Summer at World's End Page 8

  ‘What did she do to you?’ she asked, enthralled.

  ‘Played war. Took me out of school and put me to work in the shop. She has this lousy little shop, see, sells a few groceries and vegetables and fruit and that, near the council flats where we live. It’s the only one, so she cheats the old age pensioners and the little kids who can’t walk to the High Street. Gives them the rotten apples and spuds from the bottom of the pile and shorts them on the change. I told ‘em, “Take the bag and help yourself”, and when my mum came back from bingo and found them taking all the good tomatoes from the top, she yelled out they was pinching the stuff and she’d fetch the coppers. “And you can tell ‘em Liza’s been taking money from the till,” pipes up old Hube, Mother’s little angel, so I bashed him one and he fell into a bin of sprouts and I run off. I run - oh, I don’t know - up the Midlands somewhere. I lived with these old tramps, on the road. One of them died. In a railway siding, it was. I sat in this cattle truck and held his old hand when he was dying and he says, “Liza, look after me dog,” he says. Dusty, he called him, because he always was.’

  She put out a hand to stroke the old dog’s head. ‘I took him back to our flat, because he needed food. My mum was wild. She only likes pedigree dogs, like this fat pug she’s got. She was going to put me to work in a factory. Putting holes in the buttons. She wanted to cut my hair.’

  She put her thumbs under her long tangled red hair and shook it behind her shoulders. Carrie did the same. She would never cut hers. She understood when Liza went on. ‘She got out the scissors, so I run out and got in this car where they’d left the keys and drove away - right through the wall of a house where the people were watching telly. Their faces!’

  Everyone laughed, and the love bird Gabby woke up and cackled, and ran his beak along the bars of his cage as if he were playing the harp.

  ‘All right then, that’s the story,’ Liza said. ‘Think what you like, I don’t care.’

  ‘Nor do we.’ Tom spoke for them all.

  Lester said, ‘My mother never tells me anything about what the girls have done, so I imagined something much worse.’

  ‘In court, they said I was beyond control.’ Liza smiled to herself, remembering. ‘The worst thing about being sent to Mount Putrid was leaving poor old Dusty. That stinker Hubert said he’d look after him - I might have known - but when I got home the other day, there was that bloated pug snoring in the armchair and Dusty, he -he - my poor old dog was out on the roof in a sort of leaky shed for a water tank. So I had to take him away.’

  ‘Poor Liza,’ Tom said, but she jumped up and cried, ‘Don’t give me none of your pity! It was my fault for leaving him there.’

  ‘I think he’s a bit better.’ Dusty was on a pile of bran sacks in a warm corner out of the draught. Tom had given him a nip of brandy that Mr Mismo had brought to celebrate Christmas and anyone’s birthday. When it was nobody’s birthday, he invented one for an animal - ‘Happy birthday, hamster’, ‘Many happies to a fine tortoise’ - so he could drink their health. ‘I’ll get some stuff for him from Mr Harvey tomorrow. Vitamins. Something to get rid of the fluid on his chest. Pills for his heart. As a matter of fact, Liza, you look worse than the dog.’

  When she jumped up, Liza had realized how dead beat she was. She had collapsed into a chair by the table, with her head on her arms. ‘I walked… I didn’t have nowhere to sleep…’

  She was too nearly asleep already to get her upstairs. They put her on the sofa with a coat over her and left her there, with Michael and the puppies, and Gabby blacked out with a towel over his cage, and the old dog snoring and twitching on the pile of sacks.

  Lester wanted to stay the night, but decided to go home to please his mother, so she might change her mind about coming to tea on Sunday. He got a lift from a boy on a motorbike, but he was still so late home that she was angry anyway and took a swipe at him with her dressing-gown cord. There were some people’s mothers you just couldn’t please.

  Liza’s was another. First she had been glad to shove her off to Mount Pleasant. Now she wanted to have her at home earning money.

  ‘She’ll set the coppers on me.’ Liza was edgy and nervous. ‘They’ll make me go back.’

  ‘They won’t know where you are.’

  ‘They’ll find out. You’ll see them creep up the lane. Big black car. I know ‘em.’

