Attica (3 page)

The three of them split up, each searching separate corners of the attic, ducking and weaving under rafters and stepping over beams. Jordy’s area contained the water tank and when he shone his torch in there he was disgusted by the dead insects floating on the surface. ‘We
drink
this stuff,’ he called to the others. ‘It’s filthy.’

‘No we don’t,’ corrected Alex, ‘unless you drink your own bathwater. That tank feeds the boiler.’

‘All right, I wash in it. It’s still filthy.’

They rooted around in the odds
and ends that were up there, kicked aside old cardboard boxes, gingerly lifted clumps of dirty clothes with their torches. They were looking for that glint of old silver which would perhaps tell them they had found the treasure they were looking for. Now that they were up there, Jordy actually felt they were on a wild-goose chase. The watch could be anywhere, if it was there at all. Who could trust an old man’s memory? Mr Grantham might have
thought
he’d thrown it up there, all those decades ago, but maybe he threw it somewhere else? Or maybe the watch didn’t exist at all?

A beam of light came near him, as he turned over a cardboard box full of clothes with his toe. A woman’s mouldy hat lay flattened beneath it, the ribbon around the crown a sort of pale yellow colour.

‘Where’s Alex?’ asked Chloe, the person behind the light. ‘I can’t find him.’

Jordy shone his torch around the attic, finding different shapes, but none of them belonging to Alex.

‘Alex?’ called Jordy. ‘Alex?’

No answer. Suddenly his torch caught some bright shining eyes that looked up at him balefully. Jordy jumped back, alarmed. Then a familiar sound came from the creature who owned the eyes.

‘Nelson! What are you doing up here? How did you get up those steps?’ He stroked the cat’s back then said, ‘Did Alex go down again, d’you think? Maybe he got bored?’

Chloe replied, ‘No, he’d have said something. One minute he was just here, to my left, and the next moment he’d vanished.’

‘Which way was he going?’

Jordy was suddenly
afraid that his step-brother might have hit his head on a beam and was lying unconscious somewhere. Vivid tales of people with concussion had been his bedtime stories from his paramedic father. You needed to get someone with concussion to hospital as soon as possible. He didn’t want to alarm Chloe though, so he said, ‘Could be at the back there, in that patch of darkness. You go back down to the flat, I’ll have a look.’

‘No,’ she replied sharply. ‘I want to look too.’

Like seasoned aircraft pilots they did a square search of the attic to the edge of the floor boards. The unboarded part went out into the darkness. Jordy decided to go further, but had to tread on beams. One wrong step and his foot could go through the ceiling into the flat below. Chloe followed him. They had to concentrate on hopping from one rough beam to the next. Strangely enough, after a long spell of doing this athletic dance between beams, still having to crouch because of the rafters, they came to some more boarding.

Jordy stepped on to it with relief. His legs were beginning to ache.

‘Our attic must continue into next door’s attic,’ he called back to Chloe. ‘There can’t be any wall between the two houses up here.’ His torch light streaked into the darkness ahead.

Chloe came up alongside him. ‘Perhaps that’s how they built houses in those days.’

‘What days?’

‘When it was built – Victorian times.’

She shone her torch beam alongside Jordy’s, then called out, ‘Alex? Are you in there?’

A faint reply came to them, seemingly from a distant place, like a whisper on the still air.

‘Was that him?’ asked Jordy.

‘I don’t know. Let’s go on a bit.’

‘Could have been a
bird or a bat or something.’

Chloe was scornful. ‘A bat? Bats don’t yell.’

‘Well, sounds might get distorted up here. There are all sorts of things like roofing insulation, tanks and water pipes and things. You hear all kinds of noises in the plumbing, don’t you? Anyway, aren’t we trespassing? I mean, we must have other people’s homes under our feet now. What if someone comes up and catches us? Won’t we get into a row?’

Chloe considered this. They were one house in a terraced row of houses. Without a doubt they had crossed over from their own home into someone else’s. Perhaps the whole row had just one attic between them, without any walls between. Did that make sense? She thought it did.

‘We need to find Alex,’ said Chloe logically. ‘He might be hurt.’

