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or sent away, and he wasn't; the way he had when he got lost down by the sea
at Bournemouth, on an outing. This can't happen to me, not on my birthday, he
kept thinking. Not on my birthday.
He went down the side of the street, round the parked cars nose-in to the
slanted curb, down to the bus-stops, looking all the time for Mr Sharpe. For
some reason he kept thinking that
Mr Sharpe would be wearing the blue hat, and he found himself looking for that
all the time instead of Mr Sharpe, who, he now realised, he probably couldn't
have described very well if a policeman had asked him to. He wandered down,
the terrible feeling growing in his guts like a live thing, wringing him,
squeezing him. People mobbed about him, on the pavement, by the bus-
stops, down ramps and out of buses; blacks and whites and Asians, men and
women, people with shopping trolleys or bags of tools, women with children in
push-chairs or dragged along from one hand.
Older children ran by, screaming and shouting. People ate hamburgers from
polystyrene boxes, chips from bags, they carried shopping or parcels, they
were old and young and fat and thin and tall and little, dull and gaudy; he
started to feel dizzy, as though the alcohol or the sultry air was dissolving
him, as though the pain inside was wringing him out like a wet towel, twisted
and squeezed. He staggered, pushed past people, looking for the blue helmet.
He could feel himself being dissolved, his identity sapped from him, lost in
this siege of faces. He got to the side of the curb, made sure there were no
buses coming, then stepped out on to the in-set bus
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turned round and started to head back the way he had come, further out from
the crowd now, staggering and swaying his way back. He looked over his
shoulder, but there were still no buses coming, ready to swing into the
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bus-stop lane and crush him, only traffic from the lights further down
charging up the street, engines roaring. He heard a bike engine, revving,
coughing. He kept going, heading back for the park; maybe Mr Sharpe would
have come back. The holes he had repaired were around about here...
Rough, screaming engine noises shouted at him. He ignored them. A bike
engine, spluttering, a diesel engine, revving. He felt suddenly dizzy and
disoriented for a moment, filled both with a sudden panic and an unsteadying
conviction he had been here before, seen this all before. He glanced up at
the sky for a second, and felt himself stagger. His head cleared and he did
not fall into the stream of traffic, but it had been close. He heard a great
thundering noise then, a noise like a car hitting something, but probably just
the sound empty lorries or trucks make when they go over those speed-ramp
things, or holes in the road, too fast.
He turned round slowly, still feeling strange, to see if it was one of the
holes Dan Ashton and the squad had done. He bet it was.
A woman screamed from the pavement.
He looked up again, into the blue, blue sky, and saw something sailing out of
it, like a reflection sliding over a globed, shiny blue surface.
A spinning cylinder.
A bike and a flat-bed truck flashed by on one side. He stood, transfixed,
thinking; my hat... my hat...
The tumbling aluminium beer barrel hit him right on the top of his head.
-CHINESE SCRABBLE-
They sat, covered in their furs, in a small open area near the summit of the
Castle of
Bequest.
A few decrepit towers and decaying fractions of floors with rooms and chambers
rose into the shining grey sky to one side of them, but most of the apartments
were empty and useless, only good for rookeries. Stones, great slabs of
slate, lay tumbled all around the small cleared area where they sat. A few
stunted trees and bushes, little more than overgrown weeds, poked out from the
mass of fallen, fractured masonry. Ruins of arches and columns lay about
them, and while they played Chinese Scrabble, it started to snow.
Quiss looked up slowly, in surprise. He couldn't recall it snowing for... a
long time.
He blew some of the small, dry flakes off the surface of the board. Ajayi
hadn't even noticed;
she was still studying the two small remaining plastic tiles balanced on the
little bit of wood in front of her. They were very nearly finished.
Nearby, perched on a pitted, flaking column, the red crow sat, puffing on the
green stump of a fat cigar. It had taken up smoking at about the same time
they had started playing Chinese
Scrabble. 'I can see this is going to take some time,' it had said. 'I'd
better find some other interests. Maybe I can contract lung cancer.'
Quiss had asked it, casually, where it got the good cigars from. He should
have known better, he told himself later: Tuck off,' the red crow had said.
'I liked that other game you played,' the red crow announced suddenly, between
puffs, from the column. Quiss didn't deign to look at it. The red crow
balanced on one leg and took the short stump of the cigar out of its beak with
the other foot. It looked pensively at the glowing end of the cigar. A flake
of the quietly falling snow landed on it and hissed. The red crow cocked its
head, looking up accusingly at the sky, then went on, stuffing the cigar back
into its beak (so that its words came out oddly distorted). 'Yes, that
Open-Plan Go was all right. I liked that board, the way it seemed to stretch
for ever in all directions. You two looked proper twats, I can tell you,
standing in the middle of an infinite board, cut off at the waist. Real
dickheads you looked. Those dominoes were just stupid. Even this is pretty
boring. Why don't you just admit defeat? You aren't going to get the answer.
Throw yourself off the edge over there.
Doesn't take a second. Dammit, at your age you'll probably die of shock
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before you hit the fucking ground.'
'Hmm,' Ajayi said, and Quiss wondered if she had been listening to the bird.
But she was still frowning deeply at the tiles on her little ledge of wood.
Talking to them, or herself.
In a few days, if Quiss had counted correctly, they would have been together
in the castle
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two thousand days. Of course, he recalled proudly, he had been there longer
than she had.
It was good, counting up the days, working out the anniversaries so that they
could celebrate them. He had started working them out in different
number-bases. Base five, base six, seven, eight, of course, nine, ten, twelve
and sixteen. So two thousand days would be a quadruple celebration, as it was
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