‘Lenny?’ said my mum. ‘Let’s put this leg safely away, shall we?’ she said. ‘Take it back through to his room and leave it where it was.’
The leg was cold and lifeless, not so different from the logs by the fire. That’s all it was, a log. I leant it in the corner by his bed.
A few days later George came back. He looked different. George was fifteen by then and he was tall and skinny (we were all skinny) with dark hair and tiny brown eyes which darted about the place like a shifty little thief. He had on the usual dark trousers and work jacket everyone wore, covered in grime from the shipyards. We were in the hideout when he came, me, Mavis and Rosie, or rather they were and I was up the tree above it testing a branch for a rope swing. The hideout was made of fallen branches stacked against the tree with a thick layer of leaves on top, all held in place by a couple of well-placed six-inch nails Mr Tait helped me with. I hooted an owl hoot through my thumbs, which was our secret signal, but they didn’t pay any attention and George came striding up the hill towards us with his big long legs.
‘I thought I’d find you here,’ he said.
‘Oh, yeah?’ I said.
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Everyone knows about this place.’
‘Go away, George,’ said Rosie, stepping out of the den. Mavis came after and narrowed her eyes.
Normally I’d have encouraged these tactics, but George’s own little eyes didn’t screw up in return and he didn’t call us names. And I needed to know about Mr Tait.
‘I came for his leg,’ said George.
‘Well, it’s not here,’ said Rosie. ‘It’s in the hut, our hut, and you can’t have it.’
‘Cool your jets, Rosie,’ I said. I heard that one in the La Scala picture house.
He gazed up at me on my branch, just as Mr Tait had done from the floor in front of our stove, and I had that same creeping itch up the back of my neck. ‘Can you come down, please?’ he said.
Please? Did he say ‘please’? He never said please, not to me anyway. Mavis and Rosie waited for my refusal and then stared at me hard when I landed with a thud beside them on the ground. I threw the rope into the den.
‘You two stay here, will you,’ he said, and he started down the hill.
‘George?’ I called after him but he kept on going. ‘George!’ So I followed him. ‘Stay there,’ I told the little ones. ‘I’ll be back in a minute. George!’ Behind me I could hear Rosie’s feet swishing through the long grass, following.
He stopped as soon as I caught up with him. His eyes had gone small again like they always did and his mouth was tight. I thought he was going to thump me because his hands were tight fists at his side, so I kept well back. He sniffed and glanced over at me.
‘He’s dead,’ he said. ‘Mr Tait, he’s...’ George began to shake. His head bobbed up and down and he gulped for air. ‘He’s dead. He died when...’
‘No, George, he can’t be,’ I said. ‘Don’t be stupid.’
‘I went outside for a smoke and then... he was in the bed, by a window, it was open, lying down... .’
I ‘Stop it, George. It’s not funny.’
‘It was visiting time and I went out for a minute and when I came back, the nurse, she said...’
‘Don’t be horrible,’ I gasped. ‘You shouldn’t kid about things like this. I’m telling him when he comes back.’
‘He gave me instructions.’
‘Shut up! Shut up!’
He took me by the shoulders. ‘Listen to me, Lenny, do you think I’d joke about Mr Tait? He’s dead. D-E-A-D dead. He got consumption and he didn’t let on until it was too late. He knew he was going. Your mum must have known. They both knew but it doesn’t really matter, does it, ’cause he’s gone. G-O-N gone. Doesn’t make any difference now.’
His jaw jutted out and his eyebrows furrowed in the middle and I saw what I didn’t want to see: that he was telling the truth, this awful truth that Mr Tait was dead. But I didn’t know what he meant because of all the people in the whole wide world, Mr Tait could never die.
‘The doctor said tuberculosis,’ I muttered, ‘not consumption.’
‘It’s the same thing, stupid,’ he said.
I shrugged his hands off my shoulders and backed away a couple of steps and then, without meaning to, I plumped down onto the grass and stared down the hill at a man who was building an extra room onto his hut. It was Mr Duncan. He had lent us tools to build our own hut way back in the beginning. Being a quiet day with no wind, we could almost hear him scratch his lip as he stopped to consider his work. Further down I could hear Mrs Alder, one of our neighbours, whistling as she hung out her washing, something my mum thought was ‘common’, which it was: lots of people did it. I would have done it too if I could whistle. I pushed my lips into a pout and tried but as usual nothing came out but hot air.
