by Fiona Gibson
We follow the dad, who is hauling along the screaming boy by the cuff of his coat. Here is Laurel Road Primary, Tod’s old school.
“Where are we going?” Tod asks.
“We’re just going for a walk.”
“Why?” he keeps asking. “Why are we at my old school? I want to go back to Anna’s.”
The mothers I knew, when our children were approaching school age, obsessed over league tables and extracurricular facilities. Some parents changed religion, or pretended to change, so their children could go to the school of their choice. Others lied about their addresses. We chose Laurel Road because it was close to Tod’s child minder, who would look after him until I came home from work.
The bell sounds and children flood into the playground. Robert’s dad made it in time, although the younger boy is still demanding to go back to the playground to gather more bark. Kids are kicking footballs, trading cards and pleading to go to each other’s houses for more play.
I spot Jill, the head teacher at the main entrance. She has a pale, round face, like an uncooked pie. She nods at me, but looks confused, like she can’t understand why I’m here. Hadn’t we moved to the country where Tod wouldn’t be bullied anymore?
Children are being taken home by mums and the occasional dad. The yard empties quickly. Pigeons peck at dropped crisps on the pavement. “Let’s go now,” Tod says, tugging my arm.
Jill is holding a small girl’s hand and glancing around anxiously. The girl’s chaotic hair is secured away from her serous forehead with a clasp. She is holding a soft toy and has dumped her lunchbox and schoolbag at her feet. All the other children have gone home.
From the direction of the park, a woman is running. She flies past me and grabs the girl’s hand.
“I’m sorry,” she’s saying, “couldn’t get out of the office on time. Stuck on a call. Shall we go to the park now, or do you want to get sweets from the shop?”
The girl gathers her belongings, but doesn’t answer. She’s freezing her mother out.
“We could rent a video,” the woman says.
“I’m cold,” Tod complains. “I want to go on Anna’s boat to that toilet place.”
“I told you, she can’t get the engine started.”
“I want to go home.”
“Come on,” I say, “let’s go.”
We follow the mother and daughter, who has dropped her toy. They’re walking faster now. Tod has to trot to keep up.
“My legs hurt,” he whines.
We’re so close now that I can see that the girl’s hair is matted at the back, as if she’s just rolled out of bed. Her school-bag is covered with peeling-off stickers.
“You could watch the rest of Snow White,” the woman says.
“Okay,” the girl says. “Did you remember chocolate spread?”
“I forgot. I’ll get it tomorrow.”
I could reach out and touch her, the girl who’s forgiven her mother, despite the lateness and no chocolate spread. “Excuse me,” I say.
The woman turns round. She has a soft, likable face. Milky gray eyes, pale lips. “Yes?” she says, smiling.
I hold out the soft toy—the rabbit. “I think your daughter dropped this.”
chapter 25
Home
I don’t know what the fish have been eating since we’ve been away—gravel, maybe, and hopefully not each other—but there appear to have been no casualties. Before we left for London I bought a chalky pyramid, called a Nutri-Block, which can keep fish fed for up to a week, but forgot to drop it into the tank.
In his bedroom Tod surveys his mummy pictures. “Do you think they’re related to Ginger in that museum?” he asks.
“You never know. They could have been his mates.” I’m glad that it’s Ginger who has lodged himself in Tod’s head, and not the mummified bull. I don’t want the livestock nightmares rearing up again.
In Joe’s garden, the tree house parts have been stacked against the garden wall. At least Carl can rest assured that the grass won’t grow anymore, not until spring.
“Why did Carl break the tree house?” Tod asks from the window. Beneath it, where there was once a locked cupboard, are shelves for his special things.
“Carl was mad because Leo fell out of it and broke his leg.”
“That wasn’t Joe’s fault. That was Leo’s fault.”
“It’s not that simple, Tod.”
“It’s not fair,” he blusters.
On the new shelves Tod has placed his binoculars, moneybox and the lighthouse snow dome. He keeps prodding the loose tooth, craving hard cash. This is my fault for buying him the magnetic kit. He thinks that a pound can be exchanged for a gizmo worth ten times its value.
“Try to forget about your tooth,” I tell him.
“I want it out. It’s so annoying.”
“Let’s do it quickly, then. We could tie a piece of cotton round it, and the other end to…”
“A car,” Tod says. “A fast car, like Dad’s.”
“Good idea. Your tooth pings out, and it’s on the end of the string, burning a groove in the road…”
“Or a plane,” Tod chirps. “We tie a silver thread to my tooth, and the other end to the tail of a plane.”
“And the tooth doesn’t come out. You’re carried away to…”
“Majorca!” Tod shouts, and we’re laughing now.
