Susan screamed, slapped hands to her mouth and felt her knees buckle. ‘Half a million! Oh, my God. Oh, dear God!’
She felt her legs give way. Richard went over to her quickly and supported her, but she
turned on him, sobbing, a hand raking out to slap at his face. She walked to the door to her studio and flung it open, collapsing heavily into her leather chair, crying with full voice. After a minute or so she leaned forward on to her work-bench and tried to stop herself being sick.
‘My God, my God,’ she wailed, and around her everything dissolved into blackness.
Michael sat with Carol on the stairs. They both wore their pyjamas and dressing-gowns against the cold. The central heating had turned itself off about an hour ago and the temperature in the house was dropping. Carol held her horseman shell and a doll dressed in Hungarian national costume. She was shaking badly, and Michael had his arm around her shoulder.
‘Katherine’s Mummy and Daddy don’t live together any more,’ Carol said. ‘She cries a lot. She says it’s like living nowhere. She has to go and see her Daddy every fortnight for one day. And the rest of the time her Mummy just talks to people on the phone and not to her. I don’t want Mummy and Daddy to live in different houses.’
‘I do,’ Michael said grimly.
Carol started to cry and Michael clenched his jaw, then stood and tugged his sister to her feet. He felt confused and sad for the girl. He knew (although it was a drifting thought) that he shouldn’t be so hard with her. ‘You’d better go back to bed. I think the shouting’s finished.’
Carol sniffed violently, and used her shirt-tail to blow her nose. She walked upstairs, a forlorn shape, mousy hair hanging lankly around her shoulders. Michael listened until he heard her run along the landing to her small room, then he stepped down to the hall, pushed open the study door and peered at the distant light, where his mother sat alone
at the work-bench, her whole body limp, like a tailor’s dummy. Occasionally a dark shape passed back and forth across the light framed by the door: his father, pacing restlessly.
Richard was saying, ‘I don’t know what the house will fetch. But not less than a hundred thousand.’
‘That’s right. Take my home. Take the children’s home away from them …’
‘We have no choice, Susan. These people mean business. I’ve got a year. I told you. They knew the money would come in dribs and drabs …’
‘Each drib and drab being fifty thousand pounds. That’s some dribbing and drabbing.’
‘We sell the house. The Minoan egg is worth forty thousand for its gold alone. Goodman will get us twice that …’
‘And take his 25 per cent—’
‘He’ll have to take less, damn him! This is a crisis. Then there’s the Mocking Cross—’
Michael’s heart stammered and his face flushed with fury. He almost ran into the room, but his mother’s voice sounded sharp, angry:
‘That was Michael’s special gift to me. That cross stays. I’d never sell it.’
‘It’s worth forty thousand, Goodman says.’
‘Goodman can take a flying fuck.’
‘I don’t like that sort of language from you, Susan. It demeans you.’
‘Dear God, listen to the fool. Who the fuck do you think you are, Rick? You’re an
alcoholic!
You’re a wasted, gambling, selfish, child-hitting
monster
. I live with you because – because I don’t know where else to go. Don’t tell
me
about my language. The temptation to laugh is too strong. The fact that I don’t laugh is mainly because I want to cry: at my own stupidity for not watching you. At not realizing what a sod you are.’
Ignoring the abuse, his father
went on: ‘Carol’s shell is valuable. It’s priceless in archaeological terms, but valuable enough on the art market. We can sell the cars. We’ll have a shortfall of no more than two hundred and fifty thousand.’
‘Is that all? Well, what are we worried about? We can have a
boot
sale. Soon make up the difference.’
‘We’ll re-mortgage the house. Get a bank loan. I’ll do some private work… Things will be fine. Things
will
be fine.’
There was a long, terrible silence.
Then Michael heard his mother crying softly.
Every time the telephone rang now, a sudden chill flooded through the house. Voices murmured, sometimes shouted. Michael came to dread the sound of the bell. He couldn’t look at his mother’s face when the telephone sounded. She looked so frightened. Sometimes when the caller turned out to be a friend, she cried with relief.
