The Whispering Road

by Livi Michael

  PUFFIN BOOKS

  The Whispering Road

  Livi Michael is the author of four novels for adults and the bestselling series of books about Frank the hamster, for younger children. She has two sons and lives near Manchester.

  Books by Livi Michael

  For younger readers

  Frank and the Black Hamster of Narkiz

  Frank and the Chamber of Fear

  Frank and the Flames of Truth

  For older readers

  The Whispering Road

  LIVI MICHAEL

  The Whispering Road

  PUFFIN

  PUFFIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Group (USA), Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia

  Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2

  Penguin Books India (P) Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India

  Penguin Group (NZ), cnr Airborne and Rosedale Roads, Albany, Auckland 1310, New Zealand

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  www.penguin.com

  First published 2005

  6

  Copyright © Livi Michael, 2005

  All rights reserved

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN: 978-0-14-192740-4

  This book is dedicated to Robert Williams,

  a great reader, who wanted more books to read.

  Acknowledgements

  The author would like to thank H. Gustav Klaus, for permission to draw on the fascinating material in Tramps, Workmates and Revolutionaries (1993, Journeyman Press); Tony Taylor, for many consultations over coffee; Mike Kane for unstinting technical support; and Ian Pople.

  Contents

  PART I Road

  1 Shovel

  2 Chicken

  3 Travis

  4 Rabbit

  5 Forest

  6 Dog-woman

  7 Pack

  8 Snow

  9 Wagon

  10 Market

  11 Alan of Hirst

  12 Show

  13 Annie

  14 Thief

  15 Angel Meadow

  16 Free

  PART II Lost and Found

  1 Graveyard

  2 Mad Pat

  3 Pig

  4 Gang

  5 Heatwave

  6 Killer

  7 Bin

  8 Bath

  9 Doctor

  10 Visitors

  11 Carriage

  12 Hat

  13 Woman

  14 Caught

  15 Nell

  16 Revenge

  17 Refuge

  18 Queenie

  19 Raid

  20 Knife

  21 Crutch

  22 Lammas

  PART III Journey's End

  1 Fight

  2 Governor

  3 Necklace

  4 Nurse

  5 Voices

  6 Afterwards

  Glossary

  Author's Note

  Part I

  Road

  1

  Shovel

  I had to get her out, that was the main thing. Annie, that is – my sister. When I saw her lying on the kitchen floor, mistress towering over her and Annie all white and still, something cold went through me, like a shadow.

  ‘What have you done to her?’ I say and Old Bert gives me a ringing clout round the ear.

  ‘Don't talk to your mistress like that,’ he says.

  I fall to my knees beside Annie. I can see blood on the stone slabs of the floor, where her head is. ‘Annie,’ I whisper.

  ‘Get 'em out,’ says mistress – with a face like a slab of stone herself – and Old Bert, arms like trees, swings Annie up easy, over his shoulder like a lamb or a new pig, and with other arm hauls me off the floor by the scruff of the neck. Off we go, my feet bumping and scraping, into the freezing night.

  Old Bert kicks open the door of the chicken shed and slings first me then Annie inside. All the hens squawk at once. Annie lands on a sack with a soft thud and her head lolls to one side. I land on my knees and my hand hits something sharp, and hard. The edge of a shovel.

  ‘Barn's full,’ says Bert. ‘You'll have to stay here the night. And mind…’ he leans closer with his big, meaty face, and breathes all over us with his sewer breath, ‘don't stir the hens. I hear them hens in the night and come morning I'll feed you to pigs.’

  That were his favourite threat. I wish I could say I didn't believe him, but I've seen him feeding the pigs before. Buckets of swill with lumps of things that look as though they might once have been a nose, or an eye.

  Old Bert looms over us a few moments more, his breath rattling in his chest. I expect him to kick me and all my skin tightens up, but nothing happens. Then he says, ‘Milking's at four. I'll be back. Don't – stir – th'hens.’

  Then he's gone, all the hens rising in a great flurry as he shoves the door open and kicks it to. I hear the big wooden plank pulled across the outside as a bolt.

  Have you ever tried not disturbing hens? I move my hand and the shovel scrapes and they flap up clucking. There's only six of them but they make enough row. I shuffle over to Annie and they start again, softer this time. ‘Annie?’ I says, and they all start squawking. I hold my breath. I try again, softer, ‘Annie,’ and take her hand. It's frozen, like mine. I push my face close to her chest and I can make out her breathing – just. I've seen her knocked out before, but not like this, never this white and still.

  ‘Don't die on me, Annie,’ I mutter, and a soft clucking ripples round the shed. ‘Don't you die on me.’

  High up there's a hole where a bit of the roof's fallen in and a pile of snow after it. A shaft of moonlight turns everything grey; grey scraggy hens watching, and Annie's grey face. If she dies I'll be all alone – with them. Old Bert, Young Bert, the master and mistress. I've never been on my own before. There's always been Annie.

