The Changes Trilogy (2 page)

The dizziness had gone from Nicky's body but her mind still seemed fuzzy with it. These people … she'd seen men and women like them before, strolling along these very pavements, doing their weekend shopping … but that was in the part of her memories which nowadays she seemed to find it hard to think about, like dreams you know you've had but somehow can't bring back when you're awake. Now, staring at these dark-skinned, bright-dressed people, she only felt their difference and their strangeness.

But they were people, and they were going somewhere.

Her mind made itself up without being asked. She slipped away along the tree trunks, across the road at the gap between the bad machines, along the pavement to where the old traffic lights stood blind as stone, left down Shepherd's Bush Road—walking now, and panting with the heat, and her neck sore from where the collar of her filthy shirt stuck to the sweaty skin—and along her home street.

Not home anymore. The street was dead, and buzzing with flies in the stinking, tarry heat.

Yes, her note was pinned to the pink door, untouched; but this time she didn't feel her throat narrowing and her eyes peppery with useless tears. She pushed the door open and ran up the stairs to her own room. Even this, with its brown carpet and the pictures of ships on the walls, didn't feel like home now. She took her satchel from the shelf, wiped the dust off it with her sleeve, undid the straps and tilted the meaningless books out onto the floor. Into the bottom of the satchel she stuffed a jersey, a spare skirt, her party blouse, the socks she'd managed to wash in soda water, and her gym shoes.

Anything else which she needed or wanted? Not Teddy, comfort though he'd been. None of the school uniforms. Nothing to make her remember home or Mummy or Daddy. That was all over now—it had happened to somebody else, a girl with parents to love her and look after her. But Nicola Gore was going to look after herself, and not let anybody love her again, ever. It wasn't worth the loss.

Out of her desk drawer she took the blunt hunting knife which she'd bought with her own money at the fair when she was staying with Granny at Hertford; and from the blue jar on the mantelpiece she took the coral and gold necklace which one of her godmothers had given her at her christening, but she could never remember which.

Then she ran down to the kitchen, picking her way to the larder between the horrible smashed machines. Two bottles of lemon soda and one of soda water from her last pub raid; the packets of nuts and the salty biscuits. Her satchel was full now, and heavy too. She slung its strap over her shoulder, picked up her pencil from the hall table, and pushed the door wide open until she could lean against it to write on her notice without its moving away.

She crossed out her last message, about being up at the Green, and wrote beneath it “I'm going away now. I waited for twenty-eight days.”

She was pulling the door shut when she thought that that sounded as though she was blaming them, so she pushed it open again and wrote underneath “I'm sure you would have come if you could. Love, Nicky.”

When she pulled the door shut for the last time she felt that there ought to be some way of fastening it, but she couldn't remember how the lock worked. So she just made certain that the drawing pins were firmly fastened into her note, turned away and walked down the street without once looking back. She started to be afraid that she would be too late, but it was awkward to run with her satchel so heavy. It didn't matter; they were still there when she reached the Green again; the strange, dark children were playing a game of “touch” under the trees.

Beyond them the adults lolled or squatted on the grass. The whole group chattered like roosting starlings. The noise of their talk bounced off the shop fronts, and all of a sudden made the Green feel as though people were living there once again. Yes, thought Nicky, these foreign-looking folk would do. She could go with them, and yet stay strangers always. It was a good thing they were so different. She sidled like a hunter toward the scampering children.

She was waiting by a tree trunk, beyond the fringe of the game, when one of the smaller boys scuttered from an exploding group which the “he” had raided. He came straight toward her squealing with laughter until he was hardly six feet away; and then he saw her. At once he stopped dead, called with a shrill new note, and pointed at her. Then he stood staring. His eyes were very dark; his hair was black and gathered into a little topknot behind his head. His skin looked smooth as silk and was a curious, pale brown—not the yellow-brown of suntan, but a grayer color, as if it was always like that. His mouth pouted.

The game stopped at his call, not quite at once, but in spasms of scuttering which stilled into the same dark stare. Now the adults' heads were turning too; the thick beards wagging around; the worried, triangular faces of the women turning toward Nicky. One of the women called; two children ran to her side and stared from there. The other children melted back toward the adults, looking over their shoulders once or twice. Several of the men were on their feet, grasping their heavy staves and peering not at her but up and down the Green. Now the whole group was standing, except for the little old woman who had ridden on the cart; she still sat on the ground and gazed with piercing fierceness at Nicky from among the legs of the men. Then she cried out suddenly, only three or four words, like the call of a bird. The words were not English.

A big man bent and scooped her off the grass, like a mother picking up her baby; he carried her to the cushioned cart, which was brightly painted with swirling patterns—it was the sort of handcart that street-market stall holders had used for pushing their goods about. The old woman settled herself on the cushions, stared at Nicky again, and called another few words. At once the whole group trooped off the grass and took up their positions for the march.

Nicky ran forward from under the trees. They were all watching her still, as though she might be the bait in some unimaginable trap.

“Please,” she called. “May I come with you?”

A rustle ran through the group like the rustle of dead leaves stirring under a finger of wind. One of the worried women said something, and three of the men answered her. Nicky could tell from their voices that they were disagreeing with her. The old woman spoke a single syllable, and the nearest man shook his head at Nicky. He was short and fat and his beard was flecked with gray; his hat was pink, only it wasn't a hat, of course—it was a long piece of cloth wound in and out of itself in clever folds to cover his head and hair.

“Please,” she said again. “I'm all alone and I don't know where to go.”

“Go away, little girl,” said the fat man. “We can't help you. You are not one of us. We owe you nothing.”

“Please,” began Nicky, but the old woman called again and at once the whole group began to move.

