The Grasshopper's Child (3 page)

‘
Autumn Gentians
,' Heidi read aloud. ‘
Sino Ornata
.'

Sino
means Chinese, she thought. She'd never seen a gentian, except in a picture. She thought of Switzerland, scattered jewels in fields of snow, and imagined a dragon's sapphire treasure of pure, concentrated beautifulness—

An idea coiled into her mind: a faint wishful thought.

But she could see her breath, and it was getting dark.

She made a lentil and vegetable soup, using red lentils from one of the cupboards,
masur
dahl
that needed no soaking; an onion and a few carrots, salvaged from the silt in the vegetable rack. She served it with the end of a loaf that she'd found in a crock, sliced and toasted, rubbed with oil and a little garlic. For dessert there would be preserved apples from a jar, heated up and served with Condensed Milk.

The cold kitchen was very quiet.

While the soup bubbled she set the table in the breakfast room, cleaned a big bowl to serve it from, found a tray, and made a start on sorting out the table. It was lucky she'd charged her phone. The kitchen clock wasn't working, but when she walked into the ‘breakfast room'
with her tray, on the dot of seven, Old Wreck was sitting there waiting, still in her dressing gown, at one end of the table. At the other end sat another Wreck, a scrawny old guy with mad straggly hair, a bristled chin and missing teeth. Neither of them said a word, to each other or to Heidi, until she brought in the apples, with the Condensed Milk in a little jug.

Old Wreck Tallis picked up the jug and sniffed at it. ‘Cold; and tinned. Can't you make custard?
Proper
custard. I won't tolerate powder.'

‘I didn't want to finish the milk. And there are no eggs.'

‘
No eggs?
Nonsense! Why else do we keep hens?'

‘Okay. I'll make custard next time.'

After she'd cleared out, and done the washing up, she carried on sorting rubbish into the kitchen recycle bins.

Old Wreck Tallis came in, and looked at her.

‘Working away. You're like a little machine, aren't you.'

What else am I supposed to do? thought Heidi. Watch telly with you and your brother? I don't think so. I bet you don't even have a telly. She bit her tongue, and just nodded.

‘The Studio Floor is kept locked. The Bedroom Floor is private. Here are your matches, and candles.
Don't
ask me for more of
either
until the end of the month.'

At 9pm all the lights went out, suddenly and silently.

Heidi climbed the endless stairs by candlelight: unpacked her rucksack at last, and set the broken chair by her bed so she could put Rock Mouse on it, to have him by her. The Rock Mouse hadn't looked like a mouse for years. He'd lost his plastic eyes and felt ears, and even his tail, long ago. But at least she wouldn't be totally alone.

A feeling of lonely adventure had been holding her up like water-wings, since Verruca disappeared. It held her until she'd brushed her teeth and had a cold wash in the Baba-Yaga bathroom. As soon as she got under the covers, and blew out her candle, the terrible scene in Mum and Dad's bedroom got its claws in her again.
If I hadn't called the police. If I'd
managed to get hold of Immy, if the ambulance had come sooner —

She saw herself and Immy sitting in A&E, like often before. Each of them holding tight to one of Mum's hands. The doctors found the pulse that Heidi was sure she had felt, flickering in Dad's throat. He was very badly hurt, but not dead. Mum would have to go to hospital for months, and Dad was badly hurt. But it was
okay
.

If only if only—

The rusty curtains didn't meet. A fang of moonlight clawed Heidi in the face. She couldn't turn away, or she'd lose the sliver of body-warmth she'd created in the cold sheets. She just lay there getting clawed, and drifting off into a half-dream, in which Dad was behind that Steel Door in the basement, covered in blood; until she heard footsteps, padding up the attic stairs. Bare feet, but she didn't think it was Tallis. She'd spotted Stubbly Chin's potential for trouble the moment she laid eyes on him. Or the moment she'd felt his creepy eyes on her—

Dazed with weary misery, she didn't feel at all scared: just disgusted.

