Escape from Shangri-La (11 page)

In the oily darkness below decks it was difficult at first to make things out. I could see the shapes of two bulky engines amidships, and beyond them a small door
with a brass handle. I tried to open it, but it was locked firmly. I turned the handle again and shook it. I put my shoulder to the door and pushed. It wouldn't give. Only then did it occur to me that I was trespassing, and more serious still, that I could be caught trespassing.

The boat breathed and groaned around me like a living thing, as if she knew I was an intruder and was telling me exactly what she thought of me. My eyes were becoming more accustomed to the dark now, and I saw to my left, down a small flight of steps, what looked like a ship's galley – a small sink, a worktop, a gas ring. There was a bottle of washing-up liquid on the shelf, and a couple of saucepans and a frying-pan hanging up on hooks above the sink. Everything was very tidy and in its place.

I was reaching out to try the tap, to see if it worked, when I heard a footfall on the deck right above my head.

‘Come on up, whoever you are.' A man's voice and it was not friendly. ‘I know you're down there.' I thought of hiding down there in the dark, but I knew there was no point. I had nowhere to run to. Sooner or later he'd find me. I had no choice. I climbed up into the glare of the daylight.

He had a sailor's peaked cap on the back of his head and wore a navy blue sweater that was full of holes. He
was pointing his pipe at me as if it was a weapon.

‘And what the blazes do you think you're doing down there?' My mind was racing. I knew how guilty I must have looked. ‘Vandal, are you? One of those vandals?'

‘No,' was all I could manage.

‘What then? It's private property this. You can't just go snooping about on private property whenever you feel like it. All the same these days, you young ones. Think you can do what you please. Well you can't, not on my patch. I'm the lock-keeper. I look after all the canal moorings. My job. This boat belongs to a friend of mine, and a good friend too. Done it up himself. Pride and joy of his life it is.'

‘My grandad,' I said. Gulls screamed overhead and suddenly I could see how it all fitted. ‘He's my grandad.' Everything Popsicle had said all along had been true. He
could
see the water from his windows. There
were
ducks on the canal, and gulls
were
always screaming around his house. His house
was
the boat, and the boat
was
called the
Lucie Alice
, all just as he'd said.

‘This grandad of yours,' the lock-keeper went on, and I could tell from his tone he didn't believe me, ‘what's his name then?'

‘Stevens. Same name as me. But we call him Popsicle. Everyone does.' He seemed taken aback, disappointed
almost. I went on: ‘And he's got long, yellow hair and it's tied back in a ponytail.' The lock-keeper took a moment or two to recover.

‘He really is your grandad then?' I nodded. ‘Didn't know he had any family. Is he all right? I haven't seen him down here for ages. Must be a couple of months now at least. I know he's always going off on his wanders; but he's been gone a long time. I was getting worried.'

‘He's been ill. He's been staying with us,' I said.

‘Not serious, is it?'

‘No, he's better now, thanks. Trouble is . . .' I said, inventing hard as I went along. ‘He wants me to fetch some things from the boat for him. But he never told me where he keeps the key to the cabin. It's locked.'

The lock-keeper smiled at me, and I knew then that I'd won him over. ‘That's easy; and what with you being his relation, like you say, I don't suppose he'd mind me telling you, would he? In the galley. He keeps it in the tea-tin under the sink. You tell him Sam sends his best, will you?'

‘You're Sam?' I asked.

‘That's me,' he said. ‘He's told you about me, has he?'

So this was the friend Popsicle had spoken of, the friend whose brother had been taken off up to Shangri-La, never to come out again.

‘Popsicle, he'll be coming back soon, will he?' said the lock-keeper.

‘Very soon,' I replied.

‘Good,' he said. ‘You take care now.' And he was gone.

I found the key in the tea-tin just where he'd said. The cabin door unlocked easily and I stepped inside. It was a whole house in one long room. The floor was strewn with overlapping rugs, all of them threadbare. His bed was at the far end, a radio on his bedside table. There were three armchairs grouped under a single oil-lamp which hung from the ceiling in the middle of the cabin, and the walls were stacked high with books all around. Huge though the cabin was – the full width of the lifeboat and half its entire length I guessed – it was somehow still snug and homely.

