The Mystery of the Cupboard (10 page)

Absurd! Ridiculous! I mocked her then, and I mock myself now for failing to resist the urge to try it.

Nevertheless I made the cupboard.

It was a plain thing like many hundred others the factory was turning out at the time. The difference was, I made this one with my own hands. Cut out the sheeting and welded it and fitted the shelf and the mirror and the handle. My mother said, “Good. But it must have a keyhole and a lock or your anger will escape.”

Poppycock! I cannot repeat it too often!

But I did it. God knows why. I did it.

And I brought it to her. And she said, “Give me the key
to the lock,” and I gave it to her, and what should she do but throw it away! Then she said, “Now, Frederick, scrape your head and heart clean of all the anger that is in them against this material you hate.”

“How?” I asked.

“Any way you can,” she said.

So I shut my eyes and imagined a pail of clear water. I imagined (what folly! I blush as I remember it) that I
took out my brain
and washed it, and
took out my heart
and scrubbed it, and the water floated with repulsive little globs of plastic in brown and yellow and blue and black. And solemn as a priest, I gathered the awful stuff in my two hands and threw it into the interior of the cupboard.

And though all had been imaginary - I who flatter myself I have no imagination but am a practical man - the gesture of throwing the plastic pieces into the cupboard was real. And my mother slammed the door, and locked it, not with its proper key belonging to the lock I had fitted, but with a key I had not then seen before. The one that she now clutches in her wasted hand.

“There,” she said very quietly. “You are free of it.” And she took the cupboard and put it away.

I seem to remember I was ill for some time after this incident. I don't know what was the matter with me. I was weak and sick, assailed with trembling, and I had no appetite. My mother nursed me herself and did not call a doctor. She said it was natural and would pass.

It did. One morning I woke as usual at six a.m. and felt my old self. A lingering loathing for all things plastic remained, and has remained. But it no longer consumed me.

Honesty, and my mother's relentless insistence, have obliged me to record this childish happening.

Interestingly, I recognized the cupboard I had made in the one I found by my mother's bedside, and turned away so that she may not see her face in its mirror. I had not seen it since. But I knew it was the same because I recognized some little details of its making. Some weakness made me unwilling to open it, but I forced myself, half expecting to find - what? I don't know. At all events, it was quite empty.

Personally I have no doubt my own strength of will was the real cure for whatever temporarily troubled me.

P
atrick arrived at lunchtime the next day.

His mother had driven him to London and put him on the train at Waterloo to travel alone, the first time he had gone on a long journey by himself, so he was full of his adventures, and for some time after Omri and his father picked him up at the station, no one else got a word in edgeways.

“There was this woman, like she had these three awful kids with her and they made such a row I wanted to move but the train was practically full, I could only find a seat in the smoking section. Then I was with these
three fellows who were like all swigging cans of beer and smoking their heads off. One of them kept telling stupid stories and roaring with laughter so it almost made you deaf. The stink of smoke was awful, I kept coughing and after a while one of them said why didn't I push off and find another seat, but I couldn't, so they started trying to get rid of me, this big guy kept sort of moving in on me till I had hardly any room to sit, and the others were breathing smoke in my face on purpose, honest they were like really
grotesque
…”

Omri sat in the back and said nothing. He wasn't listening. What he was doing was trying to come to terms with one of the greatest disappointments of his life.

Frederick's account had brought the writing to an end.

The only other thing that was written in the notebook - though he had turned every remaining page almost frantically - was two lines, in yet another handwriting quite different from the other two. It was roughly written in blunt pencil, and just said:

“Missus Driscoll died Oct. 30th 1950, leaving instructions in confedance which will be follered to the letter.”

There were scribbled initials. They looked like two
Is
or two
Ts.
Or maybe one of each.

Nothing about the cashbox. Nothing about the little people. (Fairies indeed! That was just like Frederick, to think his mother was seeing ‘fairies'!) The ‘Account of a
Wonder' was not there! She had not lived long enough to write it.

Omri had been more and more certain, as he read, that in the end Jessica Charlotte would reveal that she had brought little people to life through the key and the cupboard, just as Omri had years later. He was still certain, from hints in the notebook, that she had discovered its secret. But how she had used it, who her little people were and how they had comforted her, had gone with her to the grave.

Still, despite its cut-off ending, the Account had unveiled a lot of other secrets - secrets he was bursting to share with Patrick. But obviously for that he had to have him all to himself, which didn't happen for a frustratingly long time.

Gillon's friend Tony had already arrived by car when they returned, together with his parents (friends of the family), so they had to have tea in the garden. It was no longer strewn with old thatch, which had all been taken away, but the men were still working on the new roof. Omri's family had got quite used to watching them now, but the newcomers were fascinated, especially Tony's father who was a journalist and part American.

He was full of questions and said he might do an article on thatching for an American magazine, especially when he heard about the bottle. He pored over the photocopies Omri's dad had had made of the various bits of paper. He was quick to spot the possibility that some of the last-time thatchers were still alive.

“I'd love to interview them!” he said wistfully.

“Why not?” said Omri's father.

He spoke to the head thatcher, who said, “If you was to be stopping over, you might speak to old Tom tomorrow lunchtime at the pub. I told the lad,” - and he indicated Omri.

This was the first Omri's parents had heard about this - Omri had hoped - 
private
arrangement. Nothing seemed to be private any more, and Omri gritted his teeth. So much for the quiet talk he had hoped to have with Tom Towsler tomorrow. Tony's parents promptly decided to spend the night at a bed-and-breakfast place.