Occasionally, when he’s not refusing to put on his shoes or making puddles of pee on the bathroom floor, he makes me feel that everything else is just stuff.
Dear Ro,
It was lovely to meet you and to talk about your book. I have sent the manuscript, and copies of the illustrations, to the editor we discussed over lunch, and would hope to hear from her in the next month or so. I think the book’s lovely. I wish you every success with The Boy in the Maze.
With very best wishes,
Antonia Devine
“You wrote a story?” Marcus says. “How?”
He is calling from Will’s. I can hear Will’s son Max—I assume it’s Max—blasting the same note over and over on something like a tin whistle.
“I didn’t really plan it. It just sort of happened.”
There’s a pause, and the tin whistle stops. “That’s incredible,” he says.
“No it’s not. I just wanted something to take my mind off…”
“We need to talk, Ro.”
“What about? What do you need to tell me? That we moved here to get away from Babs and Sarah? That you wanted us out of the way?”
A pause. Just a little mistake, she’s nothing to me.
“Please, Ro,” he says, his voice cracking.
I replace the receiver and walk steadily to the filing cabinet. His papers fly from their files: House & Car, Finances, Hobbies, everything muddled and falling around me like leaves.
It’s not me, this sort of behavior. My inner toddler must have done it.
Tuesday teatime, and Tod and I are painting his bedroom. He wanted white. There were so many whites to choose from that I ended up shutting my eyes and buying the can where my finger landed. It turned out to be just white.
We have covered his bed, chest of drawers and most of the floor with clear polythene left by Sandy. Tod’s drawings have been removed carefully from the walls and stashed in a drawer. We have a roller each.
“Don’t want to help anymore,” Tod reports, after a few weedy strokes.
He shuffles away to the window to observe the inhabitants of Chetsley through his binoculars. “Mum, it’s Lucille,” Tod reports.
“Are you busy?” she calls up.
“Painting,” I tell her. “Okay if we come round tomorrow for Halloween?”
“Of course it’s okay.” Halloween is a major production at Lucille’s house. I’d have thought that Adele would have outgrown the concept of fancy dress, but she’s had her mother create an authentic Grim Reaper ensemble. She will wear a black cloak, and Tod’s mask from his age-three-to-four skeleton outfit. God knows how sh
e’ll stretch it over her walloping head. For a scythe, she will carry the hoe Marcus bought for my birthday, to which Adele has already attached an impressive tinfoil-covered blade.
Tod flops down on to his bed. “Mum,” he says, “why doesn’t Anna have any children?”
“Maybe she hasn’t met the right person.”
“How does the sperm know it’s going into the right person?”
“Well, it doesn’t know. It can make mistakes.” I climb on a chair to access the area where the wall meets the ceiling.
“What do people do then,” he rants on, “if it’s a mistake?”
“Look, Tod, this is your room. You wanted it white. Are you going to help me or what?”
“I said, what do—”
“Just paint.”
Wednesday. Antonia Devine calls me at work. She says: “Ro? I have very good news. You have an offer from Bookworm. They want to publish The Boy in the Maze.”
Sian is pouring coffee for the humbug man, who has taken to coming in and asking for books we can’t find on the computer, no matter how many searches we run. I think he comes in here for company and just invents authors’ names.
“They’d like to meet you,” Antonia continues. “Shall we set up a meeting? When is your day off?”
“Friday,” I tell her.
“Ro, are you still there? Isn’t this fantastic?”
When I’ve put down the phone, I yell so loudly that the shoebox-head dog shoots out from under the table and howls.
A pleasing aspect of Halloween is that a parent can get away with cobbling together an outfit with virtually no talent in the needlecraft arena. I have everything to hand: moon-printed fabric, donated by Marcus’s parents. I’ll cut a square, fold over one edge and thread through something to gather the neck—the cord from Marcus’s dressing gown will do nicely—and Tod will be the proud owner of one extremely spooky cape.
Tod doesn’t want a cape. He wants to be a bat, not as in Batman, but as in Muriel Hope’s book, Alfie’s Dream. A real bat. “It can’t be that difficult,” he retorts.
Marcus has made one visit, carefully timed so I’d be at work, to collect essential possessions. But most of his things are still here: his octopush kit, nearly all of his clothes, the trashed filing system. In the hall I find his umbrella. If I pull the nylon from its spokes and cut it in half, we’ll have two floppy bat wings. I’ll attach these wings to garden canes to keep them rigid. In his black sweater, gray school trousers, wings and an old Batman mask—previously unworn, and too small, but we manage to jam it on—Tod is ready for takeoff.
