Everlasting Lane

by Andrew Lovett

  ‘Anna-Marie’s right about you,’ muttered Tommie, his teeth working the end of his pencil like it was a Curly Wurly. ‘She’s stuck in her room and all you’re doing is muttering to yourself. I’m doing all the work,’ he complained. ‘You’re just staring into space.’

  What I wanted to say was that he couldn’t just write things down when they didn’t mean anything. It wasn’t all coincidence. Something caused something else to happen but that didn’t make it mysterious. That’s just what happens. Tommie got hit on the head but that was just an accident and Mr Gale was really sorry. And I dropped the vase and that was an accident too. It slipped out of my hands when the vicar jumped up on me. It was like Anna-Marie’s puzzle: everything did seem to fit together because that’s what everything does. It didn’t mean something just because Tommie wanted it to.

  I said, ‘You’re just being silly.’

  ‘If I’m so silly,’ said Tommie crossly, ‘then why is Anna-Marie locked in her room and not you?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. I was lying, of course, but that didn’t make it like a clue.

  We’d come to a line of children waiting to throw sponges at Mr Gale—‘five pence a throw’—our teacher kneeling behind a wooden screen with his head poking through. On the screen was painted the body of a schoolboy with short trousers and a blue knotted tie, on his head a schoolboy cap. He looked like that man—Terry Someone—who does My Bruvver on the telly. Tommie was delighted and quickly forgot about mysteries and coincidences as he joined the queue, rolling a ten pence piece impatiently between his fingers, until swapping it for two sopping sponges.

  ‘Ah!’ exclaimed Mr Gale, ‘it’s Winnie the Winslow boy and his demon googlie.’

  Tommie, muttering to himself, wound and then unwound his first shot with so much anger that it flew about a mile wide of Mr Gale’s broad grin. The teacher roared with laughter. Tommie scowled with concentration as he again took aim. ‘I’m glad to see you’ve recovered,’ said Mr Gale, ‘even if your sense of direction is still piss-poor.’ Eyes blazing, Tommie failed to concentrate at all and his second throw missed its target by an even greater distance. ‘That’s it,’ laughed Mr Gale, ‘practice makes perfect.’

  ‘Give me two more,’ demanded Tommie.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said the money-taking lady, ‘you’ll have to go to the back of the—’

  ‘It’s all right, Joan,’ laughed Mr Gale, ‘let him have another crack whilst he’s doing so well. I’ll make a cricketer of him yet.’

  Tommie sent sponges three and four flying with even greater determination but no greater success than the first two. Mr Gale laughed and teased Tommie to new levels of failure. ‘Keep ’em coming!’ he yelled. ‘It’s all in a good cause.’

  This time, much to Tommie’s annoyance, the lady refused to sell him any more sponges until he’d, ‘made sure there isn’t something more worthwhile to spend your money on.’

  ‘You’ll never bowl for England!’ yelled Mr Gale.

  With my encouragement and Mr Gale’s taunts in our ears we wandered off between the up and down of the merry-go-round and the belching beer tents and the flies buzzing lazily around the bottoms of donkeys as they carried toddlers back and forth. The donkeys I mean. Not the flies.

  ‘If nothing’s happened,’ said Tommie, ‘why do you think Anna-Marie is being punished? Don’t you think that’s mysterious?’

  I groaned. You see, he was wrong. It wasn’t a mystery; it was just a story and a story wasn’t the same as a mystery at all. Really a story is just consequences: consequence following on consequence like those domino things they’re always doing on Record Breakers, clickety-clack with Roy Castle tap-dancing in the background and playing the most instruments in the world ever. Just because Tommie didn’t understand everything he thought it was a mystery but it wasn’t a mystery because somebody knew the answers; like somebody knew whether Alice really was my sister or not. To somebody it wasn’t a mystery at all just like some of the things I knew—like where I hid my scrapbook or the things I put in it—would be a mystery to someone else.

  Unless I told them.

  And maybe the worst thing we could do was solve a mystery, because Alice was a mystery and a mystery was just another word for a secret and a secret was just another word for the truth and when we solved it, when it wasn’t a mystery any more, all we’d have left was the truth. Or maybe nothing.

