The House at World's End (8 page)

There was another squealing too, which did not stop. One-Eyed Jake the Pig Man had some pigs in there as well as a horse. Were they going to Belgium too?

‘Hullo, hullo, what’s all this then?’ A smell of stale tobacco, beer, garlic - Jake bending over her, and she groaned without opening her eyes.

‘If you’re alive,’ he said, in a wheezy voice that sounded like the bellows of the harmonium in the village church, ‘get up out of the road and let me by.’

‘Oh - oh my back!’ Just about now, Lester would be letting down the tail gate. Carrie began to scream and blubber, rolling about and making as much noise as she could. Recognizing a fellow-squealer, the pigs in the van set up as much racket as if Lester were a butcher with a knife, instead of a boy with a mission.

Between Carrie and the pigs, the noise was enough to drown the sound of ten horses clattering out of the van. Everything was going even better than planned. If only Michael had done his job … if only a car did not come by…

‘Come on now, girl.’ Jake stirred Carrie with his boot. Was he going to kick her over to the side of the road? She had to open her eyes and look at him. What she saw made her close them again quickly and roll over with her face in the road, still wailing.

She had expected somebody ugly. Anyone who would drive a horse to the slaughterhouse could not look like Prince Charming. She had expected an eyepatch, or a closed-up eye. What she had not thought of was a huge red beard bristling up into whiskers all round a face peppered with freckles until it became a thatch of wild flaming hair.

One eye was a small green pebble. The other was almost
as big as a ping pong ball, green and yellow like a marble. Which was real and which was glass? They both stared in different directions.

‘I don’t believe you’re hurt at all,’ Jake wheezed suspiciously.

‘I am.’ She sat up. ‘A car knocked me down. Hit and run.’ She remembered she was supposed to be hurt and added, ‘Oh my back!’

‘I’ll take you to the hospital.’ One-Eyed Jake held out a large freckled hand with a big ring on one finger, made of bent horseshoe nails. He pulled her hard. If she
had
hurt her back, it would have finished her.

She sat up quickly and said, ‘It’s clicked back. It’s better.’ She had heard the noise of the tail gate being shut. ‘Oh, thank you, thank you. Oh, you’re so kind.’

She began to gabble loudly, to cover any noise of hooves before Lester got the horse out of sight behind the hedge. ‘I’m all right now.’ She stood up. Jake got up off his dusty knees. Framed by his fiery red hair and whiskers, his freckled face was grinning with delight, his eyes staring sideways like a chicken. He felt he had done a good deed.

Well, hooray. It was better to make him happy than angry - at least until he got to the docks and found out that his cargo was short of one horse.

‘Sure you’re all right?’ he wheezed. He had a cigarette stub between his lips which didn’t seem to get shorter, just stayed there smouldering and taking away his breath.

‘Yes, yes, you go on.’ He climbed back into the van, Carrie stepped aside and they parted like old friends, waving and grinning at each other as he drove away, the squealing of the pigs rising to a protest as he bumped them over the narrow bridge, and then fading away down the road.

About a week later, Carrie was wheeling a barrow full of stable bedding when Mr Mismo came into the yard.

‘What’s this, what’s this?’ he asked, tipping his small turned-up hat over his broad red face. ‘You’ve never gone and got yourself a horse?’

‘I’m cleaning out the goat shed.’

‘I wasn’t born yesterday, old chump. You think I don’t know a barrer load of horse manure when I smell one?’

Carrie set down the barrow. ‘Well, as a matter of fact—’ She had been dying to show the horse to Mr Mismo, but if the news of the kidnapping - horsenapping - had got out, he might put two and two together. He was, as he said, not born yesterday.

‘I said they’d come to you, didn’t I?’ He gave her a funny look from under the hat. Did he suspect anything?’

‘As a matter of fact - Carrie shook her hair and gave him her innocent look - ‘my uncle
has
got me a horse. That’s what he came to tell me last Sunday.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

‘I wanted to surprise you.’ When it was necessary to invent a lie, for safety, or to protect someone - in this case Vile Bernie’s horse - that didn’t count as lying. Necessity was the mother of invention. ‘Come and see.’

The brown horse had thrown up his head with his ears back, because he was still afraid of men. But when Carrie
went up to him, he dropped his mealy nose into her hand and stood quiet, flicking his ears and rolling back his eye as Mr Mismo went all round him, feeling his skin, running a hand down his legs, with the whistling, hissing sound he made when he groomed Princess Margaret Rose.

