Summer at World's End (10 page)

‘Too right she did, after my dad walked out. But I began to hit her back when I was bigger. Well, you have to, don’t you?’

Everyone nodded, except Michael, who was asleep among Perpetua’s new puppies, with his head buried in her soft speckled side.

‘Because she never knocked Hubert about, see? That was the worst of it. That’s why I - well, if you want to know why I got sent to Mount Putrid, it was because of Hubert, my rotten little brother. Everything’s Hubert. Her little angel. Can’t do no wrong, and so when he’d tell her things to get me in trouble, she’d believe him. All right, some of it was true. It
was
me did them pictures on the blackboards at school, and when the desks caught fire - well, least said … I done a few jobs, never took much, mostly cigarettes and stuff. Took a car once, me and
a girl who was in this gang I went with. We drove to Clacton and it fell into a canal. Laugh! We thumbed a lift home and Hubert told me mum I’d run off with a sailor.’

Lester sat cross-legged, with his head on one side, alert, his dark bright eyes reading Liza’s face. Em lay on her stomach with a scarf round her hair, frowning under it because she was thinking, not because she didn’t like the story. Tom lay on his back smiling lazily, his long legs on the seat of a chair, long brown hands under his head, the striped cat Nobody going gently up and down on his chest as he breathed. Carrie sat with her elbows on her knees and her chin in her hands, staring at Liza in the lamplight.

‘What did she do to you?’ she asked, enthralled.

‘Played war. Took me out of school and put me to work in the shop. She has this lousy little shop, see, sells a few groceries and vegetables and fruit and that, near the council flats where we live. It’s the only one, so she cheats the old age pensioners and the little kids who can’t walk to the High Street. Gives them the rotten apples and spuds from the bottom of the pile and shorts them on the change. I told ‘em, “Take the bag and help yourself”, and when my mum came back from bingo and found them taking all the good tomatoes from the top, she yelled out they was pinching the stuff and she’d fetch the coppers. “And you can tell ‘em Liza’s been taking money from the till,” pipes up old Hube, Mother’s little angel, so I bashed him one and he fell into a bin of sprouts and I run off. I run - oh, I don’t know - up the Midlands somewhere. I lived with these old tramps, on the road. One of them died. In a railway siding, it was. I sat in this cattle truck and held his old hand when he was dying and he says, “Liza, look after me dog,” he says. Dusty, he called him, because he always was.’

She put out a hand to stroke the old dog’s head. ‘I took
him back to our flat, because he needed food. My mum was wild. She only likes pedigree dogs, like this fat pug she’s got. She was going to put me to work in a factory. Putting holes in the buttons. She wanted to cut my hair.’

She put her thumbs under her long tangled red hair and shook it behind her shoulders. Carrie did the same. She would never cut hers. She understood when Liza went on. ‘She got out the scissors, so I run out and got in this car where they’d left the keys and drove away - right through the wall of a house where the people were watching telly. Their faces!’

Everyone laughed, and the love bird Gabby woke up and cackled, and ran his beak along the bars of his cage as if he were playing the harp.

‘All right then, that’s the story,’ Liza said. ‘Think what you like, I don’t care.’

‘Nor do we.’ Tom spoke for them all.

Lester said, ‘My mother never tells me anything about what the girls have done, so I imagined something much worse.’

‘In court, they said I was beyond control.’ Liza smiled to herself, remembering. ‘The worst thing about being sent to Mount Putrid was leaving poor old Dusty. That stinker Hubert said he’d look after him - I might have known - but when I got home the other day, there was that bloated pug snoring in the armchair and Dusty, he -he - my poor old dog was out on the roof in a sort of leaky shed for a water tank. So I had to take him away.’

‘Poor Liza,’ Tom said, but she jumped up and cried, ‘Don’t give me none of your pity! It was my fault for leaving him there.’

‘I think he’s a bit better.’ Dusty was on a pile of bran sacks in a warm corner out of the draught. Tom had given him a nip of brandy that Mr Mismo had brought to
celebrate Christmas and anyone’s birthday. When it was nobody’s birthday, he invented one for an animal - ‘Happy birthday, hamster’, ‘Many happies to a fine tortoise’ - so he could drink their health. ‘I’ll get some stuff for him from Mr Harvey tomorrow. Vitamins. Something to get rid of the fluid on his chest. Pills for his heart. As a matter of fact, Liza, you look worse than the dog.’

