Read Online The Radleys by Matt Haig - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Matt Haig
Tags: Fiction, Paranormal
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Solitude of Trees by Alistair Hobart, the award-winning author of When the Last Sparrow Sings .
Rowan has a secret aim in life. He wants to write a novel. He has ideas, but nothing seems to make it into writing.
The trouble is, al his ideas are a bit too bleak. They always seem to involve suicide or apocalypse or—more and more frequently—some sort of cannibalism. General y, they are set two hundred years ago, but there’s one idea he has that is set in the future. This is his happiest idea—
the one about the world’s imminent end. A comet is heading to earth, and after various intergovernmental attempts to stop it have failed, people are resigned to dying in a hundred or so days. The only chance of survival is to take part in a massive global lottery, in which five hundred lucky people win a ticket to a space station where they form their own self-sustaining community.
Rowan sees it as a kind of greenhouse orbiting Venus. Then a boy, a skinny seventeen-year-old with skin al ergies, wins a ticket but eventual y gives up his place to spend seven more days on Earth with the girl he loves. The boy is going to be cal ed Ewan. The girl, Eva.
He hasn’t written a word of it yet. Deep down, he knows he isn’t real y going to be a novelist. He is going to sel advertising space or maybe, if he’s lucky, he’l work in a gal ery or become a copywriter or something. Even that’s a long shot, given how badly he’s likely to do in interviews.
The interview for his last job—doing silver service at the Wil ows Hotel in Thirsk for wedding receptions on Saturday afternoons—had been a total disaster in which he’d nearly ended up hyperventilating. Although he was the only applicant, Mrs. Hodge-Simmons had been very reluctant to take him on and had her doubts confirmed when Rowan ended up fal ing asleep serving at the head table and unconsciously poured gravy over the skirt of the groom’s mother.
He scratches at his arm, wishing he were Alistair Hobart: surely Eve would love him if he were debated on national TV. Then, as Kirsty Wark starts to wrap things up, the phone rings.
One of the handsets is lying out of its cradle on the table next to the sofa. He picks it up.
“Hel o?” He can hear someone breathing on the other end of the line. “Hel o? Who is it? Hel o?”
Whoever is there has decided not to speak.
“Hel o?” He hears a kind of clicking sound. A sort of tut maybe, which is fol owed by a sigh.
“Hel o?”
Nothing but the dial tone, humming ominously.
And then he hears the car pul up in the driveway.
Calamine Lotion
Eve sees a thin man marching across the field toward them. Only when he cals her name does she realize this man is her father. The embarrassment this causes has a kind of crushing effect on her, and she shrivels into herself as he approaches.
Toby’s also noticed him. “Who’s that? Is that—”
“My dad.”
“What’s he doing?”
“I don’t know,” says Eve, although she knows perfectly wel what he is doing. He is turning her into a social cripple. She tries to limit the damage by standing up.
She smiles apologetical y at Toby, before her father becomes too easy for him to see, with his il -washed Manchester United shirt and his unkempt hair. The father who has no visible connection to the dad she once knew, when her mother was stil around. Indeed, it was too much to expect for the world to see the man he once was, when she could hardly see him herself. “I’m sorry,” she says, walking backward across the grass. “I’ve got to go.”
Jared looks at her top and the naked skin it reveals. Skin he had once dabbed with calamine lotion after she fel in a patch of nettles on a family holiday.
The air in the car is tainted by perfume and alcohol. He knows any other parent would accept this as normal teenage stuff, but any other parent doesn’t know what he knows—that the line between myth and reality is drawn by people who can’t be trusted.
“You smel of
Rowan has a secret aim in life. He wants to write a novel. He has ideas, but nothing seems to make it into writing.
The trouble is, al his ideas are a bit too bleak. They always seem to involve suicide or apocalypse or—more and more frequently—some sort of cannibalism. General y, they are set two hundred years ago, but there’s one idea he has that is set in the future. This is his happiest idea—
the one about the world’s imminent end. A comet is heading to earth, and after various intergovernmental attempts to stop it have failed, people are resigned to dying in a hundred or so days. The only chance of survival is to take part in a massive global lottery, in which five hundred lucky people win a ticket to a space station where they form their own self-sustaining community.
Rowan sees it as a kind of greenhouse orbiting Venus. Then a boy, a skinny seventeen-year-old with skin al ergies, wins a ticket but eventual y gives up his place to spend seven more days on Earth with the girl he loves. The boy is going to be cal ed Ewan. The girl, Eva.
He hasn’t written a word of it yet. Deep down, he knows he isn’t real y going to be a novelist. He is going to sel advertising space or maybe, if he’s lucky, he’l work in a gal ery or become a copywriter or something. Even that’s a long shot, given how badly he’s likely to do in interviews.
The interview for his last job—doing silver service at the Wil ows Hotel in Thirsk for wedding receptions on Saturday afternoons—had been a total disaster in which he’d nearly ended up hyperventilating. Although he was the only applicant, Mrs. Hodge-Simmons had been very reluctant to take him on and had her doubts confirmed when Rowan ended up fal ing asleep serving at the head table and unconsciously poured gravy over the skirt of the groom’s mother.
He scratches at his arm, wishing he were Alistair Hobart: surely Eve would love him if he were debated on national TV. Then, as Kirsty Wark starts to wrap things up, the phone rings.
One of the handsets is lying out of its cradle on the table next to the sofa. He picks it up.
“Hel o?” He can hear someone breathing on the other end of the line. “Hel o? Who is it? Hel o?”
Whoever is there has decided not to speak.
“Hel o?” He hears a kind of clicking sound. A sort of tut maybe, which is fol owed by a sigh.
“Hel o?”
Nothing but the dial tone, humming ominously.
And then he hears the car pul up in the driveway.
Calamine Lotion
Eve sees a thin man marching across the field toward them. Only when he cals her name does she realize this man is her father. The embarrassment this causes has a kind of crushing effect on her, and she shrivels into herself as he approaches.
Toby’s also noticed him. “Who’s that? Is that—”
“My dad.”
“What’s he doing?”
“I don’t know,” says Eve, although she knows perfectly wel what he is doing. He is turning her into a social cripple. She tries to limit the damage by standing up.
She smiles apologetical y at Toby, before her father becomes too easy for him to see, with his il -washed Manchester United shirt and his unkempt hair. The father who has no visible connection to the dad she once knew, when her mother was stil around. Indeed, it was too much to expect for the world to see the man he once was, when she could hardly see him herself. “I’m sorry,” she says, walking backward across the grass. “I’ve got to go.”
Jared looks at her top and the naked skin it reveals. Skin he had once dabbed with calamine lotion after she fel in a patch of nettles on a family holiday.
The air in the car is tainted by perfume and alcohol. He knows any other parent would accept this as normal teenage stuff, but any other parent doesn’t know what he knows—that the line between myth and reality is drawn by people who can’t be trusted.
“You smel of
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