Midnight Blue

by Pauline Fisk

  Bonnie thought of the family faces in their frames on the stairs. Just the one family… 'You've always been here then?' she said.

  'Arabella doesn't know what it is to live anywhere else,' Mum replied. 'And nor do I, and nor do any of us.'

  A pang of envy shot through Bonnie. She thought of the times she and Grandbag had moved house. And now she and Maybelle had moved to what was supposed to be their proper home, only she’d run away. How could she explain her life to these people who could never understand?

  'You don't have to tell us where you come from,’ Mum said unexpectedly. 'We'll never ask, you know. You'll find this isn't like anywhere else you've been. You're safe up here. We're glad to have you. If you've come, it's because we need you. Edric and Godda always give us the things we need. And maybe, who knows, you might need us too.'

  You're safe up here... It was as though the whole world had been spinning and suddenly everything stopped still and the ground was firm. 'You talk…' Bonnie said, quite unable to express her true feelings, 'you talk as if you believe Edric and Godda are really down there somewhere.'

  Mum smiled. 'I'd like to,' she said. 'It's a nice idea, isn't it? I've never seen them myself, but I like to think my grandfather must have seen something to paint a picture like that. Yet lots of people look for Edric and Godda and never see them. Do you want to sit here on your own, or would you like to come and help me make some tea?'

  They made up sandwiches and put them in a basket. Mum filled the thermos flasks with tea and Jake rested beneath the kitchen window watching them. Mum hummed to herself. She wrapped a fruitcake in a napkin and put it in the basket too. She took a huge pot of casserole out of the fridge and put it in the oven and said it would be cooked and ready when they came back down. Harvesting, she said, was very hungry work. 'All food and fields and nothing in between.'

  They climbed up the hill again. 'You mustn't push yourself,' Mum said. 'You mustn't do too much. If you're tired you must go straight back down.'

  Bonnie promised that she would. Mum began to talk again.

  ‘It's nearly time for the Bank Holiday Show,’ she said. 'We always work like mad to get the harvesting done so that we can attend. It means a lot when you don't get off the hill much. There are sideshows and stalls and prizes for everything, but we wouldn't be able to enjoy them if the harvesting was only half-done. This can be a bad month for summer storms. You just have to work when the weather's good. And talking of storms, I hope we get finished soon. Something's on its way.'

  'How can you tell?'

  'It's too still. Look across the valley. It was crystal clear all afternoon, but now it's soft and mellow. I’d say rain’s on the way.'

  Bonnie looked, but found it hard to take in what Mum was on about.

  'This is me,' she thought. 'Climbing this hill with this thermos in my hand. Me, belonging in this strange, amazing place and looking for signs and talking about weather. Me, being made welcome with no questions asked.' She looked at Mum and wanted nothing but to be Mum's own girl, to share the hill with her forever, to make this magic place her own.

  'We thought you were never coming.' Arabella ran down to greet them. 'We're starving for food and panting with thirst.'

  Her face shone with husks of grain and sweat. She grabbed Mum's arm and pulled the basket towards her to see what it contained. 'Fruit cake! That looks wonderful. And Bonnie, oh great, you've brought some tea.'

  Arabella slid between them and slipped her arm in Mum's. They climbed the last few steps as a threesome and stopped in the shadow of the harvester. Then, with Arabella's help, Mum began to distribute the tea.

  Bonnie woke in the night and couldn't remember where she was. Then she saw Arabella moving across the floor like a little ghost in a long white nightdress, and realized she was crying. Bonnie stared at her. In the shadows of the night, in the same nightdress and without all the tiny, subtle differences, she might have been staring at herself. How many times, after all, had she looked like that when she was crying?

  'Arabella, what's the matter?' Mum stood in the doorway in her dressing-gown. Arabella ran to her, sobbing that she’d had a nightmare. 'It's this awful weather,' Mum said. 'It's too hot and still. There's no air. Quiet now, you mustn't wake Bonnie.'

