Cartwheeling in Thunderstorms (21 page)

“Move aside, kid. We're going to need to take a look in that trunk.”

Daniel saw he had no choice. He clenched his eyes shut and gave the bumper a proper thump. With a shriek of rust, the trunk opened.

“Oh,” said the first policeman. And the second policeman added,
“Ah.”
They looked down at two plastic bags and a patch of spilled soap powder.

“Quite.”
His grandmother snorted. “Will that be all, gentlemen? Or do you not think you've disturbed us enough for one night? Would you like us to pry open the gutters? Dig up the floor? Sing the national anthem?” His grandmother had a kind of ferocious beauty, despite being less than five foot, and as she herded them out before her, he heard her saying, “And you, lad—your boots need polishing. What, will you tell me, do we pay taxes for?”

Daniel followed them out of the garage and slammed the door shut behind him. He waited; there were the sounds of increasingly panicked apology, the low rumble of his grandmother's fiercest voice, and the front door slamming. A car started. Dan reopened the garage door and peered into the darkness. Without the policemen's flashlights the garage was black and icy.

“Will?” He didn't dare shout. He hissed, “
Will?
Are you here?”

“Daniel?
Daniel?
” Her voice sounded less musical than before, he thought—flat and shaken. “I'm caught.”

The voice came from outside the open window. There was a scrabbling, like birds on a roof, and Will's face appeared, upside down and pale in the moonlight. “Daniel! Oh, thank goodness. I think I'm on a sort of gutter. Help, please! It keeps creaking; I'm too heavy.”

“What were you
doing
, Will?”

“I tried to get right up onto the roof, but my bootlace got caught. I don't know what to do.” Will's soft eyes looked desperately into Dan's face. “Can you cut it?”

He stood on a chair and looked out the window. She was lying along the gutter, covered in leaf mold and surrounded by roosting pigeons. (He stared. Why hadn't they flown off? Or made frightened pigeon noises and warned the police?)
It was a long drop to the concrete below. “Hold on,” he said, “I'll get the kitchen scissors. Hold on, okay?”

“I can't. No! Don't go. There's a pocketknife in my pocket,” said Will. “Hold my shoulders—
ja
—I can reach it.” She had to shift her weight to get at her pocket, and the gutter shuddered and groaned. The pigeons stared reproachfully.

Will held her breath. “I—wait—
penga
 . . .” The gutter settled, but a few inches lower than before. Two puffs of relief misted the night air. Will gripped the knife in her teeth and spoke round it. “Can you reach round and cut me free?”

It took five endless minutes of cutting and waiting and listening before Will was disentangled. She still clung to the roof. “Wait! I'm at a funny angle.” Her voice was tight and breathless. “I don't know if I can slide back in.” Her voice sounded as though she was fighting tears. “I think something snapped in my ankle. Not a bone—”

“A ligament, maybe?”

Will glared. “Help, please,
ja
? I don't need a science lesson.”

“No need to get angry. You're safe now. Hold on. You okay? I'll hold on to your wrist.” Daniel reached farther out. “Give me your wrist. Yeah. Good. Slowly. Now your elbow.” He tugged at her sleeves, and Will slid toward
the casement. She kicked at the gutter with one foot. He caught her by the back of her coat and lowered her the rest of the way.

So Daniel was like she was, Will thought: stronger than he looked.

They sat together on the concrete floor.

“What time is it now?”

Will peered at the sky. “After midnight. Before two.”

“I should go to bed, or Gran'll notice. Are you warm enough?”

“
Ja
, thanks.” Will looked at him in the pitch black. She said, “Thank you, hey.” The second thank you, he thought, meant something else.

“No problem. You should go to sleep. I'll try to bring you tea and something to eat in the morning. I sing in a choir, but I should be able to get out of it.” He turned back at the door. “You do drink tea, yeah?” The girl seemed more like a cat than a person. She was like a whisper, or a starjump. “Would you rather have milk? I could find a saucer. Or do you know about mugs?”

“
Ja
! Of course. Tea is good. At home we had redbush tea; rooibos, you know?” He didn't but said he'd look in the kitchen cupboards. He added, “Sleep well. Don't run off in the night, yeah? You will still be here?”

“What? Of course! Don't let the mosquitoes bite. Sleep tight, hey.”

But Will had lied. She was getting good at it. She and Simon had never lied, at home. They'd despised Peter, who lied about pointless things, and was bad at it. But it seemed it was only easy to be honest when you were happy.

She hauled herself to her feet—foot, in fact, and even the uninjured one felt rough and raw, as though she'd walked through the padding and into the bone—and hopped to the window. The windowsill was rough unpainted wood, and she bit her tongue not to wince at the splinters. She pulled herself halfway up, but her arms gave way and she dropped down again. She tried again. Failed again. She couldn't do it; without the mad-adrenaline rush of panic, she was stuck here.

She sank down in a corner and gripped her stubbled hair, and forced her thoughts to steady themselves into columns. She needed real, solid plans. No more cartwheeling round London. This wasn't a game.
Think, Will,
she told herself, and then, when she could only shiver,
Courage, chook
. In the
Bad
column: the police were clever. They would come back. She was sure. This wasn't a book; they didn't just give up and go home. And she was just a child, and alone. In the
Good
column: Dan was funny and kind, and obviously not stupid. But—
Bad
: he was unlikely to be able to provide things like
airplanes. And he looked the sort of boy who got flustered in a fight. And—
Bad
: it would now be impossible, she saw, to get on an airplane home even when she did have the money; they did checks at airports, and—
Bad
column—they'd be on the lookout. Unless—her face brightened and shone in the blackness—she could get a fake passport. But where did a bald schoolgirl go to commit fraud? It was impossible. The world was
bad
.

