The Power of Five Oblivion Read Free

me.” And you’d better get on with it, I wanted to add. The sun was dipping behind the steeple. The gravestones were throwing out shadows that reached ever further. I would already be expected home.
    “Is there somewhere else we can talk? Can we go inside?”
    “Tell me now.”
    But he never did … at least, not then. I hadn’t heard the footsteps behind me. I hadn’t realized that Mike Dolan and Simon Reade had come back until I turned round and saw them, saw them standing there, aiming at Jamie.
    “There you are,” Reade said. “I told you something was up.”
    “Who is he?” Dolan demanded, then, to Jamie, “Who are you?”
    “I’m Jamie.”
    “How did you get here?”
    Jamie hesitated. I could see him thinking what to say. “I took a bus,” he said, finally.
    It was the wrong answer. Almost lazily, Dolan swung his rifle so that the butt crashed into the side of Jamie’s head and he went sprawling. It was the side that had been undamaged. Until that moment anyway. I shouted out but Reade stepped in front of me, blocking my way. Jamie lay still. Dolan stood over him. He turned to me. “You’ve got some explaining to do, Holly,” he said. “But that can come later. Right now you’d better get home.” He nodded at Simon. “Let’s get this boy tied up and locked somewhere safe. And find the Reverend Johnstone. We’re going to have to call an Assembly.”
    And that was it. I could only stand there and watch as the two men scooped up the boy and dragged him away.

TWO
    Rita and John lived in a modern, three-bedroomed house next to the garage – not, of course, that there was any petrol. The two pumps stood next to each other like metal tombstones, the glass broken and the metal rusted, with Mr and Mrs Esso lying dead beneath. I ran straight past it and didn’t stop until I got home.
    I’m going to have to describe the village, or what happened later won’t make any sense.
    Basically, it was set on the side of a very slight hill, with the square and the church and the main hall in the middle so there was an upper and a lower village, which were actually quite different from each other. The bit where I lived was mainly modern, consisting of neat brick houses with picture windows and back gardens which had once been full of flowers but that were now planted with vegetables. The bottom half was much older. This was where all the weekenders had lived, but they were all gone now and their houses had been taken over. These were mainly thatched cottages, which caused all sorts of problems with grubs living in the thatch and leaks in the windows, but there were also a couple of rows of pretty terraces that almost vanished behind the wisteria and honeysuckle that still erupted every spring, even though nobody looked after them.
    Walking down from the square, you came to a crossroads with the Queen’s Head on one side. The Queen, as everyone called it, was white, half-timbered and still made its own beer. Known as Queen’s Rot, it had been something of a joke in the county: weak, watery and wet was how the locals described it. Nobody had thought that, one day, it would be the only beer you could get. Turn right and you looped back on yourself, coming out on Ferry Lane behind the garage. Turn left and you passed about half a dozen houses before coming to open farmland and the orchards. The village grew wheat, potatoes and sugar beet, depending on the season, and there were pigs and chickens too. Everyone had their own allotment but the rule was that you had to share everything, even though this always led to arguments.
    Follow the main road all the way down to the bottom and you came to a quay with a flagpole but no flag, and the river, a dead end in every sense because although the water had once been full of fish, it was now thick and oily and a five-minute swim would put you into hospital – if we had one, which we didn’t – or more probably the grave. In The Queen there was a photograph of the river