Free At Hawthorn Time by Melissa Harrison Page A

back through its pages: scribbled observations, metaphors, flights of near-visionary fancy. ‘Half mad,’ he muttered to himself. ‘More’n half.’
    Before putting his boots on he checked his socks and trouser turn-ups for ticks, rolled up his sleeping bag and stashed it away. Then he shouldered his pack and made his way out of the wood towards the cooling towers. There was a river on the other side of the golf course where mayflies would probably be emerging; if there weren’t too many fishermen around he had a good chance of a couple of brown trout.
    Behind him, bats began to hunt the clearing where he had slept as the red sun slipped slowly behind the trees.
     
    Not far away, in Ardleton, the television’s cold light was flickering across the seamed landscape of James Albert Hirons’ face. He sat looking past it, unseeing; thinking instead of the lurcher puppy that Edith had taken in rather than see drowned in a bucket. Tess, Edith had called her; she had such soft ears, that dog, and he smiled now to remember them. She’d had a kennel in the garden, but when she got old and her back legs began to go he’d relented and folded up a blanket for her by the range. One clear, ice-bound winter night not long after Gillian had started school Tess had kept asking and asking to go outside, but every time he opened the back door she just dragged herself to the flower bed, out of the way, and lay down. Three times he’d carried her back in, knowing but refusing to know what was happening; she’d died in the kitchen the next day.
    And he thought about when he and Gillian’s boy used to go dipping in the ponds and canals for old iron. How the lad had loved it; it was funny the things that fascinated you as a child. He probably didn’t even remember it now, great lanky beanpole that he was. Still, it had done the child good to get him out of that house from time to time. Not that his father wasn’t a good man, but Gillian had them all wrapped around her little finger with those nerves of hers.
    She’d always been needy, though, all the way through her childhood: always crying or poorly, something wrong with her every day, it had seemed. It wasn’t him she’d got it from – after all, you couldn’t have behaved like that in Changi, you wouldn’t have lasted five minutes.
    He’d had a friend in the camp, Stan, a Lincolnshire lad a few years younger than he was. One day they were all moved, without warning, from their attap huts to the prison itself. The stone cells were tiny and crawling with rats and lice, and when the guard locked the door behind them Stan had broken down and sobbed. He’d never forgotten how the other two men in the cell had turned away, pretending not to see, as though Stan’s distress was contemptible – or even worse, contagious.
    After a while the old man slept and dreamed he was a little boy again, stumbling behind his father who was sowing, his right hand, brown from the sun, broadcasting seeds from a hopper at his chest evenly onto Culverkeys’ warm soil. He craned to see past his legs to the big tree ahead – and when he did he saw that the sun would soon go down behind its branches. ‘We must go home,’ he said, suddenly afraid; ‘Dadda, night’s coming.’ But his father, deaf and half blinded by the Great War, strode on; and James saw that he was sowing mung beans, not barley, and that above him shone not the Plough but the Southern Cross. And then he heard the clanking sound of the harrow coming up fast behind, and he woke up in his chair, his father long gone, Edith and Tess too, the television stark and loud in the corner and his old heart frightened in his chest.

10
    Herb Robert. Bracken unfurling. Snakeshead fritillaries.

    Chris arrived just before lunch on Saturday, announced by the crunch of his Mini’s wheels on the gravel drive. It was a blustery, rainy May morning, the sunshine, when it came, blindingly bright on the wet roads before the sky darkened and another