Sky Run

by Alex Shearer

  Some things I remember and some things I forget – it’s like I wasn’t even there, though I was, but I have this knack of being able not to pay any attention. Peggy says I could sleep through a war, and I probably could if it was a short one. But I wasn’t asleep or daydreaming when we set off in Peggy’s old boat that day. Because it was a big and memorable occasion. It isn’t every day you leave home and go travelling. City Island, we were heading for. Peggy said it might take a few weeks to get there and it could be something of a rough crossing at times.

  Peggy says a lot of things and you don’t always know whether to believe them. But sometimes she’s right. Only too right. Sometimes she’s bang on the nail.

  OK. Well, it started off all right. There we were: me, Gemma, Peggy and Botcher the sky-puss – otherwise known as big, fat and useless. Well, maybe Botcher is good for something – making everybody else feel useful. He’s good for your self-esteem. You only have to compare yourself to Botcher and you feel you’re on a winning team and have big talents. But what he’s best at is lounging and eating, though not necessarily in that order.

  The sky was as blue as I’d ever seen it the day we set off. There was nobody to say goodbye to us except old Ben Harley, who is Peggy’s nearest neighbour and is all white hair and whiskers and bits of red complexion and a nose that somebody maybe trod on by accident once upon a time, or swiped with a hammer.

  We could see him in the distance, waving a goodbye by swinging an old pair of trousers back and forth. And we could hear him calling, ‘Take it easy!’ and, ‘See you soon, Peggy!’ And I reckoned that for all he and Peggy made out they didn’t get on, in fact they did, and all this being crotchety towards each other was nothing but a show. I thought that he was going to miss her terrible and that she was sad to see him there waving his old trousers at her too.

  Old Ben also shouted something that sounded like ‘Bum foidge!’. When I asked Peggy what he was saying that for, she said he was saying, ‘Bon voyage’, which she said was one of the old world languages – French – and it meant ‘Have a good journey’, and that when we got to City Island and got educated we’d know all about stuff like that and be talking French like naturals. But Ben could just as well have said, ‘Safe journey!’ and then we’d have understood him straight away and wouldn’t have needed to learn French. So I don’t know why he didn’t do that, unless he was showing off.

  So that was the farewell party assembled to see us off – just old Ben Harley waving his trousers like a flag and shouting at us in French. And nobody else in the whole universe knew or cared that we were on our way to City Island to go to school and get educated and ‘have a future’ as Peggy called it.

  But wouldn’t we have had a future anyhow? I wondered. You didn’t need to go to City Island to have a future. You could get one of those no matter where you went.

  Soon old Ben was nothing but a shadow and Peggy’s island was a distant stone. All there was around us was the blue of the sky and the specks that were faraway islands. There wasn’t a cloud anywhere, not one, it was just blue, blue, burning blue – so blue it made your eyes ache and you longed for another colour, only there wasn’t one, except the flash of a bright green sky-fish flying by, or the fluttering of an orange sky-clown, or the flabby white shape of a sail-fish, seeming to wander off in all directions at once.

  ‘Martin!’ Peggy shouted at me. She sounded annoyed.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You’re the lookout, remember.’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘Lookout. You’re supposed to be looking out. You don’t look like you’re looking out to me. You look like you’re just looking.’

  ‘I was looking.’

  ‘Yeah, well, you’re supposed to be looking out!’

  ‘Yes, dumb-head –’ (That was Gemma butting in. Peggy never called you names or worked up to insults or was ever really rude to you. You need a sister to do all that.) ‘You’re supposed to be looking out on your side and I’m looking out on mine.’

  ‘Well, I was looking out,’ I said. Which was a lie, but I don’t mind telling the occasional one. ‘And even if I wasn’t, there doesn’t seem much to look out for.’

  Peggy gave me one of her older-and-wiser looks.

  ‘There never does until you see it,’ she said.

  ‘Well, what am I supposed to notice? What am I supposed to bring to anyone’s attention?’

  ‘Anything suspicious, anything dangerous, anything that looks like trouble.’

  ‘There’s her,’ I said, pointing at Gemma. ‘She looks like all of those. Especially the trouble.’

