by Dyan Sheldon
“Oh, no…” I groaned out loud. I had no idea where I was.
I wanted to join the Boy Scouts when all the other boys in my class did, but my mother wouldn’t let me, of course. She said the Boy Scouts was a paramilitary organization with a dodgy past and that no son of hers was going to be part of it. “Next thing you know, you’ll want to join the SAS,” said my mother.
So I had no Boy Scout skills to rely on. I didn’t even have a torch. Sherlock Holmes was never a Boy Scout either, but he would have had a torch with him. Or at least a box of matches.
I decided to keep going until I either came to a phonebox or worked out where I was.
I was thinking of what I’d tell my parents when I rang them to come and get me when the road was suddenly lit up. All I could see were two headlights coming towards me. I moved over and turned my head away.
Much to my horror the car was stopping.
“I don’t believe this,” I muttered to myself. “Now I have strangers offering me lifts.”
I knew what happened to people who took lifts from strangers. My grandmother was always showing me newspaper articles about people who were last seen getting into an unknown car. People who took lifts from strangers ended up in ditches or buried in shallow graves.
I was much too young to die. Acting on instinct, I hurled myself into the shadows at the side of the road.
The back door opened. A circle of blue light hovered in the darkness and an all too familiar voice called out, “Be careful, Elmo. Those are nettles!”
As if I hadn’t worked that out already.
Mrs Bamber’s head poked out of the window on the driver’s side. “Elmo Blue, what are you doing out here at this time of night?”
With a great deal of pain, I freed myself from the nettles and limped to the car.
“I went for a walk,” I explained to Mrs Bamber as I climbed into the back next to Kuba. “I suppose I got lost.”
“Well, thank goodness we came this way,” said Mrs Bamber. “Kuba wanted to go for a little drive. See the area a bit.”
Mrs Bamber started humming along with the radio once we were moving.
Kuba looked at me out of the corner of her eye.
“Did you see Barry Ludgate?” she whispered.
I nodded. I was too tired to be surprised.
“There’s been a change of plan,” I whispered back. “They’re starting the destruction on Sunday, not Monday.”
“Isn’t my father clever.” Kuba smiled. “That’s so they can start without the Greeners getting in the way. We should have known he’d never give your mother the chance to get the whole country involved.”
“So what do we do now?” I wasn’t actually asking, I was just wondering out loud.
“We stop him,” said Kuba. “What else can we do?”
I have to say that I wasn’t too keen on the idea of lying down in the mud. “You mean we’re going to block the bulldozers, too?”
“Not we,” said Kuba. “I can’t interfere, remember? You’ll have to stop them.”
She said it as though she were saying something perfectly logical, possible and reasonable, like “You’ll have to go to the shops”.
“But I’m just a kid.”
“You won’t exactly be alone,” said Kuba. “I’ll be with you.” She grinned. “At least, in spirit.”
“Oh, great,” I said. “Everything’s all right then, isn’t it?”
MR BAMBER AND
QUITE A FEW OTHER
PEOPLE GET A
SURPRISE
The Greeners spent Saturday night in our living-room, finalizing their plans for Monday morning for the umpteenth time. My mother called every television and radio station that might be interested in the story, and every newspaper, too. On Monday morning the road to the woods would be chock-a-block with Greeners, cameramen, police and reporters – just as she wanted.
The only thing that wouldn’t be there, of course, was whatever Mr Bamber’s bulldozers had levelled the day before.
I spent Saturday night watching Mr Bamber on my computer as he finalized his plans for Sunday morning. It was Kuba’s idea. I did learn some useful information – like what time the bulldozers were starting – but apart from that it wasn’t really very interesting for the first few hours. Mr Bamber was on the phone all the time. Mrs Bamber kept walking in and out of any room he was in, glaring at him, but he didn’t pay much attention.
“Not now, Arabella,” he’d hiss whenever she tried to interrupt him. “Can’t you see I’m busy?”
When Mr Bamber did finally hang up, Mrs Bamber was waiting for him. He turned off his phone and she marched into the room. That’s when it started to get interesting.
“When aren’t you busy?” demanded Mrs Bamber. “You never have time for anything else any more. You’re like a man obsessed.”
“It’ll all be over tomorrow,” said Mr Bamber calmly. “Then things will get back to normal.”
“No they won’t,” said Mrs Bamber. “It’s never over. You think normal is a meeting or you with a phone glued to your ear. After these houses there’ll be others. There’ll be shopping centres and industrial estates…”
Mr Bamber didn’t look like he thought this would be too much of a disaster. He smiled.
“You don’t mind driving the Porsche, Arabella. You don’t mind the expensive house and the nice clothes.”
“Never mind all that,” snapped Mrs Bamber. “What about Kuba?”
At the mention of her name, Kuba – who, on the grounds that she couldn’t directly interfere, was ignoring the Bambers and was putting one of my jigsaw puzzles together in record time – looked up.
“You hardly talk to the child,” Mrs Bamber was saying. “We haven’t done one family thing together since she arrived.”
“She was meant to be a boy,” answered Mr Bamber. He seemed to think this was an explanation.
