The Boy with No Boots (24 page)

‘Yes I do. I’ve plenty of time,’ said Joan firmly. ‘You tell me everything, and I mean – everything.’

Annie nodded. Her greatest fear waited at the end of her talking, like a boulder, wobbling, waiting to fall.

‘I can only go out if my Freddie is with me. He’s wonderful. Ever since he was little he’s looked after me, he holds my hands and talks me through it. Many times he’s got
me home – and – and Levi never knew. I’m so ashamed of myself, Joan, so ashamed. I’m afraid I’ll make a fool of myself, see? So now I don’t even try to go out.
God knows what would happen if I had to.’ Annie looked at Joan again, noticing the confident warmth in her eyes that made the painful silences bearable, and then she finally let go of the
boulder. ‘And I shouldn’t be telling you all this – I know your husband is a doctor and I’m so frightened they’ll think I’m a mad woman and put me in the
asylum.’

‘My husband wouldn’t,’ Joan assured her, ‘he’s a really understanding doctor. I shan’t tell him, Annie. But – let me think about this – it may be
that I can help you.’

‘You already have,’ said Annie gratefully. ‘I’ve got it off my chest.’

‘But,’ Joan wagged her finger, ‘I can only help you if you really want to get over this.’

‘I do.’

The two women smiled at each other and Joan raised a clenched fist, her eyes twinkling. ‘Courage to change,’ she said. ‘That’s what we need.’

When she had gone Annie felt better, more light-hearted. She even sang while she was making Freddie’s meal. She looked at the clock. He should be home by now.

Annie sat in the window to watch for his motorbike coming up the street. For two hours she sat there through the sunset and into the twilight. She watched the lamplighter work his way along the
street, and saw people hurrying home, bent against the North wind. She heard the six o’clock train puffing into the station.

But still Freddie didn’t return.

By nine o’clock Annie was distraught. Wrapped in a shawl she paced round and round the cottage, up and down the stairs, looking out of different windows, opening them and listening,
watching the distant hills for a moving cone of light that might be a motorbike. All night she paced and she prayed and in the deathly hush of early morning she fell exhausted into the rocking
chair and slept, clutching Levi’s dressing gown up to her chin.

At first light she was awoken by a thunderous knocking on the door. Terrified, she heaved herself up and struggled across the flagstone floor. She opened the door just a crack and peered
out.

George stood there in a heavy winter coat, his face unshaven, his hair wild, and a grim expression on his face.

‘’Tis bad news,’ he said. ‘I had a telephone call, from a hospital up in Gloucester.’

Freddie had never been so comfortable in his life. He was floating on a cushion of deliciously warm air and the light streaming over him was intensely yellow like marsh
marigolds. He looked down at his body lying in the hospital bed, its face deathly white, its blistered hands limp on the grey blanket, its knees and feet making orderly bumps in the tightly tucked
bed covers. He didn’t want to go back into that body which was filled with pain and struggling to breathe.

Each time he looked down, his mind opened up a cavern of nightmares. Ian Tillerman’s voice echoed in there, his eyes gleamed avariciously, he smelled of beer and horse manure and the
stench engulfed Freddie like smoke from a wood fire, he had to breathe it and it stung and choked his lungs. Or he would see his motorbike sinking into the deep canal, bits of it shining and
bubbling, the handlebars and the headlight were the last to be submerged as the iron grey water closed over that particular pain. A bloody lout, Ian Tillerman had called him. A bloody lout.

For hours he had lain there on the bank of the canal, face down in the mud, the cold earth and the cold sky clamping him like the jaws of winter. Then the floating had started, floating on a
cloud made of ice, watching, unable to speak, as his body was dumped on a khaki-coloured stretcher and pushed into the back of an ambulance.

The voices of nurses and doctors had burbled like a distant stream, and he’d felt hands peeling off his muddy clothes. Through half-open eyelids, he glimpsed Herbie’s leather jacket
being dropped into a basket, and the pain of thinking he would have to buy him another one sent Freddie deeper into a comatose state, and with the sleep came a profound feeling of surrender as he
let go and drifted into the shadows.

