Caddy ever after, p.6
Caddy Ever After, page 6
A silver star to light your way
and she hadn’t seen the other side at all until she got it home, when she turned it over and was surprised to find that the announcement continued:
Baby daughter born today!
Which even I had to admit was funny.
Nobody would hear of me not taking the balloon. Even Oscar argued. ’It’s very important that Sarah should see it,’ he told me. ‘It’s a symbol of the decaying and debased nature of Western Art. Anyway, it will make her laugh.’)
So there I was after all, up in Sarah’s bedroom, telling her about the night in St Matthew’s graveyard, and there was she, with that expression of stunned disbelief coming and going on her face, and then I went outside the door and fetched the balloon.
‘It’s from Eve,’ I told her, putting its silver ribbon into her hand. ‘I nearly didn’t bring it, but Oscar said it would make you laugh. He’s got a thing about stars. That’s why the churchyard was so good in the dark! That’s what we did, for hours and hours! Stare at them. He knows all their names! I have never been so cold!’
Then suddenly Sarah understood, and she started grinning. And when she saw what was written on her own star, she did begin to laugh.
Just like Oscar said she would.
Sarah laughed until tears poured down her cheeks. The balloon escaped because she was laughing so much that she could not hold the ribbon. Scritch-scratch, it went, rocking comically against the ceiling, and Sarah laughed and laughed.
She laughed until she couldn’t stop. Every time she caught sight of the silver balloon she laughed still more. She laughed until she coughed. She laughed until she could not prop herself up. She laughed until she choked. She laughed until her breathing changed to gasping, dragging, wheezing gulps for air.
Asthma.
The balloon still rocked against the ceiling, but I stopped laughing.
Then Sarah’s mother came running into the room, and she saw me, and she saw Sarah.
‘SARAH!’ she shouted. ‘Saffron! Come here and help me!’
But I did not help her. I grabbed the balloon and I pulled the window open, and I pushed the balloon outside.
It went up and up, triumphant into the dusky blue-grey evening sky, rocking and nodding like a thing alive. And I ran across the room and down the stairs and out of the door and away down the road.
I ran away as fast as I could.
I did not stay to help.
It was not just my fault. Who made me take that balloon to Sarah’s anyway? Oscar. And who started all this take-something-to-Sarah-every-day stuff? Rose. And who bought the horrible stupid balloon in the first place? Eve.
And Sarah’s mother never said one word about asthma.
Or did she?
What about all those phone calls when I did not listen?
Yes, well, who said, ‘Saffy, don’t listen!’
Sarah.
This is not the first time Sarah has got me into trouble.
It is not fair. Nobody will remember the hundreds and hundreds of times I have been there for Sarah. They will just remember the one time I ran away.
Anyway, Sarah is all right now; her mother rang to say that. She left a message with Eve. ‘Saffron will probably be relieved to know that Sarah is very much better.’
But I’m not very much better.
Nothing will ever be the same again.
Change the Subject
(Part 1)
When I have had enough of Rose asking me questions that are none of her business I say, ‘Change the subject.’
Rose said, ‘Me and Indigo wondered if you had quarrelled with Sarah.’
‘Oh did you?’
‘So we rang her up and asked and she said, “Don’t be stupid”.’
‘So, don’t be stupid!’ I said. ‘And change the subject! Why are you colouring all that cardboard black?’
‘I am going to stick it all together when I have got enough,’ said Rose, ‘and make a fold-up sky.’
‘A fold-up black sky?’
‘Yes.’
‘No stars? No moon? No clouds? No aeroplanes? No lights? No comets? No fireworks? Nothing?’
‘No.’
‘Just plain black?’
‘The sky is sometimes just plain black,’ said Rose.
Well, that’s true.
Change the Subject
(Part 2)
‘What are you writing now?’ asked Rose.
‘I am writing about Oscar’s car,’ I told her.
‘The Icon,’ said Rose.
