Everlasting Lane (8 page)

Mr Waterberry, the school caretaker, came from the village to do the garden. He was blind in one eye with thin grey hair but as tall and as strong as a bear. He pushed an ancient mower through the blistery heat and drank water from the outside tap as sweat tumbled down his wiry chest. ‘No one’s been in that garden in ages,’ he rasped. ‘You should’ve called me years ago.’

‘We keep ourselves to ourselves,’ said Kat.

Mr Waterberry tilted his head and nodded before saying, ‘I know you, m’love, don’t I? This is Margaret Goodwin’s cottage. You’re her girl.’

‘Well, you’re making excellent progress,’ said Kat (meaning the garden).

‘It’s not a lie,’ she explained when he’d gone. ‘It’s like telling a story. Not everything has to be true but that doesn’t make it a lie. We don’t want to tell any lies,’ said Kat, ‘but we don’t necessarily want to tell the whole truth.’

She called the cottage our sanctuary. And she was right. Being in Amberley changed everything. But sometimes I’d forget where I was and call her ‘Mum’ or ‘Mummy’. She’d smile and shake her head. ‘You can call me Kat,’ she’d say, ‘with a “K”.’ And it was nice to pretend. Sometimes pretending was better than when things were real.

She seemed happy and, before long, it was like we’d been there forever. And I think I would’ve been happy too but for the gloomy, green drape that I passed each night when I went to bed and every morning on my way to breakfast.

‘I’ll tell you what,’ said Kat as if she, like me, had been thinking about something completely different, ‘why don’t I show you where I used to make magic?’

Magic? I nodded. Well, that was more like it.

I followed her out of the cottage and across the gravel drive to this big shed all nestled beneath the trees. She twisted a squeaky padlock and inserted a key. I couldn’t help noticing, as the door squealed on its hinges and Kat encouraged me to peer in, that the bedroom keys had not yet been returned to the brass ring.

‘I haven’t been in here for a while,’ she confessed. The small window was thick with grime and the inside hung with shadows like sides of beef in a butcher’s shop. ‘There certainly used to be a light in here,’ she continued, fumbling around in the darkness. ‘Ah, here it is.’

I took a nervous step forward as the bulb glowed and all was revealed.

‘This,’ said Kat, ‘is my workshop. This is where I used to make magic.’

But it didn’t look very magical. There were just cardboard boxes everywhere, some sealed, others splitting at the corners or overflowing with magazines; a Union Jack hat sat on the head of a shop mannequin; an old record player and dusty black records in and out of their sleeves; a guitar with no strings; a rusting bicycle; an old paddling pool hung like an elephant skin on the wall; a toy pram still wrapped in polythene; cushions spilling their guts and enough tools to build an Ark.

The walls were lined with shelves and the shelves packed with sculptures, carvings from wood and stone. Some were
just weird shapes, all curves and angles, others were of people or animals. One was of a mother and a baby and, although they were sort of naked, when I bent down to see it I thought of those statues of Mary and Jesus they sometimes have in churches.

‘I always wanted a little girl,’ murmured Kat. ‘What do you think?’

‘Did you make these?’ I was amazed. ‘They’re really good.’

‘No,’ she said laughing, ‘no they’re not, really. But thank you, anyway.’ She kind of curtsied and then glanced around. ‘Do you know, Peter,’ she said breathing deep on the dusty air, ‘some shepherd boy only stumbled across the Dead Sea Scrolls because they’d been hidden in the middle of nowhere rather than at the back of my workshop where they would have lain undiscovered ’til the end of—’

‘How is it magic?’

She smiled. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘I’ve got something to show you.’

In the middle of the shed—I mean the workshop—was a workbench, and in the middle of the workbench, surrounded by chisels and sketch books was something: something big hidden beneath a crumpled, white, paint-spattered sheet.

‘Do you want to see it?’

I nodded and, gripping it tightly with both hands, she slowly tugged the sheet away.

