“My, I feel as stuffed as a taxidermist’s cat,” he said.
Farther along, the canal path was busier, with a constant stream of cyclists and joggers. None of them got too close, as if they sensed what had happened to the last cyclist who’d done so. Instead they slowed down, easing around us at a respectful distance. Even so, they were a source of irritation to Mr. October.
“We came here for a quiet chat, but look at them — they’re thick as flies. I can’t hear myself think.” He clicked his fingers a couple of times, and the pathway ahead suddenly appeared silent and clear. “That’s better,” he said.
“Did you do that?”
“Do what?”
“Clear the path. There’s no one else here now, just us.”
“It’s only a lull. There’ll be more along soon.”
All the same, as we strolled on I noticed how still the water had become, with the moon’s reflection frozen on its surface like a snapshot. Overhead, a few small white clouds stood fixed against the sky, not moving. In the last few seconds, the roar of traffic on a road bridge nearby had faded to nothing. This was becoming stranger, more unsettling, by the minute.
“It’s like being inside a bubble,” I said.
He gave me a quizzical look. “How so?”
“Like before, on Mare Street, when no one noticed us. And the street went quiet for a time and it was just you and me. Like being inside a bubble where we could see everything but we were unseen.”
Mr. October considered this, then a broad grin broke across his face, his silver tooth sparkling. “I knew I was right about you. I knew you had the gift the first time I saw you. Congratulations, young man.”
Now he’d confused me again. “Congratulations for what?”
“You’ve passed all the tests so far. You’ve shown just the right qualities for the job. And as soon as I’ve run my report past my superiors, I think we can move you along to the next level.”
So far he’d answered none of my questions; all he’d done was invite many more. What list? What job? What true calling? I was still pondering all this when he clicked his fingers down by his hip and the traffic noise returned to the bridge and the roads around Victoria Park. Light and movement quivered across the water again, and seconds later I noticed the first cyclist pedaling toward us around the bend.
That was when I knew for sure: He had powers I couldn’t even begin to imagine, the kind I’d only ever seen from heroes and villains in comics. If only for a minute, Mr. October had stopped the world.
Leaving the canal towpath, we cut across Victoria Park to the lake. It was quieter and less crowded there than London Fields nearer home. Families of swans and geese idled on the sparkling water.
Mr. October sat with me on the grass in the shade of a gnarly old oak, his nimble fingers knotting together a chain of four-leaf clovers.
“Count yourself lucky,” he said, passing me the chain. “Some people wait their whole lives and never find what they’re looking for. Some go looking in all the wrong places. Others are too lazy to look in the first place. They think, This is my lot, these are the cards I’ve been dealt, this is as good as life’s ever gonna be.”
“That’s sad. I’d hate that.”
“Good for you, then, because destiny tapped you on the shoulder today. Tapped you right on the shoulder and took you on a ride to see the sights.”
“Is that what this is?”
“It’s only a start. There’s so much more.”
“Why me, though?”
“Because I’ve been in this line of work longer than I care to say, I’ve lost count of the people I’ve seen come and go, and I’ve never seen anyone so right for the task as you. That’s the crux of the report I’m filing with my superiors, anyway.”
“Who are your superiors?” I had to ask.
“The Overseers,” he said quite seriously. “All you need to know for now is that our work is vitally important. Top secret. Highly classified. Not to toot my own trumpet, but without us the world would be in an even worse state than it is now. The whole thing would come crashing down. The natural order of things would change.”
“Wow. Sounds like a big responsibility.”
“Yes, it’s huge.”
“I’d be scared to take on something like that.”
“Nothing wrong with being scared,” he said. “Nothing worthwhile’s ever achieved without fear. If I’m wrong about you, I’ll throw up my hands and say, ‘Sorry, my mistake.’ But come with me and you’ll have the answers to all your questions, even the ones you haven’t thought of yet. Questions about your father and what I was doing last week at Seaborough churchyard.”
