B for Buster by Iain Lawrence Read Free Book Online

Lee could have picked me up and
carried
me to the CO. He could have
tossed
me half the distance. He laughed, then kicked out his leg, knocking my feet from the grass. I fell against him, and a moment later we were rolling on the summit of the Hambletons, over and over, back and forth, pummeling and laughing.
    But the game lasted no longer than a moment. Donny pushed me away, and stood up. He wasn’t a boy anymore.
    We drove down the east face of the hills, then circled back through a string of tiny villages until we reached the Swale. Donny stopped the car, and again he opened the boot. He took out a roll of canvas and rubber. He set it on the grass at the river’s edge, pulled a string, and the bundle exploded and became a boat.
    I was horrified. It was a life raft from a Halifax.
    â€œWhat are you doing?” I asked.
    â€œDon’t you want to go fishing?” he said.
    We launched the boat in a shady pool. Donny tossed in a couple of bottles, a chocolate bar, and oranges. We fished for trout with the hooks and line that were packed in the raft’s little kit. We didn’t catch any, but I didn’t mind. We just drifted down the river, past muskrat dens, under dangling willows. He called me Huckleberry Finn (“Pass me that orange there, Huck”), and I called him Tom Sawyer.
    We let the current take us down to Topcliffe; then Donny paddled with his hands to nudge us up against the bank. He took his car keys from his pocket. “Go fetch the bus,” he told me.
    I was stunned. No one but Donny
ever
drove the Morris. “Go on,” he said, jangling the keys.
    â€œI can’t,” I told him. “I don’t know how to drive.”
    â€œNow’s your chance to learn,” he said.
    â€œI’m too young.”
    â€œJeez, Kid. Who cares?”
    But I had never been as daring as Donny. So I guarded the raft as he went hiking back along the river. I lay on my back on the warm rubber, holding on to a willow branch as I felt the tug of the stream.
    I never figured out why Donny took me fishing. Maybe he meant to prove that he wasn’t entirely a grown-up, that he still had a bit of the boyish wickedness that had let him stand at the very edge of Kakabeka Falls, closer to the brink than any kid ever stood. But it was his last day as a boy, and nearly his last altogether.

CHAPTER 5
    EVERY MORNING AT BREAKFAST the loudspeaker switched on. There was a click and a buzz, then the deep thump of a finger being tapped on a microphone somewhere. And then a voice came on—the lovely, whispery voice of an English WAAF. “Good morning, gentlemen,” she always said.
    A silence filled the room with the first click from the speaker. Talking stopped, and eating stopped, and row after row of airmen became as still as photographs.
    The WAAF cleared her throat. She always did, and I always imagined her fingers, thin and white, lifting up to touch her lips.
    Everyone was listening, and no one moved. They
never
moved before she spoke again. Our whole days depended on the next thing she would tell us. I wanted her to say that we were “on” for the night. I was sick of being stood down day after day—more than a week since Lofty went flying. I wanted her to say that we were on, that I would be heading off to Germany.
    I looked at little Ratty and saw he had his fingers crossed. Lofty was putting his hand in his pocket. Two tables away, Donny Lee’s head of clown-red hair was bent over his breakfast.
    The WAAF, like an angel, said, “You are on for tonight.”
    I cheered. I shook my hands in the air like a boxer; I shouted, “Hooray!”
    I was the only one who did. Ratty was grinning, and Will had a thumb cocked up. Buzz and Simon and Pop all looked as happy as clams, but I was the only one in the whole room who cheered. Lofty took his hand from his pocket, and his pipe was in his fingers. He popped it in his mouth and smiled at us, but his new, dark