The Runaway Summer (2 page)

Grandfather prodded a weed with his walking stick. ‘You know, Aunt Alice and I like having you. Very much indeed.'

Since Mary knew this could not be true, she scowled and said nothing.

Grandfather said, ‘Of course, it's natural you should miss your Mum and Dad.'

‘Oh, I don't miss
them
.' Mary was so surprised that he should think this, that she spoke quite naturally for once. Then she saw the look on her grandfather's face and knew that it was the wrong thing to have said: nice children always missed their parents when they were away from them. She looked away and muttered, ‘Always quarrelling and banging doors.'

Grandfather cleared his throat. ‘Well, your friends, then. You must miss your friends.'

‘I didn't have any.' Mary thought for a moment.
Grandfather
clearly wanted her to miss somebody. ‘I suppose I miss Noakes a bit. My cat.'

‘I remember.' Grandfather chuckled. ‘He once bit me. Right through my trousers. Drew blood. I suppose we could have him here if you really wanted, though your Aunt isn't very fond of cats.'

‘Oh, Noakes isn't an
ordinary
cat,' Mary said. ‘He's more of a wild cat, really. He once killed a ginger torn, a
huge
one,
twice
his size, and he's driven hundreds of others away. The people in the other flats are always complaining.'

‘I don't think Alice would like that,' Grandfather said. ‘She prefers to be on good terms with the neighbours. But you can have some kind of pet, I daresay. Not a dog, perhaps. Alice was once bitten by a dog.'

‘I wouldn't mind an alligator,' Mary said hopefully. ‘We had a baby-sitter once when I was younger, who had an alligator called James, and she kept it in her bathroom.'

‘I was really thinking of something a bit less exotic,' Grandfather said. ‘A rabbit, say. I used to keep rabbits when I was a boy.'

Mary shook her head. ‘Rabbits are boring.' She thought her grandfather looked disappointed, so she went on, ‘It's all right. I don't really want a pet. I don't even want to go home, really. It's just that I want to know when I
am
going.'

Her grandfather poked in the rose bed with his stick and found another weed. ‘I don't know.' He looked at her sadly. ‘I'm sorry, Mary.'

She stared at the rose bushes. ‘You mean they're not coming back for me?'

Grandfather was making patterns in the earth with his stick. Mary looked at his hand, holding it, and saw there were veins on the back, like blue worms. He said, ‘Well, nothing has been decided.'

Mary's mouth had dried up. It felt rough and furry. She said, ‘They're getting a divorce, aren't they?' and knew, suddenly, that she had known this all along—for weeks now, ever since the middle of June when her mother had brought her to stay with Grandfather and Aunt Alice—but saying it out loud made it seem worse, somehow.

Grandfather's ears were red as the red bobble on his woollen hat and his face had gone sagging and crumpled. He looked
so unhappy that Mary wished she could think of something to say to cheer him up, but she couldn't think of anything.

He said, ‘My poor child, I'm afraid they are.'

That,
my poor child
, made Mary feel very odd. She usually hated it when people seemed to be sorry for her, but her grandfather had spoken so gently and lovingly—as if she really was
his
poor child, and he cared how she felt and what happened to her—that it almost made her want to cry.

She didn't; Mary hardly ever cried, even when she hurt herself badly. She just said, in a flat, bored voice, ‘They don't love me, then.'

‘What nonsense. Of course they do.' Grandfather sounded shocked and Mary pulled a face, but turned away so that he shouldn't see. She might have known he would say that! Grown-ups were all the same: they said things, not because they believed they were true, but because they thought they ought to be. ‘They both love you very much,' Grandfather said. ‘It's just that—well—just that they don't love each other, anymore …' He sighed a little. ‘Of course, your mother was only eighteen when she married. Just a child. A silly, pretty child.'

He half-smiled, as if he was thinking of Mary's mother when she had been a girl. Then his smile went, and he sighed again, and said that the trouble was, people changed as they got older, and sometimes—not always, but sometimes—if they had married when they were very young, they grew apart. They couldn't help this. It was just something that happened. No one's fault.

Mary stopped listening. There was no point. Her grandfather was so good-natured that he never thought anything was anyone's fault.

She stared straight in front of her and froze into a statue. She often did this when something unpleasant was happening: stood quite still, unfocused her eyes into a blue, and held her breath, so that she not only looked like a statue, but if she tried really hard, could almost believe she
was
one, stony-cold and feeling nothing. She could still hear things, people talking and moving about, but what they said or did seemed to be nothing to do with her.

