by Anne Fine
‘In short,’ said Will, ‘quite unspeakably cruel!’
The audience howled with laughter. Will turned to Frozen Billy. ‘So, brother. What do you think this fine “uncle” deserves, for sitting both of us in splendour on his knees every night, but making one of us work with no pay?’
I saw the beads of sweat gather on Uncle Len’s forehead. Will seized the moment to turn to the audience again.
‘Should this kind “uncle” be despised for all his promises that turn to lies?’
‘Indeed he should!’ called back the audience.
‘Perhaps he should even be thrashed like a scoundrel?’
‘Yes!’ bellowed the audience, enjoying the joke hugely.
‘Arrested, even, for his false pretences?’
I saw the sweat run over Uncle Len’s fixed smile as the audience roared their agreement.
‘Yes! Yes!’
‘Arrest him!’
Will tipped his head to one side in puppet fashion. ‘No. Wait! I have a better idea . . .’
The audience waited, spellbound.
‘I’ll tell my mother! Yes! I’ll tell my mother!’
They roared with laughter, and the act went on.
On my way backstage, I felt a hand on my arm and turned to see Madame Terrazini. She had a puzzled look. ‘Clarrie, your brother surely cannot—’
I broke away. ‘You must excuse me! I must be there for him when Uncle Len comes off the stage!’
I rushed off and waited, terrified, for the quarrel I was quite sure would follow. Smouldering with anger, Uncle Len strode to the carrying box waiting on its stand in the wings, hurled in Frozen Billy and left the theatre, ignoring both of us. I hurried after, dragging a grim-faced Will.
At the door of the Soldier at Arms, Uncle Len turned away without a word. Will muttered sourly, ‘Ale drowns more men than Neptune,’ and moved ahead of me. Each time I hurried to catch up, he walked even faster, till he was running. So in the end I let him go, and by the time I’d reached our rooms, he had pulled the coverlet over him to pretend he was sleeping.
Next morning Uncle Len greeted him with a scowl. ‘Well, Will? Your humour last night sprang from some bitter root.’
Will stared back coolly. ‘You know the saying, Uncle. “You should be careful what you give a child, for in the end you’ll get it back.” ’
Uncle Len flushed. I thought the fur would fly. But there was something in Will’s eyes that made Uncle Len hesitate. He looked quite frightened.
Pushing his plate aside, he sprang to his feet. ‘I must be off. I have a man to see, and errands to run.’
In half a minute he was out of the door. Will calmly watched him go.
I lifted my brother’s empty plate. ‘Now it’s my turn to ask: “Well, Will?” ’
He only muttered sourly, ‘I think, if Uncle Len wants a dog to follow him, then he should perhaps take the trouble to feed it.’
A few nights later, I woke to the sound of busy voices. Raising myself in bed, I listened through the darkness as hard as I could. The earnest talk kept on. I slid my feet out from under the covers and down onto the cold floor. I crept across the room, avoiding boards that creak, and poked my head round the door to hear, quite clearly, Frozen Billy’s voice:
‘. . . and I assure you it is the very hardest thing, to lose a sister.’
Then, from the same corner, came my brother’s own tones.
‘But, Frozen Billy, Uncle Len has looked for her in every curiosity shop and every pawnbroker’s.’
The dummy’s voice was angry. ‘He must look harder and longer. Still Lucy must be somewhere.’
Then what a chill I felt! Here was my brother, lying alone in his bed, talking of a dummy’s missing wooden sister in both his own and Frozen Billy’s voice. I thought of shaking him from sleep. But then the horrid idea came to me that, startled, he might wake to find himself on the wrong side of that strange barrier between the dummy and the living boy.
I hurried back to bed and lay in the darkness, telling myself fiercely, ‘Don’t be so foolish, Clarrie! Frozen Billy’s no more than a gangling toy, and children talk to toys.’ I thought back to when I had a doll of my own, remembering how I had longed for her to come to life far more than I’d feared it. I thought of Mother, too, and tried to comfort myself that she would have laid an arm round my shoulders and whispered, ‘Leave Will to his dreams’ (though in my heart I knew it wasn’t true, and she would have felt the same horror as I did).
And then, a few days later, as I was tying on my bonnet to go to the shop, Will called from his bed to tell me drowsily, ‘Oh, Clarrie, Frozen Billy says you’re to bring home some thread the same blue as his jacket, so the snag in his sleeve can be mended.’
I took him to be half asleep. But when I came home that evening and tossed the cotton spool on the table, Will said, ‘Frozen Billy will be pleased.’
‘Uncle Len, you mean,’ I corrected him sharply.
‘No,’ Will said, idly enough. ‘Frozen Billy.’ Then, glancing up, he saw the look on my face. ‘Oh, yes, of course!’ he said slyly. ‘It’s truly Uncle Len I meant to say. I’m sorry, Clarrie.’
He stuck out his hands in a little ‘I was mistaken’ gesture. But his arms moved as stiffly as rods of wood, and, as I stared, he pulled his lips back to bare his pearly teeth like an unfeeling puppet.
But in his glass-hard eyes there was no smile at all.
You can imagine, my unease grew deeper till, one night, while Will was plastering the pale cream on his cheeks before the show, I heard a strange dull thud.
I looked up from the sock I was darning to see Will swivel his head to stare at the carrying box.
My eyes followed his. ‘What was that?’
Will didn’t answer, and I was still gazing at the box when I heard Frozen Billy’s voice, all muffled: ‘Let me out! Let me out!’
Will’s hand, streaked with white paste, stayed, still as alabaster, in front of his face.
My nerves were jangling. ‘Will,’ I said sharply. ‘Are you playing a trick on me?’
He turned his mask of a face in my direction. ‘Trick, Clarrie?’
‘Yes. Have you learned so much from Uncle Len that you can even fool me?’
He drew back his lips, but what I saw was not his real boy’s smile. It was that set of fierce white doll’s teeth. His mouth never moved. But once again I heard that same dull thud and muffled voice: ‘Let me out!’
I felt such fright it almost came as a relief when Will gave a horrid sharp laugh. ‘Why don’t you do it, Clarrie? Open the box – if you dare. Perhaps Still Lucy has found her way home at last and climbed in on her side.’
I don’t believe I would have found the courage, even to show my brother that the niece of an illusionist is not so easily duped. But just at that moment the front door banged, and we heard footsteps on the stair.
Uncle Len burst in, swaying. ‘Ready to come, Will?’
I had another worry then. ‘Uncle Len, have you been drinking?’
‘I wet my whistle, Clarrie. That was all.’
‘Before the act?’
He put on a sullen look. ‘When I decide I want someone to nag and scold me, I’ll look for a wife.’
He turned away as if the conversation was over, and picked up the carrying box.
‘You’ve said it yourself a hundred times,’ I persisted. ‘Strong drink before the show is the fastest way to be shown out of the Alhambra theatre door.’
To get away from me sooner, Uncle Len tried to hurry Will by sliding a hand under his arm. But though Will jerked away and fell to one side like a puppet whose strings have gone slack, I’d still caught sight of what he was trying to hide.
‘Delay the performance until you’re on stage,’ snapped Uncle Len. He threw the cloak round Will, and, grasping him by the shoulders, steered him out of the door.
I waited till their footsteps had died away before hurrying over to where Will had been sitting. Sure enough, there was the end of a stro
ng cotton thread dangling loose from the dresser. It was a thread from my workbox, chosen so carefully it was almost invisible against the dark oak. I followed it along a crack in the wood to where it ended, out of sight on a low chair behind the side table, knotted to a muslin cloth wrapped round a stone.
I looked around the room. There on the sideboard was a wooden saltbox. I fetched it over and put it exactly where the carrying box had been standing. Then I tugged the thread.
There was a muffled thud.
I tugged again.
Thud!
I ran to the window and stared after my uncle and brother as they reached the end of our narrow street and turned the corner towards the Alhambra. My knees were trembling. I had the strongest feeling suddenly that everything in our lives was sliding further and further from safety and happiness. How disappointed in my powers of protection must my brother be that, trying to rid himself of the burden of being Frozen Billy’s ‘twin’, he turned to such cold mischief? Pretend dreams! Invented commands from a wooden dummy! Now even a haunting!
