The Boy with No Boots (12 page)

He sat next to Kate’s mother in the back, but they didn’t talk. Sally clutched her hat with one hand and the back of Joan’s seat with the other, sitting straight and alert as
if she was driving herself. When they swept to a halt outside Monterose Hospital, Sally turned and looked at him.

‘Thank you,’ she said, ‘for bringing Polly home. I don’t know who you are – but I’m very grateful.’

Aware that he was playing truant from school, Freddie chose not to tell her he was Freddie Barcussy from the bakery. He just said, ‘Kate is going to get better, I know it.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘I just do.’ Freddie looked directly into Sally’s surprised eyes and said no more. He thanked Joan for the ride, allowed himself one glance at the hospital where Kate was, and
sprinted home through the wide streets of Monterose, reaching the bakery at his usual time of ten past four.

Sad that he couldn’t tell his parents about this secret day, he’d gone to bed with his mind on fire.

The sound of the Model T Ford had set up home in his mind, a sound that was both satisfying and disturbing, like a new voice on earth.

The wooden clock in his bedroom seemed to tick faster and faster, and at two o’clock in the morning he got up, lit a candle and counted the clump of money tied in his hanky. It included
the precious florin Joan had given him and he spent some time examining it in the candlelight. There were a few sixpences too, and in total he had earned ten shillings and ninepence. Breathing hard
with excitement he prised open the floorboard under his bed and added the money to his hoard which was tied in a grey woollen sock, now so heavy that it had to be picked up with both hands.

Nothing had happened for years, and then so much had been packed into one day. His first experience of leading a pony, his nostalgic walk back to Hilbegut, the stone lions, the motorcar. All
these events were stacked precariously in his mind and right in the middle was a window of honey-coloured light where he kept the memory of Kate.

Freddie sat on his bed in the candlelight and thought about her. The more he stared at the flame, the brighter it shone, growing tall with an edge of sapphire blue. Deep in its orange heart was
an inviting archway. In his imagination he stepped through it, the flame was behind him, and he stood alone in a world of dazzling light. It was unlike any place he knew and yet he felt instantly
at home there. The light energised and refreshed him, and in the bright core of the blaze was the face of an angel. He tried to see the wings, but the shifting patterns of iridescence were too
swift. The eyes of the angel were all the colours of water, their expression imbued with wisdom and patience.

A voice called to him out of the light, its resonance infusing every shimmering strand like the wind blowing through wheat fields. He listened, and let the voice echo through him, through his
hair, his skin, and the tips of his fingers.

‘Many years will pass. Be patient. Be true to yourself. And, when the golden bird returns, you will meet her again.’

Drawing a breath from the night air, he returned with a jolt to his candlelit bedroom.

The words soaked into him, but Freddie had no idea what they meant. A golden bird? What golden bird? Mentally he ticked the ones he knew – a yellow hammer, a goldfinch, a canary. None of
them fitted. He reached for Granny Barcussy’s nature book which he kept by the bed. It was navy blue with the title embossed in gold letters, and inside was a cornucopia of painted
illustrations and descriptions. Now he could feel her next to him, eagerly turning the pages in the dim candlelight, turning them faster and faster until a golden bird was there on the page, eating
rowan berries from a branch. A golden oriole! He had it. Oriole Kate. She was named after a golden bird, and according to the text it was a rare visitor, and that described Kate perfectly, he
thought, satisfied.

He’d never seen Kate properly, never looked into her eyes. He wanted to go down to the hospital with a bunch of roses. Red roses he’d give her. He drifted to sleep, threading the
angel’s words into the fabric of his life.

In the morning he awoke disturbed by a sense of foreboding. Mechanically he got up and helped Levi with the bread. They worked silently together putting batch after batch of risen loaves into
the ovens, cottage loaves and tin loaves, French bread and the heavy lardy cake. He looked just once into his father’s eyes as he packed the bicycle basket.

‘You do your best at school today,’ said Levi.

‘Yes, Dad.’

‘Don’t go telling no lies.’

‘No, Dad.’

‘You know what I mean, Freddie. If you can’t tell the truth, then keep quiet.’

Levi’s drooping eyes looked at Freddie for a long moment, a moment he was to remember for the rest of his life.

