Raven Summer (12 page)

“Perhaps nothing,” he says. “But we should go on, Liam.”

And so we get dressed. I lead them on to the ancient reivers’ track beside the river. We walk quickly in single file through the dappled shadows. We walk northwards, towards the place of safety that Max Woods and I prepared, long ago when we were little children.

It’s easy at first, but soon the path’s tangled
and overgrown and we have to shoulder our way through dense shrubs, duck under overhanging branches. We hear dogs barking, children playing in the gardens of old estate houses. We keep low. We keep silent. The path follows the river, then curves away, then curves back again to a wide turn in the river. The bank here is a beach of great stones that clunk and slide as we tread across them. Trees have toppled here, their roots washed out by water. There are massive rocks spread out across the river. It’s the ancient raiders’ crossing place. On the other side, an apparently unscaleable wall of moss-covered rock. I roll up my jeans and step from rock to rock across the gushing water, and lead the others across to it, to the fissure that Max and I discovered ages back. At some time someone has cut deep footholds into
it. You climb by stepping upwards, by gripping the stems of stunted trees that grow out from the rock. And it’s suprisingly easy. The fissure’s wide as a man. The footholds are deep. The trees are strong. You could carry a rustled sheep on your back. You could carry the bloody body of a victim. Or you could haul them up from the top on ropes.

We hesitate at the top. We look back to the tree-lined shining river, to the castles, to the smoke rising from cottage chimneys, towards the hidden village and the city far beyond. Then we turn to the next horizon: tough grass, peaty earth, outcrops of black rock, and bleak moorland going on forever.

We walk to the north again. I think of the savage ancestors that walked here long before. Their blood and bones are mingled in the earth. Their breath is in the breeze. Their cries are in the cry of the curlew and the skylark’s song. Their ancient instincts are in us. They live on in our memories, stories, dreams.

The world looks bleak. Nowhere to shelter, nowhere to hide. But I lead my friends over a ridge and there it is. A small hidden valley. There’s a copse of twisted trees. There’s a trickling stream, a track of stones, gorse and heather, gnarled blackthorn and hawthorn and birch, and a wall of rock behind. I lead them across the grass, into the trees, towards the rock, to the head-high cave at the heart.

The air’s almost still.
There’s the gentle sound of trickling water. The cave isn’t deep. A few strides and you’re at the back. Must have been carved out hundreds of years ago, hammered out by raiders. I imagine them gathered here, bristling with arms, boasting about their battles, their cruelty, their wounds. I imagine their tethered stolen sheep, their sacks of plunder.

“It’s Kane’s Cave,” I say. “One of the places we said we’d come to if a war started. Or if the world dried up or started to burn. Or if our families died in a plague.”

I laugh at the daftness of children’s dreams, at the beauty of them.

“Watch this,” I say.

I kneel down at a moss-covered rock. It’s as broad as my chest. I grip it, start to lift it. I lift the edge free of the earth. I
tip it over. I scrape away the stones and soil beneath, and there it is.

“Treasure!” gasps Crystal.

A white plastic box, a foot long and nine inches deep. I pull it out. I lever the lid away with my fingertips. I lift the contents out: tins of beans and Irish stew and hot dogs; bags of boiled sweets; packets of rice and spaghetti; a chunk of Christmas cake wrapped in foil; a cigarette lighter; a pair of knives and forks; a tin opener; a compass; a sharpened pencil; a hard-backed school exercise book with a title already carefully written in my childish hand:
A Journal of the Last Days by Liam Lynch.

Crystal giggles.

“
A Journal of the Last Days by Liam Lynch!
Liam, what a romantic!”

Everything’s survived. A few blemishes, a bit of rust, that’s all.

“It’s a time capsule,” she says. “How long’s it been here?”

I shake my head.

“Four years, five years.” I laugh. “We used to say that if we never needed it ourselves, then some kids or some archaeologist from years in the future would find it and know all about us. Look.”

I show them the words written inside the lid of the box in black marker.

These things were placed here in the year 20—by Liam Lynch and Max Woods. We send our greetings to the people of the future.

I remember how we put it into the earth beneath the stone, how we knelt together and prayed for our families, for the people of the future and for the peace of the world. I remember
how we clenched our fists after we rolled the stone back, how we promised we’d be friends forever, how we’d protect each other always, how we’d never part.

