Free Rock a Bye Baby by Mia Dolan Page A

his brow and waved.
    ‘I’m going down a lot deeper than I planned,’ he called. ‘Got to be ready for the enemy now old Churchill is gone. I reckon I’ll be more ready for them than anyone else on Sheppey.’
    ‘That’s good,’ she called back, and wondered if he were right to be so diligent. Yes, she was aware that Sir Winston Churchill had died earlier that year but he’d been an old man who’d done well in the war. She also wondered if he was digging it big enough to take everyone in Endeavour Terrace seeing as no one else was bothering. Or would he lock them all out if the Russians did come?
    Marcie used the tree stump at the side of thechicken hutch to get up on the roof. Garth declined her offer to join her there. He was absorbed in the chickens, clucking in response to their clucks and dipping and darting his head in the same manner. Being a chicken quite suited him. His hair was the colour of dark corn and formed what resembled a cock’s comb on the top of his head.
    Poor thing. No dad and not much of a mother to speak of. Was it just getting pregnant and not being married that had made Edith Davies the way she was?
    It occurred to her that if Rita didn’t watch herself she could end up the same way as Garth’s mother – what a chill thought that was. Though Alan Taylor did have the money to put things right.
    The roof of the chicken hutch had soaked up the warmth of the sun. Marcie lay back against the single slope, her arms folded behind her head. She closed her eyes and pretended that her surroundings had melted away. That she was lying on a tropical beach and surrounded by blue sky and fluffy clouds. At least that bit’s true, she thought, squinting up at the sky with one eye.
    ‘There used to be a tree ’ere,’ Garth said suddenly.
    With that same, single eye, she saw the top half of his face regarding her from above the ridge of the roof.
    ‘Well, that’s hardly earth-shattering news,’ she muttered. The stump was testament to that.
    Garth went on talking in his slow way as though he hadn’t heard her.
    ‘And grass was here. And a little seat was here. And a flower bed full of flowers. And a bird bath …’
    ‘Chickens, Garth. There’s only ever been chickens.’
    ‘And people used to sit here.’
    She blew out a gasp of frustration. ‘Shut up, Garth.’
    The world blurred. Her mind drifted.
    Garth gabbled on.
    ‘That was back when you were small. You and your mother used to come out here to sit under the tree. And she wore a red dress.’
    Yes. A red dress with tiny brass buttons …
    Her eyes blinked open. Perhaps it was the sun, or perhaps it was that he’d snapped her out of the edge of sleep, but she could see –
actually see
– the scene he was describing. Not physically of course, but in her mind’s eye as though it had really happened.
    Bolt upright she looked down at this slow-speaking excuse for a man. He was clucking again, folding his arms against his side like chicken wings and going around in a circle, legs bent, head dipping backwards and forwards.
    ‘What was that you said, Garth?’
    ‘Cluck, cluck, cluck—’
    ‘Garth!’
    His limbs jerked to stillness. Round eyed he looked up at her, his lower lip sagging.
    ‘You told me I was sitting here with a woman in a red dress.’ She couldn’t help the trembling in her voice. ‘Did I?’
    Swinging her legs to the edge of the roof she got down onto the tree stump and from there to the ground. The grass was springy beneath her feet, as though the earth was made of sponge.
    ‘You said I used to sit here with my mother and that she was wearing a red dress. How do you know that, Garth? Did you see her sitting here? Do you remember seeing me sitting on her lap?’
    He stared at her with pale, ill-focused eyes. A sliver of saliva trickled from his drooping lower lip. ‘I don’t know.’
    ‘What do you mean, you don’t know?’
    It was hard to control her anger – or perhaps it wasn’t anger – just a kind of