The Outside Child (6 page)

“I told you. Brothers and sisters are different.”

“I wish I’d had the chance to find out.”

My chest grew tight as I thought of it; playing with George and Annabel, taking them to the adventure playground, teaching them games. I wondered if Annabel was
ever teased about her hand. I thought, if someone teased her when I was there, I’d tear their ears off.

I wondered if Plato had noticed her hand. I didn’t like to mention it in case he hadn’t. I was sorry and ashamed for Annabel.

Plato was watching me. He said, “If you want to get to know them, you can. We can come in the holidays. I expect they go to play in the cemetery. Or there may be a proper park somewhere. If we hang about, we could see where they go. You could speak to them.”

“I wouldn’t dare.” I had seen them. I had heard George talking. I knew where they lived. I hadn’t thought about what would happen next. I had seen them and got safely away without any complications and that was enough for the moment. What I wanted now was to go home and just think about them. Quietly, and on my own.

Plato was watching me with a disgusted expression.

“You can’t start a thing and then give it up, just like that. I thought you were really interested in Annabel and George, that you thought it was really
important.
I wouldn’t have wasted my time if I’d known you only wanted to see them just once, and then pack it in.”

“I don’t
know
what I want,” I said. “Now that I’ve seen them, I feel a bit funny. I don’t know what I want to do next. Or what we
can
do.”

“I’ve been thinking about that,” Plato said. “We can just watch the house, follow them when they go out, find out if they are ever alone. Easy enough to make friends in a park, or a playground. Or if you fancy something a bit more exciting we could kidnap them. We wouldn’t scare them, just make it seem like a game. We’d hide them somewhere, and give them plenty to eat, and we could send a letter to their mother saying she can have them back as soon as she agrees to your seeing them whenever you want to. They’d be sort of
hostages
.”

He was spluttering with enthusiasm for this ridiculous
plan. Because I had nothing else to suggest, I felt let down and peevish. I said, “It’s only terrorists who take hostages, and we’d be caught, anyway. Sent to prison or something. I’ll be in quite enough trouble if the Aunts find out I didn’t go to school today. I shan’t know what to tell them. I can’t tell them the truth.”

“You could,” Plato said. “You mean, you don’t want to. The truth is the easiest thing almost always, but the next best thing is a sensible lie. You just have to think yourself into it till it feels natural. That way you don’t trip yourself up.”

I groaned and he looked at me, pushing his glasses up on his nose. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll think of something. Don’t worry.”

*

“That boy is a bad influence,” Aunt Sophie said.

She frowned as she spoke, but only because she thought she ought to be cross with me. In fact, she was angrier with Maureen who had popped her head over the fence while Aunt Bill was gardening. “Of course, soon as Bill asked her what she was doing at home, that young madam was happy to tell her there was no school for your class today,” Aunt Sophie said, with a sniff. “Why didn’t you tell us, Jane? It’s not like you to be deceitful. Don’t blame it on Plato.”

“I thought that was what
you
were doing. He’s not a bad influence. It was
my
fault that I didn’t tell you we were on holiday. He hadn’t told his mother because she’d have made him stay home and do housework, or go to the launderette, or do all the shopping.”

“Is she as bad as that? I thought she was just a lonely sort of woman, not some kind of slave driver.”

Aunt Sophie was frowning properly now. Omitting to say that I had a day’s holiday was one thing; blackening a person’s character, quite another.

I muttered, “Well, anyway, she never lets him have any time to himself. And I thought, if we were late home, she
might telephone you. And you know what would have happened then. If you knew where we were you’d have told her. You know you hate lying.”

I hoped I sounded sarcastic and that she would take it to heart. Although she hadn’t actually
told
me I was alone in the world, she had let me believe it.

But she didn’t seem to hear the tone of my voice, or notice the piercing look that I gave her. She had stopped frowning and was smiling at me. She said, “Where did you go, dear?”

“Out,” I said. “Out and about.” Stick as close as you can to the truth was Plato’s advice. Not that he followed it himself, I had noticed. But then he was more practised at lying than I was. “We went to London,” I said. “I know you don’t like me to travel alone, but I didn’t think you’d mind my going with Plato. He wanted to go to a bookshop.”

This was the right kind of excuse for Aunt Sophie. She said in an interested voice, “Did he find what he wanted?”

My mind was a blank. Plato hadn’t suggested a book he might have wanted and I couldn’t think of one. I said, “He just wanted to browse. There’s not much of a choice in that shop in the High Street.”

“That’s true,” Aunt Sophie said. But she was looking distant as if she meant just the opposite.

I thought, crossly, that Aunt Bill would have believed me!

Then Aunt Sophie surprised me. She said, “I’m so sorry to question you, dear. Bill and I worry about you, but that’s no excuse for not giving you enough freedom. I’ll talk to Bill about it. We’d like to know where you’re going and when you’ll be back, but we’ll try not to pry in the future. After all, we know we can trust you.”

My father was back at sea. He had sent me a postcard from Southampton that said he was off again and would see me next time. He put dozens of kisses round the edge of the postcard.

