Everlasting Lane (11 page)

‘I can’t speak for Piggy Malone and Charley Farley,’ she
said, ‘but I’ve got literally a million … Well, not literally, but a lot of things to get done. Perhaps we could come next weekend.’

‘Ah,’ said Mr Merridew his thin smile flickering. ‘What a shame.’

He wished us good day but then stood watching as we shuffled off along the path, leering through his goggly glasses. The river was straight and so we could feel his gaze warming the backs of our necks as we walked nervously along. Until, at last, the path turned with the flow of the water and the old man’s grim shape finally disappeared behind the river bend.

Tommie collapsed on the riverbank, laughing. Anna-Marie sighed, releasing the green band from her ponytail and slipping it onto her slender wrist. She tipped her head upwards to face the sky. Her fingers ran through her golden hair, pushing it to the top of her head and letting it fall, rolling down upon her shoulders. She repeated the motion, her feet turning step by step, allowing the sun to—

‘What’s up with you, bog-breath?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Frankly, you get more peculiar by the minute,’ muttered Anna-Marie. ‘So,’ she said, smoothing her dress under her bottom and sitting among the daisies on the riverbank, ‘what do you think of our friend, Mr Merridew?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘He’s all right, I suppose.’ I wasn’t going to admit to anything else.

‘Tommie-Titmus here is afraid of him.’

‘No, I’m not,’ protested Tommie.

‘What does he do?’ I asked.

‘What do you mean?’ snapped Anna-Marie. ‘What do you mean: what does he
do
?’

‘Well, what does he do for a job?’

‘Oh, that,’ said Anna-Marie. ‘Well, he used to be some kind
of scientist I think but he doesn’t really do anything now. He says he’s lapsed.’

‘Lapsed?’

‘Yes. He says it’s all bunk. Science I mean. He says it’s religion for atheists.’

‘Atheists?’

‘Yes, you twit. It means people who don’t believe in God.’

‘Well, I know but—’

‘Well, that’s what he says.’ She thought about it for a moment. ‘But I don’t think he means it. Not literally. It’s,’ and she cleared her throat, ‘poetic licence.’

That seemed a strange thing to say. I knew you needed a licence for a TV and a dog and stuff but—

Anna-Marie sighed. ‘It means,’ she said, ‘that you can say things that aren’t true.’

‘You should always tell the truth,’ I said, but I was confused. My mum had said I should always tell the truth but then Kat had said it was best not to say anything at all. Or was it the other way round?

‘But that’s real life, isn’t it?’ Anna-Marie went on. ‘That’s quite different. It’s like in a story. In a story you can say any kind of stuff you like.’

I frowned. Kat had said something similar but I wasn’t sure.

‘Let me explain something to you, little boy,’ said Anna-Marie. ‘In a story I could say my dad was Evel Knievel and you could say you lived with the Loch Ness Monster and no one would bat an eyelid.

‘You could even say you knew a girl called Anna-Marie who was very pretty and very smart and for all the man-in-the-street knows you’ve completely made me up. Mind you,’ she said, picking her nose, ‘considering you’ve made me sound so dull he might wonder why you’d bothered.’ She examined her bogey before flicking it into a nearby bush. She began
plucking daisies from the riverbank and arranging them in rows upon the grass. ‘The point is, in a story you can make everything better.’

‘But why would Peter just make stuff up?’ said Tommie. ‘Why would he do that?’

‘Who knows?’ said Anna-Marie. ‘Who can explain the workings of an unstable mind? Anyway, don’t tell anyone what I said about Mr Merridew. Promise. It’s supposed to be some kind of secret.’

‘I know a secret,’ I said.

‘What is it?’ asked Tommie.

‘How marvellous for you,’ yawned Anna-Marie and, ‘It’s not going to be a very well kept one by the sounds of it.’ She returned to her daisies, splitting stalks with the blade of her fingernail and weaving them with quick fingers. ‘Perhaps you should look up “secret” in a—’

‘It’s real,’ I insisted. She wasn’t taking me seriously.

‘All right. All right,’ said Anna-Marie. ‘Keep your pants on.’

‘There’s this room,’ I said, ‘in the cottage. A secret room—’

‘A secret room?’

The daisy chain hung suspended between Anna-Marie’s open hands. For a moment I thought it was the flowers rather than my news which had caused her to stop.

Tommie’s eyes had lit up. ‘Why’s it a secret?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know,’ I said, ‘but it’s hidden behind this curtain and it’s always locked.’

‘Wow,’ said Tommie. ‘I wonder what’s inside.’

