Scarecrows

by Robert Westall

  He marked a tree branch that lay directly under the Pole Star, so that when the Pole Star disappeared behind the clouds again, he still had north. Then he pointed his whole arm towards north, stiffly out leftwards from his body.

  Now he was facing east. But Father wasn’t buried east; east was Moscow. Father was buried south-east; or east-by-south, actually. He’d worked it out carefully from an atlas . . . He jiggled about, bare feet on wet grass, like a man aiming a gun. When he was finally settled, he was facing directly towards where Father was buried.

  And then he closed his eyes, so the whole blackness round him swayed, and he heard the lonely sound of the wind rushing through the trees.

  And then he recited the line of poetry that Slogger had taught them.

  ‘He rides the wild October sky; he shall not die, he shall not die.’

  Even though it was only August, it worked any month.

  And then he spoke to his father.

  ‘They’re too strong. They have taken you away. They are too big for me. Come. Help me. Come. Come. Come.’

  He could feel the devils cluster round him, under the trees, singing in the air, and he went out of himself, still chanting: ‘Help me, help me. Come.’

  And it seemed to him that something answered. It did not feel like Father; but how could he know what Father was like, now? He shuddered, but remained steadfast. He gave the Something a permission to intervene. Then he stirred, sighed, feeling emptier than ever. Yawned like a child and went back into the house. He did not lock the back door. That would have seemed like changing his mind about the invitation; and it was too late to change his mind.

  Far away, the desert dawn-wind blew through a British Military Cemetery. Neglected; unlike most. Surrounded by barbed-wire so rusty that the Arab children could reach up and grind it to red dust between finger and thumb. Then spit on the sand inside.

  The peeling white gates had been wired-up, by order of the Flossies. Nobody dared go in, even if they wanted to. Only balls of rolling desert weed ran through, caught on the arms of the leaning white crosses, then blew away back to the desert. Rags of Arabic newspaper caught and fluttered like dying birds on the wire. And in the morning the windswept sand was scribbled with the tracks of sandsnakes, passing in the night.

  Major Wood’s cross leaned less than most. The newest and last. Beneath, Major Wood slept on with honour. He had not heard; was not disturbed.

  Whatever stirred in answer to his son was much nearer home.

  Next morning, early, Simon went back to the turnip field. The sun was above the horizon, but mist was still down. A golden mist, that somehow seemed to hang more solidly in the hedgerows. Curving shapes draped from branch to branch, making individual trees look like huge golden ghosts. He laughed; the curving shapes were only cobwebs, cobwebs spun in the night and thick with dew; strings of pearls, and the rising sun shone inside every pearl. And more webs were spun between the turnips in their rows; each row looked like a moving wave of a glittering sea stretching nearly to the horizon. The roof of the mill was very faint in the mist, like an island in that golden sea . . . He looked higher, and the rising sun blinded him, even through the mist.

  He soon tired of it; but still hung about, feeling that he’d left something at the gate overnight that he shouldn’t. Almost expecting to find a sodden kite or a newly-rusted air pistol.

  And then it came to him.

  The mill lay directly beneath the rising sun. East-by-south.

  When he had called to his father last night, he had been directly facing the mill . . . might have been talking to the mill.

  Now, too late, he remembered smelling the dank smell; the smell of the mill-pond. It worried him. He had only meant to talk to his father, as he often had. He resented the idea of the mill being between them. It was another . . . intrusion.

  Rubbish. But the thought stuck in his mind like a fish-hook. He suddenly realised he didn’t like the mill much any more. In fact he very much disliked it. He wished he hadn’t sat at that wooden table, on that wooden chair, playing with the old bitten pipe.

  He decided he wouldn’t go to the mill again. It was a horrible gloomy place. He would stay at home more; play with Jane, help Mum . . . Then he remembered last night, and the awful thing he had done to Mum. He was cut off from Jane. Jane had said, I hate you. But she hadn’t meant it. It would all blow over . . . But Mum had said she would send for someone who would deal with him. Who? A doctor? The yellow van to take him away? Dark consulting rooms with horrible middle-aged bald men with waistcoats and foreign accents, who watched you like cats and asked you why you’d said or done what you had said and done without thinking?

