Frank and Nick sat at the kitchen table. Nick had made some squash and they sipped at their glasses. It was nice to just be quiet for a bit, Frank thought.
‘I didn’t know if I’d see you today,’ Nick said eventually. ‘I mean …’
He let the words hang in the air.
Frank had the feeling she’d had when they’d first met at the rec, although she hadn’t thought of it in quite this way before, a feeling that he was older than he seemed. He talked, sometimes, like a grownup, and not one of the stupid annoying ones, but like one from a movie, like someone who knew their lines.
The map she’d drawn the day before, the one of the pirate island, was stuck to the front of the fridge with a cat-shaped magnet.
She drank the rest of her squash all in one go. It was cool and refreshing. Ice cubes clinked against the side of the glass, fell against her lips as she dripped the last drops into her mouth. They were numbing, stinging, but she didn’t feel sick any more. Even the aching in her knee seemed to be fading away.
She put the glass down.
‘I didn’t tell you the truth yesterday,’ she said, not knowing how else to begin.
Nick didn’t say anything.
‘About the … the cellar.’
She nodded at the door behind Nick.
‘When I went down there, it was … it was because I just sort of felt I had to.’ This was hard to explain; the words didn’t sound true, but what words would work better? She stumbled forward. ‘It was weird. I know I should’ve asked first. I knew I should’ve asked, but I couldn’t help myself. I wanted to hear the music better. I had to. It made me listen, made me follow it.’ She chuckled nervously, shaking her head and looking away. ‘And then, when I was down there I saw something, but I t-t-told you that I hadn’t seen something. I’m s-s-sorry. I don’t know why I lied, but I didn’t want you to be … to be mad. And you’ve been so kind, and I know I shouldn’t have gone down there, not without asking you first. I’m sorry, Nick.’
He sat there, staring at her.
His fingers tapped on the table as if they were practising a new nervous little dance for the big show Saturday night.
‘How are you feeling?’ he asked suddenly, pointing at her knee.
‘Better,’ she said. ‘A bit better, thanks.’
‘Do you play Swingball?’
‘What?’
‘Swingball. Dad set one up in the garden last summer, but it’s boring playing by yourself. He doesn’t have time usually.’
She followed him out into the sunlight and fresh air.
In the middle of the lawn was a tall metal pole with a tennis ball attached to it by a long bit of cord. It slid round and round on a spiral of metal at the top. She knew this game but hadn’t known what it was called. It was exactly the sort of thing Jess didn’t like to play.
They took a bat each and started knocking the ball back and forth, the pole glinting in between them.
‘What did you see?’ he said, after a bit.
‘I don’t know, not exactly. There was this thing, like a troll or an ogre or something … like something from a story or a movie or a comic … and it was making the music. It was huge and ugly and had a computer or a keyboard… and there was moss growing behind its ears and it was dressed in a toga like a Roman or something, and it was making the music, Nick. That beautiful music came from this monster. Like beauty and the beast. And then … then it saw me and the music stopped and it … said something. I don’t know if it liked me being there, cos it grumbled and rumbled, but I didn’t understand.’
Nick laughed, hit the ball hard with a thwock.
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘She’s like Dad. She doesn’t like to be disturbed when she’s working. And you must’ve surprised her. She doesn’t see many strangers.’
A blanket of warm summer snow fell over the garden when Nick spoke, making everything seem friendly again, fresh and clean and welcoming. Frank felt better for having said what she’d said. Or rather she felt better for having said what she’d said and not having had Nick throw her out or get mad.
‘Have you worked out who she is?’ he asked.
‘No,’ she said, knocking the ball back. ‘What do you mean, “who she is”? Who is she?’
After a moment’s hesitation, during which Frank hit the ball and Nick hit it back and Frank hit it again, he said, ‘You know I said my mum wasn’t here? How it’s just me and Dad here?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Well, that’s sort of true. But it’s also sort of not true. It’s complicated and I really reckon you won’t believe me. When I say it out loud it just sounds mad. I’ve never told anyone before. I’ve not really had anyone to tell.’
He stopped talking, hit the ball and watched it spin round on its spring, until Frank knocked it back.
‘The troll?’ she asked.
‘That’s my mum,’ said Nick.
‘Oh,’ said Frank.
‘Obviously,’ her stomach said, rolling its eyes.
She hit the ball again and said nothing.
‘There’s these other worlds, you see,’ he said. ‘Other universes and it’s to do with maths and physics and everything, but sometimes they touch, they bump up against each other. And when they do, sometimes something can get through. That’s what I was told.’
‘What do you mean?’ she asked.
‘In the cellar,’ he said, nodding towards the windows Frank had lain beside last night. ‘Down there’s where another world touches this one. It’s like when they touch, a window appears and you can see through for a bit … then they move apart a little and it disappears again.’
She thought of Quintilius Minimus. What was it the cat had said last night? Something about other worlds? Something about trouble? About danger? About shadows?
She swung and missed the ball as it sailed towards her, then away, and Nick batted it back for her.
This was odd.
