The First Book of Calamity Leek Read online

  There weren’t time to do nothing but set my feet racing after my sisters into the only hiding place around – the mangy-petalled, good-for-nothing-but-prickling dog roses straggling up the bottom of our cold stone Wall.

  Weren’t two seconds later that our softbrained sister skidded into the Boules, that fleabag dog snapping at her ankles. Maria stopped and stared at Truly, like she’d never seen her in her whole sorry life before. Maria stood and stared like she was a sign saying ‘This way to Out of Bounds, nieces.’ Which was all we needed, it really was.

  I poked my head out of prickles. ‘Maria, over here! Maria Liphook! The dog roses! Come on!’

  I ran out and kicked the dog off Maria, and pulled her in with us. I slid down against the Wall and jammed a hand over her lunatic mouth. Thirteen fur lumps and twenty-six jelly eyeballs, shrunk down under weeds, plugging up ears and swallowing breath, as that song kept coming our way.

  Soon enough we could hear the sound of thrashing in between words –

  See the pretty girl in that mirror there? Thrash thrash.

  I shrunk myself into my fur, quieter than a slug in buds. Or a worm. Better to be a worm, sneaking down to soil safety. Breathe all quiet under soil, worms do.

  Such a pretty face, such a pretty dress, such a pretty smile –

  All sudden it stopped. It had arrived, that song, in the Boules de Neige, and we had nowhere to go.

  I scrunched my eyes blind and tried to keep the shake out of my bones. I pressed Maria’s mouth shut and groped my free hand out for a sister’s warmth. It was Nancy’s fatty paw I found next to me, worst luck. But never mind, I took it.

  Up high on the Wall, the owl screeched. I could hear nothing else in my ears but my own smashing heart.

  Course, that dog came snarling on up to the dog roses then, snarling and sniffing and snapping for toes. And for a few seconds there weren’t nothing happening in the Garden but that owl screeching, that dog sniffing, and the sound of a bottle unscrewing. So I began to hope it was just a Constitutional being taken, and some medicine would be drunk and then the singing would turn around for the yard, and we could be back in our dorm faster than my sister Mary Bootle could say Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. And I was turning to mouth this at Nancy, when a voice said, ‘How very curious, the Boules de Neige appear to have grown a lump.’

  And all my hopes of getting back safe died off.

  A white light smashed into the dog roses and wobbled over us. ‘Toto! Toto-tots, get away from those dratted weeds, and come here at once!’ the voice said.

  Now, I don’t mind saying right here, the voice, course, was our dear Aunty’s own one, and like Ophelia Swindon Volume III: The Glory Years says it much better than me –

  Never was a larynx more loved. As powerful as the Phantom’s, as pitch-perfect as Poppins, its eviction from the theatres of the West Midlands left a vacuum as vast as a black hole, a situation as vacant as a womb, and a memory more mourned than a dodo on the dinner plates of the Indian Ocean.

  ‘How very curious, I was saying, there appears to be something cancerous clogging up this Boule bush. See, Princess, bits of bone and fur and hair. Dear oh dear, how messy it looks. And do you know what, Princess, this is very sad news, because cancers are bad news. Cancers spread, see, and soon enough they are gobbling up every inch of an otherwise healthy organ. Before long, they are on the rampage, ruining years of TLC, not to mention best-laid plans for the future.’ The medicine bottle sloshed. ‘So, what on earth are we to do with this one?’

  Someone moaned. Someone else somewhere else was eating down tears.

  Aunty’s voice turned butter-soft, ‘After all, it can’t be allowed to spread. It certainly can’t be allowed to do that. What’s that, Princess, do we have a choice? A lady always has a choice, sweetie. However, in this case, I fear our options are somewhat limited.’

  Nancy pumped my hand. I forced an eye to look out where she was looking. Our dear Aunty was jabbing about the Boules with the correcting stick, her lantern held high and her shadow thrown protecting as a wall over the bush where Truly dangled.

  Aunty slammed the correcting stick into the bush and sighed. ‘I suppose we’ll have to chop it out. Either that or mash it to a pulp. What do you reckon, Toto-tots?’

  A hot tear fell on my left cheek and ran away quick.

