Spring Comes to World's End

by Monica Dickens

  Em said nothing. She turned half round to watch. Having finished the beef, Paul licked his lips, licked his paws, and started an innocent washing routine of his back legs and tail. Em turned back to the draining board, with one eye slid backwards to the table. Jump - flash - the swift paw hooked down another piece of meat.

  As Em covered the dish, her heart began to lift again to an idea.

  The next day, she pedalled to the village on Old Red, and bought a tin of cat food. She opened it. took out some of the fishy mush, and put the rest in the tin on the table.

  Paul sat below, busy on the underside of a paw, licking and chewing between the pads.

  Em turned her back. Jump - flash - clonk. Paul hooked the cat food neatly to the floor, stuck in his head and began to eat, following the tin as it rolled round the stone floor.

  Em went to Mr Mismo’s house and asked him to put through a long distance call to the film producer.

  The first slogan that was written for the commercial of Paul hooking down cat food with his paw was, ‘The Paws that Refreshes’; but everyone in the studio groaned at the pun, including Em.

  They changed it to, ‘Chewitt Cat Dinner. Grab it any way you can.’

  And there was Paul, in the studio kitchen, with an open tin of cat food on the table. The actress who played his owner turned her back. Paul jumped, flashed out a paw, and the camera moved in for a close up of his face stuck into the tin of Chewitt Cat Dinner on the floor.

  Afterwards, there was to be a shot of him thanking his owner. Em had been dying to act that part, but although they were still telling her she would be famous some day, they didn’t seem interested in making her famous now.

  The part was played by a middle-aged actress got up to look like one of those sweet, silly old ladies who are supposed to dote on cats. Paul hated her. He would not stay on her lap for a second, much less reach up to her face for a whiskery kiss.

  But months later, when the commercial was shown, there was Paul kissing the actress - actually nuzzling at the side of her face.

  ‘Chewitt Cat Dinner. He’ll love you for ever.’

  ‘How on earth did they make Paul do that?’ Carrie asked, when they were watching on Mr Mismo’s set.

  ‘He’s a good actor.’ Em held Paul on her lap. He stared unblinking at the lighted screen.

  ‘Oh rot. Cats can’t act.’

  ‘I told him what to do,’ Em said. ‘He’ll do anything I tell him.’

  ‘Oh shut up,’ Liza said. ‘Cats don’t do nothing that nobody tells them.’

  ‘It’s done with lights and mirrors,’ Tom said. ‘It’s a trick shot.’

  ‘It’s not, so nyah.’ Em stroked Paul’s sleek black back and smiled smugly. ‘They put a shrimp in the woman’s ear.’

  Twenty-One

  Carrie and Lester spent a week of the holiday with his Aunt Lilian. Lester was still peaky after the accident, and his mother thought a few days by the sea would set him up.

  And he did get set up, in business with Carrie at the snack bar on the pier. The owner’s daughter had gone abroad, and Lester and Carrie were to wash up, and pick up litter, and chop pickles and scoop out ice cream, if they could get their nails clean enough.

  Lester was not supposed to use his broken arm, but as soon as they were on the train, he had taken it out of the sling, and he could do almost everything with it in the plaster cast.

  At first, there wasn’t much to do. The sea was cold and grey, and the wind stung sand into your face. Aunt Lilian’s beds were damp, and her spoons and forks tasted of gravy, whatever you ate with them. The long empty beach was useless without a horse.

  But the lucky chance of the job at the snack bar made it all worthwhile. Good pay, and tips. Carrie and Lester were to work every day. This time, they would go home with money for the red crock.

  Aunt Lilian’s house was outside the town, along the shore. On their first day at the snack bar, Carrie and Lester walked to work on the wide curve of beach, littered with the flotsam of last night’s high winds, which had shaken Aunt Lilian’s house like a giant with a matchbox.

