closed his fingers around the spine, whose binding made him think of old skin, and squatted by the gap between the curtains.
The book fell open at the frontispiece, which showed a wizened old man sitting crosslegged and beating a drum with the palms of his hands. In the dimness his eyes resembled globes of black ice. Ben had often thought that he must have been one of the magicians who were supposed to beat drums for months to keep the midnight sun alight, but now the eyes unnerved him. He began to turn the pages, peering at the chunks of unrhymed verse which the book said was magic poetry but which he had never been able to follow. He supposed he would have to turn on the light when he found what he was looking for, though the stars tonight seemed almost bright enough to read by. Indeed, he was beginning to distinguish the separate lines of print on the pages. He felt as if illumination was reaching for him. He didn't know how long he crouched there, but he was sure he was about to be able to read the words and what they had to tell him when he heard his aunt wailing his name.
She ran downstairs clumsily, switching on lights. She must have found his bed empty while he'd been so engrossed in gazing at the book that he hadn't heard her get up. When she barged into the room, grabbing wildly at the light-switch, he wobbled to his feet. 'I couldn't sleep, Auntie. I only wanted -'
He wasn't sure how to continue, but she appeared not to be listening; she was staring grey-faced at the book in his hands as if it mattered more than anything he could say. He leaned it against the boys' adventure annuals on the shelf and headed for the door as she stepped aside like a wardress.
The guilt of having upset her again kept him awake almost until dawn; but when she wakened him for school she was smiling as if the day had disposed of the night. He felt better at once because she did. If his reading the book bothered her, he'd wait until she was out of the house.
But that evening, when he sneaked into the front room for a surreptitious glance at the picture of the shaman with the drum, he found the annuals were alone on the shelf. He ran into the kitchen, where his aunt was chopping vegetables. 'Auntie, where's my book?'
She glanced at him with a casualness which didn't begin to fool him. 'I couldn't have been thinking, Ben. A woman came collecting books for some charity, and I didn't like to let her go away empty-handed. Never mind, you've still got the photograph I gave you. It was only an old book.'
FOUR
In the weeks that followed she tried to make it up to him. On Saturdays, shopping in Norwich, she kept showing him the oldest parts of the town, cobbled streets where muddles of houses seemed about to tumble downhill. On Sundays after church she often took him to the coast, where she played timid football with him on the stony beaches or walked with him along cliff paths whose seaward edges smoked with windblown sand. Once she took him to the highest point on the coast, a token hill a few hundred feet above the sea at Sheringham. He gazed at the grassy landscape which was almost as flat as the sea, and wished the day were already tomorrow, because he'd realised how he might track down a copy of the book. The father of one of the boys in his class at school was a bookseller.
The boy's name was Dominic, and Ben knew little more about him. He seemed not to have any close friends – certainly not Peter and Francis and Christopher, who let Ben join in their schoolyard games, such as they were. Peter and Francis punched each other several times daily and made faces at each other in the classroom to try and get their classmates hit for giggling. Christopher had saved Ben from that on his very first day by faking a coughing fit to cover up Ben's fit of mirth, and the next day Francis had bitten a chocolate bar in two and given Ben the smaller piece, glistening with saliva. Ben had swallowed the offering, along with some nausea, and since then he supposed the four of them had been friends. All the same, he didn't mean to allow that to keep him away from Dominic.
On Monday his aunt walked him to school as usual, though in Stargrave he'd walked as far to school by himself. She said 'Do your best' and patted his bottom – a gesture which she seemed to assume would embarrass him less than a kiss in front of his schoolmates – as he tried to dodge out of reach through the gates. The July sunlight capped his head with heat and glared from the tilted-open windows of the school as he waved to his aunt until she was out of sight and then strode across the crowded stone-flagged yard.
Dominic was standing near the boys' entrance to the school, humming to himself with his hands in the pockets of his baggy shorts and gazing down past his clean scabless knees at his feet, which were tapping the rhythm of his tune, a jazzed-up hymn, as his socks sagged to the beat. His face looked as if it had just been rubbed with a rough towel; his broad short nose and wide mouth seemed squashed by his high forehead, above which sprouted coppery hair that made Ben think of exposed wire. Ben was suddenly aware that Peter and Francis and Christopher were watching, and he blurted out the only question he could summon up. 'Is your name Dominic?'
Dominic watched his feet stop tapping. 'Want to make something of it?'
'No, why should I?'
'Just thought you might have.' Dominic bent to pull his socks up. 'Nicidom, you could have made, or Nodicim. Modinic's my favourite, though. Sounds like something you have to drink when you're ill.' He straightened up and stared past Ben as if he didn't like what he saw. 'What do you want, then?'
'Your dad sells books, doesn't he?'
'And yours feeds worms.'
Ben gasped and didn't know how to respond. 'When we had to say in class what our parents did and Mr Bolger let you off answering,' Dominic continued, 'I kept wondering what you'd have said.'
Ben bit his lip and realised that though he was struggling to keep his feelings down, they weren't necessarily of grief. Without warning they spluttered out of him so violently he had to wipe his mouth. 'I expect I'd have said they were under the sod.'
Dominic made such a shocked face that Ben shrieked with laughter. It felt less painful this time, more of a relief. 'What would Mr Bolger have said,' Dominic prompted gleefully.
'He'd have said,' Ben responded, and deepened his voice: ''How dare you contaminate my classroom with such language, boooy?''
Dominic laughed at that, or at least wagged his head open-mouthed to indicate mirth. 'So what were you going to say about books? I've never seen any of your gang in our shop.'
'I'm not in a gang,' Ben said, and turned to look where Dominic was staring. Peter and the others had come up behind him, their faces puffy and threatening. 'Were you skitting at us?' Peter demanded of Dominic.
'Just at a teacher,' Ben said. 'We're talking. It's private.'
'Maybe you'd better go in the girls' bogs,' Francis suggested, fluttering his hands.
'What do you want to talk to him for?' Christopher complained to Ben. 'He thinks he's too good for everyone just because his father's a stupid shopkeeper.'
'He's not stupid, he's a bookseller. You're stupid if you think he is. My great-granddad used to write books.'
'We're sorry, your lordship,' Peter hooted, bowing low.
'Your two lordships,' Francis said, and repeated it more loudly as if to bully someone into appreciating his wit.
Christopher ducked his head as if he meant to butt Ben. 'You watch who you're calling stupid.'
'I am watching.'
Christopher shoved him against the wall and then, as a teacher appeared in the boys' entrance, swaggered away with his cronies. 'So what did your great-granddad write?' Dominic said.
'Books of old legends and stuff that hadn't been written down. I wanted you to ask your dad if one of them's still published. Of the Midnight Sun by Edward Sterling.'
'Shall my dad get it for you if he can?'
'Better tell me how much first,' Ben said as the teacher blew her whistle for everyone to line up, and covered his mouth in case she'd heard him talking after the whistle and would send him to Mr O'Toole the headmaster.
As his class filed into the building, Ben's shoes his aunt had bought him for his new school making rodent
