Heaven Eyes (8 page)

“Write it,” I breathed. “Everything is true. She was a little woman with red hair that grew like fire around her face and with brilliant green eyes … I had a Salvation Army crib and pictures on the walls. We lived in that Paradise for ten short years….”

He went on writing: tiny words straggling over the wide page while black dust crumbled and fell from his fingers and hair.

“Mum,” I whispered. “Look, Mum.”

I felt her hand on my shoulder, her breath on my face. She whispered my name. She whispered the black words of our story, reading it back to me as soon as I had told it.

“Everything is true,” I whispered.

“Evrythin is trew,” he wrote.

Then his hand stopped and he turned his eyes to me. “What you digging and searching for?”

“Nothing,” I said. “Nothing.”

“Why you come here?”

“We were washed up on the Middens.”

“There is secrets,” he whispered.

His voice was harsh and threatening. He took out a key from his pocket. He opened the desk drawer and took out a carving knife. He held the blade before his face and he stared at me.

“Touch her and you is dead,” he hissed.

“What?”

“And you is dead.”

Heaven Eyes called me from the floor. She was still sleeping. I lay down beside her. Grampa watched and his eyes softened again.

“Erin,” she whispered in her sleep. “Erin. My bestest friend.”

Grampa turned his eyes to the page again and was lost in his words again. Heaven whispered my name again. I looked across at Jan. He was asleep. He had heard nothing, seen nothing. I couldn’t keep my eyes open. I took Heaven’s hand in mine, held her as if for safety; then I fell deep into sleep.

H
ER SKIN AND HAIR GLOWED
. Sunlight streamed through the skylights, through the outspread wings, over the huge printing machines. Metal letters glinted in the litter at our feet. Pigeons and sparrows fluttered over us. Little animals scratched in the shadows.

“Follow,” she kept saying. “Follow, Erin, Janry and Mouse.”

She led us from the printing works, into the lanes between the ruined buildings. We came to the edge of the Ouseburn and we paused there, at the head of steep steps that led down into the narrow gulley where the water flowed.

She reached out and clawed away dried mud from my throat with her webbed fingers.

“We will wash the Middens from us here,” she said.

She smiled.

“We will be all beautied again.”

On the opposite side of the Ouseburn was a huge warehouse wall. To our left the water flowed into the wide glistening river.

“Keep little,” she whispered. “Keep looking out, or the ghosts will eye us.”

“The ghosts?” I said.

“There is ghosts everywhere,” she said. “We eye them past where the runny water runs. We eye them in little boats. We eye them running on machines. We eye them way way down there where the bridges is. We ear when they squeal and scream and fill the night with noise.”

She met January’s eye.

“What matters, Janry Carr?” she said.

He glanced at me, glanced back at her. His hands were trembling.

“What matters, Janry Carr?” she said.

“We could just go,” he whispered to me. “We could bloody go. We could even just go back to bloody White-gates.”

“Where’s your spirit of adventure?” I asked him.

“Hell’s teeth, Erin,” he said.

“Do not be feared, Janry,” said Heaven Eyes.

“I’m not bloody frightened,” he said through his teeth.

She touched him with her webbed hand. He stared in horror. He brushed the hand away.

“I is nice,” said Heaven. “I will never never harm you.”

We watched each other, the three of us. Mouse slipped past us, and went down the steps to the Ouseburn.

“I’ll wash first,” he said.

“Good Mouse,” said Heaven Eyes. “Wash away all that filthy filth.”

She began to hum a slow sweet tune. January crouched, stared at the broken ground, stabbed his penknife into the rubble.

I crouched beside him.

“You
are
scared,” I said. “What is it? What you scared of?”

“I want to get out of this. I want to keep on, like we said we would. That’s what the raft’s for. That’s what it was about.”

“We
can
go on, but not yet, Jan. Please, not yet.”

“You’re hopeless,” he hissed. “It was going to be just you and me and the raft and the river and look how it’s ended up.”

I touched his shoulder. He tugged away.

“You’re jealous,” I said. I laughed. “That’s what it is, isn’t it? You want me and the journey all to yourself.”

“Yeah! If that’s what you want to think, then think that.” I saw the tears shining in his eyes. “But I tell you what. If you don’t get out of the bloody spell I’ll be off
myself on the raft. Just me, traveling down to the sea. Just me, me.”

“Just me, me,” I mocked. I stood up again.

Mouse sat below at the edge of the Ouseburn, stripped to his underclothes with his feet dangling in the water. He threw handfuls of water over himself. He rubbed at the Middens mud with his hands.

Heaven smiled down at him. She took my hand. I glanced down at January. Then put my arm around Heaven Eyes.

“Where did you come from, Heaven Eyes?” I asked.

She shook her head.