“She was meant to be a child,” said Mrs Bamber. “And don’t give me that ‘I wanted a son’ malarkey. You only wanted a son so you could get a spy inside Grace Blue’s house.”
Kuba’s head appeared at my shoulder.
“You know, I think she really cares,” said Kuba. She grinned at the image on the screen. “Go for it, Mum,” she urged.
As if she’d heard her, Mrs Bamber went for it.
“She might as well be a rock for all the attention you’ve given her.” Mrs Bamber had been more or less whispering so as not to wake the child she thought was sleeping upstairs, but now she stepped up the volume. “Maybe if she had headlights and could mow things down you’d give her some of your precious time.”
Mr Bamber sighed wearily.
“Arabella, please … as soon as this is over, I promise we’ll do something as a family. Go to Disneyland or something.”
Kuba snorted. “If he doesn’t watch it, we’ll all be going to jail.”
It was still dark when I got up on Sunday morning and tiptoed from the house. With a stealth worthy of Holmes himself, I tiptoed to the garage and got my bike. Kuba was waiting at the end of the road.
“What happened to you?” she demanded. “Your eyes are the size of currants. You look like you’ve been sitting in front of a computer for the past twenty-four hours.”
I didn’t feel like that. I felt as though I’d been wrestling alien monsters.
“I didn’t sleep very much.”
Which was something of an understatement. All night I’d been dozing for an hour or so, and then waking up with this cold feeling of dread. I was more than a little nervous about standing up to the chainsaws and the bulldozers. Maybe my mother was right after all, and it would be better to keep the woods and the lake and everything else rather than build another development, but progress was progress. You couldn’t stop progress. And you could get hurt if you tried. What if something went wrong and I was tragically run over?
Kuba, in contrast, was what my grandmother would have described as “bright-eyed and bushy-tailed”. In the last hour of darkness
, she almost seemed to glow.
“There’s nothing to worry about,” Kuba assured me. “The bulldozers aren’t going to be turned on a little boy.”
It was easy for her to say.
I said, “Um…”
Being mowed down wasn’t my only worry. It had occurred to me during the night that if I did survive, everyone in Campton would hear what had happened. I’d be the laughing stock of the whole school. It was bad enough that I was the son of Grace Blue, the Green Menace. Now, for the rest of my school life I’d be Elmo Blue, Campton Secondary’s representative of the lunatic fringe. I could hear Eddie Kilgour calling me imaginative names like Bat brain and Dozy, the Eighth Dwarf. It might be better if I was tragically killed; at least I’d get some sympathy.
Kuba didn’t push it.
“Did you leave the note for your mum?” she asked.
The note told my mother where I was and what I was doing, and asked her to hurry. I was more likely to forget my name than forget to leave that.
“I put it on the kettle.” That way I was sure she’d see it. She always had a cup of tea first thing.
“I left a note for Mrs Bamber, too,” said Kuba. “I wouldn’t want her to find me gone and start to worry.”
If you asked me, Mrs Bamber didn’t have anything to worry about. For one thing, Kuba was already dead.
“I see you’ve got the sign.” Kuba pointed to the large square of white card with the words SAVE OUR WOODS in large green letters that I had under my arm. “Have you got the handcuffs?”
The handcuffs, like the sign, belonged to the Greeners and would enable me to chain myself to a handy bulldozer if I had to.
“They’re in my pocket.”
Kuba climbed on to the crossbar of my bike.
“Right,” she said. “All systems go.”
“Are you sure you know where we’re going?”
Kuba looked down at me from her perch on the crossbar. “Yes, I’m sure.” She patted her jacket pocket. “I’ve got Mr Bamber’s map of the development in my pocket. I know exactly where the bulldozers will start.”
“You stole Mr Bamber’s map?” I nearly steered us off the road, I was so surprised. “I thought you weren’t meant to interfere.”
“I didn’t steal it, I borrowed it,” said Kuba. “Borrowing Mr Bamber’s map is not interfering. If, unbeknownst to Mr Bamber, I changed the map, then that would be interfering.”
“You sound more like a politician than an angel,” I said acidly. There was enough light now for her to see the scornful expression on my face.
But Kuba didn’t hear the acid in my voice or see the scorn on my face.
“Stop over there!” she directed. “We’ve got to walk the rest of the way. But first we’d better have a look at the map.”
Mr Bamber’s map was an Ordnance Survey map, but more than that – it was Mr Bamber’s battle plan. The land to be used for the development was highlighted in green.
“I think that’s his idea of a joke,” said Kuba.
Dark orange circles marked the routes and positions of the bulldozers.
“Well,” I said. “I think the quickest way is through the graveyard.”
The road the bulldozers would be coming along was on the other side. When they reached the field behind the cemetery the road forked left and right. They would surround Mr Bamber’s land and attack it from three directions.
We hid the bike and started walking through the graveyard.
I’d been in the woods, through the old cemetery and even on the lake dozens of times, but I’d never been in any of those places at five in the morning before. Not just the cemetery, but the woods themselves looked really spooky. There was a heavy mist that made the light almost sparkle. Shadows wove through it like mythical creatures that vanish with the sun.
“You can see why people used to believe in ghosts and fairies,” I whispered.
