Bird Boy E-Book

Catherine Bruton

• Herausgeber: Nosy Crow Ltd
• Kategorie: Für Kinder und Jugendliche
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 272

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

From the multi-award-winning author of No Ballet Shoes in Syria, comes a story of migration, conservation, healing and hope as a grieving boy forms an unbreakable bond with an injured bird. Nero Book Awards 2024 Shortlist - Children's Fiction After the tragic death of his mother, eleven year old Will is sent to temporarily stay with his uncle in the mountains. After years trapped in a high-rise flat, with only birds for company, Will doesn't know how he'll survive a place like this, but he soon finds solace in the woods, when he's surrounded by birdsong. With his new friend Omar - a refugee from Afghanistan - Will discovers an osprey nest, with two small chicks inside. He forms an unbreakable bond with the birds, especially the smallest chick, who they name Whitetip. But when tragedy almost strikes again one stormy night, and Whitetip is knocked out of the nest - breaking a wing, Will is determined to save her. Smuggling her down from the mountain, he finds a way to keep her alive. As Will helps Whitetip to grow and to heal, he finds a strength inside himself that he never knew he had. Maybe, finally, Will can find a way to take flight too... "Vivid and deeply empathetic, Catherine is a wonderful storyteller." - Phil Earle "A wonderfully moving story about the healing power of nature, perfect for fans of Phil Earle and Katya Balen" - Anthony McGowan "Unputdownable. A gift to nature loving young people" - Hilary McKay "A heart-felt story about the healing power of nature. Moving and powerful, I loved it" - Gill Lewis Look out for more beautiful stories by Catherine Bruton, such as: - No Ballet Shoes in Syria (WINNER of Books Are My Bag Readers Award 2019 and Nominated for the CILIP Carnegie Medal 2020) - Another Twist in the Tale - Following Frankenstein

Leseprobe

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For Isaac and Miles, in memory of

your beloved Uncle Jack xx

C.B.vi

1

Chapter 1

The first thing Will noticed when he stepped off the train was the smell of the sea. Then the looming bulk of the mountains in the fading light. Then the man standing alone at the other end of the platform, a dark silhouette against the bruised sky.

The man looked different from when they had met in the hospital. But it was hard to remember clearly, hard for Will to trust his memories, hard to trust the man either – after everything that had happened.

The man gave a curt nod in Will’s direction. He was wearing a rough fleece jacket, army trousers and big black boots that looked as though they had seen better days. His hair was cropped close to his head like a soldier too. And then there was the scar. That 2was hard to ignore.

“Train’s late,” the man said gruffly. “I thought you were never coming, lad.”

“So sorry – we missed the connection.” The young social worker called Wendy apologised breathlessly. She had spent most of the train journey tapping messages on her phone while Will stared out of the window, watching the vast sprawling city he had grown up in disappear into higgledy-piggledy house-filled suburbs, as the track plunged through patchwork fields and hedges and hills, before finally making its way through wild bleak countryside to this tiny station in the middle of nowhere, where everything smelled and felt all wrong.

After months stuck inside the flat, it all seemed unreal to Will, as if he were watching it all in a dream.

“You remember your uncle, Ian Oakley,” Wendy was saying. She spoke in the careful voice she’d used all day, as though she feared that if she spoke too loud Will might break. “You’ll be staying with him – just for the time being.”

Will said nothing.

“I’m so sorry but I need to get right back.” Wendy had been looking anxiously at her watch for the past half an hour. “This is the last train. There won’t be another one heading back to the city till the morning. 3Will you … be OK from here?”

Will wasn’t sure if she was asking him or the man, but he looked up at the stranger in front of him and they both nodded. An identical silent jerk of the head.

“Come on then, lad,” said the man called Ian Oakley, with a gruff smile. “That all you got?”

He reached out to take Will’s rucksack from him but Will instinctively flinched and held on.

“Like that, is it?” said Ian, stepping back. “Very well.”

