The Illustrated Child

by Polly Crosby

  When I reached the top, I looked around to get my bearings, my loose hat tipping down on my nose. I pulled it off and threw it in a corner.

  I walked and walked, looking into rooms but not really seeing anything, beginning to think I might never find my way out. There were signs everywhere, but none of them said ‘exit’. I began to panic. The only windows were in the ceiling, and I had no idea what level I was on, or which direction I was facing. I looked for Dad in each room I came to, but there were large men in baseball caps everywhere: we had chosen our disguise well.

  I stopped in the middle of a long room filled with the glistening skins of long-dead bodies, trying to get my bearings. No other visitors had reached this room yet, and the silence was absolute. I stood, trying not to panic, listening to the sound of my breath as it got lost in the wide space. I became aware of another sound: the tap, tap of footsteps between the display cases.

  I swung round, suddenly frightened, and I was confronted by a thin, leathery body in a glass cabinet directly in front of me. My breath left me in a cry of shock.

  ‘It’s only the Lindow man,’ came a treacly voice behind me, ‘there’s no need to fear him.’

  A little old woman was toddling towards me. She looked like countless other little old women I had seen, except perhaps a touch more glamorous. She was wearing very high heels, tap-tapping on the wooden floor towards me. I wished I still had my cap to hide under: she looked like she recognised me and, worse, she looked like a Hugger. The Huggers were my least favourite kind of fan; not content just to wrap their arms around me, sometimes they pinched me through my clothes, as if seeing the tears and confusion in my eyes finally convinced them I was real.

  I hid behind my hair, willing her to go away, and steeled myself as she came closer: sometimes people felt the urge to claim some talisman from me too – the sting as a hair was snatched from my head or a tug on my coat resulting in a stolen button. But this particular person came to a stop about a metre from me, standing neatly with her hands clasped.

  ‘Romilly Kemp,’ she said in a voice like melted toffee, and she smiled, showing a perfect set of pearl-like dentures.

  Her name was Beatrice, and she was a museum volunteer. We walked down a staircase with gold flowers on the handrail, and she showed me where the shop was, and bought me a cup of tea at the café. Then she took me round, explaining different exhibits.

  There was something nostalgically childlike about Beatrice, and something very old-fashioned too. When I stopped to eat my packed lunch, she sat cross-legged on the floor next to me, not on the bench nearby. Seeing her sitting there like that pulled at a memory, as if she was a character from a book I had read many times when I was younger, and still had a blurred recollection of.

  ‘Will you come to my house? I think my dad would like you,’ I said between mouthfuls of Wotsits. This was praise indeed. Dad had grown suspicious of most people recently, especially the strangers who turned up at our house unannounced.

  ‘If you really think I’d be welcome,’ Beatrice said with a trill of laughter that sounded like a little girl’s, ‘then I’d be delighted.’

  ‘Do you know where we live?’

  I spotted Dad coming out of a room at the far end of the hall, his face like thunder. I suddenly wondered whether I was allowed to ask people round. I took a few steps away from her, in case Dad looked our way and saw me talking to a stranger.

  She nodded, a smile stretching across her pretty face. ‘I think I can find your address,’ she said.

  It was a silly question: everybody knew where the Kemps lived.

  Two weeks later there was a knock on the door. Dad and I raced each other to the hallway, me in case it was Stacey, Dad, in case it was a treasure-hunting axe-murderer. Beatrice stood there, sparkling on the step like a cut diamond, a plant pot in one hand and a cake tin in the other.

  ‘Beatrice!’ I said, flinging my arms around her. When I stepped back, there was a chill to the silence. Dad’s face was closed, his eyebrows drawn together.

  ‘How did you find us?’ he said.

  ‘Meg,’ she said simply, and my ears pricked up at the mention of my mum’s name. I looked from one grown-up to the other, confused.

  ‘You have two picture books out, Tobias,’ Beatrice said. ‘And you were on Wogan, for goodness’ sake. It wouldn’t have been difficult to find you, even without insider knowledge. But I expect you know that: I expect you get all sorts of visitors.’ In the dappled light from the moat, Beatrice’s face suddenly looked too made-up – like a clown. I wondered with a chill who she was underneath the lipstick.

