Читать книгу Feather Boy онлайн | страница 20

There are two lamp-posts, not the concrete sort you see in ordinary streets, with the lozenge of orange light at the top, but ones that look as if they’ve come out of Narnia. Old-fashioned, fluted metal lamp-posts in pale green surmounted by hexagonal glass lamps which glimmer with that soft gas mantle light. Sticking out horizontally, just below the lamp itself, is a fluted green metal arm with a bobble on the end, which looks like a place you might hang a coat if you were given to hanging your coat on a lamp-post. Alternatively, if you were given to climbing lamp-posts this would be an excellent place to sit. It’s where Niker sits. Niker climbs like a spider.

I didn’t see him the first time, even though he was directly in front of me. I suppose that’s because I was going along with my head at the five-foot level and he was perched another five foot above that. So when the first apple landed I thought it was just Norbert bad luck. Because, as it happens, there is this large Bramley apple tree on the first bend of the passage. In any case I wasn’t exactly thinking of apple as ammunition, just apple as fruit, and fruit does occasionally fall off trees and hit people on account of the laws of gravity. So it was only when the second apple landed, squidgy and rotten and directly on my head, that I thought to look up. Or maybe it was the laugh that made me look. He’s quite a good marksman, Niker, and I think he hit me another four times before I managed to turn the corner. Afterwards, as I scraped the gunge off my coat with a stick, I wondered why I hadn’t thought to return fire. But I think I would have missed anyway.

Of course the next time I went via The Dog Leg I checked the lamp-post (which you can see from the entrance) before going in. Only that time he was up the second lamp-post, the one you can’t see until you turn the middle bend. This post doesn’t have a convenient apple tree near by. So he had a plastic bag. He was wearing gloves and he threw something loose and brown that splatted on the back of my neck. I thought it was mud – until I breathed in. When I got to school I washed it out of my hair, but the smell was still on my collar.