  She led Arabella away and shut the door after them. Bonnie lay for some time waiting for Arabella to return, but she didn't. At last, and not knowing quite why, she climbed out of bed, crossed the room, opened the door. There was not a sound anywhere. Mum's and Dad's door was ajar. Bonnie crept up to it and peered through the crack.

  They were all asleep. Mum and Dad, and Arabella between them. Mum's hand was in Arabella's hair, Dad's arm across her body. The moon lit their faces.

  Bonnie went back down the corridor. She got into bed and stared at the cold comfort of wide-eyed china dolls and teddy-bears with glassy eyes. She shut her own eyes, but even in the dark she could see the three of them in the bed together, and she thought, 'Every good thing I've ever wanted is here, and my place in it is hers because she's their daughter.' And a feeling came over Bonnie - one she'd had this afternoon when Arabella took Mum's arm, and again when they served tea together, and again before that, when she and Arabella first met over breakfast. It was just like, well, just like the way Bonnie felt when she thought of Grandbag. Just like hate.

  'I didn't just run away from Grandbag,' she thought, 'I ran away from hate.'

  It was one of those bits of self-revelation that hits you as you drift off to sleep and you wonder if you'll remember in the morning. How could Bonnie not have known? It was the monster that had towered like a dark balloon above her head for years. A monster with a red and fiery mouth that drank people's sadness like smoke to make it grow, to fuel it till it had the strength to carry them away beyond their will to choose where they would go or what they would do.

  And if she hated Arabella, what would it make her do?

  11

  Arabella was up in the barn watching Dad stacking bales when Bonnie went down the yard and out onto the track.

  Dad looked up as the gate rang shut. The day was horribly hot and close. He wiped his shiny face. 'Where's Bonnie off to?'

  A shadow fell across Arabella's face. She picked at her dress which stuck moistly to her.

  'I don’t know,’ she said. ‘She woke up and she was coming up the hill with us again, and we were laughing about something. I can't remember what, but suddenly she said she'd changed her mind. It was as if she'd remembered something. I know it's silly, but she frightened me. She said she wanted to be on her own so I... I came down without her.'

  'It takes time to make friends,' Dad said. 'It'll take time for both of you. You must be patient.'

  'I stopped feeling shy,' Arabella said. She climbed down off the bales. 'And then I thought it was wonderful. But now, oh I can't explain. There's something about her...'

  'Open the top gate for me, will you?' Dad said.

  Bonnie sloped down the hill as fast as she could. Fearful of the hate in her heart, she knew she had to put as much distance between herself and Arabella as possible. She felt as if she’d break with bitterness, but she had to do it now, quickly, before she changed her mind. She realized, miserably, that she'd left her little cardboard suitcase behind, but she couldn't go back. The track twisted and turned. It seemed to take the longest, most tortuous route down to the road, so Bonnie decided to cut across the fields. Sheep ran away from her. She passed right down one field, climbed over a stile, picked her way down another. Here she found herself where the track bent almost double and dipped into what Arabella had pointed out as Hope Dingle.

  The Dingle was far more than the little clump of trees Bonnie had seen from above. It dug down deep. Trees rose up on either side and leaves hung limp in the airless morning. As she scrambled down into the twisty canyon, Bonnie heard the tinkling of the brook. The track here was deeply rutted. It was stony, with great slabs of the base substance of the hill rising above the softer covering of earth and grass
. Bonnie began to really understand why Arabella didn't go to school, and why a once-a-year Bank Holiday Show was such an event. It was difficult getting off Highholly Hill.

  The track twisted again and the white wooden railings of a narrow bridge stood out against the dark banks on either side. Bonnie clattered over the bridge. Briefly she thought of climbing down to the water below to bathe her sticky, hot body. But if she paused, she'd think. She'd ask herself where she was going and what she planned to do when she got there.

  Bonnie climbed up the crumbling track, out of the Dingle on the other side. The banks folded back. Finally she was clear of trees. The valley lay below her, close and clear. She could see the main road and houses in the village and tractors and harvesters in the fields up on the other side. She could see a garage with a petrol sign and cars.

  'Now where shall I go?'

