The Outside Child Read online

  We ate several smoked salmon sandwiches in the train to Waterloo. I had eaten smoked salmon only once or twice in my life, as a treat, but Plato said that his mother bought it every week. “You don’t have to cook it. She says there’s no point in cooking just for the two of us. I get bored with it sometimes.”

  I thought I could live on smoked salmon for ever and ever, but I didn’t say so. It seemed to make Aunt Bill and Aunt Sophie sound either poor or mean to say that we couldn’t afford it. I said, “Aunt Sophie says too much smoked stuff gives you allergies. Perhaps it’s what causes your asthma.”

  “It’s supposed to be something in the air,” he said. “Dust or pollen. That’s why it’s worse in the summer.”

  He stared at me, his mouth slightly open and his eyelids drooping; a stupid expression he often wore when he was thinking. Then he said, “Still, maybe you’re right. You’d better eat the rest of the sandwiches and I’ll make out with the peaches and the chocolate chip cookies.”

  I didn’t care about the peaches, but I love chocolate chip cookies. In fact, along with mashed banana with sugar and cream, they are my favourite things in this world. Plato knew this because I had told him. He also knew that I wasn’t allowed many sweet things at home. I said, “Chocolate ruins your teeth,” and he smiled, very sweetly.

  “Well, if you eat the sandwiches and I eat the cookies, we’ll be saving my lungs and your teeth.”

  I said, “I suppose if you’re weedy and small you have to be sharp. But you’ll cut yourself one day.” And I gazed out of the window at the allotments on the railway embankment and the tight-packed little houses rattling by.

  “Geb nodrap,” he said humbly. “You can have all the cookies. Yako?”

  “Backspeak is babyish,” I said. “I’m giving it up.”

  *

  I sat very stiff until we got to Waterloo. Then, as the train drew in under the high glass roof, I looked at him. He was hunched up, blinking sadly behind his glasses, and I was sorry. I said, “Thank you for coming. I wouldn’t have dared go without you.”

  He squared his shoulders. He might be easy to squash but he was quick to recover. He said, “I’ve worked it out on the A to Z. We can go by bus or by Underground. Bus would be more interesting but the Underground’s quicker. We get off at Bow and walk through Bow Cemetery. Shipshape Street’s on the other side. Bow Cemetery looks huge on the map. I wonder if it’s one of the big cemeteries that were dug outside the city after the Great Plague of London. Do you know about the Great Plague? They used to put a red cross on the houses where people were dying, and write Lord have mercy upon us. And they trundled carts through the streets at night and shouted, Bring out your dead.” His eyes shone with excitement.

  I stuck my fingers in my ears, pretending to be shocked. “Pots ti,” I said. “Please Otalp.”

  *

  Even if Plato was wrong and it didn’t go back to the Great Plague of London, it was still a very old cemetery. Near the main gate there were some new graves covered with granite chippings and wilting flowers, but most of the cemetery was rough, tangled wilderness, where the old trees, laurel and holly and yew, were choked with creeping ivy and the ground was dense with scrubby bushes and thick clumps of nettles. Off the main paths, the tracks were narrow and muddy; the old tombstones had fallen over, or leaned drunkenly sideways. We explored for a while, and then sat on a bench in a big grassy clearing at the side of the railway line, and shared the rest of Plato’s lunch. In the end, I ate all the cookies. Plato said he had brought them for me and he didn’t much like them. Except for an old woman muttering on one of the benches and an old man walking his dog, there was no one about.

  We got to the school as the bell rang at the end of the morning, and stood by the railings. It was an old-fashioned school building with tall, pointed windows and steps leading up to the separate entrances for GIRLS, BOYS, and INFANTS, and a concrete playground with goal posts for netball. Children ran about, yelling. Plato said, “Will you recognise them?”

  I felt very odd; both longing to see them and hoping I wouldn’t. I said, “Perhaps they’re not at school today. They might be having a holiday if my father’s at home. Though sometimes he only gets a few days between cruises.” I hoped he was safely back on his ship. I hadn’t thought until now how awful it would be if he saw me. I felt my face burning.