  ‘What’s that?’ The shadow skull of Aunty’s head turned down at the fleabag dog itching its bottom in rose roots. ‘Chopping would probably work best, you say? Chopping it into teensy pieces and hoovering them out would work best of all? Oh, but damn and drat, I haven’t a knife on me. What’s that? Oh no, Princess, I don’t think your stumpy old gnashers are strong enough to tear it up. But I won’t say it wasn’t a charming thought, and terribly heroic of you to offer.’ Aunty shook her head. ‘I guess we’re just left with plan B. We’ll have to mash it to a pulp.’

  ‘Come along, Mr Stick,’ Aunty said. The correcting stick rose to striking position, in two-handed steadiness above Truly. I shut up my crying eyes. It didn’t do to think of my sister right now, it really didn’t.

  ‘Are we ready, Mr Stick?’ Aunty said. ‘I do hope you’re feeling energetic—’

  And someone shouted, ‘Stop!’

  Someone in the dog roses. ‘Please stop!’

  Well.

  Well, Annie St Albans, that was. None other. Jumping up out of the weeds, like a statue to her very own stupidity. And Devil take me if Annie didn’t go running on up to Mr Stick, like it weren’t the nastiest bruiser ever made. Annie went running on up, shouting, ‘Please don’t strike, Aunty! It’s me, Annie St Albans. And it ain’t a cancer in there, it’s Truly Polperro.’

  Well, Aunty lifted her lantern high at that. And the light crawled up her silver furs, and over her chins, and past the scoop of her melted cheek and into the socket of her empty eye, and set its skin to twitching. ‘You’re Annie St Albans, you say? And you say there’s something Polperroey curled up in there? Dear oh dear, I wasn’t aware we had started growing children in this part of the Garden.’

  Aunty set Mr Stick to turfing off fur from Truly. ‘Well, Toto, this is even more curious than I thought. It appears my niece was spot on, there is indeed a little girl snuggled up inside. It seems it was a good job Annie St Albans just happened to be passing, otherwise Truly Polperro might have become Truly Mushy Peas by now. What’s that, Toto? Annie needs correcting for being Out of Bounds? Oh, pup, I think perhaps you’re right. Sadly, I think perhaps she does. After all, she’s clearly come all this way alone, while her good little sisters are tucked up safe as corpses, getting their beauty sleep in the dorm. Aren’t they, Annie?’

  Well, Annie really had gone and dived herself down a well now. And she was stuck deeper than a drowning mouse. And now she was about to pull us all down there too. Because it weren’t but the worst thing you could do, to tell Aunty an untruth, because she would crack them open like a louse on a hair when she found them. And she always found them, never mind she only had the one eye for the hunting.

  ‘Aren’t they, Annie?’

  ‘No, they’re not, Aunty.’ Would you believe it, this was Dorothy. Grasshopping out of the dog roses before I could grab her fur to tug her back in. Clever Dorothy, being not so clever about it now. ‘We all came. We heard Truly scream, and we came because we were worried for her.’

  Aunty’s empty socket twitched at Dorothy, and from her living eye it seemed she wiped a tear. Except, of course, she didn’t, because Aunty had no tears left, after crying them all away when she suffered her Splashback.

  ‘Such solidarity in the sisterhood,’ Aunty said. ‘How sweet.’

  I shut my eyes again, but it was too late. The lantern swung onto the dog roses.

  ‘Choppity-chop, up you pop, every darling one of you, before Toto takes it upon herself to dive in there and tear you all to pieces. Splendid. Now then, my precious little pension plans, who’d like first go with Mr Stick?’

  After we’d received our correction, Annie an
d Nancy pushed a barrowful of Truly Polperro back to the yard. Me and Dorothy opened a fresh bale and forked it out in the skinny room built on the other side of our dorm. It was a room made white-bricked and cosy enough for one, with its own door and bolt. The mending room, it was named by Aunty, being a place for mending hearts and minds, and possibly broken-up bodies like Truly’s, if she was lucky – it was possible that might happen too.

  Annie and Nancy laid Truly out and tucked her fur coat over her. Annie fetched rabbit scraps from our trunk to keep her feet warm. Dorothy went for the Reader’s Digest Home Medicine Manual from the schoolroom, which Aunty took off her.

  Aunty looked down where Truly lay deadmeat or dreaming in straw. She had a drink of medicine and said, ‘That’ll do fussing, nieces, off you pop.’

  And we were sent out into the yard and bolted inside our dorm until we didn’t know when.

