Hartsend by Janice Brown Page B

from her head at the top made him think of elves. She wasn’t wearing earrings, and the lobes weren’t pierced. He supplied a pair – gold because of her hair, with pale blue stones to match the sweater. After a minute he took the stones away. Plain gold was better.
    He’d taken some of all he was offered, eating slowly in case he gagged. Kerr did most of the talking, but after a while, politeness seemed to get the better of her, and she asked about the trainers. Then she wanted to know the whole story, and she actually looked quite upset. Kerr didn’t say anything about the fact that he’d been too pissed to protect himself.
    â€˜â€˜We don’t get presents worth stealing any more,’’ she said.
    â€˜â€˜That scarf thing of yours wasn’t cheap,’’ Kerr protested. ‘‘What you have to understand, Ryan, is that this child,’’ he gestured towards her with his fork, ‘‘is very greedy. She misses the good old days when she and her buddies went round every shop in Aberdeen every Saturday. She has the biggest wardrobe in the house. She could start her own clothes shop.’’
    Ryan’s sisters were the same, but wise for once, he accepted more gravy without saying anything. With them it was shoes. Mostly shoes that didn’t even fit. He remembered them throwing gravel at his bedroom window to get him to open the back door in their late night dancing days. They’d hobbled in, heels and toes raw and bleeding. He didn’t think they went to the same shops as Harriet though.
    He had to wait for several cars to pass before he could cross Main Street, but there weren’t that many people on foot at this end of the village, away from the shops. An older couple with another dog, this one straining on its chain as if it wasn’t walking fast enough. One cyclist. Not anyone he knew.
    He crossed the footbridge. The river was noisy, high from all the rain. He pulled the hood of his jacket tighter, wishing he’d had the sense to wear a hat. On his right the houses had sandbags stacked beside their low walls and hedges; there had been flooding a few years back, he couldn’t remember exactly when. They hadn’t been in any danger themselves, being higher up the hill. Big private houses were being built much higher up, on a new road, well away from the river, on land that would have been too difficult or too expensive to build on in the past. ‘‘The Place that’s Going to be the Place to Be,’’ according to the hoardings.
    Different planets. With each stride he felt himself resenting what he was going towards. Their house was as clean as the one he’d just left – his mother cleaned as if that was what kept the planet turning, but that was all you could say. Nothing matched. Every window ledge had some stupid, cheap ornament on it. Two furry kittens in a basket adorned the bathroom cistern. He’d tried and failed to find some kind of symbolic significance in that. On the kitchen wall hung a calendar with red print and green exotic birds, a freebie from the local Chinese takeaway. Why she kept it, he didn’t know, since there was nothing written in any of the spaces. In the living room on top of the fireplace sat his all-time favourite, a glass vase decorated with a hand-painted teddy bear in a tartan scarf, and the words A Present from Ullapool in gold script. Ullapool had probably been glad to see the back of it.
    He vaulted over the front gate. The catch was stiff, and there was a metal bit that could catch the delicate skin between your thumb and first finger if you didn’t do it right. Just one more shitty detail in his life. Up till now he’d managed to convince himself that money and class and all that crap didn’t matter because his day was coming, the day when everyone would see that he, Ryan Flaherty, was right up there. Inside he was a genius, inside he was different from