Attica

by Kilworth, Garry

  Jordy grunted. ‘He talks like a robot. He is a robot.’

  ‘You leave him alone,’ Chloe defended her brother.

  Jordy was about to protest that he didn’t mean anything by it, when he noticed a movement coming from the wardrobe village. A lot of the stumpy, thick-chested inhabitants had gathered under a rafter and were muttering and pointing towards the trio. It seemed they had weapons in their hands: hockey sticks and cricket bats. Some even had long knives, the edges of which glinted wickedly. They began to move towards them and Jordy felt a sort of hard lump in his throat and a panicky feeling in his stomach.

  ‘Uh-oh, trouble,’ he said, trying to keep his tone even. ‘We might have to make a run for it.’

  ‘What’s upset them?’ asked Chloe, seeing the mob. ‘Why are they doing this now?’

  Jordy said, ‘I dunno, but they’re cutting off our retreat. Maybe it was you, messing around with their photo albums.’

  Alex had moved away from the sewing-machine car now.

  ‘Maybe it’s because you stole some of their food and drank from their umbrellas without asking,’ he said.

  ‘Or because you nicked one of their cars,’ riposted Jordy, ‘and started taking it to bits.’

  Chloe cried, ‘Stop arguing. They’re still coming.’

  The villagers were indeed in an ugly mood. They were making low grating sounds in the back of their throats. It was an eerie noise which scared the three children, who began to back away into a corner, towards the edge of the attic. They were not used to violence, even though Jordy had done karate at one time, and had boxed a little. They were kids who came from neighbourhoods where things were settled with words rather than weapons. Alex and Chloe, especially, were beginning to get very frightened. Jordy put on a brave front, but he too felt the terror of the moment.

  Just when it seemed the villagers were about to fall on them and start beating them, a bugle sounded from afar in the attic. There were startled looks on the faces of the advancing locals. They stopped dead in their tracks. One of them shouted something. They all began running back to their wardrobes where they took up stances of defence, as if they expected an attack.

  Sure enough, out of the dusty columns of light came another set of villagers, all swishing golf clubs. They were also bearing makeshift shields: lids of cooking pots and dustbins. This group were generally thinner and less robust than the wardrobe people: they had a willowy appearance to them. They were just as bald, however, and carried just as much plaster dust on them, and had a similar number of lumps on their skulls.

  The two groups stood about twenty metres apart and began to yell and wave their weapons at their adversaries, obviously each daring the other to come forward. Finally both sides rushed together and began striking their opponents with their various clubs. In the confusion the three children were forgotten. Chloe, Jordy and Alex made off as quickly as they could, running out into the wide open area of the attic, anxious to be gone once the combatants had finished their fight.

  As well as Chloe’s bag they took with them a backpack they had found, filled with edible plants they had taken from the hydroponics beds. The ‘food’ was quite light, even when crushed down, and the boys took turns in carrying the backpack. With Chloe’s water bottle they were prepared for another trek across the attic. All of them had their particular cravings, of course: with Chloe it was chocolate; chicken tikka masala for Jordy; hamburger and chips with Alex. The vegetables they had to eat were nourishing and kept them alive, though they were hardly enjoyable.

  But at least they wouldn’t starve to death.

  Jordy could hear the sound of hockey stick on dustbin lid for quite a while, before the noise of battle faded away behind them.

  After half a morning’s walk they came across another village, which Chloe called ‘the wash-tub village’ where the inhabitants obviously curled up in wooden tubs to go to sleep. They passed one or two tubs in which village children were resting, coiled neatly round like a length of rope on the deck of a sailing ship. It was possibly part of the reason why the wash-tub villagers were so lean.

  Here there were no sewing-machine cars, but old golf trolleys propelled – or rather, yanked rapidly forward – by casting with a fishing rod, catching the fishing hook in a plank or rafter, and winding in the slack. This transport was not so efficient as the sewing-machine cars, but there was less to go wrong. The drivers sat astride the golf bag attached to the trolley, and balanced it on its two wheels with tremendous skill. When they reached the end of their lines they removed their hooks from the wood with sets of what looked like long-handled pliers.

