Long Lankin (5 page)

Best of all, though, we like going down to the marshes. There’s a great hill on the way to the church — that’s All Hallows, stuck all by itself away from the village. It’s smashing whizzing down the hill on your bike with your feet off the pedals, but Pete’s got a puncture. Mum won’t let me take any more spoons outside, and if I haven’t got spoons, I can’t get the inner tube out. She says I left them in the garden last time, and she didn’t have enough for the prunes. I told her Terry had taken them out to eat mud with, but she didn’t believe me.

I told Pete about the two girls I’d seen. He didn’t seem too keen, but I told him they might be good for a snoop around Mrs. Eastfield’s house. He wanted to go down to the church, but I told him he had to come and sit on the fence with me and wait for them. He nearly went into a mood, but when I told him about the plans for the new camp, he came up the Chase with me to have a look.

Auntie Ida said she wasn’t moving the horrible man. She said he’d been there forever and she wasn’t getting a ladder out, and anyway she couldn’t do it on her own as it would be much too heavy, and we’d have to put up with it and she didn’t have anywhere to put him anyway, and she was really cross about the sheet and the blanket and would have to spend hours scrubbing the mattress with Dettol, and where was she going to find a rubber sheet for the bed, and Mimi should have grown out of that by now, and I was a really cheeky girl, only just arrived and telling her what to do about the painting, and what was Dad doing sending us with no change of clothes, only our pyjamas (that she’d had to stick in the kitchen sink for soaking, and however were they to get properly dried and aired by tonight with the weather so changeable she had no idea), and a couple of pairs of knickers and some socks with holes in, and if Mimi was so silly that she wouldn’t go to the toilet upstairs, there was another one by the back door she would have to use.

Then Auntie said she had to go on an errand and she’d be about an hour and a half but we weren’t allowed to stay in the house on our own. We were to go up to the village, Bryers Guerdon, to Mrs. Wickerby’s to post the letter she’d written to Dad last night. Auntie gave us threepence for the stamp, but nothing extra for sweets or anything.

She opened the back door and squinted, looking across and down the garden. Finn pushed past her and ran up the path, round the henhouse and back.

She said we weren’t ever to go out in the garden when the tide was out in the creeks because Mimi might get sucked down in the mud, which wasn’t fair if we had to stay in with all the windows shut and boil up like we were in a jungle or something. When I asked why the windows stayed closed all the time, she told me to hold my tongue. I thought it’d be even more dangerous if the tide was in because Mimi might fall in the water and get herself drowned, and that would be much worse than getting stuck in the mud, because at least then I could always pull her out before her head went under, but I didn’t dare say anything.

Auntie gave me very clear directions how to get to Bryers Guerdon and said we weren’t to dawdle and were absolutely not to go down to the old church — absolutely not, under any circumstances, she said; it was completely forbidden. I had to check the time by the big clock in Mrs. Wickerby’s, and after an hour and a half Auntie would have got back. Whatever happened, we were absolutely not to go down to the church, absolutely not. If she hadn’t returned, we were to wait for her in the Chase, and not come back over the creek into the garden, and she said most particularly we had to wait just by the old farm cottages, and not near the bridge. She made me promise, so I crossed my heart and licked my finger and spat, but she looked a bit shirty, as if she didn’t like me doing it.

Mimi and me went round to the front of the house, out through the gateway and over the bridge. Sitting on the fence, in exactly the same place as yesterday, was the boy, but this time he had another boy with him, a bit smaller.

“Spent a night in the haunted house, then?” the big boy said.

The smaller boy lifted up his arms, wobbled his fingers, and went “Wooooo!” like a ghost and nearly fell off the fence.

Their voices sounded the same, and I guessed they were brothers.

“I’m Roger, and this is Pete,” said the older one.

“I’m Cora, and she’s Mimi.” I jerked my thumb behind me at her.

“Mimi! Ooh-la-la!” said Pete, jumping down and wiggling his hips from side to side. I suppose he thought that’s what French people did all day — wiggled their hips and said “Ooh-la-la.”

“It’s not Mimi like that,” I said. “It’s a nickname. She’s Elizabeth really.”

As we walked along, Roger said he’d got three brothers — Dennis, Terry, Pete of course — and a sister, Baby Pamela.

“Baby Pamela’s all right for a name,” said Roger, “but I reckon if you’ve waited that long for a girl, you should call her something a bit more interesting, like Aspidistria or something.”

We were at the end of the Chase.

“Fancy coming down the church?” Roger asked. “Pete and me are always playing around there.”

“Auntie Ida said we wasn’t supposed to go,” I said. “Went on and on, she did. Made me promise, and I did the special sign.”

“Mum’s always saying we’re not to either, but we just don’t say,” said Roger. “There’s loads to do down there. Won’t take long to show you.”

“We’re supposed to go and post this letter,” I said.

“You can post it after,” said Roger.

“Better not. I promised,” I said.

“Doesn’t matter, then,” said Roger.

“There’s graves so old they’re half sticking up out of the ground,” said Pete. “We dig around them sometimes.”

“I’ve got to post this,” I said. “It’s for Dad to come and take us home.”

“But you’ve only just got here,” said Roger.

“I know.”

“Where’s your mum, then? Can’t she come and get you?”

“She —” I began, not sure how I was going to finish. “She ain’t at home at the moment.”

“When’s she coming back, then?”

“Um . . . sometime — not quite sure right now.”

“See you, then,” said Roger. “Pete and me are going down.”