She’d never known a boy whose mum lived in a different world before. If he’d just told her this, without her having seen what she’d seen, without having heard that unearthly, breath-catching music, she wouldn’t have believed him. Of course not. She would have laughed awkwardly and tried to get away, but she had seen. She had heard the music. She knew Nick was telling her the truth.
‘Still,’ muttered her stomach, not liking what it was hearing, ‘maybe you should run, just to be on the safe side.’
‘And that’s where I came from. That’s how I got here,’ he said. ‘I got lost when I was a baby; I found myself on the wrong side of the window. I was found on the wrong side. On this side.’
‘But,’ said Frank, not thinking of enough words to finish the thought.
‘It was an accident,’ Nick said. ‘Dad says I must’ve just been in the wrong place at the wrong time. The worlds banged together and somehow I popped through. Dad was drawing late one night and then he heard crying and thought it was the television, except he didn’t own a television back then. So he went down to the cellar and found me there, wrapped up and wriggling. And the window had shut and vanished before he got there. There was nothing there; he found nothing down there but a fat, confused baby.’
‘You.’
‘Yep. Me.’
She knocked the ball back and he missed it and she hit it harder as it went past again, sending it zooming down the coiled spring towards the bottom, towards her winning end.
‘What did he do?’
‘He did what any dad would do. He took me in. He looked after me.’
It was funny, Frank thought, how easy it was to talk about all this stuff now that they were doing something, now they had to concentrate on the ball. They slipped the words in between the batting, and the pole stood between them like a safety curtain.
‘But how did you work out that was where you came from? Did he tell you? Did the window open again?’ Frank asked.
‘I think it was the music,’ Nick said. ‘It was the music that first took me down there. I was only little,
three or four maybe, and didn’t know about any of this stuff, but I think I can remember hearing it coming up through the floor. And it was like being called home. Like a good smell that loops in your nose and pulls you along, like you’re floating. At least I think that’s what it was like. It was a long time ago. It’s hard to remember. It’s different now. I mean, now it just is what it is. I can’t think what it would be like if the music weren’t there.’
Frank could hear the faint echo of the music in her own head.
‘She was playing the music for me,’ Nick went on. ‘Playing it to say, “It’s all right, really.” I knew who she was the moment I saw her. I just knew. I’d not had a mother before, and suddenly I did. It was simple. She was beautiful and she smiled at me, but sadly, you know? And now, whenever I’m sad, she plays her music to make me happy again. It’s her way of kissing things better. The only way she has now.’
‘This window, this other world,’ Frank said, fascinated. ‘Do you go through? Do you go through to there?’
‘Is there Turkish Delight on the other side?’ added her stomach. ‘Are there talking animals? And a wicked witch? He’s having you on, Frank. This is all rubbish.’
‘Auntie Mimi tried to explain it to me once,’ Nick said. When he saw Frank’s questioning face, he added, ‘She’s just a friend of my dad’s, not a real aunt or anything. She knows loads about science and stuff. She used to babysit me sometimes when I was little. She’s the one who explained it to us, explained about the other worlds. She’s the only other person who knows about this, about me. Well, apart from you, now.’
Frank felt herself blush as she batted the ball back. She was one of just four people (and a cat, she guessed) in the whole world who knew this. (But at the same time, she was one of only two people who knew about the lucky pine cone Jess kept in the back of her sock drawer. But that secret just didn’t seem quite as interesting now.)
Frank remembered how Quintilius Minimus had said people were searching for the window. She held Nick’s secret tight to her chest. Super secret.
‘Auntie Mimi told us that when the two worlds banged together, a window between them opened for a moment – became a door, you might say – but then it closed again,’ Nick said. ‘I popped through that first time, but now it’s shut. Somehow though, that bang is still echoing, still bouncing. And each time it echoes the window appears. But only sound gets through now, only light. Each bounce or echo is softer than the one before. Eventually, maybe, it’ll stop and we won’t be able to see the window at all. I don’t know. It’s to do with energy and stuff I don’t really understand. But the fact is I am stuck here and she’s stuck there.’
‘Oh,’ said Frank. That was such a sad thought. She knew how she felt lying in bed on the nights her mum was away for business, how it just added to her loneliness. To imagine her mum being trapped in another world, unable to touch her at all … And then she thought of something else.
‘Oh God! Nick!’ she blustered. ‘I didn’t mean to be rude. I didn’t mean anything by it, but I called her a … a … troll. I didn’t know she was your mum. It’s just she’s so big and … well … trollish-looking. I didn’t mean …’
Her stomach said nothing.
But Nick just laughed, hit the ball so it spun round twice before she could even miss it.
‘Do you remember those stories you were told as a kid,’ he said, seemingly changing the subject. ‘Those old stories that had elves and goblins and ogres in? Stories about babies being stolen by fairies? Or those ones where some girl goes for a walk and comes back home only to find a hundred years have passed by?’
She nodded. The stories she hadn’t believed in. Stories she’d never thought you were actually supposed to believe. Fairy tales!
