The Lion Tamer’s Daughter (2 page)

Somehow he found another three inches of stretch and plunged his hand through the surface. The water was still water, but then another hand gripped his.

He almost lost his balance and fell, but the other hand didn't try to pull him in. It didn't let go either. When Derek tried to pull free the hand came with him, and an arm behind it. He pulled, heaved, strained. A head broke the surface. Another arm reached up and gripped the top of the side wall. Now Derek could straighten and take a fresh hold higher up the fence. And now the stranger could climb out, gasping and panting, over the fence and stand on the moonlit lawn beside him. He was a boy about Derek's own age, wearing ordinary clothes like Derek's. They were dry to the touch.

“I thought you weren't coming,” said the boy. “Have we got somewhere to live?”

“I suppose you'd better come home.”

They walked together toward the trees.

“Who …?” began Derek.

“Not now,” said the stranger.

They stole on in silence. We'll have to walk the whole way home, thought Derek. Mightn't get in before breakfast. How'm I going to explain?

The ladder was still against the wall. They climbed it, straddled the top, lowered the ladder on the far side, and climbed down, propping it back against its tree. Then back toward the road.

There were two bikes hidden in the bushes.

“How on …?” began Derek.

“Not now,” said the stranger.

They biked in silence the whole way home, getting in just as the sky was turning gray. They took off their shoes and tiptoed up the stairs. Derek was so tired he couldn't remember going to bed.

They were woken by Cindy's call outside the door.

“Hi! Pests! Get up! School bus in twenty mins!”

Derek scrambled into his clothes and just beat David down the stairs. Dad was in the hallway, looking through the post before driving off to work.

“Morning, twins,” he said. “Decided to have a lie-in?”

They gobbled their breakfast and caught the bus by running. Jimmy Grove had kept two seats for them. He always did.

Very occasionally during that year Derek felt strange. There was something not quite right in the world, something out of balance, some shadow. It was like that feeling you have when you think you've glimpsed something out of the corner of your eye but when you turn your head it isn't there. Once or twice it was so strong he almost said something. One evening, for instance, he and David were sitting either side of Mum while she leafed through an old photograph album. They laughed or groaned at pictures of themselves as babies, or in fancy dress—Tweedledum and Tweedledee—and then Mum pointed at a picture of an old woman with a crooked grinning face, like a jolly witch, and said, “I don't suppose you remember her. That's Great-Aunt Tessa. You went to her funeral.”

“I remember the funeral,” said David. “There was a grisly sort of cousin who grabbed us and told us how handsome we were, and then talked over our heads about us to someone else as if we couldn't understand what she was saying.”

“She had a face like a sick fish,” said Derek.

“Oh, Cousin Vi. She's a pain in the neck. She …”

And Mum rattled on about Cousin Vi's murky doings for a bit and then turned the page, but for a moment Derek felt that he had almost grasped the missing whatever-it-was, almost turned his head quick enough to see something before it vanished. No.

On the whole it was a pretty good year. There were dud bits. David broke a leg in the Easter hols, which spoilt things for a while. The girls kept complaining that the house wasn't big enough for seven, especially with the pests growing so fast, but then Jackie got a job and went to live with friends in a flat in Totton. Dad bought a new car. Those were the most exciting things that happened, so it was a nothing-much year, but not bad. And then one weekend in June Mum and Dad went off to the abbey to look at the roses again. Cindy and Fran were seeing friends, so it was just the twins who tagged along.

The roses were the same as last year, and Mum and Dad slower than ever, so after a bit David said, “Let's go and look at the river. OK, Mum?”

Dad gave them money for ices and told them when to be back at the car. They raced twigs on the river, tried to spot the largest trout, and then found the stream that ran through the lawn and followed it up to the spring. They stood staring at the uprushing water for a long while, not saying anything. In the end Derek looked at his watch, saw it was almost four, woke David from his trance and raced him off to look for ices.

