Read Online Ralph’s Children by Hilary Norman - Free Book Online Page B

used the
real
targets instead.
    It had been Roger’s idea to move the game up that notch.
    ‘It’s too dangerous,’ had been Pig’s reaction.
    ‘We might get caught,’ Simon had agreed.
    ‘We won’t,’ Roger had said.
    ‘Not if we plan it right,’ Jack had backed her up.
    Planning it
right
, they decided, meant isolating the Beast from outsiders, playing under cover of darkness and using war paint – as the children had in the novel that had first
inspired them – faces smeared with black and layers of brilliant colour to confuse and alarm their target and, most important, to make them unrecognizable.
    They were wary of getting caught, though it was not authority of which they were wary, but the awful spectre of being split up.
    ‘I couldn’t bear it,’ Pig had said.
    ‘It would be rough,’ the girl called Roger agreed.
    ‘It would be piss-horrible,’ Jack said.
    ‘We mustn’t let it happen,’ said the girl called Simon, ‘not ever.’
    ‘We won’t,’ Jack said. ‘Not with Ralph to help us.’
    ‘If she will,’ Pig said.
    ‘She always does,’ Roger said.
    It was true. Ralph knew that somewhere along the way she had become their creature, rather than simply their protector. And if her relationship with them had begun out of fascination, it had
long since become something of an addiction.
    ‘I’m not sure,’ she had said, when they’d first broached the new idea – knowing that by not stamping wholeheartedly on it, she had as good as given it her
blessing.
    ‘Whoever we punish,’ Simon said earnestly, ‘would have to be a true Beast.’
    ‘Obviously,’ Jack said.
    ‘We’re not brutes,’ Pig said.
    There was no shortage of potential Beasts, but the children were practical, realistic about degrees of risk. If they were to take action against, say, one of the more detested
teachers at school, they knew they’d be unlikely to get away with it; and the same could be said for the skinny old battleaxe who ran the Bartlet village shop, and who mistrusted every kid
who stepped out of Challow Hall.
    They had fewer misgivings about the cleaner.
    Rose Miller, a pinch-faced woman with meaty arms, worked five days a week in the home, lived in a terraced cottage just outside the village, was always loving to the smelly mongrel dog she
called Billy, but was a nasty piece of work when it came to her little girl and boy, always yelling at and smacking them in the shops and in the road.
Real
slaps, too, not just taps on the
bum or arm, bestowed with a force that left the kids in little doubt of what probably went on once she got them indoors.
    And since
nothing
was worse, in their eyes, than mothers who were cruel to their children, the group had unanimously agreed that Rose Miller deserved whatever they could manage to give
her.
    Intimidation, mostly.
    ‘And pain,’ Jack had urged one evening at Wayland’s Smithy.
    ‘Not pain,’ Ralph had intervened. ‘I won’t be a party to thuggery.’
    ‘Not even if it’s deserved?’ Pig asked.
    Ralph had heard longing in his tone, aware that while Pig was in most ways a gentle soul, his own parents’ savagery had made child abuse anathema to him.
    ‘Not even then,’ she had answered firmly.
    ‘So what’s the point,’ Jack had wanted to know, ‘if we can’t hurt the cow?’
    ‘We can make her afraid,’ Roger said. ‘Show her that if she can’t take better care of her kids, she’ll pay for it.’
    They’d all looked back at Ralph, waiting to see if she objected to that.
    It would, she knew, have been the moment to call a halt, but she was too fascinated to know how the new game might unfold, and so she had said neither no nor yes, and knew that she might as well
have given them an A for effort.
    They were all quiet for a minute.
    ‘What if it goes wrong?’ Simon had asked. ‘What if she recognizes us and tells?’
    ‘She won’t,’ Roger said. ‘And if she does . . .’
    ‘Worst comes to worst,’ Jack said with a shrug,