Came Back to Show You I Could Fly Read online

  She picked up the pretty cup and saucer and wrapped them carefully in layers of clothing, placing them deep inside the plastic bag.

  ‘Well, if you’ve given up on her, why are you going to all that trouble?’ Seymour demanded. ‘Why don’t you just dump that thing out in the rubbish can?’

  ‘Because it’s something from when she was different, before all this started. We had some lovely times together when she walked me to school. She made up all these games. There was a big steep hill we had to go up and I used to get tired and start complaining, you know how little kids do. But she’d pretend we were astronauts exploring another planet and if we reached the top of the hill we’d get to meet all these silvery people, they’d have silver eyes and hair…And she’d give all my clothes and her clothes names, that’s another thing she’d do. Apfel Strudel, Little Miss Muffet—that was blue and white checked gingham…I remember looking up at her and feeling so proud, she always looked so pretty people kept turning around to notice her.’

  ‘They still do.’

  ‘Not for the same reasons.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘Angie…she doesn’t live there any more, it’s like someone came and stole her away…’

  ‘She still is nice! You talk about her all the time as though she’s…dead.’

  ‘Well, sometimes that’s exactly how it feels. There’s a lot of things you don’t know about her, the things she does to get money. And her horrible friends…One of them broke into our house and stole a whole lot of stuff, and she knew all about it. Probably told him when we’d be out and the best time to do it.’

  ‘Come on, Angie wouldn’t…’

  ‘Oh, Seymour, for heaven’s sake, you don’t know anything about it! She can and does when she gets desperate enough! Anyhow, that man’s in gaol now for something else he did, and it’s a pity they don’t lock him up for good. Jas got her on drugs in the first place! Listen, you just forget about Angie, she’s not worth bothering about. I’m going in to return the keys now, and you’d better go back home. There’s nothing left to do here, it’s all finished.’

  She shooed him to the door and he caught one last glimpse of the empty room, but there didn’t seem to be much presence of Angie left in it. It was just a vacant, rather bleak structure in someone’s back yard, waiting for the next tenant.

  He went out into the alley, dazed with unhappiness, but as he crossed to his own back gate, a fragment of colour drew his attention. It was Angie’s old rag doll, stuffed into a rubbish bin awaiting collection. He drew it out and went uncertainly back into the yard, wondering if he should leave it on top of the plastic bag full of clothes. But Mrs Easterbrook and Lynne, who obviously didn’t understand its importance, would probably only throw it out again. He stood holding it by one floppy arm and heard Angie’s voice whispering in his mind, ‘Juliet, been with me through thick and thin…Oh God, the things I’ve lost…’

  He knew that he must bear responsibility for it. Post it on to her, if he could find out the address of that Lakeview place, and include some sort of message, though he didn’t know what he could possible say—

  Get well, Angie. Stay there and get well. Stay there forever if it takes that long, only get well…Angie, please get well…

  The only trouble was that such things were impossible to say in a letter.

  Oh I wish, how I wish

  That I had a little house!

  With a mat for the cat

  And a holey for the mouse;

  And a clock going tock

  In the corner of the room,

  And a kettle, and a cupboard,

  And a thick new broom!

  Chapter 12

  Rankin House was listed in the Hospitals section of the telephone directory, and there was something else added after its name—Alcoholism and Drug Treatment Centre. Seymour slowly dialled the number and asked if he could speak to Angela.

  ‘I’m sorry, it’s not possible for you to call patients on this line or to leave messages,’ an impersonal voice told him. ‘Hospital visiting hours are between three-thirty and five each afternoon.’

  He hung up and went and tidied himself in the bathroom, although that was just to fritter time, for he was neat enough already. A painfully neat kid, not really equipped to deal with this new burden sitting so heavily on his shoulders, looked back at him. He frowned at that reflected, timorous face.

