We didn’t have many things to lose. When you’re in a war or you’re doing a runner or when your friend is going away, it’s nice to have the same things in your pocket as you had yesterday. I closed my eyes hard and made a wish that Billy would find the thing he’d lost. That made me think about the wishbone and I wondered what Tia had asked for last night. I hoped it was the right thing.
Billy says everyone has light and dark inside them. When Tia’s light shone it almost blinded everyone. I was thinking about the night before and how her dance had been so beautiful it made Billy cry, when Sixpence started to cough. Then Max woke up.
‘Where’s Tia?’
I shrugged. ‘Gone,’ I said like I didn’t care.
Max put his finger out for Sixpence to hold. ‘She’ll be back,’ he said and I knew he was thinking about his mother.
Billy fed Sixpence and dressed her and then we packed our things, but still Tia hadn’t come. Max and me looked everywhere we could but we didn’t find her. We told Billy and then we went down to the boardwalk and I drew some pictures, but they weren’t as good as I usually did. I couldn’t concentrate. I wanted Tia to come back. I’d got myself ready to let Max go, and I didn’t want to have to do it all over again.
We waited. Trucks roared up and down the hill all day. Then the lights came on in the hotel. I was afraid then; afraid for Tia and for all of us. I wondered if they’d made her tell about us. If she did, it was my fault because I hadn’t given her the necklace. Maybe there was no right time. I should have just given it to her.
Then Billy said, ‘Can’t wait any longer, we’ll have to go.’
‘What about Sixpence?’ Max and me both said at the same time. But we didn’t say ‘personal jinx’, and we didn’t do a high five the way you’re meant to.
‘We’ll have to take her with us,’ said Billy.
‘What about Tia?’ I said.
Billy ripped a piece of builders’ foil off the inside of the shed and wrapped it around two bottles of warmed milk. Then he stuck them down the front of his jumper and buttoned his coat. ‘She mightn’t come back,’ he said.
I hoped he didn’t mean ever. ‘Couldn’t we wait till tomorrow?’
Billy looked to see where Max was and dropped his voice down low. ‘We might have waited too long already. They dropped another bomb last night. A big one.’
He lifted Sixpence onto his back. Max put his brave’s headdress on and we filled our pockets with stones. I held his hand when we got to the train tracks. We were heading towards the city where precision bombs flattened churches and libraries. I was going to give my best friend back to his mother. Billy had a baby who didn’t belong to him. He hadn’t found whatever he’d lost and none of us knew where Tia was. I felt the wrongness of all these things inside me like grit inside my shoe.
The wind howled like wild dogs along the electricity wires, and we looked every way trying to see more than the deep blue darkness. The cold bit into Billy’s bad leg and made him limp even more than usual. Sometimes we thought we heard voices – whispering, singing, crying voices – as we walked between the high, graffiti-covered walls. Sixpence was coughing again, and when we got to the north spur Billy stopped. For a minute I thought he’d tricked us; that he was taking us to the refuge.
‘Pull her hat down around her face,’ he said.
I pulled the tea-cosy right down and put the hole for the handle around the front, so Sixpence could breathe. Max and me laughed. It was the first noise we’d made for ages, and it sounded good.
‘Finished?’ Billy asked.
‘Yes,’ said Max, ‘you can just see her little nose sticking out.’
Billy started to sing as he walked:
‘I love Sixpence, pretty little Sixpence,
I love Sixpence better than my life.’
Then he whistled a bit and I looked into the distance, trying to see the fire in Albert’s tunnel. They say that on a clear, dark night you can see a candle burning from fifty kilometres away.
‘Are we nearly at Albert’s place?’ asked Max.
‘Must be close,’ said Billy.
‘Let’s guess how many cat-and-dogs, Max,’ I said. Max didn’t know that was how you counted seconds, I had to tell him. ‘Every time you say cat-and-dog, that’s one second,’ I said. ‘Like this: one cat-and-dog, two cat-and-dogs, three cat-and-dogs. See, that’s three seconds. Guess how many to Albert’s tunnel and then we’ll count. I say it will be . . . seventy-seven cat-and-dogs. No, one hundred and eleven.’ I picked a high number on purpose so Max would get a surprise when it was sooner.