“I’ll be in touch tomorrow,” Wendy was saying. “And I’ll pop over in a few days to check you’re settling in – OK, Will?”

But Will just shrugged. He had run out of words hours ago.

Dark was falling fast and the little train was about to leave. This was the end of the line. It couldn’t go any further or it would be in the sea. They were on the very edge of the world, Will thought, glancing beyond the station platform at the iron-grey rolling waves stretching off towards the dark horizon. A million miles from home. Where could you go from here? If you kept going, would you just fall off – into nothing? Or could you fly off into the distance, like the birds he could see hovering over the grey waves – fly off and leave all of 4this behind? If only Will had wings…

“Call me if you have any problems?” Wendy said, as the train doors beeped and the guard waved her back on to the nearest carriage.

Will wanted to say that he didn’t have her number. That he didn’t want to go with this man who was apparently his uncle but whom he hardly knew. Whom Mum had never even talked about. Whom he’d met for the first time a week ago on the worst day of his life.

He wanted to say that none of this felt real. That he just wanted to go home. That being out of the flat for so long was making him feel dizzy, breathless. That he still had questions about Mum. About what had happened. About what was going to happen to him now.

But the guard was blowing his whistle and the last thing Will heard was Wendy saying with a cheery smile, “I’m sure you two will get on just fine.”

Will wished he were one of the seagulls wheeling over the grey bands of sea. He wished he could take off – into the air, over the edge of the world, and forget that any of this had ever happened.

And pretend that Mum was still alive.

5

Chapter 2

Ian Oakley drove a battered old Land Rover. Will had never been in anything like it before, and the ancient vehicle rattled and squeaked as they turned out of the station car park, Will sitting bolt upright on the passenger seat as the suspension creaked on the rutted roads.

It was the sort of vehicle Will had only really seen on TV. On that programme Mum liked about the vets. The one they used to watch together, the two of them laughing about sheep poo and sticking their hands up cows’ bottoms. That’s why they’d started going to the city farm: every Saturday – until Mum got sick. They would buy grain to feed the chickens, and watch the cows being milked. In the spring lambing season Mum 6and Will would stay all day, and sometimes the farmer would let Will bottle-feed the new baby lambs.

But that was before. Before Mum stopped laughing, before she stopped wanting to go outside. Before she got rid of the TV and switched off the Wi-Fi. Before everything changed.

“You’ll be hungry, I expect,” Ian said, indicating a Mars bar and a can of Coke on the dashboard.

Will was starving. He couldn’t remember when he’d last eaten, but as he unpeeled the wrapper, the smell hit him – too sweet, too cloying. It brought back too many memories. A hot day in the park. A friend’s birthday party. Melted chocolate all over his face, his hands, his top. Mum crying uncontrollably.

“I’m not used to company,” Ian was saying, eyes on the slowly darkening strip of road ahead. “And I’m not sure I’m any good with kids. You should probably know that, lad.”

Will held the Mars bar in his lap, feeling the chocolate warm beneath his fingers, remembering Mum’s tears and how she had gone to bed and cried herself to sleep. His finger began to tap nervously on the plastic wrapper.

One, two, three…

“Been on my own a while so I’m a bit set in my 7ways,” Ian went on, not seeming to notice. “No doubt it’ll take a little while for us to get used to one another. But I’m sure we’ll muddle along. Not like we have much choice, eh?”

Will’s finger tapped a little faster.

Four, five, six, seven…

He glanced at the man by his side, his face briefly illuminated by the headlights of an oncoming car. He searched the stranger’s features to find something – anything – that reminded him of Mum.

“Go on, take a good look,” Ian said, eyes flicking to meet Will’s wary gaze. His face was burned down the whole of one side so that the skin looked like molten lava. “I expect it’s not every day you meet a man who looks like a James Bond villain.”

“S-sorry,” stammered Will. He dropped his eyes quickly to his hands. “I didn’t mean to –”

“Don’t be,” said Ian. “We’ve all got our scars. It’s just mine are a bit more visible than others. But you know what they say – scar tissue is stronger than skin.”

