The Ear, the Eye and the Arm (29 page)

"When can we go home?" he asked.

"Not yet! Good heavens, you're shedding germs all over the place. If the health department caught you, they'd put you in quarantine for a month. There's too much margarine on that toast, Rita. You may have the next piece dry to make up for it."

"Couldn't we talk to Mother and Father on the holophone?" The thought of actually seeing his parents' faces after so long made Tendai's throat feel tight. He took a deep breath to keep from crying in front of Rita.

"They're still in Beijing. I understand they took the opportunity to enjoy a cruise on the Yellow River —
very
luxurious, with thirty-course dinners." Mrs. Horsepool-Worthingham's face became wistful.

"You mean — you mean they went off on a
vacation?
With us missing?" gasped Rita.

"You mustn't be selfish," said the woman, sipping her tea. "Adults need their time off, indeed they do. Why, Anthony would have had me at his beck and call if I hadn't put my foot down."

Kuda began to wail from a back room. Rita jumped up.

"That's exactly the kind of thing I mean!

Sit down. He won't get well any faster if you coddle him." Rita looked anxiously at the door. Kuda's cries sounded angry rather than frightened. Rita finally returned to the table. "He's only whining for attention, you see," explained Mrs. Horsepool-Worthingham. "Anthony used to do that, but I soon put him right."

Anthony, Tendai reminded himself, was the Mellower. Tendai remembered the time he broke his arm during one of the martial arts classes. The Mellower waited on him day and night. He told him stories; he fed him treats; he even brought him a chameleon from Mbare Musika. It was hard to believe this was his mother.

A crash sounded from the back of the house. Mrs. Horsepool-Worthingham jumped up. She, Rita and Tendai hurried toward the noise. Glass tinkled; pieces of wood were ripped, groaning, from a wall. Kuda wasn't yelling anymore.

The Dobermans, thought Tendai, with his heart pounding. But when they all crowded into the back room, the dogs were nowhere in sight. Instead, Trashman beamed happily as he perched Kuda on his wide shoulders. The window had been too small for him to enter through, so he had ripped out part of the wall. Mrs. Horsepool-Worthingham was so outraged, she was unable to speak. She opened and shut her mouth like a fish.

"Strong, isn't he?" remarked Rita.

The woman at last got back her voice. "You
juggernaut!
You
dinosaur!
Look what you've done! Oh, my poor, poor house!" She knelt in the bits of plaster and glass. "I'm a poor old woman with no money. How can I afford the repairs? Oh, why did I take you little fiends off the streets?"

"What's a juggernaut?" asked Rita.

"Not
now"
Tendai hissed. He knelt beside the Mellower's mother and tentatively patted her arm. She pushed him away. "I'm sure Father will pay for the repairs," he began. "Father always does the right thing. He might even give you a reward."

Mrs. Horsepool-Worthingham looked up with an expression Tendai didn't exactly like.

"He won't do that. He says rewards only encourage gang members to hold people for ransom," said Rita.

Tendai pinched her leg, and she kicked him. "This is different. We aren't being held for ransom. It's more like paying rent. Yes, that's it. Rent for use of the house and for food."

"And baby-sitting," added Rita.
 
"How much
do
nannies get paid?"

"Nannies!" exploded Mrs. Horsepool-Worthingham. "I'll thank you to remember who I am! My mother was a member of parliament, and my father was a high court justice. Nanny, indeed! Mr. Worthingham, my late husband, ran for city council ten times."

"Did he catch it?" said Rita before Tendai could stop her.

Mrs. Horsepool-Worthingham's nostrils flared so widely, they turned white. "I'm going to put the lot of you outside. I have never been so insulted in my life! I shall give you a quarter for the pay phone — there's one at the public library. You may call the city health department and ask them to prepare beds at the infectious-diseases hospital!"

"No. Please," said Tendai. "We don't think you're a nanny at all, do we, Rita?"

And to his relief, Rita apologized. She did so with charm and apparent sincerity. Mrs. Horsepool-Worthingham relaxed. "Very well, you may stay. But only if that creature remains in the garden. One more incident -—
one more
— and out you go. Now! You may sweep up that mess, Tendai. Rita, take care of your little brother. It's clear I shall have to take steps to avoid having the house pulled down about my ears."

It wasn't easy persuading Trashman to give up Kuda, but at last Tendai got the man to climb back through the hole in the wall. The robot was sent to fetch tools; Tendai hammered plywood over the hole and broken window. The room was dark, but it would have to stay that way until Father paid for the repairs. And Father would certainly do that. Whether he also gave Mrs. Horsepool-Worthingham a reward remained to be seen.

We can't travel now, Tendai told himself. Kuda's still sick. But deep down, he knew he himself was afraid to leave. He still felt weak, and his skin was covered with itchy chicken-pox blisters. The Mellower's mother rubbed them with olive oil.

"Two dollars a bottle," she said crossly as she examined Tendai's chest. "Still, we can't send you home looking like a cheese grater, can we?”

Twenty-eight

Quarantine, to Mrs. Horsepool-Worthingham, did not mean sitting idle. As soon as Rita's and Tendai's fevers were down, she had them weeding, polishing, sweeping and painting. Tendai wondered what she did when only the robot was around.

The garden had been allowed to go wild, except for the area on each side of the front walk. Now the children were set to cutting grass and digging flower beds. They toiled until the sweat ran down into their eyes.

