Why I Went Back Page 9

  There was a faded sofa in there too, patterned with grey geometric shards, something ancient from the 1980s, as well as an electric heater with a red light that flickered when you turned it on. I’d waited a minute or two, helping get Haxforth comfortable on the sofa, but it was obvious Daniel hadn’t wanted me to stay. It wasn’t like there was anything more to be done anyhow. I’d needed to head home, back to the Big Bag, back to the letters and packets and parcels, everything arranged in street and house order and needing to be delivered fast if I was to stay on top of Dad’s stolen mail. Walking away from Annandale Avenue though I’d turned the clasp in my pocket and imagined the look on Christy’s face when he discovered the key to his pot of gold had vanished. That made me smile at least.

  Down the front, the voice continued its drone. It wouldn’t stop. It told us to fiddle about with compasses and protractors and write down formulas in our exercise books. The formulas didn’t mean anything to me. I understood them when they were staring up from the page but the minute the page was gone so were they. And what use were they? I was never going to use them outside the classroom. Nobody there was ever going to use them.

  Then again – people had used maths and stuff to understand DNA, hadn’t they? To analyse blood, to figure out the chances of one family member passing something bad on to someone else in the same family. And wasn’t that just about the first idea Daniel had had when I’d told him about Mum – how I might inherit her illness? It was scary, that he’d thought it so fast like that. Somehow it made the possibility of me getting sick like Mum seem more real, more likely. The seed had always been there, the fear, cold and buried more or less and not growing too much anyway, but Haxforth had watered it and Daniel had shone some sun down on it and now it was leaping up.

  I pushed it away until finally the bells howled and we clattered along corridors. Flickering strip lights and bodies everywhere, open doors and whiteboards, screams and laughter and darkness descending outside. Today’s sunlight gone so quickly. End of next week it’ll be Christmas.

  Last lesson of the afternoon, Miss Tuckett again. I hadn’t seen Daniel all day but now there he was, waiting for me by the door.

  ‘He still hasn’t woken up.’

  ‘What?’ I said.

  ‘He still hasn’t woken up. I thought he’d be gone by now but I went back to check on him at lunchtime and he hasn’t moved at all, it’s like he’s in a coma or something …’

  I could see he was worried, really worried.

  ‘Keep your voice down,’ I said. ‘Is he still breathing?’

  ‘Yes, he’s breathing but—’

  ‘Come in boys, come in,’ Miss Tuckett called from inside the classroom. ‘Whatever it is, it can wait till afterwards.’

  ‘He probably just needs loads of sleep,’ I whispered. ‘Plenty of time to recover …’

  ‘That’s easy for you to say. You’re not the one with a filthy old tramp lying unconscious in your house!’

  ‘He’s not an old tramp, he’s—’

  ‘Quickly now,’ said Miss Tuckett. ‘I’m shutting the door. Aidan, have you got your homework?’

  ‘Still haven’t done it, miss,’ I said.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Just haven’t.’

  The class watched, knowing the routine. The last dragging hour where Miss Tuckett tried to tell us about everything that came before.

  ‘And what about Beowulf? Are you going to bother with that? Are you going to read even one page?’

  She looked determined today, short and steely and determined like she’d finally worked out how to be a proper teacher. ‘Are any of you going to read it?’

  ‘I’ve read almost all of it already, Miss Tuckett,’ somebody piped up. ‘If you like I could—’

  Suzanne Dartnell. Class geek, bigmouth, general show-off. Another part of the routine.

  ‘Thank you, Suzanne, but I wasn’t asking you,’ Miss Tuckett told her sharply.

  Suzanne Dartnell pressed her lips together and looked upset.

  ‘Aidan, I want you to come and sit at the front,’ Miss Tuckett said. ‘Next to Daniel.’

  ‘I don’t want to sit at the front,’ I said.

  ‘Just do it. In fact I want you to sit there for the whole of next term.’

  ‘That’s not fair!’

  ‘Just do it.’

