Long Lankin (12 page)

“But people go for masses, don’t they?”

“They call them services, Roger, in the Church of England. Father Mansell does one a month there, to keep it open, but I don’t know if anyone goes down except Mrs. Mansell, of course, and possibly Mr. Hibbert, and probably Mrs. Campbell as well. It’s a bit of a trek for the old people up here, to be honest. Everyone else goes to Saint Mary’s at North Fairing. Come on, let’s go and have some tea.”

We all walked up the steps into the kitchen. I opened a tin of Spam, and Pete got the bread and the butter.

A loud thumping noise woke me, so early it was barely light. I didn’t dare make a sound. Something heavy was being dragged along the floor outside our bedroom, then down the passage to the other side of the house. After a while, I heard Auntie’s slippered footsteps coming back, then she went downstairs.

The bed was dry for a change. I lay there for a while but could find no comfort in the weight of the heavy blankets pressing down on my sore body. I got out of bed and inspected the huge purple bruise that had spread across the top of my leg.

Walking lopsidedly, I turned into the little passage to the bathroom and was shocked to see a big blank space over the door. A stepladder leaned against the wall. Old Peter had gone.

In that dark place, I had never been able to make him out well, to see if he really was the man Mimi and I had glimpsed standing by the gate. If Auntie had put him somewhere else in the house, maybe I could find him and look at him more closely. What about the man’s twisted skin? I was almost certain that Old Peter in the picture didn’t have twisted skin.

Mum had told Pete and me to get everyone some shredded wheat while she fed Pamela. Pete did the milk but slopped it all over the place, and Terry had almost emptied the whole sugar bowl over his breakfast before I stopped him. Dennis was brewing up for trouble again because there was only one shredded wheat left by the time I got to him. I fished out one of mine and stuck it in his bowl, but he started jumping up and down, yelling that it was soggy.

Then the girls arrived.

“Sorry, there’s none left,” I said to Cora. “The bread’s all gone, and that’s the last of the shredded wheat now.”

“It’s all right. We’ve had boiled eggs.”

“Why can’t I have a boiled egg?” cried Dennis.

“Because you’ve got shredded wheat, you nit!” shouted Pete.

Dennis’s face bulged red with temper. He stamped both feet hard on the lino and flailed his arms as he tried to reach Pete, who stuck bits of shredded wheat on the back of his spoon and flicked them at him while dancing around on the floor. Dennis climbed up on the table and trod in Terry’s breakfast, spilling milk and sugar everywhere. Terry stood up and wailed.

Mum came in with Pamela, who started shrieking at the noise.

“What’s going on here?” she yelled. “Who’s hit Terry?”

Before we were able to go out to play, Roger and I went to do some shopping for his mum at Mrs. Aylott’s.

“Hello, love,” she said to Roger. “Mum all right?”

“Yes, thank you, Mrs. Aylott. Oh, this is my friend Cora.”

“Nice to meet you, dear.”

“Same to you,” I said.

Roger put the list down on the counter, and as Mrs. Aylott went around the shop getting the things, she kept looking over at me out of the corner of her eye. I pulled my sleeve down over my arm but not before she’d spotted the bruises.

Just as another lady came into the shop, Mrs. Aylott asked, “So where are you from, then, dear? London, by the sound of you.”

“Yeah. Me and me sister are stopping at Mrs. Eastfield’s — just for a bit.”

She and the other lady glanced at each other, and Mrs. Aylott made a clicking noise with her tongue.

She added up the bill. “That’ll be three and fourpence, Roger,” she said, “and take a sweet from the tin — and you, dear.”

“Thanks, Mrs. Aylott.”

We stood outside the shop. It was getting hot.

“Auntie Ida’s took that picture down I told you about — you know, Old Peter — remember? I’m going to find it. I’m going to look at it properly in the light — see if it’s the man down the church.” Roger didn’t look at me as he unwrapped his toffee. “You never believed me, did you? You thought I was fibbing — and Mimi an’ all.”

He gazed across to Mrs. Wickerby’s. “I don’t think you’re pretending, but”— he popped the toffee in his mouth —“I’m just not sure.” Chewing, he stared at the post office. “You see, one day last summer — no, it doesn’t matter.”

“You can’t not tell me now.”

“You’ll laugh.”

“No, I won’t. Promise. You know I won’t.”

“Well, we — Pete and me were playing down there — you know, down the church. We were playing hide-and-seek, and it was my turn to look for Pete and — and, well, I thought he’d come out of his hiding place and spoiled it. I was just going to shout something rude when — when I realized it wasn’t him. It was —”

“What was it? Come on, Roger —”

“It was another little boy, much smaller than Pete, standing by himself in the shadows. I looked around to see if his mum or someone was there. Then when I turned back, he’d gone.”

We started to walk back up Fieldpath Road.

“Don’t say anything to Pete, will you, Cora?” Roger added. “To tell the truth, it gave me the pips. He looked — um — well, scary.”

“How on earth can a kid be scary?”

“I’m telling you, this one was. I didn’t see his face, but the skin was peeling off his hands, and he had wispy grey hair, like an old man’s.”

