At the Firefly Gate
Read At the Firefly Gate Online
Authors: Linda Newbery
To the children of St. Mary’s Primary School, Selly Oak
ONE
FIREFLIES
It was the first night away from home.
This
was supposed to be home now, but it didn’t feel like it. Henry stood looking out of his bedroom window into the dusk, at the fields, hedges and trees behind the cottage. In London there had always been traffic noise outside; here, he could almost feel the trees breathing. It was just past midsummer, and the sort of night that hardly got dark before the next early dawn.
As his eyes adjusted, Henry saw — with a thump of surprise — that someone was out there. A man, standing at the orchard gate.
The orchard was a narrow strip of grass and trees that ran behind the cottages, with a big field beyond. Each garden had a wooden gate at the end, so that you could walk straight out into the orchard. Henry’s new garden was tangled and overgrown and by the end gate the strange man stood waiting — a young man, he looked, with a jacket slung over one shoulder. Henry saw points of light dancing around his head and shoulders.
They must be fireflies,
he thought, straining his eyes: he’d heard of fireflies, but didn’t know there really were such things. Among the dancing points of light, there was one small glow attached to the young man’s hand: the tip of a lit cigarette. He was smoking, waiting.
What, or who, was he waiting for?
Watching him, Henry had the oddest sense of being both down there and up here. He could feel the floorboards under his bare feet and smell the dusty warmth of the bedroom, unused for so long. At the same time he smelled the coolness of grass and leaves, and felt the weight of the jacket on one shoulder and the wing-brush of insects against his face, and tasted the hot rush of smoke into his lungs. He saw the fireflies dance and flicker among the leaves of the apple trees, like tiny flames drawn by the glow of the cigarette.
And he knew that if he turned his head and looked up, he would see himself, a boy in blue pyjamas framed in the window, the light of the upstairs landing behind him.
He shook his head and the peculiar feeling vanished: he must have imagined it. But the young man hadn’t vanished. He lifted his cigarette to his mouth, turned and looked straight at Henry.
He knows I’m here,
Henry thought.
That’s why he’s standing there. Waiting.
Quickly he ducked out of sight behind two packing-cases, even though he knew it was too late. Just for that second, the man had looked straight at him, without any sense of surprise, as if he’d expected to see a boy standing at the window. No, more than that: as if Henry were exactly the person he expected to see there.
Take deep breaths — in, out. Try to feel confident, then you’ll
be
confident.
That was what Dad said to do, when Henry got into a panic. But those panicky times were exactly when it was most impossible to breathe normally.
Henry turned and ran noisily downstairs, as if the thump of his feet would drive the stranger away. Mum was unpacking books while Dad made coffee in the small kitchen, the only room in any kind of order.
‘There’s a man outside!’ Henry blurted. ‘In the orchard, looking in.’
‘At the end of our garden? It’s OK, there’s a public footpath runs along there,’ Dad said. He opened the back door to look out. ‘No. Can’t see anyone.’
‘He was by the gate, smoking.’ Henry stepped out to the flagged path, which disappeared beneath a sprawl of nettles and thistles a few feet from the door. ‘And there are
fireflies.
’ He peered along the length of the garden. There was no young man, no fireflies, no cigarette-tip glowing in the dark — only the warm air and the breath of the trees.
‘Just someone walking through,’ Dad said, shepherding Henry back indoors. ‘That footpath goes right along the orchard, then into the big field behind.’
He made it sound so ordinary. Less certain now of what he had seen, Henry couldn’t explain the strangeness of it.
‘Anyway,’ Dad added, going back to the steaming kettle, ‘you don’t get fireflies, not in this country.’
‘But I
saw
them!’
‘Funny time to be out walking.’ Mum was reaching deep into a crate, head down, bottom up. ‘Hen, it’s time for bed. You’ve had a long day.’
‘Mu-um! Don’t call me Hen!’
