by David Almond
“Treasure!” gasps Crystal.
A white plastic box, a foot long and nine inches deep. I pull it out. I lever the lid away with my fingertips. I lift the contents out: tins of beans and Irish stew and hot dogs; bags of boiled sweets; packets of rice and spaghetti; a chunk of Christmas cake wrapped in foil; a cigarette lighter; a pair of knives and forks; a tin opener; a compass; a sharpened pencil; a hard-backed school exercise book with a title already carefully written in my childish hand: A Journal of the Last Days by Liam Lynch.
Crystal giggles.
“A Journal of the Last Days by Liam Lynch! Liam, what a romantic!”
Everything’s survived. A few blemishes, a bit of rust, that’s all.
“It’s a time capsule,” she says. “How long’s it been here?”
I shake my head.
“Four years, five years.” I laugh. “We used to say that if we never needed it ourselves, then some kids or some archaeologist from years in the future would find it and know all about us. Look.”
I show them the words written inside the lid of the box in black marker.
These things were placed here in the year 20—by Liam Lynch and Max Woods. We send our greetings to the people of the future.
I remember how we put it into the earth beneath the stone, how we knelt together and prayed for our families, for the people of the future and for the peace of the world. I remember how we clenched our fists after we rolled the stone back, how we promised we’d be friends forever, how we’d protect each other always, how we’d never part.
“Irish stew!” says Crystal. “Midget gems! You’re a genius, Liam Lynch!”
I’m already scanning the ground again, trying to remember the other hiding place.
I stab the earth with Death Dealer. The point hits metal. I rip the turf away, shove the earth aside, and pull out a pair of aluminum cooking pots nestled into each other. I pull them apart. A pair of blue plastic bionoculars and a couple of small penknives fall out. I tug one of the knives open. It breaks, the blade snaps off and falls into the grass. I open the other one. It breaks as well.
Crystal giggles. She looks through the binoculars. She giggles more.
“What the hell did you think you’d ever see through these?”
I remember them so well. They were in my Christmas stocking along with a chocolate snowman and a book of knock-knock jokes.
“We thought we’d see the end of the world!” I say. “We thought we’d see the Third World War!”
“Oh, Liam! You must have been so gorgeous. Is there any more?”
I scan the earth. I scratch my head.
“Don’t think so.”
“Just you, eh? Just you and yourself as a little boy?”
She wets her finger, rubs the label on the hot dog tin.
“Yum yum. Just three years out of date.”
Oliver has the notebook in his hands. It’s stiff and dry. It crackles as he open it. It’s empty.
“It’s a lovely English story,” he says. “Like Robin Hood and his merry men in the forest. King Arthur’s knights riding through the wilderness. You must have had a lovely time, playing here with Max.”
“Yes. We did.”
I see us, lying in the long grass above the cave. We had sticks for rifles. We peered along them towards the soldiers playing war games far off to the north.
“Kapow!” we used to go. “Kapow! Kapow! Kapow!”
We lobbed stones as grenades.
“Kaboom! Kaboom!”
“We’ll fight to the death!” we used to cry. “Ratatatatat! Kapow! Kaboom! Liam and Max forever!”
A jet streaks over us. We hear a dull explosion in the north. We hear the pop pop pop of guns.
“Just games,” I say. “They won’t come closer. We’re just kids. We’re no interest to them.”
Oliver unpacks his rucksack: a few spare clothes, a long carving knife. He lays his sleeping bag out inside the cave.
We sit on stones. We look at the landscape and each other and the sky.
“You found a good spot,” says Oliver.
“The perfect little spot,” says Crystal.
“The perfect place for writing in,” says Oliver.
We hear guns again. He pulls out his notebook. He flicks through it: page after page of black jagged words.
“You want to read it, don’t you, Liam?” he says. “But there’s nothing. Lots of words and lots of nothing. The pages may as well be as empty as yours.”
