by Paul Magrs
I was still toggled up against the dawn in Manchester. As we ploughed into the morning and the sunlight came filtering through the shifting foliage I was lathered and uncomfortable with sweat. The backs of my knees were soaked.
‘It’s like going into the jungle,’ I said, without thinking. I was staring up into the overhanging trees, flinching as the branches reached out to scrape our window.
Katy was smirking, half-shrouded, half-brilliant in the sun. ‘They have jungle creatures in the Lakes.’
‘Do they?’
She nodded firmly. ‘Especially in Kendal. Wild animals like monkeys and snakes and them big fucking tigers.’
And then we met the Figgises. I don’t even know how to start explaining them. It’s like they were always there, just waiting to meet us and make us part of their lives. They were waiting patiently for Katy and me, biding their time on the tiny platform in Kendal. Waiting with all the other, more ordinary people.
It was quite a scene at that station when we arrived. As the train pulled in there was a kerfuffle in all the carriages, as the tired and overwhelmed kids came back to life and remembered that they were supposed to be noisy and uncontrollable. Everyone was pressing themselves against the windows and looking at the people waiting for us. The strangers who had said they would take us in.
That skinny woman with the clipboard went hurrying up and down, telling everyone to quieten down. If we didn’t watch out we’d get no one. None of those strangers would take nasty, boisterous children, would they?
Katy looked unimpressed with the whole lot of them out there. She sat back with a sigh on the bristly velveteen and made it plain she wasn’t in any rush to get outside. She fixed me with a stare, dead in the eye.
‘We’re sticking together, me and you,’ she said.
I was parched and a bit tearful. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘We’ll stick together.’ Like we’d made a pact. Like we had become Tonto and the Lone Ranger.
‘Jesus,’ she said. ‘Look at them two out there. I bet we get stuck with them.’
The Figgises stuck out like sore thumbs in that crowd. The other, normal looking people were dressed up in their best coats and hats and they were hugging their new children. Others were milling and there was a breathless excitement about it all: they all seemed happy to be paired up like this. Cheerful city children and their replacement parents. I thought for a second some awful trick had been played on us, because everyone seemed to know everyone else. Katy and me didn’t know anyone. But we had noticed the Figgises, shoved to one side, looking a bit weird. And, with a sick dread, I realised Katy was right. That troll-like man in the green serge suit with the thick white beard. His pale, flossy-haired tiny companion. They were our destiny. They had turned up to collect the two of us.
We were among the last to be sorted out. The stern clipboard woman shoved us forward like we were meeting the mayor and mayoress.
‘This is Mr Figgis and his sister, Isla,’ the woman said.
Then the old man’s hand was grasping mine and it was like holding a handful of cold pork sausages. His handshake was very gentle. His fingers were shaking as he touched mine. I turned and saw that Katy was giving the old people a very superior look. Amazing that she could pull that off, standing there with her hair messed up and a dirty blouse on. But the couple looked cowed at the sight of her pinched face. They seemed scared of the two of us and the woman in charge of us was alert to that.
‘I am sure they will give you no problems,’ she said. She wanted us off her hands pronto. ‘They hail from one of the poorer areas, but often those are the better behaved children.’ When she said ‘poorer areas’ she only mouthed the words.
‘I’m sure they will be fine,’ said Mr Figgis’s sister. We all jumped at the sound of her voice. It was extremely high-pitched and whispering. With the sun in all her fine-spun hair, and her standing no higher than my shoulders, it was like we were being adopted by a fairy. ‘Thank you so much, Mrs Beech.’
The clipboard lady nodded solemnly and moved away. She gave the two of us a warning glance first. Then we looked at our new parents again. We were at their mercy. Mr Figgis was clutching a packet of printed papers. It was like they had bought us at an agricultural fair.
‘I suggest we get them home, Michael,’ Isla Figgis fluted. ‘Get them settled in. They look a bit mithered.’
