The Red Shoe (8 page)

Now the ferry was almost quiet, the engine had died down. They felt the whole ocean rocking beneath them. Pressed in between Elizabeth and Frances’s warm legs, Matilda was safe, but she knew that under the sleek surface lay mysterious things, sharks and stingrays and even submarines, Germans and Japanese.

You wouldn’t know they were there, their father told them, all those men under there, all of them locked up in a sub, just like you, waiting for the end. You only knew because of the radar, ping, ping, ping. The sound of a bellbird in the bush, their father said. In the war that’s all I heard all day and all night, he said, ping, ping, ping. It can drive you out of your mind, he said, that sound.

“The ocean is strong and very deep,” said Elizabeth, “but nothing is as strong as the H-Bomb.”

Frances looked up.

“What’s the H-Bomb?” asked Matilda.

Elizabeth knew all about the H-Bomb. She had read about it in the newspaper.

“It can destroy the world in a single second,” she said, and her voice was dreamy. “All life will just go phhht. Imagine that,” said Elizabeth to Matilda and Frances. “Everything gone, just like that. It’ll all be empty, for ever and ever.”

“Do not forsake me, oh my darling,” hummed Uncle Paul behind them, while the smoke from his cigarette flew up in the wind.

Matilda felt afraid but Elizabeth shook her head gently. She touched Matilda’s hand.

“You don’t have to be frightened,” she said. “You won’t even know it’s happened. It’ll just go bang. You won’t know anything about it at all. It’s only knowing things that makes you afraid,” said Elizabeth, as the ferry left the world behind and sped towards the Basin.

O
N
W
EDNESDAY MORNING
, the day after the Pet Parade, Frances was snoring, but Matilda was awake early again. The all-day sucker, her wonderful prize for the snail hotel, lay on the floor beneath her bed. She’d put it under her pillow at first, but the cellophane crackled whenever she turned her head, so she pushed it away and it fell down the side of the bed with a thump onto the floor.

She hadn’t shown it to anyone, not her mother, not Elizabeth, not even Frances. No one knew she had won it, except Frances, and Frances wouldn’t say anything. That was a good thing about Frances. If she thought it was strange, she still wouldn’t say anything.

Matilda didn’t know why, but it made her feel sick to look at the lollipop now it was hers, the multicoloured swirling disc the size of a baby’s face, like a little moon in her hands on the end of a stick. She didn’t want to talk about it or even see it.

As for the snail hotel, that was worse. As soon as she’d got home from school, she hid it at the back of some bushes near the front fence. She left it there with the lid off so the snails could escape and go back to their normal snail life. They could all crawl away, leaving long silver trails and wondering what had happened to them.

“Why won’t you show it to anyone?” said Floreal, right in her ear. “Why not?”

Matilda put her hands over her ears. Shut up, she thought, shutup shutup. None of your business! she wanted to shout. What do you care? She dashed out into the back yard. She felt restless as an insect, she wanted to rush around in circles until she was too tired to think any more.

Then she heard voices, low murmurs and a laugh.

Matilda stopped running and rolled in a somersault down to the falling-down fence. She raised herself on her elbows and peered through to the back yard of the big house.

The two men who had given her and Frances a lift in the car the day before were out there under the lemon tree, smoking. Mr Driver and Mr Passenger, Matilda thought. She climbed up on the lump of crumbling sandstone and leaned over the fence and said, “Hallo!”

The men looked up. They seemed very surprised. Perhaps they had forgotten her.

“It’s me,” said Matilda.

“Hallo there,” replied Mr Driver, walking over, his cigarette pointing down at the ground. “It’s the snail girl.”

“Hallo,” replied Matilda. She hung her arms over the wooden palings.

“How are you this morning?” said Mr Driver.

Matilda shrugged. She was all right. It was funny seeing his face straight on, and not in the mirror.

“Do you want to see a trick?” he asked.

“Yes,” said Matilda.

Mr Driver put his cigarette up to his mouth and breathed in, pursing up his lips. When he breathed out he made a smoke ring, a luminous grey fading circle, and then another, disappearing up into the wide blue sky, one after the other.

Matilda clapped her hands, impressed.

“How do you do that?”

“I’ll teach you when you’re bigger,” said Mr Driver, winking at Mr Passenger.

There was a pause.

“Is the other man coming out soon?” asked Matilda conversationally.

No one spoke. The only sound was the waves, rolling over the surface of the ocean. Matilda had an odd feeling, as though she was in trouble. When she was in trouble, she kept quiet.

“What other man?” said Mr Passenger carefully.

