The Wolf in the Attic (2 page)

Lord Jesus Christos. I say your name. Lord God please don’t send me to hell. I am not a good girl – I know that – but I love my father and my mother (but she’s dead), and I love the wrens in the garden and the irises when they come up blue. Lord Jesus I try to be a good neighbour to everyone. I really do. But can you please kill all the Turks? Because they murdered my mother and took our home. And they need to be punished.

This is Anna. And thank you. Thank you very much .

A
FTER
I
PRAY,
I always feel much better, because I am told God is always listening – Miss Hawcross told me so. I hug Pie until I’m sure it should hurt but it doesn’t. I hug her so hard – until I think I can almost smell the sea again, and I think that if I open my eyes I might just be able to look at that line of blue – that other blue you don’t get here – I heard Pa once call it kingfisher-blue.
Halcyon
. Somewhere out on the horizon, it’s still there. I think Pa misses it something awful. I think the Turks took it from us because they wanted it for themselves.

I
LOOK OUT
at the rain, and think it cannot be the same world as the one I can still see in my head. All the colours have faded away.

P
A SAYS WE
mustn’t live in the past. We have become English now. But we were Greek once, like Homer and Helen and Heracles. He used to tell me stories of Achilleos and Odysseos, but not any more. Was Troy a real place? He won’t tell me. He looks out the window at the rain, as I do, and refuses to say. But I know we were Greek once, and Agamemnon was our king, and then he went to Troy and rode away on a great wooden horse and left us.

And somewhere out on the sea – Pa once told me the sea at sunset is as dark as wine – Odysseos still sails his ship, looking for us, trying to bring us home.

I miss Mama. I don’t remember her at all but I miss her – isn’t that odd? She smelled of lavender. And we had green basil growing in pots at all the windows, to keep out the flies. And it smelled like – like the best of summers. Like a land of dreams should smell.

And I hug Pie as I think of it, while the rain keeps tap tap tapping at the glass. We live in Jericho, in the city of Oxford, in the kingdom of England. And that is home now, and ever will be, until Odysseos returns.

2

I
DON’T KNOW
why that fat Henry wanted so many wives, I tell Miss Hawcross crossly, and for a moment I think she almost smiles. She is a small woman, with very thin ankles but a big… I’m not supposed to say it, but she has a big
bosom
, and looks like a puffed up little grey pigeon, with her hair up in a bun and a cameo brooch at her throat.

I see girls on the streets with short bobbed hair, and I saw a picture of Louise Brooks once outside the nickleodeon on Walton Street, and she looked so impossibly beautiful that when I got home I tried to cut off my own hair – it is as black as hers, and just as sleek when it’s wet – but Pa caught me at it and belted me until my nose bled. He gripped the hank of hair I had cut off as though it were something precious I had thrown away, and then he had to trim the rest of it anyway, to make it all the same length. It still wasn’t a Brooks bob, but it comes down to my shoulders now instead of the small of my back.

The children down by the canal still shout at me and call me a
dago
, so I don’t suppose it made much difference. It would be lovely to be pretty and elegant and sophisticated, and to smoke a cigarette in a long holder.

I bet if big fat Henry hadn’t been king, he wouldn’t have had so many wives. He was a wicked man, but sad, too I suppose. How awful, to never find someone you can truly love, so you are always looking for her your whole life. And cutting people’s heads off when they turn out to be the wrong one.

He was a great king of England, Miss Hawcross says, and I am to learn all about him and his family if I am to pass as an educated young lady and not a scrawny guttersnipe. And She gives me the flat of the ruler after that, just to make sure I remember. She is very keen on the word
guttersnipe
. And
ragamuffin
too.

After lessons, I see her out the door, because that’s polite, and watch her waddle down the street. A black straw boater she wears, when it’s not raining, and little boots with mother of pearl buttons. I wonder if she still thinks of the young man who died in the War. I wonder if he would still like her if he saw her now, with her pinched lips and greying hair.

It must be terrible to be old, when you love someone who died young. They never change in your mind, and every day you see yourself grow away from that person you were when you loved and knew them. Until you are more of a shadow than they are, and the girl you were is altogether gone, more dead even than the young man on the battlefield.

If I loved someone and they died like that, I should wear black for the rest of my life, and a veil. I would never forget them, or let anyone else edge their memory out of my mind. Memories are important, like the bones of the mind. We build ourselves upon them, flesh and blood moulded around the pictures of what is past.

I look at Pie sometimes, and think she is a memory herself. How I got her; who gave her to me. Every time I look at her I can see him smiling.

Anyway, that’s what I think. It is why I try so hard to never forget anything.

Pa is different. He wants to bury the memories and make himself someone else. It’s why he shaved off his beard, and wears tweeds, and fights so hard to look and sound and behave like an Englishman.

‘The English are a great race,’ he told me once. ‘But they have a deep down belief that they are the best of all peoples.

‘You and I come of the blood that bred Homer, and Aristotle, and Socrates and Alexandros. Whatever they call you, remember that, Anna. Our people dug the foundations of civilisation itself.’

That was a long time ago, when we first came here. I do not think he would ever say such a thing again. But it makes me proud, and when the children down at the canal throw names and stones at me, I ignore them, for I am of the same blood as Achilleos. The English have their castles, and Buckingham Palace, and the Changing of the Guard. But we have the Parthenon, and the Iliad.

