The woman told us, ‘You can buy things in the camps to make a shelter until you find your people. But there’s no room here …’ She shook her head firmly. ‘Not an inch. You’d better go quick,’ she added. ‘People don’t like new faces with nowhere to go hanging around. There’s no space at all, you see,’ she repeated.
‘Do you get the Squads here?’ I asked her.
‘Oh, yes, we get Squads,’ she said, watching me. ‘We pay ’em to keep the place clean. But not in the camps. You go there. You’ll be safe there.’
‘Do you believe her?’ I asked Jane when we got outside.
She pulled a face and shook her head. But we were glad to get away.
*
The bus left from what that woman called the high street, although it was just a dirt road. Jane began to feed the baby as we waited but Sham insisted on doing it. She gave in easily enough. The way she thought was, if you wanted to hold a baby you couldn’t be all bad.
‘You’re so good with her, Sham, you’re so good,’ she kept saying. Sham glanced up and smiled shyly. But I was cross. He wasn’t interested in feeding her. He just wanted to make sure she took to him in case he had to look after her on his own.
After half an hour an old van with some seats in the back turned up. We climbed on and paid our fares and away it drove over the bumpy, potholed road, past the wooden shacks and out to the edges of the camp. As we went further out the houses got poorer and poorer. Soon all those solid-looking shacks were gone and we were driving past tents and sheds and all sorts of crazy-looking houses. It was over an hour before the driver beckoned to us.
We climbed out into the mud and he drove off.
In front of us was a field, full of lean-tos and tents and polythene humps and houses made of mud and sticks and tin and straw – you name it. I even saw houses made out of cardboard.
The baby had slept all the way on the bus but now she woke up and began yelling. I hated that noise, it made everyone look. Sham had had enough of her too, and he gave her to Jane, who tucked her down the front of her big coat so she could look out over the top. She liked that. She looked so funny with her bald little head peeping out, grinning all lopsided when she saw us watching, she made us laugh. And we felt good because we’d made the baby happy again.
Then we began looking for a place to build our new home.
We found an empty space in a hollow. Of course Sham didn’t want to spend money on stuff to build our camp. He still thought we could find something, so we had to go off and look, but that shopwoman was right. No one threw away anything here. There wasn’t a stick or a scrap. I found some piles of rubbish but the rubbish here really was rubbish … I poked about but it was all useless. Sham tried to pull a piece of polythene off one of the buildings that looked as though it might be empty, but a man came out and chased him until he caught him and gave him a real hard clout round the head. He knocked Sham right off his feet.
‘What do you mean, pinching people’s homes?’ he yelled. He was really cross. Sham was trying hard not to cry. He hated to cry. That convinced him that we had to buy what we needed.
We were only going to be there a while so we just bought sticks and polythene and a pile of old blankets. The shopman charged us forty-five pounds! I could have cried because that sort of thing is everywhere on the Tip, and if we’d known we could have brought a mountain of it with us. But we didn’t know so we had to spend the money. We stuck the sticks in the ground and draped the polythene over them. We dug up some earth to weigh the polythene down, put some more polythene on the floor and laid the blankets on top of that. And that was our house.
6
WE GOT READY just in time. The wind blew cold and it got dark. The rain began slowly but it quickly got hard and we all dashed under cover. We wrapped ourselves in blankets and watched as everyone ran.
It really pelted down for a few minutes. We peeked through the polythene as the shopman ran out to pull down a big awning over the chairs and things he had outside the shop. He had a pole with a hook on it. The awning came down with a big thump and the whole front of the shop swayed and bounced as if it was going to fall down. The man cringed away for a second before he ran back inside.
The water began to flow in underneath our little tent and in a minute we were all trying to pile the blankets and the baby in a dry corner. The baby thought it was great fun. She kept trying to splash in the puddles.
‘You’ve come down in the world, you have,’ Jane said, lifting her up in the air. The baby gave her that wobbly smile and tried to grab her nose. Jane let her suck her nose and we all laughed.
‘That baby sucks everything,’ laughed Sham.
