2006 - Wildcat Moon (44 page)

The boy nodded silently.

“I wouldn’t touch anything else in there, if I were you,” Archie said, getting unsteadily to his feet.

“Jesus! What was it?” Peejay said, racing down the steps.

“Hand grenade. Live!”

“He saved my life,” Winston Clark suddenly realized the close shave he’d had. “And there’s a whole box of them in the cupboard,” the boy said, scrabbling to his knees.

“Thank you so much,” Peejay said. “Do I know you from somewhere?” he added, peering at Archie. The record jumped, the music started up again.

Sñorita donkeysita, not so fleet as a mosquito
,

But so sweet like my Chiquita
,

You’rethe one for me
.

Ole!

“You’re Archie Grimble from Bag End!”

Archie looked up, batting sand from his hair.

“Peejay Kelly. Peter. I used to live in Cuckoo’s Nest. My brothers used to be bastards to you. My God, they wouldn’t now, though, look at the size on you.”

Archie Grimble put out his hand and shook Peter Kelly’s.

“What in the name of God are you doing back here, Peter?”

“Well, we left, as you know, rather suddenly as I remember.”

“I know, Nan came to tell us. We didn’t have a clue where you’d gone.”

“To a pub in Ireland. The Kilpenny Arms. My folks inherited it from some distant relative they’d never heard of. They loved the pub life, did well enough for themselves, but I hated it. I had a stroke of luck, though, and got a letter about a scholarship to a school near Dublin and then when I left I came here to work. I love it And where’ve you been?”

“Italy.”

“Well fancy that! Do you know, we had bugger all when we were here as kids and yet we haven’t done bad, have we? Well, I’d better go and make sure that this lot don’t blow up what’s left of the Skallies. Are you staying here?”

“At the Pilchard.”

“I’ll catch you sometime for a pint?”

“That would be great.”

“Tomorrow, they’re opening up the wobbly chapel, if you’re interested. God knows what they’ll find in there!”

Archie watched Peejay climb back up the steps and lock the door to the Boathouse.

“Come on, you lot, we’ll go back to Hogwash and you can have a drink, while I call in the explosives people.”

“Do you know what?” Winston Clark said.

“What?” Archie replied, watching Peter Kelly walking away up the beach.

“I reckon that the saint saved me.”

“Which saint would that be?”

“I don’t know her name, but look.”

He scrabbled in his pocket, pulled out the tiny silver capsule and opened it, tipping out the little silver saint into the palm of his hand.

Archie looked down in wonder. He lifted it from the boy’s hand and turned it over. He hadn’t seen that since the night he’d got into the wobbly chapel and nearly drowned himself.

“Her name,” Archie said, “is Santa Caterina.”

“Can she do miracles?” the boy asked.

“Oh, yes.”

“What sort?”

“She can make sad people happy, weak people strong and scared people brave!” Archie said, remembering Alfredo’s words to him all that time ago.

“Wo!” the boy exclaimed. “She can do something else too,” he added, lowering his voice.

“What’s that?”

“Can you keep a secret?”

“Honest injun and all that.”

“I’ve stopped pissing the bed since I found her.”

“That’s fantastic. Where did you find her?” he asked but the boy was already gone, hurtling up the beach after Peejay.

Archie walked up through the sand dunes. The door that led into the grounds of Killivray was unlocked so he went quickly inside. He wandered slowly up through the woods. A conker fell with a thud and something moved close by. He turned. A hare stood absolutely still eyeing Archie with interest. Then it bounded away into the undergrowth.

He followed in its path but it was long gone. He found himself standing in a clearing of small headstones, a miniature graveyard. He pulled the weeds away from the bottom of one of the graves and rubbed away the moss with his fingernails. The stone was engraved with a single name, Rajah.

On another, Pipi.

He looked around, picked a few wild flowers and laid them on the grave.

Then he got to his feet and saw the small wooden cross.

The ground around the cross was well tended and a bunch of red roses stood in a silver pot and attached to them was a card wrapped in cellophane with the name of a florist shop in St Werburgh’s. He turned it over and read the writing.

“For Pop, love Dom”

Archie put down the card and got unsteadily to his feet and then he walked on.

They found the secret way into the wobbly chapel quite by accident. Winston had been down on the beach with Rosita. They’d been climbing on the rocks when the tide was out and she’d dared him to see who could climb the highest. He didn’t like heights much but he couldn’t lose face in front of a girl…

Rosita wasn’t afraid of anything, though, and soon she was high above him, then disappearing into a hole above his head…

She was dead brave for a girl, he had to admit. In the end he’d begged her to come down, but she’d called out excitedly, “There’s steps up here. Come and look.”

And he’d gritted his teeth and followed her.

He climbed warily up the slippery steps behind her, calling to her to wait for him but there was no stopping Rosita once she’d set her mind on something.

“Bloody hell!” she called down. “I’m in some sort of cupboard inside the wobbly chapel. Come on, Winston! You afraid or what?”

“C…Course I ain’t afraid,” he stammered.

They emerged from the cupboard into the chapel. It was gloomy, almost dark. Above their heads through the broken rafters the sky was full of stars.

“It’s scary in here,” Winston said as they looked around.

“It’s brilliant,” Rosita said, tiptoeing between bags of cement and shovels.

Winston stayed dose behind her.

It smelled awful and he was sure that he could hear mice scratching or maybe even rats.

Rosita stopped and pointed at the wall.