  The track looped again. Bonnie scrambled into another field and despite the sticky heat, began to run. If she followed the hedge line all the way down, she'd hit the road long before the track finally got to it. She came to a stile, got over it, stumbled through the next field and was near enough to the road to hear the rumbles of a milk lorry as it went by. She plunged into the trees that made a boundary to the field, expecting to squeeze out the other side of them onto the road itself. But they were thicker than she had expected. Once she'd pushed her way in she couldn't find the way out again. Low branches scratched her legs. She couldn't hear the milk lorry any more. She pushed on and saw yellow, stormy sunshine ahead of her. She wiped the sweat out of her eyes, made the last effort and got through.

  'Oh…!'

  Bonnie wasn't by the road after all. She was up the hill again, just below the holly grove, with the house below her and the skeleton stones of Edric's Throne above.

  'But I can't be...!'

  She had no sense of having climbed again, no sense of having struggled back up through the Dingle. She couldn't be up here. She must be imagining it. Or had she only dreamed she'd climbed down the hill? Had she been up here all along, simply imagining doing it?

  'But I went through the Dingle. I crossed the brook. I couldn't have imagined all that.'

  Bonnie got up. Her legs felt very weak. A voice inside her seemed to laugh, 'You can't escape. You can't escape.' She remembered Mum commenting, 'We say he keeps us on this hill. All these years, just the one family…'

  She began to force herself back down the hill. She found it hard to breathe. The air was so close. She ran down past the house and the farmyard and through the fields and through the Dingle and over the bridge and down the track this time, so that there couldn't possibly be more mistakes. She was hot. She was exhausted. Round and round the loops in the track she went — and then she stopped. The farm gate stood ahead of her and the yard just beyond and the house beyond that.

  'But it can't be…!'

  It was.

  'It can't be…!'

  The sky was yellow and storm flies stuck to her skin. Sweaty tears rolled down her cheeks and she put up a hand to wipe them away. 'What's wrong with this hill? Why won't it let me go?' She looked up at the white stones that dominated everything.

  'You'll find this isn't like anywhere else you've been.' That's what Mum had said.

  Bonnie sat down in the ditch beside the gate. It was too hot for crying but she did it all the same. She wanted someone, Edric, Mum, the shadowboy, to sit down by her side and explain. But no one came. She thought of getting up and doing it all again, slowly this time, carefully. But she couldn't bear for all of it to happen again. And it would, it would…

  Bonnie climbed over the gate into the yard. She dragged herself up to the house, which was empty, and stood in the kitchen waiting for Mum and Dad and Arabella to return, arm in arm and all together. Jake stirred himself from his place beneath the kitchen window. She held his head and looked into his eyes.

  'Oh Jake, I tried to get away. I did. But I’m back again and what will happen now?'

  12

  Mum woke up. The curtains were blowing about. The room, which had been so still, was full of a horrid muggy breeze.

  'What is it?' Dad stirred from the depths of sleep.

  'The curtains,’ Mum said. 'Their rustling woke me up.' She got up and closed the window. 'What a horrid night. Even though there’s a breeze, there's nothing fresh about it. Do you know what I mean?'

  Dad grunted. Mum climbed back into bed and curled her body up close to Dad’s. It hadn’t just been the curtains that had awoken her. There was something else, she said, but she didn’t know what.

  'Jake would bark if something was wrong.'

  'I suppose you're right,'

  'Go back to sleep.'

  'I hope I will.’

  Arabella woke with her head full of dreams of thunder crashing and lightning ripping like an earthquake along the ground. Her heart beat fearfully. She had a horrid, full, frightened feeling in her chest. Somewhere out on the hill, real thunder murmured. She laughed at herself.

  'Fancy getting in a state over some silly storm!' She fell asleep again.

  Bonnie woke to the sound of thunder too. She got out of bed and peered out of the window over Arabella's sleeping body. The wind was up and the sky was alive, a patchwork of clouds round a moon that was first bright and then hidden and then bright again. Bonnie watched the shadows come and go upon the landscape. She saw Edric's stones shine like white bones. She saw — right in the midst of them, whilst the thunder mumbled again —something dark moving. Then clouds swooped down, the thunder died out and the scene was lost.