Jane’s nose was all wet and so was her hair where the rain had got her. ‘We’ve got our own place,’ she said proudly.
Sham looked crookedly at her, his smile fading. He said, ‘Piece of plastic on a stick.’
‘We got out, didn’t we?’ Jane said. She tucked her hair behind her ear and stared at him. ‘No one’s going to tell you what to do now – when to go to bed, when to eat, nothing. You don’t have to go and get counted. This is ours. It’s a start.’
‘It’s less than we had,’ complained Sham. ‘We’re further away from town, where the action is.’ He wasn’t being fair. He was watching Jane in that close way of his.
Jane glanced at me but I looked away. She leaned forward as if she could press her words into him. ‘What do you have to look at it like that for? It’s going right. We got away. We have a base. We’ve got money to keep us going. Next thing is to find out where to telephone. Who the baby is, who her parents are. We couldn’t stay on the Tip, you know that. If we’d gone into town we’d have had to rent somewhere and what do you think that would cost?’
Sham looked out across the wet fields, across the glistening sheets of polythene and corrugated iron. He didn’t answer.
‘It’s all wrong,’ he said.
It was all wrong – trusting people to do you a favour if you did one for them. It was asking for trouble but I hated him for saying so.
‘Don’t say that,’ I told him. ‘You’ll bring us bad luck.’
Jane glanced at me but I wouldn’t meet her eye. I didn’t know where I stood. I only knew that Sham would never believe what she wanted. Sham had only ever wanted to make it by being better, sharper, harder, quicker. And here she was telling him to be nice!
‘Okay,’ said Jane. ‘We’ll ring them up and see what they say, okay? See if they’ll offer us something. A reward. That way we’ll find out. Okay?’
Sham pulled his blanket from a puddle that was forming underneath him. He made a face. ‘They can say whatever they like, can’t they?’ he said. He kept glancing at me. He was speaking to Jane but it was me he was telling. I was cross at him for putting me on the spot.
That’s when I remembered what I’d seen in his pocket that morning. I said at once, ‘He’s got the gun, too.’
‘What gun?’ She tensed up. ‘We don’t need guns,’ she said.
Sham stared blandly at me. He patted his pocket. ‘We may need it. I picked it up – to protect us,’ he said.
Jane stared at his pocket.
‘He’s got everything,’ I said. ‘The money, the gun. Everything.’
‘That’s right,’ said Jane. ‘You’ve seen me play fair. Now you play fair. You have the money or the gun – one or the other.’
Sham shook his head.
‘I gave you the money back,’ she insisted. ‘You play fair with us.’ She looked at him as if she could burn him up.
‘Are you going to walk out?’ he jeered.
Jane shook her head. ‘That was before. We made a deal. You have to stick to our deals, can’t you see that?’
There was a long pause. Sham ended it by taking out the money wallet and putting it on the ground.
‘If you’ve got the gun, you’ve got the money, too, in the end,’ he said. He looked at her coolly. Jane picked up the wallet and tucked it in her trousers.
&n
bsp; ‘I won’t let you down, Sham, even though you said that – even if you do it.’ She stared at him. Sham looked down and hid his face. I’d never seen him hide his face before. It was as if she’d taken everything away from him, because she was more prepared to let him shoot her than he was to do it.
When the rain fell off we went out to explore. We needed to see how things worked and find out about the kidnap. Jane stayed behind to watch the tent and babysit.
‘Did you really have a baby of your own?’ I asked Sham as we walked across the puddles and trodden mud.
Sham turned to look carefully at me with his deep brown eyes, as if he could find out everything he needed to know just by looking. I was only curious.
‘My mum used to go out and leave me to look after him,’ he said.
‘When was that, then?’ Sham had been with Mother Shelly as long as I could remember.
‘When I was little.’
Then I wanted to know. ‘What happened to him?’
‘He got lost.’
‘How?’ He turned again to look carefully at me. Now I felt as if I was stealing from him. But he didn’t say anything.
‘What was it like – having a mum and dad and all that?’ I asked jealously.