A few nights later Derek woke with his heart pounding. It was something he'd dreamt, but he couldn't remember the dream. He sat up and saw that David's bed was empty. When he got up and put his hand between the sheets, they were still just warm to the touch.

All at once memory came back, the eleven years when he'd been on his own and the year when he'd had David. The other years, the ones when he'd been growing up with a twin brother and the photographs in the album had been taken—they weren't real. By morning he wouldn't remember them. By morning he wouldn't remember David either. There was just this one night.

He rushed into his clothes, crept down the stairs and out. The door was unlocked. David's bike was already gone from the shed. He got his own out and started off.

The night was still, but he felt as though he had an intangible wind in his face. Every pedal stroke was an effort. He put his head down and rode on. Normally, he knew, he'd be faster than David, whose leg still wasn't properly strong after his accident, but tonight he guessed David would have the spirit wind behind him, the wind from some other world. Derek didn't think he would catch him. All he knew was that he had to try.

In fact he almost ran into him, about two miles from the abbey, just after the turn off the main road. David was trotting along beside his bike, pushing it, gasping for breath.

“What's happened?” said Derek.

“Got a puncture. Lend me yours. I'll be too late.”

“Get up behind. We'll need us both to climb the wall. There mayn't be a ladder this time.”

Without a word David climbed onto the saddle. Derek stood on the pedals and drove the bike on through the dark. They leaned the bike against the wall where the ivy grew. It still wasn't thick enough to climb, but it was something to get a bit of a grip on. David stood on the saddle of the bike. Derek put his hands under his heels and heaved him up, grunting with the effort, till David could grip the coping of the wall. He still couldn't pull himself right up, but he found a bit of a foothold in the ivy and hung there while Derek climbed onto the crossbar, steadied himself, and let David use his shoulder as a step. A heave, a scrabble, and he was on the wall.

Derek stood on the saddle and reached up. He couldn't look, but felt David reach down to touch his hand, perhaps just to say good-bye. Derek gripped the hand and held. David heaved. Scrabbling and stretching, Derek leaped for the coping. He heard the bike clatter away beneath him. David's other hand grabbed his collar. He had an elbow on the coping, and now a knee, and he was up.

“Thanks,” he muttered.

The drop on the far side was into blackness. There could have been anything below, but there seemed no help for it. You just had to hang from the coping, let go and trust to luck. Derek landed on softness but wasn't ready for the impact and stumbled, banging his head against the wall. He sat down, his whole skull filled with the pain of it. Dimly he heard a sort of crash, and as the pain seeped away worked out that David must have fallen into a bush. More cracks and rustles as David struggled free.

“Are you OK?” came his voice.

“Think so. Hit my head.”

“Where are you?”

“I'm OK. Let's get on.”

They struggled out through a sort of shrubbery, making enough noise, it seemed, to wake all Hampshire. Derek's head was just sore on the outside now. Blood was running down his cheek. David was already running, a dark limping shape about twenty yards away. His leg must have gone duff again after all that effort. Derek followed him across the moonlit slopes and levels. They made no effort to hide. If anyone had been watching from the house they must have seen them, the moonlight was so strong. At last they stood panting by the fence of the spring. The rim of shadow still made a thin line under a wall.

“Done it,” whispered David. “I thought I was stuck.”

“What'd have happened?”

“Don't know.”

“What's it like … the other side?”

“Different. Shhh.”

The shadow vanished and the reflection of the moon moved onto the troubled disk. Derek glanced sideways at his brother's face. The rippled, reflected light glimmered across it, making it very strange, gray white like a mushroom, and changing all the time as the ripples changed, as if it wasn't even sure of its own proper shape.

David climbed the fence, grasped the bottom rail, and lowered his legs into the water. Derek climbed too, gripped David's hand, and crouched to lower his brother—yes, his brother still—his last yard in this world. David let go of the rail and dropped. Derek gripped his hand all the way to the water.

As he felt that silvery touch the movement stopped, and they hung there, either side of the rippled mirror. David didn't seem to want to let go, either.

