2

Polly went on walking, but now she had somewhere to go. She was following a tugging in her head. It was like an instinct, the way migrating birds go, or salmon swim, sure and unhesitating, to the right place in the end. It took her round in a devious U-turn, back through the small streets, under the graph-paper buildings, across two very busy roads and up a slanting street to one side, to the elderly-looking front of a concert hall. Notices were stuck on it, one for wrestling—THE WESTON WHIRLWIND V CLAPHAM PETE—and one for a concert—THE DUMAS QUARTET TONIGHT 7:30. The part that said DUMAS QUARTET was an oblong strip of paper stuck on top of some other name and flapping loose in the wind. But it was there. Thank heaven!

The doors of the hall were shut. Polly knew at a glance that she could not get in that way. She only turned her eyes sideways to make sure, and to read the notice, and walked on without pausing, so that Mr. Leroy would not know, uphill and round the side, a way she could not have found without her instinct, and arrived at a side door, which was not quite shut.

She went straight in. Nobody seemed to be about, but now she had something to guide her beyond instinct. There was music. Overhead somewhere there were thumps and shuffling. Maybe it was the wrestling. The music was coming from below. Polly went down bleak stone steps, and down more, with the music getting louder all the time. She opened a door.

Inside was a dingy green-painted cloakroom sort of place, fairly brightly lit. In the middle of it, four musicians were sitting on tubular metal chairs in front of music stands, playing. They seemed so wrapped up in what they were playing that Polly simply stood by the door, not liking to interrupt. It did not matter anyway. Her instinct had brought her to the right place.

Mr. Lynn said, “Just a minute,” and stopped playing. The rest of the music broke off while he was leaning his cello on its spike against the chair and carefully laying his bow across the seat. The first violin said, “But I swear I got that right this t—” to Mr. Lynn’s back as he went over to Polly.

“What is it, Polly?” he said, without fuss or exclamation, quite quietly. “What’s wrong?”

Now that Mr. Lynn was really there, standing in front of her in shabby old jeans, with his chin covered in unshaven golden hairs and a faint, familiar scent coming off him, Polly found it hard to speak without crying. She blurted out what had happened with Dad and Joanna, and then bit her lips together hard.

“Jesus wept!” said Mr. Lynn. “Lucky we happened to be here.”

Polly breathed in, then out. “And even if I had any money, I can’t go home.” Her voice started to jiggle about. “Mum thinks—thinks—Anyway she says I ganged up with David against her.”

“I see. Pig in the middle again,” said Mr. Lynn. “Can you go to your grandmother?”

Polly nodded. Tears were pushing to get out of her eyes.

“Then don’t worry about a ticket,” Mr. Lynn said. “I’ll get you one. Wait till you feel better and then we’ll see what we can do.”

Polly waited, breathing fiercely in and out. When her tears had stopped pushing and retired a little, she nodded. Mr. Lynn put his large hand in the middle of her back and guided her over to the other three. They had been talking together, tactfully, in small murmurs, but they looked up with interest as Polly arrived.

“Polly Whittacker,” said Mr. Lynn. “Ann Abraham, Sam Rensky, Ed Davies.” He gave one of his gulps of laughter. “I told you we were all heroes, didn’t I?”

The three faces broke into friendly, recognising smiles. They know all about me! Polly thought in amazement, looking from Ann’s frank friendliness to Ed’s twinkle, and on to Sam’s great, gloomy grin. She almost felt as if she knew them too.

“Polly finds herself stranded,” said Mr. Lynn. He looked up at the ceiling. “Now, who might happen to have the times of trains to Middleton?”

There was a groan and a laugh from the other two as Ann bent down to a bag on the floor beside her.

“We wonder why Ann doesn’t trust motor transport,” Sam Rensky said.

Ann turned her face to Polly while she dug in the bag. The dark hair dangling across it was almost the same colour as Joanna’s, but nothing like so neat, and Ann’s brown eyes looked out among the strands, direct and amused, with friendly creases underneath. “I never ride with Tom if I can help it,” she explained. “It’s far too frightening.”

“Tom’s what I call a creative driver,” said Sam. “And the cello’s always allowed the best seat.”

“I was told you were his very first passenger,” Ed Davies said to Polly. “What horrible bad luck!”

Funny to think of Mr. Lynn telling them all about her, Polly thought. She felt better already. Sam got up and fetched her another tubular chair from the stack by the wall. Ed took the timetable from Ann and propped it on a music stand, where he held it down with his violin bow so that they could all see it. There was a through train at six-thirty.