She knew Aunt Alice was in the garden because she heard her, talking in a low, agitated voice to her grandfather, and his calmer voice, replying, but she didn't look at them, or move, not one frozen muscle, until Aunt Alice touched her shoulder and said, ‘Mary. Oh Mary, darling …'

Then Mary came alive, turning from a statue into an angry, red-faced demon, whirling round, fists clenched, so that Aunt Alice stepped backwards as if she were afraid Mary might hit her. ‘Don't call me darling, don't you
dare
…'

‘Darling,' was what her mother and father called her.
Mary
darling,
Darling
Mary.
As if they loved her.

‘I hate being called darling, it's just soppy,' Mary shouted, and ran off across the lawn, so fast that her cheeks jolted, into the shrubbery.

She threw herself on the ground. Although she shut her eyes she could still see her grandfather's bewildered old face, and Aunt Alice's silly, rabbity one, bouncing up and down. She rolled over and over, grinding her teeth and scrabbling her fingers into the soft, leafy earth. She hated herself. She was horrible, that's why her mother and father left her—Mrs Carver had as good as said so—and now she had been horrible to grandfather and Aunt Alice. Aunt Alice was a silly fool with hairs on her chin and a rumbling stomach, and she said
silly things like,
between
you
and
me
and
the
gatepost,
and
Tell
it
not
in
Gath!
but she only meant to be kind, and Mary had been horrible to her. And what was worse—so much worse, that Mary felt as if she could hardly bear it—was that neither Grandfather nor Aunt Alice would blame her or get angry. ‘Poor Mary,' they would say, ‘she can't help it.'

Whatever
she
did.

‘Poor Mary,' Mary said in a disgusted voice. Then, ‘Damn. Damn and
hell.
‘She pulled up loose handfuls of soil and leaves and rubbed them over her head and face. Some of the earth got in her mouth, which stopped her. She sat up, grimacing and spitting and said, aloud, ‘Oh I wish … I wish I could do something really
bad
.'

M
ARY RAN
. S
HE
ran out of the garden, through the main street of the town, and along the sea front, towards the pier. Her head thumped, and when she breathed, the air hurt her teeth and stabbed down her throat, like a knife.

The wind was so cold. The early morning sun had gone (as Aunt Alice had guessed it might) and the beach was almost empty; a shingly shelf sloping down to a wide, shining expanse of blue mud, with gulls crying over it.

And not only the beach was deserted. Most of the cafes on the promenade were boarded up and the Fun Fair was closed. There were very few summer visitors this year, because of the tar on the beach, and the only people in sight were very old; pensioners, sitting wrapped in scarves and overcoats in the shelters on the front, and looking out to sea as if they were waiting for something.

As she passed one of the shelters, Mary put two fingers in her mouth and gave a sudden, loud whistle, but none of the old people jumped. They didn’t even look at her. Only a few gulls rose, startled and screaming.

Mary hunched her shoulders and walked on. Just before the pier, there was an open kiosk that sold sweets and ice-cream and buckets and spades and enormous, cotton-wool sticks of candy floss. Outside the kiosk was a large, stuffed bear; if you put sixpence in the box round his neck you could sit on top
of him to have your photograph taken. Usually Mary thought he looked alarmingly realistic, with his grinning, red mouth, and spiky, yellow teeth, but today, with no one on his back, he looked forlorn and moth-eaten—indeed, there was quite a large hole in his side with some of the stuffing showing through. Mary prodded her finger into the hole and pulled out some of the kapok fluff, and the man in the kiosk poked out his head and shouted at her.

Mary stuck out her tongue, and jumped off the promenade on to the beach, beside a small jetty. On the other side, there was a patch of sand where two small children were playing, building a castle and decorating it with seaweed and lumps of tar. Mary heaved herself up on the jetty, lay on her front on its green, slimy surface, and looked down at them. When they saw her, she pulled a face. She could pull awful faces, and this was her best one: her mad face, which she made by pulling the corners of her mouth up and the corners of her eyes down with her thumbs and forefingers, and, at the same time, pressing the end of her nose with her little fingers so that the holes of her nostrils showed. She knew that if she rolled her eyes as well, this could be very frightening, and it did frighten the children. They burst into tears, and stumbled, howling, along the beach to their mother who was snoozing in a deck chair. She opened one eye and said, ‘
Now
what’s the matter with you?’

Pleased with this success, Mary scrambled off the jetty and ran further along the beach, past the pier to the bathing huts. But there were no more children in sight, only a woman sitting in the shelter of one of the huts. She was wearing an ancient fur coat—more bare patches than fur—and she had an old, lined, papery face, but when Mary pulled the mad face at her, she jumped up with surprising agility, shook a
rolled-up newspaper at Mary and said, ‘Go away this minute, you rude, naughty child.’