  In a few months’ time, this beach would be full of people, browning or blistering, the water dotted with heads, the edge of the sea trimmed with a band of splashers and shriekers. But on this raw and stormy morning, with the mist blowing in from the sea like rain, the shore was deserted and primeval. You could imagine how England must have looked to those first invading Romans two thousand years ago, where there were no houses or people along the desolate coast.

  And no bottles or tins either. Lester kicked at bits of rubbish on the edge of the sea. Every high tide brought in its offering of human mess.

  But last night’s tide had brought in something else.

  Something black and tarry lay among the seaweed and beer cans of the tidemark. Lester went ahead to see what it was. He peered, knelt down, and yelled against the wind for Carrie.

  It was a big sea bird, choked, smothered, unrecognizable. The head and wings and all the feathers were covered with black oil. The feet were stuck under the tail.

  Lester stood up and looked out to sea. There was nothing to be seen on the choppy grey water, but somewhere out there, a deadly oil slick must be trapping the offshore birds.

  ‘Look, there’s another!’

  At the edge of the sea, a blackened body washed about in the surf. Carrie ran. It was another big bird, still alive. Just alive, exhausted, the feathers on its breast stuck together, exposing the down over the fluttering heart.

  Carrie knelt by it, and put her hand out, but did not touch it. The bird’s round eye looked at her blankly. She raised her head and looked out to where it had come from, her mist-soaked hair blown across her face. She wanted to scream and sob her rage at the polluted sea.

  But Lester pulled off the wide knitted scarf his aunt had forced on him, wrapped up the bird, and ran with it to the lone house of the painter that stood at the edge of the dunes.

  The door towards the sea was boarded up for storms, the windows streaked with salt. But in the cluttered kitchen at the back, the painter was having breakfast with a tin mug and tin plates. When Lester knocked on the window and held up the bird, he came to the door at once.

  ‘My God,’ he said, without asking questions. ‘So it’s true.’

  He took the bird close to the fire, and wrapped a piece of blanket round Lester’s scarf. ‘There was a rumour last night that an oil slick had been spotted somewhere,’ he said. ‘This is an eider. He comes from far out.’

  ‘There’s a dead bird on the beach too,’ Lester said.

  ‘And hundreds of others, there will be.’ The painter was tall and spare, with a stubble of beard and a darkly weathered face that could be any age. ‘We’ll have to get a search going. Want to help?’

  ‘Of course.’ Lester and Carrie spoke together, then looked at each other. The job. The money. But the money didn’t seem important at all when you looked at this bird, this dying victim.

  In his sea-rusted Jeep, the painter dropped them by the pier to explain at the snack bar, before he drove on to alert the people who would organise the search and rescue.

  Lester hung back. He often would not talk to people he did not really know. Carrie went into the snack bar. She was just opening her mouth to ask the owner if she could manage without them, when the woman said, ‘Oh dear, you two kids. I hoped you wouldn’t turn up. I do feel bad.’

  ‘Why?’

  No work today? Carrie stood poised to run out to Lester, and follow the painter.

  ‘Well, I know you want the money, but so does this girl who turned up last night. She worked for me last summer.’

  The girl was at the sink at the back, in fringed leather shorts and hat, washing dishes furiously in gallons of hot suds to her elbows. She looked round and grinned triumphantly at Carrie. It was her sink.

  ‘She can have it.’

  Carrie and Lester ran back down the echoing pier, and along the sea front after the painter’s Jeep.
/>   Twenty-Two

  They worked for two days and a night, with dozens of other volunteers, to find as many birds as possible, and take them to the rescue station, where they could be fed and cleaned, or put to sleep if they were fatally contaminated.

  ‘I thought you were so dead set on earning money to take home,’ Aunt Lilian said, when they dropped off a rescue lorry at her house to tell her what was happening, and cram down some gravy-tasting food.

  ‘We were.’ Carrie had sent home a postcard announcing the fortune they would bring back. But that didn’t matter. Nothing mattered except wolfing some food to keep them going, and getting out again to the birds.

  They searched the beach all night. They had torches, and the headlights of Jeeps and Land Rovers, which took the birds to the cleaning station, wrapped in sacks to stop them preening their tarry feathers and swallowing oil.

