A Pack of Lies

by Geraldine McCaughrean

  Just then they came across the kindly Reverend Lovegood Divine who had been set to dig graves. He had been digging graves for some ten or twelve hours now, and had achieved quite an entrenchment across the foggy graveyard. Into the hole fell the galloping rescuers. Amelia and the two officers joined the reverend gentleman, in the twinkling of an upended horse, and lay quite stunned and winded. Evelyn looked on in dismay, helpless, and her large nose dripped with sorrow. Her bright yellow duster fluttered sadly down from her hand, as she saw the owner of the Grange totter sleepily out of the house. He had a window-box cradled to his breast, but more remarkable, perhaps, was the large bedstead he lugged along behind him, complete with silk sheet and four trailing chains. Two hounds bounded at his heels.

  ‘Aha!’ he exclaimed, standing at the end of the hole in which Amelia lay. ‘You came at last, in time for your wedding day, my dear! As soon as I can free my arm from this confounded bedspring, your kind father the vicar shall join our hands in marriage.’

  ‘Never!’ cried the vicar.

  ‘Never!’ cried the unwilling bride.

  ‘Ah! You will think differently after an hour or two in my charming torture chamber! Or should I feed these pleasant young officers to my faithful hounds.’

  ‘Oh no!’ cried the vicar, though whether he was thinking of the torture chamber or the young men, he did not say.

  ‘I submit,’ said Amelia, who was of course thinking of the young men. ‘I shall marry you - whoever you are - but you must set free my big-nosed sister and my kindly father and these two pleasant young men.’

  ‘Ach, let them go, but let them leave on foot - and may the great Grinwald Beast of the Transylvanian Plain crunch on their bones. You, wife, are the only one who interests me. Devil take me, woman, but you fire me with an insane passion. Let me get a taste of that frock!’

  But as he seized hold of her bodice laces and wound them around his fingers like spaghetti, a pawing hand emerged from the moat behind him and patted the grassy bank, feeling for a handhold.

  Out of the water came Fowlstrangler - a Fowl-strangler somewhat altered in appearance, however, for some important parts were missing. His hair was straggled with pondweed, and his pockets were full of fish. His silty crutch dripped slime. ‘Baron Greefen-bludd, I’ve been thinking,’ he said, as he pulled an eel from his lederhosen.

  ‘Ah Fowlstrangler! Make yourself useful,’ the Baron interrupted him. ‘Disentangle this bed from my arm immediately and fetch up my bride out of that hole. Our marriage is about to begin!’

  But Fowlstrangler was not feeling useful, for Fowl- strangler had been thinking. ‘My eyes don’t see well by candlelight. My ears don’t hear well in the dark. These brains of mine can’t tell a maiden from a window-box. When you put me together, sir, in your ancestral workshop, begging your pardon, sir, but it seems to me that you used some very inferior materials …In fact I say you’re a cheapskate, second-rate builder of monsters, sir, and I’ve a mind to be avenged on you for making me with poor eyes and poor ears and poor brains. If it pleases you, Master.’ And so saying, he fell on Baron Greefenbludd and, seizing him by the bedstead, picked him up and ran with him towards the moat.

  But if you think that they fell in and drowned, weighed down by the bridal bedstead, you are sadly mistaken. For as master and servant struggled and tore at one another with teeth and claws and horrid curses, the Grinwald Beast came lumbering off the Transylvanian Plain and ate them, blood and bone. It left the indigestible bedstead standing on the drawbridge. Later, a peasant stole it and sold it as a souvenir to a passing tourist, along with Bäddeschløss Grange.

  Amelia and her large-nosed sister, Evelyn, were married to the two young officers, of course, by their kindly father, the Reverend Lovegood Divine. They left Transylvania on the Orient Express, which in those days went out of its way to oblige.

  Alas, such days are long gone.

  ***

  ‘You think I’m going to fall for that one, fella?’ said Virgil, sheltering his wife in a bear-like embrace. ‘That’s a wagon-load of hooey you been giving me.’

  ‘Don’t take my word for it, please,’ said MCC, heaving the modern mattress off the bedstead’s base of springs. ‘If you would care to extract the bed-key - that’s a sort of spanner, supplied for the adjusting of the springing, don’t you know. Have you found it?’

