For Rye Gavin Gardiner (best book club books for discussion TXT) 📖

to carry this family’s name from damnation. He’s gone, you foolish girl. GONE. So silence that flapping tongue. Swallow those devil-sewn words.’

Soon the woman will run from her raving father like a scolded child. The words will replay endlessly in her mind – he’s gone he’s gone he’s gone – as the darkness pulls her upstairs to the room at the end of the hall.

‘The evils of this world are more terrible than you know, insolent whore.’ His eyes levelled beyond her, blindly fixed upon a distance unknowable, as if gazing into a hell endured long ago. The finger of his other hand tapped maniacally. ‘I have seen things you could not comprehend. I give you my word, the inferno is impending. Its flames shall be that of waves, while deep within your godless core death shall sow its wild oats…’

She’ll pry open the door to that room, the door upon which laughing cartoon bears and elephants still spell out the name after so many years:

NOAH

‘…the hand of Hell is coming, child…’

The door will creak open to reveal the untouched, unspoilt bedroom of a seven-year-old boy.

‘…the hand of death. And this hand, I assure you, trembles not.’

7

 

She doesn’t want to put her foot through his skull, but she knows she has to.

Father was strangely calm during the five days Samson went missing. The dog had been let out into the back garden and never came back. As per her mother’s instructions, the girl had ran into the surrounding fields calling the mongrel’s name, rustling a noisy bag of chicken strips in the hope he’d come bounding through the maize and barley. But Samson hadn’t heeded her calls, and the mutt hadn’t turned up back at the house for two days short of a week. By that time, the dog seemed to have gone through hell and back, hobbling up to the house on a fractured leg and leaving a dotted trail of blood from his lacerated side. It turned out these injuries were the least of his worries; the real issue lay in the infected, swollen eyelid that refused to open which, Mr Milton the vet told them, had likely been torn on some rusty barbed wire while he was missing. It was (possibly) treatable, so long as they understood Samson would have to endure many months or even years of agony during his recovery. The laceration would need stitches and the leg would never properly set, meaning the dog would struggle even just to walk for the rest of his painful life.

‘We’ll have a think,’ Father had told Mr Milton following the he-may-be-better-off-put-to-sleep conversation. The vet had to inform Mr Wakefield, in a somewhat perplexed tone, that no, he couldn’t just ‘take Samson home and see how he gets on’ – the dog would have to undergo surgery immediately, before embarking on a long, harrowing recovery. Mr Wakefield had resolved to take Samson elsewhere in response to Mr Milton’s ‘antagonising tone’. The little girl had watched the vet plead with her father to let him put the dog out of his misery, passionately appealing that no animal deserves to suffer the pain that would dominate the rest of Samson’s life.

In the end, Father had not taken Samson ‘elsewhere’. The animal had ended up right back in the same old dog basket at home. He wouldn’t move, he wouldn’t eat, and the girl never even saw him properly sleep. His existence became one of shivering and whimpering.

‘Why won’t he let Mr Milton help Samson?’ she’d asked Mother.

‘Oh, I’m sure your father knows best, my love.’

Usually that was good enough for her. Usually it had to be.

Not this time.

And so, once the opportunity had presented itself, the little girl had carried the hound through the fields in her slender arms, grunting at his weight.

Her little brother or sister (Oh, let it be a sister!) was finally ready to come into this world, and so Mother had struggled out to the car whilst Father loaded the pre-packed suitcases and told the girl she was to stay in the house until he returned from the hospital. Mother had called back over her shoulder that she would telephone Mr O’Connell, their policeman friend, to come and watch her. Her father had turned to the girl as Mother made her way outside. He shook his head. ‘You’re on your own,’ he’d said quietly. ‘No one’s coming. Don’t go outside. There’s food in the fridge.’

The car had started after a few failed attempts and trundled down the track towards town. For the first time, she’d been left on her own with the whole house to herself, utter solitude with her thoughts and her books. It should have been a blessing, but she couldn’t enjoy it. Not with Samson suffering in his basket.

‘You don’t want to be here, do you, boy?’ she’d whispered to him, then looked at the tag hanging from his collar – the same tag, collar, and name to be swapped from Samson to Samson year after year. The girl had assumed everyone did that with their dogs. She didn’t assume, however, that every little girl felt the same twang of jealousy she felt from the way her father looked at the dog. No, that was just her. Was love really in such short supply that all he could afford to give were the looks of adoration he gave the mongrel? And what kind of love wilted away the moment the object of his affection showed signs of reaching its expiration? She’d even overheard Father enquiring with a local breeder, one Sunday morning after service, as to whether he could assist him in locating a ‘replacement’.

Replacement.

The girl had looked into the creature’s wretched eyes, wondering whether that was all family came down to. What about this new brother or sister? Were they a replacement? If he could be so cold about