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Authors: Lindsey Barraclough

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BOOK: Long Lankin
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Auntie Ida put plaits in so tight I could hardly get my fingernails through my hair to scratch my scalp.

She looked out of the window at the dark grey sky and said the tide was in, so Mimi and I could put on our boots and go and see if the chickens had laid any eggs, but we’d best be quick before the heavens opened.

We unlocked the back door, walked across the cobbles of the small paved yard between the two wings of the house, and took the narrow path that led down the garden.

It was damp and chilly. Rain had fallen in the night. The wet grass was sprinkled with drops like shiny glass beads, each one separate from the others. The branches of the overgrown shrubs arched over the path with the weight of dripping water, their drooping leaves showering us as we brushed by.

Mimi held the basket, and I pushed open the old gate in the wire fence round the henhouse. Our boots soon became clogged with mud and feathers, straw and chicken muck. When we went through the door, the chickens bobbed and jerked and looked us up and down with their little beady eyes, clucking like a lot of old women gossiping.

A huge cockerel with a big fancy-coloured tail and spikes on the back of its feet came over and started pecking around Mimi’s legs. She took hold of my arm, grizzling to go out. I told her she was to give the old bird a kick if it pecked too hard.

Auntie Ida said we had to be firm with the chickens and stand no nonsense. I took a deep breath, stuck my hand under the backside of a big brown hen sitting in its box full of straw, and pushed it off. It rose up, squawking in a flurry of flying feathers and scratchy claws, starting all the other chickens off. They went scattering into the air and scrabbling for the door, making a silly racket. In the empty boxes, I found five warm eggs altogether and let Mimi help me get them safely into the basket.

It started to spit as we pulled the wire gate shut. I rested one hand gently on the eggs while we ran back along the path towards the house. By the time we’d reached the back door, dashed inside, taken off our boots, and put them in the crate like Auntie told us, the rain was falling in heavy drops. We rushed down the stone passage to the kitchen in our socks and showed her the eggs. She was really pleased with us and said we’d done well for townies. For a moment, I thought a smile was coming, but it never did.

The rain went on all day. We listened to the wireless, and Mimi cut pictures out of old magazines and newspapers and stuck them onto bits of cardboard with glue that Auntie made out of flour and water. I thumbed through the stack of papers. Most of them were old and yellow, some even from before the war.

I didn’t realize I’d started drumming on the kitchen table until Auntie told me to stop it. With a big sigh, she went into the pantry and brought out a cardboard box full of plums from the garden. Many of them were overripe and speckled with dots of white mould, but Auntie said if I helped her pick them over and take out the stones, we could make a pie. She gave me a big pinny and sat me down with a bowl and a knife, but I’d never been one for fiddly things like that, and after a short while, I was fed up with blinking plums and had two plasters on my fingers.

The water streamed down the windows in long shining strings.

“Weather for ducks,” Auntie said, getting up and looking out. “I’ll have to take some pails up to the rooms upstairs. There are always leaks when it rains like this. Mimi, you come and help me. Cora, leave those for a minute and wash your hands. You can go and feed the parrot.”

She reached behind the tattered curtain under the sink and brought out a brown paper bag full of long black-and-white-striped seeds.

“Just unhook the feed box and pour some of these in,” she said. “They’re sunflower seeds. The old bird won’t peck you.”

I took the bag and went down the gloomy passage, past the locked doors, and into the sitting room at the end with its great stone fireplace stacked up on one side with logs. The panelled walls and low beamed ceiling made the room seem very dark, probably more so than usual with the heavy sky outside. I thought how cosy it could be if only Auntie would light the fire so we might be warm.

Near the fireplace was an old red settee, so worn that tufts of hairy brown stuffing hung out of the holes. A broken spring was sticking up right in the middle. I told myself that if ever I had to sit down there, I mustn’t forget to check the place first so as not to do myself an injury.

“Hello,”
came a funny voice like an old door creaking. It was the parrot, sitting on his perch in a huge metal cage behind the settee, the stand resting on sheets of yellowing newspaper.

He eyed me up and down as I took out his feed box and filled it with fresh seeds. Some spilled out onto the threadbare carpet, and I quickly picked up every last one in case Auntie Ida came in and told me off.

“Hello.”
His voice had something of Auntie’s in it.

“Don’t you say nothing else?” I said, then thought I might try teaching him to copy some words from me. It would be a good way to pass the hours.

I put my hand through the door of the cage, and taking his time, the parrot climbed down off his perch and walked up and down on my finger, carefully curling and uncurling his claws as he went. He stretched out his wings one by one, as if he were showing me the pretty green and red of his feathers. I moved him close to his feed box and watched how clever he was at taking a seed with his beak and rolling it around with his funny fat tongue, which looked just like a piece of smooth grey rubber. The bits of shell fell to the sand at the bottom of his cage, and he ate the nice soft centre. Really nippy, what he could do with no teeth.

A piano stood beside the window. On the wall above it hung a large mirror in a carved wooden frame pocked with wormholes.

I lifted the parrot back on his perch, saying “Cheerio!” three times. That’s what I was going to do every day till he learned it. Then I hooked up his wire door and went across to the piano. I looked up and gazed at myself in the old mirror.

Its misty surface was speckled with black dots. In places, especially in the corners, the glass was so cloudy that it hardly reflected the room back at all. Towards the top there was a hole with dark cracks radiating out from it, as if somebody had thrown something small and heavy at the mirror, not shattering it, but leaving this long crooked spider of a mark. One of the cracks ran almost the full length of the glass. It cut across my face diagonally like a scar.

I peered at my horrid plaits, longing to rip out the elastic and shake loose my scraped-back hair. I wondered if Auntie would believe me if I undid it all and said the rubber bands were so tight that they just snapped of their own accord.

