Heidi looked at the cluttered table and counters. It could take her a week to find anything. She went upstairs and invaded the lamp-light room. It was no warmer than the hall, but felt cosier. Old Wreck was hiding in the depths of it perched behind an old desk, her knees up to her ears like a monkey. Books, books and books surrounded her: stuffed on shelves, falling out of stacks; layered on the floor with their pages open. The old woman scowled horribly as she watched Heidi approach.
‘Go away. You’re not to come in here. Never come in here. Dinner at seven, breakfast at eight, lunch at one, and stay out of my sight.’ She scratched her crotch as she glared, as if Heidi the slave was hardly a person, so it didn’t matter what she saw.
‘I need to go for a run to charge my phone,’ said Heidi. ‘I’m sorry to disturb you, but I can’t find the key to the back door.’
Old Wreck’s scowl slowly morphed into a leer of triumphant cunning —as if Heidi had been planning for weeks to confound her with this puzzle, but Old Wreck had been wise to her game, and had secretly plotted so she could relish the moment of Heidi’s defeat. She held up a ring with one big old monster key on it, and one ordinary latch key.
‘These are your keys. Don’t lose them. They will not be replaced.’
‘Thank you. I won’t.’
‘There’s a bicycle for errands. You will find it in the yard. You must never use the front entrance. You must always use the kitchen door, and you must always keep it locked.’
If I always keep it locked, how do I get out, thought Heidi.
‘Okay.’
2: The Gardens
The concrete yard was walled. It had a solid wooden back gate, which was locked, but the latch key opened it. A track led downhill, into the unknown. Heidi decided to leave that for another time. Instead she found her way to the front of the house, to the stranded stone archway and the National Trust Gardens. The rain had stopped. She jogged the paths she’d plodded, with a strange sense of freedom. It was easy to retrace her steps back to the car park: Verruca’s tag-stabs had fixed the turns in her mind.
Her phone was charged by the time she got there. She still had no signal, but that didn’t matter. There was nobody she wanted to call, not even Immy. No message she wanted to send, no music she wanted to listen to, no game she wanted to play. The main reason why she needed the phone charged was so she could tell the time. And have a torch. She sat on a stone kerb, looking at the National Trust admission prices board.
Mehilhoc Gardens.
Me-hil-hoc, how were you supposed to pronounce a word like that?
The grey stillness all around, the bare trees glistening with damp, made her feel as if there was nothing else left. As if the world where Dad was dead, and Mum was under guard in hospital, had ceased to exist. She felt like holding her breath forever, so she could stay in this lost dimension, and the terrible thing she’d done could never come back.
She set off jogging again, faster this time because it was really cold. She’d decided she would head for the tall evergreen, and find her way back to the yellow house from there. Dirt-encrusted National Trust signs beckoned as she sped along: promising a Himalayan Valley, a Tea Room, an Azalea Slope, a Rose Arbour; but she didn’t stop until she reached Swan Lake by accident. No ballerinas, just dark water scribbled over with strokes of light, like trembling silver fishes. No swans, no ducks. They’d probably been eaten. A small white building with a domed roof stood on a little island, joined to the shore by a brick causeway.
Holding a stitch in her side (she wasn’t used to running) Heidi walked out and read the sign.
The Mysterious Grecian Temple Restored by the National Trust 1997.
She stepped inside. The dome had an eye of thick glass in its centre that peered down, making a larger, dimmer eye of light in the middle of the floor. All around it in the darkness more eyes glittered, in tiny pairs: animal eyes that seemed to move. Her heart jolted. She thought of rats, a horde of rats, about to jump on her. She grabbed her phone and switched on the torch. The animals were harmless. They were cats.
And they weren’t alive, they were stuffed.
Her eyes had quickly adjusted to the gloom. She switched off the torch to save charge and walked around peering at the collection: a ginger cat, a black cat, a black and white cat; a Siamese, a white one with ginger patches, and a big, fat, fluffy tabby cat. Six stuffed cats on pedestals, posed on moth-eaten cushions. The Siamese look older than the rest. It was threadbare, like a much loved teddy, and one of its blue glass eyes dangled loose.
Weird.
