Sky Run by Alex Shearer Read Free Book Online Page B

though I don’t mind pretending for fun.
    It’s another of the reasons why we have to go to City Island and meet new people. Peggy says she’s got no more stories left and she’s told us them all. She’s all storied out. She says there’s plenty more out there, but she doesn’t know or can’t remember them no more. Or rather – any more. I’ve got to remember that. It’s grammar. We’re not supposed to say
no more
no more. We’ve got to say
any more
from now on.
    Peggy says there’s books out there like you’ll never see the end of. She says there’s so many that no one could ever read them all, not even if they made it their life’s work and dedication. Seems hard to imagine to me. I can’t even picture that many books, not like walls and walls of them, going on forever, but Peggy says they’ve got books in City Island like fish in the sky.
    And then there’s boys. Peggy says they’ve got almost as many boys as books and you could never get to the end of all of them either. She says it’s time I met some, but I don’t know. I mean, Martin’s a boy and so what? But Peggy says a boy’s not like a brother. She says a boy who’s not a brother is a completely separate thing and an entirely different kettle of fish. So I had to ask her what a kettle of fish was, and why you’d be cooking fish in a kettle. But she said it was just an expression, and that was all the kind of thing we’d get the hang of once we arrived at City Island.
    I’m just hoping all this education is going to be one bit as marvellous as Peggy’s making out it is. I’ve been disappointed before. She said that eating sky-oysters was a real treat when you can get them. But when we did find them, I thought they were disgusting and tasted like slime with extra slime added. So I hope that finally going to school isn’t going to be like that.
    The expression is always
finally
going to school with Peggy. Other kids, I reckon, just go to school. But not us, we
finally
go to school, like we’re the last to arrive or something.
    Anyway, I just hope she’s right and that it is going to be something special and we’re not going all this way for nothing. Though I am interested in seeing what all the fuss over boys is about. Not that I’m fussed or making a fuss. It’s Peggy who’s gone on about them. She just says we gotta go out into the world and grow up normal. She says growing up on our ownsome with a batty old woman – which is what she calls herself and we’ve ended up stopping arguing and contradicting with her as she seems kind of proud of being batty, to say the truth – but she says that growing up with a batty old woman like her isn’t good for two kids. She says it’s all right when you’re little but that we aren’t so little any more, especially me. She says (when he’s out of hearing distance) that maybe Martin still is a little bit little but that I’m not and that I am growing up apace.
    That’s the kind of word she uses sometimes. I like that expression, that you are growing up
apace
. It just means quick but it somehow sounds better. Peggy says there’s all kinds of words like that, ones that are plain and simple, and other ones that have poetry in them.
    Anyhow, Martin doesn’t really remember. Not like I do. It’s all buried deep down in the underground for him; he was so young and small when our parents were lost. But when you lose your mum and dad, it’s like the ground has gone and you’re falling, falling, falling, all the way down into the sun. And plenty of times that was what I wished would happen and it would be the better and the easier way. I even said so to Peggy, when she found me crying once, that sometimes life feels so bad that you’d rather not live it, and you miss people so much you’d rather be with them than go on