It’s all right for you, you can see in the dark! I thought. Wait for me.
I was sure he was going to jump through the window of his room again. But when I got to the room he was on the bed, lying on his side with all four long thin legs sticking over the edge, looking at me pleadingly. He was terribly tired and sick of being alone.
“All right,” I said. “I’ll stay with you.” Actually, I hadn’t realised how much I’d missed Chris until I thought he was leaving again. I was going to ask him to stay. So I left the window open so that he could get away when he wanted and hauled the covers off the floor and wrapped them round both of us. Chris put his narrow muzzle on my knee, heaved a great sigh and went to sleep. Animals are good at doing that. And Chris has always been good at sleeping.
I stayed awake for a long time, guarding him. If you look at wolves in a zoo, you will see that they always leave one of the pack awake on guard. That made it a bit like when we were small and I was afraid of the dark. Chris used to guard me. I stroked him sometimes, as if he was a dog. He was awfully thin. I could feel all his ribs through his coat and his hip bones were like knives. Perhaps wolves are always that thin. His fur is soft inside by the skin but much harsher on the outside. Anyway, he didn’t like me poking at him and shrugged crossly till I stopped. He got beautifully warm and I suppose that made me to go sleep. I don’t remember turning the lamp out, but I must have done. It was out when I woke up.
All this time I had clean forgotten the ghost. I sort of remembered in the middle of a dream I had, but then the dream became too horrible to remember anything else. It started with a smell of earth and growing things. I could hear grass and leaves rustling and I thought, I’m somewhere out of doors! But that wasn’t quite right, because the rustling was overhead somewhere, as if there was a tree growing on the roof. I was terribly cold, so I thought I must be outside. Then somebody’s feet ran over the top, where the tree was growing, with a kind of solid booming. And I realised I was buried in the earth.
It went on for years too. Sometimes I struggled and shouted. Nobody heard me, and I could hardly move. Sometimes I lay with chill cloggy earth all round me and despaired. This went on so long that I panicked. I shouted and raged and struggled and cried. When that happened, I could tell that great storms came in from the sea. I could hear the wind shouting and hail threshing the trees overhead, and sometimes one cracked and broke. I could tell that long lines of storm clouds went out from me, far inland, and made havoc in places I had never seen. And after years and years, I thought, if I know this and can do all that, then I ought to have strength to get out of here. So I began working, working, slowly and patiently to get free. I had almost found out how, when I woke up and found a dim streetlight sort of light in the room.
I was so glad to be out of the earth that it didn’t strike me as at all frightening when I saw a man in the room beside the open window. He didn’t seem a frightening sort of man anyway. I had fallen asleep leaning one shoulder against the wall, so I was sitting up, with a good view of him. He was odd-looking. He had a small peaky face with a lot of swept-back hair and very thick, dark eyebrows that bent in two upside-down ‘V’s like a clown’s eyebrows. His whole face was kind of quirked and crooked and surprised-looking. When I first saw him, he was drumming all his fingers on the edge of a bookshelf and rubbing his pointed chin, puzzled, as if he’d forgotten what he’d come for. Then he nodded. He’d remembered. He turned and came towards the bed. He leant down, quite near me, and I saw he wanted to speak to Chris.
Oh, it’s the ghost! I thought. From side-view he had a little hooked nose, like an owl’s beak. Or a parrot’s. A cross between a court jester and a parrot, I thought. It was a good description, but he was nicer than that.
Chris was curled up in a skinny doughnut-shape against my knees. But he came awake the instant the man bent over him. He raised his head, with the pointed ears pricked, and gave a miserable little whine.
The man stopped, with one hand stretched out that had been going to shake Chris. He hadn’t realised until that minute that Chris was a wolf. He stood like that staring at Chris, and his face twisted even more with a sort of horrified sympathy. Then his hand flopped in a helpless way and he started to turn away.
“No, wait!” I said. “You can say it to me. And Chris understands.”
The man whirled round and stared at me. He seemed not to have known I was there till then. One of his clown eyebrows went up and he put his hand up again in a sort of fending-off way.
“It’s all right,” I said. “I know I’m a girl, but I’m not on their side. I’m not even neutral now she did this to Chris. Who are you? Do you know what we can do?”