‘Auntie Mimi said that’s what happened to me. And what happened to me’s what happened to them. A world bumps against another one hard enough and something pops through … it could be a person from here goes there or a thing from somewhere else ends up here. And if someone from a world where everyone is small gets stuck here, people might think they were a pixie or gnome or something, mightn’t they?’ Frank nodded. She understood. ‘Where I’m from everyone’s just a bit bigger than here, that’s all. I guess it’s the world where trolls and ogres and giants come from, you know. But that’s not for definite. It might be people just made the stories up after all. Who knows?’
He laughed again.
‘But look at me! I’m massive. I’m the biggest in the school. I’ve always been biggest in class, haven’t I? I take after her, obviously. I’m clearly from somewhere else. It makes sense.’
‘Are you going to stop growing?’ Frank asked.
‘I don’t know,’ he said, shrugging. ‘I’m in another world now. Maybe things will be different here.’
She clipped the ball with her bat, badly, and it lost momentum, fell towards the pole, hardly circling it at all.
Nick leant forward, chipped it up, caught it in his hand and began again.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said.
‘No worries,’ he said.
‘No,’ she said. ‘Not for that.’ (She pointed at the ball with her bat.) ‘I mean for everything else. I mean for sneaking round your house. For sticking my nose in. For being nosey and for not telling you the truth straight away. For not trusting you.’
‘That’s OK,’ he said. ‘How’s your knee?’
She’d forgotten about it, but now it began to throb slowly, not hurting, but letting her know it was still there.
‘It’s OK,’ she said. ‘Thanks.’
Nick hit the ball again while she was distracted, and it flew off the top where the catch was broken and bounced into some bushes. Frank had lost.
As Nick lumbered off to fetch the ball, she asked, ‘How come I can’t hear her now?’
He pulled the tennis ball out of the undergrowth by its string.
‘I never know when she’s going to be there,’ he said. ‘She’s there most days; sometimes she comes in the night. It’s not exactly regular. Sometimes she’s already playing her music when I come home from school. I like that. It makes the day good when that happens. But it’s these bouncing universes, Frank. They bump together on their own timetable. I never know.’
After Nick had rehooked the ball on to the coil they played another couple of games in silence. There was no need to say anything else right then.
The sun was shining and the world smelt summery. There were flowers among the weeds of the garden and bees buzzed in their strangely lazy-busy way from bush to bush. Though heaped white clouds were building away across the estate, the sky above them was high and blue.
At some point the music began again.
‘Whatever you do,’ her stomach said, slipping its words into the middle of the morning like stinging nettles in a salad, ‘don’t listen. Don’t go closer. Don’t get involved. Secrets never end well. Leave the freak and go home. Jess’ll be back from holiday soon. Just go wait for her. Let things be as they always were.’
Everything had been going so well – the morning had unfolded so much better than Frank had expected – that these words, coming from inside her, made her feel like being sick.
She felt like she turned grey. Her breakfast bubbled at the bottom of her throat.
The ball zoomed off the top of the Swingball pole again, bouncing into the undergrowth.
‘Ah, leave it,’ Nick said. ‘Let’s go downstairs.’
‘What?’ said Frank, one hand to her chest, swallowing away the bile.
‘Quietly,’ said Nick. ‘Dad mustn’t know.’
He led her indoors. The music swirled around them, brushing their ankles like cats might and silencing Frank’s stomach.
Nick opened the door to the cellar and gestured for Frank to go first. Her eyes filled with tears as she went past him and down the stairs.
She and Nick sat together at the bottom of the steps, saying nothing.
In the cellar that was a window to another world, they
sat and watched Nick’s mum, mountainous and grey, mossy-eared and flat-faced, sitting in a room that was a window to their world, weaving her music.
Frank brushed her eyes – it wasn’t that she was crying, just that they were over-full. Her heart glowed in her chest. A smile played with her mouth, without her having to think about it.
The troll-mother had looked at them, had smiled, and turned back to her instrument, her device, and sent fast clusters of high notes skittering into the air.
‘What’s her name?’ Frank whispered.
‘I don’t know,’ Nick said.
And so they sat, listening …
And eventually the worlds shifted apart, the window faded away and the music moved beyond the limits of Frank’s hearing, and the two of them were sat in the dim cellar in friendly silence.
The stony, earthy forest floor smell filled her lungs like lemonade, as harmless stray shadows curled in the corners like mice.
This was turning out to be one strange summer holiday, Frank thought.
It was only when Frank was halfway across the park, past the rec and halfway home, that she remembered that she should’ve been worried. Fortunately Noble and the other boys had moved on somewhere else, probably home for their own lunches, so she hadn’t needed to worry, but it still felt odd having forgotten them for a moment.
‘Did you have a good morning?’ her dad asked as she put the cutlery out for their lunch.
‘Yeah, it was all right,’ she said.
She wasn’t going to tell him anything, because he wasn’t the sort of person who believed in trolls, or in things that weren’t quite trolls but were something else. And other worlds? Forget it!
And although she knew he wasn’t the sort of parent who’d ring up the child psychologist as soon as she told him she’d seen her troll-friend’s troll-mum in a cellar through a window to another world, she did suspect he was the sort who’d go, ‘Oh yes, dear?’ sarcastically, and that was almost as bad.
The Song From Somewhere Else Page 6