Authors: David Mitchell
‘Ok
ay
, you two, enough of the private eye bizz. If some joker
is
making nuisance calls then I don’t want
either
of you answering, no matter what. If it happens again, just unplug the socket. Understand?’
Mum was just sitting there. It didn’t feel at all right.
Dad’s ‘DID YOU
HEAR
ME?’ was like a brick through a window. Julia and me jumped. ‘Yes, Dad.’
Mum, me and Dad ate our butterscotch Angel Delight without a word. I didn’t dare even look at my parents.
I
couldn’t ask to get down early too ’cause Julia’d already used that card. Why
I
was in the doghouse was clear enough, but God knows why Mum and Dad were giving each other the silent treatment. After the last spoonful of Angel Delight Dad said, ‘Lovely, Helena, thank you. Jason and I’ll do the washing-up, won’t we, Jason?’
Mum just made this nothing-sound and went upstairs.
Dad washed up humming a nothing-song. I put the dirty dishes in the hatch, then went into the kitchen to dry. I should’ve just shut up, but I thought I could make the day turn safely normal if I just said the right thing. ‘Do you get’ (Hangman
loves
giving me grief over this word) ‘nightingales in January, Dad? I might’ve heard one this morning. In the woods.’
Dad was Brillo-padding a pan. ‘How should I know?’
I pushed on. Usually Dad likes talking about nature and stuff. ‘But that bird at Granddad’s hospice. You said it was a nightingale.’
‘Huh. Fancy you remembering that.’ Dad stared over the back lawn at the icicles on the summer house. Then this noise came out of Dad like he’d entered the World’s Miserablest Man of 1982 Competition. ‘Just concentrate on those glasses, Jason, before you drop one.’ He switched on Radio 2 for the weather forecast, then began cutting up the 1981
Highway Code
with scissors. Dad bought the updated 1982
Highway Code
the day it came out. Tonight most of the British Isles will see temperatures plunging well below zero. Motorists in Scotland and the North should be careful of black ice on the roads, and the Midlands should anticipate widespread patches of freezing fog.
Up in my room I played the Game of Life but being two players at once is no fun. Julia’s friend Kate Alfrick called for Julia to revise. But they were just gossiping about who’s going out with who in the sixth form, and playing singles by the Police. My billion problems kept bobbing up like corpses in a flooded city. Mum and Dad at lunch. Hangman colonizing the alphabet. At this rate I’m going to have to learn sign language. Gary Drake and Ross Wilcox. They’ve never exactly been my best mates but today they’d ganged up against me. Neal Brose was in on it too. Last, the sour aunt in the woods worried me. How come?
Wished there was a crack to slip through and leave all this stuff behind. Next week I’m thirteen but thirteen looks way worse than twelve. Julia moans non-stop about being eighteen but eighteen’s
epic
, from where
I
’m standing. No official bedtime, twice my pocket money, and for Julia’s eighteenth she went to Tanya’s Night Club in Worcester with her thousand and one friends. Tanya’s’s got the
only
xenon disco laser light in
Europe
! How ace is
that
?
Dad drove off up Kingfisher Meadows, alone.
Mum must still be in her room. She’s there more and more recently.
To cheer myself up I put on my granddad’s Omega. Dad called me into his office on Boxing Day and said he had something very important to give me, from my grandfather. Dad’d been keeping it till I was mature enough to look after it myself. It was a watch. An Omega Seamaster de Ville. Granddad bought it off a real live Arab in a port called Aden in 1949. Aden’s in Arabia and once it was British. He’d worn it every day of his life, even the moment he died. That fact makes the Omega more special, not scary. The Omega’s face is silver and wide as a 50p but as thin as a tiddlywink. ‘A sign of an excellent watch,’ Dad said, grave as grave, ‘is its thinness. Not like these plastic tubs teenagers strap to their wrist these days to strut about in.’
Where I hid my Omega is a work of genius and second in security only to my OXO tin under the loose floorboard. Using a Stanley knife I hollowed out a crappy-looking book called
Woodcraft for Boys
.
Woodcraft for Boys
’s on my shelf between real books. Julia often snoops in my room, but she’s never discovered this hiding place. I’d know ’cause I keep a ½ p coin balanced on it at the back. Plus, if Julia’d found it she’d’ve copied my ace idea for sure. I’ve checked
her
bookshelf for false spines and there aren’t any.
