Summer at World's End Page 12

  This is it.

  She took Charlie back to John, made him lie down and told him sternly, ‘Stay. You stay.’ Charlie put his head on his paws and licked his lips. ‘Lester will come for you,’ she told them.

  She crept back to a sheltered place near the Poacher’s car, took a deep breath, then dashed out, bent double, unhooked the wire, crawled into the boot and hooked up the wire again.

  She crouched at the back of the filthy, cluttered space, her heart pounding, sick with excitement.

  The two men came out of the shack together.

  ‘Come up, you brute,’ Bernie growled, and there was a choking noise, as if he was dragging a dog by the neck.

  ‘This chow-chow’s hardly worth it,’ the Poacher grumbled in his whining voice. ‘Thing’s half dead.’

  ‘It’s a dog, ain’t it? Got a liver and kidneys and four legs. They shoot the legs off ‘em, you know,’ Black Bernie said chattily, ‘to give the army docs practice at war wounds.’

  The Poacher laughed, a high braying sound that was worse than Bernie’s hoarse chuckle.

  ‘If there’s any sign of anyone snooping round your place - get in that car, you fat beast - you’ll have to move the dogs. Them lousy kids … man can’t make an honest living.’

  The Poacher made a sound like ‘Gurrutcher’ and got into the car. The door slammed and the engine started, shaking the whole car and knocking Carrie about among the tools, crumpled newspapers, beer bottles, oily rags and something that might once have been part of a bird. As the car backed over the rough ground, she bumped her head on the same place where she had hit it and got a concussion when she fell off Peter.

  With a lurch that knocked her elbow on a piece of metal and set the nerves screaming, the Poacher started forward. She lay cramped and breathless, watching the road through the gap below the bouncing top of the boot. She must know exactly where they went.

  Charlie jumped out of the trees, hurtled down a bank and galloped after her down the road.

  ‘Go back!’ she shouted, but the engine noise was enough to drown her voice from the dog as well as the Poacher. He would not obey anyway, if he had set his mind on this. Go back! She tried to will him to turn, as she could often think him into turning round when he was trotting ahead of her.

  The thought waves didn’t work. The only hope was that he would get tired and give up. The poacher turned into a straighter road and put on speed, the exhaust roaring like a dragon. The dog became smaller, desperately running, then a speck, then there was nothing on the black road. Go home, Charlie.

  The drive seemed endless. Bruised and battered, her head aching, Carrie tried to remember how they went -turn right, turn left, past a school, over a hump-backed bridge (My poor head!) past that lopsided haystack…

  The Poacher braked suddenly, shooting Carrie forward among the tools. He turned through a gate and jolted up a long rutted path between fields, with Carrie thrown back among the bits of bird. Down a sharp dip, and he stopped at last. The engine panted for a moment and died. There was a sound of muffled barking. The dog in the car answered wheezily. The Poacher cursed at it and yanked it out of the car.

  Carrie waited. There were no footsteps on the soft ground. When she heard him at the door of the place where the dogs were, she would slip out and hide somewhere till he …

  A hand with horn-thick nails came in through the opening of the boot, unhooked the wire and flung open the top.

  Carrie thought afterwards that they both screamed together. She thought - but she could not afterwards remember anything clearly - that as she somehow scrambled out, he grabbed a piece of iron and hit her on the head (poor old head, same place again). She fell. The man stood over her in his baggy clothes, his eyes crazed, his mouth twisted. She saw the spanner in his raised hand, heard dogs barking, one bark familiar and frantic, as a panting mass of fur leaped out of nowhere at the Poacher’s back.

  Caught from behind, the small man went down. Charlie had him by the coat, worrying it like a rat. The man wriggled free of the loose jacket, Charlie yelped as a boot went into his ribs, and then the coat was over his head, the sleeves tied, and he was thrown into the car. The Poacher jumped in and drove off furiously, scattering mud as he shot up the slope and roared away down the other side.

  Carrie struggled up and started to limp after him, shouting. Her legs gave way and she dragged herself to the top of the slope on hands and knees. Far away, the car turned off the field track on to the road, shot ahead with a squeal of worn tyres, and was gone.

