by Ross Welford
Pizza is all right. I do not mind pizza.
I had been in Earl Grey House for a week and everybody from Sangeeta, whom I saw daily, to the children’s-home staff (led by a slightly scary lady who was introduced to me as Aunty Reet) was being very gentle and sweet. There were eight other children there of assorted ages. Two of the girls smiled at me, but I did not feel much like speaking. The last person I had spoken the truth to betrayed me to the police. Now I had to learn to live in my life of lies.
I do not suppose that the man with the Neverdead scars knows where I am now, and besides I tell myself that I was probably imagining it all, anyway.
It is easier that way. For the time being, anyhow.
Then the subject of Mam’s funeral came up. I knew it would, of course. Sangeeta asked me if I wanted to go. I said yes. I have been to more funerals than almost anyone I have ever met, including old people.
I had seen a headline in the local newspaper two days earlier:
Woods fire victim: ‘simple’ funeral for tragic mum
Sangeeta also asked me if I wanted to help organise it, but I said no.
So there we were, me and Aunty Reet, on a Saturday morning outside Earl Grey House, waiting for Sangeeta to take us to Whitley Crematorium, where dead people are burnt instead of putting them in a grave.
I think Mam would have approved. We once saw a funeral for a Viking thane, or lord. I say Viking: he was Danish, at least, but he liked the old Viking ways because it was his family heritage. By then, his family had lived peacefully up the Tyne for four or five generations.
A floating platform had been constructed on the beach at Culvercot, although there was no village there then. The thane’s body was placed on it and surrounded with wood and sea coal, set alight and pushed out to sea.
We all gathered and sang the old songs and ate meat that the thane’s family had provided. In truth, everybody knew that only the most important people were ever buried on an actual burning ship. For a start, you had to be able to afford a ship to burn. Ealdor Sveyn – the dead lord – was certainly not that important or that rich. He was, though, what you would now call a ‘snob’. He imagined himself to be grander than he really was. But we did not mind: the funeral feast was free.
So the platform was set alight and pushed into the bay, where it drifted out beyond the rocks. It soon collapsed in a hiss of smoke. The following morning, Ealdor Sveyn’s charred corpse was washed up on the shoreline. His grandson took it away and buried it in the ground somewhere.
All of this was flashing through my head as I stood outside Earl Grey House, looking out over the bay. It was warm, but there was a slight breeze coming off the sea.
I could see the exact spot, a little way out into the bay, where Ealdor Sveyn’s raft collapsed and sank, taking his half-burnt body with it. I could almost hear the chants and sad songs that were being sung by everybody on the shore. There was one by Bede that I remembered:
‘Foruh them neidfaerae, nenig weirthit
Thonk-snottura than him tharf sie …’
‘Are you all right?’ It was Sangeeta’s voice, and I turned round. She said it again, ‘Are you all right? You were away with the mixer then, Alfie!’
‘I am sorry. Were you saying something?’
‘No. But you, you … were singing something! What was it?’
‘Nothing, Sangeeta. Sorry.’
She looked at me, eyes narrowed, for a moment. She has done that a lot in the past few days. ‘OK, then. I was asking if you’ve ever been to a funeral before.’
I must still have been in my half-dream state. I said, ‘I have attended far too many.’
‘I thought you said you had no relatives, Alfie? Is that because they’ve all died?’ She did not say this aggressively. Was she trying to catch me out? It felt that way.
I was thinking of a reply when Aunty Reet came down the steps of Earl Grey House and ushered us along to the waiting car.
I will avoid a long description of the funeral, because nothing happened until the end.
There were not many people there.
There was me, obviously, Aunty Reet and Sangeeta. I had a pair of non-jeans that Sangeeta had bought me, and a dark pullover.
There was Vericka, and Robbie the Fire Investigations man. He winked at me and gave a tight little smile. That was nice of him. But I wished there were people I really knew. Friends. Of course, that was impossible. I had even lost my cat.