Outside I heard an unfamiliar car. A sky-blue VW Jetta was crawling along the kerb, as if its driver was searching for a house number. At the end of our cul-de-sac the driver, a woman, did a three-point turn, stalled once, and drove off up Kingfisher Meadows. I should’ve memorized the number plate in case it’s on
Police 999
.
Granddad was the last grandparent to die, and the only one I have any memories of. Not many. Chalking roads for my Corgi cars down his garden path. Watching
Thunderbirds
at his bungalow in Grange-over-Sands and drinking pop called Dandelion and Burdock.
I wound the stopped Omega up and set the time to a fraction after three.
Unborn Twin murmured,
Go to the lake
.
The stump of an elm guards a bottleneck in the path through the woods. Sat on the stump was Squelch. Squelch’s real name’s Mervyn Hill but one time we were changing for PE, he pulled down his trousers and we saw he had a nappy on. About nine, he’d’ve been. Grant Burch started the Squelch nickname and it’s been years since anyone’s called him Mervyn. It’s easier to change your eyeballs than to change your nickname.
So anyway, Squelch was stroking something furry and moon-grey in the crook of his elbow. ‘Finders keepers, losers weepers.’
‘All right, Squelch. What you got there, then?’
Squelch’s got stained teeth. ‘Ain’t showin’!’
‘Go on. You can show
us
.’
Squelch mumbled, ‘KitKat.’
‘A KitKat? A chocolate bar?’
Squelch showed me the head of a sleeping kitten. ‘Kitty cat! Finders keepers, losers weepers.’
‘Wow. A cat. Where’d you find her?’
‘By the lake. Crack o’dawn, b’fore anyone else got to the lake. I hided her while we did British Bulldogs. Hided her in a box.’
‘Why didn’t you show it to anyone?’
‘Burch and Swinyard and Redmarley and them
bastards
’d’ve tooked her away’s why! Finders keepers, losers weepers. I hided her. Now I come back.’
You never know with Squelch. ‘She’s quiet, isn’t she?’
Squelch just petted her.
‘Could I hold her, Merv?’
‘If you don’t breathe a
word
to no one,’ Squelch eyed me dubiously, ‘you can stroke her. But take them gloves off. They’re nobbly.’
So I took off my goalie gloves and reached out to touch the kitten.
Squelch lobbed the kitten at me. ‘It’s
yours
now!’
Taken by surprise, I’d caught the kitten.
‘Yours!’ Squelch ran off laughing back to the village. ‘
Yours!
’
The kitten was cold and stiff as a pack of meat from the fridge. Only now did I realize it was dead. I dropped it. It thudded.
‘Finders,’ Squelch’s voice died off, ‘keepers!’
Using two sticks, I lifted the kitten into a clump of nervy snowdrops.
So still, so dignified. Died in the frost last night, I s’pose.
Dead things show you what you’ll be too one day.
Nobody’d be out on the frozen lake, I’d suspected, and there wasn’t a soul.
Superman 2
was on TV. I’d seen it at Malvern cinema about three years ago on Neal Brose’s birthday. It wasn’t bad but not worth sacrificing my own private frozen lake for. Clark Kent gives up his powers just to have sexual intercourse with Lois Lane in a glittery bed. Who’d make such a stupid swap? If you could
fly
? Deflect nuclear missiles into space? Turn back time by spinning the planet in reverse? Sexual intercourse can’t be
that
good.
I sat on the empty bench to eat a slab of Jamaican ginger cake, then went out on the ice. Without other kids watching, I didn’t fall
once
. Round and around in swoopy anti-clockwise loops I looped, a stone on the end of a string. Overhanging trees tried to touch my head with their fingers. Rooks craw…craw…crawed, like old people who’ve forgotten why they’ve come upstairs.
A sort of trance.
The afternoon’d gone and the sky was turning to outer space when I noticed another kid on the lake. This boy skated at my speed and followed my orbit, but always stayed on the far side of the lake. So if I was at twelve o’clock, he was at six. When I got to eleven, he was at five, and so on, always across from me. My first thought was he was a kid from the village, just mucking about. I even thought he might be Nick Yew ’cause he was sort of stocky. But the strange thing was, if I looked at this kid directly for more than a moment, dark spaces sort of swallowed him up. The first couple of times I thought he’d gone home. But after another half-loop of the lake, he’d be back. Just at the edge of my vision. Once I skated across the lake to intercept him, but he vanished before I got to the island in the middle. When I carried on orbiting the pond, he was back.
