The Song of the Lost Boy

by Maggie Allder

  The Professor is standing by her fire, leaning on her two mismatched sticks, looking a bit confused. I cannot see Skye anywhere.

  We go over to the Professor, and Vishna says, “Lunchtime, Professor!”

  The Professor’s brow clears and she smiles at us. “Hello, you two,” she says, sitting down creakily on her high log. “We are experiencing a time of change!”

  “We are,” I agree.

  Vishna says, “We brought back fresh apples and one-day-old pastries for lunch.” She finds the Professor’s tin plate and puts some of the food on it, but Vishna and I eat from our hands, brushing the crumbs onto the ground.

  We have just about finished, and Vishna is telling the Professor about the failure of our mission in the library, when Skye arrives.

  “Any luck?” she asks us, but does not wait for an answer. She sits on my log, next to me, and says to the three of us, “It’s decision time!”

  “Is it?” asks the Professor, and I realise that she is becoming a bit muddled with all the changes that are happening.

  Vishna moves across to the Professor and puts a hand on her arm, to stop her from feeling too worried. “What do we have to decide?” she asks Skye.

  Skye takes a deep breath. “Well, first of all,” she says, “I need to know who is staying and who is going. Giorgi, this is your last chance if you want to go with Little Bear.”

  The Professor says, rather grumpily, “I’m not going anywhere.”

  I am a bit disheartened by our failure to find out anything about my cross and Q symbol, but I do not feel at all like giving up, so I say, “I’m staying too.”

  Vishna looks from the Professor to me, and back again. Then she says, “Well, that settles it. I’m also staying!”

  Skye takes a deep breath. I think she is pleased to hear that Vishna will be around, to look after me.

  “Right,” she says. “So be it!”

  I am waiting for Skye to say something more. I know her. There is a sort of look about her, as if she is thinking about the way to tell us something. Then she leans forward and looks at the Professor. She says, “We don’t think it’s a good plan for your shelter to stay here, out in the open.” She looks at Vishna. “Nor yours,” she adds. She looks away from the fire, towards the earthworks. She says, “We want to give the impression that everyone has left. We want them to think the last group of homeless has gone, that they’ve won. The way they seem to have won in Kent.”

  “Ye-es,” says Vishna thoughtfully. “That’s a good plan.”

  The Professor says, “But Skye, I really cannot go anywhere. I can’t walk anymore. You know that!”

  Skye puts her hand on the Professor’s other arm, the one Vishna is not already holding. “I know, I know,” she says, comfortingly. “We are only thinking of moving you a few feet, out of sight of the city, closer to the Old Man.”

  The Professor is still looking upset. Vishna says, looking at the Professor and talking to her almost as if she is a kid – a younger kid than me – “That’s a really good idea. And will Giorgi and I live close to the Old Man too?”

  Skye looks gratefully at Vishna. “Absolutely,” she says. “That’s the plan.”

  The Professor is still looking worried. “I don’t know…” she says.

  Vishna pats her arm. She says, “Leave it to us, Professor. You have your afternoon nap, and Giorgi and I will move your shelter. You’ll love it! Just wait and see!”

  * * *

  I have never seen where the Old Man has his hut. I follow Skye, carrying some of the stones that mark out our fireplace. We go into the woods, past the Old Man’s fire circle, to where the Hill begins to slope down on the other side. It feels quite different here. There are far more bushes, and in the background, all the time, you can hear the whine of traffic on the bypass. I do not see the Old Man’s shelter until we are almost on top of it. There are thorn bushes all around with the last few, mouldy looking blackberries still hanging onto the branches. There is a smaller fire circle here too, the sort one person might build just for himself, and another woodpile. The Old Man is nowhere to be seen.

  Skye says, “We thought your shelters could be just here…” She walks a few steps to a place where smaller saplings and brambles seem to be fighting it out for space, and I see that there is another small clearing. She says, “There is certainly room for two shelters here.”

  Vishna is looking thoughtful. She says to me, “Giorgi, could you bear to share with me? If we make two rooms?”

  “Oh, yes!” I say. “Then the Professor can have her own shelter.”

  Skye wades through long grass into the clearing. “The Hill slopes this way,” she says. “And that way is west. The worst of the weather comes from the west, so if it were me, I’d put the shelters here… and here. With the entrances here…”

  Vishna says, “And the Professor’s shelter should be this one,” she goes to stand in the place she means, “so that she can see our shelter easily, and the way to the Old Man’s.”

  Skye says, “You won’t bother the Old Man, will you? He’s used to being on his own.” She is looking a bit worried.

  Vishna says, “No, don’t worry, Skye. It’ll be good.”

  By the time the Professor wakes up we have moved her shelter and I am carrying the last of her belongings away to her new home. Walking Tall and Big Bear make a sort of chair with their hands and carry her carefully through the copse and over to the new shelter, and sit her gently on her familiar tall log. She looks confused again, but not unhappy, and Vishna says to me, “Will you stay with her, while we move our shelter?”

