Boom! (1987) by Mark Haddon

Author:Mark Haddon
Format: epub
Published: 1987-07-30T16:00:00+00:00

Ten minutes later we pulled up outside Tesco. Becky got off the bike, handed me the keys and said, “Wait here. I’ll be five minutes.”

“But, Becky…” I complained.

“Listen, mate,” she said, wagging her finger at me. “If I’m going to Outer Mongolia, I need a toothbrush, I need eyeliner and I need some clean knickers.”

10

The road north

Toothbrush, knickers and eyeliner on board, we roared away into the evening traffic. I directed Becky towards the motorway and after half an hour we pulled into a service station so that we could grab something to eat, fill up with petrol and have a team talk.

We bought ourselves a tray of scrambled eggs and chips and sticky cakes and made our way to a window seat. We squeezed in, Becky speared a chip, I took a sip of my lemonade and she said, “Explanation. Now.”

I started at the beginning. The expulsion wind-up, bugging the staff room, Pearce and Kidd’s mystery language, Charlie saying, “Spudvetch!” to Mr Kidd, the raid on Mrs Pearce’s attic…

Becky’s chip remained suspended on the prongs of her fork, halfway between her plate and her mouth, throughout my entire story.

“Holy bananas,” she said. “And this is all true?”

“Of course it is. You saw those men in the flat. They weren’t pretending, were they?”

She let out a long, slow, whistly breath, then finally ate the chip.

“Look…” I said, reaching deep into a pannier. I took out the wristband and unwrapped the silver foil round it. “Put this round your wrist.”

“So this is the thing?”

“Yeah, this is the thing,” I said. “Now touch it with the fingers of your other hand. But be quick.”

She touched the brass bangle and jumped as the plane came in to land between her ears. “What the flaming…?”

Then the voice started. She whipped round, just like I’d done, thinking someone was standing next to her, talking into her ear.

I snatched the band off her wrist, wrapped it in the silver foil and slipped it back into the pannier.

“OK, OK, OK,” said Becky. “I believe you. God, that totally freaked me out.”

I took another swig of lemonade. “And I think it’s got a kind of tracer on it, so we can’t hang around here too long.”

She started eating her scrambled egg. “Where are we going?”

“Loch Coruisk,” I said, burrowing in the pannier again and bringing out the Ordnance Survey maps.

“Lock what?” asked Becky.

“Loch Coruisk,” I said. “It’s on the Isle of Skye.” I flattened out map number 32 across the table.

“Why there?”

“There was a message in the biscuit tin in Mrs Pearce’s attic. It was in the same language they were using in the staff room. It said ‘Coruisk’. Look…” I pointed to a jagged smear of blue in the centre of the map.

“And there was a map reference.” I dug out the Spudvetch! notebook and read out the numbers: “Four-eight-seven-one-nine-six.” I followed the lines down from the top margin and the lines in from the left-hand margin. “Here.” Where the lines converged there was a tiny square, indicating some kind of building by the mouth of the loch, where it fed into the sea.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.