Fingers in the Sparkle Jar by Chris Packham

Author:Chris Packham
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781473529427
Publisher: Ebury Publishing

5

My Piece of Sky

The Egg

April 1973

THE JACKDAWS BLEW off the field like bonfire ash, freckling grey into the bone-white sky, breaking down to the roofs, catching up on the chimneys, their chatter spent in the gaunt wind that heaved up the slope and leaned into him like a shoving crowd of ghosts. Torn grass, paper, crumpled cans and a flurry of polystyrene edged the sticky clay path checked with prints from Clarks, Millwards and the Co-op and in his pocket he fiddled with Peter Osgood, broken off at the knees, a casualty of last night’s big match on his bedroom carpet where he’d beaten himself at Subbuteo.

Snow carrion from the sheet that had fallen on the first Saturday afternoon of the Easter holidays lay cowering in the shadows, irregular volumes flecked with dripped dirt, hard, with the taste of spoons, they popped with a kick and then dribbled down his cuffs as he revolved them in his bright pink fingers searching for symmetry.

He was out for the sake of it, the front room was choked with smoke, his sister was going to a party, his parents had rowed over the reheated roast and he’d flushed his sprouts down the toilet once they’d got bored with nagging him and ignored his retching. He should have put his cousin’s old boots on, his white plimmers were now rimmed with mud, which would scab them for weeks and stain them forever. On the way down the hill the reckless buffeting had felt good, only he was out in spring’s winter, he was the brave one, but now brawling with the gale had become tiring, his head was down, his zips were up, he stooped into the hedge and settled on the rusty oil drum that all last summer he’d hoped would hide lizards but had only ever sheltered slugs.

From his cave he could see no one or anything man-made and the squall blanked out all their noises too. A sudden pelt of hail walloped him and he curled into the tree and closed his eyes savouring the brief polished fragrance of new ice that pinged with the bouncing beads over the ground. They could all be body-snatched, they could all die from a lethal plague, he’d be the sole survivor, the omega boy, he’d fortify a den, get guns and fight the zombie hordes and he’d have all the animals he wanted for company and he’d have purple carpet and those modern inflatable chairs in every room, he’d dress like Ed Straker and he’d never eat another sprout.

The bullets of hail blasted through the flimsy drapery of leaves and popped across his lap, lodged in the folds of his sleeves and thwacked the plastic bag that kept the can company in this rustic refuge, walled with bramble, holly and hawthorn. He huddled in thought, in fantasies of survival for what seemed an age. He didn’t know hours or minutes, his watchless time was measured only by his hunger and tiredness, not by his parents’ curfews or even the passage of the sun.

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