The Quickening of Tom Turnpike (The Talltrees Trilogy) (8 page)

ten

Biology
was usually a raucous lesson because Miss Prenderghast had absolutely no
control.  She didn’t seem to mind either.  I had never heard her raise her voice
and I had certainly never seen her hand out a Detention.  She simply continued
giving her lessons in her steady monotone, generally facing the blackboard so
that she could draw chalk diagrams of who-knows-what, apparently totally unaware
of the pandemonium behind her.  All I had ever learnt in Biology was how to
fire an elastic band with one hand and how to craft a paper aeroplane that
could travel the length of the classroom.

The
Biology Lab had a faint, but obnoxious smell; something between rotting vegetation
and the fumes of a fly burning under a magnifying glass.  At the back of the
room there were newts in glass boxes, sluggish and glum, and tall, white,
anorexic plants which had been grown in the dark and stood now beside their
healthy, green cousins.  It was a grim place, a concentration camp for flora
and fauna.

I
watched Miss Prenderghast carefully, trying to detect anything unusual about
her
behaviour
.  Although, I thought to myself, her
behaviour
was very rarely normal.  She was an
absent-minded, melancholy lady whose husband had been killed at the Battle of
Surrey Downs.  She smelt sort of damp and her hair was the same shade of grey
as her face and eyes.  She always seemed to look straight past anyone she spoke
to and would often forget what she was saying halfway through her sentences. 
The other teachers had very little to do with her.

This
morning, though, there would be no nonsense. 

An
expectant hush descended upon the classroom shortly after we had sat down
because Miss Prenderghast had mentioned a magic word:

Dissection.

“I
thought we weren’t meant to do dissection until we got to the Fifth Form,”
Freddie whispered excitedly.

“That’th
what I thought,” said Peregrine Trout, leaning towards us, wide-eyed with
anticipation.

“Do
you know what it’s going to be?” asked Freddie.

“My
brother thaid that it’th uthually mithe or frogth,” Peregrine replied.

“I
hope it’s frogs,” said Freddie, and added, “Apparently their intestines smell
so bad that someone always
pukes
”.  Peregrine smirked and turned back to
face the front.  I felt sick just thinking about it and had the ominous
suspicion that if anyone was going to puke, it would be me.  And I really
didn’t want to be known as the Third Form frog-vomitor.

“Take
your places,” Miss Prenderghast began, and paused, as if distracted by being
able to hear her own voice in the classroom for the first time.  “Um, yes, take
your places in pairs by the worktops.  You’ll see that I’ve, er, set out all of
the things you’ll be needing.”

Everyone
scrambled over to the worktops, keen to start hacking up a dead animal as soon
as possible.  The tools set out in front of us, like everything else in the
school, were heavily weathered and half-eaten by rust.

“Now
you’ll see on the blackboard that...”

“Er
Ma’am,” snorted Peregrine, “there’th nothing on the board.”

“Hm? 
Oh, I see.  Yes.”  She rolled down the blackboard to reveal two prepared
diagrams, side by side.  One appeared to be a cross-section of a U-boat, the
other a cross-section of a maggot-eaten apple.  “This,” she said, indicating
the first of these, “is a fish of the family
tetraodontidae
.  Who can
translate this from the Greek for me?”

“Ma’am,
we haven’t started Greek yet,” I said.

“Oh,
er, well, that’s a shame,” she muttered.  “In Greek, “tetra” means “four” and
“odon” means “tooth”.  The family gets its name because the fish have four
large teeth at the fronts of their mouths.  So, er, can anyone tell me why
these fish might benefit from large teeth?”

Freddie
raised his hand and said, “Is it because they are predators?”

“Er,
that’s correct.  They eat crustacea and
molluscs
,
and so they need these teeth,” she tapped the diagram, “for crunching their
prey”.

“Can
anyone tell me what they think the picture on the right represents?”

Nobody
replied.  I continued to study her mannerisms, looking for anything out of the
ordinary that might give a clue about what Colonel Barrington’s
spell
might be.  But there was nothing.  She was always this vacant.

“Um,
it’s, it’s the...  Er... Where was I?” she mumbled.

“The
diagram on the right, Ma’am,” I reminded her.