Mr Figgis grunted, took a hold of both our cases for us, and led the way out of the station. As we walked the short way into the town I realised that both Katy and I were hanging our heads. I wanted to be happier. I wanted to be a better choice for them. I didn’t want to be a disappointment to either them, or to my mam, who I knew would be worrying at home. And then I was thinking: I don’t need them. I don’t need new people. Who do they think they are? And they’re odd as well. We’ve got the oddest ones of the lot.
As we walked onto the high street and saw it was gloomy and everything was slate blue, overcast, dull, I turned and caught Katy’s eye. She mouthed something at me. I couldn’t tell what it was.
‘I said, we’ve got a right pair here,’ she hissed.
We were walking behind the Figgises. They were bustling down their familiar street, nodding at people they knew. No one else seemed to think they were strange-looking at all. They’d explained they lived in a house right down at the end. I couldn’t wait to get there. I was blushing and scalding over with shame. But the Figgises took their own sweet time, ambling along past the shops. They were quite at home here, in this tiny town. And now we had to be as well. I realised that Katy was holding my hand again.
You had to go through a wooden gate and up a dark, narrow alley to get to their door. The house was a tall, thin one on the main street, but it was hidden away and you’d never know anyone lived there. We slipped up that ginnel and it smelt mouldy and wet. But when Isla Figgis let us into their house we found it warm and pleasant and full of orange and yellow light. We walked straight into their dining room from the alley and the room was dominated by a round table covered with a hairy green cloth. The little woman urged us to unwrap our winter things and to sit ourselves down. The old man started fussing with the log fire.
‘It’s very nice,’ I said politely. I didn’t want them to think we had no manners: Katy was glowering at everything.
In the middle of the table there was an arrangement of pale church candles, melting into each other. There was also some very strange-looking pottery figures. Lumpy, misshapen people made by hand. I didn’t like the look of them and tried not to stare.
‘This,’ said Mr Figgis, ‘is your home now, for the duration of the hostilities.’ He got up from the fireplace and rubbed tree bark off his fat fingers, all down the front of his suit. ‘Now, I know you two will be fretting about your parents in the city, but we have to get through this as best we can. We’re a little family of our own now, the four of us, and we have to make do.’ Then he beamed at us and we saw that his mouth was crowded with lots of very square teeth. His voice was as deep as his sister’s was high. ‘You’re very welcome here.’
We smiled shyly. Even Katy. But we must have looked half-starved, because Isla fluttered into action, muttering to herself. She seemed to float around that small dining room, darting hither and thither. ‘A special treat for our famished new guests,’ was all I could make out from what she was saying. Mr Figgis dashed to help her in the small kitchen alcove.
Katy and I looked at each other. They were going to feed us. What if we didn’t like the kind of food they ate here? What did people like the Figgises eat?
The tiny Isla Figgis came back through with a large clay fruit bowl that she had to hold in both hands. She set it down on the tablecloth with a great show of ceremony. She smiled at the looks on both our faces.
‘We’ve been storing these up,’ she said, ‘just for today.’
The bowl was full of chocolate bars. In every shape and size, in bright, multi-coloured wrappers. The likes of which we had never seen. Mr Figgis was fussing around in the ta
ll bookshelf in the corner. He was reaching behind the stacks of paper-covered books and producing fistfuls more of the things. He tossed them into the bowl. Bar after bar. They were like magic.
‘Dig in, girls,’ Isla Figgis cried. ‘It won’t be everyday we can eat like this! Make the most of it while it lasts!’ Then she selected a bar for herself and unwrapped it greedily, her silver eyes shining.
The chocolate (which the four of us demolished completely that first dinner time together) was the first of the strange things, besides the appearance of the Figgises themselves, that we came across in Kendal. We got used to the ways of this curious brother and sister very quickly. I suppose that’s how kids are: how they have to be. They adapt. It’s not like I didn’t think about Mam, or talk about her, in those first few weeks, but there was so much to get used to and to absorb in this new place. And there was Katy to look after.
