Summer at World's End (15 page)

Tom was in the Children’s Zoo. He was with the baby elephant, which had to have someone with it all the time, to make up for losing its mother. Tom stood with an arm fondly over its back, the way Michael stood with his pony. It had a trunk like the hose of a vacuum cleaner, and bristly hair that made Hubert jump back six feet. ‘It pricked my fingers !’

‘Oh, put a sock in it.’

Hubert was afraid of the chimpanzees, and disgusted by the snakes, and gave sweets to all the animals that had a sign up: ‘DO NOT FEED.’

‘Pooh, what a ponk,’ he said to the lion, and a big angora goat came up behind him and butted the wide target of his back view. Hube the Boob. You thought he couldn’t get any more awful, and then he did.

Although she hated zoos, Carrie liked to spend time here with the animals; but today she was restless, thinking
all the time of the adventure ahead. Tomorrow? Day after? Next week? She would have to go every day to Bottle Dump until the Poacher came.

Her mother asked her, ‘What’s on your mind?’ They were in the monkey house. Carrie was cuddling Joey, who had held out his arms and chirped gladly when he saw her.

‘What do you mean?’ Always answer a tricky question with another question.

‘I know you. You’re up to something.’

‘Well, we’re always
up
to something,’ Carrie said, life would be pretty dull if not’

‘Something good?’

‘Mm-hm.’ Carrie nodded, digging her chin into the top of the monkey’s woolly head. The saving of life. All those dogs, the old chow, shut up somewhere, perhaps already in the laboratories, still waiting for their own people. Don’t let it be too late…

‘Tell me?’ Her mother turned away and bent towards a cage, making faces at the owl monkey, who stared back with round amber eyes. She knew when to be casual. And she knew about what people had to do for animals. She had understood about rescuing John, and about Joey. She had once been arrested in Spain for unharnessing and leading away a lame cab horse while the driver was in a bar, and Dad had practically torn down the police station until they let her out of the cell.

She knew about danger. Hadn’t she risked her life to save Michael in the fire?

There are these dogs, you see. I’ve got to save them …
Carrie could only tell it in her head, because she had sworn in blood to keep the secret.

And then that evening, it all happened.

As soon as their parents left, Carrie rode over the common to the Headless Horseman’s precipice, and down the hill into the clump of trees where she tied John. If she was not home by a certain time, Lester would ride here and lead him back, knowing she had gone on her perilous mission.

She crept forward through the bushes, adding more bramble scratches to the ones already criss-crossing her brown arms and legs. When she got to the pile of stones where she could hide and watch the shacks, she lay down. Something warm lay down beside her. Something wet licked her arm.

‘
Charlie
!’ He rolled up his eyes and grinned. He had been told to stay at home. She had last seen him drooping by the gate, head down, tail down, watching mournfully through the bars, as if he was not planning to wriggle through as soon as she was round the corner, and trail her.

‘Lie still.’ She put a hand on his curly shoulder, and raised herself up to look through a chink in the stones. At last. There it was. The bulky, battered car with the crooked bumpers and the rust stains that looked like blood, and the boot yawning half open, tied down with a piece of wire.

This is it.

She took Charlie back to John, made him lie down and
told him sternly, ‘Stay. You
stay.’
Charlie put his head on his paws and licked his lips. ‘Lester will come for you,’ she told them.

She crept back to a sheltered place near the Poacher’s car, took a deep breath, then dashed out, bent double, unhooked the wire, crawled into the boot and hooked up the wire again.

She crouched at the back of the filthy, cluttered space, her heart pounding, sick with excitement.

The two men came out of the shack together.

‘Come up, you brute,’ Bernie growled, and there was a choking noise, as if he was dragging a dog by the neck.

‘This chow-chow’s hardly worth it,’ the Poacher grumbled in his whining voice. ‘Thing’s half dead.’

‘It’s a dog, ain’t it? Got a liver and kidneys and four legs. They shoot the legs off ‘em, you know,’ Black Bernie said chattily, ‘to give the army docs practice at war wounds.’

The Poacher laughed, a high braying sound that was worse than Bernie’s hoarse chuckle.

