Summer at World's End (11 page)

Below them, the patched tin roofs of Vile Bernie’s shacks tilted crazily, the chimneys made of bent rusty drainpipes, the walls leaning against mounds of rubbish and old iron. Beyond, driven or towed or pushed into the bushes, or simply dropped over the edge of the quarry, a battered car with shattered glass lay with four wheels in the air like a dead beetle.

Carrie and Lester rode down the side of the hill into a clump of trees where they were hidden from Bottle Dump. Carrie had a halter over her bridle, and they tied up John and Peter and crept on all fours through the bushes until they could see the shacks.

A battered, bulky old car was outside the largest one, standing all askew on soft tyres, its dented boot half open, tied down with wire, so rusty and dilapidated that it looked ready to join the abandoned hulk on its back among the wretched refuse.

‘
The Poacher?
Lester whispered. He knew everybody’s car.

The Poacher was a little mean man in clothes that were too big for him, useful, like a shoplifter’s loose overcoat, for storage. He could sometimes be seen on the edge of the market, selling a few chickens and ducks. Always ordinary breeds of chickens and ducks, with no special markings. No way of telling if they were stolen. He lived in a homemade caravan, never long in the same spot. His laundry line was hung with rabbit skins. The rust stains on his car looked like old blood.

It was a warm evening, and the door of the shack stood
open. From inside came a horrible sound, like the souls of lost cats in hell. Lester and Carrie crept closer and flattened themselves to the ground below a heap of stones. The Poacher and Vile Bernie were singing.

Bernie came to the door with a wine bottle in his beefy hand, took a great gurgling swig and hurled the bottle at one of the rubbish piles, missing Lester and Carrie by inches.

‘
Don’t shoo-hoot the vicar
—’ he sang, bellowing into the night.

‘
The carving knife is quicker!’
The Poacher’s howl was high and strident, as if he had a clothes peg on his nose. ‘Come back in and open this other bottle, rot and damn your vile soul. Me teeth are too far gone to bite off the neck.’

There was no sign of the skeleton dog. But when Carrie shifted slightly, dislodging a stone, another dog, a brown and white collie, crawled out of a tipped-over rain barrel and barked, throwing itself the length of its chain, and choking.

‘Shut up, you devil!’ Black Bernie aimed a kick at it, but was too drunk to reach. The dog went on barking hoarsely. Carrie and Lester were slithering quickly backwards towards the thicker shelter of the trees.

A gunshot cracked the air above their heads. ‘There, you brute!’ Bernie shouted at the dog. ‘The next one will be for you.’

At the sound of the shot, Peter had pulled back and broken his halter rope. He had started for home, but luckily met a patch of sweet clover and stopped. He let Lester catch him easily - it had once taken Carrie and Tom and Mr Mismo (panting) two hours to get hold of him in the meadow - and Lester took off his belt to replace the broken rope.

They rode in silence for a while. Then Lester sighed and said, ‘Did you see?’

‘The dog,’ Carrie said. ‘It was somebody’s pet. Well fed, healthy.’

‘And the wine,’ Lester said. ‘He’s come into some money. Something bad is up at Bottle Dump.’

And echo there, whatever is asked her, answers ‘Death’
.

After the tea party Liza disappeared for a couple of days, leaving the dog and a note that said she had gone ‘to do a job’.

Burglary? There seemed to be nothing this girl would stop at; but when she came back, she had been to do a real job, hitch-hiking to the north country to help a friend from her old gang who had just come out of the hospital.

She arrived back in the R.S.P.C.A. van. The R.S.P.C.A. Man had met her on the road and given her a lift to World’s End. ‘I was coming anyway,’ he told Carrie, ‘to see if you’ve got any new dogs here.’

‘Only Perpetua’s puppies. Come and see them.’ He spent a large part of his days at the kennel for lost and unwanted dogs and cats, but he was always ready to see a few more.

‘The thing is,’ he said, kneeling to stroke Perpetua’s bony head, and praise her, ‘I thought perhaps a dog might have - well, strayed here, the way animals do find their way to this place.’

‘If we’d had any luck,’ Carrie said, ‘there might be a poor thin dog here like the skeleton of a ghost, that we wanted to rescue the other day.’

‘I thought you kids weren’t going to pinch any more animals.’ The R.S.P.C.A. Man tried to look severe, but his face wasn’t made for it.

Oh, we haven’t,’Carrie said, although she wished they had. Where was that wretched dog now?