  Dizzy and sick, Carrie sat down and held her head. She had no idea where she was. She could not remember the way they had come. She did not know this view. A vast cornfield, dark gold in the low sunlight, ripe for the reaper.

  As she gazed, the cornfield shimmered, misted, wavered into nothing, as she toppled over and blacked out.

  When she opened her eyes, the sun was down and every inch of her skin was being eaten by midges. She sat up and looked back into the dip. The Poacher’s jerry-built caravan stood lopsided under the trees. The dogs inside it were still barking hoarsely. Miss Cordelia Chattaway’s chow dog was sitting on the orange crate which was the doorstep, waiting to see what would happen next.

  Weaving dizzily, scratching her scratched arms, Carrie went down to the caravan. The chow stood up, wagging his curled tail expectantly, as if it was his own back door. Inside, the dogs barked. There was a padlock. She took a big stone and began to beat on it, missing sometimes, and once dropping the stone on her bare foot. When she smashed the padlock and undid the latch, two large dogs jumped out past her, knocking the chow from the orange crate, and took off up the slope. The fat old chow waited, panting and drooling, to see what would happen next.

  ‘Come on, Lancelot.’ Carrie turned her back on the wretched caravan, which stank of the Poacher and his trade and the dogs shut up in there.

  They went slowly up the slope and down the long field track, the chow wheezing, Carrie half dragging him along, half supporting herself on him. Her head was throbbing. Her arms and legs felt like cooked spaghetti. Once or twice she fell, grazing hands and knees, and the dog waited, panting, until she got up and stumbled on to the road.

  Which way? The Poacher’s car had turned left. Or was it right? It seemed too long ago to remember. The skid marks in the gravel were on the left. She turned and began walking somewhere… anywhere.

  She did not know how long she had walked when a passing car stopped. A man leaned out. ‘Why must you walk in the middle of the road?’ he asked.

  ‘Was I?’

  ‘You look rough,’ he said. ‘I suppose I ought to give you a lift.’

  Never take lifts from strange men. Dimly at the back of her head sounded the well-worn message that must have been for somebody else. She got into the car with Lancelot.

  ‘Where are we?’ she asked. It was getting dark.

  ‘Search me.’ The man wore a neat suit and a prim felt hat. ‘I’m a stranger here myself, headed through for the north. Where do you want to go?’

  ‘Home.’

  He sighed. ‘Where’s that?’

  Carrie was blank. She beat her fist on the good side of her head, and came up with the name of the village.

  ‘Never heard of it. Which way is it?’

  ‘I don’t know where I am.’

  The man looked at her. ‘What’s the matter with you?’ ‘I was in a fight.’

  He put up a hand. ‘Don’t tell me about it. There’s too much trouble these days.’

  ‘The man got Charlie.’ The pain of that was unbearable.

  ‘He probably asked for it,’ the man said stupidly, ‘whoever he was. Count me out. I don’t want to get mixed up.’

  He was quite nervous. When they came to a small town, he stopped at a lighted doorway where some people were coming out of a cinema.

  ‘Better get out,’ he said, ‘and ask the way.’

  ‘Will you wait?’ Carrie opened the door and got out with the dog.

  ‘I’d li
ke to get on. I’m not going your way.’

  Before she could ask him how he could know that, until he knew which was her way, he drove off, his hat square and prim on his nervous head.

  There were some young men and girls fooling about in front of the cinema. They stopped and stared at Carrie and Lancelot ‘The Lady and the Tramp,’ one of them said, and they all laughed.

  Carrie asked them if they knew the way to her village.

  ‘We’re going that way.’ The boy had a lot of long, pale hair, like the mane of a lion. ‘We’ll take you if you can stand a crush.’

  The crush was squeezing in beside the boy’s bony girl friend in the side-car of a motor bike, with the chow like a mammoth suet pudding on their feet. Carrie fell asleep, and woke with the girl’s sharp elbow in her ribs.

  ‘Where do you live?’ They were in the village. They took her out to World’s End and rode off, their hair like streamers in the night wind.

  As Carrie went into the stable yard, Lester jumped from the loft door of the barn down into the pile of straw.

