Fire and Hemlock (6 page)

Polly forgot to take the picture home with her when she went back from Granny’s. Granny did not remind her. Thinking about it nine years later, Polly wondered if it was not really because Granny disapproved of Mr Lynn giving it to her. On the other hand, it could have been that Granny knew, as well as Polly did, that home was not a
Fire and Hemlock
sort of place.

Home had bright, flowered wallpaper with matching curtains. Polly thought, going to bed in her own room, that pulling the curtains was like pulling the walls across the windows.

When she did remember the picture, quite late that night, she opened her mouth to yell. Then she thought better of it. Mum was in one of her moods, stony-quiet and upright, and the slightest thing would send her off into one of her long grumbles. Polly knew this, although Dad was not there to say warningly, “Quiet – you’ll have Ivy in her discontents again!” Dad had gone away on a course, Mum said. So Polly shut her mouth and did not raise an outcry at forgetting her picture.

School started again. Everybody was talking about fireworks and bonfires, except Nina, who had to be different. Nina went round claiming that she was being followed by sinister strangers. Nobody knew whether to believe Nina or not, least of all Polly.

“You mustn’t speak to them,” she said, thinking of what Granny had said.

“No fear!” said Nina. “I’m going to tell my Dad about them.”

That made Polly wish
her
Dad would come home. She missed him. She spent a lot of time with Nina that week, round at Nina’s house. Mum was still in the mood, not speaking much and not much company. Nina’s house was much more fun. It was all lined with varnished wood inside and smelled of cooking spices. Nina’s toys were allowed to lie about on the floor, just anywhere. Nina had cars and Action Men and guns and Lego and dozens of electronic machines. Most of the batteries were dead, but they were still fun. Polly loved them.

The irony was that Nina much preferred Polly’s toys. By Friday evening she was sick of playing with cars. “Let’s go round to
your
house,” she said. “I want to play with your sewing machine and your dolls.”

Polly argued, but Nina won by saying, “I shan’t be your friend if we don’t.”

They set off. Nina’s Mum shrieked after them that Nina was not to be a nuisance and be back in an hour. It was getting dark by then, and streetlights were coming on. Nina’s glasses flashed orange as she looked over her shoulder. “I am being followed,” she said. It seemed to please her.

By this, Polly understood that it was a game of Nina’s. She was glad, because the idea of being followed in the dark would have been very frightening. “How many are there of them?” she asked, humouring Nina.

“Two,” Nina said. “When it’s the man, he sits in his car pretending to be someone’s Dad. The boy stands across the road, staring.”

They walked on until they came to the pillar box on the corner of Polly’s road. Nina knew Polly did not believe her. “I told my Dad,” she said, as if this proved it. “He took me to school this morning, but the man kept out of sight.”

He would, Polly thought, if he wasn’t there anyway. All the same, it was a relief to rush up the path to her own front door and burst breathlessly inside.

Ivy met them in the hall, carrying a long, fat envelope. She handed it to Polly. She was still in her mood. “This came for you,” she said in her stony mood-voice. “What have you been up to now?”

“Nothing, Mum!” Polly exclaimed, genuinely surprised. The envelope was addressed in Granny’s writing, to Miss Polly Whittacker. At the back, somewhat torn where Mum had slit the envelope open, Granny had written:
Sorry, Polly. I opened this. It wasn’t a mistake. You never know with strange men
. Inside was another envelope, fat and crackly, with a typed address to Polly at Granny’s house. It was slit open too. Polly looked at it, mystified, and then up at her mother. “Why did you open it as well?”

Nina took a look at their faces and tiptoed away upstairs to Polly’s room.

Ivy smoothed at her beautifully set hair. “It was from Granny,” she said in a stony voice. “It might – I thought – It could have been something to do with your father.” Two tears oozed from her eyes. She shook them away so angrily that some salty water splashed on Polly’s mouth. “Stop standing staring at me, can’t you!” she said. “Go upstairs and play!”

There seemed nothing Polly could do but climb the stairs to her room. There, Nina was busily setting out a dolls’ tea party. Polly could taste salt still, but she pretended not to notice it and sat on her bed and opened her letter. It was typed, like the envelope, but not in an official way. Polly could see mistakes in it, all the way down the first page, some crossed out with the right word written above in ink, some crossed by typed slanting lines and
sorry!
typed before the right word.

The paper it was typed on was a mad mixture, all different sizes. The first page was smooth and good and quite small. The next page was large and yellowish. There followed two pages of furry paper with blue lines on, which must have been torn out of a notebook, and the last pages had clumps of narrow lines, like telegraph wires, printed across them. Polly, after blinking a little, recognised these pages as music paper. At this stage, delicately and gently, almost holding her breath, Polly turned to the very last page. The end of the letter was halfway down it, followed by an extra bit labelled
P.S
. She read,
With best wishes to my assistant trainee-hero, Thomas G. Lynn.
The name was signed in ink, but quite easy to read.

It really was from Mr Lynn, then. Polly felt her whole face move, as if there was a tight layer under her skin, from solemn to a great, beaming smile. Polly, in those days, was slow at reading. Long before she had finished the letter, Nina had given up even threatening. She played crossly on the floor by herself, and only looked up once or twice when Polly laughed out loud.

Dear Polly,

After I had to run away so
abrbubtly
– sorry! – suddendly, I had quite a while to sit on the train and think, and it seemed to me that we still had a lot of details to settle conconcerning our secret lives. Most of the things are question
oin
s-sorry! – I need to aks you. You know more about thseses things than I do. But one thing I could settle was our first avdenture – sorry! – vadntrue – sorry! – job with the giant. I think it happened like this. Of course if you think differntly, please say so, and I shall risk your annoyance by agreeing with you. Here goes.