  ‘Nothing?’ Tommie stared at me open mouthed. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘I think you’re mad,’ he said. ‘You’re just mumbling to yourself and … Don’t you care? When Anna-Marie gets out I’m going to tell her you just daydreamed the whole time.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Tommie,’ I said, and I meant it. ‘I was listening,’ but I prayed he wouldn’t test me.

  We came upon a stall where you could win a goldfish—Genuine Goldfish said the sign—by throwing a big hoop around a little glass bowl. We stood at the back of the crowd and watched the man demonstrate over and over again. It looked so easy.

  ‘I’m going to win a goldfish,’ I said. I didn’t tell Tommie that, just in case there wasn’t a real fortune-teller, this would be my gift for Anna-Marie. I didn’t want him copying me.

  ‘That’ll be ten pee for three throws, young sir,’ grinned the stall-holder, his grey teeth were like two rows of broken stones in a graveyard. ‘Best of British.’

  As soon as I held the first hoop I could tell that it was a trinket compared to the fish bowls staring back at me like the crew of Apollo thirteen. I mean with their big spaceman helmets on and stuff. Despite the encouragement of the man with the bad teeth (‘So close, sooo close … You’re nearly there … One of the best so far’) I was soon thirty pence down and beginning to realise how hard it was. I’d taken a handful of coins from my piggy-bank, from my ‘ring-money’ and was heartbroken to lose it so easily.

  ‘Never mind, my young friends,’ said the man when, after another twenty pence of failure, I hung up my hoop. ‘Wisdom isn’t free but at fifty new pence it is at least reasonably priced.’ That was easier for an adult to believe than a ten year old. ‘However,’ he said to cheer us up, ‘before you go, how about this?’ He dipped his fingers into one of the bowls, pulled out a wriggling goldfish and popped it, to our amazement, into his mouth, giving it a satisfied chew. Our nervous laughter turned to horror as he revealed the goldfish remains reduced to paste between his ugly teeth.

  ‘They don’t ’alf tickle on the way down,’ he said with a laugh.

  Tommie found a stall selling tiny, tinny necklaces and bracelets. He picked up one after another and examined them like he was Sherlock Holmes as the woman behind the bench reassured him that each one was better than the last. What a fool! I almost laughed when I pictured his miserable face as I shared the words of the fortune-teller with Anna-Marie. The future: that was the biggest mystery, the biggest secret of all. And when I’d explained all the mysteries of the world until there were no mysteries and no secrets left, wouldn’t Tommie’s list of mysteries look like, well, a scrap of paper?

  And then I saw Melanie. She looked beautiful, a princess with flowers woven into in her hair.

  ‘Hello, Melanie,’ I said.

  ‘Pinky-Perky-Poof,’ she said to the delight of her friends.

  The crowd grew and grew until it was impossible for us to take more than two steps together before bumping into someone (‘Sorry’) or someone bumping into us (‘Grunt’). Bits and pieces of conversation mixed with nursery rhymes and mingled with babies crying and old women laughing. And the noise kept growing until we pushed our fingers deep into our ears. In the end we found a gap between the canvases of Mrs Twist’s Guess the Weight of the Cake and Kirrins’ How Many Wine Gums in the Jar? stalls. Greg Kirrin, pink belly peeping out between the buttons of his shirt, glowered at me as we slipped past but I didn’t see Norman anywhere at all. We emerged from the shadows to find the stalls on the other side were dark and shabby with black flaps drawn across t
he entrances, but at least this side of the fair was softer on the ear, the air was cooler and there were fewer, if any, people wandering around.

  And then I saw this sign: Madame Vérité—Fortunes Told just like I’d hoped. Tommie snorted. ‘My dad says that kind of stuff’s all a rip-off,’ he sniffed.

  But he was the one who kept going on about mysteries and secrets. The future: the biggest secret of all, a secret that no one knew the answer to. Now that was a proper mystery.

  ‘I’m going to get Anna-Marie a proper present,’ he grumbled, stomping off in disgust.

  What a fool!

  I lifted the flap and peered inside.

  Madame Vérité was sat hunched at an old school-table and dressed just like a gypsy from one of those stories: an old shawl, like a tablecloth with tassels, was wrapped about her and the tent trembled with darkness and candlelight.

