Raven Summer

by David Almond

  “No.”

  “Tch. Look, I’m in the middle of something.”

  I want to shove the door open. It’s not long since I used to sit under his desk drawing pictures and scribbling as he wrote. Not that long since I even sat on his knee as he wrote.

  “We found something,” I say through the door.

  “Good!”

  “We don’t know what to do about it.”

  “Hell’s teeth, Liam! You’re a big lad now, you know.”

  He comes to the door. There he is with his scruffy beard and his hair all messy. There’s the screen glaring on the desk behind him. There’s the pages of scribble lying all over the floor. There’s the walls filled with books and books and books.

  “I’m in the middle of something,” he says again.

  He yells at the sky and shakes his fists as a jet flies past.

  “Go and bomb Tony Blair!”

  “We found a baby,” I say.

  “You found a what?”

  “A baby, by the river.”

  He stares at me, like I’m a hundred miles away.

  “And where’s the baby now?” he says.

  “Downstairs, on the kitchen table. And she needs some milk.”

  4

  Even when he’s standing there looking at her and touching her cheek with his finger, he says,

  “You’re having me on, aren’t you? It’s one of your lot, Max, isn’t it?” He rolls his eyes. “And how come you just happened to be at the right spot to find her?”

  “A raven took us,” I say.

  “It led us through the village and down the fields,” says Max.

  Dad grins.

  “Hey, nice touch, lads. But you’ll have to write it yourself if you want all this in a story. I’ve not got the time.”

  He raises his hands.

  “Look, Liam,” he says. “I know it’s a pain that I’m so busy, but I’ve got to get on with this book.”

  “And there was this as well,” I say.

  I put the jar of money and the note onto the table.

  He narrows his eyes.

  “Is this true?” He sighs. “It is, isn’t it? That’s all I need.”

  Dad calls the police. Max holds his knuckle to the baby’s mouth and lets her suck on it.

  “She thinks it’ll give her milk,” he says. “She’ll be bawling when she sees there’s no chance.” He strokes her cheek. “There, there. We’re going to sort you out, sweetheart.”

  Dad puts the phone down. The police are on their way. He stares at the baby. She opens her mouth and screams.

  “What should we do, Max?” asks Dad.

  Max looks inside the blanket.

  “She needs her nappy changed,” he says.

  “We can’t do that,” says Dad. “We should wait for the police before we go ahead and do anything like that.”

  The baby bawls on. Dad makes a coffee. He scribbles in a notebook.

  “So it wasn’t a crow or a rook?” he says. “They all look the same to me. Birds. Black.”

  “Raven,” says Max. “It’s bigger than a crow.”

  “And it was the same one, all the way?”

  “Aye,” says Max.

  Dad scribbles.

  “You can tame them, can’t you?” he says.

  “Aye. And eat them if you’re daft enough.”

  Dad nibbles his thumbnail. He scratches his beard. He peers into the jar and scribbles again.

  “And there was a hiker, with a red hat?”

  “Yes,” I say. “Like there’s always hikers.”

  “And the snake was an adder, yes? And it’s the heat they like, yes?”

  “Aye,” says Max.

  “And did you ever hear about anything like this happening out here before, Max?”

  “Happens all the time,” says Max. “We’re always finding babies by the river with jars of loot beside them.”

  I stash the knife with the money in my bedroom before the police arrive. There’s two of them, PC Ball ands WPC Jenkins. They’re wearing bulletproof vests over their short-sleeved shirts.

  “Do you really need to turn up like we’re a bunch of crack dealers?” says Dad.

  “It’s policy, Mr. Lynch,” says PC Ball. “No need to take it personally.”

  “You never know who’s got a gun or a knife in their pocket,” says WPC Jenkins.

  “Even out here in the peaceful spots,” says Ball.

  He looks at me. I look straight back at him. He grins.

  “Or are you all little angels out here, eh?” He winks. “Any chance of a cuppa, sir?”

  They write it all down: the journey, the discovery, the journey home. They write about the snake. They raise their eyebrows at the bit about the raven, but they write it anyway. They write a description of the hiker.

  “Walking gear,” says PC Ball. “Red cap. Could be a man or a woman. Not too specific, is it, lads?”

