It was obvious from that smell that no one had lived here in months.
The second thing you noticed was the mess.
All across the hallway were strewn papers and folders. Books bent back hard on their spines, with buckled pages and half-ripped corners. A side table had been toppled, the contents of a small drawer spilling out and trailing like a tongue toward the floor.
“Oh dear.” Mum treaded carefully across the debris, the occasional worrying scrunch under her feet, and pushed open a door into a different room. I followed.
The curtains were still drawn in what, I assumed, was the sitting room. What little light there was struggled to reveal anything. Now, one of the few good things about my condition—my inability to see color—is that I can actually see pretty well in the dark. Everything is much clearer to me than to other people, so they reckon. The outlines of shapes are more defined. The detail more obvious. Call it a lucky side effect, if you like. So, to me, the mess in the sitting room was easy to see. However, my mother was finding it difficult, so I grabbed the nearest curtain and pulled it hard.
If there were a carpet, you would never have known. The floor had more papers and folders and bits and bobs thrown all over it. An armchair had been rolled onto its side, and the cushions on a nearby sofa were all pulled out of place. On a table near another door sat a number of dirty plates and bowls, a small cloud of flies buzzing over them. A picture of a ship on the wall was hung at a very dodgy angle and it looked as though nothing had been dusted for a long, long time.
“There’s been a robbery,” I said. “Somebody’s broken in and turned the place over.”
Mum smiled and shook her head. “No. I doubt it.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, your uncle Jonah was a brilliant man. Absolutely brilliant. The cleverest man I ever knew. He could come up with the most incredible ideas, and find their solutions, like that.” She clicked her fingers in front of my face. “He was a genius. No question.” She looked about at the scruffy sitting room. “However, one of the things he always had difficulty with was taking good care of himself and his belongings. Sometimes, when he was in the middle of a brilliant idea, he would forget to eat—he ended up in hospital once due to not eating. Or he would neglect his appearance—his hair and beard would grow far too long and his clothes would start to look dirty. The other thing he didn’t do very well was to clean up after himself. Remember, I grew up with him, and even as a child he never tidied his room. In fact”—she gave a wink—“he reminds me an awful lot of you.”
“Ugh!” I moaned. “I couldn’t live in a place like this. Just look at it.”
“Well, this is your home now, Auden,” she said, scraping a finger along a very dust-lined shelf and inspecting it. “So you need to get used to it. Come on. Let’s grab some sacks and start filling them.”
CHAPTER 4
TRINITY
You see, the house had once belonged to my uncle Jonah. Jonah Bloom. Doctor Jonah Bloom. A brilliant physicist and mathematician at the University of Cambridge. Jonah Bloom, MA (Oxon), PhD (Cantab), to use his full and correct academic name. My mother’s brother. He had spent years working in the areas of artificial intelligence and synchronicity. Apparently. Not that I had any sort of clue as to what that meant. We haven’t done much of that in school recently!
He was only thirty-eight when he was discovered dead in a field close to Unicorn Cottage. Just six years older than my mother.
Heart attack, they said.
Stress from overwork, they said.
Unable to cope, they said.
When he died, he left all of his worldly possessions to his only living relative: Christabel Dare (née Bloom). Wife of Leo Dare. Mother of Auden.
My mum.
All his worldly possessions. And that included Unicorn Cottage.
* * *
The room that was to become my bedroom overlooked the garden and the lifeless beech tree. A large metal bed took up most of the space, and I think I’d once slept in it when we visited Uncle Jonah a few years before. Before the war started. Before my dad went off to fight.
I tried to make the room mine. I hung all my clothes in the flimsy wardrobe. I put some of my sketches on the wall—even the really bad one of my dad chowing down on ice cream. I kept my pencils and my pads on the tiny desk squished up next to the door. I put Sandwich’s bed on the floor alongside my own.