  JANE JONES

  ‘GOOD AFTERNOON, DEAR,’ a voice says, coming into this room I have been trapped up in. It is a white room with no shade nowhere, and without one single wormhole for the air to fly away free. Also, my left leg has been potted up like a sick rose, which they say is for mending me, but is to stop me running, I know it. ‘I hope I’m not disturbing you.’

  Well, I keep on with my pencil, like to say, ‘I’ll thank you to let me be, otherwise I ain’t never going to get the truth of everything set down before I leave tonight, what with all these interruptions, am I?’

  But the voice keeps on at me. ‘I don’t think we’ve been introduced. I’m a nurse here, my name’s Jane Jones, and you must be—’

  A hand touches mine, so I have to look up. And my hand drops the pencil.

  A female is standing over me, and she is charred like she’s taken ten turns on the Devil’s spit. Charred like her hair should be shrivelled to wisps. Like all her flesh should be dripping off her bones.

  But it isn’t.

  Her hand is charred all over, but not one bit of a finger is dripping off. Her face is charred from top to chin, but it hasn’t even started to melt. Her lips are plump, her eyes are swivelling in their sockets, and her nose is all in one piece.

  Well.

  ‘Is that a diary you’ve started there?’ she says, holding out my pencil, never mind my hand is shaking too fast to take it. ‘Goodness, but you’re a neat writer.’

  Well, it’s some minor miracle how she can even speak, it really is.

  I grab for my pencil. Not one scrap of her skin has come off on it. I rip a page from this writing book and I write quick –

  YOU ARE DEAD. WHY ARE YOU TALKING, DEAD WOMAN?

  ‘What’s that, sweetheart?’ she says. ‘Oh,’ she says.

  I write more –

  HOW DID YOU GET OFF YOUR ROASTING SPIT AND COME BACK UP?

  ‘Oh,’ she says. ‘Oh my.’ And her shoes step back quick from the bed.

  So I give her a good look over, and try to think logical, like Dorothy would. She is wearing trousers and a smock and a cap. She is only exposing her arms and face and neck. Then I realise it. And if I was speaking, I would have a good old laugh at her.

  But I’m not. So I write and tell her I know she ain’t really dead, she has just creosoted her exposed parts for protection, like Truly Polperro tried once in the summer, when she got bored of wearing her headscarf.

  Except this Jane Jones ain’t for answering. She is unpacking a wash box.

  Well, I ain’t letting her touch me and not say an answer.

  I bang my pencil on the bedpost for her attention, and I write –

  SHOW ME A PIECE OF YOUR UNCREOSOTED SKIN.

  And she reads them words and she stares at me a while. And when she’s finished with staring, she says, ‘All right, sweetheart, shall we stop playing games?’

  IT WON’T STOP THEM COOKING UP YOUR INSIDES.

  ‘What won’t?’

  CREOSOTE WON’T STOP THEM COOKING UP YOUR INSIDES.

  IT WON’T STOP YOUR SKIN FROM CRACKING UP NEITHER.

  Her eyes see this and they get small with thinking. And then she starts trying out a smile. Like all this might be something funny to her. Like I might be something funny. Which I am not.

  ‘May I?’ she says, and she comes and sits her bottom on my bed, right by my potted leg, even though I didn’t ask her to. There is a smell of Gloriana tea roses about her.

  ‘Listen, sweetheart, I’ll tell you what my big sister told me when I was your age. “Black don’t crack,” that’s what my sister said. That is unless you smoke sixty a day, and sit in the sun drinking rum from morning to night.’ This Jane Jones smiles teeth that are white as Icebergs. ‘Black skin doesn’t crack, sweetheart, that’s just the luck of the draw.’

  She pats my leg and stands up. ‘Now, are we done with the silliness? Because I can see five grubby toes peeking out the end of this cast.’ She is still smiling, and I have to say, it is uncracking.

  And I check all over again, but there ain’t one rip on her face. Not even the skinniest little seam is coming undone under her eyes.

  Well.

  Well, I think about what it says in the Appendix. And in my head I go back to the Garden and I pull it careful off the schoolroom shelf, just like I did every morning to read out a lesson over our porridge, and every night to read another over our stitching. And never mind it is lost now, in my head I can still open its black casing. I turn the pages through the metal hoops to O and find O for Outside, but, course, there ain’t never been nothing set down nowhere about uncracked females living Outside. And in my head, I go and check on F for Facts about Females and also U for Ugliness, Ungainliness, Unfeminine conduct, also all Unsavoury Urges – but there was no word on uncracked skin set down there neither.

