Feather Boy

NICKY SINGER

Dedication

For Roland

– inspiration, accomplice, son

– with my love

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Why You’ll Love This Book

Part One: Chance House

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

Part Two: The Coat of Feathers

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Praise

Copyright

About the Publisher

Why You’ll Love This Book

Why You’ll Love This BookBy David Almond

Like all the best books, Feather Boy can’t be pinned down. You have to read it, to be caught in its spell as thousands of readers have been before.

What’s it about? Robert Nobel is the class squit. He’s trying to deal with Niker, a scary and complex bully. He’s lamenting his departed father and falling in love with Kate. Then Edith, a stern and secretive old woman, picks him out from the crowd, tells him he’s the sort of boy who can fly, and sends him on a perilous quest that will change his whole life.

The story’s set in a very realistic and believable world, and it’s wonderfully fluent and readable and engrossing, but it often feels very strange indeed. It’s about secrets, the search for truth, the dangerous places that exist in the world and in the human heart.

It leads us into the dark and scary Chance House, through the sinister Dog Leg, into a feather-strewn graveyard. It contains one of the most weird and beautiful articles of clothing you’ll ever read about.

It is beautifully written: concise, rhythmical, dramatic, with hardly a wasted word. It’s a book that engages the mind and touches the heart. Read on.

David Almond

David Almond is the author of Skellig, The Savage, Jackdaw Summer, and many other novels, stories and plays. His awards include The Carnegie Medal, two Whitbreads and the Michael L Printz Award.

part one Chance House

1

It all began when Catherine came to talk about the Elders’ Project. Of course that’s not what Catherine would say. She’d say it began in a time that is yesterday and tomorrow and eternally present. But then Catherine’s a storyteller. I’m not a storyteller. I’m just the guy it happened to.

Anyway, there we all were in that dead time just after lunch, a little pale sunlight trying to push its way into Class 7R. Miss Raynham had set out a chair for Catherine and patted its seat to make her sit down. She’d said “ahem” and begun to scratch her head. None of us likes it when Miss Raynham scratches her head. Her thin grey hair barely covers her very white scalp. The merest touch of a fingernail on that creepy skull showers her shoulders with dandruff. Niker says if she ever loses her job as a teacher she could earn a living making snowdrifts for the movies. When I told my mum that story (and I made the story mainly about Niker) Mum said: “that’s nothing.” Apparently, when she was at school, they had a teacher called Miss Cathart, who used to spit down the sleeves of her cardigan. Miss Cathart’s cardigans, Mum says, were the crocheted sort. Loosely knitted. With holes in. So the spit ran out.

This is the problem with stories. They run on. So – to begin again: Miss Raynham says: “Ahem.” And then. “This is Catherine. Catherine erm…”

“Deneuve,” says Niker.

“Of Aragon,” says Derek.

“Parr,” says Weasel.

You can see we’ve been learning about Henry VIII. Well, everyone but Niker has.

“Class,” says Miss Raynham and she shifts downwind – fast. She’s big, Miss Raynham, corpulent, a blob on legs. But she moves like a spider. One minute she’s standing at the front of the class with a smile and a piece of chalk and the next thing you know is she’s zigzagged to your desk and the chalk is in your neck. Or Niker’s neck in this case.

“Catherine Fenn,” continues Miss Raynham without a pause, “has come to speak to us about the Elders’ Project. Catherine?”

Attention transfers at once to the front of the class. Catherine is youngish, in her twenties probably, little, dark, and she seems at rather a loss. Her long hair is piled up on her head and held in place with a moon and stars clip. Only the clip isn’t doing a very good job and most of the hair is making a bid for freedom down Catherine’s back. She’s wearing those brightly coloured clothes that look like you’ve dipped them at random in three different vats of dye and – as yet – she hasn’t said anything.

“Catherine,” repeats Miss Raynham with that scratch and that edgy irritation we all know so well.

“Hello,” says Catherine at last.

“Hello, Catherine,” says the class.

She shifts position, as though she’s Goldilocks and she can’t get comfortable in Mummy Bear’s chair. “Thank you for letting me be here.”

“Oh boy,” says Niker, and then seems to choke. Could be the chalk at his throat.

“I…” begins Catherine, but Miss Raynham’s patience is at an end. She strides to the front of the class.

“We’re very fortunate to have the services of Catherine, who is going to lead a project between children from this class and the residents of the Mayfield Rest Home.”

“Is that the barmy bin?” asks Weasel.

“No, Wesley, it is not the barmy bin. And it is partly to counter such ignorant attitudes about the senior members of our society that this project is being undertaken. Now, since we apparently need to return to basics, can anyone tell me what a Rest Home is?”

Niker’s hand goes up. “It’s a vegetable shop,” he says.

“Jonathan Niker. Explain yourself.”

“Well, my Aunt Maisie was there and she was a vegetable.”

“In a time that was yesterday and tomorrow and eternally present,” says Catherine suddenly, “there lived a prince who had been silent for as long as anyone could remember.” Her voice is so low and urgent that even Niker doesn’t say “Fat Chance”. “And,” Catherine continues, “his mother the Queen was heartbroken at her son’s muteness and the King heartbroken at his wife’s grief. So it was, that on the Prince’s eighteenth birthday, the King issued a proclamation saying that any man or woman who could make the Prince speak would receive the richest reward in the kingdom. However, the penalty for those who tried and failed would be instant death.”

“Cool,” says Weasel.

“They tell nursery stories in the nursery,” says Niker, twirling the sharp point of a pencil in the palm of his hand.

“Does that mean,” Catherine asks, faster than Miss Raynham, “you think this class is too grown up for such tales?”

“Yes,” says Niker. “Except,” he scans his fellow pupils, “maybe Norbert there.”

Norbert is the class squit. He’s thin and gangly, his arms and legs like white string loosely knotted at the elbows and knees. His head is too big for his body and, where other people have hair, he has this yellow, fluffy ducks’ down. His eyes are blue, though it’s difficult to see that through the thick glass of his spectacles. If you take his specs off him, and people do, he looks startled. Naked. His real name isn’t Norbert, it’s Robert. Robert Nobel. But I don’t think anyone’s ever called him that. In Kindergarten, when his hair was even more yellow than it is now, they called him “Chick” or “Chickie”. Even Mrs Morgan. But, since Niker arrived in school, it’s been Norbert. Norbert No-Bel. Norbert No-Bells-at-All. Norbert No-Brain. Norbert No-Bottle. I don’t suppose Johnny Niker, who has curly dark hair, green eyes and a fluid, athletic body, has ever imagined what it would be like to look out at the world through Norbert No-Bottle’s spectacles. But I have. Because I am Norbert No-Bottle.

“Personally,” says Catherine, “I think one never grows out of fairy tales. I think fairy tales contain all of the ways we sort experience, good and bad. In fact, I think stories are the most important form of communication we as human beings have.”

“Ahem,” says Miss Raynham.

“What do you think, Jonathan?”

“Johnny,” says Niker.

“I don’t think Johnny is a human being,” says Weasel.

“Right,” says Miss Raynham. “That is quite sufficient, thank you. The purpose of the Elders’ Project is, as Catherine will explain at greater length, to share experiences between young and old. And to learn something. Manners perhaps.”

