He had walked to the front door while he was talking. Now he opened it and walked out.
‘Cheers for the coffee,’ said Darren, following him. Spin just gave me a wink.
The door closed behind them.
That’s the end of it, then. That’s the end of it for now. In ten or twenty years I’ll come back here and see my daughter. It’ll be hard, knowing what will happen to her. What she’ll be doing. That’s my daughter, after all, and she’s going to be killing people and running off with their fingers. In four hundred and twenty years Mr Link will be back, along with Darren and Spin. I imagine they’ll have different names. I know I will have. I’ve already chosen one.
I picked up my cases and left my house. The white van had gone. There was something wrong with the sky. At first I couldn’t understand it, and then I realized that it was blue. There were no clouds.
You can never have enough life. There I was with a new one. This time I could be anything. I tried out my new name.
‘I’m Mickey Payne,’ I told the hedge. ‘I’m Mickey Payne.’
It felt right. It felt like it had always been my name.
I walked to the edge of town and looked back. Dudley sat huddled on its hill. Sam Haines would never have left Dudley. He’d have complained about it all his life, but he wouldn’t have left it. Sam Haines was all mouth.
I wasn’t him. I was Mickey Payne. I turned away from Dudley and kept on walking.
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Acknowledgements
Thanks to: Annette Green, my agent; Jim Rickards, Chris Smith and Sarah Hodgson, who got landed with editing this thing and had to take it in turns; and of course thanks to Dudley, my inspiration.
About the Author
All his life, PATRICK THOMPSON has been inspired by the rolling landscape of tarmac, low-rise concrete slabs and bread queues that is Dudley. He has written for as long as he can remember. Seeing the Wires is his first published novel.
Copyright
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers
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Copyright © Patrick Thompson 2002
Patrick Thompson asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Source ISBN: 9780007571772
Ebook Edition © DECEMBER 2013 ISBN: 9780007571772
Version: 2014–01–09
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