A Box of Nothing Page 10

The sun would be here before them. Somewhere below the earth it must already be spiralling in, and when it rose tomorrow it would fill half the sky, licking the earth with its outer flames, burning everything black. The sun was enormously bigger than the earth, and if the earth got too near it was supposed to crash into the sun and get swallowed up, but that wasn’t going to happen. Huge as it was, the sun was going to be swallowed by the hole.

  Before the sun, the moon. That was nearer still. James looked up, screwing his eyes almost shut against the brightness. He could see it on both sides of the gas bag now, and as he watched it grew bigger and bigger still, spreading and widening as it raced down, with the airship directly in its path.

  Something moved beneath his hand where it clutched the edge of the basket. He looked down and saw that the airship was coming apart.

  All this while—these few millionths of a second—the airship had simply hung there. When the rest of the Burra had thrown itself overboard with all its bits and pieces, what was left ought to have shot into the sky because of losing so much of its load, but it hadn’t. It had something to do with James being there and not belonging to this world. It was the same with the rat. The hole wasn’t going to suck them in, or the things they were touching. But it was taking what it could. It was taking what the Burra called the “life” away—whatever it was that had made all the separate pieces of rubbish agree to join up and become an airship. The actual part of the basket James was holding was really a bit of branch off a tree, as thick as a broomstick, left over from someone’s bonfire. All the strips of old TV antennas and metal crate ties and curtain rods and electric cord were unweaving themselves. The ropes that held the bag to the basket and the cords that made the net were losing their knots and unravelling. The bag itself was separating into the odd patches of plastic it had grown out of. As each piece came loose it flipped away down into the hole. In another few millionths of a second James was left floating in midair with a branch in his hand, the great black gulf below, and the huge moon rushing down toward him.

  He closed his eyes.

  “I want to go home,” he said.

  Chapter 20: Home

  When James opened his eyes he was sitting in a chestnut tree, with his right hand gripping a living branch. The roaring was still there, loud but ordinary, as the bulldozers cleared the Dump level, getting it ready to turn into a park. Mum said that the Council had been promising to make a park here since before James was born. That was why they’d never cut down the tree. It was the one you passed on your way to school, just inside the Dump fence before you got to the Nothing Shop.

  James was gripping the branch as hard as he could because he was scared of falling. That was why he had shut his eyes too. He wasn’t usually afraid of heights, but he’d come too far out along the branch, trying to reach a chestnut, and the branch had started to sway and he didn’t feel safe. He didn’t dare move. He was stuck.

  With half his mind James could remember quite well how he’d got here. He’d left home before the others to try to find a chestnut but the rubbish trucks had squashed them all so he’d wriggled through the fence, which he wasn’t allowed to, and used the bars on its inside to climb up into the branches and then climbed higher and higher and worked his way out along a branch till it had begun to sway with his weight, and then …

  But with the other half of his mind he remembered visiting the Nothing Shop and buying the box and Mum throwing it over the fence and him wriggling through the fence and finding himself on the far shore of an iron sea—and then the Burra and the airship and Rat City and the gulls and the race across the desert and the new Burra universe blazing into being while the huge moon rushed down toward him, and then …

  Then the two halves of his mind coming together again as he opened his eyes and found himself sitting in the chestnut tree. Both things were true. Neither was a dream. But the one in the Burra world must have happened in a different kind of time because he could still taste the after-breakfast toothpaste in his mouth. It was a pity he’d never be able to tell anyone about his Burra memory. They’d laugh at him and tell him he’d made it up or dreamed it. But he hadn’t. It had all happened to him, James.

  Thinking about it, and the things he’d done and endured on the Dump, far more dangerous than climbing a stupid tree, he felt ashamed of being frightened. He’d faced General Weil in his dreadful camp, hadn’t he? He’d fought a duel with a great gull. He’d towed an airship across the desert. He’d started a universe off. He wasn’t going to let himself get stuck in a tree.