  ‘Get lost, Martin.’

  ‘Here? How? There’s nowhere to get lost to.’

  ‘Then try falling over the side –’

  ‘OK, that’s enough, you two. Just keep an eye out, Martin, all right? These are dangerous skies.’

  ‘They look safe enough to me.’

  ‘That’s what’s dangerous about them.’

  ‘If you say so.’

  ‘I do. So keep them peeled.’

  So peeled is how I kept them. At least I did until they started closing. I saw nothing too interesting either, except a sky-shark, chasing its prey, and I thought to myself: Isn’t that always the way of it, one thing wanting to eat another? And I’ve also noticed that the thing doing the eating is usually bigger than the thing being eaten. Not always, but most of the time. Unless it’s bugs or sky-fleas, of course. But parasites eat you without necessarily killing you, whereas predators do the whole job in one.

  And then, I guess, I just stopped peeling them and I maybe dozed off. When I opened up the eye hatches again, the sky was just the same bright blue, as blue as all monotony. Peggy’s island had gone from view and old Ben waving his trousers was a snapshot in an album somewhere. I did wonder if I would ever see any of them again – Ben, the island, or the trousers.

  But then I saw something else, looming up and looming large, and it was a little too late to avoid it.

  ‘Land ho!’ I shouted.

  Peggy was down below. The boat was on autopilot. Gemma was trailing a fishing line over the rail at the back.

  Peggy came up on deck.

  ‘Land ho where?’

  ‘Right there, Peg.’

  I pointed to where we were heading. If I’d been keeping them alert and peeled like I was supposed to, we might have had time to take a little evasive action. But it was too late now. We were sailing along between two islands. The port-side one looked barren and empty. The starboard side one was just as barren-looking but it was definitely inhabited. You could see that because there was a huge sign there, erected at the end of a jetty.

  The sign had been hand-painted with what must have been a scraggy brush and a hand that was none too steady. It read THE TOLL TROLL IS:

  And next to that there was a rack to hold another sign, which could be changed around as needed. The sign at that moment read IN. I assume the other side of it bore the word OUT.

  But we were unlucky. The IN was up.

  Next thing we saw was that slung between the two islands was a huge net. It could be lowered or raised by means of slackening or tightening a couple of ropes. We were unlucky with that too. The net was up and if we carried on sailing we’d have sailed right into it and have got tangled up like a shoal of fish in a sky-trawl.

  ‘What the –?’

  Peggy treated herself to some cursing.

  ‘What’s going on, Gran?’ Gemma said.

  ‘I don’t know. But cut our speed or we’ll be right into that damn net.’

  Gemma reeled the sails in and Peggy shut the solar down.

  And then the noise started. It was quite a racket. It sounded like someone taking a look at a sky-cat’s intestines while the cat was still conscious. Botcher seemed to get the same idea, as he leapt up and scurried under a sail bag and tried to put his paws in his ears.

  ‘For the love of –!’

  The man on the shore was big and broad and he was wearing a skirt,
or maybe it was a kilt of some kind, and he had large, muscled arms, covered in freckles and red hair. And he was playing some sort of bagpipes. But it was obvious, from the way he was playing them, that lesson number two in the Teach Yourself the Bagpipes correspondence course had not yet arrived.

  After about thirty seconds, the ear torture ended. He stopped playing in order to swat at a whole swarm of insects that were bothering his beard. But no sooner had he swatted them away than they came back, like they couldn’t live without him. So he gave up on the pipes and he bellowed at us, long and loud.

  ‘Ahoy! You there!’

  ‘What is it you want?’ Peggy yelled back. ‘We’re just travelling. We’re an old lady and two kids. We don’t have anything.’

  ‘Everyone’s got something! And if you want to sail between my islands, you’ve got to pay.’

  ‘Just told you, we don’t have anything. Lower the net and let us pass.’

  ‘No way, old timer. You pay the toll or you don’t go nowhere.’

  ‘“You don’t go anywhere”,’ Peggy corrected him. ‘You don’t say “you don’t go nowhere”. That’s a double negative. Watch your grammar. I’m trying to get these children to speak nicely, and bad examples of common usage don’t help that.’

