The Land of Roar

by Jenny McLachlan

  ‘And webbed fingers and a magic tail!’

  Sun streams through the window and outside the birds sing. Just for a moment, it’s like it was when we were little, when we used to finish each other’s sentences and make stuff up faster than we could think it.

  Together, we stare at the map. Suddenly Rose shakes her head and jumps to her feet. She grabs a bulging bin bag and drags it towards the door. ‘Hurry up, Arthur,’ she calls over her shoulder, ‘or we’ll never get our den.’

  When I hear the bag thumping down the stairs I turn back to the map. I can’t resist.

  My eyes wander over pathways and streams and mountain passes, and I start to lose myself in this strange place we invented. Then something catches my eye – a flicker of movement, a flash of light – and I find myself staring at the Crow’s Nest. I see something that I missed before. A face is looking out of a window. The face is pale with round eyes and a crooked stitched mouth. It’s a scarecrow, a boy, and I can just make out two wings sprouting from his back.

  ‘Crowky,’ I say, the name coming easily to my lips. I stare at his black button eyes and his smile seems to stretch.

  ‘I’d almost forgotten about you,’ I whisper.

  After lunch Rose disappears to our room, and Grandad comes up to the attic to check on our progress.

  ‘Carrying all the stuff down the stairs is taking ages,’ I complain, staggering under a pile of magazines. ‘We need a quicker way.’

  Grandad looks out of the attic window. ‘Maybe you could use this.’

  I join him and I see that the garden is directly below us. ‘I suppose we could lower everything down on a rope . . .’

  ‘Or maybe,’ Grandad says, grabbing a handful of my magazines, ‘you could chuck it all out!’ And before I can say, no, that’s a ridiculous idea, he’s hurled the magazines out of the window. They flutter through the air and land all over the grass. He turns to me with a gleam in his eye. ‘Your turn, Arthur!’

  ‘Isn’t it a bit dangerous?’

  ‘Not if we only do the small stuff. And no glass or metal, right?’

  ‘Right,’ I agree, nodding seriously. Then, with a yell, I hurl out the rest of the magazines making Grandad laugh with glee.

  Then we get down to the serious business of throwing the contents of the attic out of the window. We go into a bit of a frenzy, whooping and yelling as bags burst open mid-air and boxes explode on the patio.

  Eventually, and predictably, Rose comes up to ruin our fun.

  ‘Grandad, your pants are hanging in a tree!’ she cries. ‘Why have you even kept them?’

  ‘I was saving them to use as dusters,’ he explains, then, possibly because Rose looks so disgusted, he shuffles off to collect them, coughing all the way down the stairs.

  ‘Inhaler!’ Rose and I call after him. Then Rose flops down on the sofa, pulls a piano keyboard on to her lap and starts randomly pressing the keys.

  ‘Do you want to chuck some stuff out?’ I ask, hauling a bag towards the window. ‘This one’s full of cuddly toys.’

  ‘Nah.’

  So, while Rose’s creepy music fills the attic, I throw the cuddly toys out. Grandad appears and tries to catch them. When a stuffed Winnie-the-Pooh hits him in the face he starts to fight it. It’s really funny. I turn round to tell Rose to come and watch, but then I change my mind. There’s no way she’s getting off that sofa.

  Rose used to be all right. No, she was better than all right. She was funny and laughed at my jokes and, except for the dark, she wasn’t scared of anything. It was Rose who jumped off the harbour wall one summer, right in front of all those teenage boys, and Rose who worked out that we could sledge down the sand dunes on trays. At school we were in the same class and played together every break time. I thought Rose liked this as much as I did, until our head teacher decided to mix up the Year Five classes.

  We were given a piece of paper and told to write down the names of three people we wanted to be with. I wrote down one name: Rose. I didn’t need anyone else. But then our teacher left the pieces of paper on his desk and I saw Rose’s list. She’d written:

  Angel

  Nisha

  Briony

  Rose was really happy in 5A with her three friends. Across the corridor in 5B, I wasn’t so happy. Then Rose got her phone and got into YouTube, make-up and her mates, and the Rose I knew just sort of disappeared.

  I turn back to the window and shake out the last of the toys. Grandad is lying flat on his back now, letting them fall all over him. After the last teddy has bounced off his stomach I go to clear out the darkest corner of the attic.