  It’s nothing to do with me, anyhow, he thought with anguish. Lynne said so! Angie got herself into this mess and they’ve all tried to help her and there’s nothing more anyone can do. She’s just a liar! All those rotten lies she told me…I don’t have to go and see her. I should watch that crummy old TV set all afternoon, forget about her…

  It was tempting. He winced at the thought of having to go to a strange, alarming place and ask for Angela. Ask to see a drug addict, a junkie—wasn’t that what they called them? Perhaps she would be in bed, in one of those intimidating, high white hospital beds, with other people in the same room, other…junkies. And how would he manage to talk to her, how could he possibly bridge this huge furrow that had ploughed its way through their friendship? Maybe she wouldn’t even want him to see her in a place like that. A memory of a photograph stirred in his mind, something he’d once seen in a magazine, shock tactics to warn kids about drugs. It had shown a girl, eyes black-rimmed, skin white as death, slumped on a squalid concrete floor. Fleetingly, he saw Angie’s face superimposed on the photograph…

  He spent an agonised half hour, decided to leave the house at once and visit her and get it over with, then finding dozens of tame excuses to avoid it. For instance, he could just write to her casually instead. Could phone the Easterbrooks and ask for the Lakeview address, giving some reason—Angie had lent him a book and he wanted to send it on, or she’d forgotten to return a pen of his and he wanted it back—but none of those excuses sounded convincing. And besides, there was the rag doll, for which he had taken responsibility. He glared at it morosely, knowing that he couldn’t take something like that on public transport, it would have to be disguised. He wrapped it in a striped tablecloth of Thelma’s, the first thing to hand, and shoved the whole lot into a plastic bag. Then he climbed over the back fence into the alley.

  ‘Strewth, Angie,’ he thought with despair, gazing down the dangerous length of the alleyway, buffeted by all his fears. ‘The things I do for you…’

  No one was about, and he plunged into that dark river, floundering towards the tram-stop end, but before he could reach it, two kids suddenly walked in from the entrance. They halted when they saw him, whispering together, and the sunlight blazing behind made them seem like malevolent science-fiction figures. Seymour’s footsteps grew leaden and trembled to a stop. He glanced behind at the long stretch of flagstones leading back to the other main road, and knew that was a useless route of escape. The distance was too far. His own gate was too far away, so was Angie’s, and besides, she wasn’t there to protect him. After a moment he trudged on hopelessly, his throat tight with fear, until he was close enough to see their faces. Alert faces, full of latent mischief. They didn’t move, but stood casually in the centre of the alley, positioned so that he couldn’t walk between them. Seymour came to a halt, he couldn’t do otherwise.

  ‘Well, look who’s here. If it isn’t that kid we saw the other day, the one in the park with the grandpa hanky,’ one of them said. ‘Where’s he off to, then?’

  ‘Sunday School,’ said the other boy, grinning. ‘Boy Scout Jamboree.’

  Seymour tried to keep his face neutral, but to his disgust found it slackening into a glib, ingratiating smile. A smirk, you could call it, nothing else. Something he’d read once crossed his mind, about the behaviour of wolves in a pack. How, if one were threatened by a more dominant wolf, it would lie fawning on its back, offering its neck to the threatening teeth, and its action would somehow defuse the situation. That’s what he was doing now, and he felt sickened by his cowardice, but couldn’t hel
p it. Wearing the ghastly stiff grin, he tried to step around the boy by the right-hand fence, but that space suddenly vanished, so quickly it was hard to tell if it had actually been there at all.

  ‘I’m just…just doing messages,’ he stuttered. ‘Had to go into town for someone…’

  His fear was as evident as scent, he could almost smell it in his own nostrils. Panicking, he tried to force a way through the two boys, but again the space moved and ceased to exist. Someone laughed—an unpleasant sound, not like laughter at all.

  ‘What you got in that bag? Let’s have a look…’

  He jerked it back instinctively, his action springing from shame at being caught carrying a doll and the urgent need to get it to Angie before she left. Maybe the last thing he could ever do for her.

