The Pit

“But why paint a cross, Mrs Wright?” the man had said nervously.

“Because we’re churchgoers, of course. They’re always on the streets when my son and I go to morning service.”

His mother was going to scrape the front door first thing tomorrow morning. But Oliver was haunted with the idea that she would never actually manage to get the paint off. However hard she rubbed, that awful red cross would stay.

He drifted into unconsciousness at last with the sound of a muffled bell tolling in his head. That was odd too, because it sounded quite near. The only church he knew of round here was St Olave-le-Strand, and they’d pulled that down months ago.

CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_929b17cb-6f97-523e-a40c-7b58f15e5643)

He set off for school early next day because he wanted to call in at the demolition site on the way to the bus. His mother was already busy on the front door, hacking away viciously with a rusty old scraper from his father’s toolbox. She’d got all the red paint off but the cross still showed through. It was a sandy-white now, because she’d scraped down to bare wood.

“The Society will just have to get it repainted,” she said. “They can’t put it off any longer.” Oliver slid off while she was still talking. At least the awful red cross had gone and the weather had improved too; it was actually quite warm. As he walked down the sunlit street, his fears of last night seemed slightly ridiculous. Perhaps Dr Verney was just an ordinary old man; all his mother’s residents had their odd little ways.

At the site, most of the men were in T-shirts, and a few had stripped to the waist. Oliver stood by a huge pile of rusty pipes and watched them working. After making sure that the foreman wasn’t anywhere around, he walked over to Geoff Lucas, one of his favourites. The whole site was marked off into sections by posts strung together with lengths of orange tape. “Is this where you are going to start excavating?” he asked Geoff, secretly admiring his suntan, and his big rippling muscles. Why did he have to be so puny and small? Why couldn’t he grow?

“That’s right,” Geoff said, rubbing the sweat off his face and leaving a great smudge across one cheek. “When you put up a building as big as this the foundations have got to go down deep. We won’t be starting on the footings yet, though. We’ve got to clear all this rubbish first.”

“But I thought you’d already started. What are those big holes everywhere?” He could see quite a few places where the soil went down several feet. They looked like moon craters except that they were square, not round. He’d thought those were the new foundations.

“Those were cellars, under the old warehouse. We’ve been taking old drainpipes out of those. Ted Hoskins was working on the job when—”

“When he was taken ill?” Oliver’s heart gave a queer flip and he stared hard at Geoff Lucas. “He was ill, wasn’t he?” he went on, when he got no answer.

“Dunno mate. Don’t ask me.” The man bent over his spade and started to scrape thick gooey mud off it with his boot – he’d begun whistling tunelessly.

Oliver was quite determined to find out what had happened to Ted Hoskins, and he stood over Geoff while he worked, firing off a battery of questions. “Look, mate,” the man said at last, throwing down his spade, “all I know is that he went running out of this place. Perhaps he just needed the bog or something. I mean, I dunno, do I? Anyway, he’s off sick today. Go and ask him what’s up, if you’re so interested.”

“Do you know where he lives?”

“At the flats. It’s only a stone’s throw. The caretaker’ll give you the number.”

“The flats” was bad news for Oliver. Going there might mean being seen by that gang. But he was definitely going to visit Ted after school, gang or no gang.

He decided on a change of tack; it was no good irritating Geoff. He might turn nasty, like Rick. “Found anything interesting lately?” he said, more casually. At home he’d got a very old penny that Geoff had given him, and two pieces of white tubing that his father said were bits of old clay pipes. Geoff felt in his pocket. “Well, there’s this. I picked it up on Friday … Not sure I’m going to give it to you, though. You’re a bit of a nosy parker, you are.”

“Go on, Geoff. What is it?”

“How do I know? You tell me.”

Oliver took it and held it at arm’s length. It was a small, insignificant-looking stone, smooth and black, like something you might pick up on a beach, but it was shaped like a rough triangle, not an egg, and at the narrow end there was a hole bored right through.

“There are some marks on it,” Geoff said, fishing in his pocket for a packet of cigarettes, and lighting up. “Can’t read them. I bet your Dad’d know what it was.”

“He’s in hospital,” Oliver told him. “He’s just had a big operation on his hip. I could show it to him though.” He held the stone up to the light and squinted at it. If the marks were letters he certainly couldn’t read them. He’d need quite a powerful magnifying glass to do that. “The hole’s odd,” he said thoughtfully. “Perhaps it used to have a string through it. Perhaps someone wore it, you know, like a necklace.”

Geoff sucked on his cigarette and pulled a face. “Not very pretty though, is it? Why wear a thing like that round your neck, for Gawd’s sake?”

“Can I have it?”

Geoff nodded. “OK. But don’t say I never give you anything. And I’d keep out of Rick’s way if I were you. He’s in a bad mood this morning.”

“He’s always in a bad mood,” Oliver said, slipping the little black stone into his pocket and slinging his bag of books on to his back again.

* * *

The minute Oliver walked into the playground a girl called Tracey Bell waddled over to talk to him. She’d obviously been waiting for him to show up. People laughed at Tracey behind her back because she was very short and very fat. She wasn’t at all pretty and she had a frizz of blonde hair the texture of pan scrubbers; she was no good at school work either.

