“What happened exactly? How did it feel?”
“Coming here? Well, I was hid under Scout’s bed, so it was dark anyway. I kept my eyes closed. She was just coming in the room, and I reached my hand out. She squealed and ran to get Jem. I thought she’d be along any time, but I closed my eyes again, and when I opened them, I was holding this key, just outside this schoolroom. I knew exactly what to do. But this ain’t part of the book, is it?”
“No. We should check the book, see whether it carries on as normal.”
“Ya think it won’t? Say, how’m I goin’ to get back?”
Joe paused. He wasn’t sure. It was all very well saying he could dream Dill back into the book, but Joe had now twigged that the consequences of his dreams could be a touch unpredictable. By this time, they had reached a bus shelter between the two schools. They both sat down on the bench and Joe dug in his book bag for the tattered copy of To Kill a Mockingbird he had inherited from Ben. He leafed to chapter fourteen and began scanning the text.
“Boy, you sure do read fast. What’s it say?”
“Nothing. Jem checks under the bed and there’s nothing there. There’s no mention of you at all.”
“Do I come back later?”
Joe continued scanning the book. He knew it reasonably well by now, for he had pinched it two years ago when Ben was studying it in class and had reread it this term. But now, there was no trace of Dill after chapter fourteen.
“I have to get you back into the book somehow. The thing is, I have to go to sleep. I just don’t think there’s time. I need somewhere to go to sleep as well.”
Dill didn’t seem to think this at all odd. Something else had struck him. “Say, there were blacks in your class. You have black people in your school?”
Joe nodded. “You’re in England. We don’t have segregation and stuff. And I don’t think it happens any more in the States either. Look, I’ll take you to my sister’s class. You stick with her. Everyone in her class is nine or ten. I hope that doesn’t worry you. But the thing is, you don’t look more than nine. You’ll find it easier in the primary school, and if you just keep your head down until school is over, I’ll come and get you. Then once we’re home, I can try to put you back in the book.” Joe tried to sound calm, since any anxiety might alarm Dill.
“Sure. What’s your sister like? Is she anything like Scout?” Dill hopped off the bench, totally sanguine about events and eager to get going.
Joe shook his head at the idea. “No. Unfortunately, she’s nothing like Scout. She isn’t a tomboy. In fact, she hates boys, and she’s a mouthy little cow.” He stood up and slung on his backpack, leading the way as Dill took two or three steps to keep pace with him.
“Scout can be one of them too—a mouthy little cow.” Dill enunciated the words, striving to imitate Joe’s diction. Joe grinned in response.
“Look, don’t let on I called her that. She’ll pay me back, and she’s mean.”
“Oh, I understand mean. Is she prissy?”
“Yup. She’s really prissy. She’s always neat and tidy and her hair never gets in a mess and she looks after all her stuff. She’s a girly girl. She’s into anything pink and fluffy. Have you met anyone like that?”
“Not that I remember. The only people I remember are the Finches and my mother and her new guy.”
“Don’t you go to school with girls like that?”
“I don’t know that I go to school. I’m always in Maycomb for the summer. I don’t exactly know what happens when I’m not there.”
Joe finally clicked on what he had to do. When a character wasn’t mentioned in the book, they existed in some sort of fictional waiting zone, a limbo. It wasn’t clear if Dill went to school, because no scenes showing Dill in school were in the book.
“I don’t know what you’ll make of school, but see if you can stick it out for the rest of the day. I’ll be along in three hours or so for you and Liesel. Just don’t talk too much. And don’t stick your hand up, even if you know the answers.”
From what Joe had gleaned of Dill’s personality, his last two requests were unlikely to be met. By this time, they had reached Liesel’s school. Joe recognized the lady at the desk, trying to talk on two phones at once, placating one anxious parent while giving a rocket to an intransigent one. When she saw Joe, she rolled her eyes. She clearly remembered this Knightley, even if it had been over three years since he’d last crossed the doorstep. The boys waited until she’d finished her conversations.
“What can I do for you?” Mrs. Cartwright did not sound as though she was inclined to do anything for Joe.