  I push aside a chunky TV and find myself staring into the sparkly eyes of a rocking horse. It rocks slightly, eyes wide, teeth bared, as if it’s angry about being left in this dingy spot for so long.

  I grab its mane and pull it out. ‘Look who I’ve found, Rose!’

  She looks up. ‘What? It’s just the old rocking horse.’

  ‘Yes, but it’s your old rocking horse, isn’t it? It was you who painted it black and covered it in glitter, and then you said it belonged to you and I was never allowed to sit on it. What did you call it?’

  ‘Prosecco,’ she says flatly. ‘You’d better put it in the charity shop pile. Someone might want it.’

  Suddenly I want to make Rose admit that she used to love this rocking horse. I want her to look at it, and be interested in it, and stop being cool, just for a second . . .

  ‘Hey, Rose.’ I drag it towards the window. ‘Do you think Prosecco would like to fly?’

  She looks up. ‘What’re you on about?’

  ‘He’s been stuck in the attic for too long. I think he’d like to feel the wind beneath his hooves.’ I’m at the window now.

  She leaps off the sofa and grabs hold of the mane. ‘You can’t throw him out of the window, Arthur. He’s an antique!’

  ‘He?’ I say. ‘He? ’

  Rose narrows her eyes.

  ‘Do you think you can you still talk to him, Rose?’

  She yanks the rocking horse out of my hands. ‘Let’s see, shall we?’ Then she crouches down and presses her ear to his mouth. ‘What was that, Prosecco? Uh-huh. Got it.’ She looks up. ‘Prosecco wants me to tell you that you smell like the corridor outside the boys’ toilets. In fact, Prosecco thinks that the corridor outside the boys’ toilets might actually smell of Arthur.’ She smiles sweetly. ‘It looks like I can still talk to him!’

  ‘Yeah? Well, maybe I can too.’ I stick my ear next to its mouth. ‘Sorry, Prosecco? You think Rose’s perfume smells like cat poo after it’s been in the sun? OK, I’ll pass it on.’

  Now it’s Rose’s turn. She rams her ear against his mouth. ‘Uh-huh, yep, got it.’ She looks up. ‘What Prosecco actually said was that it’s you who smells like cat poo after it’s been in the sun. You got it wrong because, unlike me, you don’t speak fluent Moonlight Stallion.’

  Moonlight Stallion. Ha! I knew Rose was still into Prosecco! He used to pop up in loads of our games and I’m sure she was always sitting on him when we played Roar.

  Roar. In a flash it’s back, and an image darts into my mind of Rose sitting high on Prosecco, bossing me around and translating his insults for me.

  Prosecco rocks forwards and again I feel like he’s looking at me. I tug him towards the window by his tail, suddenly desperate to get away from his sparkly staring eyeballs. ‘He still wants to fly,’ I say. ‘He said so.’

  Rose’s hands grab the tail. ‘I’d let go of that if I were you.’

  ‘Why?’

  Her voice drops to a dramatic whisper. ‘Because since you last saw Prosecco his tail has become poisonous and every single strand stings like a bee. The pain is intense, Arthur, and it will shoot through you like a thousand needles burrowing into your skin!’

  ‘So? You’re holding the tail too!’

  She shoves her face close to mine, eyes shining, and whispers, ‘The poison only affects BOYS!’

  A chuckle makes us look up. Gra
ndad is standing in the doorway with a cup of coffee. ‘It’s so wonderful to see you two playing again. Nothing could make me happier.’

  ‘We’re not playing, Grandad.’ Rose lets go of Prosecco’s tail. ‘We’re fighting. Big difference.’

  ‘Sounded a bit like playing to me,’ he says, then he sits on the sofa, props his feet on a suitcase and says, ‘Well, get on with it. This attic won’t clear itself out.’

  It’s fun having Grandad in the attic. He plays tunes on the keyboard and seems excited by everything we find.

  Grandad and Nani grew up in Mauritius, and when I discover something I think came from there I show it to him: an empty bottle of Labourdonnais rum, one of Nani’s old saris, a tin that once contained Bois Cheri tea.

  ‘I can smell home,’ says Grandad, sticking his nose in the tin and breathing deeply.