‘Sorry,’ Mum said, from inside the box. ‘I’ll come up in a minute to see you’ve got everything you need.’
‘Curtains,’ Henry said. ‘I haven’t got curtains.’
‘I know.’ Mum straightened up. ‘We’ll find them tomorrow. Won’t matter, will it, not for one night? This time of year it’s only dark for a few hours and you’re at the back of the house. It’s not as if anyone can see in.’
But the man outside!
‘Night, Henry. Sleep tight,’ Dad said, as he always did.
Henry went upstairs and crept to the window to check again, but saw only the twisted trunks of the apple trees and their shadowy leaves in the dusk.
The man
wasn’t
walking,
he thought;
he was waiting for something. Or for someone. He was waiting for
me.
And, in the room that held all the day’s warmth, he felt a cold shiver between his shoulder-blades, like iced water trickling.
TWO
HEN
3, Church Cottages, Crickford St. Thomas, Suffolk,
was the sort of address Henry’s mum had always wanted. Henry knew she had dreamed of moving to a village like this.
Their cottage, one of four in a row near the church, had stood empty for nearly a year. Going in was like opening up those boxes that fit one inside the other. From the front it looked tiny and narrow, with a door so low that Dad had to duck his head to get through. Inside, there was a series of rooms like a tunnel, finally reaching the kitchen and back door, which led to a long thin garden.
‘Right,’ said Dad on the second day, rubbing his hands. ‘That’s the moving over and done with. Now we start living here.’
‘Over and done with?’ Mum turned slowly one way and then the other, surveying the muddle and the boxes still waiting to be unpacked. ‘I don’t think so!’
It was another day of sorting, of wondering where things were, of trying to find places for everything. ‘Soon be back to normal,’ Dad kept saying, clambering over rolled-up carpet, or unravelling a tangle of wire flex, or trying to find a handful of screws that matched. He’d had to drive ten miles to the nearest DIY shop for curtain hooks, two tins of paint and an extension lead.
Normal!
He must be joking,
Henry thought. As far as he could see, nothing would ever be normal again.
Normal
was their old flat.
Normal
was running downstairs to Nabil’s, playing football in the park or going to the newsagent’s for crisps or chocolate.
Normal
was school — Strawberry Hill Primary and Mr Greenstreet, who taught class 6G and organised the football teams. Henry was missing the last week-and-a-bit of Year Six, the days full of fun things and a party before leaving primary school for ever and moving up to Fuller’s Wood, the comprehensive. Now, instead of going there with Nabil and his other friends, he’d have to start at an unknown school, Hartsfield High, without a single friend. It was weeks away, but still he had a sick, blurry feeling every time he thought about it.
Mum and Dad thought it was great, moving. But Henry couldn’t see much point in Mum moving miles away from London only to travel back there every day to work. Even Dad’s new job in Ipswich was half-an-hour’s drive away. Grown-ups were always going on about common-sense, without noticing how short of it they were themselves. And Henry
liked
London; it was what he was used to. He liked the mazy streets and the Underground and the red buses. He liked the parks and the pavement art and the pigeons. He liked the Planetarium and the London Eye and the Science Museum. Nabil’s mum and dad were museum fanatics, and were working their way round all of them with the two boys.
Henry thought of exploring, running out across the fields and finding a stream, a wood, trees to climb. But there was one important thing missing: a friend. It wouldn’t be much fun doing that sort of thing on his own. He wanted Nabil to live here too.
‘You can have Nabil to stay in the holidays,’ Mum told him. It was weird how she sometimes did that — picked up what he was thinking, as if he’d spoken aloud. ‘Moving away doesn’t mean you can’t still be friends.’
‘But it won’t be the
same,
’ Henry complained.
‘Things don’t stay the same for ever,’ Mum said. ‘They change, they move on. There’s email, there are phones, you could even write Nabil a
letter.
Come on, I’ve found your curtains at last. Let’s get them hung.’
