Fly Me Home

by Polly Ho-Yen

  He swept the whole lot up into a big ball, pressing it together, then closed his eyes. He was saying something, but I couldn’t make out the words.

  The ball of moss quivered, and then it shook violently. It looked like it was hard for the old man to keep hold of it, but when it stopped, there was silence around us.

  The rain had stopped falling.

  The wind had stopped howling.

  The thunder had stopped thundering.

  The storm was over.

  22

  ‘There we are!’ The old man clapped his hands together delightedly and the ball of moss fell to the ground, discarded. ‘Better, Dog?’

  ‘You … you … you stopped the storm!’ The words fell from my mouth.

  ‘I did,’ the old man said, looking right at me, his eyes twinkling as though he had known that I’d been standing there all along.

  ‘And that’s not all I can do, is it, Dog? But you know that already, don’t you?’ The last question he directed at me. His eyes reminded me of two very shiny conkers. They made brown seem like the best colour in the world. Rich and bright, warm but mysterious.

  Suddenly I felt a glow, a warmth inside me. I knew something that I hadn’t known just moments before.

  The friend I didn’t know …

  The friend who had sent me powers when I needed them most …

  My friend was standing right in front of me, picking off bits of moss and tasting the odd bit, and then wrinkling his nose in disgust.

  ‘You left me those things.’

  ‘Of course, a horse, of course. I left you those … wonders.’

  ‘Wonders?’

  ‘Come on, Dog. Something to settle your nines, I think.’

  The old man disappeared into the kitchen and the dog stood up and stretched out, extending each leg. He was absolutely huge. When I first saw him out in the street, I’d refused to leave the house. Now, the dog loped up to me and bent his head. I reached out to stroke him, and only then did he leave the room and follow the old man into the kitchen.

  ‘Splendid-diddly-o!’ I heard the old man shout loudly.

  They returned to the sitting room, the old man ducking round the branches hanging from the ceiling, moving this way and that as though walking through a maze. He began to collect the things he’d pulled out, staring at each piece intently and then stuffing it away in nooks and crannies in every part of the room. There was a system here, but I wouldn’t have been able to tell you what it was.

  ‘Dog does not like storms,’ the old man said. Maybe to himself; maybe to me. Maybe to his dog.

  ‘What’s your dog’s name?’ I asked.

  ‘Dog!’ he exclaimed as though it was completely obvious and he couldn’t believe I didn’t know.

  ‘Hey, Dog,’ I said, and the dog stretched out at my feet with his nose resting on my shoe.

  The old man was sorting pine cones into different sizes and shapes. Among them I spotted one similar to the one I’d found.

  ‘Why did you leave me those things?’ I asked him.

  He was ignoring me again. He just carried on making his piles, and I thought he wasn’t going to answer, but then he spoke. ‘Why do we do anything? Because we need to, because someone else needs us to. Head, shoulders, needs and toes, needs and toes.’

  Just then I heard footsteps outside.

  Footsteps that flew and danced over the ground.

  Footsteps that I knew.

  It was Tiber returning at last.

  ‘Home time,’ the old man said, but when I looked at him, he was tipping the piles of cones into different-sized glass jars, screwing the lids on tightly and not paying me any attention at all.

  I dithered; I knew I had to go but I didn’t want to. ‘Can I come back? On another day? Can I ask you about—’

  ‘I told you,’ the old man said, a little irritably now. ‘Head, shoulders, needs and toes. If you need to come back, then …’ He didn’t finish his sentence, as though he had run out of patience with it.

  I turned away from him and his dog and his collection of things, the overturned boxes and the flickering glow of the nightlights hanging overhead. Outside, I found Tiber opening our front door.

  His eyes widened when he saw me. ‘What are you doing out here?’ he demanded, making me forget for a moment that he was the one who’d left me alone all night; I felt guilty for being outside.