She returned to the shore and headed uphill with the silver-scribbled lake behind her. Near the top of the rise another sign invited her to The Unmissable Blue Walk. She had a stitch again so she walked for a bit, following the pointer to a flat shelf cut into the hill. Once there’d been a turf path, winding between sinuous flowerbeds. Blue must mean bluebells. She kicked, gently, at layers of sodden leaf-litter, hoping to find green shoots: but there was only a kind of matted, brown, tangly moss. The bluebell bulbs must have died of neglect.
The tall evergreen had vanished so she headed for the big greenhouses; that she also remembered seeing through the churchy windows on the Old Wreck’s stairs. They were huge: brick-framed hangars that you could have kept trees inside. They must have been heated once, she saw hot water pipes, and cables for electricity, but now it was colder inside than out. Doors sagged on rusted hinges. Green slime groped over glass, dead creepers sprawled through broken panes. Even the weeds that had sprung up had died.
In the smallest house she found a collection of display boards, huddled together in a sad, long-legged herd. They featured old photos, colour and black and white, of Mehilhoc Gardens; some of them very old. The Gardens with horses and carriages; Victorian ladies in massive skirts and tiny hats, beside Swan Lake. The Famous Baroque Fountains, sparkling like crystal fireworks. The tall evergreen; which was a Sequoia Sempervirens. There was a colour photo, quite modern, of The Unmissable Blue Walk in flower. It had been taken in Autumn, not Spring. Two brilliant streams of blue flowed under glowing autumn leaves; as if the bright, deep blue of the October sky had poured down onto the green turf.
‘Autumn Gentians,’ Heidi read aloud. ‘Sino Ornata.’
Sino means Chinese, she thought. She’d never seen a gentian, except in a picture. She thought of Switzerland, scattered jewels in fields of snow, and imagined a dragon’s sapphire treasure of pure, concentrated beautifulness—
An idea coiled into her mind: a faint wishful thought.
But she could see her breath, and it was getting dark.
She made a lentil and vegetable soup, using red lentils from one of the cupboards, masur dahl that needed no soaking; an onion and a few carrots, salvaged from the silt in the vegetable rack. She served it with the end of a loaf that she’d found in a crock, sliced and toasted, rubbed with oil and a little garlic. For dessert there would be preserved apples from a jar, heated up and served with Condensed Milk.
The cold kitchen was very quiet.
While the soup bubbled she set the table in the breakfast room, cleaned a big bowl to serve it from, found a tray, and made a start on sorting out the table. It was lucky she’d charged her phone. The kitchen clock wasn’t working, but when she walked into the ‘breakfast room’ with her tray, on the dot of seven, Old Wreck was sitting there waiting, still in her dressing gown, at one end of the table. At the other end sat another Wreck, a scrawny old guy with mad straggly hair, a bristled chin and missing teeth. Neither of them said a word, to each other or to Heidi, until she brought in the apples, with the Condensed Milk in a little jug.
Old Wreck Tallis picked up the jug and sniffed at it. ‘Cold; and tinned. Can’t you make custard? Proper custard. I won’t tolerate powder.’
‘I didn’t want to finish the milk. And there are no eggs.’
‘No eggs? Nonsense! Why else do we keep hens?’
‘Okay. I’ll make custard next time.’
After she’d cle
ared out, and done the washing up, she carried on sorting rubbish into the kitchen recycle bins.
Old Wreck Tallis came in, and looked at her.
‘Working away. You’re like a little machine, aren’t you.’
What else am I supposed to do? thought Heidi. Watch telly with you and your brother? I don’t think so. I bet you don’t even have a telly. She bit her tongue, and just nodded.
‘The Studio Floor is kept locked. The Bedroom Floor is private. Here are your matches, and candles. Don’t ask me for more of either until the end of the month.’
At 9pm all the lights went out, suddenly and silently.
Heidi climbed the endless stairs by candlelight: unpacked her rucksack at last, and set the broken chair by her bed so she could put Rock Mouse on it, to have him by her. The Rock Mouse hadn’t looked like a mouse for years. He’d lost his plastic eyes and felt ears, and even his tail, long ago. But at least she wouldn’t be totally alone.