We took the shopping into the kitchen. Mimi was helping Mrs. Jotman feed rose-hip syrup to Baby Pamela with a teaspoon. As we left the house, Pete came tearing down the veranda steps after us.

“Shall we do Patches or woods?” he asked Roger as we strolled back down Fieldpath Road.

“Let’s do woods. I ain’t never ever been in woods,” I said. “What’s Patches?”

“It’s just where some people live,” said Roger. “People from London.”

“We’ve got some camps down there, but they’re not as good as the ones in the woods,” said Pete.

“Not sure I’m that bothered, then.”

“If we did woods, we could show Cora the bomoles,” said Pete.

We turned left into Ottery Lane, then took a track off to the right.

“This is the cinder path,” said Roger, “where we made our igloo in the snow last year. Tooboy helped, but it was so small we could only get two in at a time. I read somewhere that you’re supposed to light a fire inside an igloo so the ice melts and seals up all the cracks, but we didn’t have enough room for a fire, so Pete and me took a candle in, but when we lit it, we were so squashed it singed his balaclava.”

“And me eyebrows went frizzy,” said Pete. “Then this man off the
Lokswood Herald
was going to take a picture with us standing in front of our igloo. He called at our house with his camera and we were all excited and brought him down, but when we got here, someone had kicked it in.”

“I think it was most probably Figsy, or Tooboy’s friend Malcolm,” said Roger. “But Mum and Dad tried to make up for us not being in the paper, so that night when we were in bed, they crept out and made a great big snow-woman in the garden.”

“She had big bosoms sticking out,” said Pete, showing me what they looked like, “and she was sitting down with her legs straight out and we called her Marilyn Monroe.”

“And do you know,” said Roger, “there was a little heap of Marilyn Monroe in the garden right up till April.”

Ahead of us was a wall of trees. At the edge of the woods, the cinder path became a narrow track that wound its way around the trunks. I looked up as we walked along to see little sparkles of sunlight gleaming every now and then through the whispering leaves above us.

The bomoles were three miserable bomb craters from the war.

All around us at home in London, there were places that had hardly been cleared up since the bombing, even at the end of our street. Dad said the government didn’t have any money to do anything. They’d started building new flats, but it was going to take ages. Some people had lived in prefabs for years. My friends and I played in ruins all the time and found all sorts of stuff in the rubbish — sometimes a few coppers to buy sweets with.

To be frank, these bomoles in the woods weren’t up to much — just holes in the ground with wet mushy leaves in the middle. I didn’t say anything.

There was a huge rope-swing, though, made by this big boy, Figsy. It was so high you had to climb the giant tree it was hanging from, lean over the fork made by two thick branches and have the swing handed up to you. You sat on the plank of wood with your legs on either side of the rope, then jumped off the tree and swung backwards and forwards. I could wrap my legs right around the plank, then lean back and dangle my head and arms upside down as I went, leaving my stomach behind on the tree.

Roger and Pete showed me some of their camps. The best one was in a tall tree that had a platform of branches halfway up. Roger and Tooboy, Figsy’s brother, had found an old black car door on the cinder path, and they’d dragged it up the tree and wedged it across the branches so you could sit on it, although it did slope down a bit. Pete slid sideways and flattened our bag of jam sandwiches. They ended up squashed thin, but we ate them anyway, sitting on the door, looking out over the tops of the trees and across the yellow cornfield beyond. Roger pointed out the faraway tower of North Fairing church.

When we got back to Roger’s, Mimi had fallen in the pond and was wearing a pair of Terry’s shorts. Mrs. Jotman told me to say sorry about it to Auntie Ida. She’d washed her frock, and it would be dry for tomorrow.

“You’d better hurry back,” she added. “It feels really close, and look at those big dark clouds. You don’t want to get caught in a thunderstorm.”

Mimi wanted me to carry her all the way down Old Glebe Lane to Auntie Ida’s, but I told her if she didn’t walk, I’d leave her behind. I couldn’t have lifted her if I’d wanted to. Everything ached, and now my shoulders were throbbing, too, from hanging off the rope-swing.

As we got to the top of the hill, the light was changing. The sky on the horizon became an eerie yellow-green, and above us, thick navy-blue clouds like monstrous cauliflowers rolled and gathered. A chilly breeze came whipping up from the marshes.

We heard the first rumble of distant thunder. I noticed Mimi shiver as I held her hand.

“Where’s Mum?” she said.

It was the first time Mimi had said anything at all about her.

“I don’t know. Nobody’s told me nothing.”

Even though Mimi’s small fingers were locked in mine, I felt so alone, gazing down from the top of the hill over the flat wasteland to the faraway river. It was like standing on the edge of the world.

Suddenly my heart jumped. Something — somebody — was moving up the hill towards us.

Whoever it was, they were between us and Guerdon Hall. We wouldn’t be able to get there without passing them. If we turned and ran, I didn’t know if we could get back to the main road before they caught up with us. Mimi was so tired, I was so sore — how fast could we run?

“Mimi, we’ve got to get back to Roger’s, fast!” I whispered.

“Why, Cora? Look, it’s Auntie Ida down there,” she said, pulling away from my hand and beginning to run down the hill. “Auntie Ida’s coming.”