Read Long Lankin Online

Authors: Lindsey Barraclough

Long Lankin (2 page)

BOOK: Long Lankin
8.21Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

I hang the two bags over my shoulders by the strings. The track is all mud and puddles. The soles of Mimi’s shoes have come away from the uppers around the toes. I try to keep her on the tufts of grass so her feet stay dry. My scuffed brown sandals aren’t much better. The water comes through the little holes that make the pattern on the top. I hate them because they go
flup flup flup
on the pavement and I’ve always wanted shoes that go
click click click
like Lana Turner’s at the pictures, but I have to have Monica Horgan’s old shoes because she’s older than me. The last ones were black lace-ups like a boy’s. They’re in the cupboard for Mimi.

As we work our way down the track, I hear the constant muffled sound of running water, as if secret streams are flowing down the hill and under the road, feeding and swelling the ditch below the trees. At its widest point, the ditch curves towards the road and disappears beneath it.

My neck aches with looking down to avoid the mud. I stretch up for a moment and see that some old red chimneys have appeared over the tops of the trees.

We come round a bend, and there is Guerdon Hall, half sinking into the ground.

The chimney bricks are set in patterns of squares, diamonds, and even twisted spirals like the cough candy Mrs. Prewitt has in big jars in her shop, threepence for two ounces. The crooked roof, dotted with pincushions of green moss, overhangs the dark little windows. The reflected light from the high white sky is distorted, rippling unevenly in the old glass.

A deep, open channel of water, at least ten feet across, encircles the house and its garden like a moat, spanned by a wide, flat bridge covered in a layer of earth tufted with grass and dandelions. Down the middle of the bridge, the soil has worn thin over the bare wooden planks.

The garden is a wilderness of bent, half-dead trees, strangled by bindweed, that lean over tangled masses of brambles, wild rosebushes, stinging nettles, and dry yellow grass.

I can’t think how Auntie Ida can live in such a place.

Mimi whispers, “Someone’s looking.”

“Don’t be daft,” I say. “There ain’t nobody here.”

“Look.”

She points, and I see a boy sitting on a broken wooden fence on the other side of the track, staring. I feel I ought to say something, but I’m not sure they even speak English out here.

Then he says, “Hello. What are you doing?”

I say, “Ain’t nobody told you it’s rude to gawp?”

“What are you doing, then?”

“We’re stopping here. Is this Mrs. Eastfield’s house?”

“Yes, it is,” he says. “What are you staying for?”

“She’s our Auntie Ida. Is she nice?”

“Don’t you know your own auntie?” he says, sliding down off the fence. There’s a ripping sound. He winces, but only for a second.

“We ain’t seen her before.”

“Isn’t she too old to be your auntie?”

“She ain’t that sort of auntie,” I say. “She’s our grandma Agnes’s sister — our mum’s aunt — except Grandma’s dead. Dad says Auntie Ida’s about sixty or something.”

“That’s your great-aunt, then,” he says, rubbing the seat of his trousers. “I’ve got one as well — Auntie Ethel. She lives over at the seaside at Wrayness. Her garden’s just about on the beach.”

Keeping his eyes on us all the time, the boy walks backwards into some muddy water — a good thing he’s got rubber boots on.

“That Mrs. Eastfield . . .” he adds, still moving away. “I’d watch myself if I were you. She’s a witch.”

The boy turns quickly and runs off, splashing in and out of the puddles.

As I watch him, I notice for the first time high wooden poles, with wires stretched between them, spaced out in a line along the length of the track. The last pole stands by the bridge. The wire goes down to the house and disappears under the roof.

“It mightn’t be as bad as it looks,” I say to Mimi. “I think Auntie’s on the electric.”

Mum’s going to kill me when she sees I’ve torn my trousers. There must have been a blinking nail sticking out of the fence and it’s gone right through and cut my backside, but I can’t see round. I’ll need to look at it in her bedroom mirror to weigh up the damage.

I had to decide which was worse, me looking like a dope walking backwards or those two girls catching sight of my bottom. If that nail was rusty, I’m most probably going to die from lockjaw, so I’ll have to keep checking to see if I’m smiling when I don’t want to, because that’s what happens when you get lockjaw — you can’t stop yourself smiling. It’s the most dreadful way you can die that there is, even though you look happy when you’re doing it. I don’t know whether a dab of Germolene will stop you getting lockjaw — maybe I should rub the whole tin in, just to make sure.

Trouble is, I can’t tell Mum because she’ll start asking questions and I’m not supposed to go down to Mrs. Eastfield’s.

But I like it down there. It’s nice and quiet.

Our house is specially noisy on Mondays because Mum does the washing. The whole place smells of Baby Pamela’s nappies boiling in the big pan on the gas stove. Even if I manage to hide these trousers in the dirty basket before Mum sees them, there won’t be any others I can put on secretly because they’ll all be in the washer, so I’ll have nothing to wear to make my escape in. The other annoying thing about going home is that Pete and I have had a row because I trod on one of his soldiers and broke its leg off, and he’ll be hopping mad because I’ve sneaked off and left him to do the wringer on his own.

I was down near Mrs. Eastfield’s checking over a spot I thought would be good for a camp — three trees leaning towards each other, almost touching at the top like a wigwam. Me and Pete could live there if we wanted. We could catch fish to eat, though I don’t really like fish unless it’s fish paste.