‘Oh, give me strength,’ said Anna-Marie. ‘Don’t you start. Did it even occur to lemon-head here to ask Kat about it?’

‘No, I—’

‘But, if you don’t even have the nerve to ask your—’

‘But it is a secret room,’ I insisted. ‘At Kat’s cottage. It’s behind this big, green curtain.’ Anna-Marie’s eyelids flickered
with boredom and she put a hand over her mouth as if smothering a yawn. Why wouldn’t she take me seriously? She was always treating me like I was some kind of idiot. Actually, when you thought about it, she always treated most people like they were some kind of idiot.

‘But, if you haven’t even asked about it … What do you expect? I’m sure there’s a perfectly logical—’

‘But,’ said Tommie, a curious light gleaming in his lenses, ‘what if it is a secret room? What if there’s a—?’

‘What if there’s a what?’ snapped Anna-Marie. ‘This isn’t Enid Blyton, you know, and it’s not a production of the
Children’s Film Foundation.
You’re not about to have an adventure. If it wasn’t for me looking out for the pair of you, you’d be a danger to yourselves and others.’ She resumed her threading and I waited nervously as her fingers turned and spun like needles, and the chain between them grew and grew. The afternoon was awash with summer swirling all the way up from the river to the tops of the trees and beyond.

‘Why don’t you get a hair-grip?’ said Tommie. ‘I saw them do this on
Columbo.
’ He mimed a twisting motion as he spoke. ‘You kind of loop it like this—’

‘Thank you, Miss Marple,’ interrupted Anna-Marie. She turned to me. ‘Why don’t you just get the key?’

‘I don’t know where it is.’

Anna-Marie clicked her tongue and nibbled her lip. ‘Well,’ she said finally, laying her daisies on the ground in a zig-zaggy pattern and giving an exasperated sigh, ‘I suppose we’ll just have to see what we can do about that, won’t we?’

‘Greetings, Earthlings!’ said Kat one afternoon from the upstairs window.
That
upstairs window. ‘It’s the three musketeers! All for one, one for all, etcetera!’ She was always saying that kind of thing but Anna-Marie and Tommie didn’t seem to mind. As we sat on the lawn, soaking in sunshine, she would ask after their mothers, were they enjoying the warm weather, were they going away this summer. Tommie and Anna-Marie liked Kat and chatted happily.

‘I’m just popping up to the church, Peter,’ she said. ‘Will you be all right for an hour?’

‘Don’t worry, Kat,’ said Anna-Marie. ‘We’ll keep an eye on him.’

‘ ’Bye, Mrs Lambert,’ said Tommie.

Kat tut-tutted, pretending to be cross. ‘You can call me Kat,’ and we all chimed in, ‘with a “K”.’ She laughed. ‘I’ll see you in an hour then. No more than two.’ She shut the upstairs window: the upstairs window on the left, the window to the left of my bedroom, the window with pink curtains and the strip of cardboard filling the broken pane.

The front door slammed and then a hiccup as Kat’s rusty little car came to life and struggled its way out of the drive.

Anna-Marie had been lazing backwards propped up on
her elbows but as the sound of Kat’s motor faded she snapped straight up. ‘Right,’ she said, ‘now how are we going to get into this room?’

Tommie had also sprung to attention. ‘We need a key.’

I was laid on my tummy, scratching a moat around an immovable stone. ‘But Kat’s hidden the key,’ I protested, turning to squint at my companions.

‘Let’s think about this logically,’ said Anna-Marie. ‘Why do you say she’s hidden the key?’

‘It’s not on her key-ring.’

‘But does she know you know about the secret room?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Well, know so, Peter. Has she done or said anything that makes you think she knows you know about the secret room?’

I thought hard. ‘No.’

‘Then why,’ asked Anna-Marie, ‘would she hide the key? Tommie, where does your mum keep her keys?’

‘On the hooks in the kitchen.’

‘Mine too. Come on.’

They leapt to their feet and raced across the garden into the kitchen. I rose and followed them. ‘But we haven’t got a—’

Anna-Marie and Tommie were stood staring at the back of the kitchen door, grinning at my stupidity.

‘Oh, Peter,’ said Anna-Marie as she examined the row of keys. I’d never even seen them before, ‘do you realise that if we doubled your brain cells we could have a very small game of conkers.’

Well, that was hardly fair. They only knew there was a secret room because of me. It wasn’t like I went round investigating the backs of doors.

‘Honestly,’ muttered Anna-Marie. ‘It’s almost like she wants you to find it.’

