Five Boys (7 page)

Bobby had no intention of showing Aldred his newspaper cuttings. Bobby’s only wish was to make Aldred feel so unwelcome that he would be driven out of the house. But self-consciousness seemed not to come naturally to Aldred and as soon as Miss Minter was rattling around in the pantry Aldred pulled a booklet out of a pocket, waved it in Bobby’s face and dropped it in his lap.

He shuffled along the settee and before Bobby had even opened it he could feel Aldred’s warm breath on his neck.

was printed on the cover, above an etching of St. Paul’s Cathedral, and beneath it, “A Handy Guide for Quick Sight-Seeing.”

Bobby opened it up. Each page of text was accompanied by a sketch of a London landmark. But what made the biggest impression on Bobby was the age of the book—not just that it was scuffed and had a crease down its cover, like
the creases in the palm of his hand, but that the sights depicted in it bore such little resemblance to any Bobby had visited with his parents or seen through the coach window a few weeks before.

The Albert Memorial was bathed in sunshine, its concourse deserted, except for a single stationary carriage and a horse which seemed to be sleeping on its feet. The Tower of London sat in its own oasis of tinted trees like a castle in a fairy tale, with all its flags flapping, the Thames blue and tranquil beside it but barely a boat or beefeater in sight.

The information on the opposite page was the kind of thing Bobby would normally not bother to read but an occasional sentence, such as “The handsome memorial to Queen Victoria, unveiled by the ex-Kaiser, opposite Buckingham Palace,” had been heavily underlined and the margins were covered with illegible scrawl.

Nelson’s Column had just a handful of figures strolling beneath it, wearing the same tall hats and long, trailing dresses as the guests in a photograph Bobby had once seen of his grandparents’ wedding.

“Trafalgar Square,” said Aldred and tapped one of the lions at the base of the column. “Designed by Sir Edwin Landseer—1867.”

Bobby had never heard of any such man, or any such year, and for a while just sat and stared at the book in silence.

“Have you ever been to London?” he said, after some consideration.

“I’m not old enough,” said Aldred. “But my dad has.”

The only time Bobby had been to Trafalgar Square it had been packed with people. He’d bought a tub of bird-seed
from a man in a wooden hut and the moment he’d stepped away from it the pigeons had descended on him like a mob.

Aldred plucked the booklet from Bobby’s hands and flipped through a few pages. When he passed it back it was open at its middle pages where a small street map was printed, covering an area from Tower Bridge to Buckingham Palace. The staples—one just to the east of the Temple and the other by Waterloo—had rusted, and the paper around them looked as if it had been singed by the flare of a match. Only landmarks of the stature of the British Museum or the Houses of Parliament were marked on it. The roads were empty, except for a pencil line, which wiggled along them like a discarded rubber band, and appeared to have wiggled along one or two others then been erased.

“What’s it for?” said Bobby.

“It’s my route,” said Aldred.

“What route?”

“For doing London in a day.”

Bobby stared at the map. The penciled line was hooked with arrows, to indicate the journey’s direction. The city’s streets had been filled in like a maze in a puzzle book.

“Test me,” said Aldred.

Bobby stared at the map then back at Aldred.

“What do you mean?” he said.

“On
London
,” Aldred insisted. “On my
route.”

Bobby shrugged his shoulders.

“Just say the name of a place on the map,” Aldred said.

So Bobby looked down at the booklet and read out the first words he laid eyes on. “The Bank of England,” he said.

Aldred nodded, very slowly, and brought a hand up to his temples, like a Memory Man.

“The Bank of England,” he declared from behind his fingers, “was founded in 1694. It is known affectionately as the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street and comes …” Aldred paused and rubbed his finger across his forehead, “… right after the Monument and just before St. Paul’s.”

Aldred emerged, triumphant, from his trance. Bobby was still staring down at the map. The pencil line did indeed seem to wind its way between the landmarks in the order that Aldred had listed them.

“You seem to know your way around,” he told him.

Aldred beamed. “Better than you, you reckon?” he said.

Bobby was already regretting his generosity. “It’s hard to say,” he said.

“Why?” said Aldred.

Bobby was struggling to think straight.

“Well, the thing is,” he said, “you’re learning it from a book.”