Henry hadn’t slept well last night with the black blank of the window and the thought of the strange man outside. It all seemed so different in daylight that by now he wasn’t sure why it had bothered him — someone on the footpath, stopping for a rest and a smoke, that was all. He liked his new room: the way it jutted out at the back of the house and its three steps up from the landing, which seemed to set it apart from the rest. The floor was uneven and creaked when he walked on it, so that crossing from door to window felt like being in a boat. When Mum had finished in here, he was going to put up his Chelsea posters and drape his scarf along the curtain rail. Then the room would seem more like his.
He leaned on the window-sill and saw Dad outside with a sickle, hacking a path from door to back gate. The garden must have been left to grow wild for years. According to Dad, it was unexplored jungle and might harbour creatures like pythons, orang-utans and two-toed sloths. He saw Henry watching and called up: ‘Send a search-party if I don’t come back for lunch. Tell them to bring survival rations and snake-bite serum!’
‘It’ll be more like your old room, with these up.’ Mum was standing on a chair, mumbling through the curtain-hook she held between her lips. ‘And you won’t have to imagine there’s someone out there.’
‘I
didn’t
imagine!’ Henry retorted; but the memory of the waiting man had faded so shadowily that he couldn’t be sure.
‘Count me out another five hooks, can you, Hen? See that box there? I need this sort, not the comma-shaped ones.’ Mum held one out to show him.
‘Mum, don’t call me Hen!’
‘Sorry, I keep forgetting.’
‘Well,
don’t
forget!’
He hated being called Hen. It wasn’t so bad at home, but suppose she said it when someone was listening — someone from his new school? He’d be called Hen for ever. It made him feel like a little clucking chicken.
‘Soon as you go to school next week,’ Mum said, ‘you’ll make friends, and then you won’t feel so strange.’
She’d done it again! Picked up his thought. Not that there was any chance of her forgetting. It was all arranged — he was joining Year Six at the village school just for two days, to visit Hartsfield High with them, the comprehensive.
‘What’s the point?’ he asked, knowing it was useless. ‘Why don’t I wait till September?’
‘Why does it feel like we’ve had this conversation before?’ Mum said, draping the curtain over her arm. ‘Could it be that we
have,
five times at least? You wouldn’t want to miss going to Hartsfield with the others —’
Yes, I would,
Henry thought.
‘— it’ll help you feel much less new when you start there in September — and you can start making friends in the village. You will, Henry!’
Henry shook his head obstinately. ‘What was the problem with staying on at home till school breaks up? I could have stayed at Nabil’s.’
‘
This
is home now,’ said Mum. ‘You’ll see Nabil in the holidays, and by then you’ll be feeling a lot happier. I promise.’
Henry chased a spider through the open window and watched it lower itself down the outside wall by a thread.
‘Pat’s daughter’s about your age. Oh, that reminds me,’ Mum said, looking at her watch. ‘I said we’d all call round later, just to say hello. Pat’s going to keep an eye on you, when I’m at work next week.’
‘Why does she need to?’ Henry asked, though they’d had this conversation before, too. He’d been embarrassed to hear Mum discussing
child-care arrangements,
as she called them, with Pat, their new neighbour; it made him sound like a two-year-old in a pushchair. ‘Can’t you just give me a door key?’
‘You’ll have a door key, but you’ll be spending some time at Pat’s. I expect you and Grace’ll soon be friends.’
‘Amazing Grace?’ Henry said, thinking of the song they sang in assembly sometimes, back at Strawberry Hill.
‘We’ll find out.’
Later, on the doorstep of Number One, Mum squeezed his arm. ‘It’s OK, we won’t embarrass you. Henry, not Hen! Not a single Hen will pass our lips. Remember!’ she added sternly to Dad, although
she
was the one most likely to forget.
The front door opened. And within five minutes of meeting Grace, Henry knew they would never be friends. Not if she had her way. Not if he had his way, either.