A finger jabbed into his ribs. ‘Wake up,’ Nadja hissed through her braces.
‘He’s off on one again,’ announced Stan from behind Milo.
Titters of laughter from around the classroom, all except Nadja, but that was only because she didn’t want to get in trouble.
‘That’s enough, Stan,’ said Mrs Harris.
Milo felt a kick against his chair from behind. He could smell Stan’s BO festering under his dirty clothes. It hung in the air and mingled with Nadja’s sweet perfume and the smelly plants Mrs Harris kept on the windowsills and the thick dust pumped into the air by the fan heaters that lined the hut.
He thought he was going to be sick.
‘Milo?’
‘Sorry, miss.’ He sat up, took a breath and rubbed his eyes.
Mrs Harris came into focus, her elbows akimbo, her head tilted to one side.
‘As I was saying, Milo, I’ve printed your test results and put them in envelopes for you to take home to your parents.’
Milo’s heart dropped. The last thing he needed was to have Mum nagging him about school.
‘Would you like me to hand them out, Miss Harris?’ Nadja asked, her back straight as a ruler, her small, sharp nose in the air.
Before Mrs Harris had the chance to answer, Nadja had scraped back her chair and was standing to attention. Milo and Nadja shared the double desk right at the front of the classroom; Nadja because she’d asked to and Milo because Mrs Harris thought it meant that Milo could see the board better. Mum and Dad were meant to have filled Mrs Harris in on the whole Retinitis Pigmentosa thing, but she didn’t seem to get it – that if you were further away from something, you could actually see more through the pinhole. And that if you had the whole class behind you, you were a sitting target.
Milo stuffed the letter into his school bag.
‘Pack up your things, push your chairs into your desk and line up neatly by the door.’
Milo narrowed his eyes and looked up at the clock. It was an hour before hometime and already the sky was getting dark. Gran had been at Forget Me Not for hours and hours.
‘You’d better be on your best behaviour, Year Five – we want to make a good impression on PC Stubbs.’
Since September they’d had firemen, dustbin men and paramedics in. It was part of them learning to be good citizens – and it’s never too early to be thinking about career choices, Mrs Harris told them. The problem was, Milo knew he’d be rubbish at any of those jobs. A fireman who missed the flames shooting out of the side of a house or a dustbin man who only picked up half the rubbish or a paramedic who didn’t spot that there was a second person lying in the road with a leg dangling off. You had to be able to see properly or you’d miss things and let people down and get sacked.
The lecture theatre was a hut without proper brick walls or a tiled roof. There were chairs all in a row and an old telly on a chipboard shelf. PC Stubbs stood in front of the class dressed in his black uniform and his navy cap with its blue and white chequerboard band and his navy stab vest and his navy tie and navy epaulettes and his white shirt and over it his fluorescent yellow jacket with his walkie-talkie pinned to his chest and all the bits dangling off his belt like his baton and handcuffs and a proper gun and other bits for stopping criminals.
As they walked in, he gave the pupils sticky labels to write their names on.
‘Good afternoon.’ The policeman’s voice was so low and clear that immediately, the class fell silent. Even Stan shut up for a second. Milo wished he had a voice that could do that. ‘My name is PC Stubbs and today I’m going to explain how you can all play a part in helping the police to make Slipton a happier, safer place. To start with, I’m going to show you a brief video.’
A cheer rose up in the class. Mrs Harris hardly ever let them watch films.
PC Stubbs raised his hands for silence and cleared his throat. ‘What you’re about to see is the re-enactment of a crime scene. I want you to watch as closely and intently as you can. Afterwards, I’ll be asking you some questions.’
The TV flickered to life.
Milo focused his eyes and stared through the pinhole. He liked tellies with their clear, set frame: they were way easier to watch than real life.
At the end of the film PC Stubbs froze the screen on the face of an old lady with a hair net standing on the pavement outside the RSPCA shop.
‘So, let’s see whether there are any budding detectives in here,’ PC Stubbs said. ‘What did you notice?’
‘That bloke put his hand in the old woman’s purse,’ Stan blurted out.
‘Hands up, please,’ Mrs Harris said.
PC Stubbs squinted at Stan’s name tag. ‘Okay, thank you, Stan. You’re right, that was what happened. I was looking for a bit more detail, though.’
Milo felt pleased that the policeman had put Stan in his place. Everyone saw what the crime was – you didn’t have to be a detective for that.
Everyone started chipping in.
‘He had a ’tash…’
‘He was tall…’
‘No he wasn’t…’
‘Hands up please, class.’
‘He was wearing a grey T-shirt.’
‘It wasn’t grey, it was white.’
‘Blue eyes…’
‘No, green…’
‘Adidas trainers…’
‘The old woman had a wig on…’
‘No, she didn’t…’
‘Yes, she did…’
‘No, she didn’t…’
‘Class, one at a time, please.’
