Secret of the Indian

Omri’s father was stamping up and down the living-room in a fury. His mother, meanwhile, was holding Omri round the shoulders. He could feel her hand cold and shaking right through his shirt. After her first shocked outburst when she’d come home and seen him, she’d said very little. His father, on the other hand, couldn’t seem to stop talking.

“You can’t depend on anyone! Where the hell are the police, I called them hours ago!” (It was five minutes, in fact.) “One would think we lived on some remote island instead of in the biggest city in the world! You pay their damned salaries and when you need the police, they’re never there, never!”

He paused in his pacing and gazed round wildly. The boys had put the television back and there wasn’t much disorder to see in this room. Upstairs, they knew, chaos and endless unanswerable questions waited.

“Tell me again what happened.”

“There were burglars, Dad,” Omri said patiently. (This part was safe enough.) “Three of them. They came in through that window—”

“How many times have I said we ought to have locks fitted? Idiot that I am! – for the sake of a few lousy pounds – go on, go on…”

“Well, I was asleep in here—”

“In the living-room? Why?”

“I – er – I just was. And I woke up, and saw them, but they didn’t see me. So I nipped upstairs, and—”

His father, desperate to hear the story, was still too agitated to listen to more than a sentence of it without interrupting.

“And where were you, Patrick?”

Patrick glanced at Omri for guidance. Omri shrugged very slightly with his eyebrows. He didn’t know himself how much to say and what to keep quiet about.

“I was – in Omri’s room. Asleep.”

“All right, all right! Then what?”

“Er – well, Omri came up, and woke me, and said there were burglars in the house, and that we ought to… er…” He stopped.

“Well?” barked Omri’s father impatiently.

“Well… stop them.”

Omri’s father turned back to Omri. “Stop them? Three grown men? How could you stop them? You should have locked your bedroom door and let them get on with it!”

“They were nicking our TV and stuff!”

“So what? Don’t you know the sort of people they are? They could have hurt you seriously!”

“They did hurt him seriously!” interrupted Omri’s mother in a shrill voice. “Look at him! Never mind the interrogation now, Lionel. I wish you’d go and phone Basia and find out why she didn’t come, and let me take Omri upstairs and look after him.”

So Omri’s father returned to the hall to phone the baby-sitter while his mother led Omri upstairs. But when she switched the bathroom light on and looked at him properly, she let out a gasp.

“But that’s a burn, Omri! How – how did they do that to you?”

And Omri had to say, “They didn’t do it, Mum. Not that. That was something else.”

She stared at him in horror, and then controlled herself and said as calmly as she could, “All right, never mind now. Just sit down on the edge of the bath and let me deal with it.”

And while she was putting on the ointment with her cold, shaky hands, his father came stamping up the stairs to say there was no reply from their baby-sitter’s number.

“How could she not come? How could she leave you boys alone here? Of all the criminally irresponsible – wait till I get hold of her—”

“What about us?” asked Omri’s mother very quietly, winding a bandage round Omri’s head.

“Us?”

“Us. Going out to our party before she got here.”

“Well – well – but we trusted her! Thought she was just a few minutes late—” But his voice petered out, and he stopped stamping about and went into their bedroom to take off his coat.

Omri heard the light being switched on, and bit his lips in suspense.

“Am I hurting, darling?”

He had no time to shake his head before his father burst back.

“What in God’s sweet name has been going on in our bedroom?”

Patrick, who was hanging about in the doorway to the bathroom, exchanged a grim look with Omri.

“Well, Dad – that’s – that’s where the battle – I mean, that’s where they were, when we – caught them.”

“Battle! That’s just what it looks like, a battlefield! Jane, come in here and look—”

Omri’s mother left him sitting on the bath and went through into the bedroom. Omri and Patrick, numb and speechless with suspense, could hear them exchanging gasps and exclamations of amazement and dismay.

Then both his parents reappeared. Their faces had changed.

“Omri. Patrick… I think we’d better hear the whole story before the police arrive. Come in here.”

With extreme reluctance, the boys went through the dividing door between bathroom and bedroom for the second time that evening.

The place looked terrible. All the dressing-table drawers, and those of the chest of drawers, were pulled out, their contents strewn about. The double bed had been knocked askew. A chair had gone flying, the wardrobe door was swinging open. Omri had set his mother’s little jewel-cupboard back on its feet but its door, too, was open.

But, with the lights full on, the thing the boys were most painfully aware of was the holes. Little pin-holes made by the tiny bullets, and not so little ones made by the miniature mortars and hand-grenades which had missed their targets and hit the wall and the head and foot of the bed. It seemed ludicrous to Omri now, looking at them, that he’d had even a faint hope his parents might not notice them. They might be a bit short-sighted, but after all, they weren’t blind. The room looked pock-marked.

And indeed his father was already running his fingers over the white wall above the bed-head.

“What’s been going on here, boys?” he asked in a new tone of voice.

Patrick and Omri glanced at each other, opened their mouths, and closed them again.

“Well?”

It wasn’t a bark this time, it was just a question, a question filled with curiosity. After all, from a grown-up’s point of view, what could make those tiny marks?

At that moment, there was a loud, policemanly ring and double knock on the door.