Summer at World's End (13 page)

Farewell sweet singer, dead in thy beauty…

Carrie began to have that feeling at the back of her neck. Creepy. The creepy feeling that someone is watching you from behind. She spun round, and nearly died of shock.

In the lane, half hidden behind the tree at the corner of the hedge, was a horrible-looking man, with a tired, panting dog on a frayed rope. Vile Bernie, and the dog was Dusty!

Liza saw him at the same time. She ran across the lawn and took the rope off the dog’s collar.

‘Very nice, my dears. Very nice to see you young ‘uns playin’ your innocent games.’ Leering with one eye shut from his habit of sighting down a gun barrel and the other open and bloodshot, his blackened teeth grinning in his tobacco-stained mouth, Vile Bernie was even more horrible than when he was enraged.

But he had brought Dusty back. ‘Found him t’other side of the wood,’ he said, ‘looking all round, and reckoned he was lost.’ His clothes were stiff with dirt and grease. He gave off a powerful smell. ‘Thought he come from here, seeing how you lot have all these here animals.’ His
voice was creaking and croaky, unused to being used for anything but growling and swearing and bellowing.

‘Thank you.’ Liza, on her knees by the dog, smiled up at him, shaking back her red hair. ‘It was very kind.’

‘Think nothing of it.’ Was he going to ask for a reward? Was that why he had come? ‘But you want to watch him. Lots of dog-stealing these days. Something dreadful. Lost a dog meself only last week.’

‘A collie?’ Carrie asked before she could stop herself.

But Bernie shook his head. ‘Never did know one breed from t’other. Only an ignorant man, Missie. No schooling … Never had no chance…’

Whining, he put his huge knotted hand up to his unkempt hair and tugged at a piece of it - Vile Bernie tugging his forelock like a peasant of olden times! - and went away, walking in the ditch at the side of the lane, shuffling among last year’s leaves.

They looked at each other. ‘He wasn’t so bad.’ Carrie frowned, not understanding.

‘We were wrong to think he’d been dog-stealing,’ Liza said.

The tree above them rustled and shook. Lester suddenly dropped down out of it.

Liza jumped, and said, ‘I wish you wouldn’t do that.’

Carrie had got used to Lester appearing and disappearing. ‘He wasn’t so bad, was he?’ she asked him.

‘He’s cunning.’ Lester darted out to the road to see Bernie’s humped back shuffling round the corner. ‘More dangerous than we thought.’

‘But he brought back Dusty. If he wanted to steal dogs —’

‘To put us off the scent,’ Lester said. ‘Hadn’t you thought of that? I
think he knows we know something
.’

‘We don’t know much.’

‘But he doesn’t know
how
much. If he finds he can’t choke us off like this, he’ll try something else.’

Carrie stared at him.

‘He could get dangerous.’ Lester stared back at her, knowing she understood. ‘He’ll stop at nothing.’

The summer holidays arrived, which was marvellous.

Hubert Zlotkin came, which was not so marvellous.

He was spoiled and greedy and useless. Bad enough when he was lying in the hammock, eating potato crisps and reading comics. Worse when he was out of it - a threat to society - because you never knew where he was going to make trouble.

‘We only put up with you so that Liza can stay!’ Carrie was driven to yell at him in fury, after he had left a gate open and Oliver had ambled down the road and eaten three rows of peas and some budding zinnias in the garden of the village policeman.

‘That’s right.’ One of the worst things about Hube the Boob was that he had no pride. ‘But if my Mum-may wasn’t in Clacton with Minnie Boggs, I wouldn’t put up with
you
. There’s nothing to do in this rotten hole.’

‘Try working.’

‘I didn’t mean
that.’
Hubert was shocked. ‘I mean, I’ve never lived in a house without the telly. Why ain’t you got a set?’

‘Don’t you know television needs electricity? Don’t you know
anything?’

He moaned for his favourite programmes.

‘Five o’clock.’ Guzzling bread and jam, he gazed mournfully at the watch nailed to the kitchen wall, which
was the only clock in the house. ‘Just time for
Land of the Green Monsters.’

Hube the Boob. Hube the Boob Tube, they called him when he kept carrying on about television. Square as a Cube.

