The Illustrated Child

by Polly Crosby

  ‘Who is she?’ I asked, tracing the soft edge of the feather over my cheek, and wondering if it felt like a mother’s loving fingers, but there was no answer. I opened my eyes, searching for his huge shadowy bulk in the dark room, but he was already gone.

  Four

  I awoke the next morning to the screech of metal on metal, and for an instant I thought it was the gargoyle, cut loose from his fountain, climbing the guttering to rap at my window.

  It was a light, bright morning, and I climbed out of bed and peeped outside. I had been half right: Dad was standing submerged in the moat below, a pair of pliers in his hands, attempting to unscrew the bolts that held the fountain in place. The sound it made set my teeth on edge, and I watched his red face, the thick cords of muscle bunching in his neck as he worked.

  As the last bolt loosened, he lifted the pliers high above his head and I winced as he brought them down on the gargoyle. The sound rang out across the garden. The fountain began to tilt, swinging down towards the water.

  I opened the window, scrambling onto the sill to lean out. ‘What are you doing?’ I shouted.

  Dad looked up, and his eyes widened. ‘Get back, Romilly, you might fall!’

  I leant back, still looking out.

  ‘It was giving me nightmares too,’ he said more quietly, wiping a slick of mud from his brow. He climbed awkwardly out of the moat, the dented remains of the pliers hanging from his hand, as the fountain slowly sank beneath the water.

  I spent the morning re-enacting the circus, trying to tame Monty with a whip I had fashioned out of a long strip of willow, but he just looked at me warily and skittered off, chasing the seed heads from a dandelion clock. I shot occasional glances at the place where the gargoyle had been, imagining him rising up out of the moat to haunt me, but there was only calm, still water there now.

  In the afternoon, Dad announced that I couldn’t run a circus without making toffee apples, and so we shut ourselves in the kitchen, the room filled with the most glorious smell of caramel. In the saucepan, the boiling liquid was hypnotic, popping gloopily like lava in a volcano.

  ‘I think it’s ready,’ Dad said, peering into the pan, ‘grab an apple.’

  Obediently, I picked up one of the many apples sitting ready on the counter, a lolly stick implanted vertically into its heart.

  ‘Dip it, girl! Dip like you’ve never dipped before!’

  I lowered the apple into the saucepan, aware of the sugary steam coating the little hairs on my hand, and skimmed it in the golden liquid before pulling it out, round and fat and coated in a layer of glossy mahogany.

  We repeated the process with the remainder of the apples, setting them to cool on the side, the molten toffee pooling at their bases. Dad helped me down off the stool, his palms just as sticky as mine.

  ‘Can we eat them now?’

  ‘No, they need to cool first. I tell you what, I have something to show you while we wait.’

  I followed him to his study. I hadn’t been in there since I had gone looking for evidence of my mum weeks ago. It was always locked now. Dad magicked the key from a trouser pocket, and I waited in the hall while he unlocked the door with a fumble and a click.

  ‘I found this the other day in the little attic space just off your bedroom. I thought you might like to meet her.’

  ‘Her?’ I peeped round Dad, intrigued.

  His desk was unusually tidy. There were no paints or brushes, and no picture of the circus lady like last time. But what was there was so interesting, the thought of paintings went completely from my mind.

  ‘A parrot!’ I said, for there on the desk, staring at me beneath a dusty glass dome, was a green parrot with a big black beak and round yellow eyes.

  ‘She’s rather spectacular, isn’t she?’ Dad ruffled my hair.

  ‘Can I keep her?’

  ‘I don’t know, Roe, she’s very old, and a bit flea-bitten. Look:’ He pointed to the bottom of the jar, where a number of dead insects lay, their legs in the air.

  ‘Where’s she from?’

  ‘I told you, the attic.’

  ‘No, I mean before. When she was alive.’

  ‘Well,’ Dad settled into the seat behind his desk, looking hard at the bird, ‘sometimes they’re kept as pets, but originally she would have come from a country far away. Somewhere warm and wet and filled with the raucous chitter of birdsong. In fact—’ he shifted in his seat, getting comfortable, and I perched on the edge of his desk, knowing a story was coming, and relishing the thought.

