by Polly Crosby
Dad remained silent, frowning at the picture.
‘And look,’ I said, scanning my face on the last few pages, ‘it’s on my right cheek here, but here it’s on my left.’
Dad pulled the book towards him, his brow furrowed. He turned back to the first painting I had looked at, the close-up of my face shrouded by my auburn hair, and his hand went to the mole, touching it delicately as if the girl in the picture was alive.
‘Did you forget, Dad? Couldn’t you remember what I looked like?’
He lifted his eyes to me, and in the dark of the kitchen they looked sunken, as if he had aged ten years. ‘I could never forget what you looked like,’ he said, ‘you’re my reason for carrying on.’
I studied his face, not sure if he was joking or not. He seemed serious enough. ‘Can I see this painting of me, Dad, the original?’
He sat back down and dabbed at the puddle of hot chocolate on the table. ‘I’m afraid not, Romilly, it’s still with the printers.’ He smiled at me and touched my cheek again, the other one this time, leaving a sticky chocolatey smudge.
It was a couple of days later, when I looked in a mirror, that I noticed he’d left a chocolatey mole-shaped dot on my right cheek, exactly in line with my real mole, so that I was symmetrical. I covered up my real mole and gazed deep into the eyes of the reflection Romilly, wondering who she was.
The beginning of December had been mild, and it wasn’t until Dad suggested we make Christmas decorations that I began to feel that fizz of excitement that builds on the darkened evenings that lead up to Christmas.
Together we made decorations for the tree, gluing little top hats onto blobs of cotton wool to make snowmen. Dad painted a set of angels made from meticulously cut baked bean tins. They were curved and smiling and weirdly threatening, as if their divine blue eyes could penetrate your soul. In contrast, my own angels were simple paper creations, grinning vacantly at their superior metal cousins.
‘You know, Romilly,’ Dad said, picking up a sprig of holly and twisting it with gold wire, ‘holly was often brought inside a house in pagan times to ward off evil. It’s said that it stops witches from entering your dwelling at night and casting a spell on you. It’s always a good idea to have some nearby. For safety’s sake.’
I paused from gluing the wool onto an angel’s head, a sticky thumb holding it in place. He winked at me and raised an eyebrow, and I giggled.
January brought with it frosts so hard that the water in the toilet froze solid. Stacey came, and took great delight in peeing straight onto the layer of ice, watching it steam and melt beneath her.
‘One tip,’ she called to me from behind the half-closed toilet door, ‘never eat yellow snow.’
In the evenings we put tea lights in jam jars in the garden so we could play out in the dark. I was allowed to light my own fires in the garden now. Dad showed us how to find the tiniest twigs that had fallen and died, caught in the branches of trees. These were the heart of the fire, around which we layered bigger and bigger sticks, the pile growing into the shape of a fat tepee.
When the flames had roared and begun to die, and the charred sticks had scattered, we laid baked potatoes on the glowing embers, pulling them out far too early and biting into their crispy black skin. The centre of my potato was hard and cold, but it tasted of smoke and excitement.
‘Are you ever going back to school?’ Stacey’s voice was muffled over the popping of the fire, her mouth simultaneously chewing and talking.
‘I doubt it, it’s much more fun staying at home.’
‘What’s your old primary school like in the holidays? Do the teachers live there?’
‘Of course not! They live… somewhere else.’ My time at school felt like a lifetime away. I tried to remember if my teacher had ever mentioned where she lived. Perhaps she did stay at the school, curled up in the leaves on the playing field like a hedgehog and hibernating until spring.
‘So there’s no one there right now?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said doubtfully, picking up a stick and stirring the embers so they caught and fizzed once again, ‘why?’
‘I’d like to go to your school.’
‘It’s not my school anymore,’ I said, realising with a jolt that I hadn’t been to school for over two years.
‘Not to be taught, stupid, I mean go now. To see what it’s like.’
I swallowed a mouthful of potato. It was a hard bit and it caught in my throat. ‘I don’t think we’re allowed.’
