The Outside Child (7 page)

She looked quite comfortable, her head resting on the back of the bench, her legs stretched out in front of her, and her hands folded across her handbag on her lap. Her mouth had fallen open and she was snoring gently. A little bit of cottony stuff, some sort of seed blown on the wind, had settled on her upper lip, and it fluttered with each breath.

I looked at this sleeping person who was my grandmother, and thought how odd it was that she was a stranger to me.

She stirred and muttered something. “Come away,” Plato said. “They’ll see you. They’ll think we’re thieves. Stealing her handbag or something.”

The children had come out of the bushes on the other side of the clearing. They were running towards us, a little, matted dog chasing them, leaping up, yapping. We walked slowly towards them and they glanced at us briefly as they ran past us. George said, “Gran?” and Annabel hushed him. “Don’t wake her.”

At the edge of the clearing we stopped and looked back. Annabel was fastening the dog’s leash to its collar and slipping the loop over an iron strut on the bench. “Stay,” she said. “Good dog.” And the little dog sat like a statue, ears up, head cocked to one side.

The children backed away from the bench, giggling. George whispered something to Annabel and she looked in our direction.

“Pretend to be busy,” Plato said. “Let’s pick blackberries.”

High up where they caught the sun, a few berries were ripening, but on the lower branches they were still shrunken and green.

“Rhubarb, rhubarb, rhubarb,” Plato said. “That’s what actors say when they’re part of the crowd on the stage and pretending not to notice what’s going on. If you get a stick, you might be able to reach some of the top bits. I’ll keep an eye on your brother and sister.”

The bushes were covered with dust and smelled fusty. The few berries I managed to reach were sour and pursed my mouth up. “
Yuck
,” I said, spitting. “What are they doing, Plato?”

I was too nervous, or shy, to look round myself.

“Nothing special,” he said. “It’s all right, they’re not watching us.” Then, concerned suddenly, “Oh,
no
…”

I looked then. They were standing at the wire fence between the clearing and the railway line.

I said, “They’re just watching for trains. All kids do that.”

George had sat down. Annabel was stooping over him, pulling at something. George was on his back, wriggling. He disappeared. Annabel looked over her shoulder at her sleeping grandmother. George’s head popped up on the other side of the fence. Annabel sat down.

“They’re sliding under the wire,” Plato said. “That’s dangerous …”

Annabel was wearing a skirt. A bit of it must have snagged on the fence. She said, “Oh …” and then a rude word I would not have expected. George was out of sight but I heard him laugh. Annabel tugged her skirt free. Then she vanished too.

Plato set off at a run. I followed him, my heart jumping. I was afraid he was going to wake the old lady, but he swerved as he passed the bench and made for the fence. We
stood, peering through. There was no sign of the children.

The rails started to hum. We could hear the train in the tunnel. It roared out and banged past, making the fence shake. Plato said, “We’d better see where they’ve got to.”

He slithered under the wire and held it up for me. There was a narrow path of trodden grass that led down the steep slope towards the dark mouth of the tunnel. There was nowhere else they could hide.

We stopped at the entrance. There was room between the rails and the black wall for a person to walk, but it would be terrifying to be caught there, I thought, with a swaying train crashing past. I shivered and Plato said, “Some kids enjoy being frightened.” He called out, “Hallo, there,” and his shout echoed hollowly under the curved roof of the tunnel.

We waited. “Come on out,” Plato said, using his deep, grown-up voice. “Now. This minute.”

I thought I heard a whisper, quite close. Then silence.

Plato said, “My father’s a policeman. If you don’t come out, I’ll get him to fetch you. Then you’ll be in real trouble.”

A few yards away a thin beam of light wavered, enough to illuminate an arch in the side of the tunnel. Annabel came out of it, shining her pencil torch in our faces. “It’s all right,” she said. “It’s not those rough boys.”

“I’m not scared of any old boys,” George said indignantly. “I’m not scared of anyone.”

