There was a crowd following us, we were trying not to run. Busola held my hand all the way past the shops, along the crowded summer pavements, up past an ice-cream van, a red pillar box, parked cars, people.
‘Just ignore them,’ she said.
They were following us, stomping and shouting, as we would if we’d found something loud like that to do in the long, empty afternoons of the summer holidays that end with you turning to stare sunblind down on the ground at the length of your own shadow.
‘Just keep walking.’
There’s a gang of you spot something ludicrous, shameful, and you want everyone to know you’re keeping watch – Hark, hark, the dogs do bark! That’s what it sounded like, barking. Woof! Woof! Woof!
‘Don’t run.’
So we walked, hand in hand, past the old ladies in flowery dresses, old men with their sleeves rolled up, prams and babies, shop windows and awnings drawn down against the sun.
‘Nigger! Nigger!’ That’s what they were chanting. They were wrong – we were on a church holiday to give poor children fresh air in their lungs – we were beggars. Two whole weeks away with each other, in the middle of nowhere, wondering why no one had asked us. ‘Do you want to go on holiday?’ We never went anywhere on holiday so we thought Butlins! holiday camp. No one told us it was to get on a train and go into the Forest and get left on our own. That was sprung on us. We were beggars and orphans, and we felt like it. So we clung together.
There was the statue of Paddington Bear at the station, the crowds and the noise of the engines, and we thought that was far enough, could we go home now? There were church people who took our names, the labels pinned to our clothes, waving goodbye to our mum out the window, and the gasp of the train as it set off without her.
We sat in the railway carriage with the windows open, a dusty sickly smell coming off the upholstery, the seats joggling, the countryside rolling past, and a sick feeling in my stomach wondering who was going to meet us the other end. A man and a woman got on at Gloucester to take us off. We both said under our breaths we hoped it would be them, and it was. But there was a smell as we got down that wasn’t London and made me not want to breathe. I couldn’t open my mouth, I was going to faint.
‘Was it a nice journey?’
‘Yes, it was, thank you very much, I’m Katherine,’ Busola said, using a voice I hadn’t heard before. ‘And he’s Michael.’ They both looked at me – my head spinning, taking a huge gulp of air – looked at each other, and led us along the platform past the whistles, the oily metal heat of the engine and clouds of smoke towards the smell I couldn’t breathe.
‘They think you can’t talk,’ Busola whispered as we followed them.
‘You can pick strawberries in that field,’ they said as we drove past a raised bank with gaps in the hedge. I looked up in the back seat – picking strawberries to eat, a strawberry field, growing wild, juicy and red – just the thought of it made me bite down without thinking on my ice lolly. The electric shock went straight through my teeth, up to the top of my head and down through my feet, out through my fingers, and slowly along my back in trickles of sweat. It locked my jaw so I couldn’t speak, even to tell Busola. There were star bursts in front of my eyes, bright blurs of tears. All I could do was blink. I hadn’t been away this far before ever.
Bang! went the pop-guns, click! Bang!
It was our first time alone in the town, and they trusted us to walk down and look for presents to take back. We’d already spent all the pocket money we’d earned from picking buckets of fruit – which wasn’t much because we’d eaten them as we went along and I’d been sick and couldn’t take the smell of fruit again without throwing up. So we agreed to pretend we were looking with money we’d brought from home which we didn’t have. We were going to say we hadn’t found anything to buy – it was just being polite.
‘Pull your trigger!’ They made a firing squad with their fingers and guns, ‘Bang! Bang! Bang!’
Some of them were older than us, but I wasn’t worried because everyone was watching and Busola was a girl so it wasn’t as though they were going to move in and beat us up. They were following behind.
We passed a shop window, at an angle to the street, and I could see me and Busola holding hands in silhouette under the awning. Behind us, in bright colours lit up on the street, was a tail of cowboys and Indians, a big posse of feather headdresses and cowboy hats and pop-guns. They were after us.
Caps were going off and some not exploding – Click! Pop! Snap! Bang! – and I expected to get an arrow in the back of my neck. But it never came.
‘Nigger! Nigger! Pull your trigger!’ Then the loud bit, ‘Bang! Bang! Bang!’
It was to show they were in charge and we weren’t. We weren’t from there, so they couldn’t know anything about us. If they were anything like us, they wanted to kill something, and go home and have ice cream, and come back and do it again tomorrow.
‘Just ignore them,’ Busola said.
I gripped her hand tighter and tried not to take off. We weren’t going to run, we weren’t going to play.
Pop! went the guns. ‘Bang! Bang! Bang!’ they shouted.