  He looked down. It seemed miles to the ground, but he forced himself to go on looking. The hard, potholed tarmac of the street was directly below him. In another gap between the big five-fingered leaves he could see a patch of bare earth inside the Dump where the bulldozers had finished scraping the ground level. He was wishing he was over that side because it looked softer to fall on when a large, dark rat scuttled into the gap, raised its head, and looked boldly around. Its long whiskers quivered with interest and excitement. It didn’t look frightened, though it must have been pretty bewildered by what the bulldozers had done to its world. Perhaps, James thought, it had two sets of memories, too, one about the bulldozers and one about racing a strange airship across a desert. He hoped so.

  Seeing it there, so brisk and brave, made James even more ashamed of his fright. He started to edge his way back toward the trunk. At once the branch swayed sickeningly and he had to shut his eyes and hold on tight. He felt the whole tree was swinging to and fro, but after a bit he managed to open his eyes and try again.

  He would have got down in the end, of course, without any help. It was sheer bad luck that Angie saw him. It was just like her, a totally useless kid, always mooning along and losing her gloves and tripping over things because she wasn’t looking where she was going, but then noticing her brother stuck up a tree when he especially didn’t want to be noticed.

  The first James knew about it was Mum standing straight underneath him, with her hands cupped around her mouth, shrieking up through the roaring of the bulldozers.

  “Don’t move! Hold on tight! I’ll call the Fire Department!”

  She did too. It wasn’t bad, being rescued by the Fire Department, which came in a regular fire engine with a red extension ladder that poked up between the branches, and a grinning, friendly fireman who said it made a nice change from getting people out of burning buildings and used the ladder to pick the chestnut James had been aiming for. The fireman kept calling him “sonny,” which was a pity, but otherwise it was all right. And there was a photographer from the paper, too, except that a lot of other things happened that week, so in the end they didn’t print the picture after all.

  It was even all right with Mum. It usually was when something serious happened. It was things that didn’t matter she used to be boring about sometimes.

  When everybody had gone away and they were tramping off to school with a twin gargling and the wheel buggy twittering and Angie mooning along behind, Mum said, “I want you to tell me, James—I promise I won’t be angry—but what on earth did you do that for?”

  “I wanted a chestnut to go with my tree picture.”

  “Couldn’t you find one on the ground?”

  “The trucks had squashed them. Anyway, I wanted a whole one.”

  “It’s a pity you decided to do a chestnut tree. It’s a bit ordinary, don’t you think? I bet that’s what a lot of the others have done.”

  “No they haven’t, and anyway, I haven’t either.”

  James took the piece of paper out of his pocket. It wasn’t as crumpled as he’d have expected after all his adventures, but when he unfolded it he saw it wasn’t the messy picture he’d drawn last night, watching the TV program. It was the star tree the Burra’s pencils had helped him make in the cavern. And there were some circles on the back, too, which he’d drawn when he was trying to do the equation about how far it was t
o the centre of the dune circles. That proved it, he thought. Not to anyone else, of course, but that didn’t matter.

  He showed the picture to Mum.

  “Oh, that’s pretty,” she said, “though I wouldn’t have known it was a chestnut tree. I suppose the stars are shining through the branches.”

  “It isn’t a chestnut tree. I told you. It’s a star tree.”

  They walked on, but she must have been thinking about it. They’d nearly reached the school when she said, “I still don’t get it. If it isn’t a chestnut tree, why’d you want to go climbing up for a chestnut?”

  James put his hand into a pocket and pulled out the chestnut the fireman had picked for him. Carefully he levered the covering open, teased out the glossy nut, and put it back in the pocket. He fitted the spiky green sections of shell together.

  “I need a rubber band to hold it,” he said.

  “Am I being stupid?”

  “It’s a box of nothing, you see. Everything came out of nothing. That’s what my tree means. The nothing is the seed, and it exploded itself into stars, and the universe started up.”