  Dad’s voice was controlled, as if he was struggling to contain unseen anger. ‘That doesn’t mean you can just turn up,’ he said.

  ‘She didn’t,’ I piped up in a small voice, ‘I invited her.’

  Dad blinked, his forehead uncreasing. ‘How?’ he said.

  ‘The British Museum,’ Beatrice said. ‘I volunteer there. I did hope that one day I would bump into you. I know how much you used to love it there. Before.’ She smiled at me, lifting a hand and touching my cheek with tea-soft fingers. ‘She’s so very like Meg, isn’t she?’ she said.

  I took a step back, my stomach somersaulting.

  Dad rubbed a hand over his face. ‘Romilly,’ he said stiffly, ‘I’d like you to meet your grandmother.’

  I turned, my mouth gaping, and looked at the little old lady who was no taller than me.

  ‘Close your mouth, dear,’ she said.

  Over tea and cake, my dad and Beatrice talked. They had much to catch up on. Beatrice was my mum’s mum, and Dad hadn’t seen her for eight years.

  ‘What happened eight years ago?’ I asked, shovelling a large slice of coffee cake into my mouth.

  ‘Manners, dear. Don’t talk with your mouth full,’ Beatrice said, wiping a wet crumb from her cheek.

  As they talked, I looked at my grandmother. There was something about the flick of her thin wrist as she lifted her teacup, the quick turn of her head that reminded me of the bird-like fragility of my mother. I wondered; did she see any of her daughter in me? Or any of herself, for that matter?

  As I looked at her, trying to see the wrinkles under the powder on her face, it felt as if I had known her for a long time. How many times had we actually met before? Why had we stopped seeing each other eight years ago? What had she done? Had she been locked away in an institution like my mum? And did that mean that one day I would be, too? I forced myself back to their conversation, pushing away any thoughts of what my future might hold.

  ‘It’s actually… a relief to see you,’ Dad was saying. ‘It’s hard, raising a child on your own.’

  Beatrice nodded. ‘Especially under the circumstances,’ she said, sipping her tea.

  I sat stiffly on the sofa, my mind playing over answers to the questions in my head. Dad took sympathy on my silence, mistaking it for boredom, and told me to go out in the garden while they caught up.

  Beatrice had given me a plant called a forget-me-not. It was a cloud of little blue flowers. ‘It’ll need to live near water,’ she had said, and so I took it out and knelt by the moat, excavating a small hole and patting the earth around it with care.

  I spent some time balancing on the fallen beech tree, my toes clinging to the smooth wood where the bark had begun to peel away, walking a tightrope and trying not to fall. As I practised, I wondered if Mum knew her mother was visiting us. I hadn’t thought of my mother for a while. It was easy to forget someone if nobody talked about them. I had spent a year trying to forget her. Remembering her now, I realised my memories were not tinged with sadness at her leaving us anymore, but with anger. How dare she march into our lives and swan out again so quickly? I hoped Beatrice wouldn’t do the same, and I vowed not to trust her so easily, just in case.

  A red-and-black butterfly flitted past me, settling on a lavender bush under the buddleia. I jumped down from the tree trunk (perfecting my roly poly on landing) and tiptoed towards it, a hand stretched
out in front of me, trying to coax it onto my finger.

  ‘Don’t touch them, whatever you do!’ Beatrice’s voice, old and scratchy, shot through the air towards me. Instantly my hand dropped down by my side. The butterfly soared high above my head. I squinted my eyes as it disappeared toward the sun and focussed instead on the tiny woman daintily picking her way in high heels towards me. A little way away she stopped and reached into one of the many pockets about her quilted jacket. Pulling out the sharpest pair of tiny silver scissors, she stepped toward me and laid them in my hand.

  ‘I never go anywhere without these so that I can snip the horrible little buggers in half. They fool you into thinking they’re butterflies, but they’re not. Watch out for them, they’re nasty.’

  In the days that followed, every time I caught a flash of red peppered with black in the air, a little shiver touched my shoulders and I would visibly recoil, looking at the murderous little insects with fascination.

