Long Lankin (4 page)

We have two eggs each for our tea, with bread-and-butter soldiers for dipping. Auntie only boils the eggs for a couple of minutes so there is jelly around the yolks. I peep under my first strip of bread and see it is flecked with green. I worry Mimi might make a fuss, but she doesn’t notice the mould under the butter and is so hungry she spoons up all the runny egg and scrapes out both her shells afterwards.

Auntie says it’s time for bed, and I daren’t argue even though it’s so early, especially for me. We go back upstairs. I get our pyjamas out of our duffel bags and take Mimi to the bathroom.

I push open the door. It isn’t a bathroom at all but a shadowy room full of old paintings. The Guerdons look down on us from the walls as we stand in the doorway. I see no likeness to myself at all, dark haired and dark eyed as I am, but in almost every face I see Mimi’s pale eyes, Mimi’s mouth, and her fluffy fair hair.

The walls are covered with red material, most of it torn and faded. Up near the ceiling on the outside wall are dark patches of damp, and some of the fabric has come away and hangs loose and frayed over the window.

In a dark corner nearby is a portrait of a lady with the same straight nose as Auntie Ida, but she is young and pretty, in a pink dress and lovely shiny pearls. I can’t resist running my finger along the top of the frame to see how much dust there is. It comes down in a long thick string and I sneeze two huge sneezes, which makes Mimi laugh.

Beside the fireplace, there is a short dark passage. At the end of it, I can just make out the shape of another door. “Must be the bathroom down there,” I say to Mimi, and push her in front of me.

Suddenly, without warning, she opens her mouth and screams — so loudly that the sound bounces from one side of the passage to the other.

Something crashes in the kitchen downstairs.

“What on earth’s the matter? Be quiet, Mimi —
shh
.”

I clamp one trembling hand over Mimi’s mouth and fumble for a light switch with the other but find nothing.

I look up. On the wall over the bathroom door is the face of an old man, glaring down at us out of the darkness. His eyes are two piercing white dots. A few thin grey wisps of hair hang down on each side of his skull. His outstretched hand is raised, the curved fingers spread out towards us like a claw.

I hear Auntie Ida rushing up the staircase. She is out of breath, her face white. She follows our gaze. I expect her to be angry, but when she sees the painting, she just shuts her eyes for a moment, panting slightly.

“Oh,” she says quietly, putting her hand on Mimi’s shuddering shoulder, “that’s — that’s only — we called him Old Peter. He’s been up there for years and years. You get used to him. It’s all right — really. There’s no lamp here, but leave the doors open when you come out, and the light from the bathroom window will brighten up the passage a bit. I’ll — I’ll wait for you here while you get washed, and take you back to your bedroom. Be careful: there are three steps down behind that door.”

What a daft place to put steps. If she hadn’t said anything, we most probably would have fallen smash down headfirst on the hard wooden floor and broken our necks.

Behind the door is a little room with two more doors. The one to the right is the toilet, and the other is the bathroom.

At home the privy is outside in the yard. I think it’s cleaner than having one in the house like this. Ours has been leaking for a couple of weeks, so we’ve had to share with the Woolletts next door. Mrs. Woollett’s mother, Mrs. Bracegirdle, is always in the privy because she’s got a disease. Sometimes we have to stand outside, hoping we won’t burst before she comes out. Mimi hates going to the Woolletts’. She hangs on in our house till she’s desperate.

She’s never going to go here with that man hanging on the wall.

I open the bathroom door and blink. The light is green and cold. The ivy outside has grown almost completely over the small arched windows. Some of its stems have crept through gaps and are inside, feeling their way upwards towards the ceiling.

Long ago, it must have been a different kind of room altogether, not a bathroom at all. When I stand in the corner behind the door, in that dusky half-light I can see shapes on the walls — shapes of people, trees, and flowers that were once there but have since been painted over. Now they are nothing more than ghosts, their pale colours faded almost to nothing. The shadowy people look at me, look out at me from the past. Their eyes are barely visible. They watch me in secret. Only when I stand in that special place, and turn my head in a certain way, can I peer into their hidden world and watch them back.

A huge bath, stained with long streaks of brown and green, sits on iron legs right in the middle of the room. The right tap drips now and then.

Dad didn’t put any washing stuff in our duffel bags. I brush our teeth with a nasty old toothbrush that lies on a shelf under the mirror and use some vile pink powder in a tin next to the brush. At least, I hope it’s toothpaste and not something for cleaning out the sink. I wipe Mimi over with a hard old flannel full of holes that was wrapped around one of the taps. There’s only cold water coming through.

Auntie Ida is waiting outside. I see her eyes going to the worn patches around my knees, and I cover up the holes in the elbows with my hands. She says our pyjamas are too small. My teeth begin to chatter. The house must be perishing in the winter, the sort of place to give you the rheumatics.

