Pastworld (2 page)

.

Chapter 2

FROM EVE’S JOURNAL*

.

I am Eve. I have no mother that I remember and no real father either, unless you count Jack. My memories of being little, or of being a child at all are few if any. At present I am five feet and seven inches tall and as far as I know I am seventeen years old.

I will try to write down all of the things of interest that happen, as slowly and as carefully as I can. I feel I must record my story. Others perhaps will read it. I cannot know of course who they will be.

It is early morning and the sky is filled with tumbling, ragged white clouds. I watch the clouds chase and rush after one another, and as I watch them I am almost bursting with love for all of Nature’s creation. I cannot bear to think that the day will come when I will see all of this no more.

From the earliest days that I can remember Jack has always been there. I suppose I assumed he was my father, but of course I found out that he wasn’t. He said he was my guardian, that I am an orphan. Imagine a shabby, rounded man, with thick glasses. Jack has terrible eyesight and is nearly blind, and he is so tender to me. Sometimes he is like a grumpy old toy bear that growls when you turn it over.

He is always fearful of the big city outside our windows. I have only the haziest memory of going anywhere else at all, although recently I have experienced what appears to be a returning memory or sensation. It is the smell of a particular kind of smoke and of myself jumping over some sparks and flames. Odd but it seems very real to me. Despite everything, despite the blank slate of my past, I somehow manage to understand almost the whole world around me. Perhaps it is just that Jack told me so many things, taught me so well in his way, because I often feel as if those spoken memories, those shared conversations, make up my entire childhood.

I seem to have just woken up a couple of years ago as a fully grown fifteen-year-old.

I remember one particular day very clearly. I stood at our attic window and noticed everything around me as if my eyes had just opened for the first time. I remember I watched a great passenger airship as it sailed past, and Jack said to me, ‘Here they come. Do you see?’ and he pointed at the shape as it crossed the grey sky. I nodded and repeated, ‘Here they come.’ Why that is so clearly imprinted I have no idea, unless it was because that day there was another man in the room, and as a rule we never have any visitors at all.

I remember that our visitor, a well-dressed man (‘our smart visitor’ I called him) took me by the shoulders, turned me away from the window and looked into my face, then he said, ‘My, those eyes, Jack. She’ll break hearts with those,’ and Jack agreed and sighed.

.

I pass my days and nights calm and steady and quiet in our attic rooms. I do think it strange that I am never ever allowed to go out on my own. I am only ever allowed out with poor, fearful Jack.

‘This is a big and dangerous city,’ Jack says.

‘Dangerous even for me?’ I asked once.

‘Yes, dangerous for a girl like you – double dangerous,’ he replied, scrunching up his face with anguish. ‘You have no idea,’ he added, ‘there are people out there who would mean a girl like you nothing but harm.’

I accepted his explanation, but inside I feel a strange confidence that I will be safe, invincible, if ever I do go out on my own. And oh, I want to do so very badly.

Jack keeps me close to him always. As time passes, measured by the ticking of our mantel clock, he seems to become more and more scared for me. On the rare occasions when we go out it is always now in the evening.

I am sure that the two of us are barely visible to passers-by on the dark, crowded streets. We walk together in the fogs that seem to arrive exactly on cue. Jack’s eyesight is getting so bad that I have always to lead him by the arm. A strange couple we must seem to anyone who cares to notice us. The halting, rounded Jack, and myself tall – ‘willowy’, Jack says.

I am always eager to explore everything. I am tempted to be wild: I am fidgety, and constantly dream of running away, slipping the leash in the fog, and escaping. I want just to run, skip and jump.

On our walks Jack looks around us. Peers as best he can into the cold gloom, ever fearful, ever worried, and never relaxed. Sometimes he stops and talks to an acquaintance; there is a woman we sometimes see who must live in the maze of streets somewhere near to us. I call her the lady with the cat.

‘Chilly this evening, Jack.’

‘Yes, indeed it is, my dear.’