He closed his eyes for a moment. Dappled patterns of brightness and shade played through the oak’s branches above us, falling on the intricate chain of four-leaf clovers and making them appear to squirm between my fingers.
“Well, duty calls,” Mr. October said. “We’ve come a long way together today, young man. We’ve got a lot further to go. I’ll check back with you next week about the trainee position. But now I’ve got work to do.”
I stood to watch him walk away toward the lake, a tall raggedy man dressed head to toe in darkness. As he neared the water, a frantic scratching behind me drew my attention away. A red squirrel scrambled up the tree trunk, freezing in its tracks when it felt me watching, its bright button eyes staring straight into mine for perhaps a full minute. Then it skirted around the far side of the tree, out of sight.
There were countless gray squirrels in the park, but I’d never seen a red before. I’d never seen a four-leaf clover for that matter, and here I was holding a string of them in my hand, standing on a green carpet of thousands.
Magic, I thought. Something like magic. Everything’s alive!
Folding the chain into my shirt pocket, I scanned the lake-side for Mr. October. There was no sign of him now, and the only movement near the water was that of an urban raven taking flight.
The bird soared into the air and soon became a dark dot above the trees. The moon had sunk from the sky, and I stared into the hazy blue until I grew dizzy. Then I set off toward home.
The first true breeze of the day wafted down the roadway as I came up from the towpath. I hadn’t seen anything of the sunglasses thief on the way back. Whatever she’d done wrong, I hoped she was safely back on dry land by now. But what had Mr. October meant, she wasn’t what she seemed?
On London Fields the barbecues were still going strong. The smoke made everything soft and distant. Near the fence along Lansdowne Drive, a black mass of ravens were fighting among themselves over a pile of bread someone had dumped in the park. As I got to the path that crossed the park from Lamb Lane, I saw Mum coming back from work, carrying a shopping bag and jumping aside to avoid a cyclist.
“Summer in the city! Don’t you just hate it?” she said when she saw me. “Ever noticed how cycle path sounds like psychopath if you say it three times quickly?”
“Cycle path. Cycle path. Cycle path.”
“So how was your day, love?”
“Oh, you know, not bad.”
“You’re a mine of information. But I can’t help noticing you don’t have your sketch pad with you. Remember what I said about not wasting your God-given gift.”
I felt a flush of guilt about that, but I couldn’t tell her what I’d really been up to. She’d think it was a lot stranger than frequenting cemeteries.
“Anyway, you can tell me what you did do,” she said, and twitched her bag, showing me the parcel of takeout food inside it. “You can tell me over a supper of wonton soup and shredded chili beef — your favorite.”
“But we can’t afford . . . ,” I started to say. “Can we?”
Mum shook her head, then ran a hand back through her dark blond hair. “No, we can’t. And you know what? I don’t care. You have to live a little now and then, otherwise you’d go mad. Do us a favor, hon, and carry this for me. My arm aches.”
“You’re in a good mood,�
�� I said, taking the bag. I hadn’t seen her so buoyant for ages.
“Well, I should be, considering I got the biggest tip I’ve ever seen in my life today.”
“Really? Who from?”
“Some man in a suit, very posh and smart and well spoken. A fish out of water where I work. Hands me a twenty-quid note for a six-quid roast dinner and tells me to keep the change.”
“Blimey.”
“I know! So I ask if he’s made a mistake, does he know he’s tipping me fourteen quid, and he waves me away like it’s nothing. ‘See you again,’ he says as he goes out the door. Oh, I hope so.”
“Me too. Maybe he’ll come back again and sweep you off your feet and . . .”
Mum clammed up then, lowering her gaze as we left the park. I knew right away I shouldn’t have said it. Perhaps because of the way Dad had left us — it had never been that clear to me — she never spoke to me about men.
We crossed Lansdowne onto Middleton Road. Mum didn’t speak again until we’d climbed the cool stairwell, the coolest place in town today, and negotiated the planters and pigeon droppings on our balcony to unlock the door.
