Raven Summer (7 page)

“Do I?” I say.

“But what about the book you were writing?” says Nick.

“I’ll go back to it,” says Dad.

“But what about your schedule?”

Dad shrugs.

“I’ll get back to it,” he says.

Nick sighs.

“And another thing,” says Dad. “What happens if your first parents are taken away and replaced by a monster? Will you love the monster and follow the monster? And can you get back to the first imprinting?” He ponders. “But that’s probably a different story.”

“So you’re writing two books?”

“Or maybe three.”

“You got a title?” says Nick.

“Nope.”

Nick sighs, smiles at me, swigs his whisky. I move on.

Mum passes the baby from one guest to the other. They bill and coo and say how beautiful she is and what a treasure she is. Mum takes visitors to see her paintings and photographs. I see her whispering in a corridor with Jack Scott. He’s in jeans, a red shirt, his hair’s short and sharp. She laughs with him, low and soft. I turn away just as they’re about to kiss.

Phil and Phil have both lost weight. Philip drinks white wine and nibbles carrots and celery sticks.

“I’m a changed man,” he announces. “Just had me whatdeyecallit and I’m fit as a lop!”

“Your ECG,” says Philomena.

“And soon we’re off to California,” says Phil.

“California?”
says Mum.

“Aye. It’s what we’ve always wanted: San Francisco, San Diego, Sacrawhatdeyecallit.”

“Sacramento,” says Philomena.

“Aye. Not yet, they say. But we’ll be gone soon. Straight to San Fran. Then the Chevy all the way down Highway One.”

At dusk I go down the garden with Max and Oliver and Crystal. The tent’s there, by the fire pit.

“We sleep out in it,” I say.

Crystal runs her fingers across the canvas. She says it’s beautiful. She laughs.

“You’re a dreamer, aren’t you,” she says. “You’re a wild boy, Liam.”

We light a fire in the fire pit and sit by it on logs and stones. Soon there’s a gap of darkness between the party and us.

Oliver’s in a new foster home now. So’s Crystal. They see each other at weekends. They sit together, lean against each other. Oliver puts his arm around her.

“This is a strange land,” says Oliver. “When I thought of England, the pictures in my head were of Tower Bridge, Buckingham Palace, Bath, the fields of Kent. Not this space, not all these empty places.”

An owl screeches somewhere close by. A few bats are out, flickering through the limits of the firelight—late flights before they go back into hibernation. Crystal hums a tune as she leans against him. She leans forward to stir the fire with a stick.

“They’ve said they think he’ll be safe,” she says.

“In Liberia?” I say.

“Aye, in Liberia.”

“I will die,” says Oliver. “I will be slaughtered.”

“Slaughtered?”
says Max.

“Like a beast. Like my mother, my father, like my sisters, my brothers.”

Crystal stirs the fire again. The sparks rise and dance. The fire simmers, crackles, creaks.

“Some stories are beyond belief,” she says. “But they’re the truest and oldest stories of them all. Tell them, Ollie.”

He pauses. He collects his thoughts.

“They came one morning,” says Oliver. “A troupe of them with rifles and axes and clubs.” He waves away the sparks that rise. He sighs. “Some of them were children, just like me, children with weapons in their fists, children with murder in their eyes. Can you believe that?”

He pauses. He waits.

“
Can
you?” says Crystal.

Her eyes glitter in the firelight and her hair and her face glow.

“You
have to
believe it,” she says. “Any one of us could be a murderer if they got us early enough. The murderer in all of us is just below the skin.”

Max sighs.

“Who’s
they
?” he says.

“They,”
says Crystal, “are the beasts of the world.
They
are the ones that were turned into beasts by the beasts that went before.”

Max shrugs. Maybe he doesn’t want to know. Maybe he doesn’t want to think these things.

“You,” says Crystal, “might think you are an angel, but you’re
not.
What you got is food and money and safety and
parents that love you. But what if you
didn’t
have them things? What if your parents were—”

Oliver hushes her. He puts his finger to her lips.

“Tell them more,” she says.

“Imagine this,” he says to us. “Imagine Liberia. Imagine me, not as I am now, but as a child, a little boy. Indeed, I have food, I have parents that love me, and I am happy, until this day. I am lying in the long grass close to my family home. The earth is warm, the sun is beating down on me. I am lying there to hide, because the soldiers have come to our village. For a long time we have feared that they will come. We have been certain that they will come. We have heard all the tales of what happens when they come. We have even played games about this, my friends and I. We have lain in the long grass and we have held sticks as if they were guns. We have imagined fighting for our village, driving the soldiers away. But now the soldiers are here and I am very frightened and there is no way that they can be driven away. I lie trembling in the long grass as the soldiers take my family, and another family, out into the fields. They give them rakes and spades. They point guns at them. ‘Dig your graves,’ they command. ‘Dig your graves!’ And my mother and my father and my sister and my brother dig their graves. And the soldiers stand close by, laughing and smoking cigarettes. Then they raise their guns and they slaughter my family.”

No one by the fireside dares to speak. The voices drift across the garden from the house.

Oliver looks into our faces.

“I have no evidence of what happened. I do not even have evidence of who I am.” He points to his head, his heart. “The
evidence is here, and here. And in my writing, in which I try to tell the truth. They say I cannot stay here. I am not angry that they say this. You cannot accept everyone into your country.”

He looks across the fire.

“I am Oliver Part. I am thirteen years old. I am from Liberia. My family was slaughtered. I ran away. I will not ask if you believe. It does not matter what anyone believes. I know the truth, and I try to tell it, and the truth is difficult.”

“What will you do?” I say.

His wide eyes shine as he looks across the flames.

“I will not go back.”

“We’ll fly,” says Crystal. “We’ll run. We’ll hide. They won’t find us.”

Across the garden, someone plays the Northumbrian pipes, a slow soft tune. Then there’s a shadow, and footsteps in the grass. Nattrass. His face looms into the light.

“Gotcha!” he says.

He grins. No one speaks.

“Just popped in to wish the baby well,” he says.

His face twists, somewhere between a grimace and a grin.

“The land’s full of strangers today,” he says. “You gonna introduce me, brother?”

I’m about to tell him to shove off. Crystal stands up. She steps across the flames towards him. She raises her arm and points at him.

“Who are
you?
” she says. “What do
you
want?”

“I’m Gordon Nattrass, sister,” he says.

He puts his hand out. She doesn’t take it.

“I am not your sister,” she replies.

“But we’re all one big and happy human family,” he says.
He looks down at Oliver. “Welcome to Northumberland, brother.” He doesn’t put his hand out. Oliver nods, murmurs a greeting in reply.

Crystal leans closer to Nattrass.

“Go away,” she says.

Philip calls from the house: “Crystal! Oliver! We have to go!”

“Crystal,” hisses Nattrass. “And Oliver.”

His eyes glitter as he laughs at Crystal.

“I’ll remember you,” he says. “Farewell.”

He turns back into the night.

Crystal stands at the edge of the firelight, watching him go.

“Friend of yours?” asks Crystal.

“We hate him,” I say.

“Good!”

Philip calls again. We stand up.

“If there’s anything we can do …,” I say to Oliver.

His eyes shine brightly again.

“I will think of you as my friend. And you as well, Max.”

Crystal comes to me.

“You’ll help him,” she whispers. “I know you will. You’re good and strong. I know you are.”

She kisses my cheek, then starts back with Oliver towards the house.

As we walk back, Mum appears with her camera.

“Just one shot,” she says. “You look so strange and so lovely, coming through the darkness together with the lights in your eyes and the fire burning behind.”

We stand still and face her. I stand at Crystal’s side.

Afterwards, Max holds me back for a moment.

“Do you
believe
it?” he says.

“Believe what?”

“All that stuff. All that slaughter.”

I pull away and look at him.

“Course I do,” I say.

I stumble back towards the party.

“The world’s a savage place, you know,” I say.

“You’re such an innocent,” I say.

A couple of days later I pass Nattrass in the village.

“Who’s the terrorist?” he says.

