Back to Blackbrick

by Sarah Moore Fitzgerald

  After the day he took the key away, Corporamore didn’t ever really say much to me, which was okay as far as I was concerned, because I was never in the mood for having heart-to-hearts with that slimeball. He did come down to the kitchen one day and tell us that someone was to give his daughter riding lessons. Most of the time whenever I saw him coming my way, all I did was try not to look him in the face.

  In a Blackbrick winter the place gets so cold that you have to get dressed under the covers of your bed, and when you finally do get out, you have to jump around for centuries before you even begin to get warm.

  I never did see another creepy incident with Corporamore and Maggie, which was a relief to me, seeing how basically disturbing that whole particular episode had been. But there were a couple of times when I saw him watching her from a distance, say when she was washing windows or carrying a tray along the corridor to Cordelia’s room. And there were other things about Maggie that had started to make me worry.

  It began when she got really, really sick. Kevin told me that she was puking every morning. He said it didn’t surprise him too much, considering how the food at Blackbrick wasn’t what it used to be. After Christmas she stopped feeling sick and started to get fantastically hungry. Hungrier than me and Kevin put together, which was saying a lot.

  Christmas wasn’t that different from any other time at Blackbrick, at least not for us, except that Mrs. Kelly crept into my room and left two oranges on my bed along with a midget of a chocolate bar. I saw her do it, but I kept on pretending to be asleep. Kevin rushed in to me a few seconds later, saying wasn’t it mighty kind of her, and weren’t we dead lucky to have gotten presents like that on a Christmas morning, and I was like, yeah, we must have been born under some kind of freakishly lucky star, all right.

  Maggie was getting paler and tireder and sadder-looking all the time. She never complained, so it wasn’t like anyone was drawing my attention to it, but I am pretty observant and there are things that I notice that other people never seem to see.

  In a Blackbrick spring the sunshine is like big solid bars glaring right down onto your face and making you have to squeeze your eyes together quite tightly. And birds start to tweet and twitter outside your window and they sound delighted with themselves.

  And in a Blackbrick summer everything grows wild and tall, and the solid sunshine bars gleam inside the rooms so that you can see a million sparkling particles of dust floating around like miniature galaxies. And even when it is summer, the basement where I used to sleep never gets warm, and the stone walls stay damp and cold. There was no point in complaining, because complaining got you nowhere in Blackbrick, no matter how reasonable your complaint was, unless you were Cordelia, and nobody wanted to be her.

  Over the months Kevin’s hair got longer and he got quite a lot more grown-up-looking and a good bit thinner. Which at the time was funny, considering how much fatter he thought Maggie had gotten. He wasn’t trying to be rude about it or anything, but it was true.

  I guess I knew all along what the situation was, but she didn’t talk about it to us and we didn’t talk about it to her, and the longer silence grows around something, the easier it becomes for everyone to put it out of their minds. It’s called denial, which nobody had ever heard of at Blackbrick, but it’s basically the only way to explain how we all ignored Maggie’s condition.

  And I’d been promoted. Instead of a temporary gofer, by then Mrs. Kelly said I was an assistant stable boy. I was proud of myself, because I’d put in the time and I’d earned it.

  Kevin and Maggie didn’t just learn to read and write. They became literary know-it-alls, which was a bit irritating, seeing as it was me who’d taught them the basic skills.

  I’d say that by then, if they’d been in my class, they would both have passed everyone on the reading scale. When the midafternoon stillness settled on Blackbrick, I’d often find them in the kitchen bent over a book, or sometimes even in the room next to Crispin’s, where they’d have lit a fire and where Kevin would be lying on his stomach on one of the old sofas, swinging his legs, and Maggie’d be on the floor, stretched on her back with her hands behind her head. Kevin would read aloud—a whole load of complicated, classic, dead long books. Whenever I saw him doing that with her, it always made me feel a bit jealous.

  You don’t miss people with the same intensity all the time. You can spend days, weeks even, not thinking about someone, and then all of a sudden something reminds you, and it’s as if you’ve been shot in the face with a sadness gun.

  Even though I tried to forget, there were times at Blackbrick when I thought about my mum. When she first left, I didn’t think she could get any farther away. Now she might as well have been on another planet. I missed my old granddad, too, even though I wondered how I could, seeing as I was living in the middle of his childhood. I was more or less sure he would be missing me, no matter what everyone was saying about his banjaxed brain.

  A few times, when those kinds of things went through my head, I’d pull Corporamore’s study apart when nobody else was around, trying to find the key to the south gates. I searched in the kitchen drawers and in the old cupboards and through the lidded boxes that sat on top of the dressers in the pantry. One night I had what I thought was a superbly simple idea—I thought it had been staring me in the face all along, which made me realize that I might not even need the stupid key. I brought a rickety warped ladder from the stables down to the south gates and I climbed over, quite pleased with myself until I realized that there was no future on the other side, only the same old past, and I had to climb back in again feeling like a total idiot.

  And then there were other times when I didn’t try that hard at all. Eventually I stopped trying altogether, and as I said, things grew normal and routine. Everything becomes ordinary in the end, even living in a different time zone.