“I’m sorry to disturb you, Mrs. C, but Dill here is staying with us and he’s meant to be shadowing Liesel today. My mum asked me to bring him around to the school and check that everything was okay.”
“We’ve had no notice of it. She didn’t think to send us a note, I suppose. We’re not a babysitting service, you know.”
“She was really, really sorry, but she’s in a big rush, and Dill’s parents had an emergency with their documents.” Joe avoided Dill’s admiring glance as he spun his tale.
Mrs. Cartwright harrumphed like an agitated walrus and tapped at her computer.
“Liesel’s in art just now. You’ll have to check with Miss Donohoe. You remember her, I daresay. I’m sure she’ll remember you, Joe. You know where the classroom is, just where it’s always been.”
It was weird to be back in a place that had been his whole universe not so long ago. Except that three years seemed more distant than the Cretaceous period to Joe, and he kept noticing changes, like the carpet tiles that had been renewed and the walls that had been repainted primrose and were hung with different pictures from the ones Joe had known. He led Dill down the corridors and up a flight of stairs and toward a door that had not changed. It still said Year Four, Miss Donohoe, and still had a big rainbow sticker beneath the sign. Joe waited for a second or two, listening to see if Donny was having one of her rages or if all was calm. He heard her harsh voice through the wood, instructing year four to tidy up now. It was clean-up time, all brushes to the sink, and William Monks was going to wash the brushes, this time without getting any paint on the carpet. Shrill and aggravating as a corncrake, she rattled on and on, failing to hear Joe’s initial soft knocks. Dill took over, pounding the wood with his fist. The door suddenly opened, then Dill lost his balance.
“Who on earth is making that dreadful racket?” bellowed Miss Donohoe, gazing down at the crumpled boy at her feet. Dill hopped up and her eyes rose to take in Joe’s looming figure. He was taller than she was now but she managed to reduce him back to a quivering four-footer with her gimlet gaze.
“Joseph Knightley. Come back to visit us, have you?”
“No, Miss Donohoe. That is, I’ve been sent with Dill here.” Joe launched into his bizarre tale of lost passports and American houseguests with a degree less vigor than he had used with Mrs. Cartwright. He prayed that Liesel would back him up.
Miss Donohoe turned and summoned Liesel from a small table at the back of the classroom. Joe swiftly helped Dill out of the fleece.
“Liesel, come and sort out your houseguest. He’ll need some paper and a pencil. We’ve got some numeracy skills to work on. You are still collecting them both at the regular time, aren’t you, Joe? Tuesday is one of your days to collect Liesel, isn’t it?”
“Yes, Miss Donohoe.”
“Good. Then off you go.”
Joe turned and left, relieved that Liesel had been given no chance to wreck his shaky story. As he left Liesel’s school, he checked the time and began running. Unless he went full pelt, he’d never make it back for afternoon lessons. He’d just made it back to school by his deadline and sat panting and hungry through a psychology class, most of which passed entirely over his head, an occurrence that the teacher noticed.
“Feeling all right, Joe?”
Joe was about to say, “Fine, sir,” when it occurred to him that here was the perfect solution to hi
s problems. “No, sir. As a matter of fact, I think I’m going to be sick.”
The teacher gave Joe a second look. “You do look a bit peaky. Do you really think you’re going to throw up?”
Joe didn’t say anything, just cradled his stomach and put one hand to his mouth, nodding. The teacher began to look panicked and hastily filled in an excuse note.
Mrs. Naismith was suspicious when Joe turned up at her door, but he managed a convincing retch and she hurried him to her inner sanctum where she had a couch and a bucket for him, returning almost immediately to her paperwork.
Joe closed his eyes and recalled the events of chapter fourteen of To Kill a Mockingbird. He went over them again and again, determined that this dream would not run out of his control. But Joe could not summon sleep. Morpheus would not come. To Joe’s astonishment, his body took charge and he was sick, copiously and biliously into the bucket. When he was finally done with throwing up, Joe sat shakily and went over to the washbasin and rinsed out his mouth, shivering a little. He lurched back to the couch and lay there, and this time, he did fall asleep, curved toward the wall, away from the room and all the troubles that awaited him in the outside world.