Aldred chewed this over for a second, then rejected it. “What difference does that make?”

“Well, until you actually
get
there,” Bobby said, “how do you know what it’s going to be like?”

Aldred pondered this.

“What I mean,” Bobby continued, “is how are you going to get around it all in one day?”

“My
route,”
Aldred said.

The fact that he had managed to link all the landmarks with his pencil seemed to be proof that he would be able to do the same just as easily on foot, and it dawned on Bobby that perhaps he saw the city as having the same dimensions
as his own village, with streets just as empty and no building more than a five-minute walk away.

For a while the two boys sat in silence, each stumped by the other’s stupidity.

“Have you ever been up Cleopatra’s Needle?” Aldred said eventually.

“I don’t think so,” said Bobby.

Aldred shook his head and a coy smile played upon his lips. Bobby was a stranger in his own city.

“You should,” he said.

Miss Minter had poured out the milk but decided to give the boys a couple of minutes on their own before barging back in. So she stood in the hall, like an old maid, with a glass of milk warming in each hand, and listened to Aldred’s incredible confidence being pitted against Bobby’s modesty, as the Devonian told the Londoner all about Cleopatra’s Needle, its incredible vistas and its fateful journey to the Embankment all those years ago.

B
OBBY STOOD
in the lane, wondering which drainpipe to tap on. He had a map in his hand that Aldred had drawn for him. The same penciled line that had wiggled around the streets of London wiggled up and down the village’s lanes. It had led Bobby to Aldred’s own terrace of cottages without any trouble, but the note at the bottom, telling him to “tap on pipe,” failed to specify which one. So Bobby stood and puzzled over the choice of drainpipes. Then he stepped up to the nearest one and raised his fist when a window swung open above him and Aldred appeared.

“Wait there,” he whispered. “I’ll be down in a minute.”

He was about to close the window but stopped and looked back down at Bobby. “You’re not scared of heights, are you?” he said.

Bobby had been so scared on so many different occasions that it would have taken him hours to sift through them all.

“I don’t think so,” he said.

Aldred nodded. “I knew it,” he said and disappeared.

When he emerged he had on his head a balaclava which was so old and stretched that it gathered in folds on the collar of his coat. He adjusted it so that he could see where he was going, slipped his arm through Bobby’s and led him off down the lane. He wanted to know if his map had been
useful … told Bobby he could keep it … said that sometimes he would just sit and draw maps of made-up places—places that nobody else had heard about. The only time he stopped talking was when he climbed up onto a garden wall and began plucking plums from a tree and stuffing them into his jacket pockets.

“Ammo,” he whispered, then jumped back down.

The light was fading and the village was deserted but when they got to the war memorial Aldred suddenly dropped to the ground. He dragged Bobby down next to him, slowly crawled around the memorial’s stone base, checked up and down the lane, then sprinted over to the church gates, bent double, as if some sniper in one of the nearby cottages had him in his sights. When he waved at Bobby to follow he put his head down and sprinted just as Aldred had done a few seconds before. Then they crouched by the gates, Aldred checked the lanes again, pushed the gate open and ushered Bobby in.

Bobby had felt no inclination to visit the graveyard in broad daylight and was trying to remember why on earth he had agreed to go creeping around it so close to dark. The church stood before him like a rock face, the graveyard was full of shadowy sumps and when Aldred left the gravel path to weave between the tombs and headstones Bobby followed only because he didn’t want to be left on his own.

Aldred raced ahead. Bobby tried to take a shortcut but got stuck in a gravestone cul-de-sac and by the time he found his way out and caught up with him, Aldred was standing over a headstone in a billowing cloud of his own steam.

“I’ll just give old Wenlock a rinse,” he said and winked at Bobby. “It keeps the ivy off him.”

Bobby had already discovered that being out in the country meant a boy could urinate more or less at will, but to do so on the grave of a dead man seemed to be just asking for trouble. Aldred was apparently not the least bit bothered. He buttoned up his trousers, took Bobby off to a quiet corner and told him not to move, while he went and got the key from its hiding place—a speech delivered with such gravity that there seemed to be no guarantee of him returning alive.

