“Go away, cuckoo,” she told him. “You’ll have your Marmitey fingers all over my skirt.” For a split-second, she thought she saw his eyes flash – actually flash – like somebody taking a photograph.
You’d better watch what you say, Alice warned her. Toby’s got a guardian angel, and you don’t want to go upsetting him.
A weak sun was shining through the dishrag clouds when Duncan Callander came to call the next afternoon. He sat in the best room and mum gave him a cup of tea and a plateful of petticoat tails.
“I talked to the kirk elders this morning. We had a special meeting, in fact. I want to tell you that they all extend their warmest best wishes to young Gillie here, and that they very much appreciate her bringing such a delightful story to their attention.”
“But it’s not a story!” Gillie interrupted.
Duncan raised his hand to silence her. He didn’t look her in the eye. He looked instead at the pattern on the carpet and spoke as if he had learned his words from a typewritten sheet of paper.
“As I say, they were very appreciative, and very amused. But they find that there is no evidence at all that what Gillie saw was anything more than an optical illusion; or a delusion brought on by the stress of having a new baby in the household. In other words, the most likely explanation is a little show of harmless attention seeking by an older sister who feels jealous and displaced.”
Gillie stared at him. “You said you believed me,” she whispered. “You said you believed me.”
“Well, yes, I’m afraid that I did, but it was wrong of me. I have a rather mystical turn of mind, I’m afraid, and it’s always getting me into hot water. The kirk elders – well, the kirk elders pointed out that nobody has ever produced any conclusive proof that angels actually exist, and until that happens the kirk’s official line is that they do not.” He took a breath. “I apologize if I misled you.”
“And that’s all?” Gillie demanded. “That’s all that’s going to happen? I saw an angel and you’re going to say that I was making it up because I was jealous of Toby?”
“If you want to put it that way, yes,” Duncan told her, although he spoke so soft and ashamed that she could hardly hear him.
Mum took hold of Gillie’s hand and squeezed it. “Come on, sweetie. You can forget it all now; put it behind you. Why don’t I bake you your favourite cake tonight?”
Where are you going to sleep? asked Alice.
“I don’t know. I’ll find somewhere. Tramps have to.”
You’re not going to sleep in a doorway on a freezing-cold night like this?
“I’ll find a squat. Anywhere’s better than home.”
Your supper’s waiting on you. Mum baked that rich thick chocolate cake. Your warm bed’s all turned down.
“I don’t care. What’s the point of cakes and warm beds if people say you’re a liar. Even that minister said I was liar, and who was the one who was doing the lying?”
She had trudged the whole length of Rose Street, between brightly-lit pubs and Indian restaurants, jostled by rowdy teenagers and cackling drunks. Maybe Mrs McPhail would have her for the night. Mrs McPhail believed in angels.
By the time she had crossed Prince’s Street and started the long walk up Waverley Bridge, it had started to snow again. Sir Walter Scott watched her from his Gothic monument as if he understood her predicament. His head, too, had been full of fancies. She was wearing her red duffelcoat and her white woolly hat, but all the same she was beginning to feel freezing cold, and her toes had already turned numb.
At the top of the hill the streets were almost deserted. She crossed North Bridge Street but she decided to walk down the backstreets to Mrs McPhail’s in case dad was out looking for her in the car.
She had never felt so desolate in her life. She had known that people would find it difficult to believe her. She hadn’t minded that. What had hurt so much was Duncan’s betrayal. She couldn’t believe that adults could be so cynical – especially an adult whose chosen calling was to uphold truth and righteousness and protect the weak.
She was half-way down Blackfriars Street when she saw a young man walking very quickly toward her. He was wearing a tarn and an anorak and a long Rangers scarf. He was coming toward her so fast that she wondered if somebody were chasing him. His face was wreathed in clouds of cold breath.
She tried to step to one side, but instead of passing her he knocked her with his shoulder, so that she fell back against a garden wall.
