The First Book of Calamity Leek (15 page)

It was about the nicest thing I ever tasted.

‘Goodness, that went down quick, Calamity. You are a guzzle-gob, aren't you? A moment on the lips, sweetie, that's all I'm saying. Well, all right, go on then, take another slice. I promise I won't tell.'

This slice melted even more creamy than the first.

Aunty handed me a napkin and winked, so I reckoned on it being safe to ask a question. So I said would there be cake like this in Heaven, and Aunty laughed and said of course, and there would possibly be something very similar for sale in the Outside World, and did I want to go there to fight the Good Fight?

‘Very much,' I said.

‘And your sisters?'

‘Them too.'

‘All of them?'

‘For sure,' I said.

‘That's splendid news,' Aunty said, giving her cakey fingers to Toto to lick up. ‘My pals battalion, led by my number one pal! You know, Calamity, I always knew you were the one for me. Never trust a pretty face, that's what I said to myself. All the trouble in the world comes from pretty faces, Calamity. I shan't mention names. An uglier world would be a more harmonious world, niece, I'm afraid it would. Chacun à sa place. Naturally, I'm telling
you this in confidence, and naturally, there are degrees of unattractiveness, niece Leek. In fact, I don't mind telling you, when you arrived, I informed your Mother that for all her derring-do, she could have had the decency to stop off in a lay-by and eject inferior goods. But deliberation was never her style – over-influenced by the ram-raid genre of her youth, I fear. She hasn't changed. Years of pilfering in our dorm and getting away with it, so what do you expect? No one ever changes, Calamity. What can you do? What could I ever do for you lot, stuck in here?'

Aunty had herself a long drink of medicine. ‘All I ever wanted was to make you girls happy. And tell me the truth, you are happy, aren't you?'

I looked up from drinking down my tea neat and proper like we need to.

‘Of course you are. It's the most precious thing in the world – a happy childhood. And when you come to look back on it, Calamity dearest, I think you'll know just how happy yours has been.'

Aunty dug about in the hamper for a pot of pills to eat. ‘Where was I? Oh yes, when you turned up, I'm afraid I cursed High Heaven. Nothing personal, Calamity, time and money, and you looked a sure-fire waste of both. But then I took a second glance at those flappers of yours – sticking out sideways under a fetching blue bobble hat, if I recall – and do you remember what I said?'

I shook my head.

‘I said whoopee! That's what I said. Whoopeeeeeee! Because right then and there I knew we could be the best of friends. You see, niece, I knew there was simply no room for ambition in that pair of ears.'

Aunty said, ‘Cheers,' and she swallowed her pills with
a big drink of medicine, and leaned over and tickled my left ear, and said would I like another slice? She wouldn't tell anybody if I did, because pals didn't tell. No, pals liked to share things, like cake. She went for the knife. Then she gasped and said she had something else she wanted to share with me. A secret. And it was this – we were all going to have a Trial Run, to get the blood flowing, so to speak. Mother had been going on and on about it for quite some time. And wasn't that the best of news?

Which it was.

A woodlouse crawled along the base of a petal bin. I watched it trying to get up the slippy side. ‘You haven't said what you're doing here, Annie?'

She shrugged.

‘Well. What are you doing?'

‘Stuff.'

‘What stuff?'

‘Sorting stuff.'

‘That all?'

‘That's all.'

I looked at her. ‘Annie, you do want to go, don't you?'

She tapped a shovel and laid it down by the sack.

‘To War. You do want to go?'

She picked up a spade and ran a finger along its edge. She put it down. She picked up her drawing board and wrote something on it, and then she turned the board and leaned it against the petal bin, its writing hidden away.

Well. Wasn't like I wanted to see her nonsense words, was it?

‘I have a secret too, you know, Annie.'

‘That's nice for you.' Annie picked up the shovel and put it in the sack.

‘Whoooah the hokey-cokey,' Aunty sang. She took a drink of medicine, and waved at the big old Victoria plum. ‘Whoooah the hokey-cokey.' The tree was starting to drop its yellow leaves on Truly's mound. ‘Knees bent, legs stretched, that's what it's all about!'