  ‘I’ll set Charlie on them,’ Michael said.

  Charlie thumped his tail and yawned loudly with a sound like words. Michael had taught him to play dead by catching a moment when he wanted to flop down anyway. He was now teaching him to talk, by catching him at a moment when he was stretching his jaws to yawn loudly and then saying, ‘Hullo’, so that Charlie’s yawn sounded like an answering ‘Hu-yo.’

  Michael had written this in his private book, Micheal’s Dog Lores: ‘A dog nead a lot of beath to tak so he youn.’

  ‘There was this dog in Liverpool,’ Liza said, ‘used to go into a snack bar and say, “Gimme a ham roll”.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I been there.’ In all the strange stories she told, Liza had never just heard about it. She had always ‘been there’, whether she had or not.

  Michael wrote in his book: ‘A dog in Liverpol go into a sak bar and sad (gime a ham rol).’

  Liza did not try to correct the spelling. She baked him a special loaf of sweet bread she had learned to make at Mount Pleasant, using all the currants Em was saving to make rock cakes for Miss McDrane’s tea party on Sunday. Liza and Michael ate the whole loaf without even sitting down.

  Em was furious. ‘Who said she could move in here and use all our things? She took my shampoo.’

  ‘Why can’t you be nice?’ Carrie kicked her. ‘She’s a refugee.’

  ‘Shut up with that being nice!’ Liza’s quick proud temper had caught fire from Em’s. ‘I’m leaving.’

  ‘Hooray,’ Em said, but Carrie was having an idea. It was beginning to bubble up in her head like fruit salts.

  ‘Please stay, Liza. We want you.’

  ‘Shut up being nice, I said!’

  ‘I’m not. But it’s this woman at the school, she’s coming here to make trouble about us being on our own. If there was someone here baking bread and stuff - an older girl — ‘

  ‘Old girl. Old as God. Thanks very much. You just want to make use of me.’

  ‘Look, you can’t have it both ways,’ Carrie said reasonably. ‘You won’t let us be nice to you, and you won’t let us use you. What on earth do you want?’

  Liza ran outside. They did not see her any more. When Tom came home, he went out calling and searching the meadow and the farm buildings.

  ‘Don’t bother dragging the duck pond,’ Em called through the window over the stove, where she was stirring ‘Esmeralda’s End-of-the-week Soup’. She was still angry about the shampoo and the currants. ‘She’ll be back to eat.’

  But Liza was not back for supper. She was not back when they went to bed. They thought she had left the old dog in their care and gone for good.

  In the middle of the night, Carrie was suddenly awake, not naturally, but as if something had woken her. She lay listening. No dogs barking. No hysterical alarms about foxes from the hen house. No sound from the horses. No clatter of Joey taking a night flight among the saucepans. No kitten crying in the top of a tree. She listened to the silence, only the poplar trees across the road endlessly turning their leaves inside out in the small breeze.

  It was not her ears, but her nose that had woken her. Wafting up the staircase, curling under her door like aromatic smoke, the most delicious, crusty, hungering smell in the world.

  She ran down in the old long shirt of Tom’s that did for a nightdress. In the kitchen, in the light of a flickering row of candles on the shelf behind the stove, Liza was baking bread.

  * * *

  Miss McDrane arrived on Sunday, very polite in a shiny straw hat and white gloves, knocking on the door with the pearl handle of her best umbrella to show th
at she was not going to be put down by anybody’s mother. And they were able to take her proudly through into the kitchen, where Liza, in a flowered apron hastily made by Em from one of the bedroom curtains (’Keep her out of that room!’) was cutting home-made bread and setting the table for tea with Mrs Mismo’s best matching teacups.

  ‘My mother was so disappointed to miss your visit,’ Carrie said in the sugary voice with which she camouflaged the one that came out rude for people like Miss McDrane. ‘She had to go away, but our cousin Elizabeth is staying here to look after us.’