It was a piece of wood. But that’s like saying
Tiswas
is a TV show and only making it sound like
Nationwide
because you haven’t mentioned all the running around and buckets of water and stuff like that. It was a chunk, a slice of rough, knotted tree trunk, as big as an armchair and looking as if it had been wrenched from the very heart of the fiercest monster in the woods.

‘Now,’ said Kat, ‘shall I tell you how to make a beautiful
sculpture? First of all you go into the woods, deep into the woods, and you spend the best part of a
week
finding just the right piece of wood, a special piece of wood.’ Her hand caressed the rough bark just like it was Kitty’s silky coat. ‘
This
piece of wood. Then you get your tools: a hammer, of course, and a chisel, good quality ones, nothing cheap, and then, very gently and very carefully, you remove everything that isn’t … beautiful.’

‘What’ll it be?’

‘What’ll it be?’ she whispered as if she didn’t even know herself. ‘It’ll be … whatever it wants to be. You see, Peter, it’s separate from me: like I’m standing on a beach, perched on my toes, and its flotsam on the horizon. I just sharpen my blade,’ and she picked up a chisel, holding it in the palm of her hand, admiring the curved handle, ‘sharpen my wits and let them dance across the grain, like … like sparks in a fire. I don’t make. In fact, I take away and what I, what the chisel takes away is just as vital as what we leave behind. What’s just wood, Peter, and what’s something more? Do you see what I mean? What do we take and what do we leave? And what’s the difference? The wood,’ she said, ‘the wood tells us the difference.

‘You see, when I’m working—and yes, it
is
work—I close my eyes.’ And she did so, scrunching them up tight. ‘They’re not always the best guide as to what I should do. Sculpture, any art really, is based on trust, you see, on love even. And I don’t mean trust or love like in films or TV. I mean on, I don’t know, a deeper level, a connection between two, well, souls that’s nearly … nearly physical, that can’t be broken, that can hardly be dented by anything but, well … death. I trust my hands and I trust the wood: that we’re not going to mess up. We’re a team, the wood and I, a partnership, almost like a … like a marriage. And yet, do you know, sometimes, well, I worry that, like the hammer,’ she picked it up and held it tight, ‘and the chisel,
I’m just a tool and we’re all being … wielded by the sculpture within.

‘So I close my eyes tightly, like this, and my hands move this way or that way as the grain tells them.’ She ran the head of the hammer and the blade of the chisel over the rough terrain of the wood. ‘I picture myself in the garden of the cottage: this cottage. There’s a little girl there, her hair’s like … like fire, chasing butterflies, her hands all curious. She falls and she cries,’ Kat let out a little cry herself, ‘but I don’t rush to comfort her. Children require discipline, you know. She’ll find no answers here; no explanations; no justifications. I love my child … I mean I love you, Peter,’ she opened her eyes and smiled at me, ‘no matter how … unruly, in a way that I could never love anybody else’s but spare the whip, they say, and spoil the child. Where it would be … tardy, you should make it punctual; where it would be lazy you must apply its fingers to labour without pity. But the unruly child will follow its own rules and keep nobody’s time but its own.

‘But, you see, Peter, the wood will make her wise. Can you see that? If I trust, if I plug away, cut away long enough, keep calm, do not be concerned—and if I get concerned, stop being concerned—the truth is in here somewhere. Like a midwife, I draw the sculpture from the wood, with my hammer and chisel as, well, forceps. Like Eostre, I take the day by the heels and drag it, hot and steaming, out of the twilight. The truth, when it comes, may be no bigger than a bookend and that will be fine.’ She smiled, murmuring, ‘Yes, that will be fine.’ Her eyes were open now and gazing at me as if I
was
the truth. ‘Do you know what I mean?’

I nodded.

I didn’t really know what she was talking about.

We returned to the cottage and I sat at the kitchen table with my orange maths book pretending to learn my times tables. Kat announced that she was ‘popping out’ to the church to take some of the wild flowers she’d rescued from the blades of Mr Waterberry’s mower. As soon as the front door clicked behind her I counted to exactly sixty fidgety seconds before bounding up the stairs, dragging back the green curtain and revealing the secret door. I seized and pulled at the handle just as I’d done a hundred times before. It was still locked. I pulled and pushed at it again and again until eventually I sank onto the tiny chair and wondered what lay behind.

