Tidetown (19 page)

Pangi laughs, a small laugh, but a laugh nonetheless. It makes me realise I haven't laughed or played in a very long time. No time like the present.

‘Hide and seek,' I say, running around to the back of the house, poking my head through a hole in the wall. ‘I'll hide, you find me.'

So for the next half-hour we run around the forest, hiding in bushes and treetops, seeking out nooks and crannies. Mouse sits in Pangi's shirt pocket, a perfect vantage point for a lookout. After three goes each, we slump down under an apple tree, munching through windfalls, breathing in the cold midmorning air.

‘We shall be best of friends, Pangi. You and me,' I say between bites. ‘In the middle of all this.'

He barely glances up, but I fancy I see the beginnings of a smile on his face. He looks down at his mouse, who strolls around his lap.

‘That would be nice,' he says, ‘to have a friend.'

‘Put Mouse in my shoe.'

Pangi looks a bit confused.

‘In my shoe,' I say again, reaching forward, offering the temporary home. ‘He'll be fine. I've got an idea.'

So Pangi takes the mouse from his pocket and places him in my shoe. The animal's whiskers test out the heady altitude, but then relax as I lay him and the shoe on the soft muddy ground.

‘Come on, Pangi,' I shout, as I run towards the big twisted tree I spotted earlier on, stripping off my clothes as I go, scattering them along the riverbank.

Pangi seems to get the idea. He smiles and strips down to his nut-brown skin.

In a leap and a bound we are both in the upper branches of the tree, overlooking the fast-flowing water of the river below.

‘How high?' I ask.

‘Higher,' he dares.

‘Highest,' I shout back.

And there we are, twenty feet up, edging along the uppermost branch.

‘It'll snap!' warns Pangi, as it bends and cracks under our weight.

‘Jump!' I shout, propelling myself through the air.

Falling through the void I hear Pangi howl as he leaps from the tree, the sharp snap of the branch following in his wake.

EIGHT

‘“Hope” is the thing with feathers –

That perches in the soul –

And sings the tune without the words –

And never stops – at all –'

– Emily Dickinson

He's not the biggest, not the toughest, but Spider is certainly the cleverest, the canniest, the sharpest, the most astute and streetwise of the ragtag huddle of boys waking up this morning deep in the bowels of the long-deserted mine shaft. Spider peers cautiously through the brambles and thickets that obscure and hide the entrance. Only when he's certain no one is around (though only rarely is anyone ever this deep into the woods) does he venture forth. How often has he chastised the three brothers for complacency, for crashing headlong into the open, with no thought of being discovered. The three other boys would argue ‘No one's ever here … we have such a good hiding place,' to which he always replies: ‘Until they
are
here, until they find us.'

Spider (so called due to his childhood habit of hiding under the house) ran away from home when he was ten. His stepfather, Rubin, who he had once thought was his uncle, but who turned out to be his half-brother, treated Spider worse than the yard dogs. (And the way the feral half-starved critters sulked away, tails firmly between their legs at the slightest sniff of Rubin, was some indication of what Rubin dished out in his domain). Spider had imagined his escape for years and carefully planned it the three months before his tenth birthday; not that there was to be any cake or streamers. This particular day Rubin had put him in the ‘pig pit' for not ploughing a straight enough furrow in the field that ran down from Crooked Hill to Torrent Creek. The pig pit had been dug by Rubin's own hands and spade in the dusty paddock behind the old barn. It was five feet deep and wide enough to hold Spider if he lay down and curled up. Wooden battens and corrugated iron covered the hole at ground level. By midday the heat intensified and Spider, naked and without water, would begin to roast in the damp, humid stew. As usual he'd hear Rubin stamping on the roof, sending rusty red-hot embers of flaking iron to sprinkle down onto Spider's skin. ‘Hot enough for you, ploughboy?' screamed his uncle-cum-brother-cum-stepfather. But this time Spider smiled. In his pain and suffering, unseen and alone, he smiled: he had his plan.

When later that night Rubin dragged him from the pig pit Spider pretended to be spent and delirious. ‘Sorry, Rubin,' he groaned, ‘let me try again, tomorrow. I'll do better. Straighter than the holy word.' So Rubin threw him in the barn and bolted the door from the outside, shouting: ‘And be up and ready before the sun or you'll feel it come noontime.' Spider lay in the straw gathering up every ounce of strength he could muster.

When all was quiet in the Big House, when the dogs had been locked away and Rubin had climbed in beside his sister-wife, Spider pulled on the clothes that he had hidden under the harness box and opened up the tiny tunnel that he had dug, handful by handful. Squeezing into the entrance he struggled his way along the length of the tunnel. Emerging on the other side of the barn he crept across the yard with its rusted ploughs and old tractor parts, through the hedge and down the track to Torrent Creek. The water was raging. No one at this time of year would dare a crossing: only the desperate or the damned. Spider found the muddy boots he'd squirrelled away earlier that day and lay them by the bank, putting his shirt on top. When the sun rose and Rubin kicked the barn door and called for the dogs and followed the tracks to the boots and shirt, he spat in the river, surveyed the scene and the surging waters, and said: ‘Damn you to hell, boy, I hope you felt the eels chewing on your eyes before you drowned.'

But Spider had not entered the river to swim with the eels. Instead he had backtracked carefully, literally retracing his steps, until he came to the rock face that led to the train tracks. In time-honoured tradition he listened out for the whistle and rat-a-tat-tat of the mail train, then ran alongside and jumped into the boxcar as it slowed on the bend, thereby beginning his life as a hobo.