Over three days, the darkness of his floating place transmuted into deep colours, ultramarine and crimson, and in the crimson phase he became aware of smells. He lifted his arm and sniffed his
skin, vaguely hoping for a reassuring whiff of oil and stone dust, but it reeked of Sunlight soap and Dettol. A pungent tang of camphor hovered around him, and a mild ointmenty smell from the
chilblains on his fingers. The space beyond his bed swished and clanked, and squeaked with footsteps, and the alarming rhythmic groans from the man in the next bed. Even more alarming was the
shrill rasp of his own breath cutting into his ribs like a bread knife.

Freddie was not reassured by the amorphous shape of a doctor in a white coat sitting uncomfortably close to him, and the starched apron of a nurse bending over him. Freddie had never been in a
hospital and he was terrified. He struggled to see the nurse’s face, and she was frowning like a bulldog. She had his arm in a vicelike grip.

‘Keep still or this will hurt,’ she said sharply and a stinging pain drove into his bicep. He heard a man’s voice saying ‘This will make you sleepy, Mr
Barcussy.’

Blissfully it faded and he returned to the floating place, so warm and soft now that he no longer wanted to look down at his body lying there. He wanted to go with the man in a cream robe who
smelled of meadow hay and boot polish, a shining man who was leading him down an avenue of lime trees. At the end of the avenue was an archway in a high wall with golden flowers hanging over the
top of it. Freddie could see a familiar figure standing here, waiting for him. Levi!

He paused, then walked up to his father and looked deeply into the translucence of his eyes, old familiar eyes but different now. The weariness and the gloom, the frustration and the rage had
gone, leaving a mysterious contentment. Freddie felt they were both weightless, suspended like feathers on the wind, and he sensed himself absorbing the essence of that sparkle in Levi’s
eyes.

‘Now I’ll tell you something,’ Levi said in his normal voice. He put his hand on Freddie’s left shoulder, its comforting warmth radiant like the heat from a flame.
‘That Ian Tillerman. Don’t you let ’im take your life. He’s lying. He’s lying, Freddie.’

Freddie stared into his luminous eyes and felt a change moving over him. Coral-coloured, it wound itself around his shoulders like the hug Levi was giving him now.

‘I’m sorry, son. Don’t you ever be like me.’

‘I’ve forgiven you, Dad,’ said Freddie, and Levi beamed, the smile magically bringing them closer than they had ever been.

Levi stood back and Freddie gazed beyond him into the archway, curiously observing a garden where trees glittered like jewellery and everything danced with colours. Across it was a lattice of
brilliant gold.

‘No,’ said Levi firmly. ‘You gotta go back, Freddie. Go on. Go back.’

Freddie nodded. He turned and floated back, still light as air, the man in the cream robe drifting beside him. He looked back once and saw Levi watching him, waving, then melting into the webs
of light. The tingle of his feet reconnecting with the earth made him stronger, but still he couldn’t hear his footsteps. What he could hear, louder and louder, was a rushing sound in his
ears, a voice speaking his name.

‘Mr Barcussy. Come on. Open your eyes.’

He came back with a jolt into the body lying on the bed. The pain had eased and his skin felt cool and soft, his body relaxed on comfortable pillows. Gradually the nurse’s face came into
focus. She was smiling now, a slim glass thermometer in her hand.

‘Welcome back,’ she said. ‘We nearly lost you.’

Freddie was ill for many weeks. After George had driven his lorry all the way to Gloucester and fetched him home, he lay in bed watching and listening.

His hearing was super sensitive and so attuned to the land beyond the town that he could hear the quack of herons passing overhead at dawn, and the unearthly sharp yelping of foxes, and in the
mornings the squeak of ice being broken and crisp leaves being crunched underfoot. At nine forty-five he listened for the cattle train passing through, and the distressed cries of sheep and cows
crowded together, terrified, their faces pressed to the slatted openings, their noses sniffing the fresh turfy fields where they had grazed. He felt their desperation.

Annie lumbered up and down stairs with trays of home-baked meals. She brought him a new drawing book and a pencil, but he didn’t want to draw. He just wanted to stare out at the winter
sky. The clouds created curling images of faces and ferry boats, lions and angels. Strangely, the illness was a gift of time to Freddie’s artistic soul, each change of the light adding to his
storehouse of ideas waiting to be carved in stone. He dreamed of carving in marble or alabaster, his fingers coaxing a smooth translucence from the rough blocks.

At night he kept the curtains open to the starlight, watching and learning to read the night sky. His room faced west and he lay on his side and watched for the planet Venus, as Granny Barcussy
had taught him in his childhood. ‘Venus follows the sun,’ she’d said, and her eyes had sparkled. ‘And – it’s the planet of love.’

