The Yellow Glass (13 page)

“Leave her alone, Terry Arkonnen!”

There was nothing to the boy, just sinewy skin and
bone, but his reflexes were quick – I’ll say that for him, if nothing
else.
 
He twisted round, threw me half
off his back, somehow brought his knee up and stabbed me with it as hard as he
could.
 
It was eye-wateringly
painful.
 
I staggered a couple of steps,
breathing hard.
 
When the mist cleared
and I could see again, I caught him pulling a hooligan face at me, giggling
inanely and flicking a V sign for good measure (Terry was living proof that all
the old fogeys had it spot on when they complained about the younger
generation, he really was).

A car horn blared at us, and we both dived out of its
path.
 
I couldn’t help noticing Terry’s
face as it sped past and I knew, there and then, that his dad had been at the
wheel.
 
I’d sensed this scene was serious
the minute I’d heard Uncle Reg yell in that vicious way and yet I couldn’t have
known
how
serious it was.
 
Not then.
 
But now . . if the man was on wheels, it was hotting up.
 
I mean, if I didn’t move it, the stranger I
called my uncle might abduct her from the streets.
 
So I did something I’d been itching to do for
a while and punched my obnoxious cousin on the nose.
 
Terry fell backwards, his hands nursing his
nosebleed, while I straightened up to see where Rosa had got to.
 

She was off the road by now, and halfway across the derelict
patch by the railway line.
 

“Rosa!”
 
I
bellowed, loud enough to catch her attention.
 
“Wait for me, Rosa!”

She stopped to catch her breath, dropping her bag and
hugging her body as if there was little breath in it to catch.
 
It took a minute before she could speak.

“Go away, Magnus,” she shouted, when she could.
 
“I hate you!
 
Go away, you traitor!”

She hated
me
?
 
The scene was becoming more bizarre by the second.
 
Then, as if to confirm that, Uncle Reg’s
black sedan drove clear off the road, flattening a broken, wire fence and began
to lurch over the bombsite, crashing through saplings and over lumps of rubble,
the car jolting up and down on its springs.
 
It was aiming straight for Rosa.
 
I promptly jumped over the crumpled wire and set off after them, half-crazy
with a new fear; never mind abduction, it looked like my uncle was going to run
her over.
 
The maniac was actually about
to commit murder and there wasn’t a thing I could do about it.

I’ve never run so fast in my life.
 
The sedan reached Rosa instantly, of course,
yet it didn’t run her over, it circled round her.
 
She had plenty of room to escape, but she
didn’t; she just stood there - stock still like piggy-in-the-middle - clutching
her bag to her chest, white-faced and gibbering with terror.
 
I saw why when I’d caught up a bit.
 
Uncle Reg was turning the steering wheel in a
leisurely circle with his left hand, while his right held a small pistol, the
snout protruding out of the driver’s window.
 

“Into the car, love,” I heard him say, pleasantly.
 
“Into the car, or I shoot you.”

I judged that Rosa was incapable of movement, at that point.
 
So I moved for her.
 
I ran at the sedan, wrenched the passenger
door open and leapt in.
 
Uncle Reg didn’t
even bother turning his neck to acknowledge my presence, he just carried on
circling round Rosa like a bird of prey who had all the time in the world; all
of the sky and all of the earth below at his disposal.

“Stop!”
 
I
cried.
 
“Whatever the hell you’re doing,
just
stop
it will you?”

“Keep your nose out, son.
 
This is none of your business.”

“It bloody is!”
 
I shouted and, without thinking, I fell on top of him, fists
flying.
 

His head jerked forward and the gun went off, the
retort unbelievably loud inside the car.
 
Had he got her?
 
I tried to hold
him down and get a look out of his window at the same time, but he kept
struggling and he’d got his weight on the accelerator, so the car was out of
control.
 
I’d just time for one serious
punch, which must have connected somewhere because a great, winded, ‘oomph’
broke out of him, and to scream out:

“Run, Rosa!
 
Run!”

Before the car smashed into the side of a wall and all
the colours in the world turned to black.

 
I was convinced they would follow me.
 
I sneaked into an empty First Class carriage
after the ticket inspector had done his rounds, stowed my tapestry bag in the
rack and prayed to God that they’d missed me on the platform.
 
(I don’t believe in God but, somehow, that’s
never stopped me praying to him.)
 
The
first train of the day would have been too obvious, I’d calculated, so I’d
taken the second and gone to such elaborate precautions at Charing Cross that
my Uncle Tristram would have been proud of me.
 
Even so, I’d learnt to expect the unexpected and I spent the beginning part
of the journey - when I wasn’t praying - with my teeth positively chattering
with fear.
 
I’d had hours to think about
it and I had slotted the pieces together from the hallucinatory fragments of
the night before.
 
I was pretty sure that
I knew who my enemies were, now:
 
Uncle
Reg, who was also Arko the devil incarnate.
 
An extremely fast runner called Terry, who was also Jim Johnson the
office boy at
Heaviside Import/Exports
.
 