“That’s
right.  This is a diagram of exactly the same fish.  It has inflated itself. 
Can anyone tell me why it might want to do that?”

This
time Peregrine answered, “It’s a defenth mechanithm, Ma’am.  The fish inflateth
itthelf to make it look big tho that a predator will think twithe before
attacking it”.

“Correct,”
she said.  “After you make your incisions, um...” 

We
were all silently attentive.  The word “incision” had made me feel that I was
about to do something very important, like Doctor Watson analysing a corpse for
clues. 

“…Er…
you must identify the liver, remove it, if possible without piercing it, and
place it in the tobacco tin in front of you.”

***

The
intestines were pretty disgusting, but I managed not to throw up.  In fact, to
Freddie’s disappointment, no one threw up.  And the whole thing seemed more
like a very messy lunch than a post mortem on a murder victim.

More
importantly, Miss Prenderghast’s behaviour had been just as unusual as usual. 
I began to wonder whether we had really heard Barrington clearly when we
thought he had said that she was under a spell.  I had no inkling of what kind
of spell it might be.

So,
I suppose I would have thought no more about the dissection lesson if I hadn’t happened
upon such an unlikely coincidence in History that morning.

eleven

In
spite of the aroma of Gordon’s Gin that seemed constantly to linger after her,
Mrs. Stowaway, the History teacher, was one of the school’s more normal
teachers.  She was happily married to a surgeon, had two teenage children at a
good school, two labradors and a twee thatched cottage in a nearby village. 
Someone had told me that because her husband was a doctor, he could say pretty
much whatever he wanted around anyone.  Doctors were in very high demand.

We
had our blue books open at page eighty-three.  Captain James Cook, a grand and
dignified man with a very tidy wig, was on his second voyage, having already
charted the coastlines of New Zealand and Eastern Australia. 

Peregrine
raised his hand.

“Trout,”
said Mrs. Stowaway, to signal that he may ask his question.

“Well,
you know you thaid that the Dutch
dithcovered
Authtralia and that the
British
thettled
it...”

“Yes...”
she said with the tone of caution that all teachers seemed to approach queries
from Peregrine.

“...and
you know you thaid that there were already a lot of aboriginal Authtralian
tribes
living
there...”

“Yeeees...”

“Well
I wath wondering:  Did the firtht aboriginal Authtralian to vithit Britain
declare that
he
dithcovered Britain?”

“Don’t
be facetious, Trout!”

“But,
Ma’am...” he began to protest when I noticed on page eighty-four a passage
entitled “Captain Cook and the Poisoned Puffer”: 

It
told a story about the sailors on board Cook’s ship eating some puffer fish livers
and then becoming very ill.  Their arms and legs became numb and very weak and
one of the pigs they had on board, after eating the remains, was found dead the
next morning. 
The article finished by saying, “This
is the first recorded example of tetrodotoxic poisoning”.

The
word “tetrodotoxic” jumped out at me.  It seemed somehow familiar.  I raised my
hand.

“Turnpike,”
said Stowaway, clearly relieved by the opportunity to answer questions from
someone other than Peregrine.

“Ma’am,
you see this story on eighty-four about Captain Cook eating poisonous fish…”

“Yeeees,
Turnpike.  It seems that you have raced on ahead of us…”

“Yes,
sorry.  I just wondered about these fish…”

“Aha! 
Well,” she began, “certain types of these poisonous puffer fish are, believe it
or not, thought of as a delicacy in some parts of the World.  The Japanese, for
example, pay good money for them.  Ah!” she said, turning to page eighty-five,
“If you turn the page, you will see a couple of diagrams of what puffer fish
look like.”

Turning
the page, I saw that there were two very familiar diagrams. 
One
appeared to be a cross-section of a U-boat, the other a cross-section of a
maggot-eaten apple.  Just like the diagram on Miss Prenderghast’s blackboard.

Freddie
turned and looked at me with an eyebrow raised.

“Ma’am,”
said Peregrine, “we dithected thith fish in Biology jutht now.”

“Don’t
talk such rot, Peregrine Trout!” Mrs. Stowaway snapped.  “I’ve a good mind to
give you a Detention.”

“No,
Ma’am.  Trout’s right,” Freddie piped up.  “We really did just dissect this
fish.”

