Long Lankin Read online

  Behind the door is a little room with two more doors. The one to the right is the toilet, and the other is the bathroom.

  At home the privy is outside in the yard. I think it’s cleaner than having one in the house like this. Ours has been leaking for a couple of weeks, so we’ve had to share with the Woolletts next door. Mrs. Woollett’s mother, Mrs. Bracegirdle, is always in the privy because she’s got a disease. Sometimes we have to stand outside, hoping we won’t burst before she comes out. Mimi hates going to the Woolletts’. She hangs on in our house till she’s desperate.

  She’s never going to go here with that man hanging on the wall.

  I open the bathroom door and blink. The light is green and cold. The ivy outside has grown almost completely over the small arched windows. Some of its stems have crept through gaps and are inside, feeling their way upwards towards the ceiling.

  Long ago, it must have been a different kind of room altogether, not a bathroom at all. When I stand in the corner behind the door, in that dusky half-light I can see shapes on the walls — shapes of people, trees, and flowers that were once there but have since been painted over. Now they are nothing more than ghosts, their pale colours faded almost to nothing. The shadowy people look at me, look out at me from the past. Their eyes are barely visible. They watch me in secret. Only when I stand in that special place, and turn my head in a certain way, can I peer into their hidden world and watch them back.

  A huge bath, stained with long streaks of brown and green, sits on iron legs right in the middle of the room. The right tap drips now and then.

  Dad didn’t put any washing stuff in our duffel bags. I brush our teeth with a nasty old toothbrush that lies on a shelf under the mirror and use some vile pink powder in a tin next to the brush. At least, I hope it’s toothpaste and not something for cleaning out the sink. I wipe Mimi over with a hard old flannel full of holes that was wrapped around one of the taps. There’s only cold water coming through.

  Auntie Ida is waiting outside. I see her eyes going to the worn patches around my knees, and I cover up the holes in the elbows with my hands. She says our pyjamas are too small. My teeth begin to chatter. The house must be perishing in the winter, the sort of place to give you the rheumatics.

  When we come back down the passage, I don’t look behind me at the old man on the wall, but I can almost feel two needles of light coming out of his eyes and boring into my shoulder blades.

  I lie in the big bed next to Mimi and try to get to sleep. She goes off straight away, rubbing Sid’s little worn patch, but her gentle snoring doesn’t soothe me at all.

  The night closes in, and the house wraps us up in itself, making its own noises in the dark — muffled clicks, soft thuds from unknown rooms, the rustling of mice in their secret scratchy places underneath the floors. I can hear beetles creeping along the cracks in the old hairy plaster, and above my head, in the angles of the beams, big black spiders are spinning, softly spinning in the shadows.

  I hope Auntie Ida is writing her letter so Dad will come and fetch us home.

  Late, but I don’t know how late, I hear slow creaking on the stairs. A gleam of soft candlelight flares under our door for a moment as Auntie passes on her way to bed.

  My worn-out tweed skirt lies over the back of the chair. The hem’s been hanging down for weeks. Will’s old shirt is in a heap on the floor, and I’ll just pick it up and put it on again tomorrow, along with the brown cardigan I knitted before the war, the one I wore today, and yesterday, and the day before that.

  I know what I have become. I find in some small hidden room of myself a little corner of shame, but I quickly shut the door on it.

  I used to smile at my reflection in the mirror there and carefully arrange that jewelled butterfly comb in my hair — the comb that lies in the dust on top of the chest of drawers, with three of its teeth missing. How smooth my skin was then. Now the lines on my face are like the cracks in the dried-up mud at the bottom of the creek when the tide goes out.

  I was so slender in the blue silk dress that even now hangs beside the door. The colour has faded on the outside of the pleats, where the light strikes them, but when I press them apart with my fingers, the gleaming turquoise shines out with the brilliance of years ago.

  His letter is still in its envelope, tucked into the pocket.

  Louvaincourt, January 1917

  … Last night was a night as bitter as any I’ve ever known. I couldn’t sleep for the cold, even with my boots and greatcoat on. I gave up and went out of the dugout and walked along the service trench for a while and had a smoke to stop my teeth chattering. They made such a noise I thought they might draw fire. I leaned my back against the sandbags and kept my head down so the Huns wouldn’t see the light from my cigarette.