‘I’m sorry,’ said George.
I couldn’t think what he could be sorry about. He was never sorry before. I didn’t expect ‘sorry’ from George.
I stood up again and went over to a tree and walked round it. Then I walked around it again. On my third lap I noticed George and then Rosie and then Mavis standing in a row, watching. George had his big mouth open, Rosie’s hand was heading for her ear and Mavis had fixed her eyes on me over her fist. Her thumb was neatly plugged between her lips. I continued round but bumped against the tree and lost my balance so I leant against it instead. The chimney smoke from all the huts ran straight up, absolutely vertical, past the stripes of trees, those that had been left when we cleared the hill for building. Mr Duncan had stopped fixing his hut and was rubbing his head. Mrs Alder had gone inside for more washing. Two squirrels were chasing each other round a big tree further along the road, but I lost them when they went in amongst the leaves.
‘What’s wrong with Lenny?’ Rosie’s whisper sounded close to me, but when I glanced up she was still standing with the others where I’d left them. George and Mavis stared.
‘I came straight to you,’ he said. ‘I thought you should know first.’ He waited for me to answer but a hard lump had gathered in my throat and wouldn’t let anything out. My head felt strangely cold and I reached for my tammy before remembering I’d lost it.
‘What’s the matter, George?’ whispered Rosie. ‘What have you done to Lenny?’
‘Nothing. I just told her... I just...’
‘Don’t say it!’ I said, and I put my fingers in my ears and squeezed my eyes tight shut. Then, remembering this was bad George who wasn’t to be trusted, I opened them again. ‘Come here,’ I said, and I went to Mavis and Rosie and took them by the hands and leant down so all our faces were close together. But I didn’t know how to say it so I stood up again and looked back down at Mr Duncan, who was holding a log along the side of his hut to measure it. ‘The thing is,’ I said, bending down again. I took a big breath and tried to find some words for this terrible thing. I could hear some rooks gathering in the trees further up the hill. They seemed to be discussing the news as if it was the price of butter and not the worst possible thing that could ever have happened.
‘Mr Tait’s dead,’ I said. The words rolled in my mouth like gobstoppers.
Mavis’s eyes went all around my face. She glanced over at George and then Rosie, then back at me and for a long time we stood staring at each other, I don’t know how long. She had taken out her thumb, but she put it back in again and slipped her free arm around me and held me tight. Then Rosie screamed and screamed and the noise went ripping upwards through the trees and cut through the whistling of Mrs Alder, who was out with her washing again, and the hammering of Mr Duncan at his hut. It even stopped the rooks and their chatter. Mavis and I clung to each other and I didn’t know what to do or why Rosie would want to hurt us all with her noise. George put his palms over his ears at first and then we all started shouting at her to stop. But she didn’t. She just shrieked, on and on. Perhaps she couldn’t hear us. Then Mr Duncan shouted at us to ‘turn it up’, by which he meant ‘turn it down’
, and the children from the hut next door came running to see what all the noise was about. Rosie stopped screaming and ran into the hideout when she saw them coming. She covered herself with some little pine branches we had put in there in case the Germans came, and she hugged the rope I’d thrown in like it was a teddy bear. Because the branches were over her head, all I could see of her was two eyes glinting back at me and her fingers curled round one of the sticks holding the branches in. She was only howling, not screaming any more.
‘Rosie?’ I said. ‘Come on out.’ But I didn’t really mean it. I didn’t want her to come out and I wanted Mavis to let go of me too. I didn’t even want Mavis, my only proper and fullest and bestest sister that I had lost in the bombing and had never wanted to be parted from since I found her again.
Mr Duncan and Mrs Alder and a whole gaggle of children arrived.
‘George,’ said Mrs Alder, puffing. ‘You again.’ She was red from running up the hill. ‘I might have known. What is it this time?’
