Annerton Pit Read online

  “It feels a funny sort of area for a bike shop,” said Jake.

  “I dunno. It’s poor but not a slum. Allotments and that. Quite a few people use push-bikes round here, I should think. Anyway the bloke we’re going to see runs a push-bike shop and does motorbikes on the side. I don’t know if I want a BMW, though.”

  “What’s that?”

  “German bike. Shaft-driven, not chain. Horizontally opposed cylinders—they stick out a bit at the sides but it keeps the weight low. Very reliable. Sort of bike people use for … Here we are. Lovely and crummy.”

  This shed smelt of lighter grades of oil, and ancient dust, and leather and plastic. Somebody was working near door-level, making metal nudge and click.

  “Shall not keep you three seconds,” said a man’s voice from low down. “I am Mr Manayev. And you are the young man who was ringing about one of my motorcycles, uh?”

  He had a strong foreign accent and sounded elderly, irritable and suspicious. When he got to his feet Jake could tell from the level of his voice that he was very short, too.

  “Aha!” he said, evidently noticing Jake’s stick for the first time. “And who of you is going to ride the machine, uh?”

  He laughed at his joke but Martin took it into his head to hark back to the years of dragons and ogres.

  “I bet my brother could if he had to,” he snapped.

  “I bet,” said Mr Manayev.

  “Do you?” said Martin.

  “I say so.”

  “All right,” said Jake. “I’m not old enough to ride a motorbike, but if you’ll lend me a push-bike I’ll bet you ten p I can ride it along the road and back.”

  “Come then,” said Mr Manayev. “I am not wanting anyone hurt. 1 am only making my joke.”

  “I thought you said you’d bet,” said Martin, still angry.

  “OK, OK,” said Mr Manayev. “Is an old bike here, which another spill is not hurting. I set the saddle down. You sure you want that, sonny?”

  “Ten p,” said Jake.

  The long factory wall made it an easy road to ride in; the bike’s chain was loose enough to scrape against the guard, and one pedal had a click in it, so Jake didn’t need to produce his own noises to set up echoes. He’d just gone past the scrubbing sound when he heard a rush of clawed feet on tarmac and a hysterical yelping close to his left ankle. He wobbled, steadied and wobbled again, almost falling. A woman’s voice yelled at the dog just as he got the firmness of wheels beneath him, but by then he was heading straight for the echoes of the barking and there was nothing for it but to carry on with the turn—otherwise he’d have crashed straight into the factory wall. He rode back to the bike shop counting pedal-strokes so that he’d know roughly when he’d got there. He braked and felt for the road with a sliding foot.

  “You all right, Jake?” said Martin.

  “Fine.”

  “I thought that dog was going to have you off.”

  “So did I.”

  “Good,” said Mr Manayev. “Your brother tell me you see nothing at all.”

  “Not a sausage,” said Jake cheerfully.

  “Then here is your bet you win. Good. Now we look at a machine, uh?”

  The sales ritual was the same, but very different. Mr Manayev sounded as though he hated the idea of selling his bikes and was angry with Martin for suggesting any such thing. He had three bikes in his garage, all second-hand BMWs, and Jake thought he sounded a bit nutty about them. Two of them would have cost quite a bit more than Martin could afford.

  “Why don’t you want so much for this one?” asked Martin. “It’s the same year.”

  “Been across the Sahara is why.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Been. Across. Thee. Sahara,” said Mr Manayev as if speaking to a deaf foreign idiot.

  “That’s what I was trying to tell you, Jake,” said Martin. “If you want to ride a bike across the Sahara you take a BMW.”

  “Naturally,” said Mr Manayev. “So she has lived hard, but is in good nick, despite. You get three hundred mile to a pint of oil. Not bad, uh?”

  The engine started second kick. Mr Manayev revved and idled it, then let Martin ride it round a bit of waste ground at the back of his yard. The engine had an odd note, not exactly muffled but not strident either.