So Freddie stared at it, and wondered if Kate was seeing it too. He’d shown it to her once, at Hilbegut Farm in the twilight when the western sky flushed pink, then duck-egg green smoothly
blending into indigo, and they’d gazed at the big bright star together.

Thinking of Kate was too painful most of the time, but he had to do it. He had to plod his way through the pain until he had overcome it with his own strength. There was a molecule of hope in
Levi’s words, ‘He’s lying,’ but Freddie didn’t cling to it. Kate had stopped writing to him, she was far away making a new life, and, worse, she had cut her hair. That
news in her last letter, had upset Freddie. He couldn’t imagine Kate with short hair, yet she’d said it made her feel liberated. Liberated from what? Was being beautiful such a burden?
Supposing he had carved a stone angel with short hair? It bothered Freddie in an inexplicably sensitive part of his soul, and when he dreamed of Kate it was always with the sensual memory of her
hair twined in his fingers. At least, he thought, Ian Tillerman wasn’t going to have that particular delight.

One morning just before Christmas, on the day of the winter solstice, Freddie sensed a change. At first light he got out of bed and stood at the window, watching the sunrise
reflected in the windows across the street. The weather was mild and spring-like. He opened the window and breathed deeply, smelling the steam trains and the flooded Levels beyond. A song thrush
was singing with its whole being, like an opera singer filling the awakening town with exuberant music. ‘The first bird to sing at the turn of the year,’ thought Freddie, his eyes
searching until he saw the slim shape of the thrush high on the apex of a roof, the sun gilding its speckled breast, its beak lifted to the sky. It filled him with longing to carve a singing bird.
But how would he put the song inside the stone?

Though his legs were weak, Freddie climbed into his clothes and dragged himself downstairs and out into the yard. There was his stone angel, illuminated by the sunrise, and it startled him to
see it. Had he done that? He stood in front of it, filled with an overpowering sadness as he looked at Kate’s beautiful face, captured in the stone, forever frozen, no longer laughing, no
longer turning her big eyes to gaze into his face.

A maelstrom of negative feelings gusted through him. Bitterness, vengeful thoughts towards Ian Tillerman, a slow burning fury that made him want to raise an axe high in the air and smash the
stone angel into hundreds of pieces. He let the thoughts pass through like a crowd of people stampeding to some event that didn’t interest Freddie. He could turn his back and walk away. Those
thoughts did not belong to him.

Blessed with the gift of peace, he stood thinking, his eyes exploring the blocks of stone waiting to be carved, and the red roof of his lorry still parked outside the garden wall, waiting for
him. ‘I gotta get on with it,’ he thought. ‘With or without Kate.’

And as he thought those words he was suddenly remembering another pair of eyes. Ethie’s eyes. They were pale, pale blue with a cluster of yellow in the centre of the iris, yellow like the
eyes of a sparrow hawk. Her eyes were focused on him, compelling him to interpret some silent message coded within that ring of yellowness.

Since his visions were usually of spirit people, Freddie was surprised to see Ethie in such a way. He frowned, concentrating on the deeper meaning, and saw that Ethie was lying on her back,
looking at him, trying to ask him some question that smouldered on her mind. She was floating, and the river glistened as it carried her away, her face glaring at the sky.

‘Freddie!’ Annie cried out in surprise. ‘You’re up and dressed. At last.’

He turned to see his mother emerge from the bakery, drying her hands on a towel.

‘Don’t you get cold now,’ she tried to hustle him inside.

‘I’m all right,’ he said. ‘I gotta get on with it now. Earn some money.’

Annie looked tired out, he thought, sitting with her to share a breakfast of lardy cake and cocoa at the scullery table.

‘It’s been hard for you,’ he said, ‘having me laid up.’

Annie nodded. ‘But worth it to see you better. I had enough disasters in the past so I can deal with this one. We shall get over it.’

‘Thanks.’ Freddie looked at her eyes and detected a subtle change, a shimmer of hope which hadn’t been there before. ‘Are you managing all right?’ he asked.

‘Joan’s been helping me,’ Annie said, speaking faster than usual, almost bubbling with some secret. Then she shut her mouth, brushed the crumbs from her apron, and looked at
Freddie expectantly. ‘You still want to do the stone carving, don’t you?’