‘And look after your mother.’

‘Yes, Dad.’

Freddie cycled off on the cumbersome bicycle into the misty morning. He didn’t feel like going to school after yesterday’s excitement. School seemed totally irrelevant. He
didn’t want to go, ever again.

Everyone in Monterose was gossiping about the accident at the station, and people came to look at the broken cart which was still lying there next morning with ‘Gilbert
Loxley, Farmers, Hilbegut Farm’ painted proudly on the side of the cart.

‘A disgrace, that’s what it is.’

‘It was the older daughter. Etheldra Loxley. She drove that poor pony like a mad woman. And her little sister in the back. Shame on her.’

‘Could have killed someone.’

The gossip went on circulating until it reached the bakery.

Annie was coping happily with the queue. She loved being in the shop with the warm fragrance of freshly baked loaves. She enjoyed taking them down from the shelf and wrapping them in clean
paper, then taking the money and chatting pleasantly. It was her ideal life. She didn’t have to go out. Levi was there, and he was proud of what he had achieved, the bakery business was
thriving. Freddie was nearly fourteen. Once he left school the business would do even better. Annie was satisfied that her son’s life was mapped out for him.

Until it all changed.

‘I saw your Freddie was there yesterday, at the station,’ said a woman in a brown and white gingham dress.

Annie frowned at her. ‘What do you mean, Gladys? Freddie is at school that time of the morning.’

‘He wasn’t yesterday.’

‘What?’

‘Didn’t you know?’ Gladys had a piercing voice that filled the shop. ‘Your Freddie was there. I saw him myself. And he was a good lad too.’

‘What time was this?’ Annie asked, and the sudden sharpness in her voice brought Levi out from the bakery, brushing the flour from his hands.

‘Half past ten.’

‘Half past TEN?’ said Annie in astonishment. ‘Freddie should have been in school.’

‘Oh – well.’ Gladys winked. She stood there with her hand on the loaf she had chosen, the rest of the queue listening. ‘You know what these lads are. Boys will be boys,
won’t ’em?’

‘And what was he doing? Are you sure it was Freddie?’

‘’Course it were. I know Freddie, he brings the bread round,’ said Gladys, relishing the story. ‘Well, I looked after the older girl, she was in a proper state, and
Freddie was with the little ’un who got hurt so bad. And then he offered to lead the pony home, all the way to Hilbegut. Good of him.’

‘WHAT?’

‘And I’ll bet he enjoyed his lift back in Joan Jarvis’s posh new motorcar!’

Levi spoke then and the whole shop fell silent.

‘Are you telling me that our Freddie was down there? And that he took some pony out to Hilbegut?’

‘That’s right, Sir.’ Gladys looked staunchly at him over her brown and white gingham bust.

Levi’s face went purple.

‘Right.’ With his big hands trembling he took off his baker’s apron and hat and turned to Annie. ‘You mind the shop. I’m going up the school, right now.’

The queue parted like the Red Sea to let Levi pass through, the whites of his eyes gleaming angrily. He took two strides into the street, and crashed to the ground, groaned and lay still, his
huge body stretched out on the cobbles.

‘Levi!’ Annie screamed. She rushed outside and crumpled beside him. She cradled his dear face in her arms, and sat there rocking for long hopeless minutes. The morning sky darkened
while they searched for his pulse and strained to hear him breathing, but Levi’s mighty chest was still, his face frozen in anger.

‘’Tis too late. He’s dead,’ said Annie quietly, and she watched the last sparks of his life drift past her and disappear.

‘You’ll HAVE to go out now, Mother,’ said Alice firmly.

‘You’ll have to get over it,’ agreed Betty.

Annie sat miserably between her two daughters on the morning of Levi’s funeral. Her heart was full of heat and teardrops, her grey hair a storm of impossible curls, her face swollen with
grief. She was silent now, rocking slightly, her hand picking threads out of the black shawl around her shoulders. She’d repeated and repeated her words: ‘I can’t,’ but no
one would listen, and there was nothing left to say. Only Freddie understood her fear. She looked at him now, sitting in the window, his long legs folded awkwardly, his eyes staring into the
garden. He would take care of her, she was sure. He’d leave school and run the bakery. They’d manage.