To one side of me was a writing-desk covered with charts, a pair of binoculars and a photograph in a frame. I walked round the desk and sat down. I noticed then that not all of the books were in English. Some were in French. On every ledge and shelf where there weren't books, there were models of ships: fishing smacks, clippers, super-tankers and dozens of different yachts. Across the cabin, opposite me was a workbench under the roof light. An unfinished model of what looked like a warship lay on its side, a chisel nearby, and a
squeezed-out tube of glue; and there were pieces of used sandpaper scattered all over the place.

I turned the photograph into the light so I could see it better. It was of my father. It was a photo with his printed signature on it, the one he gives away to his fans when they write in. I didn't like him smiling at me, so I looked away. That was when I first noticed the wall behind Popsicle's bed, in the darkest corner of the cabin. It was covered with a collage of newspaper cuttings. I knelt up on the bed to get a closer look. The biggest cutting was a photograph of a beach, a wide beach stretching away into the distance, with high dunes behind and plumes of black smoke rising from a town in the background. In the foreground there were long lines of men in the sea, soldiers in helmets, some with rifles held above their heads. Another photograph was of a lifeboat crammed from end to end with soldiers, a lifeboat with a funnel amidships and a bow that rose vertically from the water.

The headline above it read:
Dunkirk. Lowestoft lifeboat rescues hundreds
. I could just about read the story below:

The
Michael Hardy
of Lowestoft was one of sixteen lifeboats that took part in the recent heroic evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force from Dunkirk.
Along with hundreds of other small ships, she went in and took the troops off the beaches, ferrying them to bigger ships standing offshore outside the harbour. Bombed and strafed continuously, the
Michael Hardy
went back and forth for two nights and two days. She was twice rammed in the darkness by German motor torpedo boats but returned under her own steam to Lowestoft, her brave work accomplished.

There were several more articles like it, all with photographs. Some were of ships sinking, some of soldiers trooping wearily off ships. Others were of soldiers with their hands on their heads being marched away into captivity. Then I saw, right in the middle of this collage of war, a tiny sepia photograph – the only one that wasn't a newspaper photograph – of a young woman standing in front of a town house. She was laughing into the camera. She was pushing her hair back out of her eyes. I unpinned it and took it to the light. Something was written on the back of it.
Lucie Alice. Dunkerque 1940. Pour toujours
. The writing was faded but just legible.

I sat for a long time in the half dark of the cabin with the photograph of Lucie Alice on Popsicle's desk in front of me, trying to make sense of it all. By the time I left,
taking with me the photo of Lucie Alice and one of the newspaper cuttings, both pressed flat inside my English book, I had solved very little. This lifeboat, the one I was on, had been at Dunkirk – that was very evident. It looked exactly the same as the one in the newspaper cuttings. Then she had been called the
Michael Hardy
, and now she was the
Lucie Alice
, no doubt after the girl in the photo. But why the change? I stood on the towpath and looked up at the lifeboat. She was massive – I wondered how many soldiers she had carried out at a time, 200? 300? Popsicle must have been there. Had he been one of the soldiers rescued from the beaches perhaps? Or had he been a sailor on the
Michael Hardy
? And who was this Lucie Alice anyway? What did
pour toujours
mean? Was it Lucie Alice who had taught him French? Was that how Popsicle knew so much French?

As I walked home in the drizzle, my head reeling with unanswered questions, it occurred to me that, for the moment at least, I probably knew more about Popsicle's past than he did.

I was home late, very late. They'd both been out of their minds with worry, they told me. They had been ringing everywhere to find out where I was. ‘I've just been for a walk,' I said. ‘That's all.'

‘That's all!' My father lost all patience. He glared at
me for a while, and then stormed out, leaving me with my mother in the kitchen.

‘Why do you do these things, Cessie?' she said, shaking her head sadly. ‘No one minds you going out for a walk, but you should've told us.'