‘There was a second guy standing on the street corner, outside Bill the Butchers. Six foot two, mousy brown hair, early twenties, a mole on his cheek, brown leather shoes, faded black jeans, a red hoodie. He was the look-out.’
The classroom fell silent.
Everyone stared at Milo.
Mrs Harris’s eyebrows shot up so high Milo thought they might disappear into her hairline.
A smile crept into PC Stubbs’s mouth.
‘And who’s this young man?’ he asked Mrs Harris.
‘Oh, that’s Milo. Milo Moon.’
‘Well, it looks like you’ve got a good eye, Milo.’
Stan let out a farty noise through his mouth but this time no one laughed.
Milo wasn’t sure what the big deal was. It was easy: you just looked for the thing that you thought no one else would notice. He played the spotting game with Gran all the time: they’d stare out of her window in the attic and look out onto the street and try to notice things that the other person hadn’t. It was part of the training Gran did with him to help with his eyes, like the listening game. They did smells, too, and sometimes even tastes where they tried to work out all the ingredients in one of Mum’s microwave meals.
On the way out of the lecture theatre, PC Stubbs handed each of them his personal business card and said that if they ever had any questions about what it took to be a policeman – or if they noticed anything strange happening on the streets of Slipton – they should give him a call.
When Milo got to him PC Stubbs stopped him and said, ‘You’ve got a real talent there, Milo. We need boys like you in the force.’
Stan barged into the back of Milo. ‘He wouldn’t pass the physical.’
‘Excuse me?’ PC Stubbs asked. You could tell he didn’t like Stan.
‘He’s blind as a wombat,’ said Stan. The pupils at Slipton Junior could tell Milo had a problem with his eyes, even if he tried to hide it.
PC Stubbs’s cheeks went a deep, purplish red.
Milo felt his eyes burn. He took PC Stubbs’s card, stuffed it into the bottom of his school bag, charged down the corridor and headed out of the school gates into the dark December afternoon.
8
MILO
‘Gran, Gran!’ Milo burst into Gran’s room at Forget Me Not, dumped his bag by her bed and went to kneel beside her chair. Although the view wasn’t as good, he was glad she had a chair by the window. She liked to look out.
‘Gran.’ He took her hand. It felt heavier than usual and it didn’t squeeze back. ‘We had this policeman come to talk to us at school and he said I was really good at spotting things and he gave me his card and everything.’ Milo fished the card out of his pocket and held it up for Gran to see.
But Gran didn’t open her eyes. She didn’t even stir.
‘Gran?’
He shook her arm gently and stroked the inside of her wrist, the bit where you could see Gran’s blue veins running under her white skin. Gran wasn’t a deep sleeper. Usually, when Milo came up to see her in her attic room, she’d have heard his footsteps on the stairs and would be waiting for him, wide-eyed, ready to listen to him and to write things back on her pad. She didn’t even sleep that deeply at night.
Milo looked closer. Gran’s head hung down and her chin rested on her chest. Her eyelids were clamped shut and her breathing was deep and heavy.
‘Gran?’ He tried shaking her arm again. She stirred a little, rolled her head up, flickered her eyes open for a second and then fell asleep again.
Maybe the move had taken it out of her, thought Milo.
‘I was going to show you this letter too, Gran,’ he said, looking over at his school bag. ‘I didn’t do very well in my tests.’
But it wasn’t any good. Gran stayed silent. He’d have to come back another time.
9
SANDY
Sandy swallowed one of her blue and white diet pills, took a gulp of water and picked up the memo pad by the phone. On it was Milo’s handwriting, the letters more perfectly formed than any she’d ever seen. Dr Nolan said they’d notice things like this, how sharp and precise he could be about some things; how he’d miss other things altogether.
Samantha cancelled her waxing.
The third cancellation that week. And this was Christmas, a time when people should be queuing round the block to get plucked.
She heard Milo open and close Hamlet’s cage in the garage. He’d been giving her the silent treatment ever since she’d signed Lou up at Forget Me Not. She switched on the TV that sat on the counter; the buttons had melted and a film of soot lay across the screen.
‘Are you ready for the adventure of a lifetime? Then take a camel trek across the hottest desert in the world…’
Sandy stared at the golden sands of the Sahara. Hot, that would make a nice change from Slipton.
Twenty-seven and she’d never got on a plane, never even left England. When she was pregnant with Milo Sandy had watched documentaries about teenage mums and could never quite bring herself to identify with those girls carting prams around housing estates. But that’s what had happened: she’d got pregnant too early and then she’d missed out. She told Andy that flying scared her, how the tiniest thing could go wrong and planes would drop out of the sky. But now, with everything that had happened, getting on a plane didn’t seem so frightening after all. In fact, Sandy thought she might quite like it, packing up her life in a small suitcase and disappearing into the clouds.
Milo came back in from the garage carrying Hamlet. She shoved the bottle of pills into the cutlery drawer.
