The Wilful Eye

by Isobelle Carmody

  We had only taken a few steps when Ivan caught my arm and pulled me sideways.

  ‘It’s open,’ he gasped. I had no idea what he was talking about, but I turned as he turned, stumbling over my feet . . . I think they were my own feet, but our running was mixed-up . . . they might have been Ivan’s.

  The lights of Robbins Book Shop shone in my face. (I could even pick out that tattered copy of The Coral Island), and, sure enough, the door, which had been tightly shut and marked ‘Closed’, was certainly open now. Ivan pulled me sideways once more, and we burst into the shop.

  The man standing behind the counter, which was loaded with books and newspapers, was indeed the same Mr Robbins who had once taught us at school.

  ‘Hide us,’ Ivan cried, and once again the howling of the wolf pack sounded outside. ‘They’re after us.’

  Then a wonderful thing happened. Mr Robbins didn’t question us in any way, didn’t hesitate. He simply pointed at a deep packing case beside him. I tumbled over into it, and Ivan half-fell on top of me. Mr Robbins immediately began covering us with the newspapers from the pile on his counter.

  ‘Stay very still,’ he said, ‘just to be on the safe side.’

  Howling again. Then voices, puzzled but urgent.

  ‘Where—?’

  ‘Where have they . . .?’

  ‘Must have run in here!’

  Through the thin wood of the packing case I could hear scuffling in the doorway and those pursuing voices, unintelligible, but definitely threatening.

  ‘Now, what can I do for you lads?’ asked Mr Robbins in a crisp, confident voice, a voice that reminded me so clearly of the voice he had used in the schoolroom all those years back. He seemed to be totally without fear. ‘Is there any particular book you’re interested in?’

  ‘Books?’ cried Dexter. ‘No way.’

  ‘We were after a couple of kids . . . pickpockets,’ said another voice. ‘They ran this way.’

  You could tell from the sounds that the wolves had burst through the door and were already searching the shop for us. I heard books falling, heard footsteps that I could tell were venturing behind the counter. Someone kicked the side of the packing case.

  ‘There’s no one here but me,’ said Mr Robbins. ‘You can see that, Dexter. For goodness sake get your pack out of here, and let me get on with my work.’

  It was strange how authoritative his voice was. It was a voice that expected to be obeyed . . . not fierce, not challenging exactly, just commanding – and commanding in an odd, mild way. Mr Robbins had had years of practice.

  ‘They must have come in here,’ said Dexter, trying to establish his own authority.

  ‘I have told you . . . I am on my own and working hard,’ said Mr Robbins. ‘Please leave me alone to pick up those books you’ve knocked over, unless you’d like to do it for me?’

  Lying tangled and screwed-up under the newspapers, somehow locked into Ivan in a knot I hoped would never come untied, I felt the weight of the books Mr Robbins was putting on the newspapers on top of us. And then I heard, from somewhere in the distance, yet another wolf howl, fainter but unmistakeable.

  ‘Hey! Jake’s found them!’ shouted Dexter.

  ‘Sounds like it!’ cried someone else. There was a scrimmage of feet, the sound of several men trying to get through the door at the same time, and then silence.

  ‘They’ve gone,’ said Mr Robbins, his voice gentle but still authoritative. ‘But stay where you are for just for a few more moments.’

  We heard footsteps, a scrabbling sound, and a key being turned in a lock. The light changed, what we could see of it. One light – perhaps the one at the front of the shop, the one that had been lighting the window – had been turned off.

  ‘You can get out now, but do it carefully,’ Mr Robbins said. ‘They could come past again at any moment. You were lucky you had a good lead on them. Lucky in a lot of ways. They would have looked in the packing case if they hadn’t been distracted.’

  He pointed to a door at the back of the shop. ‘Go through there. I’ll be with you in a moment, and we’ll have a cup of tea.’

  At the back of the bookshop was another smaller room with a door that led out to a yard at the back of the shop. Ivan and I sat in that small room, sat in an anxious way, while Mr Robbins pottered around in the bookshop. Then he came in and looked over at us seriously.