  There was no moon and the frost was beginning to crust the top of the parapet. I looked up and saw the sky was ablaze with stars. I made your face out of the constellations, and tied up your hair with the long pale ribbon of the Milky Way… .

  Why am I thinking of that now? Why didn’t they leave me alone … ?

  Why am I lying awake? What am I listening for?

  They should have left me alone… .

  They can’t stay here.

  I’m lying in the ditch, the muddy water soaking my back and legs. The more I try to drag myself out, the farther in I sink. My arms reach up to grab the long grass on the bank.

  The bed was warm and wet.

  “Flippin’ heck! Mimi! Wake up! Look what you’ve flippin’ done! Blinkin’ hell!”

  “Sorry …”

  “Flippin’ hell …”

  “I had to go …”

  “Flippin’ hell …”

  The bed was getting cold and beginning to smell.

  “For God’s sake, get up! Have you finished or is there any more coming?”

  “‘S all gone.”

  I rolled back the eiderdown and blankets. Luckily they were dry, but the sheet and underblanket were sopping. I pulled them off, rolled them up, and threw them on the floor. The mattress was wet, too, but I couldn’t do anything about that now. I took off our sodden pyjamas, wrapped us both up in the prickly woollen blankets, then covered us with the eiderdown.

  Mimi went back to sleep, but I lay awake, itchy in the blanket, worrying about how I was going to ask Auntie Ida to move the painting of the old, bald man with the hand like a claw.

  I love sunny mornings in the summer holidays. I lean over Pete from the top bunk and drop something on him, like a piece of Plasticine or a slipper.

  “Oi! Leave off, will you!”

  Then he gets up and tries to hit my legs. I push the ladder down so he can’t get up, and then he goes off to the bathroom, sulking. It’s usually something like that.

  We have a bit of toast, if there’s bread left, or make ourselves some shredded wheat if the milkman’s been, then we leave the house quickly in case Mum nabs us. If you hang around the house for too long, she’ll find you jobs to do. You’ve only got to walk past the door and she’ll ask you to make her a cup of tea. Once I thought I’d give myself a bad accident with the boiling water — that would teach her to ask a child to run round after her — but I couldn’t do it in the end, in case it went wrong and I ended up in hospital for six months with no skin.

  Depending on how we feel, we might go down to the woods and see if Tooboy’s around. He’s got a scary older brother, Figsy, who has a greasy quiff and wears tight black trousers so his legs look like two sticks of liquorice. Now and then he rides a moped around the path in the woods. We call it his pop-pop and keep out of the way if we hear it coming. Tooboy lets us play on the big rope-swing Figsy made with his gang. You have to climb a tree to get to it, it’s so high, but if we hear the pop-pop, we scarper real quick, even Tooboy, and hide in the trees till Figsy’s gone.

  Sometimes we go over to the Patches and check on our camps, though if there’s anyone about, they look at us a bit sideways as people from Bryers Guerdon tend not to go there. Th
e Patches are a long way down Ottery Lane, almost to North Fairing. Dad said East Enders from London came out to the country between the two world wars and built houses for themselves on plots of land sold off or rented out by one of the North Fairing farmers. We’ve always called them the Patches — patches of land, I suppose.

  Best of all, though, we like going down to the marshes. There’s a great hill on the way to the church — that’s All Hallows, stuck all by itself away from the village. It’s smashing whizzing down the hill on your bike with your feet off the pedals, but Pete’s got a puncture. Mum won’t let me take any more spoons outside, and if I haven’t got spoons, I can’t get the inner tube out. She says I left them in the garden last time, and she didn’t have enough for the prunes. I told her Terry had taken them out to eat mud with, but she didn’t believe me.

  I told Pete about the two girls I’d seen. He didn’t seem too keen, but I told him they might be good for a snoop around Mrs. Eastfield’s house. He wanted to go down to the church, but I told him he had to come and sit on the fence with me and wait for them. He nearly went into a mood, but when I told him about the plans for the new camp, he came up the Chase with me to have a look.

