The Missing Link (9 page)

Danny was trembling and gasping. We all were. We watched the red tail-lights diminish and disappear, and then there was a full minute of shocked silence before Tina’s heart-broken wail rent the night air.

‘
Oh no! Oh no! Oh no! Oggy!
’

6

AND THEN DANNY
flipped. It was too much, and for the first time on the journey he lost control. I saw him going.

‘Hold, Danny. Hold your breath,’ I said. But it was already too late. He was making terrible whooping sounds, dragging in huge lungfuls of air, and his eyes had that dreadful look that I knew so well: huge and wild and vacant.

Tina backed off, terrified. I did what I had seen Maurice do on a few occasions – I grabbed Danny and hugged him tight. But he was too far gone and he thrashed around so hard that I was in danger of getting hurt and had to let go. For a few more moments he gaped and gasped, lumbering around in the road and crashing against the hedges and walls. I was terrified that he was going to hurt himself, out here in the middle of nowhere, but he was so far gone that he didn’t even hear my warnings. Three times he staggered and fell, three times he got up again and blundered about, like a blind, enraged monster. And then, finally, he dropped like a felled ox, out for the count.

I had seen it happen before, but Tina was terrified.

‘Oh, Jaysus,’ she said. ‘Oh, Sweet Jaysus.’

I knelt over Danny and felt his pulse. It was rapid and strong.

‘He’s all right,’ I said. ‘He just goes over the top sometimes. He hyperventilates,’

‘Hyper what?’ said Tina.

‘Too much oxygen,’ I said. ‘He’ll sleep it off.’

Together we pulled him out of the road and on to the verge. I wrapped his blanket around him and made him as comfortable as I could.

‘Now what?’ said Tina.

‘We just have to wait,’ I said. ‘We might as well try and get some sleep.’

‘Sleep!’ said Tina. ‘Sleep!’

‘Sleep,’ said Darling, like a little echo. ‘Sleep.’

She flitted up into a tree and fell silent. I lay down beside Danny and dragged a bit of the smelly blanket over my shoulders. A short distance away, I heard Tina settling herself in. I couldn’t be sure, but I think she was crying.

PART FIVE

1

IN THE MORNING
Danny was fine. I could see Tina looking at him dubiously, but it was always the same. If he ever had any memory of his turns, or any bumps or bruises, he didn’t mention them.

I had hoped that the man might remember Oggy and dump him out, but there was still no sign of him, and Darling’s hopeful recce failed to find anything. We were all sad, but Tina was inconsolable.

‘He was the best friend I ever had,’ she moaned, hiding her face in the folds of her old, grey blanket.

‘We’re your best friends,’ said Danny. He was concerned about Tina, but full of his usual delight, despite what had happened. At times like that, I sometimes felt that he was
more
than human, not less. What people could be, if the world was perfect. But his charm was lost on Tina.

‘You don’t count,’ she spat, savagely. ‘You’re both going to turn into men!’

I wanted to protest, and Danny was totally confused by the idea, but there was no denying it. I had never thought of myself in those terms,
and
wondered if it was something else I ought to feel guilty about.

‘I would never do something like that,’ I said.

‘Nor would I,’ said Danny, but Tina didn’t seem convinced. She got up and began to walk away, and there was nothing Danny or I could do except follow.

Either the mist had dropped or we had been driven up into it during the night. We walked on through it, with Darling ahead of us, vanishing and emerging again, giving a strange, slow rhythm to our march. We had little idea of where we were going, except that we were still heading North, and the muffling mist made our senses all but redundant, and threw us back in on ourselves.

It was not a good time for that to happen. Tina was more remote than ever, and Danny got gimpy and slow again. As for me, I brooded. It wasn’t fair that I had to be doing this. I was almost like a captive, forced along on this bizarre and dangerous journey against my will. By the time we stopped for lunch I was ready for a fight.

‘It’s all your fault,’ I said, breaking up a bar of chocolate and, meanly, keeping the biggest piece for myself. ‘How is it that your mother just happened to send for you just now, eh? When everything’s going haywire?’

Danny sniggered. ‘Haywire,’ he said. ‘That’s funny.’

My blood began to boil.

