Red Spikes (6 page)

You saw her serious face in the forest, her strong feet wet upon the green-golden river stones. You saw her white hand calming the breath in her throat. Let her be lucky now; let her be a lady; have pity.

My heart’s not pounding no more. It sits instead like a big hard bruise in my chest, paining green in the middle, frilling blood-purple round the edge. It takes a lot of carrying, to get it to the pathway, to keep it moving down the hill in the sunlight. I need my mam; I need her to snap at me and order me about; I need her to shrink this day to something Michaels-sized, that doesn’t hurt so hard and weigh so heavy.

I round the bend. Top Gate stands open and I start to run. I run right through the town and out the other side. All the way down to Lower Feld I go. I slide to a stop at our place, and sit on the step panting, collecting myself, readying myself to go in.

{ Winkie

Ollyn lay awake among the snoring Keller kids.
The man goggled in at her through the window.

I will go home, she thought. Somehow. As soon as he’s gone. I will run out of here; I will run home. No matter about the new baby coming; I will sit quiet in a corner. Only, I can’t be here. I can’t be here a moment longer than I have to be. I am just not brave enough.

‘Skinny little thing, aincha?’ Tod Keller had said when she sidled in their kitchen door last evening. ‘I never even noticed you among those rousty-boys, your brothers.’

Ma Keller had laughed, a sudden laugh that made Oll start. ‘Tuck her away in the press,’ she said. ‘Pop her on the mantel for the night, couldn’t we, petal?’ Her finger under Oll’s chin had scraped like splintery wood.

He was too tall a man. He was extraordinarily tall. No one else she knew could look in over the sill of an upstairs window. If it could be called ‘looking’, when a person’s eyes swivvered left and right like that, never meeting up in the same direction – at least as far as Oll had seen. She’d had the good sense, when an eye-beam swung near, to lie limp and asleep-looking. She breathed slowly while her heart banged like a soldiers’ band.

He shifted out there in the laneway, and muttered some question to himself. He rapped softly on the windowpane, and it was all Oll could do to not cringe at the sound, which was spongy somehow, as well as bony.

Go away, you horror, she thought, so I can get home from here.

Ple-ease!
Why was she like this? She knew her ma hated it, and yet the whining came up from her deeps and she needed, needed to be pressed up against warm Ma; couldn’t see why Ma would not stop a moment what she was doing and hold onto her and make things all right. Just the once would do.

Get her off me,
Ma had said through her teeth.

Huvvy had peeled her off claw by claw.
Come here you
little limpet, you little sticky octopoddle,
he laughed as she wailed.

Ollyn had lost her head a moment, thinking she would die of her distress.

And that was when Ma had rounded on her.
It’s
because of
this
you must go, silly girl! All this clinging and
sooking, you’re sending me mad!

Ollyn had blinked silent at Ma’s vehemence; Huvvy had stopped laughing and held her quite firm and protectingly.

But Ma had kept on.
Our baby will not come
out
with
you around! It will not want to see the face that horrible noise
comes out of!

She was bent over them; Huvvy and Oll were blown back by the wind of her anger. They all three had leaned like that a moment.

Take her, Huv. Take her to Kellers’. I can’t stand it any
longer.
And Ma had turned away and spread her hands on the table and gritted her teeth there with a pain.

Get your nightgown,
Huvvy had murmured in Oll’s ear, and she had hurried to do so.

The man’s feet, on the cobbles, slid, paused and then slapped. His muttering moved away from the window. Oll waited, because her heart of hearts knew he might well come back to a window he had peered in before. But she could not wait too long, because she must see which direction he went in, so she could avoid him.

Up she got from between fat Anya and bony Sarra Keller, and ran lightly to the window, keeping to the shadows. She pressed her cheek to the window frame.

At first she didn’t see him up the lane. Oh, she thought, maybe I only dreamed him. But I will go home anyway. Ma will protect me from my dreams.

But then a clot of shadow moved low against that door, at the top of those stairs there, and a high cry snaked down the lane, and the thing, the man, unfolded himself, the full kinked lanky height of him, with his shining round head, a few hairs streaked across it, a few others floating out sideways, bright and frizzly in the lamplight.

Watching him crane to see into that house, hearing his cry, Oll was like Mixie Dixon’s doll that her pa brought from Germany, held together with stiff wires. How will I
get
home, she thought, if I cannot even move?

The man’s nightgown confused her eye. It was made of the oddest shaped patches, all patterned differently.

Buttons gleamed here and there. Unhemmed, it stroked his stringy calves with fraying threads. His feet – look how many cobbles his feet covered! Oll was likely to faint with it.

He swayed out from the window, back towards the Kellers’ and called, in a high, reasonable voice borrowed from someone sane, someone real, ‘
Well
past!
So
far past their bedtime!’ Then he loped up the steps past Draper Downs’s house where there were no children, and past the House of the Indigent Aged. And around into Spire Street, to the
right
, turning
up
the hill.

Oll’s wires turned to workable muscle again, and her mind cleared somewhat. Ma, she thought. Ma. She must put herself near Ma.

She did not dress. She did not take her clothes. She did not even stop for boots. In her nightdress, cool air puffing inside it, she ran noiselessly down the stairs.

The cat by the coals lifted its black head as she passed. The kitchen door was just like the one at home; she knew how to raise the latch, hold it up while she tiptoed through, and lower it silently behind her.

It was a clear, cold night, the sky thick-frosted with stars. A part of Oll quailed and quaked and covered its head inside her, while her body ran stiffly along the house-path, across the back of Kellers’ and down the narrow side way. She peeped around into the lane, and there was the same view as from the upper room, the finecut keystone over Draper Downs’s door, the House’s curly-iron sign silhouetted against the lamplit wall – except she was lower in this view now, so much more at the mercy of things, and the night was cold, cold.

She dived down into the shadows to her left, stubbing her toe on a cobble but not stopping, not even missing a step to hop. She gasped out the pain as she ran. Her breath was the only sound, that and the slight shiftings of her nightdress, which was soft and damp with sleep, chilling around her. Her feet made no sound on the cobbles, their soles being smooth and damp too, and Oll being so light. The row houses of Pitcher Street flew past her up the hill.

A noise in the Square, just before she reached it, made her slide to a stop; her hair swung out, and her nightdress hem, just to the house-corner exactly and no farther. The clank of the lamplighter’s hook, the squeak of the lamp door. The scrape of the lamplighter’s boots. His sweetish pipe-smoke wisped around the corner and tickled her nose.

She ran back up Pitcher Street; it was far to the first lane. She hid, and panting peeped back down. There: he was crossing the street-end, attending to the corner lamp, closing it – and moving on around the Square?

No. Oll swallowed a whimper. The lamplighter was coming up Pitcher Street. She could go to him, perhaps; she could ask him to take her home. He would have to.

But I’m not brave enough, she thought. I can’t go up and talk to a man, not in the middle of the night, not after seeing that other. And she ran away along the lane.

She could have taken the back way behind the row houses, but a dog was barking somewhere down there, and the noise was too much for her all by itself in this huge night. So she ran on to Swale Street – and out into the middle of the street she ran, and down she ran in the full lamplight right alongside the drain there, so that when the tall patched shadow unkinked itself from a doorway uphill, why, there she was, clear as anything, little and live as he could wish for.

‘Ooh, there’s one!’

She skittered aside like a rat, under a jettied upper floor. There was nowhere to run on to, though, however much she searched; and however small she was, no cavity could hide her.

His great feet walked down Swale Street, treading with exaggerated care. His voice fluted up there among the stars. His nightgown – Oll was the wired-together doll again – his gown was made of many nightdresses, she saw now, small ones, unpicked, spread flat, and clumsily sewn together.

His knees came down inside the nightgown-cloth like two great tree-bolls falling from a woodcutter’s cart, and his fists came down like two more, either side of the jutting room.

Ollyn wilted and whimpered and shrank into a ball.

His face came down: his wide mouth with bad teeth saying, ‘Where can she be, my little mousette?’ in that too-high voice; his nose, long and uneven and gristlylooking, with sprays of dark hairs from the nostrils; and eyes, so big and so mismatched, searching, searching, first this one then that.

‘Ah. Ha-ha-
ha
.’ That was his own voice, that deep one, that rougher one. ‘But you can’t make yourself small
enough
, can you?’

She looked from eye to eye.
Ma,
she mouthed, and tears came.

‘That’s what I like to see,’ he said.

He picked her up and brought her out and examined her, laying her flat across the palms of his big hands. She could not identify the bad smell of them.

And then she was too busy trying to breathe, because he had stopped her mouth with soft wax, tied it in with a rag. She was near dead with fright, just as a mouse or bird will die in your hand, from being so enclosed.