‘Grannie, that was rude!’
‘What?’ Annie asked with the well-rehearsed innocence of a habitually naughty child.
‘You shut the door in Mr Winter’s face!’
‘Well, he mentioned That One didn’t he. It was red rag,’ she said sheepishly. ‘I suppose he couldn’t have known.’ She slathered a warm scone with butter and paused for a few decadent seconds to watch it melt into the crumb.
‘I think that will be my fault, Grannie. You see, I showed him the Delia book I got you from the library. He was just being polite.’
Her grandmother’s eyes sparkled spryly. ‘He won’t mind. You see, once you’re as old as your grannie here, you can pretty much get away with saying anything. You can be as rude as you like. People expect it even. Welcome it – they call you sprightly, a marvellous character, a real treasure. It’s one of the benefits of age, Nell. That and the bus pass. I’m baking this morning: quiche and ginger biscuits. I’ll send him some biscuits round. That will put everything straight with him, trust me. What are your plans, lady?’
‘Well, it looks like it is going to be a nice day, so I thought I’d take a library book out on the green to do some reading. Maths today, I think, algebra. I hated being stuck in yesterday, I suppose we’d better make the most of these end of summer days.’ Nell heard her voice ring bright and true. Annie would now expect her to be out all day and she could devote her time looking for Ferdinand, just as she had hoped. Thanks to the grey man, she knew exactly where she should start. ‘I hope Mr Winter does forgive you granny. I bet he could get you thrown in jail if he wanted.’
Her grandmother hoisted herself out of her chair with a groan. She galumphed to the sink, her breakfast cup and saucer clattering in her unsteady hands. ‘My ginger biscuits will work their magic, lady. Don’t you worry about that. They’ve got me out of worse crimes than a slammed door, but that’s a story for another day. Before you go out, there are a couple of chores you can do for me.’
Nell let out a tiny whine. She was itching to get outside and start the search for her fox.
‘First, the lightbulb in the kitchen needs changing. You know standing on chairs makes me dizzy. Then you can give all the rugs a good beating in the yard. After that, you may get on with your algebra.’
Nell smiled to herself. The unspoken reason Annie didn’t like changing lightbulbs was that she hated to stand on the kitchen chairs. They groaned and squeaked under her weight, the legs bowing as if made of liquorice. Beating the rugs with an old tennis racquet made Annie cough and splutter, but it was one of Nell’s favourite chores. She would sling the rugs over the washing line. The muted reds, indigos and ochres would glow against the whitewashed walls of the yard, making Nell dream of faraway lands and flying carpets. Nell would beat them with all her might, delighting in the clouds of dust that billowed like grey glitter in the sunlight. Sometimes Ferdinand would appear in the clouds, like the amber-eyed genie from the Arabian Nights. She knew she would not find him there that day; his discovery would not be so easy.
Nell competed her chores in an acceptable twenty-six minutes. From her bedroom window, she saw the day was bright and fresh. Big, blousy clouds raced across a blue enamel sky. She shrugged off yesterday’s clothes and pulled on a t shirt and denim pinafore dress. Collecting her binoculars, her algebra book, her moss green notebook and a pencil, she clattered downstairs.
At the stove, she found Annie melting brown sugar, treacle and butter in a red enamel pan. The kitchen smelt rich and sweet and rich with spice.
‘All done Grannie. Do you need anything else before I go?’
The old lady waved absently as she stirred the pan with a wooden spoon. She peered at the contents like a good, studious witch at her cauldron.
‘Lunch at twelve, Nell. Don’t be late.’
‘I wouldn’t dream of it, Grannie,’ the girl replied truthfully. Grandma Annie regarded tardiness at mealtimes a crime worthy of the guillotine.
The village primary school was unsettlingly close to Nell’s home. When the wind blew from the west, she could hear it all: the high, bubbling voices of children playing, the low, chiding voices of the dinner nannies and the clang of the brass bell heralding playtimes and fire drills. The quickest way for Nell to get to the school was to cut through the churchyard. That morning, the school was where she was headed.
