Summer at World's End Page 7

  ‘Sometimes I wonder,’ Mother had said, snatching away an aspirin bottle, which Joey had found in the bathroom, ‘whether this darling creature is a suitable pet for you.’

  ‘He’s not our pet,’ Carrie said. ‘He’s our friend.’

  ‘Well … ‘ Mother could not deny that, since it was she who had taught them, years ago, to treat animals as equals, not possessions. ‘But it’s the wrong kind of life for a jungle animal.’

  ‘But it’s a life. He’d have died in the awful pet shop. And if he’d gone for research —’

  ‘He’ll die if he eats all the aspirin, you can tell him from me.’

  Medicine bottles of any kind were Joey’s passion. When Mrs Figg had been sitting outside the house, she had put her handbag on the ground. Joey had opened it while she was talking to Lester, and found the bottle of slimming pills, which she carried about like a good luck charm, but never actually took, because they were supposed to take away your appetite, and being slim wasn’t worth that.

  They found Joey next morning in his chair by the stove, with the empty bottle in his limp hand.

  ‘Dead!’ shrieked Michael, who had come down first.

  Carrie came running. ‘He’s passed out.’

  They wrapped him in a rug, and Em ran down the lane to get Mr Peasly’s taxi. He rushed them through the country roads, leaning hard over, like a racing driver, to corner on two screaming wheels. Carrie had been slapping Joey to keep him awake. In the taxi, Mr Peasly’s driving did it for her.

  Alec Harvey, the vet, was a cheerful young man who was not surprised at anything that came through his surgery door. Local children brought him frogs and fish and birds with broken wings. If they couldn’t pay, he helped them anyway. A mother from the new housing estate, which was called Newtown, had brought her screaming baby once, because the doctor wouldn’t come and she couldn’t get to the hospital. Alec Harvey had taken a green and white marble out of the baby’s ear. He had it displayed in a jar on a shelf, and had stuck a medicine bottle label on the frame of his vet’s certificate: ‘Also Baby Doctor.’

  ‘A monkey on slimming pills.’ He scratched his curly brown head. ‘They didn’t teach us that in college.’

  He and Tom gave Joey a double dose of ipecacuana, to make him throw up the pills. Nothing happened, except that Joey looked more uncomfortable than before, and began to cry a litle, rounding his mouth to say, ‘Oh, oh, oh,’ in Carrie’s lap.

  ‘Now listen here, you beggar,’ Mr Harvey said through clenched teeth. ‘You’re not going to die.’ He gave him another dose, and took him away from Carrie just in time.

  Mr Harvey was very pleased. ‘Also Monkey Doctor’ he wrote on a label, and stuck it on the frame of his Certificate of Veterinary Medicine.

  Mr Peasly, who felt that he had saved a life by his two-wheel driving, was so pleased that he drove Carrie and Em and Michael to school for no extra charge.

  ‘Why are you late?’ The Headmistress, Mrs Loomis, met them in the corridor.

  ‘Our monkey took an overdose of slimming pills.’

  ‘Next time you invent an excuse, do make it a good one will you, people?’

  She wasn’t a bad old soul. ‘They’ll have to retire her soon,’ Em said, as Mrs Loomis pottered away. ‘She’s getting soft.’

  After school, they drove John back to Newtown to collect Joey. They took the torn and grubby pink blanket which had been the monkey’s best possession ever since he came to live with them. He carried it about, fought with it, trailed it like a wing as he leaped among the high rafters of the barn, draped it over his ears for safety like an ostrich burying its head in the sand, and slept every night with a corner of the blanket in his mouth.

  At the vet’s, they found him climbing on the wire of one of the dog runs. He snatched the blanket, and ran to the wire roof and hung there by a foot and a tail, hugging the blanket, crooning to it, rubbing it over his black snub face.

  ‘He’s gladder to see that than he is to see us,’ Carrie said. ‘It’s as bad as Mike with that old voodoo doll.’

  Michael had had the hideous doll ever since a crabby neighbour had brought it the week he was born, and been offended because he was too young to look at it. He had eaten off its toes and fingers and pulled out its eyes and hair.

  ‘When Miss McDrane found it in my satchel,’ he said, ‘she said I had a sick mind.’

  Carrie groaned. ‘Why did you have to remind me of her? It’s only two days till Sunday.’