  “BOOM!” said Angie.

  A Biography of Peter Dickinson

  Peter Dickinson is a tall, elderly, bony, beaky, wrinkled sort of fellow, with a lot of untidy gray hair and a weird, hooting voice—in fact, he looks and sounds a bit like Gandalf’s crazy twin, but he’s just rather absentminded, thinking about something else, or daydreaming.

  He was born in the middle of Africa, within earshot of the Victoria Falls. Baboons sometimes came into the school playground. When people went swimming in the Zambezi they did it in a big wooden cage let down into the water so that the crocs couldn’t get at them. For the hot weather the family went south to his grandfather’s sheep and ostrich farm in South Africa.

  When Peter was seven the family came back to England so that he and his brothers could go to English schools, where they taught him mostly Latin and Greek. He didn’t have an English lesson after he was twelve, and nobody ever told him to write a story. He was fairly good at games.

  He’s led an ordinary kind of life—not much by way of adventures, but some silly things. Such as? Well, when he had to join the army just after World War II, they managed to turn him into two people, so he was bashing away at infantry training at a camp in Northern Ireland when two seasick military policemen showed up and tried to arrest him for being a deserter from a different camp in the South of England, where his other self was supposed to be bashing away.

  He was tutoring a boy in a huge old castle in Scotland when the butler (it was that sort of household) said to him at breakfast one day, “Ah, sir, it’s a long time since we heard screams coming from the West Wing!” (Peter’s screams, not the boy’s.)

  And he was knocked down by a tram on his way to the interview for his first job with the magazine Punch and arrived all covered with blood and dirt, but they gave him the job because he was the only candidate. He stayed there seventeen years.

  He and his first wife had two daughters and two sons, and he now has six grandchildren. He and his second wife, the American writer Robin McKinley, live in an almost-too-pretty country town in the South of England.

  Peter says he didn’t become a writer. He just is one and always has been, ever since he can remember, the way a goldfish is a goldfish and can’t be anything else. Go to a zoo and look at one of the big birds, a condor, say, a creature made to soar above the Andes. They’ve probably clipped one of its wings so that it can’t hurt itself trying to fly around its cage, but it’s still a creature made to soar above the Andes. If you somehow stopped Peter writing, he’d still be a writer.

  But he was a poet and a journalist before he started on books. He tried a murder story first, but got stuck halfway through. Then he had a science fiction–y kind of nightmare and decided to turn it into a children’s story, mainly to see if writing it would unstick the other book. (It did. That book won a prize for the best murder story of the year, and the children’s book was made into a TV series.)

  Since then Peter has written almost sixty books, most of them on a little old portable typewriter—one draft to see what he’s got and what else he needs to know and so on, then a bit of research, then a complete rewrite, beginning to end, and then, if all’s well, only a bit more tinkering. Sometimes it used to take a few months, sometimes a year or more. A few years back he moved over to a PC. It makes writing seem a very different kind of process—easier in some ways, harder in others.

  The ideas come from all over the place—daydreams, sometimes, or a kid on a long car trip saying, “Tell us a new story, Dad.” Or something he’s heard or read—a voice on the radio saying, “Even a hardened government soldier may hesitate a fatal half second before he guns down a child.” For the best of them it feels as if the book had knocked on the door of Peter’s mind and said, “Write me.” Then he’ll spend half a year or more letting the stranger in and finding out who or what it is.

  Peter has written all sorts of books—crime mainly for adults, though some of these are almost straight literary novels. For children, he has written fantasies, historical fiction, modern adventure, science fiction, and so on. There won’t be many more. They used to come gushing out of the hillside like a mountain stream. Then he had to lift them up bucket by bucket from deeper and deeper wells, but now the wells are empty. He says.

  Peter Dickinson was the second of four sons of a British colonial civil servant and a South African farmer’s daughter, born December 16, 1927, in the middle of Africa, in Livingstone, Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia).

