Midnight Sun Read Free Page A

prescribe a big helping of bangers and mash."
    She snapped her battered bag shut and marched out. "Will pie and chips with lots of gravy do?" the policewoman said to Ben.
    "Yes." He was suddenly so exhausted that he found his encounter in the graveyard drifting away from him, becoming unreal — almost too exhausted to remember his manners. "Thank you," he added, and the policewoman patted his head.
    When she brought him the food from the fish and chip shop, he found he was ravenous but hardly able to raise his leaden arms. He remembered an unexpectedly hot day when he'd felt like this. His mother had sat him on her lap and fed him soup. He remembered how she'd kept ducking her head to kiss him on the temple and smiling at him as if to deny the glimmer of anxiety in her eyes. He'd felt so drowsy and protected it had seemed he could stay like that for ever. For a moment he wished the policewoman would see how tired he was and feed him.
    But she was answering the phone. "The doctor's pronounced him fit for the road, ma'am. The sight of food's woken him up ... I'm sure you feed him well, ma'am ... Someone from the county force is on his way here to bring him back to you ..."
    As Ben was dipping the last of his chips in the gravy the officer arrived, a lanky unsmiling man whose jaw seemed to take up at least a third of his long face and whose peaked cap made the boy think of a chauffeur. "Whenever you're ready," he said to Ben.
    "Take your time. We don't want you being sick all over the car on top of everything else," the policewoman said.
    She saw Ben out to the car and buttoned his collar for him, and said to the long-faced driver, "Look after him. He's a good little chap who's had more bad luck than anyone deserves."
    Ben was grateful to her, though he didn't mind that the driver seemed to regard him as a nuisance not worth talking to: silence and sitting passively might let him recapture what had happened in the graveyard. The car followed its own lengthening shadow onto the moors, and Ben felt as if he was leaving part of himself behind. When he glanced back at the forest, the sun hurt his eyes. He squeezed them shut and saw a shining blotch that grew as it darkened. He felt as if the sun had blotted out the memory he was unable to grasp. He put one hand over his eyes, trying to remember, but almost at once he was asleep.
    He kept jerking awake. Whenever he did so, he felt as if the memory had dodged farther out of reach. He was beginning to think he'd lost it by not holding onto it. His blinks of consciousness showed him towns he couldn't name, a sky sliced open by a sunset, a road which appeared to lead to the edge of the world, an avenue of lamps like concrete dinosaurs whose heads turned orange in unison against a sky of dark-blue glass. Once he was shaken awake by the driver so that he could be transferred to a car from another police force. Once he awoke under a bare black sky, where the glittering of stars in the void seemed for a moment to sum up everything he was unable to grasp, to be a secret message intended solely for him. Then the moment was past, and try as he might, he couldn't stay awake.
    The next time he was aware of wakening, he realised that the car had halted. When he heaved his eyelids open, he saw he was outside his aunt's house. The small paired houses and neat gardens and parked cars were steeped in darkness which made even the streetlamps look befogged and which seemed to cling to him. He fumbled with the door-handle and floundered out of the car.
    A policeman who Ben couldn't recall having seen before was ringing the doorbell. Ben saw his aunt jump up beyond the front-room window and steady herself by grabbing her chair, in which she must have slept to wait for him. As he stumbled up the garden path, between shrubs tarred with night, she opened the front door. Her wiry black curls looked lopsided, her hornrimmed spectacles were crooked, the trademark tag of her cardigan was poking over her collar.