Aunty stopped singing and sighed. ‘Such a pretty spot.' She waved a bluebottle away from her nose. ‘Pals like to share secrets,' she said. ‘That's what pals do.' And her eye fixed on the cake as she cut out another fat triangle. ‘I wonder,' she said. ‘I wonder I wonder I wonder.' She placed the triangle onto a plate and lifted it up. ‘I wonder if any of my pals have any secrets to share.'

I said, ‘I have a secret, Aunty.'

‘You do?' Aunty gasped. Her teeth jumped all together in a smile. ‘What a pal you are! And?' she said, looking at the cake slice and then at me, ‘And?'

‘Truly Polperro flew past me yesterday in the schoolroom.'

The smile fell off Aunty's teeth. The slice stayed up in the air between us.

‘Well, thank you, Calamity, that is good to know. I have a secret about Mother.' Aunty jabbed me with her elbow, ‘She has halitosis.' Aunty laughed loud. ‘And here's another. She once ran away from her children's home and was severely beaten by Father Tony when she was brought back. Explains a thing or two about her subsequent choices in life.' She shook her head and laughed some more.

After a bit Aunty stopped laughing, and the orchard
stayed quiet, and the cake slice didn't move, and Aunty's eye swivelled and fixed something steady on me.

So I said, ‘I have another secret.'

‘Oh yes?'

‘It's about Kathy Selden.'

‘Oh,' Aunty said. ‘Oh, I see.' And she began lowering the plate – its slice all cut up and everything – back in the tin. ‘Just Kathy Selden?'

‘Well, there's Annie St Albans in it too.' Now don't ask me why Annie popped on my tongue just then, but she did. And once she was there, well, she was there.

The cake jumped back out of the tin. ‘Annie St Albans, you say? Now that is interesting, niece.'

‘Yes,' I said.

Only then I weren't exactly sure what I was going to say. See, sometimes with me, I ain't even sure what I'm thinking till the words have sprung out my throat and gone off, that's just how it is with me. But I tried to think quick because Aunty was winking ‘That is interesting' at me.

But the problem was, whatever secret Annie had, well, I'd have to go find Dorothy, most probably, and get it off her. And I weren't sure Aunty wanted to wait while I did. And I weren't even sure whether Dorothy would be up for sharing it. Because when I found her hid with Annie and Nancy in the latrines after breakfast, whispering and drawing on boards, seemed they weren't up for sharing words with no one. Oh no.

Annie was pinging the prongs on a pitchfork. I looked at the back of her board leaned against the petal bin, and I sniffed. Them drying roses sure were making my eyes water bad.

‘You know, I can't help it if Aunty likes me most, Annie. I really can't.'

Her speckled face knit up in a frown. For two seconds she said nothing. Then she looked up and said, ‘Do you think Aunty liked Truly?'

‘Why are you asking? Truly was a tragic loss to Aunty, you know that, Annie.'

‘But did Aunty like her? Do you think she feels a hole in her belly or an ulcer round her heart, now she's gone? Do you think she cried for her?'

‘What do you mean, Annie? You know Aunty's eye can't cry.'

‘But does she actually miss her in her heart?'

‘I don't know that, Annie, do I?'

A pipistrelle dropped off the rafters and cartwheeled over our heads. Annie put the pitchfork in her sack and knotted it. ‘But what do you think, Clam?'

I sighed. ‘I think you shouldn't talk like this, Annie, you really shouldn't. Truly was valuable, Aunty did say that. Valuable as a new top lip. And you can't get more valuable than that.'

Annie snorted.

‘I don't see what's funny about that, I really don't. Truly's dying was a tragic waste of her purpose, you know that.'

Annie looked at me sharp-eyed, ‘Was it?'

‘Of course. Like it says in the Appendix, on the first page of the
P
s –
Everything has a purpose, and my nieces have a very special one!
Everything has a purpose, Annie. And we do too. You know that. Even our second-wind sisters know that.'

But she just shoved a pickaxe in a sack.

‘Annie?'

‘Everything has a purpose, Clam?'

‘All right then, take that axe you've got there. What does it do?'

‘Everyone knows what an axe does.'

‘That ain't my point. Tell me its purpose, please.'

‘Smashing stuff.'

‘And that hessian sack?'

‘You should be with the Pontefracts teaching the second wind toddlers. A hessian sack holds things. Flour and dried petals, and finished-off cushions.'