‘Out with your girl, then?’

‘Yes, she’s very kindly walking with me, poor old dog that I am.’

‘You’re an old dog, Jack, and I walk a cat. Not very well matched, are we?’

Jack chuckles nervously at comments like that, but I can tell he just wants to tuck his head down into his collar and keep walking.

.

Later

Everything has changed. I will explain as best I can.

Jack went out early alone and he came back trembling and agitated and preoccupied. He sat me down, and squinted at me as best he could through his thick glasses.

‘I have to tell you something, Eve,’ he said, in an unsteady voice. ‘You may often have wondered why I look after you so carefully. The truth is that someone is after us. They have been for a long while now. I have deliberately kept this from you, Eve, just for your own protection. I have always been so very, very careful for you, but anyhow this bad, bad person has got a sniff of you, and as soon as it can be arranged we will have to move somewhere else. Somewhere far from here.’

He stood and paced up and down in a twitching panic. I could make no sense of it at all. Here was my mystery.

‘How would such a dangerous person know anything about us?’ I said.

‘He knows,’ Jack said nodding. ‘As I said, he’s got a sniff of you.’

Something alerted me in those repeated words: ‘a sniff of you’. That surely means it is not ‘us’ at all but just me alone, myself – someone is especially after me. It was suddenly clear to me.

I am a deep secret.

I am a hidden person.

I am to be kept safe for ever. I was a fairy-tale princess, like Rapunzel, locked away from the world in her high tower.

Except of course that when I caught a glimpse of myself in the overmantel glass, I saw that I am not a fairy-tale princess at all. I have no cascades of golden hair to spill out of our window all the way down into the cold street below. No, I am just myself. It was just me I saw looking back. Me, all drab in my plain cinnamon-coloured day dress, standing in our shabby attic rooms, with poor half-blind Jack to protect me.

‘Why,’ I said, ‘would anybody even know about me, let alone wish me any harm?’

Jack shook his head. ‘There are some things you are not ready to know yet.’

.

A few days have passed and the mysterious friend of Jack’s, the smart visitor, has been to see Jack once again. This time they sat together talking urgently while I stayed very quiet and made, at his request, a nice pot of Assam tea. I watched them but I said nothing. They spoke in careful, low voices, and the smart visitor was clearly as agitated as Jack. It was then that I found out something strange and new about myself. If I watched their mouths very closely as they spoke, I could read their lips. I could make out and read the words as if they were unrolling inside my own head on a printed page.

JACK: ‘I’m that attached now, I couldn’t do it, and I can’t go back, surely you can understand? You’ve got a child yourself.’

THE SMART VISITOR: ‘I do understand, of course I do, but you can’t compare the two. It’s either that or one day he’ll come for her and you will be in the way, and that will be the end of you.’

After an awkward taking of tea during which our visitor simply stared at me and shook his head, he finally made to leave. He shrugged himself into his overcoat and they spoke again hurriedly in the little vestibule that led to the staircase but now their backs were turned and I could make out nothing more of what they said.

I said nothing to Jack about my sudden ability to read lips.

When the visitor had gone and Jack turned his face back to me he looked collapsed, vanquished, twisted in grief at whatever the smart visitor’s news had been.

I went to the window and looked down on the busy street below. I watched all the bustling people going to and fro. When I finally turned away from the window and looked at Jack, he was sitting with his back to me, slumped and cowed in our dingy room. Jack turned awkwardly in his chair, squinting at me against the bright light from the window.

‘Sorry, Eve,’ he said.

‘Why should you be sorry?’ I replied.

‘Can’t explain,’ he said quietly.

In the evening we had a cold supper of sliced mutton, pickles and bread. We ate in silence. Our cutlery clattered on the plates. Jack breathed heavily not looking at me.

Since that day Jack has remained in a watchful and preoccupied state.

.

