Dreams of Leaving Read Free

girl, a twist of smoke against the grey trees on the western edge of the village. He began to run across the field. Twice he turned his ankle on a furrow. It didn’t matter. He ran on. He had to close the distance between them. Catch her before she vanishes, he had told himself. A curious thing to say. But so right, so instinctively right, he would realise later.
    He must have been eleven. Even then he had felt the pull of her strangeness and how magnetic somehow her frailty was. Close up, among tree-trunks veined with ivy and bindweed, her feet lost in leaves the colour of rust, she had the awkward grace of a bird. A stork, perhaps, or a heron. She had the same elongated neck, the same brittle stumbling legs.
    He stood in front of her getting his breath back. She wasn’t looking at him. He asked her name.
    â€˜Alice,’ she said. Without moving her feet, she turned away so he could no longer see her face. Rooted to the ground she seemed. A bird that would never fly. He could have seen it then. In that first meeting.
    â€˜What are you doing out here?’ he asked her.
    â€˜I was alone.’
    Her hands moved among the folds of her white dress. Three years younger than he was, she seemed wiser, more adult. Like blotting-paper she soaked up the messy ink of his questions.
    Still something possessed him to say, ‘Not any more,’ and she turned towards him and looked at him as if he had just spoken for the first time.
    They had met by chance and their friendship continued as a kind of planned coincidence. This understanding arose: he looked for her, shewaited for him. He always knew where to find her – by the river, in the woods beyond the allotments, up on the hill behind the police station (from there, you could see the village as it really was, a group of houses huddled in a hollow in the land, bound on one side by the river’s thin grey cord and on the other two by trees which, from that distance, all too closely resembled fences) – and soon they were spending so much time together on the village boundaries that people began to think they were up to no good. The truth was simpler, though still ominous, perhaps. They wanted privacy, secrecy. They needed territory they could call their own. So they went to the edge of the village. Had to go to the edge. There were no halfway houses. They both understood this early on and recognised it in each other. Peach recognised it too. He wrote a short memo regarding the two children. The police were alerted. Gently.
    An endless source of fascination for George, those boundaries. Marked on the map, but invisible in real life. Invisible but concrete because people had believed in them for so long. He was overawed by the power beliefs could generate. He could even hear it. Like electric fences, the boundaries seemed to hum when he approached. He knew them off by heart, as he knew the names of the twenty-nine policemen who took turns to patrol them. The twenty-nine real policemen, that is. How many dummy policemen there were he had never been able to work out. They were always moving them around.
    One of Peach’s inspirations, the dummy policemen. They were built out of straw, as scarecrows were, but instead of being dressed in rags they wore proper uniforms – helmets, truncheons, the lot. They stood in realistic positions throughout the village and the surrounding countryside. Their eyes always seemed to be staring at you. In poor light they looked as real as real policemen. It was an immensely cunning, uncanny and economical device.
    They terrified Alice. She said they looked like dead bodies propped up. Whenever she saw one she had to poke or tickle it just to make sure it wasn’t alive. She was convinced that, sooner or later, one of them would begin to wriggle and giggle on the end of her finger. She dreaded the moment. She had another theory. She thought their faces resembled the faces of policemen in the village. ‘Look,’