The baying for our blood fell away as we moved steadily out of the town – packs of children licking into their ice lollies, the bristle of feather and contorted faces, screams of ‘Nigger! Nigger!’, the alarm of shrill, noisy laughter, voices shouting themselves hoarse – all falling away into a kind of deafness as we made our way steadily uphill, towards the endless summer of white clouds tumbling out the blue, up over the brow of the hill and round the corner to our turning on the right.
‘How was that?’ they asked when we got in.
‘Fine, thank you very much,’ Busola said. ‘We didn’t find anything to buy but we’ll take our stilts home to show, if that’s all right.’
Mr Brown had built us both wooden stilts and we’d spent most of the holiday practising on the steps of the back garden. We were quite good at it by the end because that’s how long it took to introduce us to the headmaster’s children across the road and until then we had to play by ourselves. We had outings – for me to swim and put my head under the brown water in the river, to pick strawberries, go for picnics in the Forest – but it didn’t get started until we were wrestling Charles with his sister on the lawn to keep him pinned down.
‘What’s the matter?’ he said, because I stopped suddenly.
His trouser leg got hitched up and I was staring straight at the skin above his sock. It was blank, a white I’d never seen before – it was wrong, it wasn’t supposed to be like that, it was shocking.
‘You sure?’ he said when I said, ‘Oh, nothing.’ I suppose I meant there was no colour there – none – but I pulled the trouser leg down and went on wrestling. It was the party for us going and his sister was in a long party dress and he was in long trousers. They were the first middle-class children I’d met and they were very nice. We met over the fence the day before as we were on the stilts and they were trying to get a look at us from the footpath along the back. We became friends straight away and let them try our stilts and they asked if they could give us a party for our going away.
‘Perhaps we should have introduced them sooner?’ Mrs Brown said, but they were both teachers and Charles’s dad was the headmaster and had a really big house so I understood that we had to be invited. And anyway before we could get to the party we had to deal with the lamp. Somebody had broken it and the pieces were lying smashed on the bedroom floor. One of us must have done it in our sleep, we didn’t have table lamps by the bed at home, so that was what did it.
‘Who broke the lamp?’ Mrs Brown asked, and Busola said it was me. I didn’t know it was so I wouldn’t take the blame and shook my head. I’d already decided to leave the talking to Busola, but she wasn’t being fair.
‘You can both go up to the room and come out when someone owns up. Just tell us who did it and you can go to the party,’ which was very fair, I thought, except when we got up there Busola turned on me.
‘It’s your fault, why don’t you own up?’
‘Because it’s not! What if it’s you? It’s on your side!’
‘You coward, you broke it!’
‘You can tell them it’s me all you want, you’re not getting out!’ I said, and that’s how it stayed until they came up to check on us.
‘You’ve got another ten minutes, the party’s starting,’ they said, and closed the door.
So what we did was toss a coin to see who was going to own up.
‘Heads I win, tails you lose,’ she said.
The coin was still in the air when I said, ‘No.’
‘All right,’ she said, catching it, ‘but if I lose, you’re carrying the stilts, all the way home.’
That felt like the best deal I could get, so we did it again and I lost. I went down on my own and apologised to them saying it was probably in my sleep and I didn’t remember doing it but we worked out what must have happened and it was my fault.
They looked at me like they’d never met me before.
‘Thank you,’ Mr Brown said.
It occurred to me the most I’d ever said to them was yes or no, and thank you.
‘You speak well,’ said Mrs Brown.
‘Thank you,’ I said.
‘No problem, it’s only a lamp,’ and she sent me upstairs to get ready for the party as he was shaking his head.
It struck me going up the stairs that I really was in trouble. I’d stopped reading and I wasn’t talking. The only person to talk to was Busola – whoever she was pretending to be – and I wasn’t getting on with her.
‘Let’s make friends,’ I said.
She looked up and said, ‘What, with those people over there? We’re leaving.’
‘No,’ I said, ‘you and me.’
She let out a cackle like a witch, and doubled up laughing. Instead of being with me she was against me. She looked up from the bed and there were tears in her eyes so I thought about the strain it was on her as well.
‘We’ve had that lynch mob after us, and you think you survived it without me?’
I could see her point.
When we got to the party there were four new children, two of them were dressed up as cowboys with those horses’ manes going down the sides of their legs, sheriffs’ badges, waistcoats and cowboy hats with stitching around the brim. So we were careful of them and stuck to Charles and his sister. Their dad had a beard and smoked a pipe, he stood off and watched us, but their mum was lovely with jellies and biscuits and party games. Charles was going to grammar school after the summer and was older and cleverer than us. That was the story, but to us he was kind and floppy and still just wanted to play and we were his excuse. We wrestled him down on the lawn because his sister said he was a big puppy dog and we had to stop him drowning in the pond.