  Here are Peter and his brother Richard as children in Africa, where many of Peter’s books take place. In fact, he used this photo as a pivotal clue in Perfect Gallows.

  The family came “home” in 1935 so that the boys could go to British boarding schools, but within a few months, when Peter was seven, their father died suddenly of a strangulated gut, leaving their mother with very little money. Their British relations were close knit and supportive, and in 1936 Peter was sent to Saint Ronan’s, a prep school in Worthing with a charismatic headmaster named Dick Harris. Pictured here are Peter (in the red jersey), age eight, with his mother, elder brother, Richard, and younger brother Hugh.

  This is a photo taken in 1936 during a family holiday at Stutton. The Fisons had been very good friends with Peter’s father and stayed close to his family after his death. They invited the Dickinsons to stay with them for several vacations at their house on one of the Suffolk inlets. They would spend most of the day in boats on a local pond or on the nearby beach. Here you can see the kids lined up on the beach from tallest to shortest. From left to right: Elizabeth Fison, Peter’s brother Richard, Peter, Gay Fison, and Peter’s youngest brother, David. Peter doesn’t remember why his brother Hugh is not in this picture. Perhaps he was taking the photo.

  Here’s a picture from 1937. One of Peter’s aunts had a home on the Sussex coast at Littlestone, and Peter’s family used to go there during school vacations. Peter remembers that they used to play a lot of games there, including a family version of hide-and-seek. Here you can see them taking a break for some ice cream. From left to right: Peter’s cousin Anthony Butterwick, Richard, Peter, and Hugh. David was too young then to play these sorts of games.

  When the German invasion of England looked imminent, St. Ronan’s was evacuated to Bicton Park, a great red-brick Georgian house in the idyllic setting of a large deer park in Devon. Peter’s novel Hindsight is based on his time here. The curriculum was mainly Latin, Greek, and math, with some French, history, and geography, and only one English class a week. Peter was never asked to write a story, either while at St. Ronan’s or later.

  In 1941 Peter took the scholarship exam for Eton against the advice of Dick Harris, who thought he wasn’t up to it. But his math score saved him, even though he was the bottom scholar in a bad year, just as his father had been, and he was ac
cepted. After an uncertain start at Eton, Peter enjoyed his time there. He turned out to be fairly good at the bizarre versions of soccer they played, and was elected to Pop, the equally bizarre society of school prefects chosen not by the authorities but by the students themselves.

  In 1948 Peter went to King’s College, Cambridge, on a closed exhibition (a minor sort of scholarship, exclusive to Etonians). He feels he wasted his time there and worked ineffectually, having taken little part in the many extracurricular activities on offer. After a year he switched from classics to English studies. He failed to get the hoped-for first in his finals, but the college gave him a bursary to study for a PhD. Halfway through this, he walked into the dean’s office. The dean looked up from the letter he was reading and asked, “Would you like a job on Punch?”

  Peter Dickinson at an editorial meeting at Punch in the early 1950s. (Photo credit: Picture Post, Bert Hardy)

  Peter and Mary Rose Barnard (1926–1988) were married at Bramdean, Hampshire, on April 26, 1953. She was the daughter of a naval officer who was senior enough to ride a white horse along with the other Lords of the Admiralty in the coronation procession for Queen Elizabeth. Peter and Mary set up house in an apartment in Pimlico, he continuing at Punch and she working in the display department of Heal’s furniture store.

  In 1955 Philippa Dickinson was born at Wingrave, near Aylesbury, Bucks; Polly arrived thirteen months later in a small house behind Harrods in London; John came five years after that; and James followed eighteen months after John in the terrace house in Notting Dale, London, where the family lived for the next twenty years. Here the family is pictured at the weekend cottage on a hill above Crondall, Hampshire, with a marvelous view northeastward over the village and across miles of countryside. This is the setting for The Devil’s Children, the third book in the Changes Trilogy.