The Game Page 4

  Nobody took much notice of Hayley. She sat on an embroidered chair nibbling at a hard rock cake – which made her feel like a rather small squirrel – and listened to the three adults talk about world affairs, and science, and the stock market, and some prehistoric carvings someone had found in a cave near Nottingham. If Uncle Jolyon had specially wanted to see Hayley, he showed few signs of it. He only looked at her once. Hayley was struck then at how dishonest the crinkles round his eyes made him look. She thought it must be because she had just seen Flute. Flute’s green eyes looked at you direct and straight, without any disguising of his feelings. Uncle Jolyon’s eyes calculated and concealed things. Hayley found she distrusted him very much.

  When the tea was drunk, Uncle Jolyon leaned over, grunting a little, and pinched Hayley’s chin. “You be a good girl now,” he said to her, “and do what your grandparents say.”

  The way he smiled, full of false kindness and hidden meanings, truly grated on Hayley. And the pinch hurt. “Why are you so dishonest?” she said.

  Grandma went stiff as a post. Grandpa seemed to curl up a little, as if he expected someone to hit him. Uncle Jolyon, however, leant his head back and laughed heartily.

  “Because I have to be,” he said. “Nobody expects a businessman to be honest, child.” And he shouted with laughter again.

  Uncle Jolyon went away after that – with Grandpa seeing him into his waiting taxi in the friendliest possible way – and Hayley was left to face Grandma’s anger.

  “How dare you be so rude to poor Uncle Jolyon!” she said. “Go up to your room and stay there! I don’t want to set eyes on you until you’ve remembered how to behave properly.”

  Hayley was quite glad to go. She wanted to be alone to digest all the things she had seen that afternoon. But she could not resist turning round halfway upstairs. “Uncle Jolyon isn’t poor,” she said. “And he orders Grandpa around.”

  “Go!” Grandma commanded, pointing a strong finger upstairs.

  Hayley went. She went into her room and sat there for a long time, staring at the photo of her parents on the mantelpiece. So happy. That was what Hayley had expected the mythosphere to be like, full of happiness, but it seemed to be full of tragic things instead.

  After a while, though, it occurred to her that in a way it was full of happiness. The hunter in the leopardskin had been happy, until he saw the ladies and turned all mean. The ladies who turned into swans had been happy as they ran down to the water. And that boy with the dogs had been happiest of all until he was stupid enough to annoy a goddess.

  “It’s silly to let the bad things come out on top!” Hayley said aloud. “The good, happy things are just as important. They just don’t seem to last. You want to catch them at their best and keep them if you can.”

  She looked hard at the photo and wished she had another photo to put beside it, of the boy and his dogs. They had been having such fun chasing through the budding green woods. She began to imagine them, not as she had seen them, but before that, running in an eager line, with the boy at the back of them, cracking his whip and laughing at their mistakes. She remembered that each dog was slightly different from the others. Snuffer had one brown ear. Chaser was all white, while Doom was nearly black, with yellow speckles. Bell had a pale brown patch, like a saddle, on her back. The brown-and-yellow one was Pickles, the one with the white ears was Flags and the other dark-coloured one was Genius. Then there were Rags, Noser, Wag and Petruvia, all of whom were greyish with black bits in different places. As for the boy, he had been wearing baggy clothes rather like Flute’s, only in brighter colours, blues and reds. His whip had red patterns on the handle.

  Hayley could really almost see them, rushing along, tails up and waving. She could hear their pattering and panting, the occasional yelp, and the boy laughing as he cracked his whip. She could smell dog and leafy forest. So happy—

  Grandma came in just then, saying, “Well? Have you remembered— Hayley!”

  Hayley came to herself with a jump to find the boy and his dogs really and truly rushing through her room in front of her, soundless now and fading as they ran, while Grandma stared at them in grey outrage.

  “I have had enough of you, Hayley,” Grandma said. “You’re a wicked little girl – quite uncontrollable! Haven’t I taught you not mix There with Here?”

  The dogs faded silently away and the boy melted off after them. Hayley turned miserably to Grandma. “They were happy. They weren’t doing any harm.”

  “If that’s all you can say—” Grandma began.

  “It is,” Hayley interrupted defiantly. “It’s what I say. Happy!”

