Alice’s Dérives in Devonshire

Chapter Two ~ Just Us Now

Chapter Two ~ Just Us Now

Be wary of playing games of hide and seek, for there is always the risk that your cover will not get blown, that you will be forever left in hiding. Too effective a camouflage makes for a sad and solitary life.

(‘Making Room for Manoeuvre; or Ways of Operating along the Margins’ in Manual For Marginal Places, Emma Cocker)

Mum knew exactly the right things to do. The police lady told us so. Dad hadn’t come back yet, but it was nice to see people in uniforms in the front room again.

After Dad disappeared we carried on the same as before, but everything was twice as big and twice as fast. Mum did everything Dad used to do: read us stories at bedtime, watch scary programmes with us, help us paint without thinking too much, and cook meals that were bad for us. She got twice as angry, twice as worried, twice as forgetful.

I heard her tell her friends it was “for them”. She had to be “strong for them”. Was she secretly doing exercises? I wasn’t sure if ‘them’ was us, me and my little brother, or if there was another ‘them’ – if Dad had been taken away by ‘them’, or tricked by ‘them’, or had gone off to be with ‘them’ instead of ‘us’. And whether if ‘we’ could find ‘them’ then ‘we’ could get Dad back. But where are ‘them’?

I told my little brother about ‘them’ and that if he ever told anyone else that I had, then ‘them’ would come and get him in his bed and Dad would never come back. I meant to make him cry a bit, but he just went quiet and his eyes got bigger. It was a game, like ‘rockets’, for him. He wanted to know what happened next in the story. So I told him. “I think Dad must have known about ‘them’ and that’s what he was reading about and that’s why he went to the loft. But ‘them’ still got him. ‘Them’ must have found out he was writing notes about ‘them’. We need to get in his loft for clues.”

We looked up. The trapdoor was still open, but the ladder was up. A policeman had been up there. He’d said there was nothing “immediately obvious” which I think was code.

We could see the blue ceiling.

“‘Them’ are something to do with space,” I said.

“Rockets?” hoped Ben again.

“The other space. That people feel. That’s where Dad is.”

“How do you get there?”

“That’s why we have to get up the ladder. Because I think Dad found out and wrote it down.”

“What did Dad do before he was a fireman, Mum?”

“Goodness me, what made you think of that?”

I couldn’t tell her the truth.

“Well, your Dad was … is very clever, and he was always reading and he made these things, like machines…”

“Rockets?”

“No. He didn’t like that sort of… science fiction thing. He liked strange, witty things…”

“Like machines?”

“Well, they were more art than machines – dancing things, made from pumps, hydraulics… er…”

“What’s that?”

“I didn’t really understand it, to tell you the truth. I suppose they were driven by some kind of liquid. Some of them you plugged in and they walked.”

“What were they?”

“O, a funny mixture of things. Some of them were like mechanical people. Just their legs. They were for galleries and exhibitions. Silly, ridiculous, wonderful things. Chorus lines. Your Dad wanted to change this world, but all the things he knew how to do, do really well, didn’t change anything… He could make people laugh, he could make them amazed, he could even make beautiful things when he wasn’t thinking too much, but he couldn’t save anything. Least of all his money.”

“What was he, Mum?”

She laughed.

“Before he was a firefighter? He was a sculptor.”

“What’s that?”

“You know what a sculptor is. The things in the High Street – that family in stone that you touch, the thing you climb on about the war. Those were made by sculptors.”

“Dad made those?”

“No. He worked with different materials… but Dad stopped making his sculptures a long time ago. Shortly after we got together. It wasn’t his kind of world, really. You know what Nanna and Gramps are like, they’re not arty people, are they? They like the telly and the bowls club – well, that’s how your Dad grew up, with telly and football and looking at steam trains and aeroplanes and things… that’s what he’s like. So even though your father was very good at making the strange machines, and he did love it, he always felt it had led him into a world that wasn’t for him, it was really for ‘them’ rather than people like him, and he’d never properly be part of ‘their world’.” (When she said ‘them’ and ‘their world’ she put on Dad’s rumbly voice.) “Dad liked football and thrillers on the telly and going off on his own. He wasn’t very good at mixing with the other artists. He didn’t like the gallery system. So, he put all his art into a big pile and burned it.”

