The Bunker Diary by Kevin Brooks

Author:Kevin Brooks [Brooks, Kevin]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780141910598
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2013-03-07T00:00:00+00:00

Wednesday, 15 February

Things are beginning to get back to normal. Bird and Anja have got over their hangovers and got used to not smoking again. They’re both still edgy and snappy all the time, but it’s a controlled edginess now. It’s not so spiky.

Fred’s up and about again. He doesn’t look too bad. A bit hollow-eyed, a bit twitchy, but that’s about all. He seems to have got over the withdrawal symptoms a lot quicker than last time. I don’t really know how heroin works or what it does to your body, but I guess it didn’t take him so long this time because he hadn’t been taking it that long.

The rota’s creaking back into operation too. The place is getting cleaner and it doesn’t stink of cigarette smoke any more. We’re still not talking very much, but at least everyone’s sober and straight.

Normal.

Here’s a normal day.

07.00: I wake up sweating. It’s too hot. Sometimes He turns up the temperature at night. Other times He turns it down and I wake up shivering, but this morning it’s too hot. I lie in bed thinking. Thinking of other times, when I was a little kid, when Dad was at home, when Mum was …

Angry.

I always remember her angry. Angry or irritable. Or both.

I remember the garden too. The garden of the house we lived in before Dad got rich. The scrubby lawn, the hedge, the crumbling rockery, the fir trees … I can see it all, as clear as a bright-blue sky. At the far end of the garden there are two tall fir trees and a hedge of thick green privet. Wood pigeons call from the fir trees – hoo hoo hoo, hoo hoo … hoo hoo hoo, hoo hoo. I remember the hedge as a jungle. I remember summer. Slow-worms are resting in the sand and roots of the hedge. Slow-worms. Sleek brown tubes with skins of varnished leather. I sit cross-legged in the hedge-dirt watching them. They’re not worms, they’re not even snakes. I know that because I read my animal books. Slow-worms are legless lizards. They have hidden nubs of arm and leg bones to prove it. I sit in the dirt, scratching my arse, absently crumbling a clod of earth in my fingers, watching the slow-worms, and I remember Dad’s joke.

Q: Why did the viper vipe ’er nose?

A: Because the adder ’ad ’er ’andkerchief.

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