Everlasting Lane (28 page)

She sat down and ran her fingers back through her hair leaving some of it pushed up into the air. She was very pretty.

‘That’s better,’ she said. ‘A little less mystical, perhaps, but … Anyway, where were we? Oh, yes: Peter, your question again?’

I cleared my throat. ‘What’s the opposite of reflection?’

Well, I couldn’t see what was wrong with being left-handed.

‘Look,’ Miss Pevensie turned the mirror towards me, ‘your face is pressed against the glass.’

‘It’s broken,’ I said. All the cracks made me look like an old man.

‘Look closer,’ said Miss Pevensie pushing the broken mirror towards me. ‘Open your eyes. What do you see?’

The sudden daylight had dazzled me but I looked deep into the mirror until my eyes were crossed. ‘It’s me,’ I said. ‘I’m the opposite of my reflection.’ I stared at her. I felt very strange and a bit frightened although I didn’t know why. ‘What does it mean?’ I said.

‘It means …’ Miss Pevensie looked unsure, puffing out her cheeks again and scanning the red ink for clues. ‘Look, Peter, the universe is full of things: things and things that happen and some things that don’t. And sometimes things mean something but, sometimes, some things, well, they don’t really mean anything at all.’

‘But it does,’ I said. ‘It does.’ I knew what it meant. ‘It means I have to find the secret about Alice.’

‘Sometimes, Peter, secrets are secrets for a reason,’ said Miss Pevensie. And then, with a sigh, she folded the card and tucked it into her jeans pocket. ‘I think you were right, Peter. It’s like you said: it’s just a joke.’ And then, ‘Knock-knock,’ she said.

‘Who’s there?’

‘Oh,’ she seemed startled but then she said, ‘Well, it’s like
I
said, Peter: sometimes it’s best not to know.’

I burst out of the tent, dizzy with confusion, and ran straight into the middle of Miss Drew and the Amberley Ballet Group. Parents tut-tutted as I fought my way free of pink taffeta. All around me stalls were being folded away and their contents packed into boxes.

I chased after Tommie as fast as I could.

‘How’s my favourite boy?’ asked Kat, hugging me from behind whilst I sat at the kitchen table, making me jump about a mile and a half. She planted a loud, wet kiss under my ear.

It was a hot afternoon and she’d been locked in her workshop all morning, suddenly appearing with a grin like she’d won the pools and humming along to the radio.

‘What are you doing?’ she asked.

Well, she could tell what I was doing just by looking, couldn’t she? With Tommie at his dad’s and Anna-Marie spending her last day in solitary confinement, I’d settled down to stick Tommie’s latest list into my scrapbook and to write about some of the things that had happened. I’d even written down all those things Miss Pevensie had said—as much as I could remember: it’d taken ages. So, anyway, I had my book spread open on the table and bits of paper and a tub of glue with a gunky glue-stick poking out the top and Kat made a joke of peering over my shoulder. I had to keep skidding my book around the table and covering it over like that man at
The Copper Kettle.
It was sort of funny at first but I was glad when she gave up.

‘What do you keep in there, Peter?’ she asked tapping me on the head with her knuckle. I wanted to say it was a secret
but even that was a kind of secret. She wasn’t the only one with secrets, you know. ‘I wish you’d let me see,’ she said, and then grabbed the top piece of paper waving away my hand as I tried to take it back. She squinted at what I’d written, her face all puzzled. ‘I can’t even read your writing,’ she said. That was because I kind of wrote everything backwards like in a mirror (but that was a secret too).

She handed me back the paper but pretending like she was going to tug it away again. She looked a little sad as she said, ‘I wish I knew what went on in that head of yours,’ before clapping twice and, ‘Anyway,’ smiling again, ‘where’s the Dynamic Duo? I haven’t seen Anna-Marie in ages.’ I told her I was on my own. I hadn’t told her anything about Anna-Marie’s punishment obviously.

‘Marvellous,’ she cried. ‘I’ll put the kettle on and we can have a catch-up. You can tell me everything you’ve been up to.’ She went to the sink to fill the kettle, spoon tea-leaves into the pot and arrange cup, saucer and spoon. ‘Or maybe you want to ask me something.’

Well, I wanted to ask about Alice. Of course I did. But how could I? Everything I knew I knew because of, well, you know, subterfuge, just like Norman said. What would Kat say if she found out? Well, that much I didn’t want to find out. If Alice was my sister, then why had no one ever said anything about her? It was this big secret and I wasn’t supposed to know and I certainly wasn’t supposed to be going around trying to find out.

