Ash Road (14 page)

‘Yes.'

‘I knew it,' he groaned. ‘That means the gears'll be different, too.'

‘I'll stick here,' said Harry to Lorna, ‘to make sure he doesn't fall off. You sit in the front with Wallace.'

Pippa and Stevie drew away to a safe distance (the farther away the better as far as Stevie was concerned, in case Lorna changed her mind and asked him to go instead), and Wallace fiddled with the gears until he got them in neutral. ‘How d'you start the bloomin' thing?' he said.

‘I don't know,' said Lorna, ‘except that Dad presses a button, I think.'

‘What button?' said Wallace.

Lorna sat beside him and slammed the door and pointed. ‘One of those, I think. He turns it on and then presses it.'

‘Can't turn it on without the key,' said Wallace. ‘Where's the key?'

‘Oh dear...I don't know.'

‘Crumbs,' said Wallace. ‘You'd better find it then. We won't get anywhere without it.'

Lorna suddenly felt helpless again and sick with disappointment. ‘I don't know where he keeps it.'

‘Well, you'd better look.'

‘What's the good? I don't know where to look. I don't think I've ever seen the key about the house. Ever.'

Harry said, ‘When did he use it last?'

‘Sunday.'

‘He hasn't used it for a
week?
'

‘John goes in on his motorbike to do the shopping. He's got bags on the pillion seat to put things in.'

‘John's your brother?'

Lorna nodded.

‘Well, where did your dad go in the car?' Harry asked.

‘To church.'

‘All right then. Look in the pockets of his Sunday suit.'

‘They're not in his suit. I know they're not. I always press his suit. There are never any keys in it.'

‘Strike me,' said Harry. ‘You're making it hard.'

‘It's not me,' said Lorna thickly. ‘Dad's so secretive about some things. There are lots of things I wouldn't know where to find if I had to...'

Harry looked into the face of the man he held. ‘We tried, sir,' he said, ‘but there's nothing we can do about this lot, unless you can tell us where the ignition key is.'

‘It's like a nightmare,' Lorna whispered. ‘Nothing goes right.'

Pippa came back to the door of the car, and they told her what was wrong. Tears ran down Lorna's face. ‘I don't know where it is,' she said. ‘And he can't tell us. It's not fair. It's not fair...'

‘Well, surely we can look for it,' said Pippa. ‘It's got to be somewhere.'

‘What's the use?' Lorna cried. ‘He hides things.'

Suddenly Stevie shrieked, ‘I can hear a car! A car!'

‘Well stop it!' they yelled together.

Pippa took off after Stevie, and Wallace floundered out of the front seat into a crashing confusion of tool handles and collapsing stacks of empty wooden boxes; by the time he had fought his way out of them, fuming and shouting, Pippa and Stevie were out of sight.

They glimpsed the car, the tail-end of it, a utility truck pulling away from the gateway.

‘The milkman!'

They ran like mad, yelling and shrieking into the wind, waving their arms. The driver didn't notice them. He had arrived unheard, left the milk bottles in the box, turned and pulled away again, up the hill. Stevie had heard him driving off.

They reached the road, still yelling, still waving their arms, but the milkman had gone beyond call. The Georges' box was his last stop that morning on Ash Road, and now he was heading back to Prescott or somewhere else. They didn't know where. They didn't know which route he took.

‘Oh, Stevie,' panted Pippa. ‘Poor Lorna.'

Wallace arrived limping. Lorna had stopped halfway down the path, too dispirited to come any farther.

‘That's that,' said Wallace. ‘You can be stiff, can't you?'

‘The baker doesn't come today, either,' said Stevie.

‘Who does come?' said Wallace. ‘Anybody?'

‘Not on Saturdays.'

‘Gosh. Talk about Siberia.'

‘Well, I reckon someone will have to walk,' said Pippa. ‘We've got legs. It's silly standing round doing nothing. And I reckon someone should get back on that phone and start ringing everybody for miles around until someone answers. Someone's got to be at home. It's just plain silly. And I reckon someone should walk up to the highway and stop the first car that comes by.'

‘How far is it to the highway?' said Wallace.

‘Two miles.'

‘Crikey. Two more miles'd kill me. Me feet are like dirty great lumps o' meat.'

‘I'll go,' said Stevie.

‘You're too little. You've got to stop with me.'

