Free Inch Levels by Neil Hegarty

said. ‘Time to head for home.’
    Patrick looked up at her, his face a mingled expression of teenage sullenness and something else – a bleakness: she took a breath. Margaret had crunched on ahead, was now rushing, climbing the slope of the sea wall; and now Sarah looked at her son, moved by something, by a sudden concern – but most of all, by shame. ‘Alright there?’ she said. ‘Are you cold?’ But Patrick shook his head: it was too late. She clasped her hands together: he got up with noisy, grinding difficulty, and ignored her as he too crested the sea wall; and as she watched her two children vanished, disappearing over the edge. Cassie was silent. They were remote now, each from the other, the four them alone on a sea of sliding stones.
    Catch them up, Sarah thought, and suddenly it seemed to her that there was a choice here, that this was another moment where anything might be possible. A turning point, she thought: I only have to speak – and she took a deep breath of salty air and almost called out. Stop , right now: stop, stop and come back. I need to say something to you. But her son and daughter were gone: and the moment was gone; and now even Cassie had passed her, reaching the slope of the wall and clambering up to the crest – and now she too vanished.
    A turning point. A turning missed: Sarah recognised its familiar shape – and here was the very ground of Inch Levels shifting and trembling there under the soles of her shoes. Easier to say nothing, to keep her silence, her distance. Keep her past stamped back into a shadowy corner. Better for all their futures.
    She would do it for them.

5
    ‘Who’s your favourite figure in history, sir?’
    The memory swam into Patrick’s head as he lay under the blue coverlet. Good days and bad days: and today, his body was pounded by pain. There was a refuge of sorts in memory, in the past; greedily he plunged in.
    Only last year, he thought: only a year and a bit ago. And yes: this question Patrick actually was asked, by one or other of his callow charges. And for a moment he was stumped for an answer. He rubbed his jaw – the spring of 1985: yes, the spring of last year, a warm afternoon, with summer and the end of his teaching year in sight, and the last class of the day, and the green lawns below the windows manicured and inviting and the heat building up in the little classroom under the eaves: a room filled with people waiting for the bell to ring. A helicopter racketed overhead, and after a few minutes another one: trouble, then, somewhere in town.
    The bell was a better sound. Clang, clang. Once every day it was a welcome sound, heralding as it did the end of school.
    ‘My favourite?’ Rubbing his jaw. ‘A teacher,’ he said, playing for time, ‘isn’t supposed to have favourites, Mr Porter, is he?’
    A rumble of reluctant appreciation, then young Porter again. ‘Seriously, sir.’
    ‘Ah, Mr Porter, this is too difficult a question on a hot afternoon. Ask me again tomorrow, when I’ve had time to think.’
    Spotty Mr Porter did ask – and Patrick had an answer ready. James Cook, Captain Cook, thricefold circumnavigator of the globe, interested not so much in exotica and cannibals and heathens and what have you, but in people. In what they liked and disliked, in what they ate and what kept them healthy, in what they wore and if they prayed and to whom – or Whom – and why.
    In what made people tick. He was a favourite.
    ‘Captain Cook,’ Patrick said. And another adolescent rumble around the classroom. Captain Cook was – English , wasn’t he? A sense of scandal in the air: Mr Jackson didn’t have to choose an Irishman – but did he have to choose an English man?
    Patrick explained. And maybe a few of them got it. Young Porter though, he didn’t approve, and he said so straight out. ‘Not an Irishman, sir, then? What about –’ … but Patrick cut him off there: no way, he thought, am I going to listen to some ream of Great