He digs his fingers into the quilt until he recognises he can't burrow into the earth. He stops for fear of tearing his aunt's quilt and having to explain. He straightens up in a crouch to retrieve the quilt, which he hugs as he stumbles back across the field with his head down. The sky is pretending that it never faltered, but all the way to the house he's afraid it will part to expose more of a face.
While nobody is up yet, Colin senses that his uncle isn't in the house. He tiptoes upstairs to leave the quilt on his bed, and then he sends himself out again. There's no sign of his uncle on the way downhill. Colin dodges onto the path under the trees in case his uncle prefers not to be seen. "Uncle Lucian," he pleads.
"You found me."
He doesn't seem especially pleased, but Colin demands "What did I see?"
"Not much yet. Just as much as your mind could take. It's like our stories, do you understand? Your mind had to tell you a story about what you saw, but in time you won't need it. You'll see what's really there."
"Suppose I don't want to?" Colin blurts. "What's it all for?"
"Would you rather be like my sister and only see what everyone else sees? She was no fun when she was your age, your mother."
"I never had the choice."
"Well, I wouldn't ever have said that to my grandfather. I was nothing but grateful to him."
Though his uncle sounds not merely disappointed but offended, Colin says "Can't I stop now?"
"Everything will know you can see, son. If you don't greet the old things where you find them they'll come to find you."
Colin voices a last hope. "Has it stopped for you?"
"It never will. I'm part of it now. Do you want to see?"
"No."
Presumably Colin's cry offends his uncle, because there's a spidery rustle beyond the trees that conceal the end of the path and then silence. Time passes before Colin dares to venture forward. As he steps from beneath the trees he feels as if the sky has lowered itself towards him like a mask. He's almost blind with resentment of his uncle for making him aware of so much and for leaving him alone, afraid to see even Uncle Lucian. Though it doesn't help, Colin starts kicking the stone with his uncle's name on it and the pair of years ending with this one. When he's exhausted he turns away towards the rest of his life.
Direct Line (2004)
As Sharpe strode into the passage under the railway he heard a woman talking to herself ahead. Since the last of the lights had been vandalised overnight, the tunnel was flooded with darkness. He wasn’t about to be daunted by that or by her, even if she was homeless or mad. As he halved the distance to her, the train he’d just left passed overhead as though the July heat had congealed into an elongated clap of thunder, and he glimpsed her clutching at her face. “No,” she cried, high-pitched as her footsteps and their echoes as she fled. An object clattered down the wall to join the rest of the litter. Sharpe was opening his mouth to ask her to retrieve it when he saw it was luminous.
An abandoned hypodermic to which it lent a poisonous green glow distracted him from immediately seeing that it was a mobile phone. Even he recognised that it was expensive, the kind of item his pupils at school boasted about. It weighed less than a tiny skull. When he brought it not too close to his ear, he was greeted by a rush of static that seemed for a moment to be trying to form words. The noise sank into the dark as the phone was extinguished, and he hurried to catch up with its owner. Wastefulness offended him as much as litter.
The tunnel opened onto the road to the school. The road was rowdy with schoolboys, some of whom nudged each other at the sight of him. Had the woman been intimidated by the mass of them? She could have taken refuge in any of dozens of grimy houses split into secretive flats or in one of the alleys strewn with refuse. He was holding up his find as if this might draw her out of hiding when behind him a boy said “Sharpy’s got a mobile now. He can’t say nothing about ours.”
Sharpe swung around to confront the twelve-year-old’s unnecessarily small face, which grew smoothly innocent. “Perhaps you saw the lady this belongs to, Lomax. She ran out of there not a minute ago.”
The boy’s stunted crony Latham peered up from under his brows as though out of a lair. “We thought she must of been raped.”
“We looked for who done it and we seen you.”
“I was attempting to return the property she dropped. I hope you would have done as much.” When this provoked two identical disbelieving stares he said “You were asked to tell me where the lady went.”
“Behind them houses like she couldn’t wait to have a shit,” Lomax said, pointing to the alley Sharpe had just passed.
“No, it was them like she had to piss,” said Latham, indicating an alley beyond the exit from the pedestrian tunnel.
Sharpe hadn’t time to rebuke the vulgarity, whether it was automatic or deliberate. He sidled down the nearer alley, past bulging waist-high plastic bags torn open by animals or kicked asunder by children. Halfway down he met a transverse alley overlooked by the backs of two streets. There was no sign of the woman, but another at an upper window turned her head to keep an offensively suspicious eye on him. When he called “I’ve lost property for someone” it neither assuaged her stare nor attracted the owner. He stowed the mobile inside his jacket as he left the alley, ignoring questions and suggestions about where he’d been and why.
Lomax and Latham were even less eager than usual to reach the school. He caught up with them at the entrance to the schoolyard packed with uproar and furtive misdeeds, those that bothered to be furtive. “Did you give it to her, sir?” Lomax enquired.
“Did she like it, sir?” said Latham.
Their untypical enthusiasm made their meaning clear, but he wasn’t going to waste time on it. “I shouldn’t have expected any sense from the terrible Ls,” he said.
He was entering the school when the bell began to clang. He helped herd the scholars to the assembly hall and joined his colleagues on the stage, from which he fixed his stare on his class near the front of the long hot room. The general restlessness lessened as the headmaster marched to his lectern. Mr Thorn let his gaze roam until there was silence, which turned more inert as he addressed the question of self-sacrifice. Soon he was asking five hundred boys to think of items they could live without. He had just cited mobile phones when one rang.
For once it didn’t belong to any of the boys, though it was set to the remains of a chorus from the Messiah with a disco beat: “Hal-lel-lu-jah, hal-lel-lu-jah, lu-jah, lu-jah, lu-jah ...” As Sharpe glanced along the rank of his colleagues he realised that several were gazing at him. “Excuse me, head,” he murmured, “not mine,” only to demonstrate something like the opposite by retreating into the wings. He snatched out the mobile and thumbed the key that bore an icon of a vertical receiver. He was about to speak when the phone did so in a woman’s voice so impatient it left politeness behind. “Got it?”
Sharpe responded in a whisper, if a loud one. “Yes” was all he said, since it seemed obvious.
“Can you bring it?”
“Where?”
“Usual place.” As he concluded she had less language to her than the worst of his pupils she added “It’s Sue.”
His own terseness was designed to interfere as little as possible with Mr Thorn’s speech. “Where again?”
“What?” Even more suspiciously she asked “Is this Janey?”
“If she’s the lady who owns the phone she dropped it. Perhaps you could—”
“Wrong number. I don’t know any Janey. I’m not Sue either.”
Presumably she had run out of denials. A sound like a wind through a bone replaced her voice. He poked the button inscribed with a supine receiver and was putting the mobile away when it rang again. Mr Thorn faltered irritably in the middle of a word. Sharpe jabbed the first button and hissed “Yes?”