Dreams of Leaving Read Free Page A

she would cry, ‘here’s Peach.’ And George would tilt his head on one side, try to see the likeness. He wanted to believe her. She invented nicknames for them too. Peach she called ‘Melon’ because he was ‘much bigger than a peach’ or ‘Gooseberry’ on account of his short prickly hair. Marlpit was ‘The Waterfall’ because he dribbled so. Hazard she described as ‘the one with a face like a shovel’ so he became ‘Shovelhead’. But when she heard their heavy boots comecrashing through the undergrowth she would flatten herself against the ground until it seemed the earth would open up and swallow her. Her eyes staring, her blonde head pressed sideways into the leaves, she would always whisper the same words:
    The world is a dream
    It will always be so
–
    It was the beginning of a nursery rhyme that every child in the village knew off by heart. It was what the boots meant.
    *
    By the time she was fifteen Alice was already moving out of reach, her mind a wild garden where only weeds grew. Their age-difference was beginning to count now. George tried with his own sharpening intelligence to cut through to her, to clear some ground, but no matter how hard he tried the jungle always grew back. Rain would fall overnight and in the morning he could no longer tell where he had been.
    He remembered finding her once that year sitting in the tall grass on the hill behind the police station. He sat down beside her. She acknowledged his presence with a slow hydraulic turning of her head, so smooth and slow that, horrified, he thought of a machine.
    â€˜Who are you?’ she asked him.
    It wasn’t a joke, and he didn’t try to laugh it off.
    The jungle always grew back.
    It was during the same year that Tommy Dane made his famous escape attempt. Everybody knew about Tommy Dane. He was a phenomenon. So much so that a new word had been invented to describe him.
Juvenile delinquent.
George remembered thinking how complex, how grand, that sounded. Like a title or something. Tommy obviously thought so too. He certainly did his best to live up to it.
    When he was seven years old he cut a rat’s throat during needlework class. A live rat. He used a pair of nail-scissors. The rat died theatrically on the scarred lid of his desk. When he was twelve he got a 22-year-old girl pregnant. The girl claimed that he had tied her to a tree with coat-hanger wire and then raped her. Tommy denied it, but people believed the girl. At sixteen he set fire to his parents’ house while they were asleep inside. They survived. The house burnt to the ground. Tommy decided it was time to leave home.
    Rumour had it that he had staged a fake accident on the main road outside the village, using a stolen hayrick, his father’s bicycle and a gallonof fresh pigs’ blood. He arranged the hayrick and the bicycle so it looked as if the two had collided, then lay down on the tarmac with his head in a puddle of blood. He hijacked the first car that stopped for him. He climbed into the back seat and, brandishing a fiendish homemade bomb, shouted, ‘Get going, you bastards, or I’ll blow us all sky-high.’ Accounts of exactly what followed vary, but, somehow or other, the bomb exploded in Tommy’s face. The driver of the car (a spirited chap from the south coast, retired brigadier apparently) pulled into the side of the road, sprinted to a public phone-box, and called the nearest police station. Which just happened to be New Egypt.
    George would never forget that afternoon. He was standing outside the post office with Alice when they brought Tommy in. It didn’t look like Tommy. Glossy yellow blisters, smooth as mushrooms, swelled on the left side of his face and the palms of his hands. One eye was a bloated purple slit. His hair must have caught fire at some point because it had shrivelled, coiled into a few black springs. He had no eyebrows any more. Invisible slings