“I think it was the news,” said Elizabeth. “You know how he goes funny about things like that.”
“He doesn’t like dead people,” agreed Frances.
They gazed down, the three of them, at the iron-grey waves streaming swiftly under the arrowhead of the boat. The closer you looked, the faster it seemed, but it’s just an illusion, said Elizabeth, it just looks like that.
“Row, row, row,” thought Matilda, remembering the Argonauts, the jolly-band-of-rowers, row, row, row.
Now the ferry was almost quiet, the engine had died down. They felt the whole ocean rocking beneath them. Pressed in between Elizabeth and Frances’s warm legs, Matilda was safe, but she knew that under the sleek surface lay mysterious things, sharks and stingrays and even submarines, Germans and Japanese.
You wouldn’t know they were there, their father told them, all those men under there, all of them locked up in a sub, just like you, waiting for the end. You only knew because of the radar, ping, ping, ping. The sound of a bellbird in the bush, their father said. In the war that’s all I heard all day and all night, he said, ping, ping, ping. It can drive you out of your mind, he said, that sound.
“The ocean is strong and very deep,” said Elizabeth, “but nothing is as strong as the H-Bomb.”
Frances looked up.
“What’s the H-Bomb?” asked Matilda.
Elizabeth knew all about the H-Bomb. She had read about it in the newspaper.
“It can destroy the world in a single second,” she said, and her voice was dreamy. “All life will just go phhht. Imagine that,” said Elizabeth to Matilda and Frances. “Everything gone, just like that. It’ll all be empty, for ever and ever.”
“Do not forsake me, oh my darling,” hummed Uncle Paul behind them, while the smoke from his cigarette flew up in the wind.
Matilda felt afraid but Elizabeth shook her head gently. She touched Matilda’s hand.
“You don’t have to be frightened,” she said. “You won’t even know it’s happened. It’ll just go bang. You won’t know anything about it at all. It’s only knowing things that makes you afraid,” said Elizabeth, as the ferry left the world behind and sped towards the Basin.
Ten
WEDNESDAY, 14 APRIL 1954
ON WEDNESDAY MORNING, the day after the Pet Parade, Frances was snoring, but Matilda was awake early again. The all-day sucker, her wonderful prize for the snail hotel, lay on the floor beneath her bed. She’d put it under her pillow at first, but the cellophane crackled whenever she turned her head, so she pushed it away and it fell down the side of the bed with a thump onto the floor.
She hadn’t shown it to anyone, not her mother, not Elizabeth, not even Frances. No one knew she had won it, except Frances, and Frances wouldn’t say anything. That was a good thing about Frances. If she thought it was strange, she still wouldn’t say anything.
Matilda didn’t know why, but it made her feel sick to look at the lollipop now it was hers, the multicoloured swirling disc the size of a baby’s face, like a little moon in her hands on the end of a stick. She didn’t want to talk about it or even see it.
As for the snail hotel, that was worse. As soon as she’d got home from school, she hid it at the back of some bushes near the front fence. She left it there with the lid off so the snails could escape and go back to their normal snail life. They could all crawl away, leaving long silver trails and wondering what had happened to them.
“Why won’t you show it to anyone?” said Floreal, right in her ear. “Why not?”
Matilda put her hands over her ears. Shut up, she thought, shutup shutup. None of your business! she wanted to shout. What do you care? She dashed out into the back yard. She felt restless as an insect, she wanted to rush around in circles until she was too tired to think any more.
Then she heard voices, low murmurs and a laugh.
Matilda stopped running and rolled in a somersault down to the falling-down fence. She raised herself on her elbows and peered through to the back yard of the big house.
The two men who had given her and Frances a lift in the car the day before were out there under the lemon tree, smoking. Mr Driver and Mr Passenger, Matilda thought. She climbed up on the lump of crumbling sandstone and leaned over the fence and said, “Hallo!”
The men looked up. They seemed very surprised. Perhaps they had forgotten her.
“It’s me,” said Matilda.