‘Well, someone has.’ The R.S.P.C.A. Man stood up and brushed straw from the knees of his blue uniform. ‘There’s a big dog gone from a farmer near my place. And a lady rang me up this morning to say her dog had simply disappeared. Never runs off, but it’s been gone four days. And Pine Tree Kennels, they lost two last week before they put padlocks on the runs.’

‘What sort of dogs?’

‘Two setters. Nice ones. The lady’s was a sort of collie cross, it sounded like, though she didn’t know how to describe it. Silky fur, pretty white face, plumy tail - you know how they carry on. They never say mongrel.’

‘Why would anyone steal a dog, unless it’s valuable?’

‘I hate to tell you, Carrie.’ The R.S.P.C.A. Man looked at her sadly, the smile crinkles round his mouth and eyes straightened out into white lines in his tanned face. ‘They’re short of research dogs at the University. Especially biggish ones. They’re paying good money for them, and some of the dealers - well, they don’t ask where they come from.’

‘Come with me,’ Carrie said.

They drove to Bottle Dump. Vile Bernie knew Carrie, and the R.S.P.C.A. Man’s uniform would make him suspicious, so they took Liza. They hid in the back of the van while she went boldly up to the shack with the excuse of asking the way.

‘I’ll put on a foreign accent,’ she said, ‘so he’ll think I’m a lost stranger.’

They heard her knocking on the door, and shouting, ‘Plees mister! I am lost girl, ‘oo need ‘elp from ze kind Eengleeshman!’

No roar from Vile Bernie. No barking.

‘Nobody home.’ Liza came back to the van. While she watched the road, Carrie and the R.S.P.C.A. Man searched round the shacks and dumps, but there was no sign of the brown and white collie. Where was it? Even the barrel and chain were gone.

That evening, Liza and Em went unhopefully into the larder to see what they could cook for supper. There wasn’t much. A lot of their food money had gone to buy some more chickens. They could sell eggs to people who like to get them from hens that were running free, not caged like criminals.

‘Got to spend money to make money’ was a good business motto, but it would be some time before they would make any money out of the new Rhode Island Red hens, Rosie, Redruth and Rubella. They sat funkily under a gooseberry bush, like new girls at school and would not lay, while Dianne and Currier and their five conceited daughters patrolled with their feet picked up high, and dared them to come out.

Michael had sold some of his home-made stools at the church fete, but one of them had come back after it collapsed under a stout lady and she fell into the grate. Michael would have to sell another stool to pay her back her money.

Or sell some more stable manure to the fertilizer-hungry gardeners at the housing estates. But Carrie would not let him drive John in the muck cart with the sign he had written on the back: ‘FINE FARM FERTILER. WE DELVER.’ He was trying to build a small cart for Oliver Twist out of a wheelbarrow body and old pram wheels, but when he tried it out, Oliver trotted off with the broomstick shafts, the axle collapsed, and Michael was left sitting on the ground in the barrow.

Carrie should have driven the fertilizer over to the housing estates herself, but when they came back from school, John was tired … No, he wasn’t, but it was more fun to ride him with Lester than to drive him in the muck cart…

‘So you see,’ Em told Liza, ‘there’s only a few odd bits of this and that —’

Liza poked about the slate shelves among the sad little saucers of left-overs, and said, ‘I’ll make Putrid Pie. That’s what we had on Sundays at Mount P. Everything bunged into a pan and stirred up - different every time.’

She bunged and stirred, with the handle of a screwdriver, since she couldn’t find a big spoon.

‘Is that the chicken food?’ Michael came into the kitchen.

‘It’s your supper,’ Em said, ‘so go and wash your hands.’

‘What for?’ He had not washed before meals since they lived with Aunt Val and she used to drag him shrieking to the basin.

‘Do it,’ Em said sternly. It was to get him turned away to the sink, so that he wouldn’t see Liza bunging in the remains of Em’s short crust pastry that no one would eat.

‘What the eye don’t see, the heart don’t grieve over,’ Liza muttered, rotating the screwdriver, and indeed, when they were all in the dining-room which used to be the saloon bar when World’s End was an inn, everyone said the Putrid Pie was the best supper they had had for ages.

‘Oh thanks very much,’ Em said, huffed. But secretly, she was glad not to be stuck with all the cooking. Someone else’s food always tasted better, like sleeping in a bed you haven’t made yourself.

Joey sat on the rung of Carrie’s high stool at the bar, and she passed him down interesting snacks she found in the pie. She was feeling especially warm about him. Her worry about the dogs going to the research laboratories
had taken her back to those dangerous days when she and Lester had saved Joey in the nick of time from the same fate.