I telephoned Shipshape Street. Sometimes a woman’s voice answered and then I put the receiver down quickly. But if it was Annabel or George, I hung on while they said, “Hallo,” or “Who’s that?” or, if it was Annabel, “Do you want my Mummy?”

Then one day Annabel called out, “Mummy, it’s that person who doesn’t speak, only listens.”

I thought of my musical box. I had had it as long as I could remember. It had belonged to my mother and when I was small, two little drummers used to spring up when you opened the lid. They stopped working when I was five and took the box with me to school, but the music still played; a pretty, tinkling tune.

I put it ready beside the telephone. Annabel answered and I lifted the lid. She said, “Oh,” as the tune began playing, and laughed when it finished, and said, “Come here, George. Listen. It’s a music box.”

It was a good way of hearing their voices and getting to know them as they talked to each other. George said one time, “Is it magic, An’bel?” And I heard her explain that it was one of those things like the Time or the Weather Forecast that the telephone told you if you rang the right number. She said, “I expect it’s got turned round
somehow.” I thought that was clever and sweet. George said, very excited, “Then it
is
magic, isn’t it?” And she said, sounding very grown-up, “Not really, not real, fairy magic. Just a mistake of the telephone people.”

*

Aunt Bill and I were supposed to go to Dorset at the end of term, but Aunt Bill’s friend, who had been at art school with her, wrote to say that the twins had got chicken pox badly and it would be better if we could go later on, towards the end of the holidays. I tried to sound sorry when the letter arrived, because Aunt Bill had been looking forward to being in the country, seeing her friend, tramping the hills, and painting wild flowers and berries, but I can’t have been very convincing. Aunt Bill looked at me in a puzzled way and said, “I thought you enjoyed going there, Jane. You had a fine time last year. Organising those little children.”

That was before I found out I had a real brother and sister. I said, “I expect I’ve grown out of playing families. Kids can get boring.”

“She’s got better things to do these holidays, Bill,” Aunt Sophie said. And she winked at me.

Naturally, Plato’s real plans were different. “What spies do is find a house near the one they want to watch, and get in
somehow, rent a room, something like that, and settle down with a telescope and a camera with a zoom lens.”

I let him run on, since it seemed to amuse him and there was no one around to hear him being so childish. And in fact to begin with, when we went to Shipshape Street the first week of the holidays, the laugh was on me. There was an empty house opposite Number 22, with a builder’s board up, and scaffolding, and a stack of bricks in the little front garden, although no one was working yet. There was no side entrance, but at the end of the terrace a cinder path led round the back along the ends of the gardens. To listen to Plato, you would think he had planned it. “Perfect,” he said. “What did I tell you?”

“We can’t break in,” I said. “It’s trespassing. We’ll get into trouble.”

“Only if we’re caught,” Plato said, as we marched along the cinder path. “Even then we’d only be told to push off. Who’s going to fuss over a couple of little kids playing?”

He wriggled his shoulders and seemed to shrink inside his clothes so that he looked much younger, around ten, and mischievous. I said, “If we’re caught, I warn you, I’ll run. Leave you to do all the talking.”

But there was no one around. The cinder path was empty except for the dustbins, each painted with the number of the house it belonged to. The dustbins for Number 19 were empty and the back gate swung open, loose on its hinges. Inside, the garden was jungle; apple and pear trees grown straggly so that their branches met over our heads, and rambler roses and clematis twined among them. No one had pruned them this year and perhaps last year, too; the ground was soft with the leaves of last autumn. The fences were high and although we could hear children playing somewhere quite close, they couldn’t see us and we couldn’t see them.

“It must have been empty for ages,” Plato whispered. The windows on the ground floor were boarded and a
couple of planks nailed across the back door. There was a sash window half-way up the wall, between the ground and the first floor, but there was no way of reaching it. A drainpipe at the side looked too rusty and old to be trusted.

I had lost my nerve anyway. Peering in through the planks, through the glass of the back door, I thought the inside of the house looked dangerously derelict, with a jagged hole in the ceiling and boards hanging down. I said, “Even if we could get in, we’d break our legs probably. It’s all rotten.”

Plato tugged at the planks. “These are rotten all right.” A few splinters came loose. He shook his head and stepped back, sucking his fingers. “I need a crowbar,” he said. “Or a jemmy.”

“Why don’t you shout over the fence and see if next door have got one?” I was being sarcastic because Plato had sounded so matter-of-fact—as if most people normally carried burglary tools around with them.

He looked at me, very straight. “I don’t suppose they’d have one, do you? But I’ll try if you like.”

And he actually got hold of an old plastic crate that was part of the litter around the back door and put it against the fence between the two houses. But the moment he climbed on it, the next door dog started barking.

It wasn’t an ordinary bark. It was a deep, throaty baying that had a thick, wet, snarling base to it; the barking of a huge, savage hound. And as it barked, it flung itself against the fence, leaping high, so that for a second we saw a wild, rolling, red eye and a great snout, lips drawn back, white teeth flashing.

