 Soldier Boy - Danny Rhodes
For Scottie and his mates it’s been a year of deadend
jobs and killing time. With his girlfriend Mel
making a go of a career, Scottie comes to a decision
that will change his life forever – to join the army.
It will bring him more money than he’s ever known,
teach him skills he’s never imagined, and lead him
to discover things about himself he’d never have
believed.
His job will carry him from the sink estate of his
birth to a land that’s foreign in every conceivable
way. And it will bring him home again across
thousands of miles to face the future and the past,
a stranger with a secret, and ultimately lead to a
confrontation with an awful, undeniable truth.
He’d run through the snow until he reached the school,
smashed the window with his bare knuckles, climbed through
the space and pushed two sets of lockers in front of the hole
to block it. Then he’d made his way upstairs to the top floor,
his footsteps hollow in the empty stairwell, his breath showing
in the freezing corridors, his whole body aching. He chose the
classroom on the corner because it had the best arc of fire,
just like they’d trained him to do, and then he slumped to the
floor beneath the windows and pulled the muffler to his face.
He’d come a long way, thousands of miles across land
and air and sea. He’d come all that way with half a shoulder
missing to find out his girlfriend didn’t want to know him any
more. His city didn’t want to know him either. He wasn’t the
same person as the one who’d left.
It didn’t take a genius to work that out.
About the Author
DANNY RHODES lives in Canterbury and teaches English in a school by the sea. He has published short stories in the UK and the US. This is his second novel.
Publication date for Soldier Boy: 12 March 2009
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