“And angels,” said Kuba.
I shivered as I followed Kuba between the carved stones. Even though the sun was breaking, it was cold.
We finally got to the edge of the field.
I peered into the gloom. Tiny lights shimmered towards us on the road straight ahead.
“That’s not a bulldozer,” I said uneasily. “That’s a car.”
I didn’t remember any mention of cars.
“Security guards,” said Kuba calmly.
“Security guards?” I didn’t remember any mention of security guards either. “What security guards?”
Kuba gave me a scathing look. “You didn’t expect Mr Bamber to send in the chainsaws and bulldozers without protecting them, did you? Just in case?”
Now I didn’t just have to worry about being squashed, I also had to worry about being shot.
“So now what am I meant to do?” I groaned. “The security guards will have me before I get anywhere near the bulldozers.”
“Stop panicking,” she ordered. “I’m here, aren’t I? You’ll be fine.”
“Oh, right,” I grumbled. “My guardian angel.”
Only Kuba wasn’t right there, was she? I was in the middle of the road, holding my placard, and Kuba Bamber was nowhere in sight.
“Just block the fork so they can’t turn without running you over,” she’d ordered. “And if they do grab you, try to handcuff yourself to their car.”
The lights were getting closer and closer, but I didn’t know what to do.
That is, I knew what to do. I’d seen Grace Blue lie down in front of a bulldozer on the news. And so had Eddie Kilgour. He’d tortured me for months with that one. “Is your mother still throwing herself in front of cars?” he’d call when he passed me in the hall. When it was the school cake sale he’d suggested that my mother bring the road pizza. But that was in primary school. I’d been hoping that secondary school would be different. There were so many new kids – kids who didn’t know anything about me or my family – that I finally had a chance to be treated like a human being and not a geek.
I just didn’t know if I could do it. I wondered if my mother had found my note yet. She and Gertie always got up really early. My mother, being a gardener, didn’t like to waste any daylight, and Gertie, being a baby, woke up with the sun. My mother might already be on her way with the Press. I crossed my fingers. I could only hope that she wasn’t bringing the milk float.
The security car arrived first. There were two lorries and six bulldozers behind it.
Instinct must have taken over again because I immediately sat down. I raised my placard high.
There were three large men in the car. The one who was driving stopped a few feet away from me and got out.
He was even larger out of the car than he had been in it.
He gave me this big fake smile.
“Hello there, young fellow,” he said as if he was practising to be Father Christmas or something. “And what are you doing out here all by yourself at this hour of the morning?”
I moved my sign towards him in case he hadn’t read the message.
“I’m stopping you from clearing the woods.”
He kept smiling.
“Why don’t you go home, little boy? Your mother will be worried if she finds you’re not there.”
“My mother would be here too if Mr Bamber hadn’t lied about when he was starting to clear the woods,” I said very loudly.
The other two guards had also got out of the car by now. One of them sort of smirked.
“It must be the Green Menace’s boy,” he said with a wink at me. “Did your mother put you up to this?”
“No.” I was amazed at how calm I sounded. “My mother didn’t put me up to this.”
The man driving the first lorry leaned out of his cab.
“What’s going on?” he yelled.
“We’ll just be a minute,” said the first security guard. Still smiling as if he was going to fall over with happiness, he started towards me. “Why don’t you get out of the way before you get hurt, lad?”
“Why don’
t you get out of the way before you get hurt?” I asked back. It was really scary: I sounded just like Grace Blue.
I was holding the sign so tightly that my hands ached. The security guard took another step towards me.
“Because I’m bigger than you, that’s why,” he informed me.
And then I started to sound even more like Grace Blue.
“Might does not mean right,” I told him.
This isn’t a quote from the Bible, as far as I know. It’s a quote from my mother. It’s what she always says when other people tell her that you can’t fight the town hall. I’d never really understood what it meant before, but sitting there with the guard bearing down on me I suddenly understood it completely. It meant that having the money and power to do something didn’t make it the right thing to do. And it also meant that not having money and power didn’t make you wrong, or mean that you couldn’t stand up for what was right. Up till now I’d been doing what Kuba pushed me into doing – and because I’d seen my mother crying on the computer that time. But suddenly I really was there because I wanted to be. I was in the right; I knew I was. I held my sign even higher.
All the men were laughing, even the ones in the bulldozers.
“Might doesn’t make right…” The first security guard was practically doubled up and choking. “Now I’ve heard everything.”
“Not quite,” said a pleasant voice behind me.
I glanced over my shoulder.
The guard scowled at Kuba. “Where did you come from?”
“From that field over there.” She jerked her head towards the field next to the cemetery. “I was going for a walk.”
The guard turned his scowl on me. “Is this girl a friend of yours?”
I nodded. “Yeah,” I reluctantly admitted. “She’s a friend of mine.”
Kuba sat down at the edge of the road to my right, out of the way but in view. I assumed this was her idea of non-interference.
I must admit that it surprised me, but I was glad to see her. On the other hand, she didn’t make me feel less nervous. I really didn’t want her to do something she wasn’t supposed to do. It was bad enough being in trouble with the law without being in trouble with God as well.