‘If there’s any sign of anyone snooping round your place -
get
in that car, you fat beast - you’ll have to move the dogs. Them lousy kids … man can’t make an honest living.’

The Poacher made a sound like ‘Gurrutcher’ and got into the car. The door slammed and the engine started, shaking the whole car and knocking Carrie about among the tools, crumpled newspapers, beer bottles, oily rags and something that might once have been part of a bird. As the car backed over the rough ground, she bumped her head on the same place where she had hit it and got a concussion when she fell off Peter.

With a lurch that knocked her elbow on a piece of metal and set the nerves screaming, the Poacher started forward.
She lay cramped and breathless, watching the road through the gap below the bouncing top of the boot. She must know exactly where they went.

Charlie jumped out of the trees, hurtled down a bank and galloped after her down the road.

‘Go back!’ she shouted, but the engine noise was enough to drown her voice from the dog as well as the Poacher. He would not obey anyway, if he had set his mind on this.
Go back!
She tried to will him to turn, as she could often think him into turning round when he was trotting ahead of her.

The thought waves didn’t work. The only hope was that he would get tired and give up. The poacher turned into a straighter road and put on speed, the exhaust roaring like a dragon. The dog became smaller, desperately running, then a speck, then there was nothing on the black road.
Go home, Charlie
.

The drive seemed endless. Bruised and battered, her head aching, Carrie tried to remember how they went -turn right, turn left, past a school, over a hump-backed bridge (My poor head!) past that lopsided haystack…

The Poacher braked suddenly, shooting Carrie forward among the tools. He turned through a gate and jolted up a long rutted path between fields, with Carrie thrown back among the bits of bird. Down a sharp dip, and he stopped at last. The engine panted for a moment and died. There was a sound of muffled barking. The dog in the car answered wheezily. The Poacher cursed at it and yanked it out of the car.

Carrie waited. There were no footsteps on the soft ground. When she heard him at the door of the place where the dogs were, she would slip out and hide somewhere till he …

A hand with horn-thick nails came in through the
opening of the boot, unhooked the wire and flung open the top.

Carrie thought afterwards that they both screamed together. She thought - but she could not afterwards remember anything clearly - that as she somehow scrambled out, he grabbed a piece of iron and hit her on the head (poor old head, same place again). She fell. The man stood over her in his baggy clothes, his eyes crazed, his mouth twisted. She saw the spanner in his raised hand, heard dogs barking, one bark familiar and frantic, as a panting mass of fur leaped out of nowhere at the Poacher’s back.

Caught from behind, the small man went down. Charlie had him by the coat, worrying it like a rat. The man wriggled free of the loose jacket, Charlie yelped as a boot went into his ribs, and then the coat was over his head, the sleeves tied, and he was thrown into the car. The Poacher jumped in and drove off furiously, scattering mud as he shot up the slope and roared away down the other side.

Carrie struggled up and started to limp after him, shouting. Her legs gave way and she dragged herself to the top of the slope on hands and knees. Far away, the car turned off the field track on to the road, shot ahead with a squeal of worn tyres, and was gone.

Dizzy and sick, Carrie sat down and held her head. She had no idea where she was. She could not remember the way they had come. She did not know this view. A vast cornfield, dark gold in the low sunlight, ripe for the reaper.

As she gazed, the cornfield shimmered, misted, wavered into nothing, as she toppled over and blacked out.

When she opened her eyes, the sun was down and every inch of her skin was being eaten by midges. She sat up and looked back into the dip. The Poacher’s jerry-built
caravan stood lopsided under the trees. The dogs inside it were still barking hoarsely. Miss Cordelia Chattaway’s chow dog was sitting on the orange crate which was the doorstep, waiting to see what would happen next.

Weaving dizzily, scratching her scratched arms, Carrie went down to the caravan. The chow stood up, wagging his curled tail expectantly, as if it was his own back door. Inside, the dogs barked. There was a padlock. She took a big stone and began to beat on it, missing sometimes, and once dropping the stone on her bare foot. When she smashed the padlock and undid the latch, two large dogs jumped out past her, knocking the chow from the orange crate, and took off up the slope. The fat old chow waited, panting and drooling, to see what would happen next.