  Unwilling to be made still more a fool of, Virgil groped among the springs suspiciously, and the bed resounded like a harp plucked out of tune. With a clatter, Virgil found the bed-key.

  ‘Note the words Facut in Transylvania which, being translated, you will find means “Made in Transylvania”. The maker’s name you will find stamped on the angle-iron securing the bed-head to the frame.’

  ‘Virgil, think of it!’ cried his wife, going down on hands and knees to sneeze among the fluffy dust. ‘Make the man sell you the bed, Virgil! We can put it in the shop and … gosh all-mighty, honey! See here where the chains were joined on! See where they just been nipped off short?’ (In her astonishment, Ailsa too went down on her hands and knees to look.) ‘Buy the bed, Virgil! Gosh knows, you don’t got to sleep in it!’

  ‘I don’t?’

  ‘No! Just put it in the store with the story wrote out real nice - like on the Dracula film posters. And maybe we could get wax-works. D’you think we could get wax-works, honey?’

  Virgil and MCC were, by this time, poring over the telephone directory for the name of a shipping company which would transport the bed from Povey’s Antiquary to the comic shop off the Chicago freeway.

  Ailsa wrapped the bed-key in tissue-paper for the couple to take away with them, and Virgil and Lindy-Ann left arm in arm shortly afterwards, laughing raucously and discussing the possibility of opening a museum of horror in the basement. MCC squared up the mattress, then dusted off his hands and shirt and said, ‘Well, that’s me out of a bed. I’d best find somewhere else to lay my head. Thanks for the job. Thanks for the cheese sandwiches. If I were you, Mrs Povey, I’d open up the books side of the business. Fiction, that’s what they want. That’s what everyone wants really. Isn’t it?’ And he headed for the door.

  ‘Mr Berkshire, wait!’ called Mrs Povey. ‘The shipping company won’t be coming for the bed till Wednesday. You could maybe stay till …’

  ‘Oh but I couldn’t sleep in it now. It’s someone else’s property. Paid for. That would be dishonest.’

  ‘MCC!’ called Ailsa, but though he turned back towards her, she could not find anything to say.

  ‘Ah yes,’ he said, as if reminded by the sight of her. He felt in his breast pocket and held out to her the lead soldier from the bric-a-brac shelf. ‘Take it. Keep it,’ he said brightly. ‘A souvenir.’

  ‘I don’t want it!’ she replied, with as much rudeness as she could muster. He shrugged, put it back into his pocket, and hurried off down the street in the direction of the library. Now and then, he broke his stride with an overarm googly or off-break or spinning delivery of some imaginary cricket ball.

  Ailsa ran and stood on the edge of the pavement and watched him out of sight.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  THE ONLY ANSWER

  After a while, Ailsa went back into the shop and sat down on the chaise longue. Her mother clearly wanted to say something helpful, something comforting, for she kept clearing her throat and dusting pieces of furniture with the palm of her hand. Knowing it would not help in the least, Ailsa turned and, at random, pulled a book off the shelf so as to be unapproachable. It was a trick she had learned from MCC. The book had a green, cloth-bound cover stained black by all the hands that had held it. The spine was torn down at the top so that the title was completely obliterated and she had to open it at the title page to read, The Man who came from Reading. With her heart pumping the blood a little too fast through her head to make reading easy, she let the pages fall open where they would, and found herself looking at a dull page - no action, no dialogue — just a description.

  HE HAD ON a green cord
uroy jacket worn bald in all the creases of elbow, armpit and round the button-holes, and an untied green bow tie snaked from under his collar. His white cricket flannels were colour-matched to his jacket by the long, oval grass stains on both knees. His suede shoes, too, were like a badly worn wicket, with a lot of dark, bare patches showing. His dark, curly hair had receded to that point which makes men look extra-intelligent and shows the veins in their foreheads when they are excited, and it curled directly into a short, dark beard which isolated his face from the paler skin in the open collar of his shirt.