  The wind had dropped, and the sky was clearing. After midnight, the merciful moon came out to whiten the beaches, and show up the black lumps that floated or struggled in from the treacherous sea. There was a desperate, grim urgency in all the searchers, men and women and the children like Carrie and Lester, that kept them going through the long chilly night.

  Some of the time, Carrie felt that she was walking in her sleep alone, unaware of Lester or any of the other figures who plodded down the long shore, her boots endlessly dragging through the wet sand, the roar and hush-sh-sh of the sea for ever in her ears.

  Then what had been a black rock moved, flopped and floundered, and automatically she darted between the bird and the sea, so as not to drive him back into the water. The bird staggered up the beach awkwardly, as if he was an offshore bird like an eider or a sawbill, and there was Lester, with a sack and rescuing arms, and a set white face drained of everything but exhaustion.

  There was no emotion any more. At first there had been sorrow and anger at each bird dead, or hideously contaminated. Now there was just the job to be done.

  At dawn, they dragged themselves home for a few hours of sleep. Aunt Lilian, who had a son in the lifeboat service, and understood battles against the sea, woke them as she had promised.

  ‘Though Lester’s mother won’t like it,’ she told Carrie, whose tired eyes fought to cope with the sunlit breakfast table. ‘He’s supposed to be here for his own health, not the birds’.’

  ‘Same thing.’ Lester stumbled down the stairs, in the rumpled clothes in which he had slept, his hair in dark spikes, his arm hanging heavy in the dirty plaster cast, frayed at the edges like a beggar’s rags.

  ‘You’re not using that arm?’ His aunt put down plates of greasy sausages, fried bread, flabby bacon, and eggs with burned edges and broken yolks. She was a good aunt, but not because of her cooking.

  ‘Of course not.’ Lester changed the fork to his good hand, and put the other in his shirt front like Napoleon.

  ‘Your mother will kill me.’

  ‘Then you won’t tell her, will you, Aunt Lilian?’ Lester said sweetly.

  On the second day, they went to the rescue station to help feed the shocked and starving birds with sprats and herring, and to clean off the oil from the ones that might survive.

  Outside the building, the corpses of birds were piled up in long rows. Hundreds and hundreds of them. Some had been brought in dead. Others were so badly oiled that an injection of death was the kindest rescue.

  Carrie had seen dead animals and birds, but never wholesale death like this. She stood outside the building with her hair hanging over her numb face, and mourned for the lost sea birds.

  In the whole of her life, she would never see anything as terrible as this. She felt as if she had lived her life. She felt very old. And yet her hand moved out to take hold of Lester’s hand, as if she were very young.

  ‘I want more kids in here to clean birds!’ a voice shouted.

  ‘Come on.’ Lester pulled at Carrie’s hand. ‘There’s nothing to do here. We’re needed inside.’

  They worked all day, washing the sea birds with a chemical soap that would remove the tar without too much of the natural oils, rinsing them in a tub and drying them with hair dryers.

  Then they tried to stuff bits of fish into their beaks and make them swallow. Some of the birds died of shock before the cleaning was finished. But they would have died anyway if the oil had been left on them. Many of them refused to eat. Even those who were washed and fed, and looked all right in the warm cages, would have to stay a year in captivity before they would recover enough insulating oils in their feathers to live again in their natural home far out at sea.

  Carrie held the neck of a big eider duck between the fork of her fingers, while her other hand rubbed in the soap. He crouched still on the bench, not struggling. But when she washed his downy breast, she felt his small heart beating frantically.

  When she held him in a towel in her lap while Lester dried him, his heart slowed. His eye was clearer.

  ‘That chap might make it.’ The R.S.P.C.A. man stopped and put his hand on the duck’s narrow head.

  ‘If he does,’ Carrie had an idea, ‘could we take him home?’

  ‘They’re terribly difficult to care for.’

  ‘Miss Etty would help us,’ Lester said. ‘She’s a bird genius.’

