A Small Free Kiss in the Dark Page 9

  I took Dad’s overcoat off the nail and put it on. I felt in the pocket for my chalks, and stepped outside. Mist swirled between the deserted rides like tired old ghosts. I didn’t hear the sounds of war, just sea sighs and the music that made my heart ache.

  I was almost past the refreshment pavilion when I saw a movement from the corner of my eye. I stepped inside, into the shadows. Moonlight poured in through the broken roof and I saw the girl in the far corner of the room. She had her back to me and was taking her clothes off, layer after layer of the rags and tatters she carried around on her back like Billy and me did, because we had no place to leave them. Underneath everything else she wore something that looked like nothing, and fitted like her skin. She looked soft and newborn like a butterfly escaping its cocoon. I watched as she tied her cobweb hair away from her face and stepped up on a small wooden stage where she bowed herself down under the moonlight and raised herself up to the stars and stilled herself to listen to the music that only we could hear. Then she let the dance come out of her.

  I’d never seen a person dance before, not in real life, not this kind of dancing. I didn’t know how to look at it or what I was supposed to see. I searched for all the things I looked for in a painting: line, colour and movement, light and shade. This girl danced like light on water. After I’d watched for a while I looked with all of me, not just my eyes, and then I saw the meaning of the dance. I wanted to stop looking because it was so sad, but I couldn’t because it was so beautiful.

  Then the baby cried and the ballerina stopped and picked it up. I wasn’t scared any longer. I came close and the girl looked at me and she must have known I’d seen the meaning of her dance because it was still shining in my eyes. I touched the baby’s starfish hands and they were as cold as a merchild’s. I drew flowers on the stage for the ballerina while she fed her baby something from a bottle. When I’d finished I reached out and touched her wrist and she let me wrap my fingers around her scars.

  Sometimes words come out of me and I don’t know where they come from or why. They’re like falling stars tumbling through the universe; bright, burning things that can’t be stopped. That’s what happened when I looked into the ballerina’s pansy eyes.

  ‘Billy won’t hurt you,’ I said. I’d seen his fists and I’d heard his sharp words, but I’d felt his gentle hand around mine and I’d seen him cry for poor Bradley Clark. Now I understood that Billy was like my dad: that the only person he fought with was himself. ‘He gets mad sometimes,’ I told the girl, ‘but he’s like the mother and the father of Max and me and he’s our best friend.’

  I knew she’d been waiting for those words because afterwards she let me take her and the baby to Billy and to Max.

  12

  Song for Sixpence

  A sixpence is a small and silver coin from the olden days. It’s worth less than a shilling but more than a penny; it’s worth six pennies. It was called ‘sixpence’ because ‘pence’ is short for ‘pennies’.

  Billy says an old sixpence is worth about the same as five new cents. He also says, ‘No man is poor who has sixpence in his pocket.’ That’s a wise saying he made up all by himself. I know it’s true, because now we’ve got Sixpence.

  There’s a song about a sixpence. It’s a nursery rhyme that we learnt from Billy. He used to sing it to the baby who belonged to the dancing girl whose name was Tia. This is the way the song goes:

  ‘I love sixpence, pretty little sixpence,

  I love sixpence better than my life.

  I spent a penny of it, I lent another of it,

  I carried four pence home to my wife.’

  Max knew another nursery rhyme about sixpence, but this was the one Billy liked best. We called Tia’s baby Sixpence, because Billy used to sing the song to her all the time.

  Tia said it was a stupid name, but she wouldn’t tell us the baby’s real name. In the beginning, I never heard her call the baby anything. She didn’t talk to any of us much and sometimes she went away by herself and left Sixpence with us. To begin with I was scared we’d make a mistake, because we didn’t know much about babies; Billy was an old man, Max was just a kid and I was somewhere in between.

  Even though they can’t talk, babies have a sort of secret language. You’ve got to figure out what their different kinds of crying mean. It seemed like Sixpence was always crying until we got better at telling what she wanted. We had to learn fast because of the sandbag wall.