Oliver felt a bit sorry for her. Lessons were no problem for him, he was always near the top, but he knew how it felt to be different. He was odd to look at too, with a large head that looked much too big for the scraggy neck that supported it and pale, rather bulgy eyes; and he was the smallest, weediest boy in the whole class. He was no good at games either, even worse than Tracey Bell. People called him a wally.

Tracey didn’t have a dad but everyone knew Mrs Bell. She was just a bigger version of her daughter, with the same kind of pan-scrubber hair. “I might be coming to your house this week,” she told Oliver excitedly. “My mum’s doing a cleaning job for your mum. Good, i’n’t it?”

Oliver stared at her round moon face; he could have kicked himself. He’d told Tracey last week that his mother was looking for a cleaner, but he’d never imagined that she’d tell her mother, or that Mrs Bell would knock on the door and ask for the job.

The news put him in a bad mood. In spite of his secret sympathy for Tracey, he felt threatened, afraid that she might start poking and prying. She’d ask him why they hadn’t got a television and why he always had to go to bed so early, and why his parents were so old.

At nine o’clock he filed miserably into the school hall with the others, all set for a depressing week. Most lessons bored Oliver because he was so clever; he always finished first then he had hours to kill. He usually ended up messing with the things in his desk, then he got told off, or sent to the library for private study. That was boring too, because he’d read all the books that interested him.

But after assembly something quite exciting happened. The science master stood up and told them that their school, Dean Street Middle, had been chosen as the main location for a new television project. Kit McKenzie, the famous TV “animal lady”, wanted to come to the school and film them. It wouldn’t be lions and tigers, it’d be domestic animals, ones you could keep at home. But she was on the lookout for something unusual. “If you’ve got an interesting pet at home, or can get one,” the science master told them, “find out all about it, make notes on the way it behaves, what it eats, all that sort of thing. You never know, you might be one of the lucky ones and end up on television.”

At break everyone was talking about the animal project. Most people had pets like mice and hamsters but one boy had a lot of stick insects and a girl in 3B said she was going to borrow a parrot from her Grandad and Grandma. “It can sing pop songs,” she told everybody, “and it swears.”

“I don’t think they’d want that on TV,” Tracey Bell said, in her loud, penetrating voice, sidling up to Oliver.

He was feeling rather depressed as he listened to all the talk about gerbils and Siamese cats, and about a large spider called Boris that had lived for two years in William Briggs’ bathroom cupboard. His mother would never let him have a pet, not even for something educational; she made enough fuss about Binkie. There was no way he’d get on TV. Then Tracey sprang a surprise. “My Uncle Len’s got a pet shop,” she whispered, cornering him in the playground by the bike racks. “He could get us something interesting.”

“Us?” Oliver repeated suspiciously.

“Well, we could do our project together, couldn’t we? It’d give us a lot more chance.”

It was Tracey Bell’s dream to go on television, and she’d got it all worked out. Oliver was the cleverest boy in the school so he could do all the writing and reading up, and her Uncle Len would get them the animal, something a bit different, if she wheedled him. They just couldn’t lose. “What sort of thing do you fancy, Oliver?” she said brightly. It was hard to crush Tracey Bell.

Oliver didn’t fancy anything, and he didn’t fancy appearing on the TV screen next to her. They’d look ridiculous, like Little and Large. “A rat,” he said stonily. That might shut her up.

“A rat? Ugh … Oliver. What do you want one of them for?”

He didn’t know, he’d just said the first thing that had come into his head, though he must have been thinking about rats anyway, because of all Dr Verney’s questions about rats and mice.

“Well, at least it’d be something different,” he told Tracey, feeling a bit mean. Surely her Uncle Len didn’t sell rats in his shop? He’d never actually heard of anyone keeping a rat as a pet. Though now he actually thought about it, studying rat behaviour might be quite interesting. Weren’t they supposed to be highly intelligent? He dimly remembered reading a book once, a science fiction story in which rats had taken over the world.

“If Uncle Len can get us anything it’ll have to come to your house,” Tracey told him. “We live in a flat and we’ve only got a balcony. My mum won’t let us keep anything out there.”

Oliver didn’t reply. Tracey’s uncle would probably say no, for a start, and if he did come up with anything he couldn’t see his mother letting him have it at Nine, Thames Terrace. As for keeping a rat … he could just see her face if he came home with one. It was such an awful thought it was almost funny.

CHAPTER FOUR (#ulink_b231a4c7-cc00-5d4d-9664-9d718367d703)

He found Ted in a stuffy room, sprawled in a chair, staring listlessly at a TV set. It was on low and the news commentary was hardly a mumble, he couldn’t be listening. And he wasn’t looking at the screen either, his eyes were going straight past it.

“I’ve brought you a present,” Oliver said, holding a paper bag out. Ted took it and looked inside. It was a chocolate bar, fruit and nut, the kind he sometimes brought in his lunch box. Oliver knew he liked it.