Read The Grasshopper's Child for Free Online Page B

sorry.
    Daylight had seeped away by the time he was satisfied. He pulled his pack from under the tarp, and prepared for dinner by making an offering to the river. A fragment of smoked Polish sausage sank at once. A hunk of bread and a small piece of cheese were adopted by the tide —which had turned while he was making ready for the night— and went dancing off down to the sea. His gifts were accepted, the omens were propitious.
    He ate his own share slowly, a woolly scarf muffling his chin; hood well down. He’d have liked a hot drink, but he’d run out of stove fuel, and Clancy never lit a fire in the open.
    The stars came out. He tried to name them, alternately lying on his back and sitting up to consult his Planisphere with a shaded penlight. (He knew that in country darkness the tiniest light leaps out at people, and can attract unwelcome attention). Betelgeuse, Aldebaran and Mars: Astrology and Astronomy both appealed to him. Do the stars and planets send us messages? Do they know what patterns they are making; from the point of view of human eyes? Are they really talking to the people who look out from the surface of this blue dot, in the family of an ordinary sort of star called the Sun? Like a complicated, aeons-long-distance kind of mirror-writing. If they do make signals for us, he thought, I bet they make mistakes too. Did we send disaster is nigh? Oops, typo! We meant, delight is nigh. Prepare for the end

of the world: prepare for better times. But he should turn in, the March night was cold and he was getting chilled.
    Cocooned in his sleeping bag, he made up the log and marked his personal map. Tuesday, approx. 16.00 hrs arrived at destination. When he’d put his colours and inks away, with the map and notebook, in their waterproof box, he turned off his wind-up, and lay awake. He was glad there were no cattle. Cowpats, Clancy hated cowpats. Was that the sound of footsteps? Sometimes he wished he had a dog, or a cat (if you could get a cat to accept this way of life); just for the early-warning system. He heard an owl, and felt his demons gather.
    It was always hard to sleep in the boat, with the tarp almost on your nose. In the end he abandoned the fight, wriggled out of his cocoon, and clambered onto the bank.
    The stars had vanished. The moon, some nights past the full, was rising in a veil. White mist filled the meadow. He waded up to his thighs, his cargo pants getting soaked. Two dark shapes raised their heads above the foam; antlers like springing thorns: roe deer. They leapt away, reached the wall and bounced right over it, as if on springs. Clancy laughed, slipped, and fell on his face in the wet grass. Ouch. His right palm had connected with the edge of something hard, smooth and squared. He sat up, shook his penlight so he could see what he was doing, and dug the thing out. It was a cigarette lighter. He rubbed dirt from an inscription he couldn’t read, and thumbed the wheel as a matter of form. A gout of fire sprang up. He was so astonished he flamed it three times before he realised what he was doing.
    Lighter fuel, he thought. Is somebody around here selling contraband?
    It was an intriguing item, anyway. He stowed it in an inside pocket.
    Heidi had found her window’s missing panes, in the old fireplace behind the bookcase: glass diamonds tangled in a dusty knot of lead strips. At home she’d have looked up ‘Mending Leaded Windows’ on the internet. She would have a go, anyway. Smooth out the lead with a hammer, track down some heavy-duty glue, maybe in that Utility Room:something that would stick metal to glass. It was a project to pursue.
    She’d taken a good hard look at Stubbly Chin, under cover of serving breakfast, lunch and supper. The monster must have been him, who else? But everything’s always different in daylight. Old Wreck Roger didn’t look all that dangerous, and nothing had happened , he’d only peeked. She’d decided