Out of Time (7 page)

One boy, two girls. They shook hands as though he had returned from a victorious exploit.

‘You’re hungry.’

He nodded and stood awkwardly while food was brought to the table, cold meat on a thick wooden platter, a cooked root vegetable akin to a potato but with more flavour, small yellow tomatoes, spiked green leaves. Into an earthenware mug someone poured milk. Joe emptied it in one draught and, despite ten pairs of eyes watching him, wolfed down the first real meal he had eaten for countless weeks. He felt he ought to say something, make the equivalent of polite conversation, but nothing came to mind; and the young people round the table made no contribution. An uneasy silence reigned and he was relieved when Randolph lit a second lamp and led him out of the kitchen and down a corridor. His stomach full, exhausted from his day, Joe could barely walk but swayed from side to side as he stumbled up countless flights of stairs, through echoing rooms and collapsed somewhere on a bed.

*

Susie is alone in a cell. It is small. It has no window but she is used to small windowless spaces. The cell has a straw mattress on the floor. It has a bucket. That is all. She does not know where her parents are, there is no one to let her out and no one to take her skipping. She is a prisoner. She misses Susie Two, her charcoal and parchment. She sits on the mattress and imagines all that she would write.

From time to time water and food, thin soups and soggy potatoes are brought in by a female guard. She is large and impassive, her eyes dead, registering nothing. The first time Susie speaks to her her face is slapped. She does not try it again. Susie wonders how long she is going to be kept a prisoner.

Susie expects, after the first day, that her slop bucket will be emptied. But it is not. The smell is intolerable. Susie bangs long and loud on the door but no one takes notice. The bucket is emptied only after several days. She tries to be brave but finally she lies on the mattress and cries. It is all more than she can bear.

*

Joe woke to the unaccustomed luxury of a bed, a pillow, a light duvet. He thought he was back in his room at Bantage and need only wait for Mum to call before he was up and off to school. He drowsed lazily and thought about the coming day. What lessons had he got? What had happened the day before? He could not remember and eventually opened his eyes to the bare timbers of a sloping roof. Memory came flooding back and with it grief and longing. His former life, which had been near enough to touch, had once again slipped into the past.

The room he was in was bare, the only furniture a bed, a table, a chair. A window looked out on a roughly cut stretch of grass, a green bank, and above it a wood dominated by silver birch shimmering in the rays of the early sun. He put on his jeans, reduced to shreds, T shirt and hoody but did not cover his head. It seemed inappropriate. He opened the bedroom door which led onto a narrow, wood panelled corridor. There was no sound to guide him and he wandered through the rambling house which once must have housed a large family but now echoed to silence. He happened on a flight of narrow stairs and a small landing that swept, grander and larger, into a hall. This Joe descended and continued through a door to the left, down a corridor and, following the mouth watering smell of freshly baked bread, into the sunlit kitchen that faced the same grassy area as the room in which he had slept. It was large, dominated by the long refectory table at which he had eaten his meal the previous night. Heavy chairs ranged round it were elaborately carved, not unlike those he had seen rotting in the waste ground, though of superior craftsmanship. This Joe admired. It was, as far as he could see, the only concession to luxury. The rest of the kitchen was functional, bare brick walls mellow with the patina of past years, a wood burning stove, above it a bread oven. On the inside wall a generous fire burned below a spit. Shelving round the walls was laden with heavy earthenware pots. It reminded him of the ancient kitchens of country houses he had visited. He wondered if he was in a time warp.

Only Otto was there, of the others he had met last night there was no sign.

‘Food?’

‘Yes please.’

Milk, fresh bread.

Otto seemed the kind of boy they would label studious at school, bad at games, perhaps inclined to be bullied though he did not have the air of a victim. Joe made several attempts to draw him into conversation but Otto had a shut in quality that made open questioning embarrassing.

Breakfast finished Joe took the earthenware mug and plate he had used to a deep white sink by the window and rinsed them in a bowl of water. Otto watched and nodded, then led him outside into a small area scented by thyme. The kitchen garden. To their left, a tall trimmed beech hedge surrounded a spacious formal garden, landscaped into five triangular flowerbeds, their apex pointing towards a well which was protected by a convex wooden roof.

