The Exiles

take her mind off her broken arm she was quite liable to lie awake and talk all night.
    ‘I suppose it might be a little bit haunted!’
    ‘Is it?’
    ‘Perhaps a bit,’ repeated Big Grandma grudgingly. ‘In a manner of speaking. A rather flamboyant manner of speaking, and not strictly true.’
    ‘What by?’
    Big Grandma’s imagination failed her. ‘All sorts of things. Go to sleep.’
    Naomi, suddenly overwhelmed by exhaustion, lay quietly conjuring up ghosts to haunt Big Grandma’s house. Strangely enough, all the dim white spirits of her imagination turned, on closer inspection, into sheep. Sheep that ate dog food. Sheep with aching knees and legs in plaster. She fell asleep.

Chapter Eleven
    The morning post brought Mr Conroy’s letter from Lincolnshire. The ten pound note fell out as soon as they ripped open the envelope.
    ‘They’ve started sending my money,’ said Phoebe, very pleased. ‘At last!’
    Rachel, who had been sitting on the end of Naomi’s bed chewing up the last of the cheese sandwiches, made a hasty grab for the ten pound note. It came in half.
    ‘Mind my plaster,’ said Naomi from the pillows, where Big Grandma had ordered that she should spend the morning. ‘Anyway, it’s Ruth’s swimming to the Isle of Man money.’
    Ruth came in at that moment. ‘Big Grandma says you’re not to get up until she says so.’
    ‘What, not even to go to the toilet?’ asked Rachel and Phoebe in chorus.
    ‘What, not even to go to the toilet?’ called Ruth over the banisters.
    ‘Yes, of course to go to the toilet!’ shouted up Big Grandma, grinding her teeth.
    ‘But you can to go to the toilet,’ added Ruth, reappearing in the bedroom.
    ‘I already have,’ said Naomi. ‘Look! Dad’s sent your Isle of Man money already!’
    ‘I don’t believe you,’ said Ruth, not very hopefully.
    As proof, Rachel and Phoebe, unprotestingly, each handed her half of a ten pound note. They were very pleased to think she was going to swim all that way.
    ‘Oh,’ said Ruth sadly. ‘Oh, well, I might as well do it this afternoon then. Might as well get it over with.’
    ‘Don’t forget to send us postcards before you get the boat back.’
    ‘I shan’t be able to go buying postcards in a swimming costume,’ protested Ruth.
    ‘Wear your shorts and a T-shirt to swim over,’ said Naomi resourcefully, ‘and they’ll dry off in the sun as you look for the post office.’
    ‘Oh, all right.’
    ‘Make sure you eat a lot of dinner. To give you strength.’
    ‘What’ll you tell Big Grandma when she asks where I am?’
    ‘We’ll just say you’ve gone for a swim,’ said Naomi. She seemed to have thought of everything.

    Mrs Conroy, lying in the far away Lincolnshire garden having an after lunch Five Minutes, reread Naomi’s latest letter. John was right, she thought; they certainly did sound happier. They should get his letter today, and her own, forbidding the list of enterprises that Naomi had described, tomorrow. Tomorrow. Panic seized her and she rushed into the house and dialled Big Grandma’s number.
    ‘Answer, answer, answer,’ she prayed, having awful visions of Ruth in the middle of the Irish Sea, equipped with her father’s ten pound note for the boat home.
    ‘Where’s Ruth, Mother?’ she shouted frantically when Big Grandma finally answered the phone.
    ‘Whatever’s the matter?’ asked Big Grandma. ‘Ruth? I don’t quite know at this moment. She said this morning she was going swimming …’
    ‘Oh God, Oh God,’ said Mrs Conroy.
    ‘But I think she might still be up in Naomi’s room,’ continued Big Grandma, wondering if her daughter had gone mad and if so whether she ought to mention Naomi’s broken arm.
    ‘Tell her,’ shouted Mrs Conroy, ‘not to swim to the Isle of Man! Not to! Go and tell her now!’
    ‘I can’t think what you’re talking about!’
    ‘Just tell her! Go now. Please go now!’
    ‘Better not to mention Naomi’s arm,’ thought Big Grandma. ‘Better perhaps to humour her.’
    ‘I’m sure she has no thought of doing such a thing,’ Big Grandma said as soothingly as she knew how. ‘But I’ll go up and tell her and then I’ll get her to ring you back.’

    She found Ruth busily engaged in sewing a ten pound note inside a plastic bag to the inside of her shorts. Naomi was studying a map in the back of a guide book that had been purchased only that morning. Rachel and Phoebe sat on the windowseat gazing out towards the horizon with their