  ‘Mother. Read this,’ she said, thrusting the open book at Mrs Povey and starting to pace up and down the shop in time to her heartbeat. It couldn’t be. He existed. She had touched him. He had to exist. Other people had seen him. Other people had had their lives changed by him. She struggled to recall the different customers who had bought or not bought at MCC’s bidding - the major, the engaged couple, the spoilt girl, the Americans, the man at the auction room. Where were they now? All gone? All untraceable? Who could she run to and demand proof of his existence? She bitterly regretted now refusing the gift of the lead soldier, for that, it seemed now, would have been some tangible evidence that just five minutes before a living, breathing man had stood in the shop and … A wave of panic deafened her for a while to the excited rattling of Mr Singh at the door. The catch had slipped and he could not get in, despite pushing against the glass with his forehead. In his arms was clasped the inlaid wooden box.

  Trembling with an agonizing delight, Ailsa slipped the catch and Mr Singh tumbled into the shop. ‘I opened it! I did! I did! I opened it with a hairpin and oh-so-delicate probing, probing,’ and he prodded at the air with the very hairpin, as if it would open to them, all three, the secrets of the universe.

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Mrs Povey quietly to her daughter. ‘I’m afraid poor dear MCC is found out. His “fictions” are about to be shown up for what they are.’

  Immediately Ailsa dreaded the awful revelation of the empty box and the complaints of the newsagent, cheated out of his money by a fast-talking storyteller.

  But Mr Singh’s face was wreathed in smiles. He had seen into the box already and now he pushed his hand in under the lid and pulled out a dull, dangling object which he thrust so close to Ailsa’s face that she screamed. It was an old, decaying, half-wound plait of hair, its original colour lost … as were the markings of the dead snake coiled up in the bottom of the box along with a nib pen and some brown, crumbling sheets of writing paper. ‘The bicycle-riding young gentleman’s story was all true!’ he said, with a look which apologized for any slight doubt he had harboured. ‘Where he is? I want to show him inside this very delightful box.’

  Ailsa turned triumphantly on her mother who had just read and thrown aside the green-bound book. ‘You see! He didn’t tell lies at all! His stories were all true, Mother! Look at the bed! “Made in Transylvania” and the chains just nipped off short! He didn’t tell lies. He just knew an awful lot, that’s all.’

  ‘No. That’s not it, my dear.’ Mrs Povey pointed at the book where it lay on the floor, the exact colour and texture of MCC Berkshire’s shoes. ‘MCC Berkshire doesn’t exist, my dear.’

  ‘But his stories!’

  ‘Are true. Yes. And if Mr Berkshire doesn’t exist but we know his stories for true, there is only one explanation.’ She walked away, too overwhelmed by the momentousness of her discovery to let them share it, and when she shut the door of the living room, her movements beyond it made not a sound. Ailsa turned to find Mr Singh gone too, the door sighing itself shut without a single ring from the bell under the mat.

  She bent to look out of the window, and the oblong of April sky she could see had turned a peculiar white. Flocks of migrating birds arriving with the spring flew in dense, straight lines overhead like typed words on a sheet of paper. She repeated what her mother had said, although the words seemed unable to escape her mouth as she spoke them, and a strange blankness seemed to be seeping into her brain. ‘If MCC doesn’t exist, but we know his stories for true, there is only one explanation.’

  Realization fell on her not like a ray of light or a clap of thunder but like a white dust-sheet settling very gradually over a piece of old furniture.

  Michael Charles Christie Berkshire drew the sheet of paper out of his typewriter with a shuddering sigh and laid it face down on top of the others, pinning it in place with a single lead toy soldier. Behind him, beyond the sun-filled open window, a shout went up - an appeal for lbw - and a polite patter of applause said that another batsman’s innings was over. Only a friendly village match, only the Reading Second Eleven, but the first of the season.

  Not that Michael was ever asked to play. Oh, they told him he was ‘in reserve’ so that he sat all day in cricket flannels in his bedroom overlooking the pitch, but he was never called on to play. He wished people would not humour him like that. Of course they wanted players who could see the ball to hit it. And run.

  He patted around the desk-top until he found his glasses, and put them on. The comforts of his room swam into view — the shabby furniture, the hundreds of books, the box-files full of manuscripts only waiting for the day he became a famous and sought-after author. But his heart continued to ache.

  Downstairs in the kitchen, his mother was making sandwiches for the cricketers’ tea, and their neighbour was once again lending the benefit of her advice in a stream of well-meaning prattle.

