Annie shut the barn door and set off down the path. ‘Everyone stay close, and go tiptoes on the gravel,’ she whispered. ‘Someone keep a watch on Maria at the back.’
And my sisters crept off after her, their torches making a yellow caterpillar, their sacks chinking with their steps, their breath puffing out in ice clouds. I watched them head west for the path to the turnips, not one of them stopping to say, ‘Where’s Calamity Leek? Come on, sister, catch us up!’ No, I watched them go, and I thought to turn back for the yard where some younger body – Millie Gatwick, say – would be welcoming of a cuddle. Then I thought about Annie. I thought how easy she had said to me she weren’t doing nothing with them tools. And now she was heading for the Wall. My heart stopped dead a second. Weren’t nothing for it, I set off quick after them.
Deep into the plum orchard, I caught up with her and grabbed her fur.
‘You never told me, Annie. I asked you what the tools were for, and you never said the truth.’
A brown owl leaped off a high branch and glided over us.
‘And that ain’t sisterly,’ I said, my voice shrinking off, so it near got lost in the night. ‘Annie, it ain’t.’
But Annie just shone her torch in front and kept on stepping.
We came to the fattest plum tree. Annie swung her torch down on Truly’s mound. Dew bubbles shone on Truly’s pebbled name. Annie swung her torch over the Boule heads and strawdolls, and the millipedes and dung beetles that were chewing over the soil, and she walked on.
I caught her again in the last of the plums, tugging on her smock to slow her steps. ‘I didn’t send Truly to Bowels when I had my tea with Aunty, you know that, Annie. I would have done anything to keep her safe. You know that, don’t you?’
Annie didn’t look at me, but she did put out her hand for mine. ‘Step your feet in my torch puddle, Clam, you’ll find it easier that way.’
‘Only, can you tell Nancy, please? Only, she won’t listen to me because of that sick piglet. Which I only told Aunty about for all our safety. And you should know I would do anything to keep you safe, Annie, I really would.’
Annie lifted a low branch and ducked out of the orchard. Under His deceiving moonlight, Sting Alley was shaped into soft grey feathers. ‘Run through here fast as you can, Clam. Stay close in my steps.’
We didn’t stop running until I felt my toes slide into bog. Out here the black night had melted into the ground, so there weren’t no way of telling sky lid from soil. There weren’t a sound but that of squelching sisters, clinking tools and my own panted breath.
‘You know, Annie, we could still turn back,’ I said. ‘They’d all listen to you. Happen this midnight bog-stomping has been fun, but it’s been quite fun enough.’
Annie’s eyes didn’t shift off following her torch puddle.
‘Thing is, Truly was nosy and look what happened to her. I know you loved her, but it doesn’t mean you have to end that way too. And if there ain’t any injuns out there, but something worse – well then, it will lead to more than nonsense for you, won’t it?’ I tried to turn my voice nice and creamy. ‘I won’t tell no one if you decide to turn round. If you hurt your toe all sudden, or get a bellyache, say.’
Annie stopped. ‘But will it lead to nonsense?’ She looked round to check on our sisters. I counted the breath clouds puffing out in the dark. Thankful, no one looked to have been sucked down to Bowels yet.
‘What if it’s stopping nosiness we’re at, Clam? What if it’s that we’re doing?’
‘Well, everyone knows you don’t stop an itch by scratching it.’
‘But, see, I’ve been thinking. Aunty always says we are special—’
‘—grown with special purpose, yes, Annie.’
‘Yes, of course, but here’s the funny thing. Truly don’t seem so special to Aunty now she’s dead. So what if Truly’s nosiness – all her wanting to fly, all her wanting to touch the sky lid – what if that was what actually made her special? What if that is what her purpose actually was?’
‘Well, Annie, that is such a bottom-up way of thinking it’s not even—’
‘No, listen, Clam. Truly told me things she saw, and then she died. So I’ve been thinking, maybe my purpose is to take Truly’s words and find out the truth of them. So when I find there’s no injuns prowling Outside, we’ll all be safe, and my own special purpose will be done.’
Well, not even Evita Thrupp’s sieve would have been able to sift sense from that. And I told Annie so. I said this way of thinking was just a brain set restless from grief. And she looked at me close then, a frown puzzling up her brow. ‘Is it really so wrong just to want to see what’s out there, Clam? Is that really so wrong?’