A feeling of lonely adventure had been holding her up like water-wings, since Verruca disappeared. It held her until she’d brushed her teeth and had a cold wash in the Baba-Yaga bathroom. As soon as she got under the covers, and blew out her candle, the terrible scene in Mum and Dad’s bedroom got its claws in her again. If I hadn’t called the police. If I’d managed to get hold of Immy, if the ambulance had come sooner —
She saw herself and Immy sitting in A&E, like often before. Each of them holding tight to one of Mum’s hands. The doctors found the pulse that Heidi was sure she had felt, flickering in Dad’s throat. He was very badly hurt, but not dead. Mum would have to go to hospital for months, and Dad was badly hurt. But it was okay.
If only if only—
The rusty curtains didn’t meet. A fang of moonlight clawed Heidi in the face. She couldn’t turn away, or she’d lose the sliver of body-warmth she’d created in the cold sheets. She just lay there getting clawed, and drifting off into a half-dream, in which Dad was behind that Steel Door in the basement, covered in blood; until she heard footsteps, padding up the attic stairs. Bare feet, but she didn’t think it was Tallis. She’d spotted Stubbly Chin’s potential for trouble the moment she laid eyes on him. Or the moment she’d felt his creepy eyes on her—
Dazed with weary misery, she didn’t feel at all scared: just disgusted.
The footsteps padded to her door, and padded down again. They faded into silence. And Dad was bleeding behind the steel slab. She couldn’t go to help him, because Mum was cuddled up beside her. Heidi’s Mum had bad nights. Dad wasn’t always sympathetic, so Mum would come to Heidi’s room. Mum was asleep, so Heidi had to keep still or the warm, peaceful body next to her would wake up, panicking and crying—
Heidi jerked awake, falling out of her narrow groove of warmth into vicious cold. She couldn’t have been asleep long. The moon hadn’t moved an inch, it was still staring at her. She forced herself out of bed, across the frozen floor, and tried again to close the curtains. Hopeless, it was like pulling on cobwebs. At least she found out why the room was so incredibly cold. Two leaded panes, in the side of the window that didn’t open, were missing. Icy air was streaming in.
‘Great,’ muttered Heidi. ‘Absolutely great.’
Too exhausted to think about covering the hole she stumbled back to bed, groped for the duvet: and something that stank of rotten meat moved under her hand. A blurred shadow was there, and then it wasn’t. Imagining things, she told herself, as she pulled on her only jumper. Then she saw the hollow, where her pathetic duvet lay dented, as if someone had just been lying there. She felt it, and it was warm.
‘NO,’ said Heidi loudly. ‘It wasn’t Mum. I was dreaming.’
She grabbed the Rock Mouse, and pulled the sad limp duvet over her head. Soon her mother, or whatever it was, came back. Heidi lay clutching Rock Mouse, not daring to stir: not even daring to open her eyes, until the dawn. At least the footsteps didn’t return.
Keep Your Mouth Shut And Your Head Down
My tongue
Lives in a red room
Behind the teeth,
Behind the teeth,
It watches the world
Through ivory slabs
That are almost walls
Behind the teeth,
Behind the teeth,
Sometimes it frets and paces,
In its red cave
Sometimes it fiercely prances.
Sometimes it escapes, but
It soon comes running home
It knows where it’s safe.
Behind the teeth,
Behind the teeth.
3: The Door in the Wall
In the morning there were four glass bottles of green-top semi-skimmed on the kitchen doorstep, plus a pot of cream with a waxed paper cover; and a vegetable box. Heidi was grateful, but she noted that somebody besides herself had a key to the yard door, and she didn’t like that.
She soon found the hens, clucking and fussing in a tarpaulin-roofed shed. There was also a wood stack, and a disused garage that held a disaster of an old bike, sacks of biomass briquettes, a bin of poultry food, and a lot of empty hooch bottles: country vodka. She let the hens out into their run, and collected fourteen eggs from the nesting straw. It was like some insulting, stupid Country-Living quiz. Why do we keep hens, slave? Do you even know? Yes ma’am, Old Wreck. I do. We have hens in town, thanks. She hadn’t been able to keep hens at home. Their garden was too small, and Mum was scared of furry and feathered things. But she’d liked looking after the poultry at her Learning Centre’s Food Farm. The ducks were more fun, but the chickens were okay.
