Read Online The Lives She Left Behind by James Long - Free Book Online Page B

eyes.
    ‘Fifteen feet, maybe more,’ said the man. ‘Can you get up? I only ask because we need the trench. If you’ve finished with it, that is.’
    Luke took the outstretched hand and stood up carefully.
    ‘I’m Dozer,’ the man said. ‘You okay?’
    ‘Yes. What are you doing?’
    ‘Digging. Just started. All we’ve done is get the turf off.’
    The boy looked at the long strip of earth and recognised it for what it was. ‘You’re archaeologists?’
    Dozer nodded. ‘So what do we call you?’ he asked.
    Part of the boy thought it would be good to get away as fast as he could, to leave his embarrassment far behind and take his aches with him back to the anonymous world below. ‘Luke,’
he answered, and the man laughed.
    ‘Luke Skydiver,’ he said. ‘Just right.’ Then from behind him another man’s voice said, ‘Hang on, I know you, don’t I?’
    Turning, he saw a familiar face – a teacher’s face where there shouldn’t be a teacher. Two hours from his school. That wasn’t fair. Embarrassment would travel home with
him now.
    ‘I’m Luke Sturgess, sir.’
    ‘Yes, of course. My History Club.’
    They stared at each other in equal awkwardness. Luke had signed up for the after-school club entirely because he liked the picture on the poster. He had gone twice and it had gone badly.
    ‘How did you get here, Luke?’ The man was looking up the hill as if more people might come raining down. ‘Are your parents here?’
    Martin. Luke’s memory gave him the name. Mike Martin. They’d hardly come across each other.
    ‘No, I came by bike.’
    ‘From Wincanton? All that way? Why?’
    And there were so many possible answers to that question. There was Barry, who had his mum in tears. There was his birthday in two days, which would have Barry right in the middle of it for the
first time ever – Barry who did sly, small things to get at him. Then there was some sort of fifteen-about-to-be-sixteen sap rising in him, which seemed to have no outlet but physical
exercise. Above all there was that feeling of something missing, something he might find if he just looked hard enough. If he just knew where to look. It was an overwhelming certainty that wherever
he was it was not the right place, and whoever he was with they were not the right person.
    ‘I don’t really know,’ was all he said.
    ‘You’d better come with me,’ said the teacher. ‘Come and see Rupert. He’s in charge. We might have to fill in a form or something.’
    The boy didn’t want to move away. He felt that the impact, the moment when there was no breath in his body and the roof of his world had been made up of three girls’ faces, had
bonded him to this particular earth, but obedience made him follow the teacher round a shoulder of hillside to where a man was spraying yellow lines on the grass. The boy searched for the girls as
they walked but they had vanished like wood nymphs.
    ‘Rupert,’ the teacher called, and the man with the can looked round. ‘Sorry to bother you but we’ve had an unexpected visitor.’ He explained and the archaeologist
looked the boy up and down.
    ‘Do you feel all right?’
    ‘Not really’ would have been the truthful answer. Luke was somewhere outside himself, floating above his own head. Nothing was the same any more. ‘A bit sore,’ was all he
said.
    ‘Bad luck. Did you come to see the dig?’
    ‘No. What are you looking for?’
    ‘An explanation of why there’s a large hole where no hole should be. Are you interested?’
    He nodded.
    ‘Really? All right. A dog fell into an underground chamber. We’ve peered down it and there’s an echo, so we’re trying to find out what it is.’
    And Luke’s mind, still a little loose from its moorings after his fall, conjured out of nowhere a picture of scared men with spades. Burying something? Retrieving it? He couldn’t
tell.
    ‘Why are you spraying the grass?’
    ‘I’m marking out another trench. We can’t go in from the top