The moment the grey man had asked Nell to close her eyes and imagine where Ferdinand might be, a picture came to her that was clear and bright: she saw herself and her fox lying in the whispering grasses of the old air raid shelters, hiding from the muddling world of school. During the war, the shelters were a place of sanctuary from a sky raining bombs. During her school days, they were a sanctuary to Nell from routines and rituals she did not understand. Of course, that is where Ferdinand would be. She could feel it. Every tiny pulsing cell of her body seemed to confirm it.
She also knew what had guided him to the air raid shelters. The ‘connection’, as Mr Winter had called it. It was the poor thundercloud boy trudging up the hill to school, scolded by his tank-like mother. It was the livid-red slap that seemed to ripple through the fog like an earthquake. She’d remembered Ferdinand’s spine arching and prickling at the sight, and the furious black flash of his eyes as he watched.
Nell did not want to waste time walking to the churchyard gate so she scrambled over the wall, grazing herself. Strings of tiny beads of blood blossomed on each knee. They stung badly and tears welled in her eyes, but she had no time for self-pity. She licked the palm of her hand, pressed firmly down on each wound and moved on.
Ordinarily, time in the churchyard was sacred and Nell would savour the languid minutes or hours spent dawdling there. It was place of silence and enchantment. Wildflowers grew, tangled in the long, swaying grass. The ancient graves were toppled, eroded by time and salt air. No one had been buried in the old churchyard for decades. A new cemetery had been constructed nearby, smart and neat with shiny marble graves arranged in the geometric rows of a modern housing estate. It had a gravel driveway and even a tap for watering flowers. What it did not have was the wild beauty of the old churchyard, its birds and flowers and the surging unquiet canopy of trees that rustled or roared depending on the wind.
By the drowned sailor’s grave, Nell picked a posy of harebells, daisies and yarrow. The flowers were faded, parchment dry, but she placed the offering by the church door and said a silent prayer that she might find Ferdinand, her only true friend.
As she left the churchyard, the school and the air raid shelters came into sight, Nell’s heart thumped so violently she felt her small body might not be able to contain it. She had the sensation of movement, motion all around her, everything was racing – the fat clouds above her, the leaves and branches of the aged trees. She could feel the blood thrumming purposely round the veins and arteries of her body. Everything was converging, rushing to that very moment. It was time.
She approached the school slowly, reverentially. She could not bear to contemplate the desolation she would feel if Ferdinand was not there. She took the binoculars from around her neck and began to scan for a tell-tale flash of red umber. There were four shelters, four overgrown mounds of earth hidden beneath tangled ivy and towers of skeletal cow parsley. A tall green metal fence had been installed on the school side to stop children venturing in. On Nell’s side there was just a low stone wall to scale. She moved her binoculars backwards and forwards. On top of the mound furthest from the playground, she saw him: Ferdinand was there! He lay as neatly and primly as soft toy from Woolworths, straight out of its box. His black-tar legs were stretched out in front of him, his ears were pricked and his nose was high and proud. He was watching the doors to the school, flicking his brush from side to side impatiently.
The joy: Nell thought her heart would explode like a November firework. She sat on the wall, swung her legs over and dropped into the tall, swaying wasteland of the shelters. She had to move cautiously. The grasses came above her knees; it was dizzying, she felt as if she was wading through a surging sea of green light.
She had just opened her mouth to call to Ferdinand when she saw the fox’s body tense. Following his eyes, she saw the doors to the school open and heard the clang of the brass bell. Of course, she glanced at her watch; it was half past ten precisely: time for morning break.
She crept closer to Ferdinand and hunkered down. The last thing she wanted was to be spotted by her ex-classmates. The familiar smells of school swathed her, carried on the gusty wind: the freshly cut grass of the school field, the mince and dumplings bubbling in the kitchen. She closed her eyes. The darkness gave her a comforting sensation of invisibility. She kept her eyes tightly shut until the high hysteria of the first seconds of break were replaced by a gentle, purposeful thrum.