  Or Nunk? If Nunk came, it would be worst of all. Nunk loved Mum. Nunk had standards of behaviour. Which didn’t cover using Father’s uniform to make Mum unhappy.

  Run, Simon, run for cover. Run back to what you know before it’s too late – if it’s not too late already. Even Joe Moreton seemed bearable this morning.

  As he turned to go, he took one last look across the field to the mill. The sun had risen a little more; it did not get in his eyes so much. Then he peered more closely. For he had the stupid illusion that there were three people standing in front of the mill; knee-deep in turnips, as if they were wading through the green-gold sea . . .

  Then the sun blinded him again. Silly fool, he thought, and ran indoors to have breakfast. There was bacon frying, and Jane playing on the floor, illegally in her pyjamas, getting her knees filthy and being nagged as usual. And Joe warming his backside against the Aga, and the kittens feeding in a purring mass, and Mum in her turquoise dressing-gown. All safe and usual.

  Then Jane looked up at him; and her face was the face of a suspicious stranger.

  ‘Hallo, Jane.’

  She looked down at the floor again, quickly; and Mum did not tell her to say hallo either. Mum kept her head down over the stove, looking pale and ill. And Joe held his first cup of coffee and stared blankly out of the kitchen window at nothing.

  The silence grew and grew; nobody looking at him. It was like still being outside, alone with the mill and the idea that there were three people wading through the turnips towards the house . . .

  ‘Hallo, Mum,’ he said, as brightly as he could.

  ‘Hallo, Simon,’ she said automatically; a push-away hallo.

  ‘Hallo, Joe.’

  ‘Hallo,’ said Joe, carefully neutral, still staring out of the window. Then he turned to Mum and said, ‘How long will breakfast be?’ though he could see quite well that the bacon and eggs were nearly cooked.

  Simon bent down to stroke the cat and kittens. And they stopped purring.

  He was outside. Outside the family.

  Alone with the mill.

  Joe ate quickly, as if he hadn’t eaten for a week, and went whizzing up to his studio even before he’d finished his second cup of coffee. He took the coffee with him in his hand. Jane just vanished. Mum, with a sigh, began washing up.

  ‘Shall I dry for you?’ Simon asked.

  ‘If you like,’ she said, listlessly, not caring if he did or not.

  They washed and dried-up in silence.

  ‘Right,’ said Mum. ‘I must go and do the beds.’

  Everyone was leaving him; no one could stand him being near. It terrified him.

  ‘Mum?’ He wanted to say he was sorry. But when she looked at him, he knew it wouldn’t be any good. She’d just brush it off like a fly.

  ‘What?’ she said, like she couldn’t bear him speaking to her.

  So he didn’t try. Instead he said, ‘Can I borrow your binoculars? The bird-watching ones?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, tightly.’ But just make sure nothing happens to them, will you?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You know very well what I mean. Don’t drop them in the fish-pond or anything. It would be just too boring, Simon.’

  ‘I wouldn’t do that.’

  ‘Wouldn’t you?’ Her eyes were blank. ‘All ri
ght, then.’

  He took the binoculars down to the turnip-field gate; got them into focus. He wanted to prove that there was really nothing in the field by the mill; that his stupid eyes were playing him tricks. It was so distant . . .

  But his eyes weren’t playing him tricks.

  There were three figures standing among the turnips. Quite motionless. So inhumanly motionless it was beyond belief. Staring at the house. Who were they? He focused and re-focused frantically for a better view. He had to know.

  Then he laughed. They were only scarecrows. Two male, one female. The front male was big and burly. The female stood beside him, just on his right. The other male was much further back.

  As he watched, the woman raised an arm, and pointed. But it was only the wind. For he could see the little gust silvering the turnip leaves too. Her arm was only an empty rag, that the wind would blow easily.

  Stop being stupid, he told himself. The farmer had made the scarecrows simply to scare away the crows.

  Did crows eat turnips? Enough to be a nuisance? Crows ate dead animals, surely – rabbits flattened by traffic on the road. He had often seen them flying away as the Morris approached. Sometimes they flew away too late, and the car flattened them, to a nasty flutter of black feathers . . . which other crows . . .

  Mr Mercyfull hated crows more than anything.

