How long has it been? he wondered, his arm burning from the weight of dragging the stumbling Sorah along behind him. Sorah’s eyes were glazed and his tongue was hanging from his mouth. If not for Sim pulling him along, he would have fallen to his knees. would have fallen to his knees.
How many days since we began to run?
‘Better not to think of that,’ Lekkie said in a conspiratorial whisper, having attached himself to them in the night after getting a clip over the ear from his sisterblood for teasing Mif. Sim shook his head, realising he had spoken his thought aloud. It would not do for him to lose his concentration.
‘Lekkie,’ Kora said warningly.
‘He is all right,’ Sim said. ‘I mean. We do not mind him coming along with us.’
Kora regarded him for a moment, then turned her face forward. Sim was unable to decide if she approved or not.
By afternoon they had slowed to a trotting walk. They came to Wirun, lying panting brokenly by the side of the road. It was such a shock to find her alone that Sim stopped.
‘Get up!’ he urged. ‘You must not stop.’
‘I must,’ Wirun said despairingly. ‘My body will not obey me and so I will die by the road. Better that than to run on and on forever.’
‘I will help you,’ Sim said, seeing her bleeding pads.
‘No. One must run one’s own race, and mine is done. But you have the strength to be kind, Sim, and that is rare.’ She glanced over at Kora, who had stopped as well, and Sim had the feeling that something passed between the pair.
Sim turned his attention to Sorah who stood swaying beside him, a milky cast to his eyes.
‘You might as well leave him too,’ Lekkie said, with cheerful ruthlessness. ‘He’s not going to make it much further and they can keep one another company.’
‘No,’ Sim said, taking Sorah’s paw firmly in his own. ‘We will go to the end together.’
‘So be it,’ Wirun sighed. ‘Run then, for the song fades.’
‘We must rest a bit,’ Kora said calmly. ‘A few moments will not make so much difference. We will stay with you for a while and perhaps . . .’
‘No,’ Wirun said. ‘I will not be the cause of delaying you. Go. I do not want you here.’
And so they went on.
It was nearing dawn, and they had almost reached the top of the highest hill. They were all walking, for none of them had strength left even to trot, not even Kora. Sorah was leaning heavily on Sim when Mif gave a wail of despair.
‘The song! It has stopped! The Piper has abandoned us.’
They all stopped, aghast, for it was true. None of them could remember the moment it had ended, and yet, for the first time in days, Sim could hear the wind in the sparse grass alongside the road.
‘But I can hear something,’ Rill said, tilting his head.
‘Something,’ said Floret, speaking for the first time.
Kora looked at Sim, her eyes gleaming yellow in the predawn blue. ‘It is the wind,’ she said, but there was hope in her voice.
‘Not the wind,’ Sim said certainly. ‘Maybe it is not too late.’
‘Too late,’ Floret murmured and fell silent again.
‘Come,’ Kora said, and they crept up the last bit of road to the top of the hill.
And then they were gazing down to where the road stopped and the land ended as if someone had sliced it. A dark shimmering shadow lay beyond, undulating and uttering a rasping whispering growl.
‘The road ends, but what is that beyond it?’ Mif whispered fearfully. ‘Has the night leaked down over the land? Are we to be drowned in the darkness?’
‘Where are the others? Where is the pack?’ Lekkie asked in a voice that shook.
‘It is the Great Blue,’ Sorah croaked.
Sim stared down at his friend, thinking him delirious, but his eyes were clear.
‘What else can it be?’ Sorah pleaded, as if it was up to Sim whether it was or not.
‘It is black,’ Rill said. ‘Like the sky at night. In the day it is blue and at night it is black.’
Sim did not know what to say. The side of the land, bitten off into a jagged cliff rearing out over the inky blackness full of drowned stars and the moon like a white hole, filled him with dread. The road had ended, but was this liquid darkness the Great Blue? And if it was, where were the others?
‘Let us go down,’ Kora said, and walked forward as if in a dream.
