The Moon King (8 page)

Later that evening, Helen was helping Mammy Kelly to get the tea.

‘Has Ricky turned up yet?’ her mother asked, handing her the breadboard. She was starting to get worried.

‘No,’ said Helen, guardedly. She didn’t want too many questions asked about why Ricky had gone and hidden himself away.

‘But it’s, oh, getting on for an hour since anyone saw him,’ said Mammy Kelly, handing her the breadknife as well. ‘Be careful with that, lovey,’ she added, automatically. It was what she always said when she gave anyone the breadknife. ‘Where did you look for him, that time?’ she went on.

‘Oh, just around,’ said Helen airily, tossing her hair over her shoulder as she peered into the crumby depths of the breadbin. ‘Which loaf, Ma? The brown or the white?’

‘Oh, cut them both,’ said her mother. ‘They’re like the lion and the unicorn in this house,’ she added, somewhat irrelevantly. ‘Around where?’ she added, determined to find out more about Ricky. An hour was a
long time for a child to be missing. ‘Where did you look, I mean?’

‘His room, you know.’

‘Is that the only place you looked?’

‘No-o-o,’ said Helen reluctantly.

‘Well, then, where else?’

‘Well,’ said Helen, ‘I did try the other room up there, you know, the junkroom?’

‘The junkroom? What possessed you to try that old dump?’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ lied Helen. ‘I just thought maybe he was up there. But anyway, the door was locked.’

She hadn’t meant to let that slip out. Her mother was bound to find that suspicious.

‘The door of the old junkroom was locked?’ her mother repeated, incredulously. ‘But who would lock the junkroom?’

‘Maybe it was just stuck,’ said Helen, not too sure why she was fibbing about this. It was probably going to come out about her teasing Ricky anyway, at this stage, and hedging like this wasn’t going to make much difference.

‘But don’t you see,’ said her mother, light dawning, ‘if the door is locked, that probably means Ricky’s locked himself in there!’

Brilliant powers of deduction! thought Helen witheringly. But she said, as if carelessly, ‘Oh, do you think so?’

‘Yes, of course I think so. He’s got to be there. He’s
nowhere else about the house. I checked all the other rooms. Why on earth would he go locking himself in the junkroom?’ Her forehead was all runnelled with thought. ‘Oh the poor little scrap! He must be worried about something. It couldn’t have been that he didn’t want to see Mrs O’, could it, Helen?’

‘How would I know?’ replied Helen, sawing vigorously at the brown loaf. ‘It could be anything. He’s not the full shilling, is he?’

‘Don’t talk like that, Helen,’ her mother reprimanded her.

‘Sorry,’ Helen mumbled. She knew she wasn’t supposed to use expressions like that about children who came to the house, no matter how obvious it seemed to her that they weren’t right in the head.

‘Look, let’s go and get him, will we?’ said Mammy Kelly, taking off her apron, as if she was going on an outing. ‘Come on, just the two of us.’

‘Ummm,’ said Helen. ‘You go. I’ll finish cutting up the loaves.’ She didn’t want to be there when her mother winkled Ricky out of the junkroom.

‘Ah no,’ said Mammy Kelly, ‘come on with me.’

Helen couldn’t think of an excuse, so she put her breadknife down and followed her mother, stifling a sigh.

In the hall, they met Tomo.

‘Ricky’s locked himself in the attic,’ Mammy Kelly told him.

‘What’d he do that for?’ asked Tomo.

‘Well, I don’t know. Maybe he didn’t want to meet Mrs O’ today.’

‘Why not? He doesn’t usually mind her.’

‘Well, I don’t know, but come on anyway.’

The three of them trooped up the stairs to the first half-landing. As they did so, the bathroom door opened and Lauren came out, wiping her hands on her skirt.

‘No towel,’ she said apologetically. ‘Where’s everyone going?’

‘To the attic,’ Mammy Kelly replied. ‘Ricky’s locked himself in up there.’

‘Oh?’ said Lauren in surprise. ‘Is that where he’s got to? Can I come too?’

But she was talking to their backs. They’d got as far as the landing now. Lauren joined the trail.

Billy was sitting on the landing, carefully pulling his socks off.

‘How did you get here?’ asked Mammy Kelly, swooping down to pick him up. Billy gurgled and offered her a sock.

Upwards they went, the four of them and the baby, to the attic floor.

But there was no reply when they knocked on the door and called out Ricky’s name. They rattled and shouted and yelled, but still there came no reply.