‘I don’t know,’ said Sham. And he wouldn’t say any more.
*
At first sight the whole camp looked like a sort of filthy Tip with the rubbish spread out all over instead of heaped up. But people lived in this rubbish. The cloudburst had turned the place into a mudbath. People were out sweeping muddy streams away from their homes and wiping their tents clean where the dirt had splashed up. We split up. Sham went off in the direction of the shop to see what he could nick. I wandered off round the houses. Neither of us could really believe there was nothing to find lying around somewhere.
I spent ages at it but there really was nothing, not a stick or a scrap of paper that didn’t belong to someone. I gave it up and started hanging around trying to overhear something about the kidnap. No one was talking about it, though. All the radios were playing music. I found a little house with an aerial on it and I could hear the TV on inside. I kept coming back and in the end I was lucky – the news was on. I leaned against the outside wall and kept my ears open. But someone came out and chased me off so that was no use, either.
I was on my way home when I saw the old man. He was a big, fat, old man in his trousers and shirt, sitting in an armchair on a wooden platform half in, half outside. His home was a clever-looking thing, a sort of hangar of branches and polythene and carpet, plastered in mud and then covered again with polythene. It was made of layers like that, and inside there were strings with pots and pans and bits of machinery and other stuff hanging in the air. The floor was raised high up. He had an enormous beard that went right round his face and he would have looked like Father Christmas except that there was an enormous yellow stain in the middle of it from cigarettes. He was sitting there up in the air on his platform floor like the King of Somewhere and Something and he was reading a newspaper.
I wanted that newspaper. Jane could read it. She could find out.
I hung about to one side out of sight. The old man was puffing and blowing, although he wasn’t doing much. He didn’t have any teeth and he kept squashing his face up. He had a pair of reading glasses on his nose and those and the slippers on his feet made him look as if he was living in a proper house and not in a heap of rubbish at all.
After a long time he leaned back in the chair, sighed, and put the newspaper down by the side of his chair. He leaned briefly down by the other side to pick up a can of beer – and I was there. I grabbed the newspaper and went skidding off through the mud. He heard me, of course, and let out a shout, but I was already gone. I glanced back and saw him lumbering down from his platform. But he was still in his slippers – imagine wearing slippers in a place like that! – and he’d only taken a few steps before he realised he was standing in a puddle. He glanced down and bellowed.
‘Bloody kids!’ he roared. Then he took the slippers off, flung them into his shack and took off after me barefoot.
I lost him quickly; he was big and slow, splashing like a bear in the mud and puddles. I went the wrong way to lead him astray, and then I doubled back and made my way to our place. Not before I flicked through the paper, though. There was a picture of our baby on the second page.
Jane had put down a sheet of polythene outside the tent and the baby was sitting on it. She had a jam jar and she was busy putting sticks and bits of dirt into it. Jane sat on a stone nearby, gazing out across the muddy shacks and tents. She looked vacant, faraway. She frowned at the newspaper when I gave it to her.
‘You can read it, can’t you?’ I said.
Jane didn’t reply. She smoothed it down in front of her. She’d taught herself to read. She stayed in and pored over books and learned how while the rest of us were out wasting time. But she didn’t seem so sure of herself now. She’d found the picture of the baby and she grinned, then peered anxiously about to make sure no one was watching. She ran her finger along the lines of words.
‘What’s it say?’ I begged.
‘Just a minute – the words are so little …’ she muttered and screwed up her face. ‘The words are so long,’ she said. There was a long pause and then she rubbed her face and sat up.
‘You said you could read,’ I said angrily.
‘It’s bloody hard, it’s a posh paper.’ She glared at the paper for showing her up like that.
‘You said you could read,’ I said again. I kicked at the stupid paper. It had everything we wanted to know! I felt like ripping it to bits. When she heard the paper crackle, the baby smiled her silly loopy smile and reached out to hit at it with her stick.
‘Can’t you even read her name?’ I asked Jane. What was the point of her staying in all that time? It was stupid calling the baby ‘the baby’ all the time.
