“He’s gone now … You can go back home if you like …” I said. I was going to pull the door open a bit more, but I didn’t want her to see me use my shirt to touch it.
“He was scared, Matty! He actually looked scared.”
She stopped and stared at me as I huddled in the corner. Beads of sweat began to run down my face.
“You okay? You’re not going to faint again, are you?”
I shook my head and tried to look calm, even though I wasn’t feeling it.
“I reckon he thought she was casting some kind of spell on him, don’t you? Did you see her finger? Maybe Jake knows something because he lives next door to her and he’s seen something we haven’t. Do you think she’s a witch?”
Her flip-flops slapped again as she walked back and forth.
“A witch?”
Melody was grinning at me, thrilled from the excitement of seeing Jake beaten for once. I must admit it did feel good seeing him scared, but at that moment I was more concerned about the tiny pieces of black fluff from Melody’s cardigan slowly appearing on our carpet. My heart was pounding. The girl in my hallway—the girl who hung out in graveyards—needed to leave immediately.
“And what about that lamp in her window? What’s that all about? I’ve never ever seen it turned off.” Melody was jumping up and down, and she clapped her hands together. “Maybe it’s some kind of beacon! Like a symbol to other witches that a real witch lives there! What do you think?”
I watched her for a second as she practically bounced off the walls, but when she saw my face she stopped.
“Matthew? What? What is it?”
I risked her seeing me use my shirt as protection and opened the front door widely as she stared at me.
“I’m sorry, Melody, but I’m really busy at the moment. Can you go?”
She looked outside, then back at me.
“What?”
“I said, can you go?”
Lots of little lines crinkled across her forehead and her bottom lip protruded over her top lip as she took in what I’d said.
“But … but we’ve got things to talk about. Don’t you want to discuss Old Nina?”
I shook my head.
She blinked at me a few times and took a step toward the door.
“But you let me in. You let me in when Jake was being mean!”
I could feel the germs from her cardigan nipping at my ankles, burrowing their way under my skin. The feeling brought tears to my eyes.
“I didn’t mean to. I made a mistake.”
She pressed her lips together and glared at me before stomping out of the house and across the street.
I quickly slammed the door and ran upstairs.
The Wallpaper Lion woke me up.
In my dream I’d asked him a question: How does it feel being stuck up there all day, Lion? Just watching the world go by?
Sounding a bit nervous, like he knew he shouldn’t be talking but really couldn’t help himself, he said: Surely you know how that feels … don’t you, Matthew?
I jumped when he spoke and woke up. My heart raced and for a moment I felt disoriented, like I always did when I fell asleep in the daytime.
I was facing my floor, my head at an angle on the edge of my pillow. A yellow rectangle of sunlight stretched across my carpet from my desk to the bookshelves. I listened, waiting to see if he was going to carry on, but all I could hear was the drone of a distant lawn mower. Rolling onto my back, I watched the small area of wallpaper that resembled a lion’s face. His eye still drooped downward, his matted mane circling his head like a blazing sun, his nose flat and wide, and his mouth now, thankfully, tightly shut.
My clock said 12:45 p.m. I’d been asleep for over an hour. It was weird; the less I did, the more tired I felt. I got up and stretched.
Outside, a sagging blue wading pool, filled with a summer soup of water, grass, and dead flies, sat in the middle of Mr. Charles’s backyard. Casey and Teddy were nowhere to be seen. Our yard was also deserted. Mum’s empty lounge chair crisped in the baking sun, and behind it Dad’s gardening wigwams were all dark and shriveled.
Taking my notebook with me, I crossed the landing into the office to see if anything was going on outside at the front.
Monday, July 28th. 12:47 p.m. Office/nursery. Very hot.
Teddy is in the front yard next door. He’s wearing a pull-up diaper and a white T-shirt with a cartoon ice-cream cone on the front. He doesn’t have any shoes on. There is no sign of Casey or Mr. Charles. The gate is shut, the small lever on the latch in place.