‘I'm not too little. I'll be in the fifth grade this year and I wasn't too little to come lookin' for you.'

‘You're stopping with me,' said Pippa firmly. ‘I'm responsible for you.'

‘Aw,' said Stevie.

‘It's a bad day. It's dangerous. Just look at the light and the smoke up there.'

To tell the truth it was the first time Pippa had noticed it herself. It was a sudden revelation, an awakening, a shock.

‘Golly,' breathed Pippa. ‘Just look at it.'

‘Yeh,' said Wallace. ‘And it's rainin' ash if you please.'

Ash was eddying on the wind like snowflakes, fragments of burnt fern fronds, pieces of charred leaves. Probably it had blown for miles. The sky was full of it.

8

Gramps

‘Does it mean the fire's comin'?' Stevie said. ‘It's awful-lookin', isn't it? T'isn't like a fire at all.'

Pippa turned a frown on him. ‘If you do see it, you'll like it even less. Fire that'll put up smoke like that isn't the sort you want to see.' Not that Pippa wanted to see either.

Stevie squinted again into the sky. The smoke cloud was a pale brown overcast with billows of white and curious areas of mahogany and streaks of sulphurous-looking yellow. The sun shone through like a white plate in a bowl full of dye, but the light on the road was reddish. There was ash on the road, too, unnumbered flakes of it lying in the gravel and in the grass at the edges and caught up like black flowers in twigs and foliage. They turned to powder when Stevie touched them.

‘I say,' said Wallace, almost unbelievingly, ‘isn't that the milkman coming back again?' He wondered how it could be the milkman coming into sight over the same hump in the road over which he had disappeared; but who else could it be?

Pippa yelled for Lorna. ‘A car. Quick. Quick.' She pushed Stevie. ‘Run, Stevie. Make sure he sees you. He might turn round or something.'

Stevie ran, and the others waved their arms and jumped and shouted, and Lorna arrived, half-laughing, half-crying. ‘It's the Fairhalls, Pippa,' she shrieked. ‘It's the Fairhalls' car. It is. It is.'

Stevie, floundering up the hill, also recognized it as the Fairhalls' car. Finally out of breath, he reeled to the side of the road and waited for it. It came lurching and shuddering towards the boy, blowing clouds of exhaust smoke, roaring and coughing, and then stopped a couple of hundred yards short of him, its engine beating at a high rate of revolutions. Stevie realized with dismay, that Gramps Fairhall couldn't see him, or was ignoring him, or was so preoccupied that he wasn't even looking.

‘Mr Fairhall,' he shouted and started running again, with Pippa and Lorna after him.

‘Mr Fairhall! Mr Fairhall!'

Stevie got there first and grabbed at the door handle and anchored himself to it as if to prevent its escape.

‘Mr Fairhall,' he panted, and an enormous, florid face, bereft of hair except for two bushy eyebrows, demanded, ‘What are you doing here, young Buckingham? I thought you were with your mother. Have you got Peter with you?...What's that you say?'

Gramps seemed incapable of realizing that Stevie didn't have the breath to make himself heard above the engine.

‘What was that about Peter?' he demanded a second time. ‘What did you say?'

Pippa and Lorna arrived, flushed and breathless, throats so dry they could scarcely make a sound.

‘What are you children doing, running around on a day like this?' Gramps boomed. ‘Where's Peter?'

‘Oh, Mr Fairhall,' gasped Lorna, ‘my dad's sick. He's dying, I think. You've got to take him to hospital. Please, Mr Fairhall, please.'

‘Can't hear you, child. Speak up.'

‘Switch the engine off,' yelled Pippa.

‘Can't,' boomed Gramps. ‘Got to charge my battery. If I stop it, it mightn't start again. Tell Peter to come here at once or I'll tan the hide off him.'

‘Mr Fairhall,' cried Lorna. ‘It's my father. He's ill. Terribly ill.'

‘Peter ill? What do you mean, Peter ill?'

‘Not Peter,' shrieked Lorna hysterically. ‘My dad. My dad! Oh goodness, what's wrong with everybody? Isn't
anybody
going to help me?'

‘Bless my soul,' boomed Gramps, ‘you'd better get a grip on yourself, young lady. It's your father that's ill, is it? Well why did you say it was Peter?'

‘She didn't,' screamed Pippa. ‘Do switch that stupid engine off. Do stop roaring it!'

