On top of Pa’s white shirt was his letter: ‘To The Boy In The Shed’. Dieter was waiting and it was hard. To help he sang one of Ma’s songs.
‘Putter un Salz, Milch un Mel un Safran, Safran,’ he tried. He had learned this song like he’d learned that other song, ‘Frer-a jack-a, frer-a jack-a, dormey voo! Dormey voo! Somi lama Tina, somi lama Tina! Ding Dang Dong!’ Dieter had no idea what the words meant, but still he sang, his voice clear and high and pure, ‘Putter un Salz, Milch un Mel un Safran, Safran: macht dem Kuchn gel!’
Sunlight crept out from behind a cloud and poured through the mildewed window: three Red Admirals twitched, trapped in cobwebs. Dieter tried to think of nice things, he thought of the green shoots of bluebells coming up in the wood behind the Hall. He tried to think what Cynthia would be doing now because she wouldn’t be sitting in a stupid shed with a stupid shirt in her hands. She’d still be on the Wasteland with the rest of the Wee-Hoos, playing, Dip, dip, dip, my little ship, sails on the ocean, like a cup and saucer, you are not it; Tommy Perrot would be pinching Cynthia and saying, ‘C’mon Cyn, let’s have a go at sardines, go on, Cyn!’ and Cynthia would be putting her nose in the air, her brown eyes flashing, because Tommy was the only one who wanted to do all those girl-and-boy things.
The Red Admirals twitched some more, and suddenly Dieter felt like crying. He was so cold his lips were numb and he decided to try another song because singing helped Ma and Saskia; he decided to sing something Cynthia had taught him, something she called a Calypso.
‘London, is the place for meee!’ he cried. ‘London, this lovely citee! You can go to France or America, India, Asia or Australia, but you must come back, to London citee!’
His cry echoed in the empty shed, his breath coming out in puffs of white. Dieter thought about London: he thought of the broken buildings and the cracks, he thought of the wide spaces and the rubble, and he thought of all those adventures he was missing. He gazed up at the dust dancing and the cobwebs pulsing, and Dieter heard a noise.
‘Pop!’ it said. Then, ‘Pap!’
There were sparks and a shimmer that had to settle. Then, by the window and the filthy crates, there was a boy’s face.
The face was moving as if the boy was already standing up, but there was no body beneath it.
The Cheshire Cat, Dieter thought, as the face moved towards him. He gripped his pa’s crisp shirt tight, he stopped breathing, but he was determined that this time he wouldn’t run away.
The face was making a strange noise, as if tiny wings were fluttering in its throat. Dieter felt the balloon’s skin crackle beneath him; there was electricity: a crackle beneath his bottom and a crackle in the air.
He’s not a duppy, Cyn, Dieter thought, he won’t hurt me.
‘I – I brought you this shirt, these trousers,’ Dieter said. ‘I thought you’d be cold.’
Then Dieter wondered how the boy could use the shirt if he didn’t have a body.
A hot breeze of golden sparks cut through the freezing air and suddenly the boy was all there: his chest, his arms and legs, his neck and around that a silver collar. The boy shook himself and stretched up: Dieter had never seen anyone so naked, not even himself. The boy walked from those filthy storage chests and it was soundless, but Dieter watched the pit-pat, pit-pat of his footprints in the dust. Pit-pat, pit-pat; like steps in the sand and no one there.
The boy was thin. He was small, but Dieter couldn’t tell how old he was.
The boy hunched over and bent into a squat. His arms dropped, hands palm-up and circling in the dust like little fish. The golden sparks were gone and Dieter saw the boy was pale for all his blackness.
‘Are you well?’ Dieter asked and he wondered if Ma had ginger beer or ginger biscuits because that always helped him.
The boy’s head fell to one side as if he was listening for something.
Dieter clearly saw that collar now; there was fancy writing on it and a delicate chain dangled from a silver link onto the boy’s skinny chest. The collar was tight; creases in the boy’s neck showed above it.
‘What’s that?’ Dieter pointed.
The boy was blank.
Dieter laid the shirt and trousers on the floor and he stretched his finger out to the boy’s neck and touched the metal. ‘Oh,’ Dieter said. ‘Oh,’ as a Corona-pop fizz crashed through his fingertips and up his arm. He felt faint. ‘Oh.’ Dieter shook his buzzing fingertips.