“It’s one of those things they fill up with holy water,” Winston said.

“I know that We’ve got them in the church at school. Look at that though.”

There was a collection box set into the wall.

“What does it say on the front?”

“It’s Latin, I think”

“You know any Latin?”

“Course I do, I go to a convent.”

“What’s it say, then?”

“I don’t know, we haven’t got to that bit yet.”

“We can’t open it, we haven’t got a key.”

“We could pick the lock.”

“Can you pick locks?”

“Course I can. Like I said, I go to a convent”

She slid a hair clip from her hair and then busied herself poking at the lock.

“Hurry up, Rosita, I don’t like it in here. There’s graves and stuff.”

After an age the door opened and Rosita stepped back.

“What’s in there?” Winston gasped.

“Some kind of a box.”

She took it out, blew the cobwebs off it and eased off the lid.

“What’s in there?”

“It looks like a map with directions.”

“Is it in old-fashioned writing?”

“No. Just ordinary.”

“What’s it say?”

“Give me a chance. Here we go:”

Take a walk out west of Skilly. Pause, then climb the wooden stile&hellip
;

See a house that’s very old
,

Be not afraid, be very bold
.

Ten yards left, five north…be sure to measure
,

…closer and closer to the Pirate’s treasure&hellip
;

“Bloody hell!” Winston said.

“Treasure!” Rosita cried. “I’ve always wanted to solve a mystery. Come on.”

And she was off, back through the cupboard and down the steps with Winston Clark hot on her heels.

The late evening air was soft, heady with the scent of honeysuckle and herbs. Beyond the window of the summerhouse the sky was streaked with crimson weals.

On a shelf yellow poppies drooped in a jam jar and dust motes fizzed in the dying light A wasp was busy in a box of windfall apples.

The match flared and soon candlelight flickered and the shadows of tin soldiers loomed on the walls.

The kindling in the stove crackled. A moth flapped wildly at the window and an owl called out timidly from the woods. The record on the gramophone turned slowly…

Archie walked quickly over the lower lawns where abandoned tennis racquets and toys lay in the grass. He climbed the steps and walked through the rose garden.

Before him the lights of Killivray glittered behind the diamond panes of glass. The sound of children laughing drifted down from an open window.

The door to the summerhouse opened with a sighing noise. Archie Grimble stood framed in the doorway, a pale moon rising behind his head like a halo.

Archie stood quite still, looking into eyes as startled as his own.

She no longer wore the old-fashioned clothes, and the plaits with ribbons were gone. Her hair hung down over her slender shoulders.

Her eyes sparkled in the flickering light as he walked towards her.

The air was filled with the smell of cinnamon and roses and freshly washed cotton. It was a smell that he’d never quite forgotten. He put his arms around Romilly Greswode and held her for a long time.

Through the window he saw the huge moon, bursting at the seams, hovering in the peat-black sky.

A wildcat moon.

In the wobbly chapel the dawn light shone through the window and dappled the altar with a host of moving colours

Two workmen came in through the door.

“You know what we’re s’posed to be doing, Harry?”

“Moving the bones,” Harry answered. “The floor is all rotten so we’ve to dig up the bones and then when we’ve sorted out the floor we’re to rebury them.”

“Bloody load of old nonsense, if you ask me.”

“Ah, well, lad, apparently they’re going to restore this place to its former glory!”

“Bloody daft.” the lad said.

“Come on, let’s get on with it”

They picked up their picks and began to prise up one of the flagstones from the chapel floor.

“Lefs be having you, Thomas Greswode.”

They struggled to lift the stone and rested it against a wall. Then they stood together looking down into the deep hole.

“Look at that, the coffin’s all rotted away but you can see the skeleton. How old did you say the boy was?”

The lad walked across to the stone, leant it towards him and looked at the back.

“Says, born in 1888 and died in 1900, that”d make him twelve.”

“They must have been big buggers back then, look at the length of his legs; he must have been well over six and a half foot tall if not more. That’s some height for a bloody twelve-year-old.”

“That’s tall for a man, that is. I remember my old grandmother saying that there was a fisherman went missing, oh, I’m going back years now, before the first world war—went overboard further round the coast. Big Ed they used to call him. My gran used to say that he was always chewing toffee and had lost every tooth in his head by the time he were eighteen except two at the front.”

He looked down at the skull and shivered. “Bit like this fellow then, look there.”

They both looked down at the grinning skull with the two yellowed teeth…

“Well, they ain’t the bones of a twelve-year-old, that’s for bloody sure!”

“Had we best get on the phone and tell the governor?”

“No, it’ll only cause complications.”

“It’s peculiar if you ask me! Mind, this is a queer neck of the woods. When the bad storms came at the end of the sixties a tree came down on one of the graves in the cemetery and they reckon there was nothing in the coffin at all. It were completely empty. There was talk of grave robbers. Burke and Hare and all that sort of stuff.”

“Come on, lefs hurry up and get the other one up. It’s giving me the bloody creeps in here,” the lad urged.

“What sort of a name is that?” the workman said, looking down at the flagstone.

“Spanish, I reckon, you can hardly read it though. Somebody or other, wife of Angeles. I can’t read it properly, hang on, born in Italy…”

The flagstone came up like a rotten tooth and the air was filled with the stench of ancient dust and mould.

“No bloody coffin at all in this one, just a small skeleton.”

“Christ; look, this one only had one leg.”

“And there’s six fingers on the one hand.”