by Polly Crosby
And then, without notice, it was there: the train rushed past my nose as if it had jumped from another dimension, carriages of goods flashing by in an endless panorama of colour. The force of it rocked me back on my heels, pushing me away from danger, and then we were twirling on the platform, drunk on adrenaline, huge gulps of laughter rising from our bellies, our hearts going as fast as the train as it sped swiftly away.
‘Told you,’ said Stacey, her eyes glittering. And then they flicked away from me and her face changed. I followed her gaze. Far off, at the other end of the platform, a figure stood. Where it had come from I couldn’t guess, the platform was an island in a sea of flat fields, we’d have seen them coming a long way away.
Stacey stepped closer to me so that our hands brushed. The figure was very still.
‘It’s a phantom,’ she whispered solemnly, taking my hand properly, her nails squeezing into my palm. My skin prickled.
‘It’s not,’ I said, as whatever it was took a step towards us. Somehow I knew a ghost would be less scary; less real. It was holding something in its hand. It looked like a shovel.
‘D’you think it’s a grave digger?’ Stacey’s palm was sticky in mine.
‘I don’t know. Come on.’ I began to pull her away, back towards the village and safety.
‘But I want to see!’ she said, planting her feet firmly on the ground.
The figure moved closer. It looked like a man; a very tall man with slender arms and legs. He was definitely holding a shovel. Round his neck he had a camera with a long lens attached to it. He lifted it to his eye, training it on us.
‘Stacey,’ I urged, pulling at her hand desperately.
‘Wait,’ she said, and I knew that to her this was just another game, like gambling our lives with the trains. The man raised his hand.
‘Come on,’ I pleaded, giving her hand a yank as the man began to stride towards us, but she wouldn’t budge. He broke into a sprint, the spade and camera swinging awkwardly by his side. Stacey stepped in front of me, spreading her arms as if to protect me. The man came to a stop right in front of us. He tilted his head and eyed me behind my protector, and without warning, his hand shot out and he grabbed my wrist.
‘Hey!’ Stacey shouted. My own voice seemed to have disappeared.
‘Romilly Kemp,’ he said, squeezing hard. Something about the way he said my name was familiar. The lens of his camera winked in the sun, and a memory came to me of bushes shaking, of the same gravelly voice. And with his words it was as if the spell was broken: Stacey pushed me away, breaking the man’s grip, and we began to run, sprinting over the platform, through the gate and down onto the road, the man standing still and statuesque behind us.
When we had run far enough away to feel safe, we stopped to catch our breath and turned back to the station. The man was still standing there, watching us. His voice drifted across to us, two words carried on the wind like little gravelly ghosts, as if he couldn’t reach us himself, but his words could.
‘Romilly Kemp,’ they whispered, ‘Romilly Kemp,’ and we turned and ran faster, leaving our shoes behind.
‘Why do you think people follow you?’
We were sitting at my desk beneath the circular stained-glass window at the end of my bedroom. Romilly and the Kitten was laid out in front of us. Stacey had a copy of her own – Dad had signed one and given it to me to pass on to her a few months ago, around the time that she began to show more of an interest in the treasure hunt. In the short time she had owned it, it was already more thumbed than any book I had ever seen. When I told Dad what a state it was in, he said with a serious face, ‘That’s the very best proof there is of a well-loved book.’
‘Maybe they think I know where the treasure is,’ I said. ‘They think because I’m in the books I must know.’
Stacey had her finger under a word. ‘But you don’t.’ There was a question in the way she said it, even though I’d told her a million times.
‘I don’t,’ I said. I hadn’t told her what Dad had said the day we went metal detecting, that it wasn’t necessarily a search for gold and jewels, that it was as much for me as it was for the public. Stacey was only just beginning to find the idea of a treasure hunt interesting. I didn’t want to dim that excitement by making it seem less fun. I imagined her hopeful face dropping as she realised there might not be any precious riches to dig up at all.