It’s Norbert No-Bottle that hurts the most. Niker started calling me that after the Grape Incident. Maybe I’ll tell that story later. Right now I can’t even say the word “grape” without feeling sick. And I still get queasy going down the aisles at Sainsbury’s, just in case I encounter any big, fat, green grapes.

“We’re going to be telling stories,” says Catherine. “About our lives and those of the Elders. We might look at their childhood experiences compared with yours. Or their wisdoms and yours. And then we’re going to try to make a piece of work that records the things we find out.”

“What sort of work?” asks Kate.

“I’m not entirely sure yet. Probably some sort of large picture, or pictures, a collage perhaps of writings, paintings, photos, mementoes. I think we should be looking at two pieces of work. One which might eventually hang in the school and one in the Home.”

“Groovy,” says Weasel.

“Naturally,” says Miss Raynham, “not everyone will be able to take part in the project. Working space at Mayfield limits the numbers we can reasonably send.”

“So we’ll be going to the Home?” asks Derek.

“Yes. On Wednesday afternoons. For the next four or five weeks. So,” Miss Raynham chin juts challengingly forward, “I’m looking for about ten volunteers.”

That’s when people look at Niker. Nothing obvious, just a quick glance, a sidelong peek. Is this project going to be for the Cool Gang or the Class Duffers? Is it a good thing or a bad? Will Niker give it his seal of approval? He sits there (I’m looking too, of course) like some Roman Emperor, imperious, disdainful, savouring the lengthening moments during which the rest of us wait to know whether the project lives or dies.

My hand goes up.

“Thank you, Robert. Robert Nobel.” She writes my name on a list.

Niker scowls furiously. I have jumped the gun. Now no-one else will volunteer, because the class pariah is going. This is power of a sort I suppose, to be able to make something untouchable by touching it. In any case there are no more hands.

“Come on, come on.” Miss Raynham is embarrassed, agitated. “Liz will be accompanying the Mayfield group. The rest of you,” she glares, “will be remaining here with me.”

Liz Finch, our student teacher, is bland, harmless and has no known habits. So, normally, this would be a good ploy. But everyone knows that Wednesday afternoon is actually PE (with Mr Burke) and double art (with Mrs Simpson), which is why people continue to roll scraps of paper between fingers and thumb and stare out of windows.

“If there are no more volunteers, I shall be forced to choose.”

“Many brave men and women,” says Catherine, “tried to make the young Prince speak. And as many were beheaded. The King and Queen had all but given up their quest when, from the woods nearby, came one last adventurer…”

Kate’s hand goes up. I might be imagining it but I think I hear the grind of Niker’s teeth. Of all the people he’d want not to go, she’d be top of the list. Not that I think she’s challenging him, it’s just that the project obviously intrigues her and, unlike some other people in the form, Kate has a mind of her own. That’s why I like her. I’d like to say she likes me back. But actually I don’t think she’s any more conscious of me than she might be of a woodlouse. Niker she has noticed, not least because he says “Stylish,” every time she passes. I keep waiting for her to wither him with some remark. But she doesn’t. Sometimes, she even smiles.

“Kate Barber,” notes Miss Raynham. “Thank you.”

Kate’s friend Lucy then puts her hand up and the spell seems to break. Oliver, Tom and Mai and a couple of others volunteer. Only Derek continues to haver.

“Right,” says Miss Raynham, doing a quick count-up. “I make that eight. So, if we add in young Wesley Parr and Mr Niker here, I think we have a full complement.”

So that’s how, the following Wednesday, I find myself at the Mayfield Rest Home, starting a project that’s going to change my life for ever.

2

The Mayfield lounge is like a dentist’s waiting room; green chairs lined up against the walls and that dull, limbo feeling of time having moved elsewhere. On top of the television set in the far corner is a crochet mat and, on the windowsill, some fake flowers in white plastic pots. We arrive after lunch and the residents are already seated. Some are in the green chairs perched on plastic cushions, others have brightly-coloured patchwork blankets tucked around their knees and a walking stick or zimmer frame near by. Some are sunk in wheelchairs.

Their hush seems to fall on us as we enter the room. A disconsolate, decrepit hush. And all of a sudden the ten of us are trying to huddle behind Catherine as though we’re embarrassed for being so full of life. Some of the residents peer at us, others ignore us, or maybe they just don’t see us. Niker shifts from foot to foot. I concentrate on the floor. The carpet is gold and swirly. If Miss Raynham were here she’d take charge, but Miss Raynham is not here. As we wait – and wait – for Catherine to do something, a wheelchair suddenly shrieks: “I think I’m in the wrong place!”

“Join the club,” says Niker.

“Now, now,” says Matron. “Mavis.”

Mavis is a chicken in a dress. At once bony and fleshy, her plucked yellow skin springs with coarse hair. At some stage her neck must have been chopped out and her head stuck straight back on to her shoulders.

“What’s going on?” she asks.

“It’s The Project,” says Matron, enunciating loudly and clearly as though talking to a foreigner or an imbecile, “with the children.”

“Oh,” says Mavis. “When’s tea?”

“Hello,” says Catherine, finally arriving at the television set, the room’s focal point. Then she adds, in her rather faltering way, “I’m Catherine.”

“Two of my family died in this place,” says Mavis.

“No, they didn’t,” says Matron briskly. “Now children, why don’t you all sit down?”

Gratefully we sit. The residents shuffle and cough and peer.

“Hello,” says a relatively normal and fit-looking man, leaning down towards me. “Who’s this then?”

“Robert,” I whisper.

“Oh aye,” he says. “What yer doing here, Robert?”

Catherine begins to explain. Because she’s standing and we’re all sitting, she’s just about big enough to command attention. She talks briefly about the project and then suggests we work in pairs.

“Just space yourselves out a bit,” she tells the class, “that’s right, into a ring. Now, introduce yourself to whoever you’re closest to. That person will be your main partner. Though, of course, we’ll all be sharing ideas later on.”

As chance would have it, I’m still closest to Mr Relatively Normal. Niker, however, is sitting at Mavis’s feet.

“I’m Robert,” I repeat quickly, to establish my claim.

“So yer said,” he replies. “I’m Albert. Robert and Albert. Bert and Bert. Do they call you Bert?”

“No.”

“Oh aye,” Albert says.

There’s a pause and then he says, “I were a ladies’ man. Once.” And he sighs. The sigh is sad and resigned but it’s only a moment before he leans down and smiles at me. “Eh up, lad.”

There’s something tender in his look, not a tenderness for me of course, just something misty about his past, and in that moment I indulge a few warm thoughts of my own about my grandfather, Grandpa Cutting, who used to call me “lad” and take me boating before he died of a heart attack hanging a garage door. And I’m just thinking maybe Albert will be all right and perhaps the Nobel luck is going to change when a voice chisels through the room:

“I don’t want this one.”

Everyone turns to the speaker. She is tall (even seated), white-haired, ram-rod-backed and her perfectly still right index finger is pointing down at Kate.

“Well,” flusters Liz Finch, the student teacher who, up until this point, might have been a sheet of wallpaper, “perhaps you’d like to swop with Kate, Lucy. Lucy?”

Lucy isn’t moving.

“Lucy?”

“No,” says Ram-Rod. “I don’t want a girl.” The index finger lifts, it moves. “I want a boy. In fact,” the finger stops mid-swing, “I want him.” She’s pointing at me.

Now, you know those team games where there are two captains and they each pick someone to be on their side, turn after turn, until there’s only one person left? And no matter whether there are ten or twenty players that last person is always the same? The one who is never chosen, whatever the game? Well, that person’s me.