“Were you there?”

“O, yes. We all nearly died of the fumes!” She laughed. “That’s how your Dad became a fireman. We burned the sculptures on Gramps’s allotment and Gramps got into terrible trouble. All the black smoke blew onto someone’s washing and then the fire brigade arrived and we all had to run for it! Except for your Dad. He said: ‘I’m going to be a fireman’. We all laughed at him, because it was like a little boy saying he wanted to be a train driver. But he did, didn’t he? He was so happy. He could save the world.”

“Was Dad a hero, Mum?”

“He loved trying to be one.”

“Has he gone away because he can’t be a fireman anymore?”

Mum didn’t answer that for ages. Then she nodded and the nod made her cry. It tipped out the tears. They weren’t pretend. I think she really, really believed it. But I knew she was wrong and that the real, real, real reason was up in Dad’s loft and it was something about ‘them’ and ‘their world’ and ‘space’ and ‘connections’ and the ‘something system’.

First we tried with teddy bears.

Dad had once got out of his cot when he was a baby by piling up his teddy bears. Great Nanna was looking after him in the shop. She’d heard a big thump and then the bell in the front go, but when she looked there was no customer so she went back to her dinner. Dad was crawling along in his rompers next to the big road when the lady from the sweet shop saw him.

We piled the bears up under the loft, but even with two fairies, a shark and a dinosaur we didn’t have enough.

If only we could get the metal ladder past Mum. No chance. What game could we say we needed it for? Picnic, Battle, House, Den? Our plan had to fit with one. Den Mountain, then…

We put all my little brother’s clothes drawers in a pile on the landing and leaned our mattresses against them. When Mum came up to dust we said they were the roof of our cabin.

“Big roof,” she said. But she didn’t stop us.

Inside the den, we planned until Mum went downstairs to warm up the dinner. Then we started. My little brother sat against the bottom of the mattresses to keep them from sliding and I began the climb. I could get my toes into the bits of the mattress where the buttons were and if I held my arms out wide I could hold on to the edges where there was a stringy ridge. Once I’d got my toes in the first button dip I pulled with my fingers, so I could bring my other foot up to the second button dip. Then I searched around for a grip inside it with my toes. I couldn’t see them, but they felt like desperate little fishes panicking in a jar. Not like they were mine. At last the toes settled down, gathered round the button. I pulled myself up with my fingers again and all of me slid up the mattress. I could feel the springs pinging from my heart beats, even though I don’t think real mattresses have springs anymore. I was scared Mum would hear the ‘boing, boing, boing’. When I got my toes into the next button dip, I couldn’t push off from the carpet any more. I wanted Mum’s arms. I weighed like a schoolbag full of books and water bottles.

My little brother was trying to reach the arm of a plastic pirate that he’d noticed in the fluffy bit between the carpet and the wall.

I pulled as hard as I could and my toes nibbled madly round the next button dip. The loft ladder hung a little down from the trapdoor and I would get on to it with one more pull and toehold. I felt my toes grip on properly and I pulled again. The top mattress suddenly bent in the middle, pinging my brother in a somersault down the landing carpet. He veered off and rattled against the banisters. Under me everything went soft and I was dropping, not sliding, but coming down fast, then bump, I hit the point where the first mattress was still bent over the drawers and all my breath came out in one go. But it is a thick mattress and the bump was soft as well as sudden. I bounced a bit more and then sat down, hard on the carpet.

My brother was laughing, and I was gasping.

“Are you all right, you two?”

I couldn’t speak, but my little brother wheezed that we were “only playing”.

“Well, be careful up there.”

I had to lie still for a while and try not to breathe too hard. I lay on my back and looked through the hole above into the sky that I couldn’t get to.