Will didn’t know how to respond. It had been the same on the train with Wendy, and in the hospital with the nurses. Even with the policeman who’d tried to talk to him about what had happened. Will had so many questions, but every time he tried to ask them, his 8throat clammed up and no words came out.

So all he could do was count.

One, two, three, four…

They had turned off the main road now and the Land Rover was plunging into a series of narrow-looking country roads that climbed steadily up into the looming mountains that Will had caught glimpses of on the train journey. They bumped over tiny lanes that ran alongside little streams and rock-strewn hillsides on which ragged sheep grazed like pale smudges in the twilight. At one point, Will caught sight of a waterfall, high up on the hills. He’d never seen a waterfall in his whole life, and it added to the feeling that this was just a dream and soon he’d wake up and find himself in the flat with the doors and windows closed, and Mum would be alive and everything would go back to normal.

Five, six, seven, eight…

And then he spotted it – a bird with giant wings, which seemed to float on the air beneath the purpling sky. Will stared at the floating creature in awe. He couldn’t make out what it was from here – a goshawk maybe, or a red kite? No, it was neither of those. The wings were the wrong shape.

He wished he had his bird book. The one Mum had given him that helped to distinguish the different types 9of gulls that flew across the estate, and so he could tell the tree sparrows from the house sparrows and name starlings and crows and pigeons. But the book was back in the flat.

Nine, ten, eleven, twelve…

As he stared at the giant bird hovering over the fells, Will remembered the thing Mum had said once: “We all come back as birds, Will! Isn’t that a lovely thought? All the lost souls of our loved ones come back with wings.”

Could it … be her?

Thirteen, fourteen, fifteen. Stop.

His heart lurched, and the feelings he’d been working so hard to keep inside tried to push their way up through his chest. Will tapped his finger quicker on the frayed canvas seating – one, two, three, four – counting the thoughts back down, where they couldn’t hurt him. Mum was gone. Five, six, seven, eight. She was dead. Nine, ten, eleven, twelve. And she wasn’t coming back as a bird or anything else. Thirteen, fourteen. Why would she? After all, it was Will’s fault she was no longer alive. Fifteen. Stop.

“I’m sorry about your mum,” Ian said suddenly.

Will swallowed. Clenched his fist.

“What happened to her…” Ian hesitated. “It must have been tough on you.”

10Will wished the man would stop talking. Because it was Ian’s fault too.

“And I’m sorry you’re stuck with me for now,” Ian went on. “But it won’t be for long. Just till your grandparents can have you.”

Will had spoken to his grandparents on video call that morning. They couldn’t wait for him to join them, they said. Just as soon as the paperwork was completed, his grandma explained. There was a lot of red tape, his grandfather added. They loved him very much and always had, his grandma insisted. Then she sighed and said, “We’ve missed you, William.”

Will said he missed them too, but the truth was he hardly knew them. They were his dad’s parents, but Dad had walked out when Will was only a baby and died a few years later. And his grandparents lived on the other side of the world – Melbourne, Australia – but it might as well have been on Mars, as far as Will knew.

“Obviously, there’s visas and things to sort out,” Ian was saying. “And a passport too. But then you can go over there and begin to – you know – make a new start.”

But Will didn’t want to start again. He didn’t want a new home. He just wanted to go back to how things were. Even though he’d hated it for so long.

11The light was dipping and the giant bird up on the hillside was no longer visible.

We all come back as birds, Will.

He started the count again.

One, two, three…

“You’re not a great one for talking, are you?” Ian went on.

Four, five, six, seven, eight.

Will said nothing.

“Well, this is certainly going to be interesting, kid.”

12

Chapter 3

Night was beginning to close in as they made their way through a patch of woodland where dark branches made a spider’s-web tunnel over the road. Will had been on the move since early morning and he was struggling to keep his eyes open now. But then they emerged from the trees and were greeted by the sight of a vast expanse of water lit up by the moonlight, a huge dark lake stretching out for what looked like miles, flanked on one side by vast towering mountains. On the far shore, piles of dark rubble tumbled down like a frozen avalanche, and a thin layer of mist lay over the water, slipping like quicksilver to the near shore road, where it petered out into small beaches and inlets.

