Follyfoot Page 6

  Help him, Callie. But she could not move. The boys were at the outside door as the little boy rushed into the cloakroom gasping and wild-eyed.

  ‘They’re after me!’ He could hardly speak.

  Don’t get mixed up. Keep clear. ‘I can’t – this is the girls’—’ she began, but the child stammered, ‘Save me!’ and without thought, she pushed him into her open locker and shut the door.

  It locked automatically. It was a tiny space, but the child was tiny, and there were air holes at the top to let out the smell of hockey boots and gym shoes.

  Feet clattered on the stone stairs, and Lewis was in the cloakroom with three or four grinning cannibals behind him.

  ‘Well, look who’s here.’ Lewis began to throw coats and scarves about, looking for the little boy.

  ‘Get out of here.’ Callie held herself tense so that the trembling of her body would not reach her voice. ‘You’re not allowed in here.’

  ‘Who cares?’ Lewis began to try the doors of the lockers pulling out stuff from the open ones, while his mob tore clothes off the hooks and threw shoes and tennis rackets about just for the mess of it.

  ‘Where’s that mucky kid?’ Lewis was looking through the air holes of the lockers. What would happen when a pair of terrified eyes met his? What would happen when he saw it was Callie’s locker and went at her for the key? It was round her neck on a string. He would probably strangle her.

  ‘What’s he done?’ If she could just keep them talking someone would come.

  ‘Croaked to a teacher. Got us in trouble.’ A gym shoe, a purse, a stuffed bear flew out of a locker over his shoulder.

  ‘Why?’

  For answer, he tore the photograph of a boy from the back of a door, crumpled it up and threw it in her face.

  He was getting near her locker. Her hand went up to the key string at her neck. ‘There’s no—’ she said, ‘there’s no one—’

  ‘Shut up.’ Lewis took hold of Callie’s long pigtails, wrapped them round her throat and pulled the ends.

  Choking, Callie looked desperately out of the window. Then she saw a miracle, right before her anguished eyes. Big bold Betty Rundle, goal for the hockey team, was rolling in early across the yard. The boys saw her too. Lewis let go of Callie’s hair, and they ran. Coughing, Callie pulled the child out of her locker, and dragged him – he could hardly walk from cramp – down the corridor and round a corner before Betty Rundle kicked open the outside door and came whistling down the stairs.

  Miss Crombie was angry, puffed in the face. ‘What’s the point of me getting here early if you can’t bother to come early too?’ She was never at her best in the morning.

  ‘The bus was late,’ Callie said faintly. Her throat still hurt.

  ‘It’s for your sake, not mine,’ Miss Crombie went on without listening. ‘Now hurry up and let’s go through that French translation before the pagan hordes arrive.’

  While she read aloud, misreading some of her own words so that they sounded like mistakes, Callie thought about the little boy as she had left him sitting alone in his empty classroom, sheltering behind an oversize desk as if it was a fortress. After he had told the teacher about his books being thrown in the pond, Lewis had lain in wait for him one morning last week and bent back his fingers behind a bus shelter. That was why the boy came to school early.

  ‘But not early enough for him,’ he told Callie.

  His name was Toby. He was about ten – no one at home remembered his birthday – but undersized, with weak, skinny legs and large shaggy head on which his ears stuck out like the handles on a porridge bowl. He was a weird-looking child, like a goblin changeling. Callie hoped she would not get mixed up with him again.

  ‘Don’t leave me,’ he had said, when she put him into his classroom.

  ‘Oh, look. I only hid you to save my own skin.’

  ‘You live up the hill, don’t you?’ His pointed, big-eyed face was like a marmoset. ‘So do I. What bus do you get home?’

  When she told him, he said, ‘I’ll wait after my last class and go with you.’

  ‘Oh, look.’ She did not want to get mixed up with this child.

  ‘I’d be safe with you, see?’ Sitting at the desk that was too big for him, he had nodded confidently, as if Callie was as big as Betty Rundle, and as bold.