  I opened my mouth to object, but then Tiber said, ‘I’ll keep it from Mum. Just this once. She would be so mad if she knew that you had been out at this time of night.’

  So I didn’t tell him anything and I didn’t find out where he had been either.

  And I certainly didn’t tell him about the old man and the dog from next door.

  I didn’t tell him how I’d seen the old man stop a storm.

  23

  ‘Some people!’ Mum kissed her teeth as she saw a car draw up and someone dump more rubbish by the bin. ‘I’m going to say something sooner or later. I’m sick of living like this.’

  She said this all the time but she didn’t really mean it. She carried on cooking her sweet-potato stew, but from time to time she stared out of the window towards the bin and the growing pile of rubbish around it.

  Tiber was lying asleep on the sofa, stretched out long and thin like a pencil. I wasn’t surprised that he was tired after being out for almost the whole night. Any time I tried to ask him where he’d been or why he’d left me, he would turn to me, his eyes dark. ‘If you keep on, I’m going to tell Mum that you went out on your own.’ So I stopped asking, although I didn’t stop wondering.

  ‘I didn’t know anyone could sleep this much,’ Mum said, and raised her eyebrows at Tiber, prone and still.

  I didn’t answer and looked at the wall on the other side of which I’d seen the old man and Dog. Among the piles and piles and jars and jars of things.

  I had to see him again. I had so many questions for him. Where did he get the things from? How did they work? And, I wondered a little shyly, why had he left them out by the bin? Did he mean for me to find them?

  For the next few days I didn’t get my chance though. It was half-term, so Mum took a few days off work, and both Tiber and I stayed in. We had a Big Tidy of the house, which involved Mum chasing us around with sponges to scrub out sticky old cupboards that never looked properly clean. After that she said we should try and decorate a bit, but as we didn’t have much money she asked Tiber and me to do some drawings to stick up. Tiber flat out refused, so I did as many as I could.

  Later in the week Mum took us to find the local park, but it was surrounded by roads, the ground littered with cigarette ends. The grass grew scantily amidst patches of mud.

  There was a sort of climbing frame, which Tiber and I tested out. Tiber hung upside down from the bars by his legs, then pulled himself back up and swung off easily. I couldn’t do anything half as good as that, but when I managed to climb to the very, very top, I called out to Mum to look at me.

  She didn’t hear me at first; I could see her looking around at the cars, at the people sitting on the bench. Her face was set in lines. I thought I could see her tutting, just like she does when she sees the rubbish piled up by the bins. Then she heard me and managed to smile and clap at me. I waved at her very carefully and quickly, taking one hand off the bar.

  Later on we got a phone call from Dad; it had been so long since we’d heard from him, and Tiber and I crowded around the phone, talking at the same time. He just laughed when he heard us babbling away.

  ‘Let me speak to Mum first,’ he said when he’d stopped chuckling.

  Mum went off into the hallway so that we couldn’t hear exactly what she was saying to Dad. We didn’t need to be told not to follow her.

  Tiber and I waited our turn. Tiber didn’t say anything, but I knew that he was just as excited about talking to Dad as I was. He pretended that he was fiddling with his watch, but I saw the little smile that kept creeping up around the corners of his mouth.

 
Now and again Mum’s voice would rise sharply and then fall, like it did when she was angry. Tiber knew the pattern too; he raised his eyebrows at me when she did it a third time. Then we couldn’t hear her at all; I thought Dad must have been talking non-stop.

  But when Mum came back, she didn’t hold out the phone to either of us. ‘He had to go,’ she said. ‘He’ll call back soon.’

  I didn’t know what to say, but Tiber slammed his hands down on the work surface so that it rattled and shook. The sound of his hands slamming down – that was exactly how I felt.

  ‘None of that!’ Mum shouted, but Tiber quickly turned and raced out of the back door. I didn’t know why he was going that way – that door only led to the tiny square of concrete that was our garden. It had walls all the way round. We hardly ever went out there because it smelled so bad.

