Everlasting Lane (33 page)

I hoped so. I’d like that.

Oh, and, of course, she was called Mrs Goodwin which was my grandma’s name too.

‘Oh, go on, Anna-Marie,’ pleaded Tommie. ‘It’ll be fun. What else is there to do?’

‘Yes, Anna-Marie,’ I said. ‘We won’t do it if you’re not coming.’

‘Fine,’ said Anna-Marie. ‘Then don’t do it.’

‘Well, what
are
we going to do?’ asked Tommie with an exasperated sigh. ‘I mean we’ve got all summer.’ He had begun to toss his ball up in the air, whirling it until it looked like the world going round and around. ‘We’ve got to do something, haven’t we, Peter?’

‘Stop it,’ said Anna-Marie, her voice like a whisper. And then: ‘Stop it!’ so loudly my ears jumped and Tommie stopped his spinning. ‘Don’t you understand, you idiots?’ she wailed. ‘We’re children: we don’t
do
stuff. Stuff is done
to
us. Haven’t you noticed? It’s the adults who decide everything. You’ve been watching too much television, Tommie. Peter’s not in Amberley because he chose it: he was brought here whether he liked it or not. You didn’t decide your parents shouldn’t live together: they decided. You’re just two little boys with two little brains.’

‘But we do do things,’ insisted Tommie, reeling from Anna-Marie’s outburst. ‘We go down the lane and we go to the pylons and we go to the Lodge …’

The look on Anna-Marie’s face was ugly. ‘Of course we
do
things,’ she snapped. ‘That’s all we ever do. But that’s not what I meant. What I mean is … we don’t
change
things.’ She made a funny noise, half way between a cough and a sob. ‘We don’t change anything.’

I looked at Tommie. Tommie looked at me.

‘I thought we could,’ said Anna-Marie. ‘I thought if we found out about Alice, then we could change things. Maybe. I thought I could change things.’

‘What things?’ said Tommie.

‘Things!’ snapped Anna-Marie. ‘Things. What do you mean,’ she did her stupid-question voice, ‘What things?’ She sighed. ‘Just things.’

‘But what things?’

‘I thought,’ Anna-Marie took a deep, shuddery breath, her fingers twisting her necklace, Tommie’s necklace, looping it around, ‘I thought I could change me. I thought I could … be better. Like Alice.’

‘Better?’

‘We shouldn’t’ve gone to the Lodge,’ I said.

For a moment, from the look on her face, I thought she was going to hit me. Anna-Marie I mean. And I would’ve let her too. I deserved it. But, instead, her hand stayed in her lap and she said, ‘Really?’ and then she said, ‘Do you think?’

She’d pulled the chain of that necklace tight around her finger; the tip all white but bulging, gasping for blood.

‘But we had to, didn’t we?’ I said.

‘What do you mean,’ and she put on her idiot-voice again, ‘We had to, didn’t we?’

I hesitated. Searching for the right words was like searching for pennies in a big, black bag of sand. ‘I mean it’s like what you said about consequences,’ I started. ‘You made us go to the Lodge because we knew about Alice. Going to the Lodge was a consequence of that just like us all sitting here like this,’ I meant because we were all so miserable, ‘is because of going to the Lodge. I mean Kat says that consequences can be bad as well as good: like bombs going off.’

‘What do
you
know about consequences, Peter?’

Actually, I was suddenly beginning to think I knew quite a lot: my ‘chosen specialist subject’ as the vicar might say. ‘It’s like
you
said: kids don’t know about consequences when they do things. They just do them anyway. And when we started trying to find out about Alice we didn’t know if it was a good thing
or a bad thing. I mean what happened to her and if we hadn’t gone to the graveyard and if we hadn’t gone to the Lodge then we wouldn’t know but we did and now we know that something bad happened and we can’t change that, we can’t change what we—’

‘That’s what I mean,’ said Anna-Marie. ‘We can’t change—’

‘No,’ I said. ‘We can’t change but that’s the point because now we know about the things that happen. Now we know about consequences we can decide what to do because we’ll know that there’s consequences and we can try to work out what will happen if we do this thing or that thing. It’s …’ What I wanted to say was that it was like what Anna-Marie had said about being a good teacher and teaching kids about consequences and that they should think about things before they do them and that if she hadn’t insisted maybe we wouldn’t’ve gone to the Lodge and we might never’ve known and that was a good thing, wasn’t it? But I didn’t say that. It would’ve sounded stupid, so, ‘It’s like something you said,’ I said.