  “At least it’s quieter than the other one,” said Jake when Martin came back to them.

  “Which other one?” snapped Mr Manayev, bristly with suspicion.

  “Oh,” said Martin casually, “I was looking at a ’64 BSA Thunderbolt up at Catch and Catch …”

  “I know her,” said Mr Manayev with a yapping laugh. “You not touch her, sonny. Joe Catch, he been trying to sell eight months. Frame twisted like barley sugar, uh?”

  “Yes, well, I sort of thought …” said Martin. “But Mr Catch swore she’d never been in a smash.”

  “Correct,” said Mr Manayev. “And why? She never been more than fifty mile an hour is why. She belong to Harry Frome, little building-man up Scarrow Road, and he puts his own side-car on her for carrying his ladders, uh? Is a good builder, but not for side-cars. How that frame is twisted!”

  Jake grinned at the curious grunt by which Martin tried to suggest that this was what he’d suspected all along. Then Mr Manayev looked over the moped, which was in very good nick as it was only a year since Granpa had given it to Martin and it had been kept in a garage and serviced by Martin with detailed love. Mr Manayev got out a little book which listed dealers’ prices for second-hand bikes of different makes and years and they settled on ninety-five pounds as a trade-in value for the moped.

  “And two-twenty for the BMW?” said Martin.

  “Two hundred,” said Mr Manayev.

  “But you said.”

  “Said is said. I was coming down to two hundred when you bargain with me. Your mother is still washing you behind the ears, uh?”

  “Oh … hanks. What do you think, Jake?”

  “OK by me.”

  “Right. It’s a deal.”

  “Quick like that? What will you do for insurance?”

  “I did the moped with my Dad’s agent. We’ll go back into town and fix that, then I’ll pick up a helmet for Jake and the cash for you. Back about three, with luck.”

  It took longer than that, so they didn’t get home till nearly five. As he opened the door Martin heard it slither across paper on the mat, but the second post turned out to be only a letter for Mum. Nothing from Granpa. Perhaps the amusement and excitement of helping Martin buy the BMW made this seem more of a let-down than if Jake had simply come home from school and found nothing. At any rate it depressed him enough for Martin to look up half way through tea and say, “What’s up, Jake?”

  “I wish Granpa would write.”

  “He’s OK.”

  “I suppose so.”

  Silence. The flop of an oily page as Martin read his BMW maintenance manual. The far snore of a jet plane coming in to Eastleigh.

  “Tell you what,” said Martin suddenly. “Half term, next week. I’d been thinking we might take the bike to Wales and I’d show you a bit of rock-climbing. But if nothing’s come from Granpa by then, we’ll ride up north and look for him.”

  Chapter Two

  Almost the whole of the journey from Southampton to Newcastle was dreary. For the first few miles Jake enjoyed the thrill of rushing air, the steady contented pulse of the engine, and the sense of making a start towards a place where he truly wanted to be. But the nag of the wind and the noise from the exhaust blotted out other feelings and sounds; the only variations came from the other traffic, being passed by a hurtling car on the right or passing a slow-moving lorry on the left; then for a few seconds there would be the drub of a different engine, the whine of tyres and the buffet of displaced air. Even the smells were monotonous; it took something really pungent
like a bonfire or a hardboard factory to penetrate the fuzz of exhaust and rubber and hot metal.

  Five days earlier, when Martin had first ridden the BMW home from Mr Manayev’s, he had given Jake an earnest lecture on how important it was for the pillion passenger to keep his own body steady behind that of the rider, and not to try, when the bike leaned to take a curve, to lean the other way to right it. This lecture, Jake found, was quite unnecessary; because he couldn’t see the tilting horizon, “down” for him was where he felt it to be; when the bike leaned for a corner this sense of downwardness stayed in line with the bike, at the exact angle where gravity and centrifugal force cancelled out. So Jake didn’t even have the excitement which most pillion passengers enjoy in their first weeks of riding as they learn to master their instincts and trust the rider in front of them.

