The Homeward Bounders (11 page)

I don't know what happened to Helen. My lot took me to a bathroom sort of place, where they made sure I was thoroughly washed. I suppose they liked their meat hygienic. Then they gave me one of their neat whitish suits. I didn't mind that. My old clothes had been pretty beaten up in Helen's world.

All the time, the Bounds called, harder every minute. The result was that I kept trying to get away. I made pointless dash after pointless dash. I was so desperate that I didn't care if Rule Two got them for interfering with me. And they caught me each time, firm and businesslike, as if they were used to it. The final time they grabbed me, they led me out of the hall and through the square towards the jungle. I felt almost better. That was the way the Bounds were calling me. The only two things I had to worry about then were how to get something to eat, and how not to
be
something to eat. And what had happened to Helen, of course.

I needn't have worried about Helen. We came in a crowd along the jungle path to that very selfsame clearing where the Boundary was, and the women came along with us, bringing Helen. I never found out what had gone on, but I don't think they had managed to bathe Helen. They certainly hadn't managed to change her clothes. She was still in the same muddy black outfit. She still didn't look as if she had a face. And there was a huge snake wrapped round her shoulders, hissing and rearing at people. Everyone was keeping a rather respectful distance. I thought at first that the snake was another trick of hers with that arm. But it wasn't. It was a real snake.

The next bit was bad. They kept us surrounded, at the edge of the clearing, and we were both nearly frantic to get to the Boundary in the middle. But they wouldn't let us move from beside a post they had set up by the trees. That post was one of the nastiest things I have ever seen. The top of it was carved and painted into a cluster of cruel little faces. All the faces were eating one another. Painted blood ran down the faces and down the post. Underneath the post stood the polite, social man who had been standing in the bush to meet us the day before. He didn't look social at all. He looked pleased. He was stripped to the waist and, in his hand, he was hefting a nice sharp brass hatchet.

“It may be all right,” I said to Helen, not really believing it. “Something bad's bound to happen to him if he goes for us with that chopper.”

“Yes,” she said. “But he'll have chopped us in two by then. Take hold of my hand and run when I tell you.”

I wasn't too keen to get near that snake of Helen's, but I moved over and took hold of her left hand. The snake put its tongue out at me, but otherwise took no notice. Helen used her right hand to part her hair and took a long careful look up at that nasty post. Then she stretched her right arm into the air and made it turn into the same carving as the post. Only hers was alive.

Each of her fingers budded into a cruel little head, and each as it budded turned and bit the next one. The palm of her hand swelled into two more heads, and her wrist into three, all gnawing away with white fangs. Blood—it looked real blood—was running down her arm before it began to turn into a post, and it went on running as the cruel mouths chewed. Helen turned it this way and that. Everyone near backed away, appalled—and I didn't blame them. It made me forget I was hungry, that thing.

As soon as a space was cleared, the snake unwrapped itself from Helen and slid to the ground, which made everyone back away further. The only one who didn't was the man with the hatchet. He came for us.

“Run!” Helen shouted.

And we did run, like mad for the middle of the clearing, with Helen holding her horrible arm over her head and the man leaping behind, swinging his hatchet. What he thought when we vanished, I don't know. We were in the middle of a carnival the next second.

That's the trouble with Boundaries. You often don't have time to catch your breath. I was still thinking I was going to be chopped in two any second, when I was being whirled away in a dance by a big white rabbit with balloons bobbing over his head. Other strange figures were dancing and laughing all round me. I tried to keep my head and hang on to Helen in the crowd, but she was far more confused than I was, and she let go. It took me ages to shake off the rabbit. I thought I'd lost her. I went fighting my way through the laughing, dancing, dressed-up crowd in a panic. Carnival music was stomping and hooting in my ears, and people kept swinging me round to dance, or handing me pies and toffees and oranges, and it really was only by the merest luck I found her. She was sitting on the steps of the bandstand, shaking her right hand and wringing its fingers.

