by Guy Burt
“I know,” I said. “If it’s finished in time, we could do that at half-term. If I can borrow it for a few days. And if it doesn’t rain, of course,” I added doubtfully.
“Unpredictable thing, the future,” Sophie said. “You can never be sure what might happen. You can’t even imagine it, necessarily. That’s chaos theory for you.”
We walked round the second slight bend in the road and our house came into view, huddled in its long garden in a dip in the land. In the drive, my father’s car was clearly visible.
“What do you think Daddy’s doing here?” I said.
“God knows. Another surprise visit. Maybe we’ll get something decent for supper.” Her tone was hard, unpleasant.
“It’s not his fault,” I said uncomfortably. Sophie shot a glance at me, one eyebrow raised.
“What’s not?”
“Him being away all the time.”
“It’s not? What, you think it’s his work or something that keeps him away?”
I stared back at her, not knowing what to say.
“Shit, you didn’t really think that, did you?” She shook her head again. “Christ. You don’t get the impression he just doesn’t like being with us all that much?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
She sighed, and then slapped my arm gently. “Hey. Sorry. I didn’t mean to snap.”
“It’s OK.” There were birds trailing across the sky near the wood, and I followed them with my eyes until they swept out of sight.
“Hey,” Sophie said after a pause, “did I tell you I got my period?”
“Did you?”
“Yeah. I’m the first in our class, I think.”
“How does it feel?”
“Odd. It’s nothing awful, though. I got really worried at one point, all that stuff about pains and cramps and things, but none of that’s happened.”
“Have you told Mummy?”
“No. Why, do you think I should? Like, walk into the drawing room and say, 'Hello, Mummy, did you know your daughter’s a functioning woman now?' “ She giggled. “I don’t think so. I used some loo paper, and then bought some towels and things in town.”
“Where did you get the money?” I asked. She looked at me strangely.
“I’ve been saving up,” she said. “Why? You think I nicked it or something?”
“No,” I said, hurriedly. “That’s not what I meant.”
She stared at me almost angrily for a second, and then her expression changed, and softened. “Ah, shit. Yeah, of course I nicked it. Anyway, who’s going to do that sort of thing for me if I don’t do it myself? One thing you do learn in this household, Mattie, is that you’ve got to look after yourself.” We turned into the drive, and our feet scrunched on the gravel. “One other thing, though. If you need any cash for anything, don’t for heaven’s sake try to take it yourself. You’d balls it up. Let me know, and I’ll give you some, OK?”
“OK,” I said, secretly rather shocked. And then, because we were about to enter the house, I stopped. “Sophie?”
“Yeah?”
I hesitated. “What did—I mean, how did you do it? Take it from her bag?”
A slow smile spread over her face. “No, stupid,” she said, and slapped me lightly again. “She’d notice. I took her cash card. The code’s written down in the telephone book. Pretty stupid, 'cos there’s no area code and this region uses five figure phone numbers.” She shrugged. “C'mon, let’s get something to eat.”
What Sophie had said about my father not really liking us preyed on my mind. That night in bed, I realized that she was undoubtedly right, and was confused that I hadn’t reached the same conclusions myself. Five of the children in my class had divorced or separated parents, but there was no way that I would ever have counted myself as a possible sixth. My parents weren’t separated; my father simply hardly lived with us, that was all. When I began to think of the situation in these terms, I found myself scared and worried. I found it more difficult still to see that the strange relationship between my parents, no matter how tenuous, was apparently a permanent one. In the end, I took some of these fears to Sophie. We were walking by the edge of the wood, supposedly collecting seeds for a project of mine.
“They say a creaking gate hangs longest,” she said. “That means even when something doesn’t look as if it’s OK, it may keep going for years. And some things that look shiny and wonderful are rotten inside, so it works the other way as well.”
“I suppose so,” I said. “It can’t be very nice.”