  ‘So it is,’ said Alec Harvey. ‘Let’s go for a ride.’ He exercised a thoroughbred for a friend.

  ‘Oh good. Can we race?’ John could keep up for a quarter of a mile before the bay thoroughbred drew ahead like a galloping machine.

  ‘Oh, no you don’t, Carrie.’ They were in the surgery now, and Em was tidying up, rearranging bottles with a pursed, finicky mouth, like Lester’s mother when she attacked the crusted stove at World’s End. ‘You asked McSewer. We’ve got someone coming to tea,’ she told the vet.

  ‘Tea parties. Aren’t you social?’ He was washing his hands. It was getting dark outside. As he straightened up and reached for the towel, he looked at the window, stared, then shook his head. Tunny. I thought I…’ He went to the door and looked out. There was no one there. But a wolfhound in the kennels had begun to give voice, a long sad, howling noise which the other dogs took up in various sizes of yaps and howls and barking.

  ‘Qui-utt!’ Tom yelled down the passage like Miss McDrane trying to control her class. ‘You want me to come out there?’

  The dogs might have answered, ‘Yes’, since they loved Tom. Some of the barking stopped, but the wolfhound went on.

  ‘There is someone there.’ Tom went out. They heard him walk round on the gravel, then he called to somebody and they heard him talking. Then a girl’s voice. The side door to the waiting-room opened. Tom came in with the girl from Mount Pleasant. Liza, the girl with the long dark red hair who Mrs Figg had put on to the train to go home.

  She looked tired and dirty and rumpled, as if she had been sleeping out of doors. In her arms she held an old dog, its hair in lumps, one eye clouded over, limp legs dangling.

  Without asking any questions, the vet held out his arms and took the dog into the surgery and laid it on the shiny white table. It lay quietly, shivering and panting feebly.

  ‘He’s ill.’ The girl put her hands to her hair, twisted it into a rope and let it fall round her tired face again. She wore an old pair of shorts, cut ragged at the knee, a sagging jersey, dirty bare feet. She did not look at all like the girl who had sat in Mrs Figg’s car with her skirt and her thick make-up ‘to annoy my mum’.

  ‘I thought you lived in London,’ Tom said. ‘Why did you bring him here?’

  Liza looked round the room warily, as if she expected to be caught and slapped back into Mount Pleasant. ‘You talked about the vet.’ She nodded at Mr Harvey. ‘I thought he would help.’

  ‘I’d like to.’ He had been examining the dog. ‘But the old fellow is pretty far gone. Why don’t you leave him here and I’ll see what I —’

  ‘You’re not going to put him to sleep?’ Liza clutched at the dog’s matted coat so fiercely that he whimpered.

  ‘I hope not. Sometimes it’s the kindest thing. But not without asking you, of course.’

  ‘No!’ Liza set her jaw so as not to cry. She was trembling too, like the dog.

  Carrie gave Joey and his blanket to Michael, and went to Liza. Tom put his hand on her arm. But before they could comfort her, a terrible din and commotion started up in the waiting-room as four small boys burst in, wild-eyed and shouting, with a cat that had a fish hook caught in its mouth.

  ‘He went to get the bait and he —’

  ‘On the hook —’

  ‘Poor old Tom, his old mouth —’

  ‘Bit of cod, it was. My Auntie give it us —’

  ‘Laid it down on the bank and he sneaks up —’

  ‘Always loved a bit of cod —’

  �
��Oh, the blood —’

  They all talked at once.

  Liza picked up her dog. The cat was laid on the operating-table, and Carrie held it while Tom quickly shaved a place on its leg to inject anaesthetic, and Mr Harvey snipped the end of the hook and pulled it out with forceps without drawing back the barb. He put two stitches in the torn lip and when the cat came round and the commotion was settling, they realized that Liza had slipped out, and taken her dog.

  Tom went outside to look for her, but she had gone.

  15

  A man who bred racing whippets had paid his bill at last, so Alec Harvey, whose pockets always burned when they had money in them, took Tom and Carrie and Em and Michael out for supper. They lit the paraffin lamps on the two-wheeled trap, and John waited outside the fish-and-chip shop quite contentedly, since people who came out gave him some of their chips.

  One man’s chips he wouldn’t eat. ‘Go on you beggar.’ The man was insulted. ‘What’s the matter with this nag?’