Betty and Alice had always collaborated in forecasting gloom. They’d been away from home for years, and Freddie had hardly seen them in his life. Annie knew he found them intimidating,
especially today. Both were dressed in the blackest of black outfits, identical hats with black net veils covering their faces, trendy tight-fitting black skirts and jackets, and grim expressions
to match. Annie felt she no longer knew who they were. To her, Betty and Alice were a long ago memory of happy children.

She looked at her elder son, George, who was hunched on a chair, so like Levi, inarticulate but wise. He’d arrived on a throbbing motorbike, and she could see that Freddie was fascinated
by it, more interested in the bike than in his brother who was fifteen years his senior.

Annie had wanted to blame Freddie for Levi’s sudden death, but she chose to keep quiet. A death was trouble enough. She understood Freddie’s aversion to school. Surely he’d
suffered enough, she reasoned, and in the months and years to come she would need him. Without Freddie, Annie saw herself ending up in the asylum. She even felt threatened by her two daughters,
Alice the manager and Betty the echo. There was something ominous about the way they wanted to manage her, the cast-iron conviction they had about her agoraphobia. Levi had tolerated it, Freddie
understood, but Alice and Betty wanted to deny its existence.

The slow clop-clopping of the horse-drawn hearse brought a respectful silence to the street. Neighbours stood outside their doors, workmen downed tools and took off their caps, playing children
stood silently, their backs against the wall.

‘It’s coming,’ said Freddie from his seat by the window.

Together they filed outside in their black clothes, with Annie wedged firmly between Alice and Betty.

It was the second funeral Freddie had experienced in his life. At Granny Barcussy’s funeral he had walked, white-faced and distraught beside his father, and Annie had
stayed at home, peering out at the sad procession. At the graveside Freddie had broken down and sobbed uncontrollably, and Levi had picked him up and held him like a baby. The smell of his coat and
the feel of his big hands patting him had comforted Freddie.

Now he was nearly a man, and no one would comfort him at his father’s graveside. He would have to stand there, stiff and expressionless like Alice and Betty.

When he saw the two black horses turn into the street he had a terrible feeling of deep, deep cold. The power of death to suddenly strip the vigour out of the whole street was almost
disabling.

He stood at the door, next to George who towered over him with his face set rigid. Freddie wanted something from the stranger who was his brother, warmth or eye contact or a touch on his arm,
but there was none. He wanted to walk backwards in front of Annie, helping her as he had always done, but Alice and Betty had her in an iron grip, their fingers clamped onto her black shawl.

Loneliness engulfed Freddie, and it was the loneliness of being different. This was his family, but he wasn’t remotely like any of them, nor did he want to be. What he wanted most in that
moment was to run away, to arrive at his father’s funeral from a different direction and watch it as a lone observer. He wanted to experience the funeral with the sky and the wind and the
twisting flight of gathering swallows. He wanted to sit on the floor of the church and feel the music rumble through stone, and watch the faces of coloured glass and stone, watch and read their
expression and feel their empathy. And he wanted to share his father’s journey into the unknown, into the silent land.

So he walked alone at the back of the black procession on its way to the cemetery, falling further and further behind, and he looked down from a great height and saw himself detaching, step by
step, from the silver cords that bound the generations. He was alone. He saw his family drifting away from him on a river of forgetfulness, and he was glad to walk alone, his feet governed by the
tolling of the church bell, his eyes gazing at a sparrow hawk hovering in the distance.

The silence of the funeral seemed to have a shape, an elongated elliptical space that extended ahead of the cortège and for some distance behind, the shape excluding the normal life of
the street. Freddie kept within its boundary, close enough, but apart. George didn’t turn to see where he was, and Alice and Betty minced along – almost carrying Annie, the backs of
their three heads bobbing in the wake of the hearse as it halted outside Monterose church. A group of people who had known Levi were at the entrance, hats in hand, and the vicar loomed like a heron
inspecting an estuary.

Once, Annie had sent Freddie to Sunday school, and the teacher had refused to have him there again. ‘All he does is walk around and stare at the statues and the windows,’ she’d
complained. ‘He won’t sit down with the others.’ Freddie had longed to go in there again but he’d never had time off from school, the bakery, the railway, and Annie’s
endless errands.