The keys jingled as her finger traced along the row. She
stopped when she reached the only key that wasn’t labelled, lifted it from its hook and smiled. ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Can you imagine any circumstances in which someone would label a key:
Secret Room
?’ She was just like someone out of
The Famous
—

But they were already bounding their way upstairs. As I trudged up behind them I could already hear Anna-Marie dragging back the heavy curtain and Tommie gasping: ‘It’s true. There is a secret room.’

‘Maybe,’ said Anna-Marie, ‘or maybe there’s just a door behind a curtain and an odd little boy,’ she glanced at me as I stepped onto the landing, ‘with an over-active imagination.’

‘But, Anna-Marie—’

‘Hush your whining, Peter,’ said Anna-Marie. ‘Let me think.’ She studied the door peering at the hinge and then the lock. She reached out and touched it, placing first the pad of her finger and then the palm of her hand against it as if testing the temperature.

The only sound was our breathing. Anna-Marie put the key in the lock and turned it. I suddenly felt all hot and cold at the same time. ‘Maybe we shouldn’t.’

‘Oh, dear,’ said Anna-Marie as the lock clicked. ‘Have you got the collywobbles?’

I shook my head but didn’t move.

‘All right,’ said Anna-Marie with a sigh, ‘before we go in, let’s say for argument’s sake that this is a secret door to a secret room. What is a secret?’ Her hair was almost white by the light that shone through the landing window. ‘What’s it for?’

‘A secret,’ said Tommie, ‘is something that somebody knows that they don’t want somebody else to know. So they keep it a secret.’

‘Good,’ said Anna-Marie. ‘So, what is it that Kat doesn’t
want Peter to know? What are the sorts of things that people keep secret? What are the things that people don’t want other people to know?’

‘Well,’ said Tommie, ‘say sometimes a person might have done something like committed a crime or stolen a lot of money and they don’t want the police to know about it or they’d go to jail.’

Anna-Marie looked doubtful. ‘Are you telling me you think Kat is one of the Great Train Robbers?’

‘No, I—’

Anna-Marie groaned and pressed two fingers against her forehead. ‘Let’s say for the time being that Kat doesn’t exactly look like the master criminal type. No, there must be some other reason why she doesn’t want Peter to know about this room.’

‘Oh,’ said Tommie, ‘in films they sometimes have secrets like documents that they don’t want the enemies to get hold of. They have a big stamp that has “Top Secret” on it.’

‘Well, what sort of secrets are they?’

‘Like where their missiles are based or it might be a secret code.’

‘Again, Tommie, I don’t think Kat’s the type of person who has missiles.’

‘Well, I know, but—’

‘Look around you,’ said Anna-Marie. So we did. ‘It’s 1976. It’s Amberley. It’s not Nazi Germany.’

‘All right,’ said Tommie, thought wriggling across his brow like a caterpillar. ‘Well, a secret is like another word for what’s true, isn’t it?’

‘Go on.’

‘And if people don’t know the secret,’ gasped Tommie, ‘then what they think they know is a lie.’

Anna-Marie stared at Tommie. ‘You know, that’s very
smart,’ she said. Tommie smiled. ‘For a moron,’ and his smile disappeared. ‘So, Peter, do you want to know the truth?’

Well, that wasn’t even a fair question. Of course I did. This, under my own roof, this was like cheating.

‘Peter?’

Because Kat and I did have a secret, of course, but not from each other. Except she did have a secret, didn’t she? So, what did I have?

‘Peter!’

Of course I wanted to know. I was entitled. ‘Ouch.’

‘I’ll do it again if you don’t get a move on.’

‘She’ll kill me,’ I whispered, and Anna-Marie and Tommie laughed but, of course, they didn’t know her like I did.

Anna-Marie tutted and reached over my shoulder. ‘When Kat’s away …’ She pushed the door open and we looked inside.

‘Oh,’ said Anna-Marie. ‘Wow,’ but my breath caught in my throat like a large peanut. Scared to talk, scared to breathe, scared to be there at all, it was like stepping into Wonderland but on the wrong side of the looking glass, like we were reflections, noses pressed against the glass, peering through.

It was empty. The room I mean. I mean it was empty of people. That was the first thing I noticed. The second thing I noticed was that it was twice the size of my room.
Twice
the size! But at least my room didn’t have pink walls, and shelves crowded with stuffed toys and glassy-eyed dolls. There were bats and balls too, and cubes with letters, cubes with numbers, all mixed up. There were books: story books, picture books, you know, all over the place. And boxes, toy boxes, pushed up against the walls and, to one side, a rocking horse, shining as if it had been dipped in syrup, a red bridle gripped between its teeth. I could guess who’d made it, of course, working away in her magic workshop, removing the unbeautiful.