Eight Days of Luke

“Ah, but why didn’t you come first?” said Cousin Ronald. “We’ll settle for Scrum, then, shall we?”

“Let it be Scrum,” said Aunt Dot decidedly.

David saw his fate being sealed and became frantic. “No, you needn’t,” he said loudly. Everyone turned angrily towards him. David made an effort to sound polite and reasonable, but he had to try so hard that his voice came out as loud and careful as a radio announcer’s. “It’s quite simple really,” he said. “Why don’t you all go to Scarborough and just leave me here?”

“Oh indeed?” said Uncle Bernard. “And what do you propose doing in our absence?”

“Fill the house with compost and marmalade, I expect,” said Astrid.

“No,” said David. “That was a mistake. I’d be very careful, and I’d be out all day playing cricket.” An idea came to him as he spoke. It struck him as a brilliant one. “I tell you what – you could buy me a bicycle.”

“You’ll be asking for your own car next,” said Astrid. “Will you want a Rolls, or could you make do with a Mini?”

“Out of the question,” pronounced Aunt Dot.

“No, it isn’t,” David said eagerly. “A bicycle would cost much less than going to Mr Scrum. I thought you’d leap at the idea, really. It’s three miles to the recreation ground, you see.”

“Get this clear, David,” said Cousin Ronald. “You are going to Mr Scrum for your own good, and not to any recreation ground on any kind of conveyance.”

“I don’t want to go to Mr Scrum!” David said desperately.

“Why not?” Astrid said, laughing. “He may be very nice.”

“How do you know?” said David. “How would you like to go to Mr Scrum?” Astrid’s mouth came open. Before she or anyone else could speak, David plunged on, again trying so hard to be polite that his voice came out like an announcer’s. “It’s like this, you see. I hate being with you and you don’t want me, so the best thing is just to leave me here. You don’t have to spend lots of money on Mr Scrum to get rid of me. I’ll be quite all right here.”

There was a long and terrible silence. One of the shiny green flies buzzed maddeningly three times up and down the table before anyone so much as moved. At last, Cousin Ronald, red right up to the bald part of his head, pushed back his chair with a scrape that made David jump, and stood up.

“Get out,” he said, with fearful calmness. “Leave this room, you ungrateful brat, leave your lunch and don’t dare come back until you can speak more politely. Go on. Get out.”

David stood up. He walked to the door, which had somehow moved several miles off since he last came through it, and when he finally reached it, he turned and looked at them all. Three of them were sitting like statues of themselves. Cousin Ronald was still standing up, glaring at him. David saw that he really was the same height as Cousin Ronald, and that made him feel much less frightened of him, but much more miserable.

“I took five wickets against Radley House last week,” he said to Cousin Ronald. “You couldn’t do that.”

“Get out,” said Cousin Ronald.

“And I bowled our games master. Middle stump,” said David.

“Get out!” said Cousin Ronald.

“First ball,” said David, and he went out and shut the door very carefully and quietly behind him, much as he would have liked to slam it. Mrs Thirsk was coming up the passage from the kitchen, perhaps to bring the pudding, but more likely because she had heard something interesting going on. “Thin grey pudding!” David said loudly. But he could not meet Mrs Thirsk face to face because there were now tears in his eyes. He slipped out of the side-door instead and went running up the garden with great strides, until he reached the private space between the wall and the compost heap.

It was baking hot there. The air quivered off the compost. David stripped off the ballet-skirt sweater – which served to dry his face – and squatted down anyhow in the middle of the gravel. He could not remember having been so angry or so miserable before. For a while, he was too angry and miserable even to think.

His first real thought was to wonder why he had not seen before that all his relations wanted was to get rid of him whenever they could. He supposed that was why they made such a point of his being grateful – because they looked after him when they did not want him in the least. And he wondered why he had not realised before.

His second thought was to wish he could go away and live on a desert island. Knowing that was impossible made him so miserable that he had to walk about and scrub his eyes with the back of his hand. Then he thought he would like to have the law on his relations. But they had not done anything he could have the law on them for. The judge would say they had treated him well and he ought to be grateful.

