Summer at World's End (16 page)

‘Poached egg,’ he said.

The Poacher had disappeared. His caravan had gone, leaving a litter of bones and beer bottles, and he was not seen again in those parts. Vile Bernie had also vanished. His friend (if he had ever had a friend) One-Eyed Jake the Pig Man, gave the information that he had gone away for his health and would not be back until goodness knows when - if then, since the damp at the Dump was getting to his joints.

The R.S.P.C.A. Man had been to all the dealers he knew. None of them had seen Charlie. None would admit to knowing either Bernie or the Poacher.

‘Why would they take him to a dealer?’

‘Well … You know why, Carrie. We’ve been into this before. The University only buys through regular dealers.’ He did not want to talk about the Research Laboratories.

‘If they didn’t sell him for the Labradors,’ Michael said, ‘what else would they do?’

The R.S.P.C.A. Man was sitting on the old lawn roller, which was one of the garden seats, consoling himself with a mug of cider after a fruitless trip to the other end of the county. Michael stood in front of him, his small, hardworking hand on his knee, his dear eyes searching the man’s crinkly ones for an honest answer.

‘What else would they do with our dog?’

‘You know that too, Mike. If Charlie attacked the Poacher again—’

‘Which he would.’

‘ - a gutless sort of bloke like that wouldn’t take any risks.’

‘He’d kill him, you mean.’

The R.S.P.C.A. Man nodded, looking glumly into his cider mug, and Carrie said, ‘It would be better than the-than the other thing.’

One of the girls at Mount Pleasant had once worked in a
laboratory, cleaning the mouse cages. She had told Liza about a mongrel dog she saw, running, running on a treadmill, with wires in its heart to check how much strain it could stand.

Hubert enjoyed tragedy, as a change from the monotony of life, which he made monotonous by being Hubert. ‘Do you remember,’ he sighed from the ground where he was lying on his stomach with the only two cushions, ‘do you remember how Charlie could catch biscuits backwards, without looking? Alas, never again.’

‘Shut up, Tube,’ Em growled.

‘And do you remember,’ his sigh blew an insect away through the grass, ‘how he’d carry that hamster about and it was always soaking? I bet if 11 pine away now that —’

‘Shut
up
, I said!’ Em turned him over roughly with her foot and he lay on his back like a beetle, legs waving.

‘She kicked me! Lizer! She kicked me!’

Liza threw a book at him.

She and Tom hated having to go to work while the others searched for Charlie; calling, calling over the countryside, going again and again, uselessly, to Bottle Dump and the hollow where the Poacher’s caravan had been.

It was a dreadful time. It was the most horrible time of their lives, even worse than after the fire, when their home was gone and their mother in hospital. Then at least they had known the worst. Now they knew nothing.

One night when Carrie could not sleep, she was writing in her horse book with a candle on a chair by the bed. To take her mind off Charlie, she was writing about flies -how horses could twitch any square inch of skin they wanted, while people could only do that with their faces.

’A horse,’
she wrote,
’has to have a tail to flick and skin to twitch because he has no hands. He does not use his tail like a dog, he…’

A dog … a dog … my Charlie with the shaggy hair. She could feel a poem coming on, with the same sort of flushed, sick feeling that tells you a temperature is coming on, or your dinner is coming up, or both.

Her hand moved almost by itself, as if it had its own life:

I dream of Charlie with the shaggy hair,
Charlie, who saved my life by being there.
Where did they take you? Where are you now, old friend?
Can you not find the scent back to World’s End?

As she read it aloud, a figure in a torn vest and drooping pyjama bottoms appeared in the doorway, trailing the mutilated voodoo doll.

‘Who are you talking to?’ Michael grumbled, still half asleep. ‘Did Charlie come back?’

He climbed on to the bed and Carrie read the poem to him. She thought it was rather good, but small boys never say if anything is good or bad.

‘You can have it for your dog book.’ She tore out the page, since it did not belong with horses.

The next day, Michael went out on Oliver with a bread and dripping sandwich and a Coca-Cola bottle of water coloured with beetroot juice labelled: ‘EMERJENC RASON.’ He was not home by the evening.

Em came back from the wood where she had been searching, with half a dozen cats dashing up and down trees, in case Charlie had got caught in the undergrowth on his way home. Lester came back with Peter from one more useless trip to the airfield. Carrie and John came back from a long ride to a distant town, where the blacksmith had told her he had once heard there was a pet shop. He had heard wrong.

