“Sheldrake,” Tina said.
I didn’t know if I was more disconcerted to be named or because of who’d done so. She inched her long smooth oval face at me, which intensified its similarity to her father’s. “She’s right, Mrs Noble,” I had to say. “She’s good.”
As Mrs Noble hid whatever expression she’d almost betrayed, Bobby said “Shall I push the baby so you can have a rest?”
“I’m not a baby,” Tina said. “I’m Tina.”
“You’re not one, are you?” For longer than a breath Bobby seemed to be held by the toddler’s gaze, “I can still push you,” she said, “if your mummy likes.”
“I don’t mind,” Mrs Noble said and then seemed to recollect the situation in some way. “It’s up to her.”
“You can push me,” Tina told Bobby. “Push me past the sky.”
“You like going high, do you?”
Tina raised her gaze from Bobby’s face. “See past the sky,” she said.
It might have been an invitation, and I glanced up as Bobby did. Perhaps not just the pale blue of the sky made it look thin as a shell. I wondered if Mr Noble had told Tina any of the things he’d written in his journal; I could easily have thought her words showed he had. As Bobby moved behind the swing to give it a first push, Mrs Noble said “How are you getting on at school, Sheldrake?”
“My name’s Dominic.” There was no longer any point in hiding my identity, but I wasn’t about to be called by my last name when she wasn’t even a teacher. It wasn’t just how her question recalled one of Mrs Norris’s that made me feel she was similarly anxious to pretend everything was normal, and it seemed I had to play the game as well. “I’m getting decent marks,” I said.
“Yes, my husband used to say he could rely on you.”
At once I was nervous of learning how much she knew. Might she have the incident with his journal in mind? Or if she was thinking of how I’d helped to put him out of a job, Jim had been involved too. I hadn’t thought of a response when Tina swung down from the height of a moderate push to gaze at her mother, which looked as if she was bringing her attention down to Mrs Noble’s level. “What does that mean, mother?”
Perhaps the last word was disconcerting just because it sounded too mature in such a young mouth, but I could have thought it bid some implication not too far from sarcasm; “What are you asking me?” Mrs Noble said.
She might have been taken for a parent patiently indulging a small child, and yet it seemed less than appropriate. I could have fancied that Tina resented having to descend from her next flight in the air to explain. “What does rely mean?”
“It means you can know that somebody will always do what you’d hope they would.”
Tina sent her a look from the height of the swing. “You mean like father.”
“Oh, yes,” Mrs Noble said and returned the stare. “You can rely on him.”
Was I alone in hearing more in her words than they owned up to saying? I had a sense that Tina might be meant to, but my friends seemed unaware of any of this. “What’s he doing now?” Jim said.
Mrs Noble stared at him as if he hadn’t understood her last remark, and Tina kept her eyes on him while she sailed down from on high. “What’s your name?”
It was Tina who asked, and not very much like a child. “I’m Jim,” he said.
“And I’m Bobby,” Bobby said with all the breath she had left from dealing a vigorous push.
“Is that for Roberta?” At least it was Tina’s mother who asked, not the toddler. When Bobby nodded with a scowl that suggested she would like to dislodge the name, Mrs Noble said “Please don’t push her too high, Roberta.”
“Father sends me higher. He sends me past the clouds.”
“I’m sure even he wouldn’t want you hurt, Tina.”
Within this was a word that I wasn’t sure I grasped or cared to grasp. “Can I push her this high?” Bobby said.
“Yes.”
While Tina and her mother both said so, Tina’s voice was stronger. I had the uneasy notion that Mrs Noble was echoing her, and not too willingly either. As Bobby gave the swing a shove Jim said “So what’s Mr Noble doing?”
“No need to repeat yourself, James. I don’t forget what’s been said.” Mrs Noble looked as though she would have used his surname if she’d known it. “He’s doing what he’s always done,” she said.
“What’s that?”