‘Goodness, I hope he hasn’t had an accident or anything!’ said Mammy Kelly. ‘There are all sorts of yokes in there. They might be dangerous. Quick, Tomo, break
the door in. Quick, quick!’ There was panic in her voice. Helen stood behind her and bit her nails.

Tomo stood back from the attic door and then he lurched at it. It shuddered, but didn’t give. He lurched again. This time there was a groan of splitting wood. At the third lurch the lock broke away from the door and the door swung inwards.

Inside the attic room, the tailor’s dummy stood quietly, its lampshade hat perfectly still on its head; the musty old typewriter sat motionless on the rickety old desk; the crystal chandelier spilled silently, as if frozen in time, over the edge of its cardboard box; the multicoloured blanket drooped emptily over the moon chair; the moon itself balanced in endless, perfect stillness on the point of the chair back. Not a breath was breathed, not a sigh was sighed, not even the air stirred. There was no sign of Ricky.

Rosheen clattered her bucket of feed and her water jug as she went off to feed the pigeons. She could hear the sounds of Mammy Kelly cooking the tea as she closed the back door behind her. The evening was chilly, with more than a hint of autumn in the air, and there was that cold, sweet smell of grass you get when the dew starts to fall. Rosheen shivered inside her jacket.

Rosheen usually had Ricky’s help with this chore in the evenings – sometimes he did it for her – but he hadn’t turned up yet, since he’d disappeared this afternoon, so she thought she’d better get on with it. It would soon be too dark to see out there, and besides, it was past their feeding time.

Rosheen had decided not to worry about Ricky just yet. He’d reappear at teatime, she told herself. It wasn’t time to start panicking. Nobody else was too concerned, though it had been embarrassing when they couldn’t find him for Mrs O’Loughlin. But the locked attic door puzzled Rosheen. She could have a good think about it while she was with the pigeons. She often did her best thinking out
there in the company of the birds.

They’d be hungry, Rosheen thought, as she was so late feeding them. She’d better open the door carefully or they might mob her.

But the pigeons didn’t come rushing towards her as she’d expected when she entered the shed. Maybe they’re getting sleepy, thought Rosheen. It’s almost dark.

It took a moment for her eyes to adjust to the gloom in the pigeon shed, and when she could finally make out shapes, she saw that the perches were bare, the bird-boxes empty. All the birds were huddled in one corner, in a great heap, like a giant, living duvet. They warbled and burbled a bit as she approached, and shifted their wings, as if to get more comfortable, but otherwise they didn’t move. They certainly didn’t come flying towards her. Softly she moved nearer to where the birds were huddled. What was it they were huddling over?

The birds set up a mild conversational cooing as she came closer, as if to say, Ah there yoooou arrre, Roosheen. But still they didn’t come to feed.

Rosheen came right up to them and knelt on one knee to examine the pile of birds and then she started to wave her hands gently, to encourage them to move. Languidly, a few of the birds on the outside layer of the huddle flew up to their perches. Rosheen spoke out loud then, and waved her arms some more. ‘Shoo,’ she said gently. ‘Go on, shoo off there and let me see. Shoo, shoo, shoo.’ Another layer of birds rose lazily from the pile and circled
the shed, and then another and another, until the air was filled with the soft beatings of pigeons’ wings and finally Rosheen could see a shape that wasn’t birds. It was like a pile of clothes thrown on the sawdust floor.

‘Ricky?’ she whispered. ‘Ricky, is that you?’

The pile of clothes, still wearing the occasional pigeon, moved, like a slice of swissroll gradually unwinding. Relief flooded Rosheen. She hadn’t realised how worried she was until the worry lifted, but now she could feel her blood surging around her body, singing with relief. Her toes tingled with it, her scalp prickled with it. Her head ached with relief, her heart pounded with it, her ears rang with it.

‘Oh Ricky!’ she said, a little more loudly this time.

Ricky sat up, covered in feathers white and grey and brown and with gobs of bird-goo dotted here and there. Rosheen reached out and brushed away the remaining birds with the backs of her hands. They flapped away from her, but one bird, the small one called Fudge, came fluttering back immediately and took up residence on Ricky’s shoulder. Rosheen tried whooshing him away again, but he came back as soon as she stopped, so Rosheen gave up and started to pick clumps of feathers out of Ricky’s clothes. His hair was all stuck about with feathers too.

‘You look like an Indian chief,’ said Rosheen. ‘The last of the Mohicans! How long have you been out here? Have you been asleep?’ He must have been. She could tell
from the muzzy look he gave her.

Ricky just stared at her, his eyes huge and black, his face pale as a pigeon’s underbelly.

‘Ricky, you weren’t planning to stay out here all night, were you?’

Ricky looked away.