I yearned for Mother and Father. They would have known what to do. I would have leaned out further and willed them on the stinging wind: ‘Come home! Oh, come home, please!’
Except that Mother couldn’t; and Father mustn’t, for fear of wasting all the time we’d already spent apart.
Instead, I closed the window and turned back to the chilly, cheerless room. My only companion was the girl on the cocoa tin, smiling as calmly and seraphically as if she’d never known a moment of unhappiness in her whole life.
I loved her, but it still burst out of me.
‘All right for you,’ I heard myself whispering bitterly. ‘You have no troubles at all. Things are all right for you.’
The Seventh Notebook
Our nights grew colder and darker, with sneaking winds that rattled the window frames and crept beneath doors. In his next letter, Father wrote:
Here, half a world away, we move towards summer. I think days can’t get lighter, hotter, longer – and still they do! If only you were at my side, to hear the frogs in the creek, and laugh with the kookaburra. Oh, when will we be together?
‘Never,’ scoffed Will, tossing the letter down on the table.
I didn’t argue. Will’s world had turned as grey and unpleasant as the fog outside the window. Each night he found a dozen new ways of being sour.
‘Herrings again? Clarrie, your mind’s as cramped as this room. Can’t you think of a new supper?’
‘Clarrie, where are my shoes? Into which silly place have you tidied them this time?’
‘This cocoa’s thin as ditchwater, Clarrie.’
I told him shortly, ‘It’s the best I can do tonight.’
He scowled in the mug. ‘Pass me the tin,’ he ordered. ‘I’ll stir in more myself.’
Not even bothering to look my way, he stuck out his hand, fingers spread, and looked up in surprise as I dropped the tin on it. ‘Empty? Can we no longer depend on you for anything?’
‘We have run short of money again, Will.’
It seemed he was ready to quarrel about that, but in the end contented himself with swirling the drink with his spoon till it slopped on the rag rug. ‘Ugh! Horrible! Horrible!’
‘Which, Will? The hot drink I just made for you? Or the mess you’ve made for me?’
‘Uncle Len’s right,’ snapped Will. ‘You have become a nag and a scold.’
As if to prove ill-temper under a roof is catching, Uncle Len started on Will. ‘Did I not ask you to find a rag to stop that hole in the window? There’s a wind strong enough to lean on coming through tonight.’
Snarl, snap. Snap, snarl. I looked around and wondered how Mother had ever made a warm and welcoming home out of this dark, dank nest. Now she was gone, I saw it clearly. The bare boards were pitted and rough, the rag rugs fraying. The rented furniture had been broken and mended and broken again. Every mug was chipped, and all the chair covers worn and stained.
And Uncle Len was right. The spiteful draughts whistled through each hole and cranny.
How could we carry on in such a way? And yet I knew that the worse things were, the smaller the chance of keeping Uncle Len from spending even more of our money seeking solace in the Soldier at Arms.
When they had gone, I sat at the table and wept. Through falling tears, the smile on the face of the girl on the cocoa tin turned strange and quavery, like a face in water, as if, like the friend I’d made her, she chose to take my troubles on herself.
I tried to comfort her. ‘You can’t help me,’ I whispered. ‘You’re just a painted face on an empty cocoa tin. You can’t help me.’
But as I blinked away the tears to see her better, into my mind sprang the echo of something Uncle Len had once said, and the inklings of an idea that might save us.
Did Madame Terrazini even hear my nervous tapping? Or was it purely by chance that after a moment the door flew open.
‘Ah, Clarrie!’ she said as if she’d been expecting me. Ushering me inside her cluttered office, she shut the door behind us, pointing to one of the two flowery armchairs.
‘Sit down.’
I perched on the very edge.
‘So,’ she said, smiling broadly. ‘You’ve come for money at last!’
Now here was a surprise! Could she be offering an easier way out of our troubles?
I spread my hands. ‘Well, if we could have just a little more . . .’