  ‘A cup of tea? Or perhaps not,’ he said. ‘You look as if you need to be safe at home. If you go out of the back door there, you’ll see my car. Go out to it quietly – it’s locked of course, but here’s the key – slide into the back seat and keep your heads down. Those so-called wolves could still be stalking you. Give me a minute or two to close up the shop and I’ll drive you home.’

  ‘Don’t they . . . don’t the wolves ever bother you?’ asked Ivan.

  Mr Robbins laughed a little. ‘I’ve worked here a long time,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a lot of friends, some of them even tougher than the wolves. And most wolves know I have a gun – a licensed gun – under the counter. All the same, you be careful getting into that car.’

  ‘Come on, Babe!’ I said to Ivan.

  ‘I’ll go first, Babe,’ he replied. ‘You can be my rearguard.’

  We did what Mr Robbins had told us to do, breathing hard, slid out the back door of his shop, found the car (no trouble at all) and scrambled into it. A short time later he joined us, and drove us down Forest Road, now almost empty, and up the hill, back up out of the woods.

  ‘It’s been quite a night,’ I said to Mr Robbins. ‘Lucky for us you were still open.’

  ‘It’s mostly safe during the day . . . well, safe enough,’ Mr Robbins said. ‘But night – well, at night it becomes a different place.’

  ‘I’ll come back again in the daylight,’ Ivan promised. ‘I’ll get that copy of The Coral Island you’ve got in the window. Don’t sell it to anyone else, will you?’

  And at last we came back to my place, high on the hill. Woodlands smouldered angrily below, as if it were furious because we had remade the old fairytale. The story should have ended with our deaths, but in the end we had escaped. Someone closer to home would probably be furious, too.

  We said goodnight and thank you yet again to Mr Robbins and made for the front door. Brook’s silver car was drawn up outside the garage.

  ‘We won’t tell them anything that happened to us,’ I said. ‘Let’s just make out we missed Brook and then walked home up the hill.’

  ‘You think he left us there on purpose, don’t you?’ Ivan said.

  ‘I know he did,’ I replied. ‘He thought there might be a chance that . . .’ But a moment or two later we were inside, surrounded by light that seemed an entirely different element from the lights that had shifted and moved around us in Woodlands. And there was my gran beaming at us encouragingly, thinking perhaps that, since I was still with Ivan, I was a step closer to doing something worthwhile with my life, even if it was only marrying and settling down. And maybe that’s what Brook had felt too. Maybe that’s what prompted him to leave us in a dangerous part of the city, taking a chance.

  My mother was suddenly hugging me with a strange desperation.

  ‘We’ve been so worried,’ she cried, ‘so worried!’

  ‘What happened to you?’ Brook asked, standing behind her like a puppeteer behind a puppet. ‘I drove around and around, but I couldn’t find you. I thought you must have decided to walk home.’

  ‘He was so worried,’ said my mother, echoing herself. ‘Worried sick.’

  Brook and I looked at each other. It was a strange glance we exchanged, for I knew (and he knew I knew) that he had abandoned us out of a sort of malice. I read frustration in his glance, before, all in a second, his expression remade itself. All in a second he forced himself to look relieved . . . happy that I was home safely. But I knew! I knew, and he knew I knew. What he didn’t know (I had only known it myself for a few minutes) was that I was planning to leave home. Ivan’s place had room for
me. Until then I would be doubly on my guard . . . on guard against the stepfather of fairytale. And after all, it was a fairytale Ivan and I had lived through.

  Later, saying goodnight to Ivan, I told him, ‘We were babes in the wood, Babe.’

  ‘You’re right. We actually were, Babe,’ he said.

  ‘Babes in Woodlands,’ I joked, ‘lost in a way, even though we were close to home. But we were lucky, lucky and quick.’

  ‘And Robbins covered us with leaves,’ he added in a wondering voice, amazed to find he had lived out a fairytale. ‘Robbins covered us with leaves even if they were leaves of newspaper.’