  All this nostalgia makes Grandad move on to singing sea shanties in French, and Rose and I fall quiet as his deep voice fills the room. We’ve only visited Mauritius once, when we were little, and I can hardly remember it. I can hardly remember Nani either. She died when we were three. Rose and I start to put anything that might have belonged to Nani on the sofa next to Grandad. He glances down at the beads and scarves and boxes, but he doesn’t stop singing until Rose pulls a half-deflated dinghy into the middle of the room.

  It’s not the dinghy that interests him, but something hidden behind it.

  He disappears into the shadows of the eaves and comes back dragging a camp bed. ‘Remember this old thing?’ he asks.

  I catch my breath. It’s an ancient camp bed, one of those ones on wheels that folds in the middle, like a table-tennis table. It has a mouldy-looking orange mattress, rusty springs and a plastic headboard . . . It’s rubbish, but just looking at it makes my heart beat fast because Rose and I loved playing with it. We kept it closed, and the folded mattress made a damp, dark tunnel which we would dare each other to crawl through. I can clearly remember the spine-tingling feeling I got when I pushed my head inside and forced myself to go into the darkness.

  ‘Arthur weed in that,’ says Rose.

  ‘I did not! I spilled a Fruit Shoot in there.’

  ‘Whatever,’ she says with an infuriating smile.

  Grandad runs his hand through the dust on the headboard. ‘Well, one of you definitely did something to it. Look at this!’

  I see some words are scratched into the plastic headboard.

  ‘“Enter here for the Land of Roar”,’ I read, although what it actually says is,

  I slip my hand in my pocket and touch the corner of the map.

  ‘What’s the Land of Roar?’ asks Grandad.

  ‘Just some game we used to play,’ says Rose.

  Suddenly I know exactly why we scratched those words on to the headboard. ‘This was how we got there,’ I say. ‘We’d crawl into the bed, shout, “Hear me roar”, and when we came out the other side we’d be in Roar!’

  Rose groans. ‘We’d be in the attic, Arthur.’

  ‘I know,’ I say quickly. ‘I mean, it’s how the game always began.’

  Grandad pats the bed. ‘Well, how about it, twins? Fancy crawling through the bed and having one last adventure in Roar?’

  Rose looks at him in horror. ‘Grandad, we haven’t played games like that for years. Plus I’m not going anywhere near that stinky old wee mattress.’ She gives the bed a shake. ‘It’s heavy. Do you want me to help you get it downstairs so we can dump it at the tip?’

  ‘No,’ I say quickly. ‘We’re saving the big stuff for the end. Right, Grandad?’

  He nods. ‘But I have seen one big thing we can get rid of.’ He picks up the dinghy and carries it towards the window. ‘Let’s see how far this baby can fly!’

  He forces it halfway out then gives it a massive shove. Rose and I get to the window just in time to see the dinghy float over the garden wall and land on the Baileys’ conservatory.

  ‘Oh dear,’ says Grandad. ‘I suppose I’d better get it back.’

  ‘I’ll go,’ cries Rose, dashing out of the attic.

  Soon I see Rose run outside, climb on the wheelie bin and scramble into next door’s garden. Mazen is on her trampoline; she acknowledges Rose’s presence by shrieking, ‘What are you wearing?’ then doing a backflip.

  ‘Well, Arthur?’ Grandad is watching me. ‘Are you up for taking one last trip to Roar?’

  Honestly? I’d give anything to play Roar with Rose again. Just me and her, and a load of dragons and unicorns and no thoughts of starting secondary school. But it’s impossible. I’m too old and I couldn’t do it without her. The rush of excitement that I felt when I saw the bed has gone and in its place is a heavy lump of disappointment. ‘No thanks, Grandad. Rose is right. We don’t play games like that any more.’

  Outside, we can hear Rose and Mazen talking, then the squeak of trampoline springs.

  ‘Who said anything about playing a game?’ Grandad grins then turns away. ‘Come on. I saw a bag of tennis balls earlier. Let’s see if we can chuck them as far as Mazen’s trampoline.’

  By the end of the day the attic is empty.

  Well, almost. The camp bed is sitting in the middle of the room, watched over by Prosecco, but everything else has gone: the dressing-up clothes, the plastic weapons, the Playmobil, the cuddly toys. Even the Quality Street tin is down in the garden in the tip pile.

  I take one last look around the room, and turn out the light.