‘Come on, Lancelot.’ Carrie turned her back on the wretched caravan, which stank of the Poacher and his trade and the dogs shut up in there.

They went slowly up the slope and down the long field track, the chow wheezing, Carrie half dragging him along, half supporting herself on him. Her head was throbbing. Her arms and legs felt like cooked spaghetti. Once or twice she fell, grazing hands and knees, and the dog waited, panting, until she got up and stumbled on to the road.

Which way? The Poacher’s car had turned left. Or was it right? It seemed too long ago to remember. The skid marks in the gravel were on the left. She turned and began walking somewhere… anywhere.

She did not know how long she had walked when a passing car stopped. A man leaned out. ‘Why must you walk in the middle of the road?’ he asked.

‘Was I?’

‘You look rough,’ he said. ‘I suppose I ought to give you a lift.’

Never take lifts from strange men
. Dimly at the back of
her head sounded the well-worn message that must have been for somebody else. She got into the car with Lancelot.

‘Where are we?’ she asked. It was getting dark.

‘Search me.’ The man wore a neat suit and a prim felt hat. ‘I’m a stranger here myself, headed through for the north. Where do you want to go?’

‘Home.’

He sighed. ‘Where’s that?’

Carrie was blank. She beat her fist on the good side of her head, and came up with the name of the village.

‘Never heard of it. Which way is it?’

‘I don’t know where I am.’

The man looked at her. ‘What’s the matter with you?’ ‘I was in a fight.’

He put up a hand. ‘Don’t tell me about it. There’s too much trouble these days.’

‘The man got Charlie.’ The pain of that was unbearable.

‘He probably asked for it,’ the man said stupidly, ‘whoever he was. Count me out. I don’t want to get mixed up.’

He was quite nervous. When they came to a small town, he stopped at a lighted doorway where some people were coming out of a cinema.

‘Better get out,’ he said, ‘and ask the way.’

‘Will you wait?’ Carrie opened the door and got out with the dog.

‘I’d like to get on. I’m not going your way.’

Before she could ask him how he could know that, until he knew which
was
her way, he drove off, his hat square and prim on his nervous head.

There were some young men and girls fooling about in front of the cinema. They stopped and stared at Carrie and Lancelot ‘The Lady and the Tramp,’ one of them said, and they all laughed.

Carrie asked them if they knew the way to her village.

‘We’re going that way.’ The boy had a lot of long, pale hair, like the mane of a lion. ‘We’ll take you if you can stand a crush.’

The crush was squeezing in beside the boy’s bony girl friend in the side-car of a motor bike, with the chow like a mammoth suet pudding on their feet. Carrie fell asleep, and woke with the girl’s sharp elbow in her ribs.

‘Where do you live?’ They were in the village. They took her out to World’s End and rode off, their hair like streamers in the night wind.

As Carrie went into the stable yard, Lester jumped from the loft door of the barn down into the pile of straw.

‘You got him. You marvel, I knew you would. When you didn’t come back, I went for John. What about the other dogs?’

‘I let them loose.’

‘Oh, you
marvel.’

‘They got Charlie.’ Carrie almost never cried. She did now. Lester hugged her, but she could not stop crying.

One of the dogs that Carrie had let loose turned up at his home two days later. The other was picked up by the police, raiding dustbins, and the R.S.P.C.A. Man was keeping him in the kennels until he could find the owner.

Miss Cordelia Chattaway changed her black gown for her rambler rose Sunday dress, and wanted Michael to take her and Lancelot for a ride again, but Michael wouldn’t. No one could do anything, with Charlie in danger.

Carrie could not tell anybody about being hit. They would send for Mother, and she might send for the doctor who had murmured over Carrie’s concussion, and he would murmur her into bed, with chicken broth and the curtains drawn.

She thought of Charlie all the time, woolly and grinning, with his badly-fitting brown eyes that showed the white all round, and rolled when he was gay. Her head ached most of the time. Lester brought some aspirin from his mother’s medicine cabinet at Mount Pleasant.

‘What for?’ Carrie blinked and frowned under the weight of her headache.

‘Why didn’t you tell me the Poacher hit you?’

‘He didn’t — ‘ she began, but Lester put out his hand and gently touched the lump under her hair, that no one else had seen.