Stallo Read Free Page A

picks up the jeans and asks him if he has been swimming. He didn’t go near the pool, did he?
In the bag, which is open on the floor, he finds a pair of dry underpants patterned with roaring hot rods and motorbikes, and after he has put them on he climbs up onto the sofa and buries himself under the sleeping bag. The zipper is a track of cold steel teeth against his thigh and he changes position to avoid the feel of it on his skin. The knobbly sofa fabric is rough against his legsand it is warm where his mother has been sitting.
He hears his mother rustling behind the log basket, stuffing wads of newspaper into his boots and hanging up his clothes on the chairs around the table.
He wants to tell her about the animal. That it was grey.
‘But what kind of animal was it?’
He sits with his mouth open for a while as he thinks.
‘I think it could have been a lynx.’
His mother shakes her head. ‘I don’t think so.’
‘A wolf then?’
‘It was probably a bird. It generally is a bird.’
‘No. It wasn’t a bird. Birds don’t have fur.’
She has come to sit beside him. With her index finger she lifts a thick lock of hair from his forehead. He stares out through the window and is still in the forest.
‘It was an animal, Mum.’
She nods.
It has started to rain again, and soon it is thundering on the roof.
*
The fox’s-brush flowers down by the path are lying on the ground after the downpour. Everything is flattened and changed and glistening moistly. It is still raining slightly and now a wind has started to blow. It can be seen in the swaying pines and the other trees that flicker and reflect the light, and every so often small gusts of wind hurl handfuls of raindrops at the windowpanes.
Groups of dead insects have collected on the windowsill. They have crawled close together to die – flies, mostly, but also wasps grown brittle. A butterfly with closed wings. It has shut itself up like a book. It would not look dead otherwise because it has keptall its colours. He asks his mother what the butterfly is called, but she does not know.
‘A peacock butterfly, perhaps. Or a small tortoiseshell. I don’t know …’
He reaches for the little box made of bark that is standing on the table. He knows it is empty but looks inside anyway. Something ought to be kept in it, but he does not know what.
Then he has an idea. He picks up the folded butterfly and lays it in the box. He takes great care, and when he has replaced the lid he shakes the little box to hear the butterfly inside.
*
Darkness has deepened in the forest, and around the glass lamp beside the door moths are flitting about. They rustle against the illuminated globe, entranced. It looks as if they want to get inside. His mother reads to him from one of his comics. In the middle of a speech bubble she stops because the boy has lifted his head from her arm and is looking open-mouthed at the window.
‘I heard something!’
His mother raises herself up on one elbow and also listens. The grasshoppers are making their rasping sound, and the shadows under the bunk bed make her face pale and turn her eyes into dark pockets. A gap has opened between her lips.
Then she sinks down again.
‘It’s nothing.’
The boy does not want to believe her. He jumps down to the floor and pulls aside the towel hanging as a curtain at the window. He rests his hand on the mosquito mesh and cranes his neck, looking down the path.
‘It sounded like something was walking out there. Something big.’
His mother has laid her head on the pillow.
‘It was nothing,’ she says.
So he wriggles down under the quilt again.
Lies there alert.
Listening.
‘Shall I carry on reading?’
He sniffs and nods.
*
Afterwards, when they have turned off the light, they hear a faint rustling on the roof.
The rain is falling softly. As if practising.
He can hear a mosquito moving about the room, but it seems unable to find its way to the bed. It goes quiet from time to time. He thinks it is waiting.
‘Mum,’