Flood by Ian Rankin Read Free Book Online

of them, dodging and weaving and never once being touched. His grandmother called to him from the end of the road. Everybody stopped playing and looked towards her.

    'Come on, Sandy. Tea's ready.' He began to walk away.

    'Cheerio,' said one of the girls.

    'Aye, I'll see you.' Sandy began to trot towards his retreating grandmother. He was eager to tell his mother that he had been playing with his friends.

    Was it soon after that that his grandmother had died? He could not remember exactly. No, it was after that that she had taken the first of her bad turns; the first at which he had been present. It had scared him for days afterwards.

    He had described it to his new friends as they played behind the picture-house. 'She couldn't speak or anything,' he had told them. 'She just sat in her chair. Her mouth was open a little and she was dribbling. Spit was running down her jersey.' They made funny faces at that. One or two laughed. The girls seemed more intrigued than the boys.
    'And her hand was shaking like somebody shivering, but she was sweating. She was like that for ages. Sometimes her eyes would open. Then they would close again.' The girls gasped in horror at the thought.

    'Sounds like what happened to my uncle,' said one of the boys, chalking his name on the wall with a stone. 'He was sitting reading in the house one day and the next thing he was on the floor. He coughed and blood came out of his mouth.' He gazed at them to fathom the effect of his words.
    One of the girls put her hand to her throat and said, 'Eeyuk,' while another closed her eyes and clamped her hands over her ears theatrically. Even Sandy was sweating a little as he imagined the scene. Blood coming out of your mouth! It was horrific. He tapped his fingers on the stone wall and tried not to look a sissy. He noticed that the other boys were doing much the same thing. Someone suggested a game of football and it seemed like a good idea, but the ball was at the boy's house in Dundell, and Sandy didn't think he was allowed to go that far away. He watched them all leave, still shouting at him to join them. He smiled and shook his head.

    'I'm going somewhere with my mum,' he lied. 'I think we're going to Edinburgh.' He flushed immediately, ashamed of the whopper. He walked home slowly, kicking a stone the length of Main Street without it once rolling on to the road. He left the stone outside his gate and went indoors.
    It was a good stone, and he would keep it. By the following morning he had forgotten it, and when he finally did remember a few days after that the stone had disappeared.
    He found another, better one, and thus had started his collection of good stones.

    He thought about his mother's hair now as he walked up the street from the Soda Fountain. Black and silver, hanging in thick threads. Black night shot through with wisps of moonlight. He had described it like that in one of his English essays. He liked English, and especially liked writing essays. He got good marks for them. He had been rather annoyed when his mother had started going out with his English teacher, Mr Wallace. Now people would think that any future good marks were due to that and not because he was good at writing things. He had seen Mr Wallace stroke his mother's hair as if checking that it were real.

    'Don't pull them out,' his mother used to say if Sandy's curious fingers lingered over the silvery threads. 'They just come back in thicker than ever.' When she had said that he had thought that maybe she was a witch after all. She was something magical that talked on bad days with the long dead and sang sacred songs with a shawl strewn over her lap in the small back room where the memories were kept.
    Some warm Sundays, if he was in his bedroom with the door a little ajar, doing his homework, he would hear her voice lullabying spirits in that back room. Her hair would be hanging around her in a manner that caused Sandy to stir uneasily in his adolescent body. He would