This was so exactly the sort of thing I would have expected him to say that I couldn’t help laughing.

Plato looked at me coldly. “It’s not in the least funny. They could have been electrocuted. Or run over by a train. You wouldn’t laugh, would you, if you saw someone mashed up in the wheels, torn to bits, just blood and bone, screaming?”

I said, “Don’t frighten them, Plato.”

He frowned at me; a frown that was meant as a warning. He said, “It seems someone has to.”

“We were quite safe,” Annabel said. “We always go in the hole at the side. It’s a special safe place for railwaymen when they are working.”

She sounded bold enough, but as she emerged into the daylight at the end of the tunnel, I saw that she was scarlet with embarrassment and shame.

I said, when they were safe on the bank, “What did you mean about the boys? What rough boys?”

“Big boys,” George said. “Sometimes they chase people in the cemetery. Last holidays they chased us and one of them had a knife, so we ran and hid in the tunnel.” His eyes were round with excitement, not terror. “Then they came after us, but we found the hole and hid in it, and they couldn’t find us. And a train went by like a
dragon,
and Annabel cried, but I didn’t.”

“No one was chasing you this time,” Plato said.

I had never seen him so solemn and stern. He hadn’t been frightened before, when we first saw what they were doing. He had frightened himself since with what might have happened. He was still frightened now.

Unlike George, who said boastfully, “I like to hide in the tunnel with the trains going by. It makes fireworks go off in my head. It’s my
best
treat.
It scares Annabel but it doesn’t scare me. It doesn’t scare me one bit.”

“Then you must be an exceptionally stupid boy,” Plato said.

“He’s not stupid,” Annabel said, speaking fiercely. She pushed in front of George, placing herself between him and Plato. “It was my fault. He wanted to go and I wouldn’t let him at first, but then I said I’d take him if he was nice to Gran and stopped teasing her. And he
was
nice, so I had to.” Her forehead creased anxiously. “My Daddy says it’s wrong not to keep your side of a bargain.”

She looked straight at me as she said this. It was probably
only because she thought I was more sympathetic than Plato, but it gave me a strange feeling, all the same, to hear my little sister telling me something our father had said!

I said, “Isn’t George usually nice to his Gran?” I saw Plato’s expression and knew, at once, what I’d done.

Annabel hadn’t noticed. But George said, “How do you know my name?” He wasn’t stupid. He was sharp as a pin.

Plato said, “Your sister told us, dummy! You called her Annabel. She called you George.”

I saw his eyes—blue eyes, like our father’s—cloud over as he tried to remember. I said quickly, “It wasn’t being very nice to Gran to go in the tunnel, was it? How do you think she’d have felt if you both had been killed?”

“She
wouldn’t mind. She’d say, good riddance to bad rubbish.”

I laughed. “I don’t believe you.”

“She said it this morning when I said I was going away and never coming back. She said it even after I showed her I’d packed my suitcase.”

“That’s not fair,” Annabel said. “You know you were being horrible about the baby. You know what you said.”

He looked at her, sidelong and sly. “I said, Throw the pig baby into the dustbin if he keeps up that squealing noise. Everyone was just as fed up as me!” He put on an injured tone. “I don’t know why Gran got so mad!”

Plato said, “Have you got a new baby in your family?”

Annabel nodded. “He’s a week old. He’s going to be christened Horatio. That’s one of Daddy’s names. The other one’s Edward. And George has got that one for his second name. It’s Daddy’s second name, too, and it’s the one that he’s called by.”

“I think Horatio stinks,” George said. “I’d kill anyone who called me Horatio. I know he was a famous sailor but the silly people in my class won’t know that.”

“Has the baby got another name?” I asked. I tried to sound calm, though I felt light-headed and shaky.

“William,” Annabel said. “That’s what Daddy wants to call him. But Mummy doesn’t like it. She says he’ll be called Bill for short, and she doesn’t like Bill. She wants
Humphrey
, after her father.”

“Horatio Humphrey is a bit of a mouthful,” Plato said.

