Opening it to the first page, she slid the book until it was exactly halfway between the two of them.
Together they began to read.
2
The True Story of Harrowing Farm
It was a wet and windy night, so wet you could slip and drown, so windy no one would hear your cries. Only a snake or a toad would choose to be away from shelter on such a night. And that is why only the snakes and the toads saw the gleaming green light pouring down from the black sky.
We chickens saw nothing, of course. How could we? There are no windows in the chicken shed. If we had windows, our lives could not be ruled so well by the electric light that decides when we wake and when we sleep and when we lay our eggs. After – oh, yes, of course, after – some of the hens in the cages by the door said that they’d heard the soft hum of the engines over the howling of the wind. But the rest of us think they were boasting. On that black night, the spaceship landed without a sound. And it was not until the shed door flew open, flooding us with an eerie green light, that most of us chickens woke with a flutter and a squawk.
Little green men.
And they spoke perfect Chicken. (Later we found out they spoke Pig and Cow and Crow and pretty well everything. It’s one of the ways in which they are, as they put it, ‘superior’. They can speak any language they happen to meet. But on that first night we were amazed that they spoke perfect Chicken.)
Not that they were polite with it.
‘Chickens!’ said the spindliest and greenest, and it was almost like a groan. ‘Travel a frillion miles, and what do you find when you arrive? A chicken!’
The others flicked the catches of our cage doors with their willowy green fingers.
‘Out, out!’ they called. ‘Wakey, wakey! Make room! Out you get! Clear off! Go and make your own nests! The party’s over!’
The party’s over? We chickens couldn’t believe our luck. We’d been locked in those cages almost since we were born. Nothing to do. You can’t even stretch your wings. You just stand there on a wire rack (ruining your feet) for your whole life. And the one thing they want you to do – laying your egg – you’d far rather do in private.
The party’s over! I can’t describe to you the din as we all fluttered clumsily down, and scrambled unsteadily for the door.
The little green men were even ruder now.
‘Call themselves chickens? I’ve seen finer specimens on other planets begging to be put down!’
‘Look at them! Twisted feet. Bare patches all over. And look at their beaks!’
‘Disgusting!’
‘Leave the door open as you go, please. This shed needs some fresh air.’
Fresh air! And we were out in it for the first time in our lives. We weren’t going to hang around shutting the shed door. No fear. We were away. The last I heard as I went hobbling off on my poor feet into the night was one of the little green men scolding the stragglers.
‘Hurry up. Out of those cages, please! We need tham for others.’
With one last shudder and a flutter, I was off.
3
Harpoon . . . Harpsichord . . . Harridan . . .
Gemma read faster than Andrew. By the time he reached the bottom of the page, her eyes were already on him.
‘What do you think?’
He twisted his face into a worried frown. He was about to speak, she knew. But then he just shook his head. He couldn’t find the words.
‘You think the chicken might have come from one of the farm sheds you pass on the way to school, don’t you?’ said Gemma. ‘I didn’t know the place had a name.’
Andrew turned back a page.
‘Harrowing Farm . . .’ he read aloud. ‘Funny name.’
‘Not funny,’ said Gemma. ‘That’s just what harrowing doesn’t mean.’
‘Harrowing means raking,’ Andrew corrected her. ‘A harrow is a tool that breaks up lumps in the soil.’
Now it was Gemma’s turn to correct him.
‘When we went to London,’ she told him, ‘my dad wouldn’t let me go in the Chamber of Horrors. He said it would be too harrowing.’
Andrew lifted his desk lid and rooted in the mess till he found his dictionary.
‘Harpoon . . . harpsichord . . . harridan . . .’ His finger slid down the side of the page. ‘Here we are. Harrowing.’
She leaned across, but he lifted the book and turned to face her so she couldn’t see. She just had to listen to him reading it.
‘Harrowing: breaking the clods in soil; or: terribly upsetting and distressing.’
Gemma ran her finger over the rough edge of the sacking cover.
‘So which do you think they meant?’
‘Maybe they meant both.’
‘Oh, Andrew! Surely not! Farms aren’t . . . Farms shouldn’t be . . . Why, everyone knows that farms are . . .’
Even before her voice trailed away, she was out of her seat and over to the bookshelf. Her fingers ran across the spines of the books as she read the titles aloud:
‘Life in the Arctic . . . China . . . Pterodactyls . . . Meet the Stone Age People . . . On the Farm. Here it is!’
She pulled out On the Farm. The book was for younger children really, but since the pictures were bright and clear, and there was quite a lot of information in it, their teacher had left it in the class library instead of sending it back to the Infants.
Gemma opened the pages at random. The pig was rooting contentedly with its snout in a frosty tussock of grass. The cow stood beside her calf, nudging her affectionately out of the ditch beside the hedge. In the soft summer evening sunlight, the hen ran happily round the orchard with her chicks.
