A Small Free Kiss in the Dark (13 page)

‘Why do they make things worse than they already are?’ The words came out before I could stop them.

‘It’s the war,’ Billy said. ‘Makes heroes of some, cowards of others.’ Sometimes his answers only left you with more questions.

He took us on a detour before we got too close to the fish-and-chip shop. We ended up around the back and sat behind a row of wheelie bins, eating oranges until it was safe to come out. The post office and the chemist shop had metal bars on the front windows, but round the back the high-up windows to the toilets had none; just narrow glass louvres.

Billy stepped up on a sewer pipe that jutted out of the wall, but he couldn’t reach the window. I pulled a wheelie bin across, climbed up and jiggled the top piece of window glass until it came loose, then I lifted it out. The next piece came out easy, but the bottom one was jammed tight. Billy was too big to fit through. Max would have been the perfect size, only he was too short to step down onto the toilet when he got inside. It was up to me. I took all the clothes off my top half, because it was going to be a tight squeeze. Billy hung the torch strap around my neck and told me what to look for.

‘I think it’s called Infant Formula,’ he said. ‘It’ll be in a big tin.’

I had to go in backwards. It was easy till I got to my shoulders, then it felt like my skin was scraping off on the metal window frame. I was scared the bottom piece of glass would break, but it didn’t.

It was a goldmine in there. I found the milk and heaps of other stuff for Sixpence: spare baby bottles, soap and powder especially for babies, disposable nappies and even pink singlets. I stood up on the toilet seat and passed them all out to Billy.

‘There’s little tins of baby food, too,’ I whispered out the window.

‘She’s too young for that,’ Billy said.

‘But when she gets teeth she’ll need some,’ I heard Max say, and I could tell he really wanted me to get some of those tiny tins.

‘Just a few then,’ said Billy.

When we got back, Tia and Sixpence had gone.

‘She won’t be far away,’ Billy said. But I ran everywhere, looking. I was afraid we’d never see them again. Then I remembered the refreshment pavilion. As I ran towards it I heard Tia’s voice coming from inside. I stopped to listen and heard her singing.

‘I love Sixpence, pretty little Sixpence,
I love Sixpence better than my life.’

That’s all she sang, just the first two lines. To begin with I felt happy; Tia did love her baby, I thought. But then she kept on, singing the same two lines over and over, and the longer she sang the more it sounded like the words came from some dark, empty place inside her. Some people, like my dad, have invisible scars; others, like Tia, have scars you can see. I was afraid Tia might be like Vincent who had both kinds of damage. It’s a difficult job to look after a person who’s damaged on the inside. Sometimes they won’t let you. I felt lonely and wished I was six, like Max, and someone would take care of me.

I went inside and put Dad’s coat on.

‘Where are you going?’ said Max.

‘Just out.’

‘Can I come?’

‘No.’

‘Don’t be mean!’ He stamped his foot and started to cry.

‘Skip?’

I left before Billy had a chance to say any more. I felt in my pocket for chalk as I walked along the boardwalk. I should be practising. I should be reading my books, I should be getting an education. I didn’t want to look after Sixpence and Tia and Max. The chalk snapped in my fingers and I threw it as far as I could. Soon it would be dark and the travellers would come along the boardwalk, like a flock of birds migrating to a place where they could survive the winter. I thought of waiting till they came and going with them, but I remembered what Billy said about heroes and cowards. I knew I wasn’t a hero, but I didn’t want to be a coward, so I went back inside.

Tia was there with Billy and Max. The coals under Billy’s multipurpose appliance were hot and they were washing Sixpence in the red bucket with warm water and her special baby soap. After they dried her and sprinkled her with powder they dressed her in a pink singlet and a disposable nappy with pictures of giraffes on it. She smelt beautiful and I loved her with all my heart and soul. I wanted Tia to feel the same. Maybe if the empty space inside her was filled with love there’d be no room for sad and dark things.