George turned beady eyes on him. “What’s
your
name? And
hers?
”

Plato winked at me. “I think we’d better get off this railway before we get arrested,” he said. “And wake up your grandmother.”

*

She wasn’t on the bench. “She’s gone looking for us, she’ll be worried,” George said with some satisfaction. “People get mugged in the cemetery sometimes. There are all sorts of robbers, and gipsies, and people with dangerous dogs.”

“Kidnappers, too?” Plato said. “If you want to get rid of Horatio Humphrey, you could always leave him here in his buggy and see what happened.”

George stared, his face swelling with outrage. “I wouldn’t let anyone take him. I’d
kill
them.”

“He didn’t mean it,” I said. “He was joking. I think we should go and look for your grandmother.”

“It’s better if we stay here,” Annabel said. “We always stay where she lost us. So she knows to come back if she can’t find us.” She hesitated, the crimson colour coming up in her face. “Gran doesn’t lose us, or go to sleep usually. It’s just that she’s been up at night with the baby.”

I caught Plato’s eye and we smiled at each other. I wondered if his sister was as sweet as mine. I said, “Perhaps we’d better stay till she comes back. We could play a game.”

*

Plato had some string in his pocket and he taught them cat’s-cradle. George was quick to learn, he only had to be shown once. Annabel was slower because of her missing thumb and forefinger, but I was interested to see that although she had hung back to start with, as soon as she
knew we had seen her bad hand, she stopped minding about it and was almost as neat as her brother. By the time their grandmother came running across the grass, they were both quite absorbed; tongues between their teeth, fingers busy.

“There you are, darlings,” she cried. The little dog leapt at the children in turn, licking their faces and ruining their cat’s-cradles.

“We were all right, Gran,” Annabel said. “I’m sorry we lost you.”

“We were playing hide and seek,” George said accusingly. “And when we came back you and Bucket had gone.”

“And I’ve been racing round after you. What an old silly I am! Never mind, I can see you’ve been well looked after.”

She smiled at Plato and me. She had a nice smile, she looked friendly, but my heart was jumping again, banging about as if it had come loose in my chest. I had recognised her from her picture. She might have seen one of me.

And perhaps she had. She was looking at me. She said, “Do you live round here, dear? I’m sure that I’ve seen you somewhere …”

I thought that my heart would burst. I was dumb.

Plato came to my rescue. He said, “I’m Plato Jones. And this is my sister, Aliki.”

I dreamed about them that night, and the next night, and the night after. At first, nothing special happened in these dreams. It was just that they were always there, Annabel with her sweet, anxious smile and her little hurt hand, and naughty George, laughing. Then, a week later, I had a real nightmare. They were in the tunnel and the train was coming. They were running in front of it, trying to find the safe place in the side of the tunnel. But when they reached it, the hole was blocked with a mess of rubble and the train was roaring up fast behind them, turning into a dragon with fiery breath and huge, glowing eyes. Just before I woke up, they began screaming.

Plato said, “I expect they often go into the tunnel. Annabel tries to get George to be good, and it’s the best bribe she can think of. George’s best treat—that’s what he said, wasn’t it? I suppose we should have told someone. I would have told their grandmother, except you were looking so sick, like a ten month old
corpse,
and I thought the sooner we went home the better.”

“George would have hated you!”

“I could survive that! But if you like, I could ring up and pretend to be someone who’d seen them and worried about them being killed on the line. Or we could send their mother a letter made of words cut from the newspaper and post it somewhere like Waterloo, so that she couldn’t guess where it came from. We could sign it
Concerned.
Or
Well-Wisher.”

“It wouldn’t work. People don’t pay attention to anonymous letters.”

“Well, that’s all I can think of,” Plato said. “I suppose you could keep a watch on them all the holidays, but that might turn out to be tedious. And Annabel’s quite grown-up. Even George is fairly sensible.”

