by Joan Aiken
A queer thing happened later that day.
Gran had decided to polish the spoons and forks, a thing she does only once a year. She has a bottle of fluid she dunks them in, and she keeps the bottle on a shelf in a cupboard. On top of the same cupboard live tins of paint.
Whether she shook the cupboard, or a passing truck shook the building, I can’t tell—nothing of that sort seemed to happen—but, anyway, a massive ten-liter can of white paint somehow got dislodged from the top of the cupboard and toppled forward, right above Gran.
“GRAN!” I yelled, from the other side of the room, and she swiftly reared herself back. The paint tin missed her head by a fingernail’s breadth and landed smack on her hand.
She fainted.
I managed to hitch myself across the room and wrap her hand in a dishcloth. Then, luckily, Mrs. Enderby from the next-door flat arrived; she had heard the crash. She went back to her own place and phoned for an ambulance.
Gran had to go to hospital and have a broken finger set.
It wasn’t till late that evening, when she was back home again, that we heard the ice had broken on Kelso Pond and quite a few skaters took a ducking, Mack and Orrin among them. Lucky they hadn’t drowned.
7. The Pigeon
“ALL THIS HAS GOT TO STOP,” said Gran next day. “It’s like a sickness. Once it starts, if it has been used for wrong reasons it infects everyone around. Go up and knock on Mrs. McGregor’s door,” she told me, “and ask if she has time to step down and have a word with me about Mack and Orrin.”
No problem about going up to the McGregors’ flat. I roll myself along the passage and go up in the lift.
Unexpectedly, the door was open. And Mrs. McGregor was not inside. But a couple of builders’ workmen were, one looking out of the window, one studying the ceiling.
“Yon’s where the damp gets in,” he said.
“Aye, ye can see.”
You could. There was a big brown patch. The McGregors’ flat was the top one, under the roof.
The man who was looking out of the window shouted an order to an invisible someone down below.
I crossed the room in my wheelchair till I was beside him—as there was no Mrs. McGregor to stop me tracking dust over the carpet—and took a look out.
Down below was one of those huge articulated trucks with a crane attached. As well as the driver there was a man sitting in the control saddle of the crane. At that moment he was maneuvering the grab so as to pick up a pack of roofing slabs from the rear part of the truck. The claws of the crane scooped up a bundle of slabs as if they had been a pack of playing cards—but each of those slabs was at least ten meters long, and wide and thick in proportion.
Heaven knows how many tons the whole load of slabs must have weighed.
Then the crane began hoisting itself upward, undoing more and more silvery sections, which came sliding out of the body of the truck like a coiled snake unwinding. And the dangling claws—with their oblong freight—raised themselves up higher and higher. Now they were right outside Mrs. McGregor’s window. Now they were up above, out of sight.
“Dinna lay them down all together!” shouted the man at the window. “I misdoubt the roof mightna take the weight. Lay them doon in a row, side by side.”
I heard a shrill voice from the roof. Mrs. McGregor.
“Come away out of there, boys!” she was ordering. “Come away at once, the both of ye!”
Of course I guessed at once what the scene up there must be. Mack and Orrin McGregor, attracted like pins to magnets by the builders’ activities, were up on the roof, probably in hopes of being able to get their hands on the crane controls, or on its load, when the men’s backs were turned—and do heaven knows what damage.
Mrs. McGregor had gone up to prevent this, and also to tell the workmen where the rain came through.
I whizzed back across her carpet (mud and oatmeal squares) and went up in the lift to roof level.
Mrs. McGregor saw me first.
“Och, heavens above!” she cried. “Now look who’s here!”
Mack and Orrin gave me glances bubbling over with verjuice. But they could do nothing with other people about. Two more workmen were up here, shouting advice to their mate on the crane.
“If those men weren’t here, though,” the boys’ looks said, “we’d have you over the parapet, chair and all. Just you wait!”
The two men, concentrating on the crane and its load, had no time to spare for me or my wheelchair.