“Hallo there,” replied Mr Driver, walking over, his cigarette pointing down at the ground. “It’s the snail girl.”
“Hallo,” replied Matilda. She hung her arms over the wooden palings.
“How are you this morning?” said Mr Driver.
Matilda shrugged. She was all right. It was funny seeing his face straight on, and not in the mirror.
“Do you want to see a trick?” he asked.
“Yes,” said Matilda.
Mr Driver put his cigarette up to his mouth and breathed in, pursing up his lips. When he breathed out he made a smoke ring, a luminous grey fading circle, and then another, disappearing up into the wide blue sky, one after the other.
Matilda clapped her hands, impressed.
“How do you do that?”
“I’ll teach you when you’re bigger,” said Mr Driver, winking at Mr Passenger.
There was a pause.
“Is the other man coming out soon?” asked Matilda conversationally.
No one spoke. The only sound was the waves, rolling over the surface of the ocean. Matilda had an odd feeling, as though she was in trouble. When she was in trouble, she kept quiet.
“What other man?” said Mr Passenger carefully.
Matilda hadn’t heard his voice before. She didn’t like the sound of it.
“Matilda!”
It was her mother, tapping on the half-open kitchen window at her. Even at that distance, Matilda could hear a kind of frown in her voice.
“You’d better go,” said Mr Driver, drawing again on his cigarette. “Don’t keep Mum waiting.”
“You shouldn’t talk to strangers, you know,” her mother said, shaking her head at Matilda as she came inside, the screen door banging behind her.
“They’re not strangers,” Matilda defended herself. “They’re neighbours.”
“You’re too friendly for your own good,” sighed her mother, putting a plate of two eggs on the table in front of her. “That’s going to get you in trouble one day.”
Well, that’s silly, thought Matilda. She stared down at the eggs, like two huge moist yellow eyes. How can you be too friendly? Be a good friend to everyone, that’s what my teacher says, every living thing. Every Living Thing.
I want to be friends with everything, thought Matilda, her head rushing, not just living things. I want to be friends even with stones and houses and big blocks of wood and glass. I can be friends with whoever I like, even the men next door.
Eleven
THURSDAY, 15 APRIL 1954
ON THURSDAY, SCHOOL BROKE UP for the Easter holidays. They heard footsteps coming up the front path.
“Daddy?” said Matilda, jumping up.
They were expecting their father to come home from his ship, he should be home already. Their mother ran to open the front door. But it was Uncle Paul.
She threw herself in his arms, thought Elizabeth, watching them. In books people were always throwing themselves in each other’s arms, and perhaps in real life as well.
“Don’t you have to play the piano today?” she asked.
“Don’t I deserve a day off?” rejoined Uncle Paul cheerfully.
“Can you take us to the Show?” said Matilda.
“Ah, the Show, the Show,” groaned Uncle Paul, flopping on the sofa, “always the Show.”
“Can you?” said Matilda.
“He won’t,” said Floreal.
Go away, thought Matilda, just go away. She kicked out her leg, trying to get at Floreal, but because he was invisible she missed, and stubbed her toe on the floor instead.
“Let’
s have fish and chips for tea,” said Uncle Paul to their mother. “What do you say?”
Could they?
“What do you say, my friend Frank?”
Uncle Paul leant over to Frances, who was sitting quietly chewing on her nails. He poked her in the stomach. Uncle Paul liked to tease Frances, trying to make her laugh. Frances is so sad and solemn, he said. She should work for an undertaker.
“All right,” mumbled Frances.
They walked down together to the fish-and-chip shop, which was opposite a little beach where the shops were. It was cold and getting dark, but Uncle Paul bought lots of fish and chips wrapped up in newspaper and handed them each a packet to hold to their chests, like a hot water bottle.
They went and sat on some wooden seats across the road to eat them. Salt and heat and oil rose in the dim air. Soon they were surrounded by red-eyed seagulls.
“Don’t feed them, Mattie,” warned their mother. “It’s not good for them.”
