Then, all of a sudden, he recognized his home, the apartment building where he and his parents lived, with a cinema across the street. Seeing it now made Kip gasp, and for a moment, he wasn’t sure he wanted to return to an empty flat, without his parents. A sad, hollow feeling gripped his stomach, though it could have been caused by the cloud passing through an air pocket before touching down.
Kip almost got tangled up in a cluster of dish antennae and clothes lines on the roof of the apartment building as he jumped free of the cloud and dropped to his hands and knees on the hard concrete. For a moment, the cloud hovered beside him. Then, it rose up, as if it had a mind of its own. Kip had often stood here on this roof and flown kites with his father, watching the coloured squares of tissue paper dancing in the wind.
Getting to his feet, he dusted himself off and hurried across the roof to a door that led into a stairwell. Eagerly, he turned the knob, hoping it wasn’t locked. To his relief the door opened and he started down the steps. The building was eight storeys high, and their apartment was on the fifth floor. Kip was in too much of a hurry to wait for the elevator. His legs were unsteady as he made his way down, and he felt a little bit sick after riding the cloud.
There was the door: Apt 5C.
He tried to turn the doorknob, but it was locked. Kip didn’t have a key, but with a trembling hand, he reached up and pressed the bell. He realized that nobody was likely to be at home, but he didn’t know what else to do. A sharp buzzing sound echoed inside, as if the flat were empty and deserted. Several seconds passed as Kip held his breath and closed his eyes, until he finally heard the door open.
Looking up, he saw his mother standing there, staring at him in surprise.
‘Kip!’ she cried, then took him in her arms and squeezed him as hard as she could. When she finally let go, he saw his father too, standing beside her. He lifted Kip up in his arms and kissed his cheeks, spinning him around the way he always did when he came home from work. They all had tears in their eyes.
‘When did they let you out of jail?’ Kip asked, barely able to speak.
‘Just this morning,’ said his mother, holding on to his hand.
‘The truth finally came out,’ his father said. ‘They found the documents that proved we were innocent, and the judge released us. We’ve only been home for an hour, and we were just planning to come and get you . . .’ His parents looked at him with puzzled expressions.
‘But how did you get here?’ his mother asked.
Kip was tongue-tied. He tried to think of a simple answer that might make sense, until the words finally came out of his mouth.
‘I . . .’ he hesitated. ‘I ran away from school!’
THE BEGINNING
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Penguin Books is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.
This collection published 2018
Copyright © Stephen Alter 2018
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Jacket images © Prabha Mallya
ISBN: 978-0-143-44218-9
This digital edition published in 2018.
e-ISBN: 978-9-387-62507-5
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
The Cloudfarers Page 12