“What did you do that for?” she squealed at him; but immediately he seized hold of the toggles of her duffel coat and dragged her close to him. In the streetlight she could see that he was foxy-faced and unshaven, with a gold hoop earring in each ear, and skin the colour of candlewax.
“Give us your purse!” he demanded.
“I can’t!”
“What d’you mean you can’t? You have to.”
“I’m running away. I’ve only got six pounds.”
“Six pound’ll do me. You can always run away again tomorrow. I don’t even have anywhere to run away from.”
“No!” screamed Gillie, and tried to twist away from him. But he clung onto her duffel coat and wrenched her from side to side.
“Out with your purse or it’ll be the worse for you, bonny lass!”
“Please,” she swallowed. “Please let me go.”
“Then let’s have your purse and let’s have it quick.”
His face was so close to hers that she could smell the stale tobacco on his breath. His eyes were glassy and staring. She reached into her pocket, took out her furry Scottie-dog purse and handed it to him. He glanced down at it in disdain.
“What’s this? A dead rat?”
“It’s my p-p-p—”
He thrust the purse into his pocket. “Trying to make me look stupid, is it? Well, how about a little souvenir to make you look even stupider?”
He dragged off her woolly hat, seized hold of her hair, and wrenched her from side to side. She couldn’t scream. She couldn’t struggle. All she could do was gag with fear.
But it was then that she felt the pavement vibrating beneath her feet. Vibrating, as if a heavy road-roller were driving past. She heard a deep rumbling noise, that rapidly grew louder and louder, until she was almost deafened. The young man let go of her hair and looked around in alarm.
“What in the name of—” he began. But his words were drowned out by a thunderous blast of sound, and then a dazzling burst of white light. Right in front of them, a tall incandescent figure appeared, crackling with power, a figure with a crown of sizzling static and immense widespread wings.
It was so bright that the entire street was lit up, as if it were daylight. The falling snow fizzed and evaporated against its wings. Gillie stayed with her back to the garden wall, staring at it in disbelief. The young man stood staring at it, too, paralysed with fear.
The wings flared even wider, and then the figure reached out with one long arm, and laid its hand on top of the young man’s hand, as if it were blessing him, or confirming him.
There was a sharp crack which echoed from one side of the street to the other. The young man screamed once; and then smoke started to pour out of his mouth and his nose; and he exploded. Fragments of tattered anorak were strewn all over the pavement, along with smoking ashes and dismembered shoes.
Almost immediately, the figure began to dim. It folded its wings, turned, and vanished into the snow, as quickly and completely as if it walked through a door. Gillie was left with nothing but the young man’s scattered remains and an empty street, although she could see that curtains were being pulled back, and people were starting to look out of their windows to see what had happened.
She picked up her purse. Next to it, there were six or seven white feathers – huge and soft and fluffy as snow, although some of them were slightly scorched. She picked those up, too, and started to walk quickly back toward North Bridge Street, and then to run. By the time she heard the fire engines she was well on her
way home.
She pushed Toby through the kirkyard gate and up between the snow-topped gravestones. Duncan was standing in the porch, pinning up some notices. He gave her an odd look as she approached, although he didn’t turn away.
“What have you come for?” he asked her. “An explanation, or an apology? You can have both if you like.”
“I don’t need either,” she said. “I know what I saw was true and I don’t need to tell anybody else about it. I know something else, too. Everybody has a guardian angel of their own, especially the young, because everybody has to do something impossible, now and again, like learning to walk, or learning that your parents do care about you, after all.”
“You seem to be getting on better with your little brother,” Duncan remarked.
Gillie smiled. “God must have wanted him, mustn’t he, or else he wouldn’t have sent him an angel. And God must have wanted me, too.”
Duncan gave her a questioning look. “There’s something you’re not telling me. You haven’t seen another angel, have you?”
“Did you hear about the lad who was struck by lightning last night, in Blackfriars Street?”
“Of course. It was on the news.”
“Well, I was there, and it wasn’t lightning. Whoever heard of lightning in a snowstorm?”