After tea, Omri was just trying to cut Patrick out of the group to get him up to his room, when his mother gaily suggested that Omri and Gillon take Patrick and Tony on a tour. This took ages, because, maddeningly, Patrick was really interested and kept exploring and asking questions, especially about the hens. He was absolutely fascinated about the fox.

“But the henhouse shuts, how did he get in to kill them?”

“Through a bit of a tear in the wire. There, see, where Dad mended it?”

“But he couldn't have got them out through that!”

“He didn't. He just killed three, ate one on the spot and left the others.”

“Wow. How did they look, dead?”

“Horrible. No heads. BERLUD
everywhere,”
said Gillon with some relish.

“Grotesque!” (This was evidently Patrick's current favourite word.) Then he said, “Hey, Omri, where's your cat?” There was a silence. “Don't tell me the fox got her, too!”

Omri said, “I don't know. We don't know what's happened to her. She's been missing ever since we got here.” He had a pang of disloyalty because he actually hadn't thought about her much since he'd been reading the Account.

“Tough luck. Sorry,” said Patrick. “Poor old Kitsa.”

Omri, thinking the ‘tour' was over, opened his mouth to suggest they go up to his room to talk, when Patrick said, “Did you say the wood by the river was yours too? Excellent. Let's go down there and explore!”

“Yeah!” chimed Tony, and the two of them took off across the yard like a pair of foxhounds on the scent.

Gillon echoed Omri's sigh.

“Just a pair of townies,” he said sadly.

“Patrick's not. He's lived in the country for two years.”

“Kent,” said Gillon. “Flat. All orchards and stuff, no wild parts. Not Dorset. You can't blame them really.”

Omri stared at him. “You like it here now then,” he said in surprise. Not much more than a week ago Gillon had still been moaning about leaving London.

“Don't be a dork,” said Gillon obscurely. “Come on, let's show them that climbing tree with the old rooks' nests. Do you think Dad'd let us take the blow-up dinghy on the river?”

What with one thing and another, it was bed time before Omri got Patrick alone. The two boys were sharing Omri's room, while Tony was to sleep in Adiel's.

“We'll have to talk quietly,” said Omri. “The walls are very thin, you can hear everything.”

Patrick looked at him. “Oh - yeah!” he said, evidently remembering for the first time that Omri had something to tell him.

He picked up the rucksack that contained his few things, mainly two sets of spare trainers, his Walkman, and almost no clothes, and from a side pocket extracted a small plastic bag with some cotton-wool inside. Out of a bed of this he carefully unwrapped the figure of a cowboy on a black horse. The little man, seated on the high-pommelled Western saddle, wore a plaid shirt and chaps, boots and spurs, but no hat.

Patrick fingered him lovingly. “Hope he got his hat back,” he said.

“Remember at his wedding, when he said you couldn't be legally married without a hat?”

The boys stifled fond laughter. “He'd lost his nerve!”

“He got it back again.”

“I do
wonder
how they're getting on! Emma thinks Ruby Lou might have had a baby by now.”

“Pretty quick if so, they've only been married ten months.”

“Eleven.”

“Isn't Ruby Lou a bit old?”

“I don't think she's more than about thirty.”

“Do you think Boone still drinks whisky?”

“He said he'd stop.”

“Bet he didn't.”

“What do you reckon's happening to Little Bull and Twin Stars?”

But for once Omri didn't want to reminisce or talk about their little people.

“Guessing's okay, but look at this,” he said quietly. “This is something better than guessing.”

He took the notebook from under his pillow and solemnly handed it to Patrick.

Patrick turned it over in his hands, opened it in the middle, peered close in a comic sort of way as if the writing were microscopic, read a few sentences, frowned, opened it in another place, and read a bit more. Omri found his fingers itching. “Don't,” he said sharply.

Patrick looked up. “What?”

“Don't just - riffle through it like that, reading a bit here and there. You have to read it right through, properly.”

Patrick riffled again and said, “All this? In this tiny writing? It'd take for ever!” He put the book down and Omri at once picked it up. “Tell me what's in it.”

Omri felt himself getting wound up. He'd been a bit wound up ever since the station, to be honest. This was Patrick all over, so full of himself, and not prepared to be bothered if something were difficult, or took a lot of
concentration. But he was Omri's friend in a very special way—he knew the secret, had shared in it, and there was, in any case, no one else he could tell about the Account, with which he was bursting. Besides…
Don't judge. Don't judge if you've ever done anything mad yourself.
Omri kept remembering that.

He sat on his bed with the book in his hands.

“All right,” he said. “Only listen properly. It's complicated.”

And slowly and carefully he recapitulated the whole story of his find and the Accounts of Jessica Charlotte and then Frederick.

Long before he'd finished, Patrick had stopped fidgeting and yawning and had fixed his eyes on Omri in a way that told Omri he was completely focused on him, on the story.

When he finished, about an hour later, there was a long silence and then Patrick said, “Makes sense. The cupboard and that. Explains why it only works on plastic. Explains the connection with toys. Obviously Frederick was quite hot on magic without knowing it… Being so angry probably made it stronger. Like a curse he put on the cupboard.”

“A
curse?”
Omri was startled.

“Well, we did do harm with it. It was you said that.”

“But the magic is good.”