‘There’s nothing funny about it!’ I yelled. ‘I
don
’t want to be here, understand? I don’t even know where we’re supposed to be going!’

All three of them just stood and stared at me, as though I was the one who was mad, and not them. I stood up and began to walk back the way we had come. I suppose I thought the others would follow me, but they didn’t. I kept going, unwilling to back down now that I had tried to make a stand, but I was getting scared, being out there on my own, and despite what Maurice had said, I felt responsible for Danny.

Besides, I had all the money. In the end I had to stop. But I wasn’t ready to go back to them, yet. I wasn’t going to back down that far.

I sat on a wobbly stone wall in the damp, misty afternoon, and waited. Eventually, Darling arrived. I knew she was there but I didn’t look up. She tried to win me over by doing more impersonations; an owl, a football crowd, an opera singer, but I refused to be amused. Then she did a duck, and I couldn’t help laughing.

‘Come on, Christie,’ she said. ‘We need you.’

I shook my head. ‘I just don’t know what’s going on,’ I said. ‘You’ve got to explain things to me, Darling.’

‘Explain what?’

‘How you and Oggy can talk, for one thing.’

But Darling just looked perplexed. ‘I don’t know, Christie,’ she said. ‘How did
you
learn to talk?’

‘But that’s different. All people can talk. But animals can’t. They just can’t.’

Darling hopped on to my arm and gobbled
up
a small spider that I hadn’t noticed. ‘All I know is that we’re not supposed to tell anyone. Except you and Danny.’

‘Why?’

Darling had to think hard about that one. Eventually she said, ‘I think it’s something to do with Mother’s lab. She doesn’t want anyone to know about it.’

‘Her lab?’

Before Darling could reply, Danny and Tina emerged from the mist, and I remembered that I was sulking.

‘Come on, Crimpy,’ said Danny.

I looked away, remembering his mother. Striding down the street. A lab. So she really was a scientist. And maybe not so mad, if she had found a way of altering animal behaviour.

‘We’re going, whether you like it or not,’ said Tina. ‘Do you think we care if you come?’

‘Thanks, Tina,’ I said. ‘I’m definitely not coming now.’ Even though I wanted to again. More than ever. To see the lab, to know more about what Mother was doing.

‘I care, Christie. I care,’ said Danny. He was distressed, and beginning to wind up. I glared at Tina. She looked away.

‘All right,’ she snarled. ‘I want you to come, OK?’

It wasn’t the enthusiastic response I would have liked, but it was enough to let me off the hook. Danny made delighted whooshing noises and threw his arms all over the place. Together again, we walked on into the enveloping mist.

2

AS NIGHT FELL,
we came upon a little farmhouse and, with Darling on the look-out, succeeded in sneaking into a dry outhouse at the back of the yard. It was a fuel shed, with a big stack of musty logs in one corner and neat bundles of kindling in another. In a third corner was a stack of old cardboard boxes and newspapers and, with a bit of quiet labour, we spread them out and made a fairly level sort of bed. It wasn’t much, but after the bone-deep dampness of the misty night it was five-star luxury. The covert adventure brought us all together again, despite our tiredness. We might even have been happy for a while, if it hadn’t been for Oggy. His absence was even louder than his presence, and we missed him terribly.

We shared some more chocolate and were jostling for position under the blankets when we heard the farmhouse door click open. The window of the shed had no glass in it, and the sound seemed horribly close. Then a torch beam began to strobe across the darkness, a man coughed, and slow footsteps advanced towards our door.

Tina went rigid with fear. Danny’s breath
rasped
like a saw, until I whispered to him to hold it. For once, he did. Above our heads, Darling dropped down from the rafters and drifted out through the window like a leaf on the breeze. The footsteps were closer, and we heard the soft creak of a log basket meeting the ground. There was no escape now, and we were all wondering what to do and say, when the shrill, urgent tones of a ringing phone began to sound.

The man swore and retraced his steps, more rapidly this time, back to the house. With our hearts in our mouths we jumped up and felt around for our gear in the darkness. The log basket went flying as we pelted out and across the yard to the gate and the public road beyond. Danny moved faster than I had ever seen him go; covering the ground in long, gallumphing strides. We didn’t slow down until we were well clear of the farm and quite sure that no one was coming after us. As we were recovering our breath, Darling caught up with us.

