The Outside Child

by Nina Bawden

  But she didn’t seem to hear the tone of my voice, or notice the piercing look that I gave her. She had stopped frowning and was smiling at me. She said, “Where did you go, dear?”

  “Out,” I said. “Out and about.” Stick as close as you can to the truth was Plato’s advice. Not that he followed it himself, I had noticed. But then he was more practised at lying than I was. “We went to London,” I said. “I know you don’t like me to travel alone, but I didn’t think you’d mind my going with Plato. He wanted to go to a bookshop.”

  This was the right kind of excuse for Aunt Sophie. She said in an interested voice, “Did he find what he wanted?”

  My mind was a blank. Plato hadn’t suggested a book he might have wanted and I couldn’t think of one. I said, “He just wanted to browse. There’s not much of a choice in that shop in the High Street.”

  “That’s true,” Aunt Sophie said. But she was looking distant as if she meant just the opposite.

  I thought, crossly, that Aunt Bill would have believed me!

  Then Aunt Sophie surprised me. She said, “I’m so sorry to question you, dear. Bill and I worry about you, but that’s no excuse for not giving you enough freedom. I’ll talk to Bill about it. We’d like to know where you’re going and when you’ll be back, but we’ll try not to pry in the future. After all, we know we can trust you.”

  Chapter Seven

  My father was back at sea. He had sent me a postcard from Southampton that said he was off again and would see me next time. He put dozens of kisses round the edge of the postcard.

  I telephoned Shipshape Street. Sometimes a woman’s voice answered and then I put the receiver down quickly. But if it was Annabel or George, I hung on while they said, “Hallo,” or “Who’s that?” or, if it was Annabel, “Do you want my Mummy?”

  Then one day Annabel called out, “Mummy, it’s that person who doesn’t speak, only listens.”

  I thought of my musical box. I had had it as long as I could remember. It had belonged to my mother and when I was small, two little drummers used to spring up when you opened the lid. They stopped working when I was five and took the box with me to school, but the music still played; a pretty, tinkling tune.

  I put it ready beside the telephone. Annabel answered and I lifted the lid. She said, “Oh,” as the tune began playing, and laughed when it finished, and said, “Come here, George. Listen. It’s a music box.”

  It was a good way of hearing their voices and getting to know them as they talked to each other. George said one time, “Is it magic, An’bel?” And I heard her explain that it was one of those things like the Time or the Weather Forecast that the telephone told you if you rang the right number. She said, “I expect it’s got turned round somehow.” I thought that was clever and sweet. George said, very excited, “Then it is magic, isn’t it?” And she said, sounding very grown-up, “Not really, not real, fairy magic. Just a mistake of the telephone people.”

  *

  Aunt Bill and I were supposed to go to Dorset at the end of term, but Aunt Bill’s friend, who had been at art school with her, wrote to say that the twins had got chicken pox badly and it would be better if we could go later on, towards the end of the holidays. I tried to sound sorry when the letter arrived, because Aunt Bill had been looking forward to being in the country, seeing her friend, tramping the hills, and painting wild flowers and berries, but I can’t have been very convincing. Aunt Bill looked at me in a puzzled way and said, “I thought you enjoyed going there, Jane. You had a fine time last year. Organising those little children.”

  That was before I found out I had a real brother and sister. I said, “I expect I’ve grown out of playing families. Kids can get boring.”

  “She’s got better things to do these holidays, Bill,” Aunt Sophie said. And she winked at me.

  She meant Plato. In the ordinary way I would have objected to the suggestion that I was keen on an asthmatic, short-sighted squirt of a boy a year younger than I was. But in the circumstances I could see that the idea was useful. I couldn’t make myself blush, but I lowered my eyes modestly and said, “Well, we do have a few plans. Plato wants to go to some museums and galleries.” I looked at the Aunts and saw they were beaming approval of these educational projects. To make sure they were both equally pleased. I went on, “Especially the Natural History Museum for the birds and animals, and the National Gallery for the pictures.”