Will stopped tapping. Stopped counting. Almost 13stopped breathing. He had never seen anything so strange and beautiful in all his life.

“Is it … real?”

“Reckon so,” Ian replied, with a gruff laugh.

Something darted out from the trees that flanked the road. A shape loomed out of the shadow and Ian slammed on the brakes just in time.

Car headlights … screeching tyres … Mum’s scream.

Ian cut the engine, and the images in Will’s brain cut out quickly too. The bad memories were like that. They came quickly, uncontrollably, filling his head before he could count them away, then were gone again before he could properly hold on to them, making it confusing – dizzying – to remember, impossible to forget.

As Will’s eyes adjusted, he saw a deer on the road in front of them, a young one by the looks of it. Will stared as it stood, quivering eyes bright in the headlights, frozen in fear.

“Don’t panic, boy.”

At first Will thought Ian was talking to him.

“Stay calm, boy.” But he was talking to the deer, in a soft crooning voice. “Take your time, lad. No hurry.”

Will’s heart was still pounding. The images were still there, flickering in the back of his mind. The ambulance, the flashing lights, Mum lying on the dark tarmac.

14On the road ahead, the deer remained motionless and an eerie silence had descended. But still the creature just stood there, a shimmering black silhouette against the blue sky and the purple shadow of the giant mountain.

Then, as quickly as it had appeared, the deer turned and was gone. Disappeared into the undergrowth. Will let out the breath he hadn’t realised he had been holding.

“You soon get used to that sort of roadblock around here.” Ian shrugged as he restarted the engine.

But Will’s heart was still pounding as they drove on, and the remembered screams were still in his head. He tried to count away the bad memories, tapping with his fingers to push them back down. It usually worked; the counting usually helped to slow his breath, helped shut the bad thoughts away.

But today the memories seemed more insistent than usual, refusing to leave him.

No matter how many times he repeated the numbers.

15

Chapter 4

A few short minutes later they drew up outside a tiny, grey-slate cottage nestled at the foot of a rocky fellside, set back just a little from the giant lake. There was only one other house close by, and in the moonlight Will could make out what looked like ruined farm buildings behind, falling into tumbles of rocks, slowly being reclaimed by the fells.

“Home, sweet home!” said Ian.

It didn’t feel anything like home to Will. Nothing like the tower block. Nothing like the city where he had been born. Nothing like the flat where he had lived with Mum his whole life.

“I know it’s not exactly Buckingham Palace,” said Ian as he let them in through a wooden door with a 16frame so low even Will had to duck.

Will looked around. The cottage was clean and really tidy but there were none of the homely touches Mum liked so much. There were no knick-knacks on the mantelpiece, no candles or incense sticks or lava lamps. No throw cushions on the bare-looking sofa either.

Mum loved cushions. At home they’d had cushions of all different shapes and sizes: crochet cushions and cushions in the shape of dogs; a tiny cushion in the shape of a robin – Will’s favourite; fluffy cushions and sequinned cushions and flamingo cushions. So many cushions there was hardly any room for Will and Mum on the sofa.

“No doubt it’s not like you’re used to – you know, with – your mum,” Ian went on. “Not like city life here – and we don’t get much Wi-Fi up here if that’s what you’re thinking.”

Will shook his head abruptly. “I wasn’t. Mum didn’t. That is, we didn’t have Wi-Fi.”

One, two, three, four…

Mum worried about Wi-Fi. About the dangerous radio waves that might hurt your brain. She’d even asked Mr Ford in the flat next door to turn his off in case it came through the walls. They’d had a huge row about it, and Will had come home from school to find 17Mum curled up and crying in the corridor. Mr Ford had told Will she needed her head seeing to.

Five, six, seven, eight… Will pushed the memory hurriedly away.