Although he was more round than square. To shut him up, and get some fat off him, Tom set him to digging up a bed to plant with winter cabbages. Hubert toiled away panting, sweat pouring off him, sticking the fork through his foot, falling over backwards if he struck a root. Once he pretended to faint, very dramatically, clutching his brow and crying, ‘It’s all going black!’ before he swooned carefully into a soft path of long grass. Tom dashed a bucket of water over his head, so he didn’t try that again.

Poor old Hube. Tom got quite fond of him, because he was so awful.

‘You must work if you want to eat,’ he told him.

Hubert understood that. He wanted to eat.

A man from the village drove to a factory in Nettlefield every morning, so he took Tom with him to his new job at the zoo. Liza rode Old Red to the bus stop, and went to the housing estates to work for Mr Harvey.

She was clumsy and reckless and slapdash. ‘But she’ll learn,’ Mr Harvey sighed. He called her Old Red, like the bicycle. She wore her russet hair in a thick braided rope down her back, and sometimes when she came home she was so tired that she cried when she told them what she had broken or spilled, and how many wrong medicines Mr Harvey had just stopped her giving in the nick of time, and how many wrong messages she had given to customers.

‘I told this lady her dog was ready to go home,’ she said. ‘But it was Heaven he was ready to go home to, not her.’

‘What did Mr Harvey say?’

Liza sighed and wiped her eyes with the end of her pigtail. ‘“You’ll learn.”’

Everyone was tired, working in the heat of this amazing August. Em was baby-sitting for various local mothers who couldn’t stand having their children home from school. Carrie was doing deliveries with John and the trap for a market gardener whose engine had dropped out of the bottom of his truck.

After the collapse of his muck cart, Michael had dragged home an old wicker armchair from the dump, and had converted it into a sort of horse-powered wheelchair in which he and Oliver Twist took an old crippled lady for rides. Her name was Miss Cordelia Chattaway. She paid Michael a pound a time to ride through the lush green lanes under a mauve silk parasol, bowing and smiling to non-existent friends and admirers, her wheezy old chow dog squatting on her useless little feet.

In the evenings, everyone ran up the meadow slope, through the fence and down through Mr Mismo’s cow pasture to plunge into the cool shallow brook. They lay on the pebbly bottom with their eyes closed, letting the water run over them.

‘It’s too cold!’ Hubert wailed, dipping in a toe like an uncooked cocktail sausage.

Charlie barked behind him. He started, slipped, fell in, and lay on his back like a dead fish, his pale hair floating downstream.

‘I feel like the mermaid in
Mysteries of the Deep,
’ he said. ‘Sunday evenings, seven-thirty.’

Hube the Boob Tube. He was a step down on the ladder of human development.

‘We had a monkey that was more intelligent than you,’ Carrie told him.

‘So what?’ He lay in the cool water with his face
screwed up, as if someone were going to come at him with a bar of scrubbing soap. ‘Monkeys used to be people.’

He got everything wrong.

Joey the black woolly monkey was not coming home. When he recovered from pneumonia, Janet Lynch had suggested that he should stay at the Children’s Zoo.

‘Get sick again, if not,’ she said in her clipped, time-saving way. ‘If you love him, let him stay.’

Carrie missed him sadly, and would not admit that life was easier without the mess of him, and the clamouring for attention, and the scares - where was he? What had he got into?

‘Not good, you know, to keep a monk at home,’ Jan Lynch said. ‘Needs his own kind.’

‘He needed
me,’
Carrie said sadly, remembering the clutching arms, the leathery little hands, the mumbly kisses. How he chirped when he was happy. How he cried like a baby when he was unhappy, and it looked like laughing, if you didn’t know.

One evening when the sun had gone down and drawn the worst of the flies with it, Carrie and Lester and Michael and the dogs went for a long supper ride with sandwiches in their pockets and a hot water bottle of cider lashed to the front of John’s saddle.

They rode through the woods, where the path was black and squashy from centuries of fallen leaves, down into a valley, across a tiny stream where Oliver jumped three feet in the air from a standstill and Michael fell off, and up to the top of the gorse common to eat their sandwiches on the sinister lip of the Bottle Dump quarry.

In the summer, the bushes were too thick to see down to the shacks. They sent Michael sliding down the steep bank to scout. He came back to report nothing. No lights in
the shacks. No dogs in sight. He had thrown down a stone to see what barked or moved.

‘What did?’

‘Only some rats on a rubbish heap. They went back into it. I saw their tails.’