‘Something?’ Anna-Marie laughed. ‘Something I said? Something you did, Peter. Something you did.’ She reached over and grabbed my knee. ‘Peter,’ she hissed through her teeth, her fingers like claws, ‘what did you do?’

I shook my head. ‘I … I don’t know … I—’

‘My dad’s dead.’

I looked up at Anna-Marie not quite sure I’d heard what I thought I’d heard. ‘What?’

‘My dad,’ she said again, ‘is dead.’ She was twisting the necklace round and round her finger until it was pinching her neck.

I glanced at Tommie. He was watching Anna-Marie but I could tell he already knew. I mean, of course he already knew. Everybody knew everything except for me. But even so, this was …

‘What do you mean? When?’

‘He hit me with this broom once, you see. A broomstick I mean. He broke it clean in half.’ She released the necklace for a moment to mime the breaking of a stick. The chain had left a thin white line about her throat which quickly flooded with dark pink. ‘Across my back,’ she sniffed, her wrist across her nose she unpicked a tear from the corner of her eye with her thumb. ‘I broke his watch, if you must know.’ She examined her tear. ‘But it was an accident. He didn’t mean it,’ she said. ‘He just got angry, you know, and didn’t know how to …

‘Oh, it’s easy to sit in judgement, Peter. We all make mistakes. You’ve made a few yourself.’

‘But … What happened?’

Anna-Marie looked at me. Tears were running down her cheeks like drizzle down a window pane, snot bubbling in her nose. Again she wiped it away leaving a swipe on her sleeve. ‘Peter,’ she said, ‘do you really have no idea? Do you really have absolutely no idea?’ She made a noise like it was supposed to be a laugh but wasn’t. It was more like a croak really, like she was being choked. ‘The police came. My mother called them and they came and took him away and they put him in a … in a cell and then they decided to put him in … in the Lodge,’ she took another deep breath all tattered and torn, her shoulders trembling, ‘because he wasn’t well and we could go and visit him but when I came home,’ she sniffed, ‘came home from hospital and my mother took me he wouldn’t see us and then,’ deep breath, ‘after we went home again he went to his room and then,’ deep breath, ‘he took his shoelaces and tied them to the light and stood on a chair and …

‘Oh, Peter,’ she cried, ‘don’t you know anything?’

No. No, I didn’t know anything.

‘I thought he was in sales,’ I said.

I needed to think. I needed to get away and find a willow
of my own. No, I didn’t know anything, but I thought that if I could just go somewhere, somewhere else where nobody was talking to me I might be able to start fitting the jigsaw pieces together.

But the funny thing was I’d thought it was only me—I mean me and Kat and Grandma and Dad and Alice—who had a jigsaw. I hadn’t realised or at least I hadn’t thought that Anna-Marie might have one too. And if Anna-Marie had one, what about Tommie? I glanced across at him, his spectacles all shiny like silver coins. Did he have one? What about his mum and dad? What about Norman Kirrin? Or Mrs Carpenter? The vicar? Surely not. Or maybe … maybe it was all just one big puzzle.

Glancing at her watch, Anna-Marie lifted her bag and hung the strap across her shoulder. ‘But the thing is,’ she said, getting to her knees, wiping her eyes dry with the back of her hand, ‘do you want to know why he died?’

I stared at her, her eyes so cold and blue. I shook my head. No. No, I didn’t. Not at all.

‘Because, Peter, people don’t get second chances,’ she said. ‘Not really. Not … Not literally. He couldn’t undo what he’d done and he couldn’t be forgiven any more than … any more than you can.’

And then she was gone.

Tommie and I rushed to collect all our bits together; to chase after Anna-Marie as quickly as we could. But we were bumping into each other like a pair of
It’s a Knockout
penguins and my
Mousetrap
box fell from my arms, all the pieces higgledy-piggledy across the ground. Tommie was ready to part the long leaves of the willow and laughed to see me scrabbling around on my hands and knees. But then, with a sigh, he bent to help me shove all the bits back the way they’d been.

It’d been so cool beneath the willow that we hadn’t thought how warm the morning was even though it wasn’t yet nine o’clock. It was too warm to run—all hot and treacly—but, as Tommie and I hefted our bags and stuff onto our shoulders and under our arms, Anna-Marie had already disappeared, so we didn’t have much choice if we were going to catch up with her, did we?

As we panted up Everlasting Lane, Tommie shook his head and said, ‘She’s really cross. Maybe we should leave her alone.’

