Ash Road (10 page)

She ran down the paddock again, back to her father. He lay in the full sun, streaked with dust and sweat. She felt so sad for him, for a man so proud to be lying there like that. Even if it hurt him she would have to move him. She wiped his face on her dress, hooked her hands under his armpits, and dragged him into the narrow strip of shade at the foot of the raspberries. ‘Won't be long now, Dad,' she said. ‘They're coming.'

She ran back up the hill. She was beginning to feel sick as well as confused; her stomach was churning and the pulse was thumping tightly in her temples. She honestly doubted that she had the strength to run as far as the Fairhalls' or to Grandpa Tanner. Her legs wanted to give way at the knees.

Suddenly she thought of Bill Robertson, and she lurched to a stop, panting, against the house. He was young and strong and had a big truck and was only a mile and a bit up the road and was on the telephone and was to deliver a drum of oil to her father that morning, anyway. She hadn't spoken to Bill Robertson more than three or four times in her life, but at once he seemed very close to her.

She hurried inside, looked up his number, and dialled it. Almost to her disbelief there was no answer. Where was everybody? What was the use of a telephone in an emergency if no one ever answered it? For an awful moment she felt that perhaps her father was meant to die. There were people who said that when one's number was up, it was up, and nothing could be done about it; that trying to prevent the passage of destiny was like commanding a river to flow backwards.

There was a knock on the door. It frightened her terribly, because there wasn't anyone, she thought, within miles. All sorts of sinister images flashed through her mind, things she had never thought of before. The knock seemed at this moment like a signal confirming that time was up for her father, or even like a signal from her father himself, as if his spirit as it passed by had paused for one last moment of contact with her.

The knock came again. It was, after all, an earthy, ordinary knock. How could it have been anything else? She felt ashamed, then wildly elated. Now it seemed like an answer to a prayer.

She went to the door, and there, beyond the wire screen, silhouetted against the brilliant light, were the heads and shoulders of two real live men. One of them said, ‘Do the Pinkards live here?'

Then she saw they weren't men, but boys, strange boys, and that there were three of them. She pushed the door open, but was tongue-tied. When at last she spoke, her words flooded out in disorder, and the third boy, the one standing back, said almost in an undertone, ‘It's the wrong place. I told you it was. Let's scram.'

‘Don't go,' she said sharply, suddenly afraid again.

The nearer two glanced at each other uneasily, and the third continued to back away. ‘Come on,' he said insistently. ‘It's not Pinkards'. I said it was at the bottom of the hill.'

‘Do stay,' appealed Lorna. She couldn't believe that anyone would leave her now. ‘I can't get a doctor and my father's ill. I can't get anybody. Nobody answers the phone.'

The boy at the back said, ‘Do we look like doctors? Come on, fellas. Let's get out of here.'

‘You wouldn't
leave
me,' cried Lorna. ‘You couldn't do that. He's down in the paddock, out in the sun. Can't you even carry him up to the house for me?'

‘Look,' said the boy at the back, not to Lorna but to the others, ‘we—can't—get—involved.'

Lorna gaped at him. He didn't look that sort of boy. He looked tired and dirty, terribly dirty; they all did; but he had a nice face. The face didn't go with the words that came out of it. Nothing fitted. Not even the roughness that was in his voice. Nor did it make sense that the others seemed inclined to do as he said. They were so much bigger and burlier than he was. The biggest was like a man, except for his face. It didn't seem right that the most boyish of them should be their spokesman, should decide their actions. Lorna was desperate. She had to hold them.

‘There's an old door in the shed,' she said, almost fiercely. ‘It'll do for a stretcher. We can each take a corner.' She glared at the boy in the rear. ‘You're a fine sort of gentleman, you are!'

‘Come on, Graham,' said the big one. ‘We've got to do it. Haven't we?'

Pippa walked and stumbled down the road with her eyes fixed ahead. She longed to sit down somewhere and have a good weep, or go home, but she couldn't turn back, couldn't even stop, while Peter was there. She hated him and he wouldn't stop following her. He was like a dog. If he had started yelping and snapping round her ankles she wouldn't have been surprised. ‘Go away,' she said. ‘You make me sick.'