The boy sniffed.
Dieter felt a sickness that reminded him of sucking too many iced lollies. An odd bubbling came up in him as if he’d spent too long in the sea under a hot sun: he could smell it too; the salt of the sea and a warm sweetness.
Dieter roused himself.
‘I live here. Do you, too?’ he breathed. ‘I live here with my mother and my sister, Saskia. She’s miles older than me. Four or five years at least.’ Dieter was surprised he didn’t know exactly, because he didn’t think of Saskia exactly at all. He picked up a garden cane and hit the ground with it. He decided to try his best Mrs Channon EL-O-CU-TION voice.
‘My name is Dieter, Dieter Sugar, and we’ve been here for such a long time, since February. We came from London. Have you been to London? No? Well, anyway, that’s my real home though they tell me this is too. It’s my grandfather’s house you see and my Pa is dead. I’m the only Sugar left.’
The boy’s head jerked.
‘But there are these things called duties and they might tear it down. That’s what the old man said. That’s the old man in that scabby office off Piccadilly. He was rude to Ma, so I hated him. I hated him and I hated the lady Ma made me see because I was down in the dumps. That lady smelled of animal skins and I bit her…’
Dieter hit the cane – snap-snap – the boy flinched.
‘Sorry! That’s a bit noisy isn’t it? I do hate noise when I’m sick. Should I get you some ginger beer? No? Anyway, the thing is we’re here because I’ve no cousins or second cousins or secret relations or anything, not on Pa’s side. Pa had an older brother but he died when he was young. So I’m the last as Saskia doesn’t count, even though she’s my sister because my pa wasn’t her pa.’
Dieter caught his breath but he couldn’t stop, this was the most he’d said to anyone in months. ‘But Ma doesn’t like to talk about that. Ma doesn’t like to talk about much. She won’t talk about Pa. He died. He hanged himself. At Christmas.’ Dieter was surprised how easily that came. ‘Sas has another Pa, nobody knows where he lives, which I say is pretty careless. I think if he wanted to find us he could, he could send Saskia birthday presents or Christmas cards. I think he’s a rotten Pa and I think Saskia thinks so too.’ Dieter’s throat clicked but the words kept coming. ‘And Ma says we’re an odd bunch because she has dark eyes and I have green eyes and Saskia has very blue eyes. Ma says we’re as mixed as a litter of cats. Do you want to join my gang? We’re the Wee-Hoos and we’re the best gang on the Wasteland, you have to join…’
This talking was like eating a sliver of cake but wanting more until the cake plate is empty and your mouth and your cheeks are sticky and your stomach’s a drum, and no matter how much Dieter hated what he was saying – all of the secrets that tumbled from his lips – he couldn’t help but talk because the boy was there twitching his head like a marionette.
‘I brought you a shirt and trousers,’ Dieter finally whispered because the life had gone out of him. It was the feeling of chloroform – and Dieter had had his tonsils out – it was the feeling of a freeze moving along his veins. He looked at the boy. ‘Who are you?’ he said.
The boy didn’t speak, but he did let his head fall to his other shoulder, and when he did this the small bones in his neck clicked and popped with the movement (because it had been so long). When Dieter heard this sound his ears whined, his chin fell to his chest, and his nose dropped splashes of blood onto his father’s white shirt, and then the world was gone.
In the darkness Dieter might have heard a sniffing, a crack of more bones moving, and then
the smacking of lips, perhaps the lapping of a tongue. He might have heard a soft moan, and then the hurried flutter of countless soft wings.
John Phelps’ Secret
8
‘There now, steady. Let me get you up.’ As John knelt to lift Dieter from the shed floor, the lad seemed to come to; then he was jerking, his legs little pistons kicking.
‘Hey! Hey now, steady!’ John wiped Dieter’s bloody nose with his handkerchief. ‘Head back. Hold it here, lad. Press down. Nothing to fret about.’
He let Dieter’s head rest in the crook of his neck and their chests met: good-heart to tic-tacky heart. He felt the boy shiver against him. The shed was freezing.
