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Authors: Lindsey Barraclough

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BOOK: Long Lankin
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We tore up the lane after her. Even though she fell over once, she sped along so quickly we never caught up with her till we reached Guerdon Hall.

“Auntie Ida! Auntie Ida!” she screamed, rushing over the bridge and banging with all her might on the great wooden door in the porch. “Auntie Ida!”

From inside the house, Finn started barking furiously. The crying baby stared at us from its place over the arch as Pete, Roger, and I raced over the bridge. Auntie Ida and the dog, bounding with excitement, came out.

“What on earth is going on?” cried Auntie, lifting Mimi up in her arms and pushing her hair off her face. “Get down, Finn! Calm down!”

Auntie rummaged in the pocket of her pinny for a hankie and wiped Mimi’s nose. Mimi wouldn’t stop crying.

“There was this — this — man!” she gulped. “That — horrible — horrible — man!”

“What are you talking about? What horrible man, Mimi? Where have you been?”

“That — that place where we went. Down there — that church — it’s nasty — that — that man’s down there!”

“What man? Who?”

“That — that scary man with the black dress! They went in. He — he come and said things!”

Auntie Ida looked up and stared at us. Her eyes hardened into two pieces of jet-black coal. “Cora!” she said in an awful shaking voice. “Have you — have you dared to go down to the church?”

My head went dizzy.

In a moment, Mrs. Eastfield had almost thrown Mimi down to the ground and was on us. She grabbed Cora by the arm and dragged her through the door into the house. Cora could hardly keep up with her, squirming as she tried to get away, but Mrs. Eastfield had her fast, her fingernails digging deep into Cora’s skin.

Mimi was at their heels, crying, “Cora! Cora! Don’t do that, Auntie Ida!”

Pete and me didn’t know what to do.

We hung about on the stone flags in the porch for a second, then quickly walked in through the big front door as it began to creak shut.

Following the shouting, we got to the open kitchen door just in time to see Mrs. Eastfield land a great wallop on the side of Cora’s face — such a whack that it sent Cora sprawling. As she went down, she banged her leg on the side of the table and then fell hard on her bottom on the stone floor. The money jingled in her pocket. She cried out.

Mrs. Eastfield was breathless with fury, the whites of her eyes wide in her bright-red face.

Cora could hardly get her legs to stand her up again, but Pete and I were too scared to go through the doorway to help her.

I tried to get up, but my backside hurt so and my face stung like burning. I tried to push myself up on my hands, but I couldn’t get them to work. They didn’t seem to belong to me. Mimi was shrieking. I just caught sight of Roger and Pete in the doorway with their mouths hanging open.

I reached up and got hold of the top of the big table with my shaky hands and managed to pull myself up to standing, but my legs were trembling and I couldn’t let go.

I didn’t want to look at Auntie Ida, but she slammed her two great fists down from the other side of the table and leaned all the way over so her face was right in mine. I could feel her breath and smell tea. Tears were coming down my cheeks in two hot streams.

“I
told
you!” she shouted. “Never —
ever
— to go down to the church! You don’t know what you’ve done — you stupid,
stupid
girl! How
dare
you! How
dare
you! How could you ever —
ever
— leave that child on her own! How
could
you!
You don’t know what you’ve done!

Then, through the blur, I saw that her eyes had gone down to my skirt. She snatched something out of my pocket. It was the letter to Dad. She made a horrible noise through her teeth and twisted the envelope so tightly in her hands that it almost ripped.

Mrs. Eastfield headed for Pete and me. I thought she was going to belt us, too.

“And you!” she yelled. “I’ll make sure your mother knows about this! Be sure I will!”

Storming between us, she pushed us aside so hard that Pete’s head flew back and banged on the door frame with a clunk. He moaned, staggered slightly, then looked up at me with watery eyes, spilling over into tears.

“I — want — my — mum,” Cora sobbed in a small voice.

I just didn’t know what to do. The only thing I could think of was to get us all home as fast as possible, but I’d have to confess to Mum about going down to the church. It would be much, much worse if she heard it first from Mrs. Eastfield.

So I had to find Mrs. Eastfield to ask her, but it was the last thing I wanted to do in all the world. She’d gone off down the hall past the big stairs, so I went after her, but every room I tried was locked. The big thick door at the end of the hall was the only one that gave when I pushed. When I peeped in, somebody said,
“Hello.”
It was a real live parrot in a cage.

Mrs. Eastfield was sitting hunched up in the corner of an old red settee, kneading a handkerchief in her hands. She looked up, and her eyes were red and wet. I stared down at the floor.

“Mrs. Eastfield —” I swallowed. “Would it possibly be all right if Cora and Mimi came up to my house for a bit? I absolutely promise we won’t go down the church again. I’m really, really sorry. It”— and I took a deep breath —“it was my fault, and Pete’s. We’ll take them in the woods and over the Patches next time. Honest. We won’t do it again.”

“Do what you like,” she said quietly, wiping her nose on the hankie. “I don’t care.”

“I’ll post that letter. I absolutely promise I’ll post it at Mrs. Wickerby’s. You can ask her if we bought the stamp. I promise. Honestly. Hope to die. Cross my heart.”