  ‘You got him. You marvel, I knew you would. When you didn’t come back, I went for John. What about the other dogs?’

  ‘I let them loose.’

  ‘Oh, you marvel.’

  ‘They got Charlie.’ Carrie almost never cried. She did now. Lester hugged her, but she could not stop crying.

  25

  One of the dogs that Carrie had let loose turned up at his home two days later. The other was picked up by the police, raiding dustbins, and the R.S.P.C.A. Man was keeping him in the kennels until he could find the owner.

  Miss Cordelia Chattaway changed her black gown for her rambler rose Sunday dress, and wanted Michael to take her and Lancelot for a ride again, but Michael wouldn’t. No one could do anything, with Charlie in danger.

  Carrie could not tell anybody about being hit. They would send for Mother, and she might send for the doctor who had murmured over Carrie’s concussion, and he would murmur her into bed, with chicken broth and the curtains drawn.

  She thought of Charlie all the time, woolly and grinning, with his badly-fitting brown eyes that showed the white all round, and rolled when he was gay. Her head ached most of the time. Lester brought some aspirin from his mother’s medicine cabinet at Mount Pleasant.

  ‘What for?’ Carrie blinked and frowned under the weight of her headache.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me the Poacher hit you?’

  ‘He didn’t — ‘ she began, but Lester put out his hand and gently touched the lump under her hair, that no one else had seen.

  ‘Poached egg,’ he said.

  The Poacher had disappeared. His caravan had gone, leaving a litter of bones and beer bottles, and he was not seen again in those parts. Vile Bernie had also vanished. His friend (if he had ever had a friend) One-Eyed Jake the Pig Man, gave the information that he had gone away for his health and would not be back until goodness knows when - if then, since the damp at the Dump was getting to his joints.

  The R.S.P.C.A. Man had been to all the dealers he knew. None of them had seen Charlie. None would admit to knowing either Bernie or the Poacher.

  ‘Why would they take him to a dealer?’

  ‘Well … You know why, Carrie. We’ve been into this before. The University only buys through regular dealers.’ He did not want to talk about the Research Laboratories.

  ‘If they didn’t sell him for the Labradors,’ Michael said, ‘what else would they do?’

  The R.S.P.C.A. Man was sitting on the old lawn roller, which was one of the garden seats, consoling himself with a mug of cider after a fruitless trip to the other end of the county. Michael stood in front of him, his small, hardworking hand on his knee, his dear eyes searching the man’s crinkly ones for an honest answer.

  ‘What else would they do with our dog?’

  ‘You know that too, Mike. If Charlie attacked the Poacher again—’

  ‘Which he would.’

  ‘ - a gutless sort of bloke like that wouldn’t take any risks.’

  ‘He’d kill him, you mean.’

  The R.S.P.C.A. Man nodded, looking glumly into his cider mug, and Carrie said, ‘It would be better than the-than the other thing.’

  One of the girls at Mount Pleasant had once worked in a laboratory, cleaning the mouse cages. She had told Liza about a mongrel dog she saw, running, running on a treadmill, with wires in its heart to check how much strain it could stand.

  Hubert enjoyed tragedy, as a change from the monotony of life, which he made monotonous by being Hubert. ‘Do you remember,’ he sighed from the ground where he was lying on his stomach with the only two cushions, ‘do you remember how Charlie could catch biscuits backwards, without looking? Alas, never again.’

  ‘Shut up, Tube,’ Em growled.

  ‘And do you remember,’ his sigh blew an insect away through the grass, ‘how he’d carry that hamster about and it was always soaking? I bet if 11 pine away now that —’

  ‘Shut up, I said!’ Em turned him over roughly with her foot and he lay on his back like a beetle, legs waving.

  ‘She kicked me! Lizer! She kicked me!’

  Liza threw a book at him.

  She and Tom hated having to go to work while the others searched for Charlie; calling, calling over the countryside, going again and again, uselessly, to Bottle Dump and the hollow where the Poacher’s caravan had been.

  It was a dreadful time. It was the most horrible time of their lives, even worse than after the fire, when their home was gone and their mother in hospital. Then at least they had known the worst. Now they knew nothing.

