Section 3, 3

We decided that the only way to find Zig-zag would be to make the Storey institute into a giant toy, cover it in flying tumbling streamers, frozen forever in a delirious dance of joy, breathing in the whole town, and breathing out the shy ghosts of a thousand plumbers, plasterers, and potters and carvers and unicorn-teachers buried in its fabric, and showing everyone the magic of art and love and loss, and that’s what we did and it worked.

Zig-zag appeared, slinking out of the record shop over the road where he’d been living, and he crossed Meeting House Lane and sat down on the pavement and looked up at the shiny metal streamers for a long time before returning to the vinyl 45s and LPs in the record shop where he was loved in a different way, a way he’d become used to and didn’t want to change.

(Am I Fern? Or am I Charlie? Or are we both the same? Have a look at Charlie’s blog for the answer)

Section 3, 1

Go back a bit. Back a bit more. That’s it. Back to before I died. That’s right just there. That’s exactly right. Stand there. Close your eyes. Close them now. Think about Zig-zag. Think about the cat. Picture him. Think about him living in the portico with Charlie. Finding Zig-zag will help us find the answer. If you can conjure him in your mind he’s alive somewhere.

Think about Charlie too. He has a hat now. A hat, and a beard, and glasses, plus he smokes a pipe. No one would be able to doodle on a photograph of him.

If it wasn’t for the 11 plus Charlie and I might have been together. I can’t understand how he ever passed that exam, though.
For the following statement, find the best reason among the four given.
A clock is useful in the house because:

1:We should be late for school without it
2: It often needs winding
3: It tells the correct time
4: It gives a cheerful tick

Charlie would have liked the sound of the cheerful ticking, and that’s why I loved him, because he was always so thrillingly and pointlessly wrong about everything, and maybe if everything hadn’t happened the way it did and we had got together sooner, that little chip of diamond he left in my heart would have melted away.

Find Zig-Zag please.

THE CHILDREN ARE CRYING

(In Charlie’s blog you can see in the words he uses, a glimpse of the poet he once was, bubbling up to the surface)

Section 2, 5

I don’t think Charlie’s poster will find the cat and I’m not sure mine will either. Charlie and I don’t have a very good record on written communication. It must have been love, because when he read that note fifteen years later he still came to find me.

But I wasn’t there, the lunchtime lectures ended a long time ago. I wasn’t at the storey, I wasn’t anywhere. A few weeks before the builder took the note to Charlie I was out with my husband, my second husband, and it was lovely weather and we decided to have a picnic out on the sands, near Silverdale. It was my fiftieth birthday and we thought it would be romantic, and we sat below Humphrey head on a blanket and we had fizzy wine and we kissed for a long time, and then it went foggy, out of nowhere, and you know the tides around here, and the waves rushed in, rushed towards our love, surrounded us and made us into an island, and that’s how we died; together. I guess it could just as easily have been me and Charlie in another existence.

I used to think about Charlie a lot. Once I saw him on his own walking slowly out of the lino factory, but I didn’t stop.

I thought about Charlie and our night in the Tasting Garden as the water crept up, the coldness numbing us, and we were crying and holding the mobile phone higher and higher and we kept dialing and redialing and looking for the lights, then we saw the smeary blues and whites and heard the shouting, the panic, and they really did seem to be trying, but it was all too rough, too stormy, and I remember thinking how I’d hate to be the rescuers, watching us, so helpless, and I remember thinking I had a new name and that when Charlie read in the papers that I had died, he wouldn’t even know it was me.

Find Zig-zag please.

THE CHILDREN ARE CRYING

Have a look at Charlie’s blog and see what he did when he found out.