One year Saul got himself chased into the pond by wasps. He still talks about it. Chased him a good quarter-mile. A million of them he said there were afterwards, showing off his red swellings. 'Your arithmetic's off,' Sid Perfect informed him. Sid Perfect was an excellent darts player. He could tell you how many you needed and how best to score them before the last dart had landed. He was good at predictions. He could tell a woman whether she should expect twins. He could tell a person they were going to die a violent death. He was never wrong.
A million, Saul insisted again. He got upset about it. I'm no liar, he said. I know one million wasps when I see them. And he punched Tommy King in the head to prove it.
Walter sees the cattle on the hill have raised their heads. More curious than a cat, a cow. Tommy Castle said that. A natural with cattle he was. Something about those who nursed a grief a long time, made them good around animals, economical with their movements. Excellent with cattle, Tommy, in spite of his old age; milk yield never better anyhow. If you ask him about the war with the Boer he'll tell you. Go on, ask Tommy, they used to say. And he did tell, even to a very small boy, which Walter was at the time. Tommy's grief was over the mothers and babies, the ones who were starved, put in camps, fenced in like you would for animals. Tommy heard them crying still, here in the Chilterns. He couldn't stand it. He kept to himself after that war. They were removed, he said, the ones who had died, to make room for more Boer mothers and their babies to come and starve and cry and wait to die. The English this was, Tommy said, who did it, the British Army. Walter, who was just a boy then, didn't believe him.
Walter and Sankey lean and smoke.
'Here, I have a good one for you, Walt.'
'Ready and able.'
'Why is a kingfisher blue?'
'Why is a kingfisher blue?'
'That's it.'
'So that he may attract the lady kingfishers.'
Sankey waits. 'How did you come by that?'
'A little knowledge of the avian kingdom goes a long way.'
'Well, it is wrong. A kingfisher's plumage, my friend, is as blue as Our Saviour's eyes. An exact replication of the colour, in order that mankind may know what it is to be looked upon by the Light of the World.'
'God help us, Sank.'
'I'll drink to that.'
'A jar of ale will cure the ailment with no name.'
'You read my mind just then, Walter.'
Walter places two halves of ale before Sankey and slides into the chair beside him. Now that they are here at the Royal Standard he finds he is happy to taste the bitter froth on his tongue and half listen to the gargles of chatter filtering through the smoke.
'This is a marvellous day,' Sankey remarks. Walter says nothing. He does not wish to respond, fearing it is the introduction to a long, tortuous discourse. After a pause Walter fills his pipe and strikes a match and soon they are both shrouded by a dense fog.
A man enters with a cringing collie around his ankles. He nods and crosses to the bar.
Sankey raises his glass. You could join me, I suppose, at the church room if you so wished.'
The collie slips into the shadow beneath a table. It makes Walter think of stoats. Walter does not want to go to the church room. Sankey is always rooting about for a conversion. He does not reply. That is the end of that then.
From stoats Walter's thoughts drift towards ferrets. He fancied a ferret as a boy, but his mother would not tolerate one in the house. He suggested it could sleep outside in a kennel, to which she replied, 'Are you deaf?'
'Do you like ferrets then, Sank?'
Sankey looks hard at his drink while he decides. 'No. They bite and they smell, Walt. Canaries are nice.'
'They may give a playful nip.'
'They can draw blood.'
'Only if they're upset.'
'You can't upset a canary, they are a stable bird, Walt.'
'Not if a cat is about.'
'Morning, Jim. No, but generally.'
'I don't like the twittering.'
'They don't twitter, they sing. Good as any nightingale.'
'I'll take your word for it.'
'You should. Canaries are the ticket.'
'I'm not a bird man.'
'No, well. You might consider it, Walt.'
'So you say.'
'I do.'
'I shall sleep on it.'
'Good, then. Hello, John. That'll put hairs on your chest.'
'If you say so.'
'I do say, Walt. I do.'
Seven
THE HILL THAT gave Cryers Hill its name could indeed make you cry. If you stood at the summit where the sky arched and the clouds raced and you turned to face the wind, your cheeks would be streaked in seconds. No one could withstand it. If you stood there you wept. Sean stood there a lot. It wasn't bad, the way the wind pulled at you, tugged you as if you were important. He ran along the ridge, where the trees were bent almost to the ground, until tears ran down his neck and pooled inside his ears. He fell against the hill and let the wind pulverise him. He watched the clouds rolling like tumble-weed, and the birds trying to fly, swiped away like paper bags.
Here was a hill for heroes. Girls didn't like it by and large; the wind made them scream, excepting Ann, who screamed for no one. Ann would stand at the highest point like a buccaneer, blinded by tears, showing her teeth. She understood perfectly well the heroics of hilltops.
It was said there were soldiers buried in the hill. It was said that during the Civil War the injured ones were carried to the top. There, with Hughenden Valley below them and the wind of judgement above, Royalists and Roundheads alike bled to death. Their cries could be heard in the hamlets in the valley and around. This, some say, is how the village came to be known as Cryers Hill. Sean believed it must be true, and sometimes thought he heard voices in the wind.
A child was buried here too, the locals said. A hundred years after the Civil War an infant was struck down in the night by an avenging angel, and subsequently buried on the hill by her mother to be closer to God. The story was if you stood on the hill under a full moon on the exact avenging angel date, you would hear the child sing.
Sean heard no singing today, but he could see a man about five hundred yards away, standing alone below the crooked limb of a great tree. The man was staring out towards the valley. He was clothed, so Sean deduced he could not be the streaker. Why on earth did people stare into valleys? Sean tried it to see. Green. Green. Green. The End. There was nothing there! And still he was staring. Where was his dog anyway? Why would a man walk around without a dog? Ann would know. Ann would ask him. Scuse me, Mister. What you staring at, Mister? She would narrow her knavish eyes. It was possible Ann was not supposed to live on earth with everyone else. More than once Sean had seen her thrown into the clouds. She would be on her garden swing and he would hide by the fence, waiting. He recalled her rising into the sky, hair afloat, the shreds of her voice coming at him in ribbons, like the dead infant's song. He thought then she was born to float or fly.
One way or another Sean was used to looking up to Ann. She spiralled through his head at night and swung in and out of his waking thoughts, even when she was standing right beside him. Ann. Anna. Like that hymn Sean once heard, Who's Anna? Who's Anna? Who's Anna in the highest? Ooh, Miss! Sean would put his hand up because he knew the answer to that one. At night, as he fell asleep, he saw her swim across a blank sky, unhurried, long-necked, like a swan. The man is gone. Sean is amazed. He must have taken his eye off the ball. This is how it goes.
Sean appears from nowhere, treading slow-motion steps past the diggers. He has set his heart on space travel. For a week, he has been wearing a cement-sack helmet with holes cut for his eyes, and now he's upgraded to a plastic fish tank. Sun dazzles bounce off his aquarium head, which is square instead of round as it should be, but it was a matter of limited choice. Seen through the plastic, his face is determined. Every time he moves his head the thing slides about, but he is growing used to it and hardly
notices the clunks around his temples and ears.
He watched them, the astronauts, bouncing across the television screen and back again, their voices bursting in their helmets against the ping and hiss of satellite static. He stared at the line of fossil-grey footprints in the moon dust, and at the American flag they'd planted, its reds and blues faded to BBC black and white. But mostly he stared at the surface of the moon, which looked a lot like their front garden, a lot of dirt and dust, waiting for turf.
The fish tank makes his voice exotically different, resonating from the bottom of a deep bell jar. Ann begins to treat him with a new respect. Some of the older kids laugh but this does not seem to affect Sean; on the contrary, he has grown fearless and debonair. The builders have left cylindrical sheaths of ribbed plastic lying around, packaging from piping and plumbing ducts. Sean wraps a length around his neck for an oxygen tube, a blue one that swings around his knees. It is perfect. Ann is finding it harder to say inconsequential things to him; the paraphernalia he wears is intimidating. Mostly he cannot hear what she is saying anyway, and she is losing the will to repeat herself. For Sean the aquarium helmet is an agreeable barrier between him and the world and now between he and she. It leaves him alone with the songs of the universe, the thoughts of an intergalactic traveller.
He struggles up behind her to the summit of a brick mountain, sweating and gasping inside his tank, watching while she springs nimbly ahead. It is higher than he anticipated. His thoughts are orange, blue, orange, blue, as he looks down, up, down, up, bricks, sky, bricks. There is no breeze to lift her skirt, Sean notices. The sound of his panting reminds him of something but he can't think what. His breaths temporarily mist up the tank so that he cannot see, clearing just in time for him to take another step before his next breath mists everything over again. He is suffocating; sweat runs down his neck and tickles around his ribs. The sound of his swallowing is unnaturally loud. A spaceman does not mind this. A spaceman does not complain, not even when his stomach floats into his mouth and his brain falls out of his shoes.
She is already there, brisk and thoughtless as an Alpine goat. The climb was tough but necessary. Ann points out to Sean that he will have to get used to high altitudes and he may as well start now. She mentions too that the brick mountain will make a man of him. 'It'll make a man of you,' she confirms, hands on her hips, glancing dismally at his muffin knees. 'It'll make a proper man of you.'
Eight
THE DAY WALTER went alone to the woodland pond, he went to think his thoughts and catch a fish, if he was lucky. He lay down with his rod for a rest. All his thoughts and naggings tipped out of his head and he was left with a lovely blankness and the mew of a bunting.
He saw his girl swimming there. She wasn't his girl then, but he knew she would be. He was nineteen when he knew. He watched her floating and saw how white her skin was in the green water, her belly, her breasts, her pond-tangled hair. A naked girl. Then she turned over like an otter and dived down. She did not come up again. Walter ran to the edge of the water. He crashed through the reeds and stood panting at his own dirty reflection. He panicked. He pulled off his boots and socks, knowing all the time that he could not swim even if he wanted to. Finally he shouted out her name.
She was sixteen when he decided. She came up out of the water, green as a mermaid, a few feet from his face, streaming with water and duckweed, and roaring with mocking laughter. She wasn't gold-haired or loving or happy as Larry. She was no Cissie. She kept a mouthful of curses behind her crowd of teeth and a great shout of a laugh that narrowed her eyes to nothing. Walter fell in love with Mary Hatt. This was before. Later they would say, poor Walter Brown. He never really had a chance.
*
Sean and Ann sleep in one of the splintery bedrooms of a half-finished house. It smells of soft wood and wind. There is no roof, but in spite of this Sean is compelled to watch the sky through the empty window frame. He sees tufts of cloud and an aeroplane sail by. A breeze comes up the stairs from the hall and whirls around them and up and out where the roof should be. They are forbidden to do this. Children are not allowed in the incompleted houses; they have all been warned, but there are no workmen about today, no foreman, no one. Sean listens out for murderers or streakers. He wonders what exactly he would do if a murderer strolled in now, rolling his eyes and gnashing his teeth. Kung fu? Bruce Lee would probably never come to Buckinghamshire. If he did he would go to High Wycombe for the bright lights, or Amersham.
Nobody knows they are here in the unfinished bedroom of an incomplete house in a nameless cul-de-sac. You can bury people in cement. Duncan Drew said that. Sean wonders whether anybody will be looking for them, calling out their names. Unlikely. This is Sunday and all the parents will be sitting bare-legged in their stony gardens. The bell from the church clangs; imploring them to come up the hill in their shorts and flip-flops, so that the Good Shepherd can help them with their stony lives.
Sean notices that Ann is still asleep. Now it is he alone who knows they are lying in a pretend, dust-blown bedroom, roofless and illicit. He tries to imagine they are married and this is their real-life bedroom, with wallpaper, slippers and a nice carpet. He rolls over to his Mrs Wife and pulls her hand from her mouth. Her lips are cracked and dry and slightly apart. He touches her thigh and finds it surprisingly cool and hard, and then she shifts, 'P'sof,' and turns away from him.