  Chapter Five

  Hayley hated to remember the next bit. Grandma refused to explain or speak to Hayley. She simply rammed Hayley’s clothes into a suitcase and made Grandpa phone Aunt May to send Cousin Mercer to fetch Hayley away. Hayley was locked into her room until Cousin Mercer arrived the following morning and nobody came near her, even to bring food. That was bad enough. So was the journey that followed, long and confusing and full of delays and rain. But the worst was that Hayley was sure that Flute would turn up in the garden and find her gone, and be terribly puzzled. She was sure she would never see Flute again.

  She sat beside the pretend cat, trying not to think at all. She could hear the running and shouting again in the distance but it did not seem very important.

  For a moment, she thought she was crying. Drops were falling heavily on the pretend cat and then splashing on to her leg. It was only when more drops fell on her head that Hayley realised the water must be coming from somewhere else. She looked up. The ceiling above her sofa was covered in upside-down puddles, with big dewy yellow drops forming in the middle of them and then plopping down. At almost the moment when she turned her face up, the puddles all became too big to hold together and water began coming down in streams, nearly as hard as it was raining outside.

  Hayley jumped up. “Oh dear,” she said, collecting cushions and the pretend cat and dumping them into a dry chair. She tried to push the sofa out from under the flood, but it was too heavy for her to move. She simply got sprayed with water splattering up off the carpet. “I think I’d better tell someone,” she said doubtfully.

  She ran out into the hall. No one seemed to be about down there, but there was a lot of shouting and running about going on somewhere upstairs. Hayley rather timidly climbed the stairs, past the small safe room she had been given and on up to the right.

  A river of water met her near the top, coming down like a waterfall from stair to stair. The landing, when she came to it, was a small oblong lake, and the corridor off to the right, which must have been right above the lounge, was a dark tunnel filled with rain. Someone screamed, “Turn off that light! It’s dangerous!” Footsteps thundered and splashed somewhere out of sight, and voices from unseen cousins and aunts yelled, “Tollie! Where are you? We need you!” and “Bring that bucket here, quick!” and “Throw all the towels down there!” and in between, everyone yelled for Tollie again.

  “I think they know,” Hayley said to herself. She stood to the side of the waterfall at the top of the stairs, wondering what she ought to do.

  Aunt May and Troy, both of them soaking wet, burst out from the rain in the dark corridor and splashed to a stop when they saw Hayley.

  “She’ll do!” Troy cried out. “She’s a lot smaller than Tollie.”

  “Oh, so she will!” Aunt May gasped. Sheets of water sprayed round her wet slippers as she dived on Hayley and took hold of her arm. “Do you mind helping us, dear? One of the gutters is blocked and we’re all too big to get out of the window.”

  Troy seized Hayley’s other arm and the two of them towed her across the landing. The lake soaked Hayley’s shoes and socks instantly. She was rather surprised to find that the water was not really cold. But then the whole of Ireland was not really as cold as London.

  “Mercer’s tried getting to it from outside with a ladder,” Troy explained, switching on the big electric t
orch he was carrying, “but the wind blew him down, so it has to be unblocked by someone small enough to get out through the top bathroom window.”

  “Will you do that for us, dear?” Aunt May said as they all plunged into the downpour inside the corridor. “We’ll hang on to you. You’ll be quite safe.”

  “Yes,” Hayley said, “of course,” thinking that there didn’t seem to be much choice.

  “Of course you will!” Troy said warmly.

  With rain thumping and pattering on their heads and backs, the three of them rushed up a flight of stairs that was exactly like a waterfall, to where Troy’s torch glinted on choppy waves in another flooded corridor. Dark shapes of people churned about in it, shouting to one another to “Keep that door shut!” and then, “Where is Tollie?”

  Aunt May and Troy wheeled sideways from here and pounded up another flight of stairs which were – confusingly – completely dry. Both of them yelled over their shoulders, “It’s all right. We don’t need Tollie. We’ve got Hayley instead!” and then wheeled sideways again into a little bathroom with a sloping ceiling. Someone had put a big flickering lantern in the washbasin there. By its light, Hayley saw a bath wedged in under the slope of the ceiling and above the bath a small square skylight propped open on a thin metal bar. Rain was spattering viciously in through the opening. Hayley looked up at it and thought, How do I get up there?