  Miss Tuckett glared at me. I glared back. Almost standing toe to toe. I knew I’d made her cry in the staffroom before now and I knew I could make her cry again. If I walked out, she’d have to come after me. The thing was, I really did want to know about Beowulf, about the kings and witches and monsters that were in it. I wanted to learn. About this anyway. Though of course I couldn’t ever tell her or anyone else that.

  My brain felt hot and angry and totally totally exhausted.

  I picked up my bag and my books and moved them to the front row, to the table alongside Daniel, and then I sat down.

  ‘Good,’ said Miss Tuckett, blinking, not believing her luck. ‘Now, books out and let’s begin looking at this ancient poem. The first page, in fact the very first word – ‘Attend!’ – is really important. Anyone know why?’

  Suzanne Dartnell’s hand flew up.

  ‘Anyone else?’ Miss Tuckett asked hopefully, and when no-one else volunteered she sighed. ‘Yes, Suzanne?’

  ‘It shows the poet wanted to be listened to, miss, like he was speaking it instead of writing it down. Lots of these old poems were spoken for years before anybody wrote them down.’

  ‘That’s right. Remember what we said about the Dark Ages – about people not writing things down? Beowulf belongs to what we call an oral tradition.’ Miss Tuckett wrote Oral Tradition in big letters up on the whiteboard. ‘So, if people just told the story, why bother to write it down at all? What sort of man, and we think it was a man, would do a thing like that?’

  ‘Anybody who could read and write,’ someone said.

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘A king?’

  ‘Even a king might not be able to write. A king would probably have had a poem like this read to him, as a form of entertainment. Anyone else? What do you think, Aidan?’

  Daniel pressed at the fold in the book we were sharing and pointed to a word.

  ‘An atheling,’ I said.

  ‘And what’s an atheling?’ I could hear the surprise in Miss Tuckett’s voice.

  ‘Someone from a noble house, miss,’ Suzanne Dartnell said.

  ‘Thank you, Suzanne!’

  ‘Someone from a noble house,’ I said.

  ‘Good guess, Aidan. But still not quite right. In fact, it’s thought that the story of Beowulf was written down by a priest, an Anglo-Saxon priest, around a thousand years ago. Lots of people have guessed at the exact date, but nobody knows for sure. Make a note of that, please.’

  Everyone scribbled down this Important Information.

  ‘Let’s read some of it aloud, get a feel for it.’ Miss Tuckett smiled, relaxed her shoulders. ‘We’ll cheat, go to the end, with the dragon. That’s the most exciting passage. Storytellers have always saved the best bits till last, even a thousand years ago.’

  Then we went around the class, reading out sections of the poem.

  A dragon. I didn’t know there was one of those in it. Or a thief, who slips into the dragon’s lair during the dead of night and steals a golden cup. How Beowulf has to kill the dragon but gets killed himself doing it. How afterwards, as a sort of tribute, the rest of the hoard is buried deep in the ground.

  They left the earls’ wealth in the earth’s keeping,

  the gold in the dirt. It dwells there yet,

  of no more use to men than in ages before …

  ‘But of course,’ interrupted Miss Tuckett, ‘gold was very useful then, as indeed it is now. It has always been mankind’s most valuable metal, and we can see from this poem how it was used to show how rich and important you were. It shines like the sun, so it might have seemed almost magical in the middle of a dark winter. And it
never corrodes. You can bury it in the ground and it’ll still be there centuries later.’ She tapped the book in her hand. ‘There are countless examples here of gold casting its spell over men.’

  I glanced at Daniel, feeling at same time the clasp’s soft warm metal in my pocket.

  The thief. What happened to the thief?

  I flicked through the pages ahead but he wasn’t mentioned again.

  He just seemed to vanish.

  Chapter 25

  ‘Who is he, really?’

  ‘I don’t know. Honest. Everything I know about him, you know too.’

  ‘But he’s talked to you, hasn’t he? I mean, before. So you must have some idea …’

  ‘All right then. It’s sort of like he belongs to the past, but somehow he’s got loose and ended up here.’