“If it wasn’t lightning, then what?”
Gillie reached into her pocket and took out a handful of scorched feathers, which she placed in Duncan’s open hand. “There,” she said. “Evidence of angels.”
He stood in the porch for a long time, watching her push Toby away down the street. The wintry breeze stirred the feathers in his hand and blew them one by one across the kirkyard. Then he turned around and went inside, and closed the door.
The Hungry Moon
Lewes, Sussex
Lewes is the county town of East Sussex, set on the River Ouse with idyllic views of downland toward Glynde and Eastbourne. I lived here many years ago, next to the fifteenth-century residence of Anne of Cleves, and I always enjoyed its steep cobbled streets and its characteristic tile-hung houses. It was at Lewes in 1264 that Simon de Montfort defeated King Henry III; and the town’s strategic importance is remembered in its castle, with a Norman inner gate.
Other significant ruins include a Cluniac Priory dating from 1078, where I often used to walk. There were shadows here, and whispers, as if the monks were still going about their business.
Lewes has changed dramatically since I knew it. A new bypass cuts across the water-meadows by the Priory. The old chandlers and butchers and haberdashers have all vanished. Two fine Lewes institutions remain intact, however: Harveys Brewery, with its fine range of Sussex ales; and the annual Lewes Bonfire celebrations, when bonfire societies parade in the streets and blazing tar barrels are thrown into the River Ouse.
Some older traditions have survived in the area, however – traditions that are alien to Sussex. Come and see if you can face up to them now.
THE HUNGRY MOON
Marcus sat at the breakfast table and stared at the hungry moon. The hungry moon winked back at him, the way it always did, mouth crammed full of farmhouses and hayricks and trees and black-and-white Friesian cows. There was something lewd and knowing about the way that the hungry moon winked at him, although he was only nine and he didn’t know what ‘lewd’ meant. All he knew was that the hungry moon didn’t look like the kind of hungry moon from which you should accept gobstoppers outside the school playground.
Not that you would ever meet the hungry moon outside the school playground. The hungry moon existed only on the side of Moon Brand Wheat Flakes – a rather tasteless, old-fashioned breakfast cereal which Marcus’s father insisted they bought, because it reminded him of the time when he was a boy, and the Dandy was only tuppence, and the funniest programme on television was Mr Pastry, and you could walk all the way to Waddon Ponds to look for tiddlers without any fear of being molested. Besides, Moon Brand Wheat Flakes were ‘ideal for growing children,’ even though they tasted like dried butcher’s paper.
It was Moon Brand’s ‘hungry moon’ trademark that fascinated Marcus. It floated just above a wheatfield, with a huge spoon in its hand, shovelling up the countryside and devouring it. It was drawn with immense attention td detail: it had craters all over its face, and it wore button-up gloves. In the background, there were high, windswept downs and a church spire, with rooks circling around it.
Marcus liked to play a kind of Kim’s game with the hungry moon, memorizing all the different things that it was swallowing. Tractor, fence, pig, gate, swill bucket.
“Aren’t you finished yet?” asked Marcus’s mother, coming into the dining-room with flour on her hands. “I know you’re on holiday now, but it’ll be lunchtime before you’ve eaten your breakfast.”
Marcus’s father came in too, his hair brushed and brilliantined, his moustache neatly clipped. Marcus’s mother said, “Here, wait,” and started to pick hairs from his navy-blue blazer, but he flapped her away.
“I don’t have time,” he told her. “I have to be in Hemel Hempstead by three.”
He opened out his RAC road map on the other side of the table. “Here, I’ve got it. Bovingdon Road. But where’s Bovingdon Close? I wish they wouldn’t print these names so damn small.”
“French!” scolded Marcus’s mother, which was what she always did when he swore. She opened the top drawer of the sideboard and took out a magnifying glass. “There – try this. Perhaps you need glasses.”
