The Claude Glass by Tom Bullough

Author:Tom Bullough [Tom Bullough]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781908745224
Publisher: Sort Of Books
Published: 2012-09-17T04:00:00+00:00

The morning after the thunderstorm was Easter Sunday, and the world woke clean and shiny – seemingly amazed that it had made it through this cataclysm of fire and water, only to emerge on a more or less normal day. Across Penllan, the grass had become fluorescent, as had the small yellow flowers that glowed amongst it, as had the primroses in the hedges and the full-blown leaves of the chestnut trees. It was as if everything was revealing more of itself on mornings like these – whether from shock, or relief, or exaltation – or as if you were yourself able to see a little wider, to glimpse in this sudden beauty something of the world’s subliminal extent.

In the barns, coloured eggs appeared beneath the bantams, and Robin and Martin set out before breakfast to comb through the haylofts, searching the spaces between bales, the holes in the walls, the places in the rusted-up workings of ancient machinery. They scrambled up pillars, shouting as they spotted a speck of blue amongst a mass of brooding feathers, a flower-shaped arrangement of eggs on the top of the highest stack. They waved their arms to drive off the hens, gathering their eggs in a hay-lined basket while the cocks crowed and preened and ignored them along the beams.

Dropped in boiling water, the eggs began to shed their colours instantly – green, blue, yellow, red, rising in plumes, fanning as they came to the surface, remaining beautiful for a moment or two as the colours swirled together. Then the saucepan turned to a brownish murk and you couldn’t see anything at all, until, five minutes later, Tara sat regular eggs on the table and cracked the tops with a teaspoon.

The ordinariness of the eggs, Tara explained as she chopped up their toast into soldiers, was entirely to be expected. Coloured eggs were, of course, magic – deposited in the barns during the night by the egg fairy, who was the tooth fairy for the rest of the year. Her eggs were entirely harmless, just so long as you could make them vanish again by noon of the next day. This meant, first, that you had to boil off the colour, then you had to eat them, making sure that you didn’t leave even the tiniest scrap, then you had to throw the shells on the compost heap with a particular incantation.

If you did all of these things correctly, then you were allowed to eat some chocolate: the only time that you were allowed to eat chocolate in the entire year. And if you didn’t, then the egg would hatch and grow into a chicken the same colour as its egg all over, very angry and larger than the house.

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