Attica (18 page)

‘Yes we do, and you’d be most welcome any time,’ said Judy, making Chloe feel guilty for harbouring doubt about them. ‘Don’t stand on ceremony.’

Alex and Chloe gathered up their backpacks and went on their way.

Once the children had disappeared into the twilight zone, Punch turned to his two companions and said, ‘That boy is turning.’

‘You noticed then?’ replied the
policeman. ‘I did too.’

‘I hope he doesn’t,’ sighed Judy, ‘for his sister’s sake. She’ll miss him, she surely will. You can see she’s fond of him.’

‘Well,’ finished Punch, ‘maybe something will happen to stop him. You never know. Miracles do occur, occasionally. Now, my dear, what shall we do with the rest of the afternoon? There’s still a lot of light left in those high windows. Let’s have a game of cards. I miss my cards. Who’s got that pack of Happy Families we found the other day?’

CHAPTER 11

Dancing Rats in the Moonlight

Having fought his way
across the region of the scissor-birds Jordy had settled for a while in a forest of tall clocks. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to leave it. He did. For one thing, the grandfather clocks were all set to different times, which meant there wasn’t an hour in the day when all of them were silent. At least one of them was chiming. And the ticking drove him crazy. He wondered who it was who wound them up.

And of course, the hands were all going backwards, which meant that an hour after a clock had chimed six times, it chimed five.

‘Have to clear myself an area,’ he said. ‘Otherwise I’ll never get any sleep.’

And this he did, by opening the fronts to the grandfather and other clocks and stopping the pendulums. Those with weights and chains, he unhooked and let fall to the bottom of their cases. With others he simply jammed pieces of paper in the works to stop the wheels from moving. Thus he managed, after a day, to make himself a silent vale in the forest of tall clocks, where he could wait for his step-sib-lings. He had seen them coming over the plain behind him: vague misty shapes warped by the moted sunbeam shafts that criss-crossed the space between.

Chloe he had recognised
by her posture: Jordy had always admired the straightness of her back when she walked. Alex had been more difficult to identify, for he seemed quite lumpy now. Then Jordy realised his step-brother was bundled up for some reason, with coats and other clothes, a hat, and was wearing some kind of mask. But it had definitely been Alex: you could tell by the way he dragged his feet and walked in that dreamy kind of way which told you he was lost in his head somewhere.

‘I expect they’re missing me,’ he told Nelson, who paid him a visit once the clocks had stopped. ‘I can’t see them getting on very well without me. They’re not practical like me. I’m a survivor.’

Nelson agreed with Jordy, of course: he always did.

But after that initial sighting, Alex and Chloe vanished. They must have taken another turning, or direction. Jordy was disappointed. He longed to have someone real to talk to now. Loneliness was not a pleasant thing, especially in a strange place. It dragged you down. He found himself waking in the middle of the night with a start, wondering if he’d heard voices or had simply been caught in a dream. He would stare out into the darkness, hoping that Alex and Chloe were nearby, and that morning would reveal them. Once or twice he even called out their names, but received so many mocking replies from attic creatures, he never did it again.

At night the attic was like a jungle. Even with the clocks stopped Jordy was plagued with sounds. There were twitterings, squealing, screeches, scratchings and scrapings and the like. These were noises he could more or less identify and put down to live creatures. But there were other more sinister sounds: whirrings, rattlings, mechanical buzzings, high whining noises, raspings. Some of them were quite loud and near to him, others were softer and further away.

In the night it seemed as
if the whole of Attica was swarming with mechanical beasts, roaming the boards, looking for prey. When morning came around, however, it became relatively quiet again. He would stand on the edge of the plain and stare out, thinking to see herds of clockwork elephants, or robot monkeys, or automated leopards out there. But once the darkness had lifted, the boards were bare of such creatures. There was just him, alone, without a single companion of any kind.

