Long Lankin Read online

  “We all know what a blinking cave is,” says Roger, “but there aren’t any round here. Can you pass up another bit of paper? I’ve run out again.”

  “Can’t make head nor tail of it,” I say, looking at the second sheet he’s given me. “It says best.”

  Pete looks over. “Doesn’t make sense,” he calls up to Roger. “Cave best. Are you sure you did it right?”

  “’Course I did.” Roger comes down off the chair with the last page. “Anyway, it definitely doesn’t say anything about Derek Meacock and Sylvia Sparks. This is it. There’s no more. It says iam.”

  “Cave best iam,” I say. “It’s a load of rubbish if you ask me.”

  “I expect he’s got bad breath,” says Pete thoughtfully.

  “What are you going on about now?” says Roger. “Who’s got bad breath?”

  “Derek Meacock. That’s why Sylvia Sparks won’t go to the pictures with him.”

  “Oh, leave off, will you?”

  We stare at the paper.

  “Hmm, Cave best iam,” says Roger, scratching his head. “Cave best iam. No idea.”

  “It must be foreign,” I say. “Oh, that’s funny. I said that before. Yesterday. At Auntie Ida’s.”

  We were really nervous, Pete and me, going over the bridge to Guerdon Hall. I got a nasty dry taste in my mouth, and I could see Pete looking around with eyes as big as Ping-Pong balls.

  “Where’s the dog?” he whispered.

  “Auntie Ida said she was going out,” said Cora. “She’s most probably taken him with her. Look, Mimi, promise me you won’t tell Auntie we’ve been down the church.”

  “Why?”

  “Because she said we wasn’t to go, remember? If you tell, I’ll — I’ll chuck Sid down the toilet.”

  “All right.”

  “It’s here, the writing,” Cora said to us, pointing up as we got close to the house.

  A cracked piece of wood was nailed up over the porch at a wonky angle. It had a rough carving of a baby’s face on it. Underneath, all worn and chipped, were the same words as on the gate down at the church: CAVE BESTIAM.

  “That’s not a very nice thing to have on the front of your house, a blinking crying baby, so you have to look at it every time you go in,” said Pete.

  “We don’t go in here,” said Cora. “We go round the back. Come and see.”

  We were a bit worried about this, to be honest. Round the back was where the chickens were. Pete and I sort of dragged our feet a bit.

  “What’s the matter?” said Cora. “Ain’t you coming?”

  “Well,” I said quietly, “it’s the chickens.”

  “Don’t tell me you’re scared of a load of flippin’ chickens!” said Cora.

  “Well, for a start, are you sure they’re chickens?” said Pete.

  “What do you mean, sure they’re chickens? What else would they blinkin’ well be — blimmin’ vultures?”

  “Nah, well,” said Pete, “we think they’re children Mrs. Eastfield’s put a spell on.”

  “Pete does,” I said quickly.

  “What a load of stupid rubbish,” Cora said, annoyed. “We had their eggs for tea yesterday.”

  “Doesn’t mean they weren’t children first, before they laid eggs,” said Pete. “If you’re turned into a chicken, you couldn’t be a real one if you didn’t lay eggs.”

  “It’s still rubbish,” said Cora, and we might have stood there talking about this a lot longer, but there came the sound of barking, and the big dog bounded over the bridge and down the path. Pete jumped behind me.

  Then Mrs. Eastfield appeared, carrying a huge, scruffy leather suitcase with its straps straining. She had to lean to one side to balance herself.

  “Crikey! We’re trapped!” Pete whispered to me.

  Mrs. Eastfield saw us and put the suitcase down. The lines on her forehead set themselves into a nasty frown.

  “Cora!” she said. “I thought I told you to stay in the Chase if I wasn’t back — near the cottages, I said!”

  “Blimey, I forgot —”

  “I will not be disobeyed! While you’re here, you’ll do what I say! I won’t have this, Cora! I won’t!”

  “Sorry, Auntie.”

  Mrs. Eastfield wiped her forehead with the back of her hand. Then she took off her scarf and, fanning herself with it, looked Pete and me over. I felt hollow around my knees. Pete’s eyes had grown into tennis balls.

