by Ruth Thomas
Mrs Henrey did not like Julia. She was clumsy and she was sneaky and Mrs Henrey usually discouraged her. But today she was grateful to have as much as one child, even Julia, to help put up the extra chairs and pick pieces of paper off the floor after everyone else had gone.
‘Can I do anything else for you, Mrs Henrey?’ Julia enquired anxiously, her eyes begging. ‘Can I clean the board? Please let me clean the board.’ She was enormously pleased that the day had ended so well. Mrs Henrey had actually let her help!
‘Thank you, Julia. Yes, you can clean the board if you will.’
She has got a nice side, I suppose, Mrs Henrey thought. I really must try to be nicer to her. She hasn’t got much going for her, poor soul. Mrs Henrey had long ago despaired of ever actually teaching Julia anything.
‘Can I do your desk, Mrs Henrey? Can I tidy your desk for you?’
Mrs Henrey thought it might be less than wise to let Julia touch the papers on her desk. Julia was notoriously clumsy and accident-prone. ‘That’s all right, Julia,’ she said. ‘I can manage now, you go home. Thank you for your help.’
Mrs Henrey left the room, carrying a pile of reference books. Julia supposed she was returning them to the library, at the other end of the corridor. She looked again at Mrs Henrey’s desk. It was in a terrible mess. There were papers everywhere, and someone had even left a jar of red paint with two brushes in it, right in the middle of the papers. Julia thought she could at least remove the red paint and carry it to the paint tray beside the sink, where it was supposed to be. She reached across the table from the front, and picked up the jar of paint. As she did so she noticed another mucky pot, this time with blue paint in it, standing on a ledge just behind Mrs Henrey’s desk. She might as well take the two pots together, Julia thought.
In her eagerness, Julia did not notice the leg of Mrs Henrey’s chair, cunningly protruding from behind the large desk. The red paint in one hand, she lunged forward to pick up the blue. She stumbled against the chair leg and tripped, bruising her arm painfully against the ledge, and her chest against the back of Mrs Henrey’s chair.
The red paint leapt in a stream from Julia’s extended hand.
The paint poured over the papers on the desk. It poured over Mrs Henrey’s beautiful white cardigan, draped over the chair. It splashed over Julia’s dress and spattered her face and her hair. It dripped on the floor, it was everywhere.
Horrified, too stunned to cry, Julia regarded the disaster for a moment, then ran from the classroom. She clattered on ungainly feet down the stone staircase, through the vestibule and the open school door into the playground. Shoulders hunched forward, she began to run heavily, up the road towards her home.
The tears broke as she turned the corner into her own street. They coursed down her long pale cheeks; she was racked by great ugly sobs. By the time Julia turned into the hallway of the house where she lived, she was bawling loudly.
Julia lived on the upper floor of a converted terrace house. As she lamented her way up the stairs, her mother came on to the landing, to see what the commotion was all about.
‘Gawd, whatever’s the matter with you?’ said Julia’s mother, surveying her unattractive daughter with some distaste.
Mrs Winter was very smart. Her dyed blonde hair was beautifully arranged, her well-proportioned figure immaculately clothed, and her face, pretty in a hard sort of way, carefully made up. Julia, plain and unprepossessing, had turned out a great disappointment to her.
‘For gawd’s sake stop that noise,’ said Mrs Winter unsympathetically. ‘Nobody’s dead, are they? What’s up then?’ She did not wait for a reply because she had just noticed the red paint on Julia’s dress. Her voice rose to a screech. ‘Look at your clothes, you great nuisance! What have you been doing to get in that mess?’
‘It was an accident,’ wailed Julia.
The blotchy tear-stained face, mouth open and downturned in misery, did nothing to soften her mother’s anger.
‘Accident! You’re always having accidents. Do you think I’ve got nothing better to do than clear up after you all the time? I’ve got to work, you know. This is supposed to be my day off. Oh, get in that bathroom and wash yourself. And put that dress to soak. More ironing for me again, I suppose. You’ll wear me out, Julia, and that’s the truth.’