  ‘In fact, many years ago, this particular parrot flew over the Amazonian rainforest, calling out her strange song, but none of the other birds understood her. So one day, as the monkeys chattered and the crickets whirred and buzzed below, she took off from the fronds of a barrigona tree, and began the longest flight of her life.

  ‘On the way she passed swallows and swifts, and even, once, a seven-tailed peacock from the Peruvian mountains.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘They’re very rare.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘And then, one warm, balmy English summer’s day, she spied this house, and came down to land.

  ‘Now, this was Braër House from a hundred years ago, and a different little girl lived here then. The parrot landed on the bridge, and the little girl said, “Oh, hello,” and the parrot found she could understand her: the language she had been speaking all this time was English.’

  ‘Did they have lots of adventures like me and Monty?’

  ‘Well, they would have done, but just as they were beginning to be friends, a witch came to the village, looking for somewhere to stay. She knocked on the door of Braër House, and asked if she might have a bed for the night.

  ‘The girl’s father – who was a disagreeable sort – told her to leave. But on her way out, she saw the girl and the parrot. The witch was tired and hungry, and somewhat grumpy, and, feeling spiteful, she cast a spell over the two of them. When the daughter didn’t come home for tea, the man went outside in search of her, and there on the grass was the parrot, dead and stuffed and perched in a glass bell jar.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘But that’s not all. When he went back inside his house, he found his daughter in the little study at the end of the hall, also dead, also stuffed, in her own, life-sized bell jar, staring out at him, her little hands pressed against the curved glass.’

  ‘But… but the witch wouldn’t leave her like that!’

  Dad lifted a finger to quieten me. ‘Sometimes, the girl’s father would come downstairs and the girl and the parrot had changed position.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘The parrot would be standing on one leg, or tucking its head under its wing. And the daughter, well, she was often sitting on the floor of the bell jar, her head in her hands, and once he found her on her knees, her hands pressed together in prayer.’

  ‘What did he do?’

  ‘He decided to open the bell jar, to release his daughter. He imagined that whatever magic was going on, it was contained within the glass, and once the glass was removed, she would resume her original form.

  ‘But he was so desperate to free his daughter, he didn’t consider what might go wrong. He tried to lift the heavy glass dome, but it was stuck tight to the base. His daughter was crouched at the bottom, frozen in a cowering posture, her hands above her head as if preparing for the disaster that was sure to come.

  ‘Frustrated, the man found an axe and took it to the bell jar. As the metal bit into the glass, the jar crazed and cracked and began to shatter, falling over his daughter like rain, landing in her hair and slicing at her skin.’

  I put my hand to my mouth in horror.

  ‘But his daughter began to crumble too. She cracked like glass, collapsing into a million shards. The man bent over and picked up the largest piece he could find, a fragment of her eye, and he stuck it right in the centre of the fireplace in the drawing room so that she would watch over them always. And then he poured the rest of her away
into the moat.’

  I jumped down from the desk, pulling the parrot off and carrying it awkwardly into the drawing room. Dad jogged behind me, his arms outstretched in case I dropped it. The drawing room was a large space full of dusty old furniture. Ancient frayed rugs lay underneath spindly chairs with legs shaped like bamboo. There was a huge stone bowl protruding from the far wall that looked like it came out of a church. It had a spout in the shape of a raven’s head, and I eyed it beadily as I came in, thinking how similar it was to the gargoyle in the moat.

  The fireplace was a huge brick affair, the kind you could walk into and stare up into the blackened chimney above. Monty was sitting there now, transfixed by the echoing caw of the crows perched on Braër’s roof. He stood up to greet us, his back end coated in soot.

  True to Dad’s word, stuck fast in the middle of the mantelpiece was a dark, shiny fragment that looked like flint. I put the parrot on the floor and reached up to touch it, but I was too small, and my fingers brushed the rough brickwork instead.

  ‘What happened to the parrot after that?’ I said to Dad.

  ‘The man hid her in the attic because she reminded him of his lost daughter. And that’s where she stayed until I dug her out, covered in cobwebs.’