To her astonishment, when she next looked at Ferdinand, he was no longer alone. Looking through her binoculars she saw the scrawny, thundercloud boy lying on his belly next to the fox. She watched as the boy took a blue school exercise book from underneath his shirt. It was a maths book, Nell remembered: the maths books were coloured blue. The boy flattened some grass in front of him, placed the book on the ground and began to write. He had not seemed to notice the fox who watched his jottings with the kindly expression of a proud and benevolent teacher. While he worked, the boy’s colour was the blue green of a peacock feather: beautiful, complex and ever-changing in the dappled shimmering light.
Nell felt the stab of an emotion she could not understand, not unravel. It was something like agony, but deeper and murkier. Jealousy? Betrayal? Ferdinand had left her. Her beautiful fox had left her. The pain of loss seeped through her body. And then it stopped. A thought dropped into her mind like a postcard through a letterbox, like the happy chime of a bicycle bell: she must join them. It was what Ferdinand had wanted all along. It had been his plan.
She made her way cautiously up the steep bank of the shelter. The boy was so focused on his exercise book, he had not noticed her approach. Ferdinand turned his head and looked at her with his radiant black eyes. They flashed like fool’s gold. He welcomed her with a crooked, toothy smile. A warm wave of love ebbed from the fox to his girl. Nell felt bourn up by its powerful certainty. In that instant, she understood. She understood everything.
For as long as she could remember, Nell had been locked in her role. Her role as the lonely, friendless child. The ‘unfortunate girl’, the ‘poor girl’ – as she had often heard herself described. Her character had been cast firm and she had been unable to free herself. Her world was small and mostly unpeopled: the green, the library, the kitchen, her bedroom, her fox and her grandmother. In the last few days however, extraordinary things had happened. She had the sense that the plaster that held her tight was cracking, crumbling – that she was breaking free from the constraints of her narrow role.
First, the grey man had seen her, seen her with his cool olive eyes. He had spoken with her and listened to her. He listened to her as if her words had value, as if she had value. When she spoke with the grey man, she lost the hideous embarrassment she felt when connecting with others. Her words had not tangled. Her thoughts had not muddled. Their conversations seemed to engrave upon Nell a value, an approbation like a jeweller’s mark. She was enough. Whatever she was, it was enough.
Then Ferdinand had left her. But no, that was not correct, not accurate: he had not left her at all. He had summoned her to the air raid shelters, to this moment. He had never doubted she would come. He had not left her because he was never lost. He was helping her find herself. Find a new role for herself, at least. A new role as a friend. It was not a role that she was waiting passively to have bestowed upon her by another. It was a role she must carve out for herself.
The thundercloud boy looked up and his body tensed. Nell felt his nervous, feline energy. He was watchful, ready to run. He was looking for an escape route, for a safe place to hide. His eyes were brown, dark, velvet-brown and his skin was pale. He was thin, thinner even than the grey man. So pale and thin, Nell felt that in direct sunlight, his body would be completely translucent: his veins, his heart, his thoughts entirely visible beneath his skin. Maybe he had been locked in a tower by a wicked witch for years, never seeing sunlight, feasting only on the berries that tangled round a narrow window. He might have been a character from her book of fairy tales. He was wearing the dishcloth grey shirt of the previous day. Maybe he only had one shirt, or possibly all his shirts were dishcloth grey. Nell could not imagine his sour-faced mother ironing clothes with a sprinkling of lavender water, like Grandma Annie. Again, Nell realised how lucky she was. She was safe and warm and cared for, just like the rose pink lady with the enormous spectacles had said she would be. But more than that – she was loved. At that moment Nell felt the love that surrounded her. She was not an ‘unfortunate’ or ‘poor’ girl at all. She was a loved girl. She was a loving girl. She was powerful beyond measure.
The thundercloud boy clearly had no intention of speaking to her, Nell understood. He looked at her coolly, resentfully and turned back to his book. She would have to direct this scene, she knew. She would have to cast breadcrumbs of words for the boy to follow. It was not a comfortable role for Nell to play. Her eyes flitted to Ferdinand’s. She nodded at the fox. As usual, their thoughts were unspoken, but totally synchronised, totally understood.