‘What pond?’ I asked when we stopped wrestling to catch our breath. His eyes clouded and started to cry without him making a sound. We looked at his sister and she leant over to us and said Charles had jumped in and tried to kill himself in the river because he was unhappy, but their dad had jumped in and got him out.
‘It wasn’t like that,’ Charles said.
‘What was it like?’ said Busola, and I would have told her because it was so kind and grown-up the way she asked it.
‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ he said.
Their mum came out with the other children reaching round her for cakes and called us over to the wooden table, while Mr and Mrs Brown came out with their baby and the dad came out carrying a big glass jug of brown lemonade with leaves in it for the grown-ups. They were talking and laughing, with the other children hollering over the jug of clear lemonade the mum was pouring. Charles wiped his tears with his finger and thumb and buried them softly in the grass. He looked older and darker in his eyes, as though his childhood was over. His sister looked at us as he stood up and walked away, she plucked a blade of grass and sighed.
‘He doesn’t want to go to grammar school,’ she said. ‘They won’t let him just play.’ And she looked across at her mum and dad setting up the jellies and the cakes and the glasses of lemonade on the table, ‘I’m going to be left on my own.’
‘What shall we tell them when we get back?’ We were lying in bed with our bags already packed on the floor.
‘That you broke the lamp,’ she said.
The pieces had been cleared up for us when we got back to the room. There was only one lamp left on my side of the bed, so I got my own back by switching it off and making her lie there in the dark until our eyes got used to the light from the window.
‘Perhaps I should tell them you stopped speaking,’ she said.
I didn’t say anything, thinking she would laugh. But after a while I began to worry what would happen if she did tell them. I was rude to the people who looked after us. I wasn’t, I just let her do the talking. What happened was I got on with their daughter who didn’t speak. We played and just looked at each other. I went back to being a baby. But I was counting the days in my head, so I wasn’t a baby. I was just trying to hold my breath. Was I trying to kill myself? Why wasn’t I speaking?
‘What about that voice you been using?’ I said.
‘I haven’t the least idea what you’re talking about,’ she said. ‘Could you explain?’
She put on that voice to keep people away, for it to be there instead of her. It was scary.
‘You know what I mean,’ I said.
‘Goodnight. Don’t forget to turn off the light,’ and she turned away under the covers.
‘Weren’t you frightened?’
She didn’t move.
‘They could have beaten us up.’
‘But they didn’t.’ It was her own voice. ‘And we still have to get back. So let me sleep, before they come in the room and look at us.’
I didn’t know they did that.
‘Busola?’ I said, but she didn’t answer. ‘Busola?’
I listened for footsteps on the landing. An owl called outside. I thought about the lamp broken on the floor. About who she’d become on the holiday. About what she knew and hadn’t told me. The way she’d been with Charles, giving him a hug as we left. And when his sister asked where we came from, the way she’d cut in and said, ‘The moon.’ About us being followed and called names, she said not to answer. About the way she looked after me. And I wouldn’t speak. About wanting to be brave like her, and I wasn’t.
Our dad was in the station, standing with his foot up at a stall smoking and looking down the platform. He saw us from a distance and came over and chatted to the people who were getting us off the train with our bags. We showed him our stilts which we’d lifted ourselves off the overhead racks. He let us carry them all the way to the car, saying we had to write and thank those people as soon as we got home, what was their name? Mr and Mrs Brown, we said, they were teachers. Did we like being away on holiday? Neither of us said anything, but Busola looked at me and nodded.
We were in the green car going back over Vauxhall Bridge. It was old-fashioned, and the running-board under the doors was a bit broken, but it had red leather seats and orange lights that flapped out like ears at the side, and it was our dad’s car and made us feel better. I felt a pressure come off my chest as we got over the river, like a weight I didn’t know was there but that made it hard to breathe, and as we came down the slope the other side I was back home.
We stopped suddenly and the whole of the back seat tumbled over on top of us. Our dad didn’t seem to notice we were underneath as he slammed his door shut and opened the boot to get our bags out. Busola looked at me across the stilts which had been on our laps. It was awkward because our heads were bent under the overturned seat, so we didn’t speak. The door opened and he pulled us out saying he’d soon get it fixed. Our mum was at the window waving to us as he walked off with the bags and we pulled our stilts free. She was in her nightgown and her hair was grey. Manus and Connor were still away on holiday, our dad said, and she’d been in hospital.
He stopped at the door to wait for us with the key in his hand, glancing up at the window. Busola and me looked at each other, and got up on our stilts to show our mum and dad how good we were. We walked towards them along the pavement, taking tall strides because we’d grown up and they hadn’t been there to see it.