  By the time dusk comes both shelters are up. Skye and Vishna have used the old canvas from Skye’s tent to build our hut. It is larger than the original one, and the red curtain does not fully divide the two rooms, but it feels warm and familiar to me.

  I say to Skye, “Now you don’t have a shelter.”

  And she says, “No, not anymore,” and I think it is very sad. “But I dare say you’ll let me doss here, when I visit?”

  So I say, “Of course we will!” and I feel a bit better.

  Vishna says, “I’m making dinner now; are you staying, Skye?” but Skye says not, gives me a hug and heads off towards the top of the Hill again.

  The next day, when Vishna has made breakfast for the Professor and for us, and the fireplace is tidy and clean, so as not to attract vermin, Vishna and I walk back through the trees to our old camp. Everything has gone. The shelters have all been taken down. The stones from the fire circles have gone. There are worn patches here and there, and a hollow where Little Bear and Dylan wanted to create a paddling pool, but that is all. The people have all gone.

  I say to Vishna, “I didn’t say goodbye to anyone. Not even Skye!”

  “Probably best that way,” says Vishna.

  * * *

  I don’t know if the grown-ups decided it among themselves when I was not around, or how it came about, but there seems to be an agreement that none of us will go over to the Old Man’s shelter. The Professor becomes much brighter over the next couple of days. I think she is becoming accustomed to the changes, and I can tell that she likes to have Vishna around. On the second morning after everyone left, while we are crouching in our shelters eating breakfast, watching a steady drizzle drift across the hillside, the Professor says, “We need to tell the People that everyone has gone.”

  “Yes,” says Vishna, looking surprised. “I hadn’t thought of that.” Then she adds, “I never knew how it worked with them. How do we make contact?”

  “I know,” I say, “Sort of. I know where to meet them, but I don’t know which nights they come.”

  Vishna says, “We’ll just have to go to the meeting place every night until we see them.”

  Vishna and I spend our first few days working out the details of our new life. A lot of the people who left h
ave given us bits and pieces of food, but we will need to sort out our own systems for gleaning. The fruit and vegetable man at the market will help, of course, and Vishna thinks the art school cafeteria throws out quite a lot of food. We think we might have to fill our water bottles from the river, which seems a bit risky, but there is still half a crate left of the good stuff the People gave us, so in the meantime we agree that wherever we go we will keep our eyes open for outside taps.

  Each night we go down to the lay-by where the People Who Must Be Saints gave us the chocolate bars that time when I was allowed to help. We wait in the shadows, but nobody comes, and we give up, three nights in a row, when the cathedral clock strikes one. On the fourth night Vishna says, “I think they must have heard that everyone has gone.”

  As she says it, we hear the whine of the electric van. Its lights are off, and it is going very slowly. It pulls up more or less where it did last time, and we all wait, just as we did before. Then the driver’s door slides open and someone climbs out.

  It is not one of the People who was there last time. This person is smaller, dressed in dark clothes with a hood up. We walk out into the moonlight. The van driver does not go to the back of his vehicle, and he seems to have nobody with him.

  “Hi!” whispers Vishna.

  “Hi!” whispers the van driver. He walks a bit closer to us, and I see that it is a girl. Not a nearly grown-up girl like Vishna, but a young girl, maybe a year or two older than me.

  “Do you live on the Hill?” she murmurs, and her voice sounds hoarse, deeper than you would expect from a girl.

  Vishna whispers back, “Nobody lives in that camp now. They’ve all gone. We came to tell you.”

  The girl is quiet for a moment. Then she says, “Did they arrest them? They have arrested all our adults – everyone who was at Meeting on Sunday.”

  “Wow!” says Vishna. “All of them?”

  “Everyone who was at Meeting,” the girl says, “and the little ones who were in the crèche.”

  Vishna says, “What will you do?”

  We cannot see the girl’s face. She stands very still for a moment, then she says, “Anyhow, I just came to tell you that we cannot help anymore.”

  Nobody moves. Then Vishna says, “If you ever need help, come around the back of the Hill.”

  The girl does not answer. She just stands there a moment longer, then goes back to her van.

  After she has driven away, Vishna says to me, “She’ll survive.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because she didn’t let anything slip,” says Vishna. “I asked her how she would survive, but she didn’t answer. We don’t know anything at all about her. If we were being questioned, there would be nothing we could give away.”

  “But if they question her,” I point out, as we start to climb the Hill again, “she will know where to find us.”

  Vishna reaches out to hold my hand. She says, “That was a risk we had to take. They’ve helped us all this time, the People. We have to be ready to help them.”

  “Yes,” I say. “That’s right.”

  * * *

  New customs begin to develop. We find a tap in a garden belonging to an old cottage near the river. There is always a hosepipe rolled up on a stand next to it. I say, “This is so that the woman can water her garden.”

  Vishna says, “This is so that the woman’s gardener can water the garden!”

  We are on our way home from the art school, carrying all sorts of strange food. Earlier Vishna collected bruised bananas and cabbages which the caterpillars had been at, from the fruit and vegetable man. I stay at the camp with the Professor, who has decided to teach me some French and to keep me on the ball with my maths and English. I cannot go into the city on weekdays because of police and school attendance officers.