He yawned and took off his glasses and rubbed at his eyes. It seemed that now there was nothing more to find out, no more real spying to do, he had lost interest. We had found my brother and sister, saved them from death on the railway line, and taught them cat’s-cradle. That was enough for Plato!

That it wasn’t enough for me was something I was only just beginning to realise. And not just because of the dreaming. I thought about them in the daytime as well. I wondered what they were doing, and if they had looked for Plato and me the next time they went into the cemetery. And I wondered about Horatio Humphrey.

*

I said to Aunt Bill, “I wonder what Annabel and George are doing these holidays.”

“More or less what you were doing at their age, I expect. Getting into mischief!” She put her arms round me and gave me a hug—rather awkwardly, because her hands were covered in paint and she didn’t want to touch my clean dress with them. She said, “You’ll see them one day, I expect, and wonder what all the silliness was about. Be a sensible girl now, and put them out of your mind.”

I said to Aunt Sophie, “It’s funny not to know your brother and sister. Their mother might have another baby, and I’d never know, would I?”

But Aunt Sophie was listening to her invisible Walkman and didn’t hear me. Or pretended not to. She didn’t answer me, anyway.

I hated them both.

*

Plato came to my house and I went to his. Aunt Sophie made a shepherd’s pie and Aunt Bill picked runner beans and fat, ripe raspberries out of the garden. Plato had second helpings of everything, but when I went to his flat to have lunch with him, he ate only half a frozen fish finger and a spoonful of ice cream. His mother watched me finish what he had left and said, “It’s nice to see someone eat up instead of picking, like Plato. If you came to lunch more often, Jane, I might be encouraged to start cooking real food again.”

We played Scrabble all afternoon, even though it was a fine day outside. Plato’s mother chain-smoked, and the stubs of her cigarettes, burning out in the ash tray, made the flat smell disgusting. Plato won six games, I won two, and Plato’s mother lost every time. I thought that her brain was probably furred up with tobacco.

She kissed me goodbye when I left and asked me to come again, any time I wanted. She sounded as if she meant it. She said she always enjoyed meeting Plato’s friends and that it had been especially nice to meet me.

While she was saying these things, Plato was standing behind her pulling sick faces. I thought that was mean when she was trying so hard to be nice. When he saw me out, I looked up at the window and saw her standing there watching us. She looked lonely and I waved to her. I said to Plato that I liked his mother, and he pulled his sick face again. I said, angrily, “At least she doesn’t tell lies to you.”

*

Aunt Sophie let me eat as many sweets as I wanted without even raising an eyebrow, and Aunt Bill sat with me until quite late some evenings watching television programmes that I knew bored her. And they both took days off from painting and gardening and music to drive Plato and me into the country for picnics. Once Plato’s mother came too, squashed between Plato and me in the back seat of Rattlebones,
and although she smoked, the Aunts didn’t complain, just opened the windows.

They were being so considerate because they were sorry for me about George and Annabel. Being pitied doesn’t exactly thrill me, but I could have stood it from the Aunts in the ordinary way, if it hadn’t been for Horatio Humphrey. The more I thought about it, the more certain I was that they must have known about this new baby. My father would have rung up to tell them he had been born, and they had hidden it from me. Just as, until I had found out about them by chance, they had hidden Horatio’s older brother and sister.

It set me wondering how many other things they had kept from me. What about all those other relations whose photographs stood on my father’s desk, in his cabin? I had thought that my grandmother lived in America. Or was dead. But she was alive and in England, just a train ride away.

“Maybe she doesn’t want to see you,” Plato said. “Maybe there was some frightful family row and no one’s spoken to anyone else ever since. My mother hasn’t spoken to
my
grandmother, my father’s mother, since the divorce and that’s ages ago. I go down to Wales by myself now, of course, but to start with she used to come on the train with me and hand me over to Uncle Emlyn at the station as if I were some sort of
parcel,
without saying a word to him. She’d give me a letter to give to my grandmother, what I mustn’t eat, what time I went to bed, and what to do if I had an asthma attack, and my grandmother would read it and laugh, and say,
Does
she
think
I
don’t
know
how
to
look
after
a
child?
And I was mad at her for laughing, and mad at my mother for giving her something to laugh about.”