“Ta ta, then.”

Mimi and me stood and watched while they went towards the church. I looked at the envelope in my hand:
H. R. Drumm, Esq
. I imagined Dad would get the letter the next morning, which was Wednesday, and might come in the afternoon, or Thursday at the latest, so if we were going home nearly straight away, maybe it wouldn’t matter if we just popped down and had a little look at the church; then we could go up to the post office afterwards.

“Hang on!” I shouted, shoving the letter in my pocket. “Wait! We’ll come an’ all!”

Roger and Pete looked back, then stopped to wait for us.

“Don’t want to,” Mimi said.

“You’ll do what I blimmin’ well say!”

“Auntie said not to.”

“Don’t flippin’ well tell her, then.”

“Don’t like it.”

“Stay here on your own, then!”

Mimi’s lower lip wobbled. She rubbed Sid’s worn patch, then put her small soft hand in mine.

We walked down the lane until we came to a large gate standing all by itself on the left-hand side of the road. It had a tiled roof, held up by a wooden arch supported by stone pillars. Like the roof of Guerdon Hall, it was sunken in and soft with green moss. The wooden gates in the middle looked half-rotten. They’d been lashed together with bunches of old ropes and rusty chains. The pillars were messy with brambles and wild rosebushes, and the stinging nettles were nearly as high as our shoulders.

“This is a funny old gate,” I said, standing in front. “Why’s it all tied up, then?”

“I don’t know,” said Roger. “It’s always been like that. You ever made itching powder out of the middle of rose hips?”

“Nah, does it work?”

“Yeah, brilliant. Have you tried blackberries?”

“Won’t you get poisoned, just eating stuff by the road?” I said.

“No, but you’ve got to eat the black ones.”

I put one in my mouth. It was really sour.

“We haven’t had enough sun,” Roger said, screwing up his face. “Maybe in another week or so.”

As I spat out the blackberry, I saw something small and pale moving on an enormous, ugly old tree far away on the wild edge of the churchyard, beyond the gravestones. Leafy branches grew out of the massive trunk, but no farther up than halfway. The tree had no crown. Instead, a huge, bare white branch towered high above the cluster of branches lower down, ending in a gigantic hook split into two.

Roger followed my gaze. “We don’t like that tree, Pete and me,” he said. “Most of it’s dead. It’s most probably a gypsy tree.”

“What’s a gypsy tree, then?”

“Well, if you give a gypsy some money or buy some pegs or something, then they’ll hang a rag from a tree near your house so the next gypsy who comes along knows you’ll give them something as well.”

“But there ain’t no houses here. Why do you think it’s a gypsy tree?”

“Because there’s things on it,” said Pete, “and when there’s things on a tree, it’s a gypsy tree.”

“It’s like it’s got a dead heart,” I said.

A little way down the road was a wide iron gate, opening onto the dirt path that led to the small church, its warm stone walls flickering in the swaying shadows of the fat overhanging trees.

We cut across in front of the tower, weaving our way around the weathered, ivy-choked crosses and tombstones and trying not to trip over the tops of the ancient graves hidden in the long grass. As we drew nearer to the far boundary of the churchyard, I felt my shoes and socks becoming sodden. The ground was growing spongier, and the small rounded hummocks of moss began to give way under our feet so that we were trailing through shallow water. We came close to the tree at last. I saw that the great thick roots facing us were rising up out of a boggy pool, ringed with reeds and bulrushes. There was higher ground at the back where the ground seemed to be dry, and on that side the tree appeared to be well rooted in the shaded earth.

Odd things hung from the branches — dirty rags, shredded by the wind, all faded to the same shade of greyish white, fastened on with rusty wire so long ago that the bark of the tree had grown around it; the remains of children’s shoes; an old leather sole; a small buckle. Nailed to the trunk was a little, rough square of wood, covered with faint scratches that might once have been writing; other rusty nails stuck out with nothing on them at all, as if the things had long blown away and rotted in the soil or had fallen off to be lost in the green stagnant water.

I looked up. A face with one eye stared down at me. It was the broken head of an old doll tied onto a branch by its long dirty hair.

A pile of brown, rotting flowers was stacked up against the wall on the dark side of the church.

“They’re from people’s funerals,” I told Cora as she picked up some soggy little cards in cellophane covers. “Old Mr. Hibbert comes down and tidies up the newer graves and chucks the old wreaths on this heap. He’s done it for years. Once, Pete and I had to hide for two hours while he was pottering about. If he’d seen us, he would have sneaked on us to Mum.”

“You know, some of these flowers are still all right,” Cora said. “They’ve got little wires coming out of them.” She held up the rusting frame of a square wreath. “Look, we could make new wreaths with flowers that ain’t mouldy yet and put them on them poor old graves from hundreds of years ago where nobody visits.”

My first thought was that Gary Webb in my class would probably beat me up or something if he found out I’d been playing with flowers. I’d had a lot of trouble one way and another with Gary Webb. I saw his mum at the Confirmations and she’d got the same sort of sticking-out teeth.

The worst thing happened when we had a new teacher in our school, Miss Doyle, who was a real person and not a nun. She asked us if we had anything interesting to tell the class about where we lived, and I put my hand up and said we had some beavers living in the pond by our woods, and they’d made a big house out of sticks.

“A lodge,” she’d said.

“Yes, that’s right, a lodge,” I said, and by the end of my story, I almost believed it myself, I could see the beavers so clearly in my mind.