Counting Stars by David Almond Read Free Book Online Page A

at my side.
    “What’s in there?” she says.
    I open the box, show the eggs laid in neat rows on smooth sand. I touch them with my fingers, and name them.
    “Starling, larky, blackbird, wren.”
    I point up into the tree, to the nest deep in the foliage.
    “Hedge sparrow,” I tell her.
    I pick a fragment of shell from the tip of my tongue.
    “Give us an egg,” she says.
    I hold out the bright blue fragment to her.
    She laughs, grips the growling dog by its mane. Beyond her, men are already uncoupling trailers, throwing rods and girders down onto the grass, unrolling great sheets of canvas. I see the Time Machine, sky blue, with pyramids and flying saucers and fleshy pink women in bathing costumes painted on it, at the center the arched entrance with its beaded curtain.
    A skinny naked boy crouches before the eggs, shoves his finger into the sand. I clip his hand away.
    “Which one you from?” I ask the girl.
    “We tell your age for sixpence. Dad gets out of chains and sticks skewers in himself. Mam tells your fortune and shows her knickers to men after midnight.” She held her hand out. “Give us a penny, eh?”
    “What’s your name?”
    “Little Kitten.” She shows her nails like claws. “You’re fourteen. Give us a penny.”
    I drop a coin in her palm and she giggles and spits then sets off to the river with the dog and her friends. Out in the field, older children are roaming now. A juggler spins knives. Elvis Presley’s voice starts to crackle and roar. I move out from the tree. The woman leaning against the Time Machine hails me as I walk by. She is blond, plump like the women in the paintings. I see how the name and the bodies have been painted time and again.
    “Yes, you, boy!” she calls.
    She wears high heels, short skirt. Makeup is caked on her face, her eyes are rimmed by black mascara. I start to turn away, then catch my breath at the tenderness I see in her. She is thirty, or older, or even my mother’s age. She smiles, she licks her lips, she tugs gently at the straps beneath her white blouse. I stare at the entrance to the Time Machine, at the darkness inside.
    “Make sure you come and see the Time Machine,” she says.
    I stare at her.
    “Remember,” she whispers. “Remember, bonny boy.”
    I turn my eyes away, I leave the field, I hurry home.
    I’m in the kitchen with my sisters. Dust seethes in the sunlight that’s pouring in. Light flares in the loose strands of my sisters’ hair. We gaze at the eggs. We practice naming them, remembering them.
    “Blackbird,” we whisper. “Starling, larky, wren.”
    I show them the paired pinholes in each egg, tell them how to blow out the stuff from inside. I tell them it was Dad who taught me all this, who years ago took Colin and me through the old lanes at Felling’s edges. I tell them the rules he taught me: be silent and quick, don’t damage the nest, take only one egg, and only when the clutch is three or more.
    I see tears in Catherine’s eyes.
    “What’s wrong?” I say. “What’s wrong?”
    She raises her hand into the streaming light. We watch the dust in silvery fragments dance and seethe about us.
    “Human skin,” she says. “They told us at school—the majority of dust is human skin. Dead skin.”
    We meditate upon this. We laugh. The dust rises and falls, we watch it stream into our mouths with breath.
    “Angels are like this,” says Catherine. “Their bodies are subtler than ours. Their atoms are dispersed. They are more spirit than matter. They are all around us.”
    We look at her.
    “They told us at school,” she says. “It’s true.”
    We all laugh again.
    “It’s true,” say Mary and Margaret together. “It’s very very true.”
    “It is,” I say. “And I saw a Time Machine today.”
    Dad comes in from the sunlight. He has his heavy herringbone coat over his arm. He kisses the girls and sits with us and sighs at the beauty of the day. He lights a Players and the smoke weaves and spirals through