Raven Summer by David Almond Read Free Book Online

fort. There’s a couple of temps with me. But they’ll soon be split up and sent off to other families.”
    Mum and I watch each other.
    “And the baby?” she says.
    “Don’t worry, I won’t let them send a single one of them to anybody I haven’t been and vetted myself.”
    Mum chews her lip. Dad’s printer whirrs away upstairs. I squeeze her hand.
    “Go on,” I whisper.
    “Philomena,” says Mum, “how do I go about becoming a foster carer?”
    Philomena laughs.
    “Now, why am I not surprised to hear that?” she says. “Well, there’s forms to fill in and people to impress, but in the end, it all comes back to the ability to love. And of course Philomena’s reference will be very influential.” She pauses. We can hear the smiling in her voice. “Would you like me to sort out some application forms for you, Mrs. Lynch?”
    That night I’m in the tent with Max. The night’s warm and still and the tent door’s open. Bats are flickering against the sky. I’ve told him about Oliver and the war in Liberia and I’ve been going on about Iraq and Greg Armstrong and beheadings and suicide bombers and all the wars and savagery all around the world and the more I think about it, the worse it all seems, and I tell him how terrible it all is and how it feels like it’s all getting closer and it even feels like the start of World War III.
    “World War Three!” he mocks.
    “Aye. World War Three. I mean, I’ve just met a lad that’s been in a war a million miles away, but there he is right beside us in Newcastle. How much closer
can
you get?”
    He shakes his head.
    “Hell’s teeth,” he says. “Listen, I was talking to Kim to-day…”
    “Oh, aye?”
    “Aye. And she was talking about Becky Smith, that lass from Wark. And she reckons—”
    “Becky
Smith,”
I say.
    “Aye. And—”
    “There is one thing coming closer,” I say.
    “What’s that?”
    “The baby,” I say. “I think she might be coming to live with us.”
    And she does. Mum fills in the forms. She goes to see people at the town hall. They come to visit us. They interview us all. Dad calms down about it. He says yes, of course he’ll be happy about having the baby here. Yes, of course he’ll love her and look after her. It takes weeks, but all the time they’re talking to us and assessing us, we can see they think it’s all just marvelous, that Alison’s coming to a little bit of paradise.
    Philomena visits several times.
    “What a perfect place for a her,” she says. “What perfect people for her to live with.”
    And the weeks pass, and the days get even hotter, and the foundling, Alison, is brought to live with us. She sleeps in a cradle in the room just next to mine. The first night, we stand at the cradleside as she sleeps. Her eyes are shifting beneath their lids.
    “Who
are
you?” I whisper. “Where did you
come
from?”
    “We used to ask
you
that,” says Dad. “Who are you? Where did you come from? Why did you choose us?”
    “We’re all like foundlings, then.”
    “That’s right,” says Mum. “Little lost souls in a big big universe.”
    She smiles. She sighs.
    “It’s like it was intended,” she says. “Like it was meant to be.”

two

1
    Mum photographs me.
She gets close up to my skin. She gets the sunburn and the scarring. She gets the pores, the scars and nicks and bruises. She blows the photos up until they’re like paintings, like weird landscapes. She photographs my elbows, my knees, and the scabs there become like massive outgrowths on an alien world. She does sections of hair, a nostril, an earlobe, a knuckle. She makes them four feet wide.
    One day I’m lying in the garden with Max. Mum comes out.
    She frames us with her fingers. She says how great we look. She tells Max she’d love to photograph him.
    “No thanks,” he says. “Sorry, Mrs. Lynch.”
    I say it’s fine, it’s just a game, there’s nothing weird about it. Maybe his skin’ll hang in a gallery in Newcastle and people