Break of Dark

by Robert Westall

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Hitch-hiker

  Blackham’s Wimpey

  Fred, Alice and Aunty Lou

  St Austin Friars

  Sergeant Nice

  About the Author

  Also Available

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Is there a barrier dividing our everyday world from the dark unknown? If so, is it broken sometimes by alien creatures or by the dead returning?

  Why else should three successive crews flying a Second World War bomber be driven to madness, despair, even to death, though the plane returns from each mission without a scratch? What is the mysterious smell in Roger and Biddy’s house and what could account for the series of extraordinary thefts in Sergeant Nice’s sleepy seaside town; surely the work of no human hand . . . ?

  For my friend Bob Megraw

  late navigator, Bomber Command,

  and Careers Officer extraordinary

  Hitch-hiker

  It is more than ten years now since I went climbing in the Red Cuillins on the Isle of Skye, leaving behind me a broken engagement and a broken heart. Sylvia had fallen for one of our college lecturers, a divorcé with a lot of money, his own house and roving hands. He was nearly twice my age; there’s not much a twenty-year-old can do against that kind of opposition.

  In a careless, cheerful way, I didn’t care whether I lived or died. I climbed like a maniac, I climbed like a genius. The red gabbro rock of the Cuillin grips your boots like sandpaper; you feel you can climb up a vertical wall like a fly. The July sun was warm on my back, through only a thin, worn shirt. I felt invincible. But if I wasn’t, then there’d just be a long flight through space, and I wouldn’t have to think about Sylvia any more when I first wakened up in the morning. That’s all I thought there was: glorious life or sudden death. Like the song said, that we used to sing in the evenings:

  They scraped him off Great Gable like a pound of

  strawberry jam

  And he ain’t going to climb no more.

  The thought of being a paraplegic, a cabbage in a wheelchair, a prisoner for the rest of my life, just hadn’t occurred to me.

  David and Harry should have steadied me; Harry was a cheerful little lad, a game climber who didn’t give a thought to his occasional attacks of asthma. David was slow and funny, and always seemed to have time for everything and everybody. Well, he always had time for me. But my madness seemed to infect them. We came down Sgurr a Greadaigh by a gully full of rotten stone that must never have been climbed in the history of Skye; a gully that no mountaineer in his right mind would go near. Seemed like half the mountain was following us down in lumps as big as hens – and us crouching on a narrow ledge as they burst around us like an artillery bombardment, laughing our little heads off.

  We walked away without a scratch.

  We jumped the Mauvais Pas on Sgurr Alasdair, whooping like cowboys; came down by the Stone-chute that hadn’t been worn out in those days and was just like ski-ing. In short, we had a ball for ten whole days. Even the ferocious Skye midges, forcing their way into the tents in the evening against a barrage of fag-smoke and eating away avidly at the open jar of insect-repellent, were a giggle.

  Then the August rains set in, and it all went sour. Harry’s asthma came on with a vengeance. We hurried him across to the mainland as fast as we could, and then tried to hitch-hike home to Geordyland. But who wants three soaking-wet hitch-hikers with big knobbly boots and framed rucksacks that could scratch the enamel off your car at any moment? We waited together half a day, then decided to split up. Two together might make it; three never would – and David had the big, non-leaky tent, and was much more patient with somebody sick than I was. So I walked off down the road and left them to it. Ten minutes later they passed me, waving wildly, perched among sacks of stinking fishmeal on the back of a lorry marked GLASGOW. I never saw them again; I hope they’ve had happy lives. They were good mates.

  Me, I had a high old time. Went down Glen Shiel on the back of a motorbike in a thunderstorm. Went down Glen Alby behind the luggage in the back of a van, while the family prattled cheerfully about their holidays and I had to be sick into my sandwich box out of politeness, and they never even noticed or shut up for a minute. They dropped me on the northern outskirts of Fort William. A weak sun came out; I felt purged and cheerful. I had done the hard bit. I still had five pounds in my wallet and I could coast home as gently as I wished, stopping and staring whenever I felt inclined. In a fit of euphoria, I cleaned out my rucksack and dumped the remains of my grub: a stale half-loaf, a bag of over-ripe plums and a packet of butter that had melted in the sun five times. I dumped them and the sandwich box (friend of the countryside that I was) under some very prickly brambles in a rather wet ditch. Then I walked into Fort William and treated myself to the loo in the railway station.