Before Jim could ask this Tina did. If she had been considerably older I would have said it sounded less like a question than a warning. “As he likes,” her mother said.
How defiant was this meant to be? I was disturbed to think we were glimpsing hints of her relationship with her child and perhaps with her husband as well. If this was how mother and infant behaved in public, what might their home life be like? I saw my friends were determined to ignore the situation, and as Bobby dealt the swing another push Jim said doggedly “Isn’t he still a teacher?”
“Oh, he likes to think he’s much more than that.” For a moment Mrs Noble looked provoked to add something other than “If you’re asking about school, that’s what he’s doing.”
“We wouldn’t mind still having him, would we, Dom?”
I took Jim to be assuring her of our good intentions. “No,” I said as unambiguously as I could.
“Where is he now, Mrs Noble?”
Her eyes flickered, and I sensed her nervousness. “May I ask why you want to know?”
“We’re only interested,” I tried protesting. “Like Jim says, we miss him.”
“I should tell him, should I? Perhaps you’d like him to get in touch.”
She’d narrowed her eyes as if this might hide how she was scrutinising both of us. I was wondering how closely she might think we were involved with him and his beliefs, and searching for a way to reassure her without admitting any of the issues that underlay the wary conversation, when Bobby said “What else does he do?”
She must have lost patience with our tentative attempts to learn the truth, but she left Mrs Noble yet more suspicious. “Just what are you thinking of?”
“These told me he helped people at a church.”
No doubt Bobby thought this sounded innocent enough, but Mrs Noble’s eyes became slits that might have been trying to shut out the world. “Helped people,” she said.
“Yes, when they were—” I saw Bobby realise she was close to saying too much. “When they were sad.”
“That’s what they were. That’s what they all are,” Mrs Noble said but plainly had a stronger word in mind. “And yes, he’s still up to his tricks.”
This was surely our cue, but neither Jim nor Bobby seemed to know how to respond, any more than I did. Mrs Noble opened her eyes wide to gaze hard at us. “I hope none of you or your families are mixed up with them,” she said.
“We aren’t,” Bobby said and gave the swing another push. “So where—”
“That’s enough now.”
The voice started on high and seemed to grow louder as it descended—loud enough to be addressing everyone below. The gesture Tina made might have been embracing us as well, unless her outthrown arms were miming flight, though surely not mimicking a crucifixion. This wasn’t the whole of her movement. The top half of her body strained forward against the strap of the swing in a miniature version of her father’s habitual posture, and I couldn’t help thinking of a baby snake. I wondered how much of this Mrs Noble was attempting to ignore as she said “Mother’s talking, Tina.”
“I want to go home now. I want to wait for father.”
I couldn’t judge how ironic Mrs Noble meant to be by saying “Wouldn’t you like to stay with your new friends?”
Tina didn’t even glance at us. While the swing subsided to a halt she kept her gaze on her mother. “He doesn’t want you talking about him,” she said.
I don’t know which daunted me more—the fancy that Mr Noble was speaking through his infant daughter or the alternative, that she was speaking for him. After
a silence that felt reluctant to acknowledge its cause Mrs Noble said “I won’t discuss my husband with children. Come along, Tina.”
I think we all realised that she was determined to pretend she was in control. She unstrapped Tina from the swing and waited while her daughter climbed into the pushchair. As she strapped the toddler in I noticed that her hands were trembling, and I could have thought she was doing her best not to touch her child. We were loitering out of confusion and embarrassment when she turned on us. “Haven’t you anything better to do except gawp?”
Bobby stepped forward. “Can I help you, Mrs Noble?”
“Of course you can’t,” Mrs Noble cried. “There’s nothing any of you can do except leave us alone, so please do that at once.”
My face grew hot enough to turn up everyone’s embarrassment. As we stumbled away from the playground—Jim and I did, while Bobby marched—Tina called “Thank you for being my helper.”
