Runt by Niall Griffiths Read Free Book Online Page B

thought he would. You’re okay, tho, yeh?
    Again I said yes and told him I wasn’t scared even tho I was but Rhiannon’s smile was still in me.
    —Well, just be careful, that’s all. I’ll keep my eye on that bastard as well but I can’t
always
be around, y’know?
    He gave me the tent rolled up in its bag and I put it on my back with my arms through the loops and it wasn’t heavy at all even tho it would be my home for a bit. I felt like a snail. Drunkle put the rucksack with the clanking pans on his back which went clank and then he put a bottle in each of his coat pockets which made a sort of clanky sound as well and then he put his gun over his shoulder and told me to let Arrn out of the truck and I asked him if I should put Arrn on his lead and Drunkle looked around the car park with no people in it any more and said no it’d be okay but that I should take it with me Just In Case.
    I let Arrn out and he went mad, going jump and wag. Drunkle told him to Behave Himself in a voice that had a hardness in it and he stopped jumping and sat and didn’t look sad just kind of in a calmness and happy’d to be out and his face with all that in it made me laugh. Drunkle leaned against the truck and lit a cigarette and the smoke went up and then drifted away like a running cloud.
    —We’re going over the ridge, he said, and made his cigarette point to a High Bit that I could see below the sun.—No, fuck that, we’re going
around
the ridge. Take a bit longer like but as long as we get to the stones by night. That’s the main thing.
    Stones? There were a million stones on the mountain. The mountain itself was a giant stone. —What stones, Uncle?
    —Them standing stones. By the spring. I’ve taken you there before, remember? Twlc y Filiast?
    I remembered then and put a smile into the air cos I liked that name and Arrn wagged his tail a bit cos he liked that name as well cos it was
his
name in a way and he understood that and I understood him. Drunkle liked that place, Them Stones, and he had taken me there five times and Auntie Scantie went with us two times as well and I thought that going there again would make Drunkle sad and that made me wonder and I was going to ask Drunkle why we were going there but he rubbed my head which I liked and asked if I was ready and then went off and me and Arrn followed him. Them Questions again. Why is it that grown-up people always ask questions that they don’t care if you answer or not? They put a question at you and then just walk away or just carry on talking and I don’t know why they do that it puts a puzzlement in me and a wonderment and not like that wonderment the birds put in me or the mountains put in me it is a wonderment that makes me a bit not-nice-hot. Even Drunkle does it but he’s my Drunkle.
    We walked out of the car park our little Army Of Three and through the village and down a lane and around an old house with nobody in it and over a bridge and over a fence and over a boggy bit that went squish. Arrn loved it, he did, snuffling and sniffing everything he could see and getting all dirty. He sniffed some reeds a bit far away from me and a whitey bird not small flew up screaming and started to swoop on him and Drunkle said it was a harrier probably with chicks and would most likely blind Arrn so he shouted him over and Arrn came with a worryment in his face which made me laugh and the not-small screaming swooping bird went back into the reeds. I liked that bird very much. I’d seen the type of him before but never up that close and I wondered if birds like that had babies like Charlesworth did not kittens of course but if one of their babies would be different to the others, a different colour and a different size and a different Way in it to the others in the nest with him. I hoped they did. I hoped everything did that in the world had babies, not millions of babies like frogs or fish but just a few like hedgehogs or foxes and that looked like their Mams and