  ‘Cross my palm with silver,’ she said in a croaky voice.

  I didn’t have any silver but I nervously uncurled and handed over my pound note: a whole pound, yes, but worth every penny, and she was happy to take it, fold it three or four times and pop it into this tin with a slot cut in the top like my Pinky-Perky money-box. There was a veil across her mouth and the shawl was pulled so far over her head that I could barely see her face, only shadows and the quick flickery flash of big gold earrings and a shiny pendant, like a capital J.

  And then she said, ‘It’s Peter, isn’t it?’ which was kind of funny and sort of magical because she didn’t even know my … But then I thought: Capital J? Why would Madame Vérité be wearing a pendant with a capital J? Madame Vérité didn’t even start with a J. But then neither, I thought as the so-called fortune-teller pulled back her shawl and lowered her veil, did disappointment.

  ‘I was hoping,’ said Miss Pevensie with a smile, ‘that I might run in to you today.’

  But I wasn’t smiling: I was cross. I mean she always seemed very nice and everything but, after all, she was only a teacher. In fact, she wasn’t even a proper teacher yet. In fact, she was no more a real-life fortune-teller than Mr Gale was a real-life schoolboy.

  I should have known.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘Blame it on the PTA.’

  ‘Can you really tell the future?’ I said. I’d had a headful of questions: about Anna-Marie and about—

  She shook her head. ‘No.’

  ‘Oh.’ I wasn’t even surprised. ‘Well, what about the past, then?’ Maybe she could tell me whether Alice—

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘but let’s see if I can’t tell you what’s happening now.’

  Now? Now? That didn’t sound like a whole pound’s worth. I rather thought I could do that for myself.

  She waved for me to sit down on the stool that faced her.

  I sat and she said, ‘Give me your hand.’ Miss Pevensie stretched out my palm and studied it, tracing the wrinkles with her finger. ‘Your life-line is very long,’ she said.

  ‘Is that my life-line?’

  ‘I think so. But they’re all very long so I don’t think you have anything to worry about.’

  ‘It’s like Everlasting Lane,’ I said, watching it wriggle off into the distance.

  ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Do you think so? Well, I suppose it could be.’

  She slipped some blue cards from under her gown and removed the elastic band holding them together. The cards were covered in red writing. She began to shuffle them badly.

  ‘You’ve got to ask me a question,’ she said.

  ‘Where did you get those cards?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Try something more, I don’t know, magical.’

  I thought about it and then I said: ‘Who digs the gravedigger’s grave?’

  Miss Pevensie looked a little surprised. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘that is an interesting question.’ She held out the blue cards in a fan. ‘Pick one.’

  I took a card and cupped it in my hands hiding it, trying to read it in the dark.

  ‘No,’ said Miss Pevensie, ‘it’s okay to show me. It’s not like a card trick. Well, not exactly. I can’t guess what you’ve got. You’re going to have to show me.’ She took my card and held it beside the candle. ‘I’m supposed to read it to you,’ she said.

  ‘Is it like a story?’

  ‘Sort of,’ she said, ‘but it’s more like a riddle.’

  ‘Like a joke,’ I said. ‘Like a knock-knock joke.’

  She smiled, you know, that smile that grown-ups do when you’ve got something wrong but they don’t want to say so. Some teachers do it all the time. ‘Now,’ she said, and put on this funny voice like Norman reading his poem: ‘Who digs the gravedigger’s grave?’

  And then, squinting by the flickering light, she read aloud:

  A ship sets sail: its purpose, a return to where it started,

  A child chosen as a guide to oceans yet uncharted.

  The ocean rests upon its bed: fat, content, indifferent,

  Whilst chaos turns your little boat from harbour dim and distant.

  I stared at her in amazement. I had no idea what she was talking about.

  ‘Did that, erm, answer your question?’ she said.

  I think she knew the answer to that but when I didn’t say anything she puffed out her cheeks, took my hand and opened up my palm before me. ‘Look closer.’

  ‘It’s all wrinkled,’ I said.

  Dark and light continued to ripple around the tent, shadows scurrying across Miss Pevensie’s face like mice, but I tried to ignore their spooky tricks and concentrate on the book which the teacher—the so-called teacher—now pulled from beneath her robes: a small book but thick like the Bible I’d seen on Mrs Carpenter’s desk.

