Sophie (8 page)

“Right,” Sophie said at last. “If we go back that way, we’ll have a look as we go past.”

The farm buildings were low and grey. It was nowhere near as big a farm as the one on the opposite side of the road, which had a number of big red tractors and an evil, one-eyed cat that sat on the wall and hissed. Instead, there were a couple of houses, a shed with some oil cans in it, and a long barn, made out of corrugated iron. We crept into the farmyard, and, having satisfied ourselves that there was no one around, began to explore. One of the proper buildings had its windows boarded up so that we couldn’t see in, while the other—which, I guessed, had been the farmhouse proper—had been emptied. We poked around in the shed, and tried the door on the barn, but it was locked. Sophie, though, didn’t seem at all disappointed.

“That’s enough,” she said. “We’d better get home before it gets dark. We’ll go down to the quarry at the weekend and roast chestnuts; how about that?”

“Great!” I said.

“You realized far earlier than I did,” he says. “About everything, I suppose. There wasn’t a lot left for me to find out on my own.”

I keep quiet, afraid of angering him. I had thought that the panic had worked itself out of me earlier, in the shouting and struggling before he hit me. It seems now that I was wrong; I can feel it tugging insistently at me from inside, prying me open. I swallow. I
must
keep calm, even if it is only on the outside. And I can’t afford to crack up. Not now.

He is still talking. “The only thing I
did
find out was about you, and even then you practically held my hand and led me to it.” He smiles. “Practically.”

“You mean the—the quarry books?” I say.

He notices something different in my voice. “Sophie? Are you OK?”

“I’m fine,” I say. It sounds a little crazy. Again, I have to stop myself from laughing.

“If you’re sure,” he says slowly. “Yes, the quarry books. That’s right. I should have got them earlier, but—well, you know. There was a lot going on.”

I am not at all sure that I understand what he means. I nod, encouragingly.

“I’m losing track of things,” he says absently. “We found the barn. That always seems like a landmark. No, not that. A turning point. Something important.” His eyes are fixed on me. “Why didn’t you want things to change?”

The question takes me completely by surprise, and I answer without thinking. “Because I was scared.”

He sits motionless for a long moment, and then his shoulders slump fractionally. “Yeah. That’s what I thought.” He sounds as if, somehow, I have disappointed him.

We stood and examined the door carefully. There was a strong-looking chain looped through the handles, padlocked twice. Sophie scratched her nose and tugged experimentally on the door.

“This is no good at all. Just as well, really. It’s a bit bloody obvious to leave a door open. Let’s check the sides.”

We walked slowly round the barn, examining the corrugated sheeting near where it met the ground. Weeds had sprung up, and in places the metal was rusted through in holes and lines, but the structure looked secure. It was Saturday morning.

“I don’t see any way in,” I said.

“That’s because there isn’t one. Come on.” She led the way over the courtyard towards the shed where the oil barrels were, scanning the place, looking for something. “This’ll do.” From a shelf on one side, she picked up an old and very rusty iron pipe, about two feet long. “How do you fancy a bit of breaking and entering?”

“You’ll never break the chain with that,” I said dubiously.

“Not the chain, stupid. The metal panels are riveted on. I think we should be able to knock the heads off the rivets.” She frowned for a moment. “We could do with a chisel or something. If it doesn’t work properly with this, we’ll have to take the one from the quarry.”

We made a second circuit of the barn. “This looks like a good place,” I said.

“No use. It’s on the village side. We don’t want to chance being seen going in or out. It’s going to have to be on the other side, facing the hill. How about this?”

I stared at the section she was indicating. “Yeah. Maybe. What do you think’s inside?”

“Oh, treasure and princesses,” Sophie said casually, and then burst out laughing at my expression. “Well,
honestly,
Mattie—what do you think? Some mouldy hay, if we’re lucky. Come on.”

With enthusiastic dedication we took it in turns to hammer at the protruding heads of the rivets. The barn, which I had expected to ring like a gong, yielded only a metallic thud every time we hit it. The first head snapped off easily, already nearly rotted through. So did the second. Then, as we progressed up the panel, they grew tougher and more resistant, until at last we reached one—at a height of about thirty inches—which we couldn’t break.

“Forget it,” Sophie said. “We’ll do this lot next.” She pointed to a parallel row two feet farther on. “If we get both lots off, we should be able to prise it back and snap the ones at the top.”

