Framed

by Frank Cottrell Boyce

  And the true force that bonded us was the Snowdonia Oasis Auto Marvel. We were all trying to make it grow so that Dad could come back. After all, there was a whole fleet of heavy-duty vans on top of the mountain, any one of which could need a new tyre or an oil change any time. I explained this to Mam, and she seemed quite persuaded. I made her promise to tell Dad on the phone. ‘Especially tell him that we did an oil change and it worked this time, and even more especially that I helped,’ I said. ‘Then he’ll see how much things have changed here.’

  That night something woke me up. I looked out of the window, and there was a light on in the workshop and the door was open. I thought, Dad’s come home. I didn’t even put my dressing gown or my slippers on. I was in the workshop before you could blink.

  It wasn’t Dad. It was the girls. They looked really surprised when I ran in.

  ‘I thought you were Lester,’ said Marie. ‘I nearly died.’

  ‘What are you doing?’

  They were struggling with the wooden box.

  ‘We couldn’t sleep,’ Marie said. ‘What if the Holy Grail’s in the box? So we just had to look.’

  I said, ‘You don’t open it like that.’ I got a jemmy and slipped it into the groove that was hidden under the letter ‘T’ of National, flipped it up, then undid the two screws, and it opened.

  The girls were impressed.

  Inside, it was packed in bubble wrap. We took it out and there was the picture, clamped in a kind of bracket inside. Except it wasn’t a picture. It just looked like a block of gold.

  It was Minnie who said, ‘What if it is the Holy Grail?’ but we were all thinking it. Maybe that’s why it was hidden in the boot of the car instead of with the other pictures?

  I unfastened the bracket, opened the hinge and lifted the gold block out. It wasn’t a block of gold. It was wood, covered in gold. It had a little clasp on the spine. I undid it and it opened like a birthday card. The picture inside was gold and bright, bright blue – the same mad blue as the Misses Sellwood’s hair. It glowed like a little lamp.

  ‘Wow!’ said Marie. ‘What is it?’ She shoved in next to me and made me drop the painting. Minnie caught the other end of it just in time or it would have fallen on the oily floor. That’s when we decided to take it into the house.

  We set it up on Marie’s dressing table. It was pretty but random. We weren’t even sure it was a painting. Not like the other paintings. It was more like a very short picture book, with just two pages. On the left page there was a king, kneeling down with three other men, all with big long beards, standing behind him. On the other page there were a lot of women with wings and a tall woman in a blue dress, holding a baby. She looks like she’s about to chuck the baby over to the king. Some of the angels are looking up at her, sort of saying, ‘Go on, chuck him!’ And the king’s got his hands up to catch him, but he doesn’t look like he’s going to make much effort, though he does have these big goalie hands. Minnie said it was the Madonna again. She didn’t look anything like the other Madonna though. And if that’s Jesus’s mam, I feel sorry for Jesus, being chucked round like that.

  We decided to keep the picture in the house because it was safer and cleaner. Minnie took her big chart of ‘Wasps of Europe’ (she bought it in case she ever decided to do a perfect crime using wasps) down off her wall and hung the picture up in its place. It looked like it had always been there. Which is why we forgot to put it back the next morning, and that’s why, when Lester came to collect his car, he drove off without it.

  30 May

  Cars today:

  SUBARU IMPREZA – two random lads

  (filled up, bought a map)

  MORGAN PLUS EIGHT – a rude stranger

  Weather – extremely heavy rain

  Note: A FATEFUL MOMENT

  This is when Manod finally got a sign on the A496.

  OK, so it wasn’t like millions of cars came, but the main thing is – from a market-research point of view – neither of these cars comes from Manod. They’re both strangers! As Dad says, ‘There’s no such thing as strangers; there’s only customers you haven’t met yet.’

  Actually, the man in the Morgan probably won’t come again and we don’t want him to. On the good side, though, he wouldn’t have found us if it hadn’t been for the new sign. So that shows that the sign works.

  It wasn’t the council who put up the new sign, by the way, it was us. Minnie got the idea from the baby-chucking picture.

  We all woke up late the day after we did the oil change and Mam made a legend breakfast – porridge, sausages, everything. Immense! Including eggs laid by Donatello. She laid every day, but Michelangelo still hadn’t laid a single one.

  ‘Mr Lester paid cash,’ she said, ‘so this is a celebration breakfast.’

  That’s when we realized that if he’d paid, he must’ve been and gone. We all rushed to the window. We could just see the BMW slipping off into the clouds. He’d gone, but he’d left the picture.

  ‘Looks like you made a good job of those tyres, Marie,’ said Mam.

  Marie said, ‘Yeah. He should go to Kwik-Fit or somewhere to check the tracking, but he should be all right.’ But her brain was thinking, Oh my God, he left the Holy Grail behind.

  ‘Well,’ said Minnie, ‘I’ll suck a mint imperial.’

  ‘Why?’ said Mam.

  ‘No reason.’

  We didn’t want to get Mam involved.

  On the way to school, Minnie said, ‘He’s bound to come looking for it, once he notices it’s missing. And when he does we’ll give it back, and if he doesn’t, then it’s finders keepers.’

  This sounds OK in theory. In practice, it meant that she brought about ten million girls – including even Terrible Evans – back with her after school and they all swarmed upstairs to look at the picture. They all sat there on the bed, staring at the picture like it was a PlayStation.

  Jade Porty said, ‘Is it a girl or a man?’

  ‘It’s a man, obviously,’ said Minnie.

  ‘But he’s plucked his eyebrows.’

  ‘He’s a man. But he’s plucked his eyebrows. They did that in those days.’

  ‘He’s done something funny to his hair too. It looks like it’s been welded.’

  ‘He’s got lovely hands though, hasn’t he?’ said Terrible.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Jade. ‘Girl hands.’

  Then there was a sound like a helicopter – which was Marie’s school bus pulling up – and another ten million girls got off that and they went upstairs too. All the girls who normally got off in Llechwedd or in Manod town, they’d all come to see the picture.

  Marie’s friends were more interested in the women. The red-headed girl from Mr Chipz (and who invited her, by the way?) wanted to know why they all had such big heads.

  Minnie explained that they didn’t have big heads as such. ‘Women used to shave their foreheads in those days. A high forehead was a sign of beauty.’

  Terrible said, ‘When were those days, anyway? The days when men plucked their eyebrows and women shaved their heads.’

  Then Mam came up to see what was going on. ‘What’s going on?’ she said, like she was about to throw them all out. Then she saw the picture and she went, ‘Ooooh, look at that cloth. What is it? Damask? Doesn’t it hang lovely then?’

  Terrible Evans said, ‘Mrs Hughes, don’t they look good? They’ve got their heads shaved. Like me.’

  Mam walked up to the picture to get a better look, and as she went by she passed me the baby. Didn’t even look, passed him to me sideways like a rugby ball, like the Madonna in the picture, chucking babies around.

  I took Max downstairs. Tom had already gone home. It was just me and Max. The boys. I sat him down and rolled his ball at him. He went to kick it at first, but then he grabbed it and hugged it like he’d just saved a penalty. I said, ‘Good boy. Again? Give me the ball and let’s do it again.’ But he seemed to prefer just holding it.

  Then I realized I could hear someone banging on the
door of the shop. I looked out. It was Lester. Obviously he’d realized about the picture. I ran upstairs.

  Marie ran down to let Lester into the kitchen while I put the picture back in its box. The box was under the bed. The bubble wrap was still in there. All we had to do was fasten the catches in the right order and make sure it was all the right way round. Easy. After all, we’d just done an oil change and fitted a whole new set of tyres. I did the catches and Minnie slid the lid back into place. We were like clockwork.

  Mam said, ‘Have I been missing something here? Where did you learn to do that?’

  Marie told the other girls to wait five minutes before coming down, so that we could get rid of him. It might look a bit weird if there were two million girls in the same room as his painting.

  Down in the kitchen, Marie was telling Lester how we’d found the box when we were looking for the car jack and we’d decided that it was a risk leaving it there, what with the oil and so on, so now it was in the house for safe keeping. ‘How’s the tyres then?’

  ‘The tyres are fine. But the picture is here? You’re sure?’

  ‘Oh yeah. You’ve got the picture, haven’t you, Dylan? What about the oil? I wasn’t sure if you had a brand preference?’

  But Lester wasn’t thinking about oil. He just grabbed the picture off me and hugged it like Max had hugged the ball. He just stood there for a minute, enjoying breathing. Maybe he hadn’t been breathing properly for a while. He said, ‘I’m so sorry. I should never have left it in the car, of course. It should never have been in the car even, but. . . you acted with your usual good sense and kindness.’ He smiled. ‘I’m so grateful. Perhaps you’d like to look at it. It’s the least I can do.’

  And he started to undo the box. Only he wasn’t that good at it. He couldn’t find the little groove under the lid. I got a bread knife and did it for him.

  He lifted the little gold book out of the box and opened it on the table. ‘It’s a diptych,’ he said, ‘a sort of tiny portable altar. It was made for Richard II.’ Then he stopped.

  Terrible Evans had just come in from upstairs. And Jade Porty. They smiled at him and stood behind our Marie, looking at the picture. He carried on. ‘It’s all gold leaf. We know who everyone is in the picture because everyone has their emblem – a sort of logo. For instance, the king holding the arrow is Edmund, who was killed by Danish archers. The king holding the ring is Edward the Confessor, who is supposed to have given his wedding ring to a beggar and the . . .’

  He stopped again. Two of Marie’s mates had come in now, and also the red-haired girl from Mr Chipz and Mam with Max. They all smiled at him. He smiled back and carried on.

  ‘So you see, it’s less like a painting and more like a puzzle.’

  ‘Or a code,’ said Minnie, looking at me.

  ‘Or a code. Indeed,’ said Lester. Then he stopped. The rest of Marie’s mates had come in now. The ones at the back were standing on chairs.

  ‘This is turning into quite the public lecture. Where were we? Well, King Richard is wearing a white deer. That’s his emblem. And the angels are wearing it in his honour. It’s on the back of the frame as well. Look.’ And he went to close it, then stopped again. About another hundred females had come in. They all smiled. He smiled back, but looked at me. I smiled too.

  ‘Well, perhaps I’d better . . .’ He was going to put the picture back in the box, but all these millions of girls did a big disappointed ‘Ooooh’. They sounded like the Kop after a missed penalty. He was too scared to stop then. He said, ‘Well, what else can I tell you? Oh. Yes. The little pommel at the top of the banner here. It looks like a simple silver orb, but if you look closely you can see it contains another picture – of a castle on an island. Can you see? We only discovered that quite recently when the picture was cleaned. A hidden masterpiece. That could be an emblem of Manod, of course – something that looks quite small and insignificant but which hides something wonderful – namely, these paintings.’

  He was at it again. Small and insignificant! He can change his own tyres next time.

  ‘So there we have it. The Wilton Diptych. Painted towards the end of the fourteenth century, artist unknown. Goodnight.’

  He grabbed the painting, snapped it shut and shot out through the door before you could say, ‘0–60 in seven seconds.’

  And this was a Fateful Moment, because in his hurry Lester forgot the wooden box the picture came in. And without that box, we’d never have been able to do our Great Art Robbery.

  Anyway, the point is, in school the next day all the girls (which is everyone) were on about emblems, and during art Minnie said, Why didn’t Manod have an emblem? And Ms Stannard said we should design one. And so they all spent ages painting clouds and sheep and mountains and stuff. And Ms Stannard was really cheery because . . . you know what? For once, all the paints got used, except the grey. The yellow ochre, the crimson lake, the Prussian blue, and forty shades of green. Only the grey was left untouched.

  All I could think of was that picture of me in the newspaper, on my own, on the forecourt with a ball.

  When Ms Stannard saw it she said, ‘Football, football, football. What’s football got to do with Manod?’

  I said, ‘Absolutely nothing, miss.’ Which was definitely true.

  ‘Now, girls,’ said Ms Stannard, ‘and Dylan, let’s think about a motto to go with our pictures. When you drive into Blaenau, for instance, there’s a sign which says . . . what?’