  I wanted to run. I said, “Oh, Plato, I can’t. Let’s go home.”

  “After we’ve come all this way? Don’t be silly. You’re not doing anything wrong. It’s not wrong to want to see your brother and sister. It can’t hurt anyone. Not just looking.”

  “It feels wrong, that’s all.”

  “Are you scared they’ll recognise you?”

  I shook my head. I was too full to speak. I couldn’t have run if I’d tried. I felt like a criminal.

  Then I saw Annabel and I stopped being frightened at once. She was walking across the playground towards the entrance marked INFANTS. She looked just as she had done in the photograph on my father’s desk: long, soft, curly hair bouncing on her shoulders. And she had the same little worried half-smile as she turned for an instant and glanced in our direction. As if she were looking for someone.

  “That’s her,” I said. “The one in the red dress with the pretty hair.”

  “Don’t shout!” Plato said. “She’s looking at us. Do you want her to hear you?”

  It was Plato who was nervous now! “I’m not shouting,” I said. “And she’s not looking at us.”

  She had been looking for George. He came tumbling down the steps with a lot of other small boys in jeans and green sweaters, laughing and squealing, bursting with just-out-of-school energy. His big satchel banged against his legs, pulling him sideways, and his fat cheeks were hard and rosy as apples as he ran towards Annabel.

  She took his hand, bending over him, straightening his sweater under the satchel strap, and he looked up at her, laughing. They walked together across the playground, towards us. My brother and sister.

  They were strangers to me, but I felt as if I had known them all my life.

  Plato whispered, “Perhaps they go home for lunch.”

  They came out of the gate. George was chattering. “We did joined-up writing this morning. Miss Povey said I was very good, better nor anyone, but then my fingers got tired and I lost a mark at the end.”

  They passed so close that I could have touched them. Annabel had a green plastic bow in her hair that pulled it away from her forehead, and she was fiddling with it as if it annoyed her. I thought she might have been made to wear it at school to keep her curls off her face and it seemed I was right, because she took it off and shook her hair free and combed the curls loose with her fingers …

  With her three fingers. She had no forefinger and no thumb, just a small, pink lump where they should have been.

  I only saw this hand for an instant. She put it—and the bow—either into a pocket, or into a fold of her dress. Her other hand was holding George’s. Their clasped hands swung between them. He said, “Oh, my satchel’s too heavy,” in a sudden, babyish wail and she let him go, took it from him and hung it over her own shoulder, then reached for him again, doing all this with one hand—with her right hand, her good hand with four fingers and thumb—and keeping her damaged hand hidden.

  There was a small road at the side of the school. The rest of Shipshape Street lay beyond it; a short street of terraced houses with the green of the cemetery at the far end. Annabel and George stopped at the small road, and I was glad to see that they had been taught their road drill. They both looked left, and then right, and then left again, even though there were no cars in sight. Then they crossed as they should, neither dawdling nor running, just walking briskly. As soon as they reached the opposite side, Annabel let go George’s hand and he darted ahead, jumping cracked paving stones as I had done at his age. Plato and I followed slowly.

  I said, “They oughtn’t to walk home alone. Someone ought to meet them.”

  I
felt angry with their mother. Annabel was only ten years old and I had been eleven before Aunt Bill and Aunt Sophie had stopped meeting me after school.

  “They haven’t far to go,” Plato said. “And someone’s looking out for them, anyway.”

  The ‘someone’ was standing at a gate, waving. A lady in a bright yellow blouse. George ran up to her, thudding into her, and she gasped and then laughed, putting her arms round him and swinging him off the ground. She put him down and bent to kiss Annabel. She said, “Have you had a good morning, my darlings?”