Perhaps she meant Bobby and the swing, but I could have thought she was contradicting her mother. I glanced back to see Mrs Noble pushing the chair towards the park gates so fast that she might almost have been following it, drawn in its wake. “Bloody hell,” Jim said, the strongest words he used even when there were no adults to overhear. “That’s the weirdest kid I’ve ever seen.”
“Maybe she’s how girls need to be,” Bobby said.
This silenced Jim and me, and disturbed me more than I understood. “I don’t care what Mrs Noble says,” I declared, which felt like a bid to reunite the three of us. “We can help. We can watch the house.”
19 - The Price of Information
How long are we going to have to carry on with this?” Jim said.
We were crouched behind the hedge between the graveyard and the main road. As a solitary lorry passed the Noble house with a clatter of its tailgate Bobby said “How long do you think, Dom?”
“Can’t it be as long as we have to?”
I was reflecting that none of the Tremendous Three would have asked Jim’s question in any of their adventures when he made the difference plainer by saying “I’ve got footy practice later.”
“Well,” Bobby said as if they were competing to demonstrate the extent of their lives outside our little gang, “Elaine’s coming to mine to give me a perm.”
I found this so unexpectedly female that it seemed not much less than a betrayal of my assumptions about her, but then I’d taken Jim to be more committed to our mission than he was proving to be. “I can watch by myself,” I said, “if you want.”
“Don’t make it sound like we’ve let you down,” Jim complained. “It doesn’t need us all to stay here. Just one of us can follow Nobbly if we ever get the chance.”
“We weren’t saying we were leaving you right now, Dom. Just there’s other things we could be doing.”
This only made me feel that the Tremendous Three were in danger of drifting apart, at least in the form we’d clung to for so many elongated youthful years that it felt like our entire lives—mine, at any rate. “Do we want to stop being the Three?” I blurted.
Bobby’s lower lip shrank inwards, giving me a glimpse of her small not quite even teeth. “We never said that, did we, Jim?”
“We won’t stop being friends, will we? Let’s vow we won’t for as long as we live.”
I could see that Bobby realised this wasn’t what I’d had in mind, but she said “We’re meant to swap our blood.”
“That’s just in stories, Bobs. We aren’t in one of them.”
“We’re in something like one, aren’t we? Like one of Dom’s.”
“If we’re still pretending we can pretend we’ve swapped blood.”
I didn’t know which of them made me feel more childish for wanting to preserve our bond. “All right then, let’s vow,” Bobby said. “Only it’s got to be real, not a pretend.”
“Tell us what to say, then,” Jim said.
“We’ve got to hold hands at least.”
We both took hers, and I felt an unfamiliar thrill that I couldn’t quite admit to locating as her small soft cool fingers closed around mine. “We’ll always be friends and we’ll always look out for each other,” she said. “Go on, Jim.”
“Always friends,” Jim mumbled as though he was determined not to be told exactly what to say, “and we’ll always look out for each other.”
“Dom,” Bobby said and gave my hand a gentle squeeze that roused a new sensation in the pit of my stomach.
“We’re always going to be friends and we’ll never stop looking out for one another.”
Bobby let go of my hand at once, and I was disconcerted to feel jealous because she was still holding Jim’s. In a moment she released his, and I saw that she’d relinquished mine to peer through the hedge. “Someone’s coming out,” she whispered.
The front door of the house was inching open. I thought someone might be spying on us, and I crouched so that my eyes were just above the wall beyond the spiky hedge. I was about to grab Bobby’s hand to tug her down when she copied me, and Jim did. We stayed low as the door swung inwards, revealing Mr Noble’s father, who limped with his stick along the short path to the gate, making way for Tina in her pushchair. As Mrs Noble tilted it to ease the wheels over the doorstep, I could have fancied she was raising the child’s face to watch the colourless October sky. Indeed, Tina declared “There’s no sky” loud enough for us to hear across the road.