“That’s the one,” said Mr. Lynn. “I can put you on that and still have time to get ready for the concert. I’ll phone your grandmother and ask her to meet the train.”

He went away to look for a telephone. Ann said, “Would you like some coffee?” Polly still did not like coffee, but she nodded shyly. Whereupon Ann pulled a thermos flask out of her bag and poured Polly a cupful. It was warm and dark and sweet, and Polly found it surprisingly nice.

Ed Davies said, “What isn’t in that bag, Ann?”

“Would you like a sandwich?” Sam Rensky said to Polly. When Polly nodded, he fished in his trouser pocket and produced a bent cheese sandwich wrapped in plastic film. Ann and Ed laughed.

“Sam always has food somewhere,” said Ann.

Sam smoothed the sandwich out and passed it to Polly. “I’m not like other people,” he said mournfully. “I have hollow legs. It’s a great trial.”

The sandwich was warm as well as bent, but it made Polly feel almost good again. Ann poured her another cup of coffee to go with it, and by this time Polly felt she knew them all well enough to explain, a bit shyly, to Sam that he was Tan Hanivar the shape-shifter and that shifting shape took a lot of energy. “I expect that’s why you’re always hungry,” she was saying when Mr. Lynn came briskly back.

“Your grandmother says you’re not to worry. She’ll be at the station to meet you,” he told Polly.

“Thank you,” Polly said gratefully.

“Tom, you never told me I was a shape-shifter!” said Sam. “What’s Ed?”

“He calls music out of the air,” said Polly.

“I do! I do!” Ed said enthusiastically.

Mr. Lynn gave Polly one of his blandest joke-sharing looks. “Sometimes,” he said, “it can be quite deadly.”

“Hey!” cried Ed, as everyone laughed.

“And what am I?” Ann asked Polly.

Polly saw Mr. Lynn looking at her with interest. They had never yet decided what Tan Audel did. But now she saw Ann, with her square, quiet face and her deep, friendly brown eyes, Polly knew exactly what Tan Audel did. “You never give up,” she said. “But your main gift is the gift of memory. You remember everything—”

Ed and Sam exclaimed, and looked at one another in astonishment. “How did she know?”

“Knowing things is Polly’s heroic gift,” said Mr. Lynn. Polly had not realised before that she had a gift herself. It was a surprising discovery. She and Ann looked at one another and laughed, Ann, with her head flung back, obviously very pleased.

After that, everyone became more sober. Ann said doubtfully to Polly, “Would you mind very much if we got on with our practice?”

“We agreed to give the same programme as the Hertzog Quartet,” Sam explained, “because they’d already printed all the stuff.”

“Which means doing one thing we’ve only done about twice before,” Ed said. “We’re having devilish problems with our ensemble in that one.”

“Oh yes. I didn’t mean to be a nuisance,” Polly said.

“You’re not a nuisance,” said Ann.

Everyone waited while Mr. Lynn considered Polly, tipping his face until Polly looked at him, just as he had done at the funeral, to judge whether she would be all right.

“I think I will be,” said Polly. “I’ve got your book to read.”

Mr. Lynn nodded. That seemed to reassure the others, and they got down to playing music again. While they were making strange whinings and plunks, tuning strings, Polly moved her chair back and got out The Golden Bough. But she hardly got halfway through “Temporary Kings” and nowhere near “The Sacrifice of the King’s Son.” The practice was too fascinating. She laid the book down on the floor and leaned forward to listen and look.

The music halted as she did so. “What did I do now?” said Ed.

“Nothing,” said Mr. Lynn. “Polly, for the love of the strange gods of the heroes, don’t do that to that book!”

Polly looked down at the book, bemused.

Ann said, “Tom, I really do think you have eyes in the back of your head now!”

“You’ve got it open, lying on its face,” Mr. Lynn said. “The poor thing’s in torment.”

“One of his obsessions,” Sam said to Polly.

“Humour him,” said Ed. “So that we can get on.”

“Or I shall never send you another,” said Mr. Lynn. But he looked round at Polly as he said it, to make sure she knew it was one of his half-jokes. Polly hastily shut the book and laid it down again, and the practice went on.

Of all the things Polly found she had forgotten, some six years later, this was the one she was most hurt and astonished not to have remembered. At the time, she had kept telling herself that she would never forget this afternoon. How could she have forgotten how kind they all were, without the least fuss? Even more, how could she have forgotten watching and listening while they practised, as if it was a special private performance just for her? They made it seem like that, by turning and looking at her apologetically when things went wrong, or smiling at her in triumph when the music went right.

