Free Counting Stars by David Almond Page B

together and squealed and screamed.
    When it was over we sat on the stones again. The girl was at my side. I wrote in my book,
I went to Jonadab today
. I closed my eyes and moved into the silence. After a long time, she whispered. “Yes. This is Jonadab.” And then another long time, and she whispered, “We bring the ponies for the grass.”
    She leaned on me.
    “We sleep out in fine weather,” she whispered. “Our home is not far away.”
    Her body rose and rested on her breath.
    “Your people are good,” she said.
    “Yes.”
    “Write your people.”
    I wrote their names: my father, my mother, my sisters, my brother.
    “Write the one that’s gone.”
    I wrote her name, Barbara.
    “Write us.”
    “Who are you?”
    “John and Jane.”
    I wrote their names.
    “Who are your people?” I asked.
    “Our father died and then our mother died. We live with another, who is bad.”
    The boy was silent, until he knelt before us with his knife. He took our thumbs and cut into their soft flesh and squeezed out the blood. He cut his own thumb. We pressed our wounds against each other’s wounds.
    “Now we brothers and sisters,” he said. “We joined in blood.”
    We meditated on this.
    “One day much blood will run from our knives,” said the girl. “We will go off on the horses.”
    I asked no questions. We sat there. The field by the river was quiet and still. The men in the shipyards called to each other. Sparks cascaded into the water.
    “One day I thought I was going to die,” she said.
    She turned. We looked together toward Jonadab Lane, and saw the dark figure waiting there below the broken buildings.
    “It’s nothing,” she whispered. “Don’t look. Don’t ask.”
    After a time she kissed my cheek.
    I thought of Miss Lynch and of my duty to move forward.
    I thought of my sister in the ground at Heworth. I thought of the stone with her name on it, the space beneath waiting for other names. I thought of passing her, of climbing home again through familiar streets, passing familiar faces, and there came a great ache of desire to stay in Jonadab this day, and then to disappear, to ride into the unknown places with these gentle children and their beasts.

The Subtle Body
    I FELL IN LOVE WITH T HERESA as I came back from kissing the cross.
    It was Good Friday afternoon. St. Patrick’s church was packed. Babies squealed. Old women whimpered in grief. The place reeked of incense and sweat and beery breath. The priests’ voices droned in prayer and wobbled in song. They went on and on about death and hell and gloom. The day darkened and darkened and darkened. A hailstorm roared in from the North Sea.
    I squirmed on my hard seat. Never again. Never again.
    I was with Mick Flannery. He’d gone off to train to be a priest when he was eleven. Two months ago they’d sent him back, and he was quickly making up for lost time. It was Mick who spotted Theresa. We were shuffling to the altar. The choir was groaning through “O Sacred Heart.”
    “Corduroy suit. Black hair,” he hissed. “Lovely.”
    She was on her way back, black mantilla draped across her head.
    “An angel,” he moaned. “Who is she?”
    A mystery. I dipped my head as Father O’Mahoney held out the cross. I kissed the great black nail that pierced Christ’s feet.
    Going back, I saw her a few rows beyond our own. Her eyes were piously downcast.
    The priests said that Christ had begun his voyage through death, that like all of us he would rise again, that like all of us he would return in more glorious form.
    I kept turning.
    She raised her dark eyes to me, and my heart was hers.
    Afterward, we waited in the dusk beneath St. Patrick’s statue until she came. She was with a girl I knew, Mary or Maria, who lived out Heworth way. We followed them toward Felling Square, then on to Watermill Lane, where heavy trees grew from the verges and yellow streetlights shone down through the spring leaves.
    “What can we do?” said Mick.
    I started to