But I was thinking, was she right? Anna-Marie I mean. When you thought about it, her dad was just like my dad. Not just that he was dead but because he didn’t get a second chance either. And I think it was all he wanted, my dad. He didn’t want to die. And I know Anna-Marie said we didn’t
get second chances but she’d been wrong before. She’d been wrong about Alice, hadn’t she? And about going to the Lodge too, so maybe she was wrong about this. I was trying to think about something Kat had said.

We didn’t catch up with Anna-Marie until the sign at the very top. She was waiting for a gap in the traffic, arms crossed, toe tapping impatiently as the school cars and a big blue bus passed by.

‘It’s not true,’ I said breathlessly as we reached her. I grabbed her arm and said it again: ‘It’s not true.’

‘What?’ she spat, spinning round to face me, shaking my hand free. ‘What’s not true?’

‘I mean maybe your dad didn’t get a second chance but that doesn’t mean nobody does. Some people get stuff like I got an Action-Man helicopter for Christmas once but not everybody did. It’s like we’re, you know, butterflies—’

‘What are you wittering on about, Peter? Tommie,’ she pleaded, ‘shut him—’

‘No, no, listen,’ I said. I tried to take her hands in mine but she pulled them away like I had that ring-a-roses plague thing Mr Gale told us about.

‘Don’t you speak to me—’

‘Shut up!’ I shouted. ‘Just … It’s … Let me think … It’s important. I …’ I took a big breath as I shoved my hand deep into that sand, you know, not real sand but the sand in that black bag I was telling you about. And then I found it: a big shiny penny glinting in my hand. Not a real penny but … Well, you know what I mean.

It was too late.

Anna-Marie was already crossing the big road—the main Nancarrow Road—just managing to skitter out of the way of this big lorry that blared its horn as it roared by. Tommie and me shouted at her to slow down but she wouldn’t. So then
we had to wait for this tractor—this big, smoky, green tractor with a rattley tin trailer—to go by before we could chase after her again.

We squeezed along the hedges that separated us from the fields where Kat had seen the scarecrow man—I mean Norman—that day, with the hills all crumpled up in the distance like the folds of my blanket. We reached the pavement and passed the
Amberley
sign into the village. This was Rone Lane and all its little tea-pot cottages and creosote fences and low brick walls. I could see a lady outside
The White Hart
standing on a chair and pouring a pan of washing-up water into the hanging baskets. The pavement was all cluttered with children on their way to school, toys and games carried preciously in their arms, school-bags dragging along in the gutter behind them.

Anna-Marie brushed past them all; Tommie and I stumbling along in pursuit taking turns to knock each other into the road.

‘Maybe,’ I said, ‘you don’t get second chances,’ as we pulled level with Anna-Marie alongside the telephone box. ‘Not even like that man in the Bible that Mrs Carpenter always says. Maybe that’s not what a second chance even means. You can’t change a dead man into a live man. Nobody can do that; not even grown-ups. Maybe not even Jesus.’ I was all breathless, what with walking as fast as her. ‘But maybe a second chance isn’t the chance to make a wrong thing right or a bad thing good,’ I went on. ‘Maybe a second chance is a chance to do another thing, a new thing that is good or right. But maybe you can’t know. Maybe it is a secret. But you can find secrets out like we found out about Alice.’

I didn’t know for sure that she was even listening, until she said, ‘But—’

I waved her quiet. She was always talking, wasn’t she? Now
it was my turn. ‘Because Alice was like a mystery,’ I said. ‘She was like a magical thing that we didn’t understand like I don’t understand how a fridge can be cold even when it’s warm or how the world’s spinning about at a million miles an hour but we’re all here as if we were—’

‘Oh, Peter,’ growled Anna-Marie, ‘please don’t tell me you think fridges are magic.’

‘In olden times,’ called Tommie jostling along behind us, ‘like in caveman times, if you had a fridge they’d think you were magic.’

Yes, I thought. Just like that. Thank you, Tommie.

‘It’s magic,’ I said. ‘And magic is true.’

Anna-Marie stopped and turned and, well, you know how sometimes if you go for a walk in the country and sometimes you’ll see a field with horses in? There was one in the lane which I told you about. Anyway, sometimes we’d go right up to the fence and Anna-Marie would hold out handfuls of grass and the horses would come gallumphing over and nibble at the ends and then every now and again one of the horses would snort and ripple its nose about. Well, that’s pretty much what Anna-Marie sounded like when I said that magic was true: a big, horsey snort like I’d just said the stupidest thing in the world.