“I hope I don't have to do that again,” she said to me, just as if I had been there all along. “That hurt.”

“I bet it did,” I said. “Thanks. Have a toffee.”

“You may well thank me,” Helen said, but she took the toffee. “If you get us into another mess like that, I shall go away and leave you in it. What do we do now?”

“Have fun,” I said, “by the looks of it.”

We did have fun in that world. We called it Creema di Leema when we talked about it afterwards, because of the drink that made everyone so happy there. It was like a sort of creamy orange juice. It never made you really drunk—just happy and bubbly. We drank it of course. Everyone did there, from babies. You couldn't
not
drink it. They forced it on you. I think the
Them
playing old Creema di Leema thought it would be funny to have everyone a little drunk all the time. Anyway, it was one of the best worlds I've ever been in—like a month-long party.

Being a bit tanked up all the time, I started being as rude to Helen as she was to me. It turned out to be the right way to treat her. We slanged one another all the time. I stopped being afraid of her—I admit I was, up to then: she was so weird. And it helped that, in Creema di Leema, she was always making mistakes. She wasn't quite so capable as she seemed, and she really didn't understand the serious way they took their jollity there. She had been brought up too solemn.

A lot of her mistakes had to do with this power she had over creepy-crawlies. She always said that wasn't a gift: she just loved critters. And she did love them. If I'd had a row with Helen and I ever wanted to soothe her down, the surest way to do it was to find a worm or an earwig or a rat and give it her. She would hook her hair behind her ears and bend over the thing, beaming. “Oh isn't it beautiful!” she would say.

“No it isn't,” I would say. “I just gave it you to keep you happy.”

The trouble is, on a world of drunks, you have to go carefully with the snakes and spiders—and with the elephant trunks, for that matter. Old people didn't find them funny. In old age, they had taken enough Creema di Leema on board to start seeing snakes where no snakes were. They didn't take kindly to real ones.

Helen and I got a job as the front and back halves of a pantomime horse. We did a turn nightly on the Esplanado di Populo while the acrobats changed costume. We never could keep in step with one another, but that was supposed to be funny. They could hear us counting, “One, two—one, two—
change
step—no the left foot, you fool!” and fell about laughing.

After a week we had earned enough money to get Helen some clothes. We had to go from shop to shop for them, because almost no one on Creema di Leema wears black, and Helen insisted on it. But she got them in the end, by sheer persistence. After another week, I was able to change my cannibal clothes too—I hated them by then. Mine were a nice dark bright red all over. The shop people thought they were just as sober as Helen's.

Helen celebrated my new getup by acquiring a bright red and black slippery snake I didn't know about. She included it that night in her end of the horse—the back end. It made itself known to me by getting up the back of my red shirt. I came half out of the front of the horse, red in the face and swearing horribly. The audience shrieked with laughter, until I managed to shake the blessed snake out of my clothes and it went whizzing across the stage into the crowd. Then they just shrieked.

“It was
not
a snake!” Helen yelled at me. “It's a kind of lizard.”

“I don't care! You're not to do that again!” I bawled. “Get back in your horse.
Left
, right—
left
, right.”

But they booed us off the stage. We nearly lost our job over it.

Another of Helen's mistakes happened when I'd let her be the front end of the horse for a change. She said it wasn't fair, not being able to see. From the front of the horse you could see quite well, out through its mouth. Helen stood in the middle of the stage and stared at the audience.

“Keep your mind on your job!” I growled at her. You get hot and nasty all wrapped in horse and bent down with your arms wrapped round the person in front.

But Helen gave a squeal and ran for the edge of the stage. It took me by surprise. I sat down and brought Helen's half of the horse down on top of me. She kicked to get free but she couldn't. The audience loved it. I didn't.

“Let me get up!” Helen yelled. “That's my mother in the audience! I haven't seen her since I was five!”

