Pete cried out louder because he thought this man (he looked like a man to Pete) was going to have his turn with the diddycoy thick-ead new boy. He cowered, crying, and wishing he could join his mother in heaven.
But the boy-man knelt down and took hold of his shoulders. He didn’t spit, or kick, or slap. He didn’t call names, and there was no great warrior shield other than his presence. He looked into Pete’s eyes and held his shoulders firmly.
‘You’ll be alright, mate,’ he said. ‘Those wankers will leave you alone now.’ He helped Pete get to his feet, brushed him down, told him to go and get washed as best he could, and then he walked away.
Pete was never troubled by bullies again. The boy-man, who was only one year older than Pete, made sure of that.
Pete told his dad about it all, and his dad made a complaint at the school. He found out that the boy-man had been a bit of a bully himself and had been suspended from other schools for doing bad things. He lived with some travellers on a camp outside town and didn’t come to school very often. They said he was a good kid, really, but fell in with bad company. They said that diddycoy meant a gypsy who was not pure Romany, like a half-caste, his dad explained it. They said that the boy with dark hair and bright eyes, with dark skin and little education was probably related to one of the travellers but none of the gypsies admitted to him being theirs; he just kind of tagged along with them and was accepted because he was willing to work for them. But where this boy came from and who he was didn’t matter to Pete. Whoever he was, Pete was grateful for what he did and went to search him out. They became the most unlikely of friends and Pete looked out for the chance to repay him for his kindness.
Six
NO MORE FIELDS, no more light sky. Now all Lily can see out of the windows are trees, and Myles cautiously slows the car. The woods become a forest and the forest is dark. She presses her head to the window and looks into the gloom.
What is she expecting to see? Some strange creature running through the woods alongside her? A unicorn or something more magical, Pegasus, perhaps, racing the car? He wouldn’t need to be going very fast. Myles is driving like an old person. It’s like he doesn’t want to get to where they are going. But, no, there are no unicorns in these woods, nothing wonderful, nothing to see but trunks of trees going past in a random order, and behind them more trees, until everything is a thick mass of leaves and undergrowth. Nothing interesting going on out there.
Nothing but stories.
She chews her lip as she remembers one of her grandfather’s stories. It helps take her mind away from the numbing pain in her stomach that makes her feel sick and weak. It was a visit, another birthday visit not long after the day with the mysterious book, so, probably, her eleventh birthday.
They drove out to see grandpa as usual. It always involved a long drive. Myles (she’d given up thinking of him as dad since he had caught her trying to get into the padlocked fridge one week into her starvation diet and had slapped her) always said that there was only one way to drive to the house, and that was to go around the wood and come in from the other side. He said that, as the crow flies, it was some twenty miles from the edge of their town and yet sixty miles one way to drive to it.
Sixty miles. Lily looked at the back of Myles’ head as she thought this and wondered how dull sixty Myleses would be when one was dull enough.
She’d asked why no one had built a road through the woods to get to the house and he’d explained that there was no point. There was only the one house and only one track, so no council was going to spend money making grandpa’s life easier when he had a way in and out of the forest already. He was lucky enough to have a phone and electricity. It was an inconvenience for the family to drive all the way around the forest to the other side so that they could reach it, but it made for a pleasant drive, Myles had said. A boring one, Lily thought.
She had taken an interest in that particular journey that day because she was starting to learn how long things took to happen. She had decided that of all her school subjects she preferred science, especially chemistry and physics. She was looking forward to learning more about them when she got older because she had wanted to work in a laboratory and wear a white coat. So she had been reading about distances, time and speed, weights and amounts, how much of this it would take to do that, how much of what was needed to cause this to have an effect. She had been trying to work out their speed by the distance between telegraph poles and the time it took to cover that distance, but then they entered the woods and there were too many trees, so she could no longer see clearly. Her mind wandered and she started to wonder why there was just this one house in the middle of nowhere, stuck in the woods on its own. And then she had wondered why grandpa had decided to live there. She’d asked Myles, or daddy, as she called him back then.
‘It’s an old family house,’ he had said, looking at her in the rear view mirror. She noticed that Pam shot him one of her looks, the one where she pinched her face up like someone had farted and she’d got first whiff. Lily chuckled at the thought but no one in the front took any notice of her. ‘What?’ Myles asked of his wife. Pam’s profile showed Lily that she was telling Myles to tread carefully, and the slump of Myles’ shoulders told her he knew he had to obey. ‘Ask your grandpa,’ he had said, and left it at that.
So, when they finally reached the house, and when Myles and Pam were happily drinking their customary cup of tea in the sitting room while browsing over the antiques and wondering how much the paintings would one day sell for, Lily had some alone time with Grandpa.