  In the mornings or late at night, when Max and me were sleeping, Billy would go down to the boardwalk. He’d meet travellers from the city on their way to someplace else and they’d swap information and share cigarettes. Billy sometimes told us things he’d found out from the travellers and sometimes he’d say nothing. One morning someone explained why the sandbag wall was being built.

  ‘They’re sending in peacekeepers,’ he said.

  ‘Does that mean the war’s over?’ I asked Billy. A thousand thoughts about what this would mean for us waited for me to pay them attention.

  ‘No, they just come to make sure no one breaks the rules.’

  ‘What rules?’

  ‘Rules of war.’

  I didn’t know there were any rules of war. ‘But it’ll be good when they get here, won’t it?’

  ‘They’re soldiers and they’ll be armed. Keep well away from them. Don’t go anywhere near them sandbags, do you hear?’

  Billy’s eyes got a wild look in them and his lips clammed up. I knew better than to ask any more questions. I wondered if we were already breaking one of the rules: the one about trespassing in No-Man’s-Land.

  The peacekeepers were why we started paying special attention to Sixpence. We couldn’t let her cry too much. Usually she wanted one of two things: milk or a nappy change. I didn’t mind feeding her, but the nappy part was disgusting. I tried to get out of it, but Billy said we had to take turns.

  Babies need a lot of things we didn’t have, so Billy, Max and me went looking for a charity bin. Tia didn’t want to come. The first bin we found was so full I couldn’t get inside the slot. The next one was a lot further away, but it was only half full. I stood on Billy’s back and pulled myself in. It was a soft landing but it was difficult to sort through all the clothes while I was in there.

  ‘Just chuck things out,’ Billy shouted. ‘We’ll look at them out here.’

  We got a few thin towels and baby clothes, but Billy pounced on some old sheets. ‘That’s what we need!’ he said. ‘We’ll rip them up and make nappies. Now let’s see if we can find some milk powder.’

  We walked to the supermarket we’d been to last time, but there’d been a fire. The shop was an empty shell, except for the melted metal shelves and burnt-out fridges. Billy didn’t say anything; there was no need to – anyone could see it would be useless going in. We walked for a long time till at last there were shops ahead: a chemist, a post office, and a fish-and-chip shop with clouds of thick black smoke pouring from the footpath outside. A bunch of guys were setting plastic chairs on fire and hurling them across the road like fireballs.

  ‘Why do they make things worse than they already are?’ The words came out before I could stop them.

  ‘It’s the war,’ Billy said. ‘Makes heroes of some, cowards of others.’ Sometimes his answers only left you with more questions.

  He took us on a detour before we got too close to the fish-and-chip shop. We ended up around the back and sat behind a row of wheelie bins, eating oranges until it was safe to come out. The post office and the chemist shop had metal bars on the front windows, but round the back the high-up windows to the toilets had none; just narrow glass louvres.

  Billy stepped up on a sewer pipe that jutted out of the wall, but he couldn’t reach the window. I pulled a wheelie bin across, climbed up and jiggled the top piece of window glass until it came loose, then I lifted it out. The next piece came out easy, but the bottom one was jammed tight. Billy was too big to fit through. Max would have been the perfect size, only he was too
short to step down onto the toilet when he got inside. It was up to me. I took all the clothes off my top half, because it was going to be a tight squeeze. Billy hung the torch strap around my neck and told me what to look for.

  ‘I think it’s called Infant Formula,’ he said. ‘It’ll be in a big tin.’

  I had to go in backwards. It was easy till I got to my shoulders, then it felt like my skin was scraping off on the metal window frame. I was scared the bottom piece of glass would break, but it didn’t.

  It was a goldmine in there. I found the milk and heaps of other stuff for Sixpence: spare baby bottles, soap and powder especially for babies, disposable nappies and even pink singlets. I stood up on the toilet seat and passed them all out to Billy.