  ‘Pongy washing, bet that’s what it is,’ one of the boys jeered. ‘Off to the laundromat with his spare hankies…’

  Under snatching, relentless fingers, one of the plastic bag handles broke, revealing a section of the tablecloth, garishly striped in red and blue bands. Seymour found his voice, battled to hold it steady, chatty even, and kept his fingers tightly hooked in the other handle. ‘This?’ he said. ‘Well, it’s…’ Oh God, what had Angie called them, that day at the races? ‘Jockey’s silks,’ he said with forced swagger. ‘You know, those jackets jockeys wear in horse races.’ Trying to sound like a myriad of other kids in playgrounds displaying prized possessions…‘My dad gave me this, my uncle brought this back from…’ And always himself on the fringe, not included, suffered to be part of the audience.

  ‘They belong to Clive Trelawney,’ he said in a rush. ‘My uncle. Got to get them to him right away, he’s riding in a big race this afternoon.’

  ‘Clive Trelawney’s your uncle? Get out!’

  ‘Yeah, he is. He’s riding a horse called Plumestone, fifth race on the program. This jacket, I mean these silks, they’ve just been dry-cleaned. You know how it is, all those top jockeys are dead fussy about the way they look on the track. I’d take it out and let you have a proper look, only they’re folded a special way…Still, I guess you can watch the race on telly if you’re interested.’

  All the time he was walking, step by small ragged step, heart thumping, towards the alley entrance. At least they’d let the other handle go, and he looped it around his wrist with a show of casual importance…

  ‘My old man’s always placing bets down at the shop,’ one of the kids said conversationally. ‘He won five-hundred dollars once on the quadrella.’

  ‘Well, you tell him to watch out for a horse called Black Satin. A real roughie, but it can sometimes win you a whole month’s rent. Specially if my uncle’s riding it. See you round some time…’

  He was scrambling up on to the tram, glancing back at the kids, and they didn’t look threatening at all, now. One of them even gave him a half wave. Outwitted, he thought, with pleased surprise. You don’t always have to roll over and offer up your throat, there are other ways you can get out of things. Other ways where you come out the winner.

  The elation of being a winner stayed with him while he got off the tram at the railway station and bought a ticket to Knudsen. He stopped at a flower stall, thinking that he should buy something for Angie. You always took flowers to people in hospital, even if the Rankin House place wasn’t really a proper one. But the stall flowers were unspectacular bunches in identical wrappings, as though they’d all been processed in some factory. The only thing out of the ordinary was a sheath of pale stems dotted with small silvery moons. Each disc felt like silk stretched delicately over framework.

  ‘That stuff’s called honesty,’ the assistant said. ‘Present for someone, is it, love? People buy it to put in dried-flower arrangements, but it looks nice on its own, too. It’s expensive, though, we don’t often have it in stock.’

  On the way to Knudsen station, he thought dubiously that, expensive or not, he might have made a mistake about the choice of flowers. They didn’t look very exciting, nestled in their tissue wrapping, just a handful of brittle little circles the colour of milk coffee. But there was no time to worry about that now, he had to find a red-brick building on the left-hand side as described by Thelma. It was easily visible from the train, but when he got off, he became lost in a maze of narrow, illogical streets while trying to find the entrance. Angie and her hospitals, he thought irritably. Why can’t she ever pick one in a place that’s easy to get to!

  After trudging around a complete block, he found the entrance at last, with a large sign above the gate saying ‘Rankin House’. The sign didn’t carry the extra information that had been in the phone book, and he was glad of that, grateful that Angie’s trouble wasn’t advertised to all the passing traffic in the street. Now, he thought, all I have to do is walk into the reception hall, that should be easy enough for Clive Trelawney’s nephew. It’s visiting hours, they said so on the phone. All I have to do is ask for her…nothing to it…

  But when he forced himself to go through the gate, he was unexpectedly amongst a crowd of people in a small barren garden. He hovered, stricken by bashfulness. Many of them were visitors, he could see that by the bunches of flowers being handed over, and there were kids, too, amongst the visitors, so he didn’t really look out of place. But at first it was difficult to tell which ones were patients. He’d been prepared for dressing-gowns and hospital wards and nurses in the background. Disorientated, he stood looking around and suddenly located Angie without having to ask anyone. She was sitting by herself under a tree on the far side of the garden, looking very subdued and small, like a lamp turned down low. Even her clothes were lacklustre—washed-out old jeans and a shirt faded to the colour of water. Her hair hung in slack tendrils around her lowered face, and she was playing listlessly with a long stem of ivy, winding it around her fingers.