When she jumped up, Liza had realized how dead beat she was. She had collapsed into a chair by the table, with her head on her arms. ‘I walked… I didn’t have nowhere to sleep…’

She was too nearly asleep already to get her upstairs. They put her on the sofa with a coat over her and left her there, with Michael and the puppies, and Gabby blacked out with a towel over his cage, and the old dog snoring and twitching on the pile of sacks.

Lester wanted to stay the night, but decided to go home to please his mother, so she might change her mind about coming to tea on Sunday. He got a lift from a boy on a motorbike, but he was still so late home that she was angry anyway and took a swipe at him with her dressing-gown cord. There were some people’s mothers you just couldn’t please.

Liza’s was another. First she had been glad to shove her off to Mount Pleasant. Now she wanted to have her at home earning money.

‘She’ll set the coppers on me.’ Liza was edgy and nervous. ‘They’ll make me go back.’

‘They won’t know where you are.’

‘They’ll find out. You’ll see them creep up the lane. Big black car. I know ‘em.’

‘I’ll set Charlie on them,’ Michael said.

Charlie thumped his tail and yawned loudly with a
sound like words. Michael had taught him to play dead by catching a moment when he wanted to flop down anyway. He was now teaching him to talk, by catching him at a moment when he was stretching his jaws to yawn loudly and then saying, ‘Hullo’, so that Charlie’s yawn sounded like an answering ‘Hu-yo.’

Michael had written this in his private book,
Micheal’s Dog Lores: ‘
A dog nead a lot of beath to tak so he youn.’

‘There was this dog in Liverpool,’ Liza said, ‘used to go into a snack bar and say, “Gimme a ham roll”.’

‘How do you know?’

‘I been there.’ In all the strange stories she told, Liza had never just heard about it. She had always ‘been there’, whether she had or not.

Michael wrote in his book: ‘A dog in Liverpol go into a sak bar and sad (gime a ham rol).’

Liza did not try to correct the spelling. She baked him a special loaf of sweet bread she had learned to make at Mount Pleasant, using all the currants Em was saving to make rock cakes for Miss McDrane’s tea party on Sunday. Liza and Michael ate the whole loaf without even sitting down.

Em was furious. ‘Who said she could move in here and use all our things? She took my shampoo.’

‘Why can’t you be nice?’ Carrie kicked her. ‘She’s a refugee.’

‘Shut up with that being nice!’ Liza’s quick proud temper had caught fire from Em’s. ‘I’m leaving.’

‘Hooray,’ Em said, but Carrie was having an idea. It was beginning to bubble up in her head like fruit salts.

‘Please stay, Liza. We want you.’

‘Shut up being nice, I said!’

‘I’m not. But it’s this woman at the school, she’s coming here to make trouble about us being on our own. If
there was someone here baking bread and stuff - an older girl — ‘

‘Old girl. Old as God. Thanks very much. You just want to make use of me.’

‘Look, you can’t have it both ways,’ Carrie said reasonably. ‘You won’t let us be
nice
to you, and you won’t let us
use
you. What on earth
do
you want?’

Liza ran outside. They did not see her any more. When Tom came home, he went out calling and searching the meadow and the farm buildings.

‘Don’t bother dragging the duck pond,’ Em called through the window over the stove, where she was stirring ‘Esmeralda’s End-of-the-week Soup’. She was still angry about the shampoo and the currants. ‘She’ll be back to eat.’

But Liza was not back for supper. She was not back when they went to bed. They thought she had left the old dog in their care and gone for good.

In the middle of the night, Carrie was suddenly awake, not naturally, but as if something had woken her. She lay listening. No dogs barking. No hysterical alarms about foxes from the hen house. No sound from the horses. No clatter of Joey taking a night flight among the saucepans. No kitten crying in the top of a tree. She listened to the silence, only the poplar trees across the road endlessly turning their leaves inside out in the small breeze.

It was not her ears, but her nose that had woken her. Wafting up the staircase, curling under her door like aromatic smoke, the most delicious, crusty, hungering smell in the world.

She ran down in the old long shirt of Tom’s that did for a nightdress. In the kitchen, in the light of a flickering row of candles on the shelf behind the stove, Liza was baking bread.

*        *        *

Miss McDrane arrived on Sunday, very polite in a shiny straw hat and white gloves, knocking on the door with the pearl handle of her best umbrella to show that she was not going to be put down by anybody’s mother. And they were able to take her proudly through into the kitchen, where Liza, in a flowered apron hastily made by Em from one of the bedroom curtains (’Keep her out of that room!’) was cutting home-made bread and setting the table for tea with Mrs Mismo’s best matching teacups.