Ed seemed the one everyone blamed when it went wrong. Polly was rather indignant about that at first. Ed was small and round and only just as tall as Ann, and she thought they picked on him because of his size. But after a while she began to realise that it was Ed himself who took it on himself to be in the wrong nearly every time one of the others made a mistake. She was pretty sure Ed was pretending, because the others all got ashamed at admitting they were wrong. Polly began to suspect Ed was really a superb violinist, despite the daft, dismayed look he kept on his face while he played.

Beside Ed, Sam Rensky’s face went through incredible contortions. It was a rubbery, long-nosed face—his nose was nearly as long as Granny’s—with a long chin like a rubber boot toe. He was as tall as Mr. Lynn, but a good deal skinnier, and the violin looked like a little toy under his long chin. Above it, his face grinned, glared, pursed its lips and ran down to new shapes in ripples. You might have thought he was mad if you had not known he was living the lovely sounds he and Ed were making. Bright, sharp streaks of sound, Polly thought. If you were able to hear lime juice, it would sound like violins.

It took Polly some time before she could hear Ann’s viola at all. The composer never seemed to give it a bit on its own, and Ann did not help by keeping her face plain and straight as she played, with her jaw sort of ground downwards to hold the big viola in place. But at length Ann did have a piece on her own—Polly heard it several times, because Sam kept coming in at the wrong place—and the sound was vibrant and full, not as low as Polly expected. Ann played as precise and sweet as Ed, and there was a sort of excitement behind her playing quite at odds with the plain look on her face.

Polly probably watched Mr. Lynn most—Tom, that was. She began to think of him as Tom a bit, now there were three other people all calling him Tom. Apart from that glimpse on television, she had never seen him play his cello. He sat wrapped round it in a way that amused her, with his head bent to dwell in the cello’s sound. One huge hand deftly planted itself on the strings, firmly trembled there—the trembling was something all four did—and then moved elsewhere while the bow carved sounds that thoroughly surprised Polly.

Up to then Polly had thought of a cello as an accompanying sort of instrument, deep but a little dull. Certainly Mr. Lynn made it chuff and rumble at times, but that was only one of the things he made it do. He seemed to be able to make every sound, from a melodious groan to high song right up in the same range as Ann’s viola, either in a tactful undertone, or a smooth shout, or a stringy rasp. But it was the bell-like song in the middle which surprised and delighted Polly most. She liked that even better almost than the moments when Sam or Ed would gasp, “Put your back in it, Tom!” and the music suddenly widened until it seemed amazing that only four of them were making it.

I am lucky! Polly thought. Dad and Joanna seemed to be something that had happened last month, instead of only that morning. Just how lucky she was Polly gathered from their talk during the times they were all leaning forward, pointing at the music on the stands with their bows.

A lot of these times they were saying things like “Sam should be watching Ann when Ann comes in off the beat here,” or “Tom, how about starting that forte here, instead?” or “OK. Let’s take it again from D.” But they said enough round the edges of these things for Polly to gather that they had been asked to do this concert at very short notice, late last night, because the Hertzog Quartet, who should have been doing it, had all gone down with flu. They were pleased to get the chance to play, but they were all rather nervous. And but for this chance, they would have gone back to London today.

Finally they all put down their instruments and stretched. Ed said, “That’ll have to do,” and Sam said, “I’m starving.”

“Polly and I had better go,” Mr. Lynn said. “Will someone look after my cello?”

Polly stood up, rather regretful. She would have liked to hear the proper concert now.

“Wait a moment,” Ann said. “Money.”

“Oh, yes. A whip-round for Polly,” Ed said. “She’ll need to eat on the train, won’t she?”

Each of them gave Polly a pound. She was so grateful, she almost cried again.

“It’s nothing,” Ann said. “We happen to have it. You don’t. I’ll see to the cello, Tom.”

Polly and Tom left the peeling green cloakroom with Ed and Sam, who were going to look for food. “And we have to look for my car,” said Mr. Lynn. “I know I left it somewhere quite near.” It was dark outside by then. He took Polly’s bag off her, and they set off the opposite way to Ed and Sam.

“I saw it,” said Polly. “That’s how I knew you were in Bristol. It had a parking ticket.”

“It’s used to them,” said Tom. “Where was it?”

“I’m not sure,” Polly said.

“Lucky we left time to look, then,” he said.

They crossed the two busy roads, which were now busier than ever. As they arrived safely on the other side, Polly asked hopefully, “Do you think you might marry Ann?”

“Not a hope,” Mr. Lynn said cheerfully. “Ann has her own ideas about such things.”

