Lost: Part 3

A restless gust rattled the open window of Nell’s bedroom. In his sleep, Ferdinand’s black whiskers twitched, alive with electricity. His nose quivered too, as he decoded messages and memories carried on the wind. Suddenly his golden eyes snapped open and his tail swished furiously. Then, sensing the invisible danger pass, he yawned, opening his mouth like a pink orchid, and sank back into sleep. 

Ferdinand had been with Nell since her first night at Grandma Annie’s. Nell had been taken in a car to the cottage by smart lady with huge, round spectacles. She had never been in a car before. The transitory images that flitted by her window fascinated her: an old man wobbling on a blue bike, a cow in a field of thistles, a grey church on a hill. She kept her nose pressed against the glass for the whole thrilling journey. She felt like a caged bird whose cover had finally been removed. She gobbled up the sights, every single one of them. The lady with the spectacles kept glancing at Nell. As she expertly steered the car through towns and villages, she explained that Nell was going to a new home and that there she would be safe and warm and cared-for. Safeandwarmand cared-for. The words were spoken with a gossamer softness – it was tone unfamiliar to Nell: but she thought it as sweet as a songbird. She turned to the lady like a flower turns to the sun and in that moment the air around the lady had shimmered rose-pink. That was the first occasion Nell recalled seeing a person’s colours. Nell did not know what safeor warmor cared-formeant, or what a new home was, those words had no more meaning than the sound of the car horns that beeped or the church bells that rang. But there was something about the rose-pink lady’s manner which calmed Nell and quietened her thumping heart.

            Later that night, after a supper of cauliflower cheese and treacle tart, Grandma Annie led Nell upstairs to her bed. Her sheets were white and crisp and her blankets were kingfisher blue and edged with satin. Everything she remembered about that day: the kind lady’s voice, the glorious supper, the blankets on her bed, everything was imbued with a softness and warmth that was alien to Nell. And yet, she felt safe. In her new bed, in her new room, she imagined she was a baby bird tucked up for the night in a nest lined with thistle-down. It was as if all the hard, sharp grit of her life had been sifted away and only a talcum-powder softness remained. She slept soundly and dreamlessly. She did not miss the slamming doors, the angry, unfamiliar voices or the loud pulsing music. She woke once. After freeing herself from her tight bandage of blankets (something Grandma Annie had called ‘tucking in’) she padded over to the window and pulled back the lace curtain, curious to see where she had ended up. The sky was a blue-black velvet cloth embroidered with shimmering stars. The paths criss-crossed the village green like silver ribbons. Everything was still. Everything was silent. Everything was perfect. Satisfied, she turned to get back into bed. It was then she noticed the red fox lying there. He was stretched in a crescent shape, as if leaping through a sky of blue blankets. Nell saw nothing extraordinary in this. Nothing more extraordinary than the rose pink lady’s songbird voice or the three plates of oozy cauliflower cheese she had devoured at supper. The fox flicked his white-tipped tail and flashed a toothy grin. His amber eyes glowed momentarily like a Christmas lantern, and the name Ferdinand chimed in her head like the ring of a bicycle bell. In the room next door, Grandma Annie began to snore. Nell took one more look at the spangled stars in the sky and climbed into bed next to the fox. He pressed his warm body into hers and rested his chin on her shoulder. Nell could feel the booming of his enormous heart. She thought she finally understood what the kind lady had meant when she used the word ‘home’.

            

Monday morning: the first day of the new school year. Nell glanced at the clock by her bedside and wondered how it could possibly be seven o’clock already. She bolted out of bed and scrambled into pair of jeans, a red sweater and her favourite yellow wellies. Ferdinand burrowed his face into the soft, sleep-scented pillow. He was in no mood to be roused. Foxes were terribly lazy creatures, Nell come to learnt. She called his name urgently, shook his bony shoulder and rushed into the bathroom. Within two minutes she was haring down the narrow cottage stairs with a grumbling Ferdinand at her heels. Today, she decided, she would watch the Grey Man from the shade of the lime trees in the churchyard. 

            ‘Morning Grandma Annie,’ she called as she skidded across the washed kitchen floor and reached for the door handle. Her grandmother was clucking at the stove, stirring a chipped enamel pan with a wooden spoon and flipping rashers of golden streaky bacon with a spatula. The room smelled of toast, bacon and strong, sweet tea. 

