CHAPTER THREE

SAFE IN THE RUCKSACK

The journey from London was long and boring and Olly had an odd sad feeling inside him, as if something heavy had settled on his heart. He decided that the best way of forgetting about 58 Wigwell Avenue and everything he was leaving behind in London was to make his thoughts go dark as night every time  they seemed to be going anywhere near those things. It was a good trick and after a while he could do it pretty well. He let his thoughts to go other places, like the beach in Dorset where they had been on holiday and found fossils or the gleaming white rink where they had seen Aladdin on ice.  For the rest of the time, he listened to a story tape and played a bit with Lula. They stopped twice to eat and so that Dad could stretch his legs and shortly after the second stop, Mum said, ‘Look.. can you see how the countryside has changed ? Lots of hills and sheep and streams. Isn`t it great ?’

Olly looked out of the window. They had come off the motorway and he could see sloping green fields leading to steep, sharp looking hills and criss-crossing the fields, ribbons of uneven grey fences.

‘The sheep could jump those.’

‘Baa baa black sheep,’ Lula sang.

‘Sheep don`t jump,’ said Dad.

‘Yes they do, haven`t you ever seen them leaping about in the spring.  ?’

‘That`s lambs, not sheep.’

‘Anyway, they could jump those fences.’

‘Walls. They`re not fences. They`re part of the landscape here.. dry stone walls. Why do you think they`re called that, Olly ?’

‘Because they`re not wet I suppose.’

‘No, because they lay the stones on top of each other very carefully without using any mortar to cement them together. The walls stay up because of the way they balance the stones.’

‘Oh.’

‘Dry stone walling is….’  Dad`s voice went on and on in the way it did when he started about something he thought Olly ought to find really, really interesting but Olly had stopped listening. It wasn`t that he found what Dad was saying boring, or not very boring, it was something else. He had a strange sensation in his leg, under pocket of his jeans, as if something were stinging him or burning. He wriggled about in his seat belt and got his hand in. Whatever it was stung his finger.

‘I think there`s a wasp in my pocket.’

‘There can`t be.’

‘Don`t be silly Pete, of course there could be, wasps get into all sorts of places, don`t you remember the time grandma had one inside the rim of her gardening hat. You`ll have to stop, poor Olly.’

Dad stopped a little way up the road and pulled up onto the wide grass verge.

‘Hello cows,’ Lula said. The sheep were quite close to the road and staring at them. ‘Moo moo.’

‘Come on, let`s see, turn out your pocket carefully. No, wait – I`ll do it.’

‘It`s OK.’  Olly didn`t care for the thought of Mum digging in the pockets of his jeans by the side of a road. Anyone might go by and the anyone might think he had needed to wee and had to have his Mum to help.

He put his hand in and probed about. Wasps were small and soft and furry but what his fingers touched was small and hard and smooth.

Olly took a stone out of his pocket.

‘Not a wasp.’

‘Oh thank goodness for that –just a pebble digging in you. Come on, get back in the car, we`ve still got about sixty miles or so to go.’

Dad started the engine. Mum handed Lula a new book she had in the bag of playthings that came out one by one on a journey.

‘Moo, moo,’ Lula said, waving the book at the sheep.

Olly looked down at the stone in the palm of his hand. It had small strange scratches on its surface but it was perfectly round and smooth and he couldn`t see how it had made his leg sting and burn at all. But to be on the safe side, he pulled his rucksack over, unbuckled the front pocket, and dropped the stone inside. That way, it couldn`t hurt anyone.