‘The river looks as good as new.’ She put out a hand towards the model but then withdrew it as if commanded not to touch. She waved it over the blue and grey painted plaster of Paris. Stiffened peaks and troughs moulded to illustrate the wash of a passing boat beneath the looping span of the bridge. The water level had lowered with the ebbing tide. Figures hurried along tiny streets. A trapdoor in the river dropped down with a bang and a skulled head emerged, grey eyes venomous behind thick glasses.
‘Got it?’ The working jaw straining parchment skin hatched with lines. Fluffy brown hair tufted like a young bird’s in a fringe around the tonsure.
‘Of course.’ She held out the book.
He dipped into the hatch and, scuffling, reappeared by the side of the miniature cityscape. He was shapeless in a baggy mauve tracksuit, the jacket zipped up to a neck corded with veins; over this he wore a wool dressing gown, the cord trailing.
‘This is second-hand. I want a new one.’ His voice was querulous. He leant on the structure and the frame creaked.
‘I found it. We save money.’
A stain ran down the man’s trouser leg. Shambling along the boundary of the streets, he left a spatter of droplets on the floorboards, smearing them with his leather slippers. Even with the skylight open, the stench of piss and solvent was strong. He opened the paperback and, licking a finger, consulted the pages.
‘There’s no airport terminal, the A13 isn’t here and you’ve scribbled on every page. What have I told you about spoiling things?’ He directed a bony forefinger at a house in a Georgian square, the curling wrought-iron balcony fashioned from fine wire and painted black. In the centre of the square were two rectangles of green washing-up scourer and between them, on a grey painted path circling a patch of moulded soil, stood a miniature ceramic figure fashioned in a running pose. ‘That house has been rebuilt since this book was printed.’ He blew at dust on the roof of the five-storey house, whiter than the others in the square.
‘They don’t put houses in the A to Z, just streets.’
He pulled at the waistband on his trousers and lurched towards the door. ‘This edition is 1995, it’s older than the one you lost.’ His voice subsided to a whine. He thrust the book at her and proceeded out to the passage.
She skimmed the atlas. The pages were marked with lines traced along the streets with a ballpoint pen. They made shapes that made her think of letters.
‘I’ll get you a new copy tomorrow,’ she called and then blurted out to the empty room: ‘I didn’t do the writing, it wasn’t me.’
He knows that.
She paused for a moment as if acknowledging the words. She noticed the drops on the floor and went after the old man.
‘Shall we change your trousers, Dad? They must be horrid.’
The man shambled off into another room along the passage without replying.
From a cupboard in the passage, she lifted out a fresh pair of pyjamas. She was too late to stop her father sitting on his bedspread, sodden trousers around his ankles. He did not help when she lifted his feet up and slid the damp material clear. It was hard to believe that the boys would end up like this.
Not all of them.
She hefted the frail man to his feet and gripped him by his tracksuit jacket to stop him falling. Her eyes averted, with the other hand she eased up his pyjamas and, holding his weight with her body, deftly knotted the cord.
Once he was propped up in bed, all tucked in with the travelling alarm clock set for his early start, she returned to her room and fetched her coat and car keys.
‘Sleep well, Dad.’ She hovered in the doorway. He was leafing through a colourful hardback book, the cover depicting young men racing in canoes. It occurred to her that his reading matter was now the same as the boys.
She was certain that no one saw her leave by the back door and get into her car.
9
Monday, 25 April 1966
At five to eight in the morning few in Ravenscourt Park had time or leisure to sit in contemplation on one of the benches by the floral beds or winding paths. There were children, many with harried parents in tow, and commuters cutting through to the station. Suited men with briefcases, shadowy in trilbies or bowlers, macs draped on arms against forecast showers, strode along the avenue. Most were breezily oblivious to the carpet of blossom softening their tread or fluttering down like out-of-season snowflakes. If a petal landed on a Crombie-coated shoulder it was whisked off with an impatient hand.