  People think that the past always stays the same, but that’s not true. The past changes exactly the same way as the present does, and people in it change too, and the person who changed most was Maggie McGuire—though, as I said, she never ever complained about anything, which made it easier for us all to keep on pretending that she was okay.

  There was one person who did complain and who kept on complaining and who looked like she would never stop, and that was Cordelia. Over the months, she seemed to discover whole new oceans of demandingness and obnoxiousness, but we had to put up with it, and we weren’t supposed to say anything to her.

  I wanted to tell her how spoiled and mean she was, but it’s funny how some things are difficult to say. Cordelia kept on being able to do what she liked, and we had to keep on accepting it. It was to do with something that Kevin and Maggie called the pecking order. I’m not saying I liked it or anything. I’m just saying that’s the way it was.

  I think it was nearly summer when Maggie got obsessed with apples. They were the only things she wanted to eat, and she didn’t really have an interest in anything else. She said she woke up with images of apples in her head. She said she dreamed of apples, red and crunchy and sweet. She said she might go into a decline if she wasn’t able to eat them. If Maggie had had cravings for potatoes or turnips or jam or onions, then we would have been grand. The Blackbrick pantry was full of stuff like that. It was Kevin who suggested that it might be a good idea to have a look in the orchard. “That’s normally where you get apples,” he said cleverly.

  So the two of us went to the orchard, where the trees hung over into the courtyard. Except that there were no apples because apparently it was the wrong time of year. But after a bit of searching around, we found this shed with wooden buckets that were full of apples that somebody must have stored from the season before. We ran back to the kitchen, where there were big stringy, muddy sacks with dirty potatoes in them. We emptied one of them out, making a big potato mountain in the pantry. Back in the orchard shed, I stood at the door keeping watch while Kevin filled that old ropy sack with apples from the wooden buckets. Apples for Maggie.

/>   We carried them to her room, the two of us feeling very proud of ourselves, dragging that massive sack behind us. We told her that we’d risked our lives to get them, which might have been a slight exaggeration, but in fairness, the whole thing had actually been quite difficult.

  “Oh, Kevin, Cosmo, you’re as kind as anything.” But she explained that she suddenly didn’t want apples nearly as much as she used to. “It’s milk that’s the only thing I’m dreaming of now,” she said.

  “Thanks for keeping us posted,” I said, feeling a tiny bit annoyed.

  But I kept hearing her voice over and over in my head telling us how we were as kind as anything. And Maggie had this special way of saying “oh” that always made my heart flip over. Sometimes I hear it in my dreams still, but not very often.

  Chapter 17

  IT WAS hard to stay annoyed with Maggie for too long, no matter how often she changed her mind. Her face was still pale and oval and her hair was still all curly and messy and she was basically still gorgeous. Even more gorgeous, actually. When someone is as lovely as she was, you sort of want to do things for them even if you think occasionally that maybe they’re being a bit demanding.

  Kevin did say that he was getting kind of tired of being at her “beck and call” the whole time and responding to all her whims. But I didn’t mind too much at all. When she asked me if I could possibly do Cordelia’s breakfast again once in a while, there was a part of me that was actually happy.

  “Do you consider that girl to be your friend?” Cordelia asked me as I was trying to get out of her room one morning, not long after the apple heist.

  “Yes, I totally do.”

  “Well, I’d watch out if I were you. I don’t think she’s the kind of person you should be friendly with at all. A boy can get a bad reputation very easily, and you wouldn’t want to get one, Cosmo, would you?”

  I didn’t really know what she meant. I said I wasn’t all that concerned about reputations. I told her everyone should make up their own minds and not listen to other people’s theories. Cordelia replied that in actual fact, reputation was everything, which was the irony of the century, considering how much everybody hated her.

  She told me that Maggie was an unchased girl. “Utterly unchased” is what she said. Her father had told her that. I took it to be a very good thing. I told Cordelia that I thought everyone had the right not to be chased, and she looked at me with a big mystified expression in her eyes and a crinkly little frown on her brow.

  “Listen, Cordelia, I’ve got a lot of stuff I need to do, so I’d better go off and do it, right? I’ll see you soon.”

  She spoke to me then. Her teeth were clenched. She said that I was not to take my leave of her until she said so. She said I was an insolent boy, which means “cheeky and disrespectful.” She said that she was always to be considered the most important chore that I had to attend to. I felt like telling her to flip off with herself.

  We ended up having to give Cordelia that riding lesson that Corporamore had said he wanted her to have. She trotted down to the stables in a light-pink velvet coat that swung from side to side, and a stupid hat. Kevin said, “Miss Cordelia, hop up there, and we’ll start off nice and carefully.” But I whispered the secret fast signal into Somerville’s ear, and that brilliant horse ended up clattering off with Cordelia desperately holding on to her neck. By the time we got back, Cordelia’s face was light green in color, but she didn’t say anything about it, and neither did we.

  The next day Mrs. Kelly told us that Miss Cordelia had decided she didn’t want riding lessons from us anymore, and me and Kevin gave each other a high five in the cellar.