That night, the little black monkey had indigestion. He rubbed his hairy stomach and groaned and rolled up his eyes like Charlie when he was playing dead.

‘It’s my fault.’ Liza was filling a hot water bottle to comfort him. ‘The Putrid Pie.’

‘No, it’s not.’ Em came from the front of the house. ‘He’s been at the pills again.’ She held out an empty bottle. ‘Dusty’s Digitalis. They were hidden in that blue jug on the mantelpiece, but
he
found them.’

When Carrie went to Mr Evans, the village chemist, to get some more pills for the old dog, she told him about the monkey.

‘Aha!’ he said. ‘Monkey tricks, eh?’ When you wanted something at the chemists, you had to wait through his feeble puns. ‘You know what they say - more trouble than a wagonload of monkeys? Well, I’ll fix his little wagon all right.’ His rimless glasses glittered. He sucked his teeth and snickered at his own wit. Carrie waited with a face like a boot for him to get down to business.

He went down to the end of the counter where he mixed the medicines and stuck on labels with writing that no one could read.

‘Did this once for a man who had a pet pig,’ he told Carrie, while he fiddled about. ‘Greedy as a pig, it was’ (Snicker, snicker). ‘When there was nothing else to eat, it ate the wife’s sleeping tablets and fell asleep by the side of the road. Got picked up for dead by the rubbish cart and woke up in a pile of garbage half a mile off the coast. All at sea, you might say. So I made up some capsules with pepper inside. Laugh! The man left ‘em about, and when that pig got a taste of one, he sneezed so hard he blew
the ring right out of his nose. There you are, my dear.’ He handed Carrie Dusty’s tablets and a box labelled, ‘Monkey Puzzle Pills’. That will be three pounds and seventy five pence, and I thank you.’

‘Will you put it on our bill?’ Carrie asked faintly. She hated having to say that as much as shopkeepers hated having to hear it.

The capsules were a success. They put the box in the blue jug on the mantelpiece while Joey was watching with his ripe blackberry eyes, and then left him alone. Quite soon they heard a terrible racket. The sitting-room looked like an earthquake. Chairs were overturned, one curtain torn down, the poker stuck through the wastebasket, the tablecloth torn off and wrapped round the monkey, who was rolling about on the floor with streaming eyes, sneezing and sneezing.

‘That’s cruel,’ Michael said.

‘It’s to save his life. He’ll be all right in a - in a —’ Carrie clapped her hand over her face and exploded through it like a volcano. Joey had scattered the pepper all over the room.

But the woolly monkey was not all right. He went on sneezing. Then he began to cough and wheeze. Instead of jumping about, always trying to be higher than everyone and throwing nutshells at your head, he walked like a crab, feebly sideways, or sat in a corner with his blanket over his head and his mouth stretched in a shape of woe.

‘What’s the matter?’ Michael cuddled him. ‘What’s the matter, poor woollen monkey?’ But Joey would only go, Oh…oh…’

‘Monkeys only talk to each other,’ Carrie said. ‘They’d never let people know if they could talk, in case they were made to work and pay taxes.’

Because they thought it might still be the effects of the Monkey Puzzle Pills, they did not take him back to the vet for a while. But when they did, Mr Harvey took Joey’s temperature, shot up his curly eyebrows and brought them down again in a worried frown.

‘Hundred and four. Looks like pneumonia.’

‘What can you do?’ They looked at him; Carrie, Liza, Em and Michael, waiting.

‘Don’t look at me like that.’ The young vet spread his hands helplessly. ‘I’m not a monkey expert. It’s easy for a doctor. He has only one kind of animal to learn about -people. A vet knows dogs and cats and horses and cows and pigs, but he can’t know
everything.’

‘It says, “Also Monkey Doctor”.’ Michael pointed
trustingly to the label Mr Harvey had stuck on his veterinary certificate.

‘Oh Lord — ‘ he swung away and reached for the telephone. ‘There’s a girl I know at the zoo over near Nettle-field. I’m going to ask her. Zoo hospital? Miss Lynch please … Hullo - Jan? Alec Harvey. Look, I need your help.’

When he put down the telephone, he unbuttoned his white surgery jacket. ‘She says bring the monkey to her at once. She’ll find out what bug he’s got, and put him in a special oxygen cage. I’ll drive you. Tom, you hang on here. Take the temperatures and give the medicines. Check the stitches on that dog’s leg. If anyone comes in, do first aid, or whatever. Ask them to come back.’