  Unfortunately, as I was sitting thinking in solitary state, my trousers round my ankles and my wallet sticking half out of my back pocket, a crafty Fort William hand came under the wooden partition and helped itself to my wallet. I remember the hand was pale, freckled and had little ginger hairs all over it. But by the time I’d pulled myself together and got my trousers up, the freckled hand had turned into a set of rapidly retreating footsteps that soon mingled with the holiday crowds outside. I walked about for an hour looking for that hand; but most people had their hands in their trouser-pockets anyway.

  I didn’t bother to go to the police station. Instead, I walked back to the northern outskirts and retrieved my half-loaf, butter and rotten plums from the very prickly ditch. Contact with muddy water had not improved them. Then I set about getting home as quickly as possible, before I starved to death. Scottish hospitality had left me with twenty-two pence in my pocket. I got a ride on a mass of empty milk-churns as far as Ardlui, at the northern end of Loch Lomond, and then my luck ran out. For hitch-hiking, the Lomond road is a bastard, however lovely the scenery. You see, the bonny, bonny banks of the said loch zig-zag in and out, and the Lomond road zigzags with them, every forty yards. And the one thing a hitch-hiker must do is to stand where a car can see him a hundred yards away, to give the driver time to pull up. I walked fourteen miles looking for that hundred-yard straight, and never found it. And it rained a lot, and the more it rains, the less likely you are to get a hitch.

  So by nine in the evening, very footsore and sorry for myself, I was near the southern end of the loch, just north of Balloch. There, there are caravan sites between the road and the loch, and on the other side of the road, a steep, wild and magnificent hillside of bracken ascends halfway to the sky. Fine to camp, if you can find a flat six feet to take your tent, and if you watch where you’re putting your feet; they never seem to provide enough toilets on those caravan sites, and there’s a lot of do-it-yourself among the bracken. And courting couples; the Scots have some funny tastes. Still, the Scottish Tourist Board laid on a magnificent sunset for me, and the loch looked just like all the songs and poems said. And I sat at the door of my tent like Abu Ben Adem, eating soggy bread and rotten plums and smelling the hamburgers frying in the caravan park.

  I became aware eventually, even through the choking clouds of self-pity, that there was a persistent rustling in the bracken behind my tent. Ho, I thought, what Scottish goody is this? A cow, to trample my tent flat? Or the Dr Moriarty of Fort William station loo come back for my trousers? I leapt up with the ferocity of a tiger and flung myself in the general direction of the noise, tripping over a guy-rope in the process. The noise rapidly retreated before me, as I plunged deeper and deeper into the head-high bracken. I was just starting to wonder if someone was luring me away while his mate st
ole my tent, when the something stopped and stood still. I could just see a bit of it through the bracken. It had two legs and was very pale. I lunged, and stopped, my mouth gaping.

  A girl was standing there, stark naked, her arms crossed across her breasts, looking at me with exactly the air of a startled deer. God, she was a smasher. Long silky blonde hair, long shapely legs, slightly cut and bleeding in one place from the bracken stems. Even with her arms crossed where they were, I could see that Men Only had nothing on her. It was, I suppose, every adolescent’s wish-fulfilment. Except she was blue and goose-fleshed with cold, and I couldn’t help thinking that the braw Scot who’d coaxed her into this state was likely at any moment to manifest himself like a roaring lion seeking whom he might devour.

  I blurted into my innocent-bystander routine. Her eyes watched me; huge blue eyes. But they weren’t terrified, or even embarrassed. They had the cool, appraising look that a rock climber has, the moment before he spits on his hands and makes a start on the central buttress of Great Gable.

  ‘Please help me,’ she said. I could tell from her voice that she was as much a lady as the Queen of England.

  ‘What d’you want?’