‘Course we’re not allowed, that’s why I want to go.’
‘What, right now?’ My mind was trying to think of reasons not to, but all I could come up with was, ‘There might be ghosts.’ I knew I sounded pathetic, and I wilted inwardly, knowing she had won.
‘Yeah! I bet there are. There was a boy who went to your school once who drowned in a well. Maybe his ghost is there still, pulling up the bucket to try to find his long-dead body.’
‘There isn’t a well at my school.’
‘Course not, they filled it in with stones and earth so no one else would fall in, but you can still make out the circle if you look close enough. Somewhere in there, his bones are rattling about, working their way to the surface.’
I didn’t know if she was telling the truth or not. I tried to look into her eyes, but they were masked by the reflection of the flickering flames.
‘OK, let’s do it,’ I said grudgingly.
The school felt familiar, as if I were recalling it from a dream rather than a real memory. It was a Victorian, red-brick building. It loomed out of the dark like a gothic manor house.
‘Stacey, I’m not sure…’
‘Come on, it’s OK,’ she said, taking my hand in a rare moment of empathy and leading me through the high metal gate that led into the playground. We had brought a tea light each to light our way, wedged into scraped-out baked potato skins. The liquid wax swayed and splashed in its hot tin holder, coating my thumb in a painful layer of warmth, and setting immediately.
I stepped forward and tried the door, but of course it was locked. We stood on the step, thinking for a minute. ‘I know,’ I said, inspiration taking me, ‘the girls’ loos! The windows are always open ’cause they smell so bad.’
We rounded the south side of the building, and sure enough, there were four large windows. The top pane of each was open a fraction. An eerie light filtered out, casting rectangles on the ground.
‘I’m going in first,’ Stacey said, to my relief, putting her tea light on the ground. ‘I’m going to need to climb on your shoulders.’
‘OK.’ I put my tea light with hers and crouched down by the wall. She climbed on. She was much heavier than I had imagined. I stood up slowly, the world made out of little popping stars. The soles of her trainers ground into my shoulders, pulling on my hair as she manoeuvred herself into a standing position. I struggled to stay still, and then there was lightness and she was gone. I looked up. The top half of her body was inside the window, but her legs were still sticking out. They were flailing about as if she couldn’t quite squeeze through.
‘Are you OK?’ I whispered as loudly as I dared. Her legs kicked violently against the glass, and I thought for a moment she was going to break the window pane, but then with one last flounder she was through.
Her voice came floating out of the open window, echoing as if she were far away, ‘This isn’t the girls’ bogs, it’s the boys’. And it stinks! And there’s poo on the wall.’ The voice was getting quieter, as if she were walking away.
‘Stacey, what about me?’ I said, waiting in the quiet. And then a voice around the corner went, ‘Psst!’
She was standing at an open door I had never seen before, as if it had just been magicked into existence. ‘Hurry up then,’ she said, as if I had been dawdling.
I took her into my old classroom and showed her where I used to sit. She pulled the chair back and sat down, looking intently at the whiteboard. Moonlight filtered through the huge windows, making everyth
ing pale blue. Glittering stars and papery snowflakes twirled from strings in the ceiling.
‘Do you think your dad’s treasure could be hidden here?’ Stacey said. It was the first time since Dad went on Wogan that she had shown any interest in the treasure hidden in Dad’s books.
‘What made you think of that?’
‘It just feels like everybody in the world is looking for it now. Shouldn’t we be, too?’
I looked round at all the trays and cupboards. ‘The school isn’t in any of the books,’ I said doubtfully.
‘But that would be the brilliance of his plan!’ she said. ‘And anyway, he hasn’t written all of the books yet. Maybe the next one will be Romilly and the School.’
‘Sounds a bit dull. What’s fun about school?’
‘Good point. We should have a look at your dad’s books. See if we can spot something everyone else has missed.’
I nodded excitedly at her enthusiasm, my mind already flicking through the pages, showing her my favourite pictures, talking through my theories.