Beyond the candyfloss canopy of cherry trees were tennis courts and the flawless verdure of the bowling green. Swings in the empty playground hung motionless from chains, the sandpit was pocked with little footprints and a moonscape of collapsing castles. Still mid spring, the paddling pool had not been filled and pigeons and sparrows pecked at crumbs blown from picnic lunches on the blue surface.
Pedestrians were funnelled on to a path darkened by a mesh of oak branches on one side and the District Line viaduct on the other leading to a gate between two stone pillars topped with stone spheres.
Mary and Michael Thornton walked at a slower pace than the other children, still strangers to them. The ten-year-old girl gripped her seven-year-old brother by the hand. Neither spoke; each was grappling with the business of starting at a new school halfway through the year where the other children would already have made friends.
Their mother had left earlier than usual for her job because she had a longer journey involving two buses and a walk at the other end. Mary was in charge; she held on to her brother’s fingers for dear life.
At the road they hung back. Children bunched up at the kerb, teetering and shoving while a car rolled by and then a motorbike. In their wake, the group swarmed across the road and, shouting and jostling, pushed through the side entrance into the primary school. Michael and Mary followed. Michael paused; pulling on Mary’s hand, he pointed through a mesh fence.
‘It’s all mud,’ he breathed. ‘It’s not a real playground.’ He clutched the mesh with his free hand.
‘It is.’ Mary swung his hand up and down as if the action would convince him that the obvious was not true.
‘I don’t think I like it,’ Michael confided.
‘Yes you do.’ She tugged him forward, but paused by a board in the middle of the mud.
Ravenscourt Gardens School
Headmistress: Miss B. M. Crane BSc (Hons)
‘That’s a bird,’ Michael announced. ‘Cranes eat rats and toads.’
‘Hurry up!’ Mary jerked his hand and then looked down at him. ‘Did you read that?’
Michael nodded, dwelling on his sandals.
‘You can’t read.’ Mary was firm. It was she who could read.
‘Do you think she looks like a crane?’ He brightened.
‘Of course not.’ Mary set off again, forcing Michael to fall in step.
The siblings straggled along paving beside the soil, the clamour of children’s voices getting louder. Rounding a low building they found themselves in a playground. There were two entrances flanked by raised brick flower beds. Mary pulled her brother closer and, batting off invisible crumbs, adjusted his jumper. She tucked his shirt into his shorts with such energy she lifted him on to his toes. He tottered when she let him go.
‘You’re an infant. You go through there.’ She indicated the word engraved in stone above the doors: ‘Infants’. This information appeared to surprise Michael.
He gaped at her. ‘Aren’t you coming?’
‘Of course not, I’m a junior. See?’ She gesticulated at a corresponding sign above the other entrance. ‘I’ll meet you there at home-time.’ She nodded towards a chrome drinking fountain fixed into the wall by the Infants’ door. ‘Don’t be late. I shan’t wait. I’ve got the tea to make.’ She spoke sharply, evoking their mother. She grabbed Michael and gave him a rudimentary hug. They clung together. Then Mary pushed her brother off and propelled him through the doorway.
Mary Thornton watched children file into the Juniors�
�� entrance. After a bit, she drifted over to the doors and looked inside. A row of shoe racks and coats hung from hooks. There had been a cloakroom at her old school too. She had no cause to go into this one because, furious at being made to mind Michael, she had ignored her mother’s instructions and not worn her coat.
‘Mary Thornton?’
Mary wondered if there was a hook with her name in this cloakroom like there was in the other school. Was her name still on the hook by the window there? Perhaps they had scribbled over it as they did to Arthur Madden’s when he left. She had been next to Jean Bryan, whom she wished were her friend. Now that she had left, Jean would never be, not that Mary cared, she told herself.
‘Mary Thornton!’
She could go in and find her hook even without her coat.
‘Did we wash our ears this morning?’
A hand clamped the back of Mary’s neck so that she could not turn her head.
‘What?’
‘“Pardon”, dear, not “what”.’
A woman in black and white zebra clothes fastened with huge black buttons was above her. The hand stopped Mary escaping.
