No Such Creature by Giles Blunt Read Free Book Online Page A

intervene and make him a temporary ward until such time as a suitable home might be found. The order of such business begins with a receiving home, usually run by a good-hearted, inexhaustible couple who are on call seven days a week to take in children they have never met. A child may stay overnight or as long as a few weeks.
    If suitable relatives are not forthcoming, and the child is not a major behavioural problem, he or she will then be moved to a foster home. This is intended to be for the longer term—ideally until the child is returned to his natural home or adopted into a loving family. This is not generally expected to happen with children over the age of seven or eight, but the social agencies try to be optimistic.
    A difficult child faces a bleaker future of group homes and detention centres, but that was not likely in the cards for a good-natured boy like Owen Maxwell.
    Various friends and neighbours came forward in the early days—Owen didn’t lack for friends—but none of their families proved suitable to the Department of Children and Families. Either they could not make the required long-term commitment or they had children too close in age, which would be likely to cause conflict. Owen was lucky in one way: both his parents had been covered by munificent life insurance policies. In some cases the applicants to foster Owen may well have been motivated by something other than altruism.
    He would never forget the cold clench in his stomach when Mrs. Callow first took him to the receiving home. It was a natty little house of red brick in a corner of Norwalk with which he was completely unfamiliar. Mr. and Mrs. Platt were both jolly ovoids with carroty red hair, as if a pair of Toby jugs had leapt from the shelf and incarnated themselves for the sole purpose of greeting newly orphaned boys.
    Mrs. Platt showed him where the bathroom was, explaining the house rules, which were Byzantine, and showed him to the IKEA-crisp chamber he would be sharing with a buzz-cut urchin some two years his senior nicknamed, appropriately, Buzz. Buzz had claimed the top bunk upon arrival some days previously and warned Owen on his first night that if he tried to storm that fastness he would be repelled “by any means necessary.” Those were his actual words.
    Outside the borders of his own bunk, Buzz had no concept of privacy, or of its corollary, private property. Within the first three nights Owen lost a Harry Potter book, a Game Boy and a much-loved baseball mitt. Buzz was a versatile sportsman, and one of his favourite pastimes was a game he called Goober. The rules were not complex. When the rest of the household was supposedly dreaming, Buzz would roll back the top end of his mattress, affording him a perfect if somewhat segmented view of Owen, lying awake in grief and loneliness.
    “Watch this,” Buzz said one night, and with a solemn expression he released a viscous blob of saliva from between pursed lips. It elongated, drooped toward the transfixed Owen, and was then reeled back up by a sudden intake of Buzz’s breath. “The trick,” Buzz explained, “is to see how low I can get it to go without actually hitting you.”
    “Kind of a one-sided game,” Owen pointed out. “What am I supposed to do—spit upward and see if it’ll reach you?”
    “No, doofus. You’re supposed to not move a muscle, no matter how close it gets. It’s a test of nerve.”
    “I don’t want to play.”
    “Too bad, ‘cause here it comes.” Another hideous blob drooped toward him.
    “If that hits me,” Owen said, “I will kill you.”
    Buzz made an insincere attempt to recall his missile and it hit Owen squarely in the forehead. His reaction was instantaneous. He booted the springs above him with all his strength, causing Buzz to carom off the ceiling and plummet to the floor. The noise was stupendous, and brought Mr. and Mrs. Platt clattering into the room. Accusations were hurled, evidence weighed, and a rapid judgment