‘What do people do in school, anyway?’ she said, picking up a pencil and idly scratching her name into the desk. I found her some paper and pushed it in front of her.
‘Just do some writing,’ I said, and she set to right away, practising her letters, scribbling on the paper, her hand shielding the words.
While she worked, I strolled around the room, wondering if she might be right, if this could be the setting for the next book.
It was strange, being in the classroom again. Whenever I had thought about my time at this school, the memories had been filled with the ring of my classmates’ voices. Now, at night, with just the two of us here, I wondered if I had dreamt it all.
I remembered with a shiver the child’s voice that sometimes woke me at night, talking so fast and so softly that it sounded like it was speaking another language; a language I had learnt years before but since forgotten. In the silence of the room I thought I heard it here, whispering at me desperately through the dusty air.
‘What do you want?’ I whispered back to it, straining to hear a reply, to distinguish the voice from the low hum of the boiler, the swish of trees outside.
‘Are you OK?’ Stacey was looking at me strangely.
‘I’m fine,’ I said, listening intently, but the voice had gone, melting into the quiet of the classroom as if it had never been there.
Stacey was still looking at me peculiarly. I spotted an old, worn dictionary lying on a bookshelf. ‘I was just looking for this,’ I said, picking it up and waving it at her. I didn’t want to let on how spooked I felt. I flicked through it, navigating past torn, well-thumbed pages covered in great scrawls of crayon. The book settled open, and I looked down. Whether by coincidence or whether by choice, it had opened on ‘treasure’. I put my finger under the definition, reading slowly.
treasure
1 precious metals or gems. 2 a thing valued for its rarity. 3 colloq. a much loved or highly valued person.
If the treasure in Dad’s books wasn’t gold and jewels, then it had to be either 2 or 3. I tried to think of anything rare and of value we owned. The only thing I could think of was the original paintings from the books, but it couldn’t be them because I already knew exactly where they were, and Dad had said the treasure hunt was partly for me. That left number 3, but I couldn’t see how Dad was hiding someone he loved in his books, except for me, of course, but I wasn’t hidden: I was painted there for all to see. Then the shadowy woman came into my mind. Was she what Dad was hiding? Was she the treasure? She was the opposite of what I imagined treasure would be. Gold and jewels reflected light, sparkling at you until your eyes were dazzled, but the shadowy woman sucked it in, absorbing light and happiness like a black hole. If she was the treasure, I wasn’t sure I wanted to find her.
I looked up from the dictionary at the large, dark classroom, trying to figure it all out. A lone papier mâché dragon hung from a beam above me, a stringy piece of tinsel dangling from its wing. It winked at me, its nostrils flaring. I quickly looked away. The boiler in the corner clunked loudly, making me jump.
I looked over at Stacey. She had stopped writing and was staring around her, mesmerised by the twirl of paper decorations above our heads.
‘Shall I be the teacher?’ I asked, breaking the silence.
‘OK,’ she said uncertainly, and I felt a sudden power over her, knowing how out of place she must feel in the school.
‘How about…’ I said, thinking on the spot, ‘how about we do a spellings test. I’ll tell you words and you can spell them.’ She began to shake her head, but, ‘You can’t be at this school and not do spelling,’ I added imperiously.
‘OK,’ she said, picking up her pencil and waiting, poised, for the first word.
I thought for a moment. ‘Up,’ I said. Her face relaxed and she scribbled the word onto the paper.
‘In.’ I rattled through all the two-letter words I could think of, moving onto three-letter words, watching her face to judge her reaction, trying desperately to think of words she could spell.
After ‘cat’, ‘dog’, and ‘bum’ I decided that was enough, and asked her for the paper so I could mark it. Stacey approached the desk warily and handed it to me. The paper was creased and smudged. I took it and pretended to look over the tops of my (invisible) glasses. Her writing was scruffy and huge. There were no joined-up letters. Everything was spelled correctly though, except ‘bum’, which she had spelled with an a instead of a u. I ticked it anyway, feeling guilty for making her do the test in the first place.
