Summer at World's End Page 10
‘Twins, eh? Bit much, ain’t it?’
Mrs Zlotkin was surprised to see Liza wearing the bedroom curtain apron and handing round the bread she had made. Not pleased. She was never pleased. But surprised. ‘At least you learned something at that Mount Poison, or whatever they call it.’
‘I can do more than you think,’ Liza said. ‘I got a job.’
‘What sort of a job?’ her mother asked suspiciously.
‘With a vet.’
‘A vet - what’s all this?’
‘An animal doctor. The Fielding’s brother works for him, but he’s going to work at the zoo —’
‘What for?’ Mrs Zlotkin’s eyes bulged like hard-boiled eggs.
‘Because of the monkey.’
‘What monkey?’
‘Forget it.’
Liza had worked for two days cleaning houses in the village. Michael had washed a car, and Em had got extra money for baby-sitting ‘above and beyond the call of duty’ (getting bitten in the calf of the leg by Mrs Potter’s middle brat), so it was a pretty good lunch. Hubert ate everything he could lay hands and teeth on, sighed and threw himself on the ground, denting the turf. He lay with his stomach sticking up, panting gently.
‘It’s not bad here.’ It was the first time his mouth had been free to speak since the beginning of lunch.
‘That’s right, love.’ His mother always agreed with him.
‘So I can stay?’ Liza pounced.
‘I didn’t say that. Minnie Boggs asked me to go to Clacton in their caravan. I’ll need you at home to look after my little Hubert.’
‘You want me to take care of him?’
‘Kind Liza take care of poor Hubie.’ He blinked up, laughing at her, his face pink and glistening from the juices of what he had put into it.
‘I’ll be —’
Liza was working herself up to explode with rage, but Mrs Zlotkin was having an idea, her face bursting with the effort. ‘I might let him come here, though.’ (No one had invited him.) ‘Put roses in his cheeks, that would.’ (They were crimson already with overeating.) ‘All right, girl. If you want to stay, he comes too.’
‘Always a snag to everything,’ Liza muttered, and Em picked up a tray and grumbled into the kitchen, ‘Hubert …Hube the Boob…What a summer.’
Carrie said nothing, torn between wanting Liza and not wanting dear little Hubie, so Michael put his brown, grubby fingers on the edge of the table and leaned forward as politely as a head waiter and said, ‘Of course, Mrs Slotmachine, we’d love to have him.’
Mrs Zlotkin belched.
‘Thanks for nothing.’ Hubert lay on his back chewing grass, with Maud, the deaf white cat, on his stomach. He picked her off all wrong, pulling a hind leg, and she squealed and struck out and ran up a tree.
‘Mum-may!’ He sat up and held out his podgy hand, trying to force tears. ‘It scratched me!’
Squawking about blood poisoning, Mrs Zlotkin took him into the kitchen to wash the tiny scratch. Em was getting out cups for coffee, and Gabby was cackling from his cage, ‘Cuppa tea cuppa tea cuppa tea’, as he always did when he heard the rattle of china.
‘Pretty Polly,’ Hubert said. He stood on a chair to reach the cage, which hung from a ceiling hook that had once been used for curing bacon.
‘He’s not a parrot, and don’t open his cage when the back door’s open,’ Em warned, but Hubert was not in the habit of listening to instructions. He opened the cage door and put in his fat finger with Mrs Zlotkin’s handkerchief tied round it. Gabby, who had learned to trust human fingers, hopped on to it.
‘Look, Mum-may, see the pretty polly!’ Getting down from the chair as clumsily as he did everything else, Hubert stumbled and fell. The love-bird flew away. Hubert grabbed for him, missed, grabbed again. He tore out half the tail feathers and the bird flew drunkenly out of the back door. Gabby was never a good flier, even with a whole tail. He floundered into a tree, and the white cat got him.
Wails and shrieks. Liza swore.
‘What have I done now? Hubert wanted to know. ‘It was the mean old cat.’
‘Of course it was, my love.’ Mrs Zlotkin put her fat arms round him.
Her face went blank with surprise when Em rounded on her, ‘Don’t blame the cat - blame that stupid Boob!’
Mrs Zlotkin had not come here to be talked to like that, thank you very much. After she and the Boob had flounced off in the purple van, Liza went into the wood to call Dusty from where he was hiding. He didn’t come. Liza began to worry. ‘He doesn’t know his way round here, and he don’t see so well.’
‘He’ll turn up at supper-time,’ Michael said. ‘Let’s have a bird funeral to take your mind off it’
‘Only if no one is going to say anything against Maud,’ Em said.
She went upstairs to get their father’s long black oilskin, which she wore for funerals of mice, and frozen hedgehogs, and the kitten that had drowned in the duck pond, learning to fish for newts. They put the love-bird into a biscuit packet and buried it under the tree ‘where he died so bravely’. Em read some verses from a poem they had found in a musty exercise book in what might once have been a children’s nursery, long, long ago. The writing was brown and faint. Between the pages was a dried flower, and a small bird’s feather.
Found in the garden, dead in his beauty -
O, that a linnet should die in the spring!
Bury him, comrades, in pitiful duty.
Muffle the dinner-bell. Solemnly ring.
Bury him nobly, next to the donkey.
Fetch the old banner, and wave it about.
Bury him deeply. Think of the monkey.
Shallow his grave, and the dogs got him out.
Bury him softly, white wool around him …
Carrie’s thoughts drifted away to the child who had written that poem more than a hundred years ago. A house full of animals then, just like now. A house made for animals, Wood’s End, World’s End…
Sleepy after the big lunch, she stood with her back to the road, her face lifted in pleasure to the sun. In the commotion of Gabby’s death, Lucy had put her bearded face into the hammock and torn off the cover of Horses in my Life to get at the glue in the backing. Carrie would have to pay the library for it. How? … Somehow… Not bother now …
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…’
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.’
21
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 befo
re 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.
22
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.’