  Holding himself against the soft warm leather of Martin’s back, moving when his brother moved as if they were two branches of a tree which have grown almost into a single branch again, Jake passed the time by thinking about Granpa.

  Most people in his life had begun as voices, or sometimes smells. Granpa had begun as a presence. Since he’d been a baby Jake had always woken early. One morning when he was five he had lain for a while listening to bird sounds and traffic sounds and decided that it would be a good hour before anyone else was up, so he’d slipped downstairs to the kitchen for a cup of milk. He’d taken his mug off its special hook and was opening the fridge when he’d realised that there was someone else in the room. Not Mum—she’d have started talking. Not Dad—there’d have been cigarette smoke. Martin never got up till he had to. No, there was a stranger sitting by the table, watching him.

  Jake turned with the bottle in his hand and said, “Who are you? What are you doing in our house?”

  “You’re Jake,” said a quiet, slow voice. Perhaps the man didn’t want to wake the others, but it sounded as though he always spoke like that.

  “Who are you?” said Jake.

  “I’m your grandfather.”

  “No you aren’t. Granpa’s across the sea.”

  “They made me come home. They didn’t give me time to write to your Mum.”

  Very vaguely, as if it had been part of his dreams, Jake remembered the tinkle of the door-chimes and Mum’s excited gabble.

  “Oh,” he said. “Well, hello, Granpa.”

  “Hello, Jake.”

  Jake felt for the mug he’d left on top of the fridge, poured it two-thirds full of milk and put the bottle back. He could feel Granpa watching him all the time. He was proud of the way he did things for himself—several of his sighted friends weren’t allowed to pour out their own milk because their Mums thought they’d spill—so he didn’t mind showing off to Granpa.

  “Shall I tell you a story about crocodiles?” asked Granpa suddenly.

  “A true story?”

  “I don’t make things up, Jake.”

  “All right. I’ll go and fetch my dressing-gown.”

  When Jake came down again the kitchen was empty. He found his milk and went to the lounge. It smelt of bedrooms, as if somebody had been sleeping on the sofa, but Granpa was standing over by the window, watching him again.

  “You can sit down,” said Jake. “But you mustn’t put your feet on the chairs.”

  “I thought you couldn’t see anything at all, Jake.”

  “Course I can’t. And I won’t ever, either. I don’t mind.”

  “How did you know I was here?”

  “I just knew. Did the crocodiles bite you?”

  “They tried to. They bit a friend of mine very badly, so now he’s only got one leg. You see, we were coming down this river …”

  It was a good story, very exciting, a bit frightening and all coming right in the end except for poor Toby’s leg. But it wasn’t at all like Dad’s stories (though they could be exciting too, when they weren’t just funny) because Jake knew all along that everything in it was absolutely true. When it was over Granpa asked a bit more about being blind, and about sometimes knowing things without being able to explain how, but by then Jake didn’t mind because he knew that Granpa with his soft, slow voice was a friend, a real one, who he’d found for himself.

  Now, looking back on it as he sat in a dream-like stupor on the pillion of the BMW, Jake knew that all that first meeting had been exactly like Granpa—the gentleness and quietness and pleasure in amusing a small child, joined with the refusal to make a good story better by inventing extra bits and the patient insistence on trying to work out how Jake had known where he was, first in the kitchen, then in the lounge. Granpa was nutty about explanations, especially explanations of mysteries. He would nag away at them until he was quite certain how a thing happened, or why it was there. Dad said this was what had got him thrown out of the African country where he’d spent all his working life as a mining engineer. As long as he’d stuck to showing how witch-doctors did their tricks nobody had minded much; but then he’d started trying to find out why a whole pile of new machinery had turned up to be installed in a mine which was almost worked out, and he’d learnt that somebody had paid somebody a colossal bribe for the order and one of those somebodies was married to the sister of the Minister of Something

  Dad said Granpa had been dead lucky, not just because his mining company had had to pay him quite a bit for being sacked so unfairly, but lucky to get out at all. If he’d nosed a bit further (Dad said) the odds were he’d have finished up dead at the bottom of one of his mine-shafts, instead of being free to wander round Britain explaining away other people’s ghosts.