  The shed stinks. It's full of chicken sh*t. Plus it's freezing. Hardest winter in twenty years, Old Bert said. Every morning we have to break the ice round the cows' faces where their breath has frozen over them. I can't feel my fingers and I'm starving. I only had bread at breakfast, bread hard like a stone but crumblier. I catch myself looking round at all the grey, scraggy hens and wondering if I could eat one raw and if Old Bert'd notice. Hunger must be making me mad. He'd kill me of course, but then maybe I'll die anyway, frozen over and starved in the dark. Maybe I'd rather die chewing on a hen.

  The nearest hen looks at me like it knows what I'm thinking, with its round, hard eyes, grey as pebbles in the moon. I look at that hen and it looks right back at me. I'm thinking about the last time I helped out in the kitchen and mistress made a meat pudding from one of the sheep that had wandered from the flock and froze. She mashed stale bread with boiling water and boiled up the meat in a pudding cloth till the juices ran, and all the time
I'm clemmed – my stomach's stuck to my spine. The smell of mutton fat wafts in through my nostrils till I can feel my head fizzing like a pint of ale gone bad. Me and Annie are supposed to be clearing up but we can't stop watching master sink his toothless gums into that pudding and all the juices running down his chin. Then he starts up with a snarl and a curse and drives us off without even the usual piece of stale bread to gnaw on through the night.

  That's what I'm thinking when I look at that bird.

  I know if I touch the hens I'm done for; but maybe I don't care. I know they haven't been laying in this weather, or I'd look for eggs. But they'd raise the roof anyway if I took their eggs. Maybe I'd rather be hung for a chicken than an egg. Slowly, without taking my eyes off that bird, I begin to move.

  And at that moment, Annie moans. I yelp in fright and all the birds cluck and yammer. Annie takes no notice. She rolls over with her little roly-poly body that never seems quite shrunk to skin and bone, and tries to get on to her knees. She can't do it. She sinks down again, hitting the floor, and makes a noise like she's going to be sick. Only she hasn't eaten either. I grab hold of her under her arms and haul her up.

  ‘Annie,’ I breathe. ‘Are you all right?’

  Daft question. She only moans again and her head lolls sideways. I'm so glad she's coming to that I hang on to her tightly, then prop her up against the wall. She doesn't open her eyes. But after a minute she speaks.

  ‘Cold,’ she says. I rub her arms, but my hands are so cold I can't feel either them or her. She turns her head into my shoulder. ‘Drink,’ she says. I look at the pile of snow. Propping her up again so that she doesn't fall over, I crawl over to it on my hands and knees and scoop up some of it. The hens seem to be getting used to us now – they don't flap and cluck, just stare at me beadily. I hold the snow to her blueish lips and after a moment she makes little sucking movements. I feed it to her patiently like you have to feed the calves that come early and can't suck, and gradually the snow disappears.

  Maybe the cold of it in her throat wakes her up because slowly her eyes open, pale and glassy in the moonlight. She doesn't seem to be looking at anything, just staring. I pass my hand in front of her face and she doesn't blink. Then she says, ‘They're looking,’ and turns her face into my shoulder again.

  I don't know what she means. The hens?

  ‘Annie, it's all right,’ I say. ‘It's me, Joe. You've had a knock on your head, but you're all right now. You'll be fine.’ But she only turns her head even further into my shirt.

  ‘Stop it,’ she whimpers. ‘Make them go.’

  ‘It's all right, Annie,’ I say, wishing I believed it. ‘There's no one here but the hens.’ Annie only moans and shakes her head. Her whole body is shaking.

  I don't know what to do, so I stroke her hair that clings in little damp rats' tails to her shoulders and neck. I'm wondering if the blow to her head's sent her funny and whether she'll come out of it or not. I'm thinking that a daft sister might be even worse trouble than a dead one.

  ‘Sssh, Annie,’ I say. ‘Try to sleep.’ She doesn't stop shaking, but slowly her grip on my shirt loosens and she shuts her eyes.

  ‘Hungry,’ she says.

  Well, there's not much I can do about that. I stare around the shed, wondering if there's any food for the hens, but I can't see anything. Nothing but chicken sh*t and ice. There's a scurrying noise and a rat runs across the far side of the wall and disappears. That lifts my spirits a bit. In the workhouse I got quite good at catching rats, but I've never had to eat one raw. I stay with Annie until her breathing changes and I can tell she's fallen asleep. I cover her up with the sack she was lying on. Then I start to look around the shed.

  Nothing. Some crates and an empty barrel. Another barrel full of frozen water. No sign of a rat even. All the time the hens watch me nervously, but they don't start squawking. I find a big wooden pole that might once have been a broom and a bucket. No food there either.

  ‘Looks like you get fed about as much as we do,’ I say to the speckled hen, and she cocks her head at me as though listening. I rattle the door, just in case but, as I thought, it's barricaded on the other side. I wonder how long it'll be before Old Bert comes back, then turn the bucket upside down and stand on it. I climb from there to the wooden crates stacked up near the door, trying to see through the gap in the roof. All I can see is a slice of moon and a star. It's not snowing, though.