The Figgises had a sort of double life. Outside they looked a bit weird as they trundled about the town together, but people respected them. All the men raised their hats to Isla, and Michael was greeted properly, as if he was someone quite important. Neither lingered to chat with people: they were in some private bubble of their own.
Home in that narrow house, things were different. The Figgises grew livelier, wilder in their private world. Without, all was scrimped and saved for, hushed and careful and everything for the war effort. Within their walls, there was a lightness and a gaiety. They liked to find cause to celebrate. Their house was in a different world to the one in which a war was going on and bombs fell on houses and people were being locked up and tortured. It was as if they were trying to live in a different time.
Isla Figgis played her musical saw in the evenings. She did so that first night we were there. For that occasion, she put on a very old-fashioned white and silver evening frock and took up a chair by the fire, the gleaming saw wedged between her little knees. Well, we just about fell about laughing at the sight of that. Then she started to play, drawing a long, quivering bow across the savage teeth of the instrument. This thin, unearthly music filled the dining room. And we fell quiet. We sat enraptured, just like Michael Figgis did, watching his sister, though he must have heard her play many times before.
Brother and sister were devoted to each other. There was a bond between them of the like I’d never seen. They drew the two of us strangers into their warmth and there we felt secure, almost immediately. Only once or twice we’d wake from the drowsy spell their love put us under, and start to think it a bit out of order. A little unhealthy, perhaps. We’d start to look with outside eyes, at this thing that had grown in their private world. Unconditional love, was what they had. And that they lavished upon the two of us waifs. They had chosen us and we got the full brunt of their attention and care. In those first weeks, even Katy started to relax and relent in their unwavering love. She let Isla Figgis clean her things, even wash her hair as Katy sat in their bath at the top of the house. She came down to dinner that night with her black hair shining like I’d never seen it. She’d even let Isla tie a blue ribbon in it. I admit I laughed at the sight of that: Katy being the properly-behaved little girl. Katy trying to make herself pretty. She wrenched that ribbon out and stomped back up to our room. She pulled that girl’s dress over her head and put some of her old rags from home back on. She sat on her bed and wouldn’t talk to me. Michael Figgis had to go up and talk to her, coaxingly, carefully, damping her resentment down. I wished I hadn’t laughed at her. I knew I had to be careful with Katy: I knew how touchy she was. But I was relaxing, too, in the Figgis’s household. I was letting my own guard drop.
‘They’re filling out, Michael.’ That was one of Isla’s favourite phrases that spring. ‘They’re getting some colour in their cheeks. And look!’ She would clamp her little fingers around my arm, or Katy’s and pinch to show how much flesh we’d gained. ‘Look how much plumper they are!’
This gave us the willies. The way the two of them cooed over how much healthier we were. How we’d filled out. In our bedroom at the top of the house, Katy and I would whisper to each other across the dark space between the beds.
‘They’re feeding us up because they want to eat us,’ said Katy. She loved to say this. She knew I would shriek and hide my head under the heavy counterpane. ‘They’re stoking up the fire and they’re going to shove us in that fucking pot. You watch out.’
We’d laugh ourselves daft over stories like that. We’d only say these things when we were alone in the room they had given us. It was our own world within the Figgises’ world.
Though we laughed, there was still something a bit sinister about the way the two old people examined the bloom in our cheeks. The way they congratulated themselves on the care they were investing in us.
One night, Katy said, ‘They go on daft with us because they can’t have kiddies of their own. That’s what I reckon.’
I scoffed at her. ‘Of course they can’t. They’re brother and sister.’
‘So they can’t,’ said Katy. She left a little gap. ‘And they’re too old as well.’