Sandwich had made herself at home as soon as she had arrived. She skulked out first thing in the morning, popping back for food and the occasional tickle and sleep. In the evening, she would skulk back out again before bringing something dead into the kitchen and dropping it like a gift on the floor for us. Sometimes, though, it wasn’t dead. If it was a mouse, it would skitter off under the tables and dressers until Mum would manage to drop a metal colander over it, slide a large piece of cardboard underneath—petrified squeaks as she did so (from the mouse, not my mother)—and carry the poor thing out to the bottom of the garden, freeing it near the ramshackle collection of sheds that Uncle Jonah had acquired and filled full of utter junk.
When not trying to catch mice, Mum spent those first few days busying herself, making the place nice and arranging our water rationing. She went off into the town and filled the cupboards with food from the shops and markets.
One day, I went with her. We both got into the Bot Job and, after the fourth or fifth attempt, the engine started and we trundled on our way. We drove up the long road to the roundabout with the big hospital and then farther on into town. The houses were large and long with big wrought-iron gates and everything looked clean and neat.
Eventually, we got to the shopping area and Mum parked the car, which seemed to just shudder itself to death when she turned off the ignition.
Most of the shops were open. Only a handful looked closed with big boarded-up windows and TO RENT signs sticking out at right angles to the walls. Which surprised me, as most of the shops in Forest Gate had long been abandoned. In Forest Gate, you had to walk or catch the bus all the way in to Stratford to get to any real places to buy stuff. There was nothing in Forest Gate. Not even a sweetshop.
Here, people—mostly women and old men, of course—were working their way along the shopping precinct, nipping in and out of the hardware shops and paper shops and clothing stores, stumping about with their carrier bags.
We slipped into one of the electrical shops and Mum bought a new toaster, which was on sale. Fifty percent off. Only fifteen thousand pounds. A bargain. She pushed it down into the bottom of her little hemp sack and carried on.
At the end of the pedestrianized area we turned the corner toward the food markets. And the world seemed to change.
The buildings suddenly seemed to leap back in time.
The pedestrianized area had been lined on each side by incredibly shiny and modern-looking buildings. Brand-spanking-new (or newish) and sterile and dull.
But these buildings …
Huge and impressive, with wide arched doors and slim-cut windows. Spires and battlements and straight-out-of-the-ground columns. Flat, even lawns lay stretched in front of the buildings, some of which looked like churches, some of which looked like castles. Even the roads had changed from spacious, level tarmac to narrow cobblestones.
“What are these?” I asked my mother, my head swiveling from one side of the road to the other as we walked.
“Colleges. The Cambridge Colleges. Part of the university.”
Trapped in between the walls of the old buildings, however—sitting in the center of the old road—was a massive slice of modern life. The rectangular, shiny vending machine—perhaps a quarter of a mile long—looked completely out of place here. Row upon row and column upon column of metallic drawers, each of them with a small scrolling screen on the front revealing what was inside and the price.
King Edward Potatoes, it flashed on some of the drawers. £5000 a bag.
Carrots … fresh today … £1000.
&n
bsp; Beef steak … £80000.
Naturally, very few people were buying any of the meat—hardly anyone could afford it, after all. So the chilled drawers of beef and chicken and lamb and pork mostly remained untouched.
The shoppers’ chattering voices all blurred into one another and bounced off the stone walls in this strangely cramped street, while a couple of the squat, rather funny-looking Dodo drones were busy cleaning and refilling the empty drawers from a supply trolley, their short, shuffling feet making them waddle from side to side.
“The university? Where Uncle Jonah worked?” I asked eventually.
She nodded. “Yes. He was a fellow of Trinity College.”
“A fellow?”
Mum shrugged. “I don’t really know what it means,” she said, and fed a thick handful of notes into the slot next to one of the drawers. The door lowered, there was a happy sort of bleep, and a small paper bag of potatoes was gently pushed out into her hands. “But I think it means he was very high up. Very clever.” She took the potatoes and shoved them into the hemp sack alongside the toaster.
