A Small Free Kiss in the Dark Read online

  ‘It’s probably just a kitchen,’ I said. ‘Come on, Billy will be waiting.’

  ‘Just a peek,’ said Max with his hand on the latch. ‘It won’t take long.’

  I should have stopped Max right then, but I watched his fingers undo the metal catch. The door was heavy and Max couldn’t open it by himself. I wish I’d walked away, but I didn’t. I stuck my fingers underneath the rubber seal and pulled. The door came open with a rush and Max screamed. I grabbed the torch and turned it off, but not before we’d seen all the dead bodies hanging from a rail on huge metal hooks, and not before we’d seen what the maggots had done to them. The smell was disgusting. I tried not to breathe, and Max was throwing up all over the place. I grabbed his hand and we ran for the street.

  ‘They’re animals, Max,’ I said in case he thought they were people’s bodies.

  ‘I know,’ he sobbed, ‘the poor things.’

  Billy came back with bread and cake and biscuits and he held out a jam tart each for Max and me. ‘Thought you were starving,’ he said when we didn’t take them. I told him what we’d seen and he got a bottle of water out and cleaned Max up as good as he could. I got a bottle for myself, but no matter how hard I scrubbed or how much water I used I felt like the smell of the rotten animals had got into my skin and onto my clothes.

  We walked back the way we came, and even though it was dark there were no lights burning inside the houses. They were like people without hearts; raspberry tarts without the jam. The further we got away from the butcher’s shop, the better I felt. I saw Dreamland, milky as the moon, maybe only fifteen minutes away if we walked fast. Carelessly, I let my suitcase wheels hum along the pavement in time with my heart.

  We had got to the S-bend in front of the hotel when suddenly Billy put his arms out and grabbed me and Max and we all went tumbling down the grassy embankment. I saw streamers of starlight, smelt dirt up close and felt my back smack against something hard. I caught my breath and rolled over, looking for the others and for my case. A low stone wall had stopped us from rolling onto the winding road, two metres below. Max was lying face-down on the grass above me. He was sobbing. I don’t think I could hear him, but I knew, somehow. I crawled up and lay next to him.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ I whispered.

  ‘I’ve lost my glasses.’

  ‘We’ll find them. I’ll get Billy’s torch.’

  Then I heard a motor running, the gears changing at the bottom of the hill.

  ‘Keep your head down!’ Billy hissed. I saw the lights of a truck and ducked.

  We lay flat beside the wall, while the truck wound its way slowly towards the top of the hill. Once it passed us, Billy put his head up and so did Max and me. We watched the hotel gates slide open to let the truck go through and saw lights flood the building. We waited for a long time before we dared use the torch to look for Max’s glasses and my case.

  That night we slept in the House of Horrors. We’d checked it out while it was light. From outside it looked like a huge, lumpy cave. Inside was a miniature railway. It had everything: tracks, a platform, signals, tunnels and a tiny train. We walked along the tracks with Billy’s torch and looked at the fake skeletons, bats, witches, ghosts, giant spiders and monsters. Bits of cloth, hanging from the ceiling, brushed against our faces, and if you shut your eyes they felt exactly like spider webs. It must have been fantastic when everything worked. Billy said there were ghostly noises, special lighting effects and coloured smoke. We planned to sleep in the carriages. They all had names painted on them. Max and me had picked the Devil’s Lair and Billy said he’d have the Vampire’s Nest.

  Before we got in our carriages that night, Billy hung his torch up and fixed Max’s glasses with a bandaid. He always had useful things in his pockets, like his pocketknife and bandaids and bits of string and dead Christmas beetles, which aren’t exactly useful but they’re nice to look at. After Billy fixed the glasses, Max and me got our appetites back. The bananas were a bit squashed, so we ate them first, then we had rainbow cake with chocolate icing and hundreds and thousands.

  Billy didn’t want any cake. ‘Save me some for breakfast,’ he said. ‘And don’t forget to switch the torch off before you go to sleep.’