Mrs.
Stowaway paused.

“Well,”
she said.  “I must say that if that’s true, I find it very surprising.”  Her
brow was furrowed in genuine concern.  “It seems like far too dangerous an
experiment.”

“Ma’am,”
I said, “Captain Cook in his diary talks about the liver.  Is that the most
poisonous part?  Miss Prenderghast got us to cut out the livers of the fish and
place them in tins.”

“I
am no expert, of course,” she replied, “but as I understand it, the livers are
very poisonous indeed.  Well,” she shook her head and looked really rather
perturbed, “Miss Prenderghast must know what she’s doing.  All I can say is
that I hope you all wore gloves and washed your hands thoroughly after you
finished.”

It
had seemed odd at the time that we had been made to do a dissection at all.  This
was something that was not usually done until at least the Fifth Form.  It now
seemed even odder that Miss Prenderghast had made us do a dissection of a very poisonous
creature rather than the usual rat or frog. 

I
wondered what she was planning to do with the livers after we had left.

twelve

During
free afternoons, the Forest was a paradise of turmoil and boys brawling in
boilersuits.

“You
know about that tree, don’t you?” said Freddie.  We were on our way to the
Vegetable Gardens for Hard Labour; harvesting carrots, lettuce and rhubarb. 
The tree he was pointing to was known as the Watchtower, a great conifer near
the 1
^st
XI cricket field.  All of its lower branches had been lopped
off and a thick white ring had been painted around its trunk some way up.  The
Watchtower, and the large red rock which sat next to it, formed the setting for
one of Talltrees’ more tragic ghost-stories.

“Course
I do,” I said.  “You’ve probably told me about it a zillion times.”

But
he had already begun.

Before
the War, Freddie explained, a boy had managed to climb right up to the distant
height of where the white ring was later painted.  It was the highest that any
boy at the school had ever managed to climb.  So high, in fact, that the
players in the cricket match had even stopped what they were doing to watch
with a dizzying sense of fascination mixed with fear.  And the climber had been
waving to them, when a sudden gust of wind whipped up.  He lost his grip and
his footing.  And he fell. 

The
story went that the sound of his skull hitting the Red Rock was like that of a
shotgun on a calm September morning.

After
his funeral, his grieving mother was driven to the school by horse and
carriage.  She demanded that the Headmaster, and Freddie paused so that he
could get the words just right, “henceforth prohibit any boys from climbing to
such a height up such tall trees so as to prevent such tragedies”.  The
Headmaster agreed.  But what he did not tell her was that he would take her
demand literally.

So,
as there was only one “such tall tree” in the school grounds, and no others of
identical height, the prohibition would affect only that tree, and the white
ring was painted at “such a height” as that from which the boy had fallen, thus
marking out the level above which boys were prevented from climbing. 

According
to Freddie, the ghost of this child, whom Freddie called “the Fallen Boy”,
could be seen on moonless nights throwing itself repeatedly from the
Watchtower, trying in vain to find some way of landing without dying.

“But,
you know, the weirdest thing of all was that his body was
never found
! 
By the time the cricket umpires had arrived to see what was what, he was gone,
vanished into thin...”

“Oh
come on, Freddie!  You say that at the end of every ghost story!”

“Well
maybe that’s because it’s true!”

I
sniggered.  Nevertheless, I quickened my stride a little as I suddenly felt as
if someone had breathed down my neck.

We
turned away from the Watchtower and followed a narrow deer-track among the
trees canopied with leaves glinting in the mottled light of the sun.  The track
led out towards a broad clearing, where the soil had been turned into neat rows
for vegetables, overlaid with netting to keep out the rabbits.

“Hullo,
guys.”

“Hi,
Samson,” said Freddie cheerily.

It
was Samson Akwasi, the African boy who worked in the Kitchens.  Quite a few of
us were pretty good friends with him, but it was best not to be seen talking to
him too often, particularly not when people like Colonel Barrington or Doctor
Saracen were about.  It was well known, though, that some of the Masters taught
him during their spare time and most of the other Masters turned a blind eye. 
He was especially good at French.

“What
are you two doing here?” he asked.

“Vegetable
Gardens,” I said.