He puts his pen in his fist. He drags the tip across a series of finished pages, canceling them out. He turns to a new page. And he turns his attention from us, just as Dad turns his attention as he begins to write. His eyes cloud over. He rests the pen on the page and writes.
I write the date on my own first page with the old pencil. I write a few tentative lines.
I’m fourteen years old now. I’m with Crystal and Oliver. There’s no plague. No war.
Oliver grunts. He bares his teeth. Suddenly he stabs the carving knife into the earth at his side. He cancels what he’s written. He starts again. He glares when he sees me watching.
Crystal laughs. She’s looking through the useless blue binoculars again.
“Come on,” she says. “Take me for a walk, Liam.”
15
We go to the head of the valley. We take some bread and apples. We sit on an outcrop of rock and eat. She takes the knife from the sheath at my hip. She scrapes the rock with it, loops and whirls and snaky shapes. I watch the tip of the knife move across the surface. I’m nervous about asking what I want to ask.
“Why do you cut yourself?” I say.
“What?”
“Is it to prove to yourself that you exist or something? Or to punish yourself or something?” I look away. “It doesn’t matter. It’s nothing to do with me.”
“I don’t mind. It’s just a stupid thing. First time it was just a little daft thing with a potato peeler. One Sunday lunchtime I get bored. I’m peeling potatoes and I lift my sleeve and put the blade of the peeler on my skin and tug. Ouch. Pain. But I don’t stop. Soon it’s razors and knives.”
My eyes widen.
“Don’t look like that,” she says. “There’s nothing special about it. Lots of kids in care do it. You’ve never wanted to, have you? Kids like you don’t.”
“Kids like me?”
She clicks her tongue.
“Don’t be thick, Liam. You know what I mean. It must be dead boring being loved and looked after.” She smiles. “Kids like you imagine being kids like me, but kids like me want nothing more than to be kids like you.”
She jumps up onto the rock. She poses there and her skinny shape and wild hair are silhouetted against the brilliant sky.
“I’m weird and dramatic!” she says. “I’m a wild girl!” She steps down. “And I just wish I was one of the boring little village girls you probably turn your nose up at.”
She grabs my hand, tugs me forward, and we walk across the moor.
“I’ll tell you about Clarrie Dowd,” she says. “I’ll tell you how far kids like me’ll go to imagine having other lives.”
She leads me to another rock. It’s covered in lichen and moss. We sit down on the grass. We lean back against the rock. I turn my face to the sun, already high up in the sky. From down in the valley we hear a sudden yell from Oliver, then another, a writer’s yell, just like my dad’s.
“His story’s not working,” I say. “He can’t get it right.”
“He will,” says Crystal.
Then there’s silence.
“Clarrie Dowd,” says Crystal. “Now, there’s a weird girl. We shared a home together, me and her and a few other lovely waifs and strays. It was on the seafront at Cullercoats, a lovely big stone place with lovely house parents. Clarrie used to hypnotize. We used to get together after midnight on her bed, hunched up in our pajamas with our teddy bears in our arms. She did this thing with her hands and her voice. You are in my power. Close your eyes. Go back and back. Reme
mber. Rememberrrr. She took us wherever we wanted to go. She told us she believed in reincarnation. She said that all of us had lives before, in other places, other times, other bodies. She said she could lead us back to those lives. We could live in them again, if only for a short time.”
“Do you believe that?”
“Doesn’t matter what I believe. I know what I saw, sitting there on Clarrie Dowd’s bed. I saw kids being lifted away from what they were. One lad remembered being a gunner in the war. He was in a gun turret in a bomber flying over Germany. Enemies at two o’clock! he gasped. He held the air like it was a machine gun. He stared at the ceiling like it had a flight of fighter planes in it. Ratatatat! he went, and the bed bounced and bounced as he fired. Ratatatatat! Die! Die! There was podgy little Jo Scoular. She was a maid in a grand house. Such a giggle. Thank you, ma’am, she used to say. Of course, sir. Let me take your hat and coat, sir. And some were even animals—we had a dog and a cat and even a raccoon. Imagine that, eh? Ha, and all the barking and the growling and meowing. Was like a zoo some nights.”