  She had pretty, crinkly grey hair, and a pink and white wrinkled face with a bit of a moustache on her upper lip. I wanted to stop but I thought that might seem suspicious so I marched firmly on, Plato beside me, sneaking a look at the house as we passed. It said 22 in the coloured glass of the fanlight. There were looped net curtains at all the windows, and a hanging basket of red geraniums over the porch.

  Annabel and George ran up the paved path and into the open front door. The lady in the yellow blouse was still at the gate, fastening it with a loop of wire. She looked at us. And I recognised her.

  I held my breath and looked back at her without blinking. For a second I thought she looked puzzled, but I could have been wrong because although she smiled, it was only in the way people smile at kids in the street.

  Seeing them and not seeing them at the same time.

  *

  When we heard the front door close, we bolted. We ran to the end of the street and squeezed through a place where the railings were bent wide enough to let us through, into the cemetery.

  We ran along twisty paths until we were deep in the wild part and Plato was gasping. I stopped and he flopped down on a flat mossy tombstone. He looked blue round the mouth. He tried to speak. “That … wa …” was all he could manage.

  “Plenty of time,” I said. “You may have picked the right place to die but you’re a bit young for it.”

  He smiled weakly and fumbled for his inhaler.

  While he recovered, I looked at the tombstones nearby. They were not all for old people. Beth Blossom had ‘fallen asleep’ in 1910, when she was three years old. And the family vault of the Sidcup family had the names of four children carved on it. Herbert Sidcup, Florence Sidcup, James Sidcup, and Prudence Sidcup, had all died when they were younger than I was.

  I thought of them lying under my feet, quiet and still. I wondered what it would be like to have such a large loving family that everyone wanted to be buried together. And I wished I hadn’t made that silly joke to Plato.

  I said, “You’re all right, aren’t you? I mean, you aren’t going to die?”

  He was still a bit breathless but the blue look had gone from his mouth. “Shouldn’t think so. People do die from asthma. Most don’t. A good many often grow out of it. That wasn’t your stepmother.”

  “No. No, it wasn’t.”

  “Too old.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Aunt? Older sister? Grandmother?”

  I hadn’t wanted to tell him. I hadn’t even wanted to think about it. Now I was forced to. “She’s my father’s mother,” I said. “I’ve seen her photograph in his cabin. Only she was younger and her hair was dark.”

  “You mean, she’s your grandmother!”

  “I suppose so.” I tried to look surprised, as if this thought had only just occurred to me. I said, “I’ve never met her. She’s never met me. I thought she lived in America.”

  “Maybe she does.” Plato looked at me warily. Then his face brightened. “Perhaps this is her first visit to London.”

  I shrugged my shoulders.

  “Oh. Well.” He sucked at the braces on his teeth, making an irritating clicking noise. “There must be some explanation. Your grandmother has come from America for the first time, and she’s staying with your father and Amy, and Amy has stopped her coming to see you. If Amy’s mad enough to stop you seeing Annabel and George, she’s mad enough for that! She probably threatens to kill herself to get her own way. Cut her veins in the bath. Or put her head in the gas oven. My mother was always frightening my father with something like that. It didn’t work in the end because he left all the same, but it might work for a while on someone who wasn’t used to it.”

  “I’m glad you’ve got your breath back,” I said.

  “It makes sense, doesn’t it? What else could it be?”

  “Just that she doesn’t want to have anything to do with me. Even if she did live in America, she could have written to me if she’d wanted to. Or sent me a birthday card. Not that I care. If she wrote to me I’d have to write back to her. And I hate writing letters.”

  That was a big lie. I would have liked to have hundreds of grandmothers, all sending me birthday cards. I would have written back to them all, long, brilliant letters so they would never forget me. But Plato hates families, so he believed me.

  “Relations are a pain,” he agreed. “My relations, anyway. Always ringing each other up and shouting. The Welsh ones are better than the Greek, but only because they are meaner about using the telephone. And my Welsh grandmother sends me a text to learn each week. From the Bible.”