“Oh,
so did you accidentally use the
Führer’s name in vain?” he
joked.

“Something
like that,” scowled Freddie.

“Well,
you don’t need to worry about collecting in the carrots and rhubarb,” he said. 
“I did that this morning.  I’ll get the lettuce in later.”

Freddie
looked at me beaming.  “Wow!” he said.  “Thanks, Samson!  This’ll be the
easiest Hard Labour ever!”

“Hey,
but why don’t you come and see what Reggie and I have done with the Hut?”

Over
the past three years, I had seen Huts in various fascinating and imaginative
forms:  multi-levelled monkey-puzzle tree-houses, unearthed air-raid shelters,
even a village of leafy wigwams with a strictly enforced feudal system.  But
the Burrow was by far the most ingenious. 

It
had been set up about four weeks ago by Reggie Pickering.  He, Samson and one
or two others had begun by digging a few foxholes in a clearing among the trees
behind the Tennis Court, overlaying them with corrugated iron supported by
crow-bars and planks of wood, and replacing the earth on top.  By now it had sprawled
into a tangled complex of tunnels.  Above ground you could see nothing but its
three entry-holes where guards would be stationed during a Hut War.

The
Burrow had excellent defences.   It was surrounded by a barricade of thorny
branches, beyond which were two tall fern-trees with crows-nest platforms.  An
attacking force would be seen from the crows-nests at least half a minute
before reaching the barricade.  Ample time for Reggie to rally his troops.

I
had been a member of the Burrow for about two weeks.  It had cost me two Granny
Smiths and half a tube of Spangles.  Freddie had joined at the same time by
waiving Reggie’s debt of four Pontefracts.  Reggie’s tuck-box must have been
heaving.

“Look!”
Freddie whispered to me as the three of us tramped towards the Burrow.  “What’s
she
doing?”

Just
a few yards away from the path that was trodden through the Forest crouched
Miss Prenderghast, examining and pruning a small tree. 

 
I
suppose there is nothing strange about a Biology teacher, and such a quiet and
lonely one, being out here by herself, tending to a plant.  But it was such an
odd looking plant, about my height with dull purple, bell-shaped flowers,
tinged green, and large, shiny black berries.  Miss Prenderghast was picking
these berries slowly and deliberately, and placing them in a leather pouch at
her side.  She didn’t notice us as we walked by.

“
Password
?” 
We had reached the edge of the Burrow’s territory and Florian Tickle was sitting
on a branch above us, with a bow and arrow at the ready.

“For
God’s sake, Tickle!  It’s me, Akwasi and Turnpike!” shouted Freddie
impatiently. 

“Password?” 
Florian Tickle was exceedingly annoying.  He was in the Third Form, but in the
B-stream rather than the A-stream, so he didn’t have his lessons with us.  He
was pretty stupid and was obsessed with anything to do with the army.  Freddie
looked at me and shrugged.

“Dragonfly,”
I sighed.

“You
may pass,” he stated, eyeing us suspiciously and lowering his weapon.

Freddie
stuck two fingers up at him and muttered “idiot” as we edged through a gap in
the barricade.

“’Ello,
fellas!” Reggie shouted, looking up from a hole he was digging with a rusty
trowel.

“Hi,
Reggie,” I replied.  “Where is everyone?”

“Scrounging
crow-bars and corrugated iron.  Hey, go down there and see what Akwasi’s done
to the War Committee Chamber!”

The
Burrow really was not a place for the claustrophobic.  So if I had known what I
had been getting myself into at the time when I handed Reggie my Confectionery
Ration, I wouldn’t have been so eager.

The
first time I crawled in, it was all I could do to master the panic.  But, soon
enough, the further I crawled, the more my panic was replaced by amazement.  And
now I had no fear of being underground at all.

I
went in last, crawling into the tunnels after Samson with the thick smell of
mud in my nostrils, edging forwards on my elbows and knees.  We passed the
Munitions Store and the Officers’ Mess on the right, before Samson disappeared
around a corner to the left.  I followed him and, as I passed through the
opening into the War Committee Chamber, my right elbow jarred suddenly
downwards as I lost the floor underneath me.  I slid and rolled and soon came
to an abrupt halt on my face, with a mouthful of mud.