‘Hello, I’m Nell. Can I join you?’ She did not wait for an answer. She expected if she did, it would not be positive or even polite. She sat herself down under the shifting light of the trees.
The boy glanced in her direction as if he was throwing a dart. ‘Can’t stop you, can I?’
Nell was not put off – his prickly disinterest was her own default position when meeting people for the first time. She took a moment assemble in her mind some words, some ideas for a conversation. She would be clumsy at it, she knew, like an infant selecting brashly coloured building blocks.
‘You’re new here, aren’t you?’
The boy kept his head down, not even acknowledging the question. His eyes were focused on numbers, huge numbers set out neatly in towering columns that covered the page of his book. His lips moved while he worked as if he were singing along to a tune only he could hear.
‘I used to go to this school, which is how I know you must be new. I am home schooled now. But when I did come here, this is where I would sit. Every break time, every lunchtime – even lesson time, if I could. This exact spot. This was the only place in school I liked. Up high like this, amongst the trees, it feels like flying doesn’t it. Swooping like a swallow.’ She spread her arms out wide and lifted her face to feel the cool air rushing past.
The boy’s eyes had flitted to her when she mentioned being home schooled. He was curious about that, she could tell. Ferdinand blinked approvingly. Keep going, he seemed to say. Keep talking.
The scratch of the pencil and the whisper of the air in the trees was calming. Nell closed her eyes and tried to assemble the next building blocks of their conversation.
The boy spoke, ‘Shit!’
It was a bad word, she knew, a very bad word indeed. She stopped herself from issuing a loftily disapprovingly rebuke. She looked at the boy. He had been working feverishly on his sums and now the nib of pencil had snapped. Ferdinand was unconcerned with the swear-word. In fact, he looked amused by it, tickled. His eyes flashed more brightly than ever. The lad began emptying his pockets, scattering the detritus of boyhood in front of him: a conker, two dice, a piece of still-wrapped bubble-gum, a toy car with three wheels, a handful of paperclips and an elastic band.
No pencil sharpener. No spare pencil.
Nell understood exactly why Ferdinand was so puffed up with satisfaction. She wondered momentarily if he had somehow caused the pencil to snap. It would not surprise her. Nothing would surprise her about her wily old fox.
She placed her own newly sharpened pencil in front of the boy. She knew if she handed him it, he would not take it.
‘Here, have mine,’
He looked at the pencil with revulsion as if it might be hexed.
‘Take it, I have more at home.’
The boy looked from the pencil, to her face. He was assessing the risk, she thought, weighing up his options. It was the same with the battle-scarred tom cat who occasionally visited Nell’s back yard. Nell would set down a saucer of cream or chicken, sit back and wait, trying to still herself, silence herself until the cat found the courage to eat.
She lay back in the bunker’s long grass and watched the leaves quiver in the lemon light above. When she turned to the boy, she noticed he had taken the pencil and recommenced his calculations. It was a small victory, but a delicious one.
‘Your work is very neat, I must say.’ Nell mused. ‘When I did maths the numbers didn’t seem to want to stay in their boxes. They got so muddled. Mrs Green would always say, Nell – imagine each number is a poisonous spider. You must keep it in its box! It cannot escape! I don’t think likening numbers to tarantulas is a very good way of getting someone to enjoy maths, do you? Anyway, then the thought would be in my mind that there were hundreds of poisonous spiders on the loose in the classroom and I couldn’t concentrate on work at all after that.’ She paused, wickedly, ‘I liked to imagine who they might attack first. So many choices. Mrs Green, possibly, one might lurk in her crocodile skin handbag. A tarantula in Penny McBryde’s hood, maybe.’
The boy laughed. It was such an unexpected response, ripe and rich and glorious.
‘I’ve met Penny McBryde,’ he said dryly. ‘She is just asking for a tarantula in her hood.’
Nell smiled to herself. It had worked. The door was opening. ‘What are you doing, is it addition?’
