Raven Summer (3 page)

“Was Jack Scott there?” I say.

She looks me straight in the eye.

“He was,” she says. “And what about you? Had a good day? Been with lovely Max?”

“Aye,” I say.

“Lovely.”

She stares out the kitchen window, into the darkness. She hums some old tune. One of her paintings is just beside us on the wall: slashes of green for fields and brown for walls and bark and blue for sky. A great jagged slab of red hangs right across the center. Her name’s in black in the left-hand corner:
Kate Lynch.
People say they like her paintings for the wildness that’s in them, for the edge of violence they see in them.

It’s about time to start the baby story when the phone rings. She doesn’t want to answer it. I pick it up.

A man’s voice.

“Is that Liam Lynch?”

“Yes.”

“Hello there, Liam. Could I ask you about your little adventure today?”

I gulp.

“Depends,” I say. “Who’s this?”

Who is it?
says Mum’s face.

“Oh, sorry, Liam. This is Michael Martin from the
Chronicle.
We had a little nod from the police. We’d love to know about your baby.”

“It’s not my baby,” I say, then I let the phone drop.

Martin’s voice goes on. I click it off.

Mum tilts her head.

“Well?” she says.

“You’ll not believe it,” I say. “But here goes.”

The phone rings a couple of times as I’m talking. We don’t answer it.

Dad yells down:

“Will you answer the bloody phone, Liam!”

Then he comes down himself.

“Oh,” he says. “You’re back. Hi.”

“Hi,” says Mum. “And I thought I was the one making news today.”

ITV send a car next day.
Max and his mother are in the front with the presenter Joe Tynan. Max is full of it. He’s wearing a freshly ironed blue shirt and clean jeans. His hair’s plastered down with gel.

“Isn’t it
exciting?
” says Mrs. Woods. “You’re going to be on
tonight
, Liam.
And
the
Chronicle’s
been on,
and
the
Journal.”

She smoothes Max’s hair.

“Now, make sure you both speak clearly,” she says.

She waves at my mum as she steps out of the back door.

“Hello, Mrs. Lynch,” she says. “Isn’t this a turnup?”

Mum giggles.

“It’s a hoot. Liam and Max on the telly!”

“Oh, and that poor
baby
!” says Mrs. Woods.

“I know,” says Mum. “And she was in my house and you know I never even
saw
her.”

“Poor little mite,” says Mrs. Woods.

Joe Tynan rubs his hands and grins as he looks out at the scenery. He says he just loves it out here. What a setting for this bit of news. The story’s got the lot. It’ll more than likely go national, even further.

Dad snorts. He’s in the kitchen doorway drinking coffee.

“We’d like you to be in this, too,” says Joe Tynan.

“Me?” says Dad.

“Yes. You’re Patrick Lynch, aren’t you? It’s an honor to meet you, sir. In fact, we’d just been talking about doing a feature on you.”

Dad’s face twists.

“And now this!” says Joe Tynan. “It’s just like one of your books, isn’t it?”

“What?”
says Dad.

“It
is
,” says Joe Tynan. “The wandering lads, a strange child, the message, the treasure …”

“Treasure,”
says Dad. “It’s hardly—”

“And there’s the other thing, too.”

“The other thing?”

“Max’s been telling me. The
raven
, Mr. Lynch. The trek across the fields, the snake, which all seems like pretty weird stuff.”

“Weird stuff?”

“Magic, Mr. Lynch. That’s what we’re talking about. Magic, taking place in the fields and lanes of Northumberland.”

“Hell’s teeth! Is
that
the angle you’re going for?”

“It’s not an angle, Mr. Lynch. And after all, there’s plenty magic at work in your stories.”

“But they are
stories.”

“Exactly,” he says. “They are stories, and this is—”

“The real world,” says Dad.

“Correct,” says Joe. “But as you’ve said many times yourself, the real world is the very very strangest of places.”

Dad snorts again.

“Of course it is!” he says. “But it doesn’t need magic to make it strange.”

Joe just smiles.

“There’ll be a perfectly rational explanation,” says Dad.

“Could be,” says Joe. He rubs his hands and grins again. “But until the explanation turns up, what other approach do you suggest we take?”

