Little Exiles

The man in black’s eyes seem to have fallen on another boy, the lanky redhead from breakfast, but something compels Jon to stand up. Dodging a rampaging bigger boy, he scurries to the doorway. At first, the sun-tanned man does not even notice the boy standing at his feet. Jon reaches up to tug on a sleeve. His fingers are just dancing at the hem of the cloth when the man looks down: violent blue eyes set in a leathery mask.

‘I have a question,’ Jon pronounces.

‘A question?’ The accent is strange, English put through a mangling press and ejected the other side.

‘I want to call my father. He’s coming to fetch me.’

The man in black nods, as if he has known it all along.

‘I didn’t know who to ask,’ Jon ventures.

‘I see,’ the man says, placing an odd stress on the final word. ‘And when was the last time you saw your father? Was it, perhaps, the night he brought you here?’

‘My mother brought me here,’ says Jon, exasperated at the man’s stupidity.

‘And your father?’

Jon Heather says, ‘Well, I haven’t once seen my father.’

The man gives a slow, thoughtful nod. He crouches, a hand on Jon’s shoulder, but even now he is some inches taller and has to look down, along the line of a broad, crooked nose. ‘Then it seems to me, you hardly have a father at all.’

At once, the man climbs back to his feet, barks out for the red-haired boy and turns to lead him along the corridor.

Alone in the doorway, Jon Heather watches.

‘If you keep letting them take it, they’ll carry on taking it,’ the boy with red hair snipes. Tearing Jon’s blanket from the hands of a bigger boy, he marches across the dormitory and flings it back onto Jon’s crib. ‘What, were you raised as a little girl or something? Just tell them no.’

‘Thank you.’

‘Yeah, merry Christmas,’ the redhead replies.

Christmas Day has been and gone. This year, no card from his mother, no parcels wrapped in string with his sisters’ names on them. All of this he can bear – but he cannot stand the thought that, this Christmas, he kept no vigil for his father’s return.

It is the small of the afternoon and outside fresh snow is falling. Ice is keeping them imprisoned. Jon tried to hole up in the dormitory today, but with the grounds of the Home closed, clots of bigger boys lounge around their beds, working on ever more inventive ways to stave off their boredom – and Jon knows, already, what this might mean. If you tell tales to the men in black, they give you a lecture on the spirit. If you tell tales to the soldier at the end of the hall, he bustles you to a different room and, by the time you look back, he is gone. It is better, Jon decides, to stay away. A man, he tells himself, can endure anything at all, just so long as he has his mother and father and sisters to go back to.

He bundles up his blanket and tucks it under one arm. Then, with furtive looks over each shoulder, he bends down and produces a clothbound book that has been jammed beneath his mattress. He could read We Didn’t Mean to Go to Sea a hundred times – he’ll read it a hundred more, if it makes these two months pass more quickly.

‘Where’re you creeping off to?’

It is only the red-haired boy again, suddenly rearing from a bottom bunk where he has been tossing the rook from a game of chess back and forth. On his elbows, he heaves himself forward.

‘I’m going to find a corner,’ Jon says.

‘Down in the chantry?’

Jon shrugs. The Home is still a labyrinth of tunnels and dead chambers, and he has not given a thought to where he might retreat. There are passages along which the boys know not to go, but mostly these lead only to barren rooms, boarded-up or piled high with the things past generations of boys have left behind. A brave expedition once found a box of tin soldiers here which they brought heroically back and refused to share – but not even those brave boys have dared to sneak in and spend the night in that deep otherworld. Bravery is one thing, they countenance, but foolishness is something else. At night, those rooms are stalked by the ghosts of children who died there.

‘Maybe I’ll go to the dead rooms,’ Jon says, for want of something better to say.

‘Well,’ the red-haired boy goes on, allowing himself a smirk at this new boy’s ridiculous pluck, ‘you see George, you tell him I’m looking for him. I said I’d come looking, but I aren’t ready yet. You tell him that.’

‘Which one is George?’

‘The chubby one. Got no right carrying fat like that in a place like this.’

The one who wore a cap of milk and oats at breakfast, Jon remembers. He sleeps in the bunk beside the red-haired boy and wakes early every morning to hang out his sheets to dry. On his first morning in the Home, Jon saw the red-haired boy shepherding him out of the dormitory and returning with crisp sheets stolen from the laundry downstairs.

‘I’ll tell him,’ says Jon.

In the end, Jon does not dare follow the long passage from the entrance hall and venture into the boarded-up rooms. Instead, head down so that he does not catch the eye of a man in black scolding two boys for playing with a wooden bat, he slopes across and finds a small hollow behind the chantry, where old furniture is piled up and blankets gather dust. It is cold in here, but Jon huddles up to leaf through the pages of his storybook. So engrossed is he that he does not, at first, register the portly figure who uncurls from a nest of dustsheets.

Suddenly, eyes are upon him. When he looks up, the chubby boy is standing in front of him, holding out a crumpled blanket as if it is both sword and shield. He is shorter than Jon remembers, with hair shorn to the scalp but now growing back in unruly clumps. His lips are red and full, and the bottom one trembles.

‘I just want to …’

Jon scrambles up. ‘I’m sorry,’ he begins. ‘I didn’t know anybody came here.’

The fat boy shrugs.

‘You’re George.’

The boy squints. He seems to be testing the name out, turning it over and again on his tongue. Then, head cocked to one side, he nods.

‘There’s a boy up there, said he was looking for you …’

At that, the boy seems to brighten. ‘That’s Peter,’ he says. ‘He said he’d come soon.’

Jon shuffles against the stack of chairs, as if to let the boy past.

‘You don’t mind if I stay? Just a little while?’

Jon shrugs, sinks back into his blanket.

‘I come here before stories sometimes.’

Jon falls into his book, but he has barely turned a page before he hears the boy strangle a bleat. When he looks up, torn out of some countryside adventure – Jon has never seen the countryside, and marvels that people might live in villages on hills, climbing trees and boating on lakes – the boy is too slow to hide his tears. There is a lingering silence, and Jon returns to his tale: two boys are scrambling to moor a boat as fog wreathes over the Fens.

Again, the boy chokes back a sob. This time, Jon looks up quickly. Their eyes meet. The boy strangles another sob, and then rushes to mask the fact that he has been crying. For a second, his eyes are downcast; then, by increments, he edges a look closer at Jon.

At last, Jon understands. The boy wants his crying to be heard. ‘What’s the matter?’

The boy shrugs oddly, his round shoulders lifting almost to his ears. ‘What’s your name?’

Perhaps he only wants to talk – but, if that is so, Jon cannot understand why he is cowering in this cranny at all. ‘I’m Jon.’

George gives a little nod. ‘There was a Jon when old Mister Matthews brought me here. He was one of the bigger boys. He wasn’t here for long.’

‘He went home?’