  ‘There’s little tins of baby food, too,’ I whispered out the window.

  ‘She’s too young for that,’ Billy said.

  ‘But when she gets teeth she’ll need some,’ I heard Max say, and I could tell he really wanted me to get some of those tiny tins.

  ‘Just a few then,’ said Billy.

  When we got back, Tia and Sixpence had gone.

  ‘She won’t be far away,’ Billy said. But I ran everywhere, looking. I was afraid we’d never see them again. Then I remembered the refreshment pavilion. As I ran towards it I heard Tia’s voice coming from inside. I stopped to listen and heard her singing.

  ‘I love Sixpence, pretty little Sixpence,

  I love Sixpence better than my life.’

  That’s all she sang, just the first two lines. To begin with I felt happy; Tia did love her baby, I thought. But then she kept on, singing the same two lines over and over, and the longer she sang the more it sounded like the words came from some dark, empty place inside her. Some people, like my dad, have invisible scars; others, like Tia, have scars you can see. I was afraid Tia might be like Vincent who had both kinds of damage. It’s a difficult job to look after a person who’s damaged on the inside. Sometimes they won’t let you. I felt lonely and wished I was six, like Max, and someone would take care of me.

  I went inside and put Dad’s coat on.

  ‘Where are you going?’ said Max.

  ‘Just out.’

  ‘Can I come?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Don’t be mean!’ He stamped his foot and started to cry.

  ‘Skip?’

  I left before Billy had a chance to say any more. I felt in my pocket for chalk as I walked along the boardwalk. I should be practising. I should be reading my books, I should be getting an education. I didn’t want to look after Sixpence and Tia and Max. The chalk snapped in my fingers and I threw it as far as I could. Soon it would be dark and the travellers would come along the boardwalk, like a flock of birds migrating to a place where they could survive the winter. I thought of waiting till they came and going with them, but I remembered what Billy said about heroes and cowards. I knew I wasn’t a hero, but I didn’t want to be a coward, so I went back inside.

  Tia was there with Billy and Max. The coals under Billy’s multipurpose appliance were hot and they were washing Sixpence in the red bucket with warm water and her special baby soap. After they dried her and sprinkled her with powder they dressed her in a pink singlet and a disposable nappy with pictures of giraffes on it. She smelt beautiful and I loved her with all my heart and soul. I wanted Tia to feel the same. Maybe if the empty space inside her was filled with love there’d be no room for sad and dark things.

  Between us, Max and me made forty-seven paper cranes. Billy threaded them all onto bits of string and hung them up in the tunnel so Sixpence could look at them when it was too cold to go outside. On days when it was fine we packed the bottom of my suitcase with newspaper and put Sixpence in on top. We zipped the case up until just her head was poking out. We put socks on her starfish fingers and a tea-cosy hat on her head and wheeled her down the boardwalk so she could see the seagulls flying free.

  A sixpence is a small thing and so is a baby. I have especially made this chapter short because it’s mostly about small and precious things, like sixpences and babies.

  13

  Ambushed

  One day, when Tia didn’t want to hang around with us, me and Max took our slingshots that Billy helped us make out of bike-tube rubber and forked sticks, and we went along the boardwalk to the information booth. There were two huge pots there, full of dirt and dead plants and cigarette butts. We scraped handfuls of pebbles off the top and put them in our pockets for ammunition.

  When we got as far as the house next door to the orange tree I saw some pickets had come loose from the back fence.

  ‘Look Max!’ I whispered, even though we were at least five blocks away from the sandbag wall. ‘Let’s take a short cut through the jungle.’

  I went first, squeezing through the gap in the fence and crawling through the bushes, when a crazy screech ripped through the silence. I was sure we’d been ambushed. We didn’t have time to get our slingshots out. We dived for the ground, covering our heads with our arms. Air and dust gusted all around. I imagined a helicopter hovering above us, full of soldiers with guns aimed at Max and me. Maybe it was the peacekeepers. Then suddenly I figured out what the sounds were and I opened my eyes. It looked like an explosion in a pillow factory: feathers floated everywhere. We’d broken in to a chicken run.

