The Emerald Forge (Pilgrennon's Children) Read Free

without either of them losing face or Dana having to think or talk about her emotions.
    “Oh, that’s nice. We’ve got steak for dinner.”
    “Don’t want any,” said Dana.
    “All right, I’ll keep some for you. You come out when you’re feeling better.”
    Dana heard Graeme go downstairs. She put her hand in her pocket and held Ivor’s watch. A hot ache filled her eyes and nose.
    She sat up and swung her legs down from the bed, and concentrated on the sensation of the carpet under her feet. After breathing in and out a few times, she got up and went to the desk. Dana arranged the fuses in her pencil tin in ascending order of amperage, standing on their ends on the shelf above the desk. She looked at the ordered calm of the regular, coloured writing on the white middles, and then she opened the biscuit tin and found the pot of enamel paint that was the right colour for painting a Wellington bomber. As she concentrated on reproducing the camouflage patterns on the kit’s box, it became easier not to think about what had happened today. By the time she’d finished, it seemed the surrounding room separated her from the boy following her and Pauline and Graeme’s disapproval, as though they had become distant.
    She heard Graeme’s footsteps coming upstairs as she was putting the paint away. He knocked on the door.
    “Dana, can I come in?”
    “If you want,” said Dana nonchalantly. “It’s your house.”
    Graeme came in and sat down on Dana’s bed. Dana sat at her desk and put the fuse tin away in the drawer without looking at him.
    “It’s your house now as well,” he said gently. “I’m sorry you came in and heard the end of that conversation we were having. We didn’t mean it to sound like what you heard. And besides, it was wrong of us to talk like that. What you like is your choice, and not ours, and not our business to talk about.”
    Dana shrugged.
    “Pauline’s gone out with some people from work. Would you like to come downstairs and have dinner with me?”
    “All right, then.”
    “I recorded the news. If you like, we could watch that too.”
    “Yes please, Graeme.”
    Downstairs, Cale was sitting at the dining room table, eating tapioca pudding. Propped up in front of him was one of his music books with his b’s and q’s written in it. Cale was disinterested in anything musical and refused to play music for anyone. All he did was work out Pi, convert the digits of it into notes, and write them in the book and then play the tuneless string of keys they translated into on his keyboard. He was still working through the decimal places, and Pi in C Major as Graeme called it had built up into six volumes.
    Graeme brought his and Dana’s dinner plates into the living room so that they could eat off their laps. Dana started to eat while he sorted out the recorder.
    They both sat and ate in silence while the headlines ran. First was another report about electricity and nuclear powerplants, which had featured often on the news recently. Jananin wasn’t on it, and Dana was a bit disappointed as Jananin was very keen on nuclear powerplants and often would argue about them in public debates. But they did show a film of a site on Lewis — Dana didn’t recognise where, but the scenery was familiar to her — where they were proposing to build a new one.
    The next report showed a picture of a graveyard, and Dana didn’t pay much attention to the introduction to it.
    “...are shocked and disturbed by the desecration of the grave of a young victim of the First of December London Compton bombing. The deceased, a girl estimated to be about twelve years old and whose identity was never discovered, died from heart failure in the Information Terrorism attack over two years ago.”
    Dana stopped chewing and stared at the television. It had to be Alpha. No other girls had died in the Compton bomb blast.
    “The girl’s grave was dug up, and police say the coffin appears to have been tampered with, but