There was a reporter, too, with a camera, which she put away after Sangeeta had a quiet word with her. I am not sure what a reporter was expecting to see. Probably more people, I should imagine.
There was a vicar, obviously.
After all the words had been said, and Sangeeta had squeezed my shoulder until I almost asked her to stop, and the coffin disappeared behind a red curtain like an especially sinister magic trick, that was it. We turned to go, and I saw them.
Roxy Minto and Aidan Linklater, standing at the back of the little chapel.
‘Who are they?’ murmured Sangeeta slowly.
Well, what could I say? ‘I do not know,’ was not true. Nor was ‘friends’, for I certainly did not think of them as such. They had betrayed me, which is not what friends do. Had they not, I might already have acted upon me and Mam’s plan.
We were walking up the chapel’s aisle, and would be level with them soon.
‘I, erm … just give me a moment, will you, Sangeeta?’
I was left in the chapel with Aidan and Roxy.
‘Hi,’ they both said together, in a flat tone, appropriate to the circumstances.
‘Hello.’
‘I …’ said Aidan. ‘I thought, that is, we – Roxy and me – we thought we’d come along and, erm …’
I should have helped Aidan out here. I should have recognised that he was trying to be kind, but was struggling for the right words. I should have said something like, ‘That is all right. Thank you for coming.’
Instead I cocked my head and waited for him to stumble through.
‘It … it’s just that your mum, your mam … well, erm … she was all you had, and erm …’
Roxy had taken a breath to say something, but I turned to Aidan first. ‘Listen. I know you mean well, but frankly I do not—’
He cut me off. ‘Alfie. We believe you.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
Roxy said, ‘We believe you, Alfie. The thousand-year thing. Or at least we don’t disbelieve you.’
‘There is a difference?’
‘There’s loads of stuff that doesn’t add up, but there’s evidence there if you look for it, at least back a few hundred years, and, if it’s true for a few hundred years, then why not for a few hundred more?’
I stared at them both. I felt breathless. I glanced over at Sangeeta, who was having a quiet conversation with the vicar, but still watching me out of the corner of her eye, I could tell.
‘Thank you,’ I said, eventually. There was a long pause, and then I said, ‘So why did you tell the police where I was?’
A shocked look passed across Aidan’s face. ‘Is that what you think? Alfie, I didn’t. It was my little sister. Honest. She was just … she’s only seven. I never told a soul!’
Roxy, too, looked horrified. ‘You’re our friend, Alfie. Friends don’t—’
But she was cut off, because at that point Sangeeta came over, all smiley and funeral-gentle.
‘Hi,’ she said to Roxy and Aidan. ‘I’m Sangeeta, Alfie’s CPO. Do you know one another?’
‘A bit,’ said Aidan.
‘That’s nice. How do you know Alfie?’
‘Oh, erm … through, erm … school.’
Why did he say that? I had sort of edged behind Sangeeta now, and I was frantically shaking my head at Aidan, and at the same time Roxy’s description of me as a ‘friend’ was echoing round my brain.
Do I believe her? Does she mean it?
‘That’s strange,’ said Sangeeta, turning to me. ‘I thought you said you were
a home-ed, Alfie?’
‘Not school!’ yelped Aidan, picking up on my signal. ‘No – not school. No. That is, erm …’
Aidan was not a convincing liar, or a good actor. The panic was in his voice. All over him, actually. You could practically smell it.
Sangeeta, genuinely curious, I think, said, ‘Yes?’ and thank heavens for Roxy Minto.
‘You mean schoolwork, don’t you, Aidan?’ she drawled as if to a rather slow child. ‘You helped Alfie with his schoolwork occasionally. But you only visited him once or twice. Maths, mainly, wasn’t it?’ Aidan did not respond. ‘Wasn’t it, Aidan?’
‘Oh. Yes. Maths. Yes,’ Aidan intoned, nodding on each syllable. Either Sangeeta is easily fooled or she decided not to pursue it at that time.