‘Peter,’ said my father, smiling, ‘have you seen this trick?’ He moved to the opposite side of the table and drew back the chair. As he sat he took two paper shapes, a red square and a blue circle, from the pile before me. His tongue licked each shape.

And I smiled because, well, I had a trick of my own. The real me couldn’t remember what but the memory-me was bubbling, rattling around on the hob trying to keep his lid on. It was like the world’s best secret: like an adult’s secret, forever just out of view.

Only this one was mine.

My father pressed the red square to the forefinger of his right hand and the blue circle to the forefinger of his left. He placed each gum-shaped finger on the edge of the table with the rest of his fingers hidden beneath.

I stifled a giggle and he smiled again. I felt a bit bad because he thought I was excited by
his
trick. He didn’t know about mine. Not yet. I held the secret in my head where it scorched like a piece of toast. I could hear it tempting me to tell it, a best friend whispering in my ear, ‘Go on, go on.’ I was impatient
for the trick to be revealed, to have my cleverness applauded, to taste success as rich and spicy as the hot ginger cake fresh from the oven but I knew I mustn’t tell.

It would ruin the surprise.

‘Two little butterflies sitting on the wall,’ sang my father. ‘One named Peter,’ he winked at me, wiggling the broad finger of one hand. ‘One named Paul,’ he wiggled the finger of the other. Then, with a wave of his right hand, he cried, ‘Fly away, Peter!’

His finger returned to the surface of the table and the red square had disappeared. I gasped. ‘Fly away, Paul!’ he cried, repeating the movement with his left hand. When it returned the blue circle too had vanished.

His eyes smiled.

‘That’s … That’s magic.’

‘No,’ he said a little sadly. He revealed the rest of his fingers and there were the coloured shapes, the red square and the blue circle, just where they’d always been. He’d changed fingers. ‘It’s a trick,’ he said, and then, ‘Look at the mess you’ve made with that glue, Peter.’

Upstairs the Hoover died.

And then—

Kat had been gone an hour. By the time she returned I was back at the kitchen table, twisting and retwisting Action Man into warlike shapes and trying to smile as if the world was a simple, uncomplicated place full of doors which were always unlocked. She stared at me, her eyes like shadows, as if she couldn’t quite remember who I was. And then, when she did remember, she said that she was going to lie down for a while and that I should go outside to, ‘play or something.’

I sat awhile longer, twisting Action Man’s arms and legs
back and forth, back and forth only to look down and discover that one by one I’d pulled them free of his body. The kitchen clock ticked, the fridge shuddered again and having tipped Action Man’s sad remains onto the bed of pink roses in the bin, I crept to my bedroom to find the Robin Hood set Kat had tugged from under my bed. The green felt hat with the feather was way too small and babyish for me so, instead, I wrapped my school tie around my head and slipped the bow over my shoulder. The skipping rope, a perfect lasso—not that Robin Hood really had a lasso—was missing.

In the kitchen I slapped syrup and jam onto slices of bread and made a fierce face at my reflection in the butter knife. And then I trudged out into the dry afternoon woods to play.

Or something.

Of course, Robin Hood wasn’t really bothered about having anyone to play with either. Apart from his Merry Men I mean. But when my father died the friends I did have at my old school began to keep away from me like I had some kind of
dead-fatheritis.
They were mostly nice to me because the teachers told them to but in their eyes I was different now, as if I’d visited some alien world—like those children who went on their holidays to Spain—but not one that anyone wanted a postcard from: a world where death was something more than the way bad guys met their ends on TV. It was something real. So I would sit on my own and leave them to their games of chase and
Doctor Who
or
Mission: Impossible.
If someone did invite me to join in I’d pretend I hadn’t heard or I’d scream at them ’til they went away and told the teacher: