‘Won’t we get in trouble?’
Tommie shook his head. ‘What do you think of him?’
‘Mr Gale?’ I said. ‘I don’t know. He gets really angry.’
‘I think he might be mad,’ whispered Tommie. ‘Once, I was off ill for three days and he read my note to the class. It said that I’d been sick and … stuff. Who would do that? Well, everybody laughed and … Well, some of the girls called me … Well, stuff for weeks. He thought it was funny,’ said Tommie. ‘My dad says I should stand up for myself.’
‘Are you friends with Anna-Marie?’
‘Oh, yes,’ said Tommie. ‘I thought you might be friends with her. That’s why I didn’t like you.’
‘I thought I was friends with her.’
Tommie frowned. ‘Did Anna-Marie ever ask you who your favourite Roller was?’
‘Yes.’
‘Oh … What did you say?’
‘Woody.’
Tommie laughed. ‘Ha,’ he said. ‘It’s Les. You see, apart from me, Anna-Marie isn’t really friends with anyone.’
Back in the classroom, Tommie returned to his seat but shot straight back up again, letting out a yelp. Mr Gale rushed to him and placed an arm around his shoulder. ‘What on earth’s wrong?’ Tommie flinched as he removed a drawing pin from his behind. ‘Oh, my Lord!’ exclaimed Mr Gale. ‘Whoever’s responsible for this heinous crime? Speak now or forever hold your penis.’ Nobody even looked up from their work. ‘Oh, well, Winnie,’ said Mr Gale, a big grin on his face, ‘it looks like we may never get to the bottom of it.’
Tommie turned to me. ‘See?’ he mouthed. ‘Mad!’
My name is Peter Lambert. I am aged ten years old. ‘Lambchop.’ I was nine years old the night my father died. ‘Lambchop!’ Or ten. I don’t remember—
‘Lambchop!’ Mr Gale was scowling over my shoulder, his large fingers squeezing creases into my work. ‘It’s not much to show for a whole—’
I grabbed the crumpled paper from his hands and tore it into strips. Melanie gasped and everybody else stared at me like I was mad.
Mr Gale looked startled. ‘Perhaps,’ he said, nodding towards the pale-eyed children whose table stood apart from the rest beneath the window, ‘we should put you with the special-learners.’
I slipped the shreds of torn paper into my pocket.
9
At the end of the day Tommie was in his detention and, still upset from Anna-Marie at lunchtime, I was pleased to find Kat waiting for me, lurking with her back to the crowd of mothers standing by the gate. She seemed relieved to see me and took me quickly by the hand but it was already too late. This one woman had turned round as Kat called my name and was staring at her open-mouthed. I recognised her right away. It was that fat lady from the Lodge.
‘Well, bless my soul!’ she cried.
Kat was about to speak when I squeezed her hand as hard as I could, you know, before she broke the rules of the game. I was just in time.
‘I’m sorry,’ she mumbled to the fat lady and we scurried off like two blind mice.
There was no pavement on the main road, so, hand in hand, we pressed back against the cushion of the hedgerow as vehicles passed. It was warm and we breathed the scent of honeysuckle and other sweet summer smells. Kat took a deep breath, sighed and began pointing out the boundaries between the different farms.
‘Isn’t it beautiful, Peter?’ she said. ‘Wasn’t it right to come here?’ And then, ‘Oh, my goodness! Look!’ In the distance, maybe half a mile away, there was that man again, the one I told you about, in the middle of a field turning from one direction to another. Kat stopped and stared. She bit her lip and trembled. ‘I haven’t seen him in years.’
‘Who is he?’
‘That,’ said Kat, ‘is the Scarecrow Man.’
Mr Waterberry, the school caretaker, came from the village to do the garden. He was blind in one eye with thin grey hair but as tall and as strong as a bear. He pushed an ancient mower through the blistery heat and drank water from the outside tap as sweat tumbled down his wiry chest. ‘No one’s been in that garden in ages,’ he rasped. ‘You should’ve called me years ago.’
‘We keep ourselves to ourselves,’ said Kat.
Mr Waterberry tilted his head and nodded before saying, ‘I know you, m’love, don’t I? This is Margaret Goodwin’s cottage. You’re her girl.’
‘Well, you’re making excellent progress,’ said Kat (meaning the garden).
‘It’s not a lie,’ she explained when he’d gone. ‘It’s like telling a story. Not everything has to be true but that doesn’t make it a lie. We don’t want to tell any lies,’ said Kat, ‘but we don’t necessarily want to tell the whole truth.’
She called the cottage our sanctuary. And she was right. Being in Amberley changed everything. But sometimes I’d forget where I was and call her ‘Mum’ or ‘Mummy’. She’d smile and shake her head. ‘You can call me Kat,’ she’d say, ‘with a “K”.’ And it was nice to pretend. Sometimes pretending was better than when things were real.
She seemed happy and, before long, it was like we’d been there forever. And I think I would’ve been happy too but for the gloomy, green drape that I passed each night when I went to bed and every morning on my way to breakfast.
‘I’ll tell you what,’ said Kat as if she, like me, had been thinking about something completely different, ‘why don’t I show you where I used to make magic?’
Magic? I nodded. Well, that was more like it.
I followed her out of the cottage and across the gravel drive to this big shed all nestled beneath the trees. She twisted a squeaky padlock and inserted a key. I couldn’t help noticing, as the door squealed on its hinges and Kat encouraged me to peer in, that the bedroom keys had not yet been returned to the brass ring.
‘I haven’t been in here for a while,’ she confessed. The small window was thick with grime and the inside hung with shadows like sides of beef in a butcher’s shop. ‘There certainly used to be a light in here,’ she continued, fumbling around in the darkness. ‘Ah, here it is.’
I took a nervous step forward as the bulb glowed and all was revealed.
‘This,’ said Kat, ‘is my workshop. This is where I used to make magic.’
But it didn’t look very magical. There were just cardboard boxes everywhere, some sealed, others splitting at the corners or overflowing with magazines; a Union Jack hat sat on the head of a shop mannequin; an old record player and dusty black records in and out of their sleeves; a guitar with no strings; a rusting bicycle; an old paddling pool hung like an elephant skin on the wall; a toy pram still wrapped in polythene; cushions spilling their guts and enough tools to build an Ark.
The walls were lined with shelves and the shelves packed with sculptures, carvings from wood and stone. Some were just weird shapes, all curves and angles, others were of people or animals. One was of a mother and a baby and, although they were sort of naked, when I bent down to see it I thought of those statues of Mary and Jesus they sometimes have in churches.
‘I always wanted a little girl,’ murmured Kat. ‘What do you think?’
‘Did you make these?’ I was amazed. ‘They’re really good.’
‘No,’ she said laughing, ‘no they’re not, really. But thank you, anyway.’ She kind of curtsied and then glanced around. ‘Do you know, Peter,’ she said breathing deep on the dusty air, ‘some shepherd boy only stumbled across the Dead Sea Scrolls because they’d been hidden in the middle of nowhere rather than at the back of my workshop where they would have lain undiscovered ’til the end of—’
‘How is it magic?’
She smiled. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘I’ve got something to show you.’
In the middle of the shed—I mean the workshop—was a workbench, and in the middle of the workbench, surrounded by chisels and sketch books was something: something big hidden beneath a crumpled, white, paint-spattered sheet.
‘Do you want to see it?’
I nodded and, gripping it
tightly with both hands, she slowly tugged the sheet away.
It was a piece of wood. But that’s like saying Tiswas is a TV show and only making it sound like Nationwide because you haven’t mentioned all the running around and buckets of water and stuff like that. It was a chunk, a slice of rough, knotted tree trunk, as big as an armchair and looking as if it had been wrenched from the very heart of the fiercest monster in the woods.
‘Now,’ said Kat, ‘shall I tell you how to make a beautiful sculpture? First of all you go into the woods, deep into the woods, and you spend the best part of a week finding just the right piece of wood, a special piece of wood.’ Her hand caressed the rough bark just like it was Kitty’s silky coat. ‘This piece of wood. Then you get your tools: a hammer, of course, and a chisel, good quality ones, nothing cheap, and then, very gently and very carefully, you remove everything that isn’t … beautiful.’
‘What’ll it be?’