  Mr Mercyfull said crows could tell whether you were carrying a shotgun or not. That they could even tell a shotgun from a stick. If you pointed a stick at them, they ignored it. If you pointed a shotgun, they were off like the clappers. They could even swerve at right-angles if you shot at them in mid-air. Crows could count humans, up to the number of five. Or so Mr Mercyfull said.

  Anyway, there wasn’t a crow in sight. Come to that, there wasn’t any bird in sight, over the whole great prairie of the field. He searched carefully with the binoculars. Not a sparrow in the hedgerow even. Only a kestrel hovering, far away, beyond the village in the opposite direction. So, OK. That meant the scarecrows were working. That was what they were for, wasn’t it? Be no point to making them, otherwise.

  Only the guy who’d made them certainly knew how to make them lifelike, even if their arms were no more than rags. Then he thought, maybe the guy made the woman’s arm just a rag, so it would blow in the wind and scare the crows. He’d be some old local; probably some old gaffer with sixty years of skill behind him. He’d like to meet him.

  It was just that – the scarecrows seemed oddly . . . familiar, somehow. He couldn’t tell why.

  That was daft. He returned the binoculars to Mum, putting them back into their case with much more care than usual. ‘Told you I wouldn’t damage them, old silly.’

  ‘Yes, Simon,’ she said, in a carefully meaningless tone. ‘If you want to do something useful, go down to Cosima’s for a loaf, will you?’

  Anything to be rid of him.

  THIRTEEN

  Cosima was the only friend Simon had made in the whole village. A lively lady, with elegant legs that you saw too much of, because she still clung to short skirts and bicycled round the village on breezy days. She often gave you a shock, being partial to wigs so that she seldom looked the same two days running. She had a long blonde wig, which she put on just before she closed the shop to go out for the evening, which made her look as sexy as Marlene Dietrich. Only when she was too busy, she wore her own hair, which was short and bubble-cut.

  Things happened to Cosima. But she never told you all at once; they were more like telly-serials, though they made Crossroads seem very dull. Once, she’d smelled a terrible smell of gas in the middle of the night. Next day the Gas Board had come and ripped up every floorboard, especially under her newly-laid wall-to-wall carpet, which cost two hundred pounds cut-price in Macclesfield. Nevertheless, she was lost in admiration at the Gas Board’s devotion to duty. Next day, they returned, with the Inspector. Who pronounced himself Baffled. Though he obviously Knew What He Was Doing. Finally, at the last possible moment, the leak had been found in the least accessible place. Disaster averted by a whisker . . . only that had been the day the Nasty Great Thing had run over Cosima’s hand as she opened a bag of Cyprus potatoes, and vanished behind the deep freeze. The Police had been called; fetched a man from Manchester University who had shown Cosima a huge coloured book of Nasty Great Things. Cosima had picked one out which turned out to be an Egyptian spider-scorpion; any bite of which would be instantly fatal. Four policemen with special gloves ransacked the shop, raping open boxes of catfood and apples; looting the jumbled treasure of years. The spider-scorpion evaded capture. The man from Manchester said it Could Be Anywhere, and might live a month. The whole shop took on the air of the Battle of Britain, and Cosima wore wellies and elegant purple elbow-length gloves day and night. She named the scorpion Percy and looked hourly for his reappearance. At the end of the month, Percy was discovered with his legs turned up, stone dead, under a stack of Choice Pineapple Bits. There was great rejoicing, and the man from Manchester was summoned again. Only to find that Cosima had interred Percy in her garden, under a cross made of two wooden lolly-sticks. Cosima grieved for Percy; dead so far from home and kin on sunny Cyprus. The man from Manchester took him away unfeelingly in a jar . . . but just then, a pattern of cracks appeared in Cosima’s bedroom ceiling, directly over her bed. Looking like a map of South America . . .

  But Cosima had time for other people’s troubles, even in the midst of her own. Her pretty clown-face would turn utterly tragic at accounts of crucifixion by lumbago, or the iniquities of the Social Security. She Felt. Only, Simon noticed that once the person she’d Felt for had gone, she would whisk briskly around her shelves with a pink feathery duster-on-a-stick, humming selections from Oklahoma. Probably to take her mind off the world’s woe.