Six o’clock that evening we’re all in front of the TV. Mum’s got a glass of wine. Dad’s got a pint of beer. I’m drinking Coke.

“I warn you,” says Dad. “They’ll miss out most of what you said. They always do. They never get it right. Don’t be surprised if you’re not even on at all, specially if there’s been another knifing in Middlesbrough, or some little kid’s been mauled by a dog in Wallsend.”

He swigs his beer and grunts.

Mum’s all grins.

“Liam and Max on the telly!” she says. She squeezes my arm and giggles. “Hey, we should have put some of my paintings up in the background, Liam! Make sure we do it next time!”

Dad grunts again.

“Next time!” he says.

Then he shuts up. We’re the first item on the news. It starts with stuff about the baby and appeals for information. They ask the hiker in the red cap to come forward. A doctor says he knows the mother’ll be in great distress, but she will of course be treated with great compassion. So please come forward. Then it slips into Mysterious Events in Secret Northumberland. There’s a swirl of mist, the cry of a raven, a flash of black wings, a casket of treasure, then a film of Rook Hall and the police searching around it.

“Here we are in the twenty-first century,” drones Joe Tynan, “but could ancient forces—forces of magic and mystery—still be at work?” He reads the message in a stagey voice. “Please look after her right,” he says. “This is a child of God.” He widens his eyes. “What could it all mean?” he whispers.

“It means zilch!” says Dad. He glares at the screen. “You could say that about every single kid that’s ever been born.”

Then there’s Max looking bright-eyed and smart and me dead scruffy as we tell the tale. “And the raven really did lead you?” is Joe’s final question.

“Aye,” says Max. “It came into Liam’s garden and led us away.”

Then there’s a few of Dad’s books with mist swirling again, and an adder slithering across them. Then Dad himself, an interview from ages back, from when his books were just starting to sell. He looks really young and fit and bright. “Yes,” he says, “truth and fiction merge into each other. We try to keep them apart, but how can we? We live
in a miraculous world, a world that is filled with the most amazing possibilities.”

Dad grunts and groans and grinds his teeth.

“Hell’s teeth!” he says.

He flings a cushion at the TV and he sinks his beer fast.

We do get on national TV
, a little item at the end of the ten o’clock news. We’re in the News of the World next to a report about Michael Jackson’s nose cracking up. The
Sunday Times
links our story to a travel feature about the beauties of Northumbria.

The attention lasts a week or so, but pretty soon it all starts dying off. Dad’s right, and other stories start taking over. There’s a big drugs raid in Middlesbrough. A couple of Newcastle United players kick each other half to death on the quayside. Thirty asylum seekers jump ship in Blyth. Then the big one: a journalist called Greg Armstrong who grew up in Hexham has been taken hostage in Baghdad. A couple of groups claim to have him. His wife and kids are on TV, pleading for his release. He can’t be traced.

The police visit farms and cottages for miles around. No answers about the baby. No information. The red-capped hiker’s never found. A new story turns up during the search: the death of Thomas Fell. His body’s found in an ancient cottage in a valley below Cheviot. Must have been there months. It’s almost eaten away to bone. He must have been eighty years old. He was a prisoner of war in World War II who never went home again. He became a wanderer, a tramp, living alone in the northern moors. He lived out in the open in summer, in abandoned cottages when the cold came. He was often seen roaming, dreaming. He was rumored to be a good man, a kind man. But he was silent and elusive, a man who loved his solitude. Not a man for making friends or having family. Kept himself to himself, never lost his thick Bavarian accent. Left behind a sheaf of poems in German, a box full of treasures dug out from the earth: arrowheads, coins, stone knives from right back in the Stone Age. The story’s told, then fades away, like all the stories in the news.

The days heat up.
There’s restrictions on water use. The brook slows to a trickle. The river sinks. Max and I play football in the garden, climb trees, wander through the lanes. We camp out every night in the garden in the breathless nights. I polish the knife, I sharpen it, I soften its sheath. I dream about it resting snug in my hand. We talk about the baby. I spin yarns about her: she’s a fairy baby and the money’s fairy gold; she’s come through some kind of time warp from the time of the border raids; she’s the child of some barmy farmer and a witch.