‘Go away this minute, go away this minute,’ Mary chanted, copying the old lady’s indignant voice and waving her hands about, but inwardly she felt cast down. ‘Naughty’ was a babyish word. Only small children were naughty. She pulled another face—as if she were going to be sick—but her heart wasn’t in it, and the old lady just looked contemptuous. She sat down, arranged the mangy fur over her thin knees, and closed her eyes.

Mary watched her. Sometimes it upset people if they opened their eyes and knew you had been staring at them all the time. But the old lady stayed so still that she might really have been asleep—or dead—and after a minute Mary gave up and climbed the steps on to the promenade. She felt, suddenly, heavy and lumpish, and so bored that she wanted to yawn. Pulling faces and annoying people was too easy, there was nothing
to
it! If Grandfather knew, he wouldn’t even be cross! He might say ‘Well, dear, it wasn’t very kind, was it?’ But that would be all!

Ordinary naughtiness was no use, then. Mary didn’t really know what she meant by ‘no use’; just that she wanted to do something much worse, so that Grandfather—and everyone else—would know how really bad she was. She felt that in some queer way this might make her feel better.

But what could she do? She looked at the desolate promenade and the long line of shuttered bathing huts. Grandfather rented one of these huts to change in when he swam, which he did every day, when it was warm enough. Aunt Alice thought he was too old to swim, now he was nearly eighty years old, and was always telling him so. He might have heart attack, or drown, or catch a cold! Aunt Alice couldn’t
do anything about the heart attack, or the drowning, since she had always been too frightened to learn to swim herself, but she did her best to prevent his catching cold by coming down to the hut with him and making him cocoa on the stove inside. Grandfather hated cocoa, but Aunt Alice made him drink it, standing over him with a Do-as-I-tell-you-or-else, expression.

Mary thought that old people were often no better off than children, with other grown-ups always bullying them and knowing what was best for them and making them wear vests and drink cocoa.

She thought of a way to get her own back on Aunt Alice. The key to their bathing hut was hidden underneath, fastened to the bottom step by a piece of wire. She could get inside and make a good mess—empty out the sugar on to the floor and put sand in the cocoa …

For a minute, the idea seemed a good one, then she found herself yawning. She felt too lazy to go to all that trouble! Besides, Aunt Alice was short-sighted. She might not notice the sand in the cocoa, and Grandfather would have to drink it! And even if he found out whose fault it was, he would still only say, ‘Poor Mary. It’s not her fault she’s naughty. She’s upset and you can hardly blame her.’ (Since people were always making excuses for Mary and she was always listening at doors, she knew just what he would say.)

Mary yawned again, until her jaw cracked. No—if she was going to do something bad, she would have to think of something worse than that. Something
criminal—
like being a bank robber or a murderer!

She began to walk back towards the pier, jumping the cracked paving stones and crossing her eyes to make it more difficult. Then she wondered how long she could keep her
eyes crossed and concentrated hard on this, succeeding so well that a passing woman glanced at her, averted her own eyes hastily, and said to her husband, ‘What a terrible tragedy! Such a pretty child, too!’

By the time Mary got to the pier, her eyes ached with squinting and she felt hungry. Finding half a crown in her pocket, she went to the kiosk for a stick of candy floss. She wondered if the man would recognise her as the girl who had been pulling the stuffing out of his bear, but he didn’t really look at her; he gazed at a point somewhere beyond her shoulder and served a man who wanted a packet of cigarettes, although Mary had been there before him.

Mary hated the man in the kiosk for this. When he finally attended to her, giving her the candy floss and turning to the till for change, she took two Crunchie Bars from the front of the counter and put them in her pocket. She took her change, smiling so brightly, and saying
thank
you
so pleasantly, that the man seemed startled. He smiled back and said it was a pity it had blown up so cold, after such a fine morning.

The Crunchie Bars were sticking through the stuff of her jeans. Mary kept her hand over the bump and backed away from the kiosk, still smiling hard. Then she turned and skipped off, humming under her breath. She felt excited and scared at the same time. She longed to look round to see if there was anyone around who could have seen her, but she didn’t dare. She went on, hopping and skipping and humming like a girl without a care in the world until she came to some steps that led to the beach. She ran down them, jumping the last three, on to the shingle.

Her heart was thumping. She crouched in the shelter of the sea wall which had a concrete lip, curving over her head. The sea came right up, during high tide, and it smelt sea weedy
and sour close to the wall, rather like the smell in a cave. Mary wrinkled her nose, but didn’t dare to move. Alarming fears were crowding in on her, making her legs feel stiff and heavy. Suppose someone had seen her! Suppose hundreds of people had seen her! She had thought the sea front was empty, but suppose all these people had really been hiding—in the shelters and behind the bandstand, and under the tall, wooden legs of the pier! Waiting and watching! Suppose they had all risen up and run after her, shouting together, ‘Stop thief, stop thief …’

Suppose they were running after her
now.

