Familiar and Haunting Page 8

  “Are you coming, then?” shouted Mr. Crackenthorpe from below.

  “Oh, yes, yes, yes!” gasped Mrs. Crackenthorpe, now up from her chair and waddling toward the bedroom door.

  “Elsie, do you hear me?”

  “Elsie …” said Sim reproachfully. “But you definitely said—”

  From the doorway Mrs. Crackenthorpe spoke hurriedly over her shoulder: “Lying in bed, you can think a lot of things. Inside your head. You can make things happen inside your head. Happenings. Real adventures …” She was gasping for words and for breath.

  From below: “ELSIE!”

  Mrs. Crackenthorpe’s last wheezy whispers reached Sim from just outside his bedroom door: “You shut your eyes, Sim Tolland. You try it. Remember, inside your head.” Then a slow thumping down the stairs, and Mrs. Crackenthorpe was gone.

  Thoughtfully Sim collected the packet of jelly babies from the sheet where Mrs. Crackenthorpe had dropped it. He broke it open and popped a jelly baby into his mouth. But no, he’d lost his taste for jelly babies.

  He spat the baby out onto a saucer by his bedside that already held some grape pips.

  He was still thinking of what Mrs. Crackenthorpe had told him. She had climbed a tree. Well, he was pretty sure he could think of an even better, cooler thing to happen. Inside his head.

  He settled himself as comfortably as possible. Then he shut his eyes.

  What the Neighbors Did

  Mum didn’t like the neighbors, although—as we were the end cottage of the row—we only had one, really: Dirty Dick. Beyond him, the Macys.

  Dick lived by himself; they said there used to be a wife, but she’d run away years ago, so now he lived as he wanted, which Mum said was like a pig in a pigsty. Once I told Mum that I envied him, and she blew me up for it. Anyway, I’d have liked some of the things he had. He had two cars, although not for driving. He kept rabbits in one, and hens roosted in the other. He sold the eggs, which made part of his living. He made the rest from dealing in old junk (and in the village they said that he’d a stocking full of pound notes which he kept under the mattress of his bed). Mostly he went about on foot, with his handcart for the junk, but he also rode a tricycle. The boys used to jeer at him sometimes, and once I asked him why he didn’t ride a bicycle like everyone else. He said he liked a tricycle because you could go as slowly as you wanted, looking at things properly, without ever falling off.

  Mrs. Macy didn’t like Dirty Dick any more than my mum did, but then she disliked everybody, anyway. She didn’t like Mr. Macy. He was retired, and every morning in all weathers Mrs. Macy’d turn him out into the garden and lock the door against him and make him stay there until he’d done as much work as she thought right. She’d put his dinner out to him through the scullery window. She couldn’t bear to have anything alive about the place (you couldn’t count old Macy himself, Dad used to say). That was one of the reasons why she didn’t think much of us, with our dog and cat and Nora’s two lovebirds in a cage. Dirty Dick’s hens and rabbits were even worse, of course.

  Then the affair of the yellow dog made the Macys really hate Dirty Dick. It seems that old Mr. Macy secretly got himself a dog. He never had any money of his own because his wife made him hand it over, every week, so Dad reckoned that he must have begged the dog off someone who’d otherwise have had it destroyed.

  The dog began as a secret, which sounds just about impossible, with Mrs. Macy around. But every day Mr. Macy used to take his dinner and eat it in his toolshed, which opened on the side furthest from the house. That must have been his temptation, but none of us knew he’d fallen into it until one summer evening we heard a most awful screeching from the Macys’ house.

  “That’s old Ma Macy screaming,” said Dad, spreading his bread and butter.

  “Oh, dear!” said Mum, jumping up and then sitting down again. “Poor old Mr. Macy!” But Mum was afraid of Mrs. Macy. “Run upstairs, boy, and see if you can see what’s going on.”