“Robert, isn’t it?” says Catherine.

And all the times I’ve prayed, I’ve pleaded, I’ve begged to be chosen and God’s ignored me? And now—

“Norbert,” says Niker. “She wants Norbert!”

Niker’s jeering does not deter Ram-Rod. She beckons me and I just know I’m going to have to go.

“Norbert,” repeats Albert, meditatively.

Kate is already halfway across the room. I stand up.

“Sorry,” I say as we pass like a substituted football players at the edge of the pitch.

“You’re joking,” she says.

A moment later I’m face to face with Ram-Rod. Close to, she looks surprisingly frail. Her body so thin and bloodless, she must, I think, be sitting upright by force of will alone.

“I’m Robert,” I say, extending a polite hand.

“Edith,” she replies, ignoring the hand. “Edith Sorrel.”

My arm drops uselessly and me with it. I’m back on the floor.

Then, like the cavalry, the tea trolley arrives. It comes with clink and clatter and shout and “Thank God” from Albert. Catherine, obviously taken aback that tea can be so early, suggests we all use the time to get “better acquainted”. We know what this means because Liz Finch briefed us on the bus.

“Remember your Elder may be deaf,” she said. “Just ask short, simple questions. Do you have children? Grandchildren? A husband/wife? What job did you use to do? And speak up.”

“Do you have children?” I ask Edith Sorrel.

“No.”

I pause, leave a gap. This the art of conversation, you know. You say something. They say something. You say something.

Edith says nothing.

“A husband?” I enquire hopefully.

“No.”

Another pause. Longer this time. I watch the trolley coming, so very slowly round towards us.

“Looking forward to tea?”

“No.”

The trolley passes us. The staff obviously know that Edith does not take tea, she does not take biscuits. The biscuits are those oblong ones which say “Nice” on them and are covered in sugar. I watch them go Weasel’s way.

“Did you have a job?”

Behind me I can hear Kate’s Albert. He had a job. He worked “in sawmills” and then “on the building”, he got paid sixpence a day.

“How much is sixpence?” asks Kate.

“Eh?” says Albert.

“Sixpence – how much was it worth?”

“Three loaves of bread, that’s what sixpence were.”

“No,” says Edith Sorrel. “I did not have a job. Young women were not encouraged to have jobs.”

And then I think she’s not really trying and it’s not fair and anyhow I’m cross about the biscuits, so I say: “Any special reason why you didn’t want a girl?”

“No.”

“OK. Any special reason for wanting me?”

She stares at me. Under her gaze, I feel quite transparent. As though she’s looking straight through me and out the other side.

“I mean me,” I persist, “me rather than any other boy?”

“No,” says Edith Sorrel.

“Well,” says Catherine, as the tea trolley finally beats a retreat, “I’d like to tell you all a story.”

“Oh aye,” says Albert.

Edith Sorrel clasps her hands in her lap. And I have this weird sensation that she’s holding herself, trying to comfort herself.

“It’s about a silent prince and the young woman who wants to free him from the curse that has rendered him mute. The Prince’s mother and father, the King and Queen, have promised the riches of their kingdom to anyone who can make the young man speak. But for those who try and fail, the penalty is to be instant death.”

“Is it Neighbours?” asks Mavis.

“You daft brush,” says Albert.

“Well, the young woman knew it would take more than skill or cunning or luck to make the Prince speak, for many had gone before her and as many had lost their lives. So the young woman took herself into the forest where her grandparents lived. And as they sat around the cottage after supper, she told them of her plan.

“‘Oh my beloved,’ cried her grandmother, ‘you know not what you ask.’

“‘Indeed I do, Grandmother,’ said the girl. ‘And that is why I’m here. I have come to listen and to learn. For you and Grandfather have lived long in the forest and understand how it is that night turns into day and winter into spring. And if this were not enough, you have lived long in each other’s hearts and so understand the dark and light of love, and if this were not enough you have read many books and told many stories and so know what makes a beginning and what an end. I beg you, Grandparents, share what you can with me, for I am eager to know what you know and to carry your wisdom to the Prince.’”

“Nurse,” cries Mavis. “Shut the curtains!”

“I’ve nearly finished now,” says Catherine, gently. “If you want to sleep. But you see, the grandparents did tell the girl their wisdom. All night long they spoke and she listened. And I was hoping we could do something similar here.”

“What?” says Albert.

“She wants you to tell the children your secrets,” shouts Matron.

“No I won’t indeed. They’d be shocked.”

“Not secrets,” says Catherine. “Wisdoms. Things you’ve learnt over the years.”

“Not to be nosey,” says Weasel’s Elder. “That’s what. Mind your own business. That’s what. Little piggies have big ears. That’s what.”

“Well, that’s a start,” says Catherine.

“That’s what,” says Weasel emphatically.

“Wesley…” says Liz Finch.

“I’m just repeating the wisdom,” says Weasel. “Learning from Dulcie here. That right, Dulcie?”

“Cheeky little blighter,” says Dulcie.

“Anything you’d share with me,” I say to Edith Sorrel, “if I was going to be beheaded tomorrow?”

“No.”

I put my finger to my throat and make the sound of ripping flesh. “That’s me gone then.”

“What?” For the first time she seems caught off-guard.

“Dead,” I repeat. “I’m dead. Just twelve years old and dead. D.E.A.D. Dead. Finished. Kaput. Head on the carpet.”

“Stop it,” says Edith Sorrel. “Stop it at once.”

“Can’t stop it. Sorry, without The Wisdom, I’m a goner. Didn’t Catherine say? Just one or two old forest truths and I’ll be OK. You can save me. You do want to save me, don’t you?”

She gives me that stare. “Of course. I’d give my life to save you. You know that.”

“Oh. Right. Great. Well, you’ve got to tell me something important then.”

“What?”

“I don’t know! You’re supposed to be telling me. Whatever the most important thing in your life is. Was. Whatever.”

“Top Floor Flat. Chance House, twenty-six St Albans.”

“What?”

“You can go there. Walk. It’s not far.”

Geography has never exactly been my strong point but I’d say St Albans has to be two and a half hours’ drive from here. So maybe Niker’s right about the vegetable shop after all.

“Sure,” I say. “I’ll go right after school.”

“You’re such a good boy,” she says and then she reaches up towards my head and gives me this little dry, tender tap. “Beautiful,” she murmurs, hand in my hair, “beautiful.”

I pull away. “It’s horrid,” I say, “my hair.” And I tell her how they used to call me “Chickie”.

“I don’t see Chickie,” she says and then: “Pass me my bag.”

Jammed down the side of the seat is one of those triangular witches’ bags, faded black leather with a large gold clasp. I extract it and hand it to her as instructed. From the musty interior she draws out a mirror in a suede case.

“Now,” she wipes the surface with the back of her liver-spotted hand. “What do you see?”

She holds the mirror up to her own face. And this is what I see: A spooky old bat with snow-white hair, weird black eyebrows and about a million wrinkles.

“Come on,” she urges, “come on.”

“I just see a lady.”

“No, you don’t.”

“Well an old… erm, an elderly lady then.”

“Liar,” she says. “Tell me what you see.”

But I can’t.

So she says, “You see an old hag. A wrinkled old hag. Yes?”

“Maybe.”