  One night when Carrie could not sleep, she was writing in her horse book with a candle on a chair by the bed. To take her mind off Charlie, she was writing about flies -how horses could twitch any square inch of skin they wanted, while people could only do that with their faces.

  ’A horse,’ she wrote, ’has to have a tail to flick and skin to twitch because he has no hands. He does not use his tail like a dog, he…’

  A dog … a dog … my Charlie with the shaggy hair. She could feel a poem coming on, with the same sort of flushed, sick feeling that tells you a temperature is coming on, or your dinner is coming up, or both.

  Her hand moved almost by itself, as if it had its own life:

  I dream of Charlie with the shaggy hair,

  Charlie, who saved my life by being there.

  Where did they take you? Where are you now, old friend?

  Can you not find the scent back to World’s End?

  As she read it aloud, a figure in a torn vest and drooping pyjama bottoms appeared in the doorway, trailing the mutilated voodoo doll.

  ‘Who are you talking to?’ Michael grumbled, still half asleep. ‘Did Charlie come back?’

  He climbed on to the bed and Carrie read the poem to him. She thought it was rather good, but small boys never say if anything is good or bad.

  ‘You can have it for your dog book.’ She tore out the page, since it did not belong with horses.

  The next day, Michael went out on Oliver with a bread and dripping sandwich and a Coca-Cola bottle of water coloured with beetroot juice labelled: ‘EMERJENC RASON.’ He was not home by the evening.

  Em came back from the wood where she had been searching, with half a dozen cats dashing up and down trees, in case Charlie had got caught in the undergrowth on his way home. Lester came back with Peter from one more useless trip to the airfield. Carrie and John came back from a long ride to a distant town, where the blacksmith had told her he had once heard there was a pet shop. He had heard wrong.

  Liza came back from work with a wound on her wrist because a cat had bitten her, and a wound on her pride because Alec Harvey had said, ‘That’ll teach you to hold ‘em the right way.’ Tom came back from the zoo.

  ‘Where’s Mike?’

  ‘He’ll be back for supper.’

  ‘What supper?’ No one bothered to cook much these days. They lived on snacks, and Hubert spent half his
time in Mrs Mismo’s kitchen, trying to keep his strength up.

  Carrie went to Michael’s tiny room to see if he had left a note, as he sometimes did: ‘Gon to vilage for comiks.’ ‘Gon to dig wurms for Erny MkNab farther.’

  No note on the grubby flat pillow under the sloping ceiling (Michael had got this room because he was small enough to sit up in bed without crashing his head), but his marbled Dog Lores book was on the floor under the bed.

  He had copied out Carrie’s poem:

  I drem of Carly with the shaggy hare

  Carly who savd my life by beimg tere.

  Were did the take you? Were our you know odd friend?

  Can you not find the sent bak to world end?

  On the next page, he had written:

  ‘A dog folow his nose home unless he smel somting beter.’

  Had Michael got a new idea about Charlie? Carrie ran down and got on Old Red, which staggered like a groggy horse when you mounted, and squee-clunked down the lane and up the rutted track to the village rubbish tip, favourite calling place of the dogs and the goat. It was in the hollow of a dry stream, thickly set with trees and brambles and bushes which had sprung up, fertilized with garbage, to hide the garbage’s ugliness. Behind a pile of brushwood and tree roots, Michael sat in the dusk like a small garden statue, his empty Coca-Cola bottle upturned on a twig. The Piebald pony stood near him, eating leaves, his long white tail firmly caught in a thorn bush.

  ‘Why didn’t you come back for help?’ Carrie began to work carefully to free Oliver’s tail.

  ‘You told me, if a horse gets caught up, don’t let him panic. If I left him, Ollie would panic’

  ‘He wouldn’t.’

  ‘You told me.’

  The strong thorns were so tangled in the pony’s long tail that Carrie had to go home and get scissors. Next day, Michael trotted off again to search another rubbish tip, the back view of Oliver unfamiliar with his thick tail cut off above the hocks, swinging faster than usual, like a shortened pendulum.