  Carrie took the potato and tasted it. ‘He won’t eat them without salt.’

  ‘Bad luck on him then,’ said the man, ‘because the doctor has dared me to eat salt, else my legs will go up like balloons.’

  They dropped Mr Harvey at home, and drove away from the crowded, lit Estates and down the dark road at the edge of the hills, licking their fingers and singing.

  They sang very loudly as they approached a particular corner with a lone tree and a dark swampy thicket that smelled rank and rotten.

  ‘And then the MAN, quite ill at EASE,

  Said, ‘Brrring some brrread sir, if you plee-hee-hease!’

  The corner was unpleasant in the daytime. At night, it was scary, even with Tom. Years and years ago, said the legend hereabouts, a girl had eloped with her lover, the two of them riding on a white horse. But the girl’s maid had betrayed her, and the father was waiting in the lone tree with a noose of rope. As they rode below, he slipped the rope over the young man’s neck and jerked him off the horse. He hung there, choking to death, while the girl and the terrified horse plunged into the swamp, sinking deeper and deeper into the sucking bog until they were drowned.

  And still, it was said, on the right kind of night, you might see the vague shape of the young man swinging from that high branch (or was it just the shadow of a cloud across the moon?) and hear the despairing cries of the girl as she sank helpless into the swamp (or was it just the wind in the line of poplars?).

  The corner was called ‘Hard-to-come-by’, even on the maps, because horses had never liked to go past it. Sure enough, as they neared the line of poplars and the lone tree, John slowed to a walk, peered, and dragged the trap to the other side of the road.

  ‘You see.’ Carrie shivered. Was it better to look at the tree and the swamp, or not to look? ‘He does know something.’

  ‘You do,’ Tom said. ‘You send him the thought through the reins.’

  ‘No. He sends the thought back to me. Like when you’re jumping, you can tell if a horse is going to refuse.’

  ‘You’ve got it wrong.’ Tom could argue all night once he got started. ‘He can tell if you’re scared of a jump, and that’s why he refuses.’

  ‘But I’m only scared because I get the message from him that he doesn’t like the look of it.’ Carrie could argue too.

  They argued into a patch of damp mist. Trees and hedges retreated into vapour like a mountain top into clouds. The yellow light of the lamps did not reach the road. John’s long ears were edged with an eerie luminous sheen. He shied again.

  ‘You see,’ Tom said, ‘you’ve made him spooky.’ But John had swerved to avoid someone in the road. A girl carrying something in her arms. Liza was trudging along in the dark mist with her old dog.

  Carrie said, ‘Ho!’ sharply. She had taught John to stop without the bit, like they did in Western films.

  ‘Where are you going?’ Tom jumped down.

  ‘Dunno.’ In the wavering light of the lamp, Liza’s face was full of shadows, her damp hair hanging over the dog like a shawl.

  ‘Come back with us.’ Tom handed the dog up into Em’s lap. He pushed Liza up too, and trotted home beside the trap with his hand on the shaft, matching John’s hoof beats.

  Approaching the edge of their wood where the road ran through the tunnel of beeches was like coming into the home stretch. John leaned into the collar and quickened his jog. But at the crossroads with the hollow tree and the letter box in the wall where no one ever posted letters and no postman ever took them out, he stopped, peered, and let out some dragon snorts, to frighten an enemy, or give himself courage.

  What on earth? There was nothing there but the hollow tree and the wall and the letter box and the heap of stones the roadmenders had left.

  The mist had cleared, but there was no moon, and the dark was settling down thick and early. Beyond the flickering light of the oil lamps on the front of the trap (’I’ll have you prosecuted,’ the village policeman swore, ‘if you take that contraption out on the roads at night’), the heap of stones moved. A man who had been sitting there got up, and as he moved away under the hedge to the side road, he looked at them.

  The thick black hair and beard, the leering, gap-toothed mouth. The huge gun on one shoulder. A wretched skeleton of a dog dragging behind him on a piece of rope.

  ‘Vile Bernie!’ Carrie whispered. She had not seen him since she and Lester had kidnapped first Perpetua and her puppy and then John from his horrid clutches. ‘What’s he doing here?’

  ‘Looking for something to shoot.’ Tom took John’s bridle and led him across the road and into the familiar wood, which encased them like a warm bath. ‘He’s a night person. He hunts at night.’