Gradually, we did so. One by one, the rivet heads gave in to our incessant pounding and sheared free. Eventually, Sophie put down the piece of iron and straightened up.

“OK. What we want to do is lift it up from the bottom, like we were going to peel it up. But waggle it backwards and forwards to break that one there,” she added, “and not the other one. If we leave one of the top corners attached, it will act as a sort of hinge for this panel, and hold it in place better. All right?”

“Yeah,” I said. We took a bottom corner each.

“Ready?” I nodded. “Right, then. Pull.”

We heaved the rusty sheet upwards, trying to avoid the stinging nettles and the sharper rusty edges. Then once it was out at a reasonable angle, we began to rock it back and forth, bending it a little so that the main stress was put on one of the two remaining rivets. After three or four tries, it suddenly snapped in half with an audible crack.

“There!” I gasped. We took a step back and surveyed our new door.

“Should be pretty much invisible from ten yards away,” Sophie said approvingly. “And we can bend it back to being much straighter than it is at the moment, too.” She glanced at me, and grinned. “Come on. Let’s see what we’ve got.”

We swung the panel aside and scrambled through the gap on our hands and knees. Reaching outside again, Sophie dragged it back down into place, and the fan of sunlight was abruptly cut off. We stood up, and looked around us in the gloom.

“Wow,” I said, still panting a little. “It’s really huge.”

Sophie took a step forward. “Not bad,” I heard her murmur.

The inside of the barn was larger than the assembly hall at school. The floor was hard-packed earth, uneven and covered with a layer of chaff. Down one end there was a large, empty table and a pile of fertilizer sacks. Filling the remainder of the barn was a sprawling mess of bales. Two thin windows, one at each end and very high up, let in spears of light in which dust motes swirled and flowed lazily, as if they were in treacle.

“Is that hay?” I asked Sophie.

“Don’t think so. It’s straw, I think.” She sniffed. “Probably last year's, too. God knows why it’s still here. I think they would have sold hay.” She took another step forward, almost hesitantly, and looked around her. “This is pretty good,” she said. “You want to explore?”

“OK,” I said, and made off towards the table end. There was almost nothing else worth seeing; this was the end that pointed towards our house, the end with the doors. The opposite end, pointing towards the village, was the end with the straw. The smell of the place was thick and musty, with overtones of cows and sunlight and heat. It was not unpleasant. It tickled my throat, but in an unthreatening way; not like the choking constriction that came with the dreams. I trailed back along the length of the building to where Sophie was standing on a straw bale.

“We could move these, I think,” she said. “If we took an end each. I’ve tried one and it weighs a lot, but I reckon we could do it.”

“We could build them into a castle!” I said.

“Sure could,” she said, and smiled. “Better things than that, too. You could make tunnels, and roof them over with other bales, and shit like that. There’s enough stuff here.” She thought some more. “We’re going to need torches, though, and lots of batteries,” she said.

“Why?”

“Think it through. Do you think it would be a good idea to light candles in here?”

I looked at the straw. “No,” I said, and giggled.

“Well, then. But if we build a closed space among all that lot, there won’t be any light. I’ll get some this afternoon.”

“Sophie?”

“Yeah? What?” She was turning in a circle on the bale, sizing up the possibilities that existed in her new domain.

“How much money do you have?”

“Ah,” she said, and grinned. “You really want to know?”

“Yes!” I said, eagerly.

“Well, it’s OK to tell you, I suppose.” She paused. “You
really
want to know?” she asked again, her eyes sparkling.

“Tell me!”

“A few hundred quid.” She registered my shocked face with evident enjoyment. “Not bad, is it?”

“Wow,” I said, lamely.

“I thought she’d notice if it was a small amount, or something uneven. But if the balance is out by hundreds, then she’ll probably think she’s made a mistake. I bet she doesn’t have any idea about keeping track of what she spends.” She smiled a small, triumphant smile. “We’ll get a decent lot of batteries and a few good torches. But that’s all. The rest of the money’s for important things only, not sweets or comics or crap.”

“Where’ve you hidden it?” I asked.

“Somewhere safe. Come and look at this.” She set off, climbing up the bales towards the corner of the barn where they were most highly stacked. “It’s going to be really something, if we get organized.” She frowned. “Damn school. It should be the summer holidays. We’ll have to work at it at weekends. We can always bring a picnic. Mummy’s pleased if we get out of her way in any case, so that shouldn’t be a problem.”