“Oh, I hate being grateful!” David said. And he wished his relations were wicked, instead of just ordinary people, so that he could do something awful to them.

Then he thought of the way they were sending him to Mr Scrum, and he wanted to do something awful to them anyway. Something to make sure that they were miserable for every moment they spent in Scarborough. Suppose he put a curse on them? Yes, that was it. He had read a rather pointless book last term, in which the boy put a curse on someone and it had worked. He would do the same to Uncle Bernard, Aunt Dot, Cousin Ronald – specially Cousin Ronald – and Astrid.

David roved up and down the hot space thinking what to put. And he had another idea. He would not curse them in English, because that was too ordinary, so ordinary that it might not even work. But he had read somewhere else that if you gave a set of monkeys a typewriter each and let them type away for twenty years or so – wouldn’t they get tired of it in five minutes? David broke off to wonder – anyway, they typed away and ended up accidentally typing the complete works of Shakespeare. In the same way, surely, if you just said any sounds that came into your head, wouldn’t you, mightn’t you, end up by reciting a real rattling good curse that would make it snow in Scarborough all next week and perhaps bring Cousin Ronald out in green spots into the bargain? And if it did, it would have the advantage of being an accident, and not truly David’s fault at all.

It seemed worth trying. For the next twenty minutes or so, David walked up and down the hot gravel, from compost to wall and back, muttering words and mouthing what he hoped were strange oaths. When he found a combination that sounded good, he stood still and recited it aloud. Each time he felt secretly a little foolish, because he knew perfectly well it had made no difference to his relations at all. But it was very satisfying all the same, and he went on.

At last he found the best combination of all. He could really almost believe it was words, fierce, terrible words. They asked to be said. And they asked to be said, too, in an important, impressive way, loudly, from somewhere high up. David climbed to the top of the compost heap, crushing baby marrows underfoot, and, leaning on the handle of the spade, he stretched the other hand skywards and recited his words. Afterwards, he never remembered what they were. He knew they were magnificent, but he forgot them as soon as he said them. And when he had spoken them, for good measure, he picked up a handful of compost and bowled it at the wall.

As soon as he did that, the wall started to fall down.

CHAPTER THREE Luke (#ulink_66186333-fa2a-51fb-9b43-601d09b8f201)

It was like an earthquake. It is a horrible feeling to have caused an earthquake. The wavering and heaving were to some extent under David’s feet, and the compost shifted and quivered like quicksand. That would have been enough to send David leaping down from it. But he could see that the wavering and heaving was stronger near the wall. He knew the wall was going to come down and that it was his fault. He tried to run towards it.

“No, no!” he said. “Stop it! I didn’t mean it!”

The solid ground came up in ripples under his feet and made him stumble. In front of him, the wall rippled too. He could hear the bricks grinding as they swayed up and down. The top of the wall made a crazy outline against the hot blue sky, wagging up and down, with bricks coming loose and lifting, then banging back into place again, and mortar spurting from between them. After that, there was so much dust and mortar that he could hardly see the wall, and he had to hold his arm over his head against the rubble raining down on him. The heaving underfoot went fiercely on. The wall could take no more and fell, backwards from David, in three slow, sulky bangs, into the garden behind Uncle Bernard’s, and set loose even more dust as it went.

The next second, the gravel was covered with angry orange flames, pale and vicious-looking in the sun and dust. David backed out from them desperately, until his shoulders hit the hedge and held him up. But the flames had gone by then. They just flared through the dust as if someone had dropped a match in a pool of petrol, and then went out. David was sure his curse had punctured a gas-main. He looked the heaving ground over hurriedly, to try and locate the leak before going to confess and get help.

He saw a round thing, something like a pipe and at least as thick as his arm, writhing among the rubble, and he thought it was a gas-pipe. It was covered with an ugly mosaic pattern which glittered in the sun. There were others, too, further off, and if David had not known they were gas-pipes, he would have sworn they were snakes – snakes somehow swimming in the rippling ground, as if it were water.