I was beginning to see what Dad had meant when he said it wasn’t just about finding the treasure, but about the excitement and anticipation of searching for it. Every time we looked through the books now, or walked out in the fields, kicking at the earth with our toes, I saw that gleam of excitement in Stacey’s eyes, worlds of possibility reflected in her face. No real friend could dampen that with the truth.
And yet sometimes, just as I was about to go to sleep, I felt I was beginning to understand what Dad wanted me to see. An illustration from the book would fix itself in my mind, and it was like it was reaching out and taking me by the hand to lead me down a long corridor of memory, back to London, back to my early years. But whenever I started to follow, feeling that warm, familiar hand in mine, the corridor disappeared, and I found myself in bed again, alone, staring up at the ceiling.
Stacey was gazing absently at the little circular window. I noticed she had the Tufty Club badge pinned to her T-shirt, and for a moment I felt annoyance that she should be wearing it when it was rightfully mine. I looked back at the book and cleared my throat.
‘Come on, you know this word.’
Stacey blinked and turned back to the desk. ‘“Monty was a… cho… choc-o-late point Si… a… mese kitten with cross eyes and a kink in his tail, but to Romilly he was perfect.” What’s a chocolate point?’
‘It’s his colouring.’ I picked Monty up by the scruff from his sentry position at my feet, and dangled him into my lap where he curled up contentedly and closed his eyes. I pointed to his ears and his tail, ‘All his pointy bits are chocolate-coloured. See?’
‘Do you think Monty knows what the treasure is? Maybe he swallowed it.’ She giggled. We looked at him asleep on my lap, and then at his doppelgänger curled in Dad’s hand in the book. There was a silver bell on the kitten’s collar. Somewhere in the jumble of my thoughts I remembered the real bell and the shivery sound it made. I hadn’t seen it in years.
Stacey turned the pages, flipping through them so that the paper fanned our faces.
‘What are you doing?’ I asked.
‘Why are you always running away from things?’ she said, stopping at a random page and pointing.
Along the top of the page, above the main illustration, was a tiny silhouette of me. I was running, my hair flying out behind me. The silhouette of a lion was galloping along behind me, his jaws wide open. I had my head turned and I was looking at the lion, as if I was calculating how long it would take for him to catch up. There were pictures like this on the top of every page. They were so small that you’d need a magnifying glass to see them properly. Fortunately, Dad had bought me one for just that purpose, and I pulled it out and handed it to Stacey. She held it over the lion, and his tiny, sharp teeth came into view.
She turned the page, and there I was again, this time running away from a dragon, its black fiery breath licking at my heels. The next page had a panther, the one after that a wolf.
‘I suppose it is you?’ Stacey said. ‘This one could be Red Riding Hood. Maybe they’re all fairy tale characters?’
‘They look like me.’ I bent to study the slope of my nose, the cut of my hair. It troubled me that Dad thought I would always run away from these beasts, that I wouldn’t turn and fight. Maybe he wanted to instil a sense of danger in me, I thought doubtfully, a fear of the wilderness that Stacey and I so often marched across together.
On the next page, a gaggle of geese was chasing me.
‘That’s just silly,’ Stacey said, ‘what’s even scary about a goose? You wouldn’t run away from them, would you?’
I felt my f
ace flush. ‘Of course not.’
It got even worse in Romilly and the Circus. Dad had turned it into a comedy: he had me running away from butterflies, birds and even a tiny mouse.
‘Your dad does know you, right?’ said Stacey, ‘I mean, in real life you’re almost as fearless as I am. Look at how you stood on the platform earlier when the train came past. Your nose was about an inch away from it, but you stayed put.’
I shrugged. Maybe Dad didn’t know me at all. After all, he spent most of his time locked away, painting his pictures.
‘All the main pictures in the books are exactly like you,’ Stacey said, pointing to the colourful pictures of me and Monty on each page. ‘Look: you’re going on adventures, finding things out. But these little silhouette pictures at the top are the complete opposite. It’s like he thinks you’ve got split personality disorder or something.’