  “Don’t worry, we’ll lift you,” Troy said. He picked up a bath stool and banged it down in the bath. “Hop up there and I’ll boost you,” he said.

  Before Hayley could move, Aunt May scrambled into the bath, saying, “I’ll keep it steady.” Whereupon her sopping slippers shot out from under her and she sat down with a splash, sending the stool clanging into the bath taps.

  “Oh, not again, Auntie!” Troy said. He put his shoulder under Aunt May’s waving arm and helped her flounder to her feet again. Somehow, in the course of the vast scrambling that followed, Aunt May’s necklace burst. Beads clattered into the bath and rolled about on the dimly lit floor. “Last necklace to go,” Troy said cheerfully. “Don’t tread on a bead, Hayley. The floor’s covered with them now.” He put the stool back under the skylight and squelched into the bath beside it. He held out both hands to Hayley. “Up you get,” he said. “Take my torch and get on the stool.”

  “You’ll need the torch to see the drain,” Aunt May panted. Her hair was now out of whatever had held it together and fanned over her big shoulders like a lion’s mane. “The drain’s down to the left of the window.”

  Hayley took hold of the torch and found herself being hauled up on to the stool. She stood there, wobbling rather, feeling Troy grab her from one side and Aunt May from the other, and cautiously took the metal bar off its spike and pushed the tiny window open with her head.

  It was horrible out there. Windy rain stormed into her face. Worse still, when she worked the torch through beside her face and got it pointed downwards, all she could see was a sort of trench full of turbulent water just below her and the square shapes of the castle parapet beyond that. The drain was obviously deep under water. She was going to have to guess where it was. The only way Hayley could see to get near it was to ooze herself out of the window headfirst. And then grope.

  “We’ve got you,” Troy said encouragingly as Hayley began to wriggle herself forward.

  The frame of the skylight was only just big enough for her to get through. As Hayley wriggled onward, the spike that the metal bar hooked on to scraped its way agonisingly down the middle of her chest, while the bar itself hung down and poked her in the head. By the time her feet had left the stool and she was hanging half in and half out, she was still a foot away from the murky ditch of water and being stabbed in the tummy button by the spike. She was going to have to get all of her outside.

  Behind her, she could hear the little bathroom filling up with people. Someone said, “She’ll never get to it like that!”

  Oh yes I will! Hayley thought. “Be ready to hold my feet!” she shouted and thought she heard someone say “OK.” Then, clutching the torch in her right hand, she began to inch herself down the sloping tiles outside. Rain pelted across her. Before long, she had the feeling it was raining upwards into her pants. The skylight bit into her shins, the tiles scraped her front. The only comforting thing was that she could feel Troy’s hands warm and strong on her left leg and Aunt May’s hands, softer but just as strong, holding her right calf.

  They were paying her out of the window like a rope.

  The hands had reached her ankles before Hayley could even touch the water. Left, she thought. She had to stretch and ooze and extend herself sideways before her hand could go into the rippling flood. It was surprisingly un-cold to her fingers. The hands were holding her shoes by then. And she stretched and oozed and tried to lengthen herself again, until finally her fingertips met a rough, leaded bottom. She couldn’t feel any kind of drain. Rather desperately, she swished her hand further to the left. Here there was the faintest feeling that the water was pulling at her fingers. Almost shrieking with the effort, she managed to move her hand that way.

  The tips of her fingers touched something thick and rubbery-feeling. With another desperate stretch, Hayley somehow got one finger under it, and then her thumb on top. Then she could pick whatever-it-was up.

  It came up with a gurgle. Hayley was so surprised at how quickly things happened then that she nearly screamed. Water thundered past her nose from right to left and tried to take her hair with it. To the left, it became a whirlpool, fairly whizzing round and round, and gargled away down the unblocked drain so fast that by the time Troy and Aunt May, thoroughly alarmed at the noises Hayley was making, had started to haul on her ankles, the gutter was empty.

  Troy and Aunt May went on hauling. Hayley scraped rapidly and painfully up over the tiles, and agonisingly across the spike, and landed on the stool in the bath again, soaking wet and with her dress torn completely open down the middle.