She took the paper from me and her face lit up at all the ticks.
‘Are these the kind of words you did in your spellings tests?’
I tried to think back to my short time at school. I couldn’t remember any spellings tests. I couldn’t remember much about school at all. ‘Yeah, sort of,’ I said.
‘Will you teach me to write one day? And to read?’
‘Doesn’t your mum do that?’
‘She used to but she says she’s too busy now. Would you?’
I thought for a moment, daunted by the size of the task, not sure I knew much more than Stacey, but how could I say no? I nodded and she launched herself across the desk and hugged me. I’d never been hugged by her before. It was the kind of hug that squeezes the air out of your lungs. It felt good.
Thirteen
Dad announced at the beginning of the new year that the ‘Great Outings’ would begin: days out to museums and art galleries that, in his words, ‘will enhance your appreciation and understanding of the world that surrounds and enriches you.’
It felt like a good opportunity to spend some time away from Braër: the fans that had come out of the woodwork after the second book was published had slowly drifted away, and, with the third book not due out until the summer, we were almost guaranteed some quiet, uneventful trips.
Over the spring, we visited many cultured settings, travelling by car and bus and rail, sometimes too tired from the journey to fully appreciate the places when we got there.
In the summer, as a finale to our cultural tour, Dad announced that for a twelfth birthday treat we would be going to the British Museum. I was overjoyed: I had been asking to go for years, my mind full of hazy memories of the weird and wonderful collections inside.
Dad insisted we go incognito. On our last trip away, we had encountered a very earnest young woman who had been quite insistent that it was shameful and wrong for my father to put me in his books. Her ringing voice had followed us throughout the museum until we had to be escorted out of a back door for our own safety. I felt very silly as we stood on the steps of the British Museum, wearing an identical baseball cap to my father, but no one cast a second glance our way.
From the outside, the museum seemed as if it had been made for giants. Huge, resplendent pillars stood at the front as if they were holding the place up. I wrapped my arms around one, and Dad joined me, but even then, we could hardly reach halfway rou
nd, and I wished our little family was bigger so that we could make a proper circle.
Inside, the museum echoed beneath my feet. Dad and I stopped in the entrance hall, feeling the cool, dusty air hit us, a welcome change from the sizzling heat of the pavements outside. Ahead of us, a strange green light filtered through, as if we were about to enter an underwater world.
‘Come on,’ Dad said, setting off without me.
The hall opened out onto a vast, bright circle, the curved glass ceiling above us criss-crossed with a lattice of triangles. Dad chuckled as I gaped up at it, awestruck.
‘Got your sketch pad?’ he said, and I nodded, not daring to speak in the huge, echoing room.
‘Pencil?’
Check.
‘Charcoal?’
Check.
‘Right. Meet you back here in two hours.’ And he set off at a brisk pace, climbing a curved staircase ahead, leaving me alone in the eerie, pale green light.
At least now I was alone, I could go and find the museum shop for a brief respite. I looked around, searching for a sign to show me the way, and set off down a brightly lit walkway, trying to remember coming to this museum before, my memories as small and diminutive as my former three-year-old self.
I took a corridor, turning left, then right, until I found myself in a vast open space filled with towering stone giants. They seemed made for the museum, fitting perfectly into the high-ceilinged rooms. I imagined them coming to life once the museum was closed, roaming the halls, Egyptian statues shaking hands with Mesopotamian beasts. There were lots of stone animals here: lions and strange wild things that looked like dogs. I paused by a sleek, muscled panther. Its eyes bored into me, and I put my hand warily over its huge paw. ‘You don’t scare me,’ I whispered.
As the day wore on, I began to feel thirsty, and I turned back, retracing my steps. I came to a long, gloomy room that I hadn’t been in before. It housed row upon row of Egyptian mummies, standing next to each other in silent ranks, and as I passed between them it felt like they were waiting for something, like an army on the eve of a great war. It was an eerie room, and it made me uneasy. I took the first staircase I came to, and began to climb, looking back to check they weren’t following me.