“So do I.” She puts away the mirror. “It always surprises me. You see, I expect to see the girl I was at twenty. With skin and hair like yours. And yet whenever I look – there’s the old hag.” She laughs quietly.

“Right.”

“So you’ll go to Chance House for me?”

I’m not sure where the “so” comes from in this. There doesn’t seem any “so” about it. But I nod like the sad guy I am.

“Good. Thank you.”

“Everything OK?” asks Catherine, coming by.

“Oh yeah. Great.”

“Good.” She moves on but not before Albert bursts into song:

“Run rabbit, run rabbit, run run run.”

“Stop it,” says Edith Sorrel. “Stop that at once!”

“Don’t be afraid of the farmer’s gun!” squawks up Mavis.

“Right on,” says Niker.

“He’ll get by…” continues Albert in a gravelly lilt, “without a rabbit pie…”

“Stop the singing,” says Edith. “Don’t sing. I asked you to stop.”

“Ole misery guts,” mutters Albert.

“Run,” Niker encourages the Chicken, “run rabbit…”

Edith draws herself to her feet. She is tall. She reaches for her stick. For one insane moment I think she intends to hit someone. But of course she only means to walk away.

“Run,” sings Albert jovially to her stiff, retreating back, “rabbit, run, run, run.”

I follow Edith into the corridor. Each stride looks painful.

“Can I help?”

“No,” she says “No. Go away. Leave me alone.”

“Don’t mind her,” says Matron. “She doesn’t mean anything by it.”

But, as Edith shuts the door of her room, I have this horrible feeling that she does mean something by it. All of it.

3

I don’t go to Chance House. Not right after school anyway. But I find myself wanting to go. The whole walk home to Grantley Street I keep thinking, “I ought to be going to Chance House. Why aren’t I going to Chance House?” And it’s not just because I told some batty old woman that I would go, it’s because I feel, about as powerfully as I’ve ever felt about anything, that the house is standing somewhere close, waiting for me. Maybe being batty is catching.

Grantley Street is a thin strip of houses, wedged between two roads. Our front door opens straight on to the pavement of Grantley and our rear patio on to The Lane, which is lucky considering it could open on to The Dog Leg. The Dog Leg can be scary. More about that later.

Our back gate is a nine-foot barricade of wood with a deranged row of nails banged in along the top. It’s about two years since Mum made with the hammer, so the points are a bit rusty now. I perform complicated manoeuvres with the gate lock, the bolts and chain and then, once inside, remove a loose brick from the garden wall to get at the house keys. A moment later I’m letting myself into the kitchen.

“I can see you,” I announce in a loud voice.

I wish I could stop doing this. I’m not quite sure who I’m expecting to find in our kitchen. Niker. A burglar. Dad. But it’s part of the routine now, a habit, a mantra. Saying it protects me, gives me one-up on Whoever’s There. Proves I can’t be startled, taken advantage of. Trouble is, I have to do it in every room in the house.

“I can see you!” I yell into the sitting room. Then I thunder upstairs and repeat myself in Mum’s bedroom, in mine and finally in the bathroom. This little quirk started about three years ago, when Dad left and Mum took the extra shifts at the hospital. “No choice, now,” Mum said. The good news is I don’t do the cupboards any more. I used to shout into the larder, Mum’s wardrobe and the airing cupboard. This has to be progress.

Of course, I don’t yell if Mum’s home. Well, I did once, blasted into the kitchen shrieking, “I can see you!” at the top of my voice. Mum was sat at the kitchen table drinking a cup of coffee.

“That’s lucky,” she said, “or you’d need new glasses.”

They call it obsessive-compulsive behaviour. Or compulsive-obsessive or Chance House Bonkers or something. People do it with hand-washing. I read that in the newspapers. They wash their hands again and again and again, four times, six times, twenty times. Then as soon as their hands are dry, it’s back to the basin again, wash, wash, wash. Washing until they bleed. By comparison I have to be a mild case. Almost normal in fact. Norbert Normal.

Anyhow. I’m in the house. I’d like to tell you that I get a chocolate biscuit and then go straight on to the computer. Well, I do get the biscuit but then I go upstairs to paint my models. Niker, when he came round, called me a “Saddo”. I didn’t tell him we don’t have a computer because of the money. I told him I like painting model soldiers. Which, as it happens, I do. That was a little while after the Grape Incident. Which took place in The Dog Leg. Anyway, I didn’t tell Mum anything about anything. But she’s not stupid. She’d watched me avoiding The Dog Leg, even though it’s the quickest way to school. And one afternoon she asked:

“Is someone on your back?”

“No.”

“Someone bullying you?”

“No.”

“Do you want to invite anyone home for tea?”

“No!”

“If someone’s on your back,” she said, “you can always try to make a friend of them. Ask their advice. Get them to help you with something. Invite them home. It sometimes helps.”

“Right.”

How come grown-ups are always so smart about your life, but not quite so smart about their own? Slap, slap, slap. That was Dad hitting her on the landing. Well, hitting her on the face actually, out on the landing. Or maybe on the shoulders. I didn’t really want to look. I could hear plenty enough. Anyhow, I didn’t notice her trying to make him into a friend next morning.

So what happens? Niker comes home. I didn’t think for a moment he’d accept the invitation. In fact, it took me three weeks to pluck up courage to ask him, and even then I had to write the time and date down and pass it to him like some secret note. I thought he’d laugh. But he just looked at me and said: “Yeah. Why not.” Of course Mum had planned to be there, but she hadn’t reckoned on a juggernaut jackknifing on the A23 and ploughing into six other vehicles. Like every other member of nursing staff in Sussex, she was called into Accident and Emergency. So when we got home there was a note on the table and a lasagna in the oven. Niker doesn’t like lasagna.

“No computer and no food,” said Niker. “On the other hand – no parents.”

I had never intended to show Niker the lead soldiers – the ones that were my father’s when he was a child. Dad had bought them in Willie Sureen, Sloane Street, with his own pocket money on one of the rare occasions he’d accompanied my grandfather on business to London. No more than half a thumb high, each man is intricately cast, from the sharp tip of his spear to the insignia on his tricorn or the buttons on his spats. Highlanders of the ’45 rebellion who died at Culloden, French officers who fought against Wolfe in Canada in the Seven Years War, a single Grenadier guard on his knees with a bayonet, a little drummer boy. Each delicately painted in Humbrol enamel, every silver belt buckle, cross-gartered stocking, black sporran tassel executed perfectly, every soldier a tribute to the skill of my father, who has such large, ungainly hands.

No, I never meant to show Niker these soldiers, which I keep wrapped in tissue paper in the Huntley and Palmer Superior Reading Biscuits tin in which Dad presented them to me on my eighth birthday. I intended to show him the small, less detailed plastic models, also my father’s, from the American War of Independence. Cavalry, artillery, foot soldiers, painted more sporadically by Dad, and left in their grey or blue plastic for me to finish. And painstakingly, with my sable brushes and thinners, I have been finishing them. The rifles of these soldiers are flexible, durable, whereas the smallest, most accidental, tweak can snap the sword of one of the lead soldiers.

So there they were that day, the plastic models, on my desk. The horses, the riders, the gun carriages, the infantry and even one or two odd cowboys, a belly-scuttling Indian, a First World War soldier, titbits to entice. And the paint of course. And the brushes. I knew it was a risk. But that was what I was doing – risking.

Niker scanned my room. “What’s in that tin?”

