Attica (2 page)

‘Funnily enough, India,’ he said. ‘My dad was in the army out there. So I first saw the world in the Far East and you’re from England.’ He turned awkwardly in his deckchair. ‘That dark-haired one. The smaller boy. He passed me in the hall without a good-morning or a how-are-you.’

‘That’s Alex. He doesn’t mean anything by it. He’s just quiet. Lost in a world of his own. He wasn’t being rude. Sometimes I get annoyed with him and yell at him to pay attention to me, and he simply looks startled – you know, like a rabbit with a fox or something. You can tell he’s somewhere else, on another planet. Some boys are like that. Most girls are like me though, aren’t they? Chatterboxes.’

She smiled, knowing by his amused look that she was charming the socks off Mr Grantham. He was a crusty old man, even Dipa and Ben had said that, but Chloe was good at getting under the armour of such people. When they had had their dog, the woman at the kennels had been regarded as a ferocious dragon, but Chloe had made her a friend.

Her new step-father had been an easy nut to crack at first, but she noted with some chagrin that now he was
family
he was not so swiftly charmed. Neither she nor Alex had liked him in the beginning, though that had not stopped her from being enchanting. Ben was not what they would have chosen for their mother as a second husband. He didn’t seem ambitious enough. Ben seemed happy to remain just a paramedic, which was not much different from a nurse, while Dipa was way above him as a doctor.

Their own father had been a businessman, full of drive.

‘Penny for ’em.’ Mr Grantham interrupted
her thoughts. ‘’Less they’re private, of course.’

‘I was thinking about my dad.’

‘Oh yes?’

‘Not the one you’ve seen, my
real
dad. He died of a heart attack two years ago.’

‘Oh, I’m sorry.’

‘That’s all right.’

‘You have a new dad now, then?’

‘Ben’s divorced. His wife ran off with a neighbour.’

Mr Grantham’s eyebrows went up. ‘That’s a bit more information than I think I should have.’

‘Yes, sorry,’ said Chloe, biting her lip. ‘Ben’s all right, really. But he’s not my dad.’

‘Of course not. I expect he’d agree with that. At least you’ve got a family. All mine have gone.’

Things were getting a little gloomy.

‘Can I get you a drink or something?’ asked Chloe brightly. ‘A cup of tea?’

The words ‘cup of tea’ seemed to stir the old man’s energy levels and he perked up.

‘You wouldn’t mind? The back door to the kitchen’s open. I could really do with a drink and I can’t always get up once I’m sat down.’

‘I don’t mind.’

Chloe went into the kitchen, which was a mess. Nelson, limping badly and full of hope, followed at her heels making soft
meow
s. Chloe ignored Nelson and found the teabags and the kettle. The milk was in the fridge. She gave Nelson the cream from the top in a tin lid. He lapped it up quickly then, sensing that was it, went back to Mr Grantham’s feet.

‘Do you take sugar?’ she called, and when he waved over the top of the deckchair, cried, ‘How many?’

He held up
one finger.

The sugar was harder to find, but she tracked it down eventually. She made two cups of tea in rather dubiously clean cups and took them out to Mr Grantham.

He said, ‘Got yourself one, eh? Quite right and proper.’

He sipped the tea with thin lips, staring into the yards of the houses that backed their own. Chloe noticed that the backs of his hands were covered in dark nebulous islands like coffee stains. Blue veins stood out under the thin layer of skin. Mr Grantham was very, very old.

‘Were you married?’ asked Chloe, trying to spark off the conversation again. ‘Did you have a wife?’

Mr Grantham put down the cup with a shaking hand, making it rattle in the saucer.

‘I had a wife, a very nice lady,’ he said, his translucent blue eyes beginning to moist over. ‘She died several years ago. It’s becoming harder to remember her face now.’

‘You have photos though?’

‘Oh yes, I have lots of photos of Florrie. Of her, and other people. But they’re just ghosts now. It doesn’t seem real any longer, that old life. It feels as if I’ve read about it, in a history book. Funny how the mind works.’

The pair of them spoke no more that day. Chloe read her book and Mr Grantham read his memories.

Jordy teased her a little when she told him about her conversation with Mr Grantham.

‘I wouldn’t know what to say to an old guy like that,’ he said. ‘What’ve you got in common?’

‘Secrets,’ she said. ‘Girls just love secrets. To hear them and to tell them. Old men have got lots of secrets. Things we wouldn’t even dream of. You don’t know anything about girls, do you?’