‘Cushions then, Annie?'

‘Make clouds to clog up the sky lid from His heat. Everyone knows that.'

‘And what about the petals inside?'

Annie shrugged.

‘They perfume the air in the sky so we ain't all poisoned by His polluting farts. And what about the writing on the cushions – taunting him with it's our “Home Sweet Home” not yours – all that is pure purpose. And by the way, you need to protect yourself more from Him. When the clouds are busy elsewhere, you really need to be more careful, Annie. Who's to say all this hot and bothered talk of yours isn't your brain heating up from careless exposure?'

Annie didn't say nothing.

The pipistrelle whooshed over our heads and flew back to the rafters.

Annie folded over the top of the sack and pressed it down tight. ‘So, Truly?' she said all quiet.

‘Truly what?'

‘What was her purpose, Clam?'

I stood up and straightened my smock. ‘It is very late
and we are Out of Bounds. We should go back to the yard.'

‘What was Truly's purpose, Clam?'

It took a moment to pull my voice out of my throat. ‘Well, happen she missed it, Annie. She missed it.'

Aunty plucked a grey pebble off the T on Truly's mound. She washed it in her teacup and screwed it in her empty socket. Her cheek scrunched up to hold it in. ‘Annie St Albans, you say, niece? I'm all ears.'

The cake triangle was sitting out on the rug. A bluebottle was crawling along the top, stopping now and then to have a lick of its legs.

‘Annie has been listening to the Wall, Aunty,' I whispered.

‘Now, that is an interesting secret, niece. Most interesting indeed. And where exactly has she been listening?'

‘Well, I saw her do it out in the bog, but all around, probably. She's probably been going listening all round it.'

Aunty leaned forward and the pebble plopped out of her socket onto the cake. The bluebottle flew off. ‘So, tell me, niece Leek,' Aunty's eye fixed on me, ‘what does it say, the Wall?'

‘Well, Annie says it don't say nothing.'

Aunty kept on looking at me, and her mouth started wobbling this way and that, like she couldn't choose between joy or sorrow at hearing this, and maybe I could help her choose. But I couldn't. But never mind, because happen it was joy that came to her, because her teeth spread wide, and her whole body began to wobble with laughter. ‘I reckon Annie is turning into a bit of a lunatic, that's what I reckon. Asylum Annie – how's that for a
new name for her!' And Aunty laughed till her top teeth fell on her tongue.

After she jammed them back in, she handed me my cake slice. Except when she passed it over, happen she had changed her mind, because her voice came sorrowful and her eye turned towards Truly's mound. ‘I shouldn't have laughed, niece, that was wrong of me. I don't mind telling you, Annie's mental health is a cause of concern. I know she's grieving, but I'd hate to see her mind get fried like poor Maria, or even worse, her body overheat entirely like Truly Polperro. Dear oh dear, that would be such a waste.'

Aunty looked so sad, that I felt sad too, thinking on these possibilities for Annie, and I tried to look as sad as is possible when licking off chocolate fingers.

‘Napkin, Calamity, please! But I tell you what,' Aunty was smiling now, ‘I know how we can keep Annie safe.'

‘You do, Aunty?' Because happen I never did with Annie.

‘I do, Calamity, and it's very exciting.'

‘It is?'

There was a crackling in the trees. Toto looked up and snarled.

Aunty beckoned me. ‘Come up close, Calamity Leek. Closer, pal. Now you ask – quite rightly – how I'm going to keep Annie safe, and the answer is simple. I'm going to borrow a couple of eyes and ears.'

‘You are, Aunty?'

‘I am. Can you guess where from?'

I looked down at the rug. ‘I don't know, Aunty.'

‘Oh, I think perhaps you do.' Aunty's elbow gave me a jab. ‘I'm going to borrow them from my bestest pal. Can you think who that might be?'

Well, my heart blushed to hear it.

‘And I'm going to cut her a deal. In return – very generously – I'm going to give her the answer to a secret.'

‘What secret will it be, Aunty?'

Aunty laughed loud, ‘Oh cute move, Calamity Leek. Well, as your Mother once made me swear right outside this very Garden Wall, the only secret ever worth its salt is the one you must keep till the end. So think carefully. Go on.'

Well, there weren't but one secret a Garden body could ever want.