The Exiles

that Phoebe was about to start a fight with an eighty-year-old man, shoved her out of the shop and prepared to open the map again.
    ‘Lost already?’ enquired a scruffy boy, sauntering up the street towards them. ‘Straight down the road. You can see the house from here.’
    ‘She’s practising maps,’ explained Rachel.
    ‘How do you know who we are?’ asked Phoebe.
    ‘Your gran said you were coming,’ he explained. ‘She said to keep an eye out for you.’ He was too polite to add the rest of what she had said.
    ‘We’re going to the sea,’ Rachel told him.
    ‘Straight down the road the other way then,’ the boy said. ‘You’ll see the Island today.’
    ‘The Isle of Man?’ Ruth asked. ‘You can see that from Big Grandma’s house. I saw it this morning.’
    The boy looked up at the hot blue sky and pulled his sheepskin jacket closely round him. Ruth noticed that he was wearing a thick jumper underneath. ‘That means rain’s coming,’ he informed them. ‘When you can see the Island, that means it’s going to rain. And when you can’t see it, that means it’s raining.’
    ‘Joke,’ he explained as they stared blankly at him. ‘Oh well,’ he continued, giving up his hope of a laugh, ‘I’ll be off now.’
    ‘Don’t get lost,’ he added over his shoulder.
    ‘He sme—’ began Phoebe in a loud voice, and was stopped just in time by a hard smack from Ruth.
    ‘What if he heard you?’ Anxiously she looked after the boy, but he had not turned round. He was walking straight down the middle of the road, gazing at the world as if he owned it.

    ‘Well,’ commented Naomi from the doorstep some time later. ‘I see you found the sea. Who pushed you in, Phoebe?’
    ‘No one,’ answered Ruth. ‘She fell, running away from a wave and it went right over her. Oh, stop grizzling Phoebe, and go and put some dry clothes on. D’you know what,’ she continued, turning back to Naomi, ‘everyone knew who we were straight away!’
    ‘We met a boy’ – Rachel took up the story – ‘and he said Big Grandma told him to watch out for us. And it’s going to rain if you see the Island, and you can see it.’
    ‘You can’t now,’ Naomi interrupted.
    ‘You could before. Then after that we met a man who said he’d heard we were coming and he said it was a queer day and it would rain or go dark before morning, and we said how did he know, and he said it always had so far, and there were awful people in the shop, and they said—’
    ‘Blow your nose, Phoebe,’ interrupted Naomi, bored by this recital. ‘What’s the matter with you anyway?’
    ‘It’s her postcards,’ explained Ruth. ‘They got soaked in the sea, and a good job too. Show Naomi your postcards, Phoebe, and leave your ears alone.’
    ‘They’ve got sand in,’ said Phoebe, sniffing loudly and handing over her purchases.
    ‘Nobody likes them anyway; even the man in the shop didn’t, and now they’ve got all wet.’
    ‘Why ever did you choose them?’ Naomi eyed the postcards critically. ‘And why get the same picture three times?’
    ‘The lady looks just like Big Grandma with different hair,’ Phoebe defended herself, ‘and I like sheep. There are lots of sheep round here.’
    ‘Not like these.’
    ‘Everyone knows who we are,’ continued Rachel, feeling that her story had been disrupted for too long, ‘and the old lady with the dog said she didn’t know how Big Grandma was coping!’
    ‘Anyway,’ said Naomi in a loud voice, ‘shut up a minute, Rachel. What about the books you went for? Why didn’t you get any? I thought at least you’d bring back magazines or newspapers or anything.’
    ‘He doesn’t sell books,’ Ruth told her, ‘and he’ll only get you magazines if you order them specially and you have to say you’ll have them for at least three months, same with newspapers. He says he doesn’t want them left on his hands like he’s had before.’
    ‘Well, couldn’t you have bought any of the ones he’d had left on his hands then?’
    ‘He said he hadn’t got them anymore.’ Ruth sighed. ‘I tried talking reasonably to him but he’s a bit crackers and it was hard with Phoebe arguing in the background. And Rachel.’
    ‘I wasn’t doing anything,’ put in Rachel. ‘Only talking quietly to myself.’
    ‘Oh well,’ Naomi rose stiffly from the doorstep, ‘it’s teatime. Big Grandma sent me to look for you. You’d better chuck those cards away, Phoebe, before she sees