The footsteps padded to her door, and padded down again. They faded into silence. And Dad was bleeding behind the steel slab. She couldn't go to help him, because Mum was cuddled up beside her. Heidi's Mum had bad nights. Dad wasn't always sympathetic, so Mum would come to Heidi's room. Mum was asleep, so Heidi had to keep still or the warm, peaceful body next to her would wake up, panicking and crying—

Heidi jerked awake, falling out of her narrow groove of warmth into vicious cold. She couldn't have been asleep long. The moon hadn't moved an inch, it was still staring at her.
She forced herself out of bed, across the frozen floor, and tried again to close the curtains.
Hopeless, it was like pulling on cobwebs. At least she found out why the room was so
incredibly
cold. Two leaded panes, in the side of the window that didn't open, were missing.
Icy air was streaming in.

‘Great,' muttered Heidi. ‘Absolutely
great
.'

Too exhausted to think about covering the hole she stumbled back to bed, groped for the duvet: and
something that stank of rotten meat moved under her hand
. A blurred shadow was there, and then it wasn't.
Imagining things
, she told herself, as she pulled on her only jumper.
Then she saw the hollow, where her pathetic duvet lay dented, as if someone had just been lying there. She felt it, and it was
warm
.

‘NO,' said Heidi loudly. ‘It wasn't Mum. I was
dreaming
.'

She grabbed the Rock Mouse, and pulled the sad limp duvet over her head. Soon her mother, or whatever it was, came back. Heidi lay clutching Rock Mouse, not daring to stir: not even daring to open her eyes, until the dawn. At least the footsteps didn't return.

Keep Your Mouth Shut And Your Head Down

My tongue

Lives in a red room

Behind the teeth,

Behind the teeth,

It watches the world

Through ivory slabs

That are almost walls

Behind the teeth,

Behind the teeth,

Sometimes it frets and paces,

In its red cave

Sometimes it fiercely prances.

Sometimes it escapes, but

It soon comes running home

It knows where it's safe.

Behind the teeth,

Behind the teeth.

3: The Door in the Wall

In the morning there were four glass bottles of green-top semi-skimmed on the kitchen doorstep, plus a pot of cream with a waxed paper cover; and a vegetable box. Heidi was grateful, but she noted that somebody besides herself had a key to the yard door, and she didn't like that.

She soon found the hens, clucking and fussing in a tarpaulin-roofed shed. There was also a wood stack, and a disused garage that held a disaster of an old bike, sacks of biomass briquettes, a bin of poultry food, and a lot of empty hooch bottles: country vodka. She let the hens out into their run, and collected fourteen eggs from the nesting straw. It was like some insulting, stupid Country-Living quiz.
Why do we keep hens, slave? Do you even know?
Yes ma'am, Old Wreck. I do. We have hens in town, thanks. She hadn't been able to keep hens at home. Their garden was too small, and Mum was scared of furry and feathered things. But she'd liked looking after the poultry at her Learning Centre's Food Farm. The ducks were more fun, but the chickens were okay.

The hen house hadn't been cleaned recently. She mentally added that chore to her list, and wondered about fires. On the whole, and since her own bedroom wouldn't get any warmer, she was fine with the stingy radiators. She decided to wait until she was asked. Or ordered.
Six of the eggs were warm, the rest were stone cold. She broke the cold ones one by one: in the yard, to avoid stinking the kitchen out. They were all bad. She chucked the mess into a bin marked DIRTY ORGANICS. The other bin was marked NON-RECYCLABLE WASTE.

Which solved another of her puzzles. All she had to do now was find the oven. The
vegetable box wasn't great, which surprised her. And there was a pat of butter, but no meat at all. In town, everyone was convinced people in the country ate incredibly well. Maybe the Old Wrecks were vegetarians. She found a torn note in the bottom of the box.

Hello Heidi, I'm sorry I couldn't be around to welcome you. I hope you're settling in all
right. I'll knock when I deliver again, next week. I'm SO sorry for what's happened. Call me,
any time, day or night, if you're worried, or if there's anything you need to know! Love Rose.