  Someone shouted, “She did it!”

  There were cheers from the crowded bathroom behind her. Someone else said, “What was it? What is she holding?”

  Blinking in the lantern light, Hayley turned herself around on the stool. Cousins and aunts were packed into the tiny space, dimly lit and staring, with Cousin Mercer ducking his wet head in through the door at the back and Tollie squashed up against the bath in front. Troy gently prised the torch out of Hayley’s right hand and switched it off. Aunt May seized Hayley’s left wrist. “Good heavens!” she said.

  Hayley looked that way to find that her fingers were clamped round a pork chop. It was large. It was raw, and whitish with waterlogging, and sort of triangular, but there was no doubt what it was. It was almost exactly the right size and shape to block a drain.

  “It’s a pork chop!” Aunt Alice exclaimed. “However did that get into the gutter?”

  Hayley looked at Tollie, down near her soaking shoes, and knew at once. If ever she saw guilt and annoyance, it was in Tollie’s face at that moment. No doubt Tollie had hoped to be the one who went heroically out through the window. But when Aunt May said, “We have crows and seagulls here all the time – one of them must have dropped it,” Hayley did not contradict her. Even though Tollie looked up at her with scorn and dislike, for being too feeble to tell, Hayley did not say a word. She was shivering all over and her front hurt.

  Aunt Celia said, “Poor child! She’s bleeding!”

  Hayley was seized and carried away. The pork chop was taken from her like a trophy and she was carried over marshy carpets, first to somebody’s bedroom, where Harmony bathed her scraped front and spread soothing ointment there, while cousins ran about finding her some fur slippers and a large fluffy dressing gown. Then, wrapped in these luxuries, she was carried downstairs again. “I can walk!” Hayley protested.

  “Yes, but you’re not going to – you’ve saved the day,” Aunt May told her.

  She ended up in the kitchen, which was still dry and beautifully warm, where the au
nts made quarts of cocoa. There Hayley sat in a wooden armchair, surrounded by relatives who were all praising her – except for Tollie, who sat in a corner and glowered at her – sipping cocoa and gradually warming up. Some of the warmth was from the unusual feeling of being the centre of everyone’s admiration – apart from Tollie’s of course. When Troy appeared, in a red dressing gown, he said, “Well done! You’re a brave one, aren’t you!” And Aunt May, now wearing a musty-smelling fur coat, hugged her mightily and said, “You courageous child! We won’t forget this in a hurry!”

  Hayley had never known anything like this. The warmth from it was still with her when Cousin Mercer carried her up to bed and she fell asleep, into warm, sunny, contented dreams.

  Chapter Six

  The next day, it was hard to believe that it had ever rained. Hayley woke to find the sky a bright heavenlike blue with great snowy clouds hustling across it. Aunt May woke her by coming in with an armload of clothes.

  “Here, dear. Most of these should fit you. Try them on and make sure you’re warm enough. The wind’s chilly today. Breakfast in half an hour.” Aunt May’s hair, because it had been soaked last night, was wilder than ever that morning. Half of it fell down as she crossed the room. And she seemed to have found a whole lot of new necklaces. Red amber beads dangled clacking on her shapeless maroon dress when she threw the clothes on Hayley’s bed and went dashing away downstairs.

  Hayley got up and examined the clothes. There were shorts with pockets, trousers with pockets, jeans, socks, T-shirts, jackets with pockets, sweatshirts with both hoods and pockets, knitted things, but not a single dress or skirt. Hayley could feel her face settling into a beaming smile. She made a careful selection: trousers with pockets, because those were like the ones Troy wore, a T-shirt that said “HEADS I WIN, TAILS YOU LOSE”, thick yellow socks, because the trainers were rather big, and a red cardigan, because she suddenly discovered that red was her favourite colour. Feeling baggy and strange and comfortable, she looked in the mirror to do her hair and wondered what Grandma would say. Her hair had gone right out of control in the night. It radiated from her head in curls, tendrils, ringlets and long feathery locks. Hayley had a moment of terrible guilt. She was never going to get it neat! Then she thought of Aunt May and realised there was no need to bother here. She dragged a hairbrush through the wildness and went downstairs.