‘I can’t count to that many,’ Max said.
‘Doesn’t matter, I’ll help you. What’s your guess?’
‘I say . . . twenty-six cat-and-dogs!’
I lost count a few times, but I got to two hundred and nineteen cat-and-dogs before we saw what was left of Albert’s tunnel. It used to be a square tunnel, made out of concrete panels, but something had landed on it and smashed one of the walls, and the roof had slid down. Now the tunnel looked like a crooked ‘A’. I didn’t want to go in there, but we had to because Sixpence was crying. Her voice sounded thick and strange.
‘She needs a drink,’ Billy said. He switched on his torch and shone it around inside. In the corner, where part of the tunnel had caved in altogether, I saw a heap of rags. I thought it might be Albert, but Billy flashed his torch away before I got a proper look. Then he took his backpack off. He passed Sixpence to me. ‘She’s hot,’ he said, feeling her forehead.
‘Should I take her hat off?’
‘No, just feed her while I get a fire going.’
He gave me a bottle and I crossed my legs and nursed Sixpence inside my coat the way Tia did. I had to be careful so it wouldn’t hurt too much, but I needed to feel someone warm and alive next to me. It wasn’t long before I started thinking about Tia. I wondered where she was and I hoped she had her red coat on and that she wasn’t scared.
Once the fire was going, Billy and Max and me ate ginger biscuits and drank tea, then Billy took out his Hohner. I lay down beside Sixpence with our hearts touching. I didn’t hear the strangers come. I saw their faces in the firelight and thought they were God’s red children. On the wall behind them I saw my primitive drawings and Max’s handprint and mine, together for always. I thought my prayers to Max’s ancestors had been answered and they had come to comfort him and whisper wise thoughts and guide his footsteps through the dust. Then I saw their faces; they were pale as ash and their eyes were like black holes. They looked like the living dead: like zombies.
I heard Billy talking. He sounded peaceful and I saw him take the ginger biscuits from Max’s bag and put the used teabags back into the water in the fruit salad tin. So I looked at the strangers through slits between my eyelids. There were two men, one old and one younger, a woman who might have been someone’s mother, and a boy who looked a bit older than me. They had bags and bundles and I saw that they weren’t really zombies; they were like us, God’s pale children. But I knew Billy would have helped them no matter what colour they were.
‘Many on the road?’
‘More and more every day. We heard there’s a refugee camp further north.’
‘You’ll go there?’
‘If we can, Dad’s getting on. He’s not so good at walking now.’
Billy poured weak tea into foam takeaway cups and handed them around. Then the biscuits.
‘Haven’t got a smoke, have you?’ he asked.
‘I am Thomas,’ said the old man, holding out a packet of cigarettes. ‘Old Thomas.’ He put his arm around the younger man’s shoulders. ‘This is my son, Tommy.’
Billy took a cigarette; a whole one that hadn’t been smoked before. He held it under his nose and smelt it from one end to the other, then he put it in a pocket inside his coat. ‘Much obliged, Thomas, I’m Billy.’
The old man dunked his ginger biscuit and took a bite and then he said, ‘You headed north?’
Billy shook h
is head. ‘No. We’re going back to the city.’
The woman’s mouth fell open like a handbag with a broken latch. ‘Oh you mustn’t!’ she said and darkness spilled out of her. ‘You mustn’t take the children there. It’s not safe.’
I opened my eyes properly then and sat up.
‘We’re taking the little fella to find his mother,’ said Billy.
The woman looked at Max who was sleeping beside me, wrapped up in a blanket.
‘He’s only six, he needs his mother.’
Then Sixpence coughed and woke up and I put the bottle in her mouth again. The woman looked at her red cheeks and felt her forehead, the way Billy had. ‘She has the fever. She needs water, boiled water. Where is her mother?’