She turned and held out the creased letter without even looking at me. “Do what you like,” she said again. “It’s too late anyway. . . .”

It was a bit of a miserable walk down the Chase, I have to say, with all of them snivelling.

“Dad walloped us the other day, didn’t he, Pete, for fighting,” I said, doing my best to make Cora feel better.

“That was your fault.” Pete sniffed. “You know that green engine’s always been mine. Auntie Barbara gave it to me.”

“Rubbish!”

“She did!” He stopped dead in the road, his hands curling into fists.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, you can keep the blimmin’ thing.” I tossed my hand in the air at him, then turned back to Cora. “Sister Laserian at school’s the worst for hitting,” I said. “She’s got this special stick. It’s this thick.” I held my thumb and first finger at least two inches apart.

“No, Sister Camillus is the worst,” said Pete. “She whacks you with her hands. They’re hard like leather, like the soles of your shoes, most probably because she does loads of it — whacking.”

“Must have hurt her at first, though, when she first started.”

“She probably did it for a penance at the beginning,” Pete went on. “Then God made her hands hard in a miracle, so she could stop us being so wicked, like if we talk at dinners.”

“They’re the Sisters of Divine Mercy,” I told Cora.

At last she lifted her head.

“There’s this teacher at my school — Mr. Diamond,” she said. “The boys say if you’re naughty and he catches you, he’ll hit you with a slipper with nails sticking out of it.”

“Blimey! Do you know anybody he’s done it to?”

“No — nobody I know.”

It was sweltering. Pete pulled out his handkerchief, knotted the corners, and stuck it on his head like Grandpa used to do, except Grandpa’s hadn’t usually been blown in over and over again then left in his pocket for weeks till the lumps of snot had gone green and hard.

Cora put her head down again. She was walking oddly — I suppose because of her banging her leg against the table and falling on the floor. There was a big red patch on the side of her face and some small half-moon nail marks on her arm. Mimi kept tugging on her skirt and trying to get her to talk to her.

As we got nearly to the top of the hill, we pointed out the old pillbox, a concrete bunker from the war, behind the trees on the right, but Cora didn’t seem that bothered. Then, as we passed Glebe Woods on the other side of the road, round the back of the Treasures’, I tried to cheer her up by showing her the bit of broken fence where you can get through. As long as you’re careful to pull it back behind you, from the road nobody need ever know you were in there.

“There’s a ruined castle in the woods,” said Pete.

“Oh, yeah,” said Cora, as if it was a fib. It wasn’t a fib, actually. There were heaps of old stones and half-buried bricks all covered in trees and bushes and moss. It was really fun, climbing over them and exploring. Once, Mr. Crawford, the Treasures’ gardener, spotted us from the garden and chased us out, shouting and swearing. We don’t go in there that often, because we’d get into big trouble with Mum if we were caught, but if we hear the mower on the front lawn, we know he’s round the other side of the house, so we creep through the fence and jump around on the castle until the engine stops, then run away quick.

Just after Glebe Woods, there’s a stream that runs under the road and behind the pillbox on the other side. If it’s clear, you can drop bits of twig on one side of the road and see if they come out on the other, but more often than not it’s choked with grass.

We carried on up the lane and crossed over the main Daneflete road opposite the Thin Man.

To get to Bryers Guerdon, you walk down the Daneflete road a bit, then cross over to go down Ottery Lane, which leads into the village. It’s like going through a green tunnel, the top end of the lane, because the trees lean over towards each other and their highest branches meet up in the middle.

There’s a deep ditch running along the right-hand side of the road. I pushed Pete in it once when he was little, and felt awful afterwards because Mum had to throw his coat away. He swallowed some of the water, and for days afterwards, I thought he was going to die of the fever.

When you get to the place where the houses start, there are bridges over this ditch. Each house has its own bridge.

The first house on the left is Mr. Granville’s shop. He’s the butcher, and he’s got a big moustache that goes up at the sides in two points. When I asked Mum how it stays up, she said he puts wax on it. A bit farther down on the other side, there’s Mrs. Wickerby at the post office, then, over the road from her, there are two grocers together. Mrs. Aylott’s is the one we go to — the other one never seems to have much in it. It’s called the Dairy. The old lady, Mrs. Rust, sits in there all day with a hairnet on, knitting. Some people must go in, but we never do. Everything on the shelves in the Dairy has a great big space around it. There’ll be a loaf of bread and then three feet of empty shelf, then a jar of Golden Shred, then four feet, then a packet of Daz and some Marmite.

Mum sends me down to Mrs. Aylott’s with a list, and if I can’t carry it all, Mr. Aylott comes round with the stuff in a box when the shop shuts.

I really like Mr. Aylott a lot.

When it was the Garden Fête over on the field in June, Mr. Aylott was Madame Zaza the Fortune-Teller. He wore one of Mrs. Aylott’s scarves done up in a turban and some earrings made of brass curtain rings on loops of string. When he came out of his tent for a cup of tea, Dennis and his friend Bernard kept creeping up on him and lifting his skirt. Mr. Aylott would turn suddenly and pretend to take a swipe at them, and they’d go shrieking off. I don’t know why they did it over and over again; he still had his trousers on underneath.

BOOK: Long Lankin
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