  That was what Dad said. You couldn’t tell with Dad. He liked Granpa, but he liked a good story too, and he enjoyed the idea that nobody ever quite knew if he was telling the truth. Mum liked Granpa, of course, but she didn’t understand him one bit. Jake found himself wondering whether Mum understood anybody—she didn’t give herself much chance, always talking and never listening. Dad said her own mother had been just the same, which was why Granpa always spoke as if he didn’t expect anyone to hear him, and why he’d gone to live in Africa too. Anyway, one of the things Mum couldn’t understand was why Granpa refused to settle down in the cosy room she’d found for him a couple of streets away from the Bertolds, but spent eleven months of the year out with his camera and his tape-recorder, trying to find explanations for well-known hauntings and wailings. Jake thought it was funny of Mum. It was so obvious. Granpa was like that, and you couldn’t expect him to do anything else.

  The engine quietened to a purr. The onrush of air slowed as the tyres joggled over roughnesses. The bike tilted. When Jake reached his foot down he found unmoving rutted earth.

  “Transport caff,” said Martin. “Sit on one of these things for more than a couple of hours and your arse becomes a lump of lead. Pretty boring for you I’m afraid, Jake.”

  “I’m all right. I’ve been thinking about Granpa and his ghosts.”

  “I’ve got a new idea about that. I hope we find the old boy because I want to see his face when I tell him.”

  The March air struck chill on Jake’s scalp when he eased his helmet off. He slid his stick out of the scabbard arrangement Martin had made so that it could lie along the frame of the BMW, put the fingers of his left hand on Martin’s forearm and walked with him into the caff.

  While Martin fetched coffee, Jake sat at a plastic-topped table and enjoyed the return of his senses—the muggy sweet smells of food, tobacco smoke and tea, and the rattle of cutlery and the clash and tinkle of the till and the wave-like wurra-wurra of voices. He tuned in to an argument between three men a few tables away.

  “ … it’s my livelihood, innit? Course I’ve got a right to say string the bleeding idiots up. I’d a done it meself, supposing I’d been there. Look, how long have I been driving? I’ll tell you. Nineteen years, that’s how long. I can remember when there wasn’t no motorways. Could you do Southampton Carlisle
in a day? You say yes, and I’ll tell you you’re a liar. So when a bunch of commie students gets it into their soft little heads to blow up motorways, I say bring back the death penalty and string ’em up.”

  “What I want to know,” said a slower voice, “is why they go calling themselves Green bleeding Revolutionaries. Sounds sort of soft, uh?”

  “Read about that, I did,” said a younger voice. “There was this Green Revolution, it said. Summink to do with growing more rice in India and places. This lot of beggars just nicked the name.”

  “Talking of that,” said the second man, “did you hear about Trevor? He was doing a run up to Hull with a load of babies’ bottles when he had it nicked at that caff north of Huntingdon. Bet the villains had a bit of a shock when they opened up Trevor’s trailer and seen what they got! Eighteen thousand babies’ bottles!”

  “Nothing in ’em, I suppose?” said the first man. “No Scotch, I mean?”

  Luckily they were still exploring this new problem when Martin came back. He was quite capable of getting into an argument with three lorry-drivers about the merits of the G.R. movement. The coffee was baddish, but hot. Just in case Martin could hear as far as the lorry-drivers, and just in case they came back to the death penalty for the Motorway Bombers, Jake said, “What’s this new idea of yours?”

  “I bet it isn’t really new. Some SF writer must have thought of it. Ghosts don’t come from the past, they come from the future.”

  “Then why are they sometimes dressed in wigs and ruffs and things?”