by Xan Brooks
In fleeing the house she’s become a fugitive. She mourns her lost earnings, left in the drawer at her bedroom in the cottage. Without those she has nothing. By rights her party tunic still belongs to Clarissa, while its kangaroo pouch contains the amulet that Elms killed his best friend to obtain. To make matters worse, she is sat behind the wheel of a stolen truck, fleeing the scene of a crime with a man who has been listed as dead. She can barely conceive of how many laws she is breaking. Past a certain number, she supposes it ceases to matter.
The windscreen vibrates; the cab is open at the sides. The low winter sun sends bars of shadow across the truck. When the Scarecrow notices the girl shivering, he removes his topcoat so that she can wear it. He searches the glove compartment and finds a briar pipe, a packet of tobacco and a folded envelope of petty cash. And here at last the fates are smiling on them. Either Coach was planning a major purchase or the groundsman liked to have emergency funds with him. The envelope contains banknotes and coins totalling just shy of six pounds. The Scarecrow says that this is more than enough. It will take them where they are going and allow them to travel in style.
Stolen money, she thinks. Stolen lorry. If they encounter a policeman, he will put them in irons.
She says, “I almost wish we were going to the sea. I’ve only been once before and I loved it.”
“I once read that all human life began at the sea,” the Scarecrow says. “When our ancestors crawled out of the sea, they carried a portion of it with them, because it turns out our bodies are largely made up of sea water. What are tears if not drops of sea water?”
“Is that where we’re going, then?”
“No. We’re going to the west.”
He has a book in the pocket of his coat because he never likes to go anywhere without one. This is one she has heard of: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. He reads aloud to her for about half-an-hour, after which the jolting motion of the truck becomes too much for his eyes and he has to give up.
“Not to worry,” she says, although she had been enjoying the story.
Shortly before noon they alight on a wide thoroughfare where the Maudslay can run. The town of Reading is somewhere to the east and the city of Oxford far away to the north, but both might just as easily not exist, so completely are they concealed by these yellow wooded hills. The road is empty of traffic, but it has a history of violence. At intervals they pass the remains of foxes, squirrels and badgers. The animals have been flattened so completely that they stick to the surface like a series of cave paintings.
In the sodden forecourt of a lonely petrol station, a young man in shirtsleeves and high-waisted trousers saunters from his hut to top up the tank. He says, “I got some fresh eggs, if you’re in the market.”
The Scarecrow climbs from the cab to stretch his legs. He says, “I’ll bet we’re your first customers of the day.”
“Then I win and you lose. I had a fellow drop by not an hour ago.”
The Scarecrow smiles. “What desolate country this is.”
“It’s filling up,” the young man replies, and for a moment Lucy assumes he is referring to the tank. “Every week, every day, a few more motors on the road. This time next year we’ll probably have our first traffic queue.”
“I’ll take your word for it.”
The man removes the pump and re-fastens the cap. “Sir, excuse me for asking, but was you hurt in the war?”
“I was,” he says. “I was shot down in a plane.”
The young man nods. “Sorry to hear it. I would shake your hand, sir, except mine’s so mucky.”
“That’s all right,” says the Scarecrow. “Consider us shook.”
When the trees fall away, the sky is enormous. The road forks on open ground and they run past the edge of Stonehenge, which is smaller and more compact than Lucy had imagined, all but dwarfed by the plain and the clouds and the noise of the truck. After men crawled out of the sea they learned to worship the sun. The Scarecrow explains that these stones were raised by druids, thousands of years ago, but that no one knows exactly how they did it, or what purpose they served. He jokes that one day people might look at St Paul’s cathedral and wonder why that was built too.
She says, “Maybe he was a druid. Mr Elms.”
The Scarecrow, though, is unconvinced. He says Arthur Elms did not know what he was and that this was the problem, it might be why he was doomed. “The man had a gift but he could not name it or control it. If he’d been stronger – I mean mentally stronger – he might have managed better.”
“Magic,” says Lucy and then, taking one hand from the wheel, she retrieves the contaminated amulet from her kangaroo pouch. She shows it to the Scarecrow, explains how she came by it. More than anything, she wants to throw it overboard, onto the grass verge or into the road, except that he tells her not to be hasty. She might be able to sell it; the cash could come in handy. Sometimes, very rarely, good things come out of bad things.
Lucy shakes her head. “Is that even true?”
“Probably not.” He flashes a grin. “It’s just a thing people say.”
The land out here is flat, given over to farms. At intervals, however, they pass an isolated home, set hard against the road. She devises a game where she marks each house with a score out of ten, mentally deciding which one she would live in. Most of the houses are upright, red-brick affairs; they stick out like sore thumbs. But she eventually sees one that she likes – a cottage half-hidden by greenery, wrapped in the landscape. Its walls have been rounded as if by a butter knife. A single chimney pot sits dead-centre on the roof. It is a dwelling that would rather not be spotted from the road and she decides it’s all the more inviting for that. Lucy points it out to the Scarecrow in the few seconds before the hedges crowd in and conceal it for good.
He cranes his neck. “You once said you wanted to live in a marquee on the beach.”