She laughs, remembering.
“Sometimes their eyes were wide open, sometimes shut dead tight. We couldn’t wake anybody up, that was the rule. Or they might die, or be caught in some kind of limbo place. It had to be Clarrie that brought them back, Clarrie that guided them back to the room, to the bed, to their ordinary life in the home on the seafront at Cullercoats.”
“Did they remember when they woke up?” I ask.
“Yeah, they did. And most of them believed that what had happened was true. It was that real, they used to say. It was like being there at that time. It was like being that person. Ha, or that cat. When they talked about it, it was like they were in a dream, or having visions. Ha. I remember one kid. There’s grins all over his face. Oh, Clarrie! he goes. It’s just lovely being a sheep! And we all loved her, lovely Clarrie Dowd. She was some kind of a saint. I’m sure she was.” She pauses. “This is so weird, telling it all like this. Never told it all before. It must be something about being out here in the open.”
“And what about you?”
“Me?”
“What did Clarrie do to you?”
“I didn’t want to do it, not for a long long time. And Clarrie never pressed none of us to it. She said it must be us that made the decision or it could go all wrong. I think I was scared of the fire, of finding myself in it again. I told Clarrie that and she said that yes, I might have to go through the fire, but I could go further back, to the time before the fire if I wanted to. She was so sweet. She was a bit older than us all. Her poor mum had been a drug death. Her rotten dad was long long gone. She said she sometimes slipped automatically into her own past lives and there were dozens of them. She said the best lives were the lives lived on water. She said she’d been a cook on the Queen Mary. She’d been a pirate called Dirty Dot with a wicked cat called Pete. She said she had glimpses of a life lived long long long ago when she was without legs. She had a tail. She lived in a beautiful blue lagoon with blue and yellow fish and an octopus and she was a mermaid, and that, she said, looked like the happiest of all times for her. Did she believe it all? She said she did. And she was happy and kind and we loved the power she had on us and the power she gave to us. And it was something else to be on the bed together with the beauty and the mystery of other lives around us.”
She keeps on scraping with the knife. She makes two joined curved shapes, like wings. She carves them deeper.
“My mark,” she says. “The phoenix.” She scrapes again, below the wings. “And look, these are the flames.”
“And did you go back to the time before the fire?” I say.
“In the end I did. I remember going through the flames themselves and it was terrifying. But Clarrie guided me back, back. And I saw them, my mam and dad and the ones that were lost and I felt their touch on me and their breath on me. And I believed it, too, and when I came back to the bed I remembered it so clear, and I was so pleased.”
She holds the knife up. She presses her thumb against the blunt tip.
“I’m ruining it,” she says.
“It’ll sharpen. And look, you’re making proper rock art with it.”
She carves again, going deeper.
“It’ll be here forever,” she says. “Folk in the future’ll say, What on earth could it possibly mean?”
“And did you go further back?” I say.
“To other lives? No. Clarrie said did I want to but I said no. I said I wanted this life to be enough for me. So I went no further than when I was a little one in my family’s arms and only went there two or three times. I was scared of wanting it too much, scared that going back might turn to some kind of drug that stopped me growing up properly in the here and now.”
“And …?”
But she laughs and presses her finger to my lips.
“And in the end,” she says, “good Clarrie was took away from us to another home. And people come and asked about her but we told them she did only good things and she let us talk about the past. And some of us like her moved on again. That’s what it is to be a kid like me. You move from one home to another home and meet many that’s kind. And there’s always those who have gone from our lives, and those people are like ghosts, like scattered bits of memory, like things you miss, like dreams you carry round with you.”
She smiles.
“And anyway,” she says, “all life sometimes seems like dreams. Do you think so, Liam?”
“Yes,” I say.
“Good.”
She puts the knife in my hand.