  I thought of asking Billy about No-Man’s-Land, but decided to wait until Max wasn’t around. I hung Dad’s coat up on a nail in the wall and Max and me got in our carriage and shared a blanket. The ghosts didn’t worry us; we knew they were only make-believe.

  Max didn’t say anything for a while and I got nervous. I thought he might ask me a question I didn’t know the answer to. I started talking so he couldn’t. ‘Tomorrow we’ll fix this place up a bit, Max,’ I said. ‘We’ll patch up the holes in the walls and sweep the platform. We’ll make it real nice.’

  Then I opened the packet of Clinkers from the newsagent’s and we played a game. We each put a Clinker in our mouth and then we sucked the chocolate off and tried to guess what colour the inside was. I like pink ones best but there aren’t many pink ones in a packet. In the game we had to say our answer out loud, then we both opened our mouths at the same time and I looked in Max’s mouth and he looked in mine. The first one to get three guesses right was supposed to have a go of the cigarette lighter, even though Billy would have killed us if he knew. It’s easy to tell the taste of green and pink, but sometimes yellow and orange are hard to tell apart. Max never got any right but I still let him have one go of the cigarette lighter. We could hear Billy snoring and we put our hands over our mouths so we wouldn’t laugh.

  After Max went to sleep I turned the torch off and had a go of the cigarette lighter. It looked like a candle burning in the dark. Candles always make me think about God, so I asked Him not to let Max dream about the poor dead animals. I hoped He’d forgotten about the other thing I asked.

  I tried not to think about Cecily and the library, or about the lights in the hotel, the army truck and the Boulevard of empty houses, or about the place called No-Man’s-Land.

  Instead, I thought about the way Billy was on the carousel that afternoon. I smiled in the dark when I thought of him shouting at the invisible crowd in a half-singing, half-talking sort of way. He was like a fishmonger at the market on a Saturday morning, trying to get rid of his King George whiting and his flathead and his gummy shark, so they didn’t go off over the weekend.

  I wished he’d be like that for ever, because it felt as though he enjoyed being with us. If he did, maybe he’d stay and I’d never be afraid of anything then. It would be perfect, just Billy and Max and me. I went to sleep then. I didn’t know that the girl in the red coat would come and change everything.

  9

  One perfect day

  In the salty grey morning I made a plan to give Billy and Max one perfect day. If it worked, maybe that would be enough to keep us together.

  I needed to leave my books behind while I carried out the plan, and I wanted to make sure they’d be safe if anyone else should come to Dreamland while we were away. So, while Billy and Max slept, I crept deeper into the House of Horrors, carrying my suitcase. I followed the silver tracks into the Cavern of Vampires and then I turned Billy’s torch on. I sat among the coffins and the dangling skeletons with Billy’s torch in my hand and my books on my knees. I touched their shining covers and turned the cold, smooth pages and filled myself up with the look and the feel and the smell of the paper and pictures and words. Then I opened the lid of one of the coffins and hid my books under Dracula’s red-and-black cloak.

  I promised myself that one day soon I’d read them again. I would get myself an education, like Billy said I must, but for now I had to concentrate on staying alive and keeping us together.

  Billy and Max were still asleep when I got back, so I quietly collected the things I needed for one perfect day. Then I went outside and looked up towards the hotel. The night before it had shone like a lighthouse – we could still see it when we reached the House of Horrors – but in daylight it seemed a long way away. I couldn�
��t see the metal gates or the truck, so I figured that if anyone was up there they wouldn’t see me either. And anyway, where I was taking Billy and Max we’d be hidden by the walls of Dreamland.

  I wheeled my case to the coffee-seller’s booth behind the carousel. It had wheels and a canvas awning and shiny black doors under the counter. Billy had picked the lock with his pocketknife the day before, to see what was inside. We found small paper packets of salt, sugar, coffee, tea and powdered chocolate. There were spoons and cups and serviettes. I took what I needed and put them in my suitcase with the things I’d got from inside.

  Then Billy woke up and came out and I asked him if we could spend the day at the beach. ‘Please, Billy. I’ve got everything we need, look!’ I showed him inside the suitcase.

  It took him a long time to say anything.