  ‘Have you ever seen her move?’

  ‘Nobody sees her move, Romilly. They only notice it when she’s changed position.’

  I went over to the parrot again. She was sitting straight-backed and to attention, her head cocked slightly to one side as if she were listening.

  ‘Come on,’ said Dad, ‘those toffee apples should be cool enough to eat now.’

  I hefted the glass dome, my hands barely reaching round it, and carried it, panting to the kitchen table. Dad was levering the toffee apples off the tray with a knife.

  ‘Dad, can I keep the parrot? Can she live in my room?’

  He put down the knife and looked at me with a very serious expression. ‘You’ll need to look after her, she’s very old,’ he said. ‘Here,’ he handed me a toffee apple, and I licked it, patting the parrot’s glass dome with the flat of my hand as if I were patting a dog.

  Dad put his hand on top of mine on the dome, his fingers flexing slightly the way they did when he laid his hand on my head to say goodnight. I licked my toffee apple. It didn’t taste like the ones at the circus. It had a slightly burnt flavour, mixed with a smoky smell that felt wrong with all of that sugar.

  ‘What was she called?’ I asked between licks.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The girl who died?’

  Dad’s hand stopped flexing. ‘I don’t know,’ he said at last.

  ‘And the parrot? Does she have a name?’

  ‘I think it’s engraved right here.’ He bent and looked at the little curved plaque at the jar’s base.

  ‘What does it say?’

  ‘She’s called Jasmine.’

  I studied Jasmine in her curved glass aviary. She was looking back at me in the same way that the eyes of people in portraits follow you around the room.

  I took a bite of the toffee apple, and a sharp pain sent shivers up into the roof of my mouth. ‘Ow!’

  ‘What is it?’

  Something foreign and sharp was rolling around my mouth, knocking against my teeth. I put my finger in and scooped it out.

  A large tooth lay in my palm. On one side was a big, brown hole. The place where it had been in the back of my mouth sang with pain.

  Five

  After the first day at my new school, I ran down to the meadow to find Dad. The huge beech tree in the garden was beginning to shed its leaves, and they were scattered across the grass like a discarded silk petticoat. I laughed at the tree’s nakedness, shaking off the cardigan from my new uniform. The fallen leaves flew up all around me in a cloud of gold, and I pretended I was commanding them, waving my hands about my head like a witch casting a spell.

  Dad was sitting on an upended wheelbarrow in the meadow, his sketchbook in hand, his great bushy eyebrows furrowed in concentration. His face was still nut brown from the summer, and I could see little stripes of white all over his forehead where the skin between his wrinkles remained untanned. He looked like a tiger.

  I came to a stop near Dad, and he snapped his sketchbook shut as soon as he saw me.

  ‘Young Romilly!’ he roared, and I jumped, wondering if he was losing his hearing.

  I offered him a bit of the tangerine I had saved from my school dinner, and which tasted of wet toilet paper, and he took it gratefully, munching it, pips and all, the bristles around his mouth frothing juice.

  ‘Rumour has it that this little meadow was an overflow for the churchyard.’ He nodded towards the church’s high tower, peeping over the hedge.

  I looked around the meadow. It was a triangular field bordered on all sides by high yew hedges. ‘But there’s no gravestones,’ I said, feeling a little disappointed. It would be nice to find some human bones.

  ‘Well, that’s what rumours are. No one knows if they’re the truth.’

  I scanned the field again. There was nothing exciting here, unless you counted a huge heap of metal rods and discs piled up by the hedge that hadn’t been there the day before.

  ‘Do I have to go to school?’ I asked, changing the subject and biting hard on a piece of tangerine. Stacey had not been in my new class. At break time I had searched the playground, but it was only a small school and none of the children milling around on the tarmac were her.

  Dad placed the sketchbook on the floor. ‘School is important, Romilly,’ he said with a sigh, ‘and besides, people would berate me for taking you out.’ He got up from the wheelbarrow and stretched, his joints cracking noisily. ‘Even if I was able to just whisk you out, I really can’t have you at home right now. My mind is bursting with ideas on how to make money out of this old place, and you’d be too much of a distraction.’

