Boy A by Trigell Jonathan

Author:Trigell, Jonathan [Trigell, Jonathan]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
Publisher: Profile Books UK
Published: 2011-03-11T00:00:00+00:00

N is for Newspaper.

Negatives and Neckerchieves.

They’re going to Alton Towers. Chris and Steve the mechanic are discussing the merits of the new A50 dual carriageway, on which they have sped from the M6. Jack is listening in the middle. It’s odd to be in the van on a Saturday. The windows are open, and he can smell the dust and dirt, whose scents have been awakened by an earlier light rain. Chris is taking it slowly now they’re on these little country lanes. It’s only days since the accident. It’s still on Jack’s mind too. But the air is fresh out here. The skies are clear. The sun is shining through the trees, scattering strip-lights on the road before them. And they’re going to Alton Towers.

They pull in, past the big purple billboards, along the park’s road. Which has a single unbroken dividing line, to show you are in a different world now. Chris continues straight on, when the way splits, to the branch marked ‘hotel’ not ‘entrance’. Jack waits a moment or two before he says anything. Hoping that Chris or Steve the mechanic will notice they’ve gone wrong. He doesn’t like to point out mistakes in others, particularly in Chris, who rarely takes a bad route. But there is no getting round it, they have certainly missed their turning.

‘Chris,’ he says, ‘I think we might have gone past the entry back there.’

Chris laughs, ‘Don’t worry, Bruiser, we’ve got a special way in. I told you we could do this on the cheap, didn’t I?’

Jack suffers a slight sinking feeling, but the unstressed grins on Chris and Steve the mechanic’s faces tell him there is nothing to worry about.

‘It’s mostly public footpath where we’re going,’ Steve the mechanic says. ‘It was there before the rides.’

There’s a big brass statue of a flying machine in front of the building. Jack would quite like to look at it, but Chris swings the van into a parking space beside a gleaming people-carrier, almost hidden from the hotel. They walk together down the gently inclined field that flows down the left-hand side. Steve the mechanic says the slope reminds him of a hill he used to go sledging on, when he was little. But the field is too lushly green for Jack to picture it covered in white, and he tries but fails to remember the crunch of snow under his feet. Here the ground bounces with the thickness of the grass. At the pasture bottom there is a barbed-wire fence. Jack finds barbed wire repellent. He saw someone trying to climb razor wire once. He’ll never forget that.

Over a stile they go, into a wood. Sure enough there is a small green sign that says ‘Public Footpath’ and points along a beaten hard mud path, which they follow. It’s quite beautiful in the woods. He wishes Michelle was here. Jack feels close to nature somehow along this path, with trees all around. Like a woodsman. Like Davy Crockett. His dad took him to see the film once.

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