‘My mother was
so
disappointed to miss your visit,’ Carrie said in the sugary voice with which she camouflaged the one that came out rude for people like Miss McDrane. ‘She had to go away, but our cousin Elizabeth is staying here to look after us.’

‘Indeed.’ Miss McDrane drew in her waist and stuck out her top and bottom. Her pink-rimmed guinea-pig eyes flicked round the room to find fault, but came back to the tea table. She took a paper handkerchief out of her sleeve and dabbed at the corners of her watering mouth. She was very greedy. At school lunch, where Mrs Loomis made teachers take tables ‘to civilize the savages’, nobody wanted to sit at Miss McDrane’s table, because she short-served people to leave more for her, and when it was shepherd’s pie or macaroni cheese, she kept the crusty bits round the edge for herself. She watched your piece of bread to see if you were going to eat it, and then pounced as soon as someone got up to clear plates, saying, ‘Waste not, want not,’ as she popped your bread into her mouth.

She managed to put away a lot of Liza’s bread and cake, even while keeping both little fingers crooked high in the air to show she was a lady, and went away quite satisfied.

‘I like a girl who can bake,’ she said at the door, chasing the last crumbs of fruit cake round her mouth with her tongue. ‘You don’t find that these days.’

Drunk with food, she put up her umbrella although it wasn’t raining, teetered to her car in her best shoes, and drove away, sitting bolt upright with her hat on straight, like Mrs Noah.

Liza collapsed on the doorstep, clutching Carrie. ‘A girl who can bake!’ she shrieked. ‘If only she knew where I learned how!
“You don’t find that these days.”
Too true, Miss McSmell. You only find it at Mount Putrid!’

When Carrie told Lester about the skeleton dog she had seen at the crossroads with Vile Bernie, the adventure light came into his face and he began to make plans for rescue.

They were sitting in one of their special trees in the beech-wood, pretending to ride. The thick grey branches were shaped exactly like the neck of a horse. With a piece of rope for reins, you could sit in the crook of a branch against the trunk, and perform amazing feats like winning the Three Day Event at the Olympics, or crossing the Sahara on an Arab stallion.

With John and Peter in the meadow, they could ride any time they wanted to, but they still acted out this pretence, which they had invented before they ever had horses.

‘We could hide in that hollow tree at night,’ Lester suggested, ‘and make a noise like ghosts. He’ll let go the dog and run.’

‘Don’t forget he’s got a gun.’

‘People don’t shoot at ghosts.’

‘Vile Bernie shoots at anything. He shoots at bottles in the dump. He shot the hat off Alan Tupper’s scarecrow.’

‘We could tell the police he hasn’t got a dog licence.’

‘How would we know?’

‘I’ll ask Arthur at the post office.’

‘We don’t want anything to do with the police while Liza’s here.’

‘I can’t just kidnap the dog,’ Lester said, ‘like I did Perpetua and Moses, because Bernie doesn’t keep dogs in that outhouse anymore.’

‘How do you know?’

‘I spy round there from time to time, just to keep an eye on things.’

‘When do you go?’

Lester looked vague, and stroked the neck of his tree horse. He didn’t time his days like other people, and there seemed to be more hours in his.

‘Why don’t you take
me?

‘This evening?’

When the sun was going down, Carrie saddled John, and Lester put a halter on Peter, and they rode across country to the small corner of hell where Vile Bernie lived.

It was called Bottle Dump, because that was what it had been for as long as anyone could remember, a place where people chucked things they didn’t want, and Vile Bernie had chucked himself down there, which was very fitting.

It was a disused quarry below the gorse common, its steep sandy sides now overgrown with bushes and rank weeds, at one end the treacherous sheered-off edge where the Headless Horseman was still said to be seen, galloping to his death.

Carrie and Lester cut across a corner of the common, the horses hopping low gorse bushes like cats, and skirted the lip of the quarry, looking down into Bottle Dump over the leaning fence which the Headless Horseman had jumped.

I hate the dreadful hollow behind the little wood…
The Tennyson poem might have been written here.
Its lips in the field above are dabbled with blood-red heath
.
The red-ribbed hedges drip with a silent horror of blood,
And echo there, whatever is asked her, answers ‘Death’
.