  ‘That’s not possible. Or – only in the way that we’ve all come from the past.’

  ‘I know. But it’s what I think anyway.’

  We were standing at the school boundary, me and Daniel, right by the blue-and-yellow gates. The sky was darkening and the shadows of homeward bodies teemed under orange streetlamps.

  ‘You’re only saying that because of the clasp,’ Daniel said. ‘Because of what that man told us. But Haxforth could’ve got it anywhere, he could’ve stolen it …’

  ‘You’re right. I reckon that’s probably what he did do.’

  ‘Well, that’s wrong, if he did. It’s just wrong. It’s against the law.’

  I shrugged, started walking. Tried not to think of Annie Fraser-Howe and her fifty-pound note. Daniel kept pace alongside but I didn’t want to debate it. I was guessing he didn’t know what it was like to be hungry, miss meals, go around with a stomach that kept folding in on itself until you thought maybe it’d disappear altogether like a dried-up puddle.

  ‘You are coming to mine – aren’t you?’ he said. ‘Now, I mean? So we can work out what to do? Only I was really hoping he’d be gone by the time Mum gets back from work.’

  ‘You told me she never goes down there.’

  ‘She doesn’t.’

  ‘So what’s the problem? If Haxforth’s asleep like you say, how will she ever know?’

  ‘He might wake up. I made some jam sandwiches and left them down there for him, and when I went back at lunchtime some of them were gone so I knew—’

  I laughed, couldn’t help it. ‘One minute he’s in a coma and the next he’s eating jam sandwiches!’

  ‘She just has this way of finding out things,’ Daniel said, suddenly miserable.

  I looked at him. His face wasn’t much more than an outline under the slagheap sky.

  ‘Course I’m coming back to yours. What else did you think I was going to do?’

  ‘Thanks.’ I could hear the relief in his voice.

  We walked fast through the streets, taking the quickest route to Annandale Avenue.

  ‘What time does your mum get home from work? How long have we got?’ It was a casual question. All I expected was a casual answer.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘She’s a barrister, usually she works out of town. Tonight I think she’s finishing early though. She’s on the warpath. That’s why I don’t want to make her even more angry.’

  ‘Warpath?’ That didn’t sound good.

  ‘She’s got this big case coming up and she’s expecting all these important documents in the post. Only they’ve been lost or something. They haven’t arrived anyway. So she’s going to the sorting office to make a complaint. She’s really angry about it. I think she’s got an appointment with the district manager, somebody important like that.’ Daniel flashed me an embarrassed look. ‘That’s something she’s really good at, my mum – making a fuss.’

  I stopped dead.

  ‘What?’

  ‘She’s making a complaint, about the post. They were meant to be coming by Special Delivery. It’s nothing to do with me.’

  ‘Look,’ I said, ‘I – I just remembered … There’s something else I need to do, something important.’ In the space of about two seconds everything inside my brain’d got jumbled up, was skidding around. I couldn’t get my thoughts in order or find any kind of anchoring point. Daniel stared at me like I’d gone off my head.

  ‘What could be more important than this?’

  ‘I need to – well—’

  ‘But you can’t just leave me with Haxforth …’

  I saw the safe spot then, spied it, made a grab. It was the only thing to do.

  ‘I can get you that post,’ I said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘That post – all that post that’s gone missing, that your mum’s going to complain about – I can get it for you.’

  Daniel’s mouth opened and shut but no sound came out.

  ‘79 Annandale Avenue – that’s you, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, but—’

  ‘Daniel,’ I said, ‘I’m in really deep shit. I can’t explain now but I’ll get that post for you – probably by tonight. Only, stop your mum making that complaint.’

  ‘But she might’ve made it already.’

  ‘Well, call her! Get your phone out and call her and find out and if she hasn’t, then stop her!’

  I must have looked desperate, standing there practically shaking all over, marble-white from fear most likely and shouting crazy like that.