They were up on the landing outside Grandpa’s den. He had been in there to get the Birthday Book, the special album that had to come out on every birthday visit. Lily had, as usual, been told to wait outside. No-one but Grandpa went into the den, and no-one asked why, but she knew. He kept his money in there and his favourite book, the Birthday Book. She knew it was in the bottom drawer of an old desk. She peeked through the gap in the door every time he went and fetched it. She also knew that he knew she was watching and he didn’t mind. Grandpa and Lily had a special bond and she was allowed to know things that he never told anyone else.
That day, she sat on the floor, running her fingers through the carpet and wondering what had made the trail of small stains that ran from the den door to the bathroom. The carpet smelled of dust and she wondered why Grandma had never been around to keep it clean. It was a cream colour and nicely comforting to touch. It was also intriguing with that dribble of something. She guessed it was shampoo and then, being eleven, had this thought that perhaps grandpa had messed himself and not made it to the bathroom on time. The thought upset her, so she moved to sit back against the wall instead and looked across at the other wall with its painting.
Of all the paintings in the house, this was her favourite. The view was of the front of the house with the tall trees behind, the chimney at one end, the sloping roof with three, big, black birds sitting on top, ravens, Lily imagined, rather than crows. Crows were dull. There was the front door with the pointed red roof over the porch, the dining room window to one side, smaller than the living room window to the other side. That window was wide and open. You could always see straight into the living room as you drove up to the house, but not the dining room. That room always had drawn curtains.
There was something missing from the side of the house, though, the garage and the den. They had not been built when the painting was created so all there was to see were the two downstairs windows and the two upstairs, with the door in the middle. What Myles used to call a ‘typical house.’ Lily always called it a lonely house, and made lonelier because of the face in the window.
Upstairs she could see grandpa’s bedroom window over the living room, and there was the face looking out. The figure was herself, or so she always liked to think. In truth, the painting had been made over one hundred years ago so there was no
way it could be Lily. Besides, it could have been a boy’s face looking out.
She’d asked grandpa about the face, once, and he said the boy was him, but she knew that wasn’t possible, either, and had laughed. ‘You are not that old,’ she had said, and he had put his arm around her and squeezed her, told her she was his little treasure.
She was staring at the face and wondering who he was when grandpa came out of the den with the Birthday Book. He saw her looking at the painting.
‘Ah, your lonely house, Lily,’ he said, as he slowly lowered himself to the floor to sit with her.
‘Why is it here?’ she had asked. ‘And why lonely, grandpa?’
‘It’s a long, old story, girl,’ he said, ‘and one that you needn’t trouble yourself with yet.’
‘But I want to know.’
He’d given a long, deep sigh and put his arm around her. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I can’t tell you all, not yet, at least, but I can tell you that we’ve had a house here since before this forest grew up. We’ve always lived in this place, our family, and we’ve always kept a house here.’
‘We own the forest?’ Her eyes must have lit up or something as she said this because he laughed.
‘No, girl, we don’t own all of it. Oh, we have land around, special land, always have had, and the house is the centre of the land. Before it was forest there was grazing and we were farmers and such. Now there’s only me and Myles from the old family and he’s living over in that town, so there’s only me and the house, and the trees. Been like that a long time, now. Look.’ Here he opened the Birthday Book and turned to the front page.
It was the same front page as Lily always saw, and there was the same rough drawing, only more faded now.
It was a drawing done many, many years ago, and grandpa said it was very valuable. It showed a family group sitting down to eat around a fire outside a small, round house.
The building had a roof made from branches, and the people were wearing skins and furs. Around the house were enclosures for animals. Cattle were in the distance. There were hills and then masses of sky.
And it looked like something angry was coming out of the ground behind the round house, something like clouds, dark and swirling. There were storm clouds on the horizon as well, and in the corners of the sky, as if the picture was showing that something bad was on its way. And, if you looked very closely at the ground-smoke, you thought you could see eyes in it, little demon eyes, and they looked angry at having been disturbed by the family and the house.
‘This was drawn in the fifteen hundreds,’ grandpa said, as he said every year, ‘but it shows the place long before the trees grew up, and this roundhouse still isn’t the original house. We had family here right back to before the Vikings came, they say. It’s always been passed down, see? That’s how we know. Each generation tells the stories on to the next so they know. That’s why we always look at this book on your birthday.’
He turned a page and Lily saw a lot of writing in joined up letters.
‘What’s all that?’ she asked.
Grandpa turned to the next page, quickly. ‘Ah, that’s just rules and things,’ he said. ‘You don’t need to know them yet. We’ll talk about that when you’re older.’ Then he nudged her shoulder, gently. ‘You’re the last of our line, Lily, and one day, like they say in those jokes, all this is going to be yours.’
‘Even the painting?’
‘Even the painting,’ he said. He pointed to a black and white engraving torn from some old book. Lily had seen it before but still he gave her the story. She liked grandpa’s stories. She learned things from them. ‘Look, see, that’s some of the first trees being planted,’ he said. ‘The drawing shows the land after a great battle between two tribes, long before the Romans came.’