  Grandad seems to have forgotten about the meal commonly known as dinner so Rose and I heat up a pizza we find at the bottom of the freezer then put ourselves to bed. We have to. It’s midnight and Grandad is out in the garden, dancing round a bonfire he’s made out of old newspapers and egg boxes.

  The pizza and trampolining have put Rose in a good mood because she starts kicking the bottom of my bunk bed, distracting me from the book I’m reading. The only downside to staying at Grandad’s is having to share a room with Rose.

  Eventually the kicking stops and I try to get into my book. Clearing out the attic has left me feeling a bit weird and on edge, but soon I find myself pulled into the story. It’s about a girl who discovers she’s descended from a Samurai warrior and can defeat any enemy by summoning the ghost of her ancestor. I wouldn’t be worried about starting secondary school if I had a Samurai ghost on my side.

  Rose’s voice drifts up from the bottom bunk. ‘Arthur . . . Mazen says you’re going to be eaten alive at Langton Academy.’

  Some people believe that twins can read each other’s minds. I can’t read Rose’s mind, but sometimes she can read mine.

  ‘Mazen says, because you can’t play football and you got a telescope instead of a phone for your birthday, everyone will think you’re weird.’

  I really don’t like Mazen Bailey.

  ‘Oh, and Mazen says you should use product on your hair. To make it, you know, less big or people will laugh at you.’

  Actually I think I might hate Mazen Bailey.

  ‘Arthur? Can you hear me?’ Rose gives the bottom of the bed an extra big kick. ‘Mazen was only trying to help. She’s in Year Eight so she knows.’

  ‘Mazen Bailey,’ I say, after a moment of dignified silence, ‘believes that The Force Awakens is the first Star Wars film, so obviously her opinion counts for nothing.’

  Rose goes quiet and all I can hear is tap, tap, tap, tap.

  ‘Rose, are you sending her a message?’

  ‘Shh,’ she says. ‘Did you just say obviously her opinion counts for nothing, or clearly her opinion counts for nothing?’

  I throw myself over the side of the bunk bed and make a grab for Rose’s phone, but she just pushes me away and keeps typing. ‘Rose, if you press send I’ll –’

  She looks up, interested. ‘Yes? What will you do?’

  ‘I’ll . . . I’ll . . .’ What can I do? What power do I have over Rose these days? She doesn’t want to hang out with me. I don’t make her laugh any more. Everything about me annoys her. ‘I won’t sleep in here!�
�� I shout.

  She bursts out laughing. ‘So? That would be great!’ Then she presses her finger down. ‘Ooops . . . I just pressed send!’

  Rage surges through me and I badly want to hit Rose, but I can’t, because she’s my sister and hitting my sister when I was six might have been just about OK, but hitting my sister when I’m eleven is wrong.

  Rose laughs. ‘You look funny, Arthur. Are you going to cry?’

  Over my dead body, I think, but I do have a painful lump in my throat because what Rose just did was so disloyal. Rose and I are twins. We’re supposed to stick together!

  The lump in my throat gets bigger and I have to squeeze my eyes shut to make it go away.

  ‘You are,’ Rose says confidently. ‘You’re going to cry.’

  But I don’t cry. Instead I do the thing I always do when there’s a chance I might cry. ‘ARRRGHHHH!’ I scream in her face. Then I grab my duvet and stomp out of the room, slamming the door behind me.

  No way am I sleeping in the same room as my disloyal, evil, mocking sister. No way am I ever speaking to her again. No way am I even going to breathe the same air that she breathes . . .

  There’s just one problem.

  Where can I sleep?

  Grandad’s house is big, but it’s also full. There are two spare bedrooms, but neither of them has beds. One of them has got Grandad’s drum kit in it, and the other’s full of books and Nani’s old things. Then I remember where there’s a perfectly good bed. One that folds in the middle and has a mattress covered in orange and brown flowers and ‘Entur heer for the laned of ROAR!!!’ scratched into the headboard.

  A bed that I’m ninety-nine per cent certain I didn’t wee in.

  It turns out attics are extremely creepy at night, especially empty ones.

  Moonlight streams in through the single window, lighting up the camp bed and making Prosecco look extra glittery. I step inside, my duvet trailing behind me, and flick on the light switch.

  Nothing happens.

  It takes several more pushes before I realise the bulb must have gone. It doesn’t matter. I’m going to sleep. I don’t need a light to open up a camp bed and fall asleep.