She was turning the pages angrily now, and I sighed inwardly, wishing she would forget it. I didn’t like it when she got like this, working herself up over something that didn’t really matter. She was liable to explode if I didn’t find a way of calming her down.
My eyes fell on the open page of Romilly and the Kitten, and inspiration struck. It was the close-up of my face, the one Dad had said was a printing mistake, showing my mole on the wrong cheek.
‘I forgot about this,’ I said to Stacey, cutting her off mid-rant, ‘I spotted it last winter. Dad painted my mole on the wrong cheek. He said it was to do with the printers, but half the pictures are the right way round, and half are wrong.’
Stacey looked at the page, her brow furrowed.
‘It’s probably just one of Dad’s lapses of attention,’ I said, beginning to close the book.
‘Wait.’ Stacey’s hand slammed down on the paper.
Oh goodness, I thought, I’ve stirred her up even more.
She was looking intently at the mole, her eyes flashing from me to the open page before her.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said, not liking the laser-like beam of her eyes on my skin.
‘What if it’s a clue?’ she said.
‘How can a mistake be a clue?’
‘What if it’s not a mistake?’ Stacey bent her head again, looking this time through the magnifying glass. Her breath smelt of Parma Violets as we peered through the lens together.
‘It must be part of the treasure hunt,’ she said. ‘It’s got to mean something. But what?’
‘I don’t know…’ I scoured my brain for inspiration. ‘Maybe you can connect the moles like a join the dots game, and X marks the spot?’
Stacey nodded, her face serious, unaware I was joking.
There was a knock on my door and Dad crawled through, heaving a basket of washing with him.
‘Hello, hello. What’re you doing?’
‘We’re trying to work out what the treasure is,’ I said, glad of the distraction.
‘Not you too. I’ve just taken delivery of thirty-three long and boring letters, all thinking they’ve found it. Found what, I ask you? Bloody fools, the lot of them.’ He turned the washing basket upside down on my bed. Crumpled clothes landed on the duvet, smelling slightly fusty.
‘Is that what you were doing when you lost your shoes this morning, Roe,’ he said lightly, ‘looking for treasure?’
‘No, we were just playing,’ I said.
‘And did you lose your shoes too, Stacey?’
Stacey looked down at her bare feet. They were black at the edges. She giggled.
‘She did,’ I said, ‘but it doesn’t matter ’cause it’s summer, and her mum says if you work it right you can turn your feet into leather, and then it’s like wearing a pair of shoes, so that’s what she’s going to do. I might try it too.’
‘I’ve been practising round near the gorse,’ Stacey said, ‘and I can only feel the prickles if I really stamp on them now.’
‘But couldn’t you wear another pair of shoes, Stacey?’ Dad said.
Stacey looked at Dad as if he’d gone mad.
‘Couldn’t she find another pair?’ he said, looking at me.
‘Where would she get another pair from?’ I asked. Stacey only had one pair of shoes. Now they were gone, I couldn’t imagine her wearing any others.
‘Good point. I’m sure Roe’s got an old pair you can have. Or else you could tie your feet up in plastic bags.’ He chuckled.
‘I don’t think my mum would like that,’ Stacey said, very seriously. ‘And I like having bare feet.’
‘Romilly, while I’ve got you here, I wanted to remind you about our boat trip tomorrow.’
‘You’ve fixed it then?’ The rowing boat had lain in the garden for years, its warped wooden planks like the remains of a beached whale. Last time I had seen it, it had been more hole than boat.
‘I have! And I’ve tested her too. We won’t sink, I promise. I’ve given her a name as well. I thought I’d call her Panther, after the one that escaped from the circus. I’m not sure there’ll be enough room for Stacey, it’s a two-man boat, but you can both go out in her another day.’
‘I don’t really like boats,’ Stacey said, ‘I prefer swimming, it’s safer.’
But Dad wasn’t listening. He had picked up my picture of Mary Mother-of-God, frowning. ‘What on earth is this?’
‘It’s Mary,’ I said. ‘Mum gave her to me. She told me Mary is the mother of all people. She protects me.’