  Holding the scissors in my left hand, concentrating on not stabbing myself as Dad had taught me, I grinned at Beatrice and started my sentry duty around the garden, seeking out dangerous-looking insects, unsure if I were brave enough to cut them in half. What if they stung you like wasps, or burrowed under your skin? Or maybe they aimed for your throat and strangled you to death with their feelers. I shivered with frightened pleasure.

  The garden in summer was made up of smells. Each bed of hot, crumbly soil held tangles of roses and lavender, papery dry in the July sun. Beatrice herself smelt of something a bit like summer turning to autumn, as if she were preparing herself for a long lie down. The tips of her fingers looked as if she had dipped them into tea. She didn’t smell like old people normally do, and she radiated colour. Her eyes were ringed with blue powder and her lips wore a bright fuchsia pink smile. Her hair had been yellowy white at the museum, but today it was the shimmering violet of the tiny butterflies that settled on the buddleia in the garden. She smelt particularly of lavender, standing in the middle of my garden, and I wondered if the smell had made her hair change colour.

  ‘Do I have to call you Grandma?’ I asked as we wound back up through the garden after showing her the mobiles.

  ‘Not if you don’t want to. I’m Beatrice, or Bea, either will suffice.’

  ‘Why haven’t you visited before?’

  ‘Family relationships aren’t always easy. People tend to take sides. They get angry and then, when they realise they’ve made a mistake, sometimes it’s too late.’

  ‘Did you volunteer at the British Museum just so you could find me?’

  ‘Not only because of that. When you’re as old as me, volunteering is a good way to fill up your time. But yes, I was keeping an eye out.’

  ‘I’m glad you were there the day we went,’ I said, linking arms with her.

  ‘Me too, dear.’

  ‘Bea, you won’t leave us like Mum did, will you? I don’t mean you have to live here or anything, but I can see you, can’t I? Whenever I want?’

  Beatrice turned to look at me. ‘Of course you can. In fact, why don’t we write to each other, too? That way I can keep abreast of everything you do.’

  ‘I’m not very good at spelling,’ I said doubtfully.

  ‘Practice makes perfect,’ she said, squeezing my hand. ‘Your father tells me you’re happy living here. A proper free-range childhood.’

  ‘It’s lovely.’

  ‘You don’t miss London? Or get lonely, not going to school?’

  ‘I don’t really remember living in London. And I have Dad, and my friend Stacey.’ I patted the beech tree. ‘Sit down. I want to check something.’ Mention of Stacey had reminded me of the nail varnish I had hidden by the cart shed. ‘Do you like nail varnish?’ I called to her, going over and ducking down by the water butt to search for the pink bottle, unsure if I had replaced it after the snail incident last summer. It was exactly her colour, I thought.

  ‘I used to love it, but now my nails crumble and my hands are too shaky to paint it on. Do you like it?’

  I got up, unable to find the bottle. ‘I like it on snails, but it smells too weird to put on my nails.’

  Beatrice nodded in agreement. ‘That rhymes,’ she said. ‘Did you know that I’m an author too, like your father?’

  ‘Really?’

  She nodded. ‘I used to write stories about a group of little ghosty children. I based all the books in the garden of the house I used to live in. Your mother grew up there, too.’

  ‘Was it like Braër?’

  She looked about her, and I thought I saw her eyebrows twitch at the wildness of the garden. ‘No, not exactly,’ she said. ‘It was quite a large house. You might call it a mansion. The gardens were large and very neat. Nothing like this.’ She put her hand in the pocket of her waistcoat. ‘I have the first book here. I thought you might like to see it.’ She pulled out a small paperback and handed it to me.

  ‘Thank you.’ I took the book and flicked through, disappointed that there were no colour pictures in it. ‘It’s very different to Dad’s,’ I said, not very kindly. There weren’t many pictures in it at all.

  ‘I wrote it forty years ago, so it will be different.’ Her voice was fuelled by a creamy sweetness.

  I stopped on a black-and-white drawing of a fountain in a formal garden. It was a huge, intricate structure, depicting woodland animals gathered around a pool in the shape of a giant leaf. One or two were dipping their heads to drink. Beatrice had gone quiet. She was looking at me, the smile gone.