  The children watched enthralled as some of the villagers – obviously those who had chosen not to go to war with their fellows – were engaged in casting huge distances with heavy lead weights. They stared as the drivers then reeled in the line with astonishing speed, thus covering a great distance in a very short time.

  ‘We should try that,’ Jordy said. ‘Better than walking.’

  ‘The skill required,’ Alex pointed out, ‘must take years to acquire.’

  The children passed by the village warily, encountering the same strange looks they had been used to with the wardrobe people. Not wanting to antagonise the washtubbers as well, they thought it best to get out of the area as quickly as possible. It seemed easy to upset these people, especially when you didn’t know what was expected of you. As Chloe pointed out, this was an unknown culture. They might well have been Marco Polos, travelling through China in a bygone century.

  ‘These people are probably from abroad,’ said Chloe, warming to Jordy’s theory that ‘travellers’ had been allowed to use the attic of the house below during inclement weather, ‘with a culture quite different from ours. We must have done something that was insulting to them, in some way, without realising it. That’s what’s upsetting them.’

  Jordy said, ‘Never mind them, have you seen any trapdoors lately?’

  ‘I haven’t seen a trapdoor since we left the forest,’ replied Alex. ‘Not since you mentioned your watch was going backwards.’

  It was true: the long and level boards stretched far away, both behind them and ahead, with not a trapdoor to be seen. The long lean boards were light-grey with age, like flattened days, and seemed endless. It was as if infinity had been pieced together and placed before them, to become eternity. Time and place were one, a single entity. The grey days were planks, the grey planks were days. A whole section of boards made a month. Several sections were a year. A region turned into a century. A cluster of regions became a millennium. Square supporting timbers embedded in the millennia, beams and rafters, angled buttresses held up a whole history and prehistory, time on the shoulders of place, until the millions of plank-days, plank-months, plank-years curved away into unknown futures and pasts.

  ‘We must come to the end of the attic soon,’ muttered Jordy. ‘Even if we’ve got a furniture warehouse below us. I mean, I’ve seen them from the motorway, these big storage depots, and they’re massive. How we managed to wander from our house into one of those I don’t know, but that’s what it’s got to be. Maybe there was an industrial estate behind the trees of our back garden? I haven’t looked properly, have you?’

  The other two didn’t answer him.

  He had to admit to himself that the horizons stretched far and wide on all sides, vanishing into the gloom of recessed corners and niches. Above them there was a sky full of triangulated rafters, and high, high above the rafters the occasional dirty square sun which let in the light of the outside world. Bright golden light full of golden flecks of dust. Magical really. To Jordy they looked like teleportation shafts that could transport you to a golden world, but of course when he stood in one nothing happened. They were just sunlight and dancing dust motes piercing the gloom.

  He had to admit his warehouse theory was unlikely too. Were the largest warehouse in Britain below them, it was improbable that it could support such a huge attic. Yet Jordy reminded himself that, when yo
u were in a house without furniture, an open space such as one might find in the attic of a massive storage depot, it always appeared bigger than it was.

  Yet wherever he looked, there appeared to be no end to this attic: it seemed to go on for ever.

  Moving out on to the wooden-plank plain, beyond the villages, Jordy, Chloe and Alex left the edges of the attic for the central desert. Here previous wanderers had placed upside-down umbrellas and parasols, open to the heavens, their spikes in the cracks between planks. These seemed to be situated under leaks from the roof, which dripped into their ‘bowls’ whenever it rained in the real world outside. Thus the children had the benefit of these oases, as they crossed the flat, wooden, arid areas of the attic, where even the spiders were scarce. Occasionally, above them, a bat flew in the darker regions, flashing across one of the dirty skylight windows. On the floor were some beetles on their backs, having fallen from a great height somewhere up in the sloping lanes of the roof.

  Jordy said, ‘I wonder what this place is called?’

