Free Marlford by Jacqueline Yallop Page B

agenda.’
    Gadiel was unmoved. ‘How had you planned to change the world, then?’
    â€˜See the world, I said. See the world.’ Dan poked at his spectacles. ‘Which is what we’re doing.’
    â€˜Well, we’ve not seen much of it. It’s not been a week since we left.’
    â€˜Yeah, and already we’ve started a squat. Come on, Gadiel – you’re being negative, man.’
    â€˜But there’s only two of us,’ Gadiel pointed out. ‘And no one even knows we’re here. How’s that going to make a difference? It doesn’t make sense if there’s only two of us.’
    Dan slapped his hand against the breeze blocks. ‘Others will come, won’t they, in time? They’ll come and join us. Other people will hear about it and come.’
    â€˜What other people?’
    â€˜I don’t know. But that’s how squats work, man – they grow.’
    â€˜Yeah, and what will happen then? To Ellie? We’ll have to go back to university at the end of the summer and – well, then what?’
    Dan shrugged, setting off for the bedroom, his candle light bobbing. ‘It’ll be out of our hands, man,’ he answered, talking as much to the fickle shadows as to Gadiel. ‘The squat’ll have a life of its own by then.’

Seven
    E llie turned away from the lime avenue and the mere, on to the rutted tarmac lane that led to the hutments, walking unhurriedly to the two lines of oblong shacks, patchworked in corrugated metal and wooden panels, greening in the damp shade of a row of fir trees. The buildings were featureless. The hutment closest to the manor, still in use by the men, was in reasonable repair – it had been mended in places; the ground around the doorway trodden smooth – but the rest were overgrown with brambles and spiked through with twisted saplings; they created an ugly scar of ruined shacks, their roofs collapsing and rusting, their walls splayed. The barbed wire that had once coiled around them was denuded, like the coarse hair of a very aged man. It sprang in odd directions, forced into crude and unexpected sculptures, finally slinking away towards the end of the lane and disappearing into a shallow sinkhole. The field beyond, bounded by a black-and-white metal fence, was neatly planted with barley, pale and dense, almost ripe.
    Ellie collected water from the standpipe so that shecould wash dishes in the wide, flat sink which was secured to a wobbling trestle of sorts at the side of the hutment. From the lane and the strip of cleared land alongside, she picked up empty beer cans and a number of dog-ends, then went behind to the toilet, which she sluiced with water from the hose, jamming the wooden door open with its wedge to air the cramped and foetid space within.
    Inside, the dormitory was laid out with two parallel rows of metal bedsteads, twenty in all, most of them empty; a single, large table was the only other piece of furniture. She made the three beds nearest the door and collected the washing piled on the floor.
    As she cleaned, she recited Shakespeare, the complaints of injured Caliban accompanying the brisk scratch of the broom. But the verse flustered her; she found the conversations of the previous evening cramming back into her head, the words stripped and prickly, meaning nothing now. She grabbed one of the metal bedsteads, letting the broom drop, breathing hard, sickened with the dizzying sense that she was falling. It took her a while to compose herself. When she set to work again, she took care to sweep more slowly, beginning a leisurely dramatization of The Lady of Shalott , transporting herself to a springtime of lilies; a blossoming island where she drifted on the dark river of Tennyson’s long poem, beautiful and bewitched, half-sick of shadows. Standing on her toes, she looked out of the high window, expecting to see the approach of an armoured knight through the narrow slot of