‘You must be Mary Thornton, our late arrival in Class One.’
Mary could not make her mouth move and she darted a look at the Infants’ gate. It was too late to run away; they should have done it in the park.
‘I’m Miss Crane. The headmistress. Welcome to Ravenscourt Gardens School. I am going to take you to your teacher.’
All Mary thought while she trotted beside the tall, thin lady along a brown corridor that smelt nasty was that Miss Crane did look like a crane. She wanted to tell Michael.
She was taken to a room with a glass wall. Out of the light floated another lady, smaller and crosser than the Crane Lady, who pointed at a chair at a table on which lay a blue exercise book and a pencil that someone had chewed. Mary wedged herself on to it.
Later in the day Mary Thornton would see that the wall was not glass, but made up of windows with metal frames. The design, innovative in its day, ten years earlier, was intended to give the children a long view and encourage creativity. Perhaps it did in the summer but the unremitting sunlight warmed the crates of milk and in the winter despite the radiators a draught made the rooms permanently chilly. All of this Mary had yet to discover. Allowing her new landscape in bit by bit she registered a playground with goal posts and, away from the school, the railway viaduct that her father travelled over to get to his new job. She gazed longingly at it.
‘Children, this is Mary.’
Mary whipped around and without considering the horror of speaking in front of the class said, ‘I have to be called Mary.’
‘Yes, dear, that’s what I said,’ the teacher snapped.
Everyone was staring and not one was smiling. Perhaps after all the new job and the new name was her fault.
*
Michael was not by the fountain. Mary sat on the brick flower bed, running her fingers through the nasturtium petals. The flowers were familiar. She had grown nasturtiums at her old school. Some girls she remembered from her new class went by without noticing her. One of them was the nice girl with plaits who had taken her to the dinner hall and asked if Mary would like her to sit with her. Mary had said no because she was sure the girl with plaits did not mean it. Now she wished she could think of her name so she could call to her. She prepared a smile, but the girl didn’t see her. Mary pretended to busy herself with her satchel buckle.
There was a bang. She looked around. Everyone had gone. The Juniors’ door was blowing back against the wall. Bang. The noise gave her a bad feeling in the pit of her tummy. She heard a train, but from where she sat couldn’t see the station. The train didn’t stop, which she knew meant it was on the Piccadilly line. That was blue on the map and went to Caledonian Road to where she used to live.
The little girl ran back to the Infants’ door. It was shut. She grabbed the metal bar and, leaning on it, dragged the door open. She decided it was all clear and squeezed through the opening.
The corridor was identical to the Juniors’ corridor except it stank of stale dinners. Mary hated the smell but now it reminded her of her old school so it gave her the courage to creep right in. She popped her head into the cloakroom. Michael wasn’t there. All the coats had gone. She risked a peep into the boys’ toilets. She could hear a plinking like pebbles dropping into water and, about to leave, spotted that one of doors to the stalls was shut. She was drawn forward despite her unease and she pushed it with one finger. The door swung slowly open to reveal a toilet with no lid and a brown smear inside. The urinals behind her began to flush, one after the other. Water rushing inside the pipes suddenly gushed out along a ceramic gutter into a drain. Mary fled.
Michael had gone back to the new house without her. Or, worse, he had run away on his own.
She rushed back the way she had come and turning the corner came upon a man in a grey overall. Behind him the lino shone like ice. He waved a string mop before him like a scythe sweeping a crescent of wet on the floor. She tried to sneak away but he had seen her. He leant on the mop handle, squeezing out dirty water into a bucket.
‘You wanting to walk here?’ He sounded cross but he was smiling. He ground the mop into the bucket.
‘No,’ Mary said promptly.
‘You look lost.’ He resumed his cleaning. Back and forth. Back and forth. Coming towards her.
‘It’s all right. I can go this way.’ Mary gestured behind her.
‘How’re you going to get out? I can’t see your wings from here.’
Mary wished she did have wings, like an angel. Wings would change everything.