How am I supposed to call her, thought Heidi. I don't know her number. And how does she know she loves me?

Old Wreck wasn't so bad. Heidi had no desire to meet some do-good stranger who would pity her, and ask a lot of questions. She needed to be left alone, so she could lick her wounds and think. The note was like a stab from Virtual Verruca's pointing finger.

She screwed it up and chucked it in the paper recycling.

The kitchen wasn't too bad when she got down to it, after serving and clearing breakfast, and doing the washing up. The mess was mostly on the surface. Maybe there'd been another slave, who'd been fired for some reason. The worst thing, aside from the prehistoric cat poo under the sink, was slug tracks on the rugs. Heidi
hated
slugs. Slugs indoors were the filthiest, most disgusting thing imaginable. She searched for Slug Bait but found none.

Old Wreck Tallis and her nameless brother, Old Wreck Stubble Chin, didn't say a word at breakfast, or at lunch: which suited Heidi just fine. When she'd done the lunch washing up and planned their dinner, she decided it would be okay to go for another run.

The greenhouses beckoned, with their faint promise: except she wasn't in the mood for wishful thinking. All she wanted was exercise. She headed for the evergreen, but she took her eyes off it once, and it vanished again.

Tricky thing! Heidi ran on, confident now that she would not get lost.

Trees had fallen in the
Himalayan Valley
, crashing into the ferny gorge; ripping out huge ragged pads of earth and rock with their splayed feet. One of the Famous Baroque Fountains was a disaster area, the crystal firework show lost to a black-water swamp, where water lilies struggled like dying octopuses and a sullen geyser bubbled in the middle. Heidi picked her way around the mess, holding a stitch and wondering what
Baroque
was supposed to mean.
Horses that were half-way mermaids; going by the fallen chunks of statue. And a naked merman with big sprawling hair; and broken giant seashells.

The Azalea Slope was a straggly jungle. The ruins of the Big House were scattered over a big flat grassy space, the other side of
Swan Lake
from the
Grecian Temple
. They creeped her out. The blackened stumps of walls weren't old enough to be romantic. They smelled of wet ashes. She ran on, glimpsing shapes of greeny bronze and greyish marble in the overgrown bushes: hidden attractions that had lost their signs. Once she thought she saw a dragon, but maybe it was only a weird shaped tree, and finally, she hit a wall.

It was about time to turn back, but she needed to walk off another stitch and there was a narrow path beside the wall. She walked along it, ducking branches that dripped cold water onto her neck, until she reached a door. It was banded in studded iron, and set in an arched recess. She tried the iron ring of the latch, just out of curiosity. The latch lifted, the door shifted. Heidi gave it a shove, tearing at ivy shoots, and squeezed through the gap.

Trees pressed close on the other side, spiky holly and bare young oaks. She waited to see if her tag would stab her for leaving the Gardens, but nothing happened. Maybe she was still
in
the Gardens and this was another attraction,
The Spooky Wood
. The path went on, so Heidi went on too, picking up speed as it headed steeply downhill; until she came tumbling out onto level ground beside a grey-paved country lane.

She had a stitch again.

There was a briny, unmistakable smell in the air: it lifted her spirits.

To her right the lane grew wider, and a faded, broken white line ran down the middle.
Heidi sensed Virtual Verruca's evil powers in that direction, so she turned left. Soon there was a sign in the winter grass of the verge: MEHILHOC. Then a fingerpost, pointing up an even smaller lane to the
Ancient Church of St Mary Of The Harbour
; and then she reached the village. Houses, a pub and a shop, all clustered round a harbour where small boats lay lopsided on the mud, on either side of a dark river channel. The tide was out but the sea must be near: breathing its salt air on Heidi; bathing her in happy memories.

The pub was called The Blue Anchor, the shop was called The Fertile Crescent. The river looked harmless, almost jumpable, but there'd obviously been floods. Every building had layers of mud and scummy tidelines, the highest almost up to the upstairs windows.