When he had finished, all he said was, ‘Brown bread. A load of brown bread every three days and a small cigar to chew once a week to clean out his system. And plenty of Doctor Green.’

‘We can’t afford a vet.’

‘Doctor Green.’ He waved a hand. ‘All that good sweet grass out there.’

‘Oh yes. We’ve got to finish fencing the meadow.’ They could not buy rails or posts or even wire, so they were using everything they could find to patch up the hedges and broken-down fence of the meadow that ran up the gentle hillside behind the house. Drainpipes, bits of split planking, a rotting door they found behind the barn, sheltering thousands of wood lice, an iron bedstead that Michael had begged from an old cottage lady and dragged home up the lane.

As Mr Mismo left, he asked casually, ‘Where did your uncle get this champion hoss?’

‘I - I don’t know.’ Carrie buried her face in John’s wispy mane, which she rubbed every day with oil, to make it grow. She hated not to tell Mr Mismo the truth. She had a feeling he would have enjoyed the story of One-Eyed Jake and the horsenapping. But he was still a grownup. And it was still horse stealing.

She had told Tom, of course. She had to. He saw Lester and her coming down the lane with the horse, practically carrying him because he was so tired.

‘Horse stealing?’ he said, and Carrie said, ‘As a matter
of fact, yes,’ and excitedly began to tell him the whole marvellous adventure.

When she had finished, Lester added, ‘It was my idea.’

They watched Tom. He looked solemn, his long face, half-boy, half-man considering. Then he let out a shout of laughter and jumped into the air, his hair, which Valentina had tried to get at with the nail scissors from her handbag, flying like a mane.

‘I think it was a marvellous idea! Why didn’t you let me help?’

‘We thought,’ said Lester, ‘you were old enough to know better.’

‘This boy is rude,’ Tom said. ‘Who is he?’

‘I told you. A friend of mine. Lester.’

‘Lester who?’

‘I don’t know.’ Lester had not told Carrie his surname, nor where he lived. With Lester, you didn’t waste time on that kind of boring question. With Lester, you asked questions like, ‘Do you think Mr Mismo’s bull might once have been Henry VIII?’ and, ‘Why do animals want to die alone?’

‘I’m incognito,’ Lester said mysteriously. ‘No man knows my name.’

‘Because you’re a horse thief?’ Tom was grinning.

‘Don’t ask,’ Lester said, and they both laughed.

When they showed the brown horse to Em, she said the same thing as Tom: ‘Why didn’t you let me help?’

‘We will next time,’ Lester said. Now he had met all the family, and they all seemed to like each other. Carrie was relieved. It was wretched when you liked someone, and the other people you liked didn’t.

‘But if I’d been there,’ Em said, ‘I’d have taken the pigs out of the van too. It’s just as bad for them.’

‘Pigs are born to be eaten,’ Tom said, and Em kicked him in the shin.

That’s a rotten thing to say.’

‘You eat bacon and sausages,’ Tom said.

That’s different
That
pig has already been killed. It won’t bring it back to life if I don’t eat it.’

‘But they wouldn’t kill another one,’ Lester said, ‘if you didn’t.’

‘Or you.’ Em stuck out her pointed tongue at him. She could be as rude to people she had just met as if she had known them for years.

‘I don’t’

Don’t eat bacon or sausages! How could a boy live and grow to be however old he was, without eating bacon, meaty and mellow, so fragrant in the pan? Or without knowing the gush of savoury steam as you put your fork into a sausage and it burst and spread, crusted brown at the ends, packed with delight? No wonder he was so lean and light

‘Could you eat your grandmother?’

Lester began to explain his ideas about people coming back to earth as animals, but all Em said was, ‘Well, if your grandmother had already been killed for bacon, it wouldn’t make any difference to her either,’ and went away to boil a piece of ham for supper.

Carrie worried a bit about whether she ought to be a vegetarian too, but she caught Lester one day, coming down from the top of the meadow (he always approached the house from a different direction, because he would not tell her where he lived), eating a cold beef and pickle sandwich, so she stopped worrying.