  Naturally, Plato’s real plans were different. “What spies do is find a house near the one they want to watch, and get in somehow, rent a room, something like that, and settle down with a telescope and a camera with a zoom lens.”

  I let him run on, since it seemed to amuse him and there was no one around to hear him being so childish. And in fact to begin with, when we went to Shipshape Street the first week of the holidays, the laugh was on me. There was an empty house opposite Number 22, with a builder’s board up, and scaffolding, and a stack of bricks in the little front garden, although no one was working yet. There was no side entrance, but at the end of the terrace a cinder path led round the back along the ends of the gardens. To listen to Plato, you would think he had planned it. “Perfect,” he said. “What did I tell you?”

  “We can’t break in,” I said. “It’s trespassing. We’ll get into trouble.”

  “Only if we’re caught,” Plato said, as we marched along the cinder path. “Even then we’d only be told to push off. Who’s going to fuss over a couple of little kids playing?”

  He wriggled his shoulders and seemed to shrink inside his clothes so that he looked much younger, around ten, and mischievous. I said, “If we’re caught, I warn you, I’ll run. Leave you to do all the talking.”

  But there was no one around. The cinder path was empty except for the dustbins, each painted with the number of the house it belonged to. The dustbins for Number 19 were empty and the back gate swung open, loose on its hinges. Inside, the garden was jungle; apple and pear trees grown straggly so that their branches met over our heads, and rambler roses and clematis twined among them. No one had pruned them this year and perhaps last year, too; the ground was soft with the leaves of last autumn. The fences were high and although we could hear children playing somewhere quite close, they couldn’t see us and we couldn’t see them.

  “It must have been empty for ages,” Plato whispered. The windows on the ground floor were boarded and a couple of planks nailed across the back door. There was a sash window half-way up the wall, between the ground and the first floor, but there was no way of reaching it. A drainpipe at the side looked too rusty and old to be trusted.

  I had lost my nerve anyway. Peering in through the planks, through the glass of the back door, I thought the inside of the house looked dangerously derelict, with a jagged hole in the ceiling and boards hanging down. I said, “Even if we could get in, we’d break our legs probably. It’s all rotten.”

  Plato tugged at the planks. “These are rotten all right.” A few splinters came loose. He shook his head and stepped back, sucking his fingers. “I need a crowbar,” he said. “Or a jemmy.”

  “Why don’t you shout over the fence and see if next door have got one?” I was being sarcastic because Plato had sounded so matter-of-fact—as if most people normally carried burglary tools around with them.

  He looked at me, very straight. “I don’t suppose they’d have one, do you? But I’ll try if you like.”

  And he actually got hold of an old plastic crate that was part of the litter around the back door and put it against the fence between the two houses. But the moment he climbed on it, the next door dog started barking.

  It wasn’t an ordinary bark. It was a deep, throaty baying that had a thick, wet, snarling base to it; the barking of a huge, savage hound. And as it barked, it flung itself against the fence, leaping high, so that for a second we saw a wild, rolling, red eye and a great snout, lips drawn back, white teeth flashing.

  One glimpse was enough. Plato tumbled off the plastic crate and we tore down
the garden, the dog running beside us on the other side of the fence, thudding against it, leaping and growling. We stumbled down the jungly garden and through the gate to the cinder path. I thought, suppose the gate to the other garden is open!

  I didn’t stop to look. Plato had started gasping. I grabbed his hand and dragged him along with me. Behind us, the dog’s howling grew frantic. I heard the scrabbling of its paws and the crashing of its body against the wooden fence. Then a man shouted. The dog yelped as if someone had thrown something at it, and its barks became whimpers.

  Plato collapsed on a dustbin. When he had gathered his breath, he said, “That was blood-curdling. I don’t know what blood feels like when it’s curdled, but mine’s cold. As if my veins ran with ice.”

  “Milk goes lumpy when it curdles.” It seemed an odd moment to be discussing the meaning of words. I said, “I’m not going back there.”

