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

latch jumped down too loudly into its socket, but no one woke.
    He had thought that he would never sleep again, but he slept at once and dreamed nothing. He had thought Mass would be late and the crucifix missing, with a different one put in its place, but Father O’Connell came out onto the altar as the bell stopped on the minute of eight and the great brass cross was upright and shining as it caught the sun, the splayed figure unharmed.
    He had thought there would be mention made, aninquest, an appeal for those responsible. But the sermon was about spreading the gospel through the missions to Communist China and nothing was said.
    He had thought his legs might not bear him up in the line for Holy Communion and the host burst into flames as it touched his tongue, but he moved up behind his mother as usual and the host tasted of wallpaper and was cool in his mouth.
    He did not look for the others. Anyway, Deano often missed. He had a different sort of mother.
    Father O’Connell put out his hand, greeting them at the porch, and Mick had to take the yellow fingers but the look on his face was no different and nothing happened, nothing was said.
    Which, in the end, was the worst of it. Nothing happened. Nothing ever happened and for the rest of his life he was waiting and the fear was always there, a cold, hard, bitter pebble lodged in his chest, cold but at the same time blazing red and burning into him.
    He and Deano and Sluggy hung about by the breakwater and at the corner of the Bracken and occasionally at Deano’s house, where the smell was still terrible. Norrie turned holy for a while and even thought of going for a priest, but ended up staying athome, forever half-closing his eyes against his cigarette smoke, his teeth rotten and always giving him grief and a foul temper.
    Sluggy moved away after the operation on the hole in his mouth and they never knew whether it had made him talk better.
    Mick took to carpentry and liked it, then threw it up, went south, married, left her, traipsed about, never settled. Never could. Because of the waiting and the fear and the dreams of the hollow, incensed darkness and the feel of the stone in the palm of his hand and the sound of the brass crashing down, crashing on and on and on. He took up smoking but it didn’t help, because nothing could. All that would help would be when something happened to punish him and put an end to it.
    ‘Goddit. We’ll shoot the crucifix.’
    He often heard Deano saying it, and the thump of his fist against the wet wood of the breakwater, and waited, for the consequence of it all.
    He thought that almost certainly the waiting would kill him by itself, but it didn’t, and after a time he simply accepted that it never would but that he would die of something very ordinary, like old age.
    Until then, he just had to wait, and go on waiting while nothing happened. Nothing at all.

Moving messages
     

Moving messages
     
    Some people make tunes, but it is lines that run like moving messages through my head. Whatever else I am saying and doing often has no bearing on this inner, verbal life.
    ‘
Thou hast made me, and shall thy work decay?
’
    It rode with me up the escalator and my footsteps tapped it out in a rhythm along the street. My mother had a similar problem with hymns.
    ‘
I am a little world made cunningly
.’
    I wondered if Velma had ever suffered from poetic tinnitus. It might provide an opening.
    The restaurant was chrome and black and angular and a shock to the system. The table was square, the plates were square and the water came in a square glass, but the bread rolls were round and soft, like my life now, lived among hills like breasts and tender bales of fabric.
    They had tortured flowers with wire stays, andstraitjacketed them in thin metal tubes. The table napkins were origami.
    ‘Didi!’
    Her kiss scratched my cheek, dry as a quill.
    ‘Goodness,’ I said. I have not been Didi for thirty-four years.
    I had painted Velma in my