‘Like you told me about sending Popsicle to Shangri-La, I suppose,' I retorted.

I could see that she too was at the end of her tether. ‘That was different. You know it was. I can't talk to you when you're like this. I've got some marking to do.'

I helped myself to a yoghurt from the fridge and sat down to think things through. I couldn't just leave it until visiting day the next Saturday to tell Popsicle of my discovery. The sooner he knew I'd found the
Lucie Alice
, the sooner he saw the photograph of Lucie Alice and the newspaper cutting, the sooner he might remember the rest. And, besides, I was burning to tell him. Perhaps, with these new pieces of the jigsaw puzzle in place, he might be able to put the whole picture together at last. I would cut school tomorrow and go up to Shangri-La. I'd forge a sick note and take it in the following day. Other people had done it and got away with it. No one would find out, not if I was careful. And I would be very careful.

Playing truant was not nearly as easy as I had
imagined. I left home at the normal time. That was a mistake for a start. I had planned to double back, wait for my mother and father to leave, take my bicycle from the garage and cycle up to Shangri-La. But I had forgotten something: on the way to school in the mornings, you were never alone, you were always one of a crowd.

Mandy Bethel was there, as usual. So were all the Martins from across the road, and then Shirley Watson and a dozen others joined us too. We were all of us walking to school, not necessarily together, but we were all going the same way. I couldn't just double back, not without questions being asked anyway.

I was almost at the park gates before I finally worked out something that had a chance of being believed. I stopped dead and pretended to search frantically in my bag. As she came past, Shirley Watson asked just the right question.

‘Forgotten something?' She stopped beside me.

‘Maths homework,' I replied.

‘It
was
the same one, wasn't it?' she asked.

‘What?' I couldn't think what she was talking about.

‘That boat, that old boat on the canal.'

‘Oh, that . . . Yes . . . Thanks . . . I'd better go back home and fetch it . . . I'll catch you up.' I ran off back
across the road and into the estate without ever once looking behind me. I wasn't sure I'd been entirely convincing, but at least I'd got away.

I skulked in a bus shelter for a while, just until I was quite sure the house would be empty, and it was just as well I did. I'd been there only a few minutes when I saw my mother coming along the road in her car. I looked the other way hard, and hoped. Fortunately, she went by without seeing me. At least now I knew the coast was clear.

After that it was plain-sailing, except that the hill up to Shangri-La seemed a lot steeper and a lot longer than before. In the end I had to get off and walk, which was just as well because it gave me time to think. I couldn't just walk in there and announce that I wanted to see Popsicle. That Mrs Davidson, the Dragonwoman, would be bound to ask searching questions. I was in school uniform. Why wasn't I at school? I was alone. Where were my parents? At all costs I was going to have to avoid the Dragonwoman.

I left my bicycle hidden deep in the rhododendron bushes beside the drive, and then crawled the rest of the way through the undergrowth, until I was as close to the house as I dared. A white minibus was parked outside the pillared porch. I could just make out the
writing on its side, in large pink lettering: ‘Shangri-La. Residential Nursing Home'. I thought of making a dash for it, across the drive to the dayroom window overlooking the front lawn. It wasn't far, but I just couldn't summon up the courage to do it. I could see people moving about inside the house, but they were too far away, too shadowy for me to be able to identify any of them as Popsicle.

Then I had a stroke of luck. I'd been sitting there in the bushes for some time, wracked by indecision, hugging myself against the cold of the wind and with terrible pins and needles in my legs, when the front door opened. It was Harry, in his wheelchair. He was wheeling himself out from the shadow of the porch towards the rose garden on the other side of the drive from me. He had some kind of basket on his lap, a gardening trug perhaps. It crossed my mind that this might be the moment to make my move. The front door was open and inviting, and Harry would know where Popsicle was. It was a very good thing that caution got the better of me.

Suddenly Mrs Davidson was at the door and shouting after him. ‘Half an hour only, Mr Mason. Do you hear me?'