S
aturday morning came. I could have had a nice lie-in, but no, instead I got up early and bicycled over to Hal's house
before breakfast
. There'd been a small change of plan. It seems we would never be able to follow Alec in his van, so now, instead of that, we were going to cycle
ahead
of him to the hospital and wait there to see what happened. I really didn't see the point of all this, but Hal insisted.
Normally I couldn't have got away with leaving the house at the crack of dawn, I'd have been missed at home, only they were all fussing about getting Larry to the airport in time for his flight and giving him long and complex instructions about how he was to behave himself when he got to Paris and how he was to have absolutely NO alcohol of any description, no way, no, no, no.
Larry doesn't drink. Let's face it, Larry is not one of nature's rebels.
But my parents don't believe this. They believe all that stuff they read in the papers about Teenage Drinking. Larry is not exactly what you would call a typical teenager. I probably will be, when I get to that age. I will most likely be a
total handful, get studs everywhere, wear the most way-out things, listen to really objectionable music. I will drive my parents up the walls. They've had it easy with Larry. They won't know what hit them. I am looking forward to it.
I got a list of instructions too, of course, before they left for the airport, about how I wasn't to open the door to strangers, and I wasn't to light any fires or leave the cooker turned on and how they'd be right back as soon as Larry's plane boarded. I waved them off at the front door, and as soon as they'd left, I leaped onto my bike and scooted over to Hal's.
My kooky friend, I said to myself as I rode out of our estate; along the main road; past the Centra shop; around the corner into Hal's estate; past all the nice, calm-looking gardens with their flower beds and their little gates with notices about BEWARE OF THE DOG and their WELCOME mats on the doorsteps and wishing wells in the middle of the lawnsâall those houses with their curtains closed and sensible people inside them in their beds, which is where I should have been. My weird friend. Rosemarie and Gilda were beginning to look much more acceptable. At least they wouldn't have me up at the crack of dawn bicycling around town on a mad escapade like this. They wouldn't have the imagination for it to start with.
Hal was waiting for me at his gate, looking pale and anxious, with his bike.
Alec's painter's van stood in the driveway, a little white van with a ladder on the roof rack and ALEXANDER DEN-HAM
INTERIOR AND EXTERIOR PAINTWORK NO JOB TOO SMALL painted on the side of it in rainbow colors.
“Hi, Hal!” I called.
Hal made a zipping signal across his mouth to shut me up, and he indicated that I was to dismount.
“What's wrong?” I asked in a loud whisper.
“Nothing,” he whispered back. “But he's up already. We haven't much of a head start, so we have to dash, OK?”
I nodded.
“Right,” said Hal throatily, “wheel your bike
quietly
to the end of the road, and then we'll cycle from there.”
I nodded again. I am so cooperative, really. And away we went. Against my better judgment.
There wasn't much traffic about early on a Saturday morning, so we made good headway by cycling like mad. Every time a car came up behind us, Hal turned around to check if it was Alec, but it never was.
“Maybe he's not going to do it,” I yelled at Hal when we stopped at the traffic lights in town. “Maybe he doesn't want to. Maybe your mother has made him go to the golf thing with her after all. Who's supposed to be minding you, by the way?”
“I mind myself,” Hal said.
“You don't!”
“Yeah, I do. Unless it's nighttime. Come on, Olivia,” he suddenly yelled, spurting ahead as the lights changed to green. “Keep up!”
I jumped onto my pedals, and I kept churning all the
way over to the hospital. We got off at the gate and I hung over my handlebars, trying to get my breath back after our crazy bike ride.
The hospital is a big, sprawling place with blue railings and a lot of low, flat-roofed buildings. Just inside the gate, on the left, is a large notice board with signs in different colors that point you to the various departments, and on the right, before the notice board, is a glass kiosk sort of thing, with a security man in it. There's a red-and-orange striped pole that goes across the gate, so you can't get in unless the security man raises it.
As soon as I could talk, I said, “Well, are you sure he got the message?”
Hal was pretty winded too. “I think he must've,” he gasped. He breathed a bit and then he went on. “There was an ALMIGHTY row this morning. My mother threw her shoes out the window.”
“Why?” I wondered if maybe he'd put stones in her shoes as well.
“I have no idea. Anyway, she came down in her bare feet and her new outfit, and she jumped into her car and zoomed off to her golf tournament without even having any breakfast.”
This house was beginning to sound odder and odder. I mean, it's one thing to start turning a garage into a playroom and then go off the idea. It's another thing to start threatening an odd little squirt like Hal with six years of
compulsory rugby and another thing again to throw your shoes out the window because someone won't take you to a game of golf. Maybe they were always flinging things out of the windows. Maybe they did worse than that.
“Oh, Hal,” I said.
“So, you see, Olivia?”
I did kind of see. His family certainly seemed a bit peculiar, I have to say. I started to feel a bit sorry for Hal, and there's only one of him too, which makes it harder. Larry would not be my idea of a person to spend the rest of my life on a desert island with, but if the chips were down, we'd stick together, me and Lar. Poor old Hal had no one. Only me.
“But, Hal, you know, you can't mess with grown-ups. They always win in the end.”
Hal shrugged.
We were just locking our bikes to a railing, out of sight behind a parked car on the other side of the road from the hospital gate, when Alec's little white van appeared at the end of the road, and there was Alec hunched over the steering wheel, looking right and left before turning into the road we were on.