They moved on, more easily now there were boards under their feet. The deeper they went into the attic, the more the darkness seemed to close around them. Then suddenly they came upon an area where there was a skylight, but high above. When they took stock and stared at their surroundings, they found the edges of the attic had moved back and back, leaving a huge space between. Above them the roof itself went up to dizzying heights. In front and behind, there was no beginning and no end. They were still in that triangular shape of the inside of a roof, but the apex was somewhere high above their heads, while the lower angles on either side had moved beyond the range of their vision.

‘Wha—where are we? It’s grown a bit,’ said Jordy. ‘The attic. It’s become – I don’t know – maybe we’re in a bigger house, at the end of the row? Is there a big house there? I can’t remember.’ He peered into the dimness. ‘I can’t see the corners. And where’s the roof?’

Chloe sneezed violently, making
him jump.

‘Sorry,’ she said croakily. ‘Dust up my nose.’

She looked above at a forest of stout rafters, criss-crossing this way and that. A bewildering maze of angled roof timbers, with gloom filling the spaces between. Every so often there was a main support for the roof, a thick roughly hewn wooden pillar that shouldered the architecture above it.

A very big building, certainly. A manor house, perhaps? Or a vicarage? Or maybe even a church? She could see great beams curving overhead, like the flying buttresses of a cathedral. No, there was a skylight there, high above the beams, like a square sun above the network of lumber, its sharp shaft of light penetrating right down to the floor beneath. You wouldn’t have a skylight in a cathedral roof. In the sunbeam it threw down danced those bright specks which her mother used to call ‘angel dust’.

Chloe said in awed tones, ‘Where are we?’

‘It’s
massive
, isn’t it?’ He looked back into the darkness from which they had come. ‘We could get lost up here. You remember that story of the kid who climbed into the trunk during a game of hide-and-seek, and the lid locked shut behind him? They found him a hundred years later, just the dried-out bones covered in dusty rags …’

‘Don’t!’ warned Chloe, knowing Jordy was trying to scare her. ‘Stop it now.’

Jordy said gleefully, ‘Nobody ever found him.’

Chloe ignored him. ‘Where’s
Alex
?’ she said, in a tone which registered her frustration with her brother. ‘He’s always sliding off somewhere.’

‘I’m here,’ said a voice behind them, making both her and Jordy jump again.

‘Why did you run off?’ cried Chloe, rounding on her younger brother. ‘How did you get there?’

Alex looked annoyed
and surprised. ‘It was you two who went off. I just followed your torch lights. You were a long way ahead of me. I had to run to keep up with you in places.’

Jordy said wearily, ‘Oh, come on, Alex.’

‘No, I’m telling the truth,’ cut in Alex, sounding angry. ‘It seemed like you were trying to get away from me.’

Chloe flushed. ‘That’s not true and you know it.’

Alex was sulky. ‘Well, that’s how it seemed to me.’

Jordy said, ‘Let’s all calm down. We’ve found each other now. No, we weren’t trying to get away from you, Alex. We were looking for you. Chloe was worried about you. She thought you might have banged your head on a rafter or something. I don’t understand how you got behind us, because we searched the attic – our attic, that is – before we set out. Now we’re somewhere in this much bigger attic …’ He looked up, to see two birds – or birdlike creatures – glide from one rafter to another.

‘It is big, isn’t it?’ Alex murmured, looking up and around him. ‘It’s giant size. Maybe we’ve shrunk? That’s what’s happened.’

Chloe said, ‘Don’t be silly.’

‘In that case, the attic’s grown.’

‘Now you’re being even sillier.’

Chloe sounded angry but Jordy knew that Chloe, in her heart, was upset by their situation. Jordy himself didn’t know what to think. It was all very extraordinary, very weird. Out there in front of them was a kind of thicket fashioned from scores of old fishing rods, with their lines going back and forth creating a tangle of cords. Dangling from the lines like loose wicked thorns were fishing hooks of all sizes. It really was like a dense bramble bush, which had obviously been there a long time: it was covered in spiders’ webbing from top to bottom.

He muttered, ‘Come on, we’ve got to find our way home. I hope I recognise
which is our trapdoor.’

Jordy started to walk back the way he had come, but Alex cried, ‘That’s not the right direction.’

‘It’s this way.’ Jordy pointed. ‘Isn’t it, Clo?’

‘Well, I thought we came from that way.’

She pointed in a different direction still.

‘Now we’re stuck,’ growled Jordy. He made a decision. ‘I’m the eldest. It’s my responsibility. I say we go my way.’

