22 Britannia Road - Amanda Hodgkinson [114]
Men disturbed them last night, Wednesday, knocking on the door, taking cardboard boxes away and bringing bales of cotton sheets. His mother told them she was Tony’s housekeeper. The men lifted their hats and thanked her, and they, too, handed her money. Aurek hid from them. He made a nest in a bale of sheets.
During the day, his mother moves like a sleepwalker. She wanders the beaches and he follows her, trailing along behind, kicking sand and picking up shells and broken glass. When he is hungry she buys him candyfloss: pink and green clouds of it, which make his teeth ache and his mouth water. Lovely sweetness dissolves on his tongue and he takes wild bites, the roughness of sugar on his cheek, gobs of it in his hair. If he eats it like that, his mother stops walking and watches him. Sometimes she even smiles for a moment. Then she drops her head, studies her feet and walks on again.
He doesn’t ask her about the enemy, but every time he hears footsteps outside the house or sees a man walking on the beach alone, he wonders if it is him, his father, come to take them home again.
Tony comes back on Friday night, and early on Saturday morning they drive to a forest of pine trees a half hour inland. It’s wide and evenly spaced with trees growing in pale soil. Tony drops them off, saying he has business to attend to in Felixstowe.
Aurek gathers the field mushrooms that grow in the grass at the edge of the forest. He can’t remember learning how to hunt for mushrooms. It is something he has somehow always known how to do. He spots a cluster of smooth-skinned death caps and squats down beside them, pulling his knife from his pocket. With a steady hand, he cuts them, discarding the round puffy sac at their base that he knows poisonous mushrooms have. These cause death after a day or so. There’s no cure. He lays them on the ground and looks at them. If Tony was dead, maybe they could go back home? He is already a bad child. It is his fault they are here.
‘What are you doing with those?’
Aurek jumps. He hadn’t heard his mother behind him. He avoids her eyes but is sure she can read his mind, and kicks at the mushrooms, stamps on them until they are a mush under his feet.
‘Make sure you wipe your knife well. Those are dangerous.’ Silvana smiles, puts her hand on his cheek. ‘It’s lovely here, isn’t it? Just you and me. Like it used to be.’
He would prefer it if the enemy was there too, telling him how telephones work or what makes a motor car go. The enemy could build them a tree house. He could make them a proper home in the trees. Aurek reaches out and touches his mother’s hair, twisting a curl through his fingers.
‘Did I do something wrong?’ he asks, and she laughs loudly, as if he has told her a very funny joke.
At twilight, when Tony comes back to get them, the biggest bats Aurek has ever seen have begun to swoop through the branches. He finds a dead one and his mother persuades Tony to let him keep it.
Aurek lays it out on the porch, where it dries hard like leather, but a few days later the wind snatches it up and steals it away. Aurek spends days searching for it along the seafront, crawling under beach huts and fisherman’s huts, in among green nets and wicker lobster pots, his fingers searching through damp newspapers, fish hooks and pink discarded fish guts.
‘Is it good for him to run wild around town?’ says Tony to Silvana when he arrives the following Friday evening and Aurek comes home stinking of fish.
‘Perhaps Peter could come and play with him?’
‘He’s with his grandparents.’
Aurek sits on the front doorstep, his fingers in his ears, pretending not to hear them talking. He tries to imagine the sound fish make under water, wonders whether they sing to each other like birds.
‘Maybe Aurek should go to school? You’ve been here a fortnight. We don’t want the social services coming, asking questions.’
‘He isn’t ready for school.’
‘What is that he’s got in his hair?’
‘Tar. He was down at the boatbuilders’ again.’
‘You shouldn’t let