“Where’s Trinity College?” I asked. “Which one’s Trinity?”
“I don’t know.”
“Can we go and find it?”
“What? Now?”
“Why not?”
Mum sighed. “But there are things at the house that I need to do, Auden. Things that can’t wait.”
I put on one of my puleeeeease faces—she can never resist one of my puleeeeease faces—and she shook her head, giving herself up to the idea.
She asked one of the other shoppers and he pointed us in the right direction. We made our way along the street and turned off down an even narrower and much quieter cobblestone road.
A couple of signposts later and we were standing outside the main entrance to Trinity College. Set back slightly from the main lane, it was one of the ones that looked like a castle with towers either side of the main door, each with funny stunted turrets.
To the right of the main portcullis-style door was a smaller entrance, and we watched as two young men—clearly not conscripted—both dressed like that old comic book hero Batman with capes and funny hats, slipped in through this second door.
“Shall we have a look?” I asked.
“I don’t think we’re allowed, are we?”
“We could try. See what happens.”
“Well…”
“Come on.”
We both walked in through the small door, Mum a few steps behind me.
The room we entered felt a little bit like a tunnel. To the rear of us was the door through which we had just come, and ahead of us was a larger, open door leading out onto a green square. But the room itself was dark.
Along one of the walls I could make out row upon row of boxes, each of them with tiny names written on them.
“What is it?” Mum couldn’t see as clearly as I could see in this half-light.
“Boxes. Pigeonholes. For mail.”
The boxes were in alphabetical order and in some of them, envelopes and sheets of paper curved or slumped to one side.
I went in closer and ran my fingers over the names. When I got to Jonah Bloom, I froze. The pigeonhole was empty, that was to be expected. But the fact that the university authorities hadn’t removed his name, despite the fact that it had been a good six or seven months since Uncle Jonah had died, gave me a chill. Perhaps it was just because if they removed his name then—because it was all alphabetical—they would have to move everybody else (with a surname that came after Bloom), too. Shift them all along one place. Perhaps they just didn’t want to have to bother with all that.
Mum came alongside me, saw the name and ran her fingers over the lettering.
“You all right, Mum?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said unconvincingly. “I’m okay.”
We walked out through the other door into the brightness of the morning once again. Some of the young students flapping about in their weird costumes gave us a quick glance but otherwise nobody paid us any attention. The square into which we stepped was unlike anything I’d ever seen before. Surrounded on all four sides by lots of different tall windowed walls, it felt a little like a really old prison—though there were loads of doors leading onto other places. The grass was neatly trimmed but dull, and a weird domed fountain thing sat oddly off-center, looking like it needed a good shove to put it into its correct position—like an accident nobody ever repaired.
Mum and I stared up at all the windows, neither of us saying—but both of us wondering—which one belonged to Uncle Jonah. Our feet tapped lightly on the flagstones as we worked our way across the quad.
In the far corner, we found ourselves drifting through another small door into a passageway with cold stone steps—like those from a dungeon—leading upward.
“Shall we go up?” I asked, pointing up the stairs.
“No,” Mum answered quickly. “No. Let’s not. I don’t think I want to get farther into this place. It’s cold. Let’s get out of here. Knowing he used to work here … I don’t think I like it.”
“Okay, Mum.”
Instead of taking the stairs we found another door coming out onto a small pebbly path to the side of the college. We followed the path around a corner until the skyline opened up a bit and the remnants of a river flickered in the sun.
“Sorry. It was silly of me to make you go into the college. I just thought that … I thought that perhaps that was one of the reasons for moving to Cambridge in the first place. To … sort of … find him.”
Mum tried that squeezing-the-shoulder thing with me again, and this time I thought I’d better allow her to have it.