I
got up onto my knees and could hear the other two chuckling.  I brushed the
dirt from my hair and face and looked around.  In the dim light, I was amazed. 
What had, only a week ago, been nothing more than a wide, but shallow dent in
the ground, overlaid with corrugated iron was now a circular room with a ledge
for seating around the wall.  It may not have been the dome of the Volkshalle,
but it was almost high enough for me to stand up.  I shuffled over to sit on
the ledge next to the other three.

“Not
bad, eh?” said Reggie.

I
nodded.

“Hey,
Samson,” said Freddie suddenly.  “Were you in Assembly this morning when Doctor
Boateng did his talk on Voodoo and everything?”

“Yeees,”
replied Samson suspiciously.  He usually sat at the back with the Cook, the cleaners
and the other school servants.

“Well...
um... what did you think about what he said?”

Samson
frowned.  “I don’t know.  What do you mean?”   

“Samson,”
I said, realising where Freddie was leading.  “Freddie’s beating around the
bush.  What he wants to know is whether you thought it was true, all that stuff
Boateng said about Voodoo, you know, about there not being any black magic and
all that.”

“Actually,”
he said, “well I suppose Boateng’s the expert, you know, and my family was
Catholic.  But back in Africa, we had a maid from Dahomey, called Ang
é
lique. 
She was the one who taught me to speak French. 
She
believed in Voodoo. 
So I suppose I know a little bit about it from the stories she used to tell.” 
He stopped digging.  “Hey, listen to this one.  She used to tell me and my
brothers this to scare us before bedtime.  But she always said it was totally
true and was the real reason why she ran away from home.

When
she was a girl about our age, years and years ago, she had a twin sister who
died in strange circumstances.”  Samson began to speak in a chilled tone,
stretching certain syllables to feed the tension.  “After they buried her, the
Voodoo priest gave Ang
é
lique
a doll and he told her to look after it for the rest of her life.

It
was only a small, wooden doll.  But Ang
é
lique
said that its eyes seemed to shine brightly.  The priest explained to Ang
é
lique
that she and her sister shared one soul.  So when one of them died, half of
their soul would join the afterlife.  The priest said that he had stopped that
from happening by performing a Voodoo ritual so that the part of their soul
belonging to Ang
é
lique’s sister would live
on inside the doll.

For
years and years, Ang
é
lique wore the doll on a
string around her neck and would never take it off.  Not even to go to sleep. 
But eventually she married a Catholic man who didn’t trust the old ways.  And,
to please him, she took Holy Communion and promised never to wear the Voodoo
doll again.  She put it in a tin box and hid it in a hole in the ground.”

I looked
around, remembering where I was.  I realised that it wasn’t a far cry from
being in a tin box in a hole in the ground.  I started to feel a need for
daylight and air.

***

One
day Ang
é
lique went to fetch water
from the lake.  She had to walk for an hour to get there with four empty
buckets.  It was an unusually hot day, even for West Africa.  The sun was
pounding down on her as she trekked through the dust.  She was thirsty and
there was a mirage always hanging in the air in front of her.

As
she approached the lake, she saw that there was a girl standing there with her
back to Ang
é
lique, just staring out
towards the water.  It was strange because there was nobody for miles around
and the nearest village was the one which Ang
é
lique
had come from.  At first, she thought it was just a trick of the heat or her
thirst getting to her, but she felt that she knew this girl.  In fact, it was
more than that.  She didn’t just recognise the girl, she actually felt like it
was
her
standing there where the girl stood and she suddenly felt a
terrible empty sadness deep within her like all of her insides had been taken
out.  She wanted to cry, but she couldn’t.

She
approached the lake slowly.  She didn’t want to because she was afraid.  But
she couldn’t help it, as if she was being drawn towards the girl like two
droplets of rain, side by side, running down a window.  The nearer she got to
the girl, the more the sadness inside her threatened to overwhelm her.

When
she was a few feet away from the girl, the girl turned to face her.  Ang
é
lique
felt a heavy jolt, like a heart-attack.  She looked at the girl and felt like
she was looking at herself twenty years earlier.  But something about the girl
wasn’t right.  Her eyes were dead and she had no smile.