Read Online Rook by Jane Rusbridge - Free Book Online

head and reaches for the protective gloves on the hat shelf above the coats. Out on the lane again, clutching the shovel, she bears down on the three boys crouched by the ditch. The mesh of the veil is sticky with dust.
    The youths look round. One, gawping at her, belches and clutches his stomach.
    ‘Careful! It’s highly contagious.’ She makes her voice a gruff bark. ‘Bird flu!’
    Two of the boys step back, but the one with the black hood grinds his fag end under his trainer before slipping the hood from his forehead. The gleam above his upper lip is not a boil, but a lip piercing. His smile is slick with confidence.
    ‘Gonna get rid of it?’ He jerks his head towards the jumble of black feathers.
    Nora nods, pointing in the direction of a red van parked a little way up the lane: Harry’s van.        
    ‘Sick!’ The boy kicks the kerb with the toe of his trainer before he struts off, the ragged hems of his jeans scuffing. His two mates scuttle along behind, one glancing back over his shoulder. Nora suppresses the laughter threatening to bubble up inside her. She’ll refashion the whole story later for her mother: young hooligans prowling and armed with knives, an injured bird; herself coming to the rescue, festooned in a veil.
    The bird opens one visible eye as she bends over it but, although the spread wing has been gathered in to the bird’s breast, it doesn’t stir. She puts the shovel down. Her father’s gloves are too stiff with age and disuse to handle something light and fragile as a bauble, she might crush the bird’s ribcage. As the finger of her glove brushes the feathers, the beak opens wider, tongue lifting like a latch, but the bird doesn’t peck or claw. She lifts the veil from her face and removes the gloves. Taking a breath, she flexes her fingers and, with a fingertip, strokes the back of the bird’s head. The feathers there are smooth, iridescent green and purple.
    She’d better get a move on, because Ada will want tea when she wakes from her nap. As her fingers close around spines like plastic drinking-straws amongst the feathers the bird jolts sideways, a heave of body and wing which catches Nora by surprise. She lurches back.
    Harry is wandering down the lane whistling, feet slopping in a pair of purple plastic crocs. His buckets hang, clanking, from his wooden ladder balanced over a shoulder, and his Hawaiian shirt, fastened with only one remaining button, gapes over his broad chest. He’s holding a brown paper bag.
    He stops and contemplates Nora’s legs as she stands in the ditch, the hem of her dress clutched up at her hips away from the sappy bluebells. She drops her dress and tugs the bee-veil from her head.
    ‘All OK?’ His voice is a rumble.
    ‘Yes.’ Nora nods, smiling. ‘Yes, yes, absolutely.’ He’s studying her face, waiting for her to say more. She must look mad standing like this in a ditch. ‘There’s a bird.’ She points.
    Harry puts his brown paper bag, the buckets and cloths, the ladder and his bundle of car keys in a heap on the tarmac and hunkers down.
    She waits for the deep slow sound of his voice. She has grown to like its vibration, the slur of words as if he can’t be bothered to separate sounds. In the few months since he parked his caravan up on Geoff Strickland’s old airstrip, he’s become a familiar sight around the village. His forehead is furrowed by a long scar which makes it difficult to guess his age but he seems older than her; perhaps forty. More scars, pencil-thin and silvery, web across the backs of his hands, now splayed on each thigh. He has no small talk, leaving sentences to float, incomplete, as he stares into the middle distance over a cup of tea. Now, however, he says nothing. He kneels by the bird, broad shoulders blocking her view. Curls clump at the nape of his neck, as if he’s been out in wind on water all day. A gust blows the floral cotton of her dress against her thighs.
    She jumps when Harry gets to his feet and