The nights gave him the feeling of being besieged, threatened and menaced by hordes of unseen creatures. The days left him convinced that he had been abandoned, acutely aware of his solitude, like a castaway sailor on a desert island. Neither sensation was very pleasant. Yet he was swiftly falling in love with the attic. He guessed it was the same sort of feeling his grandfather had spoken of, when talking of Africa. In his grandfather’s youth Africa had been a dangerous place, with wild animals which roamed everywhere. Snakes, crocodiles, lions and other beasts. There had also been the extremes in climate, deadly diseases and mosquitoes. Yet Jordy’s grandfather had loved Africa with a great passion. This is how Jordy felt about Attica: it was a dangerous place, but it captured your heart.

When Nelson was around Jordy felt better, but Nelson was not one to stay long and once he’d gone again the bitter taste of loneliness returned to haunt him. He found he needed to talk to himself to avoid going crazy. One’s own company is better than nothing. Otherwise he was afraid he might come to believe he was not there at all: a figment of an imagination. How terrible that would be, to discover he did not exist except in the mind of a spider or a fly. To go swiftly from a point where he believed he was the only real living thing in the world, to the sure knowledge that he was nothing but a stirring of the dust, a draught of air, a splash of light.

‘I must try to stop
these weird thoughts coming into my head,’ he told himself. ‘Otherwise I
will
go crazy.’

He tried making noises to prove to himself he was there: clashing old saucepan lids together and kicking hollow drums. But somehow the noises made things worse. He found himself listening very hard in the silence that followed, for sounds that he might have missed during the racket. What if there had been a search party out there, calling his name, and he had blotted those calls out with his stupid noises? Every solution turned out to be a problem and every problem grew to enormity.

But he stayed in the forest of tall clocks, and waited. There came a time when he ran out of food and had to go looking for more. Sick as he was of the vegetables grown by Atticans, he knew he had to find some or starve. And true to his determined nature he
did
find some. Two hours’ walk from the forest there lay a triangle of three Attican villages. He visited this place twice in two days, gathering crops and filling his larder.

On his third trip he found the villages in the middle of a festival.

‘Oh, hey!’ cried Jordy, delighted with what he saw. ‘A game of hockey – I think.’

It appeared that they celebrated this festival by playing sport with old-fashioned T-squares – such as those used by draughtsmen and architects – wielding them as their sticks. With these sticks they batted an object around in teams of thirteen, attacking three goals placed one outside each village. Jordy watched as the lumpy little Atticans charged back and forth, whacking a ball made of rags. There seemed to be few rules in this game apart from the obvious one: you were not allowed to pick up the ball.

There were no goalkeepers
and the goals themselves were sea chests on their sides with the lids thrown back, like open mouths waiting to be fed.

‘Oh, wow,’ Jordy murmured to himself from behind a cardboard box. ‘I’d love a game …’

He sat watching for quite a time from his hiding place. Gradually, one by two or three, players began dropping out. Jordy wasn’t sure why this was happening, but he guessed that when they got too exhausted to play any more they simply gave up. Once they came off the pitch, it seemed they couldn’t or wouldn’t return. Before long the teams were down to about three on each side and Jordy realised that the drop-out rate had been the same from each team at any one time. So if a player from village A had had enough, and left the field, village B and C players would follow shortly. Thus the teams were reduced equally and with no advantage to any of them.

One trick with the T-square seemed to be a favourite. A player would slip the T-square between an opponent’s legs, so that the top bar of the instrument was behind the ankles, then yank him off his feet. A great cheer would go up from the crowd when one of them did this to another. Jordy could see no referee or umpire on the field and assumed this kind of play was not a foul, even though the aggrieved player would leap back onto his feet and remonstrate loudly with the attacking player.

Finally, when there were only three players, one from each village, left on the pitch, Jordy could stand it no longer. He jumped out and grabbed a T-square which had been left leaning against a box. Shouting wildly, he threw himself into the fray, swinging his T-square with expert hands.

‘Go for the ball!’ he
yelled at himself. ‘Keep your eyes on the ball!’

Indeed, one would have expected the villagers to have been shocked into immobility by the sudden appearance of a ghost. Not so. The players still on the pitch fought furiously with him for possession of the ball. Did he think he could be a star T-square-wielder overnight? Not so. These villagers had been playing the game since they could walk. Within two seconds Jordy was on his backside and nursing a bump on the back of his head.