  He was waiting for her. He waited every day and chatted by her side on the bus. In the morning, he was on the early bus, with his face unwashed and his socks in holes on his dangling legs, his books on the seat to keep a place for her.

  He chattered while she was trying to read, telling her things about his home and his cats and his brothers and sisters who were bigger than he was – even the younger one – because he had been ill.

  ‘They gave me up for dead,’ he said cheerfully. ‘I heard them say so in the hospital.’

  The exam was only two days away. Callie swotted all the time.

  ‘Why are you always reading?’ Toby asked her when she only grunted at his twentieth question about the horses at the Farm, which fascinated him.

  She told him about the scholarship. ‘If l get it, I’ll be out of this rotten school next term.’

  Toby said nothing. This was so unusual that Callie looked at him. Tears stood in his big eyes, and his mouth drooped at the corners.

  Why should she feel guilty? It was her life, not his. But she did. Before they got to the top of the hill, she told him he could get off the bus with her and see the horses.

  Steve was very nice to Toby. He picked him up so he could see over the half doors. He took him on his shoulder out to the fields and let him open gates and hold them for horses coming through. When Cobbler’s Dream came in, he put a saddle and bridle on him and let Toby ride in the jump field.

  On the ground, the child was top-heavy and misshapen, but on the pony, he did not look odd at all. He sat well by instinct, held the reins the way he was told, and learned the rhythm of rising after Cobby had trotted carefully round a few times on the lunge rein.

  ‘Never seen anyone get it so quick.’

  Toby grinned with his mouthful of bad teeth. When Steve lifted him down, he clung to the chestnut pony’s neck, went into the stable with him, pressed his big head to his strong chest while he was eating, and had to be prised away by force for Steve to take him home.

  Callie went with them. Toby lived in a tumbledown sort of cottage with thin prowling cats and decrepit vegetables and a collection of rubbish and old cooking pots and broken furniture outside, as if there had been a fire.

  His mother came out, holding a baby which was dribbling at the mouth and nose. ‘Where the hell have you been?’ Her voice began to lash at Toby before he had opened the gate, lifting it creaking on its one hinge.

  Steve explained. The mother still looked grim, partly because she had not got her teeth in.

  ‘He can come back any time,’ Steve said.

  ‘We’ll see,’ the mother said ungraciously.

  Next morning on the bus, Callie was reading history.

  ‘I hope you get bottom marks in everything,’ Toby said.

  ‘I’ll die if I do.’

  ‘I’ll die if you go away,’ he said, not in sorrowing self-pity; just as a statement of fact.

  When the examination came, it was like preparing a horse for a show. There was a special supper the night before. Callie washed her hair and cut her toenails and went to bed with hot milk. Her mother was up early to cook her a big brain-building breakfast, and everyone came from the stables to say good-bye – ‘As if I was going to my execution.’

  Toby behaved as if she was. ‘This is my worst day,’ he kept saying. ‘This is the worst bloody day I ever had in my whole life.’

  When Callie left him at his classroom, where she always had to take him because of Lewis, she said, ‘Wish me luck,’ but Toby only looked at her as if she were a traitor.

  ‘Good luck!’ Miss Crombie patted her on the back outside the examination room. ‘I know you can do well.’

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bsp; And when Callie saw the first paper, she knew she could too.

  Waiting to see exam questions is one of the worst times in life, doomed, sick, your brain empty of everything you ever learned. The papers are passed out. You turn them over. Your eye scans quickly down and you see, yes, yes, one after the other, things you know, things you have revised, favourite things – two you never heard of, but there’s enough choice without them – and then it is your day.

  It was Callie’s day. She picked up her pen, squared her elbows, smiled at the invigilator, who did not smile back for fear of cheating, and wrote her name beautifully at the top of the beautiful clean paper. Question No. 1: Name the 6 wives of Henry VIII and say what you know of each.

  Easy, easy. Katherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour, Anne of Cleves, Katherine Howard, Katherine Parr. She knew them backwards in her sleep.