  Auntie Ida said she wasn’t moving the horrible man. She said he’d been there forever and she wasn’t getting a ladder out, and anyway she couldn’t do it on her own as it would be much too heavy, and we’d have to put up with it and she didn’t have anywhere to put him anyway, and she was really cross about the sheet and the blanket and would have to spend hours scrubbing the mattress with Dettol, and where was she going to find a rubber sheet for the bed, and Mimi should have grown out of that by now, and I was a really cheeky girl, only just arrived and telling her what to do about the painting, and what was Dad doing sending us with no change of clothes, only our pyjamas (that she’d had to stick in the kitchen sink for soaking, and however were they to get properly dried and aired by tonight with the weather so changeable she had no idea), and a couple of pairs of knickers and some socks with holes in, and if Mimi was so silly that she wouldn’t go to the toilet upstairs, there was another one by the back door she would have to use.

  Then Auntie said she had to go on an errand and she’d be about an hour and a half but we weren’t allowed to stay in the house on our own. We were to go up to the village, Bryers Guerdon, to Mrs. Wickerby’s to post the letter she’d written to Dad last night. Auntie gave us threepence for the stamp, but nothing extra for sweets or anything.

  She opened the back door and squinted, looking across and down the garden. Finn pushed past her and ran up the path, round the henhouse and back.

  She said we weren’t ever to go out in the garden when the tide was out in the creeks because Mimi might get sucked down in the mud, which wasn’t fair if we had to stay in with all the windows shut and boil up like we were in a jungle or something. When I asked why the windows stayed closed all the time, she told me to hold my tongue. I thought it’d be even more dangerous if the tide was in because Mimi might fall in the water and get herself drowned, and that would be much worse than getting stuck in the mud, because at least then I could always pull her out before her head went under, but I didn’t dare say anything.

  Auntie gave me very clear directions how to get to Bryers Guerdon and said we weren’t to dawdle and were absolutely not to go down to the old church — absolutely not, under any circumstances, she said; it was completely forbidden. I had to check the time by the big clock in Mrs. Wickerby’s, and after an hour and a half Auntie would have got back. Whatever happened, we were absolutely not to go down to the church, absolutely not. If she hadn’t returned, we were to wait for her in the Chase, and not come back over the creek into the garden, and she said most particularly we had to wait just by the old farm cottages, and not near the bridge. She made me promise, so I crossed my heart and licked my finger and spat, but she looked a bit shirty, as if she didn’t like me doing it.

  Mimi and me went round to the front of the house, out through the gateway and over the bridge. Sitting on the fence, in exactly the same place as yesterday, was the boy, but this time he had another boy with him, a bit smaller.

  “Spent a night in the haunted house, then?” the big boy said.

  The smaller boy lifted up his arms, wobbled his fingers, and went “Wooooo!” like a ghost and nearly fell off the fence.

  Their voices sounded the same, and I guessed they were brothers.

  “I’m Roger, and this is Pete,” said the older one.

  “I’m Cora, and she’s Mimi.” I jerked my thumb behind me at her.

  “Mimi! Ooh-la-la!” said Pete, jumping down and wiggling his hips from side to side. I suppose he thought that’s what French people did all day — wiggled their hips and said “Ooh-la-la.”

  “It’s not Mimi like that,” I said. “It’s a nickname. She’s Elizabeth really.”

  As we walked along, Roger said he’d got three brothers — Dennis, Terry, Pete of course — and a sister, Baby Pamela.

  “Baby Pamela’s all right for a name,” said Roger, “but I reckon if you’ve waited that long for a girl, you should call her something a bit more interesting, like Aspidistria or something.”

  We were at the end of the Chase.

  “Fancy coming down the church?” Roger asked. “Pete and me are always playing around there.”

  “Auntie Ida said we wasn’t supposed to go,” I said. “Went on and on, she did. Made me promise, and I did the special sign.”

  “Mum’s always saying we’re not to either, but we just don’t say,” said Roger. “There’s loads to do down there. Won’t take long to show you.”

  “We’re supposed to go and post this letter,” I said.

  “You can post it after,” said Roger.

  “Better not. I promised,” I said.

  “Doesn’t matter, then,” said Roger.