‘Don’t want to,’ he said haughtily. ‘Especially if they support Manchester United.’

She said, puzzled, ‘I don’t support
any
football team.’

‘That’s even worse.’

A week after their first
meeting, Chloe again found Mr Grantham in the garden, contemplating nature. This time it took quite a while for her to get him to open up, but once he did Mr Grantham was even less reluctant than before to share his thoughts with her. She asked him at one point if he had gone to university, as she was thinking of doing that one day.

‘University? No, no, never went there.’ He almost chuckled. ‘We didn’t do things like that in them days. I went to a village school. Left at fourteen. Never took exams or anything like that. Went to work in a grocer’s, behind the counter. Just before I was twenty, the war came along, and I joined up.’ His eyes narrowed at this point. ‘I was engaged to a young woman called Susan then. She gave me a silver pocket-watch before I left for overseas, with her photo in the lid which covered the face. It was musical. Played
Frère Jacques
when you opened it.’

‘Oh, were you very much in love?’ Chloe recalled that his wife’s name had been Florrie. ‘You didn’t marry in the end?’

His mouth formed a thin bitter line.

‘No, no, we didn’t marry. I came home after the war, from POW camp in Germany, and she’d run off. Married a much older man than me. They’d moved away, so I never saw her again.’

‘Oh, how sad.’

Mr Grantham rallied. ‘Probably for the best.’ But he didn’t sound as if he meant it. ‘I met Florrie a little later. She was a good wife. We loved each other.’

‘What about the watch? Have you still got it?’

‘I think it’s up in the
attic somewhere. I chucked it there when I heard Susan was married to another man. This was my parents’ house, you see. I’ve lived here almost all my life, except for India and Germany.’

‘Don’t you want the watch?’

He humphed. ‘I’m too old to go climbing around in dusty attics. Much too old now. Pity though.’ His eyes became distant. ‘I wouldn’t mind seeing that watch again. It would’ve hurt too much, earlier, but now – well, feelings get a bit dusty too, with time. I’ve not had a bad life, but I’ve been thinking more and more about how I cursed Susan for running away with that fellow Perkins. It sort of ruled my life for a few years and I got very bitter. Eventually I met Florrie and things came all right again, but it was a bit dark for a while. A bit dark. I’d like to make my peace with Susan’s memory now. Getting the watch back would help. I feel bad about chucking it aside like that.’ He gave Chloe a wry smile and nodded towards the heavens. ‘You never know who you’re going to meet up there, do you?’

‘I’ll ask the boys. They won’t mind having a look up there for you. Me too. I wouldn’t mind.’

‘You’re very kind.’

‘Rooting around in an old attic might be fun,’ said Chloe. ‘You never know what you’ll find.’

‘That’s very true. Treasure and trash, that’s what you’ll find in attics.’ He turned and stared into her eyes. ‘It would be nice to find treasure, wouldn’t it?’

Once Chloe had gone, Mr Grantham had a sudden flash of guilt. He liked Chloe. She was a nice girl. Since they had begun their infrequent conversations sprigs of apple blossom had begun to spring from the flinty beds of his thoughts. Should he warn her? He wanted to. But he just didn’t know.

What if harm should
come to them? It hadn’t to him, but maybe he’d been lucky. Then again, you couldn’t live your life in perfect safety. That would be very dull and boring. You had to have some danger and excitement. That’s why boys bought motorbikes and girls backpacked around the world.

No, he wouldn’t warn them. Let them find out for themselves. They could always turn back, if they were too afraid to go on. It was that kind of place. It might make his old heart race and bang against his ribs to think about it, but theirs were stronger, stouter organs.

Later, while Dipa was preparing dinner in the kitchen, Chloe told Alex and Jordy about the ‘secrets’ she’d learned from Mr Grantham. Predictably, Jordy was a little scornful and said they weren’t exactly headline revelations. Equally as predictable was Alex, who was more interested in the pocket-watch than in any ancient love story.

Yes, he said, he wouldn’t mind helping Chloe look for the watch. ‘Those old watches with real brass works,’ he said reverently, ‘are ten times more interesting than modern watches. Digital watches are the worst, but the ones which try to look like old watches are just as bad. All they’ve got inside ’em is a chip. Just that. A rotten old computer chip. But just think of all the engineering that went into making an old watch! All those cogs and wheels, the hair spring, levers and – and,’ he said almost darkly, ‘there’s a thing called an
escapement
. If you didn’t have that, the whole works would go out of balance and tell the wrong time.’