  She began to write: ‘Katherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour …’

  The image of Toby’s face, pinched, pale, grubby, the big marmoset eyes and the pointed chin, lay on the white sheet of paper.

  ‘I’ll die if you go away.’

  Callie sighed, crossed out her first words, and began to write again:

  ‘Katherine Taragon, Ann Seymour, Marie Antoinette, Katherine the Great, Bloody Mary, Katherine Dubarry.’

  No one could understand it. They called it bad luck, an off day, stage fright. Miss Crombie was upset enough even to call her stupid.

  ‘You knew most of those questions. They were tailor-made for you.’

  ‘I lost my head.’

  ‘And lost the scholarship.’ Miss Crombie was bitterly disappointed.

  ‘I don’t really mind. I never did want to go to boarding school.’

  ‘I mind,’ Miss Crombie said. ‘And I mind for your mother.’

  ‘She didn’t really want me to go away.’

  Chapter 13

  TOBY SAID, ‘I knew you wouldn’t get it. But I’m glad you didn’t.’

  Callie did not know whether to be glad or sorry. She had thrown away her chance – but was it worth it? At school, there was not much she could do to help Toby. It was actually worse for him to be the friend of someone whom Lewis hated as much as he hated Callie.

  Once when he tripped Toby up in the corridor, Toby managed to bite him as he scrambled up. The Louse had teeth marks on his hand.

  Callie saw them, and jeered. ‘He’s got rabies, didn’t you know? Ooh look – you’re foaming!’ and ran into the crowd.

  Toby came quite often to the Farm to ride. Cobby could be a bouncing, jet-propelled handful when Steve got him on his toes to jump, but he was clever enough to know when to take quiet care of a rider. He had once worked for a paralysed girl, walking by himself into a pit so that she could heave herself from her wheelchair on to his back.

  Riding David, Steve took Toby along the top of the hill through woods and fields and ferny lanes where he had never been before, because his legs would not carry him far. Colour came to his cheeks and his muscles grew stronger. Even his mother, who never admitted optimism, was forced to say that it might be doing him good.

  One evening when Callie brought him back to the Farm, he said he could not ride.

  ‘I hurt my hand.’ He had it in the pocket of his droopy shorts which were handed down from someone bigger.

  ‘Let’s see.’ Steve took out the hand.

  ‘Nothing much.’

  Steve gently unwound a blood-soaked handkerchief. The nail of one finger was torn off down to the quick.

  ‘Why didn’t you go to the nurse?’ Anna asked, when she was cleaning the finger and bandaging it.

  ‘I dunno.’ He kept his eyes down.

  ‘Did Lewis do that?’ Callie asked.

  ‘Who’s Lewis?’ asked her mother.

  ‘That boy from Pinecrest. You know. The one who is our enemy because of Miss America, and the stable licence. He’s Toby’s enemy too.’

  ‘Surely he wouldn’t do a thing like that to a little boy?’ Like her husband, Anna had an enduring faith in human nature, sometimes ill-founded.

  The day when he was chased like a small animal, running for his life into the bicycle shed, had taught Toby not to tell tales to grown-ups. But he told Steve how Lewis had caught him on one of the swings and twisted it, jamming his finger between the chains.

  Next day, when Steve had finished the morning work in the stables, he went down the hill to the school.

  Callie had told him that some of the big boys went down to the end of the playing fields for a smoke after lunch. Steve hid in the bushes, rubbing his knuckles.

  Half a dozen boys came down and lounged about for a while, talking in grunts and guffaws, making grubby jokes about the teachers. Steve recognized the Louse’s voice, oozing thick and stupid through his adenoids.

  Steve crouched, then suddenly leaped out and grappled with him. Surprised, Lewis went down, and they rolled over and over, punching and kicking and scratching and hurting each other in any way they could.

  As Steve had expected, the other boys were too yellow to join in. They watched for a while, circling the desperate fight like dogs. Then when Lewis began to scream as Steve was on top of him rubbing his face into the ground, they ran off.