Peter didn't answer back; he stuck stubbornly behind her, though he had a suspicion that he was ‘cheapening' himself (whatever that may have meant), that if he really valued his ‘dignity' he would do as she wished. But there were things more important to Peter than the bewildering adult standards of conduct his parents and grandparents talked about and tried to impose upon him. Nothing was more important to Peter than Pippa's goodwill. He had never had a real fight with her before. It was a disastrous thing, as if he had been caught in a sinking ship and was powerless to save himself. It seemed that the only way to get back into a happy frame of mind was to be close to her when her humour changed; for surely her anger had to run out. This half-haughty, half-frightened girl in front of him was not like Pippa at all.

‘You're still there, are you?' she said. ‘You're like a little puppy dog. Do they call you Fido at home?'

Pippa had not forgotten what the argument was about; she had seized upon it as something to be pursued to the bitter end, as a way of being rid of Peter Fairhall for good and all. Then she saw at the side of the road the three haversacks the heavy-footed boys had carried down the hill. She was instantly, if vaguely, curious and was surprised to see that she had come abreast of the Georges' gateway, that she was opposite the path flanked by cypress trees that ran for about a hundred yards to the Georges' house.

‘Goodbye,' she said suddenly. ‘Good riddance. I'm going to see Lorna.' She scarcely changed her stride, merely pivoted on the sole of her shoe.

‘
No,
' pleaded Peter.

For at once she was out of reach. The road was as much his as anybody's and he could pursue her there, but he couldn't take the argument through the Georges' gateway. Other people would straightaway be involved: it wouldn't be private any more. She'd got away from him!

He had been so sure that it would all work out. It hadn't. It had ended with nasty words and with a pain so deep that the world around him blurred and the details of earth and scrub and trees for a few moments merged into a uniform colour, a nameless colour that looked like misery. Then it separated again into its components, and not far from his feet were the three haversacks dumped in the tall, dry, wiry grass at the edge of the roadside ditch. These became of absorbing interest to him, though for a while he didn't really observe them. He could see that they had come out of the fire, that the fire had been so close to them that it had left its mark upon them, that the packs were partly burnt, and that two of the sleeping-bags strapped to them were not fit to be used again. They triggered a strange response in him. He felt he knew about these haversacks, that they were not new to him, that they had reappeared out of some past or half-forgotten experience. Three campers. Three teenage boys missing in the fire...

He had never doubted for a moment that his deduction was the right one. He
knew.

There was in him, too, another bridge of understanding, another flash of perception. Pippa had followed them down the road. Pippa had followed them through the Georges' gateway. In some obscure way they had created the division between Pippa and himself; and he began to feel against them the stirrings of a positive dislike.

They
were
the missing boys. And they were missing not because they had been burnt to death in the fire but because they had got away from it. And for what reason would they get away from it? Certainly not for the reason that applied to himself. They were on their own; they were free agents; and for that, too, Peter resented them and envied them and wanted to strike at them. Surely if they had had nothing to hide they would have stayed to fight the fire? And what did they have to hide but the fact that they had started it?

Rarely had Peter seen anything so clearly. Never had the processes of his mind brought him so swiftly and surely to a conclusion. That he had based it on the flimsiest of evidence never occurred to him. He
knew.

He didn't rush through the Georges' gateway; that was not his nature; he started off down the path nevertheless, frightened of those three big boys, but not so frightened that he was afraid to face them in front of Pippa.

They put the door down in the shade at the back of the house, and Lorna dropped on one knee beside her father. She didn't know what to do next. She ran her fingers nervously across his brow and said, ‘I'll get a pillow.'

As soon as she had disappeared into the house Graham hissed at the others: ‘You're crazy. You're plumb crazy. Now look what you've done. How are we supposed to get out of this lot? We're hooked.'

Harry and Wallace glanced at each other and at the sick man at their feet. Harry was tight-lipped. ‘It's just one of those things,' he said.

‘Yeh,' agreed Wallace. ‘No one's laughin', Graham. It's like Harry says.'

Lorna clattered out with the pillow in her hand.

