Daisy’s Notes- Wednesday, 20^th of March, 2019

Aunt Coralie was not kidding about the ivy.  Most of the house looks as if it’s being eaten by a hedge.  I’d say that Elodie Healy should hire a decent gardener, but, honestly, it looks like the ivy’s the only thing holding the place together.

I was pretty shocked when Elodie agreed to speak to me, but Gran wasn’t.  “Any excuse to talk about herself,” she said.  I asked her if she wanted to come with me, and she said no.  So did Mum and Coralie.  So did my cousins, though in their case it was less because they’d vowed never to go anywhere near THAT WOMAN again, and more because they didn’t want to spend their days off driving to the other side of the country to talk to a crazy old lady they didn’t know.  If Uncle Matt hadn’t agreed to come along, I’d have had to decide between cancelling the whole thing and agreeing to be alone in an old, creepy house with somebody who terrifies most of my extended family.

Honestly, after reading Coralie’s last couple of letters, I think she terrifies me as well.  Nausea, dizziness and headaches are consistent with, say, the flu, but you know what else they’re consistent with?  Carbon monoxide poisoning.  And, given what we know about Elodie Healy, I wouldn’t put it past her.

Apparently Elodie’s famously cagey about her real age, but from what I can gather, she’s probably about 86.  In some ways, she looks a lot younger- dyed blonde hair, perfect makeup, plus I suspect she had a facelift or two back in the day.  But… you know when you find an insect, and you’re not sure if it’s still alive, so you tap its shiny shell with your fingertip, and it crumples to bits because everything underneath’s already rotted away?  Something about her made me think of that.  Of course, it could be that that simile just popped into my head because there are so many ACTUAL dead insects in her house.  Every surface I saw in there had a bunch of little specks on it that I didn’t really want to think about.  The whole house looked as if it had been uninhabited for about two hundred years.  Here and there, you could see traces of that splendid architecture Coralie was always banging on about, but most of it was under about six inches of dust.

Elodie’s not easy to pin down to any particular subject.  In the first half hour that me and Uncle Matt were there, she managed to talk about her artistic talents (varied and plentiful), her thoughts on iPhones (negative), her view of the modern world (cold, aloof and petty), and her children (still not speaking to her.)  Then, it was as if she suddenly remembered who we were, because she abruptly changed the subject so she could launch into a tirade about how terrible Gran was when she worked for her.  “My husband and I took Lorna in and nurtured her gift.  Could anyone else in her life say that?  I doubt it!”  She waved her hands about to celebrate scoring a point.  “Maybe if we’d got her two or three years earlier, it would have been different, who knows?  But by the time we met her it was already too late.  She’d got used to grabbing for herself and never considering her duty to the theatre itself.  All three of them were like that, really- spitting on their ancestors’ gifts to them, the future generation they longed to know would succeed and thrive.  If only they’d known!”

Matt cut in.  He’d end up regretting it.  “When you say ‘all three of them’…”

“Her and those boys,” said Elodie, “Her paramours.”  Her lip curled.  “It was shameful, the way those three behaved.  You’d have thought they were animals.  It didn’t matter which combination of the three of them, as long as there was a hole and something to put in it.”

I think she was trying to pick a fight, but I didn’t really want one.  Matt might have, but he’d gone quiet and ill-looking.  I didn’t blame him- if Gran had a lot of threesomes in the Sixties, then I’m happy for her, but I didn’t want to hear about it from Elodie Healy.  And in Matt’s case, these were his PARENTS we were talking about.  Anyway, I decided to steer the conversation elsewhere.  “That’s why Coralie came to yours in 1981, right?  Because she thought her parents’ friend Adam might have been her real dad?”

“Oh, no doubt about that,” said Elodie, smiling snake-ishly, “Let me let you in on a secret- I might have played along, but I knew who Coralie was the moment she opened her mouth.  It was as if I had Lorna Lazenby and Adam Summers in my hallway all over again.”  She sighed.  “Passing off another man’s child as her husband’s.  Like mother, like daughter, I suppose.”