“You’re a real romantic, aren’t you?” she said. “Of course it’s not nice. But then, I couldn’t honestly say that Mummy’s a very nice person, could you?”
“Do you think it’s her fault?” I asked.
“Yes,” Sophie said sharply.
We had half-filled a plastic bag with a variety of winged and furred seeds. At the corner of the wood, near the fallen tree where once, two years before, we had brought a cousin of ours on a walk, we stopped and looked down on the farm.
“Do you think it’s empty?” I said.
“I don’t know. There’s a conker tree down there,” Sophie added. “They’re seeds, too.”
“Can we go and get some?”
“If you like. And those ones right down there are ordinary chestnuts. If we get some of those, we can eat them. We’ll have a chestnut roast.”
“Yeah!”
She grinned. “Come on, then. We can have a look at the farm on the way.”
Even at the time, I half suspected that Sophie’s real reason for cutting down across the fields was to see what had happened to the old farm, whether it had really been sold or not. We scrambled under barbed wire and over a dry-stone wall, and ended up on a winding track spanning the distance between the road and the farm buildings. The three chestnut trees were a little farther along it, the conker tree almost next to us. We spent a happy half an hour grubbing up spiky conker husks and rubbing them with our feet until they popped open to disgorge the glowing brown conkers. Quickly, I amassed a large collection in the bottom of the bag, as well as pockets full of the most impressive-looking. Then we went on down the lane to the chestnuts, and repeated the performance, only with less enthusiasm; too many of the cases revealed only wafer-thin, useless nuts. Eventually, though, we decided we had enough of these for a decent feast.
“Right,” Sophie said at last. “If we go back that way, we’ll have a look as we go past.”
The farm buildings were low and grey. It was nowhere near as big a farm as the one on the opposite side of the road, which had a number of big red tractors and an evil, one-eyed cat that sat on the wall and hissed. Instead, there were a couple of houses, a shed with some oil cans in it, and a long barn, made out of corrugated iron. We crept into the farmyard, and, having satisfied ourselves that there was no one around, began to explore. One of the proper buildings had its windows boarded up so that we couldn’t see in, while the other—which, I guessed, had been the farmhouse proper—had been emptied. We poked around in the shed, and tried the door on the barn, but it was locked. Sophie, though, didn’t seem at all disappointed.
“That’s enough,” she said. “We’d better get home before it gets dark. We’ll go down to the quarry at the weekend and roast chestnuts; how about that?”
“Great!” I said.
“You realized far earlier than I did,” he says. “About everything, I suppose. There wasn’t a lot left for me to find out on my own.”
I keep quiet, afraid of angering him. I had thought that the panic had worked itself out of me earlier, in the shouting and struggling before he hit me. It seems now that I was wrong; I can feel it tugging insistently at me from inside, prying me open. I swallow. I must keep calm, even if it is only on the outside. And I can’t afford to crack up. Not now.
He is still talking. “The only thing I did find out was about you, and even then you practically held my hand and led me to it.” He smiles. “Practically.”
“You
mean the—the quarry books?” I say.
He notices something different in my voice. “Sophie? Are you OK?”
“I’m fine,” I say. It sounds a little crazy. Again, I have to stop myself from laughing.
“If you’re sure,” he says slowly. “Yes, the quarry books. That’s right. I should have got them earlier, but—well, you know. There was a lot going on.”
I am not at all sure that I understand what he means. I nod, encouragingly.
“I’m losing track of things,” he says absently. “We found the barn. That always seems like a landmark. No, not that. A turning point. Something important.” His eyes are fixed on me. “Why didn’t you want things to change?”
The question takes me completely by surprise, and I answer without thinking. “Because I was scared.”
He sits motionless for a long moment, and then his shoulders slump fractionally. “Yeah. That’s what I thought.” He sounds as if, somehow, I have disappointed him.
We stood and examined the door carefully. There was a strong-looking chain looped through the handles, padlocked twice. Sophie scratched her nose and tugged experimentally on the door.