The less pleasing aspect is that trick-or-treating requires a parent to accompany their young offspring as they bang on the doors of strangers, demanding money and sweets. In most of these strangers’ windows are artfully carved pumpkins, with glowing mouths and eyes, not like our botched creation with one letterbox slit, because I cut the eyeholes too close together and the middle section caved in.
We stop at Lucille’s, where there’s an ocean of sweets and a pissed-off Grim Reaper who’s not allowed out trick-or-treating because she’s contracted a virus called slapped-face syndrome. I’m curious to see how red Adele’s face really is, if it really looks slapped—but she’s hunched on the sofa, wearing the skeleton mask and stabbing the carpet with the blunt end of my hoe. Carl looks up from the Lexley Gazette.
“Haven’t seen Marcus for a while. Does he still want to be in the team? The quiz final’s next week—tell him we need him.” He turns back to the front page story: “Professor Tickles Charged with Drunk Driving.”
“Tod,” I say, “why don’t you sing your Halloween song, the one you learned at school? You’re meant to do something to earn your sweets.”
He stands up, adjusts the right bat wing, opens his mouth and announces, “I’ve forgot it.”
We leave Lucille’s laden with confectionery and bang on Harry’s door. No answer. He’ll be out trick-or-treating in some spectacular creation, with a wheelbarrow to carry home all his sweets and cash. It has started to rain and we have run out of people to visit.
“Let’s go home,” I tell Tod. “I’m freezing and it’s school tomorrow.”
“No, let’s go and see Joe.”
“It’s so late, Tod. I’m sure he won’t have anything for you.”
“Please, I want to.”
“We’re not staying long, okay?”
He charges up the path and hammers Joe’s door with his fist.
“No one’s in,” I say quickly.
The door opens. “Ro, bat, do come in,” Joe says.
It’s the first time I’ve been in this house. Joe’s paintings are propped against walls, with tools and planks lying against them, as if he doesn’t think of them as anything special. There are overgrown plants bursting from pots, and books heaped up unsteadily on an old, gnarled table.
“Got any treats?” Tod demands.
“I’m glad you came,” Joe says, “because I do have something for you. Tod, would you wait down here for a moment? I want to show Ro something first.”
“Okay,” Tod says warily.
“Come upstairs,” Joe whispers.
“What for?”
“Please come up. Tod’s fine here—aren’t you, Tod? Look, there’s charcoal and paper on the table. You can draw.”
Tod pulls off the Batman mask and rolls a stick of charcoal between his palms. I follow Joe upstairs to a small room, a bedroom, which overlooks the garden. There is only an unmade single bed, and a lamp on a small circular table. He turns off the lamp.
We are the ghosts of Halloween
The spookiest spooks you’ve ever seen
Downstairs, Tod is singing the song that Miss Glass taught him at school.
Joe stands at the window and says, “Come here.”
We sleep all day and we spook all night
So you’d better watch out, ’cause you’re in for a fright. Whoo!
“What is it?” I ask.
“There’s something I want you to see.”
I stand beside him and peer through the window. Even with the outside light on, I can’t see what he means. There is grass down there. Sixteen-inch grass, Carl reported, by the end of summer. “I know the tree house has gone,” I say.
“Yes, but there’s something else.”
“You’re building another one?”
“Look down,” Joe says, “down at the grass.”
And then I see it. Coiled pathways loop back on each other, swirling across the whole garden. Where the path starts, close to the house, is a white sign on which he has painted: START. I can’t see where the end is, the goal. Maybe it doesn’t have an end.
“Do you think Tod will like this?” Joe asks.
“Tod!” I yell. “Come up here.” He clatters up, with blackened fingers from the charcoal, which adds to his battish look. “Look out of the window,” I tell him.
He is quicker than I am, sees it immediately, and tears back downstairs and out into the garden where he charges into the maze.
A trio of rubber-faced ghouls pause at Joe’s fence, wondering, perhaps, why a four-foot-high bat is running in circles and spirals. As they hurry away, I look over at our house, mine and Tod’s house, with the varnished oval sign now gone. It’s no longer Gorby Cottage. It’s just plain Number Nine.
At the center of the maze, Tod is holding up something, some kind of prize he’s found. It’s only when we’re out in the garden, and he runs toward us with his palm outstretched, that I can see his treasure.
Tod is holding his tooth.
First U.S. edition September 2005
WONDERBOY
A Red Dress Ink novel
ISBN: 978-1-4603-1174-5
© 2005 by fiona Gibson.
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This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, incidents and places are the products of the author’s imagination, and are not to be construed as real. While the author was inspired in part by actual events, none of the characters in the book is based on an actual person. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental and unintentional.
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