“It’s fish,” replied Matilda, throwing a big piece in the middle of the flock so they squawked and fought over it as though they hadn’t eaten in weeks. “Fish is what they eat.”
“It’s not fish really,” said Elizabeth. “It’s shark.”
Matilda licked the salt from her lips. Shark. Once they had been at the beach when a shark had come. No one saw the sharp grey fin rising above the ocean, but a siren went off and they all had to get out from the water and wait for it to go away. Their father had bought them each a lemonade iceblock to eat while they waited. Then he had lain on his back in the sun, his eyes closed tightly, his arms and legs stretched out on the sand.
“We’ll have cooked daddy for dinner,” their mother joked, but actually they’d had fish and chips that day as well.
“It’s not fish really,” their father told them. “It’s shark.”
“Yuck,” said Matilda.
“It’s the best,” he grinned. “No bones.”
It seemed a long time ago. Now their father was away on his ship when he should be at home. Matilda stood at the water’s edge, where little waves lapped over her sandals as the sun was setting. Her mouth was dry and salty and there was shark inside her.
She stared out across the bay, over towards the high dark bush where the Basin was, a mountainous shape in the twilight. I thought no one could get me up there, Matilda remembered, high in the highest branch of the tallest tree.
It was a secret that she had climbed that tree. She wasn’t allowed to climb trees that high. She might tumble down and crack her head open and her brains would fall out. That happened to her mother’s friend Yvonne’s little brother when he was only three and Yvonne had never got over it, never. Why didn’t they put his brains back in? asked Matilda and her mother said, You silly goose, once your brains fall out that’s it, it’s all over. So they left his brains on the street and Yvonne never got over it.
Matilda didn’t care about Yvonne’s little brother and it wasn’t a tree he fell out of, it was a truck. She climbed the tree that day in secret when no one was looking, higher than she had ever climbed before. How high she was, so high you could see everything, like a bird in the blue sky, she could see the whole of the Basin.
I am such a good climber, Matilda thought, but in fact she nearly fell, down from the top of the tallest tree in the world. Her foot had slipped and she was going to fall, she was, she really was, down down down to the dead earth, but just in time she thought of Yvonne’s little brother and his brains all over the street, and she had grabbed the branch above her head and gripped it so hard her hand bled.
Now, on the little beach where they ate their fish and chips, a flock of cockatoos rose up in the sunset from the trees, cawing, with their golden crests shining and their white, white wings spread wide. For a moment the world swayed in front of her and she felt her arms and legs begin to tremble.
“But I don’t want to remember,” said Matilda out loud.
And she closed her eyes tightly, so very tightly, just like her father on his back on the sand when the shark came.
Twelve
GOOD FRIDAY, 16 APRIL 1954
ON FRIDAY THERE WAS NO SCHOOL. Their mother toasted hot-cross buns on the grill, lifting them up with a fork to see how brown they were.
They all ate them, even Uncle Paul. He was greedy like a child. Matilda liked that. She hated the way grown-ups always said, That’s enough, thank you, no, I really can’t manage any more, how they wiped their mouths and cast their eyes downward. Uncle Paul was greedy, he never said no and he always wanted more.
“What’s that ghastly music?” he said, kicking the back door open with a plate in one hand, a hot-cross bun in the other.
They listened. It was coming from the big house next door. It was as though the house was singing, deep, long, dreary notes.
“Who are those people, anyway?” Uncle Paul raised his hands in the air theatrically. “Sounds like a death march.”
He let the door swing shut, and went and sat at the piano. He licked his fingers one by one because they were covered in butter, then he began to play a tune on the high-up notes.
“That certain night, the night we met,
There was magic abroad in the air!”
sang Uncle Paul. Matilda slid herself next to him on the piano stool.
“Are you going to church at Easter?”
“Are you?” replied Uncle Paul.
“I don’t know,” said Matilda.
“There were angels dining at the Ritz
And a nightingale sang in Berkeley Square.”
Uncle Paul was playing the very top notes so softly he had to bend his ear down to the keys to hear it.