“This is no good at all. Just as well, really. It’s a bit bloody obvious to leave a door open. Let’s check the sides.”
We walked slowly round the barn, examining the corrugated sheeting near where it met the ground. Weeds had sprung up, and in places the metal was rusted through in holes and lines, but the structure looked secure. It was Saturday morning.
“I don’t see any way in,” I said.
“That’s because there isn’t one. Come on.” She led the way over the courtyard towards the shed where the oil barrels were, scanning the place, looking for something. “This’ll do.” From a shelf on one side, she picked up an old and very rusty iron pipe, about two feet long. “How do you fancy a bit of breaking and entering?”
“You’ll never break the chain with that,” I said dubiously.
“Not the chain, stupid. The metal panels are riveted on. I think we should be able to knock the heads off the rivets.” She frowned for a moment. “We could do with a chisel or something. If it doesn’t work properly with this, we’ll have to take the one from the quarry.”
We made a second circuit of the barn. “This looks like a good place,” I said.
“No use. It’s on the village side. We don’t want to chance being seen going in or out. It’s going to have to be on the other side, facing the hill. How about this?”
I stared at the section she was indicating. “Yeah. Maybe. What do you think’s inside?”
“Oh, treasure and princesses,” Sophie said casually, and then burst out laughing at my expression. “Well, honestly, Mattie—what do you think? Some mouldy hay, if we’re lucky. Come on.”
With enthusiastic dedication we took it in turns to hammer at the protruding heads of the rivets. The barn, which I had expected to ring like a gong, yielded only a metallic thud every time we hit it. The first head snapped off easily, already nearly rotted through. So did the second. Then, as we progressed up the panel, they grew tougher and more resistant, until at last we reached one—at a height of about thirty inches—which we couldn’t break.
“Forget it,” Sophie said. “We’ll do this lot next.” She pointed to a parallel row two feet farther on. “If we get both lots off, we should be able to prise it back and snap the ones at the top.”
Gradually, we did so. One by one, the rivet heads gave in to our incessant pounding and sheared free. Eventually, Sophie put down the piece of iron and straightened up.
“OK. What we want to do is lift it up from the bottom, like we were going to peel it up. But waggle it backwards and forwards to break that one there,” she added, “and not the other one. If we leave one of the top corners attached, it will act as a sort of hinge for this panel, and hold it in place better. All right?”
“Yeah,” I said. We took a bottom corner each.
“Ready?” I nodded. “Right, then. Pull.”
We heaved the rusty sheet upwards, trying to avoid the stinging nettles and the sharper rusty edges. Then once it was out at a reasonable angle, we began to rock it back and forth, bending it a little so that the main stress was put on one of the two remaining rivets. After three or four tries, it suddenly snapped in half with an audible crack.
“There!” I gasped. We took a step back and surveyed our new door.
“Should be pretty much invisible from ten yards away,” Sophie said approvingly. “And we can bend it back to being much straighter than it is at the moment, too.” She glanced at me, and grinned. “Come on. Let’s see what we’ve got.”
We swung the panel aside and scrambled through the gap on our hands and knees. Reaching outside again, Sophie dragged it back down into place, and the fan of sunlight was abruptly cut off. We stood up, and looked around us in the gloom.
“Wow,” I said, still panting a little. “It’s really huge.”
Sophie took a step forward. “Not bad,” I heard her murmur.
The inside of the barn was larger than the assembly hall at school. The floor was hard-packed earth, uneven and covered with a layer of chaff. Down one end there was a large, empty table and a pile of fertilizer sacks. Filling the remainder of the barn was a sprawling mess of bales. Two thin windows, one at each end and very high up, let in spears of light in which dust motes swirled and flowed lazily, as if they were in treacle.
“Is that hay?” I asked Sophie.