To be fair to Hal, Alec wouldn't exactly be my idea of someone I'd like to meet at breakfast every day from now until I was old enough to leave home. He's a bitâferrety And his face is shiny. I don't know what it is about shiny faces, but they give me the creeps.
I'm sorry if you have a shiny face and you are reading this. You are probably a lovely person, and you most likely have compensating features, such as not being ferrety. Having an aversion to shiny faces probably says more about me than it does about the person with the shiny face, but anyway, Alec is a man with a shiny face, there is no getting away from it.
We crouched down behind the parked cars and watched. It should have been adventurous, but I just felt a bit lightheaded from cycling all that way with no breakfast, and a bit panicky, too, about what was going to happen next.
Alec drove right up to the orange barrier. We could see him pointing and gesticulating and the security man scratching his head, but eventually the red-and-orange pole went up, and the little white van drove in. It stopped at the big notice, and then it turned right, in the direction of the physiotherapy department.
“You know, Hal,” I said, watching the little white van disappearing around a building. “I can't see this all ending in divorce, somehow.”
“They're not married,” Hal said, “so they can't be divorced.”
“No, but it doesn't matter what you call it. The thing is, Hal, kids can't make adults break up. This isn't going to work. And it'll be boarding school for you in September if you don't start talking to him.”
Hal didn't answer. He just crossed the road to the
hospital entrance and took a look around. I trailed along after him, still trying to reason with him, but he wasn't listening.
There was a separate little gate for pedestrians. We could just saunter in without having to go near the security man, if we left the bikes outside. But it was about six hours until visiting time. If we met someone who wanted to know our business, I didn't know how we were going to explain what we were doing wandering around the hospital grounds at this hour of the day.
“Maybe we should just wait here for a while,” I said. “It won't take him long to discover it's all been a hoax, and then he'll just have to turn around and come out again. Then we can go home.”
“Yeah, OK,” said Hal. He sounded a bit deflated.
We sat on the hospital wall and kicked our heels against it. It was a low brick wall, with prickly things growing behind it, but if you sat carefully, you could avoid getting scratched.
My tummy was rumbling.
“I could murder a doughnut,” I said after a while.
“Stop,” said Hal. “You're making it worse by talking about food.”
Time ticked on.
“The kind with jam in the middle are my favorite,” I said. “Though I like the ring ones if they have icing on them. And sprinkles.”
“Olivia! Shut it!”
“Half a dozen doughnuts,” I said after a while. “A
mountain
of doughnuts. I'm starving.”
“Stop!” said Hal. His tummy was rumbling too. I could hear it.
I checked my watch. “Hal,” I said, “it's nearly ten o'clock.”
“Yes,” he said, “long past breakfast time. That's why we're so hungry.”
“That's not what I mean,” I said. “I mean, he's been in there a good quarter of an hour. What do you think is going on?”
“Heh-heh,” said Hal.
“Hal?” I said. “Hal, that building you described behind the physiotherapy department. The one he is supposed to paint. What exactly is it?”
“It's the mortuary,” Hal said. “Heh-heh!”
“
What?
”
“The mortuary.”
“Hal, is that something like a morgue?”
“Yeah,” said Hal. “I suppose you could say that. Only smaller.”
“Hal! You can't have!”
“Heh-heh,” said Hal again, sounding like the evil vampire character in a horror movie. “Heh-heh!”
“Why on earth did you direct him to the morgue, Hal?”
“Well, I was trying to think of the most lugubrious place. It seemed like a good idea.”
“Lugubrious!” I snorted. “Hal, you are seriously deranged. I mean, I always knew you were weird, but this is positively
Gothic!
”
“Yeah,” he said with a grin. “You and me, we're Gothic. Like the cathedrals. Aren't we, Olivia?”
I suddenly didn't want to be Gothic anymore. I mean, I was on Hal's side, but Romanesque looked quite attractive from where I was sitting, outside that hospital with madboy beside me and my stomach screaming for food. My parents would be home from the airport soon too, and I would be in right trouble if they arrived back to an empty house.
I clenched my teeth and said nothing for what seemed about ten minutes. I checked my watch. Two minutes had passed. It was now exactly ten o'clock. Still no sign of Alec coming back and looking thunderous or puzzled or whatever it was that Hal was hoping for.
“Maybe he got lost,” Hal said after a while. He was starting to get a bit jittery. I could see.
“I'm so hungry,” I said a minute or two later.
“Well, what do you think?” asked Hal. “Will we go off and get some food someplace, or will we hang on here a bit longer or what?”
I wasn't sure what we were doing there anyway, and I was very tempted by the idea of food, but at the same time I felt we couldn't just walk off and leave poor old Alec in thereâwith the
bodies
. Even if he did make people throw their shoes out the window. (I suppose she must have been throwing them
at
him. What a pair they must be!)
“Maybe we should go in after him and see what's happened,” I said. “What do you think, Hal? We got him into this, whatever it is. We are sort of, you know,
responsible
. He might have run into some sort of trouble in there, trying to convince people there is a Clem Clapham on the staff. They might have decided he's an escaped loony or a spy or
anything.
”
“A spy!” snorted Hal. “What would a spy be doing snooping around a hospital mortuary dressed up like a painter? And it's Callaghan.”
“Well, what would
anyone
be doing snooping around a hospital mortuary?” I said.