Chichester Greenway

by Alton Saunders

  Chapter 19:

  AKKRI GOES SHOPPING

  Vill and Eedo had discovered that Bavilan played the lute. Late in the afternoon Vonn and Akkri came upon the three of them as they were about to start some singing together. “Would you like to join in?” Eedo asked. Akkri did not consider himself a singer but he saw Vonn’s face light up. It was just what she needed to take her mind off the heavy experiences of the morning.

  “I’d love to,” said Vonn.

  “I’ll come back later when you’ve got your voices in tune,” said Akkri. After waiting and worrying all morning he felt like going off somewhere himself, but not so far as Vonn had gone. Yes, he would go and see Andrew. He wanted to understand more about what it was like living on Earth.

  A few minutes later he was ringing the Canadines’ front door bell as he had seen Andrew do the day before yesterday. Was it really only two days ago? It felt like weeks. Andrew himself came to the door. He was feeling chirpy. Tomorrow was an Inset Day which meant the teachers had to go to school but he did not. The pupils, with what Mrs Faighly termed their advanced sense of humour, called it an Insect Day. Mrs Canadine was feeling sorry she could not afford to take him somewhere special, but Andrew did not mind.

  “Hallo Akkri! We’re in the kitchen. I’m just finishing off my homework.”

  Akkri noted another word that did not seem to correspond to anything he knew. Vonn had told him about ‘country’ and ‘border’ and ‘food aid’. He followed Andrew into the kitchen. Mrs Canadine was sitting at the table with her envelopes. He had not yet worked out what they were for.

  “Hallo, Akkri. Come and sit down. I hope you don’t mind if Andrew just finishes off his homework.” Mrs Canadine kept strict discipline about things like that.

  Akkri was glad of the chance to find out what ‘homework’ was. He watched Andrew write down some numbers in a book, then some other numbers underneath them. He could see that he had copied them down from another book that was open on the table. He edged his chair closer as Andrew picked up a shiny transparent strip with numbers and marks on it and used it to make a straight line with his pencil under the lower numbers. Then, with furrowed brow, he slowly wrote down two more rows of numbers, made another neat line and underneath wrote yet another line of numbers.

  “Can I have a look?” Akkri asked. He pulled Andrew’s book towards him. The top two rows, copied from the other book, were 49 and 23. The two rows Andrew had written underneath his first line were 147 and 980, and the final row, under his second line, was 1127. What did it all mean? He could see no connection between the lines of numbers at all.

  “Is it right, do you think?” Andrew felt pretty sure it was, but he liked asking the older boy. For a moment he had actually forgotten that he was a boy from another planet.

  “I’ve never seen anything like this in my life,” said Akkri. “Could you explain it to me?” He listened carefully as Andrew explained about multiplication. It was amazing, but he wondered what the point of it could be. He had gathered that Annilex, Tamor and Korriott had already found out some very strange things in the library they had visited that morning.

  While this was going on, Mrs Canadine had calmly continued with her work, apparently finding nothing odd about a boy who appeared to know absolutely nothing about mathematics.

  “Finished, Mum,” said Andrew.

  “Mrs Canadine,” said Akkri, “please could you tell me what it is that you are doing?”

  She showed him her book with its lists of something called addresses. She had to find the right address and write it on an envelope, put a folded piece of paper in the envelope, stick the triangular part down onto the rest of it and then stick a small blue rectangle in one corner.

  “Is this your homework?” Akkri asked.

  Mrs Canadine laughed. “Yes, this is my homework,” she said.

  “And why do you do it?”

  “Well, it brings in some money. Not very much, I’m afraid. We use it to buy things Andrew needs for school.”

  There was that word ‘money’ again, and now ‘buy’. Akkri had a feeling it would be too complicated to go into now. It seemed to be something to do with the way life was organised, here on Earth. Instead he asked the same sort of question he and Vonn had asked in Andrew’s class: “Mrs Canadine, what would you want to do if anything at all was possible?”

  Mrs Canadine smiled. This sounded fun. She tried to have fun with Andrew, but they were both of them rather too serious to enjoy it for long. She used to have fun, back in the village. Yes, that was one of the things she would like. “I’d like us to have a holiday in the village I lived in when I was Andrew’s age. There’s nowhere we could stay, though, only a hotel, and that would be much too expensive.” She paused, looking a little sad. “Andrew, I think it’s time we went to the supermarket. You can come with us, Akkri, if you like.”

  Andrew enjoyed their trips to the supermarket, though it meant Vicky could not come round after school on the days for which they were planned. It was a pity it was a Maths homework. She probably wouldn’t get much of it right without his help.

