Lee Raven, Boy Thief

by Zizou Corder

  I realized that where he had been listening there was a manhole.

  I followed him. I wished I’d had a chance to tell Mr Maggs I was going out, but I didn’t dare try and ring him. Trying to stay invisible while scurrying along was already hard enough work.

  The young man went on up Bruton Lane, through the warren of mews at Bourdon Street, Avery Row and Lancashire Court, heading in a loop north towards Oxford Street. It was a warm evening and there were plenty of people around. I didn’t feel there was any danger, as such, but my heart was pounding.

  Crossing Oxford Street, I nearly lost him in the hurly-burly of buses and electrocabs. Heat was rising gently off the pavement and my feet ached a little. I was only really used to being inside at Maggs Brothers. A woman with lots of shopping bags pushed past me and I stumbled – when I looked up, he was nowhere to be seen.

  I hurtled to the north side and looked around.

  There!

  He was going into a cafe. I could see him through the plate-glass window, ordering some food, sitting down. He looked as if he were settling in.

  I positioned myself across the road, keeping an eye on him through the rumbling traffic. Now would be a good time to ring Mr Maggs.

  He answered almost immediately. ‘Janaki, my dear!’ he cried. He only ever calls me ‘my dear’ when he’s worried. ‘Where are you? The police have been here again and I couldn’t find you!’

  ‘Mr Maggs,’ I said, ‘listen – somebody else came round about the book! He said he’s called Richard Oliver and claimed to be Joe English’s social worker, but I don’t think he is. He said he knew where Joe would have gone, so I’ve followed him.’

  Of course dear Mr Maggs was horrified.

  ‘Janaki!’ he cried. ‘For goodness’ sake, child, come home! It could be dangerous! Where are you? There is a lot of money at stake here… Come home and I will send the police…’

  ‘No,’ I said, and actually I surprised myself. ‘If he’s to lead us to the book we don’t want him scared off.’

  ‘Oh, for goodness’ sake, child,’ he said, but then the reception went fuzzy. I was saying, ‘I’ll call you later’ – and we were cut off.

  Could I really follow him myself, alone? Wasn’t I too scared? I didn’t know.

  Somehow I stayed where I was.

  Every now and again Richard Oliver looked up and out at the street. He lingered over his meal. Then, when it was pretty much dark, he paid and came out of the door.

  It occurred to me that he had been waiting for the dark.

  So I was going to follow him at night-time.

  OK. I could handle that. It would make it easier to hide from him.

  He was turning into a small street. Slowing down.

  I followed. It was a cul-de-sac, widening out at the end into a kind of small square, with one imposing building taking up the end. Along the sides were Georgian buildings like Maggs Brothers: brown brick, handsome, with black iron railings in front and steps down to the area below. Several of them had blue plaques to show what famous people had lived there in the past. The windows of the office buildings all had a shut-up Sunday look: blank-faced. There were fewer people here. One of them was Richard Oliver.

  The moment there were none (except for me, pressed invisibly against a doorway again), he crossed over to the last house on the left and neatly jumped over its railings.

  What was he up to?

  I crept along to the building and, positioning myself silently on its pale stone steps, I peered over into the dimness of the area.

  He was down there and beside him was a manhole. He swivelled his head up in a last-minute check and then, swift as a monkey, he had twisted off the manhole cover and jumped down.

  All that was left was a hole in the ground.

  I couldn’t quite believe what I had just seen. It seemed impossible, somehow. People don’t just disappear down holes. I stared at the empty space where he had been. After a few minutes it became clear that he wasn’t immediately just going to pop out, so, cautiously, I approached and crept down the iron stairs.

  The manhole cover lay on the ground where he had left it: dull grey metal, with Dudley and Dowell written on it.

  I stepped carefully over it and peered down the hole.

  How could Mr de Saloman’s book possibly be down there?

  CHAPTER 12

  The Story Continues According

  to the Book

  Booko! Well. Honestly. Made me sound like a footballer.

  He was going to have to come up with something better than that.