  Aunt Sophie and I read to each other out of the Bible, and not only on Sunday. Aunt Sophie didn’t go to church with Aunt Bill and me, but she said that if I didn’t know the Bible I would never understand English literature. But I didn’t say this to Plato in case he thought Aunt Sophie was cranky.

  I said, “You like Aliki, though.”

  “I told you. Brothers and sisters are different.”

  “I wish I’d had the chance to find out.”

  My chest grew tight as I thought of it; playing with George and Annabel, taking them to the adventure playground, teaching them games. I wondered if Annabel was ever teased about her hand. I thought, if someone teased her when I was there, I’d tear their ears off.

  I wondered if Plato had noticed her hand. I didn’t like to mention it in case he hadn’t. I was sorry and ashamed for Annabel.

  Plato was watching me. He said, “If you want to get to know them, you can. We can come in the holidays. I expect they go to play in the cemetery. Or there may be a proper park somewhere. If we hang about, we could see where they go. You could speak to them.”

  “I wouldn’t dare.” I had seen them. I had heard George talking. I knew where they lived. I hadn’t thought about what would happen next. I had seen them and got safely away without any complications and that was enough for the moment. What I wanted now was to go home and just think about them. Quietly, and on my own.

  Plato was watching me with a disgusted expression.

  “You can’t start a thing and then give it up, just like that. I thought you were really interested in Annabel and George, that you thought it was really important. I wouldn’t have wasted my time if I’d known you only wanted to see them just once, and then pack it in.”

  “I don’t know what I want,” I said. “Now that I’ve seen them, I feel a bit funny. I don’t know what I want to do next. Or what we can do.”

  “I’ve been thinking about that,” Plato said. “We can just watch the house, follow them when they go out, find out if they are ever alone. Easy enough to make friends in a park, or a playground. Or if you fancy something a bit more exciting we could kidnap them. We wouldn’t scare them, just make it seem like a game. We’d hide them somewhere, and give them plenty to eat, and we could send a letter to their mother saying she can have them back as soon as she agrees to your seeing them whenever you want to. They’d be sort of hostages.”

  He was spluttering with enthusiasm for this ridiculous plan. Because I had nothing else to suggest, I felt let down and peevish. I said, “It’s only terrorists who take hostages, and we’d be caught, anyway. Sent to prison or something. I’ll be in quite enough trouble if the Aunts find out I didn’t go to school today. I shan’t know what to tell them. I can’t tell them the truth.”

  “You could,” Plato said. “You mean, you don’t want to. The truth is the
easiest thing almost always, but the next best thing is a sensible lie. You just have to think yourself into it till it feels natural. That way you don’t trip yourself up.”

  I groaned and he looked at me, pushing his glasses up on his nose. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll think of something. Don’t worry.”

  *

  “That boy is a bad influence,” Aunt Sophie said.

  She frowned as she spoke, but only because she thought she ought to be cross with me. In fact, she was angrier with Maureen who had popped her head over the fence while Aunt Bill was gardening. “Of course, soon as Bill asked her what she was doing at home, that young madam was happy to tell her there was no school for your class today,” Aunt Sophie said, with a sniff. “Why didn’t you tell us, Jane? It’s not like you to be deceitful. Don’t blame it on Plato.”

  “I thought that was what you were doing. He’s not a bad influence. It was my fault that I didn’t tell you we were on holiday. He hadn’t told his mother because she’d have made him stay home and do housework, or go to the launderette, or do all the shopping.”

  “Is she as bad as that? I thought she was just a lonely sort of woman, not some kind of slave driver.”

  Aunt Sophie was frowning properly now. Omitting to say that I had a day’s holiday was one thing; blackening a person’s character, quite another.

  I muttered, “Well, anyway, she never lets him have any time to himself. And I thought, if we were late home, she might telephone you. And you know what would have happened then. If you knew where we were you’d have told her. You know you hate lying.”

  I hoped I sounded sarcastic and that she would take it to heart. Although she hadn’t actually told me I was alone in the world, she had let me believe it.