‘Well, that’s nice of you,’ she said. ‘Thank you for coming today. It was very thoughtful.’
Walking back to the car, Sangeeta and I were a few paces ahead of Aidan and Roxy.
‘Why did you say you had no friends, Alfie?’ she asked quietly.
I had begun to say, ‘Because I thought it was true,’ when her mobile telephone started ringing in her pocket and she stopped. That was when I saw a thin man, with a thick black beard and big eyebrows, wearing a long dark overcoat. When he was about thirty feet away, he abruptly turned and walked quickly in the opposite direction.
It was definitely him.
Sangeeta was hunched over her telephone and did not see this.
I looked behind: Roxy and Aidan were just coming out of the chapel, talking to each other. I immediately worked out that the man was going to approach me until he saw them, at which point, he had turned and hurried away between the overgrown graves and mossy headstones. Seconds later, he disappeared behind a line of long black hearses that were awaiting the next funeral.
Something stirred inside me. That memory from long, long ago, rising to the surface and taking a gasp of air.
His face, leaning into mine, and growling, ‘Holl munnen!’
Shut your mouth.
The smell of cheese, and sealskin, and ship’s tar.
His long teeth snarling at me to be quiet as I cried for my da.
The man from the boat to England.
Aidan’s Uncle Jasper.
Did you know a shark can detect blood in the water up to five miles away? I sometimes feel that way with danger: I can notice the faintest traces. It is like a smell. An aroma of something from the past, and it was playing in my nose when I said to Sangeeta, ‘Can we go now?’
‘All right, Alfie,’ she said. ‘What about your friends?’
‘NOW. We need to go now.’ I hurried, head down, towards Sangeeta’s car with Sangeeta trotting behind me to catch up. When I glanced back, I saw Roxy and Aidan looking puzzled and hurt, and I wanted to go back and explain, but I could not, because I did not understand it properly myself.
I am certain Sangeeta thought it was delayed grief that had made me hurry off and so she left me alone in my thoughts as we drove away. But it was not grief. Well, not only grief.
It was Jasper.
It was fear.
Plus the realisation that Aidan and Roxy had lied to Sangeeta. For me. They had done that for me.
Sangeeta had stopped the car outside Earl Grey House and was saying something. I had not been paying attention until she took something black from her handbag and put in it my hands.
‘… It’s just for safety, you know. I’ve put my number in already, and Aunty Reet’s.’
A mobile telephone. I have never owned one before. Or even used one, for that matter. I turned it over in my hands, examining it.
She must have thought I disapproved because she said, ‘Yeah, I know. Sorry it’s not a smartphone, but it does the job.’
Instead of asking her how to use it, which would sound odd, I thought I would work it out myself.
Later I lay on my bed in my room at Earl Grey House. I stared at the ceiling. For the first time in a week, I thought about Mam and did not feel the hole of emptiness opening up inside me. Instead I felt a cold, sickening fear.
Jasper.
I had it all worked out. He did not know where I lived, so he had waited for Mam’s funeral, knowing – or hoping – that I would be there. Then he would approach me.
Why, exactly, I could not figure out – but it could not be good. The memory of his bearded face levelling with mine on the creaking cargo boat all those years ago kept coming back and it scared me.
Fear had replaced grief – and it was about to get worse.
Mam and I survived because we stayed together.
It was a strange life, indeed, but we had each other. Neither of us would leave the other alone in the world. You see, there was only one livperler left. If either of us took it, we would be able to live and die as normal – we would restart the ageing process. But, by doing so, we would abandon the other. That was our dreadful reality.
Mam would not take it and let me watch her grow old and die. Nor would I do that to her. Neither of us would make the other live on without the other.
Yet we each knew that we were not immortal. Ageless and immortal are different things; so we lived with the understanding that one day an accident might befall one of us and leave the other still living.
Neither of us liked the idea of being alone, and each of us thought that suicide was both terrifying and repellent.
Instead whoever was left would immediately enact the plan:
1. Locate the sole remaining life-pearl.
2. Administer it straight away, and thereby …
3. Restart the process of ageing, and …
4. Begin again to grow up.
It sounds simple. It is not. For one thing, I have to get to the life-pearl, and that is not an easy thing because Mam and I hid it, long ago, in a secret, hard-to-reach place. But I am going to have to do it.
I long to grow up, to be a man. I long to be in a hurry to do something, before time runs out. I long for the feeling that life is precious, that I have to cram as much as I can into every sun-drenched day and every frost-filled night; to know that childhood is special because it does not last forever; to have friends, like Aidan and Roxy, who will not look at me strangely, and then turn away from me when I fail to age like them.
In short, I long to grow older, and if that means that one day I will die then I will make sure that I do not waste any more of my life.
That is what my plan is.
As soon as I can get the life-pearl.
Although, for that, I am going to need a boat.
1250 AD
We had left the monastery at Jarrow several decades before. Old Paul had grown old, and retired from his post. He had made enough money – we knew not how – to buy a small farm on what we called Cockett Island just off the coast.
In those days, monasteries – or at least some monasteries – were incredibly rich. Some of that money ended up being used to buy land and houses for retiring monks.
Paul asked Mam and me to join him, she as his housekeeper and me as his scribe: someone who would write for him as his eyesight was becoming very poor. He was also fond of Biffa, probably the world’s only Neverdead cat. He promised her an endless supply of the island’s plentiful crabs. He would mash them up for her, because already her teeth were getting worn like mine and Mam’s, and she found it difficult to bite through crab shells like she used to.
Mam and I had now been living for more than two hundred years. Throughout that time Mam had kept with her the single remaining life-pearl.
It was – is – stored in a small clay box, about the size of a modern cigarette packet, surrounded with sheep’s wool and fine sand for extra protection. The box bore no marking. The lid fitted closely, and was sealed with a mixture of tallow, beeswax and pine resin.
That box lived with us, almost as if it were another member of our little family. Mam always knew where it was. We seldom travelled, but, if we did, Mam would carefully unpick the seal and lift the tiny sphere out and sw
allow it for safekeeping. It would reappear about a day or so later, expelled in the manner dictated by nature.
Glass – in case you did not know – is extremely resistant to almost all forms of chemical reaction, so the little ball was completely undamaged by stomach acids and other internal processes. At the end of the journey, the glass ball would be cleaned, replaced in the box with some sand, resealed and buried in a place that only Mam and I knew.
Thus did the clay box containing the life-pearl come with us to Old Paul’s farmstead on Cockett Island.
The choice of burial spot for the clay box was always crucial. The ground should not be too damp. Nor should the box be buried too deeply: we had to be able to get at it quickly in an emergency. If we could not for any reason, if we had to leave in a hurry, then it would need to remain undisturbed and undiscovered for as long as it took to come back and retrieve it.
It was Old Paul who suggested the cave on the eastern side of the island: one of two caves high up the beach that were dry year-round. He knew about the pearl, and he knew we needed to keep it safe from those who might want it. The cave was deep and dark. There was a crevice behind a large boulder at the back that I could squeeze my arm into. Inside the crevice, out of sight, was a sandy ledge. It had been used in the past to conceal treasures from the Vikings, its location passed from one prior to the next.
It was perfect. Anything put there would be safe: completely hidden forever from anyone who did not know of it. The only people who did know were me, Mam and Old Paul.
We had encased the clay box in more tallow and resin and beeswax for extra protection. When it hardened, it was wrapped in rough cloth, and this is the package that Mam extracted from her shawl as we stood in the cave at twilight.
The wind howled around us and the island’s puffins – the squat black birds with the comical beaks – skidded and swooped in the sky above us. Old Paul, almost blind by now, intoned a prayer that he had made up for the occasion.