Foxspell by Gillian Rubinstein

Author:Gillian Rubinstein
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ligature Pty Limited
Published: 2013-04-09T00:00:00+00:00

9.

When Tod woke up it was bright daylight. A train was clattering down the hill towards the city. Perhaps it was the 12.01, or the 1.01. Tod yawned and stretched, not bothering to check his watch. There was no need to get up yet, he thought lazily. No need to move until the sun disappeared from the sky and night fell. But he didn’t exactly think it in words, and he didn’t think about precise times either. He saw a series of images inside his head—the sun, the night, himself set within each frame, part of the sun, part of the night, not a person who thought things out and planned them with clocks and dates and timetables.

He yawned again. He was changing inside in some way but he wasn’t sure what he was changing into.

Then the door opened and his mother came into the room. The images disappeared and he was back to his old way of thinking again. He didn’t feel like getting up. He wanted to stay in bed and work out what was happening to him, so he lay with his eyes closed, and hoped she would go away again. But Leonie was in a brisk and bossy mood. She shook Tod awake and made him get up.

She made him lunch and told him he could go to school for the afternoon, and since she was going out she would drop him there on the way. Tod wasn’t sure how much Dallas had said to her, but Leonie must have been a bit suspicious, because she sat in the car for a few minutes and watched him to make sure he went in.

Ms Linkman was trying to interest the class in English grammar, but Tod’s thoughts kept wandering. They wandered over the quarries, searched for the big fox, thought about Grandma’s stories and about people who could be half-animal and half-man, and ended up outside the strange camp in the cave, staring at the fire.

Tod couldn’t understand why he hadn’t been able to find the way through the ash trees when he had been there with Adrian. He kept thinking about all the different paths and tracks he had explored, running through them in his mind with his new way of thinking as if he were watching himself running along them, ears pointed, tail swinging.

Martin nudged him. ‘Stop making that funny noise,’ he muttered.

‘What noise?’

‘Like you’re panting.’

‘I’m not making any noise,’ Tod said.

‘Yes, you are,’ Adrian put in.

Ms Linkman stopped in midstream. ‘Are you listening, Adrian?’

‘Yes,’ he assured her innocently.

‘So what was I saying?’

‘It’s wrong to put the apostrophe in its when it means of it,’ Martin said swiftly.

‘I wasn’t asking you, Martin, I’m sure you know this already. Tod and Adrian, do you understand it?’

They both nodded their heads. Ms Linkman sighed and went on.

Finally the lesson was over and they packed up their books before the siren went.

‘Are you coming to my house?’ Martin asked Tod.

Tod had forgotten he’d said he might go and play computer games again.

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