“I memory little,” she said. “There is nothing but a deep deep dark. Grampa tells me this deep dark is the Middens. He tells me that he dug me out one moony night. That is all I memory, Erin Law, before Grampa and the printing works and the ghosts.”

“Nothing else?”

“Nothing else excepting sleep memories, and these I do not speak of for they must be wrong.”

“What are the sleep memories, Heaven Eyes?”

“Must never tell them. They does angry Grampa.”

She shifted closer to me.

“Grampa is old,” she said. “Him does say that mebbe one day I must cross the river to the world of ghosts.”

She took a chocolate from a pocket and pressed it into my palm.

“For you,” she said. “A chocolate that is the sweetest thing of all.”

Mouse climbed the steps again, dripping water. He smiled and smiled.

January shoved past us and went down to the water.

“You is beautied and happy, Mouse,” said Heaven Eyes.

Mouse laughed. He held Squeak in his gently closed fist.

Heaven touched the words tattooed on his forearm.

“What is these letters on you?” she asked.

“Please look after me,” said Mouse.

“Yes,” she said. “I will truly please look after you.”

She pondered.

“But what is letters doing on your skin?”

“My dad scratched them there,” he said. He lowered his eyes. “He said one day I’d be on my own. He said I was weak and would always need to be protected. He got the idea from a book we used to read about a bear. He scratched them in with a knife and ink.”

She stroked his arm.

“You is not alone now, little Mouse,” she whispered.

“I know,” he said. He took Squeak out from his pocket. “And I’ve always got this one, as well.”

He cupped his hands and Squeak tumbled through his fingers. He tipped Squeak into Heaven’s hands and
she laughed as the tiny creature scuttled and tumbled there.

“Lucky Mouse,” said Heaven Eyes. “Lucky lucky Mouse.”

Squeak somersaulted and Heaven laughed. I saw how similar they were, Mouse and Heaven Eyes, how they were both like little children. Heaven passed Squeak back into Mouse’s hands; then she held up her webbed fingers to the sunlight and said to me,

“What is a dad, Erin?”

Then she ducked down.

“Ghosts!” she hissed.

She drew us back into a warehouse doorway.

“Janry,” she called. “Keep little and still.”

Across the river, two cyclists pedaled on the cycle track toward the sea.

She smiled.

“All gone!” she whispered in delight.

She danced back onto the quay above the Ouseburn and her hair and her dress swirled around her.

“Happy,” she sang. “Happy, happy, happy!”

Below her, January flung handfuls of black mud into the stream.

S
HE GIGGLED
.

“Put in your hand, Erin Law,” she said.

She giggled again and spread her webbed hands across her mouth.

We had all been washed. There were just traces of the Middens in the creases in our skin, and its deep stains on our clothes. We were in one of the warehouses. There were piles of packing crates. Many of them were opened, like the one before us.

“Go on, go on,” she said.

I reached inside, angled my arm, stretched my hands, touched smooth cool cellophane-wrapped boxes.

“Feel?” she giggled. “Feel, Erin?”

I lifted one of the boxes out, and I giggled too. It was a blue box of chocolates.

“For you,” she said. “For you and Janry and Mouse and Squeak. Go on, eat, eat!”

I peeled away the cellophane, opened it, passed around the whitening drying-out chocolates.

Heaven Eyes took an orange cream. She said it was her favorite. She licked her lips and sighed.

“Grampa says them will not last evermore,” she said. “But there is lots in that crate an there is lots of crates.”

She showed us crates packed with tinned corned beef, with plastic packets of raisins and currants. She showed us dozens of crates that still weren’t opened.

I chewed a caramel.

“How old are you, Heaven Eyes?” I said.

She crinkled her eyebrows.

“No,” she said. “I is not old. That is Grampa, Erin.”

“How many years are you, though?”

She gazed at me with her pale and shining eyes, so keen to please me, but all confused.

“How much time?” I said.

“Eat another,” she said. “Go on and eat another. They lovely as lovely.”

January cursed. Mouse shoved chocolates into his mouth.

“How many days and nights?” I said.

“Day comes first, then night, then day again, round and round like dancing.”

“You don’t understand,” I said.

She pondered.

“Life is wakes and sleeps,” she said. “Is that what you is wanting?”

“How many wakes and sleeps have you been here?” I said.

She pondered. She giggled.

“You making my head flap like a pigeon wing, Erin.”

She peered into the chocolate box.

She pursed her lips.

“As many sleeps as there is orange creams,” she said.

January cursed.

“In this box?” he said.

“Oh, in the whole wide wide warehouse, Janry.”

“How many’s that?”

She giggled and blushed. She turned her eyes away from January. She touched my arm with her hand and shuffled close to me.

“Three?” she whispered into my ear.