The Various (32 page)

‘Now we are assembled,’ Tadgemole spoke, ‘and
you
see that we have a wayfarer as a guest. I will say no more of him, save that – rare among his kith – he has a liking for a song. We must encourage this heresy where we find it,’ Tadgemole allowed himself a wintry smile, ‘and hope it may spread like a very plague above ground. Welcome then, Master Ickri – and all – to Midnight Almanac. Not quite all, I see, as Bibber is once again absent – no matter, we shall manage. Now then, who’ll take up almanacs and instruct us this night?’

Half a dozen hands were raised and Tadgemole, glancing quickly around, said, ‘Tingel, we’ve not heard from you in a moon or two. Come, give us a passage.’

There were one or two murmurs of approval as Tingel rose from his seat, and shuffled, with the aid of a curved hobble-stick, to the front of the room. Tingel was a powerful speaker, despite his years, and was known to have some lively notions beneath his straggly crown of white hair. He hooked his stick over the edge of the high board and rested his swollen knuckles on the polished top, staring at the coloured blocks laid out before him.

‘Now, friend,’ said Tadgemole, ‘what will you give us?’

Tingel reached out and chose the green block. He dragged it towards him and picked it up with both hands – it was obviously heavy – and then, to Little-Marten’s astonishment, seemed to split it asunder. The thing simply fell apart within his grasp – first into two, then into many sections as he turned it back and
forth
, flicking it this way and that. It was marvellous to watch. Finally he made the wayward object whole again, and replaced it on the board. Little-Marten glanced at Pank, ready to huzzah this clever display if prompted, but the room remained silent. Once more, Tingel reached out and this time chose the scarlet block. He held this aloft briefly, having come to a decision.

‘Pears’ Cyclopaedia,’ he said, and there was another murmur of approval and anticipation from the audience. Pears’ Cyclopaedia was one of their favourites.

Chapter Eighteen

UNCLE BRIAN HAD
finally relented, as George had known that he would, and said that it was OK for Midge to stay in the tree house,
provided
 . . . and there had followed such a long list of conditions that George eventually became bored and started to wander off.

‘Hoy!’ said Uncle Brian, sharply, ‘I haven’t finished yet.’

‘
Dad
,’ sighed George, in exasperation, ‘don’t
fuss
. I promise, OK?’

‘Promise what?’

‘Everything. Everything you said. We’re only at the end of the lawn, not . . .
Jamaica
.’ He didn’t know why he said Jamaica.

‘
Jamaica?
’ Uncle Brian laughed. ‘What’s Jamaica got to do with anything?’

‘Wish
I
was in Jamaica,’ said Katie. ‘Wish I was anywhere but here.’ She sat with her legs over the arms of the old sitting room sofa, flicking gloomily through the TV guide. Uncle Brian glanced at her, but refused to be drawn on that one. He returned his attention to George.

‘Well, just . . . watch it, that’s all,’ he finished, lamely, and let it go. ‘Anything good on?’ he said to Katie, but she didn’t reply.

‘Yesss!’ said George, galloping up the stairs in search of Midge. The door to her room was open, and he saw her standing at the window, gazing out towards the horizon. ‘Dad says yes,’ he said, slightly breathless from the stairs. Midge was silent, so George had a go at that thing where you put your heels firmly against the wall and try to touch your toes. He slowly toppled forward and reached out for the corner of the bed at the last minute to break his fall. The bed moved, and he bumped his knee on the floor.

‘Are you OK?’ he said, picking himself up, and rubbing his knee.

‘Yeah, sorry,’ said Midge, turning away from the window. ‘Just thinking, that’s all.’

They found an airbed and an old foot pump in the linen cupboard next to the end bathroom. The rubber foot pump looked perished, and had faded from its original red to a dusty pink colour, but it still seemed to work. They put these, together with Midge’s bedding, into a couple of black bin-liners and lugged them up onto the tree house platform.

‘Forgot my toothbrush, and my jimmies,’ said Midge, struggling to untie one of the sacks. ‘I’ll go back later.’

‘Your
jimmies
?’ George laughed.

‘Sorry,’ said Midge, slightly embarrassed. ‘Pyjamas. That’s my mum for you. Anyway,’ she said, rallying, ‘I
bet
your mum has some stupid names for things too. They all do.’

‘Yeah, well, she
does
still . . .’ George hesitated, unwilling to come right out and say that on chilly nights his mother was still liable to offer him a ‘hottie-bottie’. He winced, and changed the subject. ‘You’re probably right. Shall I put a record on?’

‘Maybe later.’ Midge gave up trying to undo the black sack, and ripped it open instead. She sat back on her heels, looking at the swirly colours of her duvet cover as it emerged from the split black plastic. ‘This looks like a butterfly, coming out of its . . .’ She couldn’t remember the word. ‘George, what do you think about all that stuff about Celandine? Great-aunt Celandine, I mean?’

‘Great-
great
-aunt Celandine,’ corrected George. ‘Well, like what?’

‘Well, do you think . . . she might have been telling the truth?’

‘What – about seeing fairies? Come on.’ George snorted disparagingly as he scuttled after the airbed stopper which had made a sudden bid for freedom. ‘Mad as a hatstand, if you ask me.’ He caught the stopper before it fell over the edge of the platform, and sat trying to thread it back onto the bit of string that was attached to the airbed. He sucked the frayed end of the string and frowned in concentration, his hair flopping forward over his face.