  “They weren’t close by,” I say. “And the sun was glaring.”

  “And Rook Hall?” he says. “It’s on a walking route, eh? So they left her in a place where they knew she’d be found.”

  “They?” says Dad.

  “It’s usually the mum,” says PC Ball. “They’re too young, they can’t cope, something like that.”

  “She’ll need help as much as the baby,” says WPC Jenkins. “She’ll turn up in the end. She’ll not be able to stay away from her child.”

  They phone headquarters: the area around Rook Hall needs to be sectioned off and searched.

  “They’ll be contacting all the hospitals now,” says WPC Jenkins. “They’ll get messages to the GPs. Somebody some-where’ll know something. They’re looking for the hiker. These things don’t stay mysteries for long.”

  A motorbike screams on the military road. A jet howls past. Dad growls at it. PC Ball sips his tea.

  “Peaceful out here, isn’t it?” he says.

  An ambulance turns up. A couple of young paramedics in orange jumpsuits come in.

  “Abandoned?” says the girl, Doreen. She lifts the baby. “Who’d abandon a lovely little lass like this?”

  She holds the baby up high.

  “Girls are gorgeous!” she says. “But my goodness, they can stink! Pooee! But guess what I brought, just for you? Nappies! Hurray!”

  She changes the baby on the draining board. She murmurs all the time, she makes her eyes wide and bright, she coos and squeaks.

  “Perfect as a picture. And sweetly smelling as a rose. Now, would our lovely little girly like some milk?”

  She feeds it from a bottle. The baby snuffles and sucks, and after a while just goes to sleep, and Doreen sits there with the baby on her lap. She smiles and sighs.

  “You found a proper little angel, lads,” she says.

  The paramedics take the baby away. The police take the basket and the note and the jar of cash. They say they’ll be in touch. There’ll be lots more to ask, lots more to talk about. They’re just about to leave when PC Ball says, like he’s suddenly remembered to say it,

  “Thank you, lads. You’ve been good citizens.”

  “What else could we do?” says Max.

  “Oh, you’d be surprised.” He tightens the straps on his bulletproof vest. “Some lads in your position, seeing all that cash …” He grins at me. “Know what I mean, lads?”

  I look straight back at him.

  “No,” I say.

  “That’s great. And you weren’t—even a good lad like you, Liam, even for a few seconds—tempted, were you?”

  “What?” snaps Dad. “What exactly are you suggesting?”

  “Oh, nothing, sir,” says PC Ball. “But in our position, you always have to allow yourself to wonder.”

  And he looks at me for a moment, then they’re gone.

  We sit at the kitchen table. Dad says he should get on, but he doesn’t move. Scribbles a bit in his notebook. Stares and ponders. He’s doing what he does to just about everything, turning it into a story.

&nb
sp; “How old do you think she was?” he says.

  “A few months,” says Max. “Mebbe four.”

  I imagine Mum holding me up high when I was a few months old and saying, Boys are gorgeous! We were in Newcastle way back then, stony broke. We were right on the brink, Mum used to say.

  Dad keeps on scribbling.

  The fields are shimmering outside the kitchen window. There’s cattle, sheep, hedges, copses, the blue blue sky. And more jets, black and silent over the hazy wind turbines at Hallington Ridge.

  Then there’s footsteps outside, and here’s Gordon Nattrass at the door. I go to him.

  “You said you’d come to the field,” he says. “And you didn’t.”

  “We got sidetracked,” I tell him.

  “You weren’t avoiding us, then?”

  “Course we weren’t.”

  We watch each other.

  He’s still carrying the saw. There’s a sack slung over his shoulder. “You’re missing out, brother,” he says. “We had a great time.” Then he goes. A few drops of blood drip from the sack as he walks away.

  5

  It’s late when Mum comes home. Max has gone. Dad’s upstairs. There’s a smell of cigarette smoke on her, and that look in her eyes she has these days when she comes back from town.

  “What a day,” she says. “Lunch with Sue, then of course the gallery launch, then of course we go on for drinks.”

  “But you drove,” I say.