We’ve got camps all over the place, Pete and me. We’ve even got one in the woods near where that woman keeps wild pigs. At least, we haven’t seen the pigs ourselves, but Tooboy swears blind she’s got some and he says they’ve got big tusks with blood on the ends.

Trouble is, if we did make the wigwam, it would be a bit close to Mrs. Eastfield’s. Pete and me are pretty sure she’s a witch, like old Gussie Jetherell, just down from us — though
she
definitely is. She’s got lots of cats, and that’s a sign. I’ve never seen any cats at Mrs. Eastfield’s, but there’s a great big dog that comes out over the bridge, barking its head off. Sometimes I dare Pete to see how close he can get before it starts, but he’s really scared, and if the dog sees him, Pete legs it and doesn’t stop running till he gets to the end of the Chase. The Chase is Mrs. Eastfield’s road.

I’d love to go into Guerdon Hall. If we asked those girls, they might get us into the house to have a good look around. One’s about my age, and the little skinny one’s more like Terry. Their shoes were all holes, and their clothes were too small for them and, if I’m honest, a bit dirty. They certainly don’t come from anywhere around here. I could tell because the older one left the
h
off of
house,
and nobody here talks like that. Grandma would say they were common.

Poor things, having to stay with Mrs. Eastfield.

Pete and me can hear chickens clucking round the back. Pete reckons they’re probably children Mrs. Eastfield’s caught and put a spell on. I’d try creeping round to see, but Pete won’t, even for a dare, even if we left the dog some meat with sleeping powder on. He says he doesn’t want to be turned into a chicken and eat rubbish seeds and have to push eggs out of his backside all day long.

We stood by the bridge, Mimi clinging to my hand. On the other side of the channel, two rusted iron gates lay half-hidden among the weeds, left where they’d fallen from the gateposts long ago.

The water level was dropping, making a quiet gurgling sound as it went, leaving behind white frothy bubbles on the thick dark mud, just as it did when the tide was going out on the river at Limehouse. Perhaps the channel was not a moat at all, but a loop at the end of a salty tidal creek.

I looked back to the broken fence the boy had been sitting on. It ran along the front of two small ruined cottages. One of the roofs had sunken in, and the other was nothing more than a jumble of wooden sticks. Dirty splinters of glass from smashed windows stuck out of the long grass behind the fence.

Farther away, standing across the end of the track, was an old barn with a wide-open doorway and a long low roof full of holes. Tangled heaps of rusty machinery were piled up in the yard.

Suddenly the deep, hollow sound of barking and the thumping of heavy paws echoed off the walls of the house. An enormous dog came bounding round the corner. Two long strings of dribble flew out of its slobbering mouth and streamed down its shoulders as it ran.

Mimi let go of my hand and fled back down the track. I should have gone after her, but I didn’t want to turn my back on the dog. I glanced behind and saw her slip on the mud into a pool of water.

“Shut up, you!” I shouted at the dog. “Look what you’ve flippin’ well made my sister do!”

It leaped up, but I wasn’t scared. There were dogs like this at home. I stuck my hand out, palm upwards. The dog slowed down a bit, stopped, and sniffed my hand. Then it lolled out its long drippy tongue, moving from one front paw to the other, and gave another few barks, but not so loud this time. I patted its big head, then wiped the dribble off my hand on my skirt. Mimi, grizzling, got up on her own. There were muddy streaks down her coat. Her hands and knees dripped brown water.

“You flippin’ clot,” I said, brushing her down. “What’s Auntie Ida going to say? Oh, it’s all right, Mimi, for Pete’s sake. He’s just a noisy beggar. Stick your hand out like this. Let him sniff you. Blimey, you smell flippin’ awful now. Look, even the dog’s backing off.”

Mimi wouldn’t go over the bridge. “Ain’t goin’,” she said with a sniff. “Don’t like it.”

“You have to. Come on.”

“Won’t.”

I stooped down, picked a dandelion clock, and blew towards the house.

One o’clock, two o’clock, three o’clock
— the little parachutes streamed across the water.

Mimi stepped closer —
six o’clock, seven o’clock

“I ain’t never known one do the right time yet,” I said.

Mimi bent down and tore one up for herself. She blew —
one o’clock, two o’clock
— and followed the swirl of seeds as they floated over the bridge in a cloud of tiny white stars.

I called in at the post office on the way back to see if Mrs. Wickerby had any more soldiers.

Pete and I hate Mrs. Wickerby, because when we did “Penny for the Guy” on Bonfire Night, she wouldn’t let us do it outside her shop because she said it was begging, so we had to drag our guy over the road to outside Mrs. Aylott’s instead. We told Mrs. Aylott we were getting money for the poor, but all we got was threepence from Mr. Rust, which we thought wasn’t going to be much use to the poor, so instead we went into Mrs. Wickerby’s and bought some bubble gum.

There were loads of soldiers in a cardboard box on her counter. I thought it would be easy to take one without Mrs. Wickerby seeing because the three old Death sisters were in the shop having a chinwag with her. They’re called Beattie, Jessie, and Elsie, and they all wear the same white hats that look like meringues.

BOOK: Long Lankin
8.21Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

Blue Waltz by Linda Francis Lee
Little Conversations by Matilde, Sibylla
Her Own Rules by Barbara Taylor Bradford
Sealed with a promise by Mary Margret Daughtridge
The Outcasts by John Flanagan