They turned into a narrow street with old houses, which Polly was sure was the street where she had seen the horse-car, but it was empty, all blue twilight and orange streetlight. The wind met them here. It whipped Polly’s hair in front of her, set Tom’s anorak rattling and the rubbish in the gutter rolling and pattering as they walked up the street.

Polly thought of herself walking in the wind all morning. She found she was able to talk about Dad and Joanna now without threatening to cry, and she began telling Tom, shouting against the wind at first, and then talking normally, as they turned into another narrow street, where the wind was less. There was no car there either. Paper and old leaves tumbled gently along behind them.

Mr. Lynn yelped with laughter over the grey-and-gold toilet paper. “I wish I’d known you were here, having that kind of time,” he said.

“It makes me think,” said Polly. “What happens to all the people who don’t have someone like you they know?”

“God knows,” he said very soberly. And they walked the rest of the way down that street without speaking. The rubbish pounced and pattered behind them in the wind. Almost like little creatures running after us, Polly thought in a dreamlike way.

At the end of the street they were among the graph-paper towers and the wind was fierce. “This is wrong,” Polly said. “It was in an old street.”

“I know. This is the most confusing town I’ve ever been in.” Mr. Lynn turned round to go back up the old street. Polly felt him go stiff. “I think we’ll keep on the way we were going,” he said carefully.

Polly turned too, against the wind, and looked back up the street. Her dreamlike feeling at once became the feeling of pure nightmare. For a moment, as you do in nightmares, she could not move. In the middle of the dark little street, the pattering rubbish was slowly piling upon itself, floating slowly and deliberately into a nightmare shape. It could have been a trick of the wind, but it was not. It was too deliberate. Plastic cups, peanut packets, leaves, and old wrappers were winding upwards, putting themselves in place as parts of a huge, bearlike shape. As Polly watched, a piece of newspaper rose like a slow ghost to make the creature a staring face. Tom seized her wrist while she stared and pulled her away, among the tower buildings. They did not exactly run, but they went in long strides as fast as they could walk. Both of them kept looking back. The creature of rubbish was following, billowing on pattering, manlike legs.

“What can we do?” said Polly. “Throw a lighted match at it?” Her head was turned over her shoulder. It was coming rustling after them against the wind.

“I thought about that, and I don’t think so,” Mr. Lynn said. “There’s a risk it will just come after us burning. Let’s find somewhere where there are a lot of people.”

Beyond the towers, they came to some kind of shopping precinct. It was wide and paved and quite well-lit, with lighted shops all round. A lot of people were there, heads down against the wind, hurrying, so that the place was full of banging feet.

The creature of rubbish came after them faster here, travelling in swoops, changing shape as it travelled. Polly could see the thing more clearly every time she looked. She could see the spaces between the writhing newspapers and the peanut packets riding in it alongside dead leaves.

It was collecting more as it came. Every time Polly looked, it was larger, with more legs, but it never fell apart and it always had that staring newspaper face.

“It’s mostly made of air,” she said. “It may not be able to hurt us.”

“Do you want to bet on that?” said Mr. Lynn.

As he said it, the thing was near enough to put out a pattering piece of itself and search towards their heels, so near that they could hear the hundred papery parts of it scuttling along the pavement. They both ran. They ran sideways across the precinct, behind a kiosk and some concrete seats. But the thing streamed sideways too, round the kiosk and rattling across the seats, and kept on coming after them. Quite a few people looked up curiously as Tom and Polly pelted past them.

“No one else can see it!” gasped Polly.

“I know. Proper clowns we must look!” Mr. Lynn panted. “If only we could find my damn car!”

They raced along beside lighted shops and whirled round a corner into another open stretch of precinct. They could tell by the rustling and rattling that the thing was close behind. Both of them were sure that the car was somewhere over to the left of this space. Tom took Polly’s wrist and dragged her over that way. And then retreated hurriedly as the newspaper face and a storm of small rubbish rose billowing and reaching for them. As they backed round the corner again, Polly caught a glimpse, between the spaces of it, of a dark, bulky figure standing watching against a lighted shop window.

“Mr. Leroy—”

“Yes,” Mr. Lynn said. “I know.” It was that quiet manner of his that ran you up against silence. Since Polly was not ten years old any longer, she knew better than to say any more. She simply sprinted back the way they had come, with Tom’s hand lugging at her wrist and the creature scuttling close after, wondering if this nightmare would ever end. They missed the way they had come into the precinct and simply plunged up the first street that seemed to lead away.

And there, up a short hill, was the horse-car crouched against the kerb at last. Tom let go of Polly’s wrist to get out his keys as they dashed towards it. He got there before Polly. When she pelted up, he had the doors open and was throwing her bag into the back seat.