“Ha,” she says. “I’ve changed my mind.”
After the Scarecrow saved Lucy and made her leap from the window, he had turned back into the din and the blaze of Grantwood’s interior. He unbuttoned his shirt and clasped the cotton to his mouth. But the smoke meant that he could neither see nor breathe freely, while the heat was so fierce it stirred unquiet memories of his descent in the plane. Somewhere in the depths he heard Julius Boswell calling for Clarissa. He prodded the shoulder of a servant who had fallen, but the man was out cold; the fumes had stopped up his lungs.
He retraced his steps, forcing his way down the burning corridor that led to the drawing room. Halfway there, he had found Toto’s wheelchair, lying on its side. He attempted to go further, searching for a body, but the gusts beat him back and his shoe leather wilted. So he stood alone in the smoke, whipped by the backdraught, the last of the four.
The Scarecrow recounts all this to Lucy on their long drive to the west. He talks of the fire, and of other things, too. He tells her about Audrey and Michael, his infant son, and his job at the printworks and of the rotary press that everyone called the Dreadnought. He describes the plane crash that burned him and his stumbling walk to the church and the mermen in the lake and how he had wanted to join them, even though they were soldiers and not really mermen at all. And he says that in a sense that was just what he did, insofar as he has spent the past five years in limbo, all the while thinking he could never go home. He says that he sees things differently now; he feels a weight has been lifted. He has been selfish and proud, but this is all in the past and he is returning from abroad. The prospect excites him, although it is frightening too. He laughs at himself and says, “Perhaps it’s true what they say. There is no place like home.”
“Bram,” Lucy says and this makes him laugh all the more.
“Your real name is Bram. That’s what I should call you.”
He says, “Good God. I haven’t been called that in years.”
They are in the woods of west Wiltshire
when the Maudslay overheats. The Scarecrow flips up the bonnet and refills the engine from a jug and when he crosses back to the cabin he sees that Lucy is fighting back tears. His talk of home and family has pierced the girl’s armour and shaken the last of the Grantwood enchantment. She misses her brother; she has not seen him for so long. She promised to visit and she swore she’d send money and she must now face the fact that she has broken her word. She has been sitting here thinking how stupid and greedy the Scarecrow has been when it turns out that she has behaved just as badly as him.
He says, “I don’t know about that. Maybe we both lost our way. Don’t be too hard on yourself. It can all be set right.” He adds that when they reach a post office she can send Tom some money. Whatever’s left over will pay for her train ticket home. He does not want her making the return drive on her own and besides, he suspects that the truck is on its last legs.
“Poor old Maudslay,” the girl says. “We used to all sit back there in the summer. Me and Fred and Edith and John.”
“I reckon they’re probably in better shape than the truck. At least they survived, they got out alive. Even Fred survived, I think.”
“Fred,” says the girl and now the tears are too much. If she keeps crying like this she will flood the foot well with salt water.
This journey has been endless. She has been driving forever and her left leg has stiffened and swollen where she stabbed it on the glass. They squandered so many hours on the winding holloways beyond Grantwood House that it is mid-afternoon when they arrive at the town. Here she leaves the Scarecrow for a time to post a pound note to Tom at the Griffin. She prints the address on Coach’s dirty envelope and on the reverse flap she writes, “From Lucy xxx”. No doubt the money will be intercepted before it reaches the boy, but that can’t be helped, and she is belatedly fulfilling her part of the bargain. Hopefully he will see her name and her kisses and be pleased by the news that she is alive and thinking of him.
The town, such as it is, strikes her as dilapidated and sad. The commercial parade operates on a subsistence ration. It is the sort of place where, were you to enter a shop or a tea room and ask whether it’s open, the proprietor would grimace and shrug and say, “Can be, if you like” as opposed to replying with a straight yes or no. There would be a layer of dust on the shelves. The cakes would be stale and the tea would be stewed, and even the busiest weekday would have the texture of a Sunday. She thinks the town is as bad as Edmonton in its way, although the Scarecrow counts this as his home and therefore she decides it can’t be as grim as all that. He was brought up on these streets and operated the Dreadnought in the printworks nearby. Tomorrow they will drive the three miles out to his village, but for now they should rest. They could both benefit from a bath; they still stink from the fire. They could both use some sleep; they are half-sick with exhaustion.
The George Inn, like the Griffin, has six guest rooms upstairs. She would be willing to bet it has six vacancies too. When they push open the door, the noise frightens a marmalade cat, which tears through the lobby like a flash of late sunlight. The girl at reception glances up and then screams.
“Excuse me, miss, I mean no harm. I’m wearing a mask because my face is burnt.”
The receptionist flushes. Opening the leather-bound ledger with a furious motion, she says, “It wasn’t that, sir. It was just the silly cat scared me.”
They book themselves into a twin room at the front. Net-curtained windows look out at the high street. Two single beds stand against the far wall. The Scarecrow approvingly flicks the switch by the door. “Electric lights,” he says. “Civilisation again.”