‘You and your two months,’ Chloe said. ‘You think because you were born in July and me in September you’re the boss.’

‘Well, somebody’s got to be.’

‘Not necessarily. You’ve heard of democracy, haven’t you? We’ll vote on it.’

But a vote did nothing to get them any further, since they voted three ways. It was settled in the manner it always was when they were unsure which way to go. Jordy started out in the direction
he
wanted to go and the others felt they had to follow or lose him. Both Chloe and Alex still grumbled that it was the wrong way, but they felt they ought to stay together. Jordy felt no triumph on this occasion: he was simply praying he was right.

Chloe decided they were like explorers crossing uncharted regions as they walked the boards of this huge vault of wood and plaster. Deeper and deeper they went, failing to find their own trapdoor, and finally even Jordy was forced to admit they had probably gone wrong. He said he was sure he had the right direction, but the others said obviously not. So they turned round and began to retrace their steps. At least, they believed they had turned round, but after a while Chloe wasn’t even certain about this.

‘Look,’ she said, peering up into
the gloom above, ‘you can just see the apex of the roof. It’s running opposite to the lines on the floorboards. We’re going level with them now. If we walk at right angles to the cracks, we should get back to where we started.’

It seemed Jordy was too worried to argue with her this time, so the three of them did what Chloe considered to be sensible, yet after an hour or two they still didn’t know whether they were any nearer to their own part of the attic. They were all becoming quite tired, and thirsty too. Piles of junk containing the clutter that one finds in an attic were here and there on the landscape.

Chloe picked up an old bottle made of green glass, with a loose glass stopper rattling in its neck.

‘Cod bottle,’ she said, having once collected old bottles. ‘These are quite rare.’

‘Is there any cod juice left in it?’ asked Alex, through parched lips. ‘Anything to drink?’

‘You don’t get cod juice in a cod bottle. It’s just called that. I think they used to have lemonade in them.’

Alex wandered off a bit while the other two sat down to rest on the floorboards. Alex was one of those people who usually have luck on their side, and this time was no different. He found a water tank hidden in the shadows. Using his hand as a cup he drank from it, ignoring the dead spiders and one or two down feathers floating on top. Then he called the others. They stood and stared at the water for a while, reluctant to drink.

‘We don’t know when we’ll find another waterhole,’ said Alex. ‘You’d better drink. And Clo should fill that cod’s bottle.’

‘Why do you call it that? A waterhole?’ said Chloe. ‘You make it sound as if we’re wild beasts, lost in the desert or something.’

‘He’s right,’ Jordy said. ‘It is a waterhole. There’s nowhere else to drink, is there? And the light’s going …’

The other two followed
his gaze upwards, to see the square sun dimming in the rafter-crossed sky.

‘We must conserve our torch batteries,’ said Jordy. ‘Don’t use them unless you have to.’

‘Who made you boss?’ murmured Chloe, but the heart had gone out of her protests. She found herself gripping her torch as if it were a talisman, as if to let it go would be to abandon any chance of escape from this arid wooden place.

The smell of the water was tempting her now. Her throat was so dry she was rasping her words. She filled her bottle, pushing it right down under the scummy surface. She watched as the escaping air bubbles were replaced by water. Then she took the bottle out and drank from it, not caring that the glass container had probably lain in the attic for over a hundred years. She told herself if there had ever been any germs on the neck, they themselves would have died of thirst before now.

Jordy too succumbed and drank directly from the tank, skimming the surface free of dead insects with his hands first.

‘If we all wake up with stomach ache,’ he muttered, ‘I won’t be at all surprised. No one’s brought their mobile, I suppose?’

‘Not me,’ Alex said. ‘Why would I?’

True, thought Chloe, who did not even bother to answer. Why would they take a phone to search the attic? It wasn’t as if they were even going out of the house.

Normally, if they were camping or sleeping somewhere strange on holiday, they would sit up and talk into the night. Yet here, in this great attic they could think of nothing to say. Chloe simply sat there, hugging her knees through her jeans, staring up at
the roof. She half hoped that stars would appear up there, now that the sun had gone down. Only one single such twinkling light came to comfort her. It was a bright one, probably Venus, caught in the skylight window. It did cheer her somewhat, to know that there actually
was
a real world out there.