Still, Tendai found it pleasant to get his hands into the good red soil. He was becoming an expert on such things. The ground in Dead Man's Vlei was gray and sickly. The earth of Resthaven was heavy with clay: it baked hard in the sun. Mrs. Horsepool-Worthingham's garden had been lovingly worked with compost for many years until it crumbled like a rich cake in his fingers.

"The red color is due to iron," she told him. "Good for blood, good for sap." And it must have been, because the weeds rioted everywhere. Now and then, in the tall grass, they came across statues of little men. Rita screamed when she encountered the first one.

"I thought it was one of the Dobermans," she explained. Tendai studied it curiously. It was about two feet high with a stocking cap and white beard.

"That's a garden gnome," said the Mellower's mother. "He watches over the plants."

Tendai and Rita nodded in appreciation. "It's a fetish," Rita whispered. "I didn't know the English tribe had them." They carefully trimmed the lawn around the gnomes, of which they eventually found fifteen. When they planted the marigolds, they put a flowered border around each statue.

Inside the house, they sanded and polished the scratches out of the furniture. They waxed the floor, took down curtains to wash and arranged books on the shelves. Rita polished the eyes of Son of Steel until they shone like jewels.

"This is fun," said Rita as she dumped an armload of twigs from a roof gutter to the yard below. Tendai had his legs hooked around an old chimney as he cut away the wisteria vine that threatened to topple it. He smiled in agreement as he wiped the sweat from his face.

Down below, Mrs. Horsepool-Worthingham threw a rock at Trashman, who was working his way through a mango tree. It bounced off his broad back. "She ought to leave well enough alone," Rita whispered. When Trashman was driven away from the fruit trees, he ripped open the Doberman cage to get at the steaks. This upset the Mellower's mother so much, she retired to a far wing of the house.

Tendai wondered what she did there. The property was so large, he hadn't explored all of it yet. And he wasn't welcome in all of it either. That wasn't surprising. Father had never invited him to play in the library. Elders had their mysteries, which children disturbed at their peril. But still he wondered, when she took down the sherry bottle and withdrew down a vine-shadowed walkway, what she was up to.

Where, for example, was the holophone? She must have had one to call the Mellower. Why wasn't he allowed to use it? No one could catch chicken pox over the phone. The more Tendai thought about it, the more he came to the same conclusion: Mrs. Horsepool-Worthingham didn't want them to contact home. But why would she not want them to?

"Tendai! Rita! Come prepare dinner,' the woman called from a window. Rita dropped a last load of twigs and dusted off her hands. Tendai watched a blue-and-yellow-striped lizard scurry out of the wisteria and wriggle across the roof tiles before he followed Rita down the ladder.

"Guess what we're having for dinner,' Rita said brightly as they washed their hands at a sprinkler.

"Don't start," said Tendai.

"Yummy canned peas. Lovely boiled squash and cream crackers with — are you ready? —
fish paste à la margarine.
The best kind, with the little bones inside."

"We've eaten worse."

"And for dessert, an
entire
graham cracker with stewed guavas from which most of the grubs have been removed."

"Are you complaining about my food?" said Mrs. Horsepool-Worthingham from the window.

"No, indeed. I look forward to it," Rita said, bowing.

"I'm not made out of money like your father. If you want larks' tongues on toast, you'll have to whistle for it!" The woman slammed the window.

"Why do you do that?" said Tendai wearily.

"Because there's perfectly good food in this house. Steaks for the dogs, cream for Pasha's Favorite, cakes for those awful visitors." The awful visitors were the women who belonged to the Animal Fanciers' Society. They came in ones and twos, sipped expensive tea and ate little almond tarts.

Rita and Tendai were banished to a far room when the women arrived, but they always crept back. It was a game. They moved silently between the hedge and window to watch the tea parties from deep shade. They were greatly curious about English customs, and Rita pointed out that they could get Scout badges in anthropology if they took notes.

The visitors paid as much attention to their animals as Garikayi's clan did to cattle. Each dog or horse was lovingly described. The ladies ate from a communal bowl of snacks, although they transferred the food to personal plates. To be polite, each always left a half-eaten almond tart behind, a habit that drove Rita wild. These were later fed to Slasher and Fang.

"It's her house. We can't tell her how to run it," Tendai said. Rita squared her jaw exactly as Granny did when the She Elephant needled her.

Now Rita and Tendai fired up the old coal stove in the kitchen, cut grubs out of the guavas and boiled the squash. The late-afternoon sun slanted over the wall, highlighting blood-red petals from the rose tree that framed the window. Swallows darted in and out of clay nests built under the eaves.

Tendai sighed with contentment. Of course he would rather be home, but they had been gone so long, home had grown somewhat hazy in his mind. In the meantime, it was extremely pleasant to laze in Mrs. Horsepool-Worthingham's kitchen after a vigorous day's work. The teakettle purred on the stove. The squash bubbled. Pasha's Favorite burped as his stomach worked on the sardines he had had for lunch.

"I shall retire for a few moments' peace," Mrs. Horsepool-Worthingham announced as she removed the sherry bottle from the pantry. "Ring the bell when dinner is served." She went off to the wing Tendai hadn't explored. He rose to follow, but Rita put her hand on his arm.

"Kuda," she said. And of course she was right. Kuda's welfare was more important than satisfying his curiosity.

If it hadn't been for his little brother, Tendai would have been completely happy. The
 
little
 
boy had
 
a
 
far worse
 
case
 
of chicken pox than he or Rita. Furthermore, he had no patience with it. "I hate being sick!" he screamed. "I want Mama! Make me better now! Now! Now! Now!" And so, to keep Trashman from ripping out another wall, Kuda had been moved to a tiny room at the center of the house.