  “There’s graves so old they’re half sticking up out of the ground,” said Pete. “We dig around them sometimes.”

  “I’ve got to post this,” I said. “It’s for Dad to come and take us home.”

  “But you’ve only just got here,” said Roger.

  “I know.”

  “Where’s your mum, then? Can’t she come and get you?”

  “She —” I began, not sure how I was going to finish. “She ain’t at home at the moment.”

  “When’s she coming back, then?”

  “Um … sometime — not quite sure right now.”

  “See you, then,” said Roger. “Pete and me are going down.”

  “Ta ta, then.”

  Mimi and me stood and watched while they went towards the church. I looked at the envelope in my hand: H. R. Drumm, Esq. I imagined Dad would get the letter the next morning, which was Wednesday, and might come in the afternoon, or Thursday at the latest, so if we were going home nearly straight away, maybe it wouldn’t matter if we just popped down and had a little look at the church; then we could go up to the post office afterwards.

  “Hang on!” I shouted, shoving the letter in my pocket. “Wait! We’ll come an’ all!”

  Roger and Pete looked back, then stopped to wait for us.

  “Don’t want to,” Mimi said.

  “You’ll do what I blimmin’ well say!”

  “Auntie said not to.”

  “Don’t flippin’ well tell her, then.”

  “Don’t like it.”

  “Stay here on your own, then!”

  Mimi’s lower lip wobbled. She rubbed Sid’s worn patch, then put her small soft hand in mine.

  We walked down the lane until we came to a large gate standing all by itself on the left-hand side of the road. It had a tiled roof, held up by a wooden arch supported by stone pillars. Like the roof of Guerdon Hall, it was sunken in and soft with green moss. The wooden gates in the middle looked half-rotten. They’d been lashed together with bunches of old ropes and rusty chains. The pillars were messy with brambles and wild rosebushes, and the stinging nettles were nearly as high as our shoulde
rs.

  “This is a funny old gate,” I said, standing in front. “Why’s it all tied up, then?”

  “I don’t know,” said Roger. “It’s always been like that. You ever made itching powder out of the middle of rose hips?”

  “Nah, does it work?”

  “Yeah, brilliant. Have you tried blackberries?”

  “Won’t you get poisoned, just eating stuff by the road?” I said.

  “No, but you’ve got to eat the black ones.”

  I put one in my mouth. It was really sour.

  “We haven’t had enough sun,” Roger said, screwing up his face. “Maybe in another week or so.”

  As I spat out the blackberry, I saw something small and pale moving on an enormous, ugly old tree far away on the wild edge of the churchyard, beyond the gravestones. Leafy branches grew out of the massive trunk, but no farther up than halfway. The tree had no crown. Instead, a huge, bare white branch towered high above the cluster of branches lower down, ending in a gigantic hook split into two.

  Roger followed my gaze. “We don’t like that tree, Pete and me,” he said. “Most of it’s dead. It’s most probably a gypsy tree.”

  “What’s a gypsy tree, then?”

  “Well, if you give a gypsy some money or buy some pegs or something, then they’ll hang a rag from a tree near your house so the next gypsy who comes along knows you’ll give them something as well.”

  “But there ain’t no houses here. Why do you think it’s a gypsy tree?”

  “Because there’s things on it,” said Pete, “and when there’s things on a tree, it’s a gypsy tree.”

  “It’s like it’s got a dead heart,” I said.

  A little way down the road was a wide iron gate, opening onto the dirt path that led to the small church, its warm stone walls flickering in the swaying shadows of the fat overhanging trees.

  We cut across in front of the tower, weaving our way around the weathered, ivy-choked crosses and tombstones and trying not to trip over the tops of the ancient graves hidden in the long grass. As we drew nearer to the far boundary of the churchyard, I felt my shoes and socks becoming sodden. The ground was growing spongier, and the small rounded hummocks of moss began to give way under our feet so that we were trailing through shallow water. We came close to the tree at last. I saw that the great thick roots facing us were rising up out of a boggy pool, ringed with reeds and bulrushes. There was higher ground at the back where the ground seemed to be dry, and on that side the tree appeared to be well rooted in the shaded earth.