Hamlet had only been with them a few months, and already he’d doubled in size. When Andy showed up with him in June, a few days before he left for Abu Dhabi, Sandy said, no way, we’re sending it back. But Milo insisted that Hamlet would stay small. Really small, like these, he said, showing Sandy pictures on the internet. A wet snout, tiny pink trotters, a corkscrew tail. He won’t be any trouble and I’ll take care of him, I promise.
Milo, always taking care of things.
‘I’ll make you some toast,’ said Sandy.
Milo didn’t answer. He buried his nose in Hamlet’s fur, walked through the kitchen without saying a word and carried him upstairs.
Right from the word go, Andy had been better with Milo than she had. He hadn’t taken responsibility for any of the routine stuff like buying shoes and attending parents’ meetings and taking him to dentists and, in the last year, to the optometry appointments with Dr Nolan, but he understood what made Milo happy. And then he’d gone and left him.
And now she’d taken Lou away from him as well. He thought it was all her fault, she could see it in those sharp, focused eyes of his.
They’re creatures of habit, that’s what Gina said last week as Sandy rubbed cellulite cream into her thighs. He’ll get used to it being just the two of you. Gina had put her mother in Forget Me Not last Christmas.
Sandy toasted two pieces of bread, smeared them with butter while they were still hot, licked the fat off her fingers and spread Marshmallow Fluff on top. She’d bought Fluff as a treat, or maybe a compensation. But for what? For losing the people he loved? For having to live with her?
She layered the pieces of toast on Milo’s favourite plate, the one with pigs flying around the rim, and carried it upstairs.
10
MILO
Milo heard shuffling outside. A dull thud as something was placed on the carpet and then Mum’s footsteps plodding back down the stairs. He waited to hear her mules clip-clopping on the kitchen tiles before going over to open the door.
Two pieces of toast sat on his favourite plate, the one Gran had bought him as part of a set from the RSPCA shop on Slipton High Street. He smelt the sweet Marshmallow Fluff melting into the hot butter and all the muscles in his tummy stretched towards the plate.
Hamlet trotted up behind him and nudged Milo’s ankles with his wet snout. Milo looked at the toast, swallowed hard and closed the door.
He looked around the room. It was the same as always, only Gran was missing.
Milo looked at the bagpipes and at Great-Gramps’s Royal Argyll Sutherland Highlanders uniform hanging on the wardrobe. Sometimes Gran put it on for fun and apart from the fact that it was too big, she actually looked like a proper soldier.
Milo had tried the uniform on too once and it had floated around his wrists and his waist and his ankles. You’ll grow into it, Milo, Gran had written on her pad. But Great-Gramps was a big man, perhaps bigger than Milo would ever be.
As Milo looked around the room he was glad he’d persuaded Gran only to take a few things with her. She’d be back here soon and it would be pointless carting it all back and forth.
He pulled the letter from school out of his back pocket. He wished Gran hadn’t been asleep when he went to Forget Me Not, he’d wanted so badly to read it to her. Gran could be relied on to react properly, she wouldn’t make her eyebrows shoot up and she wouldn’t shake her head and start biting the nail on her little finger or sigh like the end of the world was coming. She’d just listen and write: there’s more to life than exams and make notes about Great-Gramps and how he’d been this amazing soldier and that he was really clever and liked reading things like Shakespeare, even though he left school early and didn’t have any qualifications. When her hands weren’t shaking, Gran could write faster than most people talked.
Milo hugged Hamlet in close, took the letter out of the envelope and whispered his exam results into Hamlet’s soft ears: the maths results went into his black ear and the English results into his white ear.
When he’d finished, he buried his nose in Hamlet’s fur and closed his eyes.
By the time Milo woke up it was dark outside. Hamlet lay nestled in the crook of his elbow. Trying not to disturb him, Milo cradled Hamlet in his arms and stood up. Maybe it was the dead weight of Hamlet’s sleeping body, but he felt heavier than Milo expected. Mum kept going on about how fat Hamlet was getting, even though Milo explained that he was following the internet feeding instructions. Anyway, she was one to talk, munching her way through all those packets of Hobnobs.
Milo walked over to the window that jutted out of the front of the house. One of the pieces of paper from Gran’s pad lay on the side, a message scrawled across the front in her big capital letters: BE QUIET. She’d hold it up to the window for Mr Overend who lived across the street. Mr Overend never did anything but mooch around in his PJs, whist
ling. Sometimes he whistled so loud that he drowned out the planes.
Gran liked looking at the planes and she liked looking across town. From up here, you could see the high street and the church tower and the canal and the Tesco warehouse and the turning to the motorway. And you could see the park, the tops of the trees, the white paths in the moonlight.
Milo noticed the flickering of the park keeper’s torch as he walked around, locking the gates. What would it be like to get caught in there overnight? To sleep under the sky with all those trees swaying above you?
What Milo Saw Page 4
