    She smiled again.
    “You should ask about these things,” she said. “You should write down everything you find. Or the memory will be gone.”
    She moved among us. She kept returning to me. She watched me drawing, the pencil following the shapes my finger made as it moved across the map.
    “You won’t understand this,” she said. “When you travel through the place in which you were born, you travel through yourself.”
    I set off that Saturday morning. I put bread, cheese, fruit in a haversack. I put in my map and a notebook. I told our parents that Miss Lynch said it was my duty to understand my home, and that I was going to explore for a few hours.
    “Just in Felling,” I said.
    They laughed and said I’d hardly be lost, then.
    As I walked from the garden through the gate, Catherine called after me.
    “Where you going?”
    I grinned and looked back at her.
    “Jonadab,” I said.
    On Rectory Road our grandfather was watching from his window. He beckoned me over. I waved and walked on. I called that I was going to Jonadab and knew that he couldn’t hear. It was early spring and crocuses were growing in the verges beneath the trees on Chilside Road. The sun was drying the pools on the pavements left by last night’s showers. The distant river was gleaming between banks crammed with cranes and warehouses. The sea on the horizon was dark as ink. As I turned down onto The Drive I heard a voice calling me. I turned and waved again, to one of our aunts, one or other of the identical twins. I crossed the bypass at Heworth and paused on the high steel footbridge that trembled as the traffic roared beneath. I looked down across the graveyard and tried to distinguish our sister Barbara’s grave and tried to recall how she had been in life. I paused again in Pelaw, in the shadow of the huge CWS buildings that lined the road there. The clash of printing machines came from inside. I nibbled some cheese and looked at the unfamiliar faces passing by. I consulted my map, walked on, turned left at Bill Quay Park into a street that suddenly steepened in descending to the Tyne. There were a few rows of terraced houses, an area of waste ground before a pub, the wide expanse of the river, shipyards filling the opposite bank, ships as tall as St. Patrick’s church resting there. I found the small white nameplate with Jonadab Lane written in black, fixed to the wall of a low warehouse or workshop. The lane was uncared-for: broken tarmac, cobbles showing through, potholes filled with black rainwater. A slope of weeds and broken buildings hung over it. I followed it and it opened out into an empty area, a small rough field sloping to a six-foot drop to the water. Then there were factories and workplaces and houses stretching all the way to the city with its arched bridge.
    Three ponies were tethered to stakes, with their heads lowered to the grass. A boy and a girl sat on a pile of stones facing the river. A small fire burned beside them, its smoke rising languidly through the clear air. A bony mongrel was tied to the stones by a rope around its neck. It growled, and the children turned to me. They leaned closer together and muttered and laughed.
    “Who this?” the boy called.
    They laughed again and turned to face me.
    “Who this?” he repeated.
    They had long sticks in their fists like spears, the tips pointed and scorched. They had sheath knives in their belts.
    The boy jabbed his spear at me.
    “Ungowa!” he said. “Speak!”
    The girl stared. The dog growled again.
    “Is this Jonadab?” I said.
    “Not understand!”
    They laughed.
    The boy shouted, “Shove off home!”
    I stood there.
    The girl took her knife from its sheath, ran her thumb over the blade. The