  “And who are you?” she said.

  “Roger and Peter Jotman,” I blurted out. Crikey! I’d actually talked to Mrs. Eastfield.

  “Jotman? Two of the Jotman boys? Does your mother know you’re here?”

  “Um, pardon?”

  “You heard me. Does she know you are here?”

  “Er —”

  “Obviously not! You know full well she would be furious if she knew you had come down to Guerdon Hall.”

  I heard Pete gulp at the same time as me.

  “Better go. Bye, Mrs. Eastfield. Thank you, Mrs. Eastfield,” I said.

  Pete and me shot off like lightning bolts. Halfway down the Chase, we stopped to get our breath.

  “Cor, narrow escape, there,” panted Pete, leaning forward with his hands on his knees.

  “Yeah, but what was in that great big suitcase?”

  “Most probably stuff for spells,” said Pete. “New supplies.”

  Auntie Ida wouldn’t open the suitcase until she’d had a cup of tea. Mimi and me stood quietly on the sunken floorboards by the kitchen door while she made it. I knew the case had to be something to do with us or Auntie wouldn’t have kept us waiting there. When she finished her tea, she put the cup and saucer in the big stone sink. Then, with a grunt, she lifted the suitcase up onto the kitchen table, undid the strap buckles, and threw the lid back. As the case burst open, I caught a wave of light-coloured material and a lovely fresh smell on the air, but Mimi and I stayed where we were, not daring to move until Auntie called us over.

  The case was full of lovely clean clothes — perfect, no holes or patches or darning: gingham dresses for me, one blue and one mauve with a white collar; skirts; green trousers with yellow stitching on the pockets; a white cardigan with pink roses in two lines next to the buttons; flowery pyjamas; and (I couldn’t believe it) a pair of red slip-on shoes without any straps or buckles. Amazingly, they fit pretty well. There were dresses for Mimi, too — one pink with coloured smocking, another in white — pairs of knickers with rows of lacy frills, socks, little black shiny shoes, and pyjamas with yellow ducks on. At the bottom of the case, wrapped in brown paper, were some wellingtons.

  Everything was much nicer by a million miles than anything we had in London. Clothes went round in Limehouse, all used before, the elbows worn out by some other child, the patches sewn on by someone else’s mum. The only things I ever had new were the jumpers Nan knitted, striped in odd colours from old scraps of leftover wool. When I grew out of them, Nan unravelled them, washed the yarn to get the kinks out, then knitted bigger ones, the stripes always in different places to where they’d been before.

  It was wonderful of Auntie Ida to go to all this trouble for us, to buy all those lovely things, but I didn’t say anything other than a quiet “Thank you, Auntie Ida,” because it wasn’t good manners to draw attention to the fact that money had been spent. Dad always said there was quite a lot of it — money, that is — on that side of the family, Mum’s side. He even said that they were actually toffs, but that my Grandma Agnes, Mum’s mother and Auntie Ida’s sister, had been a black sheep. I know that that sort of black sheep has got nothing to do with the nursery rhyme. It means somebody in your family who has done a bad thing and can’t ever be forgiven for it.

  Pete and I walked back up the hill.

  “What do you reckon Cave bestiam means, Pete?”

  “I dunno,” he said, shrugging. “‘Best cave’ or something. I dunno. Is it French? You’ve done French in your class.”

  “Yeah, but only counting to ten and days of
the week, and I can’t remember anything after Thursday,” I said.

  “It’s not German, because it doesn’t sound like a war film, like when they’re escaping from a prisoner-of-war camp.”

  We spent a bit of time discussing how we would have got out of Stalag Luft 5.

  “Do you know what Cave bestiam sounds a bit like to me?” I said after a while. “I think it sounds a bit like Latin.”

  “Like in church?”

  “Yeah, the priests are always saying quoniams and gloriams. Bestiam’s the same.”

  “I dunno. Maybe. Cave is English, though. How could we find out?”

  “We’ll have to have a think. We can’t ask Mum. You know what she’s like, and Dad’ll just go along with her. She won’t stop asking questions, like where did we get it from. We’ll have to ask someone clever.”

