Five Boys (8 page)

“Mind the rungs near the top,” Aldred called down into the chamber. “They’re rotten.” Then he carried on climbing.

By the time Bobby had made his way around the bells’ cradle and reached the foot of the ladder Aldred was opening the hatch in the roof and clambering out of sight, leaving a neat square of stars for Bobby to aim toward. He put his foot on the bottom rung and set off, rather warily, and was halfway up when the ladder began to bow in and out and he had to stop and wait for it to settle. Below, the six bells continued their colossal meditation. The room was their temple—their nursery. Then Bobby set off again, inching ever upward, until Aldred popped out among the stars and held out his hand.

“Come on, London boy,” he said.

It was like stepping out onto a tiny, sky-bound courtyard. The village’s roofs buckled far below and the moon lit up a landscape which was bigger and more barren than any Bobby had seen before. Perhaps it was the effect of the fresh air working on him or, despite his earlier assurances, he was just giddy from having left the ground so far behind.
Either way, the moment he set foot on the roof his legs turned to lead and he waddled about on them like a sailor stepping back onto the quay.

“That’s better, isn’t it?” said Aldred.

Bobby nodded, and for a while they just leaned against the battlements, with the wind ruffling their feathers and nudging the weathervane up on its spike. Then Aldred stepped into the middle of the roof and stretched out his right arm and pointed down the valley.

“Miss Minter’s,” he said.

He swung his arm around to his right.

“Totnes,” he said.

He kept on like this, picking out houses, nearby villages, the river, the sea. He swung his arms around like a policeman directing traffic, as if whole towns and tides were queueing in the dark. Then he went back over to Bobby and leaned on the ramparts and nodded at an old stone barn a mile or two outside the village, with a sloping roof which caught the moonlight, and as they looked at it Aldred asked Bobby if he ever wondered about the pyramids.

“What pyramids?” he said.

“The pyramids in Ancient Egypt,” said Aldred. “And all the gold they buried with the dead boy king.”

Bobby had never heard of Ancient Egypt. He had a good idea what a pyramid looked like, but was not about to pit his piddling wisdom against the authority next to him.

“What’s there to wonder about?” he said.

Aldred rested his chin on his hands. “You know how many men died towing Cleopatra’s Needle to London?” he said.

Bobby had to admit that he didn’t.

“Six,” said Aldred. “Drowned in the Bay of Biscay.” A faraway look came over him. “I saw a picture once.”

This picture must have made quite an impression on him, for its very recollection seemed to carry him off into a reverie of drowned Egyptians, with whom he rolled and turned for some considerable time, leaving Bobby at a bit of a loss and a little embarrassed, but he thought it best not to interfere. And in time Aldred rolled his head on his hands and cast his thyroidal gaze up at him.

“Cursed,” he said, pausing for dramatic effect. “And if there’s one sort of curse you don’t want to get mixed up in, it’s an Ancient one.”

A few minutes earlier, Bobby had never heard of Ancient Egypt or been the least inclined to wonder about its pyramids, but the more Aldred kept on about it, the more he was troubled by its evil curses, and soon the church’s very crenellations threatened to crumble beneath his fingertips.

“You know what’s buried under Cleopatra’s Needle?” said Aldred.

Bobby didn’t and was tempted to say that if his finding out was likely to unlock yet more curses, he would rather things stayed that way. But Aldred was already raising a hand to his forehead and assuming the persona of the Memory Man.

His words came out of him almost automatically, as if they were being communicated to him from the other side. “Bibles in several languages,” he reported, “… wire ropes … specimens of marine cables … a box of assorted pipes …”

Bobby hadn’t the faintest idea what Aldred was going on about. The only thing it reminded him of was the game
they sometimes played at his auntie May’s in which a tray of household objects was brought into the parlor, then removed and you had to try and remember what you’d just seen.

“… a shilling razor,” Aldred continued, “… jars of Doulton ware … a box of hairpins …”

He surfaced briefly, winked at Bobby, then added, “… photographs of pretty English girls …” which seemed to Bobby to be neither particularly Ancient nor particularly Egyptian but Aldred carried on, oblivious.

