The rest of the summer holidays began to follow a pattern. Dad let Jon in every morning at around 7.30 and shouted me out of sleep. I stumbled down the stairs and into the kitchen and into a chair opposite an already seated Jon. I would be a bit useless for the first few minutes as I tried to shake my head awake and steer my thoughts from dreams back to reality. Even before my mum died I’d had horrible nightmares that hung around the corners of my mind for hours, colouring the whole day. My currrent nightmares involved a lion, loose in the house, hunting me, eating and clawing its way through doors. It always ended the same way: paws on my chest, mane tickling my face, teeth bearing down. Even in daylight the memory made me shiver. Dad would put the kettle on and disappear to his workroom and I would make me and Jon a cup of tea and after what could be a few seconds or a few minutes, Jon would start talking. As he spoke I watched him, his twitches and tics, his jerks and shudders. He was like a small, wild animal. One at the bottom of the food pile with the most predators, never relaxing, sleeping with an eye open. His eyes constantly darted around the room and he was always tapping one part of his body against another. He was thirteen like me but looked at least two years younger. He only stood as high as my shoulder and his tiny wrist looked like it would snap with the weight of lifting the cup of tea from the table to his mouth.
It was one of the first mornings Jon visited and I was stood by the kettle, squeezing a tea bag against the side of a cup and watching the water turn dead-leaf brown. I was still half asleep and only half listening to him rattle on. He was telling me that he lived with his grandparents. That they don’t have a TV and have lived in the same house all their lives. They used to be friends with Mr and Mrs Thornber, he said, but they fell out in a dispute over who owned a corner of a field. He told me that they don’t like strangers or incomers. I couldn’t help thinking as I passed him his tea that they sounded like a pair of miserable bastards. He took the cup and put it down on the table, blew on it and said, ‘My mum died when I was six but I remember loads about her. I never met my dad. Do you know about Duerdale?’
I told him I didn’t and tried to concentrate as he reeled off the facts.
‘It’s an old mill town, situated in the base of the Bowland Valley. Most of the houses are terraced houses, back to back, set out in grid form …’
I sipped from my tea and he told me that the cotton-mill owners built the houses and that when you started working at one of the mills you would be given a terraced house to live in. He said that all the houses are very close to the mills so that the workers didn’t have far to go, but it was also so the mill owner could keep an eye on his workers. They were built during the Industrial Revolution, he said, at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century, and in a lot of places they’ve been knocked down because they aren’t considered suitable for modern living. He said in some towns they knocked down terraced houses and put up flats instead and moved everyone from the houses to the flats. He looked amazed as he considered this and said wasn’t it ridiculous. I’d never thought about it and I didn’t care but I nodded that it was anyway.
He looked up at the ceiling, rocked his head from left to right and carried on. ‘We live on Bowland Fell which has mainly been used for sheep and dairy farming in the past but there aren’t as many farms now because of foot and mouth and supermarkets.’
He came to a halt. He’d finished. I passed him the biscuit tin, but he’d already stood up. He walked out of the kitchen, down the hallway and the front door banged closed behind him. The tea sat on the table, still steaming, untouched. I considered him for a moment. He was weird. Mum would have liked him.