‘That’s right. The Icon.’
Oscar did not have an eighteenth birthday party. Nor did he have any presents. He had money instead. He said most of his relations had no problem with that.
‘They have not got what it takes to choose the gear for me,’ he said. ‘And they have realized it at last, which is nicer all round. (It miffs the grannies no end to find their offerings have been flogged on eBay, but what can you do?)’
‘What?’ asked Rose, who had been listening with fascination to these graceless remarks.
‘That’s what I’ve come to show you,’ said Oscar, and led us outside.
It was the most hideous car that I had ever seen, bright green, with googly eyes for headlights and a warty plastic roof. It looked like a giant toad. An ancient, unhappy, giant toad.
‘There!’ said Oscar, smirking.
‘What is it?’ I asked.
‘It is an Icon!’ said Oscar. ‘They don’t make them like that any more. It is a Classic. It is French design at its Ultimate. It is a Modern Antique. I bought it off the Internet with the birthday takings. What do you think?’
Rose and I looked at each other, and we both understood without a word that this was not the moment to say what we thought. It would have been too unkind. However, while I was searching for a few tactful words of admiration, Rose asked: ‘Does it go?’
‘Go?’ repeated Oscar. ‘What d’you mean, does it go? How do you think I got it here? It goes like a dream. Ride in that and you are riding in history. Get in and I’ll show you,’ said Oscar.
That was how Rose and I ended up stranded in a lay-by high up on the road that crosses the moors to the east of the town. It was mid-afternoon in a landscape that was sodden, freezing, dark and probably haunted.
Oscar had been very depressed when his wonderful new toy had ground more and more slowly up a hill, coughed in a hopeless kind of way, drifted into the side of the road and died.
‘It didn’t do anything like this before,’ he said.
A waiting silence filled the car: the sort of silence that occurs when a miracle is needed.
‘Well,’ said Oscar, when no miracle happened. ‘Better take a look at the engine.’
He paused for a moment, and I knew why. You could tell by the way the sheep were standing that it was definitely chilly outside. However, he bravely pulled down the earflaps of number two hat, wound a few extra loops of scarf around his neck, climbed out, raised the Icon’s rusty bonnet and peered inside.
Rose, who had scrambled out after him, came to peer too.
‘How can you tell which bit’s broken?’ she asked.
‘Obviously,’ said Oscar, ‘well, obviously, you’d see something like, like . . .’
‘Smoke?’ suggested Rose.
‘Yes, smoke and . . . um . . .’
‘Broken wires?’
‘Maybe broken wires, yes.’
‘Holes with stuff coming out?’
‘Any of those things,’ agreed Oscar, clearly relieved to have the technical details so confidently provided. Then he and Rose both looked back inside the engine again and shook their heads and said, ‘Definitely nothing wrong there.’
Having settled that for certain, Oscar climbed back into the car and folded me in his arms. (A gesture not of attraction, but of refrigeration, as I realized when he unfolded me and remarked with obvious disappointment, ‘You’re not very warm, either.’)
What will I do without Sarah to share these things with? (Change the subject.)
Rose had wandered off and begun jumping backwards and forwards over a small flooded ditch at the side of the road. Oscar was in a stupor (hypothermia). I returned to trying to recall where I had last seen my mobile phone.
Finally I remembered. In the kitchen, being recharged, and that’s where it still was.
‘I hope you have your mobile with you because I don’t,’ I said to Oscar.
‘Actually Saff,’ said Oscar, ‘I’m between mobiles right now.’
Oh.
Rose’s ditch-jumping was becoming more and more ambitious. She was working hard. She said afterwards she thought she might as well since it is no fun sitting in the back of a car while the people in the front are snogging.
How true.
But how inaccurate.
If Rose had looked, she would have seen that I was fuming and Oscar was not noticing. This went on for some time. Then I began rummaging through a black hole beside the steering wheel and Oscar lightened the atmosphere with a few merry musings on the Weather Forecast.