  Actually – I was rather excited about the idea of having a name. While I was closed I had been thinking of what might be good ones. Something in Babylonian, perhaps, to convey my roots. But nobody would be able to pronounce it. But then – well, realistically, nobody would need to apart from the boy. I wasn’t suddenly going to become a public chatterer, natter natter natter with everyone I came across. No, this boy would be the only one to ask me questions. This was not my choice. It was how things were. I am after all a book. I communicate on the page – even when I really love my reader, and there have been some I have loved very much, the ones who discovered my secret and returned to me over and over.

  But… many children can’t read. Adults too.

  If I come across them in the future, might I not speak to them, now that I have found my voice?

  The idea scared me a little. Not because of talking to them, but because… well. Put it this way. It is not a nice feeling to be coveted by men. When they covet you they steal you and chase you and do all sorts of alarming things, and you cannot always protect yourself. If you try to, you can draw even more attention. You have to find someone to protect you. Would this boy be able to protect me? It was a long time since I had been through a metamorphosis – I had held the same basic shape now since I became vellum sixteen hundred years ago. The occasional temporary swap into modern book form – that funny Beano, for example – was nothing much to me. But what if they wanted to make me digital, technological? I had evolved from clay to papyrus to vellum long ago, in my youth… Could I now become bytes or bits? A disc or a pod, like the boy said – a pod full of binary code? This has been beginning to happen to stories. They are taking another new form… I had changed before and I will change again no doubt. Even so, I shivered a little at the thought.

  Am I ready to become a piece of technology?

  I think not. I think humans still love to read words from paper pages.

  I had been lonely beyond belief locked up for years by those de Salomans, with no one to offer a story to – except when my darling Eliane came to me of course, breaking the rules and not being scared of her great-grandmother’s curse. I gave her a pink fluffy cover once – oh, she was so happy. But all those stories about ballerinas I had to think up! And now I was out in the world again… Well, it was exciting. But alarming. I was made for the study, the deckchair, the bedside table – not for the sewer and the ambitions of modern science.

  Still, here was my nice new reader. My new friend, I could call him even. I was in his hands and I would give him what he wanted. He wanted to know the very most recent part of my tale. He wanted the bit with him in. Humans always do. Usually I manage to give it to them – or at least, to paraphrase the philosopher Jagger, if I don’t give them what they want, I give them what they need. But what I can’t do is cut to the end. Read me and you read in the right order. No cheating.

  So I told him first about life in the tomb in Egypt, and about the earthquake that came and ripped our quiet life-in-death to shreds, and how I lay in my pot for years under the desert sands. I told him about being dug up by that thieving skinny-legged graverobber, and how he ran into the governor’s agent at a tavern and the governor’s agent scared him into handing me over, and how the governor’s agent sent me to Zenodotus, the librarian at Alexandria, in case I was valuable. At Alexandria I was loved. The Pharaoh, Ptolemy I, was a demi-god with a beaky nose; he loved books so much that eve
ry ship which came to Alexandria was searched for books, and every book that was found he bought it, or stole it, or had it copied. This is how his library became one of the wonders of the world.

  ‘So you’ve known lots of gods?’ he said.

  ‘Of course,’ I replied.

  ‘Weird,’ he murmured. ‘Go on.’

  ‘Zenodotus soon discovered my nature,’ I continued, ‘and gave me directly to Ptolemy, who kept me for his personal pleasure, reading my stories every night, and telling nobody of my magic properties – not even Demetrius of Phalerum, whose idea the library had been in the first place. He only told his son, Ptolemy II. He’s the one who bought Aristotle’s library.’

  ‘Who’s Aristotle?’ he asked.

  ‘That’s another story,’ I said.

  ‘Only my brother Billy uses it for rhyming slang –Aristotle, bottle, bottle and glass, ar–’

  ‘Yes, well, thank you for that,’ I said. ‘Moving swiftly on… Ptolemy II loved me too, but he had to hide me from Ptolemy III, who had passionate but – curious – literary habits. He stole some very valuable stuff from the Athenian State Archive – originals by Aeschylus, Euripides and Sophocles… Do you use those for vulgar terms as well?’