            ‘Wait there just one second young lady. These eggs are just scrambled right. Sit yourself down. We’ll have breakfast a bit earlier today so we can have a chat about school.’ 

            School. Nell froze. She was torn. She needed to see the Grey Man, to update her moss-green notebook with Monday’s movements and colours, but her usual excitement was tainted with disquiet. Yesterday, she had been discovered: her eyes had met the Grey Man’s and the whole earth had tilted. Maybe lying low for a few days would be a good idea. She could stay home and help with chores. If she was to get her way about school, she needed her grandmother on her side. In the end though, it was the smell of breakfast that helped make up her mind. She never could resist the smell of bacon frying. She turned away from the door, removed her binoculars and slid demurely into the kitchen chair. Ferdinand slinked under the table, eager to recommence snoozing. As she watched Annie fussing at the stove, the memory of the Grey Man from the previous day exploded in Nell’s mind. When her eyes connected with the man’s, his colours had changed. The flat stone greys and drab charcoals shimmered with flecks of iridescent silver like glitter tossed against a darkening sky. Her fingers tingled with excitement, eager to record this insight in her notebook. Just as she was about to spring from her chair and retreat to the privacy of her bedroom, Annie waddled to the kitchen table bearing two piled plates.

‘I don’t know where you think you are going, young lady, but you will sit your bony bottom back in that chair. Breakfast is ready and we do not waste good food in this house.’

            With her inelegant gait, glowing, rosy face and crest of white hair Annie resembled a plump and contented hen. Nell’s heart tremored with love for her grandma and the sight of the soft, oozy flesh which strained the buttons of her flowered dress. At times, she yearned to climb onto her grandma’s knee and sink into the warm, soft folds of her body. 

Annie placed the plates on the table and with a trembling hand poured two mugs of strong tea, adding a heaped spoon of sugar to each. She picked up her knife and fork and peered at Nell with bright, keen blue eyes. 

            ‘School today, Nell?’ 

            Nell put down her fork and looked at her grandmother. Her face was sagged and drooped like melted wax. Her colour that morning was red, as usual, but it was a soft red, the blushing red of a crab apple. Nell thought hard about how she might answer. It was important that she chose her words carefully. She wondered whether Ferdinand would help, but from underneath the table, she could hear his gentle snores and dreaming, twitching paws. She was on her own.

            ‘I don’t think so, Grandma,’ she replied. She kept her voice flat and emotionless, as if she was discussing the possibility of rain. ‘I’d like to go to the library and help you with some jobs, if that is all right. These eggs are lovely, by the way. What’s different about them?’

            It was a sly, fox-like tactic, changing the subject to food. Annie’s eyes narrowed like a snake’s, but she took the bait. ‘A splash of double cream, that’s all and a fine sprinkling of red cheddar.’ The old woman opened her mouth to speak again but Nell leapt in first.     

            ‘If you write me a list, I’ll get your shopping while I go to the library. You know, I was remembering the cauliflower cheese we had on my first night here. We haven’t had it in such a long time, Grandma. Can we have it tonight?’

            Ferdinand was awake. From under the table, she heard a snort and the quiver of paws on slate. Without being able to see him, she knew he was laughing. He knew her game. He would be proud. He had taught her well.

Annie sighed, heaved herself out of the chair and shuffled to the dresser. He legs were swollen badly, Nell noticed with a tender ache. They looked like two mottled tree trunks. Nell hated to see signs of frailty or age in her grandma. She could not contemplate life without her, or life without Ferdinand. She felt a slow, strangling paralysis at the thought. 

Annie dropped a pencil and notepad on the kitchen table. Her breath rasped as she eased herself back into her chair. She gulped her tea as if it were oxygen. 

‘All right then, Miss Nelly Nelly, I’ll start on the shopping list after breakfast. You can help me with the washing before you go. Sheets and towels today. It’s a bright and breezy so everything will dry in two shakes of a lamb’s tail.’