Reaching toward some bright pink roses, Teddy picked a fistful of petals and scattered them onto the path, dancing as they tickled his sunburnt feet. A trowel and a green kneeling pad lay next to him. Mr. Charles must be in the middle of some gardening. When he reappeared he wasn’t going to be happy with what Teddy was doing, not after all the hours he spent fiddling with those flowers.
In his left hand Teddy clutched the little square, blue blanket he’d been holding when he first arrived in the big, posh car with Casey. He let the blanket fall to the ground, then grabbed more petals and watched as they rained down on top of it. When the last petal had dropped he stretched toward a large rose but caught his forearm on a thorn.
“Owwww!” he said and he did a little jig as his face crumpled into a scowl.
For a moment I thought he was going to go and get Mr. Charles, but instead he just squatted down and inspected the cut on his arm, dabbing at it with the blanket.
I heard a door bang open, and Mr. Jenkins appeared from next door wearing his running gear and studying his iPod as he looped some white headphones around his neck. His teeth shined bright against his tanned skin as he smiled to himself. Fortunately there was no sign of Hannah or her swollen belly. Mr. Jenkins turned left out of his driveway and then broke into a jog, oblivious to the toddler crouching down in the garden next to him.
Teddy stood up. There was a tiny trickle of blood running down his arm, but it didn’t seem to bother him; he reached for more petals and then stopped. Something out of the corner of his eye had distracted him.
Me.
He turned and pointed a chubby arm toward my window as he gasped:
“Fishy!”
I watched him bounce up and down, clearly ecstatic that he’d spotted the Goldfish Boy all on his own. He looked around for someone to tell.
“Fishy, Casey! Look! Fishy! Granda!”
But nobody came.
I turned away from the window and glanced at the time in the corner of the computer screen.
12:55 p.m.
That time was important.
I don’t know why it stuck in my mind but it did, even without writing it down.
At some point after 12:55 p.m. on that bright, scorching day, Teddy Dawson went missing.
Mr. Charles hadn’t been gardening after all. The trowel and kneeling pad I’d seen had just been left over from the previous day, forgotten in the madness of trying to look after two young kids. While Teddy was picking the petals, Mr. Charles was inside having an afternoon nap in his armchair. I was cleaning my room when, at 2:37 p.m., I heard a shout from the garden.
“Teddy! Teddy, where are you? Don’t hide from Granddad now.”
I looked outside and saw the top of Mr. Charles’s red head as he stood on his patio, his hands on his hips.
“Something’s going on,” I said to the Wallpaper Lion.
“Teddy? Teddy! You come out here this instant, young man!”
He walked around the side of the house and I ran to the office. Claudia, Melody’s mum, was just reversing her old car out of their driveway, and as she drove past number eleven, she put her hand up and waved at Mr. Charles, unaware of the panic he was in. The old man ignored her and trotted down his path, his head darting this way and that. I took some notes.
“Teddy! Teddy! Stop hiding and get back here—now!”
A few pastel pink petals fluttered along the path toward the front gate, which was no
w wide open. Mr. Charles walked quickly around the semicircle of the cul-de-sac, looking over garden fences and into car windows.
“Where are you, Teddy? Teddy!”
His voice sounded different. It was much higher than usual and it was shaking. As he walked past number five, Jake’s mum, Sue, appeared in her supermarket uniform.
“Everything all right, Mr. Charles?” she called.
“He’s gone. Teddy’s gone. TEDDY!”
This last cry reverberated off the windows and we all listened for any reply, but the only sound was the low hum of some distant traffic and a group of sparrows, chirruping madly in the dusty road. Mr. Charles staggered forward, and Sue ran down her path and put an arm around him. She talked to him as they slowly made their way to number eleven.