The first thing you must rememember is that Mr Thomas Piper is very strong. He may look exactly like me – not unlike and ostrich in gold – rimmed glasses – but he has muscles which I, in my false identity as a mere cellist, lack. Every morning he lifts mighty sin-sorry!-sun-blistered wooden shutters, two of them, from the windows of his shop and carries them away indoors. He follows this by carrying outside to the pavement such items as rolls of chicken wire neither you nor I could lift, piles of dustbins, graden rollers neither of us could move, and stacks of hefty white chamberpots that we would have to take one at a time. Every evening he takes it all in again and brings out the shuterts. He could, if he wished, win an Olympic Gold Medal for wieght-lifting, but this has never occurred to him.

In between customers, he idly sharpens axes and stares out into the street, thinking. Like me, he has an active mind, but not having been given the education which was thrust upon me, his mind whirrs about rather. He buys old books from junk shops and reads them all. Most of them are horribly out of date. His sister Edna, who, you tell me, hates him to spend money on useless things like books, tells him he is mad. Mr Piper thinks she may be right. At any rate, on this particular morning his thoughts are whirring about worse than ever, because he has been reading an old book called “Don Quixote,” about a tall thin man who had read books until he went mad and fought some windmills, thinking they were giants.

Mr Piper is staring out between dangling scrubbing brushes as he sharpens his axe, wondering if he is that mad himself, when the light is blocked from the door, once, twice, by something enormous going by. The fire-irons round the door knock together. Mr Piper blinks. For a moment he could have sworn that those were two huge legs, each ending in a foot the size of a Mini Metro, striding past his door. “I
am
that mad,” he thinks. He has gone back to sharpening his axe when he hears crashing from up the street. Then screams. Then running feet.

Edna calles from the back room. “What’s going on, Tom?”

A girl Mr Piper recofnises as Maisie Millet from the supermarket checkout goes running past, looking terrified. “Something at the supermarket, dear,” he calls back.

“Go and see!” Edna screams at him. She is unbearably curious. She likes to know everything that goes on in Stow Whatyoumacallit. But she cannot go out herslef because she always wears a dressing gown to save money and never takes her hair out of curlers.

Mr Piper, still holding his axe, goes out of his shop and stares up the srteet. Sure enough, there is broken glass over the pavement in front of the supermarket, and people are running away from it in all directions, shouting for help. A robbery, thinks Mr Piper, and runs towards it, axe in hand. He pases the phone booth on the way. The manager of the supermarket is in it, white-faced, dialing 999. The plate glass window of the supermarket has a huge hole in it, with notices about this week’s prices flapping in shreds around it. As Mr Piper races up, a white deep-freeze sails out through the hole and crashes into a parked car. Dozens of pale pink frozen chickens drop like bricks and skid across the road. People scream and scatter.

One person does not run. This is a small boy with rather long, fair hair. As Mr Piper stops and stares at the slithering chickens, this
boy girl
person comes hopping through the mess towards him.

“Thank goodness you’ve come, Tan Coul!” this person calls. “Do hurry! There’s a giant in the supermarket.”

This child suffers from too much imagination, Mr Piper thinks, looking down at
her
-sorry!-
him
. She-sorry!-he is madder than I am. “There are no such things as giants,” he syas. “What is really going on?”

Like an answer, there is a terrible roar from inside the broken window. Mr Piper wonders if his glasses need cleaning. A young man in white overalls from the butchery departmnent leaps through the hole in the window and runs as if for his life. Something seems to grab at him as he leaps. Whatever it is is snatched back immediately, and there is an even louder roar. It sounds like swearing.

Mr Piper is trying to convince himself that he did not, really and truly, see a huge hand trying to grab the younf man, when the boy says, “See that, Tan Coul? That was the giant’s hand. He cut his thumb on the window. That’s why he’s swearing. Let’s go in quickly, while he’s sucking it. There may be some more people stuck inside.”

Mr Piper looks down the street, where the supermarket manager is still frantically talking into the teolephone. There is no sign of police or fire brigade yet. It is clear something has to be done. Consoling himself with the thought that there must be a lunatic inside the supermarket even more insane than he is, he says, “Very well. Stay there,” and crunches through the broken glass to the window.

There is an awful mess inside. Shelves of things have been pushed this way and that. The floor is covered with mounds of salt and washing powder, broken jam jars and pools of cooking oil. There are holes in the walls where freezers have been ripped out. Toilet paper has been unreeled across everything. But the thing which causes Mr Piper to stop short by the checkout desks is the huge bulk he can see down at the far end. Something large and round shines balefully at him from there, surrounded by what seems to be barbed wire.

Could that thing really be a giant’s eye, peering at him from a giant’s hair, behind a giant’s doubled-up knees?

“I don’t
think
it’s a windmill,” he murmurs doubtfully to himself.

“Of course it isn’t,” says a voise at his elbow. He sees that the boy has followed him inside. “The giant’s sitting down against the end wall, with his knees up. He’s too big to stand up in here. That should make things easy. You can just chop his head off with your axe.” Mr Piper does not like
ve
even killing flies. He is quite convinced that the huge thing down at the end is an optical illusion of some kind. He tucks his axe under his arm and takes his glasses off to clean. The giant – or whatever – dissolves into a blur, which makes him feel much happier. “I told you to stay outsude,” he says to the boy.