“Right. Well, are you hungry?” asked Ian with a frown. “There’s beef stew. Just from a tin. But there’s fresh-baked bread Mrs Coggins from next door dropped over. Oh, and mashed potatoes – with cheese.”

“I’m not hungry.”

Nine, ten, eleven, twelve…

“Right,” Ian sighed. “Well, you must be tired?”

Thirteen, fourteen…

It was Mum who started it. The counting. When she was sad or worried or finding it hard to breathe, she would tap her finger on her palm. Will wasn’t sure when he’d started tapping too. The counting had helped him to cope, at first, when things got really bad, but now it was hard to make it stop.

Fifteen. Stop.

“Come on then, lad.” The man sighed. “Let me show you where you’ll be sleeping.”

Up a rickety staircase to the tiny landing – barely big enough for them both to stand on. A cupboard-sized bathroom directly in front, then one door on each side. One was Ian’s room, the other where Will would sleep.

18The bedroom was just as barely furnished as the sitting room, with a small window through which all Will could see was darkness.

“I picked up a few things you might need,” Ian said, indicating a pile of items on the floor. “Carrie-Ann from over at the campsite sent some spare clothes over. And Eammon Pat from the pub dropped in a pair of walking boots. Not new, but broken in.” He pointed to them. “You’ll need those tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow?”

“You’ll be going to a nature-camp thingy while I’m at work,” Ian said. “Holiday-club sort of thing because all the kids are off school this week. It’s on the other side of the valley.”

“Nature camp?” This was the first Will had heard of it.

“Your social worker – Wendy – she thought it would be good for you to be outside.” Ian sounded as unconvinced as Will felt. He was too tall for the room, his head nearly touching the low ceiling. “You know, in the great outdoors. With other kids your age. Healing power of nature, that sort of thing. I dunno, kid. Just give it a try.”

The great outdoors.

Mum had said they didn’t need to go out. They 19could bring the outside in. She had pots and pots of paint and brushes, and one time they covered nearly every wall of the flat with pictures of woods and trees and fields and lakes and rivers and mountains, and birds – so many birds. Birds flying over the walls and across the ceilings, so that when Will lay in bed at night he could look up and see owls and egrets and swallows and pintails and gulls of every variety flying above him.

“Will there be…” Will glanced at Ian. “Will there be birds?”

“Birds?” Ian looked at him in surprise. “Aye, there should be plenty of birds round these parts.”

Will’s heart lifted, just slightly.

We all come back as birds, Will.

Ian looked at him quizzically. “She loved her birds too, didn’t she? Your mum.”

Onetwothree…

“I’m … tired.” Will just wanted to lie down. To be on his own. To close his eyes. Stop thinking.

Fourfivesixseven…

There was a pause.

“Right, well it’s breakfast seven a.m. sharp.” Ian’s voice was clipped again. “I like routine, you’ll soon see that. Pretty set in my ways. But if you can muddle along with me, I expect we’ll figure it out.”

20His eyes met Will’s just for a second. And they were Mum’s eyes. Honey-coloured. Almost amber.

Eightnineteneleventwelve…

Ian paused, and Will wondered if he might try to hug him – fold Will up in his arms like Mum did when he was hurt or sad or sick or cold or tired.

But then there was a cry from outside, a low hooting of an owl, and the moment passed.

“All right then, lad,” said Ian curtly. “Goodnight.”

Thirteenfourteenfifteenstop.

21

Chapter 5

Will dreamed of the bird that night.

It was hard to fall asleep. The bed was unfamiliar, the sheets stiff and scratchy, the pitch dark of the little attic room and the strange sounds of the fells so different from the bright, loud, unsleeping cityscape of home. The city had never been quiet. Twenty-four hours a day, sirens wailed and dogs barked and there was always loud music coming from somewhere, or the sound of Mr Ford shouting in the next-door flat. The cottage felt oddly quiet in comparison, apart from occasional creaks and rustlings, and the wind rattling the old windowpanes that sounded like Will’s endlessly tapping fingers. At one point he heard the owl again, and other sounds that might have been the fluttering of 22batwings, or birdcalls – he couldn’t tell. He wished he had his bird book.

