Free The Facts of Life and Death by Belinda Bauer Page A

damp, and Ruby got red and sweaty in the wrestle.
    Once she’d got it open far enough to reach inside, she put the gunbelt on first, hitching it all the way round to the final hole, which was small and stiff. It was too big for her, but not
too
too big, and if she spread her legs a bit, it would stay on her hips. The holster hung to her knee.
    Then the hat.
    She lifted out the black Stetson and placed it on her own head like a crown.
    The Jingle Bobs were complicated. She couldn’t work them out. She spun the little wheels to make them ring, and decided she’d try them on another time.
    Holding the gunbelt up all the way with a casual hand, Ruby waddled splay-legged the few paces to the mirror on the back of the door.
    She looked
exactly
like a cowboy. Her bunny slippers spoiled it a bit, so Ruby chose not to look at them.
    Her right hand fell naturally to the holster and she felt a jag of disappointment that there was no gun to play with. Sticks were just fine until there was something real to measure them by. In this holster they would have been just sticks. A real holster needed a real gun.
    Ruby drew her finger at the mirror. ‘Pow! Pow-pow!’
    The hat fell over her eyes with the recoil.
    Ruby pushed it back, then tried to catch sight of herself while she wasn’t looking, so she could see how she
really
looked.
    Still amazing.

    The tip of the fishing rod dipped and danced, but John Trick didn’t see it. He saw
past
it – across the pale-grey sea to the vague hump of Lundy Island on the fuzzy horizon, and beyond that to a more distant place, while the crabs made merry with his bait …
    As a child, John had rarely gone to primary school, where he’d been relentlessly teased about the scars on his face. And when he had gone, he’d learned to lash out first and let the other kids ask questions afterwards – if they still had teeth that weren’t a-wobble in their heads.
    But then – on his first day at big school – he had seen Alison Jewell.
    She had hit him like measles.
    He hadn’t stopped fighting, but he had gone to school every possible day for the next four years just to see her – just to occupy the same space. Now and then, he and the other boys would shout inappropriate things at her in a bid to make contact, but he never had the courage to say anything
real
, because she came from Clovelly, and he’d heard that her mother was a doctor.
    Her
mother
!
    Even though he’d barely spoken to Alison in all the time they shared a classroom, just enough of that unexpected schooling rubbed off on John Trick that by the time he left he was taken on as an apprentice welder at the shipyard.
    John remembered the early mornings when he got up in the dark and felt like a man. Riding his scooter through the lanes, the indicator clicking loudly in the night, to join the other men. They’d start with nothing but their hands and a plan and they’d build a ship. Every day they welded and moulded and fabricated their own lives; their own pride; their own futures. They talked and they shouted above the noise and they told dirty jokes and laughed whether they were funny or not. They arrived together and they left together, bonded by clocks and hard labour.
    With his first pay packet he’d got just drunk enough that he’d caught a bus to Clovelly, banged on doors until he’d found Alison Jewell’s home, and asked her to marry him.
    She’d laughed.
    ‘I didn’t even know you liked me,’ she’d said.
    ‘I don’t like you,’ he’d told her. ‘I
love
you.’
    Alison had frowned – as if she couldn’t understand how someone who looked like him could ever love someone who looked like her – and so he’d leaned in and kissed her with tongues, and then pushed her down on to her bed under her Take That poster. Her parents were downstairs, so she’d tried to shove him off, but she hadn’t tried
that
hard, and he wasn’t so drunk that they couldn’t seal the deal.
    Happy days.
    He’d wanted to tell the whole