Then the thing nearest David surfaced, shaking clattering small stones off its blunt head, and saw David. It reared up as tall as he was, hissing furiously. David found himself face to face with a very large snake indeed, with a head as flat as Mrs Thirsk’s feet, a forked flicking tongue and yellow eyes which seemed to be made of skin. He could see its fangs, and the poison sacs at the top of them, and he was sure there was poison dripping from those fangs.

David lost his head. He made a frantic sideways dash along the hedge and seized the spade from the compost. The snake struck after him and missed. It was still half under the gravel, which hampered its movements, fortunately for David and the ground was not heaving so much now. David turned round with the spade in both hands, and hit the snake a hearty smack with it. He did not kill it, but he made it recoil. So he hit it again. Meanwhile, at least two other snakes were moving towards him, slowly and with difficulty, as if the ground were getting harder every second. David hit the first snake again, and then aimed a swipe at the next two, to discourage them. But the first snake reared up again as he did so and he had to concentrate on that.

He would never have managed alone. But, while David beat away at the first snake, he heard somebody else busily battering at a snake in the distance. There was so much dust and confusion still, that he never saw the person clearly while the battle lasted. He assumed it was Cousin Ronald at first. Then he caught glimpses of a shape much taller and thinner than Cousin Ronald’s and he thought it must be Aunt Dot. But he had little time to think. The ground was hardening all the time and he simply hammered the snakes back into it. If he hit them often enough, he discovered, they went back under the gravel and stayed there. The real trouble was to do it before the next snake could reach him, and that was where the other person helped. It was not until David had smacked the last length of the last snake well and truly into the earth that he realised this person was a complete stranger.

They stood looking at one another in the settling dust, David leaning on the spade and the stranger propped on the hoe he must have fetched from the shed beyond the hedge. David was shaking all over. The stranger was panting rather, but not in the least upset. He looked jaunty. He even laughed a little, as if snakes were a bit of a joke. He was not as tall as David had thought – only about David’s height – and he seemed a year or so older than David.

“Thanks,” David said to him gratefully.

“Thank you,” replied the stranger, jauntily smiling. “I’m Luke. Who are you?”

“David Allard,” said David. “I live in that house there. Do you—?” He meant to ask if Luke lived in the house beyond the broken wall, but he turned to point as he said it and after that he could think of nothing but what a hideous mess it was. The wall was in three long heaps – an utter ruin, lying on the neatly mown grass of the neat and respectable orchard belonging to the neat and respectable house David could just see down among the trees. David thought it was a miracle that nobody had come out of that house – or Uncle Bernard’s – with loud shouts of fury. Or not yet. “Oh dear,” David said miserably.

“A bit of a ruin, isn’t it?” Luke agreed.

“Yes, and I did it,” David said. “I shall get into trouble.” Which was putting it mildly, he thought.

Luke laughed, and jumped on to the nearest heap of wall to look at it more closely. “Did you really do this?” he said. “How?”

David followed Luke over to the wall, thinking that Luke must be a trespasser and nothing to do with the neat and respectable house after all. He was wearing cast-off looking clothes, much like David’s, and he was covered with brick dust, cement dust and what seemed to be soot. And it was plain he did not care two hoots about the broken wall. He sat himself down on a convenient heap of bricks and patted another to show David where to sit too.

“Explain,” he said, and folded his arms, ready to listen, with a very engaging look of interest. Luke had a sharp and freckly face, under the dirt, and a burn or something on one cheek, probably from those sudden flames. His hair seemed to be red. At any rate, he had those kind of red-brown eyes that only go with red hair. David rather took to him.

“I did it trying to curse,” David confessed, and sat down too, though he could not help taking a nervous look at the respectable house first.

“Don’t worry. They’re out, or they’d have been up here raving half an hour ago,” Luke said, which proved to David that he was certainly only a trespasser. “Now, explain. Whom were you cursing?”