Go home
, urged the nervy Maggot in me.
What if he’s a ghost?
My Unborn Twin can’t stand Maggot.
What if he
is
a ghost?
‘Nick?’ I called out. My voice sounded indoors. ‘Nick Yew?’
The kid carried on skating.
I called out, ‘Ralph Bredon?’
His answer took a whole orbit to reach me.
Butcher’s boy
.
If a doctor’d told me the kid across the lake was my imagination, and that his voice was only words I thought, I wouldn’t’ve argued. If Julia’d told me I was convincing myself Ralph Bredon was there to make myself feel more special than I am, I wouldn’t’ve argued. If a mystic’d told me that one exact moment in one exact place can act as an antenna that picks up faint traces of lost people, I wouldn’t’ve argued.
‘What’s it like?’ I called out. ‘Isn’t it cold?’
The answer took another orbit to reach me.
You get used to the cold
.
Did the kids who’d drowned in the lake down the years mind me trespassing on their roof? Do they
want
new kids to fall through? For company? Do they envy the living? Even me?
I called out, ‘Can you show me? Show me what it’s like?’
The moon’d swum into the lake in the sky.
We skated one orbit.
The shadow kid was still there, crouching as he skated, just like I was.
We skated another orbit.
An owl or something fluttered low across the lake.
‘Hey?’ I called out. ‘Did you hear me? I want to know what it’s—’
The ice shucked me off my feet. For a helter-skeltery moment I was in mid-air at an unlikely height. Bruce Lee doing a karate kick, that high. I knew it wasn’t going to be a soft landing but I hadn’t guessed how
painful
a slam it’d be. The crack shattered from my ankle to my jaw to my knuckles, like an ice cube plopped into warm squash. No, bigger than an ice cube. A mirror, dropped from Skylab height. Where it hit the earth, where it smashed into daggers and thorns and invisible splinters,
that
was my ankle.
I spun and slid to a shuddery stop by the edge of the lake.
For a bit, all I could do was lie there, basking in that
supernatural
pain. Even Giant Haystacks’d’ve whimpered. ‘Bloody bugger,’ I gasped to plug my tears, ‘Bloody bloody bloody bugger!’ Through the flinty trees I could
just
hear the sound of the main road but there was no
way
I could walk that far. I tried to stand but just fell on my arse, wincing with fresh pain. I couldn’t move. I’d die of pneumonia if I stayed where I was. I had no idea what to do.
‘You,’ sighed the sour aunt. ‘We suspected you’d come knocking again soon.’
‘I hurt,’ my voice’d gone all bendy, ‘I hurt my ankle.’
‘So I see.’
‘It’s killing me.’
‘I dare say.’
‘Can I just phone my dad to come and get me?’
‘We don’t care for telephones.’
‘Could you go and get help? Please?’
‘We don’t
ever
leave our house. Not at night. Not here.’
‘Please,’ the underwatery pain shook as loud as electric guitars, ‘I can’t walk.’
‘I know about bones and joints. You’d best come inside.’
Inside was colder than outside. Bolts behind me slid home and a lock turned. ‘Down you go,’ the sour aunt spoke, ‘down to the parlour. I’ll be right along, once I’ve prepared your cure. But whatever you do, be
quiet
. You’ll be very sorry if you wake my brother.’
‘All right…’ I glanced away. ‘Which way’s your parlour?’
But the dark’d shuffled itself and the sour aunt’d gone.
Way down the hallway was a blade of muddy light, so that was the direction I limped.
God
knows how I walked up the rooty, twisty path from the frozen lake on that busted ankle. But I must’ve done, to’ve got here. I passed a ladder of stairs. Enough muffled moonlight fell down it for me to make out an old photograph hanging on the wall. A submarine in an Arctic-looking port. The crew stood on deck, all saluting. I walked on. The blade of light wasn’t getting any nearer.
The parlour was a bit bigger than a big wardrobe and stuffed with museumy stuff. An empty parrot cage, a mangle, a towering dresser, a scythe. Junk, too. A bent bicycle wheel and one soccer boot, caked in silt. A pair of ancient skates, hanging on a coat-stand. There was nothing modern. No fire. Nothing electrical apart from a bare brown bulb. Hairy plants sent bleached roots out of tiny pots.
God
it was cold! The sofa sagged under me and
sssssssss
ed. One other doorway was screened by beads on strings. I tried to find a position where my ankle hurt less but there wasn’t one.