The House at World's End (14 page)

Some miles away from World’s End, away from the woods and the curly stream and the gentle hills, a large town sprawled on a flat plain, spreading ugliness as it grew.

Carrie had only been there once, at Christmas, to see the lights. The lights were all right, but the town was horrible, noisy and smelly and full of worried people whose faces didn’t look a bit like Christmas.

But Lester’s mother had been given two concert tickets by a woman who came to play the flute to the lawless girls at Mount Pleasant Time you two listened to something but your own daft notions,’ Mrs Figg said, so Carrie and Lester went into town one afternoon on a bus.

The concert was in a big theatre. Lester and Carrie sat at the front of the highest balcony, from where they could have flown on to the stage if it had not been a bristling forest of violin bows, sawing up and down.

While the orchestra was tuning up, with music like howling cats, they ate biscuits and dropped crumbs on the heads of people sitting below. They tore pages out of their programmes to see how long they would take to flutter down.

‘What a cheek, letting kids come here alone,’ a woman grumbled.

‘It’s a scientific experiment,’ Lester explained. ‘How do you think the Law of Gravity was discovered, Madam?’

He could be very polite when he liked, but the woman only said, ‘What a cheek,’ and snorted like a horse.

When the music started, Lester leaned forward and watched the arms of the conductor, and the hands of the pianist, and the fingers of the fiddlers, and the cheeks of the trumpeters, and the legs of the man who made the bass drum pound with his right foot and the cymbals clash with his left. Carrie leaned back with her eyes closed and listened to the colours and images and wild throbbing dreams that the music poured into her head.

She had never heard music like that before. Afterwards, she reeled out into the street like a drunk man. Lester pranced beside her, singing special bits of the music, and conducting the air. People turned to stare at them.

‘Don’t let’s go home.’ They were supposed to go straight to the bus, but all of a sudden this crowded Saturday town was an adventure. The roar of traffic and feet and voices made a wild music that led them on from street to street, weaving between the busy legs, dashing across at corners under the snub noses of panting buses, stopping to stare into lighted windows, exploring archways and dark alleys.

‘Follow me.’ Lester spun ahead and ducked into a narrow opening between two tall buildings. Carrie thought she had lost him. She ran down the narrow street, searching everywhere. Was it true then, that he could fly? She looked up at the slate roofs and chimney pots. She looked down behind dustbins and parked cars and into the doorways of the dusty little shops in this deserted street.

A pet shop. She stopped dead in front of a small dirty window, low down, because the shop was half below pavement level. On a sawdust floor, three fat puppies played and a nest of kittens slept, and a large sad dog with hanging ears lay with its eyes open, watching the street. Over the
partition between the window and the shop, a grinning face suddenly appeared. A monkey? Lester. Carrie let out her breath and went down the steps into the shop.

What could one do about such a place as this? Although the puppies were happy, because they were young and foolish, it was a sad place, where all kinds of animals that were not meant to be pets quietly despaired.

A Mexican coatimundi, its heavy striped tail sweeping the cage floor, its long rubbery nose endlessly questing for freedom. A limp ferret like the collar of Valentina’s Spring coat. Tropical birds huddled close together on a perch for comfort or warmth. A mournful snake. A tank of baby green turtles, caught by the thousand in some warm Southern swamp. They climbed hopelessly over one another, blindly wanting a way out; but if one got out by being bought, it might not even live for as long as it took for a child to get sick of it.

Mice, fish, canaries, hamsters, the long-eared dog who watched the street. If you couldn’t buy them all, what could you do about them? What could you do about the sulking parrot? What could you do about the little black woolly monkey who wore a collar and chain and sat with its back turned, shivering, on top of its cage?

‘You want to buy something?’ The owner of the shop was a pale underground man with white flesh and soft pudgy hands. Not a Black Bernie sort of villain. The animals looked fed and fairly clean. But they were sad.

‘Just looking round,’ Lester said airily, standing on his toes to keep the top of the situation.

‘You young devils. I’m sick of it.’ The man sat on a stool behind the counter and read his evening paper.

The little monkey on the chain had a blunt black face with thick woolly hair and big dark eyes like wet chocolate.
When Carrie talked softly to him, he looked round over his shoulder, then turned away and swung his head from side to side, sorrowing for his lost jungle.