Liza came back from work with a wound on her wrist
because a cat had bitten her, and a wound on her pride because Alec Harvey had said, ‘That’ll teach you to hold ‘em the right way.’ Tom came back from the zoo.

‘Where’s Mike?’

‘He’ll be back for supper.’

‘What supper?’ No one bothered to cook much these days. They lived on snacks, and Hubert spent half his time in Mrs Mismo’s kitchen, trying to keep his strength up.

Carrie went to Michael’s tiny room to see if he had left a note, as he sometimes did: ‘Gon to vilage for comiks.’ ‘Gon to dig wurms for Erny MkNab farther.’

No note on the grubby flat pillow under the sloping ceiling (Michael had got this room because he was small enough to sit up in bed without crashing his head), but his marbled
Dog Lores
book was on the floor under the bed.

He had copied out Carrie’s poem:

I drem of Carly with the shaggy hare
Carly who savd my life by beimg tere.
Were did the take you? Were our you know odd friend?
Can you not find the sent bak to world end?

On the next page, he had written:

‘
A dog folow his nose home unless he smel somting beter.’

Had Michael got a new idea about Charlie? Carrie ran down and got on Old Red, which staggered like a groggy horse when you mounted, and squee-clunked down the lane and up the rutted track to the village rubbish tip, favourite calling place of the dogs and the goat. It was in the hollow of a dry stream, thickly set with trees and brambles and bushes which had sprung up, fertilized with garbage, to hide the garbage’s ugliness. Behind a pile of brushwood and tree roots, Michael sat in the dusk
like a small garden statue, his empty Coca-Cola bottle upturned on a twig. The Piebald pony stood near him, eating leaves, his long white tail firmly caught in a thorn bush.

‘Why didn’t you come back for help?’ Carrie began to work carefully to free Oliver’s tail.

‘You told me, if a horse gets caught up, don’t let him panic. If I left him, Ollie would panic’

‘He wouldn’t.’

‘You told me.’

The strong thorns were so tangled in the pony’s long tail that Carrie had to go home and get scissors. Next day, Michael trotted off again to search another rubbish tip, the back view of Oliver unfamiliar with his thick tail cut off above the hocks, swinging faster than usual, like a shortened pendulum.

A week had gone by. Then two weeks. Almost three. Soon school would start and they would have only evenings and weekends to search. Soon they would have to admit that if Charlie was trapped somewhere, caught by the neck, fallen down an old well, he would have starved by now. Soon… eventually, they would have to give up.

‘But I knew a dog once,’ Mr Mismo said (he always knew something to go one better - or worse), ‘that was lost for seven and one-quarter months. Woman lost it out shopping in a crowd, and she was so frenzied, she went to the Hebrides Islands, casting off the world. Her hair was already grey with sorrow, when blow me if she didn’t look out of the window of her wee croftie one morning and see something in the water, and there was that dog swimming out to the island, carrying the woman’s shopping basket which she’d left behind in her frenzy.’

No one could raise a smile.

‘Tell you what,’ he said. ‘We’ll take a drive to cheeryou up.’

Mr Mismo’s driving was bad enough even when you were happy. Usually his wife would not let him near the wheel, but she was off visiting her sister in the Isle of Wight. ‘I’ve got to fetch some churns at the station. Come on, I’ll take you all into town.’

They made excuses, but he wanted their company. You could see why, as they got to the busier roads. Crammed into the front of his dusty farm truck, because the back was full of chicken crates, Carrie, Lester, Em, Michael and Hubert (trembling like a jelly) clung to each other and tried not to scream, as Mr Mismo crawled nervously along in the outside lane, with other drivers hooting and flashing their lights and taking hairsbreadth chances to get past him.

He sat like a rock behind the wheel, his tweed hat tipped over his eyes and a piece of hay between his teeth to remind him of home.

‘Look at that fellow!’ he said, as a lorry roared past him on the wrong side, with the driver and his mate glaring and shaking their fists. ‘Makes you wonder how some people passed their driving tests.’

‘How
did you?’
Em asked faintly.

‘Years ago when I got mine, we didn’t need all these fancy tests.’