  We go to the big fire circle in the copse if we want to talk to the Old Man. We call, “Old Man! Old Man!” just as we did when there was a whole camp looking out over the earthworks at the city. Then the Old Man comes and makes tea, and we talk about things. Vishna gives him one quarter of everything we glean, and he gives us herbs for tea, and some smelly stuff to smear on the Professor’s leg, where an ulcer has appeared. He always asks after the Professor but I do not think they ever meet.

  One day, Vishna and I are sitting there, drinking mint tea, when the Old Man says, “So, how’s your research going, Giorgio?”

  I am surprised. Ever since the rest of the camp disbanded it seems as if Vishna and I have spent all our time just working out how to survive.

  “I haven’t done anything since the others left,” I admit.

  The Old Man is quiet. Vishna, sitting next to me, is very still. At last the Old Man says, “If you don’t try hard to find them now, you might regret it when you grow up.”

  Then he says, “But of course, it is a long time since you were separated from them. If you want to give up, that’s perfectly reasonable.”

  “I don’t want to give up…” I say. “It’s just…”

  The Old Man sits forward, looking serious. He says, “Giorgio, you don’t need to explain to me. As long as you are happy in your own mind about what you are doing…”

  I say, “I’ll work out a plan.”

  The Old Man sits back on his log. He says, “Well, it’s good to see you both, as always.” And we know it is time to leave.

  * * *

  It is cold at night now. There was frost on the ground and on the scraggly blackberry thorns when we woke up this morning. It is Vishna’s first winter in a shelter, and I tell her about going for a jog just before bed to get warm, and about sleeping with all your clothes on. We are concerned about the Professor. She starts to cough, and Vishna says she will go into the city to find something warmer for the Professor to wear at night. The Professor tells us not to fuss, but we are both worried.

  The Professor is still teaching me. She says I have an appalling French accent but that my English is fine and that I’m never going to have problems with maths. I have made a plan for continuing my research but it means I need to go down into the city, and it is really only safe to do that at the weekends.

  Then Vishna comes back with a huge bundle wrapped up in a bin bag. She unrolls it in front of our fire for the Professor to see.

  The Professor says, “I can’t wear that!” and looks horrified. It is a rather worn-out-looking fur coat.

  Vishna laughs, “No, you can’t!” she agrees. “We could fit two of you into this!” Then she says, “But it will make a brilliant blanket to keep you warm at night.”

  The Professor says, “But it’s an animal fur! I’ve never been near an animal fur in all my seventy-five years!”

  Vishna does not look at all taken aback. “Me neither,” she says. “It’s wrong to kill animals for fashion. Everyone knows that! But you know, Professor, Native Americans used to use animal furs. The Blackfoot, in Canada. It was not for fashion. It was not abusing nature. It was using the abundance of the land.”

  “Mm,” says the Professor. She leans forward, resting one hand on her stick to balance, and strokes the fur. “I suppose we did not kill it,” she says. “It would be dead, whether I used it as a blanket or not.”

  I ask, “Where does it come from, Vishna?”

  Vishna looks slightly ashamed. “Well,” she says, “there was a pile of stuff outside the charity shop. The shop doesn’t open until ten on Fridays. It was in the pile.”

  The Professor says, “So somebody wanted to give it away?”

  “Yes,” agrees Vishna.

  The Professor strokes the fur again. “Thank you, Vishna,” she says.

  Then Vishna says to me, “And next week is half term. All the schools are out. You can go into the city and do your research.”

  * * *

  My plan is to visit as many churches as I can, starting in the middle of the
city and working out. There are two buildings that really interest me, and I have noticed that neither is locked up. People come and go to them all day. One church is under an arch near a big stone monument called the Butter Cross. When I was little and Skye sometimes brought me into the city, there were often beggars close to this church, or demonstrators around the Butter Cross, but you never see those people now. I expect the beggars are all in labour camps. And the demonstrators? In prison, I suppose, like the People Who Must Be Saints.

  It is Monday morning and I am awake early. It is still dark and my nose is cold, although the rest of me is snug in my sleeping bag, with a pile of blankets wrapped around me. I can hear the Professor snoring loudly in her shelter, and Vishna is tossing and turning a bit, getting ready to wake up. I creep out of the shelter and examine the fire. We put a thick log on it the night before, and it is still smouldering, but only just. It is hard to keep a fire in all night. I take a handful of kindling from our thatched woodpile and prop it up against the log, then blow gently. Once it has caught alight I add larger pieces of wood. By the time Vishna crawls out of the shelter, yawning and stretching, with her plaits looking frayed after being slept on all night, the water for tea is boiling.

  “You’re up early,” she says, lacing up her trainers. “Oh, look!”

  There is a small tin on one of the hearth stones. The Old Man does that sometimes. He brings little gifts while we are asleep or away from the shelter. This time it is blackberry tea, which is good for the Professor’s cough but also delicious with breakfast. Vishna spoons some into a second can and adds hot water. We leave it next to the fire to keep warm.