  I looked down, digging my toe into the mound of grass beneath my feet. When I looked up, he had crouched down in front of me so that his eyes were level with mine.

  ‘Just because I can’t give you what you want, doesn’t mean I don’t love you.’ His eyes were shiny, as if he had been caught unexpectedly in a ferocious gale.

  I nodded.

  ‘And I’m sorry if I’m not always here for you at the moment. It’s just, I have so many things to think about right now. Tell you what, when everything in here has calmed down somewhat,’ he indicated his head, and I imagined cogs whirring and little hammers tapping, ‘I’ll be able to focus much more on you, and then we can formulate a plan. Deal?’

  ‘OK,’ I said, swallowing my tangerine wedge painfully. ‘What are you doing down here, anyway?’

  ‘Attempting to pay the mortgage,’ he replied with a chuckle, glancing over at the rods and pipes in the corner.

  I looked around, but I couldn’t see any money anywhere.

  ‘Is it a project?’ I said, running my eyes over the metal rods. We had started a project at school that day, making buildings out of spaghetti and balls of plasticine. Maybe Dad was going to do the same on a bigger scale.

  ‘I suppose it is. But it’s stuck right here.’ He grabbed forcefully at the top of his forehead, as if he could pull the project right out. He smiled and turned back to his sketchbook, becoming still as a statue as if a light had gone out in him. I stepped forward and waved a hand in front of his face, but his batteries were well and truly dead, and I left him to it, walking back up to the house, in search of something living.

  Stacey was sitting on the gate, letting it swing back and forth beneath her. My stomach flipped with joy at seeing her.

  ‘You’ve had a haircut,’ she said. She had a packet of crisps in her hand, and she offered me one from the crackling bag. It tasted far more satisfying than the pithy, leftover taste of tangerine in my mouth.

  ‘Stacey, why don’t you—’ I started.

  But, ‘Shh, I want to show you something,’ she said, wiping salty potato crumbs from her lips. Jumping down from the last bar
of the gate, she took off, not looking back to see if I was following.

  She led me through the village to a paddock behind a farmhouse. I hurried after her, intent on asking her about school, but when she stopped, the question fell from my lips. A donkey stood at the fence staring at nothing, its ribs clearly visible under its shaggy coat.

  ‘It’s going to die this afternoon,’ Stacey said, watching me for a reaction. ‘I heard the farmer. They’re going to put it down.’

  ‘Why?’ I stepped closer to the animal. Its ears twitched, but it continued to stare into nothing.

  Stacey shrugged. ‘It’s old.’

  ‘Has it got a name?’ I reached my hand out tentatively, touching the donkey’s muzzle. Long grey hairs prickled my hand.

  ‘I think it’s called Billy,’ she said, climbing the fence and prodding the donkey’s flank with a stick. His tail swished angrily. He was chewing slowly, his lower lip working up and down, wobbling gently. A fat strip of hay dangled from between his teeth. I touched the edge of it as it trembled in his velvet mouth, and his lips caressed my fingers. How could such an old mouth be so soft?

  ‘Will it… will it hurt him?’

  ‘Nah, it’s quick. One shot to his brain and he’ll be gone, none the wiser.’

  ‘Shot? They… they shoot him?’ Putting down suggested a gentle collapsing of limbs. I had imagined the vet’s hand laid on the animal’s side until he bent his aged legs and lay, quietly, asleep. Shooting, on the other hand, was violent and loud: an angry death.

  ‘Can’t they give him some medicine to make him go to sleep instead?’

  ‘Not something this big. They have to get them right here, between the eyes.’ She formed her hand into a gun shape and touched her fingertips to Billy’s forehead. He blinked. ‘Got to get the brain. Don’t worry, he won’t know what’s happening.’

  But I will, I thought.

  Her warm, slightly sticky hand pushed its way into mine, and I looked up to see her looking into my eyes. ‘It’s the kindest thing, Romilly,’ she said, squeezing my hand. ‘Are you OK? Mum says sometimes I go a bit too far.’