‘Temperature’s dropping,’ he said. ‘It will freeze tonight. Or snow, if any clouds come up. Whoops! There goes Rose!’
Rose had jumped once too often. A minute later she came hopping over to us and announced, ‘I’ve got a wet foot.’
‘It was going to happen,’ said Oscar sympathetically, reaching back to open a door for her. ‘Cold?’
Rose nodded, with chattering teeth.
Oscar took off his number two hat, turned round and pulled it carefully down over Rose’s head. ‘Twenty-five per cent of body heat is lost through the head,’ he remarked. ‘Don’t ask me what happens to the rest of it because I’ve been trying all my life to find out and I still don’t know. What’s that you’ve got, Saffy?’
From among a sinister jumble of loose red and black wires (surely they should have been attached to something somewhere) I had just unearthed a very tatty car manual.
‘The Book!’ exclaimed Oscar joyfully when I held it up. ‘The Book of Words! Excellent! Pass it over!’
I passed it over and it fell open at once at a very oily and well-thumbed section headed: Trouble-Shooting. The significance of this was lost on Oscar, who was already hopefully turning pages.
He didn’t stay hopeful for long. He muttered fragments of what he was reading aloud in so uncertain a voice that Rose asked from the back, ‘Is it written in French?’
‘Medieval English, more like,’ answered Oscar. ‘Starter motor disfunctionality? Pitting and fouling of ignition plugs? Distributor and timing?’
‘With Mummy’s car, it is always petrol,’ Rose remarked.
Oscar swung round and gave Rose a very thoughtful look. Then he turned to the petrol gauge – the needle of which was pointing not just at FULL, but at some unknown register even higher (BRIMMING, perhaps) – and gave it a hard slap.
The needle dropped at once to considerably less than ZERO. When Oscar slapped it again, it fell off completely.
‘Superb!’ said Oscar, now looking extremely happy. ‘Fantastic! I knew there couldn’t be anything wrong with the engine. I’ll hitch into town and pick up some petrol and be right back. You two can stay here in the warm.’
Before we could even ask, ‘What warm?’ he was out of the car, blowing on his fingers and fastening buttons that most people do not know exist. He was about to walk off and leave us.
‘How can you hitch into town?’ I asked, jumping out after him. ‘Only two cars have passed all the time we’ve been here.’
‘So, I’ll catch the third,’ said Oscar. ‘No problem.’ Then he really did leave us.
The long road that we’d climbed so slowly had led us far out of town, high into countryside usually only seen on geography field trips. (Several ice ages, Oscar would not have been surprised to hear, had carved their traces on this landscape.) On either side of us were the broken lines of ancient dry-stone walls, little gullies like the one that Rose had jumped, and miles and miles and miles of moor. Over everything was a purplish, brownish light. It made the outlines blurry, the faraway town a grey shadow, and the road a line sketched unreliably across the painted hills.
Rose said, ‘I didn’t know places could be spooky when it was still light.’
Before I could reply, a car came past, very fast, and then another, more slowly.
Two cars at home could pass unnoticed, every minute. It was amazing the disturbance that two cars caused in that solitary place: their noise, the way their passing seemed to buffet the air around us.
It was not nice.
Rose did not like it either. She looked at me from under the brim of Oscar’s hat and said, ‘What if they had stopped?’
‘Oh Rose, why would they?’ I asked (although actually I could think of plenty of reasons). ‘To steal this car? This is not the sort of car that anyone would want to steal.’
‘Not to steal the car,’ said Rose, and I could tell that she could think of plenty of reasons too, and that she was frightened.
‘How long has Oscar been gone now?’ she asked.
‘About ten minutes.’
‘What time is it?’
‘A quarter to four.’
‘Quarter to eleven in New York,’ said Rose.
When Rose starts converting to New York time, it is a very bad sign. It means she has just about reached the limit of what she can bear.