“Anyway,” she said, unpacking the food in the kitchen, “that’s dinner from Hai Ha’s with change left over. Only thing that bothers me is, he said I looked like I could use the money. Now I feel insulted.”
“He probably didn’t mean it like that.”
“What else would he mean?”
“Where you work. It’s a bit of a dive. He probably thought you must be hard up to work there.”
“Hmm.”
“That’s probably all he meant.”
“Probably. But still. All the same.”
We felt stuffed after the meal, and I told her my day had been a good one without explaining the reasons why. I did mention the squirrel but not the four-leaf clovers, and I mentioned the girl in the canal but not Mr. October’s part in what happened. I even told her I’d had a hot dog for lunch but not where I’d gotten it.
She seemed satisfied by my story, anyway, and by the time I’d cleared the plates from the breakfast bar she was nodding over the table, close to sleep.
Another day’s waitressing had worn her out, and I felt sad that she’d been so happy over a lousy fourteen pounds. By the time I’d washed up, she’d crawled from the kitchen to the living room sofa and was drifting away in front of the TV.
Upstairs, I opened my sketch pad for the first time that day and began to draw, just doodling at first. I was trying to picture the faces Mr. October had shown me on Lamb Lane, but now they all merged into one. The only one I could see clearly was the dark-eyed pirate type with the slicked-back hair and silver tooth.
The sketch didn’t turn out well — it didn’t look anything like him — so I put the pad and pencil aside and rolled back on the bed with my hands pillowed under my head. I wouldn’t tear up the sketch, I decided, even if it wasn’t much good. It was the only memento I had from the day to prove that any of it had really happened.
That and the four-leaf clover chain inside my shirt pocket.
The hottest days passed and the air became breathable again. One night, the equivalent of a whole month’s rain fell in a hundred minutes. Torrents and droughts. Life was like that. One day with Mr. October had opened my eyes, and then came day after day of nothing at all.
Every morning at seven o’clock sharp, a wiry gray-haired man in army fatigues and scruffy sneakers came rummaging through the trash bins outside our building. If he found anything of interest among the cat litter and rotting fish heads in the bins — old clothing, an unfinished bottle of wine — he would stuff it into the pack he carried on his back. Then he would continue along Lansdowne Drive and turn into the Blackstone Estate.
Watching from my window, I wondered if he might be one of Mr. October’s many personalities. In the end I decided he wasn’t, but Mr. October might turn up again anywhere, anytime, with a different face. I might have seen him ten times on the streets without knowing it. That day by the canal seemed so distant, I might’ve dreamt it up, and as the days spun out I began to think I’d seen the last of him.
And then there was school.
Monday morning — my first day at Mercy Road School near De Beauvoir Town. Mum bustled around the maisonette, twice as flustered as usual. The only thing worse than her being late for work was my being late for school on day one.
“Tickets. Money. Passport. Apple for the teacher. Are you sure you haven’t missed anything?”
“Yeah, I’m sure.”
“Then off you pop.” She smoothed out her clothes, checked her face in the living room mirror. “Do I look OK? Will I pass?”
“Does it matter when you work in a greasy spoon?” Seeing her hurt look, I quickly added, “Fine. You look fine, really great.”
“No need to be facetious,” she said.
She’d been preoccupied since the previous Friday when the businessman had again entered the café, ordering a sandwich and latte and leaving another large tip. She’d gotten it into her head that he fancied her, and she didn’t know how she felt about that or how Dad would’ve felt if he’d known.
“But Dad’s been gone four years,” I reminded her, following her down the stairwell. “Don’t you think he’d want you to be happy?”
“You’re just a kid. You wouldn’t understand.”
“Then explain and I’ll try to.”
“One day I will. This isn’t the right time.”
It was never the right time.
We exited the building and stood on the path outside. By the cold light of day, the worry lines and dark circles around her eyes were more obvious, but she didn’t need to hear that from me.