  ‘He’s a vampire,’ Michael said chattily. He had been dozing before, but he always became lively when he got near home and bed. ‘We’ll bury him at the crossroads with a stake through his heart.’

  ‘And garlic on his breath.’ Carrie would never forget the poisonous reek of Vile Bernie threatening her from the doorway of his filthy stinking hovel. ‘He couldn’t possibly have recognized John, could he?’

  ‘Not a chance.’ Tom slapped John’s firm brown neck as he trotted beside him. ‘He’s a different horse from that wreck you brought home.’

  ‘It couldn’t be why he’s hanging round here? Why he looked at us like that?’

  ‘The evil eye,’ Michael said, with relish. ‘He’s up to no good.’

  ‘He’s never up to any good,’ Em said. ‘So why worry? The day you see Vile Bernie helping an old lady across the road or giving a child a sweet - that will be the day to start worrying.’

  Lester was waiting for them at World’s End. As they came out of the wood and awung round the corner of the blackthorn hedge, they saw lights in the windows. At the sound of John’s hoofs, the front door let out a widening slot of light on to the path. Dogs and cats ran out, with Lester behind them, and finally the lumbering shape of Henry the ram, a rolling mass of wool on inadequate feet.

  ‘How’s Joey?’ They had not seen Lester since Joey ate his mother’s slimming pills, but somehow he knew. Like a jungle native communicating through a mysterious telegraph of the Bush, he had his ways of knowing what was going on, even though he went to a different school in a different village.

  They handed the monkey down to him, wrapped in the dog-haired rug which was the cover of the kitchen sofa, the first thing they had snatched up yesterday when they rushed him off to the vet. Liza got down, and held up her arms for Em to give her the old dog. He was very limp.

  ‘Is he dead?’ Lester peered, more interested in the dog than the surprise of seeing Liza, who he thought was in London.

  She shook her head. ‘But he would have been if I hadn’t taken him away from there.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Where she lives.’ Liza would not say ‘Home’, or, ‘My mother’. ‘But don’t tell your mum I’m on the loose,’ she added quickly, ‘or she might chuck me back in the cells.’ Most of the girls
were quite happy at Mount Pleasant, but they always talked of it as if it were a dungeon.

  Tom took Liza into the house, and Lester went with Carrie to unharness John and feed him. Then they went into the kitchen, where Em had made tea, and everyone sat on the floor round the embers of the stove, because Liza, having found someone she could talk to, wanted to talk.

  16

  ‘… I’m not going to whine,’ she said roughly. She talked very rough, very tough and embittered, sitting on the floor staring into the dying stove, with her arms round her knees. ‘I tried whining when I was smaller, and it didn’t get me nothing but a smack across the side of the head. “Bit deaf in one ear, this child,” the doctor said. “Chronic.” Yeah, I felt like saying, she’s chronic, she is all right, my mum is.’

  ‘She hit you?’ Tom tried to sound casual, so Liza wouldn’t think he had been nowhere and seen nothing.

  ‘Too right she did, after my dad walked out. But I began to hit her back when I was bigger. Well, you have to, don’t you?’

  Everyone nodded, except Michael, who was asleep among Perpetua’s new puppies, with his head buried in her soft speckled side.

  ‘Because she never knocked Hubert about, see? That was the worst of it. That’s why I - well, if you want to know why I got sent to Mount Putrid, it was because of Hubert, my rotten little brother. Everything’s Hubert. Her little angel. Can’t do no wrong, and so when he’d tell her things to get me in trouble, she’d believe him. All right, some of it was true. It was me did them pictures on the blackboards at school, and when the desks caught fire - well, least said … I done a few jobs, never took much, mostly cigarettes and stuff. Took a car once, me and a girl who was in this gang I went with. We drove to Clacton and it fell into a canal. Laugh! We thumbed a lift home and Hubert told me mum I’d run off with a sailor.’

  Lester sat cross-legged, with his head on one side, alert, his dark bright eyes reading Liza’s face. Em lay on her stomach with a scarf round her hair, frowning under it because she was thinking, not because she didn’t like the story. Tom lay on his back smiling lazily, his long legs on the seat of a chair, long brown hands under his head, the striped cat Nobody going gently up and down on his chest as he breathed. Carrie sat with her elbows on her knees and her chin in her hands, staring at Liza in the lamplight.