  “Crikey. Where are we going to find someone clever?”

  “I dunno. I wonder what we’re having for dinner. Hope it’s rice pudding for afters. If it is, I bags the skin.”

  “That’s not flippin’ fair. Let’s dip for it.”

  Auntie Ida put plaits in so tight I could hardly get my fingernails through my hair to scratch my scalp.

  She looked out of the window at the dark grey sky and said the tide was in, so Mimi and I could put on our boots and go and see if the chickens had laid any eggs, but we’d best be quick before the heavens opened.

  We unlocked the back door, walked across the cobbles of the small paved yard between the two wings of the house, and took the narrow path that led down the garden.

  It was damp and chilly. Rain had fallen in the night. The wet grass was sprinkled with drops like shiny glass beads, each one separate from the others. The branches of the overgrown shrubs arched over the path with the weight of dripping water, their drooping leaves showering us as we brushed by.

  Mimi held the basket, and I pushed open the old gate in the wire fence round the henhouse. Our boots soon became clogged with mud and feathers, straw and chicken muck. When we went through the door, the chickens bobbed and jerked and looked us up and down with their little beady eyes, clucking like a lot of old women gossiping.

  A huge cockerel with a big fancy-coloured tail and spikes on the back of its feet came over and started pecking around Mimi’s legs. She took hold of my arm, grizzling to go out. I told her she was to give the old bird a kick if it pecked too hard.

  Auntie Ida said we had to be firm with the chickens and stand no nonsense. I took a deep breath, stuck my hand under the backside of a big brown hen sitting in its box full of straw, and pushed it off. It rose up, squawking in a flurry of flying feathers and scratchy claws, starting all the other chickens off. They went scattering into the air and scrabbling for the door, making a silly racket. In the empty boxes, I found five warm eggs altogether and let Mimi help me get them safely into the basket.

  It started to spit as we pulled the wire gate shut. I rested one hand gently on the eggs while we ran back along the path towards the house. By the time we’d reached the back door, dashed inside, taken off our boots, and put them in the crate like Auntie told us, the rain was falling in heavy drops. We rushed down the stone passage to the kitchen in our socks and showed her the eggs. She was really pleased with us and said we’d done well for townies. For a moment, I thought a smile was coming, but it never did.

  The rain went on all day. We listened to the wireless, and Mimi cut pictures out of old magazines and newspapers and stuck them onto bits of cardboard with glue that Auntie made out of flour and water. I thumbed through the stack of papers. Most of them were old and yellow, some even from before the war.

  I didn’t realize I’d started drumming on the kitchen table until Auntie told me to stop it. With a big sigh, she went into the pantry and brought out a cardboard box full of plums from the garden. Many of them were overripe and speckled with dots of white mould, but Auntie said if I helped her pick them over and take out the stones, we could make a pie. She gave me a big pinny and sat me down with a bowl and a knife, but I’d never been one for fiddly things like that, and after a short while, I was fed up with blinking plums and had two plasters on my fingers.

  The water streamed down the windows in long shining strings.

  “Weather for ducks,” Auntie said, getting up and looking out. “I’ll have to take some pails up to the rooms upstairs. There are always leaks when it rains like this. Mimi, you come and help me. Cora, leave those for a minute and wash your hands. You can go and feed the parrot.”

  She reached behind the tattered curtain under the sink and brought out a brown paper bag full of long black-and-white-striped seeds.

  “Just unhook the feed box and pour some of these in,” she said. “They’re sunflower seeds. The old bird won’t peck you.”

  I took the bag and went down the gloomy passage, past the locked doors, and into the sitting room at the end with its great stone fireplace stacked up on one side with logs. The panelled walls and low beamed ceiling made the room seem very dark, probably more so than usual with the heavy sky outside. I thought how cosy it could be if only Auntie would light the fire so we might be warm.

  Near the fireplace was an old red settee, so worn that tufts of hairy brown stuffing hung out of the holes. A broken spring was sticking up right in the middle. I told myself that if ever I had to sit down there, I mustn’t forget to check the place first so as not to do myself an injury.

  “Hello,” came a funny voice like an old door creaking. It was the parrot, sitting on his perch in a huge metal cage behind the settee, the stand resting on sheets of yellowing newspaper.