Her heart thumped faster. When someone actually spoke, she thought it would jump right out of her throat. ‘We seed you,’ the voice said. It came from above her head.

Mary dropped her candy floss. Looking up, she saw two faces looking down. Small, red, round faces that seemed, for a dreadful moment, to be fastened directly on to the top of two pairs of very short, stumpy, red legs. Then she saw that these nightmarish creatures were in fact two quite ordinary children, crouching on their haunches on the lip of the promenade and peering down, their chins resting on their knees. They wore shorts and had close-cropped, dark hair, slicked down so flat that it might have been painted on their heads.

‘We seed you,’ one of the children repeated, and giggled.

‘T’isn’t
seed
, silly, it’s sawd,’ said the other, and giggled even louder, fat cheeks puffing up like small, shiny balloons. ‘We sawd you,’ it gasped in a hoarse, triumphant voice, ‘Pinching.’

This last word was not really very loud, the child was giggling too hard, but it seemed loud to Mary.

‘Ssh …’ she hissed, but they went on, laughing helplessly, nudging each other and falling about, until she said, savagely, ‘Fat-faced snigger-poufs. Shut up and go away.’

They stopped giggling at once and looked astonished, as if no one had spoken so unkindly to them, before. Then the corners of their mouths turned down and Mary was terrified that they would begin to cry. She couldn’t see over the lip of the promenade, but the children were only little—not more than five or six—so it was likely that there was a grown-up somewhere, looking after them. And if they cried, the grown-up would come hurrying up …

Mary had forgotten that she wanted everyone to know how wicked she was.

She said, as gently as she could manage, ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to be horrid, but you are a pair of
sillies.
I didn’t pinch anything. That was a
silly
thing to say.’

They looked at each other. They were exactly alike: the same shining brown eyes, the same licked-down hair. And now the same stubborn look settled on both their faces.

One of them said, ‘But we was watching. We seed.’

‘We
sawd
you,’ the other corrected.

‘You don’t say seed
or
sawd. You say saw. We
saw
.’ Mary spoke impatiently. She had no brothers cr sisters and had forgotten how easy it was to make mistakes when you were small. Then she remembered that grammar wasn’t exactly important at this moment, and went on, hastily, ‘But you didn’t. You didn’t see anything because there wasn’t anything to see! I just bought some floss and two Crunchies, and now the floss is all spoiled because you made me jump.’ She
pretended
to be more upset about this than she actually was, kicking the floss with her toe and grinding it into the shingle. ‘Look at it! Shrinking up already and covered in muck!’

They both looked so guilty, their eyes meeting hers and then sliding miserably away, that she felt sorry.

She smiled to cheer them up. ‘Never mind. You didn’t mean it, did you?’

But their faces remained solemn and sad. One of them said, I’ve got a mint in my pocket. It’s a bit hairy, but you c’n have it if you like.’

‘Poll don’t like mints. I ate mine,’ said the other.

I’m like Poll, then, ‘Mary said.’ I don’t like mints much. But I tell you what, if you come down here, I’ll give you a bit of my Crunchie Bar.’

Once they were on the beach, they would be safely out of sight of whoever was looking after them. She could give them a Crunchie and then escape! Their legs were short and the stone steps were steep: she could be up and gone before they got back on to the promenade.

They shook their heads.

‘We’ve got our clean shorts on to go to the dentist.’

Mary kept her smile fixed. It was no good getting cross. She said coaxingly, ‘Well, you won’t get them dirty if you’re careful. And anyway, the dentist wants to look at your teeth, not your bottoms.’

This made them giggle. Then they looked at each other.

‘Come on, I haven’t got all day,’ Mary said. She took one of the bars out of her pocket and began to peel off the gold paper, not looking at them. She heard them whispering and then the slip-slap of their sandals as they ran to the steps. They were very slow, coming down one behind the other and one step at a time. Mary felt sick and shivery as if she were going to the dentist too. She thought that if she ate a Crunchie herself, she would probably
be
sick.

They came stumbling along the beach, their eyes shiny and hopeful. She stripped the second bar and said, ‘Look, one each! Aren’t you lucky!’

Two fat hands shot out. Mary wondered which was Poll, and if their own mother could tell them apart.

Guessing, she said, ‘Here you are, Poll,’ but she was wrong. The little girl grinned through a mouthful of Crunchie. ‘I’m not Poll. I’m Annabel. Anna for short. People always get mixed.’

‘S’ever so funny at school,’ Poll said.

They looked at each other, chocolate dribbling from the sides of their mouths.

‘I once blowed in my milk and Poll got put in the corner,’ Annabel said.

Poll giggled. ‘Then the teacher found out, and she gave me a lemon drop.’