Something in her words made me feel a bit funny. For a few days after that I watched the Figgises closely. I never had a brother or a real sister, so I didn’t know what was normal. I watched them as they cooked our meals together, as we went around the shops on the high street. I watched Isla’s devoted face, listening to Michael as he read to us in the evenings. She would hug the two of us girls to her tiny form and we would gobble up every word that the bluff old man read aloud. Ghost stories mostly. Very strange ones indeed, which he read from the paper-covered volumes he took down from his shelves. Those books were the only things in the house we weren’t allowed to touch. Only Michael himself could take them down, and he would share fragments of them with us all: his deep voice trembling through that ragged beard. Aunt Isla’s thin fingers clutching our newly-plump arms at all the scary parts.
In the end we couldn’t help congratulating ourselves on our good luck. We saw that the Figgises were soft touches. We had landed on our feet. They were so keen to please us, to look after us and give us everything we needed. We knew this wasn’t the case with other children who’d arrived on our train. Once or twice we saw the girls who’d sat in our carriage with us. The girl with the blonde pigtails and the fat ginger girl. They were in the butcher’s with their new mother, a pinched-face woman who was causing a ruckus over the counter, claiming she was being diddled again. The two girls looked like they’d lost all their spirit. Their hair had been hacked right short and they both wore these awful woollen caps on their heads. They glared at us morosely as we stood behind them in the queue, either side of Isla. Katy and I looked at each other and thanked our lucky stars. We felt proud of our tiny, fairylike adopted mother in that moment.
You’d hear such stories about what work the other kids were put to. People exploited them, used them like servants. We really were at the mercy of whoever we went to. The most that Katy and I ever had to do was work Michael’s allotment with him. He was growing vegetables for his war-work and we went early in the mornings with his barrow. We’d spend the mornings turning over the earth and tugging out these frozen cabbages and beets. It was this work, as much as anything, that put the colour in our cheeks. We’d have a break and sit outside his dilapidated shed, drinking tea from his flask. Nettle tea, which Isla stewed up on her great big pot on the hob. The result was dark green and tarry and, gradually, the two of us got to like it. We never quite got to like the beetroot soup our new parents loved. It was worth waiting for those days when they would produce those magical chocolate bars, suddenly, out of the blue. That happened sporadically, all unannounced, and our guardians gobbled up the chocolate with the same relish we did.
Another of mine and Katy’s tasks was collecting up the nettles from the woods just outside of town for Isla’s specially-brewed tea. We would go soon after it was light on those spring mornings and we took a basket and thick, heavy gloves, to protect our hands from stings. These occas
ions were another time that we had free from the Figgises. We were growing to love the two of them, but they could still be overpowering sometimes. I think the Figgises realised this, and so sent us out on these errands.
We were coming back one day when we saw those girls again. It was on a little lane and the two of them looked just as pale and miserable as they had in the butcher’s. Their hair was growing back, and it stood out in nasty tufts on their heads: one ginger, one pale yellow. We said hello and they sneered at us.
Samantha, the blonde one was called. ‘What’ve you got in your basket then? Are you eating weeds in your house? Dandelions to make you piss in your bed?’
Katy stopped in her tracks and, because she was carrying the other handle of the basket, I could feel her start to tense up. ‘Don’t talk to them,’ I told her. ‘They’re just baldies.’
‘It’s nettles we’ve got,’ Katy snapped back. ‘And we’re gonna stew them up into a magic potion. And it’ll do worse than make your hair fall out.’
This retort was a bigger success than either of us had expected. The fat ginger lass looked alarmed. She grabbed hold of her friend’s arm. Samantha shook her off. ‘Aye, I bet it will, as well.’
‘What’s that meant to mean?’ I knew Katy was really bridling for a fight. She’d been denied any outlet for her anger for weeks. The Figgises were just too good to be angry at. Katy was spoiling for a row by now. She dropped her side of the basket and was clenching her fists.
‘I just said that brewing up potions and spells is just the thing round your house. With them two.’