“The what?”

“The black lad. Whatsisname.”

“Oliver.”

I start to move on.

“Aye, him. What’s he done? And what’s he doing here? And what’s he gonna do?”

“He’s from Liberia. He’s looking for asylum.”

“Thought so.”

“And he’s not here. He’s in Newcastle.”

“Best place for him. They’ll know what to do with him.”

I start to move again, but I turn back.

“You haven’t got a clue, have you?”

He grins.

“Have I not, brother?”

“No, you haven’t. Terrible things have happened to Oliver. Things that you and me couldn’t imagine.”

“And you believe him, don’t you? Course you do. Peace and joy and love and let them all come in.” He laughs. “You’re a pushover. Half of them’s war criminals, man. They’re here to avoid justice. They’re terrorists.” He makes a fist and thumps the air. “Send them back to their hovels! Bomb them back to the Stone Age!”

He grins again.

“Just joking,” he says. “Pal of yours, is he?”

“Yes,” I say.

“Thought so. That’s great. Great to have pals from all round the world. Universal love and joy. How else we gonna have peace and understanding.” He grins, then narrows his eyes. “Oh, and just one more thing, Liam. I
can
imagine, you know.”

He looks at me, like he’s daring me to deny it.

“I always remember that day your dad come into school, Liam. Remember? That day he was reading to us from his books and talking to us and getting us to write stuff down. Aye?”

It was a couple of years back. Dad still liked to go into schools then. To get feedback, he used to say. To inspire the new generation of readers and writers. It was part of his duty as a writer.

“One thing always sticks in me mind,” says Nattrass. “It was truly inspiring. All of us, he said,
all
of us have got the
most amazing imaginations. D’you remember, Liam? Each and every one of us.”

“It’s what he always says.”

“Well, it’s absolutely true. Me, I can imagine
anything.
I can imagine the worst things in the whole wide world. Sometimes I amaze myself with the things that’s going on inside my brain. Sometimes, Liam, I can scare meself stiff.” He laughs. “Whatsisname’s tale, for instance. That’d be a piece of cake for a brain like mine. Blood and guts and savagery and slaughter. Dear me, it’s horrible just to think of it. See you around, brother.”

And we move on.

I e-mail Crystal. I don’t know what to say.

She replies almost immediately.

I imagine her in the city, in her little room, staring out into the fiery night. I imagine her pale face, her green eyes. I check again before I sleep.

I think back to the foster home. I think of their eyes on me. I think of the knife scar on Oliver’s face. I think of Crystal close beside me at the table. And I think of Alison, how I found her, how she went away, how I went to her again and found her foster sister and her foster brother. It was almost like she led me to them, just like the raven led me to her. And I think that yes, maybe this has all been intended.

Still hot, but the days start to shorten.
The darkening nights intensify our games. We play football until we can’t see the ball. We go on with our war games, we creep in the shadows, we ambush each other with savage cries. We wrestle and scream. We play Spotlight.

Spotlight. The bay’s in the middle of the field, the stump of an old chestnut tree. We play when the stars of the vivid Northumbrian night are beginning to shine. When you’re It you take the torch. You stand at the bay. You close your eyes. You count as the others scatter into the ditches and trenches and hedges and copses all around. Then you switch on the torch and go searching, pointing the beam of light into the furthest fringes of the dark. You see a hiding figure.
I see you!
you call. And then you run, chased by the one who was hiding, and
you thump the bay and cry,
Spotlight spotted you in the night! You’re out!
When you hide, curled up as if you’re dead on the hard earth or tangled in a hawthorn or balanced on a beech bough, you feel you’re far far away, in your own little isolated world. You hear the chanted counting ringing out across the field. You hear the grunts and stifled laughter of the others hiding. Then there’s the cry:
The counting’s all done and here I come!
You peep out. You see the cone of light dipping and swinging and searching. You hear the cries:
Spotlight spotted you in the night! You’re out!
You hear the frantic running. You see the torch beam whipping wildly as its holder runs. And you wait for the beam to come to you at last, to dazzle you, to get you springing into speed and life again.