When he finally did drift off, Will dreamed of the bird with giant wings soaring above him, and Mum’s voice calling out from the bird’s beak. “We all come back with wings, Will!” And Will had cried out, begged the bird to come back, but it was just out of reach. Always just out of reach.

He woke tired and disorientated, and felt achy all over as he made his way downstairs. Even the staircase felt strange after living his whole life in a flat, every creak on the old wooden floorboards odd and unfamiliar.

“Sleep well?”

Will didn’t respond, just slid into a chair at the kitchen table, where Ian presented him with a bowl of creamy, steaming porridge. Will’s stomach was still too tight to eat. He lifted the spoon to his lips and managed a few mouthfuls.

“Sorry,” he said.

“Not a breakfast person, I see,” Ian replied. “Never mind.”

Ian cleared his plate away and slid something across the table without meeting Will’s eye. A leather case with a long strap and a worn clasp.

23“They’re for you.” He coughed awkwardly. “For, you know, the nature-camp thing.”

Will pulled the leather case towards him and carefully lifted the clasp. Inside was a pair of binoculars. They were small but old, the heavy kind.

“Thought you might like them. If, you know, you’re into birds. Like Jenni. Like your – mum.”

Will stared at the binoculars. For his seventh birthday, Mum had given him a pair of binoculars she’d found in a local charity shop. They’d been bigger than this pair, more modern too. She’d shown Will how to focus the lenses so he could spot birds as far away as the river. That’s also when she gave him the bird book and taught him how to identify different species by the colouring, the shape of the wings, the curve of a beak.

One, two, three… He counted away the memories. Even the good ones hurt.

“Right, well, best be on our way then,” said Ian briskly.

Neither of them was much good at conversation, so the journey to nature camp was a silent one. Will felt as if his bones were being shaken out of his body as the Land Rover bumped along the stony, rutted roads towards the lake, which glistened gold and seemed bigger than Will remembered from last night, before 24coming to a halt in a campsite at the far end. Will could see a collection of tents and a couple of rough wooden buildings and a woman hurrying towards them. Small, dark-haired with a wiry frame and a pixie-like face, she looked almost childlike, though Will thought she was probably at least ten years older than Mum.

“You must be Will! Welcome! Welcome! Everyone’s so excited to meet you. Aren’t we, everyone?” The pixie lady was ushering him out of the vehicle, turning as she did so to a cluster of older kids, none of whom looked particularly excited. Will’s stomach contracted.

One, two, three…

“Will, this is everyone. Everyone, Will. You start getting to know each other. I just need to chat to your uncle and I’ll be right back.”

Four, five…

Will was aware of the other kids looking at him. A mixture of boys and girls. Mostly older than him. Mostly yawning in the early morning air. How long had it been since he’d hung out with other kids? More than two years. How many months was that? How many weeks? How many days?

Six, seven, eight, nine, ten…

Will had no idea what to do or say. He probably looked really stupid. He was wearing a pair of ancient walking 25boots, and a waterproof jacket that totally swamped him. And he hadn’t been outside – not properly – for so long that he knew he was pale and scrawny.

Eleven, twelve, thirteen…

He knew he should say something, but he couldn’t make any words come out. Even the air seemed different, strange, hard even to breathe in. So Will just stood there, and one by one the older kids turned away, resuming their conversations, clearly not interested.

Fourteen, fifteen … stop.

“What’s all that tip-tip-tapping about then?”

The boy was a couple of years younger than Will. Small and wiry, with a round moon of a face, light-brown skin and wispy dark hair falling over twinkling dark eyes that surveyed Will with bright curiosity.

“Oh, I –”

“Hey, don’t worry about it.” The boy was hopping from foot to foot as he spoke, as if the ground were too hot to stand still on. “Everyone has their thing. People here say I’ve got ‘ants in my pants’ – whatever that means! You have some funny sayings in your country, don’t you?”

