The Hunger Trace by Edward Hogan Read Free Book Online Page B

days want to fly a hawk for a day, go back and tell their friends they touched the wilderness. I don’t see shit burning any holes in their clothes. If you want to do this, it’s got to be every minute.’
    ‘I do know a little about the care of animals,’ said Maggie.
    Louisa managed half a nod of acknowledgment. The problem was the look on Maggie’s face as Fred had risen to her fist. She looked him right in the eye, did not twitch. Louisa had spent most of her life fiercely guarding the secrets of her daily life with the hawks. She did not want people to know exactly what she did; she only wanted them to know that they could not do it themselves. And here was someone who perhaps could.
    Christopher was still trembling when he arrived in the White Hart. The place smelled of blocked drains. He approached the bar. ‘What do you want?’ David Wickes asked.
    ‘I want to settle down with a faithful woman and have some progeny, far away from this hell-hole,’ Christopher said.
    ‘I meant to drink.’
    ‘Oh, right. Erm. A double Drambuie and a white wine, erm, spritzer.’
    Wickes sighed. ‘You’re the boss,’ he said, turning away to make the drinks. ‘But your father didn’t think Detton was such a hell-hole.’
    ‘What do you know?’ Christopher said, under his breath.
    He was tired of the way people talked about his father in this pub. Before he died, they used to say, ‘Your dad is a legend, youth.’ Christopher would reply, ‘Erm, incorrect. A legend must be, erm, deceased. It’s part of the definition.’
    Such definitions now contributed to his logic for the existence of a real historical Robin Hood. To be a legend, you have to die. To die, you must have lived. Therefore, it followed that Robin Hood had really lived. It also meant, he realised, that the men in the pub were now free to call his father a legend.
    The problem, as with all legends, was that the stories the men told of his father changed and slipped. The details turned upside down, or were forgotten. The regulars never talked of how his father would take him garbage fishing in the brook; they never mentioned the pedal cart races around the enclosures. They spoke only of naked dancing at the big house on Drum Hill (strange), and of women and more women and better women (too much information). It was worrying to hear them get the facts wrong. When people got the facts wrong once, they rarely corrected them, in Christopher’s experience. You ended up with an Australian Robin Hood and a father you didn’t recognise.
    Christopher took his Drambuie in a couple of gulps and started on the spritzer. Tim Nettles sat on a stool at the end of the bar, and nodded. ‘Hello, lad. Any luck with that online dating malarkey?’
    ‘That’s classified,’ Christopher said. He’d only just set up his profile, and couldn’t remember talking to Nettles about it.
    ‘Plenty of nice young ladies up on that hill, I’d have thought,’ Nettles said.
    ‘Erm, plenty of lunatics. With their idiot birds.’
    ‘I can’t think who you might be referring to,’ Nettles said. Wickes smiled.
    ‘I’ll find my Marian,’ Christopher said. He looked up at Wickes. ‘Same, erm, again, please bartender.’
    It was his father who had told him the stories of Robin Hood. It had been part of their nightly routine: they would watch Marx Brothers films, and then his father would tell him tales in which Robin was a lithe, skinny child who used his cunning and slight stature to crawl through the legs of the sheriff. In David’s stories, Robin could disguise himself as tumbleweed, or a green bouncy ball. Christopher had never resembled that ingenious boy, but he had loved the tales.
    Since his father had died, Christopher had felt angry about those made-up, babyish yarns. Anyone could create such stories and what was the use of that? Christopher wanted something real. He had read widely about the historical figure of Robin Hood. In the old ballads, Robin massacred fourteen