  ‘The trouble is, he doesn’t get out enough, shut away in that room all day — even in this lovely weather - rattling away at that typewriter — we can hear it, you know, right through the wall - three, four o’clock in the morning. I mean he’s never going to find a girlfriend, sitting in his room all day, is he? You should make him go out - take him out of himself it would. There’s plenty of plain girls in the world wouldn’t sneeze at him despite his …’

  ‘He’s very shy,’ said his mother’s voice in an apologetic murmur. ‘He’s got his books. So long as he’s happy.’

  ‘Yes, but scribbling stories all day! That doesn’t bring in any money, does it? That doesn’t help you with the housekeeping - and you a widow trying to manage. He’s just a drain on you, that’s what. It’s not fair. It was the same when he was at school, my Johnnie says. None of the other kids could make head nor tail of him; said he was always fibbing - telling whoppers, anyway. No wonder they ragged him — cruel, but what else can you expect? And there’s my Johnnie married and with kids of his own and a Ford Sierra. And what’s going to become of your Michael, that’s what I wonder? It’s only friendly concern makes me say it, but he ought to get out more … make some friends … make himself useful at least …’

  Michael Charles Christie Berkshire pushed the typewriter away from him and stood up and stamped. The circulation always packed up in his bad leg when he had sat for a long time. He caught sight of himself in the mirror, his eyes shrunken to piggy little smudges by the grotesque thickness of the glasses. His sparse, mousy hair was stuck to his pallid head with the sweat of concentration. That drawn, sickly face in the mirror was like the glimpse of an old enemy across the room at a party — someone he had spent years trying to avoid.

  He pulled on his old green corduroy jacket and felt better at once. Wasn’t at least the little lead soldier, standing on his finished typescript, saluting him respectfully? ‘I had to leave, though, didn’t I? I couldn’t stay for ever!’ said Michael aloud. ‘They got away from me. My characters. I lost control of them. You heard them: they were working it all out! They got too real for me!

  No, perhaps after all the soldier was beckoning rather than saluting: some strange, crooked gesture.

  ‘I mean I can’t go back, can I?’ cried Michael, and the pain in his heart was momentarily much greater than the pain in his leg. ‘It’s all just made-up lies!’ he suddenly shouted at the little lead soldier. ‘I’m just a damnable liar! Aren’t I?’

  A breeze from the open window dislodged the top few sheets of typing and
toppled the lead soldier on to his back. Michael scrabbled clumsily to save the whole stack from being scattered around the room, finishing on his hands and knees, putting the pages in order again. His eye ran over a sentence here, a paragraph there.

  ‘Of course I could always change the ending,’ he said, absent-mindedly slipping the soldier into his breast pocket. ‘Perhaps it would work better if I just changed the last few … That’s it! That’s what I’ll do! I’ll do it!’ And the ache in his chest immediately subsided as he sat down at the desk again and pulled his typewriter towards him.

  When the last cricketer was out, and the last uneaten cucumber sandwiches had been left deserted along the trestle-tables, Mrs Berkshire mustered them together on to a single plate. She could hear the rattle and ting of a typewriter overhead, and climbed the stairs to her son’s bedroom. ‘Would you like to finish these up?’ she began, putting her head around the door. But the bedroom was empty. ‘That’s strange. I could have sworn … How could he have come by me without me seeing? Still … it’s good for him to get out. I’m glad. I’m glad.’

  She went to tidy the desk, and took a quick, incurious glance at the title of her son’s latest little ‘effort’. ‘Oh, I don’t think that’s a very nice title, Michael,’ she thought primly, crossly. And separating the one sheet from the rest, she tore up the title page of A and dropped it into the wastepaper basket.

  From the bottom of the bin, a circular shine caught her eye, and she bent down with a gasp of relief to snatch up (from among a few torn sheets) Michael’s glasses. So nearly lost!

  ‘But oh! where could he possibly have gone without these?’ she said to herself.

  Geraldine McCaughrean is one of the most highly-acclaimed living children’s writers. She has won the Carnegie Medal, the Whitbread Children’s Book Award (three times), the Guardian Children’s Fiction Award, and the Blue Peter Book of the Year Award, and is known and admired for the variety and originality of her books, as well as her stunning storytelling skills.