For something quite out of order and highly unexpected was happening twelve stories down below, just above ground level.
A pigeon—at least it looked like a pigeon—was making a series of swooping attacks on the man sitting in the control seat of the crane.
A pigeon? But that was crazy! Pigeons are not aggressive. Not like that. Could it be Henry? No, of course it couldn’t. Henry was dead and buried under the big fir tree.
The man in the control seat of the crane was ducking and jerking and covering his face—he had let go of the levers and wheels that guided his load up and down and sideways. As a result, the load of roofing slabs was swinging down from the roof again, closer and closer to the tree.
The people in the road below had all flung themselves flat in terror.
The crane clutch with its load of slabs was swinging in great curves alongside the wall of Chateau Mansions. If it changed its direction ever so little it would shatter countless windows and smash dozens of balconies.
It was dropping lower and lower. People in the park stared, horrified, as they saw this murderous weight boomerang back and forth, crazily out of control, only a football goal’s height above ground.
Looking over the parapet I saw Gran come out on the little balcony where Lu-Lyn used to practice.
With a swift glance up and down she sized up the situation.
She had two things in her hands. One was a paper dart, which she skimmed down in the direction of the pigeon, who was still aggressively pouncing and diving at the crane operator. He, poor devil, had scrambled out of his seat and was huddled against the cab of the truck by his mate the driver.
Gran leaned over the parapet and shouted, but what she said went unheard. I could not catch her voice above the throb of the engine. But I could guess what she was saying, it made obvious sense: turn off the truck motor, which powered the crane.
So then Gran used the second of the two objects she had carried out on to the balcony.
It was the little Munch cushion with the painted face on it. She gave it a sharp squeeze between her two hands. And at once it let out an ear-piercing screech. It was unbelievably loud—I had forgotten what a shattering yell it gave. (Since Lu-Lyn’s death it had lived out of harm’s way on a high shelf.)
Everybody heard it—the people on the ground and the people on the roof. Everyone looked towards Gran. And she, leaning over the balcony rail, shouted again to the truck driver:
“Turn off the motor!”
This time he heard her, nodded, crept back into his cab, and did so.
But what he did was just too late.
Too late, at least, for the fir tree that was the highest in the land.
With an almighty, splintering crash, the load of roofing slabs, at the end of its pendulum swing, smacked into the trunk of the fir tree and cut clean through it, as easily as a sparrow’s beak nips through the stalk of a crocus.
The tree teetered for a moment on its stump, then, as the load swung back and slammed into it again, it fell lengthways along the truck, mashing it. By the mercy of providence the driver had left his cab again after switching off the motor, or he would have been mashed too. And his mate, cowering against the side of the truck, was buried in a mass of spindly branches, but scrambled out in a minute or two, looking startled to death but unharmed.
Meanwhile, the pigeon, distracted from
its attack on the crane operator, suddenly shot up to Gran’s balcony and, with most unpigeonlike ferocity, dived at the Munch cushion, pecking and slashing, mauling, striking and gouging with beak and claws, until the cushion was reduced to rags and tatters and a pile of foam-rubber scraps.
Then it flew towards the estuary and the sea.
8. The Crossing
GRAN, SEEING ME PEERING OVER the roof parapet, beckoned me to come back down to the flat.
“What about Mrs. McGregor?” I called, but Gran shook her head.
“No use fetching her in at present,” she said, when I was back in the flat again. “She has too much on her mind now.”
“Did that lot dig up Lu-Lyn’s grave?”
“They meant to, I reckon,” said Gran, “but I’ve a notion that when they got there …”
“When they got there?” I said as she paused.
“Lu-Lyn had taken matters into her own hands.”
“What do you mean, Gran?”
“And then—the tree,” Gran went on, talking to herself as much as to me. “The tree. No sense in planning to bury Lu-Lyn’s ashes under it now. That was a direct message.”
“A message? Gran? You mean—from Lu-Lyn?”