  ‘Indeed.’ Miss McDrane drew in her waist and stuck out her top and bottom. Her pink-rimmed guinea-pig eyes flicked round the room to find fault, but came back to the tea table. She took a paper handkerchief out of her sleeve and dabbed at the corners of her watering mouth. She was very greedy. At school lunch, where Mrs Loomis made teachers take tables ‘to civilize the savages’, nobody wanted to sit at Miss McDrane’s table, because she short-served people to leave more for her, and when it was shepherd’s pie or macaroni cheese, she kept the crusty bits round the edge for herself. She watched your piece of bread to see if you were going to eat it, and then pounced as soon as someone got up to clear plates, saying, ‘Waste not, want not,’ as she popped your bread into her mouth.

  She managed to put away a lot of Liza’s bread and cake, even while keeping both little fingers crooked high in the air to show she was a lady, and went away quite satisfied.

  ‘I like a girl who can bake,’ she said at the door, chasing the last crumbs of fruit cake round her mouth with her tongue. ‘You don’t find that these days.’

  Drunk with food, she put up her umbrella although it wasn’t raining, teetered to her car in her best shoes, and drove away, sitting bolt upright with her hat on straight, like Mrs Noah.

  Liza collapsed on the doorstep, clutching Carrie. ‘A girl who can bake!’ she shrieked. ‘If only she knew where I learned how! “You don’t find that these days.” Too true, Miss McSmell. You only find it at Mount Putrid!’

  17

  When Carrie told Lester about the skeleton dog she had seen at the crossroads with Vile Bernie, the adventure light came into his face and he began to make plans for rescue.

  They were sitting in one of their special trees in the beech-wood, pretending to ride. The thick grey branches were shaped exactly like the neck of a horse. With a piece of rope for reins, you could sit in the crook of a branch against the trunk, and perform amazing feats like winning the Three Day Event at the Olympics, or crossing the Sahara on an Arab stallion.

  With John and Peter in the meadow, they could ride any time they wanted to, but they still acted out this pretence, which they had invented before they ever had horses.

  ‘We could hide in that hollow tree at night,’ Lester suggested, ‘and make a noise like ghosts. He’ll let go the dog and run.’

  ‘Don’t forget he’s got a gun.’

  ‘People don’t shoot at ghosts.’

  ‘Vile Bernie shoots at anything. He shoots at bottles in the dump. He shot the hat off Alan Tupper’s scarecrow.’

  ‘We could tell the police he hasn’t got a dog licence.’

  ‘How would we know?’

  ‘I’ll ask Arthur at the post office.’

  ‘We don’t want anything to do with the police while Liza’s here.’

  ‘I can’t just kidnap the dog,’ Lester said, ‘like I did Perpetua and Moses, because Bernie doesn’t keep dogs in that outhouse anymore.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I spy round there from time to time, just to keep an eye on things.’

  ‘When do you go?’

  Lester looked vague, and stroked the neck of his tree horse. He didn’t time his days like other people, and there seemed to be more hours in his.

  ‘Why don’t you take me?

  ‘This evening?’

  When the sun was going down, Carrie saddled John, and Lester put a halter on Peter, and they rode across country to the small corner of hell where Vile Bernie lived.

  It was called Bottle Dump, because that was what it had been for as long as anyone could remember, a place where people chucked things they didn’t want, and Vile Bernie had chucked himself down there, which was very fitting.

  It was a disused quarry below the gorse common, its steep sandy sides now overgrown with bushes and rank weeds, at one end the treacherous sheered-off edge where the Headless Horseman was still said to be seen, galloping to his death.

  Carrie and Lester cut across a corner of the common, the horses hopping low gorse bushes like cats, and skirted the lip of the quarry, looking down into Bottle Dump over the leaning fence which the Headless Horseman had jumped.

  I hate the dreadful hollow behind the little wood…

  The Tennyson poem might have been written here.

  Its lips in the field above are dabbled with blood-red heath.

  The red-ribbed hedges drip with a silent horror of blood,

  And echo there, whatever is asked her, answers ‘Death’.

  Below them, the patched tin roofs of Vile Bernie’s shacks tilted crazily, the chimneys made of bent rusty drainpipes, the walls leaning against mounds of rubbish and old iron. Beyond, driven or towed or pushed into the bushes, or simply dropped over the edge of the quarry, a battered car with shattered glass lay with four wheels in the air like a dead beetle.

