Free The Boy Who Taught the Beekeeper to Read by Susan Hill

some chips. Go to the Amusements. Why not?’ She held out the guilt offering. He hated to look into her face, still shocked that eyes could change so completely, still appalled by the sadness.
    He took the coin. He should have kissed her and could not.
    They were allowed anywhere except for Fun Land, which was not in the open, but down steep steps underground, a place like a cave, smelling of damp. You didn’t know who might be hanging about down there and the air was bad, she said, and neither he nor Charlie had ever minded being forbidden to go, afraid of the look of it, opening at their feet like the mouth of hell, with orange and green sulphur lights and awful, echoing, shrieking voices.
    But now he went straight there without hesitating or letting himself think or imagine, ran down the steps and paid to go through the turnstile.
    And it was hell, as he had known it would be, and beckoning and exciting and terrifying as hell must be. The noise of the dodgem cars bounced off the walls and the electricity at the tips of their trailing poles fizzed and sparked.
    He could hear the shots and went straight for them. No one else was at the stand. The line of ducks bobbed along past him and round the back and came bobbing round again, and each time he took aim hehad only to think of Charlie and his swollen bruise-coloured face, or the scarlet sock and plimsoll shining wet on the shed floor.
    The ghost train screamed and howled behind its shocking hoardings and the laugh of the maniac policeman rang in his head, and he was in hell and triumphant, he could not miss. Crack. Could not. Crack. Crack. Crack.
    The electric-blue nylon rabbit was huge and burned his fingers, he could scarcely hold it to run up the steps and across the Bay Road, and throw it over the railing into the sea. The tide was high, and turning.
    ‘Can’t miss.’
    All he had to do was think of Charlie.
    ‘Can’t miss.’
    Which was the worst of it now, that he could not, and was damned because of it.
    He ran home to exhaust himself and not be able to think, but it was all there waiting for him at the bottom of the steps into the darkness of sleep, the open mouth of hell and the spit and hiss and the screaming. There was a grinning clown’s head on aturntable, with wide-parted scarlet lips between which you threw plastic balls.
    ‘Can’t miss.’
    He threw and threw and could not; even when he threw them up into the air, or away behind him, somehow the mouth caught and swallowed them each time.
    Waking, he lay quite calmly, with one question in his mind. What would happen? After he had not missed.
What would happen
?
    Slipping out was easy. The doctor had given his mother tablets after Charlie, and she still took them. He just stayed in his clothes, sitting on his bed and hardly breathing, until half-past ten, and then went, leaving the lights off and the back door on the latch.
    There was enough of a moon, lumpy and pumpkin-coloured, to see by. Mick slid close to the hedges, fences, walls.
    There was no getting out of it. It was the right time, long after confessions were over and the priests had finished preparing the altar for early Mass. No one would be there.
    Charlie, he thought, and said his name out,‘Charlie, Charlie, Charlie’. His foot had gone black where the poison had filled and swollen the flesh. He had not recognised anyone.
    But now, for the first time, Mick could not picture Charlie. He saw everything else – the chicken run, the deaf and dumb brother’s soft open mouth and anxious eyes, the electric-blue nylon rabbit, even a mushroom night-light he had had by his bed until he was three.
    Not Charlie. He tried to force the pictures of him to switch on in his head but they would not come. He thought he might have lost them for ever then.
    Two shadows, merging with the gateposts.
    ‘Mick.’
    They just touched each other. Sluggy’s face looked dark and flat in the peculiar moonlight.
    ‘I didn’t tell Norrie.’
    No. This was nothing