‘Ricky, you’d freeze to death out here. Even the birds knew that. They must have been trying to keep you warm. But it’s only teatime. Can you imagine what it would be like out here by midnight! And why did you lock the attic door? You did lock it, didn’t you?’

Ricky nodded.

‘But why, noodle-head? Why?’

Ricky shrugged. Fudge sat on his shoulder and rode up when he shrugged, like a seagull on a wave.

‘To make us think you were in there?’ Rosheen asked. ‘So we wouldn’t go looking for you?’

Ricky wrinkled up his forehead. Clearly, this hadn’t occurred to him.

‘No?’ asked Rosheen. ‘That wasn’t it? Well then?’

Ricky sighed.

‘To keep someone out, maybe?’

Ricky gave the tiniest nod, almost as if he was afraid to admit it.

‘You knew Helen knew that room was your special place?’

He nodded again, this time a series of short, quick, affirmative nods.

‘And you didn’t want her in there?’

A slow nod, this time, followed by another one.

‘You are the oddest person, Ricky,’ said Rosheen, tenderly. ‘I mean, you do the oddest things. But look, it’s teatime. You must be starving. Help me to feed the birds now, and then we’ll go in for something to eat.’

Ricky hunched himself right up, drawing his knees quickly up under his chin and shook his head vehemently from side to side.

‘And you can see Mrs O’Loughlin tomorrow instead. She said she’d be back.’

Ricky shook his head vigorously. A little shower of sawdust fell out of his hair and sprinkled his shoulders. Fudge stepped back delicately and shook his head a few times, to rid himself of the sawdust-raindrops. Ricky put a hand up and gently fingered Fudge’s feathers, to calm him.

‘Ricky, you have to see her,’ said Rosheen. ‘She’s in charge of you. But that doesn’t mean she’s going to take you away. That was just Helen saying that. She was only trying to annoy you.’

Ricky cowered back from her, though, shaking his head.

She wasn’t getting through to him. That was clear.

‘But, look,’ Rosheen said, ‘you can’t stay here. You’d die of the cold.’

Ricky turned away from her and faced the wall. He put his hands over his ears.

Rosheen thought for a moment. There was no point in arguing with him. Maybe the best thing was to leave him be for a little while. She stood up and busied herself about the shed, feeding the birds. They gathered around her as she filled their grain troughs and poured their water.

Still Ricky sat with his back to Rosheen, staring at the wall, his hands clamped over his ears and his elbows sticking out on both sides of his head. When she’d finished the feeding, Rosheen came and sat beside him.

‘Ricky!’ she bellowed at him, at the same time trying to prise his hands off his ears. Ricky resisted, and there was a bit of a scuffle. In the end Ricky dropped his hands stiffly to his sides, but he still faced the wall. He wouldn’t look at Rosheen.

Rosheen tried a different tactic.

‘You must be hungry, Ricky,’ she said.

Ricky continued to stare at the wall. Rosheen looked at his thin little back, still covered in feathers and goo. She couldn’t let him stay here. It just wasn’t on. He’d freeze or starve or both. She’d have to persuade him to come into the house. But not yet. He was too frightened. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear!

‘I’ll tell you what, I’ll bring some food out. We’ll have a little picnic out here, just the two of us, and we can talk a bit more then. You’ll feel better if you have something to eat. OK?’

Not a sound out of Ricky. Not a movement.

Rosheen put her hand on his shoulder and said: ‘I’ll be back. Just give me fifteen minutes. Don’t move, Ricky, OK?’

Ricky sat absolutely still.

The kitchen was deserted when Rosheen came in from the pigeon shed, but the tea was half-ready. The bread had been cut anyway, she saw.

Swiftly, Rosheen buttered and halved a slice of brown and a slice of white and sandwiched thick orange slices of cheese between the halves. Then she looked around for something else. She scooped up two apples and a banana from the fruitbowl on the kitchen counter and wrapped two chocolate brownies in a square of tinfoil. She couldn’t find a small bottle to put a drink in, so instead she filled a mug with milk and carried it carefully to the back door. Then she had to put everything down to open the door, as her hands were full.

She’d only been about ten minutes in the house, but when she got back to the pigeon shed, there was no trace of Ricky, apart from a bare patch in the sawdust where he’d been sitting facing the wall when she’d left.

‘Oh no!’ said Rosheen aloud to the pigeons. ‘Now where’s he got to?’

Then she sat down on the floor and put her hands
over her face. She felt a cry trying to get up her throat and out her mouth, but it got stuck somewhere and left her with a filled-up, chokey feeling that was worse than tears.