For a moment I thought he was going to speak. His face sort of gathered to make a word. Then he shook his peculiar maned head and smiled. He meant, sorry, not to you. It was a huge wide smile, as odd as the rest of him, one long line of smile wrapped most of the way round his face. I know that kind of smile from Chris. Chris used it to get out of trouble with.
“I’m not trouble, honestly,” I said.
But he was fading by then. I could see books through him, all except his smiling face. That sort of winked out and the light went with it. All I could see was the outline of Chris standing up on all four legs, whining a little, against the window.
“Chris,” I said, “would he know how to get you changed back?” Chris turned and pushed his nose at me and pushed again. “All right,” I said. “I’ll come here tomorrow night and try to make him speak. Hadn’t you better go now?”
Chris pushed his nose at me and bounded to the window. For a moment he teetered in the opening. I think his wolf’s muscles knew they could jump to the coalshed easily, but Chris’s mind didn’t. Then he jumped, scrape, thump, and he was gone too. I went drearily back to my own cold side of Mum’s bed, sniffing a little. I feel quite helpless. I suppose that’s what the dream was about.
CHAPTER EIGHT
This morning I made Chris’s bed, so that I could show Mum it hadn’t been slept in. The room smelt of wolf slightly, which is a bit like dog, but not quite.
When I showed her, Mum smiled her fond smile. “So he made his bed for once, did he? Or did someone else I know make it for him? You shouldn’t spoil him, Mig.” Then she sent me out shopping. “Chris has eaten all the food again,” she said. She didn’t seem to realise he must have eaten it raw.
I walked down the neat, empty, windswept sea front. There was Mr Phelps striding back from his swimming in all weathers. I tried to stop him. “Please, Mr Phelps—”
He just walked straight past, staring into distance with his fanatical eyes.
I went sadly down on to the sand and walked along, watching the waves crashing. The sea looked thick, bare, strong and real. It seemed far more reasonable than anything else in Cranbury. But it isn’t really reasonable, I suppose, if you think of the moon pulling all that water up and down like a yoyo every tide. Perhaps life is all like that, full of terrible hidden unreasonableness.
It was good to have peace to think. Aunt Maria talks and shouts so in the house that your mind is never quiet. I thought of everything that had happened, and it seemed to me that I might be beginning to see a way of doing something. But not quite. A wave bashed down across my shoes. The tide was coming in and I felt helpless again and went shopping.
Chris must have felt even more helpless and frustrated. I suppose he thought he had nothing to lose.
Anyway, Mum had spent that morning washing. She washed Chris’s things, including the clothes that dropped off him when he became a wolf, and didn’t notice that left him with nothing he could have been wearing. She also washed a row of Aunt Maria’s petticoats and mighty blue Baghdads. She got the lot pegged out, merrily flapping in the wind.
“But, dear, you can see them from the dining-room window,” said Aunt Maria. “I can’t have my friends sitting and watching such things.”
Mum protested it was a lovely drying day. In vain. As soon as the doorbell rang
for the first Mrs Urs I was sent out into the garden to take all the washing in. I did it very slowly. It was such a silly thing to worry about. But then if I wore blue Baghdads I wouldn’t want my friends to know either. I said so to Lavinia. She was sitting in the ornamental ferns, watching. I got about half the clothes down and folded them in a basket.
I said to Lavinia, “I suppose I’m not doing this the way you used to, am I?”
But she stared past me and bolted, a long low streak of grey. I looked round, expecting to see Elaine looming over the wall, telling me to get those Baghdads down at once. And it was Chris. He was standing on the back wall, the way he must have come in the night, sort of laughing down at me with his tongue flopping.
“Oh no, go away,” I said. “Don’t be a fool. All the Mrs Urs are here.”
I suppose that was what he wanted to know. He jumped down into the garden at once, in a lovely limber, flowing leap. He’s getting better at being a wolf. He can moved like lightning. Before I could move at all, he had jumped past me up at the clothesline and landed with a pair of blue Baghdads between his teeth. Then he made for the back door. I had left it open of course. And the kitchen door opens into the dining-room if you shove it. Chris knew that. So I didn’t follow him. I went to the dining-room window and looked in.