I glanced at George and all the other people and Mavis, and wondered whether I should explain why George’s eyes were red. Then I ran off down the hill through the trees and left them all standing there, past all the huts and all the way to the road, and then I kept on running until I came to our hut and I stopped there, panting and sweating, and tried to see in. My mum was inside. I could see her head as she jerked across the floor on her odd feet, one wooden, one real. She came to the window and started hanging Mr Tait’s perfect white handkerchiefs on the string. Her head was still at last and she had a look of concentration on her face. She’d been doing this every day since he went, washing them and hanging them, and still they weren’t perfect.
What had George said? ‘Your mum must have known.’ Her face was pale like the hankies. She glanced up and saw me but I was rooted to the spot and couldn’t go in. Had she known? Why didn’t she do something? I’d have to give her the news and I didn’t know how to do that.
Mavis and George were calling for me. So were the others, and a little way up the hill I could see Rosie standing with a hand on her hip and a fist in the air. So, instead of going in to my mum, I ran further along the road and around the bend so they couldn’t see me any more. Then I went over a dry stone wall and into the field by the loch and across the field to the farm on the side of the hill. The field was wet from all the rain we’d had and difficult to run in because of all the hummocks the cows had made. By the time I’d got to the farm my legs felt like ton weights because of the mud caked round my shoes. I leant on the back wall of the barn for a second to catch my breath.
‘Lenny!’ Their voices rang out to me across the distance. I could hear the farmer with his herd on the other side of the yard. They were coming closer, probably heading for the field, so I jouked into the hay barn and climbed up into the loft. No-one saw me. I hurried to the very back of it and huddled under the straw.
In those days, when Mavis got scared she sometimes called me Linny instead of Lenny. It was a leftover from when she was wee and it got worse after the bombing. I think for a while she decided she didn’t want to grow up after all and tried to be a baby again. It used to annoy the life out of me, but at least I always knew when she was scared. That day I heard her underneath me tiptoeing into the barn.
‘Lenny?’ she said, and ‘Linny?’ and gave a big sniff. That peculiar lump happened in my throat again. But I couldn’t come out of hiding, not even for her.
‘Lenny, come on out,’ said George. He was there too. ‘Don’t be so stupid. What about the others? What about your mum? She’ll be wondering what’s going on. Lenny? Are you there? Look, Mavis and Rosie are upset.’
I could hear Rosie crying, loud but not screaming. ‘She must be in here somewhere,’ she said between sobs. ‘This is like my uncle’s barn. He had cows too and they had a field with lots of mud too and... ,’ Rosie went on and on and on, as she always did.
I thought about coming out. I was worried about her and Mavis being on their own with bad George, but I couldn’t. I had to hold my breath until my whole body hurt, so that they wouldn’t hear me, and I had to let the snotters run onto my lip and the tears down my dress without doing anything about it so that they wouldn’t find me.
‘Linny?’
‘Lenny?’
‘Lenny, come out now or I’ll come in and get you,’ said George.
They all stood and listened for me. And I stayed where I was and listened for them and then the farmer came and shouted: ‘What are you doing in my barn? Get away out of there!’ And away out they went and just as I had breathed out at last, I heard Mavis again.
‘Linny, I’m scared. Come out. Please.’ We both waited for ages and ages.
But I couldn’t, not even for her, and then the rustle of the hay told me she’d gone and I heard bad George on the other side of the wall outside with the farmer, but I couldn’t make out what they said.
And then I thought I’d die from holding my breath. It was as if my breath had decided to hold itself and there was nothing I could do. And when I did start breathing again it was like being sick but worse, as if someone had a hold of me and was shaking me all about, like George did once when I told Mr Tait he’d stolen someone’s overcoat and got on the bus with the money in the pocket for the fare and I’d seen him do it. Only this was even scarier because there was no Mr Tait to tell me what to do or make it alright afterwards.
And my brain started going in loops. ‘I’ll go and ask Mr Tait what it means that he’s dead,’ I thought. ‘Mr Tait will sort George out.’ It’s not like I don’t know what being dead means. I saw lots of dead people during the bombing and I know that being dead means not coming back. It worried me all the more that I was being so daft. Then I heard Mr Tait talking to the farmer, I was sure it was him, and the dry shoosh of his feet in the hay down below in that uneven rhythm of his from having a wooden leg. I heard the tap of his boots on the stepladder. Then George said, ‘I don’t see her up here,’ and I realised it was George I’d heard and not Mr Tait after all. I felt silly for thinking it was him but glad George hadn’t seen me. George’s feet went back down the ladder and then the cows started making a hullabaloo out in the yard, so I let my sobs out because I knew no-one would hear me and because I couldn’t stop myself anyway.