            And so it was settled. Nell’s quiet, orderly days could continue without the harshness of the classroom. She loved her school-less days, days where hours and minutes fitted together neatly and cleanly like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Her bright mornings were crammed with chores, library books and baking. Roast chicken lunchtimes were followed by long, drowsy sofa naps. Afternoons were time for adventures with Ferdinand: climbing trees or beachcombing. At bedtime, after the kaleidoscopic hustle-bustle of the day, Nell would read animal stories to Ferdinand by torchlight. Her days were rich with experience and learning. She felt sorry for the poor children who had to spend their days chained to a desk in an airless classroom. Nell did believe children learnt anything at school. At school, teachers talked and talked and talked. Their words had bounced around Nell’s brain like an echo in an underpass. Gold stars and benevolent smiles were bestowed upon the children could take the teacher’s words and transcribe them accurately in a neat, looped script. It was a test of memory, tidiness and obedience. Nell did not see how any of those things were learning at all. Surely that was just copying, and copying was supposed to be wrong. 

Since living with Grandma Annie and Ferdinand, Nell had a blossoming sense of her own identity. She had a life that was hers and hers alone. She had a body that could do astonishing things like running and climbing and leaping. She had a brain that flashed with thoughts and ideas like exploding, spiralling stars. How could such colour and light and energy be represented by a neat line of cursive letters on a lined page or the seven times-table learnt by rote?

            Nell’s heart soared as she watched her grandma set down her knife and fork and begin work on her shopping list. The storm-cloud of school had passed. Her breezy days of freedom would continue. 

‘I’ll wash up, Grandma, and strip the beds so we can get the washing done. You have a rest.’

            With the dishes washed, dried and stacked on the dresser, and the sheets snapping on the line, Nell sat at her bedroom window and watched the procession of children marching up the slope of the green towards the village school. In their bright, September-new sweaters and cardigans, they brought to mind smudges of finger paint on a sheet of green sugar-paper. Penny McBride glowed in her buttercup yellow dress. Penny had been the only person to speak to Nell on her first day at school. For a few glittering moments, Nell had even wondered if Penny might become a friend. Nell had collected many things over the years. A friend was one treasure she had not succeeded in finding.             

It had been morning break. Nell and Ferdinand were sitting on top of one of the overgrown air raid shelters observing the chattering chaos of the schoolyard. A shrill, imperious voice trilled from below. 

‘My name is Penny Elouise McBride. Who are you and who on earth are you talking to?’ Nell peered over the edge of the air raid shelter. The girl who looked up at her was as neat and shiny as a silver pin. She beamed up at Nell revealing two missing front teeth. The sight of such imperfect perfection softened Nell’s deep-rooted spikiness. She was astonished to hear herself answering honestly. 

‘My name is Nell. I am talking to Ferdinand, my fox.’ 

 ‘Ferdinand?’ The girl whistled wistfully. ‘Goodness, you’re lucky to have a fox. I’m only allowed goldfish. And they keep dying and getting flushed down the toilet. Do you mind if I join you up there?’

Without waiting for an answer, Penny scrambled up the sides of the shelter. She sat herself next to Nell and began to untangle the spirals of sticky goosegrass that had attached themselves to her red woollen tights. Nell stared straight ahead and thought furiously about what to say. Having another child so close was a slightly uncomfortable sensation, like wearing another person’s clothes. And yet, she liked having Penny next to her. Penny’s colour was bonfire-night orange; Nell felt warmed by its flickering glow. But what to say? Maybe she could comment about the goldfish? Or the goosegrass? Or Penny’s dark-red tights? It was so tricky, she thought. The wrong combination of words would send Penny clambering back to the playground whereas the right words might enchant her into staying, enchant her into friendship. Nell opened her mouth to speak.  ‘Did your goldfish . . .’

‘Ouch! Michael Morgan you did that on purpose!’ A heavy, mud-splattered football thudded between the two girls. Ferdinand leapt to his feet, alert to possible danger. His eyes became as small and dark as elderberries. Penny rubbed her arm and groaned as if she had been hit by a cannonball. Nell thought her behaviour peculiar. Although it had made them all jump, the ball had not touched either of them. 

‘What you doing up there Penny McBride? You’ll be in trouble if Mrs Joyce catches you. Out of bounds these shelters.’ A grubby boy Nell recognised from class goggled up at them.

‘I’m sitting with Nell and Ferdinand,’ Penny said with a pert toss of her shining blown plait. ‘And we don’t want any boys joining us.’ She picked up the football and looked at it with such revulsion Nell imagined it was not a ball at all but a bleeding, freshly severed head. 

‘Now, take your stinking ball and skedaddle.’ 

Penny threw the ball at the boy’s head with such force and accuracy he had dodge to avoid the impact. Regaining his composure with a swagger, the boy spat at the ground, 

‘Ferdinand?’ he sneered, ‘I can’t see any Ferdinand. Is he your boyfriend, Penny? Is he your INVISIBLE boyfriend?’