  ‘Attica,’ said Chloe. ‘I call it Attica.’

  When she received no reply, she added, ‘The word “attic” comes from Attica, a region in Ancient Greece. Athens was the capital.’

  ‘You’re such a damn swot,’ grumbled Jordy.

  ‘No, I just like literature and language. I’m not as clever at science, maths and geography as you two. Well, maybe science, but not geography. At least, not the geography of the modern world. I’m better at the geography of the classical world.’

  ‘All right, all right,’ grumbled Jordy. ‘You’re better at everything. Who cares right now? We’re lost. Can you make a compass with your bare hands? No. Can you draw me an accurate map of where we’ve been? Some things you’re good at and some things I’m good at.’

  Chloe did not want to quarrel so she let this go, even though she was sure Jordy could do neither of those things.

  Once or twice they ran into impassable hedges, consisting of mangled wire coat hangers twisted together into an impossible mass. Some of these barriers were more than two metres high and almost two kilometres wide, with no gaps in their twisted entanglements, just a torn rag or two to attest to victims who had tried to get through. There was no way over these metal hedges, whose glinting wicked hooks clawed at their clothing much as the thorns of African bushes might do.

  To Chloe this was indeed the crossing of a continent fraught with unnatural dangers and hazards. She still had the feeling they were being followed and she often spun round, hoping to catch the creature who pursued them, only to find perhaps a lump or two on the horizon, but nothing that moved. All was motionless. Even the dust lay unmolested like a fine covering of tawny flour upon the ancient planks. The scene before them, and behind them, was almost holy in its silence and stillness.

  Now that she knew there were people here like the Atticans, who could do them harm, she was especially vigilant. Who knew what beings might come at them out of the far reaches of the gloom? Now they had met with life of a kind, anything might be possible. Expect the unexpected.

  ‘What’s that, in the distance?’ said Jordy, pausing to take a drink from an oasis umbrella. ‘Can you make it out?’

  Alex and Chloe peered into the gloaming of their twilight world. There seemed to be hills ahead, gentle at first, but rising to a monstrous-looking mountain. Visible in the haze of sunlight which came through chinks and cracks in the roof, they saw that the hills were fashioned from heaps of chairs, and others of sports equipment, but the mountain itself appeared to consist entirely of rusty weapons of war.

  On this formidable vastness of dark metal they could make out old corroded guns, their muzzles like thousands of small black mouths jutting from the upper crags; rusty bayonets and swords which stood out as vicious spikes on the lower ridges to impede any climber; slippery helmets forming slopes of dangerously loose scree. The whole mountain exuded menace, forbidding and hateful, dominating the scene ahead. It rose to impossible heights far up into the arrowhead shape of the roof, higher than the bats flew, higher than the light from lower windows. Up, up into the impenetrable darkness of unbreathable space. There its peak no doubt shaved the topmost rafter of the roof with its pointed blade.

  ‘Have we got to climb that?’ asked Alex, in hushed tones.

  ‘Dunno,’ said Jordy. ‘We’ll find out when we get there. Could be we’ve found our way into a government storage place, where the army keeps all its old weapons. I mean, government buildings are massive, aren’t they? And you never get to see how big, because they won’t let you on their sites.’ His next question was almost a pathetic plea for support. ‘Did anyone see one near our house, anywhere?’

  Neither Chloe nor Alex saw the point in answering.

  Chloe had not felt so helpless since that time at school when she was on what her teacher Mrs Erland had called ‘expedition training’. They had gone to Scotland, to the Highlands, to learn orienteering with maps and compasses. Chloe and her friend had set out, each with one of those items, and they had been separated by fog. Thus, though Chloe had the map, she had no compass, and the fog had prevented her from seeing the sun or stars, so she had absolutely no idea which way to go. Fortunately she had had her sleeping bag and its waterproof cover with her, and some provisions. She was eventually rescued by a search party.

  All the feelings she had experienced during that incident in Scotland came flooding back to her now. Not just a sense of helplessness, but varying degrees of anger directed both at herself and others.