‘He’s shivering,’ Carrie said. ‘He’s cold.’

‘Cold my eye,’ said the man, who was wearing a thick jersey. ‘He’s nervous, the silly beggar.’

‘What of?’

‘You, of course. How would you like to have some cheeky young devil poke his face into yours and jabber, jabber, jabber?’

But it was not Carrie who made the monkey nervous. When the man stood up and shook his newspaper and said, ‘Buzz off!’, the monkey cringed at his voice.

‘It’s all right, little monkey.’ Carrie put out her hand, but he was watching the man. She went to the counter. ‘How—’ Her voice came out in an anxious squeak. ‘How much is the monkey?’

The man had sat down again with his newspaper. ‘Three hundred pounds,’ he said without looking up. ‘Now buzz off, I said. I’m busy.’

As they went to the door, the little black monkey turned round. He stared at Carrie, his dark eyes seeking something she could not give, then pushed his lips forward into a nervous, coaxing smile.

‘Come on,’ Lester said, as if he couldn’t bear it either.

In the street, Carrie turned to him in distress, ‘He looked at me. Oh, did you see? He looked at me.’

‘Can’t do much about it really,’ the RSPCA Man said. He had stopped in at World’s End to see Leonora and Oliver Twist. ‘That chap treats the animals fairly well, though I’ll have to go to his shop if this cold spell goes on, and see about the temperature. We do inspect all the pet
shops, you know, but we can’t close them all up, even if we’d like to.’

‘But that monkey …’ Carrie had it on the brain. She could not get it out of her head, the dark seeking eyes and the anxious smile. ‘What will happen to him?’

‘Someone will buy him, I suppose.’

‘I wish I could.’

‘So do I, my dear.’ The RSPCA Man had a wise, kind face and blue eyes that crinkled almost shut when he smiled. ‘You’d take care of it properly. Animals like that, they get bought on a fanciful whim by someone who wants to go one better than the neighbours. Then when they find it’s not just a more comical cat or dog, they’re flabbergasted. They don’t know what to do with it.’

‘So what do they do?’

‘They try and sell it back to the shop, or give it to a zoo, if it’s not already too ill. Importing monkeys and things for pets is all wrong. There’s a stop being put to it.’

Too late for poor little Loonie. That was the insulting name the pet shop man had given to the monkey.

When Mrs Figg had to go to town to take one of her lawless girls to see the magistrate, Carrie went with her. The girl’s name was Liza. She was friendlier than most lawless girls of that age. In the car, she told Carrie what life was like at Mount Pleasant. Mount Putrid, she called it, and held her nose.

‘You girls are all the same,’ Mrs Figg said amiably. ‘Grumble, grumble.’

Carrie told Liza about the monkey. ‘He looked at me,’ she said, and Liza said, ‘If I had more than just what I stand up in, I’d buy him for you.’

Nobody had any money. When Carrie went down into
the pet shop, the man was making his tea in the back, and Loonie clung to Carrie, loving her, patting her with his delicate hands, pushing at her lips with his long skinny fingers to make her go on talking.

‘You again?’ The pale man came through with a steaming mug.

‘I just came back to see the monkey.’ He clung to her like a baby. ‘If he were mine, I’d call him Joey.’

‘Yes,’ said the man rudely, ‘you would.’

‘I came back to ask how much?’

‘I told you. Three hundred pounds.’ He was crosser than last time.

‘If I could
get
three hundred pounds,’ Carrie said, ‘would you let me take him?’

‘Might.’ The man sucked at his hot tea. ‘Might not. Depend if he was still here. There’s a chap interested in him for his business. He’s got this old barrel organ, see, and he goes round the streets. You don’t see barrel organs much any more. Bit of a curiosity. Specially with a little monkey like this dressed up in a red coat, holding out the hat for peninies.’

Carrie laid her cheek on the monkey’s woolly head. ‘I don’t think he’d like that,’ she said.

‘Oh, get out.’ The man was even crosser. ‘You get on my nerves, you honestly do.’

When Carrie said goodbye to the monkey, she whispered into his ear, ‘I’ll come back.’

Would he still be here? Would she find his cage empty and have to walk through the town listening for hurdy-gurdy music, until she found him shivering in a silly red coat, chained to the top of the barrel organ?

