The Chalk Giants Read Free

After that she was good for him because he could sit inside her and dream, though when he got her down to Purbeck the first time Ray Seddon took the pleasure out, right out, saying he thought the bloody coal had come.
    They all laughed, the people he knew, and he had to laugh with them, but afterwards it wasn’t too bad because she came out to see. She was wearing a white shirt and the canvassy skirt and her hair had been cut, though he preferred it that shade longer. The Champ was standing on the skyline, angled on the rough car park behind the pub; the sun was glinting on her dark green paint, she looked big and tough and smart. Martine had her arms folded and a cardigan over her shoulders. She said in her brittle little voice, ‘What are all those knobs?’ and he said, ‘Four-wheel drive,’ and then his voice stuck in his throat because the chance was there, anybody else in the world would have said, ‘Nip in, I’ll give you a run,’ but he couldn’t speak. So time stopped for a bit; then she was walking back saying, ‘I have to get on now,’ so he went round to the back of the car and fiddled with the jerrican lock as if it didn’t matter, and the afternoon was still and warm and he felt like death. After which Northerton was hard to take; his mother’s house and the doctor coming and the workshop and the fish-and-chip place on the corner and the birds on the telly and in the Sunday papers, all reminding him of her. Winter was coming on; and Chalky was hard to take, the Sunday walks down past the garden fields and the new Grammar School to Drawback where they ran the dogs. The grey sky and the rough brown fields, the silence and leafless trees, all were hard to take, though what he had inside him locked away he couldn’t speak of, least of all to Chalky. Though he owed the castle to him and the valley and Martine; to a week’s holiday, years back now, Chalky between women, with time on his hands for once. What had haunted Stan had left him unimpressed. The beer was good, he had pronounced; the castle all right, if you liked that sort of thing; and Martine all right, though she didn’t look like a very good fuck. Stan pondered, frowning; while Chalky swore and cursed and the greyhound put up hares it never caught, and cut itself on hedgerow wire. And sometimes it was good to get back in the Champ and drive down past the gasworks to his place and shut the curtains and put the Box on and get his mother’s tea.
    The traffic was halted again; and lights were flashing, amber and blue. There were cars drawn up and lorries; it looked like a road-block and he couldn’t think any more what he meant to do.
     
    All the tech lights were on, so the side of the building looked like a shining yellow cliff. The canteen was cold and nearly empty, stinking of lunchtime’s bacon rolls. They’d pulled two tables together, though the fat woman had yelled through the serving hatch not to, and Tasker was there from the Boot and Shoe, the only leather bloke they got on with, and Quatermain and Briant and Tony Sidgwick and half a dozen more. Mist was closing in and the odd bangs were starting already and they were all making a row, and it was Guy Fawkes Night.
    He sat with the rest, feeling a hot breeze blow on the back of his neck from the table at the far end where the art school girls were sitting. The tall blonde was there, Annette Clitheroe, thirty-five, twenty-three, thirty-six, and the little Irish one they reckoned did turns with the Pakis, and the other one, Helena, the one they nearly had the jumper off in the corridor that night and she didn’t have a stitch on underneath.; Tony Sidgwick kept cheeking them, saying to come down on the tech table and they’d show them how, then he started on Annette Clitheroe, her people had this big furnishing shop in town centre. She was wearing her hair up round one of those felt former things and Tony kept shouting what was it on her head; and she said finally, ‘That’s my