  ‘I know most people don’t go to the beach in winter,’ I said, ‘but . . .’

  ‘But we’re not most people, are we, Skip?’ he said. ‘Now what you need is a good long-handled toasting fork.’

  I ran inside to wake Max up, and Billy started making a toasting fork out of wire that was wrapped around one of the legs of the scenic railway. When everything was ready, we walked out underneath the big teeth and went down to the beach.

  I tried to remember everything about that day. I heard the rush and sigh of small waves before I saw them and I felt glad because the sea is like the Carousel of War and Peace: it’s always there.

  Billy lit a fire on the sand beside the sea, and when my eyes crept up towards the Boulevard he said, ‘They won’t be able to see it from there, and anyway there’s so many fires burning in this city, no one’s gonna take any notice of a little one like ours.’

  ‘Where are the ships, Billy?’ asked Max.

  ‘They can’t come anywhere near here. The bay’s too shallow.’

  Billy’s voice was smooth and yellow and peaceful, and it didn’t matter at all that the sky was as grey as a pigeon’s back. We spread our blankets on the damp sand and Billy boiled water in an empty peach can and made coffee and we sipped it from the stolen takeaway cups while we toasted our stale bread with the long-handled fork. Then we shared the last of our sardines and sprinkled them with salt from the paper packets.

  After breakfast I found a feather for Max and stuck it in his football beanie, and even though it wasn’t an eagle’s feather he didn’t mind. Then we borrowed Billy’s peach can and built a sandcastle with twenty-seven turrets and a moat to keep the enemy out. Next we played cricket on the hard, wet sand until Billy hit a six with the driftwood bat and I saw my rolled-up football socks disappear into the sea. Max and me stripped our clothes off then and ran into the waves, and Billy laughed and shook his head and watched us go.

  ‘Crazy kids! Crazy!’

  ‘Crazeeeeeee!’ we shouted back, and our voices sailed away like kite tails on the wind.

  The crystal sea was freezing but we danced and ducked and dived. We were merchildren and we weren’t afraid of the waves that crashed against our bodies and tried to drag us down. We saw Billy go searching up and down the long, straight beach like a pirate looking for buried treasure. We saw him discover driftwood sticks and drag them to the fire.

  ‘Castaways!’ I said to Max and punched the water with my fists. ‘Castaways on a deserted island; you and me and Billy.’

  ‘Castaways!’ shouted Max.

  Billy looked at us across the foaming waves and he got reckless and brave like Max and me; he piled the bleached wood on the leaping flames. Then he stood there on the shore with a blanket wrapped around him and his long grey whiskers flying like seaweed from his chin, and he roared at us like Neptune. We ran to him and we didn’t care that we had no clothes on because we were wild creatures, Max and me. Then we lay down on a blanket as close to the fire as we dared. The flames flickered on our stormy-blue skins and made our hearts beat slow until we turned back into ordinary boys again. Then we put our clothes on and Billy baked bananas on the coals. When they were cooked we split them open and sprinkled them with cinnamon and chocolate powder and crystals of brown sugar that we’d got from the coffee-seller’s stall, and we ate them out of their sizzling skins with plastic spoons.

  Then the storm came and we stuffed everything into my case and hurried back to Dreamland. We lay in the ghost train, Max and me together in the Devil’s Lair, warm and tired and sanded smooth. We whispered secrets to each other while rain battered the tin roof and thunder shook the world and Billy played his Hohner in the Vampire’s Nest.

  ‘I’m going to be a musician when I grow up,’ Max said.

  ‘What instrument are you going to play?’

  ‘Violin. I’ve got a violin, only it’s at my house.’

  ‘Can you play it?’

  ‘“Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.”’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘I’m not very good yet. Mummy says you have to practise every day to get good.’

  I didn’t want him to talk about his mother on that perfect day. ‘What do you want to do tomorrow?’

  ‘I think I’d like to go home.’

  ‘We could go for another adventure.’

  ‘We could go home first and then go for another adventure.’