Carrie’s head throbbed. Hubert moaned softly, too far gone to complain that he was hot or cold or sick or bored, as he usually did in a car.

They came through the suburbs and into the depressing outskirts of the town. Factories and warehouses, junkyards, coalyards, a grey brick prison and rows and rows of poor mean houses and narrow streets, laid like a dirty blanket over what had once been rolling countryside.

‘There you are.’ Mr Mismo waved his hand as if he had invented the scene. ‘Bit of city life to cheer you up.’

Steering with one hand, he swerved, went up on the
pavement, swerved again as a lamp post loomed, and just scraped through between the lamp post and the wall of the warehouse.

He stopped and mopped his face with a Union Jack handkerchief. ‘That was a close one.’

His passengers opened their eyes again. ‘We’re on the pavement,’ someone said helpfully.

‘Tell you what.’ Mr Mismo was steaming and bothered. ‘Let’s go home and not trouble with the station. They won’t have my churns anyway, if I know them.’ He got into gear with a crunch, and drove slowly along between the lamp posts and the wall.

‘Hadn’t we better get back on the road?’ someone else suggested.

‘To tell the truth, old chumps,’ he stopped again, ‘I’m a wee bit nervous today. Shouldn’t have had those raw onions for lunch, in this heat.’ His red face was dripping. The ribbon round his hat with the blue jay’s feather in it was dark with sweat. ‘And Mrs Mossman always drives in traffic’

‘I can drive,’ Lester said.

‘You’ve not passed a driving test’

‘Nor have you.’

‘You’ll get us all pinched.’

‘Better than getting killed.’

‘You may have a point there, son.’ Mr Mismo was always reasonable.

Lester sat on a pile of sacks from the back so that he would look tall enough, and put on Mr Mismo’s hat to age him and partly hide his face. Mr Mismo instructed him how to drive (‘Left hand down, sound your hooter, change down
now
’), as Lester drove skilfully and safely back through the mean streets to the broader suburbs.

They passed a sign they had not seen on the way in,
since they had been on the other side of the road and shielding their eyes and clutching each other and jamming their feet on the floorboards, as if they could brake by remote control. The sign pointed down a tree-lined avenue of new buildings. It pointed to the University Medical School. Lester stopped.

‘You must learn to use the brakes like you use the reins,’ Mr Mismo said, back in his old bossy form now that he was in the passenger seat. ‘Ve-ry gende, as if the rein was a piece of cotton thread.’

Lester looked over his shoulder at Carrie, in the back seat between Em and Michael, with Hubert stuffed down on the floor to stop him telling Lester he was dizzy.

The R.S.P.C.A. Man had said that the University only bought dogs through dealers. The dealers had said they knew nothing about Charlie. But…

Neither she nor Lester nodded. They just looked at each other, and without a word, Lester backed a few yards and turned up the avenue.

‘Wrong way,’ Mr Mismo said. ‘For’ard boy, for’ard.’

‘Just got to deliver a message,’ Lester said. ‘Won’t be a moment.’

They stopped behind a wall outside the car park, so that no one could see Lester driving. They left Mr Mismo in the car while they went along a path betwen buildings, following a sign that said ‘ANIMAL RESEARCH CENTRE’. They took Hubert with them, because he was the cleanest (he used all the hot water), and also the only one who was not barefooted and wearing a torn shirt and shorts that were blue jeans cut off ragged above the knee.

‘But I ain’t going in there,’ he said.

Through the glass doors at the entrance, they could see a woman at the reception desk who looked as if she had
come from the hairdresser five minutes ago and would not be able to type with those nails.

‘If you don’t, I’ll put spiders in your bed.’

‘No, Lester, please!’

‘Worms in your cocoa.’

‘Carrie!’

‘Earwigs in your shoes.’ ‘Don’t, Em!’

‘Maggots in your — ‘ Michael began, and with a gulp, Hubert pushed through the doors and rolled awkwardly over the thick carpet.

The woman looked up and moved the lipstick shape of her mouth. Hubert stood in front of her, wriggling and scratching his bottom. They were talking. As soon as they saw that she was not throwing him out, the others slid through the glass doors and came in behind him silently, like a file of Indians.

‘About a dog?’ The woman would be frowning, if she was not afraid to crack her make up. ‘I don’t understand.’

Hubert was stammering, his ears on fire, so Carrie said, ‘What he means is —’