Lucy draws a bath and sits in the stainless steel tub. Soaping her leg reopens the wound so that the water takes on a pinkish tinge. By now she has travelled to a point beyond tiredness. She feels rather as she did when she sniffed the white powder and she can still sense the lorry’s vibration in her joints. She marvels at the fact she was able to drive the old Maudslay. Tomorrow, she supposes, she will have to do so once more.
Her thoughts fly back across the previous twenty-four hours. They rewind from the town to the stones to the dead animals plastered like wet leaves on the road. The passage of time is funny; it can run so fast or so slow. This time yesterday the Tin Man was alive and Grantwood House was untouched. It had dominated the valley for hundreds and hundreds of years and now all at once it is gone, vanished in a fat puff of smoke. And half the people inside – well, they are surely gone too.
Emerging from the bathroom, she sees the sun has gone down and that dinner is served. The Scarecrow has persuaded the kitchen to send up a simple meal of bread, cheese, ham and pickle, together with two bottles of beer and a jug of tap water. They eat at the small table, gazing at the street. Come six o’clock, the place has already shut down. It is as if the two shapes at the glass are the only living souls in the world. The Scarecrow claims that this was a half-decent town once and could well be again, if the economy picks up. He is excited about tomorrow morning and the drive out to the village. He can’t wait to see Audrey; he has so much to explain. He says that he loved her, still loves her, and that this means there is hope.
The girl rejects beer and drinks the water instead. Hesitantly, she says, “You know you can take your mask off if you like. It might be more comfortable and I’m sure I won’t mind.”
“You asked me about the mask once before. Was that the same night that we saw the boy scouts?”
“Maybe,” she says. “It might have been.”
“I seem to remember we played football as well. Can that be right? And didn’t we all eat from a bucket of ice cream?”
“Yes,” Lucy says. “It wasn’t always horrid, the forest.”
“The Kindred of the Kibbo Kift.”
“Bram,” says the girl. “Stop hiding. Don’t be silly.”
And yet when he reaches around to unfasten the buckle, she finds she can’t stand the tension and has to shut her eyes. She sits at the table with her face tightly scrunched until he calls her name and she looks up to confront the ruined man she might have loved if a hundred things in her life had been different, or if he had taken more care that the damage he carried had not spilled over the sides and come to damage her, too.
She has decided in advance what to say to this man. “Good gracious,” she will tell him. “It’s not as bad as all that.” But she has been through too much; she is sick of shadows and lies. She gulps a breath, shakes her head and takes in the spread of burn tissue and his blank, blunted features. She says, “Bram, bloody hell, what a terrible thing to have happened.” And this makes him smile and tip his bottle in salute and so afterwards she will think that perhaps, after all, it was not such a bad thing to say.
Finally, here’s the village. It is cosy and wholesome; it makes amends for the town. The church-tower clock chimes the hour of ten and a shaggy shire horse helps itself to a drink from the trough. A wooden bench on the green faces a row of brick cottages. The girl is bundled in a gentleman’s topcoat. Her tan-masked companion sits silently at her side. He has not spoken a word since he climbed out of the truck.
Along comes an old woman. She’s on her way to the shop. On spotting the man on the bench, she performs a violent double-take. Then she regains her composure and bids the visitors a good day. Lucy politely bids her a good day in return, but the Scarecrow says nothing. He is staring at the cottages.
At five past the hour a slender boy passes by, carrying a sheaf of papers on a wooden clipboard. Lucy judges him to be around eight or nine. The wind lifts and swirls. It tears the outermost sheet from the clipboard and sends it low along the ground until it arrives at the bench, where the Scarecrow stoops to pick it up. She believes that if he paid more attention he might have retrieved the thing sooner. But he is moving stiffly and his gaze is on the boy as opposed to the page at his feet.
“Here,” calls the child. “Can I have it back please?”
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The Scarecrow’s fingers grope along the ground. When he at last finds the page, he briefly brings it up comically high, as though to cover his face, before lowering it again. So far as Lucy can tell, the page contains a pencil drawing of houses crowded about a steep cobbled street.
In a rusted voice, he says, “It looks like the view from Tucker’s Lane.”
By this point, however, the boy has turned wary. He looks from the Scarecrow to Lucy and back to the Scarecrow again. His dark hair is too long. His fringe hangs over his eyes.
“Why are you wearing a mask?” he demands.
Lucy waits a beat and then answers the question herself. “He was injured in the war. His face was burnt.”
The boy takes this in. “My dad was killed in the war.”
“Yes,” Lucy says. “Mine was as well.”
Now, finally, the Scarecrow leans out from the bench to return the paper. He says, “It’s very good. The roofs.”
“Thanks.”
“I’m afraid I’ve left a thumbprint in the corner.” The cold has made him shiver. Lucy can feel the motion through the rickety bench.
Following his gaze, she sees that a woman has appeared at the gate to the end cottage. The woman is tall and red-haired; still young, just about. She regards the figures on the green with something approaching alarm. “Mick,” she calls – but it is the Scarecrow who jerks his hand up in a greeting.
The boy has pulled the clipboard to his chest. “I have to go,” he says. “Goodbye.”
The Scarecrow says, “Is that where you live?”
“Yes,” says the boy. “I have to go now.”
The woman calls his name again.