“I may be right, I may be wrong,
But I’m perfectly willing to swear
That when you turned and smiled at me –”
“Can we go to the Show today?” asked Matilda.
“A nightingale sang in Berkeley Square!”
“You’re not supposed to go to the Show on Good Friday,” said their mother.
“Why not?” frowned Matilda.
“God doesn’t like it, darling,” said Uncle Paul with a wink. “Don’t they teach you anything at school?” He tugged at Matilda’s bare feet and shivered. “Ice blocks,” he said. “How can you stand it?”
“Daddy likes the Show,” sniffed Matilda. “He’ll take us. When’s he coming?”
“Soon, soon,” said their mother. “Blow your nose, Matilda. Get a hankie.”
Matilda rolled off the piano stool and lay down on the floor, gazing at the ceiling. If you looked long enough, it started to seem as if it was coming down on top of you, closer, closer, closer, until you felt you were going to be squashed to death underneath it. Then you jumped up and escaped just in time.
“The streets of town were paved with gold
It was such a romantic affair,
And when you turned and smiled at me
A nightingale sang in Berkeley Square!”
Uncle Paul stopped playing. He breathed out heavily.
“What a pity, what a pity!” Uncle Paul twirled his grey moustache.
“What’s a pity?” asked Matilda, sitting up.
“That life’s not like that,” said Uncle Paul. “What a pity it is.”
On top of the piano was the photograph of their mother and father at their wedding, and their mother’s friend Yvonne. Now Yvonne was a thousand miles away in New Zealand, but when Uncle Paul raised his eyebrows at her, it seemed to Matilda as though Yvonne raised hers back at him. But she couldn’t have, of course, she was only a photo. A photo was not alive, it couldn’t move. But maybe it was like a zombie, a dead person that’s really alive, like Yvonne’s dead-alive husband in the Solomon Islands.
“Where’s Berkeley Square, anyway?” she asked, not wanting to think about zombies.
Uncle Paul swung around on the piano stool.
“It’s nowhere,” he said glumly. “It doesn’t exist.”
“Yes it does,” said Elizab
eth. She looked over from the sofa, where she was reading the paper. “It’s in London. In England.”
“How do you know?” said Matilda.
“It’s nowhere,” repeated Uncle Paul.
Nowhere, nowhere, nowhere. London was so far away, it might as well be nowhere. Uncle Paul smiled at their mother. The room smelt of burnt bread. Their mother pushed her hair back from her brow. She had soft swinging hair, she washed it in Lux soap.
“Perfect hair,” said Uncle Paul, as he let his fingers fall lightly on the keys. “Your mother has perfect hair.”
He reached over and took a handful of her hair and held it up to the sunlight, strands slowly falling down onto her shoulders.
“He shouldn’t be here,” said Floreal. “He shouldn’t be here, when your father’s away.”
Matilda ran out into the back yard. The music coming from the big house next door had stopped and it was almost quiet now. But she could hear something else, someone coughing. Who was it?
She remembered what Floreal had said, how the men next door were spies. Could they be spies? Who were they spying on? Maybe I could be a spy, thought Matilda suddenly. I could watch them, without them knowing I’m here.
She lay down on her stomach and pulled herself along the grass with her arms and wiggled like a snake, right up to the crack in the fence. Then she looked through the splintered wood.
There he was again, the funny-looking man who had thrown her back the tennis ball. He was quite close to her, sitting at the garden table, laying out a chess set on a chequered board. Carefully, one by one, he was putting the pieces in their places, the little horses and little castles, the queen with a crown and the king with a cross, half of them black, half of them white, the bishops, and the pawns.
Who’s he going to play with? wondered Matilda.
Bang bang went the back door. Matilda put her hands up to her eyes in the shape of binoculars and looked through. They were men, but not the men that had given her and Frances the lift. Why were there so many men? How many people can you have in one house?
One of them came and stood next to the table, looking at the chess set, and muttering something Matilda couldn’t hear. There was a burst of laughter, but her man, the tennisball man, didn’t smile. He rubbed his head as though he had a headache.
The Red Shoe Page 6