He didn’t stop to complain: he was up on his feet in a flash and had downed the Attican who had flattened him. The other two came at him in a rush, but he sold them a dummy and sidestepped them, managing to take the ball with him. Two whirled and chased, the one on the ground followed swiftly. Jordy drew back his T-square to shoot at the nearest goal: what did he care which village it belonged to? But an Attican flung his T-square from five metres, striking the ball and sending it shooting across the field of play, out of his reach.

‘Is that allowed?’ cried Jordy. ‘Is that in the rules?’

He didn’t wait for an answer. Jordy chased the bat and ball. Reaching them he kicked the other player’s T-square out of reach, sending it skidding over the boards. Then with the other two bearing down on him he did a marvellous turn and struck the ball well. It lifted about six centimetres off the floor and passed between the two oncoming players. Onward it flew, surely and truly, and ended in the corner of a goal on the far side.

The crowd went into an uproar. They surged on to the pitch.

‘Yay!’ Jordy yelled, elated. ‘Goal!’

But the mood was ugly.

They were not coming to congratulate him, to raise him up on their shoulders and carry him triumphantly through the attic. They were coming to get him. Many had picked up T-squares and were holding them in a threatening manner. Jordy was left in no doubt they were angry with him and meant to do him harm. He decided it was time to leave. He dashed off into the dim regions of the attic. Happily they did not follow, probably feeling that having chased him away was a victory in itself, ghosts in the attic often being quite stubborn creatures.

Jordy went disconsolately
back to his camp site among the grandfather clocks and brooded for a while. That game with the T-squares had reminded him of how much he was missing his old life. He moped around for the rest of the day, thinking that he wasn’t going to move again until Alex and Chloe caught up with him. At least they never minded indulging him when it came to a game of cricket or hockey or something, even if they didn’t feel the same way about it themselves. They could be a pain in the neck at times, but they had their good points.

Jordy went for a walk in the evening, avoiding the three villages. He was on his way back when he saw the villagers gathered in a large group around something hanging from the rafters. He hid behind a pile of junk and observed them from a distance.

At first he thought it was another game, but then the scene seemed too solemn for it to be sport of any kind. Something more serious was going on. He studied the object hanging like a huge plumb bob from the rafters by a long rope. Covered in butcher’s muslin it looked like a giant cocoon, a chrysalis. About the size of a large side of mutton, it spun slowly on the end of a rope.

What the heck is that? thought Jordy.

He noticed that the villagers were all dressed in white and some of them, the ones with hats on, had wooden bowls in their hands which they offered to the masses. These containers seemed to be full of grey powder which the Atticans took in the fingers and sprinkled on each other’s heads, until their lumpy bald pates were as grey as rain clouds.

Suddenly four villagers
appeared with an enormous brass bed, carrying it up on their shoulders, one person to each leg. The brass was polished to a brilliance and sparkled in the evening light from the roof windows above. There was no mattress on the bed, only a white blanket.

The cocoon was cut ceremoniously from the rope and placed on the bed. The four carriers moved off with the crowd following and throwing the grey powder on to the cocoon. Jordy went along with them, ducking and weaving between piles of junk to remain hidden. Eventually the party came to a spot where two villagers stood with tools in their hands. They had removed three boards from the floor. The cocoon was then lifted from the bed and placed in the hole and the floorboards hammered back in place. At this point the creaking voices were raised to a high pitch and Jordy had to put his hands over his ears: the discordant sounds hurt his hearing.

Finally the group dispersed and Jordy was alone once more.

‘Wow,’ he said to himself, ‘that was weird. I wonder what that is under those boards. Something valuable, I’ll bet.’

He resisted the inclination to go and prise the boards up to see what it was. Even if it was a treasure hoard he was in dangerous territory. If he was seen it was a long run back to safety and he didn’t want to risk being caught stealing valuables as well as food. He returned to his den in the clock forest to think about what he had witnessed.