• • •
The sun had risen in a molten ball by the time they reached the edge of the world.
‘I feel no desire to run on and on forever,’ Sorah said as they sat by the road. He sounded puzzled and relieved.
‘I don’t even want to walk,’ Mif said earnestly. ‘Besides, the road does not go on forever.’
‘Do you suppose the Piper was here waiting for them when they came?’ Lekkie wondered wistfully. ‘Imagine how the bridge would have looked going up with them all swarming over it. They will be celebrating now in Evermore. All the ones who went and the Ones Who Went Before. They will have honey and nuts.’
‘Perhaps,’ Kora said. She was standing on the very edge of the jutting cliff, staring moodily down at the stones rising above the churning waves at the base of the cliff.
She looked up into Sim’s eyes, and in hers, for a moment, he seemed to see the others, thousands of them, leaping off the cliff into nothing, falling down and down onto the black teeth below, drawn by the Piper, drawn by the song and their longing for Evermore.
Sim’s heart beat fast and painfully as he wondered if it could be that all of the pilgrims had come here only to be swallowed by the voracious whispering dreams of the Great Blue? Had they not been warned by the darkness of it? Could it be that there was no Evermore? Had the Piper brought them to be devoured by the crashing water below?
Or perhaps after all, death was the only way to Evermore, and so the Piper had brought them there the only way he could.
‘What will we do now? The Piper will never come again,’ Sorah asked forlornly. ‘Must we go back along the road as penance? We cannot go forward.’
‘Maybe we could gather up everyone who is left and maybe the Piper will send another song some day . . .’ Lekkie said.
Kora looked at Sim, and her eyes were full of the bright sun and the arching sky. The dusk of uncertainty became a sharpening dawn of promise. ‘We will go back to where Wirun was, and rest awhile. Then . . .’
‘Then?’ Sim asked softly, warmed by the radiance in her eyes.
‘Then, we will leave the road and see what there is in the wide world. The Piper no longer plays for us. Either he has failed us, or we him, but it is over. We are no more bound to him now than the Great Blue is bound to the earth.’
‘Leave the road?’ Sorah said, sounding shaken. Even when their people had not dared tread the road, they had lived beside it for as long as anyone could remember. Waiting faithfully.
‘Why not?’ Kora asked, but she was looking at Sim.
He took a deep breath, sucking in the salty smell of the dreams crashing against the land, growing more blue by the moment, shimmering with sequins of light; he sucked them into his thrilling soul.
‘O why not indeed?’ he whispered.
PART II
THE WAY OF THE BEAST
‘Sometimes it seemed the giant’s hand must be
shaped into a plea for mercy . . .’
THE MONSTER GAME
Well then, the Monster Game.
This would be a good name for childhood, but the Monster Game I’m talking about is not childhood itself, though it began there for me.
Children’s lives are mostly monstrous games in which they strive to understand the forces that regulate their existence. Some never do learn that there are no rules, no regulations and no rhymes large enough and complex enough to give living any real purpose.
Childhood was no place to be in the Depression. I can’t remember the first time I heard that word. Maybe it created itself. The hunger and the pover
ty seemed to come from nowhere too, like a mushroom born out of nothing on a green lawn. And once born, it went on forever. The only thing about it that affected me directly was the hunger. There never seemed to be enough to eat. Always bread and dripping to fill up on.
Dripping then wasn’t the same as it is today.
There was nothing unique or poetic about my hunger. Almost everyone was skinny in the Depression. Except Mr Bracegirdle.
But I don’t want to think about him. Not yet, anyway.
I remember little of all the people who traipsed and dragged their feet through our lives and our living room during those years. Everything runs together – hazy, ill-connected incidents and scraggy bits of this and that.
I remember my mother feeding the boarders.