Penny rolled her eyes and yawned dramatically, ‘You are such an idiot, Michael Morgan. Ferdinand is Nell’s fox and any second now he is going to take a big, bloody chunk out of your leg. Can you not hear him snarling at you?’

Until that moment, Nell had been in awe of Penny: her dazzling assurance. Her ability to shoot words like arrows. Penny could convey so much with a with a contemptuous roll of the eyes or toss of her hair. Next to her, Penny felt as undefined as a smudge of chalk. But why had she said Ferdinand was snarling? He clearly was not. In fact, at that moment he was disinterestedly picking at the casing of a hazel nut that had become wedged in pad of his paw. 

‘Fox? You’re bloody loopy. There’s no fox there. An imaginary boyfriend and an imaginary fox. You’re sad!’ With that, the boy picked up his ball and sprinted back to the playground. His acrid, mocking tone lingered in the air like the smell of burnt toast.

‘Ignore him, Nell,’ Penny said with a wan smile. It was the sort of smile that might be bestowed on a three-legged dog or an elderly person in a wheelchair. Suddenly Nell felt very small. The bubbling hopes for friendship were stilled.  

Nell was used to people not seeing Ferdinand. For that reason, she had learnt never to mention him. Not even to Grandma Annie. What she hated most though was people who pretended to see him when they did not. If that was the case with Penny, they could never be friends. She could not bear to ask the question, but she had to know for sure. 

‘Can you see Ferdinand, Penny?’ she asked.

‘Of course,’ Penny replied casually as she chewed a strand of grass. ‘He’s right here isn’t he? Right between us.’

Her confidence allayed Nell’s fears, but only slightly. Her heart was beating as she asked the next question. Everything would depend on Penny’s answer.

‘What does he look like?

Penny frowned and her bonfire orange glow clouded slightly. ‘Like a fox, silly. Red. Bushy tail.’

For years, Nell had hoarded her days of friendless solitude, saving them up in the belief that one day they might be exchanged for the friendship of one special person. 

‘What about his front legs?’ Nell probed. ‘Aren’t they funny. They make me smile.’ 

‘What about them?’ Penny was beginning to sound bored, irritated. Her sweetness souring like milk left in the sun. 

‘They are my favourite bit about him, that’s all. What do you think?’ 

Penny shrugged and stood up. ‘Well, they are nice and long I suppose and shiny red. Shall we go play with him in the trees? I don’t see the point of having a fox at all if all we are going to do is sit around and talk about him.’

Nell was not listening. Her whole body suddenly bowed with the weight of disappointment. Penny was lying to her, as others had before. She could no more see Ferdinand than she could see the Man in the Moon. Nell stared straight ahead. She could not bear to look at the girl next to her. She allowed the silence to harden and solidify around them. She did not move. She did not speak. Ferdinand yawned, rested his head on his front paws and closed his eyes. Time limped past. Eventually, Penny sighed petulantly and scrambled down the slope of the shelter. She slipped as she went, yelping as her steadying hand grasped a clump of nettles. Nell allowed herself a tiny smile. She watched coolly as Penny sprinted towards the surging mass of children cavorting on the playground. The red ribbons that tied her plait flew behind her like the sails of a kite. Within seconds she was gone, her bonfire glow dissolved in a jumble of balls and skipping ropes and coloured raincoats. Nell and Ferdinand were alone together once again.  

She ran her hand over the fox’s smooth body. Ferdinand lifted his head and smiled at her, revealing his extraordinary front legs. The whole of Ferdinand’s front legs were black. Ink black. Midnight black. Tar black. In fact, Nell often wondered if Ferdinand had stepped into a deep pool of tar as a kit. That was just how he looked. That was how unique he was. Ferdinand’s tar black legs were her test. A true friend would see Ferdinand. Everyone else was a phony. Everyone else was a liar. Everyone else was inconsequential. 

Over time, the route from the classroom door to Nell’s perch on top of the air raid shelter became a thread of trampled ground. Winter and summer she sat there. Teachers came to collect her. They would hold her hand as they led her back to the playground, speaking at first in whispering, gentle tones and then in snappish, impatient ones. When the air raid shelters were eventually fenced off, Nell decided she had had enough of school. She would assemble a life for herself beyond its cold metal railings. It would not be missed.