Crow Boy by Philip Caveney

Author:Philip Caveney
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fledgling Press
Published: 2012-10-07T04:00:00+00:00

Thirteen

Tom lay in an improvised bed on the kitchen floor, unable to sleep. Beside him, Cameron was snoring gently, his back turned. Tom had tried apologising to him earlier and had even offered to shake the boy’s hand, but Cameron would have none of it and he hadn’t spoken a word to Tom since the fight.

Because of the quarantine situation, the boys couldn’t go up to their usual room under the eaves of the building and this was the only solution that Missie Grierson had been able to come up with: a jumble of bedding laid out on the hard slabs of the kitchen floor, a Spartan arrangement that made the meagre bed in the roof-space seem like paradise by comparison. Whichever way Tom tried to stretch himself out, he could feel the chill touch of the stone slabs pressing through the woollen blankets beneath him and he was left to lie there, thinking about what had happened earlier.

He’d told Missie Grierson everything, leaving nothing out. To be fair to her, she’d listened patiently to what he had to say, but the look on her face suggested that she was beginning to think Cameron’s opinion of Tom was spot on. A bampot. Tom couldn’t blame her. He wouldn’t have believed it if somebody else had fed him a similar story. It was absolutely mental. There was no other way of describing it.

The problem was, he had no proof now of where he’d come from. The phone had packed up completely and when he’d shown her the five pound note, she’d just looked baffled. When Tom finally asked her if she believed him she could only shrug her massive shoulders and say that she’d have to think about it, long and hard, before she could offer him an answer.

Now what else was there for him to do but try to get on with the crazy, scrambled life that had been handed to him and hope that, one day, he’d somehow get back to where he’d come from?

A scrabbling sound made him look up and, in the rays of moonlight filtering in through the room’s one window, he saw a rat creeping along the wall, the same rat he had seen before, of that he was pretty sure, though he couldn’t for the life of him think why. Didn’t all rats look pretty much the same? This one was moving forward in a straight line, as though it knew exactly where it was going but, when it was about halfway across the room it unexpectedly stopped and turned to look at Tom. Tom felt a chill go through him. It was almost as though the rat knew him and had stopped to say hello. It raised itself up on its hind legs and stayed where it was for the moment, peering at him, its nose twitching agitatedly.

‘Shoo!’ hissed Tom, not wanting to wake up Cameron, who was in a bad enough mood already. ‘Go away!’

The rat tilted its head to one side, as though trying to puzzle out what Tom had said.

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