‘Phew! That was lucky,’ said Tina.

‘Call it luck if you like,’ said Darling, clinging to the front of my jacket and trying to open the zip with her beak.

‘What do you mean?’ I said, opening it up and helping her into my pocket. She nestled down comfortably, then stuck out her head and performed the perfect telephone noise all over again.

3

OUR EXHILARATION WAS
short-lived. We walked through most of the night, along winding roads which seemed to have far more uphills than downhills. In the darkness our map was useless, and once again we found ourselves relying on Darling. I wondered how we would have managed without her.

To keep pace with Danny I fell into a meditative amble, like a monk taking a constitutional around his cloister. With our bodies on automatic and our minds on standby we trudged on through the darkness until eventually, just before dawn, we found some trees and a high wall leaning together like conspirators. In the inky shadows they created, we dropped to the ground and slept like the dead.

I was woken by a clamour of unruly voices. Above me the trees were black and fluttering, and for a moment I thought the world had gone mad. Then I realised that it was starlings, thick as foliage on the bare branches. A solitary rook perched among them, lonely as a teacher in a playground.

Darling was lost in the clamouring mass, just
one
among hundreds. ‘Darling!’ I called, and my urgency woke Tina. ‘Darling!’

There was something vaguely wimpish about being so attached to a little bird, but I was still missing Mom and Maurice, and now Oggy, and I wasn’t ready to lose someone else as well, no matter how small they might be. But she wasn’t lost. She floated down from among the masses and landed on my blanket.

‘Don’t panic, Christie,’ she said, picking small twigs and bits of leaf-mould out of my hair. ‘I was just gathering a bit of information, that’s all.’

Beside me, Danny woke up and stretched.

‘Good riddance to that mist,’ he said.

I hadn’t noticed the obvious. Through the network of branches and between the circling starlings, the sun was shining bright.

We finally figured out how to use the tin opener on my penknife and, while we were eating, another flock of starlings came sweeping across the white sky like a swarm of bees. Their wings sounded like flitters of cloth in a breeze.

Darling bolted her share of tuna and vanished among them, making me anxious again. Their chatter was deafening, containing the most amazing variety of sounds, and I found that I could imagine how it contained information; a language based on the mimicry of what had been heard in the environment.

After a few minutes, Darling rejoined us.

‘Bad weather ahead, they’re all making for the
South
, there’s snow in the mountains and more on the way.’

‘How do they know?’ said Tina, still yawning. ‘Been watching the weather reports, have they?’

‘They’re birds,’ said Darling. ‘They know how to read the winds.’

‘Just wondering,’ said Tina.

The starlings lifted off with a ripping, raining sound like a sudden squall. For a moment the sky was dark with them as they banked and wheeled and made extraordinary patterns of themselves against the light. Then they were gone, and I could sense Darling’s loneliness as she gazed after them into the empty sky.

‘Some of them spotted a dog on his own,’ she said at last. ‘It might have been Oggy.’

‘Where?’ I said.

‘Just somewhere,’ said Darling, vaguely. ‘Not here.’

‘That’s useful,’ said Tina. ‘Did your pals ever think of applying for a job with Interpol?’

Darling got into a huff and hopped off to pester the sad rook. The rest of us decided to do a stock-take and tipped everything out of our bags on to the ground.

There were some crazy things in Tina’s bag; a big chunky candle, some incense, a tiny brass bell. There were drabber things, too, battered and unrecognisable but clearly of value to her because she stowed them all away, quickly and possessively. She had a bent coat hanger in there as well, and that mysterious pink packet that she had bought in Wales.

‘What do you need all that junk for?’ I asked.

But Tina just glared at me, and suddenly I knew, and felt bad. Those pathetic bits and pieces were all she owned in the world.

The plastic bags were in flitters and we wrapped what was left in the blankets. There was disappointingly little. Two packets of home-wheat biscuits and one of cream crackers, two tins of Spam, one of peaches, and a big bag of peanuts. The only other food was Oggy’s; the last two tins of Buddy.

‘We can ditch that,’ said Tina.

But I couldn’t. Like her bits, they were things I had to carry. If I let go of them, I let go of Oggy. And I wasn’t ready to do that, yet.