‘More? ’ She raised an eyebrow. ‘I assure you, Clarrie, the Alhambra has never paid their Top of the Bill as much as I pay your uncle and brother. Why, even my glorious tenor worked happily for less.’ She sighed. ‘No, I’m afraid if Len and Will want better pay, they’ll have to look for another music hall to offer it.’
Why raise my hopes simply to crush them flat? If I’d not known the porridge jar was empty, the coal in the scuttle down to the last few damp lumps, I would have risen and walked out with my head held high.
Instead, I forced myself to say, ‘I came to ask if you would very kindly let me borrow a few clothes from the theatre stores.’
‘Clothes? For yourself, Clarrie?’
I nodded.
‘Dresses?’
I shook my head. ‘A bright blue jacket. A pair of knickerbockers. And, if I can find them, a pair of striped school socks.’
She raised an eyebrow. ‘You seem a little old for dress-up games.’
‘No, no. I thought, if I could find a jacket and knickerbockers to fit, then I could cut off my hair—’
‘Cut off your hair?’
‘As short as a boy’s. Then I could take my turn on stage as Frozen Billy’s twin.’
She stared at me. ‘You? On stage, Clarrie? What would your uncle think of that?’
‘I haven’t told him yet. But he did once warn Will, “Be sure, on the day I finally find Still Lucy, I will be offering your job to Clarrie.” ’
Madame Terrazini chuckled. ‘The day he finds Still Lucy! You are a family of dreamers, Clarrie!’ Her face grew serious. ‘I’ve heard that Mrs Trimble and Miss Foy work you hard enough. Why would you add to your burdens by taking your brother’s place on stage?’
‘To save him!’ I burst out. ‘He works night after night. His temper sours, and nothing cheers him. If I could take his place, then he could rest and his good spirits might return to him.’
She smiled at me. ‘On stage to save your brother? Your lovely hair cut short? I tell you, you have the courage of a lion. A lion, Clarrie!’
My heart was lifting. ‘So I may go in the storerooms?’
‘Yes, of course.’
‘And try to take Will’s place?’
She spread her hands. ‘Clarrie, your uncle knows his business. If you can satisfy him, I have no doubt you can satisfy me and the audience.’ She sighed. ‘Maybe it’s for the best. Anyone can see that things are very wrong between your brother and uncle. Out there on stage the two of them seize every chance to snarl at one another and pick over ancient battles. You ha
ve the look of someone hovering over a sickbed, and scuttle away each time I remind you we have business to settle—’
That word again. ‘Business?’
‘Your brother’s wages!’ She waved a hand towards the huge safe standing in the corner. ‘You can’t believe I’d trust a boy his age to carry the amounts he’s earned home in his knickerbocker pockets!’
‘But surely, Uncle Len has—?’
‘Uncle Len?’ She threw up her hands in mock despair. ‘Oh, Clarrie, would you have me watch your brother work so hard, only to see your uncle drink his wages away in the Soldier at Arms straight after? How could you even think it? Oh, my dear child!’
‘But we all thought . . .’
Now she was staring at me as much as I at her. ‘Small wonder, then, that your poor brother is in such a pet! I wonder Len hasn’t put him straight, if only to improve his temper.’
‘I don’t believe my uncle knows. You see, you give him more than you did before—’
‘A mere pittance more, I admit, now there are two of them to pay.’
‘But more. Enough to confuse him into thinking that was the new wage for them both.’
She roared with laughter. ‘Then Len’s no better with his figures than with his letters, Clarrie!’ Again, she chuckled. ‘I’ll leave it to you to turn your brother’s growls to smiles. You’ve earned that pleasure.’ Her face grew serious. ‘Meantime, let’s hear no more about you cutting off your hair and going on the stage.’
She drew a few notes from a drawer. ‘Here. Take a little now to pay your rent and fill your larder. I’ll keep the rest in my safe.’ Pressing the money into my hand, she ushered me towards the door. ‘If you are wise, you might prefer to keep this news from your uncle.’ She put her arm round my shoulders and drew me near. ‘But you can cheer your brother with the news that, by the end of this week, he will have earned—’
Lowering her head to mine, she whispered, then stepped back, laughing at the look on my face.
‘That much?’