Christmas was a miserable affair. Susan’s mother came to stay with them, and after a few hours of false jollity she too settled into the routine of gloomy, chilling silence. It snowed on Boxing Day, but there was no walk, no play in the garden with the adults. Michael’s father sat and read a paper, magazines, then a book. The TV was grazed constantly. Susan worked on a doll in her studio, and the children played Scrabble and Monopoly.
Although there had been presents, generosity was conspicuous by its absence. The year before, the house had rocked and whined with models, trains, robots and gadgets. This year there had been books, paints and a family game.
They ate goose for Christmas Day, and Michael hated the greasy taste. Carol spat hers back on to the plate and was told off, as much as her mother ever told her off.
Now, again, Michael spent most
of his time in his room. When he tentatively asked for a story he was ignored. His father was too busy. Too busy to play, too busy to read to him, too busy to go for walks. But in the evenings, as the new term began, he would sit with Carol on his knee and watch her work out her homework, encouraging here, correcting there, testing, talking, laughing with the girl.
Michael did his homework in his room. The winter was mild, after the snow flurry of Christmas, but still the chalk quarry was a cold, dead place. He went there often, but the walls of the castle were gone, the sense of a structure there, of tunnels and passages, of the route down to the ancient sea, all this had dissipated.
Then the winter began to turn.
On a Saturday in early March, Michael left the house after breakfast, depressed and lonely, and trudged across the ploughed, frozen field towards the winter woods. Behind him, Carol called to him. She was wrapped up against the chill, and was wearing her new glasses. She didn’t like wearing them, and had been teased at school, but Michael had been staunch in his defence of his sister, and had received a bloody lip from Tony Hanson in a fight on the last day of the week.
Carol had stayed very close to her brother all the way home, and that night insisted on Michael sharing her story before she went to sleep. When he refused to come from his room, she and Susan came to his chamber of wall treasures, and Carol climbed into bed next to him. Susan, reading from a book of Grimm’s fairy tales, was probably aware of her son’s irritation, but Michael soon relaxed.
It was only with the greatest reluctance that Carol returned to her own room. But in the morning, when Michael wandered off, silent and surly, she chased after him.
‘I want to see your
castle,’ she said. Her spectacles slipped on her nose and she grumbled, ‘They’re too loose.’
Michael took the frames and looked at them.
‘Don’t break them!’ Carol said anxiously as Michael twisted the ends of the arms slightly.
When she placed the glasses back on her face they held more firmly. She looked like an owl, he told her, and Carol was amused.
So he took her to the castle. They dropped down the tree rope, Michael getting rope burn as he tried to show off to his sister. At the bottom he led the way to the storage tunnel. He had a pen-light and turned this on as he stooped to crawl into the deep, gloomy tunnel.
‘I’m scared,’ Carol said, hovering at the entrance. ‘There’s nothing here,’ Michael murmured, adding, ‘Except dead things from the past …’
As far as he knew, Carol had no idea what he had been hiding in this passage, and she hesitated then grinned, not believing her brother. She crawled forward into the thin ray of light. ‘It smells.’
‘Dead things always do.’
‘There aren’t any dead things …’
His hand reached for the mummified body of a cat, still wrapped in shreds of cloth. The wooden container was around somewhere, broken during its transition through his mind. He felt the stiff, animal body, and the way it started to crumble beneath his touch. He flung it away, deciding not to shock his sister.
‘Do you want to go deeper?’
Carol said that she didn’t.
‘Coward.’
‘I’m
not
a coward. It’s cold. And smelly.’
‘Then why did you come? You said you wanted to see my castle.’
‘I had a funny dream,’ she whispered.
‘What dream?’
‘You were all covered with
chalk and running with a big dog over some hills. You were frightened. You hid in a cave in the chalk, but the men found you and dragged you away.’
Michael shuddered and crawled back further into the passage. His sister’s eyes gleamed with tears in the thin beam of light. ‘What did they do to me?’ he asked in a whisper.
‘They put a spear into you. Then they put you in a hut. They locked the door with a tree branch. They stood around and watched the hut and it rained hard, and everything was muddy.’
He had had that dream too! It had been vivid and frightening, only it hadn’t been
him
in the hut, it had been Chalk Boy.