  So I did. I was just in time for the excitement, for as I leaned out of the window, the Macys’ back door flew open. Mr. Macy came out first, with his head down and his arms sort of curved above it, and Mrs. Macy came out close behind him, aiming at his head with a light broom—but aiming quite hard. She was screeching words, although it was difficult to pick out any of them. But some words came again and again, and I began to follow: Mr. Macy had brought hairs with him into the house—short, curly yellowish hairs—and he’d left those hairs all over the upholstery, and they must have come from a cat or a dog or a hamster or I don’t know what, and so on and so on. Whatever the creature was, he’d been keeping it in the toolshed, and turn it out he was going to, this very minute.

  As usual, Mrs. Macy was right about what Mr. Macy was going to do.

  He opened the shed door, and out ambled a dog—a big, yellowy white old dog, looking a bit like a sheep, somehow, and about as quickwitted. As though it didn’t notice what a tantrum Mrs. Macy was in, it blundered gently toward her, and she lifted her broom high, and Mr. Macy covered his eyes, and then Mrs. Macy let out a real scream—a plain shriek—and dropped the broom and shot indoors and slammed the door after her.

  The dog seemed puzzled, naturally, and so was I. It lumbered around toward Mr. Macy, and then I saw its head properly, and that it had the most extraordinary eyes—like headlamps, somehow. I don’t mean as big as headlamps, of course, but with a kind of whitish glare to them. Then I realized that the poor old thing must be blind.

  The dog had raised its nose inquiringly toward Mr. Macy, and Mr. Macy had taken one timid, hopeful step toward the dog, when one of the windows of the house went up and Mrs. Macy leaned out. She’d recovered from her panic, and she gave Mr. Macy his orders. He was to take that disgusting animal and turn it out into the road, where he must have found it in the first place.

  I knew that old Macy would be too dead scared to do anything else but what his wife told him.

  I went down again to where the others were having supper.

  “Well?” said Mum.

  I told them, and I told them what Mrs. Macy was making Mr. Macy do to the blind dog. “And if it’s turned out like that on the road, it’ll be killed by the first car that comes along.”

  There was a pause, when even Nora seemed to be thinking, but I could see from their faces what they were thinking.

  Dad said at last: “That’s bad. But we’ve four people in this little house, and a dog already, and a cat and two birds. There’s no room for anything else.”

  “But it’ll be killed.”

  “No,” said Dad. “Not if you go at once, before any car comes, and take that dog down to the village, to the police station. Tell them it’s a stray.”

  “But what’ll they do with it?”

  Dad looked as though he wished I hadn’t asked that, but he said: “Nothing, I expect. Well, they might hand it over to the Cruelty to Animals people.”

  “And what’ll they do with it?”

  Dad was rattled. “They do what they think best for animals—I should have thought they’d have taught you that at school. For goodness’ sake, boy!”

  Dad wasn’t going to say any more, nor Mum, who’d been listening with her lips pursed up. But everyone knew that the most likely thing was that an old, blind, ownerless dog would be destroyed.

  Still, anything would be better than being run over and killed by a car just as you were sauntering along in the evening sunlight, so I started out of the house after the dog.

  There he was, sauntering along, just as I’d imagined him. No sign of Mr. Macy, of course; he’d have been called back indoors by his wife.

  As I ran to catch up with the dog, I saw Dirty Dick coming home, and nearer the dog than I was. He was pushing his handcart, loaded with the usual bits of wood and other junk. He saw the dog coming and stopped and waited; the dog came on hesitantly toward him.

  “I’m coming for him,” I called.

  “Ah,” said Dirty Dick. “Yours?” He held out his hand toward
the dog—the hand that my mother always said she could only bear to take hold of if the owner had to be pulled from certain death in a quicksand. Anyway, the dog couldn’t see the color of it, and it positively seemed to like the smell; it came on.

  “No,” I said. “Macys were keeping it, but Mrs. Macy turned it out. I’m going to take it down to the police as a stray. What do you think they’ll do with it?”

  Dirty Dick never said much; this time he didn’t answer. He just bent down to get his arm around the dog, and in a second he’d hoisted him up on top of all the stuff in the cart. Then he picked up the handles and started off again.

  So the Macys saw the blind dog come back to the row of cottages in state, as you might say, sitting on top of half a broken lavatory seat on the very pinnacle of Dirty Dick’s latest load of junk.

