The Ultimate Truth by Kevin Brooks

Author:Kevin Brooks [Brooks, Kevin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781447241508
Publisher: Macmillan Children’s Books

30

Although some of the older inhabitants of Kell Cross still refer to it as ‘the village’, it’s not really a village any more. It’s still got a few old-fashioned village shops, and there’s a patch of grass near the bus stop that’s officially known as the village green, but the vast majority of Kell Cross is taken up by a massive retail park and a sprawling housing estate that backs onto the Barton bypass. Not everyone likes the park and the estate. There’s always someone complaining about something – the village isn’t what it used to be, the housing estate ‘lowers the tone’ of the neighbourhood, there’s too much out-of-town traffic these days, the local shops can’t compete with the megastores. But, to me, Kell Cross is simply the place where I’ve always lived. I was born there, I grew up there. I know every inch of it – every street, every lane, every field, every shop. Whether I like it or not is kind of irrelevant.

It’s where I live.

Simple as that.

Except I didn’t live there any more.

As I cycled into Kell Cross that morning, following the all-too-familiar route to my house – left off Long Barton Road, left again into Broad Avenue, then right into Dane Street – I realised that things weren’t quite so simple any more. I suppose I’d just assumed that everything would be the same. I was going back to my house, riding my bike along my street . . . why shouldn’t everything be the same? And in some ways, it was. The bumps and potholes in the street hadn’t changed, the drain covers were still in the same place, the broken kerb where I hopped my bike onto the pavement was still there, and as I pulled up and stopped at my front gate, my house looked exactly the same as it always had too. The white walls, the grey-tiled roof, the cherry tree in the front garden . . .

Nothing had changed.

But nothing felt the same any more. The street I’d walked a thousand times, the house I’d lived in all my life . . .

They’d gone.

All that remained were lifeless replicas.

It was a very weird feeling, and I didn’t really understand it, but as I opened the gate and wheeled my bike up the driveway, the sense that I no longer belonged here grew stronger and stronger with every step. It was like being in some kind of parallel universe, a world in which everything is both familiar and unfamiliar at the same time – the sound of the gravel crunching under my feet, the scratches on the wall where I leaned my bike, the brush marks in the paintwork on the front door. I knew it all, but I was a stranger to it all.

When I opened the front door – with the key I’d taken from Nan and Grandad’s – and went inside the house, the intensity of that familiar-yet-unfamiliar feeling was so bewildering that I very nearly turned round and left.

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