  One afternoon not long after that, Maggie McGuire disappeared. The sun was like a big blob of honey dribbling out of the sky. We had finished all our chores, and we went off to hang out with Maggie like we often used to. When we got to her room, everything was neat and tidy and all her clothes were gone, and there was this little note on the pillow of her carefully made bed.

  Part of me was proud. The letters were perfectly formed and only a few of the words were spelled incorrectly, and there was nothing wrong with the grammar at all. But still, even though it was a well-written note, it was one of the worst things that I’ve ever read on a piece of paper of any kind:

  Dear Kevin and Cosmo, I am leveing this house today, and I do not think that I will be back. I wish I could stay here with you both, but I cannot so I’m afrade there you have it. Thank you for your frendship and your kindness. I will never forget it as long as I live. Please don’t try to find me. I must leve and I beg you not to folow.

  I don’t know if you’ve ever looked for someone and they’re not there. It’s a lousy feeling. Your skin goes all sweaty and you keep going back to places that you’ve been before, kind of knowing that you’re not going to find them but looking, searching, looking all the same, and your heart starts to go really fast, and you can’t think about anything else, and you begin to think that you’d do anything at all that you possibly could to find the person you are looking for. I remembered the way my mum had told me she was going to Australia, and how I hadn’t said a word, how I’d pretended I didn’t even care. I should have told her the truth: I should have said that it was definitely not okay for her to leave me like that, that I needed her to stay with me.

  I wasn’t going to make that stupid mistake again—not this time, not with Maggie.

  I started calling her name and then shouting it, and then eventually I screamed, “MAGGIE, MAGGIE, MAGGIE,” over and over again as if I was practically insane.

  Eventually Kevin said it was no good. That we’d have to go to bed and start looking for her again in the morning. I said, “Are you seriously telling me that you’re going to be able to sleep?” And he said probably not but we’d better try because there was no point in the two of us being totally wrecked on top of everything else.

  I pretended to go to bed. But as soon as Kevin said good night and closed his door, I went straight out again.

  My hands and my legs were shaking when I swung onto Ross that night, and we galloped, trying to break the sound barrier, feeling as if we were going faster than any human being and horse had ever gone before, so that we could find Maggie.

  I wasn’t going to give up. I didn’t think I ever would. I was sure she needed help. It was only after we’d trampled almost everywhere else on the estate that I thought about the gate lodge. It was one of those moments that you have in life when you ask yourself why you hadn’t thought of something sooner.

  By the time we got there, Ross and I were dog-tired, but we didn’t care that much about ourselves. I tried to open the front door, but it was locked from the inside.

  There were a few long, thinnish wooden logs lined up in a sort of pyramid shape alongside the house. I picked one of them up. It was hard to keep my balance, so I staggered around for a bit.

  I held the log as steadily as I could and then I ran, roaring, toward the door.

  The house was creaky and damp, but someone had tried their best to clean it up. There were broken old chairs propped against the walls, and someone had put wildflowers into a chipped cup that was sitting on a table. I heard a noise in the next room.

  It was her. She was there. Which just goes to show, you should listen to your gut instincts every so often.

  She was lying on a mattress on the floor. And for a moment I didn’t notice anything else except her face, but then there was this little bleating, grumbly sound and I looked among the ragged blankets that she was surrounded by, and that’s when I saw the baby, all tiny and squirmy and pink.

  “Maggie,” I said, moving closer to where she was lying. “Maggie, why didn’t you ever say anything?”

  And then the little baby’s eyes looked straight into mine without question or judgment or fear. I kept on looking at the way her mouth moved and how her fingers jerked and her eyes flickered open and closed and her legs stretched out and how little puffs of newborn breath went in and out of h
er extremely small nose.

  I even held her for a little while in my own arms.

  Her miniature hands kept opening and closing as if she was trying to cast a spell on the world. Some people say that newborn babies can’t see much, but when I held my finger in front of her, she looked straight at it. And when I opened and closed my mouth like a goldfish, she copied me. I swear. Check it out on the Internet. Newborn babies do actually do that. They have this inbuilt ability to copy the people they see around them in quite sophisticated ways almost as soon as they are born. And they’re designed to survive.

  So even though you might be very worried about how small they look, they have a great instinct for protecting themselves. Apparently if you put their hands against the branch of a tree, they’ll cling on really tight and dangle there, hanging on and not falling. I didn’t try that, though. To be honest, I wouldn’t really recommend trying that with any new babies you happen to know.

  The whole time Maggie kept looking at this tiny new person in a totally special, kind, fierce sort of a way. I wanted to do something then. It was an urge I had. Not a dodgy urge or anything. I just wanted to hold Maggie’s hand. That’s all.

  It was a feeling beyond logic or anything that scientists or researchers or theorists can explain in words or in pictures or in diagrams or in anything else. It’s that thing that’s always there. That thing that’s ancient and deep. That thing that never goes away.

  Her hair was even messier than usual and strands of it were stuck to her forehead. I brushed them away from her face as I had dreamed of doing, except in my dream the circumstances were completely different.

  She asked me how I’d known where to find her. I said I would have kept on looking until I did. She said she had wanted to do this on her own, that she didn’t want to drag anyone else into her situation, that it would be much better if nobody knew about it.