‘You don’t care about me. You don’t care nothing about me. You’ve never cared about me,’ Julia screamed at her mother.
She banged the bathroom door behind her. She had stopped crying now, and in her heart was something very like despair. Loneliness she was used to, but never before today had she felt more bitterly the need for someone to confide her troubles to. If only she had a sister. Or a grandma. Or a kind dad at home like other people. But Julia’s gran had died years ago, and her dad had left home when she was a baby, so she didn’t even remember him. Now there was only Julia and her mother, together in a small converted flat, getting on each other’s nerves.
Julia dropped the stained dress on the bathroom floor, deliberately not putting it to soak as she had been asked. She’s so horrible to me she can do it, Julia thought viciously.
If Julia was wretched at having no sisters, Nathan’s problem was exactly the opposite. He had, in his opinion, far too many. There were four of them, all older than he was, and they filled the house with their clothes and their loud voices and even louder music. There was an older brother who didn’t live at home, and when he came to visit things were worse, because the older brother quarrelled with the sisters and with his mother and father, and there was a lot of shouting and angry scenes. Sometimes the sisters quarrelled with each other as well. And as though all that were not enough, there were two younger brothers who took up space in the bedroom, and disturbed Nathan’s peace. Nathan valued peace, when he could get it, almost more than anything.
On this day, after he had run away from the class, Nathan had not gone home; he had gone to his secret place. No one knew where Nathan’s secret place was, but he had been going there regularly for some weeks now.
So Nathan came home late, and no one asked him where he had been, because there were always so many people coming and going in his house it was easy not to notice if one person was missing. Nathan pushed his way through the crowd of sisters, and sisters’ friends, and his own little brothers. His mother was in the kitchen, he supposed, cooking something for the evening meal, which they would have when his dad got in from wherever he spent his unemployed days. Nathan went into his bedroom and found it blessedly empty. He looked for his library book, and curled up on his side of the bed for a quiet read. Good job his glasses hadn’t got broken when Wayne knocked them off. He couldn’t see very well to read without them and reading was his joy – what he liked doing best in the whole world.
The book Nathan was reading was Treasure Island. He didn’t understand it all, and some of the words were too hard for him. But he could lose himself in the magic of the story – he could be there, on the ship, sharing all the adventures of Jim Hawkins, the fear and excitement that Jim felt.
Nathan was happy.
Later, in the night, the weather broke. The glaring hot day had given way to a leaden, sultry evening. The first rumblings of thunder could be heard at about midnight, and an hour later the storm was overhead, crashing through the room where Nathan lay in bed with his brother Gary. The air around the boys shattered itself and splintered into great terrifying cracks. Gary woke, sobbing with fright, and clutched at Nathan for comfort. Nathan pushed him away. ‘Shut up,’ he said roughly. ‘The thunder ain’t going to hurt you. Go back to sleep.’
‘I’m scared, I’m scared,’ Gary whimpered.
Nathan kicked him for being scared. He thought, with an almost unbearable longing, of the time that would surely come one day, when he would have a bed all to himself. A room all to himself.
The storm passed over. The street slept.
2
The day of the money
Morning came, cool and drizzly. Julia, who had s
lept badly, got dressed as slowly as possible, wondering what excuse she could make for not going to school.
‘Hurry up, lazy,’ her mother called. ‘You’re going to be late!’
Julia came slowly into the kitchen. Her mother was still in her dressing gown, her hair uncombed. Julia’s mother looked quite different without her make-up.
‘I got a headache,’ Julia whimpered. Actually, she didn’t look very well.
‘Hard luck,’ said her mother. ‘Get on with your breakfast anyway, and get to school. I’m not having you mooching about the house all day, making extra work for me.’
‘I’ll do the washing up,’ Julia offered. There was a fair accumulation of it waiting to be done.
‘Ha-ha! I’ve heard that one before. No, my lady, you’ll go to school,’ said her mother. ‘Oh come on, cheer up. Eat some breakfast and you’ll feel better.’