And Magnus . . who was just Magnus.

I felt peculiarly sick when I thought of Magnus; especially
when I recalled him jumping into that car to join his wicked uncle.
 
(The feeling reminded me of the sickness I’d
felt on the Big Dipper at Battersea Funfair the only time I’d tried it: out of
my element, dizzy, stripped of the ability to grasp anything real and make
something comprehensible out of it.)
 
Magnus wasn’t actually ‘just Magnus’, you see.
 
He wasn’t who I’d thought he was at all, and
that made me feel so sad.
 
Sad and lost.
 
I looked out of the train window and watched
London become Kent and the miserly, early morning light expand into gay, spring
sunshine and I wondered whether I would
ever
understand other people.
 
What’s more, I
wondered whether I even knew who I was, myself.
 
My name is Rosa, I repeated over the driving bass beat of the train
chugging southwards.
 
My name is
Rosa.
 
Rosa Stone.

Yet, astonishingly, as the journey went on and nobody
burst into the carriage with a gun, I began to dare to believe that I’d got
away with it.
 
As each oasthouse sailed
past my window, each strict assembly of hop poles, each orchard of stunted
apple trees, just come into leaf, I breathed a little easier.
 
It helped that those signs of spring were all
around me; London was still in thrall to the terrible, long winter we’d
suffered, but Kent appeared to have thrown it off like that thick jumper you
come upon in the summer and cannot believe you ever wore.
 
Speaking of which, I’d had Magnus’ black
slacks and jumper rolled up in my tapestry bag and - for purposes of disguise -
had taken them out and put them on over my dress, earlier that morning.
 
With the sun streaming through the window, I
was starting to feel tremendously hot.
 
By Folkestone I’d thrown caution to the winds and stripped them
off.
 
There they sat, on the seat beside
me, so hard-wearing, so voluminous, so black . . so Magnus.
 
I hated how I felt when I looked at
them.
 
Somewhere before Dover Priory I
chucked them off the train.

Alighting on the platform, I kept a firm grip on my
bag; I’d used it as a weapon before and I would again.
 
But there was no need; it was quite
miraculous
, but I really seemed to have got
off scot free.
 
Oh, the relief!
 
I can’t tell you!
 
I swished the satisfyingly full skirts of my
scarlet dress and clicked down the platform in the green shoes I’d bought with
my last pay-packet, to where I could see my father waiting with the ticket
collector.
 
He waved his arms about (as
if there was any possibility that I might miss the mountainous mass of him in
his blue fisherman’s jumper, red trousers and unfortunate beret), and shouted unnecessarily:

“Bubeleh!
 
I’m
here!”

I resisted the urge to inform him that I wasn’t blind
and allowed him to envelop me in his arms, the tang of coal and steam from the
train adding a piquancy to the wafts of cinnamon and cologne that he habitually
gave off.

“You shouldn’t have come, Daddy, not halfway through
the working day.
 
I told you on the
phone, I was going to get a taxi.”

“Well, I thought I’d find a poor, little, ailing soul,
all shrivelled and yellow in the face.”
 
He set me at arms length.
 
“But
what is this?
 
As hale and hearty as ever,
Rosa!”

“It was only a touch of uranium poisoning, Daddy.
 
I didn’t have jaundice, you know.”

“According to your mother and your aunt, you were at
death’s door in that hospital.”
 

He took my bag from me and we set off to find the car.

“Hardly!”

They’d come dashing up to Charing Cross hospital and
tried to lure me back to Kent with my baker father’s chocolate buns, only,
since I’d been poisoned, I’d gone off my food for the first time in my life, so
it hadn’t worked.
 
Except . . here I
was.
 
When you are nineteen, however much
you love your childhood home - and I did, I
really
did - any trip back without a job or a place of your own to return to, well, it
feels a bit abject.
 
I couldn’t help it;
at nineteen one only wants to fly and I felt grounded.

I got into the old Crossley while my father put my bag
in the boot.
 
When he got in next to me
the car sagged and gave a resigned, little sigh, but it started first time,
which wasn’t usually the case.
 
We drove
out of Dover, taking the route past the harbour and up the hill towards home.

“Now,” he announced, “prove to me that you are
well.
 
Tell me what you see, Rosa.
 
Tell me
everything
.”

This was an old game (possibly as old as my parents
themselves, which was, of course, as old as Methuselah).
 
I gave a low growl of irritation to let him
know how very antediluvian he was, while leaning forward in my seat because I
simply adore being tested.
 
I opened my
mouth to begin as we sped past the castle, those ancient walls which slanted,
so proprietorial, over the town and the sea.

“
Not
the castle!”
 
He said (we’d done the castle too many times
to count).

Beyond the castle, then, to where the road opened up
to the sea and the chalk downlands.
 
I
focussed on the wildflowers that had sprung up in the verges since I’d last
been there, and felt the reassuring click in my brain.

