Heaven Eyes (18 page)

W
E MOVED QUICKLY THROUGH THE RUINS
, over fences, between great heaps of rubble, past the smoldering remains of bonfires. I was already thinking of the next escape. We’d run away, the four of us together. We’d head for hidden, secret, forbidden places. No need to go far. The most marvelous of things could be found a few yards away, a river’s-width away. The most extraordinary things existed in our ordinary world and just waited for us to find them. I held tight to Heaven Eyes. Seagulls swooped over us with outstretched wings. They soared into our hearts and screamed of freedom. We moved uphill, away from the river, through the wasteland where all the terraces had been knocked down. This was where Mouse had practiced his digging, where he had prepared for his great discovery
in the black Black Middens. We entered St. Gabriel’s. We moved past the house where Mum and I had lived. This was where I had grown inside her, where I had been born into our Paradise, where there had been a Salvation Army crib and fairies on the wall, bright flowers and fattening gooseberries in the garden, where there had been love and happiness that continued still and would continue ever more. Deep inside me, Mum sighed, whispered my name, shivered with delight. We hurried on. Brick and pebbledashed walls, red roofs, lampposts, street names, road signs, square gardens. Sunlight sparkled on the house windows. It bleached the pavements. It shimmered on the black roadway and turned it to a black and shining liquid thing leading us to Whitegates.

“That’s where we’re heading,” I told Heaven Eyes. “That building there with three floors and the metal fence around it and the faces at the window.”

Wilson Cairns was at the window, as if he’d been watching ever since we left. Skinny Stu was in the garden with a cigarette in his mouth and his ribs exposed to the sun, just as when we left.

“Oh, aye?” he said, as we stepped through the iron gate.

“Aye,” we answered.

“Nice picnic, then?”

“Lovely, Stu,” we said.

“And who might this be that you’re bringing in?”

“Heaven Eyes,” I said. “A sister.”

“Oh, aye?”

He spat and coughed and crushed his cigarette beneath his shoe and peered into the sky.

We stepped into Whitegates. Maureen was on the stairs. She gasped when she saw us. She clapped her hand across her mouth.

“Erin!” she said. “January, Sean! We’ve been so worried.”

Fingers Wyatt and Maxie Ross watched from the door of the poolroom. Fingers grinned at us, held up her hands in joy.

Maureen came down toward us. She reached out and I stepped back. She hugged Mouse. She watched me over his shoulder.

“So worried,” she said. “Did you not think about that?”

“Yes.”

“But not deeply enough. Anything could have happened to you. Anything. What are we going to do with you?”

“Don’t know.”

She moved away from Mouse. She stared at us.

“And who is this?”

“We brought her back with us. She’s got no family, no home.”

She regarded Heaven Eyes.

“And what is your name?”

“Go on,” I whispered.

Heaven turned her face toward my arm. She peeped out at Maureen.

“My name is Heaven Eyes. Or Anna.”

“And where are your mother and your father, Anna?”

Heaven drew in her breath in fright. She licked her lips.

“Go on,” I said.

“They is in my sleep thoughts and in my treasures. They is in my thoughts as bright as day.”

Maureen glanced at me.

“And where have you been living, Anna?”

“With my grampa cross the runny water.”

“And where is your grandfather now?”

Heaven Eyes blinked back tears, couldn’t answer.

Maureen moved closer to me.

“Who is she?”

“We don’t know.”

She took my hand.

“I dreamed of such awful things, Erin. Why do you feel you need to run from us?”

I looked into her eyes. I saw that she was yearning for an answer. She was yearning to hold me, to welcome me back as a daughter.

“I want to understand,” she said.

“We run for freedom,” I said. “Just for freedom.”

I turned away and left her standing there.

F
INGERS HUGGED ME AS WE WENT
into the poolroom. She jabbered our names. She said she’d been so scared that we were at the bottom of the river or the bottom of the sea.

“So many stories,” she said. “So many rumors. Is it true you went off on a raft?”

“Yes!” we said together.

Fingers chewed her lips. Maxie watched in deep excitement. Others gathered around us and giggled. Fat Kev watched from a corner and scratched his belly.

“I knew,” said Fingers. “I’ve been dreaming you. Every night I’ve seen you rushing down the river. I’ve seen you miles and miles out at sea.”

She kept laughing, hugging us.

“What was it like?” she kept saying. “What was it like?”

She kept pausing, staring at Heaven Eyes, wondering.

“Fantastic,” I said. “The most exciting thing you’d ever know.”

“I knew,” she said. “I knew. I told you, Maxie, didn’t I?”

“She did,” said Maxie. “A raft. The river. The sea.”

“And how far did you go?” said Fingers.

We hesitated. It seemed nothing to simply say it: across the river, onto the Black Middens, up to Black Middens Quay, into the printing works, then home again.

I caught her arm. I gripped her tight.