  Cursing, his face smeared with earth and blood, Lewis somehow scrambled up. Before he could get away, Steve caught him with a fist on the side of the jaw and the Louse went down like a felled tree.

  Steve wiped his face on his sleeve, rubbed off his hands on the grass and ran them over his curly hair. He found a piece of paper in his pocket, and left a scribbled note tucked behind the ear of the snoring boy.

  ‘You want more of the same? Try starting anything else with the little kids.’

  Chapter 14

  NOTHING HAPPENED FOR a while. The Louse was away from school for the rest of the week. Steve had a scratched face and a lot of bruises and Callie got up very early, did all his stables for him and brought him a mug of tea in bed.

  The grey stable cat had three kittens. They were keeping the prettiest one with the Elizabethan ruff of white fur round its face, and a home had been found for the other two at a village grocery whose storeroom needed the protection of this famous family of mousers.

  On Sunday evening, Steve put the kittens in a canvas shoulder bag and rode Cobby to the village, trotting along the side of the road in the gathering dusk.

  The grocery people insisted on giving him a snack – he was the kind of boy whom women instinctively fed, not to fatten him, but to mother him – and it was almost dark by the time he started for home.

  Dark, light, sunlight, grey shadows, it didn’t make much difference to the Cobbler with his half sight, especially on a road he knew so well.

  He trotted steadily, ears constantly moving, alertly forward, swivelling back, one forward and one back, because he depended so much on his hearing.

  Steve rode half dreaming, the empty bag swinging at his hip. He knew the feel of the pony so well that it was almost like the movement of his own body. He sat relaxed, with a loose rein, not bothering to rise to the smooth trot, fancying himself a cowhand, legs stuck out in chaps, shoulders slack, single-footing through the desert sagebrush behind a herd of lowing cattle, going leisurely to the water-hole.

  The motorbike came out of nowhere, with no light. It threw itself at them round a corner and roared by so close that Steve saw the rider’s face in the instant before Cobby reared, slipped on the road and came down hard, with Steve underneath.

  His leg was pinned under the saddle. The pony struggled, and at last the weight of him lifted and he was up. Steve did not even try to get up. He did not try to move his leg. He was cold and sweating at the same time, with lead in his stomach and a sick spinning head, and he knew that something was badly broken.

  He raised his head to try and look at his leg, lying with the foot at a strange angle, then quickly dropped his head on the ground and kept it there until the blood came singing back into his ears and he knew that he would not faint.<
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  In books when a rider lies hurt on the ground, his faithful horse lowers its head, nosing him gently, and he whispers in its ear, ‘Go home!’

  In life, things don’t work out like that. Cobbler’s Dream was a few yards away at the side of the road, his foot through the reins, tearing at the long grass as if he had not had a decent meal for weeks.

  Steve whistled to him. He moved on, contentedly grazing. It was almost dark now. Steve could hardly see the rounded outline of his quarters, moving steadily away.

  No cars came by. Steve’s leg had been shocked numb at first, but now feeling was coming back, and with it pain. If a car did not stop soon, he would have to start screaming. If the Louse’s big brother came back on the motor-bike to see how much damage he had done, he would have to shout to him for help.

  Someone must help. Anyone. Help me. ‘Cobby!’ he shouted, his face in the long grass.

  ‘Who’s there?’ A high nervous voice, some way down the road.

  ‘Help!’

  A small dog yapped. Feet on the road. Then they stopped – ‘Help!’ – came on again. Then a hysterical tongue was licking at his face and Steve grabbed the little dog tightly, in a sweat of panic that it would touch his leg.

  ‘What’s happened?’ A woman walked round and stood in front of him, staring down, her hand in her mouth. She looked in a panic too.

  ‘I’ve broken my leg.’

  The woman gasped and knelt down.

  ‘Don’t touch it!’ Steve shrieked. She pulled back her hands and got up.

  ‘I’ll run back and get help. I live quite near. You stay there,’ she added unnecessarily and ran, feet fading down the road, the dog yapping and yipping as if something marvellous had happened.

  Steve closed his eyes and began to groan.