It was wonderful. Chris was galloping round and round the crowded room trailing the blue Baghdads. The silver teapot had fallen over on its side and was raining hot tea on the carpet. At least one cup was smashed. Everyone was yelling and screaming, and Aunt Maria was waving both sticks in the air. Zoë Green was standing on a chair with her hands together and her eyes shut. I think she was praying. The rest of them were making feeble efforts to stop Chris by grabbing the Baghdads. Just as I looked, Benita Wallins did grab them. Chris simply jerked his head contemptuously sideways and tore them out of her hands. Benita Wallins tipped over backwards, with her fat legs in the air. She wears Baghdads too, pink ones.
Chris galloped over to the table then. He put out a paw and swept the cake off on to the floor. Then he stood with one forefoot on the cake and the Baghdads trailing from his mouth, daring them all to get it. Only Mum was brave enough to try. She edged forward, both hands out, and I could see her mouth saying, “Nice doggie. Good dog then.” Christ stared at her intently. I could see he was hoping she would recognise him, but she didn’t.
All the while, Aunt Maria was screaming, “Get it out of here! Get it out of my sight! Oh – Oh – OH!”
This seemed to brace the younger Mrs Urs. They really do defend Aunt Maria. Corinne West and Phyllis West and Adele Taylor between them pulled the tea-soaked tablecloth off the table from under the teacups. They held it by a corner each and came tiptoeing towards Chris, like bullfighters, all in their neat pleated skirts and shiny court shoes. They tried to drop it over Chris.
There was absolute chaos for a moment. The tablecloth surged and neatly dressed ladies plunged in all directions. I saw Adele Taylor step on the cake and go skating into Zoë Green’s chair. The two of them ended up madly clinging to one another. In the midst of it, Chris must have trodden in the pool of hot tea. I heard an agonised howl, even above Aunt Maria’s screaming. But Mum’s instincts are all right underneath. She went sideways, sliding her back round the wall, and opened the door to the hall so that Chris could get away.
The side door into the garden crashed. I whizzed away from the window and looked round the corner of the kitchen by the coal bunker. Elaine came marching up the side passage and stormed in through the back door. Whoops! I thought. As soon as she was inside, I raced out through the garden door into the street. I had to get the front door open somehow and let Chris get out. I thought if I rang the bell someone would have to come and see who I was.
But Mum got the front door open as I arrived there. Chris shot out past her into the street. Somehow, in the middle of the bullfight, his head had gone into one of the great baggy legs of the blue Baghdads. There were holes torn in it, but he was almost completely blinded. I saw half one wild, staring wolf-eye as he dashed past. Mum leaned round the door and saw me.
“Help it, Mig!” she shrieked above the screams coming from the house. “Take those off it!”
Mrs Urs came running out past her into the street. Adele Taylor was waving an umbrella, Corinne West had a golf club, and Benita Wallins came puffing after, flapping an empty plastic bag! I saw Miss Phelps’s lace curtain fluttering as I pelted down the street after Chris.
He was running on three legs, pawing at the Baghdads with one front foot. His other three legs kept treading on the rest of the Baghdad. Every so often, he stopped and backed round in an angry circle, trying to back out of it all. His tail and back were all bushed out with fury. Even so, he ran twice as fast as I could.
“Stop! Wait! I’ll get it off you!” I yelled.
Maybe he was too upset to hear. Near the end of the street, his other front leg trod hard on the trailing blue cloth and he nearly pitched on his nose. But that tugged the elastic back across his head. I saw his ears come popping out. He went galloping down the sea front with the Baghdads flapping round his neck like a mad blue collar.
I ran along the front after him. People kept coming out of the houses to shout and wave and look. I saw more people in Cranbury in that half hour than I have seen all the rest of the time we’ve been here. Most of them were women, but there were quite a few old men and one or two men in sea boots, who were not so old. Chris veered away from them and leaped down on the sand, where the tide was going out again. I saw him, more and more distant, in a crazy outline against the breakers, galloping, stumbling, turning in circles, and stopping to rub himself against rocks. Halfway along the bay, he managed to tear the Baghdads off. They fell into the sea and surged back and forth there. After that Chris sprinted for his life, running like greyhounds do, doubled up, then spread, then doubled up again. He vanished up the sand long before I got to the Baghdads, and the few people who were running after him in front of me gave up and went back to their houses.