‘Haul up some water and bring it to the house.’

The tone was commanding. Joe turned the wooden handle, getting a firm grip on an elaborately carved face. A full bucket rose to the top, the water cool and clear. He carried it into a scullery opposite the kitchen. This had a brick floor and brick pillars supporting a stone slab on which rested two basins. Here he was left to strip and wash with a bar of gritty soap but before he could put on his clothes Otto brought a new set, a woven light brown tunic like his own, a darker pair of trousers, a leather belt, thonged sandals and a used pair of boots. This seemed to be the uniform they all wore. Otto picked up the Gap jumper and Joe’s Marks and Spencer pants, whose resistance to wearing out was absolute, and examined them curiously.

‘Do you want to keep these?’

‘Yes.’

‘You can’t wear that hood here.’

‘Why not?’

Otto looked at him with contempt.

They returned to the kitchen.

‘Where are the others?’

‘They will be back by nightfall.’

As an answer it was inadequate. Then, dismissively,

‘You can have today free.’

Free from what? Joe hovered but Otto turned his back. Joe left the kitchen and found his way back to his room. He hid his hoody under the mattress and wondered what to do. He felt aimless and disoriented and, for lack of any other activity, decided to explore the house.

On the landing below two heavy oak doors either side led to rooms facing the front. He pushed one open. He was in a large, rectangular room. Heavily boarded windows let in a modicum of light, enough for him to proceed and see that it contained no furniture, hangings or rugs. A door at the far end led into a second, larger room. Here too the windows were boarded, not even the faint daylight from the landing filtering in. The layout was the same, a long inner wall on his left, windows from floor to ceiling on his right and a door corresponding to the one he had entered. One room led into the other, corridor fashion. He went into the third room. This was the most spectacular, dominated by a huge mantelpiece over an open fireplace. He groped his way towards it, attracted by elaborate carvings of an extraordinary intricacy, even luminosity, for what had first drawn his eye towards them were pinpoint reflections of the sparse light. He ran his hands over the polished wood, felt the round heads and elongated bodies of carved animals, sharp pointed ears with intricate veining on the inside, the spiky leaves of ilex, circling one into the other in infinite complexity. He longed to tear the boards from the windows so he could feast his eyes on such remarkable workmanship. Instead, he touched it all over like a blind man, felt the shapes and sensed its life.

Other rooms had similar carvings but none as magnificent. All were boarded and empty.

It was eerie, alone in the semi-dark in the huge mansion.

A corridor running left and forming the corner of the house revealed a wing. Four doors corresponded to four unshuttered windows overlooking a yard. Joe opened one door. A wild young man looked at him in surprise. Joe muttered excuses and slammed out. Who could that have been? Randolph had said there were only five inhabitants, with him making the sixth. And he had seen them all. None looked like this boy. Yet there was something familiar about him, something that made Joe open the door again. The boy stared back. Joe moved further in. The boy moved too. With a galvanising shock Joe recognised himself reflected in a long mirror. He was tall, much taller than when he had last seen himself. The schoolboy had metamorphosed into a young man, tough, rough, hair jagged where he had tried to cut it, falling below his shoulders. He was thinner. Stubble covered his chin. The new clothes, the tunic hanging gracefully to his thighs, were not displeasing. He lingered, absorbing his new image.

That he was in someone’s bedroom he now noticed. Two beds stood in the corners, two chairs beside them, a small table and colourful, handmade rugs on the floor. He hastily withdrew and descending a narrow, winding staircase, found himself back in the kitchen.

Otto was still there.

‘Where do you come from?’ he asked, not turning towards him.

Joe was shocked by the unexpectedness of the question. He hesitated.

‘I have been living in a cave,’ he said.

An inadequate reply but it was all he was prepared to give away. He did not trust these people.

‘And you, where do you come from? Who are you?’