“Bradshaw’s Railway Guide … a gentleman’s walking stick …” he said, but his little recitation seemed to be running out of steam. “…
Whitaker’s Almanac,”
he said, and screwed his eyes up. The wheels had stopped turning. “… and other things of interest,” he said.

He opened his eyes and turned blinking to Bobby to bathe in the glory of his mnemonic feat and would have bathed a little longer had Bobby not asked him what an almanac was.

“It’s a bit like whiskey,” Aldred said, distracted, “but you can rub it on, like medicine. What’s important is, why was it buried under the Needle?”

Bobby shrugged.

“So that Man may know of us,” Aldred declared, “when London’s greatness has ebbed away.”

Bobby stared blankly back at him.

“Like Noah’s Ark,” Aldred said.

London, he said, was full of landmarks with things hidden under them. The poets’ bones under Westminster Abbey … the bronze from captured cannon on the base of Nelson’s Column … the torture chambers under Buckingham Palace …

But all this talk of bones and London’s ruination was doing Bobby no good at all. And the more Aldred persisted the more panic Bobby felt stir in him, like the horror he’d felt as he trawled through Miss Minter’s newspapers and come across a blasted terrace which looked just like his own.

His chest was as tight as a joint of brisket. He felt as if it had been bound with cable and wire ropes. He didn’t
want
London’s greatness to ebb away. Didn’t want to have to grub around for hairpins or old crockery to know that his mother and father had once lived there.

The tower seemed to tighten around him. He tried to take a breath but couldn’t get on top of it. And even as he said to himself,
You’re panicking … panicking
…, he saw his mother and father lying side by side in the rubble … the house flattened … London razed to the ground. History raced ahead and made the world a desert. And Bobby felt the tower tighten, slowly tighten. Tighten and finally explode.

The first chime rattled every bone in Bobby’s body and was still diminishing when the second erupted under his feet. By the third or fourth, Bobby had just about grasped what was happening and by the fifth and sixth could follow them as they swept out over the fields, dipped into the valleys and gathered there. As the last chime slowly soaked away into the landscape Bobby finally managed to take a satisfying breath and felt relief coursing through his veins. Then the other four Boys came boiling up through the trapdoor and spilled out onto the roof.

They moved so fast that Bobby had trouble keeping track of them. It was all he could do not to burst into tears.

“Has he started yet?” said one of the bigger Boys to
Aldred, but Aldred just shook his head and stared out over the roofs.

The Boys seemed to be everywhere: dropping the hatch, buttoning up their jackets and wandering all about the place. A couple of them leaned over the ramparts and watched their spit race toward the ground. Another was trying to locate his own chimney stack.

It was a while before Bobby realized that the Boys were actually ignoring him—a state of affairs he was more than happy with. The only boy who seemed to be paying him any particular attention was Lewis, who was not much bigger than Aldred and had sat down on the other side of the roof. Bobby could feel him watching, but did his best not to catch his eye. He kept this up until Lewis addressed him directly.

“Got your plums, boy?” he said.

The speed with which the other Boys turned and looked at Bobby suggested they had been paying him a good deal more attention than they had let on. Meanwhile, Bobby was struggling to make enough sense of the question to have a hope of answering it.

“Your
plums,”
said Lewis.

Bobby was absolutely baffled. The more he thought about plums the less sense he squeezed out of them and soon the only thought in his head was what his punishment was likely to be.

“Bobby and me are sharing,” said Aldred and stepped forward.

He crouched down and began pulling the plums from his jacket pocket. They rolled off in all directions and he was still corralling them back into one anothers’ company when Harvey crouched down beside him, dug a hand in his
pocket and began adding his own supply of plums to the pile. By the time the last of the Boys had squatted down and emptied his pockets there must have been forty or fifty, stacked up like cannonballs.

Bobby was getting more confused with every passing minute but had the good sense, at least, to keep it to himself, and when the Boys withdrew and lined up along one of the walls it was clear that if he didn’t go and join them he would be left on his own. So he got to his feet and went and stood next to Aldred looking out over the ramparts. Finn was the only boy missing and when Bobby glanced over his shoulder found him sitting on the roof with his back to the others, flipping a plum from hand to hand.

“Right,” said Finn. “Who’re we going for?”

“Pearce,” said Hector.

“Which one?” said Finn.

“Drowned Pearce,” said Hector.