She got up and rushed to the front of the stage. I was still sitting down, so I was dragged along behind her. “No it isn't!” I shouted as I slid along. “Stop it! Listen! It can't be your mother!”

Luckily, the audience thought it was the funniest thing they had seen when the horse broke in half and the head turned angrily round to face the rear end. “What do you mean?” snapped Helen. “It
is
my mother!”

“No it isn't. Shut up!” I whispered. “Your mother's in your world. She must be, because she can't walk the Bounds. This is someone your mother would have been if she'd been born here instead. She may even have a daughter like you here, but I hope not for her sake!”

“I don't believe you,” said Helen.

“Think about it,” I said. “You know the ways of the worlds better than I do.” I told her how I'd met the printer who was a hairy herdsman in the cattle world. “Anyway,” I said, “you'll frighten the poor woman to death if you go rushing up to her as half a horse. Then the horse opens, and a thing like
you
pops out. She'd have a stroke. Now shut up. You'll get us booed again.”

“All right,” Helen said sulkily. “I believe you. But you're still wrong.”

The front half of the horse turned and backed into the back half—pretty hard: Helen usually gave at least as good as she got—and the show went on. Helen was in her worst mood for days after that. Not that I blame her. It would upset me to meet my mother like that too. In fact, it made me think of my Home then, as hard as Helen was evidently thinking about hers. We could hardly be civil to one another for days.

But we were good friends enough when the Bounds called again for me to hang on to Helen as we went to the Boundary. I'd got so that I'd feel lost without someone to be rude to.

It was about an hour before dark when we made our next move. We were both sorry to go. The Esplanada was just starting to liven up for the night. Crowds of happy people were drifting about, offering one another swigs of Creema di Leema, and the colored lights were coming on. They looked particularly good, because the sky was yellow, with white stars pricking in, and the rows of red and green and blue lights swung against the yellow. We had a last nip of Creema when the call came and drifted up the Esplanada. As I said, I kept tight hold of Helen's sleeve. We didn't know quite where the Boundary was here, and I was taking no chances.

“We shall be quite well off,” Helen said. “I've got lots of money.”

“Then give it away,” I said. “People will just laugh at it in the next place. Nothing varies so much as money. About the only thing that seems valuable all over is gold.”

We passed money out in handfuls to any children we came to. In exchange, we got two balloons each, one of those whistles that blows out a long paper tube with a pink feather on the end, and a bag of sherbert sweets. We hadn't meant to make an exchange. But Creema people are like that.

And we couldn't have collected a more unsuitable set of objects. The twitch took us just opposite the bandstand and landed us in the middle of a war. We saw the same yellow sky, with the same pricking stars. The lights were gone of course, and it was open country, with bushes where there had been houses. As we arrived, there was a yammering over to the right and a row of angry red twinkles. Little things went whining
phwee
overhead.

“Get down!” I said, and pulled Helen and threw myself. We both went over on our faces and the balloons burst. They sounded just like the gunshots going off all round.

The reply to the yammering was a big whistling, and a tremendous explosion, bright as day. I could see earth and flaming bits going up like a fountain. That was how I noticed that another Homeward Bounder had come through at the same time as us. He was standing outlined against the explosion, looking thoroughly bewildered, and he was wearing white, which made him a perfect target.

I dived up at him and grabbed him and pulled him down too. “Get down, you fool! Don't you know a war when you see one?”

I didn't have much of a sight of him, but you don't need very long to get an idea of a person. He only looked a year or so older than I did. He looked to be a right one, too. He was the image of all the posh boys from the posh school—Queen Elizabeth Academy—that we used to call names after. He had a long fair serious face, all freckles, and nice curly fair hair. The shape of him was posh too, if you see what I mean. I am scraggly, with a wiry twist to the tops of my legs. He was straight—what you call well-knit—straight all over, including the way he looked at me with straight serious blue eyes.