I frowned.  “Coralie’s kids are…”

“NOT Coralie’s children!”  Elodie snorted.  “My God, I wonder what goes through the minds of…  LORNA’S mother.  SHE had another man’s child.”

I thought of that letter I’d found in the attic, the one Gran had written to her mum.  I don’t know if the Len Healy I met is the same one you did, but…

“Yes, my husband was Lorna’s father.  That’s why she sought us out in the first place.”  She let out a laugh that sounded more like a bark.  “I suppose that made me the wicked stepmother.”

I glanced at Matt.  He shrugged, as if to say, I guess that makes sense.

“I was married to your great-grandfather, Daisy,” Elodie added, as if prompting me to be more shocked.  As if she’d expected me to fall to my knees and wail, “You mean my great-grandad wasn’t some guy I never met because he died before I was born, but actually a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT guy I never met because he died before I was born???  Say it isn’t so!”

Instead of that, I asked her about Coralie again.  Luckily, this time she remembered she hated her as well, and started talking.  “I trusted the Daniels girls,” she said, “I wanted to show them something truly special.  And how did they repay me?  By invading my home under false pretences and lying as easily as they breathed.  She didn’t care about the school at all. She just saw it as a means to an end.”  She put her hand on her heart.  “To me, that was the greatest insult of all.”

“But you didn’t tell her you knew who she was?”

“And she completely believed she had me fooled!” Elodie crowed, “Can you believe it?  How people take each other for granted?”

Which totally justifies poisoning someone, obviously. It was around then that I started looking around to check that I had a clear route to the exit if I needed it.  “So… did you have a plan?”

“A plan?”

“Say, when you locked her in her room at the end?”

Elodie went silent for a moment, and I honestly expected her to try and deny it.  She didn’t, though.  “That school was my dream.  Do you understand? And we were up against powerful forces.”

“Right,” I said, “So you locked her in because…?”

“I wanted to teach her a lesson.”  She made a face.  “I’d suffered long enough.  It was her turn now.”

I glanced over at Uncle Matt, to check that he wasn’t about to scream at her and walk out.  I mean, it would have been understandable if he had, but if he left I’d have been stranded here.

“She wasn’t in any danger,” Elodie added, “I planned to unlock the door before it came to that.”  As if she was an expert on how much carbon monoxide will and won’t kill you.  “I planned to write to the sister and tell her she could pick her up from the local hospital.”  She let out another bark-laugh.  “Poison in her veins.  Given what she and her mother put me through, I found that quite fitting.”

I could actually FEEL my skin crawl.  I reached out and grabbed Matt’s hand.

“I couldn’t let the insult to the school stand.  It was the one thing keeping me above the drudgery of everyday life.  I saw it as an oasis, a utopia.”  She smiled sweetly.  “Ever been through that kind of dream before?”

I swallowed.  My throat had gone dry.  “But then when you unlocked the door…”

Elodie’s eyes went wide with remembered disappointment.  “She was gone,” she said quietly, “I never worked out how she escaped.”

And that’s about what I assumed.  Coralie says she remembers waking up on Friday morning to find that her bedroom door was locked, and pounding on it for about an hour before she finally managed to break the lock and get it open.  She says she rushed through the door and found herself in the upstairs hallway of her house in Brighton.  When she looked back at the room she’d just left, it had completely vanished.

Mum, Gran and Matt all corroborate her story- according to them, Coralie just turned up in the house, and none of them could remember letting her in.  You’d have thought they’d have told me this story a million times (at the very least, it’s the kind of thing Coralie could use as a talking point anytime she liked), but I only found out about it two years ago, just after what happened with Keiran.  Before that, I probably wouldn’t have believed them.

Now, though…

The End

(One more set of papers to go.)