The Boys slotted their elbows into the corners of the parapet and rested their chins in the palms of their hands. At least, Bobby
assumed
that was what they were doing and took up the same position until Aldred nudged him, with both hands cupped around his eyes.

“Binoculars,” he said.

The first plum Finn lobbed over his shoulder landed in a tree at the far end of the graveyard and was greeted with unanimous derision.

“Nowhere near,” said Hector, from behind his binoculars. “Forty degrees south, fifty degrees east.”

Bobby glanced over his shoulder and watched as Finn shifted one buttock, then the other, so that he rotated fractionally around to one side. He was still settling when Hector gave the order to fire.

“Hang on,” said Finn, picked another plum from the pile, quickly composed himself, then flung it up into the sky.

The boys followed its flight.

“That’s better,” said Hector. “Ten degrees north, twenty degrees west.”

In this way the Boys occupied themselves for the next ten minutes, singling out a gravestone, systematically bombarding it, then moving onto another one. Harvey and Lewis each took a turn at dispatching the plums, but it seemed that only Hector and Finn were qualified to give the coordinates. The others made muffled explosions in their cheeks as each plum landed, but of all those thrown only one definitively hit its target, spattering the shrouded urn on one of the more ostentatious graves and making a distinct
clink
when the plumstone struck the stone.

The troops were still celebrating when Harvey hissed from behind his binoculars, “He’s coming, he’s coming. Here he is.”

The Boys swung their binoculars around to the right, onto a cottage just beyond the war memorial, and with a little effort Bobby picked out a figure at the attic window. It was an old man. Then Bobby realized that it was, in fact, the Captain, who had taken the unusual step of sloughing off his sleeping bag to stand at his window in nothing but his vest and underpants. Bobby drew his binoculars down from his face and looked over at Aldred but decided against disturbing him, and when he looked back at the attic window the Captain was setting a telescope on a stand.

The Captain made a few adjustments, then bent down and peered through the eyepiece. When he straightened up he had a handkerchief in each hand. Stood as stiff as a board for a few seconds then suddenly flung his arms out—
one up to the right, the other out to the left—and froze. But just as his handkerchiefs were settling, he flung them out into a new position—one out to his right this time and the other straight down at the floor.

It was as if several hundred volts were being sporadically fed into him, inducing a highly mechanical, robotlike display.

“He’s like a little bloody windmill,” said Lewis and sniggered to himself, until one of the bigger Boys shushed him up.

Bobby knew that they were all meant to be keeping quiet, but after watching the Captain wave his arms around for a couple of minutes suddenly couldn’t stop himself.

“What’s he
doing?”
he said.

“Signaling,” said Hector.

Bobby carried on watching. “What’s he saying?” he said.

Lewis shrugged his shoulders. “Nobody knows,” he said.

The Captain must have flapped for five or ten energetic minutes, stopping only to squint through his telescope before going back to his hanky waving with vigor renewed—must have contorted himself into every letter of the code’s alphabet until, all at once, he crossed his handkerchiefs before him and dropped his head onto his chest. A moment or two later he snapped himself out of his little trance, dismantled his telescope and disappeared from view.

“Is that it?” said Bobby.

Lewis nodded.

“Until next Tuesday it is,” he said.

As the boys made their way down the lane ten minutes later any illicit thrill Bobby had felt from spying on the Captain was easily eclipsed by the euphoria of having spent almost an hour in the Five Boys’ company without them
hurting him. When he was sure the others were out of earshot he turned to Aldred and told him how impressed he’d been with Finn and Hector’s technical know-how, regarding the aiming and firing of the plums.

“You mean all the degrees and the easts and wests?” said Aldred.

Bobby nodded.

“Oh, they just make them up,” he said.

T
HE SPEED
with which the Five Boys’ fathers had enlisted was either a measure of their willingness to defend the land they worked on or their eagerness to leave it far behind. For Arthur Noyce and Lester Massie, at least, any respite from the tedium of animal husbandry and the trudge around the seasons was worth a look. Both men liked nothing better than to sit in the Malsters’ Arms and bemoan the loss of their wives’ figures to the ravages of motherhood. At best, they thought, they might encounter something young and slim and exotic on their travels; at worst, might learn to appreciate their wives a little more.