‘What if you get attacked by injuns?’
‘I’m taking Nancy’s blade. And I can run fast and climb trees.’
‘Well, worse then. What if you get cooked like Truly, so you come back with terrible words boiling up your brain, but you’ve turned dumb and you can’t speak them, and you die off dumb as a worm?’
We had arrived at the Wall. I leaned a hand against its cold strong bricks, and I felt something calmer for it. ‘Please, Annie. Ain’t you thought of that?’
Annie laid down her sack. ‘Happen I have, Clam. And what I actually reckon is this – even if I am dragged down to Bowels, even if, then at least Truly will be there. I will be with Truly. And how can that be so bad?’
And then I saw it – there was no stopping her.
We huddled close and stared.
The hole in the Wall winked back.
‘What’s it doing that for?’ Mary Bootle wailed.
‘Keep back,’ I said. ‘Nancy, get out your blade.’
‘It’s only trees,’ Dorothy said, figuring it first, like usual. ‘Trees waving.’
Feathered trees were waving their arms like winks through the little black hole where blind safety should have been. We stared at that hole to the Outside. A hole we hoped was big enough for Annie to squirm her skinny hips through, but shaped too tight to let any injuns jump in and tear us all to pieces. That’s what we hoped.
All about our feet were clots of brick. And I looked at that hole we had bashed in our Wall, and I tell you this, it looked about as right as a smile when it’s got a nerve-dangling gap instead of a tooth, or as happy as a pig with its intestines pulled out, or as pretty as a rose with a slug-swallowed bloom. Which is to say, it was a sore sorry sight and it turned my heart to pus to see it.
Two jackdaws bounced down on the bog. They hopped over and looked in the hole, and they looked at us, and they shook their silver heads and cracked open their beaks, and they laughed and laughed and laughed.
‘Well then,’ Annie said loud, to shut them up. She stepped over to the hole, Nancy’s butching blade in her hand.
‘Well then,’ we said.
‘I best be off then.’
‘Best had,’ Dorothy said.
‘Wait up,’ I said, going over to Annie. Least I could do was check her headscarf was pulled down safe and her fur was buttoned tight. ‘You’ll just have to watch your feet and ankles and hands and neck,’ I said. ‘And keep your ears sharp for whizzing arrows. And night’s starting to fade, so don’t go for long.’
‘Well then,’ Annie said, shrugging me off. She put an ear to the hole to Outside.
‘Anything?’ Dorothy said.
‘Trees shushing.’ Annie turned back round to us. ‘You know, I was just thinking. I was just thinking someone could come with me. To help if I get stuck in an ambush. What do you think?’
Well, them clever jackdaws were the first ones to answer. They laughed and laughed and laughed. They bounced up and down and nudged each other, and shook their wings like they were so swelled with laughter their coats didn’t fit them proper.
Nancy stepped over and jammed her shoulder at the hole. She didn’t even get in sideways. ‘Sorry, Annie.’
Annie looked at Dorothy.
Every bone in our sister’s grasshopper body w
as rattling. Dorothy blinked ten times and pinched her nose, and then she came out with it. ‘Thing is, Annie, only Eliza’s skinnier than you, really.’
Eliza coughed like she was about to die off.
And I said, ‘And if someone is to be ambushed, ain’t it better to be just one?’
Annie looked down at the bog, ‘Fair enough. I just wondered.’ Then she turned and threw herself at the hole. Her feet waggled like a fishtail jumping into water, and like that, she was gone. She had left Garden safety, our Aunty’s purpose and all her sisters. But I had tried to tell her, and there was nothing to be done now but wonder if we would ever see her again.
THE DEMONMALE
I AM LETTING him sit in this room when Mrs Waverley is in it.
She lets him hold her hand. Which is foolish. But since she must be close to being completely cooked up now, she can’t be expected to have any sense left inside her.
You tell me this is ‘Real Progress’ – me doing this ‘letting him sit’. You tell me lots of ‘Real’ things these days, Doctor Andrea Doors. Like how the Real World is with men and women. You say, ‘This is how it Really works.’
I listen to you talking about how it works with demonmales and females. ‘Men and women’, you say, using Outside words all careful like I ain’t never had a lesson on the Outside in my whole sorry life. How you reckon men help women make babies. How you reckon bits of men are grown inside all babies, even female ones. I look at him sitting there with his red ears and his hairy mouth, and I think of him living inside a baby like Baby Sainsbury’s and I laugh and laugh and laugh.
And you ask me how I think babies are made.
So I tell you about the rose bushes, and us seeded snug in the buds and attached to the petal heart, like a feather to a hen.
‘I see,’ you say. ‘And where did you learn this?’
Well, even Danny Zuko would know that, Doctor Andrea Doors, and he is a wireworm.
‘Or would you rather not say?’
Well, ain’t like it’s a secret no more, is it? So I say, ‘In the Appendix.’
‘To what?’ you say.
Which ain’t but a dumb worm question.
‘Or would you rather not tell me, Calamity?’
Over at the wall, the demonmale is pressing his hands into his knees, listening in to us. Like this is his business. Well, it will be, soon enough.
I say, ‘In the Appendix to the Ophelia Swindon Biographical Archive.’ Which is its full title. Which I don’t expect you to understand, course.
‘I see,’ you say.
Except you don’t really see much, do you, Doctor Andrea Doors?
You don’t see I am letting him sit in here because it’s the easiest way to prepare him. Letting him feel safe. If I were Nancy, I might throw him an apple now and then, while I sharpen the blade.
PIGS
DAWN CLOUDS HAD glued up the sky lid grey as porridge. Off in the yard, the cockerels were shouting for their breakfast. Dorothy called through the hole a hundred times, but nothing answered but waving trees.
I faced my sisters, their eyes boggling cold and fearful. ‘Truth needs telling,’ I said. ‘This is it. If we stay longer, we are sure to be discovered and done for. That’s it.’
Mary Bootle let off a wail and plonked herself down on a sack. ‘But it’s my turn to be at Nursery Cottage today. The second-winders need me to make breakfast.’
‘Well, Mary, the second wind toddlers will have to forget you. Most probably we will all be locked away for mending. Most probably till we are all turned Liphook.’
Maria Liphook, who hadn’t a better game now than bashing at the Wall hole. Who had no interest in grubs, and had been bashing for as long as Annie had been gone. Who, when we pulled the axe off her, had sat down and stuck her arms Outside after those trees like she was saying, ‘Yoohoo, injuns, come and get me.’
I flicked a look at our slowbrained sister and I sighed. ‘Happen I don’t want to be turned mashhead, Mary Bootle. Do you?’
Dorothy ran to the hole and shouted, ‘Annie, come on back!’
Her words died off. No one said nothing but the cockerels in the yard. Even those jackdaws had gotten bored of laughing at us and flown off over the Wall.
‘Truth needs telling, sisters.’
Nancy squinted at the bog. ‘Spit it out then, Clam, before it chokes you.’
‘All I’m thinking is we should leave here now.’
‘No,’ Dorothy said. ‘We’re not leaving Annie.’
Nancy squinted at me. I could see she was working through the wisdom of my words. ‘Well, Dorothy, it ain’t fair that we all get into trouble for it, is it, eh? We could leave Maria here to pull her out.’
‘If she comes back. If she ain’t gone and been got by—’ I didn’t have the voice to finish it off.
Mary Bootle started up with wailing in her messy way, ‘Please don’t say Annie’s been gotten by injuns. Not injuns. No, please, no.’
‘Injuns?’ A voice said loud behind us.
And there was Annie’s bushy head, poking through the hole in the Wall. And never in my life have I been so happy to see them fizzing green eyes. ‘Who’s talking about injuns? Come on, sisters, give me a hand and pull me through. I give you my word I’m not an injun.’
It was in the pigs dorm, Annie told us what she’d seen.
Nancy’s idea, the pigs. And it weren’t a bad one. ‘We’ll be safe and warm talking with them,’ she said. ‘And we can run back quick to our dorm if Aunty comes down early.’
So there we were, in with the boars. Nancy was flat on her back, crawling with piglets. We others took one boar each. Aunty never minded us touching the pigs. ‘Practice makes perfect, nieces,’ she said. ‘A male is a male is a male, so you just tickle and stroke away.’
Annie sat down by hairy Henry Higgins. I went for Caractacus Potts. Sandra got Joseph, and Mary and Eliza set to cuddling Bill Sykes, whose big old belly could take two sisters working him at once.
‘Well?’ Nancy said.
Annie didn’t look up from where she was stroking one of Henry’s front legs up and down the shin.
‘Well?’ I said.