Monday, 29^th of July, 1981

 Dear Marianne,

This morning, about halfway through our first “cultural appreciation” of the day, Elodie was called out of the room by an assistant who said there was a telephone call for her.  To be perfectly honest, I was relieved to see her go- I had a bad stomach ache this morning, and I appreciated the chance to rest for a moment instead of going over scripts and trying to think of new ways to flatter my teacher.

Well, “a moment” turned into nearly an hour.  I’m a little embarrassed to admit it, but I’d fallen asleep in my chair as the other girls talked.  One of them had to shake me awake and tell me that Elodie had summoned us all to the ballroom. 

The ballroom is the most beautiful place in the whole house, all decked out in royal purple and gold, with a ceiling that takes up a whole extra storey by itself.  It made the perfect setting for Elodie to scream herself hoarse.  It seems her “detractors” are causing problems again, and she has decided that it’s all our fault. 

Spoiled, she called us.  Ungrateful.  Not willing to work for the things she generously gives us.  “Do any of you have it in you to defend me to my detractors? No!  You hide behind an excuse of shyness, but really, you’re all cowards!” 

Maybe we are cowards, Marianne, because not one of us had the nerve to point out that we have no idea who her detractors are, let alone how we might defend her from them. 

She continued.  “You sit here without a care in the world, and outside of these walls, the whole world is falling apart!  Nuclear weapons! Racism!  Twelve-year-old girls losing their virginity to their brothers! If you’re happy with the way the world is, then fine!  Stay silent!  But if not, GET INTO THE HABIT OF DEFENDING ME!”  And with that, she stormed out of the room.  We didn’t see her again for the rest of the day. 

Nobody knows for sure who that telephone call was from.  “Her lawyer,” said one girl; “her accountant” said another.  I would be interested to know, but, in my heart, I know that it probably doesn’t matter.  To Elodie, it all comes to the same thing- her detractors, her detractors, her detractors. 

Yours,Coralie

 *

Tuesday, 30^th of July, 1981

Dear Coralie, 

You need to buy a train ticket and come back now.  Elodie Healy is completely nuts, and whatever you find out from her, it’s not worth it.  (If what you find out is even true, because, again, ELODIE IS NUTS.) 

In fact, do you know what?  I’m taking back my promise from last week.  If you’re not back by Friday, I’m telling Mum everything, and I don’t even care if I get into trouble as well. 

Don’t think for a minute that I’m bluffing.  COME HOME. 

Yours,

Marianne

 

*

Thursday, 1^st of August, 1981

Dear Marianne,  

I had hoped that the stomach ache would go away after a little rest, but if anything, it’s worse now.  I feel as if I might throw up at any second.  Not only that, but it only seems to take the slightest activity to make me completely out of breath.  I feel like one of those fragile, fainting Gothic heroines we always read about- I’m certainly in the right place for it. 

Elodie is still angry.  No matter what we say to her, it’s never good enough.  Yesterday, she had a long, poisonous lecture in stock for me specifically, when I had no comment to give on a particular line in the day’s text.  “In a whole week of giving my best to you,” she told me, “I have seen no results.  Come on- think for a change!  Respond for a change!”  (She slapped the table with her hand as she spoke.)  “I can’t do it for you!” 

I tried to reply- I tried to say anything– but the room began to swim before my eyes, and I had to concentrate on getting my breath back.  When I could finally focus, I saw that Elodie was giving me a look of the purest disgust.  You would have thought that I had spat in her face. 

“There really isn’t a whole lot I can do for you at this point,” she told me, and then she went on to the next student. 

Yours,

Coralie

(To Be Concluded)

Monday 22^nd of July, 1981

Dear Marianne,

It’s a strange, strange school that I’ve ended up in.  I look back at all the times I complained about Mr Sparrow’s boring Maths lessons, and I can hardly believe how lucky I was.  Next to Elodie Healy, Mr Sparrow is Socrates in the Parthenon.

The start of every day is the same.  Elodie hands around copies of a script, and asks us to read a particular scene and share our “deeper thoughts” on the author’s intent.  Shall I share some of the titles of these plays?  The Shadows of the Morning, by Elodie Healy.  One Thousand Tears, by Elodie Healy.  Heart’s True Treasure, by Elodie Healy.  Laughing at Midnight, by Leonard Healy (edited by his wife, Elodie).