Matilda hadn’t heard his voice before. She didn’t like the sound of it.

“Matilda!”

It was her mother, tapping on the half-open kitchen window at her. Even at that distance, Matilda could hear a kind of frown in her voice.

“You’d better go,” said Mr Driver, drawing again on his cigarette. “Don’t keep Mum waiting.”

“You shouldn’t talk to strangers, you know,” her mother said, shaking her head at Matilda as she came inside, the screen door banging behind her.

“They’re not strangers,” Matilda defended herself. “They’re neighbours.”

“You’re too friendly for your own good,” sighed her mother, putting a plate of two eggs on the table in front of her. “That’s going to get you in trouble one day.”

Well, that’s silly, thought Matilda. She stared down at the eggs, like two huge moist yellow eyes. How can you be too friendly? Be a good friend to everyone, that’s what my teacher says, every living thing. Every Living Thing.

I want to be friends with everything, thought Matilda, her head rushing, not just living things. I want to be friends even with stones and houses and big blocks of wood and glass. I can be friends with whoever I like, even the men next door.

O
N
T
HURSDAY, SCHOOL BROKE UP
for the Easter holidays. They heard footsteps coming up the front path.

“Daddy?” said Matilda, jumping up.

They were expecting their father to come home from his ship, he should be home already. Their mother ran to open the front door. But it was Uncle Paul.

She threw herself in his arms, thought Elizabeth, watching them. In books people were always throwing themselves in each other’s arms, and perhaps in real life as well.

“Don’t you have to play the piano today?” she asked.

“Don’t I deserve a day off?” rejoined Uncle Paul cheerfully.

“Can you take us to the Show?” said Matilda.

“Ah, the Show, the Show,” groaned Uncle Paul, flopping on the sofa, “always the Show.”

“Can you?” said Matilda.

“He won’t,” said Floreal.

Go away, thought Matilda, just go away. She kicked out her leg, trying to get at Floreal, but because he was invisible she missed, and stubbed her toe on the floor instead.

“Let’s have fish and chips for tea,” said Uncle Paul to their mother. “What do you say?”

Could they?

“What do you say, my friend Frank?”

Uncle Paul leant over to Frances, who was sitting quietly chewing on her nails. He poked her in the stomach. Uncle Paul liked to tease Frances, trying to make her laugh. Frances is so sad and solemn, he said. She should work for an undertaker.

“All right,” mumbled Frances.

They walked down together to the fish-and-chip shop, which was opposite a little beach where the shops were. It was cold and getting dark, but Uncle Paul bought lots of fish and chips wrapped up in newspaper and handed them each a packet to hold to their chests, like a hot water bottle.

They went and sat on some wooden seats across the road to eat them. Salt and heat and oil rose in the dim air. Soon they were surrounded by red-eyed seagulls.

“Don’t feed them, Mattie,” warned their mother. “It’s not good for them.”

“It’s fish,” replied Matilda, throwing a big piece in the middle of the flock so they squawked and fought over it as though they hadn’t eaten in weeks. “Fish is what they eat.”

“It’s not fish really,” said Elizabeth. “It’s shark.”

Matilda licked the salt from her lips. Shark. Once they had been at the beach when a shark had come. No one saw the sharp grey fin rising above the ocean, but a siren went off and they all had to get out from the water and wait for it to go away. Their father had bought them each a lemonade iceblock to eat while they waited. Then he had lain on his back in the sun, his eyes closed tightly, his arms and legs stretched out on the sand.

“We’ll have cooked daddy for dinner,” their mother joked, but actually they’d had fish and chips that day as well.

“It’s not fish really,” their father told them. “It’s shark.”

“Yuck,” said Matilda.

“It’s the best,” he grinned. “No bones.”

It seemed a long time ago. Now their father was away on his ship when he should be at home. Matilda stood at the water’s edge, where little waves lapped over her sandals as the sun was setting. Her mouth was dry and salty and there was shark inside her.

She stared out across the bay, over towards the high dark bush where the Basin was, a mountainous shape in the twilight. I thought no one could get me up there, Matilda remembered, high in the highest branch of the tallest tree.

It was a secret that she had climbed that tree. She wasn’t allowed to climb trees that high. She might tumble down and crack her head open and her brains would fall out. That happened to her mother’s friend Yvonne’s little brother when he was only three and Yvonne had never got over it, never. Why didn’t they put his brains back in? asked Matilda and her mother said, You silly goose, once your brains fall out that’s it, it’s all over. So they left his brains on the street and Yvonne never got over it.