Waiting at a corner for Mrs Figg and Liza, Carrie read a poster advertising a local horse show.

‘Valuable Prizes,’ it said. ‘Special Junior Jumping. First Prize £300.’

Everybody told Carrie not to take John to the horse show.

‘It’s too much to ask of him,’ her mother said. ‘Why make him compete? Why can’t he just be a horse?’

‘He’s got to be the best horse.’

‘Those jumps will be murder,’ Mr Mismo said. ‘They’ll start at four feet.’

‘He can do that. You’ve seen him.’

‘He - well look, Carrie,’ Tom said. ‘He won’t look like the other show jumpers.’

‘That doesn’t matter. Jumping isn’t judged on conformation.’

‘What on earth will you wear?’ Em asked. ‘They won’t even let you
in
without a jockey cap.’

‘I’ll borrow one when I get there.’

‘When I took Oliver Twist to the village fête’ Michael said to no one in particular, ‘Carrie said it wasn’t fair. What’s the difference?’

‘John’s getting stale,’ Mother said, watching from a seat on the fallen tree while Carrie went over and over and over the wall she had made out of two old doors, until John finally got fed up and ran out.

‘He’s got to learn.’ Carrie came back to her, flushed and angry. ‘He doesn’t know enough.’

‘Enough for what?’

‘To win.’

‘Oh, Carrie, why must he? Why must you suddenly beat everyone?’

‘I need the prize money.’

‘What for?’

‘Something special.’ Carrie had not told anyone about the monkey. If she wasn’t able to save him, she wouldn’t want their pity.

‘Can’t you save for it?’

There’s no
time!
Oh!’ She yanked John crossly round.

‘It’s hateful never to have any money!’

She set her jaw and went at the wall again. Her mother got up and went into the house.

A day or two later, when Em took in her tea before she went to school, Mother’s bed was neatly made. Her nightdress was hanging behind the door. Her blue dress and sandals were gone. So was she.

They found a note propped against the bread crock. She had gone to work in the kitchen at Mount Pleasant.

She came back that evening with Mrs Figg. She could hardly get out of the little car, hardly walk up the path.

‘You should all be ashamed,’ Mrs Figg said when she had put Mother to bed and come downstairs where the four of them waited, silent and afraid. ‘Letting your mother go to work when she’s still so weak. If I’d known she was in the kitchen, I’d have put a stop to it, but the first I knew was a great hullabaloo and one of the girls came running down the corridor screaming. ‘The new cook has fainted!’

‘Oh-poor Mother!’

‘Poor silly Mother,’ Mrs Figg said. ‘Why on earth did she go and do a daft thing like that?’

No one said anything. Only Carrie knew.

Everything was going wrong. The doctor said Mother had to stay in bed again. She could not even go out to the hammock.

Everyone except Carrie was still against the horse show, including John. He wasn’t working well. He was bored and careless over the familiar jumps. He rubbed his tail until there was a bare bristly patch at the top. He lost a shoe the day before the show when there was no time to go over the hill to the blacksmith. It was only a hind shoe. Carrie would have to risk it

His mane was a disaster, uneven, but too straggly to pull, and half over on the wrong side from having his head down to graze. Carrie spent two hours trying to plait it, but it stood up at odd angles in wispy knots. Two of them came undone as she started off for the show very early in the morning. To crown it all, John pretended to be slightly lame. He sometimes did that when he started out, an old trick remembered from the days when he didn’t like his work. But why today?

Jogging along through the chill grey morning, Carrie imagined herself on her dream horse. He would be a thoroughbred, bright bay with two white feet and a star like a clean snowflake. She would be in a black jacket with a white stock and yellow breeches, and a jockey cap with her name on the purple silk lining. You could see your
face in her boots. As she rode into the show grounds on her splendid horse, people would stare and exclaim, and other competitors would grit their teeth.

‘What horse is
that?’
The sixteen junior riders were in the collecting ring while the jumps were put up. Carrie stood next to a girl with no chin and a big bottom on a magnificent black horse who had tried to bite her as she hauled herself into the saddle.

‘Don John.’ That was John’s show name, from one of the poems Mrs Croker recited:

Strong gongs groaning as the guns boom far,

Don John of Austria is going to the war.