  “I just had a teeny weeny bit.” She pours a big glass of red wine. She points to the ceiling. “His nibs is at work?”

  I nod.

  She puts her hands to her face and beams.

  “They’re going to show my work, Liam. In a brand-new gallery right slap bang in the middle of Newcastle. This is big, son.”

  She swigs her wine, closes her eyes, sighs.

  “Was Jack Scott there?” I say.

  She looks me straight in the eye.

  “He was,” she says. “And what about you? Had a good day? Been with lovely Max?”

  “Aye,” I say.

  “Lovely.”

  She stares out the kitchen window, into the darkness. She hums some old tune. One of her paintings is just beside us on the wall: slashes of green for fields and brown for walls and bark and blue for sky. A great jagged slab of red hangs right across the center. Her name’s in black in the left-hand corner: Kate Lynch. People say they like her paintings for the wildness that’s in them, for the edge of violence they see in them.

  It’s about time to start the baby story when the phone rings. She doesn’t want to answer it. I pick it up.

  A man’s voice.

  “Is that Liam Lynch?”

  “Yes.”

  “Hello there, Liam. Could I ask you about your little adventure today?”

  I gulp.

  “Depends,” I say. “Who’s this?”

  Who is it? says Mum’s face.

  “Oh, sorry, Liam. This is Michael Martin from the Chronicle. We had a little nod from the police. We’d love to know about your baby.”

  “It’s not my baby,” I say, then I let the phone drop.

  Martin’s voice goes on. I click it off.

  Mum tilts her head.

  “Well?” she says.

  “You’ll not believe it,” I say. “But here goes.”

  The phone rings a couple of times as I’m talking. We don’t answer it.

  Dad yells down:

  “Will you answer the bloody phone, Liam!”

  Then he comes down himself.

  “Oh,” he says. “You’re back. Hi.”

  “Hi,” says Mum. “And I thought I was the one making news today.”

  6

  ITV send a car next day. Max and his mother are in the front with the presenter Joe Tynan. Max is full of it. He’s wearing a freshly ironed blue shirt and clean jeans. His hair’s plastered down with gel.

  “Isn’t it exciting?” says Mrs. Woods. “You’re going to be on tonight, Liam. And the Chronicle’s been on, and the Journal.”

  She smoothes Max’s hair.

  “Now, make sure you both speak clearly,” she says.

  She waves at my mum as she steps out of the back door.

  “Hello, Mrs. Lynch,” she says. “Isn’t this a turnup?”

  Mum giggles.

  “It’s a hoot. Liam and Max on the telly!”

  “Oh, and that poor baby!” says Mrs. Woods.

  “I know,” says Mum. “And she was in my house and you know I never even saw her.”

  “Poor little mite,” says Mrs. Woods.

  Joe Tynan rubs his hands and grins as he looks out at the scenery. He says he just loves it out here. What a setting for this bit of news. The story’s got the lot. It’ll more than likely go national, even further.

  Dad snorts. He’s in the kitchen doorway drinking coffee.

  “We’d like you to be in this, too,” says Joe Tynan.

  “Me?” says Dad.

  “Yes. You’re Patrick Lynch, aren’t you? It’s an honor to meet you, sir. In fact, we’d just been talking about doing a feature on you.”

  Dad’s face twists.

  “And now this!” says Joe Tynan. “It’s just like one of your books, isn’t it?”

  “What?” says Dad.

  “It is,” says Joe Tynan. “The wandering lads, a strange child, the message, the treasure …”

  “Treasure,” says Dad. “It’s hardly—”

  “And there’s the other thing, too.”

  “The other thing?”

  “Max’s been telling me. The raven, Mr. Lynch. The trek across the fields, the snake, which all seems like pretty weird stuff.”

  “Weird stuff?”

  “Magic, Mr. Lynch. That’s what we’re talking about. Magic, taking place in the fields and lanes of Northumberland.”

  “Hell’s teeth! Is that the angle you’re going for?”

  “It’s not an angle, Mr. Lynch. And after all, there’s plenty magic at work in your stories.”

  “But they are stories.”

  “Exactly,” he says. “They are stories, and this is—”

  “The real world,” says Dad.