Annie shrugged and kept on stroking.
‘What?’ Nancy said. ‘Come on, Annie. There must have been something.’
‘Trees,’ she said all quiet, her hand going up and down. Up to Henry’s elbow and down to his trotter. ‘There really weren’t nothing Outside but trees.’
‘Well, we all saw those,’ Nancy said.
‘We all saw those,’ I said, ‘and we didn’t go nowhere, Annie.’
Annie shrugged.
No one said nothing. Then Dorothy said, ‘Well, what were they like, the trees?’
Annie sat up from Henry and scuffed up a space in the straw and drew a feathery triangle on the concrete. ‘Ones like that, going on forever.’
‘Well, we all saw those, and we didn’t go nowhere,’ Nancy said. She kissed the tiddlers one by one and lifted them off her, because Oliver Twist was bashing his snout on the back yard door after getting out. ‘Happen you must have seen more than that.’
Annie circled Henry’s elbow, round and round.
‘Annie?’ Dorothy said. Dorothy was hopping about the straw, her brain rattling too crazy for pig-tickling. ‘You really must have seen more than that.’
‘I ran all the way round the Wall,’ Annie said. ‘I crossed a road that came out of two black gates tall as the von Trapp gates. And that was all I saw. Trees and two gates. No injuns nowhere. Not a whoop, not a feather, not an arrow.’
Dorothy pinched her nose to stop it jumping. ‘Did you look real proper?’
‘I’ve told you, there weren’t nothing but trees.’ Though Annie’s face was shining from being scrubbed off under the standpipe, her eyes had grown dull as mould.
‘But I don’t understand,’ Dorothy said.
‘What’s to understand?’ I said, and I smiled at Annie. ‘It’s plum simple, it really is. It being night, the injuns w
ere all asleep in their caves. That’s all there is to it. And that sure makes a happy end on it, don’t it?’
Course, it wasn’t like I was waiting on Annie to jump up and bone-hug me and say, ‘Well done, Calamity. Sorry for not listening to you in the first place and not inviting you along.’ No, wasn’t like I was waiting on that at all. But never mind. I kissed Caractacus Potts all over his ears, and I smiled and said, ‘That sure makes a happy end on it, like I always said. Don’t it, sisters? Don’t it?’
Annie jumped up. ‘I’m mighty tired,’ she said, and she went through the gate into our side of the dorm.
JAPAN
NOW I HADN’T thought I would sleep after all that, but when the Communicator bing-bonged for breakfast, I was deep in a dream chasing Truly Polperro up a plum tree.
It was my nose woke me first, hungry for a whiff of her. I rolled onto her space, sniffing up her straw, hunting a scent of the plum juice she dribbled, or the pigs she rode backwards, or the petals she jammed down her toes – I was hungry for just one whiff of her busy breath and silly ways. There weren’t one leftover smell of Truly about. And when I rolled over again, there was a concrete space where Annie and her straw should have been.
I sat up.
Dorothy Macclesfield was sitting up too. Her eyes were blinking at Annie’s empty straw, like this time they couldn’t ever stop.
There were words chalked out on the concrete –
BEEN THINKING ABOUT THEM INJUNS’ CAVES.
TRIED RUNNING ROUND THE WALL
BUT AIN’T TRIED RUNNING AWAY FROM IT.
WON’T BE LONG.
‘Oh no, oh no, oh no,’ Dorothy said.
‘Oh yes, sister Macclesfield,’ I said, and I spat on every one of them foolish words, and with my smock sleeve I scrubbed the concrete clean.
Course, it got worse then. Course it did. The Communicator toot-tootle-oot-tootle-oooooooted, which was the sign of a Very Important Announcement. The Very Important Announcement was that a Very Important Announcement was going to be made at lunch, which was going to be a Very Important Occasion, with Very Important People in attendance. Goodness, it was going to be exciting. Anyone who wasn’t drying out petals had better be in the kitchen chopping up a feast. Bring forth the patio heaters! Get your glad rags on! Rummage up some butching knives, Nancy, and tether Henry Higgins to the fence! As our dear Aunty was overwhelmed with the Very Importance of the Occasion, she was going to spoil her nieces with a perky little number called ‘Who will buy this wonderful morning?’ ‘A purely rhetorical song,’ the Communicator said, ‘because some things in life are just too valuable to sell.’
The First Book of Calamity Leek Page 13