  She shuffled the pack again. ‘Let me try one,’ she said. ‘Who puts the words upon the page?’ She pulled a card from the pack and said, ‘Every page is similar but,’ and then she coughed. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I forgot who I was supposed to be.’ She cleared her throat and started again in her best hocus-pocus voice:

  Every page is similar but every page unique,

  And each turns independent t’wards the ending that you seek.

  Upon each page, upon each life, the Author’s words are gold,

  A single page asunder would leave the tale untold.

  I wrinkled my nose. Again I had no idea what she was talking about and wished, wished, wished I’d saved my money. Suddenly it didn’t seem quite so likely that I would get to enjoy Tommie’s look of shame as I Top Trumped his piddly necklace. Maybe you couldn’t buy wisdom after all. Even for a whole pound.

  Miss Pevensie passed me the book. ‘Look closer.’

  I flicked through the pages. ‘Some of it’s missing,’ I said. And then I said, ‘Where did you get them?’ I pointed. ‘The cards, I mean.’

  ‘What? Oh, these.’ She examined the pack. ‘A friend did them for me. They were supposed to be funny.’

  ‘Is that the man from The Copper Kettle?’

  She didn’t seem to know what I was talking about but then she said, ‘His name’s Craig. Do you know him?’

  I nodded. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘He was talking to me; me and Anna-Marie. Didn’t he tell you?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said Miss Pevensie. ‘What did he say?’

  ‘He said you were his friend.’

  She smiled. ‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘He’s in the room next to mine at college. What else did he say?’

  ‘He said … Well, he said that you could—like in a book—he said you could avoid the consequences. Like if you’d done something wrong.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Is that true?’ I said.

  Miss Pevensie smiled. She shook her head. ‘No,’ she said. ‘No, that’s not true at all.’ Then from beneath her robes, she drew a mirror, just like the one Kat kept on her dressing table. She peered into it. ‘Let’s have one more go, shall we? Your turn to ask a question.’

  I looked at the mirror. ‘What’s the opposite of reflection?’ I said.

  ‘Let’s fi
nd out,’ she said optimistically. ‘Pick a card.’

  I did and handed it to her. Again she held it close to the candle but then sighed. ‘Lordy,’ she said. ‘Whoever thought red ink, blue card and candlelight would be a good combination, eh, Peter? He’d’ve been better off writing them in Braille. Listen, would you mind if I …?’

  No, I didn’t mind.

  She stood and went to the entrance, pulling back the flap and a large slab of daylight crashed into the tent. She spent several minutes wedging the heavy material behind the tent pole and then she took off her shawl and slipped off her robe. Underneath she was wearing jeans and a T-shirt just like a proper person. I mean, not like a fortune-teller. Or a teacher.

  She sat down and ran her fingers back through her hair leaving some of it pushed up into the air. She was very pretty.

  ‘That’s better,’ she said. ‘A little less mystical, perhaps, but … Anyway, where were we? Oh, yes: Peter, your question again?’

  I cleared my throat. ‘What’s the opposite of reflection?’

  You must look deeper than the glass to find the truth obscure,

  ’Tis not the consequences of our deeds alone which we endure.

  You see the world you choose to see within the mirror’s frame,

  But tales you tell with your left hand will seldom seem the same.

  Well, I couldn’t see what was wrong with being left-handed.

  ‘Look,’ Miss Pevensie turned the mirror towards me, ‘your face is pressed against the glass.’

  ‘It’s broken,’ I said. All the cracks made me look like an old man.

  ‘Look closer,’ said Miss Pevensie pushing the broken mirror towards me. ‘Open your eyes. What do you see?’

  The sudden daylight had dazzled me but I looked deep into the mirror until my eyes were crossed. ‘It’s me,’ I said. ‘I’m the opposite of my reflection.’ I stared at her. I felt very strange and a bit frightened although I didn’t know why. ‘What does it mean?’ I said.

  ‘It means …’ Miss Pevensie looked unsure, puffing out her cheeks again and scanning the red ink for clues. ‘Look, Peter, the universe is full of things: things and things that happen and some things that don’t. And sometimes things mean something but, sometimes, some things, well, they don’t really mean anything at all.’