Something moved through the passage, a gentle, cool wind, stirring his hair, making Carol blink. Michael turned sharply and flashed the pen-light into the cramped gloom. The rags on the mummified cat were crisp. When Michael crawled forward his hand descended on the creature’s remains and crushed them to dust.
‘Where are you going?’ Carol hissed.
‘Deeper,’ Michael said.
There was a place at the far end of the tunnel where the chalk entrance was narrow and hidden behind some pieces of wood. His father hadn’t seen this entrance to the deepest of the caves, where Michael had kept Chalk Boy’s unpleasant surprises of last summer.
The wind was stronger. Carol was talking behind him, but her words washed over him.
Chalk Boy … ?
He felt the hair on his neck prickle and rise. Then there was the feeling of pressure, as of hands gripping his shoulders, crushing down on his back and neck.
‘I can see the sea …’ Carol said, her voice muffled by the rock.
Michael was gasping for breath.
He was half through the narrow slot that widened into the deeper cave. His arm before him, he flashed the light around the wood and stone that was discarded here. He could hear the sound of a third person’s breathing, and for a second – just a second – there was the smell of the ocean.
‘I can see the
seaside!
’ Carol said, more loudly, and then laughed, almost delightedly.
The pressure went from Michael’s back, the hands withdrew, the moment’s touch of Chalk Boy faded. Again Michael felt deserted by the ghost that had been his friend for so long.
His shadow was outside of him again. He felt empty inside, and eased his way back to his sister.
Carol sat in the darkness, her pale face aglow with pleasure. She was holding a small doll. It was made of china and dressed in red clothes, with a red bonnet over golden hair. It was very small, and two fingers from its left hand were broken.
‘Where did that come from?’ Michael asked quietly.
‘I found it. It was just here after the ceiling opened to the beach.’
She was staring up at the ragged roof of filthy chalk. Michael stared after her. Carol put out her arm and pointed. ‘Just there, through there. I saw the beach at the end of a tunnel. There was a little boy and he gave something to me. I think it was the doll. It’s pretty. Look at it …’
Grimly, Michael took the figurine and stared at it.
What was Chalk Boy playing at now?
The house was empty, as usual. Michael
let himself in through the back door and took off his heavy school coat. It was the end of March. The weather was still cold, but he could smell the new season on the air and it was good to be home before the evening set in. There would be time to visit the pit, time to explore the garden, time to walk to the shop in the village and buy a bar of chocolate.
The house felt very hollow. The noisy heating was just coming on. The oven made creaking noises as the evening meal began to cook, ignited under its own instruction. There was no note, no plate of sandwiches for his tea. Just an empty, silent building, surrounded by rain clouds.
He went up to his room and idled for a while with his comics, his models and his thoughts. From his window he could see the cornfield beginning to mist over. The quarry was in gathering gloom. Somewhere in the house there was a sudden movement.
Puzzled, he peered into Carol’s tiny, tidy chamber, but it was quite empty. He checked the bathroom and toilet, then the guest room with its stale smell of old blankets and furniture. Finally he opened the door to his parents’ bedroom, scuffed through the deep pile carpet, ran his hands over the velvet curtains on the window, opened the closet.
It was so strange to be here, a
room where he had not been welcomed, nor taken, for years. His mother’s clothes had a heavy feel and smell about them. She wore a lot of corduroy. Belts hung from hangers, and silk scarves too. On shelves below the dresses were black and brown leather boots, sports shoes, and packs of unopened tights.
He opened the drawers to her dressing-table and looked at the scatter of objects, from hairbrushes, curlers, tubes of ‘guck’, cotton buds, elastic bands, empty photograph holders, bunches of real hair (from all the family) for doll-making, shards of china, wooden and porcelain limbs, knitting patterns. He ran his fingers through these, his mother’s private things.
Closing the drawer he felt a thrill – it was like being a spy entering the house of a suspect.
Again: the sound of movement somewhere close by.
‘Who’s there?’ he called out.
The response was the sudden sound of footsteps on the stairs. He raced to the bedroom door, stood panting excitedly on the landing. But again silence had descended.