I’m afraid that when I questioned this today, Elodie flew into a rage.  I thought the light fixtures would explode with the strength of it!  “I’m sharing scripts with you that have never been seen by anyone before,” she told me through gritted teeth, “You should be thankful.  I have always done my best to show gratitude when I’m given a gift.”

Like a fool, I persisted.  “But we’re paying to be taught by you.  If you pay for something, then it isn’t a gift.”

This time I was surprised that the whole room didn’t burst into flames.  For half an hour, Elodie listed my faults with increasing speed, while the other students hid behind their scripts.  I don’t appreciate what is given to me.  I watch too much television, and it has made me too apathetic to respond to art.  I don’t treat Elodie like a human being.  I don’t act like a human being.  I am wasting air just breathing in her classroom.

I was confined to my bedroom for the remainder of the day.  Should I have stayed quiet?  Should I have flattered her like she seemed to want?  Maybe I should have.  I don’t stand much chance of finding out who my father is if Elodie won’t even talk to me.

I will write again tomorrow.  Hopefully I’ll be back in Elodie’s good books by then.

Yours,

Coralie

*

Tuesday 23^rd of July, 1981

Dear Marianne,

This morning, I was summoned to Elodie’s office to apologise.  Her office looks less like a place of business and more like a glamorous drawing-room, full of full-length mirrors, velvet sofas and shelves of expensive ornaments.  I gave her my apology gladly, of course- I still don’t see anything wrong with what I said yesterday, but there is a great deal I want to know about our mother’s past, and Elodie is the only one who can tell me.

“I’m prepared to forgive you this time,” she told me, “But let last night be a warning.  I need an engaged group of students at this school, Nora, not people who disrupt the discussion with their own cynicism.”

I wasn’t sure that what I had shown was cynicism, but I nodded and agreed.

A sad look came into her eyes.  It was as if she was looking at memories instead of what was in front of her.  “I want to tell you a story,” she said, “It’s about my daughter, Alicia.”

“I didn’t know you had a daughter,” I said.

She smiled sadly.  “You look just like her.”

Elodie told me that Alicia was beautiful, talented and clever, and that she and her husband had doted on her from the day she was born.  “She had long blonde hair just like yours, and when the sun shone on it, it looked as though she had a halo,” said Elodie.

I was all prepared for her to tell me that Alicia had died, but no.  According to Elodie, she and her husband spent every penny they had to end her to an expensive music school in Switzerland, and that was where she fell into the hands of “our detractors.”  Elodie didn’t go into detail about who, exactly these detractors were, but she did say that they poisoned Alicia’s mind against her parents, and she hasn’t heard from her since.  It was so strange to see such a rich, beautiful woman practically crumble to nothing with grief.

The upshot seems to be that I’m forgiven, but this whole incident just raises more and more questions.  If I look like Elodie’s daughter, then did our mother look like her as well?  Did the two of them meet at any point?  Could our mother even have been one of those terrible “detractors” who turned her daughter against her?  Could that be why she always dropped such terrible hints about her in her letters to us?

It’s getting dark outside.  This school seems like a darker place by the day

Yours,

Coralie

*

Thursday 25^th of July, 1981

Dear Coralie,

Guess what?  I’ve seen a photo of Elodie Healy’s daughter.  I was pretty sure I remembered one of Mum’s old theatre programmes having a picture of the entire Healy family (next to a note about how they’d built the whole company up with their own fair hands).  So I spent yesterday afternoon looking through the attic, and, hey presto, there it was.

Guess what else?  Alicia Healy looks nothing like you.  For one thing, her hair’s brown.  She’s little and chubby and covered in freckles.  Also, the photo’s from 1963, and she looks about eight.  Mum would have been eighteen by then, so I doubt they had many heart-to-heart talks.