  ‘I am cold,’ she said, glancing around still wary as a deer, but not of me. I didn’t blame her; some funny things used to go on round Balloch; it’s only ten miles from the edge of Glasgow, and the gangs went drinking up there in summer. ‘Take me to your tent.’

  I bundled her into my tent quick, before some libidinous Jock clapped eyes on her. Then I sat outside and hissed at her through the canvas.

  ‘Where the hell are your clothes?’ A Scottish mob crashed through the bracken only twenty yards away, going up the hillside, intent on upping the fertility of the place, one way or the other. Fear for her made me angry.

  ‘I have had them stolen.’ Her voice was muffled, but maddeningly calm. ‘Can you lend me some of yours?’ She didn’t sound at all tearful or beseeching; more like she was asking the way to the town hall.

  It seemed a good idea. ‘There’s some stuff in my rucksack,’ I said.

  ‘What is a rucksack?’

  ‘That big canvas thing, with all the straps on it.’

  There was a pause. Then, ‘What is canvas?’ she asked.

  Oh God, surely nobody could be that ignorant . . . More Jocks were approaching . . . I closed my eyes and flung myself into the tent, and collided with a mass of warm, yielding curves. I grabbed blindly where I knew the rucksack should be, and only drew a deep, deep breath once I’d regained the fresh air again.

  ‘Hurry up. I am cold.’ She didn’t seem the least put out by our recent collision.

  What I had to offer her was not pretty. My camouflaged climbing trousers, caked with mud. A shirt stinking of a week’s sweat. A thick pullover with darned elbows and a pair of filthy plimsolls. All crumpled to hell. I wouldn’t have worn them again, before my mum had been at them. And I couldn’t bring myself to offer socks or underwear. I stuffed the clothes back to her through the tent-flap as if I was stoking a hungry furnace.

  The tent heaved for a bit, like two cats fighting in a sack, then she emerged, a bit red in the face, but quite composed. My stuff fitted her well enough; she was a big girl in every way; nearly six feet tall. I was surprised she didn’t ask for the loan of a comb and mirror; but she used them once they were offered.

  ‘That feller . . . who stole your clothes . . . he didn’t do anything to you? I mean, I can call the police . . .’

  You might think that for a guy who’d just been through a pretty torrid engagement, I was being a bit over-shy, wanting to call the police. I mean, one man, one woman, one tent. I was hardly outnumbered. But there was something . . . creepy about this girl. Her body was too perfect; so was her face. I mean, even the prettiest girls, even filmstars, have the odd spot or mole. Sylvia had faint blue veins showing on her thighs that I hadn’t liked much. But this girl, not a blemish. Like a pin-up in a magazine, and they’re made-up to hide their blemishes. And her voice: beautiful, ladylike, polite, formal. Like a female announcer on the telly. No expression. And not knowing what a rucksack was . . . I began to wonder if she’d escaped from the local loony-bin. They sometimes take off all their clothes and run about naked . . .

  I looked up; her cool blue eyes were watching me.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘I will look after you. Have you something to eat? I have not eaten for some time. I think I am rather . . . hungry.’

  I gave her the remains of the soggy loaf, smeared with thin oily butter. She demolished it without a grimace, as if it was a feast. I offered her the least rotten of the plums.

  She swallowed them, stones and all.

  I lay in the darkness, surreptitiously rolling over from side to side, to avoid waking her. I was wearing every stitch I had left, and I was freezing. She lay in my sleeping bag, facing me, fast asleep. A gentle zephyr came out of her mouth, lifted a lock of her golden hair, and warmed my face. I could have raped her or anything. As it was, I was lying there in a flat panic. What on earth was I to do with her? She’d told me her name was Joan Smith, which sounded as real as a three-pound note. Nobody had interfered with her, she said, apart from stealing her clothes. Beyond that, she’d told me nothing. She had asked all the questions. What was my name? Where was I going? Where was I a student? What did I study? It was like being interrogated by the Gestapo. After three hours non-stop, I was worn out, my mind in a whirl. But I still couldn’t sleep. I was hungry as well as cold.

  I turned over again, a bit too violently. She wakened.

  ‘Why can you not sleep?’