The boy looked at Nell with a sly sideways glance. ‘Nah, long multiplication. Miss Green said we could only do hundreds by tens, but that it too easy. I wanted to see if I can work out how to do ten thousands by thousands. Maybe decimals. She said I was just showing off in front of my new class. I wasn’t. I couldn’t care less what they think of me.’
Nell whistled appreciatively. ‘You must be clever. You like maths then?’
‘Suppose,’
‘Do you like school?’ as she asked the question, she pictured his reluctant, shivering body trudging through the fog towards his new school. She was certain she knew what his answer would be. She was astonished to learn she was mistaken.
‘Yes. I like the lessons. I don’t like all that stuff,’ the boy said, nodding towards playground. ‘I like it here. I don’t feel like a bird though. I feel like an animal in its den.’
‘Like a fox?’ Nell cried.
‘Suppose,’
‘Safe and warm.’
‘Hidden.’
Nell nodded. She liked to be hidden too, hidden deep under soft kingfisher blue blankets, hidden behind the pages of a book, hidden amongst the tumbled gravestones of the churchyard.
‘Can you do algebra?’
The boy sat up, legs crossed. Nell sat up too. She copied his stance. They were almost facing each other. Their knees almost touching. Ferdinand, alert, sat between them, his head moved from side as they spoke, like the attentive umpire of a tennis match.
‘I love algebra. We did it a bit at my last school. Miss showed me some, even though it was not on the curriculum. I’d often do extra. She’d give me extra maths to do.’
Nell’s mind struggled to process why anyone would want to do extra school work. It was too tricky a concept. She gave up.
‘Well, I just don’t get algebra, and Grandma Annie is only good at maths when it involves shopping receipts or recipes. I’ve got this book, see.’ She took the algebra book and laid it in front of the boy. It was to be an offering. An offering of friendship. No wonder Nell had argued so passionately with the librarian about having it. Its importance had been foretold.
The boy picked up the book. Above his head, his peacock colours bloomed and flickered.
‘Wow. This is a GCSE book. I am not surprised you think it’s hard.’ He opened a page at random and began to read. Nell could almost picture the cogs and wheels of his brain turning and clicking like the workings of an old and beautiful clock.
‘You see, algebra is just like a puzzle. A murder mystery even. There are lots of clues to follow, suspects to eliminate.’
‘Would you like to borrow it. It’s a library book, so you must take care of it. Maybe you could explain some algebra to me . . . as you’re such a wizard.’
The boy looked at the library book in his hands as if it were made of gold.
‘Thanks,’ he said quietly, meekly almost.
‘Will you be here at lunchtime? Grannie is baking ginger biscuits this morning. I could bring us some. And a flask of ice-cold milk. You haven’t lived until you have dunked one of Annie’s biscuits in freezing cold milk. We could do some algebra then.’
‘I’ll be here,’ he smiled at her. It was a faint smile, momentary, as if drawn in smoke. Nell thought it lovely.
The imperative clang of the break-time shattered the silence, sending outraged crows and blackbirds shrieking into the endless sky. The boy stood up and began his descent down the side of the shelter.
‘Watch out for nettles!’ Nell cried. ‘Wait, what’s your name?’
The boy turned back, ‘Harry, my name is Harry.’
Harry. Nell said the name over and over in her mind. It was a good name. Kind. Solid. Safe.
‘Be careful they don’t see you, Harry. They don’t allow children here.’ She spoke in a conspiratorial whisper.
‘Don’t worry. I am invisible when I want to be.’
Nell did not doubt it for one second.
Alone with Ferdinand, she plucked a strand of grass and chewed it contemplatively. ‘Harry seems quite nice,’ she said airily. The fox rested his snout on her leg.
‘Ouch! Cold nose! Bare leg! Get off!’ she shrieked. The smile on her face was as brilliant and bright as a sunflower.
Walking back to the village green with Ferdinand high-stepping by her side, she noticed, casually, the way one might notice the day’s weather, or the time on a clock, that she was happy. She had found an old friend. She had made a new friend. It had been another extraordinary morning.
Whatever she was, it was enough...
ReplyDelete