Dad stifled a snort that quickly became a cough, standing the picture back on my bedside table. Mary gazed out of her frame serenely. I wanted to tell him that she climbed out of her portrait on the nights he forgot to come and say goodnight, and wrapped her motherly arms around me. Instead I turned back to the book and to Stacey.
Dad picked up the empty clothes basket and nodded at the messy pile on the bed. ‘Make sure you put those away, Roe,’ he said, turning to go downstairs. He paused on the top step. ‘I almost forgot, you had a letter today, it’s on the bed, next to the washing.’
I got up and found the letter, balanced on a pile of T-shirts. It felt stiff, more like cardboard than paper. There was a small, hard lump in the corner of the envelope. I ripped it open. Inside was a birthday card with a picture of a circus clown on the front. He was juggling balls that spelt out, ‘Happy birthday!’ I opened it up.
It said,
Dear Romilly,
Happy belated twelfth birthday, my darling daughter.
I’m so sorry I wasn’t able to be with you to celebrate your special day, but I’m sure next year I will be allowed to come. Until then, I thought you would like these earrings. I understand you have recently met your grandmother. These earrings belonged to her mother – your great grandmother – and they are real emeralds. Maybe next year I will be able to come and see you wearing them.
With all my love,
Mum
‘What is it?’ said Stacey, noticing I had gone quiet.
I tipped the envelope upside down, and a pair of earrings dropped into my hand.
‘Wow, they’re beautiful,’ Stacey breathed, lifting an earring up to the light so that drops of green light flickered over the walls, ‘are they real gold?’
‘I dunno.’ I examined the remaining earring. The bit that went through your ear was bent out of shape.
‘I didn’t know you’d had your ears pierced,’ Stacey said.
‘I haven’t.’ I touched one of my earlobes. It felt soft and warm. I wasn’t sure I wanted a needle jabbed through it.
‘Does your mum have pierced ears?’
I tried to think back to when I saw her last summer. I had a hazy memory of birds hanging from her ears as if they were flying. ‘I think so,’ I said, rubbing at my ear and wondering if I was brave enough to be like her.
‘You’re lucky, having a mum that gives you such special birthday presents.’
‘Even if they are a few weeks late.’
‘I didn’t know she’d given you this, too,’ Stacey said, holding up the little picture of Mary.
&nbs
p; I took it from her and looked at it properly for the first time in a long time. With a rush of remembered fear, I recalled the last time I had seen my mum, the day she had denied giving me the picture. The flash of the hallway as she dragged me into the pantry. The taste of vinegar on my lips.
I placed the picture in a drawer and pushed it closed tightly. I thought of the way my mother had collapsed like a dying flower after she locked me in the pantry. Why would she write to me now? I tried to bend the earring’s hook back into place, but it refused to move.
‘My mum’s never given me anything,’ Stacey said, rubbing her bare feet on the chair’s stretcher, leaving a brown mark. ‘She was angry when I came home without my shoes earlier,’ she said.
I put the earring down. ‘Didn’t you tell her about the phantom?’ I said, remembering him standing there, tall and frightening.
‘I did, but…’ she pulled back her sleeve. Her wrist was like a green rainbow, as if some ghoulish ghost had got inside her and spread its badness under her skin.
‘Was that because you forgot your shoes?’
She nodded. I pulled my own sleeve back, remembering where the man had grabbed me. There was a pale red mark there now. Luckily Dad had believed me when I told him it was from wearing a bracelet too tight.
I lifted my hand and we put our wrists together, the red touching the green like some strange magical connection we didn’t really understand.
Fifteen
The oar made a slap, slapping sound as it hit the water, dipping into the soup-like moat and coming back covered in slime. There was a thin trickle of water in the bottom of the boat, near our feet, but Dad had assured me it was from the unseasonable summer rain the night before.
‘Is all the river like this?’ I asked, wrinkling my nose at the frog-skin smell dislodged from the moat’s depths, my eyes tracing the water for signs of the gargoyle.