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 sounds on the linoleum, he saw the headmaster waiting in the corridor, cocking his head which always made Ben think of a horse's grinning skull. He felt as if the heat and the smells of mopped floors and of the sickly green paint on the walls were writhing inside him as the class marched him to his doom. His ears were throbbing so hard that he barely heard what Mr O'Toole said to him. "I should get those oiled if I were you or you may be more than squeaking."
"Yes, sir," Ben stammered, feeling isolated and vulnerable and horribly ashamed of himself.
He was only a few paces past the headmaster when Dominic's murmur behind him almost caused him to trip himself up. "Funny, /un-ny," Dominic said.
Ben felt breathlessly exhilarated, and terrified for him. He didn't dare turn round, but he flashed Dominic a grin as they filed along the row of folding seats in the assembly hall. When Mr O'Toole thundered prayers at the hallful of children while the teachers glared prayerfully at them, Ben no longer felt alone. In the classroom he even raised his hand when Mr Bolger asked questions, and found that his palms no longer started sweating.
He was glad that his aunt didn't ask why he was pleased with himself; she seemed content that he was. That night he could hardly sleep for waiting; it felt like Christmas Eve. Soon he might know who Edward Sterling had met on his last exploration and what they had revealed to him. But when he hurried into the schoolyard, not even waiting until his aunt was out of sight, Dominic showed him his empty hands. "My dad laughed."
"How do you mean?"
"He said to tell you he wished you had a copy of that book, because he'd have given you a year's pocket money for it. He rang up a friend of his who sells old books who said he's never seen a copy in his life. You're as likely to see one as snow in summer, my dad said."
FIVE
At least Ben had made a real friend at school, which was more than he ever had in Stargrave. His aunt let him stay at Dominic's house until she came home from her tax office job to collect him. She must be pleased that she no longer needed to work in her lunch hours and that he had someone else to keep him in Norwich. Dominic's parents welcomed Ben, but it took him a while to get used to them. Mrs Milligan kept offering him food in no apparent order, perhaps because Mr Milligan was constantly on the move even during mealtimes, picking up books from the sideboard, from chairs, from a dozen other perches in the small house crammed with dingy rooms, and strolling about like an actor at a rehearsal, reading aloud. "Just listen to this," he would say, raising his squat face and half closing his eyes under their fierce reddish eyebrows as if he was smelling the pages rather than reading them, until Dominic's mother would lose patience with him and fly at him like a terrier, her short-legged body crouching to shove him towards the table, her square head lowered so that her chin appeared to engulf her stubby neck. "Their brains need feeding as well as their breadbaskets," he would protest mildly as his wife confiscated the book, growling "Don't be teaching them your manners."
The first time Ben visited Milligans Bookshop he saw a portly man with a briefcase waddling away like an endangered penguin, almost tripping over cobblestones as Mr Milligan harangued him. "Stop that man, he's living off immoral earnings. Where's a policeman? I'd like you to show him that page you didn't want me to read out loud," he shouted, and the salesman broke into a stumbling run. "Just a fellow with no respect for books or people," Mr Milligan told Ben as he ushered him into the shop. "Read whatever you think you might like so long as your hands are clean."
That was how Ben spent much of the summer. He read all the fantasies and myths and legends he could find, partly because he knew his aunt wouldn't quite approve, and some of the science fiction Dominic liked, which led Ben to the astronomy books. The measurements of space and time, the photographs of far stars and of points of light which proved to be composed of thousands of stars, filled him with an awe which felt like the edge of a delicious panic. Sometimes he was glad when Mrs Milligan rescued him from these thoughts by bringing him a bowl of cereal or a fried-egg sandwich from the house. Otherwise Mr Milligan could be relied upon to provide some diversion, reading aloud to prospective customers or trying to dissuade people from ordering books he disapproved of or disentangling authors' names and titles from their memories, whenever Ben's thoughts threatened to grow too large and dark.