They rode home another way, across the abandoned airfield at the top of a flat-crested hill. It was rather a spooky place, even in the daytime. In the War, in the Battle of Britain, young men had flown from here to keep the enemy away from England’s shores. Young men who hadn’t been pilots before the war, straight from school many of them, quickly trained, so many needed, because so many who took off from here in their tiny Spitfire fighter planes did not come back.

The broken down huts in the middle of the field held secret memories of those perilous times long before Carrie was born. Once when she was riding here alone, she had passed the small hut with the notice, ‘Briefing Room’ still on the door, where the young pilots had sat in their flight overalls and parachute harness to get last minute orders. She thought she saw the white face of a young boy glance out of the window at her, and then look back, as if he was listening to someone inside. A piece of paper blew. John had shied. What at? When she recovered her balance, the glimpse of a face was not there. Never had been?

At twilight, the airfield was especially eerie. The breeze creaked among the loose boards of the huts, and lifted a piece of tin on a roof with the mournful sound of a cracked bell. Carrie would not have come here at dusk without Lester and the dogs. Charlie and Perpetua and Moses cast wide over the field, noses down, like hounds seeking the scent. Suddenly they all got the same scent at once and streaked across the broad field together, barking with what they thought was the cry of a pack.

What on earth? From one of the huts in the middle of the airfield came an answering chorus of frenzied barks and howls.

‘Come on!’ They cantered across the field, over the broken runways, Oliver in a scuttling gallop to keep up, Michael leaning forward like a jockey. The door at the end of the hut was fastened with an iron bar and a rusty padlock. The windows were roughly boarded up. But between the boards, they could see noses of dogs, several of them, yelping and scrabbling, while Charlie and Perpetua and Moses jumped against the wall from outside, boasting their freedom.

Carrie and Michael were all for breaking into the shed and setting the dogs free, but Lester said no.

‘We’d be destroying the evidence against Bernie. There’s nothing for it now.’ He turned Peter away, neck-reining with the halter rope. ‘We must bring in the Law.’

When they came round the hill into their lane, past the big stone where Peter always shied, and John shied in sympathy, even if he didn’t see it, they sent Michael back to the stables and turned John and Peter (with difficulty) away from home. The village police station was a narrow brick cottage like a shoebox on end, with a flourishing garden, in spite of Oliver’s raid on the peas and zinnias. Had the policeman’s wife told him about that? She had said she wouldn’t.

‘I’ll tell him it was rabbits,’ she had said, and hoed out the small hoof marks and gave Carrie a cup-cake. She was well known for always being on the side of the criminal and against her husband. She had once employed a boy to chop wood, knowing he was wanted for car theft by the police of three counties.

Through the front window, uncurtained on this summer night, Lester and Carrie saw the lighted square of the television with two fat men mouthing.
Smile Awhile
. One of Hubert’s favourites. He repeated its rotten jokes all wrong, missing the point.

Lester got off and knocked. The policeman came to the
door with his collar off, wearing enormous plaid slippers like pieces of luggage.

‘Excuse me, Constable.’ All the local children were very polite to Constable Dunstable, so that he would imagine they were on his side. ‘Have you heard about any dogs disappearing lately?’

‘What’s up?’ The constable turned his grizzled head half-way, so that he could look sideways at Lester suspiciously. All boys to him were bad news.

‘If there has been any larceny of privately owned canines,’ Lester said, very formal, ‘we think we can assist you in your enquiries.’

‘Who says I’m making enquiries?’ He still was suspicious. ‘What do you know?’

‘I know where some stolen dogs are. If you’ll come with us, we’ll show you the evidence.’

‘Don’t bother me, boy.’ Constable Dunstable blew out his purple-veined cheeks testily. ‘I’m off duty.’

‘Tomorrow morning then?’

‘I’m appearing in court on a motor cycle case.’ He made it sound as if he was judge, jury and lawyers, all in one.

‘That young man wasn’t drunk and you know it!’ his wife called from inside the house.

‘We’ll take you in the afternoon.’

‘I’ll go by myself. Where is it?’

‘The road’s overgrown. No one’s been that way for years. We’ll show you our short cut.’

Next afternoon, they rode the horses and Constable Dunstable rode his motor bike as far as he could. When the path was too soft, he got off and wheeled it.