Close Your Eyes and Count to Three

by Mark Haysom

Genres: Literary Fiction

Synopsis

A story about fathers and sons and the gulf that can divide them, featuring the little boy Baxter, a character we all fell in love with in Love, Love Me Do.

Release date: April 7, 2015

Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

Print pages: 48

Sample

Small and alone, Baxter Bird waits by the side of the narrow country road that meanders across the crest of the green rolling Downs.

He shields his eyes against the glare of the noon sun and peers unhappily into the distance, following the route of the road as far as his eyes can see – to where it dips suddenly away and out of sight behind the billowing May-blossomed hedgerow.

Still nothing. No one.

Where is he?

Baxter sighs heavily, bows his head, and swings a disconsolate foot at the tufted edge of the grass verge.

It’s not the first time he’s done so since he’s been waiting. He looks down, studies his shoes: both toecaps are scuffed and greened from the hour he has spent worrying away at the thin ragged edge of the roadside.

Briefly, he wonders whether he’ll be in trouble – but decides he probably won’t be. Not really. Because they’re not his best shoes.

You don’t wear best shoes for camping: he knows that now.

In fact, he now knows a lot about camping. Like how you choose the spot for your tent, up high so that you can see forever. How you light a fire to cook sausages; how the tent is held up with poles and strings; what an owl sounds like.

In the dark.

In the middle of the night.

How to sharpen the end of a stick with a pen-knife – although he wasn’t allowed to do the sharpening, because he’s only seven and isn’t big enough to have a penknife. Not yet.

And he wasn’t allowed to light the fire either – not by himself. But he did gather some of the wood for it and Mr Robinson said he could poke at it with his stick as long as he was carefu. . .