Then the clown straightened, closed discount ugg boots up his van and started walking, in the same direction I was walking, several paces ahead of me, a small suitcase in one hand, the balloons in the other. The seafront continued long and straight, and I was walking behind him for what seemed like ages. Sometimes I felt awkward about it, and I even thought the clown might turn and say something. But since that was the way I had to go, there wasn't much else I could do. discount ugg boots So we just kept walking, the clown and me, on and on along the deserted pavement still wet from the morning, and all the time the balloons were bumping and grinning down at me. Every so often, I could see the man's fist, where all the balloon strings converged, and I could see he had them securely twisted together and in a tight grip. Even so, I kept worrying that one of the strings would cheap true religion jeans come unravelled and a single balloon would sail off up into that cloudy sky.
     Lying awake that night after what Roger had told me, I kept seeing those balloons again. I thought about Hailsham closing, and how it was like someone coming along with a pair of shears and snipping the balloon strings just where they entwined above the man's fist. Once that happened, there'd be no real sense in which those balloons belonged with each cheap true religion jeans other any more. When he was telling me the news about Hailsham, Roger had made a remark, saying he supposed it wouldn't make so much difference to the likes of us any more. And in certain ways, he might have been right. But it was unnerving, to think things weren't still going on back there, just as always; that people like Miss Geraldine, say, weren't leading groups of Juniors around the North Playing Field.
     In the discount ugg boots months after that talk with Roger, I kept thinking about it a lot, about Hailsham closing and all the implications. And it started to dawn on me, I suppose, that a lot of things I'd always assumed I'd plenty of time to get round to doing, I might now have to act on pretty soon or else let them go forever. It's not that I started to panic, exactly. But it definitely felt like Hailsham's discount ugg boots going away had shifted everything around us. That's why what Laura said to me that day, about my becoming Ruth's carer, had such an impact on me, even though I'd stone-walled her at the time. It was almost like a part of me had already made that decision, and Laura's words had simply pulled away a veil that had been covering it over.