“Now it’s your turn,” she says. “Show me what your mark looks like.”
I have no idea. I hold the point of the knife to the rock and just doodle. Then I make a spiral and that feels right, so I go round and round with the knife, spinning it to the center of the spiral and then out to the edge again. And we work like that as the day wears on, as explosions thud in the north, as distant rifles rattle, as Oliver sometimes gasps in frustration in the valley below. We pass the knife back and forward, we make our weird and beautiful marks in the stone.
16
We go back down. Oliver’s still hunched up, writing. He looks at us like he’s looking into a different world.
“Time for food,” says Crystal. “Not midget gems and hot dogs, though.”
He doesn’t smile.
I light a fire. I put the sausages I brought from home into an aluminum pan. They start to sizzle and spit.
“How did the writing go?” I say to Oliver.
He rips out a page and drops it onto the fire.
“Words are too easy,” he says. He opens his book. “What looks like truth and sounds like truth might be nothing but a dream, nothing but a story I wish had happened.”
I stab the sausages with my knife. Fat and juice ooze out. Crystal tries to take Oliver’s hand but he pulls away. He rips another page out of his book, crushes it in his fist, throws it on the flames.
“Lies,” he says.
“I know how hard it is,” I say.
“Do you?” says Oliver.
“Yes.”
“How can you know, you with your family, here safe in Northumberland?”
“My dad,” I say. “He’s a writer.”
“Your dad! Huh.”
He turns over the pages on the fire.
“Never mind. It is best that you do not know. You’re young. What’s the good of knowing?”
“Knowing what?”
He turns his face to the sky and groans.
“I should go on by myself,” he says. “What’s further north, Liam?”
“A few villages, a few castles, some ruins, lots of empty space, then Scotland, and more empty space.”
“So I could wander in the emptiness until I die. A true refugee, all alone, left over from a distant war.”
“Yes.”
“No!” whispers Crystal.
He shows us a knife is in his hand.
“See how it s
its there so naturally,” he says.
He spins it, catches it. He stabs the earth with it.
“See?” he says again.
“Yes.”
“Yes. It is at home in my hand, wherever I might be.”
He spins it again. He raises it high, as if he’s about to kill. Then he leans forward towards me. He presses his thumb against the knife blade.
“I am not what you think I am,” he says.
Then he’s silent. I turn the sausages with the knife. The sun is lower in the sky. It’ll soon be dusk. I lift out the sausages. I put them on bread. I pass a sandwich to Crystal and one to Oliver. He takes it. He eats. He rips more pages from his book. He throws them into the flames. He rips more pages, burns them, too.
“Lies,” he mutters. “Lies, lies.”
He stirs the fire. His eyes gleam as he stares into the gathering dark.
Crystal reaches out to him.
“Oliver!” she says.
He draws away. He laughs.
“Oliver? Who is Oliver?”
He sighs.
“Listen closely, children. I will tell you about the darkness at the heart of the world. My name is Henry Meadows. I am seventeen years old.”
17
He waits a moment. He laughs again.
“Yes. I am Henry Meadows. I am seventeen years old. You will ask, But why should I believe this thing and not the other thing? I don’t know why, except that this is true. So do not doubt these things. Look, I burn the lies so that what is left behind is truth. There are the ashes lying at our feet. Let me tell you about my childhood. Shall I do that? Yes? Then I remember being a boy, a pretty little ordinary boy named Henry. It was a different world, a different age. I remember my mother and my father and my sister and my brother a million miles and a million million years ago. What did we have? Nothing. A field. A hut. But I remember playing in the dust and being happy. I remember piling stones at the edge of the field while the hot sun beat down upon my back and my father sang in the field a hundred meters away. I remember my mother singing in the hut in the hot nights. I remember the skin of my young brother as we lay together sleeping. I remember the way he would kick and kick as he played football in his sleep. I remember my young sister clapping and chanting. I remember the way she would call my name. Hin-er-eee! Hin-er-eee! Hin-er-eee!”