  “I expect its bark is worse than its bite. It’s probably a soft old thing really. Just wanted to play with us.”

  “I’m not risking it.”

  “It couldn’t get over the fence. Maybe it’ll be shut up next time.”

  “You try, then. If it’s all clear, you can light a bonfire. Smoke signals. Make sure the whole street knows what we’re up to. In fact, we could send every house a round robin letter. Ask if anyone would be kind enough to lend us their front room for the holidays so we can spy on the people in Number 22.”

  I felt despairing. A couple of little kids playing, Plato had said. He had meant that was how a grown-up would see us, but it was what we were: two kids, pretending. I said, “It’s no good. There’s nothing we can do. Let’s go home.”

  He said patiently, “There is one thing. We could simply knock on their door. If your stepmother hasn’t seen you since you were three, hasn’t wanted to see you, then she probably hasn’t seen a photograph of you, either. We could say we were collecting for something. Or looking for sponsors for a walk, or a swim, to make money for charity.” He giggled suddenly and sharply, “For Oxfam. Or for handicapped children.”

  I stared at him and he went red. He said, “I’m sorry. That wasn’t funny. I don’t know why I said it.”

  I was too miserable to be angry. I said, “I didn’t think you’d seen her hand. What do you think happened?”

  “I don’t know. Genetic, probably. Born with it.”

  “Do you think she minds?”

  “I expect so. Like I mind about asthma. You just have to get used to it.”

  “I don’t think having asthma’s so bad.”

  “You haven’t got it. But it isn’t just that. It’s other things, too. Like being ugly and small.”

  I said, “Don’t be silly!”

  He pushed his glasses up on his nose and looked at me sternly. “It’s as I said, you have to get used to it. To being different. Outside.”

  “Outside?”

  “Looking at all the people inside who don’t lose their breath when they run, or wear braces on their teeth, and who have proper families. Mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters. All living together.”

  I said, “If that’s being outside, then I’m outside, too. I mean, I’m outside George and Annabel’s family.”

  “That makes two of us.” He giggled. “Like the two Bisto Kids.”

  It was then that he told me about this old advertisement. Sitting on a dustbin at the end of the cinder path, he wrinkled his nose and pretended to be a starving orphan smelling something good cooking.

  He made me laugh. He made me hungry. I said, “Aunt Sophie made me cold roast beef and cucumber sandwiches. Enough for the two of us.”

  *

  We went into the cemetery and ate lunch sitting on the tomb of Stanley Arthur McAlpine who had been ‘called to the Lord’ in 1925. The flat part of the tomb was grey-green with lichen, but the marble angel with folded wings that stood over it was still white and clean. There was a verse on its base.

  Father in Thy gracious keeping,

  Here we leave Thy servant sleeping.

  These words brought a lump to my throat, but Plato said it wasn’t so sad since Mr McAlpine had been eighty-two when he died. After we had finished eating we tried to scrape some of the mouldy green off the flat part of the tomb, and Plato pinched some plastic daffodils from a newer grave and stuck them into the earth at the feet of the watching angel. Then we looked round the cemetery for other McAlpines, but we didn’t find any; Stanley Arthur was the only one of his family who had been buried there. Plato said perhaps all the others had been cremated but neither of us knew if there had been cremation so long ago.

  Plato said he would look it up in the encyclopedia when he got home. He said he would rather be cremated when he died because it was tidier and took up less space, but I thought I would rather be buried, so that people could come and look at my tombstone and wonder about me.

  Neither of us mentioned Annabel and George. It was as if we had each decided, on our own, separately, to ignore what had brought us here, to Bow Cemetery; as if we had both realised, since the dog chased us out of the garden, that we had no real idea how to go on. I knew I was beginning to be afraid that if we hung around Shipshape Street very much longer, something awful would happen, and Aunt Bill and Aunt Sophie would find out what I’d been up to.

  I said, “Perhaps if we go soon, we really could go to the National Gallery on the way home.”