‘If I was in New York,’ continued Rose, ‘Tom would be there and it would be morning.’
I did not say anything.
‘Do you like it here, Saffy?’
No, I don’t like it here.
I tried to make myself be reasonable. I thought of all the books I had ever read where people end up in places like this. Old-fashioned story books, travel books, fantasy. They all had happy endings.
Unfortunately, Rose has read nothing except Little Red Riding Hood, and bits of Morte D’Arthur, both books whose plots rely very heavily on the presence of murderous strangers. From the back of the car I heard her give a quick gasp of dismay, and I looked round to see a van coming up behind us. At the same time the sound of its engine slowed right down, and we knew that it had seen us. We turned our heads away, as if we did not care and were not alarmed, but still we knew that speculative eyes were staring in at us. It’s possible to feel eyes. You don’t have to see them to know they are there.
Whoever was driving that van slowed to a crawl.
Then Rose used her brains. She reached across me, pushed open the door, and waved vigorously and hugely at an invisible presence just above us on the hillside. The van, which had been moving at walking pace, changed gear and moved suddenly away.
I jumped out of the car and ran and hugged Rose, who was looking ready to cry.
‘I didn’t like that,’ she said.
‘They might have been perfectly nice people, wondering if we needed help,’ I told her. ‘Or they might just have slowed down to be safe.’
‘Or they might have been murderers,’ said Rose, ‘getting all ready to jump out and grab.’
Once a thought like that is spoken aloud, it is no use trying to unthink it. Clearly there was no way Rose was going to get back into the car and wait quietly for Oscar. I didn’t blame her; I didn’t feel much like doing it myself. So I looked around for an alternative and found one straight away: a footpath leading up the hillside. If we followed it for a few minutes we would soon be high enough above the road to see much further. We could look out for Oscar, plodding towards the town, and see if he had managed to get a lift.
I suggested this to Rose.
There is no one I know who can go from miserable to happy as fast as Rose. She exclaimed, ‘Oh yes! Come on!’ and began zooming up the path.
‘As long as you won’t be cold,’ I said.
‘I won’t be cold,’ promised Rose, whirling round and round. ‘I’ve got this hat!’ and she beamed up at me and patted it hard, showing me what a good hat it was, and her eyes were shining like stars.
Change the Subject
(Part 3)
I paused my recording of what had happened on that disastrous journey in Oscar’s car to look across at Rose. She was no longer colouring squares of cardboard black. Just as I got used to it, she stopped.
Now she began sticking them together, joining them with parcel tape on their non-black sides. She did this very carefully, first arranging the squares into lines, and then taping the lines together into blocks. When she turned the whole thing back over again, it looked just like a patchwork quilt. Every single square was a different shade of black. It covered nearly the whole of the living-room rug.
Rose was very, very pleased with it.
‘It folds up just like I wanted it to do,’ she said. ‘And it unfolds just like I wanted it to do. And it is black as black all over.’
‘That’s OK then,’ I said, and I went back to my writing. It was time to describe the moor.
The moor.
That was where we had found ourselves, Rose and I, on a late February afternoon, with a clear sky and the lights of the town just beginning to show in the far distance.
How strange, I thought, how very strange, that we should be here on this cold moor. We had not chosen it, or talked of it, or planned it in any way, and yet it seemed the only place that we could be. We might have stepped into another life, so unconnected was it with anything to do with our own world.
That was what I thought, looking around me, in that silent and empty place.
Rose was not doing any thinking at all. She was skitting and skipping up the path that led to the nearby top of the hill. She went very quickly and lightly, in her little jacket and big hat, jumping the muddy bits along the way. I followed much more slowly because I had new trainers on and at that time I was still trying to keep them clean.
It was much, much further up to the top of the hill than it had looked from the road. Also there were cows. Not sheep. Cows with horns. They were far away, and they took no notice of us, but they were there.