“… give the police a call … best to be on the safe side …”
“… could he have got to? I was just in the lounge …”
I watched them go inside, then looked around at all the houses. Everything was still.
At 3:05 p.m. a police car rolled onto the street and Mr. Charles and Sue rushed to the front gate to meet them. Two uniformed police officers got out of the car as Mr. Charles launched into a trembling speech.
“… grandson is missing … mother is in New York … doesn’t know yet … is it day or nighttime there? Do you think I should call?”
A female officer put a hand on his arm and guided him back to the house while the other, older officer said something into his radio.
I went back to my room and looked out at the backyards to see if I could spot Teddy hiding in a bush or, worse, floating facedown in the pond. But there was no sign of him.
Casey was busy beside the half-deflated wading pool. Her hideous doll was propped against the blue lining, its face leaning toward the water as if it were looking for something on the bottom. She skipped back toward the house, and I stepped to one side in case she spotted me. When she reached the patio she turned and ran full speed up to the doll and, with a dirty, bare foot, kicked it in the back. The doll fell forward and made a small splash as it toppled into the pool. Casey stared at the drowning doll for a moment and then reached out and pulled it from the water, cradling it gently in her arms, stroking its hair. I shivered.
“She is one scary kid,” I said to the Wallpaper Lion. I checked my clock. It had been nearly two hours since I had seen Teddy playing with the petals.
“He’s probably hiding in a cupboard or under the bed or something. They’re bound to find him. But then why is the gate open? He wouldn’t have been able to open the latch, would he?”
I looked up at the Wallpaper Lion, who didn’t seem so sure. The urge to wash my hands overtook me and I quickly rushed to the bathroom.
The thin skin between my fingers was beginning to split and the constant washing was making it worse. I splashed some cold water on my face and then I ran the hot tap until it was scalding and started washing my hands. I lost track of how long I was in there.
Back in my room I let my hands drip onto my carpet. That was fine. The water was clean, and this was a much more hygienic way to let them dry—and less painful—than using a towel. The older policeman was walking around Mr. Charles’s garden looking under shrubs and behind bushes as Casey watched him. Sue appeared on the patio.
“Casey, come on inside now, there’s a good girl.”
She hurried the girl along while the officer studied the pond and poked at the water with the same stick that Teddy had used to prod the dead chick just last week. He opened the shed, and even I could see that all that was in there was a lawn mower, a ladder, a few plant pots, a bucket, and some garden tools. He checked around the outside, then unclipped a flashlight from his belt to peer into the dark space underneath. The female officer appeared on the lawn.
“Anything?”
The officer shook his head.
“Nothing inside either. I’m getting a ladder to check the attic. You never know.”
The woman went to the shed and took the ladder out, walking briskly back to the house as the other officer went around the side, talking into his radio.
Back at the front, things had gotten a lot busier. Another police patrol car, its blue light flashing, was just parking outside our house, and a silver Mondeo was just pulling up behind it. Two uniformed policemen emerged from the first and a man and a woman in plainclothes from the second. They all walked to number eleven and straight in through the open front door. Bumps and creaks were now coming from Mr. Charles’s attic, and I imagined the policewoman was crawling around up there, searching all the dark corners.
As I looked outside, my eyes seemed to go blurry—the glass was rippling and vibrating. My chest rumbled as a police helicopter approached from behind Penny and Gordon’s chimney like a giant black-and-yellow hornet. It thundered over the houses, and I rushed to my bedroom and watched it hovering over the backyards.
“This looks serious, Lion,” I said to the piece of wallpaper. “This looks very serious indeed.”
Our doorbell rang and I froze. Mum wasn’t due back for another hour, and anyway, she’d use her key. Peering down from the top of the stairs, I could see a large, black outline of a figure standing on the other side of our frosted glass door. The doorbell rang again, and then the letterbox opened and someone peered through.
“Hello? Can you open up please, it’s the police.”