  Miss Etty lived near World’s End in a house with a tree growing up through the middle, full of the birds she befriended. Anyone who found an injured bird or a fallen fledgeling took it to her. She would know how to care for this duck.

  And then they would set him free. Carrie saw herself with Lester on a sunny, breezy beach, with sparkles of light on the points of the waves. She carried the duck. She raised him high, opened her arms, and as he flew out to sea on his great wings, she felt her heart fly with him, rejoicing in life.

  ‘We’ll see.’ The man’s voice brought her back to the reality of the hot, crowded shed, and the duck on her lap, his heavy body warm from the dryer, his eye round and unwinking, showing no thoughts. ‘Try and get him to eat.’

  Carrie and Lester got some sprats down his long neck, and some chunks of herring. He was going to live. They would take him home, get fish for him somehow - the cats would be furious - get him used to water again, watch him grow stronger…

  As Carrie held him, his head suddenly dropped on to his breast. He sagged against her. The big soft body was still warm, but in an instant life had left it. Their eider duck was a heavy dead bird in her lap.

  Lester carried him outside and laid him with the others. Carrie went back to the bench, and a boy came in with a sack and gave her another bird to start washing.

  Twenty-Three

  When Lester’s mother had driven her home to World’s End from the station, Carrie went straight to the meadow.

  Rescuing the sea birds had been a strange and urgent adventure, but behind all the drama and urgency, and the triumph of the birds that were saved, and the tragedy of the birds that died, the horses had run through the steady inward centre of her mind that was never quite without them.

  Peter and Oliver and big contented Roy were grazing at the top of the field, but John was down near the gate, as if he knew the time of the train.

  Carrie went into the field. He smelled her hands, checking to see if she had had any dealings with other horses, just as Charlie had checked her for strange dogs as soon as she got out of Mrs Figg’s car. John blew over her hair, then put his soft, damp muzzle to her face, and they stood and breathed into each other’s noses, communicating more things than Carrie could ever express in words.

  She went into the house to change into riding clothes, and to start telling the sea bird saga that she would be telling for days, to anyone who would listen.

  But as often happens when you have a lot to tell, there was no one at home to tell it to.

  There were various notes on the kitchen table, which was the message centre of the house.

  ‘Out to supper and none of your business who with. Liza.’

  ‘That last bit of cake is mine. I spat on i
t. Tom.’

  ‘Gon to do shoping erans in vilge for Miz Chatwy. Luv to anyon who cares. Micale.’

  ‘Gone to studio. Back some time or never. Em.’

  Studio, what studio? It could not be television dog food commercials again, because Charlie was at home.

  Carrie went up to her room, loving the safe and welcoming feel of this old house. The rooms, the passages, the stairs … her feet knew every inch of floor, the dips and slopes in the stone tiles, the worn hollow in the door sill, the cracks in the wood. Her hand knew every latch and door knob. It brushed the backs of familiar chairs, and slid up the smooth wood of the bannister that led her up to her own corner room.

  The bed greeted her, unmade as she had left it, the exercise book in which she had been writing her Book of Horses shoved under the blanket.

  It was open to what she had been writing the morning she left:

  A week without horses is like a week without food.

  How can it do me or Lester any good?

  To leave your horse is to leave a part of you.

  If I remember John all the time, will he remember me too?

  Her riding clothes were on the floor. The horse pictures she cut out of the newspapers and magazines papered the walls. The windows showed her the stable and the sloping meadow. The room smelled of horses and dogs, and of herself.

  Uncle Rudolf said that when he sold this land to the developers, he would have the house torn down, and run a bulldozer over where it had been.

  Mr Peasly’s taxi stopped in the lane with its well-known brake complaint. A door slammed, the taxi drove off, and someone came into the house.

  Carrie went down. It was Em. She was wearing decent shoes and a skirt, and carrying Paul in a shopping bag.

  ‘Oh, hullo,’ she said casually, as if Carrie had only been away for the day.

  (’Kiss your sister,’ Aunt Val used to say, not knowing that sisters never kiss.)