‘What have you been getting up to, then? We’ve been looking for hours.’ John felt the lad’s lips tremble against his neck. ‘Steady. Steady. There now.’
‘Is he still here?’ Dieter whimpered.
‘Who?’
‘My friend.’
‘What friend’s that?’
‘Did he take the shirt?’
‘Now then.’
‘Is he here?’
John saw an envelope on the floor, a man’s white shirt with blood on it and a pair of smart trousers. A pity. Hard to get out, blood was. John saw what must have been the lad’s splashes of blood in the dust, yet they were smeared as if someone had already tried to get them up with a damp cloth.
‘He was here,’ Dieter whispered.
In the darkness of the shelves John saw a sparking light. He frowned and an old feeling rose up in him like bad stew. ‘It’s just you and me here,’ he said. Of course the boy was delirious, he was seeing things or doing that thing that lonely children do; he was making things up.
John felt Dieter straighten up in his arms.
‘What’s the matter with your cheek, Mr John?’ he asked.
John had forgotten and suddenly it hurt: the wound was just below the eye, high on the cheekbone. When he’d walked up the feeble plank steps into this shed, Rosie was perched on his shoulder. Then, would you credit it, the damn bird pecks him hard in the cheek and flies off. John knew she didn’t mean it; he’d had her from an egg. He knew this was a warning. Rosie was spooked.
‘Come on now.’
‘Tell him I’ll be back,’ Dieter croaked. ‘He didn’t hurt me. I just got a nosebleed.’
‘This your shirt?’
‘It’s his now.’
‘Let’s leave it here then.’
Dieter was heavy in his arms or perhaps John was a little weak.
Boy-breath warmed John’s neck as he glanced once more at the strange light and those sparks in the air. He rushed to the door singing ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’ because it was a hymn that made him feel right and John Phelps didn’t want to remember being afraid. He jumped down the steps to the grass and he felt a little better. He marched along the path, lungs rattling and breath cutting into him like a gutting knife, and John felt foolish: it was all imagination, it was all stuff and nonsense. Rosie must have felt foolish too because she swooped down from a fat oak, landed in front of him and shyly waddled to him like one of those American lady movie stars: hip-to-hip-to-hip-to-hip (except Rosie had a stick in her black beak).
‘That’s a sorry is it, girl?’ John felt the burn of his gouged cheek.
Rosie bounced with him as he walked.
‘Fair enough,’ he said and he carried Dieter up through the red gardens of rhododendrons, through the graveyard patterned with small headstones, past the black swimming pool, the old tennis court pitted with yellow-headed weeds, and towards the great grey house and, because he was carrying the boy, John Phelps walked in through the front door.
John liked to hear his Christian name from Lilia Sugar’s lips, but when she ran to him crying, ‘John, ah, John, there is blood!’ as he stood in the grand hall with her boy in his arms, he felt like her hero. His weak chest puffed as Lilia pushed him along the passageway and down the worn stone steps to the kitchen.
‘John, John, quick, quick, John!’ she cried and the words made him feel warm. Of course she was making a silly fuss, but he didn’t mind.
His boots tapped on the stone (whenever John walked down to the kitchen he felt the tension of above-stairs leave him. It was foolish, but there you were.) He knew this kitchen – its black range, its long pine table. Years ago his mother had stood at that Belfast sink cleaning for the master while he sat at the table polishing silver. He didn’t know how many years his mother had worked for old man Sugar, but she hadn’t put a foot in the door since Lilia arrived. Few from the village had; they had their prejudices and that was that. They called her ‘the German woman’.
John sat the boy on the spindle-back chair by the range and Lilia was on the lad like a rash, as if he was melting good as a block of ice in the sun and she was scooping up the water.
‘Oh, my boy, my Dee,’ she crooned and John watched her pick at the dried blood under the lad’s nose. ‘How? How?’
‘He had a funny turn, that’s all.’
‘I do not…’
‘He fainted,’ John explained.
He knocked his head against the wooden Jenny above him. The drying clothes swung and he tried not to look up, but some of her things were there: so light, so delicate and intimate, dancing in the air. He saw Lilia’s peach satin camisole; Lilia’s coral pink nightgown and he blushed.
‘Warm water, get warm water,’ she ordered and John was happy to shoot off to the scullery for a bowl.