My eyes moved down to the piano. On top was a dusty wooden clock with no hands, and next to it a small sitting lion made of brass, with ugly green stone eyes and a snarling mouth.

I wrote
CORA
with my finger in the thick dust on the piano lid.

Nan Drumm, Dad’s mum, had a piano in her little front room. Some of the notes didn’t work, but it didn’t matter. Before she went back to Scotland and we didn’t see her anymore, she would play it sometimes — old music-hall songs, and carols when we went over for our Christmas dinner. I loved singing and dancing around the room to the music, holding out my skirt and bumping into the furniture. That was before my sister was born.

I’d heard Auntie Ida go upstairs with her, Mimi clanging the buckets. Surely Auntie wouldn’t mind if I had a little tinkle on the ivories, as Nan used to say. I would have liked to learn to play the piano like Nan did. She might have shown me how to do it if she had stayed.

I sat down on the stool, one of those that whirled around and went up and down, and I must have whizzed round on it for five minutes at least before I came to a stop, all giddy. I blew at the dust on the lid. The top layer rose up around my name in a thick cloud, making me cough.
CORA
remained faintly there, even when the dust began to settle. The lid creaked a little as I lifted it to uncover the long row of black and yellow-brown keys.

I wiggled my fingers and put them softly down, thinking I might try and have a go at “Three Blind Mice,” which I’d worked out once on Nan’s piano.

I found the first three notes, and played them twice and then once more for luck.

My hand moved up the keys a little way for
“See how they run.”
I put the two bits of tune together. Then I tapped out a couple of notes with my left hand to find one that would fit, but it was difficult. None of them sounded right. I played
“Three blind mice, three blind mice,”
over and over —
“See how they run, see how they run,”
four, five, six times —
“Three blind mice, three blind mice . . .

Just then, over the noise of my clumsy playing and the steady pattering of the rain, I became aware of another sound, barely on the edge of my hearing. I stopped my fingers.

It grew louder. Inside the room, somewhere behind me, a woman was singing. I lowered my hands silently, trembling, into my lap. The tune was strange, awkward:

“Said my lord to my lady as he mounted his horse:

‘Beware of Long Lankin that lives in the moss.’

“Said my lord to my lady as he rode away:

‘Beware of Long Lankin that lives in the hay.’”

It wasn’t Auntie Ida’s voice.

Every nerve prickled on my skin. I could hardly breathe. Out of the corner of my eye I could make out the rain trickling down the diamond panes in silver ribbons.

“‘Let the doors be all bolted and the windows all pinned,

And leave not a hole for a mouse to creep in.’”

I felt the blood pumping through the vein in my neck.

“The doors were all bolted and the windows all pinned,

Except one little window where Long Lankin crept in.”

“Hello,”
said the parrot.

The singing stopped.

I gasped, stood up, and whirled round. There was nobody there. The parrot was biting at a seed in his claw. I turned back, and through the black specks scattered on the mirror I saw my white staring face, slashed into two pieces by the crack in the glass.

Auntie Ida and Mimi clattered loudly down the stairs. In my haste to get out of the room, I picked up the wrong end of the paper bag, and the seeds shot out and scattered all over the floor.

I grabbed the seeds in handfuls, tearing the bag in my hurry to get them back inside. In the end, I pushed the rest through a big hole in the carpet, then ran out of the door and back to the kitchen.

It was going to be boiling hot. The edges of the puddles down the Chase were cracking as they dried.

Pete and I thought we’d chance going down to Mrs. Eastfield’s to see if Cora and Mimi came out. Pete was pretty sure they’d most probably been turned into chickens, but I told him to leave off.

We didn’t want to get too close, so if Mrs. Eastfield was with them, we could hide in the triangle of trees or scarper quick before she saw us.

Luckily we only waited about ten minutes, discussing the camp but then thinking it wasn’t a good place after all — too near Guerdon Hall really — when we heard Cora’s voice. She was shouting at Mimi.

We peeped out first to make sure Mrs. Eastfield wasn’t there, then came out from the trees.

Mimi was wobbling on one leg while Cora poured water out of her boot, yelling that she was stupid. Mimi lost her balance and put her wet foot down in a big patch of mud. Cora shouted even louder and slapped her arm. Mimi started crying.

“Someone’s in a bad mood,” I whispered to Pete.

“Got a booter, then?” he called out.

“Yeah, she flippin’ well has!” Cora shouted back. “Auntie got us boots, but Mimi’s are too flaming big.”

“She didn’t do it on purpose,” I said.

“Well, I ain’t had no sleep, and I’m up to here with her!” said Cora, who frankly did look a bit tired.

She pulled the corner of an envelope out of her skirt pocket. “Look, I didn’t post this letter on Tuesday because we went down the church, so don’t let me forget to do it today.”

“Is it the letter about you going home? I still don’t know why you’ve got to go back when you’ve only just come.”

“I told you — Mum ain’t at home and Dad’s got to work.”

“So who’s going to look after you when you get back?”

Cora stared at the ground. “I don’t know,” she muttered. “I suppose I could make sure Mimi was all right.”

“Wouldn’t it be easier to stay here until your mum comes home?”

She pushed some water around a puddle with the toe of her boot. “Auntie Ida’s too busy to have us,” she said.

“Why didn’t you go to sleep? Was it the rain?”

“No. Doesn’t matter. Stop asking me things.”

“Do you want to come down to the church first?”

“Yeah, but best be quick. Auntie’ll go mad if she knows I ain’t posted the letter.”

“Don’t like it down there,” Mimi sniffed. “Don’t like it. That church thing. Auntie said not to go.”

“Oh, just shut up, will you? You’re a flippin’ pest,” said Cora, pulling her roughly.

BOOK: Long Lankin
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