Jordy stared at his normally quiet step-brother and said wonderingly, ‘Once you wind him up he just goes on and on, doesn’t he?’

‘Are you being unkind?’ asked Dipa, entering the
room with a steaming dish of potatoes. ‘What’s all that about? Nelson,
stop
threading through my ankles or I’ll drop this dish.’

Nelson continued weaving awkwardly between her legs and then toppled over when he caught the edge of the carpet. He was a cat who refused to acknowledge that he had only three legs. Giving the carpet an aggrieved look, he jumped up into Dipa’s chair.

‘No, I’m not being unkind – at least I didn’t mean to be,’ said Jordy. ‘We were just talking about …’ he caught Chloe’s warning look just in time ‘about old-fashioned pocket-watches. Alex seems to think they’re cool. He thinks wrist-watches are naff.’

Dipa placed the dish on a mat on the table and stepped back to look at her youngest child.

‘Well, that’s because he’d look so smart in a waistcoat, wouldn’t you, Alex? With a shiny silver watch-chain dangling from the pocket.’

‘Nobody in this house understands me,’ Alex sighed. ‘It’s the
works
of a watch I like, not the watch itself. Wrist-watches are OK. But I know Jordy likes his because it looks snazzy on him and because it tells him the time to a hundredth of a second, even at ten fathoms under water. He likes it because of how it looks and what it does and what it’s capable of doing at the bottom of the ocean, though what use that is to him I’ll never know. I like watches because of how they’re made and what’s inside the case.’

Chloe said, ‘And I couldn’t care less about any of it. Can we eat now?’

Dipa returned to the kitchen to get the rest of the meal and Alex said, ‘Shall we all look for it? The watch, I mean?’

‘I’m going to,’ said Chloe.

‘Oh, all right,’ Jordy agreed, not wanting to
be left out. ‘I’ll come too, but I warn you,’ he twisted his face into a mask, ‘it’s
horrible
up there!’

CHAPTER 2

Crossing the Threshold

The three of them didn’t discuss why
they didn’t let Ben and Dipa know they wanted to search the attic. It wasn’t that each of them didn’t think about it. Chloe certainly did. Jordy did too. (And who knew what was in Alex’s head?) But for some reason, unknown even to themselves, none of them mentioned it. Not that it was anything their parents would have objected to. They simply kept it secret. They deliberately waited for a Saturday morning when Dipa was working and Ben was going out to do the shopping. Chloe asked Jordy to go with her. Alex, however, was engrossed in making another kite and said he wouldn’t join them after all.

‘What’s that?’ Ben had asked, coming into the kitchen and catching the end of the conversation. ‘You lot going to the cinema?’

‘We might do later,’ Jordy had said. ‘Is it all right?’

‘What about lunch?’ Ben had asked. ‘Are you going to eat thin air?’

‘We’ll grab a bite in town,’ Jordy had said, and knowing Ben was disapproving of hamburgers added, ‘from the Italian sandwich bar.’

Once Ben had gone Chloe and
Jordy found themselves at the trapdoor of the attic, climbing through, armed with torches. Once more the dust and dead air assailed Jordy’s nostrils, but this time he wasn’t so worried by it. He had a means of light with him and he had Chloe. Still, once he was standing on boards inside, shining the torch into the recesses of the attic, a strange feeling came over him. It was as if they were trespassing on the sacred burial ground of another culture. There was the sense, not of being watched, but of being
felt
by something or someone. The first step he took he walked into a cobweb and covered his face with sticky threads.

‘Urrgh!’ he grunted.

‘What’s wrong?’ Chloe was whispering for some reason. ‘Step in a cow pat?’

‘Very funny. There are spiders up here.’

Chloe said, ‘Don’t try to scare me. I’m not worried about spiders.’

‘I am,’ said a deep voice behind her, sending a shock wave through her. ‘I don’t like ’em.’

It was Alex, who had changed his mind after he’d accidentally snapped the spine of his home-made kite.

‘Don’t do that!’ she hissed at him. ‘You made me jump.’

‘Nearly gave me a heart attack,’ said Jordy, his voice coming out of the darkness.

Alex shone his torch around the rafters. The beam found some hanging flimsy cobwebs, grey as old bread. ‘They’re dead,’ he muttered. ‘I don’t mind dead ones.’