I could almost sense the speed at which her mind was working, sorting out what would have to be done. In such situations, it was generally pointless my trying to volunteer anything that Sophie hadn’t already thought of, so I sat down on a bale and stretched my legs out.

“We’ll have to buy the torches and stuff at different shops, one at a time. Batteries, too,” she was saying. “Thank God I got small notes.”

I stared at the far-off roof of the barn, supported by metal girders and wooden beams. Despite the smell of cows and the dusty air, it was like a cavern out of a fairy story to me; I sat with my mouth open and my head thrown back, imagining the wonderful things we might do. There was a thump, as Sophie jumped down beside me.

“We’d better be getting home,” she said. “We’ve been here an hour and a half, and we’re going to miss lunch. We’ll go shopping this afternoon for the things we need.”

“Couldn’t we get just
some
sweets as well? For a celebration?”

“Hmm. I suppose so.”

“Great,” I said with satisfaction.

eight

“The barn confused me,” he says. “I knew what it was—another secret place, like the quarry and the holly bush. But it was different to them, too public, almost. Strange. I realized afterwards, of course.”

I am feeling better. For a while, now, sudden splinters of panic have been grating inside me, but they come and go. In the spaces between them, I am more settled. It had occurred to me that the unusual period of calm that came over me when Matthew started his story was perhaps shock; this makes sense. At the same time, I know that I need to hang on to it, however artificial that might seem. I can’t afford not to.

These are the facts: I am a prisoner. I have looked, and looked, and I can see no simple way of escape. The man who is keeping me here I thought I knew, but I was wrong, and I am having to start afresh and learn who he is. This will take time, and I have no idea whether it will help me or not. I have no idea whether I have the time to spare. But, since there is no simple way of escape, I have determined what I am going to do. I will watch him, listen to him, get to know him as best I can. And then, maybe, I will see something that will help me. Meanwhile, I try to keep myself from thinking that it is pointless, and I try to keep myself from crying.

I wish I were stronger.

He is saying, “Sometimes I wonder what you would have done without the barn. You would have found somewhere else, I suppose. You had that determination.”

We spent nearly every evening in the barn, and much of the weekend. Over the days, with much effort, the bales of straw were stacked more and more neatly in one corner, gradually forming two sides of an enclosed space completed by the structure of the building itself. A lot of thought must have gone into planning our castle: while I had spent my daydreams imagining what games we could play in it once it was completed, Sophie had obviously turned her mind to working out how our creation should be arranged if it was to be strong and safe. There were two parts to her finished design, and since we had to build it up in layers starting at the bottom, I only realized how ingenious it was once we had finished.

The bulk of the straw was now arranged so that it walled in a comfortably large space about two thirds up its height. This could be reached by climbing up a series of short steps that Sophie had artfully concealed near the end wall of the barn itself. Once inside, you could peer out over the battlements, which included several spy-holes. The entire floor of the barn was clearly visible to the defenders of the straw castle, from the near corner down to the end where the table had been.

Sophie had moved the table first of all. It was big, made solidly from thick planks of wood, and was a good ten feet long. It took us nearly three evenings of work to shift it the length of the barn, and yet Sophie never seemed to become impatient with our lack of progress: the fact that we were still only children, which made some jobs extremely difficult, she took into account. By the time the castle was finished, the table had vanished completely, buried under bales of straw.

It preserved a hollow space deep in the centre of the castle, with the apparent main room several bales’ depth above it. Moving one of the bales in the stack forming the back wall of our lookout room revealed a shaft down which you could scramble, digging your toes into the straw and holding a rope anchored at the top of the shaft. The secret door could be closed from the inside easily enough.

At the foot of the shaft we put our torches: big, rubberized models that took large square batteries.

We finished the whole project late on Saturday afternoon, one week after we had first broken into the barn. We sat in the torchlit space under the table and smiled at each other in triumph.

“It’s really good,” I said again. “You could hide here forever, and no one would ever know.”

Sophie’s smile widened. “That’s right,” she said. “The idea is that we use the area upstairs for most things, and keep this for anything really secret.”

“Yeah!” I looked at our oak-roofed, straw-walled hideout with admiration.

