The Returners by Gemma Malley Read Free Book Online Page A

up. A fiver. I’ve just found a fiver in my pocket.
    I’m smiling now. Doesn’t take much for life to feel much better, does it? Now I can grab something from the canteen before school starts. Seek and ye shall find. Just when you think life is going down the pan, you get enough of a break to think that maybe things aren’t so bad, just for a little while.
    It’s nearly lunchtime. I’ve got through double Science; now I’m in History. Half an hour until lunch. Thirty minutes. 1800 seconds. Tick, tock.
    It’s funny, time. I mean you’d think, really, that it’s just constant, that it doesn’t change. But it does. It speeds up, slows down; sometimes it disappears completely. If you could control it, if you could make time do what you wanted it to do, that would be amazing. Forget Superman or Spiderman – they’re pointless, stupid. But Time Man? That would be something. Just to be able to stop sometimes, stop everything. Fast-forward over the rubbish bits, let the good times last for ever.
    Me, I’d reverse time. I’d go back a few years. And then I’d press Stop.
    ‘Hodge, perhaps you’d like to tell us what the turning point of the Second World War was?’
    Caught, rabbit in the headlights. The teacher saw me looking at the clock. Such a rookie mistake. I grimace.
    ‘It was that battle, wasn’t it, Miss?’
    She’s too clever for that. ‘That battle? Could you be more specific?’
    I look down at my book. It isn’t even open at the right page – it’s a chapter about the Russian Revolution.
    ‘D-Day?’ I ask, dredging the memory from somewhere. A television programme. I can see black and white images of men jumping off boats. I saw an old film once about a man who knew about the secret landing. He woke up in a hospital after his plane went down and there were all these nurses and nice people looking after him. They said he’d been in a coma. Said the war was long over. Said Britain had won. They were trying to get him to reminisce, to tell them the story about how they wanted the Germans to think they were landing in one place when actually they were landing somewhere else. And then he realised that he had a paper cut on his finger. A paper cut that he’d had the morning his plane went down. D-Day hadn’t happened yet. He’d been captured by the Germans and they were trying to find out the real landing destination. For an old film, it was actually pretty good.
    ‘D-Day was how we won the war,’ she’s saying. ‘But there were several turning points during the war. Have you heard of Pearl Harbor?’
    I frown. ‘Maybe.’ I get a weird sensation in my stomach. A kind of tingling in my head. I concentrate on my breathing.
    ‘Maybe.’ The teacher rolls her eyes. ‘Has anyone else heard of Pearl Harbor? Would someone like to explain what happened and why it changed the course of the war?’
    There was a film called Pearl Harbor too, wasn’t there? I didn’t see it. I’m pretty sure of it. I didn’t watch it – the football was on at the same time and Dad never likes to miss a match. I think the film was a love story – I didn’t know it was about the Second World War.
    No one volunteers the answer so the teacher gives up and tells us. It was the Japanese, bombing American bases, making the Americans want to join the war. I’m getting a headache. I think I’m hungry. A Snickers bar probably wasn’t the best breakfast.
    ‘And the other turning point was the Battle of Britain,’ she’s saying. ‘Who can tell me something about the Battle of Britain?’
    Claire puts up her hand. ‘It was the bombing, wasn’t it?’
    ‘That’s right. A sustained effort by the Luftwaffe to gain superiority over the Royal Air Force. Had the effort been successful, well, the war could have taken a very different turn. As it was, the lack of success was considered a major turning point. Although the destruction wreaked on both sides was devastating.’
    ‘It nearly worked,’ I say. I sound angry. I