  'He sits there when the clouds come down,' Mum had said, 'when the thunder roars and the lightning cracks and the very hill itself shakes.'

  'I'd like to know why I can't get off this hill,' Bonnie thought. 'I'd ask him to tell me that, if he existed.'

  She turned to climb back into bed, telling herself it must have been a sheep up there on the stones. And suddenly the hill shook. It was like lightning running right through the ground. Like an underground train beneath the hill. It was as Bonnie imagined the first shake of an earthquake might be.

  'If he existed.’

  Scarcely thinking what she was doing, Bonnie pulled on her clothes. The hill shook again, this time more gently. She tiptoed past Arabella, who never stirred, along the corridor and through the silent house. Down in the kitchen Jake arose and followed her, and when she got outside she was glad of his company, for the wind was loud and the hill unwelcoming and the thought of climbing alone, especially through the holly grove, was chilling despite the heat of the night.

  They climbed up together, ran across the holly grove, tripped through the shaven stubble of the top meadow, clambered over the gate onto the wild brow of the hill. Here Bonnie stumbled through the bracken. Long fingers of cloud swooped down for her and she couldn't see the moon at all, or Edric's Throne. She heard distant thunder again. Jake cowered by her side.

  'Come on,' she said. 'Come on, Jake!' He wouldn't move. Low clouds swirled around them both. 'I'm walking into a thunderstorm,' Bonnie thought. 'And I could go back. My bed is warm and empty and I could still go back…'

  But then she heard something. Something different to before - not thunder this time, more like horses' hooves. Bonnie tilted her head. With the blustering of the wind it was hard to tell where it was coming from. She heard it again, softer this time, and it could be thunder, she told herself, but it could also be the legend of Edric and Godda spilling out of the shaking ground onto the hill.

  Jake shivered against Bonnie’s legs. She touched his warm fur, glad of his living presence by her side. The noise was overwhelmed by the other creaks and groans of the night, and then it was gone and she and Jake stumbled forward again. The cloud was thick about them now and the path had become stony. Bonnie tripped and fell and got up again. She carried on. Crashed into something. Pulled herself off it and saw the sign. DANGER! KEEP OUT!

  It was Batholes.

  Bonnie pulled aside the nest of brambles and barbed wir
e and peered into the cave's mouth, remembering Arabella's wistful declaration that she'd love to explore down there. 'I never would,' she thought. 'I could never shut myself away from the sky.'

  She searched the ground for horses’ hooves, imagining the mouth cracking open into an eerie grin to let its riders out. But perhaps it had been thunder that she'd heard. Certainly Bonnie found no evidence of anything else. Bonnie looked up to Edric's Throne, which loomed over the hillside like a giant ghost. 'Come on Jake,' she said. 'If Wild Edric is anywhere, that’s where he’ll be.'

  Jake pressed his body unwillingly against her legs, but still he followed as Bonnie set off. She paused to touch him. 'You're a great dog, Jake.' And then she ran.

  The stones of Edric's Throne towered above them. Bonnie had never imagined they'd be so thick and wide, so fortress-like. She walked around their outer edge, looking for a way in to that smooth stone at the heart of them where she'd seen… What had she seen?

  ‘There’s no such person as Wild Edric,' Bonnie thought. ‘This whole thing is ridiculous. I won't find horses' hoof-marks. I won't find anything.'

  Bonnie put out her hand and touched a stone. It was cold as death. In the darkness she felt a crack running down the stone and saw a shadowy, black jagged finger which seemed to point a way in. Her shoulder slid into this crack. She held out her hand and let it lead her on like a pale, fluttering butterfly. She was in a pitch-black corridor with stone on either side and nothing to guide her but one pale hand. She heard the wind somewhere outside. Her crushed body was frozen now and she couldn't believe that the night, the hill, even the wind had ever felt muggy. 'This,' she thought, 'is what it's like to be a fossil. If the stones moved even slightly I'd be entombed for ever.'