When Spider leapt into the boxcar the motion of the train slid him into the far corner of the carriage and there, among the mail sacks and bales of cotton, he fell deep asleep even before the engine had reached the bridge over Torrent Creek from whence he had come. He dreamt of snarling dogs and electric eels, foaming rapids and sizzling eggs in a greasy pan. He woke abruptly as the train stuttered to a halt. Hunger and thirst took hold. (The pig pit had taken its toll). Looking through a crack between the wooden slats he could see he was in a siding. When he jumped down from the boxcar he could smell the salt in the air. Overhead, seagulls squealed and circled, anticipating scraps from the train. When he squinted to look at the faded sign on the signal box he realised he was in TIDETOWN, a place he had never heard of.

Over the coming months he lived on his wits, rightly reckoning that it would be too suspicious for a ten-year-old from out of town to be looking for work. He'd hide in the woods during the day. Sometimes he'd spend hours high up in the boughs of an ancient oak tree watching the comings and goings on the unmade pathway below. He especially liked to see the children walking to school. Some would hurry along in groups, doing cartwheels, pushing each other into the long grass. Others would dawdle, swapping whispered secrets, eking out the time from home to school. Spider was especially fascinated by one young boy, about his own age, who was always on his own except for his little dog which padded along close by his side. If Spider wasn't up the tree he'd skirt around the farms, hiding in ditches, looking for the chance to grab a chicken, an ear of corn, or a few apples. At night-time he came in to Tidetown, peering through windows, scavenging in bins, harvesting the leftovers, the discards. Way before dawn he retreated to his hideaway, regularly changing and rotating his secret places.

When the winter came he'd head south for some warmth. Over the first five years of his wanderings, as he grew bigger and stronger, he would take odd jobs on farms, picking fruit from orchards or mending fences. But he came to like the itinerant life and always found himself hopping onto another freight train heading here or there. Then at the age of seventeen he found himself back on the northern coast and wandering in to Tidetown. On one of his nightly patrols he stumbled across three young brothers under a disused bridge that had been made redundant by the new canal and its system of locks. When they saw Spider they huddled together, a skinny mangle of bony limbs and shaven heads. ‘Don't tell on us,' one said. ‘We won't go home,' whispered another. ‘Never ever,' said the third, more confident, more defiant.

And so, under the bridge, just as a huge barge carrying pignuts was lowered into the next section of the canal, water flooding through the lock gates, the “ruffians” were born. Spider, as the eldest and most worldly-wise, was the natural leader of the gang of four. As the months rolled by they grew closer, ever more reliant on each other. The three brothers, Pious, Humble and Gentle (named by their mother after virtues she held dear) never told a soul how they came to be scrunched up together under the bridge, all skin and bone and scalps hacked and scabbed, random tufts of hair matted together with blood and sores. If asked, either then, around a fire, late at night, or later on, when adults in uniform demanded their story, they'd talk of ‘that what happened' and ‘them' and then fall silent. Once Humble said to Spider that ‘when them did that to our sister Gracious we just up and ran. Like the wind we ran until we had no more running in us. And then you found us, Spider. Like you was meant to.'

So this bright clear morning, when Spider, as cautious as ever, creeps from the mine shaft, he will be disappointed not to summon all his wits and guile to escape the clutches of Joshua Barnum, the deputy mayor, and his accomplices who leap from the bushes and grapple him to the ground.

‘You get the leader and the sheep follow,' laughs Joshua, his muddy foot on Spider's chest, his hat sliding over his brow. ‘Baa, baa!'

‘Four of them. Boys.'

Joshua stands proudly in front of the mayor: the gamekeeper reporting back on the morning's hunt. The mayor is sitting in the bay window of the drawing room overlooking the ornamental lawns and the fountain with the statue of the girl and the dolphin.

‘Good work, good work indeed,' he says, his thoughts firmly fixed on the election. ‘Where are they now?'

‘Yonder, in the barn. Under lock and key, carefully corralled and overseen, eagerly, by my two best men.'

‘Just four? Any left to run wild?'

‘In my considered estimation, no. The leader, a straggly lad with hair the colour of sunset, swears this is the sum of it.' Joshua clears his throat. ‘Four is the number I suspected. It matches our intelligence gathering for this group.'

‘Who would have thought that the four, so few, could have caused so much chaos, so much anguish. Nevertheless, excellent,' enthuses the mayor, clapping his hands together, his mind racing to the hustings and an election triumph. ‘This is our trump card, Joshua Barnum, my fine loyal man. You must be duly rewarded.'

Joshua's heart warms. The mayor has never once remembered to bring to fruition a reward, but he used his name. He called him Joshua Barnum (‘fine loyal man'), and like a well-trained dog, he finds his master's approval to be much more than enough.

Perch has taken to her bed with a terrible headache that has racked her all day long. Carp is alone. It is quiet. Shadows lengthen on the floor of the room. Soon it will be time to draw the curtains and shut out the dark. The clock ticks on the mantelpiece. Carp watches the second hand as it moves around the clock face. In the stillness, in the silence, her mind wanders to a place of doubt, a hidden place that revealed itself along with the blood that appeared one morning on the sodden bedsheet in her prison cell.
Have you ever really seen him?
it asks.
Ever really heard his voice?
She puts her hands to her ears to try to quieten the thoughts.
Did the Archangel ever come to you, ever? Ever? Really? Even once?