The Huntley and Palmer tin. Had I been looking? How could he possibly have known? Why hadn’t I hidden it, stashed it under the bed, secreted it in Mum’s room?

“What tin?”

“This tin.”

I feel cold even now when I think of him opening it. His hands on the stiff, slightly rusty lid. Him pulling and peering and me just standing there. The tissue was discoloured, brittle.

“What have we here, Norbert?”

He drew out a Highlander, red jacket, green kilt, tam-o-shanter, a running man, heels kicking, thin bladed bayonet to the fore.

“Jeez,” said Niker, looking at the exquisitely painted criss-cross leg garters, “did you do this?”

“No, my dad.”

“It’s good.” And he put the soldier down, turned it gently this way and that, admired it. “Very good.”

He unwrapped and looked at every soldier in the same way, taking time and care, asking me what I knew about the uniforms.

Two hours later Mum found us both sitting at my desk, paint brushes in hand. The lasagna, which I’d forgotten to turn down, was burnt, but there were fifteen chestnut horses with black bridles, blue saddle-cloths and fifteen horse stands. Niker had painted mud and grass on his stands. And also flowers.

Mum’s smile was so broad. But premature. Nothing changed at school. In fact it remained so much the same I sometimes think that Niker never came to my house at all. But then I sometimes think that my father, with those heavy hands, could never have painted the Highlanders. And he did.

So here I am again, sitting at my desk with the smell of turps about me and thinking about Niker because it’s preferable to thinking about what I’m actually thinking about. Which is Chance House.

You know how it is when there’s something niggling you, and you do your best to refuse it, chain it up in some dark and faraway place, only to have it come yap yap yapping back at you like some demented dog? Well, yap yap yap, here it comes again. Chance House.

“You can go there. Walk. It’s not far.”

I’m really not painting. I’m just waving a brush about. So I might as well – yap yap – go downstairs and get Mum’s road atlas. This is how she finds me, crouching over England with a piece of string in my hands.

“Geography prep?” she asks, practical as ever.

“Yap.”

“What is it?”

“Distance in miles from here to St Albans. How far do you reckon, Mum?”

“You’re the one with the string.”

“Right. Fine. Ninety miles. Would it be ninety miles?”

“Sounds about right.”

“Could we go there?”

“Why?”

Good question.

“Day out?”

She sits down, kicks off her shoes and puts her feet up on a little pouffe.

“Bit far for a day out,” she says. My mum is a small person, with a small face and a little puff of blonde hair. She looks exhausted.

“Can I get you a cup of tea?”

“God bless you, Robert.”

It’s only teabag tea but, the way she takes it, it could be water in a desert.

“I’d really like to go to St Albans. In fact, I think I have to go to St Albans.”

She shuts her eyes.

“Do you think we could?”

“Mmm.” She’s asleep. I lift the teacup from her lap. Where her skirt has ridden up I can see blood throbbing in her varicose vein.

In the kitchen I make myself a sandwich and then I return to my desk.

“It’s really not far,” yaps Edith Sorrel.

That’s when I decide to set the dream alarm. It’s not an exact science but it sometimes works for me. All I have to do is think about whatever it is that’s bothering me and then set the alarm for 3am. I’ve tried many different times of night but all my best results have come from 3am. Too early in the night and my dreams don’t really seem to have got going, too near the morning and they seem to be petering out. At 3am, I’m normally in the middle of some seething epic. As soon as the alarm goes, I start scribbling. I write down everything I can remember in my dream diary. Even the stupid and inconsequential stuff. Mainly that actually. I note all the colours, the people, the buildings, the looks, the feelings. But I don’t try to make sense of anything. In any case there often isn’t much sense to be made. But in the morning it’s different. Once or twice I’ve woken with some completely crystalline idea about a problem. An idea which often bears no relation to whatever I scribbled down in the night, but it’s still there like some perfect jewel on my pillow. Of course, it’s not always like that. Much more often I have to go back to the diary, reading and re-reading until something jumps out at me – a word, a colour, a phrase, a clue. Something to work with. Naturally, I always hope for the jewel. But somehow I can’t see that happening with Chance House.

Once I’ve decided to use the dream alarm, the evening normally passes mournfully slowly. But not tonight. It only seems a moment before I’m in bed. Then it’s just a matter of going through the ritual. I lie on my back, close my eyes, and relax my body, starting with my feet. When all my limbs are so heavy that the mattress seems dented with them, I turn to my mind. This is when it can get tricky. I think about the problem – in this case Chance House – but I try not to direct my thoughts. It works better if I can keep everything loose and unfocused. If images come, and they do, I attempt to follow them, but not to pursue them, so they can choose their own way. It normally takes a while for the vague, meandering flow to begin. But Chance House conjures itself at once, arriving exact and massive in my imagination. It’s a huge edifice of dirty cream brick. Wide, concrete steps lead to a forbidding door. The door handle is a twisted ring of metal, fashioned like a rope. I imagine myself walking up the steps, grasping the handle in both hands and passing boldly into Edith’s past and my future. But that’s not what happens. I do walk up the steps. But the moment I touch the door, there is a flash and a bang and the house disappears. Or that’s what I believe at first. A little while later, as I stand in the dark, it occurs to me that maybe I have disappeared.

4

Next thing I’m aware of is Mum shaking me by the shoulders.

“Robert,” she says gently.

At once I’m in action mode, it can’t be more than three seconds before I’m bolt upright, pencil in hand.

“Room,” I write in my dream diary. “Small, cosy, warm, not unlike my bedroom.”

“Robert?”

“People: me, Mum. Atmosphere: everyday, normal. Colours: pale but bright, morning colours.”

Mum gets up and opens the curtains. It is bright. In fact, it is morning.

I grab for my clock, focus. Focus again.

“You set the alarm for three am,” says Mum. “You silly chump.” She smiles, touches me lightly on the head.

“What!”

“Lucky I noticed, eh?” says my mother.

I fall backwards on to the bed. She re-set the alarm. She re-set the alarm! I don’t believe it. I pull the duvet over my head.

“Come on now,” she says, “seven-thirty. Chop chop.”

She leaves.

I wail, I moan, I thump the mattress. Then I get dressed.

“I’m on lates,” says Mum over breakfast. “Do you want me to walk you to school?”

“No,” I say. “No, thanks.” Niker says only girls and wusses are walked to school.

Mum notes what I eat (one slice of toast with strawberry jam), what I drink (nothing) and then she follows me to the bathroom and fiddles about while I clean my teeth. She watches me put my library book and football boots in my school bag and then I watch her as she takes them out again. She puts the boots, which are mud-free, in a plastic bag, examines the library book, remarks, “Haven’t you read this before?” and then replaces both items in the bag. After which she checks the time.

“You don’t have to go yet,” she says.

It’s twenty to nine. The journey to school – via The Dog Leg – is about five minutes. “I like being early,” I say. “I get to use the computers.” Actually Mr Biddulph doesn’t get in till nine-thirty and the computer room is locked like Fort Knox. But Mum doesn’t know that.

“I’ll get you a computer one day,” she says. “I’ll save up.”

“I didn’t mean that.”

“I know you didn’t, love.”

“Mum…”

“Yes?”

“Doesn’t matter.”

I peck her quickly on the cheek and go out the back way. As I shut the patio gate, I wave and then turn as if I was going in the direction of The Dog Leg.