‘It’s locked. You’ll have to sleep here. Detention!’ He laughed and sloshed the mop around in the bucket. ‘Oh, go on. I’ve hardly started. Careful not to slip.’
Mary tiptoed past. Once outside she was about to run, then remembered Michael. He was not by the drinking fountain. She had been given a watch for her tenth birthday, but was not allowed to wear it to school so had to guess that it must be after four o’clock. She could go without Michael. No, she could not.
She heard voices and was immediately frightened because there was only the man with the mop to save her. She edged around the side of the building and stopped.
Michael was crouched by the dug-up soil with two other boys.
‘What are you doing?’ Mary stormed towards them. Michael let out a cheer and a boy shouted:
‘You’re the champion!’ None of them had noticed Mary.
‘Get up,’ she ordered. ‘You are filthy.’
Michael sprang to his feet. The other two boys chased through the gate and away under the railway bridge. ‘See you tomorrow, Mike,’ one, his jumper knotted around his waist, yelled.
Michael made to go after them. Mary grabbed him.
‘What were you doing down there?’ Her voice was level. At their feet was a drain covered with a grille, the bars the thickness of a pencil, the spaces between them the same width. Mary scrunched up her nose although there was no smell.
‘I won all seven marbles.’ Michael opened his palm.
Mary counted the cluster of gleaming glass marbles, three coloured with a twist of red glass, one with blue and three light green. ‘Where did you get these?’
‘I just said. I won them.’
‘You didn’t have any marbles in the first place.’
‘Paul gave me one of his and then I won with it so I gave it back. Then I won another and another and another.’ His voice got louder and higher.
‘Sssssh! Who’s Paul?’ Mary asked gratuitously, not caring.
‘My best friend.’ Michael was firm. ‘Tomorrow he’s going to put me on his football team, because I’m the best.’
‘You can’t play football.’
‘I can.’ Michael was matter of fact.
‘Give me your marbles.’
‘No.’
‘Now.’
‘I’ll swap some with you,’ Michael offered.
‘You don’t have anything to swap.’
‘You can have my nature collection instead.’ Michael gave a little jump as the facts dawned. ‘I have the marbles to swap. What have you got?’
‘Why would I want a load of twigs and leaves?’ Mary yawned, tiring of the exchange. She took her brother’s hand. They trotted into the park, past the tennis courts, in tetchy companionship. Michael skipped to keep up.
‘Myr— um… Mary?’ Michael gave Mary’s hand a pull.
‘What?’
‘Daddy stops people being dead, doesn’t he?’
‘You are a nitwit. How could he do that?’ Yet Mary was unsure. She did not understand what her dad did for a job beyond calling it ‘insurance’.
‘Paul asked and I said he was the Life Insurance Man.’ Michael uttered the words with the veneration of an incantation. ‘Paul said, does it mean he stops people being dead.’ Michael hesitated then added sheepishly, ‘I said yes.’
‘You were lying. Daddy can’t do that. No one can, except God.’
‘What does he do then?’
‘He gives “insurance” to people in their houses, that’s why he goes out at night so that they’re indoors when he calls.’
‘What’s insurance?’ Michael was losing interest.
‘If you don’t know by now, I’m not telling you.’ Mary had a hazy belief that insurance was sticky like toffee and came in wrapped packets, but wasn’t going to risk saying so.
They continued on in silence towards the railway arch. Mary said, ‘Michael, I’ve decided’ – she gave his fingers a squeeze– ‘we will do our Plan. You remember? We’ll go back to our real school and fend for ourselves.’
‘It’s better here.’ Michael batted at the air. ‘It’s good you made us come.’ He wrenched free of Mary and galloped down the path, his satchel bouncing on his back, one shoelace trailing.
‘We are going tomorrow. On the Underground.’ Mary caught up with Michael and shoved him against the tennis-court fence. ‘I didn’t make us come here. Stop saying it! ’
‘Mummy said. They gave you a new name and we had to have a new house.’ Michael wriggled from her grasp and dodged back up the path.
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