‘What’ll it be?’ she whispered as if she didn’t even know herself. ‘It’ll be … whatever it wants to be. You see, Peter, it’s separate from me: like I’m standing on a beach, perched on my toes, and its flotsam on the horizon. I just sharpen my blade,’ and she picked up a chisel, holding it in the palm of her hand, admiring the curved handle, ‘sharpen my wits and let them dance across the grain, like … like sparks in a fire. I don’t make. In fact, I take away and what I, what the chisel takes away is just as vital as what we leave behind. What’s just wood, Peter, and what’s something more? Do you see what I mean? What do we take and what do we leave? And what’s the difference? The wood,’ she said, ‘the wood tells us the difference.
‘You see, when I’m working—and yes, it is work—I close my eyes.’ And she did so, scrunching them up tight. ‘They’re not always the best guide as to what I should do. Sculpture, any art really, is based on trust, you see, on love even. And I don’t mean trust or love like in films or TV. I mean on, I don’t know, a deeper level, a connection between two, well, souls that’s nearly … nearly physical, that can’t be broken, that can hardly be dented by anything but, well … death. I trust my hands and I trust the wood: that we’re not going to mess up. We’re a team, the wood and I, a partnership, almost like a … like a marriage. And yet, do you know, sometimes, well, I worry that, like the hammer,’ she picked it up and held it tight, ‘and the chisel, I’m just a tool and we’re all being … wielded by the sculpture within.
‘So I close my eyes tightly, like this, and my hands move this way or that way as the grain tells them.’ She ran the head of the hammer and the blade of the chisel over the rough terrain of the wood. ‘I picture myself in the garden of the cottage: this cottage. There’s a little girl there, her hair’s like … like fire, chasing butterflies, her hands all curious. She falls and she cries,’ Kat let out a little cry herself, ‘but I don’t rush to comfort her. Children require discipline, you know. She’ll find no answers here; no explanations; no justifications. I love my child … I mean I love you, Peter,’ she opened her eyes and smiled at me, ‘no matter how … unruly, in a way that I could never love anybody else’s but spare the whip, they say, and spoil the child. Where it would be … tardy, you should make it punctual; where it would be lazy you must apply its fingers to labour without pity. But the unruly child will follow its own rules and keep nobody’s time but its own.
‘But, you see, Peter, the wood will make her wise. Can you see that? If I trust, if I plug away, cut away long enough, keep calm, do not be concerned—and if I get concerned, stop being concerned—the truth is in here somewhere. Like a midwife, I draw the sculpture from the wood, with my hammer and chisel as, well, forceps. Like Eostre, I take the day by the heels and drag it, hot and steaming, out of the twilight. The truth, when it comes, may be no bigger than a bookend and that will be fine.’ She smiled, murmuring, ‘Yes, that will be fine.’ Her eyes were open now and gazing at me as if I was the truth. ‘Do you know what I mean?’
I nodded.
I didn’t really know what she was talking about.
We returned to the cottage and I sat at the kitchen table with my orange maths book pretending to learn my times tables. Kat announced that she was ‘popping out’ to the church to take some of the wild flowers she’d rescued from the blades of Mr Waterberry’s mower. As soon as the front door clicked behind her I counted to exactly sixty fidgety seconds before bounding up the stairs, dragging back the green curtain and revealing the secret door. I seized and pulled at the handle just as I’d done a hundred times before. It was still locked. I pulled and pushed at it again and again until eventually I sank onto the tiny chair and wondered what lay behind.
‘Peter,’ said my father, smiling, ‘have you seen this trick?’ He moved to the opposite side of the table and drew back the chair. As he sat he took two paper shapes, a red square and a blue circle, from the pile before me. His tongue licked each shape.
And I smiled because, well, I had a trick of my own. The real me couldn’t remember what but the memory-me was bubbling, rattling around on the hob trying to keep his lid on. It was like the world’s best secret: like an adult’s secret, forever just out of view.
Only this one was mine.
My father pressed the red square to the forefinger of his right hand and the blue circle to the forefinger of his left. He placed each gum-shaped finger on the edge of the table with the rest of his fingers hidden beneath.