Over the next couple of weeks, we slowly ferried a variety of useful items to the barn. The hidden room became furnished with a rug, and the walls were hung with a series of posters showing fighter aircraft that I had been collecting.

The torches were deployed carefully, with one in each corner of the room plus one at the top of the entrance shaft, so that you could see the rope clearly. We replaced this one on its hollowed-out shelf of straw every time we left. The rug covered the bare earth floor so that we could sit down comfortably; the roof was ample for this, but it would have been too low for us to sit on chairs or sections of log or whatever. Again, we collected bricks to serve as podiums for the torches. The smell of cows was still strong, and Sophie tackled this soon enough.

“We’re going to have to be really careful,” she said. “So watch. Here and here there are cans of water, OK?”

I nodded. “OK.”

“And the entrance is open. It’s not as though anything’s likely to go wrong, but it would be a bit stupid to barbecue ourselves just because we don’t like the smell.” I giggled, nervously.

Sophie had bought a packet of incense sticks from the chemist in the village, and we had three of them stuck in half a potato in the middle of the floor. Deliberately, Sophie lit a match and set it to the end of each, until they were all alight. Then she dropped the match into one of the cans of water, waited a moment for the three small flames to settle, and then blew them out. We watched in silent fascination as three bright worms of light crept at almost imperceptible speed down the sticks, and a heady aromatic fragrance filled the hidden room. The smell was pervasive, powerful in the confined space. After a little while, a haze of smoke like a fog-bank began to form just below the ceiling.

Once the sticks had burnt out, Sophie dropped them into water as well. “Right. Let’s shut the door and leave it to stew overnight. It should be better, I hope.”

I sniffed. “Smells like cows with perfume,” I said, and Sophie laughed.

“Yeah, that’s about right. Come on. You bring that water tin, and go first. I’ll do the other one and the torch.”

At school, the lessons crawled by unmemorably. My science project on seeds won me a Mars bar and a
Well done, this is very good,
and the hybrid Spitfire edged with maddening slowness towards completion. The free activity period that our class had twice a week was spent in a crumbling annex to the Art room, amidst much secrecy. More time was spent repelling curious snoopers than actually constructing the plane. James had his plans for authentic camouflage mapped out on greaseproof paper, and had mixed a series of dirty browns and greens for the top of the body, and a pleasingly duck-egg blue for the bottom, from his older brother’s collection of paints. By taking a little from each of several tins, he had managed to mix up quite a quantity of paint without his older brother noticing. In the small annex, the smells of paint oil and the nail-polish tang of dope laced the air. We had divided our tasks evenly: James was Artistic Director, Jerry was Construction—which mostly meant gluing—Simon was Chief Planner (and drew the shapes on the sheets of balsa wood) while I was Chief Engineer, doing most of the cutting with an impressive craft knife. In addition to these main posts, we all doubled as Security, protecting our brainchild from any interference. In this respect, the craft knife doubled as our Nuclear Deterrent. Most of the official names for posts and jobs were worked out by Simon. We spent the time waiting for the glue or paint or dope to dry, talking.

“My brother’s got some porno magazines hidden under his mattress,” James was saying. “I found them last summer. My mum would flip if she knew.”

“What’re they like?”

“I only got a quick look. They were pretty good,” he added casually. Simon nodded, knowingly.

“I saw my cousin once,” Jerry said, and paused for effect. “
Naked.
She’s seventeen.”

“Bullshit.”

“I did! She was getting undressed.”

“I think Jerry’s talking bullshit,” Simon said. “Serious bullshit.”

“Not true. I saw her.”

There was a moment’s hushed silence. Then Simon whispered, in a ridiculously theatrical voice,
“Naked.”
James and I exploded with laughter, howling madly. There was a thump on the door.

“Keep the noise down in there!” shouted the Art master. We stifled our giggles with difficulty.

“Anyway,” Simon went on, more quietly, “how did you see her . . .
naked
?”

“Shut up,” Jerry said.

“Yeah, come on,” James said. “Did you really, then?”

“I told you, yeah. We were staying at my aunt’s house, and I got up for a pee late at night. About eleven, I think. Maybe a bit later.”

“Get
on
with it,” Simon interrupted.

“Anyway, her door was a bit open, and I saw her. Then she put on a dressing gown.”

We stared at him quizzically. James said, “Is that—is that it?”

“Yeah. Why?”

“What was she like?”

Simon said, “She was . . .
naked.
” I hiccupped with laughter, and sat down on the edge of the table.