We had been comfortable before the Depression. My mother had come from a good family who owned their own home. My father had not been of her class, but he had offered prospects. How we fell into trouble and debt, I don’t know. Maybe it was all part of living through that time. People lost fortunes overnight, prosperous businesses faded into shuttered obscurity with no one knowing why. There was simply no money and no work. My father dying of something to do with his lungs might have been part of it. There was less and less money after that. Then one evening, my mother announced that we would take in guests. Her lips trembled when she said these words, and she held her head very high.
Poppy was ashen but the rest of us goggled, wondering what sort of guests could produce such a reaction in her. Only in time did we come to realise that by guests, my mother meant paying boarders. But she never spoke of them as such. ‘Our guests,’ she always called them, uttering this euphemism to the last.
I was moved in with Annabel and Poppy.
‘You can’t put him in with the other boys. They’ll bully him,’ my mother explained.
She was attractive, of course; delicately built with soft skin and none of Poppy’s boldness. But she had a stubborn streak and a fierce desire to redeem herself from marrying my father, from being poor, from having so many children. She had a determination not to sink into the mire beneath these disadvantages, and that meant keeping clean.
She was the cleanest woman I’ve ever known. She didn’t even smell of sweat.
I remember she used to say to us: ‘No one will say my house is dirty because I’ve got so many children.’ She would examine every face anxiously for condemnation. She feared people would brand her ill-bred or slovenly for having so many kids and scrub, scrub, scrub all through the years, all the while sighing as though God and the whole world had made her get down on her hands and knees and rubadubdub.
Why she had so many kids when she seemed perpetually embarrassed by her fecundity, I do not understand. Yet she loved us. I think we were a compensation of some sort, a protection from whatever monsters menace grown-ups.
I was never close to her. Sons are supposed, I know, to have this bond with their mothers. Ben and Tommy certainly did, and even Dave in his devil-may-care way. The girls were devoted to her too, except Poppy who was too wild to be devoted to anyone.
When I was young, I loved her in the same quiet, desperate way I have always loved. The dramatics in my family were doled out liberally to Dave and Poppy, and even in some measure to Annabel and Gertie. But not to me.
Maybe because of being the youngest, I was a sort of afterthought in most people’s minds. I suffered from a crippling shyness – as if I was forever coming into a room filled with disapproving strangers. I must have seemed a pathetic creature beside the others.
The guests came and went.
They could eat, for a small consideration, the meals my mother made for the family. Depending on how many took advantage of this offer, we kids either ate with them in splendid elegance at my mother’s precious cedar table, or in the kitchen. On the whole we preferred the kitchen because it was cosier and you could eat with your fingers and clean up the boarders’ plates on the rare occasion any scraps were left.
Of the parade of smiling or scowling guests that passed through our doors in those years, I remember only two clearly.
Mrs Barstow had flaming red hair, blue eyes and faintly greenish skin. She may have been a martian. Certainly she was not quite human. She rented our smallest room, a tiny annexe that had once been a sewing room. Unlike many of the others, she paid her rent promptly and in advance. Yet like some slinking criminal mastermind, she would creep into the house, leaping comically into the air if anyone spoke to her.
We discovered that she would come home early sometimes and sit for hours in our old cubby before coming inside at her usual time.
‘Mrs Barstow’s in the cubby again,’ Evan would whisper.
Evan and I were thrown together by virtue of our ages, but we were wary siblings for the most part, conscious of our essential differences. Evan spent hours up the peppercorn tree in the front yard on hot days and you never knew what he’d have up there with him, whether he’d let you come up or bombard you with cow dung.
Once he had a bottle of cooking sherry he had pinched from the kitchen, another time it was a dirty book he had got from one of the boarders’ rooms.
Another time it was an insect farm.
He had seen an advertisement in the back of an American comic and had decided to start his own business marketing ant farms. He thought it was just a matter of domesticating the ants. When I climbed up, he had advanced from the ploughshare to the sword and was staging battles between various insects. The tiny creatures were proving uncooperative, preferring to examine the gauze lid for an escape route to being gladiators.
