sponge sinking and tile-shard skidding, down and down, right down to the door with the brick and through that to the stripped kitchen and finally back into the garden where I take lungful after deep lungful of air.
And it’s all so ordinary. It is bright. The sun is shining and there are birds singing. Twittering in the sky. At least I think it’s ordinary until the slow-motion starts. I see a comb in the grass and then I see all the grass as hair. And beyond that, thick ropes of ivy gripping a fallen tree take the shape of a monkey clinging to its mother’s stomach. And even the discarded microwave becomes a casket, the condensation on the inside of the screen gathering into opalescent jewels joined by a thread of quicksilver where a snail has trailed.
It’s as though the world has suddenly decided to let me in on some marvellous secret, and is playing with me, gleeful, delighted. Or maybe it’s me that’s delighted. Me that’s been to the top of Chance House and got away with it! I feel light, airy and full of energy. I could skip, Icould dance. Well, I could if I had the co-ordination. As it is I’m just sort of wheeling about, dizzying my way towards the gas works and my first lesson with the divine Miss Raynham.
“Watch it, you!”
I almost bump into some gentleman with a bull dog. I smile, I wave at him.
“Sorry!”
“Youth of today,” he snarls.
But I’m spinning away. Me – Norbert No-Bottle, hero of Chance House! I waft across the main road, narrowly missing a double-decker bus. A white van comes to a halt with a screech of brakes, but I don’t think it’s to do with me. Because I’m already on the pavement, whirling through the gates of St Michael and All Angels. Going via the churchyard is not as short a route to school as via the gas works but it is more decorative. There are gravestones and flowers and bag-ladies and surveillance cameras with notices that say whatever you do will be captured on film for ever.
What I do for the cameras is – fall over. I don’t think it’s on account of a gravestone. I think it’s just my feet getting tangled up in each other. Anyhow, I crash to the ground. The two thousand pigeons which have made St Michael and All Angels their home take to the air in a furious beat of wings. My mouth is full of mud and grass and something hard. Two hard things, in fact. Gravel, I think. I sit up and spit. But I can’t see what I have in my palm because my glasses have gone missing in the fall. I scrabble about. I crawl on my hands and knees among the tombstones and then – hallelujah – my specs. I put them on. They are muddy but not broken. I open my palm. The things in there are small chips of white marble. One is streaked with blood, presumably from the inside of my cheek. They’re the sort of chippings you put round flower containers in graveyards, and, as people get picky about things like this, I decide to replace them.
There is only one grave with similar chippings. I shuffle back to it and deposit my offerings around a vase of fresh daffodils. Then I squint up to see on whose grave I fell.
The headstone is grey marble and the black words engraved there are: Our beloved son aged 12 years . The date is 1967 and the name of the child is David Sorrel.
8
I’m fine in school. Trust me. I’m cool. You’d never know I wasn’t having an ordinary day. I take an enormous interest in Pythagoras (Mr Brand), the bubonic plague (Mrs Greene) and the correct use of the inverted comma (Miss Raynham). This is what I learn: Pythagoras was a Greek mathematician who invented some theory about right-angled triangles and didn’t eat beans because he thought they had souls; the plague, contrary to popular belief, was not carried by rats but by the fleas who lived on the rats; and inverted commas are the punctuation marks that you use to indicate speech in text.
Wesley says: “Inverted commas look a bit like beans, don’t they Miss Raynham? Do you think they could have
And it’s all so ordinary. It is bright. The sun is shining and there are birds singing. Twittering in the sky. At least I think it’s ordinary until the slow-motion starts. I see a comb in the grass and then I see all the grass as hair. And beyond that, thick ropes of ivy gripping a fallen tree take the shape of a monkey clinging to its mother’s stomach. And even the discarded microwave becomes a casket, the condensation on the inside of the screen gathering into opalescent jewels joined by a thread of quicksilver where a snail has trailed.
It’s as though the world has suddenly decided to let me in on some marvellous secret, and is playing with me, gleeful, delighted. Or maybe it’s me that’s delighted. Me that’s been to the top of Chance House and got away with it! I feel light, airy and full of energy. I could skip, Icould dance. Well, I could if I had the co-ordination. As it is I’m just sort of wheeling about, dizzying my way towards the gas works and my first lesson with the divine Miss Raynham.
“Watch it, you!”
I almost bump into some gentleman with a bull dog. I smile, I wave at him.
“Sorry!”
“Youth of today,” he snarls.
But I’m spinning away. Me – Norbert No-Bottle, hero of Chance House! I waft across the main road, narrowly missing a double-decker bus. A white van comes to a halt with a screech of brakes, but I don’t think it’s to do with me. Because I’m already on the pavement, whirling through the gates of St Michael and All Angels. Going via the churchyard is not as short a route to school as via the gas works but it is more decorative. There are gravestones and flowers and bag-ladies and surveillance cameras with notices that say whatever you do will be captured on film for ever.
What I do for the cameras is – fall over. I don’t think it’s on account of a gravestone. I think it’s just my feet getting tangled up in each other. Anyhow, I crash to the ground. The two thousand pigeons which have made St Michael and All Angels their home take to the air in a furious beat of wings. My mouth is full of mud and grass and something hard. Two hard things, in fact. Gravel, I think. I sit up and spit. But I can’t see what I have in my palm because my glasses have gone missing in the fall. I scrabble about. I crawl on my hands and knees among the tombstones and then – hallelujah – my specs. I put them on. They are muddy but not broken. I open my palm. The things in there are small chips of white marble. One is streaked with blood, presumably from the inside of my cheek. They’re the sort of chippings you put round flower containers in graveyards, and, as people get picky about things like this, I decide to replace them.
There is only one grave with similar chippings. I shuffle back to it and deposit my offerings around a vase of fresh daffodils. Then I squint up to see on whose grave I fell.
The headstone is grey marble and the black words engraved there are: Our beloved son aged 12 years . The date is 1967 and the name of the child is David Sorrel.
8
I’m fine in school. Trust me. I’m cool. You’d never know I wasn’t having an ordinary day. I take an enormous interest in Pythagoras (Mr Brand), the bubonic plague (Mrs Greene) and the correct use of the inverted comma (Miss Raynham). This is what I learn: Pythagoras was a Greek mathematician who invented some theory about right-angled triangles and didn’t eat beans because he thought they had souls; the plague, contrary to popular belief, was not carried by rats but by the fleas who lived on the rats; and inverted commas are the punctuation marks that you use to indicate speech in text.
Wesley says: “Inverted commas look a bit like beans, don’t they Miss Raynham? Do you think they could have
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