“Right, then,” she said. “Do your best, try to make friends, and if the teacher asks what you do in your spare time, don’t mention graveyards.”
“OK.”
She straightened my tie and picked a few invisible specks of dust and fluff off my blazer.
“What’s up?” she said.
“Nothing.” I shrugged. “I just wish you’d talk about . . . you know what. I don’t like seeing you sad. I might be able to help. I’m a born helper, you know.”
“You’re funny. Now get along before I clip your ear.”
The school was an old Victorian building whose red bricks had darkened almost to black over time. From the outside it looked cobbled together, with turrets and cupolas and windows too dim to see through. It was easy to imagine ghosts hiding inside. The playground was narrow and long with jungle gyms at one end but no athletic field like I’d had at my last school.
Inside, the classrooms faced one another along two dark corridors which crisscrossed at the center of the building. The rooms were small, divided by newly painted partition walls, with desks crammed closely together. The ceilings were low, the fluorescent lights hurt my eyes, and by the end of first period, I was suffocating.
We began with attendance in our homeroom, classroom 8C, then had algebra with Miss Neal, a large and matronly woman with impatient, small eyes and a slow, booming voice. Through most of the lesson, I stared out the window at the small gray chapel across the street. A sign outside advertised cheap lunch specials downstairs in the crypt.
By midafternoon I’d decided I didn’t care much for the other kids in 8C. There were two in particular, twin brothers Dan and Liam Ferguson, whose cold stares and sly smiles made me think they were sharing telepathic jokes about me. There was Tommy Farley, a red-haired kid with permanently encrusted snot on his upper lip like a silver-green alien mustache; Raymond Blight, who whispered “Fish” behind my back and spent most of English flicking tiny paper balls at other students whenever Mr. Glover looked away; and Mel Kimble, a girl who finished every other sentence with the word innit.
“Mel, you can kick us off by reading the first page,” Mr. Glover said at the start of the period.
“‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,’ innit?” Mel read.
Mr. Glover blinke
d at her over his half-moon spectacle lenses. “Sorry to interrupt, but I think you’ll find that’s a spurious word not found in the original text.”
“Just reading what’s on the page, sir, innit?”
Mel wasn’t so bad. That was just her way. Some of the others were probably OK too, but on day one none of them said hello or otherwise did anything to make me feel welcome.
There was a gang of six who sat together in every class, stayed together during break, and ate together at lunchtime — Matthew, Ryan, Curly, Devan, Kelly, and Becky. They were the smartest and best-looking in 8C, and they seemed to know it. They never fussed for attention or argued or bickered or made much of a noise.
They didn’t speak to me, either, but sometimes I caught them looking my way as if trying to decide whether I was animal, vegetable, or mineral. Matthew was long and lanky and constantly grooming his fingernails. Kelly was dark and icy, looking straight through me but never at me.
Becky Sanborne was the most interesting one, I thought. She had a round cherub face with cool green eyes and a lightly freckled nose. She never stopped chatting and smiling except when she looked at me, and then she became serious and silent. Once I thought she was mouthing something across the class to me, but that turned out to be a yawn.
At lunchtime I went to the crypt. The cool, dark space was full of warm-coated senior citizens who’d claimed all the tables. Their chatter and the clink of their spoons amplified off the stone walls under a low, curved ceiling. I bought a hot dog at the counter and ate it outside on the chapel wall across from the school. The hot dog was tasty, but not nearly as tasty as the one Mr. October had given me.
In the afternoon, French with Mrs. Radcliff was followed by social studies with Miss Whatever. At least, that’s what the other kids called her. Her real name was Whittaker. Jolly and energetic, she had a habit of going, “Now, children,” in a way that made everyone squirm, which was the worst you could say about her. But during her class, our last of the day, something happened — something that turned my first day at Mercy Road from a bad day into a disaster.
Graveyard Shift Page 3