Only the locals call it The Dog Leg. Its real name is the Cut, because that’s what it is, a zig-zag passage that acts as a short cut between The Lane and Stanhope Avenue. Some people say it’s called The Dog Leg because that’s how it’s shaped – like the back leg of a dog. Personally, I think that would make for one pretty deformed dog. The passage goes twenty yards east, then right-angles north for ten yards, then sharp east again for another ten and finally sharp north before coming out into daylight under the arch of two Stanhope Avenue houses, which are joined at the second floor level like some architectural Siamese twins. Other people say the passage is called The Dog Leg because that’s what happens there. Dogs lift their legs. At the lamp-posts. If only they knew.

There are two lamp-posts, not the concrete sort you see in ordinary streets, with the lozenge of orange light at the top, but ones that look as if they’ve come out of Narnia. Old-fashioned, fluted metal lamp-posts in pale green surmounted by hexagonal glass lamps which glimmer with that soft gas mantle light. Sticking out horizontally, just below the lamp itself, is a fluted green metal arm with a bobble on the end, which looks like a place you might hang a coat if you were given to hanging your coat on a lamp-post. Alternatively, if you were given to climbing lamp-posts this would be an excellent place to sit. It’s where Niker sits. Niker climbs like a spider.

I didn’t see him the first time, even though he was directly in front of me. I suppose that’s because I was going along with my head at the five-foot level and he was perched another five foot above that. So when the first apple landed I thought it was just Norbert bad luck. Because, as it happens, there is this large Bramley apple tree on the first bend of the passage. In any case I wasn’t exactly thinking of apple as ammunition, just apple as fruit, and fruit does occasionally fall off trees and hit people on account of the laws of gravity. So it was only when the second apple landed, squidgy and rotten and directly on my head, that I thought to look up. Or maybe it was the laugh that made me look. He’s quite a good marksman, Niker, and I think he hit me another four times before I managed to turn the corner. Afterwards, as I scraped the gunge off my coat with a stick, I wondered why I hadn’t thought to return fire. But I think I would have missed anyway.

Of course the next time I went via The Dog Leg I checked the lamp-post (which you can see from the entrance) before going in. Only that time he was up the second lamp-post, the one you can’t see until you turn the middle bend. This post doesn’t have a convenient apple tree near by. So he had a plastic bag. He was wearing gloves and he threw something loose and brown that splatted on the back of my neck. I thought it was mud – until I breathed in. When I got to school I washed it out of my hair, but the smell was still on my collar.

“Norbert,” Niker said at Break. “Did anyone ever tell you, you stink?” He was sitting on the playground wall next to Kate, who was swinging her legs and eating a cheesestring. “You should take a bath.” He jumped off the wall into a puddle, soaking me, but also himself.

“E-jit,” Kate said and laughed.

As soon as I got home that afternoon I changed and stuffed my shirt at the bottom of the laundry basket. But Mum has a nose like a bloodhound.

“What happened?” she asked.

“I fell over.”

“On your back?”

“Yes.”

“In a pile of dog muck?”

“Yes.”

“Robert?”

“Yes, Mum, I fell over on my back. In a pile of dog muck. People do, you know.”

As I bathed, I thought about what Kate meant by “E-jit”. Or rather – who she meant. I decided she meant Niker and that’s why I didn’t stop using The Dog Leg. Not then anyway. No. I walked through it every day. Right up until the Grape Incident.

I’m not saying I wasn’t scared. The Dog Leg’s a spooky place anyway. Mum says it’s not mortar that holds the walls together but graffiti. And the more often our neighbours creosote their back gates the more elaborate the spray painting gets. It makes the houses looked marked, as if all the victims from the Great Plague ended up with homes backing on to the Cut. And then there’s the broken glass and the smell of urine – and I don’t mean dog urine either. Because dog urine doesn’t smell, does it? And even though the passage is a perfectly ordinary path made of perfectly ordinary concrete, footfalls really echo there. There always seems to be someone behind you, or coming towards you. It’s difficult to locate exactly where someone else is in the passage until you’re right on them. Or they’re on you. But then it should be safe because so many people use it: dog-walkers, shoppers, business people on their way to the sandwich shop, everyday grown-ups going about their everyday business. So maybe it is only me that smells fear there.

The apple-throwing happened in the autumn. And it wasn’t until the summer that Niker devised the grape thing. There were two new boys in class that term, Jon Pinkman and Shane Perkiss, Pinky and Perky, and he did it to them too. So it wasn’t just me. I wasn’t the only one. Pinky only stayed one term.

Anyway, I don’t want to talk about that now. I just want to explain why it is that I head south today – towards the sea – instead of east towards school. It’s one of about seven routes I use. I never decide in advance which way I’m going to go on the basis that Niker still manages to intercept me on an unnerving number of occasions, so he either has to be psychic or he’s put some sort of implant in my brain. If it’s the implant then I reckon he can’t know where I’m going until I know where I’m going, so the later I decide the less time he has to get there before me. You could call it paranoid, but then anyone whose been through The Dog Leg with Pinky and Perky and a bunch of grapes has the right to be paranoid.

I make my route decision the moment I let the back-gate latch fall. Click – I’m going to the sea. Click – I’m going past the Library. Only, to be honest, I do choose the sea more often than the other routes, because I love the sea. Especially in winter. Sometimes, when it’s really rough, the sea throws pebbles on to the promenade, and walking there is like treading on fists.

Today I choose the sea, but I don’t go as far as the prom, just down to the main road (where I stand a moment to look at the colour of the waves) before turning inland again. It doesn’t really matter which of the northerly roads I take, Occam, The Grove, St Aubyns, they all arrive pretty much at the gas works and then it’s just a few hundred yards to school. Today I select St Aubyns, which is a wide, ugly street with gargantuan four-floor buildings, most of which have now been turned into guest houses. One of them is called the Cinderella Hotel. It has a flight of ballroom-type steps up to its huge front door. And I’m looking, as I always do, for the glass slipper, when my eye is drawn to the building next door. It’s a colossal edifice, grim, square, semi-derelict. And, painted in gold on the glass above the boarded front door, are these words: Chance House, 26 St Aubyns.

I read the words and then I read them again. After which I shut my eyes, turn a full circle, and open my eyes again. The words are still there. As they must have been every one of the hundred times I’ve walked up this street.

“You can go there. Walk. It’s not far.”

And of course I know it’s Edith Sorrel’s house because it is precisely what I have been expecting. It’s the place I saw before I slept last night, the one I pretended to imagine. The one I knew was here but, perhaps, would rather not have known, which is why I suppose I chose to hear Edith Sorrel say “St Albans” when her clear-as-a-bell voice actually said, “St Aubyns”.

Do you sometimes feel drawn and repelled in the same moment? I call it the car-crash mentality – you don’t want to look but you just can’t help yourself. Even though you know you are going to see something appalling. Well, Chance House is my car crash. I’ve tried ignoring it but it won’t go away. So now I’m going to have to look. Worse than that, I’m going to have to go in, though every sensible fibre in my body is willing me to walk away.

There are two bits of good news. One is that I have to be at school in less than ten minutes. The other is that Chance House is boarded up. And I don’t just mean with a few nails and a bit of chipboard. Each of the eight-foot ground-floor windows has been secured with a sheet of steel-framed, steel-meshed fibreglass. The front door is barricaded with a criss-cross of steel bars, and although the second-floor windows are not obstructed, they are twenty foot from any hand-hold I can see. Of course it could be different around the back.