“I do not need glasses!” Marcus’s father retorted, but all the same he took the magnifying glass and peered through it like a detective looking for clues. “Ah, yes. Here it is. That’s stupid, they’ve abbreviated it to Bvngdn CI. How on earth is anybody supposed to know that means Bovingdon Close?”
“Perhaps the RAC credits its members with a little intelligence,” smiled Marcus’s mother.
Marcus’s father ruffled Marcus’s hair, kissed Marcus’s mother, and then he left. Marcus was left alone in the dining-room, laboriously finishing his toast. He always ate slowly because he had a plate in his mouth to straighten his top teeth.
He picked up the magnifying glass and angled it into the diagonal shaft of sunlight that came through the dining-room window. He focused the sun’s rays on his discarded crusts, seeing if he could make them burn. Then he examined the writing on the Moon Brand Wheat Flakes packet, and eventually his attention focused on the drawing of the hungry moon.
The curved lens gave the hungry moon an almost three-dimensional quality, as if it were floating off the side of the packet. Marcus was amazed to discover scores of tiny details that he had never noticed before. There was a hare standing upright in the grass at the edge of the field. There were cornflowers and butterflies and sheep grazing on the distant downs.
But then he saw something that made him frown, and squint at the drawing even more closely. Tucked in the left-hand corner of the hungry moon’s mouth was a small boy, his mouth an ‘O’ of horror and desperation, one arm raised as if he were desperately waving.
Marcus stared at the boy for almost a minute. He could understand why he had never noticed him before: without a magnifying glass, he looked just like part of the dug-up wheatfield that the hungry moon was eating. Marcus wondered if the people who made Moon Brand Wheat Flakes knew that the boy was there; or if the artist had cunningly slipped him in so that people wouldn’t notice. But why would anybody want to do that? It didn’t seem like a very good idea to have a picture of a child being eaten on the side of a packet of cereal meant for children.
The other odd thing was, the boy didn’t seem to have a hand. His arm was upraised, but it only went as far as his cuff.
Marcus’s mother came back in. “Oh, Marcus, haven’t you finished yet? You really are a snail sometimes.”
“Look,” he said, holding up the cereal packet. “There’s something I never noticed before. The hungry moon’s eating a boy.”
Marcus’s mother glanced at it without really
looking. “Poor chap,” she said, gathering up the breakfast plates.
“But look – he’s eating a boy and the boy’s really screaming.”
“I’m not surprised. Can you go down to the shop for me, and get me some suet?”
“Can I have a shilling for going?”
“A shilling! Do you think I’m made of money?”
Marcus bicycled down to the shop on the corner. It was a warm, pale day. As he pedalled, he kept thinking about the boy that the hungry moon was eating. He wondered what it would be like, to be spooned up with farmhouses and screaming livestock, and then ground up alive between giant molars. He wondered why the boy had no hand. Perhaps the hungry moon had bitten it off already. It all seemed so odd.
Behind the pollarded plane trees, the faintest of daylight moons kept pace with him, as if it were watching him, just to make sure that he didn’t give its secret away.
His old school friend Roger Fielding invited him down to Sussex for the weekend. He didn’t really want to go, because he hated reunions. Too many years had passed to make his schooldays topical, and not enough years had passed to gild them with a nostalgic glow. But he had put Roger off three times already, and he knew that he couldn’t postpone his visit any longer. Besides, Roger was something in the Department of the Environment, and there was a remote possibility that he could be helpful when it came to seeking planning permission for historic or ecologically sensitive sites.
It rained most of the weekend, in miserable misty curtains, so they spent their time playing backgammon and drinking Roger’s home-brewed beer. Roger had three damp, lolling Labradors and a small, birdlike wife called Philippa. Philippa was what Roger called “a dab hand” at anything artsy-craftsy. She upholstered furniture and restored paintings and did brass rubbings, which were framed and hung up everywhere. She had redecorated almost all of their eighteenth-century house herself, and Marcus had to admit to himself that she had done it rather well. It was a plain but elegant house with a long sloping garden and a view toward Glynde and Eastbourne.
Faces of Fear Page 3