I don’t know why Elodie made up a story about her daughter being blonde and having a halo.  I also don’t know why she forgot she had a son as well.  (His name’s Sebastian.  Also not blond.)

The school feels like a darker place every day, you say?  Then do the smart thing and come home.

Yours,

Marianne

 

(To Be Continued)

Being the second of three planned stories designed to finally finish off “The Lazenby Family Papers.”  The rest of this story is text-based, but I threw in a few scans to start off with, for old times’ sake.

(To Be Continued)

 

(This is part of “The Lazenby Family Papers,” two years late.  And since it’s been a while, I’ll repost two relevant pages, for context: )

On the day the Farrow family visited the Police Open Day, Lee was seven and his sister Polly was four.  It was almost ten years since their uncle, Johnny Farrow, disappeared into Haven Valley Stream.

If you drove for too long, like Grandpa was doing now, it got dark and the stars started shining in the sky.  And then if you didn’t watch the road under your wheels, it started to curve up, and soon you were driving up to the stars, right up in the Milky Way.  What was there to do up there?  Nothing much.  Look at galaxies, mostly.  Trail around the swirls and dots until you got bored.  Nothing much up there in space.  People kept going there, but Polly didn’t know why.

Polly pressed her nose into Spike’s fur.  Spike smelled the same, no matter what had happened or whether he’d been washed that day, and it always made her feel better.  Even if everything outside turned into blackness and stars.

It wasn’t a school day, but Grandma and Grandpa had still woken Lee up early.  They’d rushed him through his breakfast (no time for cream on his Coco Pops his morning), got him dressed in double-quick time, stuffed him in the car and zoomed down the motorway.

“Where are we going?” Lee asked.

Grandma turned round in her seat just so she could give him an angry look.  “Lee, for goodness’ sake, I’ve told you a thousand times!  We’re going to the Police Open Day!”

It was probably true about telling him a thousand times, but he still had no idea what he was going to find when he got there.  “What is a Police Open Day?”

Grandma made a noise and turned back around to look at Grandpa.  Lee looked back at his book.  It was called “The Happy Prince,” and it was about a statue that had come to life and made friends with a bird.  Next to him, his sister was playing with her cuddly hedgehog toy, pressing it up to her face as if she was trying to eat it.  Lee used to put his toys in his mouth all the time, but he didn’t do that anymore.

Grandma was talking to Grandpa.  She wasn’t whispering.  She probably thought she was, but Lee could hear her from all the way in the back.  “Remember last year?  They told us they’d come right up until the last minute, and then they backed out.”

“I remember,” said Grandpa, not taking his eyes off the road.

“Other commitments, they said.  Brett knew how important it was to us.  But he had to listen to That Woman, didn’t he?”

Whenever Grandma said “That Woman,” she meant Lee and Polly’s mum, who’d moved away last Easter.  Brett was their dad, who’d sent them to live with Grandma and Grandpa because he Couldn’t Cope.  Grandma got upset and not-whispery whenever she talked about them, but at least she could still say Dad’s name.

“And now look at them,” sighed Grandma, “No idea why this is so important to us.”

Lee carried on reading his story.  At the end, the statue and the bird both died (the statue had already died once before, but this time it actually counted) and went up to Heaven, where God said that the bird would sing hymns to him forever.  Lee wondered if that was all you did in Heaven.  Wouldn’t your voice get tired?

Grandma turned back to them.  “We’re going to the Police Open Day because your grandpa’s best friend used to be a policeman, and he’s giving a speech.  We go there every year, just to say hello to him.”

“OK,” said Lee, “How long do we have to stay there?”

Grandma made a face.  “You are the rudest person I know,” she hissed, and turned back around to not-whisper to Grandpa instead. Lee looked back at his book.  The next story was about a giant.