“Get in,” he said. “Fasten the seat belt.”

Polly dived into the passenger seat. While she was fumbling with the belt, the car started with its usual whinny and jerk. She looked up to see its headlights glaring two bright spots on a solid, writhing mound of rubbish. The great newspaper face leered. It was entirely blocking the end of the narrow street.

“Hold on. I’m going to drive through it,” Tom said. It was one of those times when heroic driving might pay off, Polly thought dizzily. The car clunked into gear and leaped from the kerb, roaring. They hurtled at the thing of paper and leaves. Blue, orange and red paper whirled in the lights, a solid thickness, and the great white paper face seemed to stoop at them, so real that Polly almost saw eyes in the crumpled eyeholes. It was too real.

“Tom!” she screamed. “Ian Hanivar!”

Mr. Lynn swore and dragged the steering wheel round. Polly had an instant’s slow-motion glimpse of Sam Rensky sliding sideways off the car bonnet along with a cloud of little glass cubes from the windscreen. On the other side there was Ed Davies, with his mouth open, yelling. “Tom, what the hell—!” Polly heard faintly through the hole in the windscreen. They nearly hit Ed too. The tyres shrieked as Tom missed Ed by bouncing up on the kerb on the other side of the street. They jolted down again. He was still driving flat out. Polly supposed she must have turned round then, because she had another glimpse of Sam Rensky rolling over in the road, trying to get up and looking utterly astonished, before they screamed round a corner and she could see nothing but white cobweb shapes from the broken windscreen.

“Stop!” she shouted. “You ran him over!”

Mr. Lynn found a handkerchief somehow and punched at the smashed windscreen with it over his fist as he drove. The car wagged. “Sam was all right,” he said. “I think. Ed was there. I’m getting you to the station before anything else happens.”

Polly helped smash the rest of the glass out of the front window. The wind howled in. They were both shaking. Polly wanted to scream out that this was the meanest trick yet of Mr. Leroy’s. It was meaner even than all the things he had done to Polly herself. He had nearly made Tom kill Sam. Sam had probably been badly hurt anyway. But she knew Tom would not talk about Mr. Leroy.

“Was it Sam and Ed all along?” she said as they roared along a huge, orange-lit road. “Not paper at all?”

“I don’t know,” Tom said. “I just don’t know.” Polly thought he was going to run into silence then, but he went on, “What is it about us?” and roared through some traffic lights just as they turned red. Cold air whistled in Polly’s hair. “We make things up, and then they go and happen. I wrote you a letter something very like this.”

Mr. Leroy uses them, Polly wanted to say. But there was more to it than that. She thought of Mr. Piper’s shop in Stow-on-the-Water, which seemed to have nothing to do with Mr. Leroy. “I don’t know,” she said wearily.

The car bucketed round a corner and screamed up the slope to the station. A big, lighted clock said twenty-five past six. In a dreamlike way Polly noticed birds roosting in a row along the hand of the clock. “Just time!” said Tom. They jumped out of the car and left it standing while they ran inside through the glass doors. Tom used a credit card, like Ivy, to get Polly a ticket. It seemed to take hours. Polly snatched up the ticket and they pelted to the platform to find the train already there, standing waiting. There were still two minutes to go.

Tom handed Polly her bag, panting. They were both still shaking. “Will you really be all right?” he said.

“I will now,” Polly said. “But what about you? You won’t be able to give your concert if Sam’s hurt, will you?”

“That I shall have to go and find out,” he said. “Don’t worry about us. Better get on the train.” He reached out and undid the handle of a door and swung it open for Polly. The other hand he put behind Polly’s head and squashed her face against his old anorak for a second. “Take care of yourself.”

The burr of his voice coming through the anorak almost drowned the sound of footsteps coming up beside them, but not quite. Out of one squashed eye Polly saw polished black shoes stop and stand just beyond Tom’s. “This is becoming more than just a joke, Tom,” said Mr. Leroy’s chesty voice.

Mr. Lynn’s hand changed direction. It was now pushing Polly hard towards the open door of the train. “Get on it, Polly,” he said quietly. “Quick. It’s just going.”

The whistle blew as he spoke. Polly scrambled up the steps and the door slammed behind her. The train moved before she could turn round, and she was moving further away when she did turn and look. Mr. Leroy and Tom were standing face to face on the platform, leaning towards one another, in fact, both talking angrily at once. She was fairly sure Tom was shouting at Mr. Leroy. She did not blame him, considering that Mr. Leroy had probably just ruined the Dumas Quartet.