  That hadn’t occurred to me, but suddenly it seemed that my joke wasn’t just a joke about an old story. We had relived it in our own time and in our own way. But maybe that is the way with certain old stories. Maybe they are lived out, over and over again, in one way or another . . . Cinderella . . . Jack the Giant Killer . . . Beauty and the Beast. Maybe they are always springing to life in an uncertain world, over and over again . . . the same but different.

  The world is full of stories, and many of them are variations on old folktales. ‘Cinderella’ constantly resurfaces around us in many different forms, many different texts. ‘Tom Thumb’ – the story of a small and initially insignificant hero who nevertheless triumphs over giants and ogres – comes alive in many current books. Stories like these, expressing basic human fears, hopes and declarations of triumph over adversity fulfil us as listeners and readers, and, though they are very familiar by now, continually deal with the same apprehensions that haunt many of us, replay the same triumphs we recognise and applaud with relief.

  Of course there are also old stories that acknowledge times of human helplessness, which remind us that we can be victims of circumstance, and the old story ‘Babes in the Wood’ is one of these. Small children are abandoned in a forest. They die there and the compassionate robins cover them with leaves. In writing a story based around that particular folktale I have made a dangerous city suburb the contemporary counterpart of the original forest, and though my ‘babes’ work their way towards a different conclusion from the traditional one, they could have died in the darkness of some back alley. The city can be as savage and alien, as filled with danger, as those forests of the distant past.

  Stories surround us. We make stories of our own lives, unconsciously editing, erasing and emphasising events. We are our own heroes, struggling through the dark forests of an ambiguous and confusing world. It has been great to take over a traditional folktale – to inhabit it for a while – and make it a current utterance without abandoning its old connections. Folktales may belong to the past, but they can be simultaneously contemporary too. My hope is that a story like the one in this book will connect past and present – the forest with the city – the babes with the Babes – and will be read simultaneously as an ancient tale and a new one, born again from the energy and persistence of the stories that run around the world like secret electricity, tying people and societies together.

  A long, long time ago and far, far away, there was a village, and in the village there was a tower, and in the tower there were twelve boys, who were locked up. The room they lived in was round, cold, hard and bare. On cold mornings they had to run to keep warm, but it was too small, so they leaned in and ran around the edge like horses racing. Sometimes five or six of them would be running at the same time, puffing and making a whirlpool of the damp air. It made them spinny after a while, so they crowded round the fireplace, and watched the dim yellow lantern twisting slowly back to the way it was.

  The room they lived in was high up, probing the cold grey of the sky like a finger. Sometimes a raven wheeled by or a gull, but otherwise there was just the sky, or the mist fogging the windows, or the wind rattling the panes and rushing on, leaving the round room solid and unshakeable, its two trembling windows blinded by the whited sky. One window seemed to belong to Soldier, at least he was the only one who bothered to clamber up to look out it. It was small and slitted like a gap in a fence paling and no sunlight came in. The others all claimed the larger one, the one for looking out, for seeing the floating white face of the moon on a black night, staring in at them, hypnotic and hopeful. In the day, when it was filled with sky, they could watch what the clouds did, or they counted the gulls sailing past, which brought you good luck, but bad luck if you saw the raven. Soldier wasn’t scared to see the raven. What luck the raven brought could not be worse than the luck they already had.

  There were six sleep mats, thin and stiff as the dead, all lined up so if you turned over too far someone else’s sleep misted your face. They slept curled round each other, like stiff and ragged little worms, wriggling towards the pockets of warm air. Dreams seeped out, musty with the smells of the others, mouthed with their murmurs and disrupted by their cries. Soldier couldn’t tell if he was listening in on their dreams or their dreams were barging into his. It was no use trying to hush and cover up; what anyone felt was there for all to see, so that after a while they got sick of looking. They stopped noticing who was crying in the dark, or who paced, who stomped and shook or moped or fought. Instead they were fixed on what came from outside, or from beyond, stalking them from behind time, rousing from the corners of memory, or edging out of daydreams and plunging back in, whipped up and stinking and clasped close. This was because of the way time moved or didn’t move, but just gripped like a hand holding you by the throat. The others, Soldier knew, had more memories than he did, and these memories were precious. You could fall to living off them, to stoking your own heart’s fire with them. Some of the boys would drag them out, glistening and newly stitched, fling them out like a new rug. Look here, look what once happened. It’s the truth, once I did this. Soldier listened dutifully over and over. He stitched himself a motley vision of what life was like out there.