  Among the animals was a hare, sitting quietly next to a baby deer, its nose twitching. The fountain reminded me of something. I tried to remember where I had seen it before. The drawing was very different in style to Dad’s pictures, it was quick and full of movement. I could almost hear the drip, drip of water trickling from the fountain, almost see the animals move slightly out of the corner of my eye. I thought of the gargoyle fountain that Dad had sunk beneath the moat’s surface.

  ‘You keep it,’ Beatrice said, nodding at the book. ‘It’s a first edition, it’ll be worth something one day, when I’m dead and gone,’ she chuckled. ‘But don’t let that stop you enjoying it.’

  I closed the book and looked at it anew. It felt special in a way I couldn’t put my finger on.

  ‘Did you ever base the characters in your books on real people?’

  ‘You mean like your father has with you?’

  ‘Sort of.’ I was thinking of the circus lady. Real life and fiction seemed so inextricably stitched together that I had begun to think that every character in his books was a real person. I thought of the shadowy woman again.

  Beatrice was looking at me strangely again, as if she was trying to read my thoughts. ‘I think there is always an element of realness about the characters in one’s books,’ she said, ‘even if it’s a subconscious decision.’

  I nodded, not quite sure what she meant. ‘Did fans of your books ever come to your house?’ I said, flicking through her book, coming back to the picture of the fountain.

  ‘Oh gosh, yes, people did visit on occasion, and not everyone that came by was very nice. Sometimes I felt just like one of my little ghosts, trapped in the house by my writing, surrounded by my stories. I sold the house in the end, after your mother went off to boarding school. I couldn’t live amongst the fame.’

  ‘Did my grandfather live there, too?’

  ‘He did, darling, but he died very young, leaving me to care for your mother and the house all on my own. In the end, I decided to put all my love into your mother: the house is owned by a charitable trust now; open to the public. Perhaps we could go sometime.’

  I nodded. I thought about how I would feel selling Braër and moving away. I wasn’t sure I could do it, or where I would go if I did.

  It wasn’t until she had gone that I realised Beatrice had not once mentioned a treasure hunt, and I loved her for it.

  Fourteen

  Having spent the beginning of summer rarely seeing Stacey and thinking
we were just too different to be friends anymore, she appeared again soon after my twelfth birthday on the last day of July, and it felt as if she had never been away. She had had a growth spurt since I last saw her, and her hair had grown to her shoulders, where it sat in mousy waves.

  As we wandered out of the village, we drifted back into our old roles, daring each other to cross the rickety planks that criss-crossed the dike we were walking next to, a thrill of danger in the air. We took a new route, heading out towards the train station. I had only ever been there before with Dad on our trips to London. It was hardly more than a single platform. As soon as we got there, Stacey sat down and began removing her shoes.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Just do what I do.’

  Feeling a frisson of nervous excitement that I only ever felt when I was with Stacey, I bent and untied my trainers, and went to join her on the edge of the platform, my toes clinging to the edge. I looked down at the rails below. It was a pure, hot summer’s day, and the train tracks shimmered beneath us.

  ‘Stacey, this feels dangerous.’

  ‘Shh, it’s coming, can you feel it?’ she said.

  ‘How do you feel a train?’

  ‘Listen with your feet.’ She nodded down at our bare toes clamped to the concrete.

  We fell silent, and I concentrated. Sure enough there was a faint vibration buzzing into my heels and up through my ankles. I strained my eyes, but all I could see was miles of train track disappearing off into nothing.

  A curious thing was happening to the tracks. A sort of whipping sound, as if cables were being snapped together, and then the sound melded into a rhythm of electronic staccato – whip-whip, whip-whip – and I was swaying with the sound, absorbed by it, teetering on the edge of the platform. It felt dangerous. More dangerous than anything she had ever dared me to do before.

  ‘Stacey, I…’ The wind was whipping up too, stealing away my words before I had a chance to finish them. A newspaper blasted towards me across the platform, catching on my foot long enough for me to read the words, Terry Waite Alive! before it was swept away onto the track.