I look up the road and then down the road. No-one is watching. No-one I can see anyway. I slip into the shadow of the side of the house. Grass sprouts through the concrete paving. There’s a small door, set into the wall of the house about four foot above ground level. It’s not barred but it doesn’t look like it has to be. There are no steps to it, and as well as being overgrown with brambles, it’s swollen shut, rotted into its doorframe.

I advance, slowly, towards the back of the house, as if I’m scared of the corner. As if I expect someone to be lying in wait, just out of view. My heart pounds as I walk. But I can’t stop now. I come to the edge of the house, just one more step, I turn…

The garden is empty, overgrown. There are dandelions in the long grass. Bluebells and a smashed white-wine bottle. The sun is remarkably warm. I compose my breathing. There is steel mesh on the first window. And on the second. There is no way I will be able to get into the house.

And then I see it. French doors on to the garden. The mesh hanging free, ripped from the wall as if it were paper.

I don’t know who’s moving my legs but I’m going towards that open door. Walking fast now, past the dirty Sainsbury’s bag and the length of washing line, past the patch of scorched earth where someone has lit a fire. Of course if the door is open there will be people. Squatters, vagrants, drug addicts. Who knows? My heart’s back at it again. Bang, bang, bang. Like my rib cage is a drum. What am I going to tell these people? That I’ve come because some batty old lady asked me to? I should be creeping, slithering along the walls like they do in the movies. But I’m not. I’m walking with the boldness of the bit-part guy who gets shot. Somebody screams, and for a moment I think it’s me. But actually it’s a seagull, wheeling overhead.

My legs are still on remote control but there’s something wrong with my breathing. I seem to have lost the knack of it. I instruct myself to breathe normally. In out, in out. The ‘out’ seems OK, but the ‘in’ is too quick and too shallow. How long does it take a person to die of oxygen starvation anyway? In out, in out. I’ve come to the door. In.

In. The room has been stripped. There are brackets but no cupboards, the dust shape of what might have been a boiler, plumbing for a sink that isn’t there and a mad array of cut and dangling wires. On the left-hand wall is a rubble hole where a fireplace has been gouged out and the floor is strewn with paper, envelopes and smashed brick.

At the far end of the room is a glass door. An internal door which must lead to the rest of the house. I look behind me and then I step inside. The door’s closed but obviously not locked because someone has put a brick at its foot, to stop it swinging. A final look over my shoulder and I’m moving towards that door. But I’ve only gone a couple of paces when I hear the scraping. A rhythmic, deliberate noise that stops me dead. The sort of noise you’d make if you were watching someone, and wanted them to know you were watching, without yourself being seen.

Scrape, scrape, scrape. Pause. Scrape.

It’s coming from my right. From the small kitchen window over the absent sink. This window is almost opaque, darkened by the steel-mesh glass and the shadow of some bush or tree that’s growing too close to the house.

Scrape. Pause. Scrape.

I see the finger now. And the knuckle – which looks deformed. But perhaps that’s just the trick of the light, the refraction of bone through fibreglass. My heart is beating like a warrior drum. Tom torn torn torn torn torn. But I’m not going to panic. I’m emphatically not going to panic.

I panic.

I leap out of the room into the garden.

I scream: “I can see you!”

A holly bush continues to scrape one of its branches against the glass of the kitchen window. Scrape. Pause. Scrape. In time with the wind.

I’m so relieved I sob. Huge foolish tears rolling down my cheeks. Norbert No-Brain. Norbert No-Botde. At least Niker isn’t here to see. Or Kate. When the boo-hooing stops I look for a hanky. But I don’t have one so I pick a dock leaf and blow my nose on that.

Right. That’s it. I’m going back in. I make for the glass door. I stride there, kick the brick out of the way and go through into a thin corridor. Then I worry about the brick. If anyone sees the brick’s been moved, they’ll know someone’s in the house. I go back out into the kitchen (which compared with the corridor is light and airy and pleasant) and retrieve the brick. Then I discover I can’t shut the door with me on the inside and the brick on the outside. Or I can, just, if I squeeze my fingers around the gap between door and doorpost, edging the brick back into place. Hang on, what if someone jams the brick right up against the door, barricading me in? Change of plan. Better to have the brick on my side of the door after all. That way at least if someone comes in from the garden, they’ll knock it over getting into the house and I’ll hear them. I bring the brick in, lean it against the door my side. Now I’m safe. If the people are outside.

But what if they’re inside?

I look at my watch. Six minutes to nine. I really have to get to school. Absolutely can’t be late. Have to go right now. The skirting board in the corridor has been ripped off. There’s a gap between the base of the wall and the floorboards through which I can see down to some sort of basement. In the dark cavity there are flowerpots, lamp bases, lamp shades, a desk, a filing cabinet and a sink, the old ceramic sort. There’s also the sound of water. Not a small drip drip, but a gushing, the noise of a tap on full bringing water pouring from a tank. Or maybe a cistern filling, or a bath emptying or…

Crash!

It’s the brick. The brick has fallen. I wheel around, catch my foot in the hole in the floor, fall, twist my ankle, drag myself up, never once taking my eyes from the swinging door. But nobody comes through. Nobody comes through! Why don’t they come through! I’m not an impetuous person, but I burst through that door, hopping across the kitchen faster than normal people run. And then I’m in the garden, and actually my ankle’s all right, so I do run. Run, run, run – flowers, washing line, burnt ground, smashed glass, corner of house, swollen door, front wall. Front wall of Chance House. Safety of St Aubyns. I collapse on to the pavement.

“Run rabbit run rabbit, run, run, run.” A familiar voice croons softly above me. “Don’t be afraid of the farmer’s gun.”

I look up. About a hand’s breadth from my head is a pair of feet.

“Hello, Norbert,” says Niker.

He swings himself down from the wall.

“You want to watch yourself.” He brushes imaginary specks of dust from his trousers. “Bad place, Chance House.” He smiles.

“What?”

“Bad place, Norbert. Bad house. Bad karma.”

He looks at my blank face. “You don’t know, do you? Everyone in town knows. But you don’t.” He turns towards school.

“Niker…”

He pauses. “Yes, Norbert?”

“Tell me.”

“Please. Pretty please, Norbert.”

“Pretty please.”

He looks at me pityingly. “A boy died in there, Norbert.”

“What?”

“You heard.”

“What boy? Who?”

“Just a boy, Norbie. Pasty little thing, by all accounts. Fluffy hair. Pale. Pocked. Bit like you, really. But his mum couldn’t see it. Doted on him, apparently. Told him he was wonderful. So wonderful he could fly. So what does he do? Opens the window of the Top Floor Flat and gives it a go. Pretty nasty mess on the concrete by all accounts.”

“Top Floor? Top Floor Flat, Chance House? Are you sure?”

“You feeling all right, Norbert?”

“Niker, are you sure?”

“Higher the window, more the strawberry jam. Lots of strawberry jam in this boy’s case, Norbert. Top Floor Flat for certain.” He grins. “Come on now, bunny, you’re going to be late for school. Better hop it, eh?”

I remain sitting on the pavement.

“Suit yourself.” He turns away.

As I watch his retreating back, the little swagger in his step, I want to believe it’s all just a story. One he’s made up to frighten me. But I know what’s really frightened me is Chance House itself. You see, it smells like The Dog Leg. It smells of fear.