“Fuck off, Simon. You’re such a dick sometimes.”

“I think this is dry enough,” James said, tapping the wing section gently. “Have we got time to do any more?”

I looked at my watch. “Not today,” I said.

That weekend, the canvas bag was sodden with water, and there were wide, shallow puddles across the quarry floor. It had rained in the night, and the sky now was a dark and smoky grey. Sophie pulled out the biscuit tin and shook the beading of water from it.

“You could put your quarry books in the barn,” I said. “Then they wouldn’t get wet.”

“They don’t get wet now, though,” Sophie said, opening the tin. “See? That’s what the plastic bags are for.”

I rubbed my elbows and peered over her shoulder at the four or five exercise books, lying safe and dry in the tin. “I’m cold,” I said.

“You can go back to the house, if you like,” Sophie offered.

“No,” I said, and wandered across the quarry towards the far end, where the weeds that had shot up in summer were wispy and brown in the moist air. We hadn’t been to the quarry for weeks, and—strangely—I found that I was at a loss for something to do. The fossils in the rock weren’t as exciting as the balsa Spitfire, and I hadn’t thought to bring a book with me. Hugging my arms to myself, I considered—not for the first time—that Sophie was sometimes very strange. The quarry books I did not understand, although their constancy in my memory made them an accepted part of life. More and more, though, her trips to the quarry to scribble nonsense struck me as almost childish, an unnecessary fantasy. I swung my trainer-shod feet in narrow arcs, knocking over weed stems.

At the same time, looking back, the gap between Sophie and me might even have narrowed a little. At the age of nine, I was a stage more responsible, a stage less vulnerable, and Sophie did not have to devote as much time to looking after me. Often we might do different things for an evening, although we’d always end up meeting at bedtime. There was more space between us, and this brought us fractionally closer together.

He gets up, walks—a little unsteadily—across the room to the window. This time, however, he appears not to be looking out through the cracks in the boards, but studying his own reflection in the dark glass. A draught stirs his hair slightly. Without looking at me, he asks, “Did you feel that, too?”

“The drawing together?”

“Mm.” He rests his elbows on the windowsill. “I think I did, even then. I only put it into words later, of course; but then, that’s true of a lot of this. You don’t realize at the time how much you
do
understand. It’s all there, but you can’t express it. Well, I couldn’t, anyway. You were different.”

“Isn’t that true of everyone?”

“Yeah. Mostly. But you
needed
to express what you felt, to let it out somehow. And there was no one there to listen to you.”

“You were there,” I say, tentatively.

I can hear from his voice that he is smiling. “But you didn’t really tell me, did you? You knew I wouldn’t understand.”

“Do you now?”

“Yes.” He hesitates. “No. I’m not sure. I thought I understood everything, at one point. But—since then, well, things have changed. . . .”

He trails off, and I am left silently agreeing with him: things
have
changed. It crosses my mind to wonder when, exactly, it was that he thought he understood everything. There’s so much that he’s not telling me yet.

Eventually, he says, “Sometimes, it seems like I spent my childhood finding out about my childhood. If you see what I mean.”

“Yes,” I say. “I see exactly.”

Miss Finch was our form teacher and our History teacher, a steely haired lady with a sharp tongue and a keen sense of justice. Of all the teachers I knew, I liked Miss Finch best, if only because she was guaranteed to be fair in dealing with any problem, and also because she seemed to show a genuine interest in her pupils. We had been working through the basic curriculum requirements of our History course for the first part of the term, and, as half-term approached, Miss Finch called a halt to the mundane work and announced something different.

“It’s a week or so before half-term,” she said, addressing the whole class. “I know some of you will have work to take home, and I don’t want to give you too much to do. It’s good to have a break. But,” she went on, as one or two people exchanged hopeful grins, “I would like to give you a short project to do. It doesn’t have to be long; it’s more a mini-project, and you can do it fairly much as you like. If you worked hard, you could have it finished before half-term begins. Now, I’m going to call you up one by one and we’ll discuss what you might like to have a go at. The rest of the class can continue with what we started yesterday.”

I bent back over my work and looked at it carefully. Before long, my name was called, and I went up to Miss Finch’s desk.

“Hello, Matthew,” she said. She always used our full names—one thing about her that I didn’t like. “I was quite pleased by the story you did for homework.”