The next illustration showed a long line of trees in the far distance, right up on to the crest of the hill. Some trees were already tall and well-founded while in the middle distance there were saplings and people working on the land. In the foreground was a new house, a longer house now, with a thatched roof. The walls were made of wood and the structure looked more permanent than the round house. In front of the house there was a table with what looked like the same group of people sitting down to a feast.
Grandpa turned more pages, and, as the years passed into the future, the trees grew thicker and the house started to change, until, towards the end of the book, there were fewer people and more trees, and then, right up to date, photos from Lily’s own life, each one showing the house inside or out, and the members of the family.
As the forest around the house became more populated so the number of family members sitting down to feast became fewer until, in the most recent photo, there was only William, Lily and Myles sitting at the dining room table, and a vague reflection of Pam behind the flash of the camera caught in a mirror.
Downstairs they could hear the sounds of Myles and Pam clattering around, looking through cupboards and opening the bookcase. Probably looking for more strange books, Lily thought.
‘They’ll be looking for my treasure,’ Grandpa said, and laughed. ‘But they won’t find it. Because you’re here with me.’
He gave her another squeeze and she felt loved. It always felt good to be sitting with grandpa looking at that book on her birthday. It was always good to talk to grandpa, but it was always better to listen.
In the back of the car Lily pulls herself away from the window, leaves her memories and sits back. It occurs to her that what is happening today has a lot to do with books. A lot of what had been happening around her recently was to do with things that had been written. Stories that had been told many times, some that had never been told, some that were told in pictures, some that had been written down, and others that were yet to be written.
It had all fallen into place for her a few weeks back when Pam had started planning their annual birthday visit to the house. Lily had remembered the Birthday Book, the images from the past, the ‘rules’, the forest fattening while the family grew leaner, and then that other book, the one that Myles had found at the house and sneaked away, the one he was reading that day when Lily had been ten. And it had been then that the connections had fallen into place and she had realised what was planned for her. It all made sense, then, and that was when she knew she had to make up her mind as to what to do. She knew what was coming, but the question was, how should she deal with it?
The answer came to her one day when she was reading one of her chemistry books. And the answer was so very simple, as good answers usually are.
Seven
WILLIAM GETS HOLD OF THE GUN before Drover. He snatches at the stock, grabs it, and drags the gun back off the table. He throws it deftly into the air as though it were nothing, catches it expertly and his finger is wrapped around the trigger, the stock into his shoulder and his eye looking down the barrels before Drover gets his fingers anywhere near it.
‘What do you want?’ William demands, and his tone is menacing.
Drover’s first thought is, ‘how many cartridges are in there?’ And then he remembers that he loaded both barrels. And now both are being aimed at him.
But did he put the safety catch back on?
Drover raises his hands and sees, from the corner of his eye, that Pete has done the same. His dumb friend is looking at him and he looks scared. He’s going to do exactly what Drover does now, so Drover had better think carefully. He judges the distance between him and the big guy and thinks about the table in between them.
‘Just something to eat, mate.’
It’s like the old man didn’t understand him. His eyes twitch and he screws them up slightly, like he’s thinking. He moves his head quickly, shaking it, and says, ‘No.’
‘Come on, just…’
‘No. No eating. Not here.’
‘Drove
r, I need the toilet.’
‘Jesus, Pete, not now!’
His eyes are still on the old man but he can see Pete cross his legs. Think, fast. ‘Look,’ he says, and puts on what he hopes is a calming voice. ‘We’re sorry, okay? We’ll just go. Sorry, yeah?’
‘Drover!’
Drover sighs. What the hell! Perhaps this man has some humanity in him. ‘Is it okay if he uses your toilet first?’
William shakes his head.
‘He’s just a kid, mate, he’s not like you and me. He’s a bit special, yeah?’
That might have worked. The man looks quickly towards Pete. His eyes flash across and then straight back again. He’s alert, this guy.
‘Under the sink,’ he says, and nods quickly towards the cupboard. ‘Bucket.’
Pete doesn’t need to hear anything else and Drover sees him kneel down by the sink. He looks straight back at the old man, though, and the gun is still pointed towards his chest.
‘Thanks. You’re a reasonable man, I can see that.’ Drover tries some kind of appeal-for-sympathy with a submissive voice. He has recollections of good-cop bad-cop stuff from his own experience. ‘So, when he’s done,’ he can hear the sound of Pete pissing in a bucket, ‘we’ll just go, eh?’
The old man’s face is softening and he is lowering the gun slightly, but it is still in his hands and that’s not good. Drover won’t feel safe until he and Pete are out of the house and on their way. With his shotgun.
‘We’ll go, now. Sorry about the window, yeah?’
He wants to see what the old man will do, and he wants to get past the table. He starts to lower his hands very slowly and steps sideways, towards Pete and the back door, as if that is where he intends to go.
Lonely House Page 6