The Ant Colony
An irresistible novel from Guardian-award-winning novelist, Jenny Valentine.Number 33 Georgiana Street houses many people and yet seems home to none. To runaway Sam it is a place to disappear. To Bohemia, it's just another blip between crises, as her mum ricochets off the latest boyfriend. Old Isobel acts like she owns the place, even though it actually belongs to Steve in the basement, who is always looking to squeeze in yet another tenant. Life there is a kind of ordered chaos. Like ants, they scurry about their business, crossing paths, following their own tracks, no questions asked.But it doesn't take much to upset the balance. Dig deep enough and you'll find that everyone has something to hide…
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Copyright © Jenny Valentine 2009
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Children’s Books in 2009
Jenny Valentine asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
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Source ISBN: 9780007283590
Ebook Edition © MAY 2012 ISBN: 9780007381012 Version: 2015-04-01
For Alex
(and Reg)
Contents
The Story of My Life Part One by B Hoban
The Story of My Life Part Two by B Hoban
The Story of My Life Part Three by B Hoban
The Story of My Life Part Four by B Hoban
I saw a girl. Just a kid. It’s not what happened first, but it’s a good place to start. I can see her now. She could be standing right in front of me. I wish she was. Dark red hair, cream white skin, eyes to the ground.
I was walking past and she was there in a doorway, an open doorway on to the street. Behind her was another door into the place, a bar I think, or a club maybe. And around her, between the two doorways, was just black, pure matt black. Her clothes were black, so her dark red hair and her pale face and hands were the only places of light.
She looked like she was appearing out of the night, sitting for a painter who’d been dead two hundred years. I’m not joking. There she was, in the rougher end of Camden High Street, looking like she belonged on the wall of the National Gallery.
I kept walking and I held her picture in my head, and I remember thinking, What if I went back and said hello? What if I told her how she looked, and how much I wished I had a camera and some idea of how to use it? I’d scare her, a big bloke like me. She’d think I was a freak. She’d move away and leave her place of perfect darkness and ruin the picture forever.
So I didn’t. I marked her down as one out of the eight hundred mental snapshots I’d taken that minute. It’s what you do in a place so crammed full of things to look at. Blink and keep moving. I’d been here less than one day, and even I’d been in London long enough to know that.
My name is Sam and I’m not from here.
I grew up in a house beneath a mountain, hidden in a dip that filled with snow in the winter, with water in the spring. Night time there was proper darkness, a total absence of light, apart from the stars which were infinite and spread just right to show you the curved shape of the sky.
There aren’t any stars in the city. I used to drag my mattress over to the window and lie on my back looking out at the damp blanket of orange that bounced off every available surface, at the flashing wings of aeroplanes.
The day I left home was like this: high sky, still air, shouting birds. I woke up and it was beautiful, and I hated the sight of it because there was no way I could stay. I forced myself to lie in bed until Dad had gone, staring at the sun through my window for so long that I could see it with my eyes shut.
I was sitting at my desk, dressed and ready to go when Mum banged on my door around eight. Three short raps. She made the distance beween us obvious even in the way she did that.
Afterwards I often wondered how things would have been different if she’d known I was leaving, if she’d have kept those feelings to herself just that once. But you can’t go around treating everyone like you might never see them again, just in case. And anyway, it was way too late by then. I already knew how she felt.
Missing the bus was way easier than catching it. I changed my school sweatshirt in the broken down barn at the end of our lane and stashed it in my bag. And then I hitched into town to catch the train. Aaron Hughes the old farmer picked me up – truck like the inside of a haystack, trousers held up with bailer twine, vicious Jack Russell on the passenger seat; that kind of old. He drove at about ten miles an hour, which is not exactly getaway speed. But he didn’t hear too well and he wasn’t bothered about talking, and I was glad about that. I wondered what he would do if he knew he was helping me escape.