  The big beardy one didn’t answer her. He put his bagpipes down, swatted away a few more of the insects that were bothering him, picked up a large harpoon that could have come off a sky-whaler, and fitted it into a gun fixed to the jetty.

  ‘You pull to, or you get blasted.’

  Peggy swore some of her swears again.

  ‘I need this like a hole in the head, you red-bearded idiot!’ she yelled at him.

  ‘You don’t pull over, you’ll get a hole in the head,’ he yelled back. ‘This size.’ And he pointed at the harpoon.

  I saw Peggy look at me with what had to be reproach, but she didn’t say anything. Maybe she knew I hadn’t been keeping my eyes as peeled as I might have. Maybe the situation could have been avoided if I’d been a better lookout, but we couldn’t avoid it now.

  ‘OK,’ she said. ‘I’ll bring the boat over.’

  She turned the wheel and guided us towards the jetty.

  The red-bearded, muscly one stood watching us come in, one hand on the harpoon gun, the other swatting the insects away. Maybe it was his beard they were in love with, or perhaps they liked to nestle in the undergrowth that thatched his arms. Either way they bothered him silly. It was no wonder he seemed in a bad mood.

  We glided in to tie up at the jetty, where he stood waiting, big and fearsome and slightly unhinged-looking.

  The Toll Troll was in, all right. And in a bad mood too. But then perhaps he was never in anything else.

  4

  toll

  MARTIN STILL TALKING:

  Peggy, being so old, often doesn’t seem so bothered about things that rightly ought to worry a person. I mean, I’m not a worrier. I’ve never really had anything to worry about – except for that time when we were small and we didn’t have anyone and everybody kept calling us orphans (and usually poor ones too, as the words orphans and poor are kind of inseparable).

  But even with a whole bunch of carefree years behind me, I was worried now. I’d never seen anything like this. The so-called, self-styled Toll Troll was even bigger close to than he’d seemed far away. He was immense. He was twice as tall as Peggy and as broad as a rock. He looked down on us like somebody contemplating his dinner and thinking that the helpings looked rather mingy. But Peggy just acted like she was the big muscly one, and he was the one-hundred-and-twenty-year-old sky-shrimp.

  ‘Well?’ she said, with a very sharp tone to her voice. ‘And what do you want?’

  ‘What do you think?’ the huge man said. ‘What does it look like?’

  Only he didn’t exactly say it like that, as he had a very odd accent, not like anything I’d heard before. He said it more like: ‘Whit dee yee thunk? Whot daes it luuk lyke?’ But his accent fluctuated. At first he was calm and clear, but then the more irritated he got, the more impenetrable it became.

  ‘Why’s he started talking funny, Peg?’ I said. But I didn’t get a proper answer. Peggy just glowered at me, Gemma kicked my shin, and the big guy kind of tensed up and started clenching his fists.

  ‘Will ye tell yon brat tae hold his tongue before I rip it oot his mouth for him?’ he said.

  ‘Martin –’

  But I’d heard.

  ‘Good,’ he said, when I clammed up.

  ‘So what do you want?’ Peggy said again.

  ‘The toll. Whit else?’ he said.

  ‘Toll?’

  ‘Aye.’

  Peggy looked at him, up and sideways.

  ‘And why should we pay you any toll?’

  ‘Because I’m asking for it.’

  ‘And what entitles you to ask?’

  The big man looked around with a kind of false innocence, and then he slowly raised his big fist and he waved it under Peggy’s nose.

  ‘This,’ he said. ‘This does.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘You’re a crook then,’ she told him.

  The big man got indignant at that.

  ‘I’m nae a cruk!’ he said (his variable accent suddenly thick as cream). ‘Ye want to use my airspace and sail between my islands, then ye have to pay.’

  ‘Why?’ Peggy said.

  He stared at her, as if no one had asked him this before.

  ‘To pay for all the maintenance,’ he said.

  ‘What maintenance?’ she said.

  He got angry again.

  ‘The maintenance!’ he repeated. ‘Maintaining the highway and keeping it in good repair.’