  Dorothy Macclesfield might think up the logical answer. But I ain’t heard Dorothy’s voice once through these walls, even though they said my sisters were all here. All of them still leftover, that is.

  And I hope Dorothy is still leftover. And I think of shouting out to check. Shouting out to say, ‘Dorothy, get ready for going tonight, because I’m off to War and you can come too if you fancy. And by the way, Dorothy, I have a question for you.’

  But then I don’t.

  Either this Jane Jones is a deadmeat wanderer from Bowels, gotten so cooked up her brain’s dripped out of her nostrils, dripping her sense out too. Or she has coated herself with creosote, and she ain’t telling me the truth about her uncrackable skin.

  Or she is.

  Well.

  Well, I watch her close. She uncovers my unpotted leg and sets to wiping between my toes. The wetness doesn’t make her hands go streaky, like Truly’s did after Aunty put her under the standpipe for an hour. And all sudden I’m thinking what Aunty said once, ‘My eye, but there’s more to you than meets the eye.’ All sudden, I’m thinking about me and Annie in the barn, weeks after Truly fell down into the Boules de Neige, and what was said then between us, that couldn’t ever be unsaid. And my heart starts battering in its box. I write quick –

  ARE YOU PROTECTED WITH BLACK DON’T CRACK SKIN

  BECAUSE YOU ARE A WEAPON LIKE ME?

  And before I know it, I write –

  TELL ME THE TRUTH, JANE JONES.

  HOW MANY DEMONMALES HAVE YOU KILLED?

  Jane Jones doesn’t look at my words until she has done wiping me all over. Then she looks at them words a long old while. Then she looks at me a while. ‘I’m afraid we’ll have to wait until tomorrow to carry on with our chat, sweetheart.’

  TELL ME NOW.

  Because I have to leave tonight, Jane Jones. I have to start the War. It can’t wait.

  Jane Jones packs up her box, ‘Tomorrow should be a quieter day for me. We’ll have plenty of time to chat then. I’ll be sure to come armed with some answers, now that I know what kind of a grilling to expect.’

  And she gives me a wink.

  Well, I saw it good and proper, that wink. Like Aunty says it was ‘a quickie but a goodie’. And then I know it. She didn’t just come to wipe me
over. Course she didn’t. She came to show me this special skin protection of hers. This Jane Jones has purpose. Just like us. She came to show me that. And just to be sure, she winks her eye again.

  And now she is going at the door.

  Words rush up my throat. Whole ones that don’t melt to nothing on the way.

  ‘Wait,’ I shout out. ‘Don’t you want to know my name?’ Because happen she will need to know my name. ‘My name is Calamity Leek.’

  And this Jane Jones lifts her wash box in a wave at me. ‘Well, it was very interesting meeting you, Calamity Leek. I look forward to catching up tomorrow.’

  And she shuts the door behind her, leaving her Glorianas flavouring my air.

  OUR DORM

  ‘WAS IT THE lid then, Clam?’ a voice whispered in my ear.

  Little Millie Gatwick, that was, two years and four months my junior, come crawling up the row to me. Gretel rat sat on Millie’s head, pink rat fingers knitting up Millie’s yellow hair. ‘Only I was thinking, maybe Truly climbed up to the sky lid, and it was what she saw when she opened it that made her fall down dumb.’

  Now, you’re probably wondering why Millie was asking me. I mean I ain’t the most-Spitting-Imaged sister. Nor am I so clever in sums as Dorothy. But the truth is, I do have about the best knowledge of the Appendix that a head could ask for. And like our dear Aunty says it best of all, ‘If my Appendix doesn’t answer the big questions in life, nieces, nothing else will!’

  And I expect you’re wanting to know why I have the best knowledge of the Appendix, but like Aunty also says it, ‘Well, niece, that’s a story probably best kept between me and you, and you and me, don’t you think?’

  Only I will tell you this, I had one problem right now – there weren’t no answer set down nowhere from A for Aunty Swindon (see also E for Eternal Love) to Z for Zebra stripes (which are to be avoided during all plump periods in life) that I could think of for climbing after the sky lid. I sighed and unwrapped my ears from their cloth strips, and sat up in my straw. Wasn’t like I’d been sleeping anyway, was it? Not with my Mr Stick-worked shoulders. Not with Truly tramping about my head. Truly and terrible injuns tramping unnecessary everywhere.