  Finney said, ‘Diffan, tell us again about when your ma was picking the turnips and the man came up the hill and he was carrying a goose and he was singing.’

  ‘’Cause he was a Florinot. Do you know, brutes, what that is? It’s a man of music and the night. And he has no home, and he doesn’t want one either ’cause the sky and the earth are his home and so he comes to ours and he teaches us the songs. Would you like I could sing you one?’

  ‘Did you eat the goose?’ said Finney. The boys all knew they didn’t eat the goose, because the goose was the Florinot’s friend. But this particular bit always impressed Finney, that a man might have a goose as a companion and not as a dinner.

  Diffan sang a song. The others gathered round, even though there was no furniture for gathering on, not a single chair, just the floor. They cooked on the fire, and they pushed their feet towards it. They had no shoes to keep their toes warm. The lantern, the way it dangled, looked like a rotten tooth. Soldier looked at the lantern and thought, This room is a big ugly mouth slammed shut, the breath stale and the teeth just getting worse. Oh the room.

  Diffan sang,

  Wind is blowing the corn, come along now

  Come along

  Come along and pick it, hold your face to the sun

  Your face will be warm, while hands pick the corn

  Come along now, come along

  Moon is darkly rising, go home little children

  Go along now

  Go along . . .

  Soldier spun the word ‘home’ round and round in his head till it made a whirring noise. He watched their faces going misty and blank with dreaming from the song. They leaned into the wall and their thoughts spread out soft like a sheet looming over the bed and they were thinking about comforts and mothers and dinners and fields and running straight out over the land towards nothing at all. Soldier clapped his hands to the song, and tried not to think of anything but the music and how it went up and down.

  Gollub was coming anyway. There was no point getting soft.

  Gollub didn’t live in the room but he was there, he kept them there. He had his spit and bulk for that. On the sixth day he
brought in two sacks, of carrots, turnips, kale and burdock root, and sometimes some dill seed and onion. There were twelve days before the fight. They cooked stew because it was soft for Meegey, who was the oldest and had lost a lot of teeth. Meegey wasn’t afraid of anything. Not even the fights. So they ate stew. Soldier couldn’t remember eating anything but stew, but some of the others could. Diffan said he ate custard and peaches once.

  Toya said, ‘That’s not so good as roast pork.’

  Finney screamed, ‘Did you eat your own pig?’ But no one answered him.

  Soldier said to him later, ‘I had a dog where I lived.’

  ‘Well how could you take a dog walking with your foot though?’ said Finney.

  Soldier didn’t reply. He shrugged and walked away and Finney hung his head, ashamed of himself for being mean.

  Gollub was coming up the stairs.

  The others liked to say it wasn’t even a foot, it was just an ugly lump. The toes were curled in but Soldier could still walk on it. Meegey said to Soldier, ‘Could be your blood comes from the Tarkings, who had the lion strength in battle. Some had toes and fingers that curled inwards.’

  A bad heart, that’s a worse thing to have, thought Soldier valiantly, like Gollub. Gollub’s got a heart made of meat and nothing else. His heart would sink to the bottom of a river and make it stink.

  Soldier didn’t know how he got the gammy foot, probably it was the way he came out. So he wasn’t wanted. But Meegey looked out for him, because he had the lion strength, and Meegey looked out for Finney too because Finney was small and young and could easily break. Finney looked out of his eyes like a little animal, like he was looking for what could hurt, not like a cat looks, but more like a small thing with no claws. Finney wouldn’t hurt anyone and neither would Garson. He was quiet and slow with a long stooping body, which shrank into walls when it had to.

  No one wanted to clean out the dung bucket. If you went for a piss and you were the one to fill it to the top, then you were the one who had to tip it all out the window into the water below. If you did cooking then you didn’t have to sweep or clean up, but everyone had to fight. Even Garson and even Finney and Diffan.