“Irish stew!” says Crystal. “Midget gems! You’re a genius, Liam Lynch!”

I’m already scanning the ground again, trying to remember the other hiding place.

I stab the earth with Death Dealer. The point hits metal. I rip the turf away, shove the earth aside, and pull out a pair of aluminum cooking pots nestled into each other. I pull them apart. A pair of blue plastic bionoculars and a couple of small penknives fall out. I tug one of the knives open. It breaks, the blade snaps off and falls into the grass. I open the other one. It breaks as well.

Crystal giggles. She looks through the binoculars. She giggles more.

“What the hell did you think you’d ever see through these?”

I remember them so well. They were in my Christmas stocking along with a chocolate snowman and a book of knock-knock jokes.

“We thought we’d see the end of the world!” I say. “We thought we’d see the Third World War!”

“Oh, Liam! You must have been so
gorgeous.
Is there any
more
?”

I scan the earth. I scratch my head.

“Don’t think so.”

“Just you, eh? Just you and yourself as a little boy?”

She wets her finger, rubs the label on the hot dog tin.

“Yum yum. Just three years out of date.”

Oliver has the notebook in his hands. It’s stiff and dry. It crackles as he open it. It’s empty.

“It’s a lovely English story,” he says. “Like Robin Hood and his merry men in the forest. King Arthur’s knights riding through the wilderness. You must have had a lovely time, playing here with Max.”

“Yes. We did.”

I see us, lying in the long grass above the cave. We had sticks for rifles. We peered along them towards the soldiers playing war games far off to the north.

“Kapow!” we used to go. “Kapow! Kapow! Kapow!”

We lobbed stones as grenades.

“Kaboom! Kaboom!”

“We’ll fight to the death!” we used to cry. “Ratatatatat! Kapow! Kaboom! Liam and Max forever!”

A jet streaks over us. We hear a dull explosion in the north. We hear the
pop pop pop
of guns.

“Just games,” I say. “They won’t come closer. We’re just kids. We’re no interest to them.”

Oliver unpacks his rucksack: a few spare clothes, a long carving knife. He lays his sleeping bag out inside the cave.

We sit on stones. We look at the landscape and each other and the sky.

“You found a good spot,” says Oliver.

“The perfect little spot,” says Crystal.

“The perfect place for writing in,” says Oliver.

We hear guns again. He pulls out his notebook. He flicks through it: page after page of black jagged words.

“You want to read it, don’t you, Liam?” he says. “But
there’s nothing. Lots of words and lots of nothing. The pages may as well be as empty as yours.”

He puts his pen in his fist. He drags the tip across a series of finished pages, canceling them out. He turns to a new page. And he turns his attention from us, just as Dad turns his attention as he begins to write. His eyes cloud over. He rests the pen on the page and writes.

I write the date on my own first page with the old pencil. I write a few tentative lines.

I’m fourteen years old now. I’m with Crystal and Oliver. There’s no plague. No war.

Oliver grunts. He bares his teeth. Suddenly he stabs the carving knife into the earth at his side. He cancels what he’s written. He starts again. He glares when he sees me watching.

Crystal laughs. She’s looking through the useless blue binoculars again.

“Come on,” she says. “Take me for a walk, Liam.”

We go to the head of the valley.
We take some bread and apples. We sit on an outcrop of rock and eat. She takes the knife from the sheath at my hip. She scrapes the rock with it, loops and whirls and snaky shapes. I watch the tip of the knife move across the surface. I’m nervous about asking what I want to ask.

“Why do you cut yourself?” I say.

“What?”

“Is it to prove to yourself that you exist or something? Or to punish yourself or something?” I look away. “It doesn’t matter. It’s nothing to do with me.”

“I don’t mind. It’s just a stupid thing. First time it was just a little daft thing with a potato peeler. One Sunday lunchtime I get bored. I’m peeling potatoes and I lift my sleeve and put the
blade of the peeler on my skin and tug. Ouch. Pain. But I don’t stop. Soon it’s razors and knives.”

My eyes widen.

“Don’t look like that,” she says. “There’s nothing special about it. Lots of kids in care do it. You’ve never wanted to, have you? Kids like you don’t.”

“Kids like me?”

She clicks her tongue.

“Don’t be thick, Liam. You know what I mean. It must be dead boring being loved and looked after.” She smiles. “Kids like you imagine being kids like me, but kids like me want nothing more than to be kids like you.”