And then the hullaballoo rolled off into the field with the farmer, and George and Mavis and Rosie must have gone home, and because there was no wind at all to whistle through the eaves of the hay barn I heard nothing at all, only the most enormous silence. After a bit my heart stopped beating like the thresher at harvest time that we saw last year and I listened to my crazy upside-down thoughts and wondered.
What did it mean that Mr Tait was dead? What did it mean he was never coming back? These thoughts tumbled about like the autumn leaves that were starting to fall. Mr Tait always came back. He was my Mr Tait.
Chapter 3
One of the things I wondered about was what Mr Tait would tell me to do right then at that precise moment. This was just the kind of situation I would have asked him about. If he’d been there he’d have comforted me with his soft voice and probably said a prayer before we did anything else, and then he’d have gone back and told my mum that he was dead. Then I realised this was one of those circular thoughts that were making me so dizzy.
But he would have prayed, that much was certain, and even though my mum didn’t really do that I knew she didn’t mind if Mr Tait did, or if I did too. They’d sort of agreed about that, in the end.
‘Dear God,’ I said, but quietly inside my head, ‘please make Mr Tait not dead.’ I stopped there because however upset I was I knew that was stupid. ‘Dear God,’ I said, ‘please help.’ And then I asked for the thing I had just lost. ‘Please send someone to help me.’ Then I waited, but nobody came.
I waited a long time in the loft of the hay barn, enough for the mud around my feet to start to dry. This wasn’t as long as you might think because the mud was encrusted with straw too and it was warm
up there, so with the help of a loose nail from the roof over my head I scraped most of it off. Fighting with my feet also helped me calm down and I could think more clearly.
I sat there a while longer and cried again. It was fierce and sore and made my stomach ache and it went on so long I thought I’d never stop. It made everything hurt and curled me up in a ball so tight I thought I’d be stuck like that forever. A heavy rain started, so heavy it was like bricks falling on the roof and it scared me because it was like the bombing, and I thought my head would explode with the noise and with my sobbing. But after a bit I could breathe almost properly again and my arms and legs and body stopped being so tight and sore, and I felt heavy and tired instead, as if I’d walked all the way home from school into a strong wind like the day they took Mr Tait away, only all by myself.
But then I remembered Mavis and Rosie were alone with bad George and I thought I’d better get out of there fast. Coming down the ladder I could hear voices in the yard outside, and when I got round the corner I saw it was the farmer and a delivery man with a lorry chatting as they unloaded sacks of grain into another barn.
‘Afternoon,’ I said as I raced past them, and they shouted something back I didn’t catch.
I calculated the farm track would be easier than crossing the muddy field again. A row of little heads popped up over the garden wall of the farmhouse.
‘Hi, Lenny,’ called one of the heads, Laura, from my school, a nosy girl my age who’d been pals with George at the outdoor swimming tournament in the summer. (Mr Tait said we all deserved medals just for going in, which was all George did.) I didn’t want her, of all people, to see me. Being red-eyed was not something I did. I was usually brave and sensible. Mr Tait said so. And anyway, I was too old for crying.
At the bend in the road the huts appeared, lined up along the side of it beneath the trees as it swooped off down the hill towards the main road and the Halfway House pub and Clydebank and Glasgow. Down at the bottom near the next bend I saw George carrying a log. Mrs Alder’s children were with him and so were Mr Duncan’s girls. They were leaping up trying to catch the log, and that’s when I realised it was no ordinary log but Mr Tait’s leg, held aloft with the foot waggling about at one end. I stopped and held onto my tummy to keep its contents from emptying onto the road. I should have gone down there and sorted him out. I should have made him bring it back, but I was too busy gawking and trying to keep breathing. Then suddenly they drew back from George and I saw him shake the leg at them so they all screamed and ran back up the road shouting ‘Lenny!’ I stood with prickles up my spine and a chill gripping my stomach. I wanted to hide and have Mr Tait deal with it. But he wasn’t there.
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