  Daniel didn’t move. ‘But it’s my mum,’ he said. ‘You don’t know what she’s like … What should I say to her?’

  ‘Anything! Anything at all, it doesn’t matter. Say – say one of your neighbours got all your post by mistake. And – I don’t know – it was sitting all this time in their garage and they were on holiday but now they’re back and—’

  ‘But it’s all lies!’

  ‘I know it’s all lies! But I’ll get you that post, so it won’t matter!’

  Still Daniel made no move, no hand towards pocket, no taking out of phone. ‘You hit me,’ he said. ‘You smacked me in the mouth and you made me bleed and you made me give you all that money. Why should I?’

  ‘I know I did. I’m sorry, I’m really sorry. But it’s all connected, the money and why I needed it and the post – it’s all connected.’

  ‘Tell me then.’

  ‘I can’t! Not now! Bloody hell!’

  We stood there looking at each other, breath steaming in the cold and the darkness pressing down.

  I reached into my pocket. ‘Here,’ I said. ‘It’s yours, to keep.’

  I held out the clasp. The coiled hinge and the arrowhead catch. You just knew it was really old. It might even be older than the man at the museum said. He was only guessing, after all. He didn’t know everything there was to know about history even if he pretended he did.

  ‘How do I know you won’t want it back?’

  ‘I won’t. It’s yours, forever. I promise.’

  ‘My dad made a promise like that,’ Daniel said. ‘He told me he wasn’t going to leave, but he still did.’

  ‘I swear then. On my mum’s life.’

  ‘What about Haxforth?’

  ‘One more night?’

  Daniel groaned. ‘It’s a massive risk.’

  ‘Please, please, make that call to your mum.’

  Daniel reached out. He took the clasp, turned it over in his hand, the soft warm gold.

  I turned, walked away. I couldn’t say anything more. I couldn’t make Daniel do anything he didn’t want to. All that was finished. The mail was the only thing that mattered. Haxforth’d come along and distracted me but he was safe now, more or less. I needed to focus on the things that were real and controllable. Everything else, I had to cut it away, bury it deep.

  At the corner I stopped and looked back. Daniel hadn’t moved. But his phone was up by his ear and he was talking into it. By the sodium light of a nearby streetlamp I saw him smile, hold an upraised thumb in my direction.

  I waved back, then my feet were pounding for home. Out of the pounding came a question:

  How many other people w
ere complaining? How many other people were like Daniel’s mum, Really good at making a fuss?

  Chapter 26

  I looked in all the rooms to make sure Dad was out, checked from the far end of the garden that none of the neighbours were watching and then I went to open the door of the shed.

  It was like an explosion.

  Before, the stuff was calf high. I’d been keeping on top of it, or at least that’s what I’d thought. I could get inside and wade around and identify the old bundles from the new, the junk mail from the important-looking stuff. Not now. Now it reached over my thighs, flowed out around my knees. I tried to get it back in but it was like pushing water, impossible.

  How, why, was there suddenly so much more of it?

  All I could think was that maybe Dad had been keeping another stash some place else, some place that wasn’t safe any more, and now he’d panicked and moved all of it into the shed. Perhaps that was his idea of taking action.

  There was still just enough light to see by. Anyone in the terrace who happened to look out of their back windows at that moment was going to see a boy and a shed and a mountain of undelivered post. You couldn’t miss it or mistake it, the whiteness making it almost fluorescent, lit up somehow from the inside.

  I had to act fast. I had to get it out of sight. I ran for the Big Bag, stuffed it full, pelted indoors and up the stairs, dumped the mail in my bedroom. Again and again I did it, five or six times, then I kicked and crammed and shoved and rammed the rest of the mountain back into the shed and somehow got the door shut.

  The door that didn’t even have a lock.

  Up in my bedroom I caught my breath and stirred the mail with my foot like it was some sort of giant cake mix. I climbed over it and sat on my bed and gazed at the condensation on the windowpane.

  Even if I found the items for 79 Annandale Avenue, how was I going to deliver all the rest of it?

  Bloody hell.