So, instead I said, ‘Will you tell me about Dad?’

She turned around to look at me. ‘I might,’ she said, slipping a hand into her front pocket. ‘That would depend on what you wanted to know.’ Standing with the kitchen window behind her, her hair shone like copper.

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Just talk about him.’

‘Well, okay. Let’s see.’ She folded her arms, the tip of her tongue touching her top lip. ‘He was an amazing man your father,’ she said. ‘Have you heard the expression: still waters run deep? Well, it means that he was calm on the surface but, well, underneath … He never talked about the war. He would never say what he’d seen or what he’d done.’

‘Did you ask him?’

‘Why, when it caused him so much pain? But it made him the man he was. I suppose I thought I had a whole lifetime to find out but, well …

‘He was a good looking man your dad—dashing—everybody said so. He had a bearing. Do you know what I mean by that? It means like he had a presence.’ She poured me an orange squash, filling the glass with shiny water from the tap. It tasted sweet and syrupy. ‘It’s hard to explain,’ she went on. ‘It was the war, I suppose, all that marching up and down and parades and whatever. He never lost it. Even when he was …

‘Are you sure you want to hear this?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, he wasn’t just good looking either; he was clever too. It’s not always easy to tell the people who are genuinely clever from people who just surround themselves with cleverness. But I always knew with your dad: you could see it in his eyes.’

Kat’s own eyes grew smoky as she remembered my father, memories billowing and merging with the steam erupting from the kettle. She turned her back to me and unplugged the kettle before pouring the hot silver water. ‘After the things he’d seen in the war it,’ she said, gently shaking the tea-pot and gazing out of the window to the garden, ‘it made him a better man, I think. He was a brave man. He wouldn’t talk about the war. He wouldn’t even talk about his dreams and I know he dreamt about it. How could he not? Maybe you
have to see the worse things, the worse things people can do before you can forgive. When you’ve seen real cruelty maybe, maybe it puts, I don’t know, foolishness into perspective. But I was never like that, I’m afraid. I couldn’t forgive,’ she looked at me over her shoulder, her eyes suddenly sharp, ‘indifference,’ before returning to pouring her tea.

Kat took a tissue from the box on the windowsill and blew her nose. She brought her tea to the table, and biscuits, those mint ones with their own tin-foil wrappers, and the tissues scrunched under her arm. I noticed that her eyes were red, but not in an angry way. She sat down and studied her hands.

‘Sometimes I have such wonderful dreams,’ she said, ‘you, your dad … All of us together. Sometimes the shock of waking up is … But then, I guess, if I didn’t wake up I’d never’ve known I was dreaming. I dream he’s still alive, just sitting in an empty chair and we talk … I forget he’s supposed to be dead, you see, and it’s the most natural thing in the world,’ and as she spoke it really was like he was there, ‘and we talk about things and we talk about you,’ listening to what Kat was saying, nodding like he used to and pinching my ear when I wasn’t looking, ‘the family, the future. We were so happy here.’ And then she smiled like it was all a bit silly. ‘But then you can do anything in dreams, can’t you?’ she said. ‘Be anything. It’s like there’s never any—’

‘Consequences,’ I said taking her by surprise. ‘Maybe that’s how you tell the difference. I mean between dreams and when you’re awake. In dreams there aren’t any consequences.’

‘Well, I suppose so,’ murmured Kat, ‘but it’s all very well talking about consequences—I mean consequences in real life—as if you can always tell what they’re going to be. Yes, sometimes it’s like, I don’t know, sure, you push a button and a bell rings but other times you can push a button and a bomb goes off, you know, kaboom!,’ her hands opened like an
explosion, ‘blowing everything to kingdom come. It’s not like you ever even know which button is which.’

She blew away the steam before taking a sip of her dark brown tea.

‘But if we were so happy … I mean, do you know why we left Amberley?’

She didn’t say anything for such a long time that I thought she can’t’ve heard me, but then she said: ‘Phew, what a question. Are you sure you wouldn’t rather know where babies come from or something like that?’ but she was only joking. ‘Are you sorry we left?’

I shrugged.

‘You’re just like your dad, Peter. Did you know that? Still waters. You just sit there and listen, digging elephant traps for people, and they rabbit on, ten to the dozen, all the things they should probably keep to themselves.’ She reached out and patted me gently on the arm and then left her hand there a moment longer like she was just touching me to make sure I was real. Then she took her hand away and wrapped it back around her tea-cup.

‘You had everything here, Peter,’ she said. ‘Who couldn’t love living here? You had a lovely home and parents who adored you. You even had a mad grandmother who thought the sun shone out of your tiny—’

‘So, why did we leave?’

Kat hesitated just a moment before, ‘Sometimes,’ she said, handing me a biscuit and unwrapping one for herself, ‘things happen.’

‘Like consequences,’ I said.

‘Since when did you start worrying about consequences, Peter?’ she said. ‘Oh, Lord, it’s Pinky and Perky all over again.’ She bit into the biscuit leaving the shape of her teeth in the soft chocolate coating. ‘But, yes, I suppose you’re right. But
then you shouldn’t cry about the past. That’s what everyone says. Well, maybe you can cry just a little bit but it’s spilt milk, they say. And all you can really do is mop it up and start again.’ As she spoke she squeezed the tin-foil into a tiny ball and popped it on the table. ‘And, I don’t know, buy more milk and not make the same mistakes next time.’ She took a tissue from the box and sniffed.

I didn’t think that she’d really answered my question.

‘But why did I come back here?’ I asked.

‘Don’t you like it here?’

I nodded although really I wasn’t sure how much I did like Amberley. It seemed such a strange place. I don’t know what my face looked like but suddenly Kat leant forward, her eyes glowing like light-bulbs.

‘Go on,’ she said, excited, just like a kid. ‘What have you been up to? What have you found? What have you seen?’

It was almost like she wanted me to tell her. I pushed my whole biscuit into my mouth and made a face that said: ‘Like what?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘When I was your age we used to go up and down all day long, looking in every hedge for things we shouldn’t know about. What about you? You can tell me anything, you know.’

Except I couldn’t, could I? ‘No,’ I said. ‘Nothing.’

She seemed disappointed. ‘Perhaps you’re not looking hard enough,’ she said. ‘There’s secrets under every bush round here. Some of them are right under your nose. Sometimes you just have to lift the stones,’ I couldn’t help thinking about Mr Merridew’s stones, ‘stones that are staring you right in the face to find something … really interesting.’

Like I said, it was almost like she wanted me to tell her.

‘Well, anyway,’ went on Kat, ‘I’ll tell you why I brought you back to Amberley, shall I?’ I nodded. ‘There are three
things you can do in life, Peter, when you’re faced with … problems.’

‘What?’

‘You can stand your ground and look them in the eye,’ and she stared fiercely at her imaginary problem, poking it in the face with her sharp nail. I nodded again. ‘You can walk away.’ I nodded a third time. ‘Or you can run,’ she said, ‘as fast as you can.’

‘What did you do?’ I asked.

‘Oh, I ran,’ she laughed. ‘I ran away from here,’ and she glanced around at the yellow walls and the brown cupboards, ‘and then I ran straight back. That’s why we ended up back here. Listen, do you remember when you used to run to your room and hide? At the old house? Well, Amberley is
my
room and Everlasting Lane is my sheets. This cottage is my blanket. Do you understand?’

And I nodded again. I really did understand. And then I said, ‘Why is it called Everlasting Lane?’ I’d asked her once before but she’d never really answered that either.

She looked surprised. ‘Haven’t you worked it out yet? Why do you think? Remember what I told you before: a name is important …’ She meant it like a clue.

I screwed up my forehead like a tin-foil wrapper but it was like long multiplication; a sum I couldn’t answer.

‘Can I tell you a story?’ she said, and settled back in her chair like one of those people off
Jackanory.
She cleared her throat. ‘Are you sitting comfortably etc.? Well, once, when I was a little girl, my mother, your grandmother, took me on a trip to see some aunt or uncle or something. We went on a train. I remember it was really boring shunting through all these little stations and everything. But then we came to one station and I was just staring out of the window, minding my own business, and there was this pole or post, you know, quite
wide, supporting the roof over the station and behind it was this brick wall and there was this man walking along the platform and as he was walking along he passed behind the post but, and this was the thing that caught my attention, he didn’t come out the other side.’ I gasped. ‘Just like that,’ she said. ‘And it was like he’d disappeared. And then another man, coming from the other direction, did the same thing: he just passed behind the post and poof he was gone.’