‘Here, give it to me,' said Harry, anxious to get her out of the way again for a moment. ‘You'd better get a blanket, too.'

‘It's too hot for that,' said Lorna.

‘We don't know for sure, do we? We don't know what's wrong with him. At least we're on the safe side if we cover him.'

‘All right,' said Lorna and went inside again. Whether it was the right or the wrong thing to do, it was at least something to do.

Harry fluffed the pillow up and pushed it under the old man's head. Graham mumbled, ‘We were safe. I just know we were safe.'

‘We still will be,' growled Wallace, ‘if you'll shut up.'

‘We'd got all this way,' sighed Graham.

‘Yeh, yeh.'

Not one of them really knew how he was managing to stand up or how he had managed to walk more than fourteen miles. Fear and fright and dismay had pushed them past a sensible limit. What a nightmare the hours of darkness had been, hiding from passing traffic, dodging lights, sometimes running with their packs jolting and jarring and chafing at them. Their feet were like balls of fire. And their shoes had been in Harry's pack all the time. Harry had bundled them up and stuffed them in his pack and hadn't even known he had done it.

Lorna brought the blanket and Harry took it from her. At that moment Pippa came round the side of the house.

She met Graham's eyes first. ‘He's nice,' she thought. But Graham didn't notice Pippa for what she was or wasn't; he saw her as just one more hazard to be overcome, one more person who might take news of what he had done to the authorities or to his parents, one more reason why he had to get away by himself. He didn't want even Harry or Wallace. Much of what had happened was Harry's fault, anyway. ‘We're going to stick together,' Harry had said, while they were still hiding not far from the fire. ‘We'll make for the Pinkards' straightaway. No one's there. All we've got to do is find the place. Jerry said if we got there before he did to make ourselves at home. That's good enough for me. It's the perfect place to lie low.'

Harry had meant it for the best, but it had been a mistake, for it had turned them into a recognizable and fugitive group of three. They should have separated and agreed to meet up again at the Pinkards' in a couple of days. Graham was sure that guilt was stamped indelibly upon him. He was sure that the first keen eye, the first searching look would imply, ‘You did it, didn't you?' If the daughter of this sick man had not been so afraid for her father's life she surely would have spotted it herself. Now there was this new girl, this keen-eyed, alert girl. Graham felt instantly that she was as sharp as a tack, but apparently she wasn't, for her glance moved swiftly from him to Lorna and from Lorna to old man George. ‘Lorna,' she cried, ‘what's happened to him?'

Lorna stared at her. ‘Where'd you come from? I've been ringing your number. Everybody's number. I couldn't get an answer anywhere.'

‘Mum's there,' said Pippa, not fully understanding. ‘Dad's there. Stevie, too, I think.'

‘But no one answered. I rang and rang. Oh, Pippa, my dad's awfully sick. I don't know what I would have done if these boys hadn't turned up. I thought your dad could drive him to hospital, but I couldn't get an answer. They're not home, Pippa. Honest, they're not—'

‘But they are—'

‘I can't get the Robinsons, I can't get the Fire Station, I can't get the doctor or a taxi or an ambulance or anything. People just don't answer. Where is everybody?'

‘They must be there,' insisted Pippa. ‘They've got all the packing to do. We haven't even had breakfast yet. You must have dialled the wrong number.'

‘But I didn't.'

‘Well let me try.'

‘Try if you want to, but I'm telling you they're not there.'

The boys, prompted by a single thought, found themselves looking at one another, for the girl called Pippa followed the girl Lorna indoors. ‘Right!' said Harry.

As one, they scuttled round the side of the house and took a short cut across a garden bed towards the path. Then they saw Peter, and Peter saw them. They almost ran him down.

They halted a couple of paces apart, Peter, startled, no longer even partly sure of himself, confronted by Wallace and Harry, each aghast, but apparently threatening in their attitude—boys that Peter knew instantly and instinctively to be his enemies—and by Graham. Graham was weak with fright and gasped aloud. If only they had walked! Now their guilt was declared so positively they might as well have shouted it from the rooftops. Innocent people didn't leap like scalded cats across garden beds.