  Had he but known it, Vicky had found that the peaceful feeling she had had when they were with Vonn and Akkri was coming back from time to time. Auntie May was sitting on her bed in the corridor with her CD player turned up loud, but Violet and Rose were in the kitchen with Mum, so Vicky had her room to herself. She was standing beside her cupboard, using the top of it as a desk for her homework. Despite the noise from Auntie May’s music just outside the door, the peaceful feeling had come over her again. She found she could remember some of the things Mrs Warbloff had said in the morning’s lesson and although the three multiplication sums at the end had proved too much for her, she thought she might have got some of the other ones right.

  “I’ve never been to a supermarket,” said Akkri. “I’d like to come with you.”

  Andrew noticed again how his mother seemed to take whatever Akkri said as perfectly normal. He supposed the shops on Vika delivered everything by skimmer.

  It was beginning to turn dark as they set out. Akkri noticed an orange glow from the main road ahead of them and as they approached the High Street he saw the double row of street lights it came from and that the vehicles roaring along the road had white lights in front and red lights behind. That must explain the lines of red and white that he and Vonn had seen from The Golden Palace. High up on the wall of the last house on the left he saw again the words Chichester Greenway. “What does that mean?” he asked.

  “It’s the name of our road,” said Mrs Canadine. “I’ve never been able to find out why it’s called that. I’d love to know. Chichester is a town, but I’ve never been there.”

  “That’s Tommy’s house,” said Andrew. “He’s a friend of ours.” He remembered how he had taken refuge there less than a week ago. He felt quite calm about it now, calm and peaceful. It was something to do with the Vikans, he felt sure of that.

  Other people were also experiencing unaccustomed feelings. Mrs Faighly, preparing for the Inset Day, felt almost light-hearted, even though her husband had just gone off to the betting shop.

  Baby Thomas was gurgling happily in his cot and Gillian felt some of her sadness lift from her as she made herself a cup of tea in her little flat. She thought yet again of the day her life had started to go wrong. But it had been wrong already, she knew that. And she did have Thomas.

  She had had yet another row with her mother. She could never think of her as ‘Mum’. Her mother had yelled: “Get out! Just clear off, see?” And Gillian had cleared off, to the pub some of her friends went to. She had always been too shy to go there before. Her friends had given her a drink and then a man had given her a drink and she could not remember anything after that until she woke up freezing cold on a park bench. She did not recognise the place at all. An old lady had told her the direction to her part of town. “It’s at least five miles,” s
he warned.

  Some weeks later she had started being sick when she got up in the morning. The school doctor told her she was pregnant. And then her mother really had thrown her out.

  Mrs Warbloff had got out her photo album. She seldom did this, but today she felt she would be able to look at her pictures of Ernst without breaking down in tears.

  And Tommy, at work on a dolls’ house, felt as though something was stirring in the back of his mind. He did not know what it was but he felt that it was good.

  Andrew and Akkri and Mrs Canadine turned right into the High Street. Andrew ran ahead and pressed a button on a pole that had a green light near the top of it. Akkri watched as the green light went out and an orange light came on. Then the orange light went out and a red light came on, and there was a sharp beeping noise. The traffic stopped and they crossed the road. Even walking on Earth was complicated, it seemed. The three of them continued until they came to the bus stop.

  Some of the sights of Earth were becoming a little more familiar to Akkri but he was aware that there was so much he did not understand and how very different Earth life was from life on Vika. He turned to look at the line of brightly lit shop fronts with brightly lit words above them: Chinese Takeaway, Insurance Broker, Hadji Mini Market, Estate Agent, Pasta La Vista. Some of the people walking past were holding things to their ears. They seemed to be talking to themselves. One man was waving his other arm about as he did so. And then there was the continuous roar of the traffic. Andrew had told him that the small vehicles were called cars and the big ones lorries, and that they were going to travel to the supermarket on a bus.

  The bus soon came, a huge red monster that looked as if it might topple over. Akkri watched as Mrs Canadine handed the man at the front three small gold-coloured discs. The man gave her two small silver discs. Some sort of ritual, Akkri supposed, like giving presents for someone’s birthday. Then he suddenly remembered – Vonn’s birthday! Tomorrow was Vonn’s birthday! She would be fourteen. He would have to wait a few more weeks to catch up with her and be fourteen himself.

  Andrew led the way to some stairs in the middle of rows of seats. There was a very strange smell in the bus, Akkri thought. Upstairs, they walked past a woman who was not just talking, but shouting to herself. The thing she was holding to her ear was shiny red and infra. It almost looked as if she was shouting at the thing itself.

