by Guy Burt
These are the facts: I am a prisoner. I have looked, and looked, and I can see no simple way of escape. The man who is keeping me here I thought I knew, but I was wrong, and I am having to start afresh and learn who he is. This will take time, and I have no idea whether it will help me or not. I have no idea whether I have the time to spare. But, since there is no simple way of escape, I have determined what I am going to do. I will watch him, listen to him, get to know him as best I can. And then, maybe, I will see something that will help me. Meanwhile, I try to keep myself from thinking that it is pointless, and I try to keep myself from crying.
I wish I were stronger.
He is saying, “Sometimes I wonder what you would have done without the barn. You would have found somewhere else, I suppose. You had that determination.”
We spent nearly every evening in the barn, and much of the weekend. Over the days, with much effort, the bales of straw were stacked more and more neatly in one corner, gradually forming two sides of an enclosed space completed by the structure of the building itself. A lot of thought must have gone into planning our castle: while I had spent my daydreams imagining what games we could play in it once it was completed, Sophie had obviously turned her mind to working out how our creation should be arranged if it was to be strong and safe. There were two parts to her finished design, and since we had to build it up in layers starting at the bottom, I only realized how ingenious it was once we had finished.
The bulk of the straw was now arranged so that it walled in a comfortably large space about two thirds up its height. This could be reached by climbing up a series of short steps that Sophie had artfully concealed near the end wall of the barn itself. Once inside, you could peer out over the battlements, which included several spy-holes. The entire floor of the barn was clearly visible to the defenders of the straw castle, from the near corner down to the end where the table had been.
Sophie had moved the table first of all. It was big, made solidly from thick planks of wood, and was a good ten feet long. It took us nearly three evenings of work to shift it the length of the barn, and yet Sophie never seemed to become impatient with our lack of progress: the fact that we were still only children, which made some jobs extremely difficult, she took into account. By the time the castle was finished, the table had vanished completely, buried under bales of straw.
It preserved a hollow space deep in the centre of the castle, with the apparent main room several bales’ depth above it. Moving one of the bales in the stack forming the back wall of our lookout room revealed a shaft down which you could scramble, digging your toes into the straw and holding a rope anchored at the top of the shaft. The secret door could be closed from the inside easily enough.
At the foot of the shaft we put our torches: big, rubberized models that took large square batteries.
We finished the whole project late on Saturday afternoon, one week after we had first broken into the barn. We sat in the torchlit space under the table and smiled at each other in triumph.
“It’s really good,” I said again. “You could hide here forever, and no one would ever know.”
Sophie’s smile widened. “That’s right,” she said. “The idea is that we use the area upstairs for most things, and keep this for anything really secret.”
“Yeah!” I looked at our oak-roofed, straw-walled hideout with admiration.
Over the next couple of weeks, we slowly ferried a variety of useful items to the barn. The hidden room became furnished with a rug, and the walls were hung with a series of posters showing fighter aircraft that I had been collecting.
The torches were deployed carefully, with one in each corner of the room plus one at the top of the entrance shaft, so that you could see the rope clearly. We replaced this one on its hollowed-out shelf of straw every time we left. The rug covered the bare earth floor so that we could sit down comfortably; the roof was ample for this, but it would have been too low for us to sit on chairs or sections of log or whatever. Again, we collected bricks to serve as podiums for the torches. The smell of cows was still strong, and Sophie tackled this soon enough.
“We’re going to have to be really careful,” she said. “So watch. Here and here there are cans of water, OK?”
I nodded. “OK.”
“And the entrance is open. It’s not as though anything’s likely to go wrong, but it would be a bit stupid to barbecue ourselves just because we don’t like the smell.” I giggled, nervously.
Sophie had bought a packet of incense sticks from the chemist in the village, and we had three of them stuck in half a potato in the middle of the floor. Deliberately, Sophie lit a match and set it to the end of each, until they were all alight. Then she dropped the match into one of the cans of water, waited a moment for the three small flames to settle, and then blew them out. We watched in silent fascination as three bright worms of light crept at almost imperceptible speed down the sticks, and a heady aromatic fragrance filled the hidden room. The smell was pervasive, powerful in the confined space. After a little while, a haze of smoke like a fog-bank began to form just below the ceiling.
Once the sticks had burnt out, Sophie dropped them into water as well. “Right. Let’s shut the door and leave it to stew overnight. It should be better, I hope.”
I sniffed. “Smells like cows with perfume,” I said, and Sophie laughed.
“Yeah, that’s about right. Come on. You bring that water tin, and go first. I’ll do the other one and the torch.”