When we come back down the passage, I don’t look behind me at the old man on the wall, but I can almost feel two needles of light coming out of his eyes and boring into my shoulder blades.

I lie in the big bed next to Mimi and try to get to sleep. She goes off straight away, rubbing Sid’s little worn patch, but her gentle snoring doesn’t soothe me at all.

The night closes in, and the house wraps us up in itself, making its own noises in the dark — muffled clicks, soft thuds from unknown rooms, the rustling of mice in their secret scratchy places underneath the floors. I can hear beetles creeping along the cracks in the old hairy plaster, and above my head, in the angles of the beams, big black spiders are spinning, softly spinning in the shadows.

I hope Auntie Ida is writing her letter so Dad will come and fetch us home.

Late, but I don’t know how late, I hear slow creaking on the stairs. A gleam of soft candlelight flares under our door for a moment as Auntie passes on her way to bed.

My worn-out tweed skirt lies over the back of the chair. The hem’s been hanging down for weeks. Will’s old shirt is in a heap on the floor, and I’ll just pick it up and put it on again tomorrow, along with the brown cardigan I knitted before the war, the one I wore today, and yesterday, and the day before that.

I know what I have become. I find in some small hidden room of myself a little corner of shame, but I quickly shut the door on it.

I used to smile at my reflection in the mirror there and carefully arrange that jewelled butterfly comb in my hair — the comb that lies in the dust on top of the chest of drawers, with three of its teeth missing. How smooth my skin was then. Now the lines on my face are like the cracks in the dried-up mud at the bottom of the creek when the tide goes out.

I was so slender in the blue silk dress that even now hangs beside the door. The colour has faded on the outside of the pleats, where the light strikes them, but when I press them apart with my fingers, the gleaming turquoise shines out with the brilliance of years ago.

His letter is still in its envelope, tucked into the pocket.

Why am I thinking of that now? Why didn’t they leave me alone . . . ?

Why am I lying awake? What am I listening for?

They should have left me alone. . . .

They can’t stay here.

I’m lying in the ditch, the muddy water soaking my back and legs. The more I try to drag myself out, the farther in I sink. My arms reach up to grab the long grass on the bank.

The bed was warm and wet.

“Flippin’ heck! Mimi! Wake up! Look what you’ve flippin’ done! Blinkin’ hell!”

“Sorry . . .”

“Flippin’ hell . . .”

“I had to go . . .”

“Flippin’ hell . . .”

The bed was getting cold and beginning to smell.

“For God’s sake, get up! Have you finished or is there any more coming?”

“‘S all gone.”

I rolled back the eiderdown and blankets. Luckily they were dry, but the sheet and underblanket were sopping. I pulled them off, rolled them up, and threw them on the floor. The mattress was wet, too, but I couldn’t do anything about that now. I took off our sodden pyjamas, wrapped us both up in the prickly woollen blankets, then covered us with the eiderdown.

Mimi went back to sleep, but I lay awake, itchy in the blanket, worrying about how I was going to ask Auntie Ida to move the painting of the old, bald man with the hand like a claw.

I love sunny mornings in the summer holidays. I lean over Pete from the top bunk and drop something on him, like a piece of Plasticine or a slipper.

“Oi! Leave off, will you!”

Then he gets up and tries to hit my legs. I push the ladder down so he can’t get up, and then he goes off to the bathroom, sulking. It’s usually something like that.

We have a bit of toast, if there’s bread left, or make ourselves some shredded wheat if the milkman’s been, then we leave the house quickly in case Mum nabs us. If you hang around the house for too long, she’ll find you jobs to do. You’ve only got to walk past the door and she’ll ask you to make her a cup of tea. Once I thought I’d give myself a bad accident with the boiling water — that would teach her to ask a child to run round after her — but I couldn’t do it in the end, in case it went wrong and I ended up in hospital for six months with no skin.

Depending on how we feel, we might go down to the woods and see if Tooboy’s around. He’s got a scary older brother, Figsy, who has a greasy quiff and wears tight black trousers so his legs look like two sticks of liquorice. Now and then he rides a moped around the path in the woods. We call it his pop-pop and keep out of the way if we hear it coming. Tooboy lets us play on the big rope-swing Figsy made with his gang. You have to climb a tree to get to it, it’s so high, but if we hear the pop-pop, we scarper real quick, even Tooboy, and hide in the trees till Figsy’s gone.

Sometimes we go over to the Patches and check on our camps, though if there’s anyone about, they look at us a bit sideways as people from Bryers Guerdon tend not to go there. The Patches are a long way down Ottery Lane, almost to North Fairing. Dad said East Enders from London came out to the country between the two world wars and built houses for themselves on plots of land sold off or rented out by one of the North Fairing farmers. We’ve always called them the Patches — patches of land, I suppose.