They walked off quite slowly, not because they wanted to move like a funeral, but because they couldn't go faster than the slowest child. Nicky stood and watched them, all shriveled with despair at the thought of facing the huge loneliness of London once again.

She stepped into the road to watch the strange people turn the corner north. (If they'd wanted to go south they would have started down the other side of the Green.) But instead they went straight ahead, up the Uxbridge Road, toward the doorstep where the one-legged man had sat in the sun.

Nicky began to run.

Her satchel dragged her sideways and thudded unsteadily into her hip. A rat tail of dirty fair hair twisted into her mouth and she spat it out. Her soles slapped on the hot pavement and the echo slapped back at her off the empty shops. When she crossed the big road at the end of the Green the strange people were only a hundred yards down it, so slow was their march. She ran on, gasping.

They must have heard her coming, because one of the four men who walked in the rear came striding back toward her, his stave grasped in both hands like a weapon.

“Go away, little girl,” he said sharply. “We don't want you. We can't help you.”

Nicky stopped. He was taller and younger than the fat man who had spoken to her before, and frowned at her very fiercely.

“No! Don't go that way!” she said between gasps. “There's a bad sickness that way. An old man told me. He said he was going to catch the sickness and die. He made me promise not to go down there. He said he'd seen people staggering about and then falling down dead in the street.”

The dark man moved his stave, so that it stopped being a weapon and became a stick to lean on.

“This is true?” he asked.

“Yes, of course.”

He looked at her for several seconds, just as fiercely as before. Then, without another word to her, he turned and called after the procession in the strange language. Beyond him Nicky could see two or three faces turn. A cry came back, the man answered and another cry came. By this time the whole group had stopped.

“Come with me,” said the man without looking around, and strode off up the street. Nicky followed.

Men, women and children stood staring and unsmiling, still as a grove of trees, while she walked between them. When they reached the cushioned cart where the old woman lay, the man stopped and spoke for some time. The old woman creaked a few words back at him. Her face was all shriveled into wrinkles and folds as though it had been soaked too long in water, but her thin hooky nose stood out of the wrinkles like the beak of a hawk, and her dark brown eyes shone with angry life. She looked like a queen witch.

“Tell your story again, please, miss,” said the man.

Nicky had stopped panting, so she could fit her words together into proper sentences; but she was so afraid of the old woman that she found she could hardly speak above a whisper. She felt the other people drawing closer, so as to be able to hear.

“I used to bring food for an old man who sat on a doorstep,” she said. “He only had one leg, which is why he hadn't gone away. He told me that quite a lot of people further down this road had stayed too, and now they'd got very sick and if you went near them you might catch their sickness. It was the sort of sickness you die of, he said. He said that they crawled out into the street, like rats coming into the open when they've eaten poison, but some of them danced and staggered about before they fell down. He made me promise not to go this way if he wasn't on his doorstep, because that would be the sign that the sickness had come up the street as far as where he lived. He wasn't here when I came to look for him twelve days ago, and he hasn't come back. That's where he used to sit, down there, opposite the church.”

The group was still no longer, but wavering and rustling. Suddenly the starling clamor of voices broke out, all of them seeming to speak at the same time. The women drew their children close to them, and the men's hands began to gesture in several directions. A younger man with a very glossy beard spoke directly to Nicky, in English.

“Cholera, perhaps,” he said. “Or plague.”

He sounded interested, as though he'd have liked to explore further up the road and see which guess was right.

The big man who pushed the old woman's cart had pulled a red book from under the cushions and was peering at it amid the clamor; two of the other men, still arguing at the tops of their voices, craned over his shoulders. The old woman held up her arms suddenly and screeched like a wild animal, and the shouting stopped. She asked a short question, and was answered by a mild-faced young woman in a blue dress. The old woman nodded, pointed south, and spoke again. The crowd murmured agreement. The big man ran his finger down a page of the book, flipped over some more pages, and ran his finger on—he must be tracing a road on a map. Then the whole group picked up all they had been carrying; the pram pushers and cart pushers circled around; the old woman screeched and they all started back toward the Green. They filed around Nicky as though she were a rock in the road.

She stood, running her thumb back and forward under her satchel strap, and let them trail past. Nobody said a word, and only one or two of the smallest children stared. When the last four, the stave carriers, had gone she followed behind. One of them glanced over his shoulder and spoke to the man who had led her into the group. He glanced back too, said something, shrugged and walked on. Nicky trudged behind.

They turned right at the Green, south. Their pace was a dreary dawdle as they went down Shepherd's Bush Road, which Nicky had so often scampered along. Carefully she didn't look up the side street to where her note was pinned to the pink door, but studied instead a gang of scrawny cats which watched from a garden wall on the other side of the road; already they were as wild as squirrels.

Yes, she thought, I am right to go now. If I stay any longer I will become like those cats. She remembered how neat the strange children had seemed, even while they were playing their game of “touch,” and wondered how she herself looked. You can't wash much in soda water.

At Hammersmith Broadway there had been either an accident or a battle, for two buses lay on their sides and a vegetable lorry had charged into the ruin, scattering crates of lettuce about. The wreckage stank and the procession edged well clear of it. A minute or two later they were on Hammersmith Bridge.

Here the whole group stopped and the adults broke into their cackle of many-voiced argument while the children crowded to the railings and gazed at the still and shining water. Small brown arms pointed at floating gulls or bits of waterlogged driftwood, ignoring the wrangle that raged behind them. Nicky wondered how they ever could decide anything if they were all allowed to speak at the same time. The big man found a sheet of paper under the cushions, a real map with many folds, and this was pored over until, once more, the harsh creak of the old woman decided the question. Mothers called their children to them; burdens were hefted; the march dawdled on.