“Um…” Will wasn’t sure if he was supposed to answer.

But the boy just shrugged and kept up his little tap 26dance. He had an accent Will didn’t recognise and like Will, he was dressed in an odd assortment of hand-me-down expedition gear – a bright-turquoise jacket with a swirly floral pattern, purple tie-dye leggings on very skinny little legs, and a pair of giant walking boots, in a strange green colour with sparkly laces, that looked far too big for his skinny frame.

“Don’t mind that lot.” The boy waved a hand towards the older kids. “Carrie-Ann says teenagers are like vampires: they’re not good at sunlight, or mornings – or human interaction, for that matter! It’s the hormones, apparently. I hope I don’t ever get any! Anyway, you can hang with me. Carrie-Ann will probably make us do a walk. Or a nature audit. She always does that when someone new arrives. It’s not your fault. Well, it kind of is, but whatcha gonna do?”

The boy spoke at full speed, the words tumbling out of him helter-skelter, pausing for a millisecond in case Will wanted to say something before going on hurriedly. “So, are you any good at climbing?” The jiggling dance had moved up to the boy’s shoulders now, as if he had electricity running through his body that fizzled out of him in jerky little bursts. It made Will’s finger-tapping thing look like nothing.

In fact, Will realised he’d stopped tapping.

27“I don’t –”

“Well, I guess we’ll soon find out,” said the smaller boy with a bright grin. “Tallest mountain in this country, that is!”

He pointed to the large bulk of rising fell to their right. The top of the mountain peak was now shrouded in mist, but up the ridge a path was clearly marked out – a scar slicing up through the rock face, with little figures making the ascent. Will had the same feeling he’d had earlier – like this was all a dream he’d wake up from at some point, and then he’d be back in the flat. With Mum.

“I’m Omar, by the way,” the boy went on, skipping from foot to foot in a bouncing rhythm. “I came last year. I live with Carrie-Ann. She’s nice, apart from the mountain climbing and nature stuff, that is. She’s a nature nut – you’ll see!”

As if to prove his point, the pixie-lady called Carrie-Ann had returned with a large grin on her face to announce, “As Will is new round here, we have a great treat today. No chores. Just a walk and a nature audit.”

Omar caught Will’s eye and shrugged as if to say, I told you so.

“I say we set a record on the number of different species we can spot,” Carrie-Ann was saying with a 28cheerful grin. “What do you think, folks?”

There was a groan from the assembled company. Omar was obviously right about teenagers.

Then Ian was by Will’s side, a hand briefly on his shoulder, making him jump. “Well, I suppose I’ll be leaving you, lad. Pick you up at four?”

And suddenly Will could hear Mum’s voice, telling him it wasn’t safe, telling him there was danger everywhere, telling him to stay inside – not take risks. The outside world was full of dangers, she had said. Full of germs. Full of things and people that could hurt you. And she had been right in the end, hadn’t she? If Will had stayed inside, then Mum would still be alive. And he wouldn’t be here.

“Right,” said Ian. And he hesitated, just for a second, as if wondering whether to hug him. “Well, I’ll … um … you know, see you later, lad. And, you know… Try to have fun?”

29

Chapter 6

The path was quite easy going at first. Carrie-Ann led the way across a stile, through a field strewn with boulders, then up a track that gradually climbed alongside a stream – a “beck” Carrie-Ann called it. She told them it ran down from high up in the mountain.

“Imagine that,” she said. “A pure stream of water stemming from deep within the belly of the earth.”

Will tried to listen and take it all in, but his mind was racing and his boots were already rubbing. They were a size too big – “which you’ll thank me for later”, Ian had said that morning. Hand-me-downs from Eammon Pat at the pub (or his daughter – Will wasn’t sure what his uncle had said), well-worn on the sole, with one of the lace-hooks broken, they were already chafing on his 30heels as the path began to climb more steeply and the ground became boggy and wet.