Midge watched him, and was suddenly desperate to tell. It had been bad enough before, but the conversation at lunchtime – the talk of Celandine –
had
really shaken her up. Under different circumstances, the news that someone else had apparently encountered the Various years ago could almost have been a comfort – but then to learn that that person was generally regarded as being crazy . . . well, what did that make
her
? For what if people were right? What if Celandine
had
been ‘seeing things that weren’t there’? Hallucinations, that’s what Uncle Brian had said. People must have them sometimes, or the word wouldn’t exist. And, what was really strange, and frightening, was that, almost from the moment she had left the forest, everything that had happened there had begun to seem unreal, as if she’d imagined it. Even before the business with Celandine had come up, she had been trying to tell herself that it was all a dream, and that she must try to just forget it. Maybe she had whatever Celandine had – some sort of illness. Maybe it ran in the family, whatever it was. This thought really frightened her. But then, she reasoned, it would hardly be likely that she and her ancestor would have the
same
hallucinations – would it? So maybe she hadn’t imagined it after all. Maybe it had actually happened. And this thought calmed her, until it occurred to her to wonder which was worse:
imagining
that little people were shooting at you with bows and arrows, or for little people to be
actually
shooting at you with bows and arrows, for real. It was too weird. She so wanted to tell. Up until now she had managed to keep her secret simply because she had made a promise – but now there was another reason for not telling: she didn’t want people to think she was
nuts
. Like Celandine. She remembered Henty, standing on the grey shale outside the cave, and saying, ‘Are you Celandine?’ And at that point she hadn’t known the name of the girl in the picture. So it must be true. It
must
be. But that didn’t make it any easier to bear.

She pulled her duvet and her pillow out of the plastic sack. Chrysalis – that was the word.

They made up their beds, one each side of the ammo box, as they had planned, and it was fun in a way – but Midge couldn’t find much to say, and she felt that George must be wondering why he had bothered to work so hard on his father for the pleasure of her company. He kept asking her if she was OK, and that annoyed her, so that by the time they had finished setting everything up they were a bit grumpy with each other. They sat at the edge of the platform, swinging their legs, and wondering what to do next. It was too early for tea, and they seemed to have run out of things to talk about. George had a thought, and he cheered up.

‘Let’s go and throw stones into the lagoon,’ he said.

‘What?’ said Midge. Throw stones into the
lagoon
? What kind of a dumb idea was
that
? A dumb boy-idea. She nearly said that she’d rather just sit and read for a while – which would have been true – but it seemed a bit unfriendly. Also, she felt that she owed George something. He
had
been nice to her and it wasn’t his fault that she was worried and thinking of other things.

‘It’s
great
!’ said George, enthusiastically, ‘It’s like
quicksand
. Well, it is sometimes – when it’s been raining a lot.’

‘It hasn’t been raining at all since I’ve been here,’ Midge pointed out. ‘But come on,’ she added, determined to try and brighten up a bit, ‘Show me what to do.’

It was a funny word, ‘lagoon’. One of those words that you could say over and over until it made no sense. Like ‘pillow’. The patch of scrubby ground at the back of the old stables didn’t seem to fit the word, no matter how many times you said it.
Goonlagoonlagoonlagoon
. The remains of a wooden fence – just a few rotten posts and broken rails – indicated the original boundary of the slurry pit, now a flat piece of greenish earth, more or less circular, out of which grew odd tufts of reedy grass. It was perhaps forty feet across, slightly lower than the surrounding ground level, and looked as though it was covered in a yellowy green mould.

George and Midge searched among the shadows behind the stables for suitable things to throw. Bits of old roof tiles, they found, together with odd lumps of hamstone and broken masonry. They kicked around in the nettles and thistles to see what else there might be.

‘Your dad said I should stay away from here,’ said Midge, feeling that she ought to make that clear, in case of trouble. ‘Oh, he stresses too much,’ said George, dismissively. ‘Tell him I made you do it.’

‘Hmph,’ said Midge, unwilling that Uncle Brian, or anyone else for that matter, should think her so easily led. Azzie, her friend at school, had sometimes got her
into
hot water – but just as often it had been the other way round. They both got bored during the same lessons, that was part of the problem.

‘Come on, then,’ said George. ‘Let’s have a bung.’

They carted their booty over to the broken fence, and George had first go, shot-putting a big lump of hamstone out on to the surface of the lagoon. The rock didn’t travel very far, and the result was disappointing. It landed just a few feet in from the edge, breaking the surface crust slightly like a spoon cracking the shell of a hard-boiled egg, but showed no sign of sinking to its doom. It just sat there, in a dull and somewhat reproachful manner.

‘No good,’ said George. ‘Got to get further out towards the middle.’ He picked up another lump of stone and stepped down the shallow bank, cautiously standing at the edge of the lagoon. He gingerly tried his weight on the outer rim of the mouldy green earth, and, finding it safe, moved forward another pace or two. Midge looked on with a kind of delicious terror – it was like watching a tightrope walker – as George ventured out just a little further and then heaved the second stone towards the middle of the lagoon. The effort of doing this caused the crust beneath George’s feet to begin to break up, and he immediately had to dance back to safety, lifting his knees high, but still looking towards the centre of the lagoon to see how his stone was doing. And this time the result was much better. The second stone landed a lot further out than the first, with a soft and quivering squelch. It didn’t sink, but sat for a while, half-buried in the ooze, giving
George
ample time to examine his trainers and to wipe them on the grass.