She jumps up onto the rock. She poses there and her skinny shape and wild hair are silhouetted against the brilliant sky.

“I’m weird and dramatic!” she says. “I’m a wild girl!” She steps down. “And I just wish I was one of the boring little village girls you probably turn your nose up at.”

She grabs my hand, tugs me forward, and we walk across the moor.

“I’ll tell you about Clarrie Dowd,” she says. “I’ll tell you how far kids like me’ll go to imagine having other lives.”

She leads me to another rock. It’s covered in lichen and moss. We sit down on the grass. We lean back against the rock. I turn my face to the sun, already high up in the sky. From down in the valley we hear a sudden yell from Oliver, then another, a writer’s yell, just like my dad’s.

“His story’s not working,” I say. “He can’t get it right.”

“He will,” says Crystal.

Then there’s silence.

“Clarrie Dowd,” says Crystal. “Now, there’s a weird girl. We shared a home together, me and her and a few other lovely waifs and strays. It was on the seafront at Cullercoats, a lovely big stone place with lovely house parents. Clarrie used to hypnotize. We used to get together after midnight on her bed, hunched up in our pajamas with our teddy bears in our arms. She did this thing with her hands and her voice.
You are in my power. Close your eyes. Go back and back. Remember. Rememberrrr.
She took us wherever we wanted to go. She told us she believed in reincarnation. She said that all of us had lives before, in other places, other times, other bodies. She said she could lead us back to those lives. We could live in them again, if only for a short time.”

“Do
you
believe that?”

“Doesn’t matter what I believe. I know what I saw, sitting there on Clarrie Dowd’s bed. I saw kids being lifted away from what they were. One lad remembered being a gunner in the war. He was in a gun turret in a bomber flying over Germany.
Enemies at two o’clock!
he gasped. He held the air like it was a machine gun. He stared at the ceiling like it had a flight of fighter planes in it.
Ratatatat!
he went, and the bed bounced and bounced as he fired.
Ratatatatat! Die! Die!
There was podgy little Jo Scoular. She was a maid in a grand house. Such a giggle.
Thank you, ma’am
, she used to say.
Of course, sir. Let me take your hat and coat, sir.
And some were even animals—we had a dog and a cat and even a raccoon. Imagine that, eh? Ha, and all the barking and the growling and meowing. Was like a zoo some nights.”

She laughs, remembering.

“Sometimes their eyes were wide open, sometimes shut
dead tight. We couldn’t wake anybody up, that was the rule. Or they might die, or be caught in some kind of limbo place. It had to be Clarrie that brought them back, Clarrie that guided them back to the room, to the bed, to their ordinary life in the home on the seafront at Cullercoats.”

“Did they remember when they woke up?” I ask.

“Yeah, they did. And most of them believed that what had happened was true. It was that real, they used to say. It was like being there at that time. It was like being that person. Ha, or that cat. When they talked about it, it was like they were in a dream, or having visions. Ha. I remember one kid. There’s grins all over his face.
Oh, Clarrie!
he goes.
It’s just lovely being a sheep!
And we all loved her, lovely Clarrie Dowd. She was some kind of a saint. I’m sure she was.” She pauses. “This is so weird, telling it all like this. Never told it all before. It must be something about being out here in the open.”

“And what about you?”

“Me?”

“What did Clarrie do to you?”

“I didn’t want to do it, not for a long long time. And Clarrie never pressed none of us to it. She said it must be us that made the decision or it could go all wrong. I think I was scared of the fire, of finding myself in it again. I told Clarrie that and she said that yes, I might have to go through the fire, but I could go further back, to the time before the fire if I wanted to. She was so sweet. She was a bit older than us all. Her poor mum had been a drug death. Her rotten dad was long long gone. She said she sometimes slipped automatically into her own past lives and there were dozens of them. She said the best lives were the lives lived on water. She said she’d
been a cook on the
Queen Mary.
She’d been a pirate called Dirty Dot with a wicked cat called Pete. She said she had glimpses of a life lived long long long ago when she was without legs. She had a tail. She lived in a beautiful blue lagoon with blue and yellow fish and an octopus and she was a mermaid, and that, she said, looked like the happiest of all times for her. Did she believe it all? She said she did. And she was happy and kind and we loved the power she had on us and the power she gave to us. And it was something else to be on the bed together with the beauty and the mystery of other lives around us.”