What else was there? With a swollen ankle, and a septic hand, and the beginnings of a black eye, and bald patches, she didn't think she'd make a prime candidate for adoption. What else? She wrestled with the thought until she could barely breathe. Will fell asleep, in the end, backed into a concrete corner, with the wind crashing against the window, and her last waking thought was of her own room back home, and the dance of the dust, and the window without glass. She would not have been surprised if her head had swollen with longing and burst in her sleep.

W
ILL OPENED HER EYES TO
find the world was still dark, and her heart was still intact. But no night was this black. She closed her eyes again, and opened them again to nothingness, and breathed in a mouthful of something heavy and gagging. She thrashed, and spat. There was a clunk, and a crack of breaking china, and quiet laughter. Panicking, Will tore her head free from the coat and saw that she was lying in bright morning light. There was a broken mug at her side and a plate of toast with something brown spread thickly on it. But Will saw neither of these, because sitting in a pool of spilled tea, there was a woman. She was wrinkled all over, hands and face and clothes—just like a slept-in bed, Will thought. She was smiling.

The woman said, “Hello, Will.”

Will leaped to her feet. The coat tangled round her legs, and she stumbled over her own knees, choking. “Ah,
sha
!” And thudded down onto the concrete floor.

The woman hadn't moved. “That sounded painful, Will.”

“No! My name's not Will,” Will gasped from the floor. “I'm a friend of Daniel's. My name's . . .” What was a boy's name? She could think of none. “Wilbur.”
Wilbur?

“No, it's not, my dear. Your name is Wilhelmina Silver.” For so minuscule an old woman, her voice was firm. It was a voice to stake a life on, rough and lilting and deep. Will didn't know what you called a voice like that; the old woman would have said it was Irish, with a shadow of South London, and a chunk of Scots.

“Please.” There was no air in Will's lungs. She whispered, “Are you going to call the police? Please don't call them,
ja
?” She swatted at the tears that had appeared on her face. “Please.”

“Come on, dear one. Sit up now and calm down. Eat your toast. Wrap yourself in this.”

Will stared out from underneath the coat. The woman's hair was thin and wispy, and she was almost bald in places, but her eyelashes were thicker than Simon's, and the eyes were the green of gin bottles and banana leaves. She could
see why Daniel—as sharp-faced and tall as he was—was so in awe of this woman.

“Eat, Will. Food makes the world look brighter. You must be hungry.”

Now that she thought about it, Will realized how hungry she had been—for weeks, a dozen different kinds of hungry. She ate the toast in three bites, without chewing. The woman smiled steadily.

“What's this one?” Will waved a second piece. “On here?”

“Hazelnut spread.”

It tasted hopeful—thick, nutty hope.

“Do you want another?”

“
Ja!
Yes. Yes, please.”

“We'll go in in a second. Finish up that last piece. No hurry, though.”

Will thought the woman's voice sounded like the opposite of hurry. It was thick and soft, like the hazelnut spread.

“I'm sure you can manage some jam, too, and there's a boiled egg in the kitchen, my love, with your name on it.”

“Thank you,” Will said. “It was a long walk.” Her bones felt hollow.

“Yes! And how did you know the way?”

“It was easy. I bought an Ayterzed.”

“Ah, child! At your age I couldn't have found my own
front door with a compass.” Will grinned into her chin. She tried not to look smug.

The woman said, “Come on, then. Start at the beginning. I want to hear your story. A story's a good return for a breakfast.”

That seemed fair. Will wrapped her arms round her chest and felt the warm skin of her own spine, and told the woman everything, slowly at first, and then with her words bumping into each other in her hurry—about Cynthia Vincy (who was to blame for her father's death) and the school (where girls sat two by two in rows of spite, and where everything was rigid and flimsy, “Both,
ja
, at once, like cardboard dolls”) and to here, now, in the refuge of the garage.

“And now,
ja
, I'm caught,” Will said, and she could not stop her chest from shaking a little. “I can't get home, because I haven't got money, so I can't bribe people for a new passport. And I don't know . . . I don't know how it works. Airplanes, and money, and everything.” She scowled at the floor to thwart possible tears. “And I won't go back to school.”

The woman stood up. It took some time, but Will didn't want to offer to help. It would have been presumptuous, maybe.

“Come into the house, dear heart, and we'll get you a
new mug of tea. No, leave the pieces. Daniel will see to them when he comes home.”

“Daniel!” She'd forgotten. “Where is Daniel?”

“He sings in the church choir. There's a wedding, and I said he was to let you sleep. I promised he'd see you soon. He fought like a wildcat, but I told him I would look after you.”

“Did he tell you I was here?” Will was suddenly angry. “He
swore
not to.”

“He did not. But I'm quicker in the brain than I look. This creaking old body is deceptive.”

“Oh. How
did
you know?”

“I can tell when my boy's lying. It's a talent the old acquire. One of the few compensations for being rickety.” The old woman led Will through the scrubby back garden and into the kitchen. “This way; up on that stool. You sit yourself comfortably. Now, let's have a look at that ankle.”

Will stared blankly. “How did you know—” She hadn't told the woman about her foot.

“I told you, love. I know how important it is to notice things. You know that too, I would guess. It takes one to know one. Boots off, girl.”

When Will was wedged in a chair with one foot in a bucket of warm water, the woman said, “Keep eating, child.
Do you want jam on the next? Good.” With her back to Will and her hands busy with the bread knife, she added, “Can I give you a piece of advice, Will?”