  ‘What if your mother wouldn’t let you go?’ I said and I felt Max grip my hand with one of his. ‘It’s your turn to choose tomorrow, Max. You can pick anywhere you like, anywhere.’

  Max didn’t answer straight away and I thought he was trying to decide. I didn’t know he wanted to go home more than anything else in the whole universe, because that’s something only people with homes can wish for. So I got a surprise when Max said in a small voice, ‘I think I’d just like to go home, please.’

  Billy stopped playing his harmonica then.

  ‘Wait a few more days, Max,’ he said, ‘then we might be able to go back and see if they’ve put up the missing persons lists. Your mother might have put your name on the list. Then we can let her know where you are.’

  The thought of Max finding his mother was as lonely as an albatross. I felt angry at how stupid I’d been. Max belonged to someone else and even Billy didn’t belong to me. It didn’t matter how perfect our day had been, it didn’t change a thing.

  When the rain let up a bit, I put Dad’s coat on and went outside. I didn’t tell the others where I was going. I walked across to the Ferris wheel and climbed up on the frame. It was easy, even though the white painted metal was wet and slippery. It was like running away; I just put one foot in front of the other one and didn’t look back. When I got to the top I slid into the seat and pulled the padded armrest across in front of me.

  You can see a long way from the top of the Ferris wheel at Dreamland, but not as far as France or Gulliver’s Meadows. All I could see was the wrecked city. Max and Billy came outside after a while. I wanted them to call out to me. I wished they would say, ‘Skip, where are you Skip? Please . . . come home!’ I watched them get on the carousel and I heard Billy calling out the way he did the day before: ‘Step right this way folks, step right on up. Get your tickets here. Don’t miss out now.’

  Maybe he was remembering how he felt yesterday and maybe he wanted the feeling to never end. It was harder to get off the Ferris wheel, because I wasn’t angry any more and because I had to look down. But Billy and Max waited for me.

  ‘Just in the nick of time, young fella,’ said Billy. ‘I’ve got one ticket left to ride the pinto pony.’ My feet slid into the stirrups and I took the reins in my hands the way I had the day before and the notes came out of Billy’s harmonica and cast a spell over us all.

  ‘Come away, Captain Moonlight, come away!’ I whispered into my horse’s wooden ear and my words went inside him and warmed his heart because that’s what words do when people mean them; they get inside you and they change everything. I felt my horse’s muscles moving and I felt breath go into him and out of him and I felt him swelling like the sea. When we stopped we were hungry so we headed back to the House of Horrors. That�
�s when we saw the ballerina, walking through the misty rain towards the carousel.

  We were gobsmacked to see her because not many people visit fun parks that don’t work, especially when there’s a war going on. Billy nodded at her but she climbed up on on a white horse without speaking, and I thought she mustn’t know that a nod was like a ‘hello’ without words. Billy took us around behind the House of Horrors and we climbed in underneath the platform and I was glad we went that way because we had provisions and books in there and I didn’t think it would be a good idea if other people knew where we were staying. We ate the rest of the rainbow cake and had a drink of water. Then we heard something cry out.

  I looked out through the holes in the tin because I’d seen the lump under the girl’s coat and I thought she might be having her baby right there on the carousel. She got down off her horse and her coat fell apart at the front because there were no buttons to put through the holes. She was already holding the baby and it had clothes on so I knew it must have been born some other time. The baby was crying, and the girl put one of her fingers in its mouth.

  When she started to walk away I saw her coat had a hood, and I remembered a story I heard a long time ago, when I was just a little kid, about a girl with a coat like that. I knew it was only a made-up story, but when I saw the ballerina walk underneath the big teeth and out into the rain, I thought about the wolf in the story and I wondered where the girl was going and if she had a grandmother to visit. It was getting late and cold, and I thought she looked too young to have a baby, but I didn’t think we’d see them again.

  10

  The ballerina, the

  baby and the brave

  Red is for danger.

  Red was the colour of the ballerina’s coat.

  The next time we saw her she was sitting in the Chariot of Peace. We knew she was there because the baby was crying. Billy and Max and me heard it when we came back from looking for provisions.