  ‘No you don’t! No you don’t!’ Mum was yelling, and I turned just in time to see Tiber vault easily over the wall and disappear.

  Mum ran outside but it was too late.

  He was already gone, and by the time she ran out of the front door there was no sign of him.

  24

  ‘Stay right there, Leelu,’ Mum told me, and she grabbed her handbag. She thrust her keys into my hand.

  ‘Lock the door behind me with this key. See? Here. And only open it to me or Tiber. Do you understand?’

  I took the keys and Mum ran out of the house. For a moment she paused as though unsure which way to go. She looked one way and then the other, and then she started sprinting the way we go as a shortcut to the shops.

  I did as Mum said and locked the door behind her. There was also a thin-looking silver chain, and I put that on as well, although it didn’t look very strong; it reminded me of a bracelet I used to have.

  For a while I sat by the window in the sitting room. As each person passed I looked out for Mum and Tiber, but they didn’t return. After a while I sat awkwardly on the sofa, feeling that I should be doing something yet not knowing what.

  And then, as though drawn like a pin to a magnet, I picked up the keys Mum had given me, unlocked the door and took off the chain. I closed it quietly behind me and peered down the road. There was no sign of Mum, no sign of Tiber.

  I suddenly wished that everything was different. I wished that Tiber hadn’t run away and that Mum hadn’t followed him. That I hadn’t sneaked out of the house. That we were all together now, eating Mum’s sweet-potato stew.

  But that’s not how things were, and when I looked one way down the street and then the other and still didn’t see anyone, I headed towards the old man’s house. I glanced at the bin – at the teetering bags of rubbish and the grey lamppost – but there was nothing slotted into the little space today.

  I noticed that the door to the old man’s house was even older and shabbier than ours. It was blue, just like ours, but it was much more faded, and the number 96 was brown with rust. I looked for a doorbell or knocker, but there was nothing like that so I just used my fist to knock.

  There was no answer and I wondered if I hadn’t done it loud enough; I knocked again. With much more force.

  Rap, rap, rap.

  I thought I heard someone moving around inside, but at that moment I heard voices down the street and, without looking to see who it was, I quickly darted back into our house and locked the door behind me.

  The voices got closer and closer until they were just outside the door. They were laughing, high voices; they didn’t sound like Mum or Tiber. Then, gradually, they got quieter and further away, until there was no sound left but the steady thumps of music from next door. I ventured outside again.

  I saw it immediately. There was something lodged in the gap between the lamppost and the bin where, only minutes before, there had been nothing. I looked up and down the street. The old man couldn’t have been far away.

  It had been bundled into a plastic bag so that it stayed in the space, but it came away easily when I tugged it.

  Inside I found shiny, caramel-coloured acorns; there were five of them. I’d seen them on the table in Ms Doyle’s room and she had told me what they were. These ones, though, were much bigger.

  ‘Do you know what an oak tree looks like, Leelu?’ Ms Doyle had asked me.

  I shook my head.

  She grabbed one of her tree books and licked her finger to flick through the pages. ‘Here …’ She prodded one of the pictures to show a huge tree: its trunk was staggeringly thick and its branches bent at angles, making wiggly lines.

  ‘One little acorn,’ Ms Doyle said, ‘and it grows into this. Amazing, right?’

  I nodded; it truly did not seem possible.

  It made me think of the towering shea tree that grew near my grandmother’s house. She’d died a few years ago, but I still remembered visiting her. She was an ancient-looking woman, but when she smiled, she looked as young as a girl.

  ‘Magic!’ she used to tell me, grasping my hand with hers. ‘Magic can appear in the most unexpected places, Leelu. It’s just about looking out for it.’

  I held the acorns in my hand and thought about the five trees they could grow into. I imagined them starting to sprout in my hand; I would have to throw them into the road. Their roots would shoot downwards and split the tarmac while their branches reached upwards, up to the sky, growing taller with each second that passed. They would tower over my house, those five trees, and you would no longer be able to see the buildings all around. It would be a little island of trees; an island of my own.