There was a map on the side of the fence.  Polly had seen it before, on one of the morning programmes Mum had always watched, glowing with warm yellow light.  It was Great Britain- Scotland at the top, Wales at the side (Polly had always wondered how all the whales had got there, if there were so many that the whole country was named after them), and England in between.  It looked like a person with wild hair and stubby arms, looking at a little Scottie dog (even though that bit was Ireland, not Scotland).  It looked a bit strange, and Polly wasn’t sure if she trusted it.  They said that was where she lived, but that wasn’t what it looked like from here.  But from here, it looked too big to fit on the side of a fence, so maybe that made a difference.

Grandma pulled at her arm, and Polly followed.  She kept her eye on the map until it got too small and disappeared behind her.  Maybe if she kept looking at it, she’d see what she was supposed to, and work out how it looked like home.

It seemed like they were stuck in the queue for the tickets forever, but then they got into the big field where all the tents and displays were, and Lee wanted to run around and see everything.  There was music coming from somewhere, and he could smell fast food on the air (not that there was much chance of him getting that- Grandma never let them.)  There were shops where they sold little plastic toys, and stalls where you could throw balls at targets and win prizes, and people everywhere, looking happy and exploring.  Polly looked around with big, bulging eyes, the hedgehog still held up to her face.

Polly had never had an ice cream like this before, a twin ice cream, red and fruity but with two sticks coming out of it.  She had a toy at home, Garfield driving a special kind of ice cream van that was on a bike, and he sold ice creams just like this one. You could see pictures of it on the side of the box.  Spike looked at it hopefully, but if he had any it would go all over his fur and make him red and sticky and weird-smelling.  Polly was going to eat it all herself.

A strange, red, cartoon ice cream come to life.  That meant that anything could come to life here.  This was a magical place.

Grandma and Grandpa walked fast.  “He’ll be by the dog training tent,” said Grandpa, pointing at the other end of the field.

“You said that wasn’t ‘til later,” said Grandma, pulling Polly along like a wheelie-bag.

“It isn’t, but that’s where he’s going to be.”

“Well, that’s what you said last year, and look what happened.”

Just then, Lee saw the most wonderful thing.  It was big, shaped like a double-decker bus with nets on the windows, and it was full of children.  Lee couldn’t tell whether it was a ball pool or a bouncy castle (or both), but it looked amazing.

“I just want to be able to eat this time.”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Dorothy!”

It was so big, it seemed to have enough room for every child in the world.  He could hear the screams and the laughter coming across the field, all the other kids enjoying it.  He could be there in seconds, among the big cartoon cardboard cut-outs and the weird rubbery smell.

Suddenly, Grandma stopped in her tracks.  “Lee, where’s your sister?”

Lee hadn’t even thought about Polly since he’d caught sight of the big double-decker bus.  He looked around, and saw nothing but a crowd of adults, all of them two or three times taller than Polly.  She could have been hiding behind any of them.  She could have gone anywhere.

Grandma could see by the look on his face that he couldn’t find her.  “Lee, you were supposed to be looking out for her!” she snapped.

“I’m sorry!  I was just looking at that big bus over there!”

Grandpa shook his head.  “Brilliant.  That’s all we need.”

“Well, go and look for her, then!” Grandma told him, pointing at the crowd.  Lee didn’t know where Grandpa was supposed to start looking.  It went on for miles and miles.

Grandpa threw up his hands and went off in a random direction.  Grandma pulled on Lee’s shoulder, and they went on walking.

The colours were bright, like you got in cartoons, brighter than they were supposed to be in real life.  There were people crowding round and throwing balls to win cuddly toys.  Polly thought Spike might want to see the other toys, so she put him up on the counter so he could get a good look.

There were some men next to her, throwing balls and laughing.  The one nearest to her was bald, not like Grandpa, who had a bit of hair around the side of his head, but all-over bald, like an alien.  He threw his shirt off his shoulders and wriggled his eyebrows.  You could smell him more strongly when he didn’t have a top on.  It was as if he was trying to get in through your nostrils and turn you into him.

Polly didn’t want to be bald and laughing and hairy-chested, so she ran.  There was a big patch of grass in front of her, so she went towards that.  Patches of grass didn’t try and turn you into something else.