  ‘I’m hungry.’ I didn’t dare say I was cold, or she’d probably have me inside that sleeping bag with her, and then . . . I shivered.

  ‘Why don’t you eat some more food?’

  ‘Haven’t got any more.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I’m broke.’

  ‘Where are you broken?’ She reached an arm out of the sleeping bag and began to feel my legs, as if she thought they were injured. For the first time she showed a trace of anxiety. She obviously wanted me kept in good shape.

  ‘Not broken. “Broke” means I have no money. Didn’t you know that?’

  ‘Broke,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘Broke.’ As if she was committing some obscure fact to memory. Then, ‘Come with me. Take me to the town. I can get you some money, quickly.’

  She was out of the bag and into my camouflage trousers and pullover in a flash. Then she was out of the tent-flap and off down the bracken slope. I had to run hard to catch her; she could move. She kept on running when she hit the road and I had to pound in pursuit. She was obviously very fit; I’m no slouch myself, but I had a job keeping up with her. We reached the outskirts of Balloch in no time at all. What did she mean to do? Go on the game in after-midnight Balloch? Burgle a house?

  She did neither. She made for the nearest pub and, stooping suddenly in the gutter outside the front door, held up something in the light of the solitary remaining street lamp. It was a fifty pence piece. She gave it to me. Then two ten pences, then three pennies. She’d trebled my capital in less than a minute. At least we could now afford breakfast.

  ‘This is a good place to look,’ she said. ‘The men come out of the pub drunk and fumble for their bus fares home, and drop coins. We will find more at the bus stop.’

  She did, too. Then she shinned over the back wall of the pub like an Olympic athlete, silent in plimsolls. When she returned, she pressed thirty-seven pence into my hand. ‘When the drunken men go to relieve themselves,’ she explained.

  We spent the rest of the night in a fiscal tour of Balloch. She was incredible. She found two pound notes blowing about; she could smell money in the dark like a dog can smell a rabbit. All she would say is, ‘It is the drunks. It is Friday night.’ I’d forgotten that, with being climbing on the Isle of Skye.

  We, or rather I, staggered back to the tent in the dawn. We were richer by six pounds, seventy-two pence. And I’d
spent twenty pence on chocolate from a machine we’d found. She was still raring to go.

  ‘You like money,’ she said, head on one side thoughtfully, in a way I later got quite fond of.

  ‘I like eating,’ I said, biting into a chocolate bar and offering her one.

  ‘This is quite pleasant,’ she said. ‘Better than your bread. But if you eat too much of it, it will harm your teeth.’ She said it like a little girl repeating a lesson.

  I, at least, slept with a full belly, and the renewed warmth of sunrise.

  We ate chocolate again, packed up the gear and went back into Balloch about nine. There was a road sweeper, sweeping the gutter outside the pub. He looked a bit fed-up and was muttering to himself. I gathered he’d been hoping for some of the loot that was jingling in my pocket.

  We had a real Scottish cooked breakfast in a café: porridge, bacon and egg, toast and home-made marmalade. The woman who served us gave Joan some funny looks, but she was obviously used to climbers beating a retreat from Skye.

  ‘You’d better buy a bloody bra,’ I said; ungraciously, for, revived by the breakfast, I was enjoying her every stretch and yawn.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘and pants and socks and a comb of my own – your hair is greasy. Give me four pounds.’

  I begrudged it, but it was she who’d given it to me. ‘Finish your meal,’ she said. ‘I shan’t be long.’

  She came back, announcing, ‘I am much more comfortable now.’ So was the waitress. But when I’d paid for the breakfast, we were down to almost our last pound again.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘I can get more money. I can get you all the money you want. I can make you a millionaire.’

  I gave her a funny look, I remember, standing on the doorstep of that café. But she gave me a very straight look back, before I could begin to think she was some kind of nutcase again.

  ‘Buy me a newspaper,’ she said.

  I spent a grudging four pence on a copy of the Scotsman. She dived straight to the back, to the racing pages, studied them with a tongue protruding from the corner of her full mouth, and announced, ‘Put a pound on that horse. He will win. Twenty-five to one.’