  ‘It’s sky,’ Peggy pointed out. ‘You don’t have to do anything to it. It’s just there. So what are you maintaining exactly?’

  The giant of a man thought about this for a moment; he stood winding bits of his straggly red beard around his fingers, then said:

  ‘I’m keeping the sky clean and free from debris.’

  And that was when I heard Peggy mutter something that sounded like bullsh— But I’m not supposed to know expressions like that, let alone use them.

  The man looked down at her. The insects went on swarming around his head, like some kind of a halo. Some of the midges were even nibbling at his hairy legs, which poked out like tree trunks from his kilt. I wondered if maybe the insects had driven him mad.

  ‘No toll,’ he said, ‘no go.’

  ‘Well, that’s too bad,’ Peggy said, ‘because we’ve nothing to give you.’

  The man sneered.

  ‘Everyone’s got something,’ he said.

  ‘I’m an old woman with two children; we’ve no money and just enough food and water to last the journey. We’re heading for City Island so they can go to school and get an education. And that’s it.’

  ‘Bairns!’ the man said. ‘Nothing but trouble and nothing but expense. That’s bairns.’

  Peggy sat down on the jetty. The giant looked down at her with outraged surprise.

  ‘What are you doing?’ he said. ‘What do you think you’re doing?’

  ‘Sitting down,’ Peggy said. ‘I get the arthritis.’

  ‘She gets the arthritis,’ Gemma said, backing her up. ‘And she can’t be on her feet too long without a break.’

  ‘Break?’ the giant of a man said, speckles of froth appearing on his lips and on the fringes of his beard. ‘I’ll give you a break. I’ll break your necks. I’ll break your skulls open with the hilt of my claymore –’ And he indicated a long-bladed, heavy-handled sword, covered in rust, that stood stuck in the ground nearby.

  His indignation rose like steam until it was all but puffing out of his ears.

  ‘You dinnae sit down when the Toll Troll’s talking. You quake in fear, that’s what you do. You quake and tremble and beg for mercy. That’s the style you need. I’ve never been so bloody insulted!’

  ‘No swearing in front of the
children, if you wouldn’t mind,’ Peggy said.

  ‘Nae swearing? Nae swearing! I’ll give you swearing –’

  But Peggy just reached out and said, ‘I wonder if you’d mind giving me a hand up now. I can’t sit down too long either or I start getting the cramps.’

  ‘She gets cramps,’ Gemma explained, ‘as well as the arthritis. She’s a hundred and twenty, you see, and not as young as –’

  ‘Will ye all shut up!’ the man said. ‘All of ye. Just shut up and let me think.’

  While he was thinking, I got curious. Peggy says curiosity is my trouble, but I can’t help it. These questions just form in my mind, and when they do, I have to ask them, as I like to find things out.

  ‘Excuse me,’ I said. ‘Mister Troll –’

  His eyebrows moved like a couple of those sun caterpillars you sometimes see on the rocks – the furry, poisonous ones that’ll kill you if you brush against them.

  ‘Whit did you just say?’ He looked at Peggy. ‘Whit did he just say? I thought yon brat was supposed to be keeping his teeth together and his mooth shut.’

  ‘I was just wondering, Mister Troll,’ I persisted, ‘if you had another name. Like, a real name. And what it was.’

  The eyebrows went on working. I really did think for a moment that they might come off and attack me. But then they came to rest and they arched into a look of, well, perplexity, I guess.

  ‘Ma name?’ He turned to Peggy. ‘No one’s ever asked me ma name. And I’ve robbed – that is, I’ve needed to take toll money from – hundreds, no, thousands who’ve passed by here. And no one’s ever asked me ma name.’

  Peggy just looked at him and gave him one of her old smiles. Her smiles are full of wrinkles and crows’ feet and leathery skin and a hundred and twenty years of living.

  ‘Out of the mouths of babes and children,’ she said.

  ‘Well, I’m nae telling you ma name!’ the Troll said. And he sounded a bit peevish, like he was the spoilt brat – instead of a massive man with a sword and bagpipes and a kilt and a big chip on his shoulder from somewhere.