Between us, Max and me made forty-seven paper cranes. Billy threaded them all onto bits of string and hung them up in the tunnel so Sixpence could look at them when it was too cold to go outside. On days when it was fine we packed the bottom of my suitcase with newspaper and put Sixpence in on top. We zipped the case up until just her head was poking out. We put socks on her starfish fingers and a tea-cosy hat on her head and wheeled her down the boardwalk so she could see the seagulls flying free.

A sixpence is a small thing and so is a baby. I have especially made this chapter short because it’s mostly about small and precious things, like sixpences and babies.

13

Ambushed

One day, when Tia didn’t want to hang around with us, me and Max took our slingshots that Billy helped us make out of bike-tube rubber and forked sticks, and we went along the boardwalk to the information booth. There were two huge pots there, full of dirt and dead plants and cigarette butts. We scraped handfuls of pebbles off the top and put them in our pockets for ammunition.

When we got as far as the house next door to the orange tree I saw some pickets had come loose from the back fence.

‘Look Max!’ I whispered, even though we were at least five blocks away from the sandbag wall. ‘Let’s take a short cut through the jungle.’

I went first, squeezing through the gap in the fence and crawling through the bushes, when a crazy screech ripped through the silence. I was sure we’d been ambushed. We didn’t have time to get our slingshots out. We dived for the ground, covering our heads with our arms. Air and dust gusted all around. I imagined a helicopter hovering above us, full of soldiers with guns aimed at Max and me. Maybe it was the peacekeepers. Then suddenly I figured out what the sounds were and I opened my eyes. It looked like an explosion in a pillow factory: feathers floated everywhere. We’d broken in to a chicken run.

Max and me rolled around among the feathers and dirt and straw, with our fists stuffed in our mouths. But the laughing leaked out of us; we just couldn’t stop it.

‘C’mon, let’s get out of here!’ I said at last, but Max had spotted a nesting box with heaps of eggs in it.

‘I wonder if they’re any good?’ I said.

We threw six at the fence to test them out: three each. The shells smashed and the insides dribbled down the grey palings. Two of them smelt disgusting and four didn’t. Even a person who’s dumb at maths knows that’s pretty good odds.

‘Let’s take some back to Billy.’

‘What if they break in our bags?’

‘They won’t if we put this in with them,’ I said and we gathered up handfuls of straw and stuffed it in Max’s bag so the eggs couldn’t move around as much. We packed twenty eggs in there and then we went next door to get oranges. We took our slingshots out and fired stones at them, but we couldn’t knock them down, so I climbed up the tree and threw the fruit to Max. I saw an old rainwater tank turned on its side with a lot of sawn-up wood in it, and I made a mental note to tell Billy.

I wanted to run back to Dreamland, to show Billy what we’d found, but we had to be careful because of the eggs. When we got back Tia was there with Sixpence and we told them all about the chickens and the eggs and the dry sawn wood in the rainwater tank. Billy scrambled some of the eggs in the fruit salad tin for our dinner and we only had to throw four away.

After Sixpence had her bottle and her bath and went to sleep, Tia went outside. I wondered where she was going. It wasn’t only when we couldn’t see her that she left us; sometimes even when she was sitting right next to us it was like she wasn’t really there at all. You could even talk to her and she wouldn’t hear you. She reminded me of the sea; the way she came dancing towards you, wild and beautiful, and just when she was almost close enough to touch she’d rush away again.

Max and me had started drawing when I saw Billy leave. I knew where he’d be going. Max had given up drawing animals. He drew people instead. None of them had faces or bellybuttons, but they all had machine guns. I’d got so used to seeing them in his pictures that I didn’t notice them any more. It was the same with the sounds of war. They’d become normal, like gulls calling and waves crashing, the blue notes of Billy’s Hohner and Sixpence crying for her bottle in the night. So I should have been ready for what came next. I’d known all along it was pretty sure to happen but I still got a shock when I found out it had. Billy dropped the bombshell when he came back from the boardwalk.

