Razorback: Twisted Tales, #2

By Roger Wood

If nobody tells you, how can you know? You can guess, you can assume, but without anyone to share your assumptions with, how can you be sure you've guessed right? The arrival of the twins tore a massive hole in Stephen's young life. Uprooted from London to a self-sufficient smallholding in Yorkshire, taken out of school, ignored by his mother, unable to bond with his submissive father, Stephen is truly alone. Then, just before he turns sixteen, his father falls ill and Stephen has to take on a man's role in the wider world. And now, for the first time, his assumptions are challenged.

RAZORBACK is a story of the weird and the unnatural. From the author of PATASOLA.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Roger Wood
• Release date: Jan 15, 2015
• ISBN: 9781310908859

Roger Wood

I have graduated four times from three different English universities and have a PhD in Radio Drama. I used to be a local politician and ran an advice centre. Now I am a magistrate and write inflammatory political material for my local political party.

Book preview

RAZORBACK

ROGER WOOD

Copyright 2015 ROGER WOOD

Published by Roger Wood at Smashwords

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Contents

RAZORBACK

Also by this author: PATASOLA

About ROGER WOOD

Razorback

Halfway round the world they had travelled, from the embers of a former village on the indeterminate border of Dagestan and Chechnya to the market in Minutka Square, from Grozny to a secret distribution centre in Yemen and thence to Malualbi in southern Sudan. There the Angola-based Frenchman known only as Patrice paid a premium price which he recouped tenfold when he offered them on the internet. Yet their world, the only world they were aware of knowing, was the eight-acre smallholding midway between the Wolds and the Dales.

Although the farm was their home, they knew this was not where they came from. Their brother Stephen was nearly ten when the family moved north and Stephen never tired of reminding them that he was a Londoner, a superior status. They knew also that Stephen was not strictly their brother because Finn and Olivia were not their biological parents, although they were, apparently, Stephen’s. Quite how this situation had arisen was unclear. The Websters were a close family, could scarcely be closer, but there were things the elder Websters did not talk about, among them the details of the twins’ adoption.

Stephen took after his parents in that respect, if no other. He did not talk, for example, about his resentment of the twins or the memories he hoarded of the time before the twins came, when the Websters still lived in upmarket Islington and Stephen went to a paid-for school where he had a social circle, even friends. When the whole family had friends, whose homes they visited and who visited theirs. Parents of schoolfriends, who invited Stephen to their sons’ and daughters’ birthday parties and who, in return, brought their offspring to his. When Stephen and his mum and dad went out together, as a family, at weekends and during school holidays. When they talked, about everything and nothing. And sometimes they laughed. Stephen did not speak of his plans to return to London the moment he was old enough (whenever that might be), leaving Yorkshire, twins, parents and especially the so-called farm as far behind as it was possible to get. Above all, Stephen did not discuss his dreams. He would have liked to confide in someone, because his dreams disturbed him even during the day,