  Mind you, when something really needed doing, like an old bereaved pensioner living alone, Cosima saw to it. Clothes were laundered, home-made pies delivered. Cosima had minions everywhere. And news . . . Who needed Radio Manchester when they had Cosima? You couldn’t see in her shop-windows, because they were plastered with HOMES WANTED FOR TWO ADORABLE BLACK KITTENS between BEST BRITISH SHERRY BRING YOUR OWN BOTTLE and CARRYCOT FOR SALE BLUE AS NEW £2.

  And she let you take a long time spending your tenpence, mauling over the rack of wrapped chocolate bars. And told you what news was fit for your ears. Only, Simon always got out of the shop quickly when somebody else came in, because Cosima was liable to draw attention to his beautiful manners, so unlike most kids these days, and all due to a Public College education and Breeding showed . . .

  Cosima had a dark, solid husband called Ernest, who only appeared at closing time, smoking a pipe, making sure Cosima closed when she was supposed to close. But until that moment, he would stand at the back of the shop in utter contentment; with the air of a man contemplating his prize-winning marrow or acknowledging with slight nods an excellent innings at Old Trafford.

  Simon parked his bike and slid into the shop through the open door. Cosima was just winding up one of her quieter monologues called ‘They can do wonders with arthritis these days’. Simon lurked behind the rack of fruit pies, in case she did an encore on Public Colleges; until the other woman departed.

  ‘And how’s His Lordship today?’ asked Cosima, who didn’t miss much. ‘You don’t like fruit pies. I once knew a man who worked making them . . . what he told me, I’d never eat another . . . not till my dying day.’

  Simon didn’t ask why she cheerfully sold them. Instead, he said, ‘Is there some old man makes scarecrows round here, Mrs Brown?’

  Cosima considered, head on one side. ‘Not that I ever heard of. You can buy cardboard ones in the gardening shops. Made by Fison’s Seeds or something. I remember scarecrows when I was a lass . . . but not round here. Why?’

  ‘Someone’s put up three in the field behind our house. Who owns the field?’

  ‘Used to be old Mr Timpson’s . . . lovely little farm he had – cows. Then he got past it, and his lad went off to be an a
tomic scientist, so he sold it to some big city syndicate. And they pulled out all the hedges and made it one big nasty field. We never see them – they don’t bother. Just send fellers with machines a few times a year, and they’re contractor’s men. They had an aeroplane here, this spring, zooming about like a Spitfire, putting out that insecticide till you could choke like poison gas. Mr Bellows had just painted his house cream and maroon, and it turned all grey all over, and he took them to court and they had to pay up four hundred pound compensation . . . but even then they never come to see, just sent a lawyer-feller. They just don’t care about us . . . and that field gets so full of weeds it would break old Mr Timpson’s heart, only he went to live with his daughter in Plumley and didn’t have to watch, thank God . . .’

  ‘Scarecrows?’ asked Simon politely.

  Cosima frowned. You could see she didn’t like anything happening in the village she didn’t know about. ‘It’s the wrong time for scarecrows. You should put them up when the seeds are planted, or the plants are little and tender. I’ll ask . . .’

  He chose a small bar of chocolate for himself, grabbed a loaf, paid, and went.

  Back in the garden, he tried to find something to do. But he could sort of feel the scarecrows watching him, even through the hedge. He kept on peeping through, to see what they were up to. They didn’t seem to have moved. But why should he expect them to move? Except that arm waving on the woman, like beckoning, every time the wind blew . . .

  Why were they so familiar?

  In the end, his own stupidity infuriated him. He began sweating, and though he took his pullover off, he didn’t stop sweating. The sun was bright, but was it really all that hot?

  He remembered Father’s voice. ‘Head straight for what you’re scared of, Simon. It’ll usually run away, if you do. If not, you’re no worse off.’

  So he went, across the turnips. The bruised track they’d made the day they rescued the kittens had almost healed; you could hardly see it, but for some reason he stuck to it. There seemed to be a shallow depression in the ground there, as if there’d once been a path, a right of way, before the syndicate ripped the whole farm into one great field. The path seemed to grip his feet, like a railway line grips the wheels of an engine. It seemed the right place to walk. He was careful where he stepped, in case the vicar was watching.