Next to the big patch of grass was a wall, and in that wall was a door.

The door was old and mossy, set into the bricks like it was one of them.  It was a door with a curved bit on the top and a big metal latch.  Polly had seen a door like this in a book or on TV, and it was a special kind of door.  It was the kind of door that had mysterious, magical people and mysterious, magical things behind it.

It made Polly’s stomach jump a bit.  She stretched up on tiptoe and fiddled with the latch until it came open.

Through the door, everything was different.

There were faces on the wall, staring at her with open, stretching mouths and empty eyes, staring right at her as if they were trying to work out whether or not to eat her.  Polly knew she should be frightened, she should scream and run back through the door, but sometimes things like the faces on the wall didn’t do anything until you started running from them.  Until they knew you were scared.  So she walked past them with her head held high, and the faces in the wall kept staring but stayed where they were, in the wall, where they couldn’t hurt her.

The wall ended and the faces ended with it.  Polly found herself looking at a little clump of trees, with a wooden platform in the middle.  Behind the platform was a big bit of wood with pictures of the moon and the stars.  The moon had a smiling face on it, with big cheeks and a big chin.

There was a woman standing at the side of the platform, and she waved her hands so that Polly knew to climb the steps up to the platform and talk to her.

As soon as Polly got up there, she asked, “Do you live on the moon?  Is that why you’ve got pictures of it just behind you?”

The woman laughed.  “You could say that.”

Lee and Grandma had been sitting next to the dog-training tent for what felt like hours.  Grandma didn’t want to eat lunch or go and look at the shops until Grandpa came back with Polly.  Instead she sat on a chair, arms folded, sometimes looking at her watch and making huffing noises, and sometimes looking at Lee and saying things like, “Couldn’t you have kept an eye on her for five seconds?”

Lee sat beside her, wishing he had his book with him.  He wanted to see what was going to happen to the giant and those kids who kept sneaking into his garden.  All he had to look at now were the people standing outside the tent.  There had been some dogs earlier, too, but they’d had to go back in.  And you couldn’t stroke them anyway because they had a job to do.  You couldn’t do anything fun round here.

The woman said she knew Polly’s uncle.

“Uncle Johnny died,” explained Polly, remembering what her grandma and grandpa had told her, about how he was in Heaven, springing through the sky after Polly’s friend’s pet dog, waiting in an old train carriage like the one in the photo Grandma showed her of the olden days.  Uncle Johnny had been here, once (when Polly and her brother weren’t), and now he wasn’t.  The woman couldn’t know Polly’s uncle.  Not any more.

“Die?” said the woman, smiling in a way that showed some of her teeth.  She had long black curly hair, and purple eyeshadow going straight up to her eyebrows.  She was all in dark red and dark purple and dark black, like she was a shadow that had come to life.  “Die?  Johnny Farrow?  That’s the last thing he’d do.”

The woman smelled like expensive sweets, like in that shop Mummy had taken them once where the windows had been made out of curly black metal and everything inside looked like the olden days again.  Like that train carriage in the photo.  Like Heaven.

“Come back and see me before you go home, OK?” said the woman, “Bring your brother, too.  I’m always up for meeting a relative of Johnny’s.”

“OK,” said Polly.  She stood up, dusted herself off, and set out to find the door again.

 Finally, Lee spotted them on the horizon.  “Grandpa’s coming!  He’s found Polly!”

Grandma jumped to her feet and strode out towards them.  Lee hurried to catch up with her.

She finally reached Grandpa, who looked like he was pushing Polly along as he went.  “Well?” asked Grandma, “Where was she?”

“Back by the ice cream van.”  Grandpa nudged Polly towards Grandma.  “I suppose we’ve missed Mike’s speech?”

Lee looked at Polly, and frowned.  She didn’t look upset or anything, but something wasn’t right about her.