  Jordy seemed to have rallied his own strength of spirit and asked, ‘You OK, Clo? You look a bit down. Don’t worry about that old mountain up ahead – we’ll probably find a way round it.’

  ‘Oh, I’m not worried, Jordy.’

  ‘How about you, big buddy?’ cried Jordy heartily, putting an arm round Alex’s shoulders. ‘You OK?’

  ‘Couldn’t be better,’ murmured Alex, without conviction. ‘Happy as a kookaburra. Hey!’ His voice brightened and he pointed. ‘There’s Nelson, out there on the horizon.’

  There indeed was the chubby princely shape of Nelson, rolling along on his three pins as if he were still at home. Nelson was a cheering sight to the three children. The familiar figure barrelled along seemingly unconcerned by the plight he was in. He had something in his mouth.

  ‘Nelson! Nelson!’ called Chloe.

  The ginger tom saw the children and came to them. He dropped a dead mouse at their feet.

  ‘Oh, Nelson,’ said Chloe softly, in admonishment.

  All his life Nelson had been bringing his human friends such gifts. But were they pleased? Not a bit. Never. Often, they were annoyed. There was no fathoming such ingratitude. But he still kept trying.

  He allowed himself to be fussed and stroked with such affection as he had never known before then, seeing that his gift had been spurned, he picked it up again and wandered off into the gloom. It seemed so normal to the children, to see their cat rolling along without a care, that they too took heart.

  Jordy especially felt that, as the eldest, he ought to show a bit of leadership. Leaders, according to the captain of the cadets he used to belong to when he and his dad were on their own, do not reveal any private concerns to their followers. Leaders show a granite jaw and talk tough. They share the problems, but not their worries. It was one thing having three heads to sort out an obstacle, but another to lay one’s fears on the shoulders of the rest of the group. Things were not desperate, he kept telling himself, only matters for concern. If they all stuck together, and used their common sense, they would come out of their travels unscathed.

  So far they hadn’t found a single watch, which told Jordy something about their search. It seemed to him that the watches must all be gathered in one place, just like the war weapons ahead of them. There must be a hill of watches somewhere, which would make their search easier, he felt. After all, to look for one watch, which might be hidden anywhere, was daunting. Looking for a whole sparkling hill of watches,
then sorting through them for the one they wanted, seemed a much easier task.

  ‘What’s that?’ he cried, alarmed, as he saw something out of the corner of his eye. ‘Over there!’

  But when the other two followed his pointing finger, all they could see was a bundle of rags under a feather-boa tree. Chloe took her list of books from her pocket. It comforted her to see how many fantasy novels there were on it and to recall how many of them ended happily.

  ‘If I find something to write with – and on,’ she told herself, ‘I’ll transfer the list, maybe update it, on a better bit of paper.’

  ‘What?’ asks the bat. ‘Come on, spit it out.’

  We ought to warn them, says the masked board-comber. We ought to tell them to beware of Katerfelto.

  ‘You need to protect the girl, is that it? You think she’s got a map in her pocket, don’t you?’

  She does keep looking at that piece of paper.

  ‘It might be a shopping list. A tin of boot polish. A dozen eggs. That sort of thing.’

  I think it’s a map.

  ‘That still doesn’t mean there’s something in it for you. No one would have a map showing a cache of Eskimo ornaments, now, would they?’

  Inuit. You must call them Inuit. There could be lots of things, mutters the board-comber, which I could use to trade. Stage jewels. I know lots of board-combers who collect stage jewels. Porcelain figures. Stamps. Cigarette cards. If there’s treasure on that map I want it.

  ‘You want? You want? That’s a bit selfish, isn’t it? What about those poor kids over there? They were nearly killed by those villagers, you know. Did you go and help them then? No. And why? Because you knew you could get the map afterwards, once they’d been murdered. If it’s lost up the mountain, though, you’ll never be able to get it, will you? You’re terrified of Katerfelto.’

  So are you.

  ‘Yeah, well, I’m not after a map, so it doesn’t count.’