The hen house hadn’t been cleaned recently. She mentally added that chore to her list, and wondered about fires. On the whole, and since her own bedroom wouldn’t get any warmer, she was fine with the stingy radiators. She decided to wait until she was asked. Or ordered. Six of the eggs were warm, the rest were stone cold. She broke the cold ones one by one: in the yard, to avoid stinking the kitchen out. They were all bad. She chucked the mess into a bin marked DIRTY ORGANICS. The other bin was marked NON-RECYCLABLE WASTE.
Which solved another of her puzzles. All she had to do now was find the oven. The vegetable box wasn’t great, which surprised her. And there was a pat of butter, but no meat at all. In town, everyone was convinced people in the country ate incredibly well. Maybe the Old Wrecks were vegetarians. She found a torn note in the bottom of the box.
Hello Heidi, I’m sorry I couldn’t be around to welcome you. I hope you’re settling in all right. I’ll knock when I deliver again, next week. I’m SO sorry for what’s happened. Call me, any time, day or night, if you’re worried, or if there’s anything you need to know! Love Rose.
How am I supposed to call her, thought Heidi. I don’t know her number. And how does she know she loves me?
Old Wreck wasn’t so bad. Heidi had no desire to meet some do-good stranger who would pity her, and ask a lot of questions. She needed to be left alone, so she could lick her wounds and think. The note was like a stab from Virtual Verruca’s pointing finger.
She screwed it up and chucked it in the paper recycling.
The kitchen wasn’t too bad when she got down to it, after serving and clearing breakfast, and doing the washing up. The mess was mostly on the surface. Maybe there’d been another slave, who’d been fired for some reason. The worst thing, aside from the prehistoric cat poo under the sink, was slug tracks on the rugs. Heidi hated slugs. Slugs indoors were the filthiest, most disgusting thing imaginable. She searched for Slug Bait but found none.
Old Wreck Tallis and her nameless brother, Old Wreck Stubble Chin, didn’t say a word at breakfast, or at lunch: which suited Heidi just fine. When she’d done the lunch washing up and planned their dinner, she decided it would be okay to go for another run.
The greenhouses beckoned, with their faint promise: except she wasn’t in the mood for wishful thinking. All she wanted was exercise. She headed for the evergreen, but she took her eyes off it once, and it vanished again.
&
nbsp; Tricky thing! Heidi ran on, confident now that she would not get lost.
Trees had fallen in the Himalayan Valley, crashing into the ferny gorge; ripping out huge ragged pads of earth and rock with their splayed feet. One of the Famous Baroque Fountains was a disaster area, the crystal firework show lost to a black-water swamp, where water lilies struggled like dying octopuses and a sullen geyser bubbled in the middle. Heidi picked her way around the mess, holding a stitch and wondering what Baroque was supposed to mean. Horses that were half-way mermaids; going by the fallen chunks of statue. And a naked merman with big sprawling hair; and broken giant seashells.
The Azalea Slope was a straggly jungle. The ruins of the Big House were scattered over a big flat grassy space, the other side of Swan Lake from the Grecian Temple. They creeped her out. The blackened stumps of walls weren’t old enough to be romantic. They smelled of wet ashes. She ran on, glimpsing shapes of greeny bronze and greyish marble in the overgrown bushes: hidden attractions that had lost their signs. Once she thought she saw a dragon, but maybe it was only a weird shaped tree, and finally, she hit a wall.
It was about time to turn back, but she needed to walk off another stitch and there was a narrow path beside the wall. She walked along it, ducking branches that dripped cold water onto her neck, until she reached a door. It was banded in studded iron, and set in an arched recess. She tried the iron ring of the latch, just out of curiosity. The latch lifted, the door shifted. Heidi gave it a shove, tearing at ivy shoots, and squeezed through the gap.
Trees pressed close on the other side, spiky holly and bare young oaks. She waited to see if her tag would stab her for leaving the Gardens, but nothing happened. Maybe she was still in the Gardens and this was another attraction, The Spooky Wood. The path went on, so Heidi went on too, picking up speed as it headed steeply downhill; until she came tumbling out onto level ground beside a grey-paved country lane.
The Grasshopper's Child Page 2