Otto ignored the questions as though they had not been uttered and Joe felt too intimidated to repeat them. He turned away, uncertain where to go or what to do. He wandered outside and sat on a tree stump facing the house whose worn red bricks glowed through lush creepers. It was even larger than he had surmised the night before. He counted eight shuttered windows on the first floor, another eight on the second, one of them the room he had slept in. They were bisected in the middle by four long, narrow windows reaching from top to bottom. These were clearly over the stairwell. Elaborately built brick chimneys adorned the roof. No belfries, he noted with relief. Two wings extended at right angles either side, symmetrically facing one another. More windows, more shuttered rooms. He found at the back a set of crumbling stables, doors swinging loosely.

Joe had had little truck with horses. His grandparents had given him riding lessons when he was eleven as a birthday present but he had enjoyed neither the riding nor the associated equine myths and conventions. The people who looked after horses seemed like a different species. He preferred football and footballers. But now, faced with empty stalls, he felt the absence of a horsy presence. Stray bits of straw and hay lodged in corners, scattered grains of corn, the pommel of a disintegrating saddle upended on the cobbles, a stirrup rusted with age, were the only mementoes of the life there had once been. All that remained was silence and hollow emptiness. It filled him with desolation and despair. He sank into a corner and wept, mourning his past and fearful of the future marching inexorably into the present.

Lonely though it had been, he regretted leaving the life he had carved out for himself on the cliff and contemplated his new situation with growing resentment. He had no wish to stay with these people who were off-hand, unwelcoming and rude, insensitive to his plight. He made a half-hearted attempt to return to the river but failed to find his way through the thick woods. It was useless, all useless.

He returned to the kitchen as the light was failing. Otto and Randolph were preoccupied, attending to an iron cauldron bubbling on the stove and a hunk of meat roasting on the spit.

‘That’s your deer.’

Randolph pointed towards it and threw more vegetables into the pot. A wave of nausea overcame Joe and he bent down to hide it, swallowing the vomit that had risen, sickly and sweet, into his throat. He felt embarrassed by his squeamishness, accustomed as he had now become to killing, skinning, cooking and eating animals, his only companions in the wild nature he had inhabited. But there had been a plea in the deer’s eyes as he bashed its brains out that haunted him. He would have preferred never to eat meat again but knew this was impractical. God, or whoever was in charge, had willed that living things preyed on one another. Divine distribution. He remembered with nostalgia the neatly packed lines of supermarket meat that concealed their association with the animals from which it had been cut.

‘You don’t have to eat it, if you don’t want to.’

Joe looked at Otto in surprise. How did he know? The other boy came in, relieving Joe of the necessity of replying.

‘I’ve hung the rest.’

Meredith was short, stocky and tough. He had a ruddy complexion, clear blue eyes and reddish hair; his hands were horny and calloused. Like Randolph, he sported a short beard, the same colour as his hair. He looked like a Viking.

‘I’ll help the girls finish.’

He spoke with the same soft burr as they all did, lengthening the vowels and lingering on last consonants.

Joe felt ill at ease. Towards dusk the two girls came in and everyone sat round the table. The one beside him, Belinda, was extraordinarily pretty with pale blue hooded eyes, fair hair that curled gently, a face like a doll’s and a smile that showed her gums. This might have been ugly. In her it was an attribute. Perhaps here was somebody he could talk to. He tried a few opening gambits and she was affable enough; but not forthcoming.

The meal over, he offered to help clear up. This was refused.

‘You start work tomorrow.’

Belinda left the room and he followed her into the scullery. She was putting on warm, outside clothes.

‘Where are you going?’ he asked

She looked at him in astonishment.

‘On guard duty of course. It’s my turn.’

‘Guard against whom?’

‘Don’t pretend you don’t know.’

She turned away. Joe, rebuffed, went back to the kitchen. Otto was again on his own and Joe could think of nothing to say to him. After an awkward pause he made his way in the dark until he found his room and, more puzzled and bewildered than before, watched the moon rise behind the hills.

The other girl, Kathryn, fetched him at sunrise.

‘I’m to show you the farm.’

She took him, in the early light, past the house. He paused by the carved front door.