“Who else? The pigeon, the grave, the tree—it all hangs together. She doesn’t want to be buried there. No—there is only one course to take as things are.”
“What’s that, Gran?”
“Take her back to the island. Bury her on Muckle Burra.”
I expect my jaw dropped as far as the girl’s in the Munch picture.
“But nobody’s allowed there.”
“We’d go at night. I know a man with a boat who’d take me across.”
“But, Gran—the island is poisoned.”
“Och,” said Gran scornfully. “Tales to frighten bairns! What fool is going to be scared of poison that’s ten years old. Forbye,”—I noticed that whenever Gran started thinking about the island she lapsed more and more into the island way of talking—“Forbye there’s a wicked weather forecast for the island over the next three days—hundred-and-fifty-mile-an-hour gales without e’er a break for seventy-two hours!”
She gave me a triumphant nod.
“Gran! You aren’t planning to make the crossing in weather like that?”
“Nay,” she snapped, “I’m not a born fool! But, after the gale like that, there’s, whiles, a spell of flat calm—who should ken the weather in those parts better than one who’s lived there all her life, and her parents, and their parents, afore? And I’ll tell ye anither thing, David,”—it was the first time that I could remember in my whole life that Gran had ever addressed me by my name—usually it was “boy” or “lad”—“I’ll tell ye anither thing—if we cross on Tuesday, yon’s Leap Year Day.”
“The twenty-ninth of February. So it is,” I remembered.
I noticed another thing. “If we cross,” Gran had said. She intended me to go too? What possible use would I be?
“But what’s so special about Leap Year Day?”
“Ach! Did ye not know? On Leap Year Day—because yon is a day fallen outside the regular calendar—all hurtful spells, all acts of malice, are set aside. Leap Year Day is outside all rules and governances. We’ll go on Leap Year Day,” said Gran.
So, on Leap Year Evening Gran and I were on the harbor-front at Firthside, the port for Muckle Burra and the northern isles. Not without trouble and hindrances on our way. A careering sports car had pursued us and missed us by a finger’s breadth, overtaking on the motorway; it flashed by us, skidded, and disappeared over the hard shoulder into the gloom.
“Young tearaways!” said our taxi driver in disgust. “They’ll break their own necks some day and good riddance. If they dinna break someone else’s first!”
Thank goodness we saw no more of them. But their faces had been familiar. Mack and Orrin in a stolen car.
Then, when we reached Firthside and Gran began making inquiries for Geordie Brough, she had a lot of difficulty finding him, and had to trudge from end to end and from back to front of the shabby little port, pushing me in my wheelchair; and I began to worry, first that we would never find him, and second that, even if we did, Gran would have run herself to the end of her strength and would never survive the crossing.
Her lips had gone very blue.
“I can stay here and wait on the harborside, Gran,” I said. “You don’t need to push me everywhere.”
“Not likely!” she said. “There’s a wheen rough types hereabouts would think nothing of tipping ye into the harbor. Ye’ll gang along with me and hold your whisht.”
At last we found Geordie in a tumbledown little beerhouse, The Caelidh, drinking fire-water with half a dozen whiskery old men.
He gave a little start when he recognized Gran and—when she beckoned—followed her, I thought, without much goodwill, into the dark alley outside.
“Gude guide us, mem! I never in the world thought to see you in these parts again, Mistress Drummond! I thocht ye were long gone to bide with your great kinfolk in the southland.”
“Not so far off, Geordie, that I canna come back when there is need. And there is need now—sore, pressing need. And you are the man that can help me.”
I saw a great unwillingness come over his face. His eyes darted from side to side, as if looking for some escape route. But at last he said rather glumly, “What’s your will, mem?”
“Do ye still have your boat, Geordie?”
“Aye,” he said reluctantly. “I do, that. But she’s as auld as I am and lets water terrible bad.”
“She’d be good enough, forbye, for a crossing to the island?”
His eyes shot up to her face.