“I’m not angry with my grandmother,” I said. “I don’t know her. You can’t be angry with someone you don’t know. I’m only angry with Aunt Bill and Aunt Sophie.”

“What about your father?”

“I’m not angry with him! There’s no point!”

Plato looked at me curiously. “It’s more his fault than anyone’s, isn’t it?”

I thought about that. I said, “He doesn’t like trouble. Aunt Sophie says he’s a sensitive man. And I don’t live with him. So I don’t get angry with him as I do with the Aunts. It’s the people you live with who make you angry. You’re always angry with your mother. You were horrid to her when she came on the picnic.”

“She smoked in the car. I saw your aunts look at each other.”

“If Aunt Bill had smoked, you wouldn’t have minded. You wouldn’t have
glared
at her as if she’d committed some terrible crime. Murdering the Queen, or setting fire to the Houses of Parliament.”

He said obstinately, “If she wanted to smoke she should have gone in her own car. Not kippered the rest of us. Anyway, what your aunts do isn’t my business.”

I sighed heavily. “That’s what I mean, thicko! You’re angry with your mother because she’s your family. I’m angry with the Aunts for the same reason. Because they ought to have told me about all the others.”

He said in a gloomy voice, “Perhaps they were trying to spare you a nasty shock. Families are
awful.
When I grow up I’m going to live all by myself in a lonely cave or on the top of a mountain. I expect if you
lived
with your brother and sister, you’d be fed up with them soon enough!”

*

I knew that was nonsense. I loved George and Annabel. I couldn’t see them, or talk to Aunt Bill and Aunt Sophie about them, and Plato was bored with them.

When I was little I had had secret people that I played with and talked to and told myself stories about: a boy, who was really a prince in disguise, and an orphan girl who had been turned out of her home by a wicked uncle. As I grew older I grew out of this childishness. I didn’t forget the prince and
the orphan girl, but I put them away in the back of my mind, as I had stashed away my baby toys at the top of the cupboard.

Annabel and George were different because they were real, but they were secret people to me. I talked to them when I went to bed, and when I woke in the morning, and when I had nothing to do in the day. I went through all my old things and sorted out presents that I thought they would like. I chose my collection of marbles for George, and my solitaire board, and the transformer that began as a tractor and ended up as a dinosaur. For Annabel, I polished the lacquered wooden pencil box with the swing top and the sliding compartment that my father had given me, and mended the catch on the coral beads that were too small for me now. There were books like
Smith
and
The
Pepper
mint
Pig
that I thought Annabel was just about ready for, and
The
Monster
Garden
and
A
Chance
Child
for George. Horatio Humphrey was too little for toys, but I found my ivory rattle at the bottom of a drawer with some other old baby things and put it in a pretty box for him.

And, as the best present of all, there was my musical box.

I thought that I might get the drummers mended, but when I went to the antique shop the man said that musical boxes were a lot of work and people didn’t always come back for them, so twenty-five pounds had to be paid in advance, as a deposit. I had twenty-seven pounds in my Savings Account, but if I used it I would have to ask for more money during the holidays and explain why I needed it and why it was important to mend the musical box at this particular moment, when it had been broken so long.

I wasn’t sure that I wanted to give it to them just yet, anyway. It would be useful if I felt lonely for them and wanted to ring them up and hear them talk to each other. And then I had an even better idea. I could take the box to the cemetery and hide in a bushy place, out of sight, and
play it when they came near me. They would be so surprised to hear the same tinkly tune they had heard on the telephone coming out of the undergrowth. It would really seem like magic then, like something out of a fairy tale.

I thought—I would be like the Pied Piper! Play the musical box and dance away with it, and they would follow me. I would lead them somewhere safe and quiet, somewhere no one could find us, and I would play with them and tell them stories.