Julia ate her cereal, found her plastic mac, and began to walk down the road, her steps dragging. She had no idea where she was going, but one thing was quite certain – she was not going to school. Mrs Henrey’s displeasure over the spilled paint was a prospect too terrible to contemplate. She would probably never go back to school again, Julia thought.
She was cold, and her hair was getting wet. The plastic mac had no hood, and Julia had forgotten to put a cardigan on over her thin summer dress. She turned into another road, so that her mother on her way to work wouldn’t catch her not going to school. She stood under a tree for shelter, and wondered what to do next.
Since it was already late, there were not many children about, and those that were scurrying urgently to get to their classes before the register took no notice of Julia. Miserable and helpless, Julia leaned against her tree, fighting back the tears. She had never played truant before. Suddenly she noticed a small figure coming down the road. Another child, but not hurrying this time. Coming slowly, feet scuffling, spinning out the time. Julia recognized Nathan long before he recognized her, and she went round the other side of the tree, turning her back, hoping he wouldn’t see her at all.
It was actually the fact that she was hiding that drew Nathan’s attention. Nathan had no interest in Julia as a person, but this was odd behaviour, and he was mildly curious. He stopped. It was hard to see, because the rain on his glasses distorted everything. There was no doubt who it was though, lurking behind the tree. Stupid Julia Winter. Nathan stepped silently up behind her, and shouted in her ear. ‘BOO!’
Her nerves already tense, Julia yelped with fright, and turned on Nathan angrily.
‘What you do that for?’
Nathan grinned. I made her jump all right, he thought with satisfaction. ‘Just wanted to. You bunking off then?’
‘No.’ Julia tossed her head and pouted her lips. Then, ‘Yeah,’ she admitted, miserably.
‘I am too,’ said Nathan – and regretted it immediately. He must be mad, confiding in this stupid girl, the dunce of Class 8. Then he decided to make the best of a bad job. There might be amusement in it, something to make the long day go quicker. The long day without a book, without anything to read. He had forgotten to bring Treasure Island, and he couldn’t go back for it now.
‘What you doing here then?’ he asked Julia.
‘Hiding, of course, what’s it look like?’
‘Well you can’t stay in the street.’
‘Why not?’
‘Don’t you know nothing?’ said Nathan, contemptuously. ‘They come out looking for you after Assembly. Mrs Peters – the Welfare Assistant – ‘comes out in her car, and she goes all round the streets looking. We got to hide properly.’
‘Where?’
‘I know a place.’ Again, Nathan half regretted what he had said. ‘You got to promise not to tell, though.’
‘A secret?’
‘Yeah – it’s a secret place. You got to promise not to tell.’
Julia gaped at him. She had never been asked to share a secret before, and she was enormously flattered that someone was asking her now – even if it was only horrible Nathan Browne, whom nobody liked either.
‘I promise,’ she said, trying to sound casual.
‘Come on then, Rat-bag.’
Dumbly, Julia followed; round the corner, and into the next street. A derelict house, the garden full of weeds, and the windows long since smashed and splintered, defaced the otherwise neatly kept terrace. A train rumbled past, somewhere behind the row of houses. ‘It’s here,’ said Nathan. ‘In here.’
Julia was disappointed. ‘That’s not a secret place,’ she objected. ‘Everyone knows that house is empty.’
‘Nobody knows I go there though,’ said Nathan. ‘It’s my secret den. Wait a minute, what you doing?’ Julia had made to take a step through the weeds, but Nathan stopped her. ‘We got to make sure nobody sees us going in.’
He made a great performance of making sure. First, he paraded nonchalantly backwards and forwards, looking everywhere but at the house. There was a woman with a shopping basket at the end of the road, but too far away to count. Then the windows of the nearby houses had to be studied. ‘See if anybody’s looking out,’ Nathan instructed Julia. He spoke in a conspiratorial whisper, and Julia began to enjoy herself very much. ‘Nobody’s looking,’ she assured him, entering into the spirit of it.