All the rest of that summer was taken up with John. They had not finished fencing the meadow, so every day,
Carrie put a long rope on his halter and lay in the grass with Henry’s wedge-shaped head in her lap, and Moses playing with her hair, while John’s teeth tore contentedly at the shorter, sweeter turf and Charlie watched them, sighing in the sun.

Gradually, John’s neck and hindquarters filled out and his coat was beginning to shine. He might never, as Mr Mismo said, catch the judge’s eye, but he was beginning to look like a horse.

‘When are you going to get up on him, old chump?’

‘Not just yet.’

‘Can’t you ride? I’ll teach you,’ said Mr Mismo, who was always ready to teach anybody anything, whether he knew it or not.

‘Of course I can ride. I had a friend who had horses, where we used to live.’ From what she had seen of Mr Mismo, sitting far back in the saddle on Princess Margaret with his short legs stuck out, she thought she could teach him a couple of things. ‘I want to wait till John’s quite fit.’

‘Scared?’

‘Of course not.’ She was scared, but not of John. Behind the joy of having him, knowing each night that he would be there in the morning to greet her with his high call like the trumpets of dawn, she was still a little scared that she would be found out. That One-Eyed Jake would find out. That Vile Bernie would find out. That John would be taken away from her. If she was already riding him, the breaking of the tie between them would break her heart.

To strengthen his muscles, she took him for long walks. They went up the meadow, through the gate at the top of the hill and down through Mr Mismo’s herd of cows
to where the wide brook serpentined its way between the willows. With Charlie and Perpetua and Moses going in and out of the water like otters, they walked along the bank to the bridge which took the Beddington road across. On the other side, they followed the path at the edge of the water meadows where once, long ago, she had seen the man on the bay thoroughbred splashing through the silvery wet grass, and Tom had quoted: ‘I
think I could turn and live with animals … I stand and look at them long and long.’

That had been the beginning of it all.

She met that same man once, trotting up behind her when she had stopped with John to pick watercress in a marshy corner. He said, ‘Hullo.’ He was young and sunburned.

‘I love your horse,’ Carrie said, standing to look at the beautiful bay.

‘Isn’t he fine? I wish he
was
mine. I like yours,’ he said in a friendly way.

‘Thank you,’ she beamed.

‘That’s nice.’ He smiled down at her. ‘People always say something like, “Oh, it’s not bad,” if you admire something. As if it was a sin to be proud.’

Wandering back down the Beddington road, John plodding behind her with his head down, while Carrie dreamed of what he would be, what they would do together, a horn like the bray of a donkey made them both jump sideways.

Rattle and roar, squeal of pigs, squeal of unoiled brakes. One-Eyed Jake pulled up with a jerk and leaned out of the window to wheeze at her.

‘Think you own the whole bloomin’ road?’

Both eyes were looking at her, the pebble and the ping pong ball, but neither seemed to recognize her. The day of
the horsenapping, she had been wearing a torn pair of jeans with her hair full of grit and ketchup. Today, she was in a pair of Tom’s old shorts, tied up with string, her hair plaited back because it was hot, and tied with a broken shoelace.

But John was John, his head down to the grass verge, because, to him, stopping meant snatching a snack.

Carrie stood her ground, expecting a hoarse roar of rage, but all she got was a wheeze of disgust from among the red beard and whiskers. ‘Traipsing all over the road with a bloomin’ horse! It’s the motorist what pays for the upkeep of the road.’

He hadn’t recognized John! ‘But a horse has right of way, you know. It says so in the Highway Code.’ She only meant to give useful information, but she was so relieved that she could not help grinning up at him, and he thought she was joking, and jerked the pig van forward, missing her bare foot by inches.

He didn’t recognize John! She watched him disappear down the road in a cloud of dirty exhaust smoke. That meant Vile Bernie wouldn’t recognize him either. If there was ever any suspicion, he would say, ‘That’s not my horse’, and Carrie would be safe. John was safe. It was safe now to do three things.

The first thing was to tell her mother. She or Tom went every week to the hospital, where their mother was slowly getting stronger, and spending longer and longer each day out of the plaster trough in which she still had to lie at night.

From World’s End it was a complicated journey of two different buses, with a two-mile walk in the middle, during which Carrie tried to hitchhike, although she didn’t tell Tom, because he didn’t tell her whether he hitchhiked or walked.

‘Don’t tell about John,’ she had told Tom. ‘I want to myself.’ ‘Why don’t you then?’