Billy shrugged. The woman didn’t make a sound but I saw the tears rolling down her cheeks and Tommy put his arms around her and I felt suddenly afraid for Sixpence.
Billy took his Hohner out. Sometimes he could get Sixpence to go to sleep when he played. He picked a song he’d taught to Max and me. A man called Dylan wrote the music and the lyrics. Billy knew forty-seven of Dylan’s songs. He said he loved them all, but the song he played in the Albert Park Hotel was a favourite of his. It was a song about trying to find answers. Billy said it reminded him of me, because I was so full of difficult questions that no one had answers for.
Old Thomas knew the words and he sang while Billy played. Sixpence went to sleep but when they finished the song, Old Thomas asked for another one, and they kept on going. The last one Billy played was the one he most often played for Max and me when we were going to sleep. He said the words were like a blessing and you wouldn’t find a better one in any prayer book anywhere in the world. My favourite part of the blessing song is the bit about always knowing the truth and seeing the light that surrounds us. It’s like he wrote that line especially for me. That’s what Old Thomas was singing when the rest of the city got blown to smithereens.
When someone famous dies – like the president of the United States of America or Princess Diana or the Pope or Kurt Cobain, people say that years later they can still remember exactly what they were doing when they heard the news. When I’m as old as Old Thomas, I’ll still remember the music Billy was playing when that bomb fell.
18
Chickening out
There’s a line in the blessing song about being courageous and strong. Max was both those things on the night the bomb fell. He stood up with his brave’s feather hat on and looked outside at the fireball that was once our city. Then he put his hand in mine and we followed Billy and the others out into the red and the black. He said nothing when we turned back the way we’d come from.
When we got to the place where the others were leaving us to go north, Old Thomas said, ‘Come with us, Billy. Get the little ones out before it’s too late.’ His eyes went to the bump in my coat where Sixpence was sleeping. ‘Sometimes it’s better to live without a mother than not to live at all.’
I couldn’t have blamed Billy if he’d given up on Tia, and now Sixpence was sick, things were even more complicated. His lumpy fingers wormed around each other while the rest of us waited for him to answer Old Thomas. I moved closer to him.
‘We can’t,’ I said at last. ‘We’ve gotta give Tia one last chance.’
‘You could go with Thomas,’ said Billy, ‘you and Max.’
‘What about you?’
‘I couldn’t make it that far.’
‘And Sixpence?’
‘I’ll take her with me, in case Tia –’ ‘I’m coming with you.’
I saw Thomas look at Max. Billy saw him, too.
‘No!’ I shouted. ‘Max stays with me. We’re sticking together. We’ll all go back for Tia.’
Billy said nothing. There was no fight left in him.
Old Thomas put his overnight bag down beside the steel rail and opened it. He felt around in the dark inside and found a small black box like the one I sometimes saw in my head. Old Thomas opened it and took out something that shone like treasure. Tommy put his hand on his father’s sleeve and looked at him. ‘Dad . . .’ he said and the sound of it was hardly a sigh.
‘I only went because I was sent,’ Old Thomas said gently to his son. Then he looked at Max. ‘May you always be brave and strong,’ he said. The words were bits of the blessing song that were still floating around in our heads after everything else had got blown away. Old Thomas shook Max’s hand as if Max was grown-up. Next he put a long striped ribbon around Max’s neck. It hung all the way down to the top of Max’s old-man trousers, and on the end of it was a golden medal.
‘Take these,’ Billy said and his voice sounded like he’d swallowed sandpaper. ‘It’s not much.’ He gave Old Thomas the rest of our oranges. They looked nearly as beautiful as the golden medal, and Old Thomas said they were even better because you could eat them.
When we got back to Dreamland the sky was the colour of roses and violets and ash. It made me think of the bruises you get on your heart when you see things like a stranger giving a little boy a golden medal. Before that I thought war was only about taking things away, and I always thought of it in black and red.
We couldn’t tell if it was day or night and we didn’t care. We came through our secret entrance and didn’t see the huge, dark shapes nosed in beside the Ferris wheel. Max climbed into the Devil’s Lair and I got in beside him with Sixpence. I squeezed some sticky milk on my finger and let Sixpence suck it until we all fell asleep.