  Andrew sat down at the very front of the bus. There was just room for Mrs Canadine and Akkri as well. It was now quite black outside and starting to rain, so nothing much could be seen as the bus got under way. Akkri found it rather bumpy and shaky and he was a bit alarmed by the noise. Mrs Canadine and Andrew seemed to think nothing of it, though, so he sat back and decided to enjoy his first ride in an alien conveyance.

  “Andrew,” Akkri asked, “what do people do when it’s somebody’s birthday? It’s Vonn’s birthday tomorrow, you see.”

  “They give presents and there’s usually a birthday cake.”

  So that was something that was the same on both planets – birthday presents. Akkri had a present ready for Vonn, a carved wooden box he had been working on for the last month, but it would be nice to have a birthday cake as well, whatever that was.

  A few minutes later the bus drew up in front of the supermarket. It was a blaze of lights, with people scurrying through the rain, pushing shiny trolleys in front of them. “Let’s make a run for it!” said Mrs Canadine. She grabbed a trolley as they headed for the entrance.

  Music was playing. Akkri could not see any musicians. He wondered if it came from a box like Mrs Canadine’s. There was a nice smell which Andrew told him was bread. And then he found his head spinning. There was such a jangling assortment of colours and shapes, and hardly any of it made any sense to him. He tried to read some of the writing on boxes and labels but it only made matters worse. He could read the words but they meant nothing to him. “What’s washing powder?” he asked. Mrs Canadine was ahead of them, putting things into her trolley, and he knew Andrew enjoyed explaining things to him.

  “It makes clothes clean,” Andrew replied.

  “But clothes are clean, aren’t they?”

  “Only when Mum washes them.”

  Akkri decided to give up trying to understand. There was just too much to take in. He would view the supermarket as if he were looking at a painting. They had now caught up with Mrs Canadine. She handed Akkri a box with a shiny transparent top. Inside was a cake with ‘Happy Birthday’ written on the top of it. “This is for Vonn. Will you give it to her tomorrow, from Andrew and me?”

  “Thank you. Yes, I will. I’m sure she’ll be very pleased to have a birthday cake. We don’t have birthday cakes where we come from.”

  Andrew was surprised that his mother could afford to buy a cake. They seldom bought anything from this part of Aisle 3.

  Mrs Canadine, for her part, was savouring the gentle, peaceful feeling she had inside her. Her mind could not focus at all clearly on Andrew’s new friends, but she had noticed changes in herself which seemed to date from their first appearance. She knew there was not much left of this month’s money but inside her there was a quiet confidence that somehow their situation was going to improve. Usually she felt quite the opposite.

  Andrew did not want to talk about it yet, but something strange and wonderful was happening. The colours on the boxes and bottles and cartons were sorting themselves out. Yes, that one was pale green, that one was purple and that one was pink. He had never seen them that clearly before. He was sure that if he drew them now he would get the colours right. He looked at his mother’s scarf. He knew it was green, but now he could see it had pink threads in it, too. He had never noticed that before. He felt afraid that when he woke up tomorrow morning his seeing would be back to how it was before. How wonderful it would be if his eyes stayed this way for ever!

  They came to the checkout. Akkri watched with interest as Andrew and Mrs Canadine put the things from the trolley onto a sort of table which then moved them to the other side of a lady who was sitting in an uncomfortable-looking chair. There they transferred them to crinkly bags and Mrs Canadine handed the lady a lilac-coloured paper rectangle. The lady gave her two silver discs, just as the man on the bus had done, Akkri noted. “What are those?” he asked.

  “It’s money,” Andrew explained.

  Akkri, Andrew and Mrs Canadine each had a bag to carry. When they got to the entrance it was raining harder than ever. A skimmer settled on the wet pavement right in front of them and Andrew watched his mum step in as if she had been expecting it all along. None of the other shoppers, staring gloomily at the downpour, seemed even to notice it.

  The skimmer set off, just above traffic level, turned right into the High Street, then, in just over a mile, left into Chichester Greenway. A quick dash up the little path to the front door and they were home, and hardly wet at all.

  A call! Although there was no hurry, Akkri felt it was time to leave. “I have to get back now. Thank you for taking me to the Supermarket. And thank you for the cake for Vonn.”

  “That’s all right, dear. See you again soon, I expect.”

  “Bye, Andrew.”

  “Bye, Akkri.”

  Although Andrew hurried to the window as soon as Akkri had gone out of the front door, there was already no sign of him.

  When Mrs Canadine looked in her purse after Andrew had gone to bed, she found she still had a £20 note in it. She puzzled over that for some time before going up to bed herself.

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