  Somewhere out there, only about a mile away, there's the workhouse where we were a few weeks back. And we thought we were badly off then. I think about the other kids there, cracking the ice and picking oakum, and wonder if they're all asleep now, and if any of them are warm. I press my fingers into the rough stone and try to haul myself up, but my fingers are like wood and I can't do it. With a sigh I clamber back down from the crates and go back to Annie. I press up close to her, under the sack.

  I'm cold. I thought it was just my fingers and feet, but now I can feel the cold inside, as though even my stomach has started to freeze. Somewhere inside me there's a small round pebble of ice, like a hen's eye only bigger. And it's growing. I can't get warm.

  To cheer myself up I think about the workhouse. Now that's something I never thought I'd say. I think about a teacher we had. Not for long – they brought her in from somewhere to teach us to write our names. She read to us from the Bible and made us copy stuff out. Well, she tried. None of us really managed. Sometimes she'd just give up and read us stories. That were all right. I remember the one about David killing Goliath. And other stories, too, about trolls, and boys called Jack killing giants. When she left I used to tell them to the other kids, and make them up myself. About Jinny Green-teeth who lurks in ponds with her long, mossy teeth, and giants throwing boulders at one another across the valleys – which is how the hills got so stony. And hags in graveyards and trolls who suck the bones of babies.

  Sometimes I could keep a whole roomful of us awake right through the night. I was cock of the poorhouse. But I don't feel like cock of this henhouse. I look balefully at the speckled grey hen and she looks back at me. Somewhere in her empty eye I see a flicker of something. Like she understands that both of us are stuck here without a chance, and her fate'll be the same as mine. I look a bit longer and think, Not if I can help it.

  And then suddenly I know. I know, sure as I'm looking at that chicken's eye, that we have to get out of there. I know we're stuck in a shed, in a farm like a prison up a hill in the middle of nowhere, but I don't care. I think about the miles of deep snow between us and anywhere, but it doesn't matter. Suddenly I'm thinking like the heroes in one of them stories. Old Bert may look like a troll, or a giant, but I'm Jack. Jack the Giant-killer…

  Jack the Giant-killer killed loads of giants, though he was only a kid – like me. In them days there was giants everywhere. But Jack was brave and fearless, and he decided to sort them out. So he set off with a pickaxe and shovel, a lantern and a horn. He dug a pit for one, then whacked him over the head with a pickaxe – thunnk! Then he met one with two heads, so he tricked that one into gutting himself and stole his sword. Then he met one with three heads, so he knocked them all together with a plank. Next giant only had one, but he was so huge Jack could only reach his legs, so he cut them off with the sword and then hacked his head off too – whuk! Urrgh! Then the next one he called out of his castle with the horn, jumped up behind him and whacked him over the head with his shovel – bamm! And knocked him into the moat. Then he ran him through with the sword.

  Well, I haven't got a sword. Or a pickaxe or a horn. But I have got a shovel.

  Jack the Giant-killer climbs up on the bucket, then the crates. Swings the shovel down hard so that it whistles through the air, once, twice – pheeeew, clunnk!

  All he has to do is to get the giant through that door.

  Then he has to get away with his sister, and at least one hen…

  First things first. I go back over to Annie and shake her. I've remembered now that it's dangerous to sleep when it'
s too cold. Old Bert once saw a shepherd froze to death with his flock.

  ‘He'll have fallen asleep,’ he says to mistress. ‘Cold sends you to sleep, then you never wake up.’

  So I remember now, before it's too late, to wake Annie.

  She grumbles and moans as I haul her to her feet. ‘Sleep,’ she says.

  ‘No, walk,’ say I, and pull her across the floor. She pulls back complaining, and tries to sit down.

  The hens start clucking and there isn't much time.‘walk, Annie, walk,’ I say, pulling her along. ‘We're not staying here. We're leaving. You've got to walk or I'm leaving you here.’

  Annie's eyes open again but she's not looking at me. Seems like she's looking at thin air. Then she lifts a finger, pointing at thin air. ‘Are they coming?’ she whispers.

  If I could've felt colder, I did then. ‘Don't start that again,’ I tell her, then go on pulling and shoving her across the floor, back and forward, forward and back, till finally she's walking on her own.

  ‘Why?’ she says.

  ‘Because we're going,’ I say.

  ‘Where?’

  I haven't got as far as that. The workhouse'd be the obvious place, but somehow I don't think they'd take kindly to us running away. It was the master of the workhouse himself who farmed us out.

  ‘I've found a good place for you,’ he said. ‘And you can both go together. That's what you wanted, isn't it?’

  I'd good place him if I saw him again.

  ‘Don't know,’ I say and she opens her mouth and points inside, meaning, what'll we eat?

  Typical Annie – says nowt and still manages to argue. But I can't think about that now. I've got to think about getting us both through the snow. I pick up the sack. ‘Here, give us a hand,’ I say. The top of it's frayed and the seam's coming loose. With a bit of a struggle we manage to rip strips off it to bind round our hands and feet. Not much, but better than nothing. We need the rest of it for the hen.