“Into another world!” I whispered.

She caught her breath.

“No!”

“Yes. We only went across the river but it really was like being in another world.”

Fat Kev clicked his tongue. He sniggered.

I put my arm around Heaven Eyes. I held her at my side.

“And this is our friend who’s come back with us. Her name is Heaven Eyes or Anna. She has come to live with us. Heaven, this is Fingers. This is Maxie. These are all your friends.”

She raised her eyes shyly. She smiled shyly. She raised her hand shyly and the light from the windows poured through the webs and made them beautiful. Fingers stretched out and caught her hand.

“You’re beautiful,” she said.

“You also is beautiful,” said Heaven Eyes.

She touched the old scalds and burn marks on Fingers’ throat.

“You is been hurt,” she said. “But you is beautiful.”

She gazed more confidently around the room.

“Oh, Erin, my sister,” she said. “Oh, Erin Law, my sister.”

And then she saw Wilson Cairns. He was at his table, facing the wall. He had a bowl of clay and a bowl of water. I led her to him. He had the muddy model of a child in his hands. It stood on the table in front of him.

“This is Wilson Cairns,” I said.

I touched his head.

“Hello, Wilson,” I said. “We came back again, like I said we would.”

He turned. He looked through his thick glasses into Heaven’s eyes, deep deep into them, as if he saw right into her, to something astonishing a million miles inside her.

“We kept watching,” I said. “We saw the most amazing things, Wilson. We found our sister Heaven Eyes and brought her home with us.”

“And you’ll leave again,” he said.

“Yes. We’ll leave and then come back again. You could leave, as well. You could come with us.”

He sniffed. He looked down at his huge body. A smile crossed his face.

“Me?” he said.

I grinned. I knew he was right. While the rest of us scampered across the earth or drifted away on rafts, he found his own freedom in his way of looking, in his thoughts and dreams, in his way of working clay.

Heaven Eyes reached down and touched the child of clay.

“Is this who you did find in all this water and in all this mud?” she said.

“Yes,” said Wilson.

“Is lovely,” she said.

“Yes.”

“And you has found her sisters and her brothers in all this water and in all this mud?”

“Yes,” said Wilson.

He showed her the other people he had made today: babies and children, boys and girls, some of them already drying out, some of them still soft and wet.

She ran her hands across the wet surfaces. She pressed gently with her fingertips. Clay and water ran and trickled through her hands.

“These is like me,” she said. “My grampa did find Heaven Eyes in the black black water and the black black mud.”

Wilson ran his pudgy fingers across her silky webs.

“There is things that is lifted out of the water and the mud that do move and walk like us,” she said.

“I know that,” said Wilson.

“We has seen these things. My sister Erin Law and my brothers Janry Carr and Mouse Gullane has seen these things.”

“I know that,” said Wilson.

She stood there with Wilson. She took a ball of clay into her hands. She squeezed and shaped and smiled as the mud and water trickled down her arms. Wilson worked along with her. More bodies emerged out of the clay. Heaven Eyes began to hum a low tune. We backed away from them. We gathered around the pool table and told Fingers, Maxie and the others of our adventures. Fat Kev lumbered out. We saw Maureen watching through the window of her office. We went on talking. We told all the believable parts first. We’d leave the unbelievable till later: Grampa’s death, the saint, the full mystery of Heaven Eyes. We went to the window and pointed across the houses of St. Gabriel’s, past the bridges toward hidden Black Middens Quay.

“It was down there, just before a massive curve in the river.”

“Where?” said Maxie.

“Where?” said the others.

“Just past the Ouseburn,” said Mouse.

“Where the mudbank is,” said January. “The Black
Middens. There’s old warehouses and factories and a huge printing works. A dead old place. Nobody ever goes there.”

“Till now,” I said.

“Yes, till now,” said January. “And now they’re knocking it down and building restaurants and things, like in all the other places.”

They raised their eyebrows. They shrugged.

“No,” I said. “We didn’t know it was there, either. But it was. An amazing place.” I laughed. “And now they’re knocking it down.”

We stared out together into the sunlit afternoon, and the room filled with the amazement that we’d done these things and come back again into our ordinary world, and that the girl discovered in the Black Middens hummed and murmured at our side.

“There’s more,” said Fingers. “Isn’t there?”

“Yes,” I said. “Much more. We’ll tell you later.”

“A
NNA WHAT
?” said Maureen.

“We don’t know.”

“And she was living with her grandfather?”

“Yes.”

“And he was called?”

“We don’t know.”

“And he died?”

“He died.”

“And this was in an old building by the river?”

“A printing works.”

“You know nothing else?”

I shrugged and stood there facing her. She’d called me out of the poolroom into the office.

“Please help me,” she said.

“I am helping.”

“Then tell me more. What else do you know?”

“A few things. But they’re hers. She might not want you to know them.”