They have a dog, he decides, like everyone on the estate, a big one, quite vicious, and a fast car that blows white smoke. He is much taller in his married-man self, and other men are afraid of him. He can punch too, but not women. He can kick dogs, they cower when he's around. No animal would ever dare bite him nor any person bully him or call him names like titch, spaz or mongol. All the girls love him, every single one. Ann will have to get over this. He is famous because he plays for Leeds, and he saved someone's life. He knows Bobby Charlton. When he was in the army they won the war; he's got medals to prove it. He could kill someone with his bare hands if he had to, if he felt like it. You can kill people with your bare hands, actually, it's very straightforward, his dad says. 'One squeeze, I could do the lot of you and afford a new car,' and they'd all laugh then. He was quite funny, his dad.
Sean can't really think of anything else. He decides to wake Ann, then changes his mind. She will be annoyed. He can feel dust in his nose, in his mouth. He creaks down the stairs, out through the raw-rimmed hole that is waiting for a door, across the dirt that is not yet a garden. He is a few yards along the ragged bit of road when her voice falls from the sky.
'Spaz!'
She is leaning through the empty window frame, and when he turns and looks up he is surprised at how nice-looking the whole thing is in spite of everything: her, the storybook house, the breeze in her hair. She holds up his tank and tube and then she chucks them through the hole.
You're a spaz. What are you?'
They land in the dirt of the not-yet garden, his helmet and his oxygen pipe, his essentials for intergalactic voyaging, his armour and his last breath.
'A spaz,' he replies.
The zigzag maze of estate paths, alleys and passages all meet up eventually and tip tunnel-travellers into the playground of the local primary school. Twice a day the tunnels are clogged with traipsing children. Twice a day the wails, moans and screams are more suggestive of asylum inmates than children learning their reading and writing.
Reading and writing is taught at Cryers Hill Primary School as at any other school, but unlike any other school they learn it differently. 'Ground-breaking,' Mrs Jackson had said at assembly, and Sean pictured the earth splitting while they all tumbled screaming into the cracks with the almost-houses, diggers and builders' huts. This was a new, modern way to read and write, modern as space flight. Children would learn to read faster and write quicker, like instant potato and Angel Delight – just add water – it would happen in a flash with no inconvenient old-fashioned waiting around.
'Front-runners,' Mrs Jackson said on the morning they
were all informed.
Sean was proud to be in an experiment; not everyone could say the same, and besides, it would prepare him for a lifetime in space, where everything is new, exciting and uncertain. What's more, this experiment was official, authorised, and they were the lucky few. The government had decreed it, the actual Prime Minister himself. And they, Cryers Hill Primary, were going to be one of the schools in the southeast to embrace and implement the latest methods devised by the godfather of this modernising new experiment, Sir James Pitman. Sir! As though he were come on a white horse, clad in armour. Sir James! Bringer of words, lancer of old alphabets.
Like a brilliant cure for a tired old disease, ITA is spreading across the country: Newcastle, Hartlepool, Liverpool, Wales. In fact it is so important it is going to America and Australia as well. Soon the children who are upside down on the other side of the planet will be reading the same books as Sean in the same instantaneous way.
The experiment is called ITA. Or, ie in the experimental vernacular. Sean's teacher, Miss Day, calls it funetic, as though it is a huge laugh. She says she is a funetic fan and Sean thinks that whatever that is, he is one too. Miss Day explains how lucky they all are to be learning the ITA alphabet, to be taught to read and write using phonetics, instead of ploughing through months of struggle and confusion as they try to learn the traditional alphabet, to read traditional books and write traditional words. Miss Day says 'traditional' as though it is a sad, pathetic thing to be, and Sean agrees that whatever it is, it's rubbish.
Miss Day says reading and writing and arithmetic are extremely difficult. When faced with them at school young children generally struggle. They cry, she explains. Some of them cry for years. Miss Day knows this for a fact because she has had to teach these poor tearful weepers herself. It's very sad, she admits. Sean and his friends are lucky, she says beamingly. They have been saved by Sir James and his modern ITA. They will learn to read and write in record time with no tears. Then, once they are experts at phonetic reading and writing, around the age of eight, they will be changed. Changeover is painless. They need to be changed at this age so that they can read and write in traditional alphabet the same as all the other poor tearful sods in the world – just like that, pie. It is like magic, except that it is real. It is a miracle. It is going to change
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