  Dirty Dick took good care of his animals, and he took good care of this dog he adopted. It always looked well fed and well brushed. Sometimes he’d take it out with him, on the end of a long string; mostly he’d leave it comfortably at home. When it lay out in the back garden, old Mr. Macy used to look at it longingly over the fence. Once or twice I saw him poke his fingers through, toward what had once been his dog. But that had been for only a very short, dark time in the shed, and the old dog never moved toward the fingers. Then: “Macy!” his terrible old wife would call from the house, and he’d have to go.

  Then suddenly we heard that Dirty Dick had been robbed; old Macy came round specially to tell us. “An old sock stuffed with pound notes that he kept up the bedroom chimney. Gone. Hasn’t he told you?”

  “No,” said Mum, “but we don’t have a lot to do with him.” She might have added that we didn’t have a lot to do with the Macys, either; I think this was the first time I’d ever seen one step over our threshold in a neighborly way.

  “You’re thick with him sometimes,” said old Macy, turning on me. “Hasn’t he told you all about it?”

  “Me?” I said. “No.”

  “Mind you, the whole thing’s not to be wondered at,” said the old man. “Front and back doors never locked, and money kept in the house. That’s a terrible temptation to anyone with a weakness that way. A temptation that shouldn’t have been put.”

  “I daresay,” said Mum. “It’s a shame, all the same. His savings.”

  “Perhaps the police’ll be able to get it back for him,” I said. “There’ll be clues.”

  The old man jumped—a nervous sort of jump. “Clues? You think the police will find clues? I never thought of that. No, I did not. But has he gone to the police, anyway? I wonder. That’s what I wonder. That’s what I’m asking you.” He paused, and I realized that he meant me again. “You’re thick with him, boy. Has he gone to the police? That’s what I want to know. …”

  His mouth seemed to have filled with saliva, so that he had to stop to swallow and couldn’t say more. He was in a state, all right.

  At that moment Dad walked in from work and wasn’t best pleased to find that visitor instead of his supper waiting, and Mr. Macy went.

  Dad listened to the story during supper, and across the fence that evening he spoke to Dirty Dick and said he was sorry to hear about the money.

  “Who told you?” asked Dirty Dick.

  Dad said that old Macy had told us. Dirty Dick just nodded; he didn’t seem interested in talking about it anymore. Over that weekend no police came to the row, and you might have thought that old Macy had invented the whole thing, except that Dirty Dick had not contradicted him.

  On Monday I was rushing off to school when I saw Mr. Macy in their front garden, standing just between a big laurel bush and the fence. He looked straight at me and said, “Good morning,” in a kind of whisper. I don’t know which was odder: the whisper or his wishing me good morning. I answered in rather a shout, because I was late and hurrying past. His mouth had opened as though he meant to say more, but then it shut, as though he’d changed his mind. That was all, that morning.

  The next morning he was in just the same spot again and hailed me in the same way, and this time I was early, so I stopped.

  He was looking shiftily about him, as though someone might be spying on us, but at least his wife couldn’t be doing that because the laurel bush was between him and their front windows. There was a tiny pile of yellow froth at one corner of his mouth, as though he’d been chewing his words over in advance. The sight of the froth made me want not to stay, but then the way he looked at me made me feel that I had to. No, it just made me; I had to.

  “Look what’s turned up in our back garden,” he said, in the same whispering voice. And he held up a sock so dirty—partly with soot—and so smelly that it could only have been Dirty Dick’s. It was stuffed full of something—pound notes, in fact. Old Macy’s story of the robbery had been true in every detail.

  I gaped at him.

  “It’s all to go back,” said Mr. Macy. “Back exactly to where it came from.” And then, as though I’d suggested the obvious—that he should hand the sock back to Dirty Dick himself with the same explanation just given to me—“No, no. It must go back as though it had never been—never been taken away.” He couldn’t use the word stolen. “Mustn’t have the police poking around us. Mrs. Macy wouldn’t like it.” His face twitched at his own mention of her; he leaned forward. “You must put it back, boy. Put it back for me, and keep your mouth shut. Go on. Yes.”