We play with the kids on the field beside the school. The kids keep on laughing at us for how stupid we looked on telly, but they want to know the story again and again. Did you really not nick some of the money? they say. You must be stupid, they say.

One day Gordon Nattrass gets on about Greg Armstrong.

“Me dad was at school with him,” he says. “Says he was a right snobby ponce. He was probably poking and prying where he shouldn’t’ve been. We’re not weeping no tears for him. What was he doing there anyway?”

“What do you mean, What was he doing there?” I say.

“I mean what I say, brother. What’s Iraq got to do with him? Why couldn’t he stay where he come from, in Northumberland?”

“Like the Nattrasses have done?” I say.

He pauses. He looks me in the eye.

“Aye, Liam, like the Nattrasses have always done. Mebbe it’d be better if we all stayed where we come from. It’d save a lot of bother.”

He laughs.

“I’m keeping an eye on the Net. Mebbe it won’t be long till we see the video of him getting his head sliced off.”

He grins at me.

“Aye,” he says. “I know what you think. I’m a throwback. I’m like something from the Dark Ages. And guess what, brother? I couldn’t give a toss.”

We play endless war games. I throw myself into it and I get wilder and wilder. I’m growing, getting stronger. I let my hair grow long. Sometimes I go out with Death Dealer resting at my hip. We rip branches off the trees. We make bows and arrows and catapults and spears. We strip our tops off in the baking heat and we battle and fight and charge. The low-flying jets roar over us. We don’t cover our ears. We yell curses at them. We yell, “Bomb them right back to the Stone Age!” We stripe face paint and dye on our skin. Nobody gets really hurt, but all our bodies get
nicked and scratched and bruised. Sometimes I see Max standing back from it all, watching me as if I’m a million miles away. He’s suddenly friendly with a girl called Kim Shields. They’ve started spending time at each other’s houses. They go walking together. I feel far away from him. Sometimes I feel far away from everything, like I’m spinning away into outer space.

Sometimes in the middle of the wild games on the field I find myself at the school windows. I look in at the classrooms I sat in when I first came here: the small desks and chairs, the paintings on the walls, the illustrated books. I remember the smells of our bodies on warm afternoons, the songs we sang, the plays we acted, the delicious lunches, the sweet teachers. I go to high school in Hexham now, and it’s fine, but it’s great to press my face to the window and look into the past, to see me and Max and the other little ones painting together, to see Nattrass scowling in the corner where he’s been put until his temper calms down.

One day I find Max standing beside me, looking into the classroom with me. Kim’s a few yards behind, like he’s just left her and she’s waiting for him to go back to her.

“It was easy, wasn’t it?” I say.

“What was?”

“Being little. Being looked after all the time.”

He shrugs.

“Suppose so. Why? Do you want to be like that again?”

“Dunno.”

I raise my hand. There’s a homemade spear in it. I pretend I’m going to plunge it into him, then I howl and run back fast into the field.

I don’t want to be little again. But at the same time I do. I
want to be me like I was then, and me as I am now, and me like I’ll be in the future. I want to be me and nothing but me. I want to be crazy as the moon, wild as the wind, and still as the earth. I want to be every single thing it’s possible to be. I’m growing and I don’t know how to grow. I’m living but I haven’t started living yet. Sometimes I simply disappear from myself. Sometimes it’s like I’m not here in the world at all and I simply don’t exist. Sometimes I can hardly think. My head just drifts, and the visions that come seem so vivid. Max still comes to the tent sometimes, but we’re getting more impatient with each other.

One night he’s talking about Kim and he says,

“You should find a girl yourself.”

“I don’t want a girl.”

“You should.”

He even says,

“And you should cut your hair, or at least keep it cleaner.”

“What?”

“That’s what they like, Liam.”

“
What?
How old are you, forty-seven?”

“No,” he says. “But I
am
growing up.”

He lies there. He looks at me. Probably we’re both thinking we don’t want to argue. We’ve been good mates. We’ve done so many things together. So we say nothing for a while. Then he starts talking again, and he starts like he’d have started in the old days, like he’d thought something really important about hiding places or treasure or how to trap rabbits.

“I’ve been thinking lots of things,” he starts. “And talking to my dad and the teachers.”