  ‘It says, “Moving Forward into the Future,”’ said Minnie. ‘Like there’s a town somewhere that’s drifting backwards into the Past.’

  ‘Exactly. We can do better than that. At Harlech they have, “Harlech – a town to live in.” As though there are some towns that you’re not allowed to live in. Who can think of a slogan for Manod?’

  I thought of ‘No Ball Games’, like it says on the bus shelter.

  It was Minnie obviously who thought of:

  Manod – Somewhere

  Under the Rainbow

  with a picture of a mountain with a rainbow on the top. Everyone loved it so much they decided to make it into a proper sign, on a big piece of wood with proper paint. And when it was finished they loved it even more, so Ms Stannard got someone from the Parish Council (Mr Elsie, the chemist) to come and look at it, and he said it was very impressive but not a funding priority. And Ms Stannard said we didn’t need funds.

  The next morning, we all got the bus up to the junction with the A496. Found the old signpost on the grass verge. Fixed the new sign to it with ‘Better than Nails’ and a piece of 4x2. Put it back in its hole and filled it in with bricks. Manod Elementary did some teamwork of its own!

  The sign obviously worked, because we had two cars from out of town the very next day. One was the man in the Morgan. He stopped on the forecourt and looked at the gate and said, ‘Is that it?’

  I said, ‘Is what it?’

  ‘There was a sign back there, pointing down here. And now the road’s stopped. What was the sign for?’

  ‘The sign’s for Manod. This is Manod.’

  ‘Well, that’s useful, isn’t it? A sign inviting you into a dead end. I’m out for an afternoon motoring in the mountains. I was just getting ready to let rip.’

  I said, ‘You want the Blaenau Bypass, then. You can let rip there, all the way to Harlech.’

  And he did.

  Then these two lads came in an Impreza, filled up and went up the mountain road to do a bit of off-roading. The one on the passenger side said, ‘You’re the kid in the paper, aren’t you? The last boy in Manod?’

  ‘That’s me.’

  ‘You might not like it now, but you’ll love it when you’re older. You’ll be the busiest lad in Manod then, eh?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  They were gone.

  This is what Newspaper Arthur wrote about the sign, by the way:

  Signs of Life

  A new sign has appeared on the verge of the A496 near Blaenau, pointing to the Ma
nod turn-off. The turn-off has been unmarked for several years. Those wanting to go to Manod will now find it easier to get there. Though they may have difficulty occupying themselves after arrival.

  So Manod finally had a sign, which is what Dad always wanted. And it was all down to Minnie!

  At night-time, if you look out of her bedroom window you can just about see a scarf of yellow light, out past the town. That’s the A496. I said to her, ‘Imagine that. When he comes home and he sees that sign, he’ll be so impressed and everything, and he won’t even know it’s by you. Legend!’

  4 June

  Cars today:

  CARBON BLACK BMW M5 – Mr Q. Lester

  (two Titian Tarts and a Picasso Pie)

  ROVER 3500 V8 – the Misses Sellwood

  (delivering painting)

  Weather – rain

  Note: THE HANDSOME REWARD

  Oh, the Handsome Reward. We spent ages guessing what Lester might give us for assisting in the recovery of his priceless painting.

  ‘Imagine if he gave us one of the paintings to keep,’ said Minnie.

  ‘That nut one would be good,’ said Tom.

  ‘Cash would be better,’ said Marie.

  We were all wrong.

  Lester came in himself this morning to collect the cake order and he said, ‘I’m so very grateful for the care you took of The Wilton Diptych. To my mind, it is the most exquisite thing in the entire collection. Not that my mind counts, of course.’ And then he gave us the reward. It was a book. A book! The National Gallery Companion (Revised and Expanded). What kind of Handsome Reward is that? When you think about it, he was asking to have one of his pictures stolen.

  ‘Actually,’ he said, ‘I wrote it myself.’

  So he didn’t even pay money for it! He wrote his name in the front for us, but he didn’t say why.

  We said thank you, but only because of customer relations.