  I knocked at the old man’s door again, but there was still no answer. I pressed my ear to it, and I was sure I heard someone moving inside, but when I knocked once more, the door remained resolutely shut. I rotated the acorns in my hand and then took the smallest one, holding it tightly in my fist so you couldn’t see that it was there.

  I squeezed hard, and wished.

  Let the door open.

  Open, open, open.

  For a moment nothing happened.

  Then I heard the sound of the lock clicking.

  The door slowly edged open.

  25

  There were the piles and piles of things lining the walls in every direction, though there was no sign of the old man.

  ‘Hello?’ I called down the corridor, but my voice sounded little, as though it had been absorbed by all the things and couldn’t get through.

  But then, in answer, there was a large crash from the sitting room. Dog began to bark.

  As I opened the door, he rushed up to me, sniffed my hand and then bounded back to the old man, who was lying on the floor, unmoving. Dog rushed back and forth between us as though trying to tell me, This way, this way.

  I knelt down next to the old man.

  His eyes were closed and he lay ever so still, as though he was sleeping, only without the snoring.

  ‘Are you all right? Can you hear me?’ I said.

  There was the smallest flicker of movement beneath the old man’s eyelids. A twitch.

  ‘I’ll get help,’ I said. ‘Try not to move.’

  I started to stand up, but just then the man’s eyes flew open and he spoke.

  ‘No help,’ he said. ‘No help. It can’t be helped, it really can’t.’

  ‘But are you all right?’ I asked. ‘Can you get up?’

  The old man took a deep breath and tried to move, but he winced with pain and stopped straight away.

  ‘I don’t suppose you could give me one of those acorns, could you?’ he asked, pointing to my bulging pocket.

  I passed him one of the bigger ones.

  He held it tightly, whispering to himself, and after that he was able to roll onto his side and stand up.

  He stretched his arms out wide, making the branches hanging from the ceiling beside him dance.

  ‘That’s betterer,’ he said.

  ‘The acorn fixed you …’ I said.

  ‘It stopped the pain. For a titbit.’

  ‘But how does it … How do the things do that? I’ve been able to—
’

  ‘Make things happen?’ the old man said, smiling to himself a little.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You needed things to happen, and so they happened.’

  ‘But …’ The room felt like it was spinning, rotating on an axis, turning upside down.

  ‘You were the one who found the things because you needed them. Head, shoulders—’

  ‘Needs and toes,’ I finished for him.

  ‘Well, yes,’ said the old man. ‘It really is that simple.’

  And then he started rummaging through his things, as he had done the first time I was there.

  ‘What are you looking for?’ I asked him, but he ignored the question and instead passed me a shoebox from one of the piles.

  It was stuffed with conkers and leaves and feathers and twigs, all jumbled up together. I wasn’t sure what it was he wanted me to do, but I started to look through the box and divide the things inside into piles, as I’d seen him do, covering the floor with even more stuff.

  I paused over one of the conkers. It looked a bit different from the others, although I couldn’t say exactly why that was. It was roughly the same size, colour and shape but there was something that marked it out as unlike the rest. I turned it over in my fingers, examining it for a moment.

  It almost seemed to glow, although it wasn’t glowing, of course. But it felt as though it was glowing.

  ‘Yes, that’s one,’ said the old man, and he plucked the conker from my hand.

  ‘One what?’

  ‘A wonder. One that will work,’ he replied. He placed the conker in one of the glass jars and then tucked the jar behind some other boxes, out of sight.

  I carried on looking through the box the old man had given me. Again, for a reason I couldn’t explain, I stopped to examine one of the feathers. It didn’t have any particular markings but there was something about it that marked it as different. Like the conker, it seemed to give off its own light, in a way that I couldn’t exactly see, though I could feel it.