  I was actually rather interested. Slang was one kind of use of language that I tended to miss out on.

  ‘Well, there’s a knock-knock about Euripides… You know knock-knock jokes?’

  ‘Of course,’ I replied with dignity.

  ‘OK. Knock, knock.’

  ‘Who’s there?’

  ‘Euripides.’

  ‘Euripides who?’

  ‘Euripides pants one more time Eumenides pants yourself!’

  Well, I laughed and laughed. Having known them, you know – it sent me quite back to old times. Lee, I have to say, didn’t think the joke was funny at all. But he liked the fact that I did. I was shaking with laughter and he was delighted with that.

  ‘You’re moving!’ he cried.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘That is brilliant,’ he said. ‘What if I tickled you? Would you feel it?’

  ‘I –’ I managed to say, but he was already having a go, tickling up my spine with his little fingers…

  ‘Get off!’ I yelled, with no dignity whatsoever. ‘Stop that! Stoppit!’

  ‘Oh, my days, you’re ticklish!’ he squeaked, as I wriggled and giggled and winced. ‘And you’re moving! Ha ha ha ha! There’s a book having hysterics on my lap!’

  ‘It’s not fair!’ I squealed. ‘I ca-a-an’t – I can’t get you back! Stoppit!!!!’

  In the end he did.

  I was panting and hiccuping, and he was grinning.

  ‘That’s very funny,’ he said, with his huge smile.

  ‘Well, I’m glad you think so,’ I said, as I got my breath back.

  ‘Well, it is,’ he said. ‘Anyway, when did you last have a good laugh?’

  It was a fair point. I had not laughed for several centuries.

  After a while I took up the story again.

  ‘It was beautiful in the Ptolemies’ royal enclave,’ I said. ‘We lived in marble halls, with courtyards and fountains, rugs and statues, peacocks and rare beasts. There were 500,000 scrolls and codices and papyrus scrolls. But it wasn’t a safe place. Zoilus had his head chopped off for joking about Ptolemy II marrying his sister. Ptolemy II poisoned Demetrius too. They said he was bitten by a snake while he was having his siesta, but he was poisoned.

  ‘The Ptolemies went downhill from there. Numbers IV and V were weak and useless. Number VIII married a sister who’d been married to their other brother before and then married his niece. The last of them was Cleopatra – ah, there’s a story.’

  ‘I know about her. She got rolled up in a carpet with no clothes on as a present for the Roman emperor. Then she got bit by a snake.’

  ‘Well – yes. There is a little more to it than that.’

  ‘Will you tell me, later?’

  ‘Of course,’ I said.

  ‘So what happened then?’

  ‘Ptolemy II had always been very secretive with me. He hid me away and as a result, after he died, nobody knew about me. I had been forgotten in a box. Luckily, in fact, for me, because the box was kept in the Sister Library, up the hill at the Serapeum, so when Julius Caesar came and set fire to the boats in the harbour and the flames licked up and caught the docks, and the warehouses, the Museion, and the main library too… I was safe, but everything else burned. By mistake, they said. Thousands and thousands of books. Seven hundred thousand. The wisdom of the past rising in columns of black smoke on the wind…’ It hurt me still to think of that fire. The smell of it, the crackle and thump and howl.

  The boy put his hand softly on my page.

  ‘Well, I survived. Then in AD 385 I was stolen by some lunatics inspired by mad Bishop Theophilus. More book-burners. These ones were burning everything except the Bible. Only the Bible could be true, they said. All other wisdom was pagan, and therefore wrong, and had to be destroyed. Eheu… dark days. Alexandria sank back to nothingness. Mud and silt blocked the Canopic Nile, the Hepastadium was covered over, and the sea crept in. Sphinxes lay abandoned on the seabed. The fanatical Emperor Theodosius, the beautiful philosopher Hypatia, murdered by Bishop Cyril. Later, when the Arabs came, they burned the remaining books to heat the water for their baths.

