The Red Shoe (9 page)

Matilda didn’t care about Yvonne’s little brother and it wasn’t a tree he fell out of, it was a truck. She climbed the tree that day in secret when no one was looking, higher than she had ever climbed before. How high she was, so high you could see everything, like a bird in the blue sky, she could see the whole of the Basin.

I am such a good climber, Matilda thought, but in fact she nearly fell, down from the top of the tallest tree in the world. Her foot had slipped and she was going to fall, she was, she really was, down down down to the dead earth, but just in time she thought of Yvonne’s little brother and his brains all over the street, and she had grabbed the branch above her head and gripped it so hard her hand bled.

Now, on the little beach where they ate their fish and chips, a flock of cockatoos rose up in the sunset from the trees, cawing, with their golden crests shining and their white, white wings spread wide. For a moment the world swayed in front of her and she felt her arms and legs begin to tremble.

“But I don’t want to remember,” said Matilda out loud.

And she closed her eyes tightly, so very tightly, just like her father on his back on the sand when the shark came.

O
N
F
RIDAY THERE WAS NO SCHOOL
. Their mother toasted hot-cross buns on the grill, lifting them up with a fork to see how brown they were.

They all ate them, even Uncle Paul. He was greedy like a child. Matilda liked that. She hated the way grown-ups always said, That’s enough, thank you, no, I really can’t manage any more, how they wiped their mouths and cast their eyes downward. Uncle Paul was greedy, he never said no and he always wanted more.

“What’s that ghastly music?” he said, kicking the back door open with a plate in one hand, a hot-cross bun in the other.

They listened. It was coming from the big house next door. It was as though the house was singing, deep, long, dreary notes.

“Who are those people, anyway?” Uncle Paul raised his hands in the air theatrically. “Sounds like a death march.”

He let the door swing shut, and went and sat at the piano. He licked his fingers one by one because they were covered in butter, then he began to play a tune on the high-up notes.

sang Uncle Paul. Matilda slid herself next to him on the piano stool.

“Are you going to church at Easter?”

“Are you?” replied Uncle Paul.

“I don’t know,” said Matilda.

Uncle Paul was playing the very top notes so softly he had to bend his ear down to the keys to hear it.

“You’re not supposed to go to the Show on Good Friday,” said their mother.

“Why not?” frowned Matilda.

“God doesn’t like it, darling,” said Uncle Paul with a wink. “Don’t they teach you anything at school?” He tugged at Matilda’s bare feet and shivered. “Ice blocks,” he said. “How can you stand it?”

“Daddy likes the Show,” sniffed Matilda. “He’ll take us. When’s he coming?”

“Soon, soon,” said their mother. “Blow your nose, Matilda. Get a hankie.”

Matilda rolled off the piano stool and lay down on the floor, gazing at the ceiling. If you looked long enough, it started to seem as if it was coming down on top of you, closer, closer, closer, until you felt you were going to be squashed to death underneath it. Then you jumped up and escaped just in time.

Uncle Paul stopped playing. He breathed out heavily.

“What a pity, what a pity!” Uncle Paul twirled his grey moustache.

“What’s a pity?” asked Matilda, sitting up.

“That life’s not like that,” said Uncle Paul. “What a pity it is.”

On top of the piano was the photograph of their mother and father at their wedding, and their mother’s friend Yvonne. Now Yvonne was a thousand miles away in New Zealand, but when Uncle Paul raised his eyebrows at her, it seemed to Matilda as though Yvonne raised hers back at him. But she couldn’t have, of course, she was only a photo. A photo was not alive, it couldn’t move. But maybe it was like a zombie, a dead person that’s really alive, like Yvonne’s dead-alive husband in the Solomon Islands.

“Where’s Berkeley Square, anyway?” she asked, not wanting to think about zombies.

Uncle Paul swung around on the piano stool.

“It’s nowhere,” he said glumly. “It doesn’t exist.”

“Yes it does,” said Elizabeth. She looked over from the sofa, where she was reading the paper. “It’s in London. In England.”

“How do you know?” said Matilda.

“It’s nowhere,” repeated Uncle Paul.

Nowhere, nowhere, nowhere. London was so far away, it might as well be nowhere. Uncle Paul smiled at their mother. The room smelt of burnt bread. Their mother pushed her hair back from her brow. She had soft swinging hair, she washed it in Lux soap.

“Perfect hair,” said Uncle Paul, as he let his fingers fall lightly on the keys. “Your mother has perfect hair.”

He reached over and took a handful of her hair and held it up to the sunlight, strands slowly falling down onto her shoulders.

“He shouldn’t be here,” said Floreal. “He shouldn’t be here, when your father’s away.”

Matilda ran out into the back yard. The music coming from the big house next door had stopped and it was almost quiet now. But she could hear something else, someone coughing. Who was it?

She remembered what Floreal had said, how the men next door were spies. Could they be spies? Who were they spying on? Maybe I could be a spy, thought Matilda suddenly. I could watch them, without them knowing I’m here.

She lay down on her stomach and pulled herself along the grass with her arms and wiggled like a snake, right up to the crack in the fence. Then she looked through the splintered wood.