“Don’t think so. It’s straw, I think.” She sniffed. “Probably last year's, too. God knows why it’s still here. I think they would have sold hay.” She took another step forward, almost hesitantly, and looked around her. “This is pretty good,” she said. “You want to explore?”
“OK,” I said, and made off towards the table end. There was almost nothing else worth seeing; this was the end that pointed towards our house, the end with the doors. The opposite end, pointing towards the village, was the end with the straw. The smell of the place was thick and musty, with overtones of cows and sunlight and heat. It was not unpleasant. It tickled my throat, but in an unthreatening way; not like the choking constriction that came with the dreams. I trailed back along the length of the building to where Sophie was standing on a straw bale.
“We could move these, I think,” she said. “If we took an end each. I’ve tried one and it weighs a lot, but I reckon we could do it.”
“We could build them into a castle!” I said.
“Sure could,” she said, and smiled. “Better things than that, too. You could make tunnels, and roof them over with other bales, and shit like that. There’s enough stuff here.” She thought some more. “We’re going to need torches, though, and lots of batteries,” she said.
“Why?”
“Think it through. Do you think it would be a good idea to light candles in here?”
I looked at the straw. “No,” I said, and giggled.
“Well, then. But if we build a closed space among all that lot, there won’t be any light. I’ll get some this afternoon.”
“Sophie?”
“Yeah? What?” She was turning in a circle on the bale, sizing up the possibilities that existed in her new domain.
“How much money do you have?”
“Ah,” she said, and grinned. “You really want to know?”
“Yes!” I said, eagerly.
“Well, it’s OK to tell you, I suppose.” She paused. “You really want to know?” she asked again, her eyes sparkling.
“Tell me!”
“A few hundred quid.” She registered my shocked face with evident enjoyment. “Not bad, is it?”
“Wow,” I said, lamely.
“I thought she’d notice if it was a small amount, or something uneven. But if the balance is out by hundreds, then she’ll probably think she’s made a mistake. I bet she doesn’t have any idea about keeping track of what she spends.” She smiled a small, triumphant smile. “We’ll get a decent lot of batteries and a
few good torches. But that’s all. The rest of the money’s for important things only, not sweets or comics or crap.”
“Where’ve you hidden it?” I asked.
“Somewhere safe. Come and look at this.” She set off, climbing up the bales towards the corner of the barn where they were most highly stacked. “It’s going to be really something, if we get organized.” She frowned. “Damn school. It should be the summer holidays. We’ll have to work at it at weekends. We can always bring a picnic. Mummy’s pleased if we get out of her way in any case, so that shouldn’t be a problem.”
I could almost sense the speed at which her mind was working, sorting out what would have to be done. In such situations, it was generally pointless my trying to volunteer anything that Sophie hadn’t already thought of, so I sat down on a bale and stretched my legs out.
“We’ll have to buy the torches and stuff at different shops, one at a time. Batteries, too,” she was saying. “Thank God I got small notes.”
I stared at the far-off roof of the barn, supported by metal girders and wooden beams. Despite the smell of cows and the dusty air, it was like a cavern out of a fairy story to me; I sat with my mouth open and my head thrown back, imagining the wonderful things we might do. There was a thump, as Sophie jumped down beside me.
“We’d better be getting home,” she said. “We’ve been here an hour and a half, and we’re going to miss lunch. We’ll go shopping this afternoon for the things we need.”
“Couldn’t we get just some sweets as well? For a celebration?”
“Hmm. I suppose so.”
“Great,” I said with satisfaction.
eight
“The barn confused me,” he says. “I knew what it was—another secret place, like the quarry and the holly bush. But it was different to them, too public, almost. Strange. I realized afterwards, of course.”
I am feeling better. For a while, now, sudden splinters of panic have been grating inside me, but they come and go. In the spaces between them, I am more settled. It had occurred to me that the unusual period of calm that came over me when Matthew started his story was perhaps shock; this makes sense. At the same time, I know that I need to hang on to it, however artificial that might seem. I can’t afford not to.