Raven Summer by David Almond Read Free Book Online Page B

your father. You are my child.”
    He kisses her, then he leaves.
    “Yes!” he says as he climbs the stairs. “That’s the answer!”
    “What’s the answer?” says Mum.
    I shake my head.
    She points at my chest.
    “And much more interestingly, what’s that?”
    “Blood,” I say.
    She gets her camera out.

2
    Mum frames the weirdest-looking photographs
and takes them to her gallery. They love them, they say they’re things of beauty. They hang them up for sale. We all go to see them, and it’s so strange, looking at bits of myself hanging up in public view. Mum’s simply called them
Landscape 1, Landscape 2
, etc.; and they don’t look human at all. A couple of them have already been sold. Soon we’ll be hanging in strangers’ houses, weird and nameless and unrecognizable.
    She photographs more and more. She photographs Alison’s perfect skin. She takes Alison out in her buggy along the tracks and across the fields. Photographs cracked bark and cracked earth and sluggishly flowing water. Grasses and fungi. Dead moles hanging in a line on a fence. A pair of magpies strangled with wire. A rabbitwith its throat ripped out. Three dried-out toads nailed to an oak tree. She photographs the living things and the dead things and the things that have never lived at all. She photographs the huge wild landscapes of Northumberland, the strange curved patterns of the rock art. The Roman Wall, the fortified farmhouses, the castles and bastles and peel towers and watchtowers, all the remnants of ancient vicious wars. The battlefields at Heavenfield and Flodden Field, where the grass blows in the breeze and tourists ramble and crops grow and sheep graze above hundreds upon hundreds of the dead. The beautiful vicious jets streak over her and through many of her pictures.
    We watch the news about Iraq and the absence of news about Greg Armstrong. Bodies are stretchered away from bombed-out marketplaces, hauled out of devastated buses. Screaming parents carry their butchered children. They lift them into blankets and baskets. Men and women scrabble at bloodstained rubble in search of their loved ones beneath. Dad yells at the screen. Get the troops out! Blair! Bush! Suicide bombers! Terrorists! He thumps the air in frustration. They’re all savages! They’re all the bloody same!
    Mum cries as she watches. She says, Yes they are all the same. All of them are people, just like us. She says it’s happened always and everywhere. She says it happened here in the times of the border wars and the sheep raids, in the moors and fields and castles that bring the ramblers and the tourist coaches. Here was a place of terror and slaughter and death. And it could happen again if the circumstances are right, if the savages among us are let loose. There are savages everywhere, waiting their chance.
    “We have to nurture the parts of us that aren’t savage,” she says. “We have to help the angel in us overcome the beast.”
    She holds Alison close and says that every body is like a baby’s body, no matter how grown-up the person seems to be or tries to be. The body is soft, beautiful, vulnerable. It’s easy to threaten it. It’s easy to harm it. It takes next to nothing to cause pain, to draw blood, to break bones. Takes next to nothing to blast a body to bits. She hugs me and she hugs the baby. It’s much harder to protect it, she says, and much more important. She takes us out into the fields and lanes. The trees are turning, birds are leaving, the days are shortening, darkening. She says that the tiniest corner of the countryside can stand for the whole world, no matter how peaceful and how isolated it might seem to be. It is gorgeous and strange and terrible and filled with throbbing life and awful death all at once. She goes to Rook Hall again and again. She photographs its walls, its rubble. There’s a notice attached to the hall now. It’s headed ABANDONED CHILD. There’s a true photograph of Alison, and details of her