The Outcast by Sadie Jones Read Free Book Online Page B

bottom came up too fast and stupid Tom Greene was in the way, and Lewis practically burned his feet off trying to slow down and they ended up on the verge and falling on their backs. Kit’s head bashed against Lewis’s lip and he had blood on the inside of his mouth. They got up. Kit was quivering all over like a little animal. Lewis put the back of his hand to his mouth and saw the blood. Joanna was inspecting a bee sting she’d sustained the day before. Tamsin stepped onto her bike again. No-one spoke for a bit.
    ‘Let’s go back the short way, over the fields.We can push the bikes and look in the river,’ said Ed and, after buying their sweets, they did.
    When Kit got home she told her mother about the broken chain and where she had left her bike. Her mother said if she was careless enough to leave it there, she didn’t deserve a bicycle and she certainly wasn’t going to ask Preston to go and collect it. The bike had been Tamsin’s originally, but Kit loved it and didn’t have another, so she spent the next day walking out to New Hill and pushing it back. It was heavy and banged against her legs all the way. She asked Preston to mend it for

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    her, but by the time he got round to it, it was almost time to go back to school.

    Every few days Elizabeth kept Lewis at home and they took a picnic into the woods and down to the river. He liked being around her and they would read and swim. Sometimes she would fall asleep in the afternoon and, after watching her for a little, he would climb trees or swim on his own, but never too far away in case she woke and didn’t know where he was.
    There was a buzzing of flies and bees and a whirring of crickets in the ferns and grass, and Lewis carried the blanket and towels for swimming. It was the woollen blanket from the car and it was itchy and crumbs got stuck in it. Elizabeth carried the basket with bread and a bottle of wine and some pork pies, which weren’t proper pork pies at all, but mostly salt and lard. They had strawberries from the garden for afterwards which were very sweet so it didn’t matter about no cream or sugar. The woods were dim around them and seemed to be sweating; the leaves were dark and still.There was the sound of a distant plane and Elizabeth thought immediately of the war and how much she hated the sound.
    ‘Mind out for the nettles,’ she said.
    It was the time of year when the nettles are coarse and big and dark and don’t sting you too badly, but they had grown out over the path so Elizabeth and Lewis had to go in single file. One brushed Lewis’s leg, but it just itched a bit so he didn’t say anything.
    ‘Do you want to go further along, where it’s deeper?’ she asked him.
    ‘Yes, let’s go by where there’s that boat,’ he said.
    It was nice of her to ask because it was quite a walk and they

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    knew they’d be hot and sick of carrying the things when they got there, but it was the best part of the river to go to because of it being wide and deep there and more like an adventure.
    ‘I hate this weather,’ said Elizabeth and Lewis was surprised; it was summer and you could be out and he didn’t know what she meant.
    The clearing by the wide part of the river was sandy with short grass in patches. The cow parsley and all the prettier things were over, but Lewis liked the longer grass now it had seeded itself. It was like pictures he’d seen of Africa and he thought if he’d been younger he would have played that there were lions. Sometimes he played that there were lions anyway, or at least imagined they were there, watching.
    Elizabeth spread out the blanket and they flopped onto it. She was wearing a blue and white patterned dress; the blue was dark, and it had square shoulders and short sleeves and a straightish wrapover skirt. She had used to wear it for going out with smart shoes, but now she wore it just any time because it was old, but it still looked nice.They looked at the pork pies, which had gone shiny and