“Speedwell, buttercup, stinging nettle,” I cried,
“chalk milkwort, vetch, heartsease, oxeye daisy . .”

“Oy,” he interrupted, “you don’t get points for oxeye!
 
They’re not out yet.
 
Only what you can see, remember.

“I saw the leaves!
 
Knapweed, hoary plantain, cowslip, birds foot trefoil . .”

“Bravo!
 
Now the
Latin!”

I won’t bore you with all of that.
 
Just to say that I’d got to ‘ranunculus
vulgaris’ when I saw the rabbit.
 
It’s
eyes were gummed shut with myxomatosis
[29]
and it crouched on the verge as a rabbit should never do, as if it had run out
of hops.
 
I shivered.
 
Somehow, Arko
had
followed me home.
 
Arko
with his milk-white eyes.
 
Arko who was
Magnus’ Uncle Reg.
 
Arko who circled round
and round, pointing his gun.
 
It struck home
- for the very first time, really - that one day Arko might kill me.
 
I burst into tears.

They put me to bed in my old room and I slept a deep,
dreamless sleep.
 
I tend to forget about
sleep, but - though it pained me to admit it - they were right and I’d been
exhausted.
 
When I woke up, I was
momentarily disorientated by a shaft of the brightest yellow sunlight entering through
a gap in the curtains, where the everlasting wind set them flapping.
 
I thought I heard voices raised in alarm, but
it was only my mother shushing my brother Sam.
 
I may have smiled into my pillow before sleep dragged me back under.
 

Next time I awoke, the shaft of light had travelled
and the familiar angles of my room had softened.
 
I could have sworn that I heard voices once
more; many voices whispering to one another:

“She’s brought us a story,” they whispered.
 
“She’s brought us another story.”
 

But it may have been the conversation of the sea,
gossiping around our wall in the fervour of high tide.
 

I shook myself awake, got up and flung the curtains
wide.

The house was on the beach.
 
Actually, there were two houses - Shore House
and Coast Cottage - two white-washed, 1930’s houses, like beached ocean liners
staring out at the sweep of St Margaret’s Bay
[30]
;
such an apparent panorama of blue ocean and, yet, the closest point on our
islands to France.
 
In the winter the
wind screamed and the salt spray whipped red stripes on one’s cheeks for daring
to venture out.
 
It could be wild, but it
was never dispiriting because even the depths of winter brought surprising new
palettes of light to wash over the sky, boosting morale.
 
Yet in the first, swooning, days of spring
there was almost too
much
light and
it hurt my eyes after months of London.
 
April by the sea on a sunny afternoon - I looked at my old clock and
could barely credit that it was going on for six - it must, surely, be time for
a chocolate bun.

My little brother, Sam, was lying on his stomach on the
sitting-room carpet, transfixed by something on the television.

“Hey,” he said, “did you know we’re getting ITV?”

“Everybody’s getting ITV, stupid.”

“Are they?”
 
He
looked doubtful.
 
“Bill Hawking isn’t.”

My mother came into the room with two cups of tea.

“That’s because the Hawkings don’t have a set,
Samuel,” she said, handing me a cup.
 
“How are you feeling, sweetheart?”

“Fine, thanks.”
 

I gave her an awkward kind of a hug over the teacups
because I’d been a bit surly when I’d arrived at the house and she’d ordered me
to bed as if I were eight years old, like Sam.
 
As always, I’d forgotten how tiny she was, how petite in every way; the
complete antithesis of me.
 
I felt like a
great, galumphing elephant next to my mother.
 
Her brown hair was cut quite short and curled softly around her face,
with a wide streak of silver flaring from the centre of her head, as if going
grey was a rather glamorous decision that her hair had decided to make.
 
She was wearing a perfect, simple white shirt
and a wide, boldly patterned skirt of green and yellow and red, cinched tight
at her waist.
 
The skirt rustled and
dipped as she moved, there was so much fabric in it.
 
Possibly net petticoats under it, too. Talk
about New Look!
 
(We’d both been
intoxicated when clothing restrictions and the meagre amounts of fabric allowed
during the war were dropped.)

“You look beautiful, Mummy,” I said.

She looked surprised.
 
Actually, we were
both
rather surprised I’d said it.

“Thank you, Rosa.
 
You look lovely, too.
 
Isn’t that
dress a glorious shade of red!”
 
She put
down her cup and picked up the hem, fingering the warp and woof, casting her milliner’s
eye over it.
 
“Too much blue for
strawberry and too much orange for raspberry.”

“Tomato?”
 
I
suggested.

“Squashed tomatoes and stew!”
 
Sam sang out.

“That’s enough out of you,” my mother straightened up.

“You look like a monkey and you smell like one, too!”

“There’s only one person round here smells like that
and he’s having a bath the instant his programme’s over,” she peered at the
set, blind as a bat without her glasses.
 
“What’s that you’re watching, Samuel?”

“Auntie Kathleen.
 
She’s gone to the doctor’s and he’s got his steth-thingy out.”