  Max and me rolled around among the feathers and dirt and straw, with our fists stuffed in our mouths. But the laughing leaked out of us; we just couldn’t stop it.

  ‘C’mon, let’s get out of here!’ I said at last, but Max had spotted a nesting box with heaps of eggs in it.

  ‘I wonder if they’re any good?’ I said.

  We threw six at the fence to test them out: three each. The shells smashed and the insides dribbled down the grey palings. Two of them smelt disgusting and four didn’t. Even a person who’s dumb at maths knows that’s pretty good odds.

  ‘Let’s take some back to Billy.’

  ‘What if they break in our bags?’

  ‘They won’t if we put this in with them,’ I said and we gathered up handfuls of straw and stuffed it in Max’s bag so the eggs couldn’t move around as much. We packed twenty eggs in there and then we went next door to get oranges. We took our slingshots out and fired stones at them, but we couldn’t knock them down, so I climbed up the tree and threw the fruit to Max. I saw an old rainwater tank turned on its side with a lot of sawn-up wood in it, and I made a mental note to tell Billy.

  I wanted to run back to Dreamland, to show Billy what we’d found, but we had to be careful because of the eggs. When we got back Tia was there with Sixpence and we told them all about the chickens and the eggs and the dry sawn wood in the rainwater tank. Billy scrambled some of the eggs in the fruit salad tin for our dinner and we only had to throw four away.

  After Sixpence had her bottle and her bath and went to sleep, Tia went outside. I wondered where she was going. It wasn’t only when we couldn’t see her that she left us; sometimes even when she was sitting right next to us it was like she wasn’t really there at all. You could even talk to her and she wouldn’t hear you. She reminded me of the sea; the way she came dancing towards you, wild and beautiful, and just when she was almost close enough to touch she’d rush away again.

  Max and me had started drawing when I saw Billy leave. I knew where he’d be going. Max had given up drawing animals. He drew people instead. None of them had faces or bellybuttons, but they all had machine guns. I’d got so used to seeing them in his pictures that I didn’t notice them any more. It was the same with the sounds of war. They’d become normal, like gulls calling and waves crashing, the blue notes of Billy’s Hohner and Sixpence crying for her bottle in the night. So I should have been ready for what came next. I’d known all along it was pretty sure to happen but I still got a shock when I found out it had. Billy dropped the bombshell when he came back from the boardwalk.

  ‘The Red Cross have got their list of missing persons up,’ he said. ‘It’s time we found out if Max Montg
omery is on it.’

  Max’s mouth gathered up into a circle like a buttonhole. ‘When?’ he said.

  I watched his face to see if that was what he wanted. But torchlight beamed back from his glasses and I couldn’t see his eyes, so it was hard to tell. Billy says your eyes are the windows of your soul. He also says different coloured eyes are the sign of a good soul and that being able to see two sides of everything is a rare gift. I don’t know if he just made that up, but I knew it was going to be hard to see the good side of losing Max.

  ‘We’ll leave in a few days,’ Billy said.

  I don’t know if I believed that Max’s mother might still be alive, but I knew it was only fair to give Max a chance to find out. And if she was alive it was only fair to Mrs Montgomery, because I was sure she wouldn’t have deserted Max on purpose. She would have planned to come back for him the way she always had, with a smile and a hug and fish fingers for his dinner. It was just that she hadn’t counted on the war.

  I was glad we didn’t have to leave straight away. You need time to get yourself ready when there’s something difficult you have to do. Giving Max back to his mother was going to be one of the most difficult things I’d ever done.

  Max had some getting-ready of his own to do. He was only a little boy, but I think he’d figured out that he might never see Billy and me again. Maybe another reason why he hadn’t pestered us about going back to the city was because he was so certain his mother would be there waiting for him, no matter when we got there. I thought it must be nice to trust someone that much.