‘He’ll come for her,’ the smart visitor said, ‘and you will be in the way.’ Who is going to come for me? I wish it could be my rescuer. At last my own gallant knight on a white charger will come. But it seems more likely from the fear on Jack’s face that he will be our nemesis. An evil enchanter, another kind of pale rider altogether, who will destroy poor Jack and take me away with him. These thoughts leave me both excited and fearful. They have also concentrated my mind and I now know just what I must to do. I have to save myself and poor Jack from such a fate at all costs.

Jack spends his days now poring over the daily newspaper and the weekly magazines. He holds his reading glass in his trembling hand over the pages, as close to the light as he can get, very obviously looking for something. He won’t explain to me what or why. He mutters as he reads, ‘Phantom, all over the phantom,’ and ‘Damn my failing eyes.’

I am resolved. Tomorrow I will simply go. I will vanish, run away and take my chances. I will at least spare Jack the fear, the danger of discovery and destruction. I will rescue myself from my high tower and spare Jack any more responsibility.

It is something I have never ever done before; I will go out and away, alone.

.

I have achieved it, so much has happened. I must write it all down very carefully.

The very next morning after I determined to run away, I looked out across the rooftops and I saw that snow had fallen in the night. It was soft and thick and spread evenly like a dimpled sheet across the roof tiles. I opened the attic window a little and breathed in the frosted air, and I looked forward in excitement to running away, out into that bright white morning.

I had planned carefully what to take. I would need to wrap up warmly, so I took my winter coat from its wooden hanger and untied the camphor bag that protectedit from moths. I packed a small leather bag with a change of clothes and all of my own money from the savings jar.Then I left the coat and bag tucked behind a chair in the parlour.

Jack went out early to the nearby grocer’s shop, and he was soon back with a packet of tea and a few rashers of bacon. As he patted the snow from his coat, he said, ‘My, it’s brisk out today, Eve,’ and then he unfurled his morning paper as usual and studied it near the even white light from the window.

I made a pot of strong tea, and some toast, and griddled the bacon for our breakfast.

I said, ‘Shall I read to you some more this morning?’

‘Yes, that would be lovely, but no more of Mr Sherlock Holmes, he’s a bit too close to the bone. Mr Dickens, I think.’ Eventually after breakfast he settled himself in his high-backed chair, and put his feet up on a cushion. He crossed his arms over his rounded tummy and nodded for me to begin.

‘Great Expectations. Chapter 1.

‘My father’s family name being Pirrip, and my Christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip. So, I called myself Pip, and came to be called Pip . . .’

As I read on through the hour I saw Jack’s eyelids begin to droop and flutter. Then the familiar little parps and snorts of his snoring began and in a few pages more Jack was fast asleep. I kept on reading aloud while I pulled from out of my bodice the note I had already written. I propped it up against the now cold brown teapot.

.

Dear Jack,

.

I am going away.

Don’t worry about me.

Don’t look for me.

Protect yourself.

.

Your loving Eve

.

Then still reading aloud I struggled my way one-handed into my warm coat and picked up the bag. Then I stopped reading, lay the book down and let myself out of the door very quietly, shutting it with just the slightest click. I was sure that no one from the downstairs lodgings or the shop below saw me leave as I slipped . . .

. . . out into the street.

I had resolved to run away to the circus. I had no plan in my head at all except to find a circus. I would vanish into the big city somewhere. I would work and travel around from place to place.

It was quite a shock to step out finally into a busy street alone and in broad daylight. It was so rushed and hectic. Ragged urchin boys sped past me on the slippery snow-covered pavement, laughing and pushing one another. Street singers were gathered in a cluster singing loudly. Hawkers were selling things: safety matches, and bootlaces, and hot chestnuts. The snow blew around in sharp little flurries and swirls. My face tingled and I felt suddenly a great rushing sensation, as if I were properly alive for the first time. My senses quivered; the cold air felt like a tonic. I found that I was very fast on my feet without Jack to hold me back. I ran, I skipped and jumped over the snow.