5

Let me tell you about Kate. She’s slim and has a small round face with a pointed chin and freckles over the bridge of her nose. Her hair is light brown and straight and she keeps it cut short, usually with a fringe. Her eyes are hazel and, when she smiles, a little dimple appears in her right cheek. Niker says she looks like a cat. She’s my idea of an angel.

It took me two terms to pluck up courage to invite her to my house. I chose a Friday, because that’s a day I know she’s normally free. Both times she went back with Niker it was a Friday.

“Thanks for asking, Robert,” she said. “But I can’t. I’m busy.” She smiled and I watched the dimple appear.

“Fine,” I said. “Another time maybe.”

“Sure.”

But I didn’t ask again. When someone says they’re busy, you never know if they’re really busy or just busy for you. And I thought if I asked again I might find out. And perhaps I didn’t want to find out. Besides it was clear I had left the door open. She could invite herself any time. But she didn’t.

So you can imagine how I feel when, next time we get onto the minibus to visit the Mayfield Rest Home, Kate chooses to sit by me. OK, so it’s not exactly a free choice. She’s late and there are only two seats left, one next to student teacher and damp sponge, Liz Finch, the other next to me. On the other hand, I have the seat over the wheel with the restricted leg room and Miss Finch has the front seat with the view. So if Kate’s just looking for somewhere to sit, Finch’s seat is closer and comfier. So I reckon it has to be significant that it is at my feet that she dumps her bag.

“Hi,” I say.

“Hello,” she replies.

I once set the dream alarm on Kate. Lay on my back in bed and asked myself how to make that dimple come more often for me. At 3 am I was dreaming that a boy was throwing stones in a lake. Every time he hit the surface it made a dimple. The water was radiating dimples. But the boy wasn’t me. I left it alone after that.

Hey – but who cares about the past? Right now Kate Barber is sitting next to me. The journey to the Mayfield Rest Home is ten minutes. I spend two of those ten minutes trying to open my mouth, which seems to have got stuck on closed. I want to say stuff like: did anyone ever tell you how insanely beautiful you are, Kate? But even I can see that’s nerdy, and I don’t want her opinion of me to drop from woodlouse to unicellular organism. So, after four minutes (Kate’s reading her book now) I say:

“Do you know anything about Chance House?”

“Sorry?”

“Chance House, twenty-six St Aubyns.” It’s not such a wild remark. Kate lives on Oakwood, which is just two roads from St Aubyns. “That big house that’s all boarded up?”

“No.” Kate returns to her book.

“Spooky. Spooky, spooky, creepy, spooky.” Wesley Parr’s face appears around my headrest. “Boy died in dat dere housie, Norbert No-Chance.” He looks at Kate. “Norbert No-Chance-at-all.”

“Oh, that house,” says Kate.

“Boy about your littlie, littlie age, Norbert,” says Weasel.

“So about your age too then, Weasel,” says Kate smartly.

“Oh creepy, creepy, bye, bye, spooky.” Weasel’s head disappears.

“So you do know?”

“Not really,” says Kate. “Or only as much as everyone knows. That a boy is supposed to have died there. And that it’s never been much of a lucky house since. Keeps changing hands.”

“Who was the boy?”

“I don’t know. It was ages ago, Robert.”

“How many ages?”

“Thirty years. Forty years. I don’t know. Why are you so interested anyway?”

“My Elder, Edith Sorrel. She lived there.”

“Oh right. Why don’t you ask her then?”

“Mm. Maybe I will.”

But of course I won’t. Can you imagine it?

Me: “Oh hello, Miss Sorrel, would you mind telling me about the boy who died in your house? I mean the one that fell out of the top-floor window? The plenty strawberry jam one?”

Her: (giving me that witchy look where she appears to be able to see right through me and out the other side) “No.”

End of conversation. But not end of story. Miss Sorrel picks up silver-topped ebony cane, bangs it three times on floor and kazzam! I’m a frog. That would be the happy ending. The miserable one would be the ending where…

“Robert. Robert!”

The bus has stopped. Almost everyone has got off.

“Robert Nobel, you are a dreamer.” Liz Finch is waving her hands in front of my face. She looks almost animated.

I pick up my bags and follow the others into the lounge of the Mayfield Rest Home. Today Catherine has arrived in advance of us. She has set up trestle tables with paper, paint, pencils, scissors, magazines and glue. The protective newspaper she’s laid on the carpet is already rucked up with the traffic of wheelchairs.

“Hello, hello,” she says. “Come in. Find your Elder, everyone. Sit down.”

There is a hubbub of greetings.

“Afternoon, Mr Root,” says Kate.

“Eh up,” says Albert.

“How you been, Dulcie?” says Weasel.

“What?” says Dulcie.

“Hi,” says Niker, tapping Mavis on the chicken-wing shoulder.

“Please explain,” says Mavis. “Don’t keep me guessing.”

“It’s me,” says Niker. “Me, moi, myself. Niker. Jonathan Niker. Double O one and a half.”

“Oh,” says Mavis. “Is that a poultice?”

“Could be,” says Niker.

“Sit down, sit down,” calls Catherine gaily. “Sit down by your Elder please, everyone.”

But I have no Elder. Edith Sorrel is not in the room. I remain standing.

“Sit down, Robert. It is Robert isn’t it?”

I sit.

Behind me Niker sets up a soft hum. Do, do der doo, do der do der do der doo. It’s a funeral march. “Never mind, Norbie,” he whispers. “I’m sure it wasn’t your fault.” Do, do der doo…

“Quiet now, please. Well, today I hope we’re going to move on to actually making some work,” says Catherine. “Some little illustrations of the wisdoms that we were talking about last week. I was speaking to Albert before you all arrived and he mentioned paths to me…”

“Primrose path to hell,” squawks Mavis.

“Right on,” says Niker.

“Well,” says Catherine, “I think Albert was thinking more of paths of wisdom. And path as visual image. Which I thought was a very good idea. Because paths are things that lead us on, take us from one place to another. So perhaps that could be our starting point for today. We might think of an individual paving stone, perhaps with a wisdom inscribed on it, or something growing round it, or something or someone treading on the stone… You can use any of the materials here and…”

People begin to drift towards the tables. In the noise and movement I slip away into the corridor. I remember exacdy where Edith Sorrel’s room is. Third on the right. I knock softly, in case she’s asleep. There is no answer. Quietly, I ease open the door. The room is small and institutional. There is a bed, a chair, a wardrobe, a basin and a bedside cabinet. Except for a toothbrush, flannel and soap, there are no personal items at all: no photos, no china, no knick-knacks, not even a book.

Miss Sorrel is asleep, breathing quietly and evenly. Sitting in the chair at the bottom of her bed is a man.

He rises, as if startled by me. He’s tall, white-haired and, despite the heat of the room, he’s wearing a full-length black overcoat. There’s something hunched about him, something glittering, that makes me think crow, hooded crow. He stares like I owe him an explanation, so I say:

“Hello, I’m Robert. I’m on the project.”

“Ernest,” he replies edgily. “Ernest Sorrel.”

“Oh,” I say. “You must be her brother then.”

“No. Not exactly.” His eyes bore into me. “I’m her husband.”

I try to keep my face neutral but, as Edith Sorrel told me quite emphatically that she didn’t have a husband, it isn’t easy.

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