  “Correct,” says Joe. “But as you’ve said many times yourself, the real world is the very very strangest of places.”

  Dad snorts again.

  “Of course it is!” he says. “But it doesn’t need magic to make it strange.”

  Joe just smiles.

  “There’ll be a perfectly rational explanation,” says Dad.

  “Could be,” says Joe. He rubs his hands and grins again. “But until the explanation turns up, what other approach do you suggest we take?”

  Six o’clock that evening we’re all in front of the TV. Mum’s got a glass of wine. Dad’s got a pint of beer. I’m drinking Coke.

  “I warn you,” says Dad. “They’ll miss out most of what you said. They always do. They never get it right. Don’t be surprised if you’re not even on at all, specially if there’s been another knifing in Middlesbrough, or some little kid’s been mauled by a dog in Wallsend.”

  He swigs his beer and grunts.

  Mum’s all grins.

  “Liam and Max on the telly!” she says. She squeezes my arm and giggles. “Hey, we should have put some of my paintings up in the background, Liam! Make sure we do it next time!”

  Dad grunts again.

  “Next time!” he says.

  Then he shuts up. We’re the first item on the news. It starts with stuff about the baby and appeals for information. They ask the hiker in the red cap to come forward. A doctor says he knows the mother’ll be in great distress, but she will of course be treated with great compassion. So please come forward. Then it slips into Mysterious Events in Secret Northumberland. There’s a swirl of mist, the cry of a raven, a flash of black wings, a casket of treasure, then a film of Rook Hall and the police searching around it.

  “Here we are in the twenty-first century,” drones Joe Tynan, “but could anc
ient forces—forces of magic and mystery—still be at work?” He reads the message in a stagey voice. “Please look after her right,” he says. “This is a child of God.” He widens his eyes. “What could it all mean?” he whispers.

  “It means zilch!” says Dad. He glares at the screen. “You could say that about every single kid that’s ever been born.”

  Then there’s Max looking bright-eyed and smart and me dead scruffy as we tell the tale. “And the raven really did lead you?” is Joe’s final question.

  “Aye,” says Max. “It came into Liam’s garden and led us away.”

  Then there’s a few of Dad’s books with mist swirling again, and an adder slithering across them. Then Dad himself, an interview from ages back, from when his books were just starting to sell. He looks really young and fit and bright. “Yes,” he says, “truth and fiction merge into each other. We try to keep them apart, but how can we? We live in a miraculous world, a world that is filled with the most amazing possibilities.”

  Dad grunts and groans and grinds his teeth.

  “Hell’s teeth!” he says.

  He flings a cushion at the TV and he sinks his beer fast.

  7

  We do get on national TV, a little item at the end of the ten o’clock news. We’re in the News of the World next to a report about Michael Jackson’s nose cracking up. The Sunday Times links our story to a travel feature about the beauties of Northumbria.

  The attention lasts a week or so, but pretty soon it all starts dying off. Dad’s right, and other stories start taking over. There’s a big drugs raid in Middlesbrough. A couple of Newcastle United players kick each other half to death on the quayside. Thirty asylum seekers jump ship in Blyth. Then the big one: a journalist called Greg Armstrong who grew up in Hexham has been taken hostage in Baghdad. A couple of groups claim to have him. His wife and kids are on TV, pleading for his release. He can’t be traced.

  The police visit farms and cottages for miles around. No answers about the baby. No information. The red-capped hiker’s never found. A new story turns up during the search: the death of Thomas Fell. His body’s found in an ancient cottage in a valley below Cheviot. Must have been there months. It’s almost eaten away to bone. He must have been eighty years old. He was a prisoner of war in World War II who never went home again. He became a wanderer, a tramp, living alone in the northern moors. He lived out in the open in summer, in abandoned cottages when the cold came. He was often seen roaming, dreaming. He was rumored to be a good man, a kind man. But he was silent and elusive, a man who loved his solitude. Not a man for making friends or having family. Kept himself to himself, never lost his thick Bavarian accent. Left behind a sheaf of poems in German, a box full of treasures dug out from the earth: arrowheads, coins, stone knives from right back in the Stone Age. The story’s told, then fades away, like all the stories in the news.