“It ended ten minutes ago.”  Grandma crouched down and clamped her hands onto Polly’s shoulders.  “We are very, very disappointed in you.  We’ve had to spend all day looking for you.  All the things we wanted to do today, gone.”

Lee realised what was bothering him.  “Polly, where’s…?”

“Spike!” gasped Polly, twitching her arms as if she thought she could find him just by doing that.

Grandpa scowled.  “That’s what you’re worried about?  No ‘sorry’?  No…”

“We’ve got to find Spike!”  Polly’s eyes were wide with horror.  She shook Grandma’s hands off her shoulders, probably without even noticing that she’d done it.

“We haven’t got to do anything, young lady,” said Grandma, putting her hands back and pulling Polly towards her, “We’re about ready to go home, thanks to you.  You’ve ruined our entire day.”

Grandpa shook his finger at her.  “If we’d had any idea how you were going to behave today, we’d never have let you…”

“Spike!” wailed Polly, tears springing from her eyes.

Grandma put her hands on her hips.  “Polly, I swear to God, if we do find that thing, it’s going right in the dustbin as soon as we get home.  You don’t deserve…”

Lee had never heard Polly make a noise like the one she made then.  It sounded more like a howling dog than an actual human girl.  Even Grandma shrunk back from her for a second, and in that second Polly was gone, through the crowd of people and over the horizon.

Lee took off after her.  Grandma had been right, earlier- he was supposed to be looking after her.  He wasn’t going to let her disappear again.

He managed to keep up with her, and they ended up at one of those booths where you could win prizes.  The man running it saw them coming.  “Hello, there!” he called out to Lee, “I was wondering if I’d see this little lady again!”  He reached below the counter, pulled something out and held it up in his hand.

“Spike!” cried Polly in wonder.

The man grinned.  “I hoped you’d be back for him.  He’s been keeping me company here since you left.”  He handed Spike to Polly, who held him up to her face and nuzzled into his fur like she was trying to merge with him.  The man looked up at Lee.  “You her brother?  Make sure she doesn’t lose the hedgehog again before you get home, OK?  He’ll start to feel neglected.”  And, smiling at them one more time, he went off to talk to some people at the other end of the booth.

Lee tapped Polly on the head.  “Come on, Polly.  Let’s go and find Grandma and Grandpa.”  He’d expected them to follow him, but they hadn’t.  Maybe they’d tried to and got lost?  It was probably a lot harder for grownups to move around if they couldn’t fit in smaller spaces.

Polly looked up a little, just so Lee could see her eyes over Spike’s fur.  They were the angriest he’d ever seen.  “No,” she mumbled.

“What?  Come on, we need to go home.”

“Grandma said she was going to throw Spike in the dustbin!”

“She didn’t mean it…” said Lee, but he knew she probably had.  She’d thrown things away before, when she was mad.  “But we’ve got to go home…”  Home was cold now.  It had been cold when Mum had moved away, and it hadn’t got any warmer when they’d gone to live with Grandma and Grandpa.  It was cold and dark and empty, and no-one wanted you to be there.

Lee looked at Polly, and shrugged.  “We’ve got to go home,” he told her, “Where else can we go?”

Polly kept Spike pressed to her face for a few seconds, then lowered him down so that Lee could see her whole face.  “I know where,” she told him.

Polly led Lee to the door.  The moon woman had said she wanted to meet him.  She’d said she wanted to meet Polly again.  She’d said she knew their uncle.  Polly didn’t mind what she said, as long as she took them to the moon with her.

They’d get in faster this time.  Lee was taller.  He’d get the latch open quicker.

Polly squeezed Spike tight in case she dropped him and lost him again.  She wondered what it would be like in space.

The End

 

As previously noted, this will be the last illustrated instalment.  I’m working on something in a different format, and I’ll put it up when I’m done.  Until then…  I don’t know.  I’ll try to post more than once a month, at least.

Part 26 will go up later this week, and it’ll be the last instalment for a while.  I’ve got some ideas about how to take this story in a different, more text-based direction, but they’re still pretty vague.