“Mem! Ye’d not be so daft? Ye know ’tis clean agin the law? Not a soul—living or deid—may set foot on that island until the new century is ten winters auld. Or maybe ’tis twenty winters—”
“Never mind the winters, ye crossgrained old loon,” said Gran. “And I don’t plan to set foot on the island. Ye mind the little creek to eastwards of the Voe Bay? Ye mind the Kelpie’s Ness and the Silkie’s Cradle?”
“Aye, Mistress. I mind them. Who should mind them better than old Geordie? Winter and summer I have passed those markers more times than there’s herring in a barrel.”
“Very well! I want you to ferry me—and my grandson here—across the water before tomorrow’s dawn so that I can leave a—a—a thing in the Silkie’s Cradle.”
“Afore tomorrow’s dawn!” he gasped. “Mem, what ye ask is clean out-of-this-world impossible. Look, will ye now, at the water!”
We had walked back towards the harborside as they were talking and I was watching, in cold sick fascination, how huge white waves, bigger than houses, lifted themselves, one by one, and crashed down over the outer harbor-mole.
Not a sailor, not a fisher, was stirring. Their boats were snugly berthed in the inner harbor and they themselves safe at home or in pubs such as The Caelidh, taking it easy.
“The water will be calming,” said Gran with certainty. “In two hours’ time the Firth will be smooth as a millpond. Ye know ye can trust me so far, Geordie? Living in the southland I have not forgotten my old weather-learning so soon.”
“Aye, so,” he said dubiously. ’Tis un unco’ risk though. An orra risk! If I did do it—and I’m no’ making any promise, mind!—I’d want a fifty-pund ferry fee. And I’d want the siller paid over, in my hand, afore we ever set foot in the boat. And what kind o’ deevil’s contraption is that?” he demanded, pointing angrily at my wheelchair. “I’ll not have yon in my boat, not for thribble the fee. There’s nae place for it!”
“Very well,” said Gran calmly.
I had gasped at the fee he demanded, but she had evidently come prepared for such a demand. She pulled out a wallet full of money.
“I’ll see your boat,
though, before I pay any fee,” she added, putting the wallet away again. So he took us along to see his boat, the Bonny Mary. I was no judge of a boat, had hardly ever been in one. It looked like a terrible old ruin to me, filled with muddles of rope and fish baskets and lobster pots and spikey-looking tools, but Gran gave it a careful inspection and said, “Very good, Geordie! Here’s the fifty pounds now. Ye can take it home to your wife—if ye still have a wife?”
“Aye,” he said sourly, gruffly.
“Well! Give Maggie my regards, remind her of the shark—how I saved her—she’ll no’ have forgotten that! And we’ll see ye back at the boat four hours before dawn; we’ll wait here. I want to reach Burra by break of dawn.”
“How will ye get the lad into the boat?” Geordie was evidently not pleased at this plan.
“We’ll manage. And when you come back bring a flask of tea with you!”
He stumped off—slowly, grudgingly, casting many glances behind him.
There was nobody else about on the waterfront this rainy, stormy evening. The wind blew. The harbor lights swung and sparkled. The wet cobbles glistened.
I wondered what was the mysterious favor that Gran had done Geordie Brough in the past, which made him feel obliged to help her now. Had she saved his life? It could not be much less. Something of the kind. What was that about the shark?
How were we ever going to get down into that boat, which at the moment floated ten feet below us?
But Gran said, “The tide’s coming in fast. And the wind is dropping.”
She was right. An hour later we were able to clamber straight across from the quayside into the Bonny Mary.
“You go sit in the cabin,” said Gran. “I’ll leave your wheelchair in the shelter. I doubt nobody’s going to come out and steal it on a February night.”
Then, as she was pushing it away, she said something else. She said—I thought—“You may not need it when you come back.”
Had I caught what she said correctly?
I clawed and wriggled my way into the boat’s cabin—which was no more than a canopy-roofed area above the size of a kitchen table—and sat on an upturned box.