Read Online The Northern Clemency by Philip Hensher - Free Book Online

was its only visible representative. They’d all concluded, with different degrees of worry or amusement, that Antony, a boy as pale and quiet as a whelk, was not the tip of some festive iceberg but probably Tim’s best or only friend.
    “No, it wasn’t Antony’s joke,” Tim said. “It was another boy, at school.”
    “You’ve been saving it up for five weeks?” Daniel said.
    “I only just thought of it,” Tim said. “There are these three bears, right?”
    “I thought this was a joke,” Daniel said. “I don’t want to hear Goldilocks.”
    “It isn’t Goldilocks,” Tim said. “And these three bears, they’re in an aeroplane.”
    “Not very likely,” Jane said. “They wouldn’t let three bears on an aeroplane. They’d eat all the meals and then they’d eat all the passengers. And they’d open the doors at the other end and there’s no one there except a lot of bones and three bears who weren’t hungry any more.”
    “Well, there’s mummy bear and daddy bear and baby bear,” Tim said, persevering, “and they’re in an aeroplane.”
    “Where were they going?” Daniel said. “I can’t remember stories like this if I don’t know where they’re going.”
    “It doesn’t matter,” Tim said. “They never got there, anyway. Listen to the story and you’ll find out.”
    “Is this a joke or a story?” Jane said. “You said it was a joke. Now it’s a story.”
    “I want to know where they were going,” Daniel said. “Can they be going to Spain? I’d like a bear who went to Spain. Or can they be comingback? Then they’d have those hats on, those sombreros. A bear in a sombrero, there’s a sight you don’t see every day.”
    “They weren’t going anywhere,” Tim said. “Stop interrupting. I’m telling a joke.”
    “They’ve got to have been going somewhere,” Jane said, “or they wouldn’t have been in an aeroplane in the first place. Go on, tell us your joke.”
    “All right,” Tim said. “So they’re in this plane, and suddenly the engines catch fire. I forgot—I should have said there’s only two parachutes on the plane.”
    “There’s only two parachutes on the plane?” Daniel said. “For three bears, and a plane full of passengers, and the crew as well? That’s not very sensible.”
    “There’s not a plane full of passengers,” Tim said, getting red in the face. “There’s only three bears.”
    “But even supposing there are only three bears—I suppose they’ve eaten all the other passengers, or maybe everyone in the departure lounge saw three bears getting on the plane, and thought, Hmm, do I want to get into a confined space with three hungry bears or, really, do I want to go to Spain that much anyway, and changed their mind and went home—I mean, even supposing that, there’s got to be someone flying the plane.”
    “Or even two,” Jane said. “I think you have to have two pilots. When we went to Paris last year there were two pilots in case something went wrong with one of them.”
    Tim thought for a very long time, breathing noisily. Finally, he said, “Daddy bear was flying the plane. Because he knew how to.”
    “Oh, that makes perfect sense,” Daniel said. “An untrained savage wild beast from the Canadian wilderness who’d learnt how to fly a jet plane. One of the most majestic yet complex machines ever invented by the human race.”
    “No, it was invented by a moose,” Jane said. “Everyone knows that.”
    “Called Harold,” Daniel said.
    “And the daddy bear said to the mummy bear, ‘There’s only two parachutes, one for me and one for you.’ So the daddy bear puts one on and the mummy bear puts the other on and they jump out of the plane.”
    “What—they didn’t even try to hold their infant?” Daniel said. “Their poor suffering infant who they loved better than anyone else in the world? They just left the baby bear to die in a plane crash? This isn’t a funny story at all. It’s deeply moving and