‘I’ll make a pot, too,’ he called out, like it was just them and time for tea.
The mangle with its green arm stood with half a pretty red dress hanging out of it. John’s gifts hung in here: two pheasants and three rabbits; he’d have to skin, pluck and gut them before they turned. He smiled because there was only him to help her with things like that. On the floor in the corners of the scullery he saw four stained enamel bowls. They were filled with dust, dirt, and dead woodlice: John remembered these bowls.
‘Sprinkle them with sugar then, John,’ his mam had told him, and she’d pour in warm water and leave them in the scullery corners. She told him it helped some, Mam said things didn’t go missing so much, bells to locked and forgotten rooms didn’t ring as often if she left out something sweet. ‘Warm sugared water, that’s his favourite,’ Mam said, ‘that’ll keep him quiet for the night.’
Mam swore each morning that the bowls were empty.
John shivered in the dark scullery. He marched back into the kitchen, empty-handed.
Lilia was already wiping under Dieter’s nose with a flannel.
‘I’m all right, Ma. Really I am,’ the lad was saying.
There were footsteps on the stone steps. John looked up and saw Saskia. He couldn’t believe that pretty Lilia was her mother. He didn’t much care for the girl.
‘Oh, Ma, what’s he gone and got himself into now?’ she said.
John watched her jump the last few steps and land with a flat-footed thump on the flagstones. She pulled out a chair, scraping it across the stone. He leant against the sink and stared at her. John had found he could do this, because to this girl he was invisible.
She was laying out The Sunday Pictorial and eating something black because it had stained her lips and her teeth. He watched as she sneaked black coils of liquorice from her front pocket into her mouth and pushed the wad of chewed black sweet further in with her fingers. She smacked her lips and John saw black dribbles of spit collect, before her big tongue came out to soak them up.
John stepped closer; he could make out the headline on the girl’s newspaper. ‘Blonde Model Accused of Killing Racing Car Driver.’
John and his mam had heard about that woman on the radio: a woman who had taken a gun and shot a man on Easter Sunday. The radio called her Ruth Ellis and Mam had written the name down with her pencil. ‘That’s London for you,’ Mam had said, and she switched the Bush off.
Lilia swooped down and snatched the newspaper.
‘Ma!’ the girl cried.
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John watched Lilia fold the paper and place it behind the bread bin. ‘Jetzt nicht, später!’ she said and he tilted his head at the strange words. Lilia turned back to her son, a scone in her hand. ‘Eat, Dee.’ It was a command. ‘Eat.’
John knew he could watch this family forever.
Dachkammer
9
It had been a long day and Lilia was glad night had come. Owls cried out like startled children from the cedar of Lebanon. The vixen called ye-ye-ye-ye-ye from the lawn as she did every night, black paws scratching for fat worms in the turf. Lilia had begun to note the habits of this place.
She’d decided to start on the top floor. She had a torch and rat poison filled her cardigan pockets. In her hand Lilia gripped the iron ring of keys she’d found hanging from those silent bells down in the kitchen.
Up here were the attic rooms.
She walked along the passage, trying each door, checking each lock. A single bat flitted above her head. A few months ago the bat would have petrified her. We get used to many things, she thought.
After the fright of today, after seeing Dieter in John’s arms, white-faced but with that blood, Lilia was locking up tonight. She was securing the place. She was protecting her boy. There were so many doors and so many keys she simply wanted to shout, ‘Get out!’ along the passageways and down the staircases, but she knew it would take more than that.
It had started on their very first night here. Lilia had felt it as soon as she stepped over the threshold of Sugar Hall; she wasn’t a fool. She didn’t know, didn’t want to know what ‘it’ was, but she’d wanted to run out of the front door with her children, she’d wanted to scream, ‘No, not this!’ But where else could they go? They had nothing, only this place and for how long Lilia had no idea, so if they had to share it then share it they would. They were squatters. They were maroons. Marooned in this great house among the trees.
Yes, these few months were not long enough for decisions. Her parents had made their decision in minutes. They had sent her to England, their Liliana, the youngest and so the one to go. She had been fifteen: her brothers nineteen and twenty-one. Lilia tested a key in an old lock and shook the memory away.
Sugar Hall Page 5