  Carrie and Lester rode down the side of the hill into a clump of trees where they were hidden from Bottle Dump. Carrie had a halter over her bridle, and they tied up John and Peter and crept on all fours through the bushes until they could see the shacks.

  A battered, bulky old car was outside the largest one, standing all askew on soft tyres, its dented boot half open, tied down with wire, so rusty and dilapidated that it looked ready to join the abandoned hulk on its back among the wretched refuse.

  ‘The Poacher? Lester whispered. He knew everybody’s car.

  The Poacher was a little mean man in clothes that were too big for him, useful, like a shoplifter’s loose overcoat, for storage. He could sometimes be seen on the edge of the market, selling a few chickens and ducks. Always ordinary breeds of chickens and ducks, with no special markings. No way of telling if they were stolen. He lived in a homemade caravan, never long in the same spot. His laundry line was hung with rabbit skins. The rust stains on his car looked like old blood.

  It was a warm evening, and the door of the shack stood open. From inside came a horrible sound, like the souls of lost cats in hell. Lester and Carrie crept closer and flattened themselves to the ground below a heap of stones. The Poacher and Vile Bernie were singing.

  Bernie came to the door with a wine bottle in his beefy hand, took a great gurgling swig and hurled the bottle at one of the rubbish piles, missing Lester and Carrie by inches.

  ‘Don’t shoo-hoot the vicar —’ he sang, bellowing into the night.

  ‘The carving knife is quicker!’ The Poacher’s howl was high and strident, as if he had a clothes peg on his nose. ‘Come back in and open this other bottle, rot and damn your vile soul. Me teeth are too far gone to bite off the neck.’

  There was no sign of the skeleton dog. But when Carrie shifted slightly, dislodging a stone, another dog, a brown and white collie, crawled out of a tipped-over rain barrel and barked, throwing itself the length of its chain, and choking.

  ‘Shut up, you devil!’ Black Bernie aimed a kick at it, but was too drunk to reach. The dog went on barking hoarsely. Carrie and Lester were slithering quickly backwards towards the thicker shelter of the trees.

  A gunshot cracked the air above their heads. ‘There, you brute!’ Bernie shouted at the dog. ‘The next one will be for you.’

  At the sound of the shot, Peter had pulled back and broken his halter rope. He had started for home, but luckily met a patch of sweet clover and stopped. He let Lester catch him easily - it had once taken Carrie and Tom and Mr Mismo (panting) two hours to get hold of him in the meadow - and Lester took off his belt to repla
ce the broken rope.

  They rode in silence for a while. Then Lester sighed and said, ‘Did you see?’

  ‘The dog,’ Carrie said. ‘It was somebody’s pet. Well fed, healthy.’

  ‘And the wine,’ Lester said. ‘He’s come into some money. Something bad is up at Bottle Dump.’

  And echo there, whatever is asked her, answers ‘Death’.

  18

  After the tea party Liza disappeared for a couple of days, leaving the dog and a note that said she had gone ‘to do a job’.

  Burglary? There seemed to be nothing this girl would stop at; but when she came back, she had been to do a real job, hitch-hiking to the north country to help a friend from her old gang who had just come out of the hospital.

  She arrived back in the R.S.P.C.A. van. The R.S.P.C.A. Man had met her on the road and given her a lift to World’s End. ‘I was coming anyway,’ he told Carrie, ‘to see if you’ve got any new dogs here.’

  ‘Only Perpetua’s puppies. Come and see them.’ He spent a large part of his days at the kennel for lost and unwanted dogs and cats, but he was always ready to see a few more.

  ‘The thing is,’ he said, kneeling to stroke Perpetua’s bony head, and praise her, ‘I thought perhaps a dog might have - well, strayed here, the way animals do find their way to this place.’

  ‘If we’d had any luck,’ Carrie said, ‘there might be a poor thin dog here like the skeleton of a ghost, that we wanted to rescue the other day.’

  ‘I thought you kids weren’t going to pinch any more animals.’ The R.S.P.C.A. Man tried to look severe, but his face wasn’t made for it.

  Oh, we haven’t,’Carrie said, although she wished they had. Where was that wretched dog now?