This time, he was flying, flying high above a town. He could hear wind rushing in his ears. He was going fast, perhaps thirty or forty miles an hour, but he was not falling. He stretched out his arms and found that angling them slowed him down and allowed him to steer himself. He descended a little, looking at the woods around the town, trying to work out from the layout of the streets where he could be. It didn’t look like a British town. The gardens were big, the houses were made of clapboard and the streets were wide. There were scarcely any cars, and those that he could see were old-fashioned, cars from a black-and-white movie with long bonnets and huge sweeping wheel arches and running boards. There were a few imposing brick buildings in the center of the town, one with a cupola and a statue of a blindfolded woman bearing scales outside and an American flag on top—the Stars and Stripes.
Joe racked his brain. Thomas had made them work out the layout of Maycomb using directions and descriptions from the book as a guide. Then someone had found a map in a study guide and they had all cribbed it, except for Joe, who had wanted to see if he could get it right. And he had, drawing a fuller and more detailed map, marked with quotations to back up his decisions. He felt vindicated when he saw that his drawing was closer to the town than the study guide’s, until he remembered that this was his dream and consequently much more likely to correspond to his view.
There was a very fine garden and next door, a more functional yard, with a swing and an American football lying on the lawn. Joe circled what he believed to be the Finch property. He landed and walked up the steps onto the porch where there was a swinging wooden seat for two. He knocked at the door but no one came. There was a screen door and an inner door. He tried them both and they were open. In he walked. He called out a hello, but there was no response. He walked through the hall, past the doors opening onto a sitting room, a dining room and a study with a desk piled high with papers. He went in and looked at the walls lined with bookshelves. Behind the desk the wall was lined with law books. Joe left the study and just as he was about to go through to the kitchen, two children clattered down the stairs and raced past him through the swinging door to the back of the house. They had not seen him, though he stood right in front of them.
Once again, Joe was stymied. He couldn’t work out how he was to get Dill back here, not now that Dill was safely practicing multiplication in Miss Donohoe’s class, nor could he say anything to the Finch children. But then he turned, and there was Dill, right behind him, wearing a school smock and covered in yellow paint.
“How did you get so grubby? I thought you were doing maths?”
“I finished real quick. The sums were easy as pie, so Miss Donohoe said I should help that William kid clean up, but we just messed around, and he squelched yellow paint all over me. It was better than anything. We don’t have paint so good back home.”
“Quick, let’s go upstairs and wash all that stuff off. I’ll take the smock back.”
It did not occur to Joe that a 1930s bathroom in deepest Alabama might not be quite what he expected.
“There won’t be any water up there. The kitchen is the only place with a pump.”
“Then just give me the smock and go and hide under the bed. Quickly, before they all come back in.” Joe was convinced that a Finch of some sort would come in much too early and spoil the story once again.
“Okay. Say, that class was fun. I wouldn’t mind doing something like that again. If you ever remember me.” Dill’s gaze was wistful. Joe steeled himself.
“It’s been a pleasure to meet you, Dill, but I’m going to try not to do that again.”
“I figured.” Dill waved without looking back and ran up the stairs. Joe stood still, but was feeling dizzier and dizzier, everything around him shimmering. He reached out for a banister, but his hand passed through it then through the step behind it, and he was falling into darkness.
Mrs. Naismith was standing over him, tugging at his shoulders. “Wake up, Joe. Wake up. It’s time for you to go home now. The bell’s about to go.”
He sat up and the bile rose again, but he did not retch this time. He screwed up his eyes and rubbed his temples.
“Would you like me to call your mother to fetch you? I know you’ve got to go down to the junior school to get your sister, but if you’re not sure you can manage, I can always track down Ben.”
Joe stood up and waited for his mind to clear a little more.
“It’s all right. I can go. Thanks for looking after me, Mrs. Naismith.”
“Just doing my job, Joe. You look pretty ropey still. Are you sure you don’t want me to call Ben or your mum?”