The flashing blue light of the patrol car swirled around the hallway like an annoying bluebottle fly. I slowly made my way downstairs and opened the door a couple of inches. The helicopter was so loud now it felt like someone was drumming on my ribs.
“Hello there. He told us you might not answer—you not well?”
A skinny policeman with a face like a tomato was standing on my doorstep holding a pad and pen. He practically had to shout to be heard over the noise of the helicopter. Behind him I could see the man who had searched Mr. Charles’s backyard talking to Claudia, who was holding her dachshund, Frankie, under her arm.
“I’m Officer Campen. There’s been a serious incident next door—a little lad has gone missing. Have you seen him at all? Wandering about?”
I shook my head.
“And have you seen anyone around in the area? Anyone acting suspicious?”
I shook my head again.
“Okay, well I need to have a quick check around your backyard. That all right?”
I blinked in the sunlight at the man and then looked down at his large, black shoes.
“Do you think you could go around the side?”
Officer Campen frowned.
“Look, son, let me come through, would you? This is serious.”
I stood back and he pushed the door wide open and thumped his great feet onto our doormat. After giving his shoes a halfhearted wipe, he walked off toward the kitchen and into the conservatory.
“Through here?”
I nodded.
“I’ll need to take a few details down in a minute,” he said and he opened our back door and went outside.
I watched from the entrance of the kitchen as he looked around our shrubs and behind Dad’s runner bean wigwams. The yards were small on our street, so it wouldn’t take long for them all to be searched. After checking down the side of the house where we keep the trash cans and recycling, he headed for the shed. A rake, two tennis rackets, and an old swing-ball pole fell out as he opened the door. Shaking his head, he climbed in over the mess, pulling things out of the way so that he could have a good look.
I took the chance to wash my hands at the kitchen sink, turning the tap on using my elbow. Germs were more widespread down here what with the doors opening and closing and Nigel skulking around wherever he wanted. I could hear the policeman talking into his radio as he headed back to the kitchen, so I quickly shook my hands dry.
“Wow, that’s better. Lovely and cool in here. Your parents at work?”
I nodded.
The policeman scraped out one of our pine chairs and sat himself down w
hile I stayed in the doorway. He frowned at me, clearly noticing I wasn’t coming into the room.
“This is number nine, isn’t it? What’s your name?”
He waited as I watched him wrap each ankle around a chair leg, his dirty soles now thankfully off the floor.
“Matthew Corbin.”
“And how old are you, Matthew?”
“Twelve.”
He looked up from his pad.
“Did you know that your neighbor, Mr. Charles, has his grandchildren staying with him?”
“Yes.”
“Well, the little boy, Teddy, has possibly wandered off somewhere. And you definitely haven’t seen him or heard him at all?”
I told him about the petals on the path and the gate being locked. I said that I’d thought Mr. Charles was gardening at the front and had just gone around to the back for something. I didn’t tell him he’d called me a fish and pointed at the window—it didn’t seem important. The policeman scribbled on his pad, his tongue sticking out at one corner as if he had to concentrate on looping the letters together. He rocked back until he was balancing on the back legs of the chair. Dad hated that.
“And did you tell anyone about this? That you’d seen a toddler on his own? Near the street?”
I blinked at him.
“I … I, well, no. I thought his granddad was around. I didn’t think there was anything wrong. And he wasn’t near the road. The gate was shut.”
The policeman scribbled something, then looked up at me.
“And why would you notice a thing like that.”
I felt a bit sick. “What?”
“The gate being shut.”
I accidentally leaned onto the doorframe, then stood bolt upright.
“I don’t know … I just look at things and see stuff. That’s all.”
Officer Campen wasn’t taking notes anymore.
“And why were you looking out the window in the first place? It’s summer vacation, why aren’t you off playing football or frying your brain with all that gaming you kids do?”
He tapped his pencil against his lips. I looked around the room, trying to think what to say.
The Goldfish Boy Page 6