Jane went back to the paper and tried to read the caption under the photograph.
‘Baby …’ she read. She looked up at me, delighted with herself. ‘That word says, “baby”,’ she told me, pointing to it. Then she frowned and began battling with the next one.
‘Sy … li-vie. Baby Sy-li-vie,’ she said doubtfully.
‘Sylivie?’ I said to the baby. But she took no notice.
‘Sylvie … Sylvie,’ said Jane, trying again. And it was like a miracle because the baby looked round and smiled.
‘Sylvie … Sylvie …’ I said. It was baby Sylvie, and she stretched out her arms and cooed. She hadn’t heard her name for days and days.
‘I read her name,’ said Jane excitedly. We were both thrilled and we kept calling her name so that she turned from one to the other, getting all laughey. Then we stopped giggling and stared at one another because it was really true. We had the baby the whole country was looking for and she was worth seventeen million quid!
I looked anxiously around and that’s when I saw that man again.
He was standing barefoot outside a tent a little way off talking to another man. He waved his arm in the direction of his house. I scurried out of sight behind Jane.
‘What’s the matter?’
‘It’s his paper,’ I hissed. I grabbed it and tried to pull it away out of sight but Sylvie had hold of it and she began to wail and hold tight to it.
Jane gathered the paper up. ‘You’ve forgotten,’ she said coldly. ‘No more taking things. No more street kid stuff. We have money, we pay our way.’ She thrust the paper at me. ‘Now you go and give it back to him.’
‘Give it back?’ I squeaked. ‘He’ll kill me!’ He was a big bloke!
‘Not if you give it back. Go on.’
She hauled me out and stuck the paper in my hand. ‘Quick, before he sees you,’ she hissed.
He turned and saw me at that very moment. There was nothing for it. Jane gave me a little shove in the back and I held out the paper and began to walk towards him. He watched me as I walked right up and pushed the paper into his
big hand.
‘Sorry,’ I muttered. I began to edge away but he grabbed my sleeve. I cringed down.
The man he was talking to laughed.
The old man looked at him and blew through his beard. His eyes were wide open. ‘What did you give it back for?’ he demanded.
I turned and gestured to Jane. ‘My sister told me.’
The old man looked at Jane. He puffed, pushed me out of the way and went lumbering over to her. He stood there staring down at her. Jane smiled weakly at him. Sylvie began to cry as he got up close. He was huge. ‘What did you make him give it back for?’ he demanded.
‘It’s yours,’ said Jane proudly.
‘What’s that got to do with it?’ demanded the old man. He looked cross. ‘Making him give it back when he got clean away. You won’t get very far like that. Giving it back!’ he complained.
‘But it’s yours,’ insisted Jane.
He shook his head. ‘You’ve got no bloody sense, you kids.’ He turned to look at me. I’d hidden behind Jane again. ‘And you’re not much of a thief,’ he told me. ‘Crashing about like a rhinoceros. If it’d been me stealing it you wouldn’t have heard a thing.’
‘But you can’t run like me,’ I cheeked him, because I could see he wasn’t angry.
He shook his head and stamped his foot impatiently. ‘I wouldn’t have needed to run,’ he told me.
Jane laughed, and he turned his wide-eyed, teasing gaze on her. ‘Don’t you teach him anything?’ he wanted to know.
‘Don’t go on like that,’ she scolded. ‘I want him to know not to steal things.’
‘I’m impressed,’ admitted the old man, ‘by how bloody stupid you are!’ I laughed. ‘No, I mean it. If he doesn’t learn how to steal round here he won’t learn anything!’
He turned and waved his stick in the air, indicating everything – the poor shacks, the poor people. ‘Do you think anyone’s going to give your things back? Look … he stole my paper fair and square. When you’re as old as I am, you can start giving people things. Here …’ He started rummaging in his pocket and took out a handful of change. He picked out a £5 piece and held it out to me. ‘Go on, take it,’ he urged. I sneaked out and took it and retreated rapidly.
The Baby and Fly Pie Page 7