“I’ll be fine.”
But of course, when he was back down at the gate of Liesel’s school, he was anything but fine. The kids were streaming out, and usually Liesel was with her mates, but this time, she was being frogmarched across the playground by Miss Donohoe.
“Joe Knightley, where’s that little boy you left me with this morning?”
Joe tried to buy time. “What do you mean, Miss Donohoe?”
“You lumber me with an extra child, then the minute I turn my back, he’s vanished into thin air. No record of any parents coming to collect him, or you, or your family. He’s just gone. Disappeared. Evaporated.”
Liesel was standing beside Miss Donohoe, looking as irritated and irritable as her teacher, her arms crossed, her nose in the air, her bunches swinging.
“Didn’t Liesel see him go?”
“No, I didn’t. We’ve searched the whole school and he’s just not there.”
“I’m sure he’s somewhere around here. Maybe he panicked and ran away. Let me just call Mum and see if she’s heard anything.”
“I’ve spoken to your mother already. She seemed to know nothing about your houseguests, Joe. Nothing at all.” Miss Donohoe gave a menacing grimace, like a chimpanzee about to eat its offspring. “So perhaps you could explain to me just where this boy came from and exactly where he has gone?”
“He came from America, just like I said, Miss Donohoe. And I think he’s gone back there. There was some problem with his papers, and we just had to take care of him temporarily.”
“He’s gone back to America. Between half past twelve and half past three, he’s returned to America. You are aware, I suppose, that the only means of reaching the US in three hours hasn’t flown for several years now, apart from the fact that a nine-year-old child is unlikely to have a ticket for Concorde stuffed up his jumper, not that young Mr. Harris appeared to have a jumper.”
“I can promise you, Miss Donohoe, Dill is safe and in good hands. Excellent hands. He is visiting the Finch family of Maycomb, Alabama.”
Miss Donohoe gave Joe a suspicious look and released Liesel into his care. “I’m still not sure I shouldn’t call the police and report this boy as
missing.”
“He’s not missing, Miss Donohoe. He’s exactly where he ought to be.” Or so Joe hoped. He hadn’t had time to check the book yet.
Liesel sighed and waved goodbye to her teacher, her face lapsing into a sulky pout with which Joe was too familiar.
“What was all that about? And why couldn’t you look after that boy all afternoon? He was closer to your age than mine.”
“Elphick thought he was junior school age. I couldn’t argue with her, Dill didn’t exactly have his birth certificate on him. Anyway, it didn’t matter to him. He’d never been to school before, so it was all new and hanging with your class was a lot more exciting than psychology. Does it matter?”
“Only that Donohoe made me go into every toilet in the whole school to look for him—boys as well as girls.”
Joe grinned. Liesel would have hated that. They stopped at the bus stop and waited there. Donohoe’s interrogation had made them miss their regular bus. Joe dug in his backpack and found his copy of Mockingbird, then flicked to chapter fourteen. He read as fast as he could, and heaved a sigh of relief as Scout spotted what she thought was a snake under her bed, fetched Jem and extracted Dill from his hiding place. There was no mention of yellow paint. Perhaps he had managed to get it off, or perhaps it was just a detail that the book skimmed over. The action seemed to unfold as before, as far as Joe could remember. He stuffed the book back in his bag and rummaged again. This time he pulled out his bus pass and the Lamborghini key. Liesel was deep in the latest Jacqueline Wilson book. He examined the key closely. He could hardly wait to get home.
It was strange not to be on the usual school bus with all the other kids. It was after the main rush and before the people who had detentions could escape. The bus was quiet and there was a gentle murmur of pensioners muttering about the price of gammon and comparing blood pressure medication. Liesel kept reading while Joe clutched his key and watched the world out of the window. They were passing through an estate of ugly houses. They looked mean and poky, their windows too small, their brick drab, and even if they were well-maintained, they had no character, just box after brick box, each with the same little patch of lawn outside. Then the character of the streets changed, the houses got larger, the cars a little newer and finally they were at their stop.
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