  I thought Plato would object. But he shrugged his shoulders. “Okay. Why not? We’ve found out the interesting part, after all. Where they live, what they look like. Spying gets boring after a bit.”

  *

  And that would have been that, over and finished and no harm done to anyone, if we had not walked to the station by way of the grassy clearing at the side of the railway line, and seen the grandmother—my grandmother—asleep on a bench in the sunshine.

  Chapter Eight

  She looked quite comfortable, her head resting on the back of the bench, her legs stretched out in front of her, and her hands folded across her handbag on her lap. Her mouth had fallen open and she was snoring gently. A little bit of cottony stuff, some sort of seed blown on the wind, had settled on her upper lip, and it fluttered with each breath.

  I looked at this sleeping person who was my grandmother, and thought how odd it was that she was a stranger to me.

  She stirred and muttered something. “Come away,” Plato said. “They’ll see you. They’ll think we’re thieves. Stealing her handbag or something.”

  The children had come out of the bushes on the other side of the clearing. They were running towards us, a little, matted dog chasing them, leaping up, yapping. We walked slowly towards them and they glanced at us briefly as they ran past us. George said, “Gran?” and Annabel hushed him. “Don’t wake her.”

  At the edge of the clearing we stopped and looked back. Annabel was fastening the dog’s leash to its collar and slipping the loop over an iron strut on the bench. “Stay,” she said. “Good dog.” And the little dog sat like a statue, ears up, head cocked to one side.

  The children backed away from the bench, giggling. George whispered something to Annabel and she looked in our direction.

  “Pretend to be busy,” Plato said. “Let’s pick blackberries.”

  High up where they caught the sun, a few berries were ripening, but on the lower branches they were still shrunken and green.

  “Rhubarb, rhubarb, rhubarb,” Plato said. “That’s what actors say when they’re part of the crowd on the stage and pretending not to notice what’s going on. If you get a stick, you might be able to reach some of the top bits. I’ll keep an eye on your brother and sister.”

  The bushes were covered with dust and smelled fusty. The few berries I managed to reach were sour and pursed my mouth up. “Yuck,” I said, spitting. “What are they doing, Plato?”

  I was too nervous, or shy, to look round myself.

  “Nothing special,” he said. “It’s all right, they’re not watching us.” Then, concerned
suddenly, “Oh, no …”

  I looked then. They were standing at the wire fence between the clearing and the railway line.

  I said, “They’re just watching for trains. All kids do that.”

  George had sat down. Annabel was stooping over him, pulling at something. George was on his back, wriggling. He disappeared. Annabel looked over her shoulder at her sleeping grandmother. George’s head popped up on the other side of the fence. Annabel sat down.

  “They’re sliding under the wire,” Plato said. “That’s dangerous …”

  Annabel was wearing a skirt. A bit of it must have snagged on the fence. She said, “Oh …” and then a rude word I would not have expected. George was out of sight but I heard him laugh. Annabel tugged her skirt free. Then she vanished too.

  Plato set off at a run. I followed him, my heart jumping. I was afraid he was going to wake the old lady, but he swerved as he passed the bench and made for the fence. We stood, peering through. There was no sign of the children.

  The rails started to hum. We could hear the train in the tunnel. It roared out and banged past, making the fence shake. Plato said, “We’d better see where they’ve got to.”

  He slithered under the wire and held it up for me. There was a narrow path of trodden grass that led down the steep slope towards the dark mouth of the tunnel. There was nowhere else they could hide.

  We stopped at the entrance. There was room between the rails and the black wall for a person to walk, but it would be terrifying to be caught there, I thought, with a swaying train crashing past. I shivered and Plato said, “Some kids enjoy being frightened.” He called out, “Hallo, there,” and his shout echoed hollowly under the curved roof of the tunnel.

  We waited. “Come on out,” Plato said, using his deep, grown-up voice. “Now. This minute.”

  I thought I heard a whisper, quite close. Then silence.

  Plato said, “My father’s a policeman. If you don’t come out, I’ll get him to fetch you. Then you’ll be in real trouble.”