Riddle Gully Runaway by Jen Banyard Page A

was in the cubbyhouse was there again tomorrow night, he’d show them his shed.
    Taking a grubby hoodie from his backpack, he lay down, bunching the hoodie under his head. He reached for his book,
Robinson Crusoe.
It was old, the story at least, written three centuries ago about a dude shipwrecked alone on an island — a bit like the
Cast Away
movie. The language was weird but you got used to it. His granddad had given it to him on his twelfth birthday, saying that the main character sure knew how to think for himself. It was lame alongside the Xbox Benson got from his parents, so he hadn’t looked at it twice at the time. But he’d been going through somestuff not long ago and found it. And now he wished the old guy was around to chat about it with.
    His iPod had run out of juice so there was no music to get lost in. It was just him and the book now, and trying to swap the stink of blood and guts that lingered in his nostrils with imaginings of beaches and hilltops; trying to believe in his heart that sometimes, like Crusoe, you had to do hard stuff in order to survive — that the deal he’d struck with the Duke was a necessary evil.
    This time on a Saturday, he was usually in Kal’s garage practising with the guys, Kal’s little sister bopping in the corner and complaining when they repeated a snatch of song till they nailed it. Kal, his penniless mate. At the end of every session, Kal would carefully wipe down the strings of the old guitar he’d borrowed from Bixo and polish the thing till it shone.
    Could what he and Kal had done be called a necessary evil too — if they hadn’t got caught, if they’d gone ahead with it? Kal wanting something so badly, just that once; him trying to help out a mate in need? Whatever, it had all gone south. He’d been given his suspension and straightaway been packed off to Riddle Gully; then that girl had put that stuff in the newspaper, telling the world what a scumbag he was. The wholesloppy business had baked onto him somehow before he’d had a chance to put things right.
    He couldn’t go home, not now, not yet. He had something in common with Mr Crusoe. He was marooned … in Princeville — a thief, a bad person, his very own shipwreck. And he could feel the tide rising, the water beginning to wet his feet. No music, no money, no phone, no bed, hungry, reeking and three days till payday. He flicked a daddy-long-legs off his page and lowered the book to his chest. He lay listening to the scuttling of cockroaches and the base
boom-boom
from the pub lounge. He cracked his knuckles one by one. He’d go back to the abattoir tonight ’cos he didn’t know what else to do.

CHAPTER NINETEEN
    Will and Pollo stood beneath the last streetlamp on the road out of town to the abattoir. Pollo held Shorn Connery by the head while Will, the end of a paintbrush to his chin, circled them slowly.
    â€˜Nearly done,’ said Will. ‘Just a dab … here … on his ear.’
    â€˜It doesn’t have to be perfect, Will,’ said Pollo. ‘I’m freezing to death! Just so long as he looks more like a Dalmatian than a sheep! It’s just a precaution.’
    â€˜A precaution against everything going wrong and Shorn Connery getting mixed up with his mates on Death Row.’
    â€˜The teeny-tiny possibility of things going wrong, Will! Stop being such a pessimist.’
    â€˜I still don’t see why we have to bring him,’ muttered Will.
    â€˜How else are we going to find Ear among five hundred head of sheep?’
    â€˜What if she doesn’t recognise him now he’s covered in spots?’
    â€˜We’ve been over this,’ sighed Pollo. ‘She will. Trust me.’
    â€˜Trust you?’ Will touched up a blob on Shorn Connery’s back. ‘Look where that’s got me.’
    Pollo huffed and turned to Shorn Connery. ‘Hold still, old buddy. It’s for your own