  He must have been half out of his mind to think that I should do it, especially as I still didn’t understand why. But as I stared at his twitching face, I suddenly did understand. I mean, that old Macy had taken the sock, out of spite, and then lost his nerve.

  He must have been half out of his mind to think that I would do that for him, and yet I did it. I took the sock and put it inside my jacket and turned back to Dirty Dick’s cottage. I walked boldly up to the front door and knocked, and of course, there was no answer. I knew he was already out with the cart.

  There wasn’t a sign of anyone looking, from either our house or the Macys’. (Mr. Macy had already disappeared.) I tried the door, and it opened, as I knew it would. I stepped inside and closed it behind me.

  I’d never been inside before. The house was dirty, I suppose, and smelled a bit, but not really badly. It smelled of Dirty Dick and hens and rabbits—although it was untrue that he kept either hens or rabbits indoors, as Mrs. Macy said. It smelled of dog, too, of course.

  Opening straight off the living room, where I stood, was the twisty, dark little stairway—exactly as in our cottage next door.

  I went up.

  The first room upstairs was full of junk. A narrow passageway had been kept clear to the second room, which opened off the first one. This was Dirty Dick’s bedroom, with the bed unmade, as it probably was for weeks on end.

  There was the fireplace, too, with a good deal of soot which had recently been brought down from the chimney. You couldn’t miss seeing that; Dirty Dick couldn’t have missed it, at the time. Yet he’d done nothing about his theft. In fact, I realized now that he’d probably said nothing, either. The only person who’d let the cat out of the bag was poor old Macy himself.

  I’d been working this out as I looked at the fireplace, standing quite still. Around me the house was silent. The only sound came from outside, where I could see a hen perched on the bumper of the old car in the back garden, clucking for an egg newly laid. But when she stopped, there came another, tiny sound that terrified me: the click of a front gate opening. Feet were clumping up to the front door. …

  I stuffed the sock up the chimney again, any old how, and was out of that bedroom in seconds, but on the threshold of the junk room I stopped, fixed by the headlamp glare of the old blind dog. He must have been there all the time, lying under a three-legged washstand, on a heap of rags. All the time he would have been watching me, if he’d had his eyesight. He didn’t move.

  Meanwhile the front door had opened, and the footsteps had clumped inside and stopped. There was a long pause, while I stared at the dog, who
stared at me, and down below Dirty Dick listened and waited; he must have heard my movement just before.

  At last: “Well,” he called, “why don’t you come down?”

  There was nothing else to do but go. Down that dark, twisty stair, knowing that Dirty Dick was waiting for me at the bottom. He was a big man, and strong. He heaved his junk about like nobody’s business.

  But when I got down, he wasn’t by the foot of the stairs; he was standing by the open door, looking out, with his back to me. He hadn’t been surprised to hear someone upstairs in his house, uninvited, but when he turned around from the doorway, I could see that he hadn’t expected to see me. He’d expected someone else—old Macy, I suppose.

  I wanted to explain that I’d only put the sock back—there was soot all over my hands, plain to be seen, of course—and that I’d had nothing to do with taking it in the first place. But he’d drawn his thick brows together as he looked at me, and he jerked his head toward the open door. I was frightened, and I went past him without saying anything. I was late for school now, anyway, and I ran.

  I didn’t see Dirty Dick again.

  Later that morning Mum chose to give him a talking to, over the back fence, about locking his doors against pilferers in future. She says he didn’t say he would, he didn’t say he wouldn’t, and he didn’t say anything about anything having been stolen, or returned.

  Soon after that, Mum saw him go out with the handcart with all his rabbits in a hutch, and he came back later without them. He did the same with his hens. We heard later that he’d given them away in the village; he hadn’t even bothered to try to sell them.

  Then he went around to Mum, wheeling the tricycle. He said he’d decided not to use it anymore, and I could have it. He didn’t leave any message for me.

  Later still, Mum saw him set off for the third time that day with his handcart, not piled very high even, but with the old dog sitting on top. And that was the last that anyone saw of him.