The Mystery of the Cupboard

  “Dad,” he asked at one stage when they were packing up, “will you have the same bank?”

  “A different branch, but yes,” said his father, puzzled. But then he understood. “Ah, your mysterious package that you asked me to have them put in their vaults. Don’t worry, Omri. They’ll keep it safe.”

  “But will they move it to the bank near our new house?” Omri persisted anxiously.

  “I’ll make sure they do,” said his father.

  Omri wrote to Patrick, his friend and the sharer of his greatest secret, on the day before moving day.

  Dear Patrick,

  We’re moving to the country tomorrow. Wish it was near you but it’s the other way. We’ll be further apart than ever. I’ll write the new address at the end. Keep in touch.

  Dad says IT will come to the new place with us, to the new bank. I hope you’re keeping Boone safe. I’m taking Little Bull and Twin Stars with me, and Matron and Fickits. I mean I’m carrying them. I’ll find somewhere safe for them in my new room. I just wanted you to know. I’m taking all my other plastic figures too. Not that we’ll do anything about them.

  Hope you’re okay and that your mum has planted a new orchard after the storm. You must come and visit us in the new house. It’s quite fun, lots of old barns and stuff, and there’s hens that the last owner (he died, he was very old, Mum says he was my removed cousin or something) left. Their eggs have very orange yolks, like almost red. A neighbour’s been looking after them and Dad wants to keep them. And there’s a wood and a river and the sea quite close. And Mum says we might have a pony!!

  Bye. Omri.

  P.S. I’m dreading starting at a new school. It’s the local comp, of course. I went to meet the head, it’s a woman. Her name’s Mrs Everest. She wears a wig that looks just like a big tea cosy.

  Two days after the move — two frantic, chaotic days, which followed a frantic, chaotic fortnight packing up — Omri was standing out in the lane that ran alongside their longhouse.

  Both his parents and his brothers were indoors trying to make some kind of order in the various rooms, which were still so jammed with a mass of unsorted furniture and crates that you could hardly move around.

  The reason Omri wasn’t with them was because he was desperately hunting for Kitsa.

  She had come from London in the moving van, in a cat basket. Too near to this (as it turned out) had been a large silk lampshade. When they arrived, the lampshade was found to be in shreds, ripped by Kitsa’s resentful claws, reached through the bars of the cat basket.

  The moment Omri had let her out, Omri’s mother, who was at the end of her rope, shouted at her, “You wicked animal, you’ve ruined my best lamp!” and made a swipe at her. Kitsa had fled, and Omri hadn’t seen her since.

  “She’ll be back,” his mother — who, when things calmed down, felt awful about her — tried to comfort him. But he was frantic with worry. How could she find her way back when she didn’t know this was now her home?

  He had already searched the whole property: the henhouse, the pigsty, the workshop, the barn, as well as the paddock and the wood, which ran down to a little river. He’d called her till he was hoarse.

  He was miserable, absolutely miserable. Nobody could cheer him up, though even Gillon tried.

  “She’ll come back,” he said. “She’s just giving us a hammering because we moved her.”

  Now as Omri stood in the lane and called her, without much hope, up the lane came, not Kitsa, alas, but a red postal van, which stopped at their gate. The postman leant out.

  “Mistle Hay Farmhouse?” he asked.

  Omri said it was.

  “Long time since there were any post for here,” he said. “You moved in, I’spect, bin empty a good while and the old man never got no letters to speak of, real recluse he was. Well, this be for you by looks of it, kid’s writin’.” And he handed Omri a letter. It was addressed to him, and it was from Patrick. Omri read it at once, standing in the lane.

  Dear Omri,

  Thanks for the letter. I looked on the map. Blimey, you’re a long way off. Too bad. Don’t know when we’ll get a chance to meet. I’ll work on my mum to go on holiday near you but I bet she won’t, she likes going over to Calais on the ferry to shop every chance she gets. Dead boring except the boat trip. She spends every minute in the French supermarket buying stuff we can easily get in Safeway at home. Crazy.

  I’ve been thinking. I wish you hadn’t put IT in the bank. I know why you did, but still. Every time I look at Boone, I get lonely for him and wonder how he’s getting on. I sometimes imagine I’m in Texas, or that Boone comes back here and I talk to him. Don’t laugh, YOU PILLOCK. I bet you feel the same about Little Bull.

  Guess what, my aunt came to visit and brought Emma. (Tamsin was at summer ski-camp - yeah!) It was great. We talked and talked about Them. She’d brought Ruby Lou and we played with them and pretended they were alive, only we had to stop cos Em started crying. She’s okay though really. She said the same as me, that she wished you hadn’t put IT in the bank. She said you should have asked us first.

  You couldn’t change your mind, could you?

  Good luck with your new school and the Tea Cosy. Maybe she’s bald underneath it. You’ll have to try to make it fall off and see. My school’s a real toilet. See ya.