  He eyed me up and down as I took out his feed box and filled it with fresh seeds. Some spilled out onto the threadbare carpet, and I quickly picked up every last one in case Auntie Ida came in and told me off.

  “Hello.” His voice had something of Auntie’s in it.

  “Don’t you say nothing else?” I said, then thought I might try teaching him to copy some words from me. It would be a good way to pass the hours.

  I put my hand through the door of the cage, and taking his time, the parrot climbed down off his perch and walked up and down on my finger, carefully curling and uncurling his claws as he went. He stretched out his wings one by one, as if he were showing me the pretty green and red of his feathers. I moved him close to his feed box and watched how clever he was at taking a seed with his beak and rolling it around with his funny fat tongue, which looked just like a piece of smooth grey rubber. The bits of shell fell to the sand at the bottom of his cage, and he ate the nice soft centre. Really nippy, what he could do with no teeth.

  A piano stood beside the window. On the wall above it hung a large mirror in a carved wooden frame pocked with wormholes.

  I lifted the parrot back on his perch, saying “Cheerio!” three times. That’s what I was going to do every day till he learned it. Then I hooked up his wire door and went across to the piano. I looked up and gazed at myself in the old mirror.

  Its misty surface was speckled with black dots. In places, especially in the corners, the glass was so cloudy that it hardly reflected the room back at all. Towards the top there was a hole with dark cracks radiating out from it, as if somebody had thrown something small and heavy at the mirror, not shattering it, but leaving this long crooked spider of a mark. One of the cracks ran almost the full length of the glass. It cut across my face diagonally like a scar.

  I peered at my horrid plaits, longing to rip out the elastic and shake loose my scraped-back hair. I wondered if Auntie would believe me if I undid it all and said the rubber bands were so tight that they just snapped of their own accord.

  My eyes moved down to the piano. On top was a dusty wooden clock with no hands, and next to it a small sitting lion made of brass, with ugly green stone eyes and a snarling mouth.

  I wrote CORA with my finger in the thick dust on the piano lid.

  Nan Drumm, Dad’s mum, had a piano in her little front room. Some of the notes didn’t work, but it didn�
�t matter. Before she went back to Scotland and we didn’t see her anymore, she would play it sometimes — old music-hall songs, and carols when we went over for our Christmas dinner. I loved singing and dancing around the room to the music, holding out my skirt and bumping into the furniture. That was before my sister was born.

  I’d heard Auntie Ida go upstairs with her, Mimi clanging the buckets. Surely Auntie wouldn’t mind if I had a little tinkle on the ivories, as Nan used to say. I would have liked to learn to play the piano like Nan did. She might have shown me how to do it if she had stayed.

  I sat down on the stool, one of those that whirled around and went up and down, and I must have whizzed round on it for five minutes at least before I came to a stop, all giddy. I blew at the dust on the lid. The top layer rose up around my name in a thick cloud, making me cough. CORA remained faintly there, even when the dust began to settle. The lid creaked a little as I lifted it to uncover the long row of black and yellow-brown keys.

  I wiggled my fingers and put them softly down, thinking I might try and have a go at “Three Blind Mice,” which I’d worked out once on Nan’s piano.

  I found the first three notes, and played them twice and then once more for luck.

  My hand moved up the keys a little way for “See how they run.” I put the two bits of tune together. Then I tapped out a couple of notes with my left hand to find one that would fit, but it was difficult. None of them sounded right. I played “Three blind mice, three blind mice,” over and over —“See how they run, see how they run,” four, five, six times —“Three blind mice, three blind mice …

  Just then, over the noise of my clumsy playing and the steady pattering of the rain, I became aware of another sound, barely on the edge of my hearing. I stopped my fingers.

  It grew louder. Inside the room, somewhere behind me, a woman was singing. I lowered my hands silently, trembling, into my lap. The tune was strange, awkward:

  “Said my lord to my lady as he mounted his horse:

  ‘Beware of Long Lankin that lives in the moss.’

  “Said my lord to my lady as he rode away:

  ‘Beware of Long Lankin that lives in the hay.’”