Of course Ben had, famously, been up the ladder before. It was one of our Family Stories and in the car we’d get Mum to tell it to us again and again.

“I had to stay very calm,” she would say: “Hello, little lad!” Because she didn’t want to scare my brother by her being scared. “Come on in, little chappie in the nappy!” Which was strange, because in the story he wasn’t wearing anything, he was just a little chappie in the nuddy climbing a huge ladder to the sky.

My little brother pretended he remembered what the loft was like, but I knew he made it up: “it’s bigger on the inside than the outside” – he stole that from Doctor Who – “with controls and a fridge and lots of beer and all our Christmas presents.” The last two bits were probably true, but the rest he was guessing.

Mum was always telling Dad off about drinking too much wine and beer and Dad was always telling Mum off for using his loft as “a rubbish dump”.

We put the two mattresses up against the drawers again. My little brother took off his socks and I sat against the bottom of the mattresses. He climbed on my leg, which hurt, and then on my shoulders, which tickled. And he was suddenly on the ladder and into the loft, his little blond head shining against the paint sky.

He whispered: “what do you want me to do?”

“What are you two doing?” Mum shouted up.

“Dens!”

I heard the clink and scrape of plates.

I whispered: “What can you see? What’s it like? Be quick!”

Ben disappeared and then his frizzy head was back in the picture.

“There’s some windows. And there is millions of books and things.”

“What things?”

“There is things from outside – rocks and dirty things…”

“What kind of dirty?”

“Dirty soil and earth. Things from the street that dogs have weed on. And people… there are people…”

“Up there?”

“Little people, plastic people and metal people from other countries. And a write-tighter.”

Probably the keyboard of Dad’s computer. My little brother disappeared and when his head next appeared he was holding a thing next to it – it was made of a dirty gold and it was a small fat person with an elephant’s head. I could see a piece of white paper on the bottom with a price on it.

“Like that.”

He and the elephant headed person disappeared. I knew what it was. When Ben appeared again he had a piece of road. It was almost too big for him to hold. I could tell it was from a road because it had a part of a yellow line on it.

“It’s got sea things on it.”

I could just see by bending my neck, because I was looking at everything upside down, that they were barnacles.

“I think Dad’s been out before, secretly – see if there are any messages or maps”, I bossed my brother.

“What are you two whispering about up there?”

Very quietly: “Anything that might say where Dad is…”

Out of the hole in the blue sky one of Dad’s notebooks dropped down.

“What are you two doing!!!!”

Mum’s face was right next to mine! It was angry and staring at me through the banisters! Now we would never find Dad!

“Where’s Benjamin?”

Ben appeared in the sky and Mum screamed. She started to run up the stairs.

I only had enough time to slide Dad’s notebook under the mattresses because Mum slipped on the carpet by the bathroom. She made my little brother jump off the ladder into her arms and told us we were NEVER to do such a dangerous and stupid thing again and made us look over the edge of the banisters so we could see how far it was from the blue sky in the loft all the way down to the bottom of the stairs in the hall. I’d only noticed the different bits of those distances before then. I hadn’t ever connected them up. And even though I wasn’t on the mattress any more, trying to get my toes to stop slipping round the buttons, I was as scared as if I was, because I suddenly saw the empty space for the first time and that its different bits were all parts of some massive thing and I was tiny on it and wriggling to hold on.

“It doesn’t mind,” said Ben.

“It doesn’t matter,” Mum corrected. “And yes it does.” Mum took away one of the mattresses so that we couldn’t get to the ladder.

“Stick to dens, please, you two – little monkeys! Come on, Alice, usually so sensible.”

Ben didn’t want to play dens. He went downstairs to watch an old ‘Doctor Who’ video of Dad’s.

I always thought Mum and Dad would split up. She had brand new dvds with cellophane on and he had old videos.

I pushed the mattress a little higher on the drawers to make more room in the den. That let more light in from the blue above. Then I crawled in, slowly pulled Dad’s notebook from beneath the corner of the remaining mattress, carefully so it did not rip. And I started to read.