At first I thought that Mr Noble must be elsewhere—that we’d missed him. The rest of the family was past the gate by the time he appeared, rubbing his hands together as if he’d just washed them. I supposed he might have been writing, though I saw no trace of ink, but I couldn’t help thinking of earth. “I’ll finish that later,” he called as he shut the door.
“Lots of time.”
Though the response was surely innocent enough, it was Tina who answered. Before I had much of a chance to be disconcerted by this or to decide if her mother and grandfather were, Bobby said “Where’s he taking them?”
Mr Noble had moved to the head of the party and was leading the way towards the intersection where park gates faced an entrance to the graveyard. “We’ll find out,” I said and started after them, keeping close to the hedge. “His wife didn’t look as if she likes it much.”
“Maybe he’s making her go,” Jim said as though this was the way of the world.
“Maybe she should tell him he can’t tell her what to do.” Fiercely enough for her whisper to grow intermittent Bobby said “How can she let him make her take their little girl somewhere like that?”
This silenced us all until we came to a wary halt, because the Nobles had stopped opposite the football ground. “Maybe they’re going to the footy,” Bobby said.
Jim gave her a look that stayed just short of incredulous. “There’s no match on.”
In a moment Mr Noble turned his back on us and led his family up the nearest side street. We waited until they were out of sight and dashed out of the graveyard. We couldn’t cross the main road until we’d looked both ways as we were forever being reminded to do and then loitered for an unnecessary number of cars to pass—at least half a dozen. We sprinted through an oily cloud of petrol fumes and peered around the corner of the side street. The Nobles were nowhere to be seen.
For a distracted moment I wondered if the Nobles had taken Tina to the junior school that occupied one side of the road. Of course the school was shut on Saturday, and in any case she was surely years too young. Unless they’d gone into a house they must be in a side street, two of which crossed this one. We ran to the first and saw it was deserted. We were about to make for the next one when the Nobles reappeared ahead.
Tina was leading the procession. I could easily have fancied she was directing it from her pushchair. The item she was hugging like a tribute was a bag of groceries. Her mother was wheeling the pushchair, while the men were empty-handed except for the stick Mr Noble’s father seemed to need more than ever. This was all I had time to see before w
e dodged into the side street, trying to look casual but nearly tripping over one another. Once we were out of sight we raced to the end and around the corner. “That’s it,” I gasped. “You’re right, we’re too old for this crap.”
It was the strongest word I’d ever used. It appeared to impress Jim, unless he was simply regaining his breath. When Bobby looked about to disagree I said “It’s just stupid. Even if we found this church of his we’d be no use.”
“Hey, hang,” Jim said before he found much breath, “on. If we find, it we can fig, ure out what to, do.”
“And it wasn’t a waste just now, Dom,” Bobby insisted. “Didn’t you think it was a bit strange?”
“No.” In an attempt to be less sullen I said “What?”
“Why did it need them all to go out for just that little bit of shopping?”
“Maybe they like going,” Jim said, “out with the whole, family.”
“Mrs Noble didn’t seem to very much,” I said. “Maybe his dad wouldn’t either.”
“Maybe they wish they, did. Maybe they’re, trying.”
“Or maybe someone doesn’t want to leave someone on their own at home,” Bobby said. “Maybe they don’t trust them.”
At once I was sure of it, and it persuaded Jim. “That’s pathetic,” he said.
“I’ll bet it’s worst for the little girl, specially when she’s so smart.”
“Got to be.” Jim paused, not for breath but as a mark of concern. “We’ll watch tomorrow then, shall we?” he said.
“I will while you’re at church,” Bobby promised.
I ought to have been pleased with their renewed commitment, but I couldn’t help feeling that Tina could take care of herself. Wasn’t that a ridiculous notion to have about a two-year-old child? In ordinary circumstances it might well have been dangerous. We made our way homewards by a devious route through the side streets and parted at the railway bridge. “You’re home early,” my mother called as I let myself into the house. “How were your films?”
The Searching Dead Page 19