They would only fight, Evan explained, if he shook the bottle, and that was what he did. He waited for them to scale the edges, then just as they reached the gauze he would shake and the ant or spider would fall back. Infuriated, it would become aggressive and attack anything that moved.
Evan said he was priming his fighters for battle, but I think he liked the futility of their minuscule struggle for freedom against his omniscient and malicious power.
It is no surprise to me that now he is a prosecuting barrister, presiding coldly over this or that life, goading people to give away more than they mean to.
Perhaps the reason why Mrs Barstow so fascinated Evan lay in his own essential oddness. Evan wanted to know what she did in the cubby house. He wanted us to spy on her and find out. I was too scared. Evan would not go alone and I refused to go at all.
Nevertheless, the cubby was a magical place because of the mystery surrounding it. Maybe Mrs Barstow put the magic in there with the drips of candlewax and cigarette butts. No one ever discovered what she did. She probably just smoked and thought her weird thoughts, but it seemed to us she was a witch who cast spells there and did unspeakable things to frogs.
My mother told us to mind our business. She didn’t care what the boarders did as long as they did it quietly and brought no one up to their rooms. For the most part, she preferred to behave as if they did not exist.
So why did she choose Mr Bracegirdle as her special pet?
Not for his appearance, surely. He was a plump, untidy little man with hair that was too long and lank, and soft grapelike eyes. His mouth, sandwiched between a narrow moustache and a bulbous chin, was red and small like the mouth of a cat, and curiously feminine.
Within hours of paying in advance for the largest room in the house, he had a workman change the lock on the door, as though we were a lot of thieves. The first night he came he shouted at Gertie for playing too loudly, and he called my mother ‘my good woman’, which ought to have put anyone off.
I think it was his plumpness that caught her, for in those lean days it suggested plenty. He must have understood this for he wore his fat with the same pride as he wore a gold fob watch with the chain strung ostentatiously across his middle. Why this should make him an object of admiration in my mother’s eyes when all around us people were starving, I don’t know.
Mr Bracegirdle nurtured and took advantage of my mother�
��s softness over him. He would discuss politics with her in a pompous voice and defer to her opinion as she doled out a second helping to him. He lent her books in foreign languages which she could not read, and exchanged sly and pointed looks with her over the dining table. He fluttered his eyelashes at her until my mother was beside herself.
When he reproved Poppy for going without stockings in the house, my mother sighed and shook her head. Poppy loathed him and would mimic the waddling movement of his fat behind. She dubbed him the Meat Man, and the nickname stuck, though we only used it behind his back.
We started playing the Monster Game before Mr Bracegirdle came and after my father died. It started as a hide and chase game, but Poppy, who could not let anything go without embellishment, thought it would be far more thrilling not just to be hunted in the dark, but to be hunted by a monster.
‘Let’s play the Monster Game,’ Evan would say, and when she was in a good mood Poppy would grin a crooked grin with her crooked mouth and nod. Then everyone, even Dave, would hide in the darkened two-storey house. After a minute and a warning, Poppy the monster would come after us.
We would hear her clearly from our hiding places, growling and slavering, horrifically realistic. Almost suffocated with terror and excitement, I would lie still in the wardrobe or behind a curtain, listening to her coming closer.
Sometimes she would artistically drag one foot and breathe raggedly. I always felt a bit sorry for that monster, who seemed to be on his last legs. Sometimes there was a drooling maniac who would cackle and make quick, sudden dashes. I didn’t like that one, but the scariest creature in Poppy’s repertoire was the breather.
That monster would move stealthily, stalking its prey in utter silence. You would not hear it until suddenly, heart-stoppingly close, there would be heavy, hungry breathing. You never knew if it was just someone looking for a better hiding place, or the monster. If you made the mistake of calling out softly, a savage howl of laughter would slice the silence and you knew you were doomed.
Those monsters were remarkably clumsy when it came to catching their victims though. Years later, it occurs to me that they were a special breed of monster: a hybrid that lived on fear rather than flesh. There is a lot of that sort in the real world.
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