Different? thought Derek. Different how?

The hand wriggled, impatient. Something must be happening the other side. No time to make up his mind. He let go of the rail.

In the instant that he plunged toward the water he felt a sort of movement around him, very slight, but clear. It was the whole world closing in, filling the gap where he had been. In that instant, he realized everything changed. Jackie would still be at home, Fran would be asleep in his room, not needing to share with Cindy. Nobody would shout at him to come to breakfast. His parents would go about their day with no sense of loss; Jimmy Grove would keep no place for him on the school bus; Mum would be a director of her company, with a car of her own … and all the photographs in the albums would show the same cheerful family, two parents, three daughters, no gap, not even the faintest shadow that might once have been Derek.

He was leaving a world where he had never been born.

T
OUCH AND
G
O

1. About Me

My name is Cyril Batson. I am a bookseller, aged sixty-five. I have a little shop in Chelsea, London, and two rooms above where I live with my cat. I have never married. Don't be put off. Most of this story is about stuff that happened when I was twelve, but first I've got to explain a few things.

My father was in the Merchant Navy, but he wasn't a real sailor. He was a ship's cook, working on the Union Castle line, the big ships that took passengers out from England to South Africa and back. Nowadays almost everyone goes by air, but it was ships then. Liners, they called them. My mother used to take me to see my father's ship come in. It had three red funnels with black bands round the top.

Each of his trips lasted almost six weeks—eighteen days out, four days there, and eighteen days back. Then he had three days at home with us and one day to go and see his mother. She was a cook too, in a big house in London, but my mother didn't get on with her so I hadn't seen her since I was small. Then my father would have another six weeks away.

In the end my mother couldn't stand it anymore. She fell in with a man called Maurice who lived somewhere up north, and while my father was away she ran off with him. Before she left she took me up to London, to a square with a garden in the middle and large white houses all round. She made sure I knew which was the right one and then we walked along to the next corner and stopped. She gave me a letter and told me to go back to the house she'd shown me and go up the steps and ring the bell, and then give the letter to whoever opened the door and wait there.

I did what she said, only before I went up the steps I looked back to make sure she was waiting for me, and she was. A maid came to the door and told me to go to a different door, in a little dark yard down some stone stairs. As I came down the front steps I saw my mother wasn't waiting for me anymore. I ran to the corner to look for her, but she was gone. I never saw her again except in dreams.

I went back to the door the maid had told me about and rang and someone came. I showed her my letter and she took it in. I waited. Then my grandmother came and told me in a cross voice to come in. She was a short fat woman who limped from a bad hip. She took me into a big kitchen and told me to sit down and gave me a mug of milk and a slice of bread and dripping, much nicer than we had at home. Then she told one of the maids to go and ask if she could have a talk with the lady who owned the house.

The lady wasn't pleased about me, any more than my grandmother was, but they both did the best they could, by their lights. My grandmother was a good cook and the lady didn't want to lose her. She let me stay in the house for a couple of days until they found a place for me in an orphanage not too far away. The lady said she'd pay the fees until my father came home and made arrangements. (My grandmother told me all this later.)

My grandmother came to see me on her afternoons out—just one afternoon a week she had. It wasn't easy for her because of her bad hip. My father didn't find out what had happened until his ship came in several weeks later and he went home and found the note my mother had left him. I expect he was upset but he didn't say anything when he came to see me. He took me to Madame Tussauds. And he saw the lady who owned the house and they sorted out about the orphanage fees and decided I'd better stay on there.

All this sounds very bad, the sort of thing nobody ought to do to a kid, and I didn't like it at the time, but pretty soon I was really glad it had happened, because there were several ways the orphanage was much better than Southampton. The first was that there were no real bullies there. I was the sort of boy bullies seem to pick on, small, a bit fat, a bit oily, no use at games and so on—nobody would ever have taken one look at me and decided they wanted me for a friend. There were three boys who used to wait for me in the school yard. Day after day I'd have to go off, knowing they were going to be there.