There he was again, the funny-looking man who had thrown her back the tennis ball. He was quite close to her, sitting at the garden table, laying out a chess set on a chequered board. Carefully, one by one, he was putting the pieces in their places, the little horses and little castles, the queen with a crown and the king with a cross, half of them black, half of them white, the bishops, and the pawns.

Who’s he going to play with? wondered Matilda.

Bang bang went the back door. Matilda put her hands up to her eyes in the shape of binoculars and looked through. They were men, but not the men that had given her and Frances the lift. Why were there so many men? How many people can you have in one house?

One of them came and stood next to the table, looking at the chess set, and muttering something Matilda couldn’t hear. There was a burst of laughter, but her man, the tennisball man, didn’t smile. He rubbed his head as though he had a headache.

He’d probably like a hot-cross bun, thought Matilda.

But she kept her mouth firmly shut. She didn’t want them to know she was there, not this time. She kept absolutely quiet, softer than a snail. She even tried not to breathe. After all, she was a spy.

O
N
S
ATURDAY THEY LAY AROUND
the house in a heap. Their mother sat by the telephone, dialling and dialling. She was trying to speak to their father, but she couldn’t find him. At last she put the phone down.

“Let’s go out!” said Uncle Paul in a loud voice, looking around at them all. “Let’s go to the pictures, all the way into town, all of us.”

Into town?

“But I want to go to the Show,” said Matilda.

Uncle Paul rubbed her forearm up and down, shaking his head.

“The Show’s too expensive, Mattie,” he said. “Come on, let’s take your mother to the pictures.”

“If Daddy was here, we’d go,” muttered Matilda.

“I’ll get you an icecream,” coaxed Uncle Paul.

“Can we see your hotel?” said Matilda, thinking about it, because Uncle Paul’s hotel was in town.

“If you’re good,” replied Uncle Paul easily. “We can see a hundred hotels if you like.”

But Matilda only wanted to see Uncle Paul’s hotel.

“What films are on, Elizabeth?” asked their mother, and Uncle Paul smiled then, because that meant she wanted to go. “In town?”

Elizabeth folded the big thin pages over, until she found the right spot.

“We can see
Roman Holiday
,” she said, “if we get a bus straight away. Or
The Robe.
”

Matilda’s teacher had seen
The Robe.
It was all about God. It sounded boring.

“I don’t want to see that,” she said. “I want to see cartoons.”

“There’s always cartoons, stupid,” said Floreal and Matilda scowled at where she thought he was.

“It stars Gregory Peck,” Elizabeth read aloud from the paper. “And Audrey Hepburn. She won an Academy Award.”

“Who’s Gregory Peck?” said Matilda. “I don’t like him.”

“He’s a famous actor, darling,” said their mother. “From America.”

“I don’t like him.” Matilda was firm.

“Go and get dressed, darling,” said their mother. “Tell Frances.”

“On the double,” added Uncle Paul.

Going to town was special, so they wore their best dresses. Matilda and Frances had exactly the same yellow-flowered dress, except that Frances’s was bigger. Their father had brought them home one time from his boat. He would have brought one for Elizabeth, too, but he didn’t know what size she was, so instead he got her a rectangular prism made of glass, with a little orange fish inside it. It’s a paperweight, he explained, it stops all your papers flying away in the wind. But Elizabeth never opened the window so she didn’t have any wind. It doesn’t matter, Elizabeth told Matilda. Things don’t have to be what other people say they are.

“Everybody ready?” sang out Uncle Paul.

They were ready, even Frances, all dressed up. Elizabeth wore a green skirt and shirt, Uncle Paul was in a jacket and tie and their mother stood beside him at the doorway in a beautiful pink-striped dress and brown sandals.

“She wishes she could wear her red shoes,” said Floreal.

Matilda stood very still and she felt her heart beating hard. Soon she would not have to listen to him, she would be outside and the door would slam and he would be locked up in the house.

“Let’s go!” she shouted. “Let’s go!”

Because they lived at the ends of the earth deep in the bush, and theirs was almost the very first stop, the bus to the city was empty. It was a double-decker and they all ran on, one after the other, up the little winding dirty staircase to the top floor. Matilda and Frances sat at the front of the bus in their yellow daisy dresses. They were so high, above all the trees and the beach and the roofs of the houses, the sloping tiles and tin and the heads of people and the tops of cars.

It was a long, long ride, away from home, through so many suburbs they hardly knew. How can there be so many people in the world, thought Matilda, there’s too many. As the bus stopped and started more people got on and clambered up the stairs. Someone sat right behind Matilda and Frances, eating a pie, and Matilda was so hungry suddenly. But you couldn’t ask strangers for food, although you could if it was the war and you were starving to death, their father said. The war was different, people did anything to survive, he told them. They killed each other, just to keep living. You shouldn’t say things like that in front of the girls, said their mother. All right, their father said, I won’t say anything.

The bus conductor was making his way down the aisle, taking money for tickets. Uncle Paul paid for them all. He had paper money. He was rich.