  ‘I wasn’t there for that. A pair of stupid rioters had taken me home as kindling for their domestic fire. They put me on a woodpile outside their hut. The smoke from the burning library and the Serapeum was drifting across the sky. People were coughing from it. I was scared then. I thought I was going to die… Then, at sunset, an ox came by and ate me.’

  The boy laughed. I must say that though he was fascinated by my tale he wasn’t entirely respectful.

  ‘It was no laughing matter,’ I said. ‘Have you ever been eaten by an ox?’

  ‘Course not,’ he said. ‘But I’m not an ancient magic book.’

  ‘It’s still no fun,’ I said. ‘All that chomping and spit. But being eaten did not, as you will have noticed, destroy me.’

  ‘Go on then,’ he said.

  ‘The ox that ate me was very fertile and of her calves several were sent to Rome to the vellum factories. And so I became a book again: stretched on wood, smooth and pearly, polished and pure. I bound a notebook for an astrologer. I passed on to a monk who made me the book of his heart and wrote in me each day his sins and his acts of virtue. He believed that God wiped me clean each night, to inspire him to greater virtues. He did become a very virtuous man.

  ‘For many years after his death I stayed in his monastery. Various monks for many years wrote their dreams and sins and aspirations in me. Some of them were poets. Whatever was written, my pages were always clean.

  ‘In the year 1025 I returned to the East, in the pocket of a crusader. I stopped an arrow on the outskirts of Jerusalem, but my owner died anyway. I was taken for a while by a mathematician, till he drowned in a shipwreck and I washed up on the shore of the Black Sea. A bandit took me to Athens and sold me to a woman who wrote songs in me; I was stolen from her purse and brought to a philosopher who wrote in me all his doubts about the purpose of life. He gave me to his son, who sold me to a Frenchman who gave me to his true love – another man’s wife – full of the love poems he had written to her while he was at war. Her husband found me and threw me in the midden, where a child spotted me and cleaned me and hid me in her girdle. Her name was Eliane de la Roche. Each day she would take me out and read me and it was she to whom I began to retell all the stories I had learned from humans through the years. It was she whose desire for stories I heard and fulfilled. She was the first since Ptolemy I for whom, each time I was opened, I had a new story.

  ‘She, sweet child, told her father. He beat her and locked me up as a piece of witchcraft.

  ‘The local priest heard of it and confiscated me. I was to be burned – again! – but the darling girl rescued me and gave me to her cousin for safeke
eping. He took me to the coast and copied out the stories I produced each day, and gave them to his friends. When he died, I lay in a cupboard for many years. An undertaker found me and when he opened me there were stories on my pages. By now I had no choice: my stories had been woken and all I could do was be read.

  ‘The undertaker sent me to the Pope in Rome. The Pope’s Undersecretary for Unwanted Gifts put me in a chamber with all the other unwanted gifts and sent a letter of thanks. The undertaker died mad from never knowing what the Pope thought of me. Some years later, a young soldier of the Swiss Guard, sentry to the Chamber of Unwanted Gifts, found me, wrapped in cobwebs, and stole me for his sweetheart. He died, mad from guilt at having stolen from the Pope. His sweetheart died of grief at his death, and her sister tried to tear out my pages, but my story of Orpheus and Eurydice so enchanted her that she could not. Instead she read me every day and was known as an eccentric. Her daughter married a Russian and took me to St Petersburg; her son hid me inside a grand piano and shipped me to Japan.

  ‘Do you want to know it all? All the tears and the fortunes made and lost?

  ‘I was a book which could not die and which had in it whatever you want. You want to know to whom I belong? And why this latest owner died?

  ‘All I can tell you is that someone is trying to steal me again. Where people used to want to burn me, now they want to sell me for money, or own me for profit. If they don’t succeed now someone else will later. But I cannot tell you who they are or what they are doing to try to get me…’

  ‘I don’t want them to get you,’ said Lee. ‘I’ll look after you.’

  The girl had said that too. When they said that it made me want to give them the best stories.