One glimpse was enough. Plato tumbled off the plastic crate and we tore down the garden, the dog running beside us on the other side of the fence, thudding against it, leaping and growling. We stumbled down the jungly garden and through the gate to the cinder path. I thought, suppose the gate to the other garden is open!

I didn’t stop to look. Plato had started gasping. I grabbed his hand and dragged him along with me. Behind us, the dog’s howling grew frantic. I heard the scrabbling of its paws and the crashing of its body against the wooden fence. Then a man shouted. The dog yelped as if someone had thrown something at it, and its barks became whimpers.

Plato collapsed on a dustbin. When he had gathered his breath, he said, “That was
blood-curdling.
I don’t know what blood feels like when it’s curdled, but mine’s
cold.
As if my veins ran with ice.”

“Milk goes lumpy when it curdles.” It seemed an odd moment to be discussing the meaning of words. I said, “I’m not going back there.”

“I expect its bark is worse than its bite. It’s probably a soft old thing really. Just wanted to play with us.”

“I’m not risking it.”

“It couldn’t get over the fence. Maybe it’ll be shut up next time.”

“You try, then. If it’s all clear, you can light a bonfire. Smoke signals. Make sure the whole street knows what we’re up to. In fact, we could send every house a round robin letter. Ask if anyone would be kind enough to lend us their front room for the holidays so we can spy on the people in Number 22.”

I felt despairing.
A
couple
of
little
kids
playing,
Plato had said. He had meant that was how a grown-up would see us, but it was what we
were
:
two kids, pretending. I said, “It’s no good. There’s nothing we can do. Let’s go home.”

He said patiently, “There is one thing. We could simply knock on their door. If your stepmother hasn’t seen you since you were three, hasn’t
wanted
to see you, then she probably hasn’t seen a photograph of you, either. We could say we were collecting for something. Or looking for sponsors for a walk, or a swim, to make money for charity.” He giggled suddenly and sharply, “For Oxfam. Or for handicapped children.”

I stared at him and he went red. He said, “I’m sorry. That wasn’t funny. I don’t know why I said it.”

I was too miserable to be angry. I said, “I didn’t think you’d seen her hand. What do you think happened?”

“I don’t know. Genetic, probably. Born with it.”

“Do you think she minds?”

“I expect so. Like I mind about asthma. You just have to get used to it.”

“I don’t think having asthma’s so bad.”

“You haven’t got it. But it isn’t just that. It’s other things, too. Like being ugly and small.”

I said, “Don’t be silly!”

He pushed his glasses up on his nose and looked at me sternly. “It’s as I said, you have to get used to it. To being different. Outside.”

“Outside?”

“Looking at all the people
inside
who don’t lose their breath when they run, or wear braces on their teeth, and who have proper families. Mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters. All living together.”

I said, “If that’s being outside, then I’m outside, too. I mean, I’m outside George and Annabel’s family.”

“That makes two of us.” He giggled. “Like the two Bisto Kids.”

It was then that he told me about this old advertisement. Sitting on a dustbin at the end of the cinder path, he wrinkled his nose and pretended to be a starving orphan smelling something good cooking.

He made me laugh. He made me hungry. I said, “Aunt Sophie made me cold roast beef and cucumber sandwiches. Enough for the two of us.”

*

We went into the cemetery and ate lunch sitting on the tomb of Stanley Arthur McAlpine who had been ‘called to the Lord’ in 1925. The flat part of the tomb was grey-green with lichen, but the marble angel with folded wings that
stood over it was still white and clean. There was a verse on its base.

These words brought a lump to my throat, but Plato said it wasn’t so sad since Mr McAlpine had been eighty-two when he died. After we had finished eating we tried to scrape some of the mouldy green off the flat part of the tomb, and Plato pinched some plastic daffodils from a newer grave and stuck them into the earth at the feet of the watching angel. Then we looked round the cemetery for other McAlpines, but we didn’t find any; Stanley Arthur was the only one of his family who had been buried there. Plato said perhaps all the others had been cremated but neither of us knew if there had been cremation so long ago.

Plato said he would look it up in the encyclopedia when he got home. He said he would rather be cremated when he died because it was tidier and took up less space, but I thought I would rather be buried, so that people could come and look at my tombstone and wonder about me.

Neither of us mentioned Annabel and George. It was as if we had each decided, on our own, separately, to ignore what had brought us here, to Bow Cemetery; as if we had both realised, since the dog chased us out of the garden, that we had no real idea how to go on. I knew I was beginning to be afraid that if we hung around Shipshape Street very much longer, something awful would happen, and Aunt Bill and Aunt Sophie would find out what I’d been up to.

I said, “Perhaps if we go soon, we really could go to the National Gallery on the way home.”

I thought Plato would object. But he shrugged his shoulders. “Okay. Why not? We’ve found out the interesting
part, after all. Where they live, what they look like. Spying gets boring after a bit.”

*

And that would have been that, over and finished and no harm done to anyone, if we had not walked to the station by way of the grassy clearing at the side of the railway line, and seen the grandmother—
my
grandmother—asleep on a bench in the sunshine.