T
HERE IS ANOTHER
meeting in the house tonight. If I hear the word
committee
once more I shall scream. I suppose I am a scrawny guttersnipe after all, because I have not the manners to sit still and smile at the people as they troop in, shaking the rain from their shoulders. These are the Greeks now, these poor folk who look like beggars from another century. There was a big debate last week, and they changed the name of the Committee they are all so fond of. Now it is not
Repatriation
, but
Resettlement
. And there is talk of hiring a steamship or something. It’s all Greek to me.

I
T’S DARK WHEN
I creep out of the house by the back door, with the voices following me into the night. Ugh, winter; the light goes before the sun has a chance to get risen properly. I can see the gaslamps still on in the Lucy factory, up the canal, but when I climb over the garden wall, there is almost nothing but the blue deep dusk out to the west, over Port Meadow.

B
EHIND ME,
O
XFORD
is still busy and bright, and there are so many motor cars that they set up a hum in the night. This is where they build motor cars, this city, more than anywhere else in England. It seems strange, for there are so many days when Oxford is grand and beautiful and otherworldly, like a city created by a curious-minded king. The University did that. I think I shall go there, one day, and study something complicated and obscure just to show them I can, even if I am a girl.

But the land swells up to the west and there is a moon rising, low over the hills at Wytham. There are deep woods there, all damp and thick and full of deer and old trenches they dug to train the poor soldiers for the war.

I follow the canal to Walton Well Road, climbing the fences of other people’s back gardens on the way, and then cross it and the railway, and step light as a…. as a cat… to Port Meadow, where all at once the world opens up, and the city is left behind, and the moon is riding higher and higher, a horned moon with clouds drifting across it, the light burning their edges silver.

It is enough to see by, but I go slowly, all the same, walking off the beaten path in the grass towards the faint light of Wolvercote in the north. Somewhere to my left is the Thames, a tiny river here compared to what it is like in London, but much cleaner I’m told, a country river.

It’s cold, and the grass is wet, but I don’t mind, and nor does Pie. I hug her to me under my coat, and feel the newspaper in the toes of my shoes become damp and start to squish and tear.

This is what Pa taught me once. You find the Plough, which is seven stars in the shape of a saucepan, and the outer rim of the pan are two stars called the Pointers. You follow their line up, and there is a bright glimmer that seems almost on its own, and that is Polaris, and it points north.

And Orion has three stars in his belt. And the Little Bear is like the Plough, only smaller. And that red flicker near the horizon in the east; that is Mars.

They are all here; all my stars. It has been a long time since the night was so clear and still, and my breath is a pale cloud in front of my face, so solid-seeming I almost think I could grab a handful of it and put it in my pocket. And the cold is getting deeper, seeping through my coat and setting chilly fingers on my bare knees, but I don’t care. I tug Pie out of my coat so she can see the night too, and so I can hug her close to my face.

The world seems so not real at night under the moon and stars, with the streets and cobbles and motor-cars and heads-down hurrying people all taken away. Here and now, is the world as it was near to the beginning, when God breathed life into it out of the darkness, and brought it up out of the waters. Was that the second day? I think so. A world empty, before the creatures crawled out of the seas to set their footprints upon it.

I am shuddering with cold, but very happy, my dragonfly mind calm and still now, as though it has become frozen along with the settling dew. I almost feel as though I am floating over the fast-freezing grass.

I walk on, in a silver cloud of my own breathing.

Godstow Nunnery is up at the Lock to the north-east. We have picnicked there, among the ruins. I think it would be a grand place to be in summer, if you were in love.

Fat Henry destroyed it, but the ruins are perfect as they are, so I can almost forgive him. It would be… it would be truly something to picnic there with someone you loved, to hold their hand in the grass, and look up at the sky. I wonder if Miss Hawcross ever lay back in the grass at Godstow with her grey hair still brown, and held her soldier’s hand under the sun before he went off to Passchendaele.

O
UT OF THE
dark a light leaps, yellow and small, like a candle fighting the wind. It’s out on the Meadow to the north-west, near the river. I feel angry at once that the night has been invaded, that perfect tinsel-bright moon mocked by a stupid little campfire. I look at Pie, and pull a face. There is nowhere to be alone in this world, not even here, not for more than a moment.

B
UT
I
CREEP
forward all the same, curious as a cat. Pa told me once I look like a cat, with a pointy chin and big eyes. But I don’t think a cat could possibly have a nose like mine. It’s too long and crooked, and it steers my whole face like the prow of a boat.

I don’t care anyway. Helen of Troy was beautiful, and look what a flibbertigibbet she turned out to be. Beautiful people are invariably boring, Pa says, because there is less of them to admire under the skin than there is upon it.

But Mama was beautiful; I’m sure she was.

I wish I could see in the dark like a cat. I am shivering, and I step in cow-pats as I creep towards the light. My shoes are so wet with the dew that I may just as well be barefoot anyway. Except for the cowpats. Yuck.

I look at Pie again, and sigh. I am close now. Nothing for it, but I shall have to crawl. I can even hear voices, quite a few, and there are shadows passing back and forth in front of the flames. The fire seems brighter than the moon now, especially as the clouds are thickening again. The earlier perfect night has gone, transformed into something else by firelight and strange voices and smelly cow poo. But it is still exciting. I make believe that it’s the Hun up ahead, or Johnny Turk, and I am a brave soldier about to erupt out of the darkness and cut all their throats.

I would feel better if I had a knife. I have one at home, a little Watts penknife Pa used to keep for scraping out his pipe. But I don’t think it’s big enough to cut a Turk’s throat.