At school, the lessons crawled by unmemorably. My science project on seeds won me a Mars bar and a Well done, this is very good, and the hybrid Spitfire edged with maddening slowness towards completion. The free activity period that our class had twice a week was spent in a crumbling annex to the Art room, amidst much secrecy. More time was spent repelling curious snoopers than actually constructing the plane. James had his plans for authentic camouflage mapped out on greaseproof paper, and had mixed a series of dirty browns and greens for the top of the body, and a pleasingly duck-egg blue for the bottom, from his older brother’s collection of paints. By taking a little from each of several tins, he had managed to mix up quite a quantity of paint without his older brother noticing. In the small annex, the smells of paint oil and the nail-polish tang of dope laced the air. We had divided our tasks evenly: James was Artistic Director, Jerry was Construction—which mostly meant gluing—Simon was Chief Planner (and drew the shapes on the sheets of balsa wood) while I was Chief Engineer, doing most of the cutting with an impressive craft knife. In addition to these main posts, we all doubled as Security, protecting our brainchild from any interference. In this respect, the craft knife doubled as our Nuclear Deterrent. Most of the official names for posts and jobs were worked out by Simon. We spent the time waiting for the glue or paint or dope to dry, talking.
“My brother’s got some porno magazines hidden under his mattress,” James was saying. “I found them last summer. My mum would flip if she knew.”
“What’re they like?”
“I only got a quick look. They were pretty good,” he added casually. Simon nodded, knowingly.
“I saw my cousin once,” Jerry said, and paused for effect. “Naked. She’s seventeen.”
“Bullshit.”
“I did! She was getting undressed.”
“I think Jerry’s talking bullshit,” Simon said. “Serious bullshit.”
“Not true. I saw her.”
There was a moment’s hushed silence. Then Simon whispered, in a ridiculously theatrical voice, “Naked.” James and I exploded with laughter, howling madly. There was a thump on the door.
“Keep the noise down in there!” shouted the Art master. We stifled our giggles with difficulty.
“Anyway,” Simon went on, more quietly, “how did you see her . . . naked?”
“Shut up,” Jerry said.
“Yeah, come on,” James said. “Did you really, then?”
“I told you, yeah. We were staying at my aunt’s house, and I got
up for a pee late at night. About eleven, I think. Maybe a bit later.”
“Get on with it,” Simon interrupted.
“Anyway, her door was a bit open, and I saw her. Then she put on a dressing gown.”
We stared at him quizzically. James said, “Is that—is that it?”
“Yeah. Why?”
“What was she like?”
Simon said, “She was . . . naked.” I hiccupped with laughter, and sat down on the edge of the table.
“Fuck off, Simon. You’re such a dick sometimes.”
“I think this is dry enough,” James said, tapping the wing section gently. “Have we got time to do any more?”
I looked at my watch. “Not today,” I said.
That weekend, the canvas bag was sodden with water, and there were wide, shallow puddles across the quarry floor. It had rained in the night, and the sky now was a dark and smoky grey. Sophie pulled out the biscuit tin and shook the beading of water from it.
“You could put your quarry books in the barn,” I said. “Then they wouldn’t get wet.”
“They don’t get wet now, though,” Sophie said, opening the tin. “See? That’s what the plastic bags are for.”
I rubbed my elbows and peered over her shoulder at the four or five exercise books, lying safe and dry in the tin. “I’m cold,” I said.
“You can go back to the house, if you like,” Sophie offered.
“No,” I said, and wandered across the quarry towards the far end, where the weeds that had shot up in summer were wispy and brown in the moist air. We hadn’t been to the quarry for weeks, and—strangely—I found that I was at a loss for something to do. The fossils in the rock weren’t as exciting as the balsa Spitfire, and I hadn’t thought to bring a book with me. Hugging my arms to myself, I considered—not for the first time—that Sophie was sometimes very strange. The quarry books I did not understand, although their constancy in my memory made them an accepted part of life. More and more, though, her trips to the quarry to scribble nonsense struck me as almost childish, an unnecessary fantasy. I swung my trainer-shod feet in narrow arcs, knocking over weed stems.
At the same time, looking back, the gap between Sophie and me might even have narrowed a little. At the age of nine, I was a stage more responsible, a stage less vulnerable, and Sophie did not have to devote as much time to looking after me. Often we might do different things for an evening, although we’d always end up meeting at bedtime. There was more space between us, and this brought us fractionally closer together.
He gets up, walks—a little unsteadily—across the room to the window. This time, however, he appears not to be looking out through the cracks in the boards, but studying his own reflection in the dark glass. A draught stirs his hair slightly. Without looking at me, he asks, “Did you feel that, too?”
“The drawing together?”
“Mm.” He rests his elbows on the windowsill. “I think I did, even then. I only put it into words later, of course; but then, that’s true of a lot of this. You don’t realize at the time how much you do understand. It’s all there, but you can’t express it. Well, I couldn’t, anyway. You were different.”
“Isn’t that true of everyone?”
“Yeah. Mostly. But you needed to express what you felt, to let it out somehow. And there was no one there to listen to you.”
“You were there,” I say, tentatively.
I can hear from his voice that he is smiling. “But you didn’t really tell me, did you? You knew I wouldn’t understand.”
“Do you now?”
“Yes.” He hesitates. “No. I’m not sure. I thought I understood everything, at one point. But—since then, well, things have changed. . . .”
He trails off, and I am left silently agreeing with him: things have changed. It crosses my mind to wonder when, exactly, it was that he thought he understood everything. There’s so much that he’s not telling me yet.