Gramps frowned irritably and eased his foot off a little. ‘If this engine stops,' he barked, ‘you'll have to push until it starts again. I've had troubles enough for one morning. I've got to get Peter back to town before all the roads are closed. You tell Peter to come here at once.'

‘Please, Mr Fairhall,' pleaded Pippa, ‘Lorna's dad is very, very sick. He's paralysed. He's got to be taken to hospital. Can't you take him?'

Gramps drew his bushy eyebrows together, still with a trace of irritation. ‘If Mr George is sick, surely the doctor can get an ambulance?'

‘Lorna can't get an ambulance, can't even get a doctor. She can't get anybody.'

‘He can't be too sick, then.'

‘But he is, Mr Fairhall. Really and truly, he's terribly sick. He looks like a dead man. She's been trying to get help for ages. She's so cut off.'

Gramps grunted. ‘I don't know what I can do.'

‘You can take him, can't you?'

‘If he's paralysed as you say,' said Gramps, ‘how do I get him to the car? I can't take the car to him. I mustn't run it down the Georges' driveway. If it stops I'll never get it out again.'

‘Please,' appealed Lorna, almost hopelessly. ‘Could you come to the head of the drive then, and leave the rest to us?'

‘Well, where's Peter? I can't go without Peter. Is he with you?'

‘Peter's in the bush,' squealed Stevie. ‘That's where he is. Hiding.'

‘Well turf him out for me, young fellow. You bring him here.'

‘Gee whiz,' said Stevie, ‘I don't know about that. How d'you find a fella when he's hidin'?'

‘Look for him,' boomed Gramps. ‘It's as simple as that...all right, you kids. Hop in the back. I'll run you down to the gate.'

They scrambled in. Lorna was crying to herself and Gramps said, ‘Has your dad been working in the paddock this morning?'

‘Yes, sir.'

‘More fool him. A man of his age out in heat like this. And up half the night, I suppose, shifting those blithering sprinklers?'

‘Yes, sir,' said Lorna.

Gramps snorted and jolted off down the hill. ‘Fire's bad,' he said. ‘It's over the top, they tell me. In the pine forest. I was speaking to the milkman. Tearing hurry he was in, too. Right along the top, he said, on a front of about ten miles. Three hundred houses, he said, razed to the ground. You young Buckinghams had better come back with me. I'll drop you off at your house. That's where you ought to be, sitting at that telephone. Your father needs his head read, rushing off and leaving you to yourselves on a day like this.'

He stopped opposite the Georges' gateway. ‘All right. Pile out. I'll turn her round and wait. And you, young Stevie, find Peter! No excuses. Find him. Until you find him I don't budge from here.'

‘But he might have gone home again by now,' wailed Stevie.

‘Not him. Flattens m'battery for me and leaves me to push the car to the road. If it hadn't been for the milkman I'd still be there.'

Pippa and Lorna stumbled down the drive. They were past running. They were both wrung out. ‘The boys have gone,' sobbed Lorna. ‘I just know they've gone. No sign of them.'

Pippa was afraid of that, too. It was the sort of thing that would happen. The first one had vanished at the earliest opportunity, and that was before the other two had blurted out their story. She knew they'd be gone. Anything else was too much to hope for. But she said, ‘Don't be silly. They wouldn't do that.'

‘Everybody else has.'

‘Mr Fairhall hasn't.'

‘Only because he couldn't get out of it. Only because it suits him anyway, because he's got to take Peter.'

The boys were in the shed. They had Lorna's father out of the car and back on to the door they had used as a stretcher. When Lorna saw them she could no longer stifle her crying, and Pippa had to comfort her. The boys looked away, and to Pippa it was all like a bad dream. She felt she'd have to be kind to Lorna, to stick to her for ever and always, for as long as she lived.

Stevie rushed down the road towards the bend, yelling for Peter. ‘Peter Fairhall, you stinker. Where are you, Peter Fairhall?'

Then he rushed up again. ‘If you don't show your ugly mug, Peter Fairhall, I'll kick your teeth in.'

Then he rushed down again, round the bend. ‘Please, Peter. Please. Come on out. Be a sport.'

Then he picked up a handful of stones and threw them fiercely in the bush. ‘You're a louse, Fairhall. That's what you are. G'arn. I bet you're not even game to come out and fight.'