‘Right – now!’ Nathan hissed, making a dive for the half-open door of the empty house. Julia followed. The two children stood together in the fusty passage way, smelling of damp and rotting wood. The small black boy with the glowering face and the poor eyesight, and the gawky white girl with a stoop. They looked at one another warily, mistrustfully. Then without a word, Nathan plunged deeper into the recesses of his secret den, Julia creeping at his heels.
They sat on bare boards, hardly warmer than outside, but dry at least. Another train went past, louder now, shaking the building with vibrations.
‘If you really want to know,’ said Nathan, ‘it probably isn’t just my den. It’s probably a pirate’s den as well.’ His head was so full of Treasure Island just at the moment that he dreamed of pirates all the time.
‘Don’t be silly,’ said Julia. ‘Pirates are by the sea. There ain’t no seaside here.’
‘There’s the river,’ said Nathan, unwilling to relinquish his dream.
‘What river?’
‘You know, where the Houses of Parliament is.’
‘Oh, that river.’
Julia had been to Westminster Pier once, last summer or perhaps the summer before. But it had taken so long to get there by public transport that she hardly connected the River Thames with her own home area. It was actually about four miles away.
‘Come on, come on, come on,’ said Nathan suddenly, in a different voice. For a moment, Julia thought he was talking to her. He had gone mad, perhaps. Then she saw the round eyes, gleaming in the dim light, as a shaggy black cat crept out of the shadows and into the children’s view.
‘Come on, come on, come on, I got something for you.’ Out of his pocket, Nathan produced a torn plastic bag, and out of the bag some scraps of food – a piece of bacon, some cheese, a lump of gristly meat saved from last night’s supper. He held out the bacon, and the cat stepped warily forward, but would not take the food from his hand. It stood two paces away, its gaze intent, quivering with longing. Half one ear was missing, and the nearest eye totally closed.
‘He’s really wild, this one,’ Nathan explained. ‘He don’t trust no one.’
He placed the bacon on the floorboards and shuffled back a few feet. The cat sprang to the food as if it had not had a square meal for months, as indeed it probably had not.
‘I call this one Sooty,’ said Nathan. ‘There’s another one somewhere. Tiger, Tiger, come on Tiger!’
A second cat appeared, in no better condition than the first, but not nearly so scared. This one came right up to Nathan, mewed a greeting and took the lump of meat from his hand. Nathan divided the cheese between the two cats and, fed, the one with the ginger stripes allowed him to stroke
its head. Its purrs echoed through the empty room.
‘Took me weeks to tame him, but I eventually done it,’ said Nathan proudly.
‘Wish I had a cat,’ said Julia. ‘Would he let me touch him?’
‘Shouldn’t think so,’ said Nathan. ‘You could try. Mind he don’t scratch!’
Julia stretched her hand out hesitantly. The cat eyed her with suspicion, but submitted to her caress. Nathan regarded her with the faint beginnings of respect, but he was none too pleased. ‘Definitely peculiar,’ he muttered. ‘He’s only supposed to like me.’
The children lapsed into silence for a while.
‘Why you bunking off then?’ said Nathan, suddenly.
‘None of your business,’ said Julia. ‘Anyway, Nathan, you’re in trouble. You got to go to Mr Barlowe, Mrs Henrey said.’
‘She’ll forget,’ said Nathan, not worried.
Another long pause.
‘What’s this place got to do with pirates?’ asked Julia, who had been thinking about it. ‘Why d’you think pirates come here?’
He didn’t really think they did. He just thought it would be nice if they did. It was an exciting idea that he could pretend to believe in when he was alone.
‘I find things,’ he said mysteriously. ‘I found a pipe one time, and a old shoe.’ Indeed, piles of similar rubbish were littered all over the room, in between the cobwebs.
‘Probably a tramp,’ said Julia.
Probably she was right, but much more interesting to think it was pirates. ‘I found a paper once with some funny marks on it. Most likely a message in code.’