Eventually, he says, “Sometimes, it seems like I spent my childhood finding out about my childhood. If you see what I mean.”
“Yes,” I say. “I see exactly.”
Miss Finch was our form teacher and our History teacher, a steely haired lady with a sharp tongue and a keen sense of justice. Of all the teachers I knew, I liked Miss Finch best, if only because she was guaranteed to be fair in dealing with any problem, and also because she seemed to show a genuine interest in her pupils. We had been working through the basic curriculum requirements of our History course for the first part of the term, and, as half-term approached, Miss Finch called a halt to the mundane work and announced something different.
“It’s a week or so before half-term,” she said, addressing the whole class. “I know some of you will have work to take home, and I don’t want to give you too much to do. It’s good to have a break. But,” she went on, as one or two people exchanged hopeful grins, “I would like to give you a short project to do. It doesn’t have to be long; it’s more a mini-project, and you can do it fairly much as you like. If you worked hard, you could have it finished before half-term begins. Now, I’m going to call you up one by one and we’ll discuss what you might like to have a go at. The rest of the class can continue with what we started yesterday.”
I bent back over my work and looked at it carefully. Before long, my name was called, and I went up to Miss Finch’s desk.
“Hello, Matthew,” she said. She always used our full names—one thing about her that I didn’t like. “I was quite pleased by the story you did for homework.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“Now, what I think you should be doing with this project is finding out about something—or someone—new, try to tackle something you haven’t done before. How does that sound?”
“OK.”
“I heard in the staffroom that you’re building an aeroplane. Is that right?”
I blinked, surprised by the change of tack. “Yeah. Me and Simon are making it in our activities period.”
“Simon and I,” Miss Finch said, with a small smile. “It sounds like fun. So I thought perhaps you’d like to do a project on this man.” She slid a photocopy across to me. “Do you know who he is?”
“No,” I admitted.
“Well, he’s called Leonardo da Vinci. He spent a lot of time building things as well. Not aeroplanes, although he designed some interesting flying machines. He was born in 1452.”
“He did that painting,” I said. “The Mona Lisa.”
Miss Finch looked slightly surprised. “That’s right, he did. And as well as being an artist, he was a scientist and an engineer and a few other things as well. He’s probably one of the most interesting people in history. Now, I know there’s a lot to say about someone like this, but I thought you could concentrate on his flying machines. I had a look through this book earlier, and there’s a parachute, and a sort of helicopter, and several sketches of strap-on wings.”
She passed me a large book, illustrated in colour. “You can borrow that over half-term, but make sure it comes back in one piece. What do you think?”
“It sounds great,” I said, and I actually meant it. Miss Finch must have realized, because she smiled warmly.
“Good. It’s supposed to be a fun project, so concentrate on the things you really find interesting. You can take the book with you. Who’s next? Vivien Jenkins! Your turn.”
I went back to my desk with the book, and, once seated, leafed through it with interest. There were lots of photos and pictures, models of some of da Vinci’s inventions, diagrams of how others might have looked. There was a sort of tank, and a thing with flails attached to it.
I turned the page. There was a photograph of one of his original sketches, on browny-yellow paper, surrounded by dense writing. I squinted at the lines closely, but they didn’t seem to make sense. Puzzled, I stared harder. They were almost like something else.
The asthma attack took me completely by surprise. It was so sudden that it felt as though someone had stuffed cotton wool into m
y throat and chest. For a long moment I had no idea what to do, and then I remembered the inhaler in my desk. Pushing the lid up cascaded the book and the paper I had been working on onto the floor, and Miss Finch looked up sharply. I clutched the inhaler and slapped it to my mouth, triggering the release automatically. There was another long pause, and the sounds of the classroom seemed to have become much farther away. The desk in front of me, where my eyes had fixed, had started to tinge with red around the edges. I could see Miss Finch coming towards me across the classroom, but her movements were slowed and distorted. I triggered the inhaler a second time, but couldn’t even tell if I had managed to breathe in any of the spray.
Miss Finch was beside me, trying to help. I felt her push the nozzle of the inhaler more firmly into my mouth, and heard her shout something into my ear, her tone imperative. Obediently, I sucked as hard as I could, and finally the red haze cleared from my vision.
Gradually, I found that I was able to exhale properly again. For a long time I sat there, my chest heaving as I struggled to stop trembling. Tears had run inadvertently down my face, and the classroom was hushed. Gently, Miss Finch prised my hand away from my face and set the inhaler down on the desk.
“How do you feel?” she asked quietly.
“OK, I think,” I said. The words sounded harsh, as if something had been torn in my voice.
She nodded. “Do you want some water?”
“No thanks.”
“Well.” She straightened up just as the bell rang for the next lesson. “Charlotte? Can you tell your next teacher that Matthew Howard may be a little late? Thank you.” The classroom drained of children until we were left alone. There was the sound of feet and talking in the passage outside.
“Well,” said Miss Finch again. “What on earth brought that on? You were fine a minute ago.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “It sometimes happens like that.”