I stifled a giggle and he smiled again. I felt a bit bad because he thought I was excited by his trick. He didn’t know about mine. Not yet. I held the secret in my head where it scorched like a piece of toast. I could hear it tempting me to tell it, a best friend whispering in my ear, ‘Go on, go on.’ I was impatient for the trick to be revealed, to have my cleverness applauded, to taste success as rich and spicy as the hot ginger cake fresh from the oven but I knew I mustn’t tell.
It would ruin the surprise.
‘Two little butterflies sitting on the wall,’ sang my father. ‘One named Peter,’ he winked at me, wiggling the broad finger of one hand. ‘One named Paul,’ he wiggled the finger of the other. Then, with a wave of his right hand, he cried, ‘Fly away, Peter!’
His finger returned to the surface of the table and the red square had disappeared. I gasped. ‘Fly away, Paul!’ he cried, repeating the movement with his left hand. When it returned the blue circle too had vanished.
His eyes smiled.
‘That’s … That’s magic.’
‘No,’ he said a little sadly. He revealed the rest of his fingers and there were the coloured shapes, the red square and the blue circle, just where they’d always been. He’d changed fingers. ‘It’s a trick,’ he said, and then, ‘Look at the mess you’ve made with that glue, Peter.’
Upstairs the Hoover died.
And then—
Kat had been gone an hour. By the time she returned I was back at the kitchen table, twisting and retwisting Action Man into warlike shapes and trying to smile as if the world was a simple, uncomplicated place full of doors which were always unlocked. She stared at me, her eyes like shadows, as if she couldn’t quite remember who I was. And then, when she did remember, she said that she was going to lie down for a while and that I should go outside to, ‘play or something.’
I sat awhile longer, twisting Action Man’s arms and legs back and forth, back and forth only to look down and discover that one by one I’d pulled them free of his body. The kitchen clock ticked, the fridge shuddered again and having tipped Action Man’s sad remains onto the bed of pink roses in the bin, I crept to my bedroom to find the Robin Hood set Kat had tugged from under my bed. The green felt hat with the feather was way too small and babyish for me so, instead, I wrapped my school tie around my head and slipped the bow over my shoulder. The skipping rope, a perfect lasso—not that Robin Hood really had a lasso—was missing.
In the kitchen I slapped syrup and jam onto slices of bread and made a fierce face at my reflection in the butter knife. And then I trudged out into the dry afternoon wood
s to play.
Or something.
10
Of course, Robin Hood wasn’t really bothered about having anyone to play with either. Apart from his Merry Men I mean. But when my father died the friends I did have at my old school began to keep away from me like I had some kind of dead-fatheritis. They were mostly nice to me because the teachers told them to but in their eyes I was different now, as if I’d visited some alien world—like those children who went on their holidays to Spain—but not one that anyone wanted a postcard from: a world where death was something more than the way bad guys met their ends on TV. It was something real. So I would sit on my own and leave them to their games of chase and Doctor Who or Mission: Impossible. If someone did invite me to join in I’d pretend I hadn’t heard or I’d scream at them ’til they went away and told the teacher:
‘Miss. Peter’s screaming again, Miss.’
A wood pigeon rattled its way through the treetops and I fired all my three arrows, straight and true—‘sh-p, sh-p, sh-p’—but there was no twang in the bow and they fell well short of their target. I collected them back and then began spraying the high branches with pebbles. The bird flew away unharmed so I dug into my knapsack and fed my hunger with syrup and strawberry jam.
I didn’t know whether to call Anna-Marie a friend or not. I certainly hadn’t decided whether to tell her about that curtain and the secret door. Anyway, she’d been ignoring me since that thing on the school playground. Whenever I’d seen her on the way to or from school she’d speeded up or slowed down so that I could never quite catch her. As I rambled between the trees I thought about Maid Marion locked away in her dingy cell by her wicked uncle. And then I couldn’t remember for sure if Maid Marion did have a wicked uncle or if I was thinking of somebody else.
Anyway, I decided I would storm the evil sheriff’s castle and slice in two any fool who stood in my way and then I would climb the tower steps and tear back the heavy curtain that concealed the beautiful maiden’s cell and then I would gaze upon her long blonde hair and big ears, my heart spinning as I took her in my arms and listened for her soft greeting:
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