‘The Red Cross have got their list of missing persons up,’ he said. ‘It’s time we found out if Max Montgomery is on it.’

Max’s mouth gathered up into a circle like a buttonhole. ‘When?’ he said.

I watched his face to see if that was what he wanted. But torchlight beamed back from his glasses and I couldn’t see his eyes, so it was hard to tell. Billy says your eyes are the windows of your soul. He also says different coloured eyes are the sign of a good soul and that being able to see two sides of everything is a rare gift. I don’t know if he just made that up, but I knew it was going to be hard to see the good side of losing Max.

‘We’ll leave in a few days,’ Billy said.

I don’t know if I believed that Max’s mother might still be alive, but I knew it was only fair to give Max a chance to find out. And if she was alive it was only fair to Mrs Montgomery, because I was sure she wouldn’t have deserted Max on purpose. She would have planned to come back for him the way she always had, with a smile and a hug and fish fingers for his dinner. It was just that she hadn’t counted on the war.

I was glad we didn’t have to leave straight away. You need time to get yourself ready when there’s something difficult you have to do. Giving Max back to his mother was going to be one of the most difficult things I’d ever done.

Max had some getting-ready of his own to do. He was only a little boy, but I think he’d figured out that he might never see Billy and me again. Maybe another reason why he hadn’t pestered us about going back to the city was because he was so certain his mother would be there waiting for him, no matter when we got there. I thought it must be nice to trust someone that much.

It was weird how Max and me spent more time by ourselves once we finally knew that we were going back to find Mrs Montgomery. Max stayed inside more. He cut a lot of pictures out of a magazine we’d found in the coffee-vendor’s trolley, and pasted them in his Book of After-school Activities. I didn’t ask to look because he always showed me things if he wanted me to see them. The other weird thing was how Tia stayed around more, at least in the daytime. I got a feeling she guessed how much I dreaded losing Max. I had to use all my different techniques to go to sleep, and even then I’d wake up again. One night I dreamt that Max was wandering around in the city all by himself. I was sweating when I woke up. I looked at Max sleeping beside me and then I got up to find a drink. That’s when Tia came creeping in through the secret entrance.

‘What’s up, Skipper?’ she whispered. Tia was the only one who called me Skipper.

‘Just thirsty.’

She brushed past me on the platform on her way to check on Sixpence. She smelt of stale scent and smoke and other night smells that I didn’t know the name of.

‘You feel hot,’ she said. ‘You’re not sick?’

I shook my head. I didn’t want to talk about the dream.

Tia took my hand. ‘Come in with me and Sixpence for a bit,’ she whispered.

‘Where do you go?’ In the dark it seemed okay to ask her. I felt her shrug. ‘Tell me,’ I said. ‘I won’t tell Billy, honest.’

‘Up on the hill,’ she said after a while.

‘Where on the hill?’ I asked and I felt cold all of a sudden because I knew what the answer was going to be. ‘To the soldiers?’

She didn’t answer.

‘Why, Tia, why do you go there?’

‘I get lonely.’

‘But you’ve got me and Max and Billy.’

‘Don’t tell Billy . . . please, Skip. You promised.’

‘But why do you go there?’

‘I told you, I get lonely.’

‘What do they do, do they talk to you?’

‘Yeah, we talk.’

‘I don’t get it. You don’t have to go up there. You’ve got Max and Billy and me to talk to; we’re your friends. And anyway you shouldn’t go up there. Do you even know whose side they’re on?’ I felt hot again. I wanted another drink. Maybe I was getting sick.

‘They’re just guys,’ she said. ‘I don’t care whose side they’re on. Maybe they’re not on anyone’s side.’

I sat up. ‘Are they peacekeepers?’

‘Peacekeepers? You’ve got to be joking. I’m the one who keeps the peace.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Nothing, just that I make them happy, that’s all.’

‘Tia,’ I said and my mouth was so dry I could hardly get the words out, ‘you don’t talk about us, do you? You haven’t told them about Max and Billy and me?’