I looked at the torn blue bloomers washing to and fro and decided to take them home as a trophy of Chris’s protest. I suppose he did it because he had nothing to lose. And he must have hoped Mum would know him. I don’t like to think how he feels now he knows she didn’t. He’d have had to cross the road and the railway, too, to get back to the woods. I hope he went carefully.
But if he knew the trouble he’d caused! Aunt Maria has had some kind of seizure and been put lovingly to bed by a crowd of Mrs Urs. All the other ones have come here to make sure she is all right, and Hester Bayley has taken Zoë Green home. Zoë Green has been sitting staring at the wall saying, “A jahudgement, thad’s whad it is!” over and over. The other Mrs Urs keep going on about, “The terrible great dog. What a shock to your auntie!” I wanted to say Aunt Maria got what she deserved, but I didn’t dare.
Elaine is marching up and down the house, booming orders. We have had the doctor. He is a zombie like the men on the train, a soft grey one in a striped suit. The vicar has just arrived. He is Phyllis West’s bachelor brother. I don’t think he is a zombie, but I think he doesn’t understand.
Mum and I have been flying about looking after Aunt Maria, obeying Elaine’s orders, clearing up, and making half a hundred more cups of tea for everyone. While I was kneeling in the dining-room with a bucket and cloth, washing the tea Chris spilt out of the carpet, the zombie doctor came and spoke to me. He crouched down beside me. He is a soft and considerate zombie. “Tell me,” he said. “You were here. Was there really a dog?”
I looked at my hands all brown and shiny with tea. “She didn’t just imagine it, if that’s what you think,” I said. “It was – a sort of Alsatian.”
“Thank you,” he said. “I know you’re very busy, but would you mind going to the chemist with this prescription? Now, before he shuts.”
So I wiped off the tea and took the prescription. I looked at it first. He is Dr Bayley. That part was printed but the rest of it was in doctor-w
riting and I couldn’t read a word. The chemist is A. C. Taylor. It said on the bottle. I think he is Adele Taylor’s zombie. He is skin and bone with three streaks of hair. He knew all about it. “Terrible business,” he said. “Needs a sedative, does she? I won’t keep you two minutes.” He went off into his cubbyhole that said Prescriptions, smiling and humming a dull little tune. I wondered if he knew his wife had stepped on a cake. But I got bored waiting. Mr zombie Taylor seemed to be telephoning while he counted pills. So I went to the door and tried to think.
It was dark outside by then, but I saw our old car as it shot past. It was just a glimpse, but I know now I’d know it anywhere. I stared after it and thought, what a fool I am! There is something I can do! Then Mr Taylor called out that the pills were ready. I walked home feeling cross with myself. I pride myself on having ideas, but all the time we’ve been in Cranbury, I’ve been letting Chris do all the real active thinking. Perhaps it’s because Chris is a year older than me. But I am not usually like this. I think it is the way everyone here takes for granted that having ideas is not women’s work and not nice somehow. In future, I swear to do better.
Chris didn’t come back last night. He must have had enough in the afternoon. He’ll be very hungry when he does come.
I left the window of his room open when I went to bed. Mum went to sleep quickly with Lavinia round her neck, the way Aunt Maria wears her dead fox. I got up stealthily and went to Chris’s room. I am not afraid of ghosts any more. I got into Chris’s bed and went to sleep there. If Mum asked, I was going to say that Chris’s bed was empty so why should I share? But she didn’t even ask in the morning. She seems to be slowly forgetting Chris exists.
I had the dream again. I remember now that Chris said the ghost brought dreams. I looked up where I wrote it down. It was as bad as last time, only realler somehow. I could feel the clammy clods of earth round me when I tried to move. This time I tried to believe I was Chris sleeping in the cold woods among the goblin trees. But I could tell somehow that they were a different kind of tree growing on top of me, lighter and bushier. And I fought to get out harder than ever.
Black Maria Page 10