So Bobby turned and stared out over the gravestones as Aldred’s footsteps receded, then crouched down and read some of the inscriptions on the headstones in the dwindling light. Judging by the dates, Devon’s dead had done most of their dying a long, long time ago and Bobby could see how somebody might think it was a good idea to send a boy all the way down here to get him away from all the dying going on back home. The week before he left a boy from his class had been found under the rubble, curled up in his grandad’s arms. The month before, sixty people died in a shoe factory when the roof fell in on them.

But it was old Mr. Wenlock and his underground neighbors who increasingly occupied Bobby’s thoughts, and the longer he waited the more conscious he became of the old Devonians packed beneath his feet. The wind had begun to whistle in the trees and some creature was making the sort of hooting which can make a boy on his own in a graveyard nervous, and when Bobby felt a hand fall upon his shoulder he nearly jumped right out of his boots.

Even after he saw that it was Aldred and not Mr. Wenlock complaining about all the rinsings he’d been getting, it was quite a while before Bobby’s heart stopped rattling in
his rib cage and a while longer for him to properly shake off the idea of Wenlock being up and about.

The key to the church was old and heavy—as Bobby discovered when Aldred let him hold it for a second or two—and a little larger than Bobby thought strictly necessary considering the size of the door. For instead of entering the church via the slab of oak in the porch, Aldred led him around to what he referred to as the “back door”—which was, he insisted, a
special
door, to be used only by people such as the reverend and the organist and himself. The moment they were inside and the door was closed behind him, Bobby felt a deeper darkness envelop him and a silence descend which his ears had trouble fathoming. The only things he could pick out with any certainty were the smell of polished wood, rotting flowers and no end of cold, uncompromising stone.

He couldn’t see a thing, but Aldred assured him that he had made this journey a hundred times, took Bobby’s hand, put it on his shoulder and led him through the dark. They crept around the organ (which took so long to navigate, it must have been about as big as a bus) and between the choristers’ pews until they were clear of all the railings and tables and other clutter and heading down the aisle.

Their steps rang out on the flagstones. Bobby sensed a great vault of religious air above him and when he clipped his hip on the end of a pew, pictured the bruise blossoming under the skin. But he blundered on with his hand on Aldred’s shoulder, until the darkness began to ease from black to blue and he could make out the arches of the windows and a stack of collection plates glinting up ahead.

The next door was even smaller than the last one. It
ground against the floor as Aldred pushed it open and a damp, earthy smell came seeping out. Aldred took Bobby’s hand and guided it to a rope which was lashed to the wall just inside the doorway. But as he slipped by and headed off into the dark Bobby suddenly doubted that he had the courage to go after him.

“How long will it take?” he said.

Aldred came back down a step or two.

“All you’ve got to do,” he said, “is keep hold of the rope and keep on walking, and you’ll be there in no time at all.”

So Aldred set off up the tower’s tight spiral and Bobby went after him, feeling as if he were entombed in stone. The only light came in through the narrow slits in the wall to his left and as he wound himself around, from one to the next, he had the peculiar sense that while his mind was all too painfully present, his body drifted in a dream.

“How many steps altogether?” he called out.

“Two hundred and sixteen,” came the reply.

Bobby gripped the rope with both hands and hauled himself deeper into the darkness. Mad thoughts rattled around inside him, like a bird trapped in a chimney, and every step did nothing but add weight to his conviction that he should turn and try to find his way back out.

They seemed to have been walking up the steps for hours when Bobby finally stumbled out into some sort of chamber. And suddenly he could smell timber, could hear the steady knock of clockwork, both of which had some humanity to them and gave him hope that he might yet live to tell the tale.

He rested his hands on his knees until he got his breath back. A little moonlight came in through the louvers and dusted the shoulders of six vast bells. They hung at head
height, with great wooden wheels beside them, like the ones on firemen’s ladders. The bells could have been cut from granite and Bobby got the impression that they didn’t much care for their visitors and was carefully making his way around them when Aldred called out and he looked up to find him on the other side of the belfry, floating in midair. Neither boy was particularly troubled by Aldred’s levitation. He was pinned to the wall but seemed not to be suffering. Bobby felt more asleep than awake, but he blinked and kept on blinking until he finally grasped that Aldred was on a ladder between the roof and floor.