‘Again, I couldn’t say. Colour and brushwork are my field. That’s more a matter for a municipal park keeper.’
‘It was popular though?’
‘The Camembert? Oh, enormously so. But you can see my problem. Water. Boats. Bad memories for Londoners, I’m afraid.’
‘Maybe . . .’ I said. ‘Maybe it will make them see that floods can be fun. Like the man you were talking about, who realized that pots and pans were beautiful.’
Lester looked at me, looked at the painting and said, ‘Let’s give it a try. And if they are insulted, well, perhaps it’s time they were insulted.’
I thought Mr Davis would be disappointed, but he drove down the mountain looking even more excited than he had on the way up. Even though the visibility wasn’t that poor, he turned on the AFL (Adaptive Forward Lighting). It’s surprisingly effective. When we got to the garage I jumped out and opened the gate. He pulled forward and said, ‘Get back in then, boy.’
I wasn’t sure I wanted to. I said, ‘Mam doesn’t really like me being out too late.’
‘Tell her you’re coming with me.’
I wasn’t sure she would see that as an advantage.
‘What does he want?’ asked Mam.
Minnie said, ‘He’s found the Holy Grail. He wants Dylan to help him dig it up.’
I thought, I’m not sure she’ll think that’s a good thing.
Mam looked out of the window. Mr Davis was leaning against his Astra. He gave her a big, cheery wave. ‘Well, that would be interesting,’ said Mam. ‘And he does look very happy. On the other hand, he is a bit unpredictable.’ She bit her lip. ‘Why don’t you both go? And take my mobile with you, just in case.’
Mr Davis took us back to his shop, where he stopped and picked up a jemmy, a chainsaw and a big pair of bolt cutters.
‘He’s going to kill someone,’ whispered Minnie excitedly.
‘I hope it’s not us.’ I whispered back.
Then he drove down to Waterloo Park and parked so that his car was facing the gates. He put the headlights on full beam so we could see the rusty ironwork. ‘Come on then,’ he said. ‘You bring the chainsaw, boy.’
It was a bit heavy to carry – but also comforting to have hold of it.
Mr Davis rummaged around with the rusty old chain until he found the padlock. He was hoping it would be rusty too, so he could just yank it off. But it was surprisingly shiny. He gave it to Minnie. ‘Keep hold of that, tight as you can, and pull.’ When the chain was taut, he gripped it with the bolt cutters and snipped it in two, like a string of sausages. The three of us leaned on the gates and pushed them open. It wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be. Mr Davis strode off into the park. When we caught up with him, he was standing in front of the mural, looking up at the panel of his own famous meeting with Elvis in Home and Bargain. He said, ‘You know what, I don’t think that was Elvis I met that day.’ Then he took his chainsaw off me, revved it up and ran it through the big boards, up and down. Elvis in Las Vegas fell flat on the ground and Elvis in Home and Bargain sort of twisted round and split in two. ‘There it is,’ he said, pointing through the gap he’d made in the fence. It wasn’t the Holy Grail or anything. It was just Manod boating lake, but it did look lovely – all velvety and silvery now that it was getting dark.
‘Is it at the bottom of the lake then?’ asked Minnie.
But Mr Davis wasn’t listening. He’d already walked over to the old boathouse and cut the padlock off that too. He disappeared inside.
‘He seems very focused,’ said Minnie. ‘Do you think he has found it?’
He came out again, dragging one of the old rowing boats behind him. ‘Come on then! Give us a hand!’ he shouted. It was pitch black in the boathouse with thick curtains of cobwebs hanging down everywhere. It was the kind of place you’d expect some secret treasure to be hidden. Maybe it was behind the boats. Mr Davis was pulling another one out. I helped him. Then we pulled out another and another. There were eight altogether. He started poking and kicking at them. ‘Seem sound enough,’ he said. ‘Just need a lick of paint, that’s all. What about this jetty?’
He walked out on to the jetty, bouncing up and down on his heels. ‘Not bad, not bad,’ he said. But he wasn’t talking to us. He seemed to have forgotten we were there.
‘I’m freezing,’ said Minnie. So we went home.
The next morning, Mr Davis’s shop didn’t open for business. It turned out he was still in the park. He’d taken down the rest of the Elvis mural and he was painting the boats blue and red. Mr Elsie – chemist and parish councillor – went up to give him a talking to: it was all illegal, what he was doing, and they weren’t properly insured.
‘The interesting thing is,’ said Mr Davis, ‘I don’t seem to care.’
Everyone said that Mr Davis had finally gone mad. But we went to look at him, and he seemed happy enough. He asked me to shove one of the boats into the water to see if it would float. It did. It was a bit wet in the bottom but it was floating.
The next time we went down to the park, Mr Morgan had brought his tractor (Massey Ferguson, seventies classic, top speed 47 mph) and he was using a hay thingy to drag all the weeds and mud out of the lake. Minnie asked him if he thought that Mr Davis had finally gone completely mad.
‘Maybe he has and maybe he hasn’t. If he has, it’s best to humour him, don’t you think?’
We asked Mr Elsie the same question the next day when we found him down by the lake in his overalls, creosoting oars. ‘He’s mad as a box of frogs,’ said Mr Elsie. ‘You couldn’t hold this oar up, could you, so I can do the other side?’
The next day, one of the vans from up the mountain pulled up and about five men jumped out. ‘We’re bored witless up there. Mind if we join you? This looks like it’ll pass the time,’ they said. One of them mowed the lawns and one of them cut the hedges. Then another van came down and the men in that one took all the litter away. Mr Davis rewarded them with pork pies. For as long as I could remember no one had ever wanted to talk to Mr Davis. Suddenly people were queuing up to talk to him – and there he was, giving orders, cracking jokes and handing out pies.
And an amazing thing happened. Mr Evans – Terrible’s dad – he turned up! He said he’d had enough of London and he’d heard that things were finally moving in Manod. Terrible asked for the morning off to help him cut the grass around the lake and Ms Stannard said, ‘Let’s make a school trip of it.’ She took us all down to the park.
When we got there, Mrs Porty was putting up some hanging baskets on the boathouse. Mr Elsie was screwing some big iron rings into the end of the jetty, and Big was with Terrible. They were carefully painting numbers on the sterns of all the boats, which were lying, bottoms up, on the grass, like a row of little huts. It was Minnie – obviously – who noticed that they were painting the numbers upside down.
Everyone laughed and then we had a vote about whether to leave them like that or clean them up and start again. We voted to leave them upside down.
I waited till he was on his own, then I asked Big if he’d seen Dad.
‘Isn’t he up in his workshop?’
‘No. He went away on business. We think he went to London, like you. That’s why I was asking.’
‘Ah, well, London’s a big place, you know.’
‘Yeah, but he was working on the New Barrier, like you.’
‘Well, it’s a big barrier too,’ said Big, which was true enough.
Then Jade Porty shouted, ‘Look!’ And we all did. It took us a minute to realize what we were looking at, though. Because she wasn’t pointing at something that was there. She was pointing at something that wasn’t there. It had stopped raining.
‘It’s stopped raining!’
The sky was completely blue, like in a Monet, and the lake was brown and still.
Big turned one of the boats over and pushed it into the water.
Mr Davis said, ‘Wait, wait. Before we declare this boating lake well and truly open . . .’
/> ‘If uninsured,’ said Mr Elsie.
‘Before we do that, I would like to thank you all for helping and I’d like to thank especially Mr Lester from up the mountain and little Dylan Hughes. They gave me this idea. It’s a pity the gallery fella’s not here, but I think Dylan should have first go, don’t you?’
And then I got this big, hectic round of applause. I thought it was going to go on forever but Mr Elsie shushed everyone and said, ‘Just to remind you, we are not insured. You take these boats out at your own risk.’
I said, ‘That’s all right.’
Then everyone clapped again and Mr Davis pushed the boat out, and that’s how I became the first boy on the boating lake since Mr Davis saw Elvis. It was beastie. You have to be careful because when you lift the oar the water runs down your arm and up your sleeve and you get soaked. But they say you get better with practice.
One of the men from up the mountain was really brilliant at rowing and his boat went up and down the lake in a straight line. It was amazing.
Later on, Tom came down and helped Big set up a barbecue while Mr Davis went to get a bag of sausages from his shop. And everyone in Manod had Davis’s Own Make sausages (except Marie, who was still in her room).
And that’s all anyone did for days. Every night after school, everyone went down to the lake and raced the boats. Mr Davis bought all the discount garden furniture from the Oasis and brought that down so that people would have somewhere to sit and wait. He sat outside the boathouse himself, and the more people talked to him, the more normal he sounded. Tom came down. Mam came down with another big tub of umbrellas.
I thought it might be nice to get Marie to come down, so I played with Max outside her door, quite noisily, to see if that would tempt her out. He was toddling past her door shouting, ‘Hot! Hot!’ for some reason, when it opened, Marie’s hands shot out and pulled Max in. Then the door shut again.
‘Hey!’ I shouted. ‘I’m trying to play with him.’ I know better than to knock on that door, but I did some noisy walking up and down outside for a while and even sighed a couple of times. Suddenly there was a flash of really bright light from under the door, just one quick flash. I shouted, ‘Are you OK?’
‘Move away from the door.’
‘What was that flash?’
‘Move away from the door.’
I stepped back. The door opened a crack and Max came waddling out on his own. Then the door was closed behind him. I picked up the baby and took him downstairs again.
So Marie never did come down to the boating lake.
Lester did though, in the end. Mr Davis couldn’t stop shaking his hand. ‘This is all down to you,’ he said. ‘All this. If I hadn’t seen that picture, none of this would have happened. You see, I lost a lot in my life. But seeing that picture, I realized I didn’t have to lose it all.’
‘Well, I’m glad you like it,’ said Lester. ‘It was quite popular in London, too.’
‘You know I’ve got a phobia about liver?’ said Mr Davis.
‘No. No, I didn’t.’
‘A butcher with a phobia about liver.’
‘But seeing the picture has cured you?’
‘No, I’m still frightened of it. It’s alive, you know.’
‘No, I didn’t know. I had no idea.’
‘A lot of people don’t. It keeps me awake at night. I’ve tried drugs, therapy, acupuncture. But being out here, digging this lake, mowing the grass, it knocks me out. I sleep like a stuffed pig.’
‘Well, that’s nice.’
‘Nice? It’s fantastic. There’s powerful stuff in those pictures.’
‘Yes,’ said Lester, ‘I’ve always thought so . . .’ And he looked around the park like he was dreaming it all.
20 June
Cars today:
RACING RED MINI COOPER S – me!
Weather – too excited to notice
Note: THE LADY IN THE LAKE
The Mini is the one that was nicked, and this is the day that we got it back – and the way we got it back was immense. I really thought this was it, that our troubles were over.
We were just finishing school and Terrible Evans cornered me in the cloakroom and said, ‘My dad’s starting work on the old pavilion tonight. You’d better come and help us . . .’
‘I can’t,’ I said. ‘I’ve got to sort out the cake orders and make sure the Gaggia is cleaned and—’
‘You’d better come and help us,’ said Terrible, ‘or I’ll kill you.’
I said, ‘What time?’
‘Five o’clock. I’ll give you till ten past, and then I’ll come looking for you.’
At five o’clock Terrible was waiting for me by the lake without her dad. Apparently he was ‘running late’. ‘Get in a boat and row till he turns up.’
I didn’t really fancy getting my sleeves wet again, but I always find it hard to say no to Terrible because of my fear of being poked in the eye.
There was already one boat out on the lake. It had a man at one end and one of Mam’s big umbrellas at the other. Terrible wanted me to row over and ram it. I didn’t like the idea, but sometimes it seems easier to sink a boat than it does to think of a reason why not. It was only when we got right up close that I saw the man was Lester. Which was a bit random. But then I saw what was behind the umbrella and that was a lot random. It was Ms Stannard.
Ms Stannard and Lester out in a rowing boat together! What’s going on?!
‘Ram them!’ snarled Terrible.
‘No! Look who it is.’
Even Terrible had to gasp. Ms Stannard seemed to be shouting at Lester. She was going on about art again. He was so listening to her that he didn’t even notice us.
‘Quentin,’ she was saying (she calls him Quentin!), ‘the whole point of art is to rescue something of ourselves from the ravages of nature. By those criteria, of course, the whole of Manod is a work of art. It’s very difficult to live up here. Just being alive is a work of art. The Sellwood sisters live halfway up the mountain and they keep their hair that preposterous shade of blue. Surely even a prig like you can see that they’re a work of art?’
‘They’re something, but they’re not art. I don’t know why you would want them to be a work of art . . .’ and more stuff like that. Ms Stannard was using her ‘patiently explaining’ voice, which is the voice she uses when she is finally running out of patience. I thought she might be about to drown him.
Terrible said, ‘They’re in love.’
‘What!? Listen to her. She’s shouting at him. She hates him.’
‘That’s how people talk when they’re in love, you moron,’ said Terrible.
Lester finally noticed we were there. He gave us a little wave and carried on rowing while Ms Stannard carried on patiently explaining.
Big Evans finally turned up. He backed his Montego up by the steps of the old pavilion and took shovels, mops, buckets and bolt cutters out of the boot. ‘Oh,’ he said to Terrible when he saw me, ‘you’ve brought your little friend along to help.’
‘He’s not my friend,’ she said. ‘He’s an idiot. He came because I told him to.’
‘Fair enough,’ said Big. ‘Gonna help us clear this place out then, Dylan?’
‘If you like.’
‘We’re going to see if it can be restored. And after that, we think this bit of grass in front here has potential as a putting green. What d’you think?’
‘OK.’
The old pavilion had massive doors that folded back, like fire-station doors. In the winter you could open just the middle bit so that it stayed warm and dry inside. In the summer, if it wasn’t raining, you could fold the whole thing right back and let the sun shine in. Now, though, the doors had great planks of wood nailed across them, top and bottom, to keep them shut. The windows were boarded up and the steps were all covered in bird muck.
‘We’ll start with the doors,’ said Big. And he gave me and Terrible each a claw hammer so we could get the nails out of the planks. It was easier than y
ou’d think. The wood was soft and the nails slid right out. They were still quite bright and shiny. You wouldn’t think they’d been out in the rain all that time. We got the bottom planks off and stacked them up on the potential putting green. Big had to help us with the top ones. As soon as he’d pulled out the first few nails, though, the whole thing started to look a bit wobbly, and then suddenly the whole front started to fall off. Big stuck his hands in the air quickly and yelled, ‘Go on, get back!’ and we ran off the porch on to the grass. Then he walked his hands backwards up the door towards us, so that it came down slowly. We rushed forward and grabbed the edges and helped him lower it. And there it was, the old pavilion, with its front completely off like a doll’s house. Inside, we could see the famous snooker table, shoved up against the wall with a dead pigeon lying on top of it. And cobwebs that were so thick they looked like washing hanging out to dry. But we didn’t notice these things at first. Because there, tucked neatly into the far corner was something else – a Mini Cooper S (racing red). Our Mini Cooper S.
I yelled, ‘That’s ours! The one that got nicked! I’ve found it!’
‘All right,’ said Terrible. ‘It’s just a car.’
But I thought I was going to explode. Ever since it had been nicked, I’d been wanting to find a clue to who nicked it. And now I’d found the whole car. I said, ‘Wait till Dad hears about this!’
As Big Evans said, it was unusual to find a stolen car at all, and even more unusual to find one in such perfect condition, and most unusual of all, the keys to the ignition were tucked under the sun visor, on the driver’s side. ‘It’s all a bit mysterious,’ he said. ‘And the real mystery is how the hell they got it in here. Up the steps and through the door and round the back of the snooker table.’
I said, ‘Pure manoeuvrability, Mr Evans. Anyone who’s seen the film The Italian Job . . .’
‘Oh, yeah. I love that film.’
‘. . . will know that the Mini can easily cope with flights of steps and can turn on its own axis to slot into the narrowest space.’
‘Excuse me,’ said Terrible. ‘Who cares?!’
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