  Seymour went across, skirting the groups of other people, and knelt down beside her. He was taken aback by the tremendous start she gave, as though she hadn’t heard his footsteps across the lawn, as though his sudden appearance had jerked her back from some other dimension. She nearly jumped out of her skin, he thought, bemused, and saw just how pale and delicate her skin was, close up. Almost too fragile to contain such a complicated and vulnerable thing as a human being.

  ‘Anyone would think I was a ghost,’ he said. ‘Hi, Angie, just thought I’d come and visit you.’

  ‘How did you know where I was?’ There was no welcome in her voice. It sounded flat and tired, but underneath the flatness lurked something that could, he sensed, flare into anger directed at him for coming. He’d made a mistake. He should have stayed away.

  ‘Your sister said Rankin House…’

  ‘Lynne? She’s been talking to you?’ The something glinted like a blade in the sunlight.

  ‘Not really what you’d call talking,’ Seymour said quickly. ‘It was only on that day when you…got so sick and they had to pick you up in the car. Rankin House was sort of mentioned casually.’

  ‘Casually, eh? Sort of casually enough for you to know the address.’

  ‘Hey, calm down, Angie. Lynne didn’t even say the address. There’s that sign you can see from the train, I just thought it might be the same place. So I dropped in to visit you, that’s all. Only you’re not exactly giving me the red carpet treatment, are you? Talk about grouchy—it’s like…like visiting Morris Carpenter!’

  Angie relaxed visibly and a shadow of her old effervescent smile crossed her face. ‘Okay, I’m sorry. It’s just I don’t like people talking about me behind my back. I thought…oh, never mind. Anyhow, you’d feel grouchy, too, in a dump like this. It’s a proper hole, this place, you just wouldn’t believe it. The rooms are like shoeboxes, that’s why everyone sits out here getting sunstroke. You go crazy in those little shoebox rooms—I was starting to feel like an Adidas sneaker. The matron, my God, you should get an eyeful of the matron! She eats live yabbies for breakfast…So, what have you been up to? I’ve missed you heaps, you know. And guess what, pal, my flu’s
nearly gone.’

  Seymour didn’t say anything. He looked away from her contrived effort to sparkle, glanced at the other patients, seeing faces superimposed upon a photograph.

  ‘Soon be out of here, though,’ Angie said gaily. ‘This evening, as a matter of fact.’

  ‘Yes, I know. You’re going to…’

  ‘Countdown to freedom, I’ve been marking off the seconds. Wow, I can hardly wait to get home, back to my flat.’

  ‘The flat? But that’s…’

  ‘What’s the matter? You look as though someone just donged you over the head with a crowbar.’

  ‘Angie, your mum packed all your stuff away and they cleaned up your flat. They gave the keys back to the lady who owns it. There’s nothing…Hey, Angie, you’re joking, aren’t you? Lynne said you’d be going to a place called…’

  The ivy stem snapped like wire. Angie cast it away and began to tear at another, binding it around her fingers. ‘I remember now, they did mention they’d be cleaning up the flat,’ she said. ‘I tend to let things get in a right old mess and Mum’s such a…It’ll be nice to find everything all tidied up for a change. There must be some mistake about the keys, though, some mix up. Doesn’t matter. That old dragon lady will be glad to see me back—no one else would want to rent a tiny place like that. Not for what she’s asking. I should have…I was going to discharge myself this morning, only I have to wait around for the results of some dumb blood test they…Let’s talk about something else, huh? I know, how about tomorrow morning you come over to the flat and we’ll go to…Oh, there’s dozens of places we haven’t been to yet! There’s ice skating…’

  ‘All your things are at your mum’s house,’ Seymour said hoarsely. ‘All your clothes, everything. Lynne reckoned you knew about it. She said…’