“There’re a load of reasons for moving here, Auden. Loads. That might be one of them, I suppose. But it’s not one of the main ones.” She smiled. “We were paying a lot of rent in London. With Dad away, we were really starting to struggle. And then poor Jonah passed away, leaving us with a tiny bit of money and his house. A house we could live in free of rent. And what with the situation in London—I just thought we could live a better life here. Start again. Wipe the window clean and start from the beginning.”
“Yeah.” I nodded, not saying anything else.
CHAPTER 5
SNOWFLAKE 843A
Uncle Jonah’s death had come as a surprise to everyone—particularly Mum. She took it hard.
Now, I suppose that’s the thing with having older brothers or sisters—they start off bigger and braver than you, so you imagine they’ll always be bigger and braver than you. You imagine them going on and on and that they’ll be there forever. (Not that I’ve any experience of that myself. Being an only child means I’ve missed out on that particular perspective of existence—yet another thing to add to the list!)
Of course, older brothers and sisters don’t go on forever, and they aren’t always bigger and braver than you. Only, most people have an entire lifetime to come to realize that. But Mum had to discover it a little too early.
What with Dad being away and the whole war thing going on, I suppose it was inevitable that, as soon as the keys to Unicorn Cottage had been handed over by the solicitor, Mum was going to want to try to get closer to her late brother. There was nothing really holding either of us in London anymore, so why not? Why not move into Uncle Jonah’s old house? The whole “moving” thing was, in a way, a sort of therapy for her. Perhaps, over time, when this stupid war had run itself into the earth and Dad had returned, she would come to terms with her own brother’s death, and life would just move on as it should.
But for now …
For now, she was surrounding herself with Uncle Jonah’s things, seeing sights that Uncle Jonah would see every day. It was a sort of grieving process, I guess.
Of course, she wasn’t the only one who was sad about Jonah Bloom’s death. I’d lost an uncle—a bonkers, fluttering genius of an uncle who would send me pictures of the phases of the moon and old, unsolvable cryptic crosswords and yellowing books on European amp
hibians. A man who once told me that everything in life goes around in a circle—the planets, the universe, the days, evolution, molecules, blood … even water. All of it on a long-winded journey back to where it all began. I’ve no idea what he meant, but it sounded impressive. Most things he said sounded impressive.
Once, he had visited us in London and taken me out for a walk. We made our way to where the old canal had once flowed—me with my coat pulled tight across my shoulders, him with his wild, flailing arms pointing and drawing figures in the sky. Always talking. Always explaining.
Dilapidated houseboats, sucked down by the mud, lolled unevenly down in the wide groove that had once been filled to the top with water.
Uncle Jonah gesticulated all about.
“Tell me, Auden.… Tell me, what do you see?”
I twisted this way and that. “Er … some buildings. An old bin. A couple of smashed-up boats. A bit of rope. A man over there with a limp.”
Jonah smiled.
“Why?” I asked. “What do you see?”
“Well”—he straightened himself up and looked around—“obviously I see everything that you see—you missed that half-ripped-up bench over there, by the way.” He pointed and I nodded. “But the thing you must always remember is that what you see—whatever images pass themselves across the retinas of your eyes—is not what will always be.”
“Eh?” He sometimes did that. Talked like what he was saying was obvious even though it wasn’t.
“What I mean is, that image,” he said, sweeping his arm out toward the canal, “is not the end of the story. It is not fixed. It is not how it will be for the rest of time. For example, those ‘smashed-up boats,’ as you put it, may one day soon be stripped apart and the wood reclaimed for another purpose. Something useful. They may be rebuilt, or even disintegrate, rotting into the mud. We simply can’t assume that the broken boats are broken boats and that is that. Broken boats forever. Everything evolves in some way or another—either with or without our help. The old bin may be put right and serve its purpose once more. The limping man may simply have a blister on his foot and recover in a day or two. On the other hand, it may be the onset of bone cancer, and he will die soon.”
The Extraordinary Colors of Auden Dare Page 2