When I opened my eyes again, the forty-seven paper cranes were dancing and light flooded in through every crack and nail-hole. An ocean of noise swallowed me up and held me under. I flung myself out of the carriage, dragging Max with me, holding Sixpence close, running for the door, and then I saw Billy. He was standing still, looking through the skeleton’s eyes. I pushed him out of the way. Outside was a tank, two trucks and a group of soldiers with guns hanging off their shoulders. I’d never been that close to a tank before. It was almost as big as the Carousel of War and Peace.
Sixpence started crying. Her breathing sounded like someone sucking the last bit of a thickshake through a straw. I pulled the tea-cosy off her head. Her hair was wet with sweat. ‘Get me some water,’ I shouted.
Billy came back with a screw-top bottle. I splashed some on Sixpence, to cool her down, and shoved the rest back in Billy’s hands. ‘Put the rest in her bottle.’
I’d made the wrong decision. Tia couldn’t come back now. We should have gone north with Old Thomas and his family. Now we were stuck in No-Man’s-Land with a sick baby. Sixpence needed clean water and maybe a doctor and medicine as well. But how do you get all these things when an armoured tank is parked almost at your door?
Max pulled at my sleeve, wanting to look. I shoved him away and held Sixpence tight against my chest while she drank. The pain was payback for all the wrong things I’d done. I sang to her while the soldiers talked and laughed and smoked, and climbed in and out of their war machines. No one could hear me. After a while the top part of the tank turned slowly until the barrel was pointed at the House of Horrors. Did they know about our hideout? Had Tia told them? If I ran outside would they shoot me?
The engine revved louder and then the tank reversed slowly. A shout went up from the soldiers and then they cheered. I felt the fall of the Ferris wheel through the soles of my feet. The soldiers who were left behind, after the tank rumbled away, got in one of the trucks and drove up the winding hill to the hotel.
Sixpence went to sleep at last and I tucked her into the Devil’s Lair. Billy lit the fire.
‘Should we head north?’ I said.
He didn’t answer. I knew he wouldn’t. I shouldn’t have asked. It feels bad when someone asks you a question and you haven’t got a clue what the answer is. But I was mad with myself for making the wrong decision and angry with Billy for forcing me into it.
No one else came near us for that morning. Billy lay down to rest his leg so, early in the afternoon, Max and me slipped outside. I told hi
m we had to be as quiet as Indian braves stalking their prey, only this wasn’t a game, it was for real. We tiptoed behind the House of Horrors and climbed, quiet as mice, into the back of the truck that was parked near the refreshment pavilion. There were metal drink containers and camouflage caps and backpacks with everything you could need inside them. There were fancy sleeping-bags called Feathersoft Microfibre, little gas burners to cook on, and tin plates and mugs. I started to feel better.
I decided to make a plan in my head the way I did when I was running away. Only this time I wasn’t running away from anything or anyone: not the teachers who told me I was stupid because I couldn’t do maths, or the people who belted me when they were supposed to be looking after me, or the ones who said my dad was crazy in the head because he could hear guns firing and people screaming ten years after he fought in someone else’s war. I was going to a place where I would never have to run away again; somewhere I could get my education and put my hands up to the sky and see the way the light falls and where the shadows lie, a place where I could catch the wind and find answers to my difficult questions. I know that sentence is long and has too many joining words in it but sometimes, when I’m angry, words burst out of me like a shout, or, if I’m sad, they spill out of me like tears, and if I’m happy my words are like a song. If that happens it’s one of my rules not to change them because they’re coming out of my heart and not my head, and that’s the way they’re meant to be.
I wasn’t going to let things happen to me any more. I was going to make them happen. I was making a plan; I was going and taking Billy with me, and Max and Sixpence. If Tia would come back I’d take her, too, and everything would be perfect.
‘Max,’ I said and happiness spilled out of my lips, ‘how do you get to Gulliver’s Meadows?’
A Small Free Kiss in the Dark Page 12