  Patrick.

  P.S. Em and Tamsin are still at the old school. Em told me Mr Johnson fell off his bicycle into some prickly bushes. She says he’s never been the same since the day of the storm. Keeps talking to himself, there’s a rumour he’s gone a bit irregular.

  This letter at least took Omri’s mind off Kitsa for a while. After reading it, he went up to his room.

  He’d chosen one of the ‘inner’ bedrooms so that he would be the one who had to pass through Gillon’s room to get to the stairs, and not the other way round. It was not a perfect arrangement, but better than Gillon having right-of-way through his room. He’d made Gillon - who had been desperate for the outside bedroom - promise always to knock, if he did need to come in, which was unlikely. Omri was a very private person. He planned to put a bolt on the door, like his old room had.

  His new bed was up, and his new desk. They were both pinewood. He’d decided to put up loads of shelves, or rather ask his dad to. His dad, however, was overwhelmed with work.

  “Time you learned to put up shelves for yourself,” he’d said shortly, on Day One.

  “Okay! Can I borrow your drill?”

  “No.”

  “So how can I—”

  “Oh, I’ll do it eventually! Give me a chance, I’m up to my neck!”

  Meanwhile, Omri made do with some planks he found - that was one great thing about this place, there was so much junk lying about — laid across piles of bricks. He cleaned them all first and the shelves looked quite good. Since losing all his stuff in the storm he’d collected a few new books and some other bits and pieces, and these he arranged on the new shelves.

  He looked at the top shelf and thought how good IT would look, standing right in the middle, with its new coat of white paint and new mirror in the door…

  No. He mustn’t be tempted. He’d made up his mind. No more of that. He’d promised himself. He must stick to what he’d decided. He fingered a small neat parcel in his jeans pocket. Where to put it? Where would be a really safe place?

  “Ah!” he exclaimed aloud.

  He took four more bricks, and turned them so the indented sides faced each other. Then he opened the packet, put Little Bull and Twin Stars and the baby, and the pony, between two of the bricks, lying down in the little hollow, and on the other side, between the other two bricks, he laid Sergeant Fickits and Matron. He felt there was something faintly scandalous about them lying side by side like that, but after all, they were plastic. Wherever they were in their real lives, they wouldn’t know, and the main thing was for them to be safe from discovery. He laid another plank-shelf across the top.

  Suddenly he stiffened, raising his head. He th
ought he heard— he rushed to the narrow window and leant out, calling. But no. It must have been another cat.

  *

  It took about three weeks to settle in. Omri and Gillon started school in the local comprehensive. They could get there in ten minutes on their bikes through the country lanes. It was a far cry from Gillon’s predicted ‘tinny country school with eight pupils’; it had over a thousand, and felt strange at first. Mrs Everest (whom Omri called Tea Cosy but the other kids called Peaky) turned out to be all right - strict, but okay. Nobody could get her wig to fall off, and rumour had it it was glued on. Omri’s form teacher was a middle-aged man called John Butcher. Obviously he didn’t need a nickname.

  Adiel set off for boarding school, a big one outside Bristol. He had all his things in a trunk, rather like Omri’s old chest only made of metal. They wouldn’t see him again till half-term. Omri missed him and didn’t miss him. Even when he missed him, he didn’t miss him half as much as he missed Kitsa.

  He was sure now she would never come back. He tried to resign himself, to think of her being free, enjoying the naturalness of her new life, but the trouble was, she wasn’t used to the country and when he let himself think about it, he didn’t see how she would manage. She’d never hunted in her life, beyond a halfhearted pounce at the odd bird - and the time she’d nearly killed Boone, of course, but that was just a fluke.

  And there was worse. They hadn’t been there a week before a fox got into the henhouse and killed three of their hens. If it could do that, it could surely kill a little town cat. Thoughts of her nagged him like an aching tooth he kept biting on to see if it still hurt.

  One evening at supper — meals were only just stopping being picnics — Omri’s father said, “Oh, by the way, Omri. I was talking to the bank manager today. Your mysterious package has arrived at the local branch and is in the safe.”

  Gillon looked up. He hadn’t heard anything about the package till now. “What’s this?” he asked.

  “Nothing,” said Omri quickly, and signalled his father, who caught on at once and refused to say any more.

  Gillon, however, wouldn’t leave it alone.

  “What package? What was Dad talking about?”

  “Oh, mind your own business!” Omri yelled at last.

  That was it for the moment, but the next day at school, Gillon found Omri in the playground and said cockily, “I know what your mystery package is.”

  “You do not.”

  “I do. It’s your cupboard, isn’t it?”

  Omri felt the blood rush to his head. He gaped at Gillon.

  “Your face! Did you think I didn’t know?”

  “Know… what?” Omri half gasped.

  “That you’re hooked on it. But putting it in the bank? Pretending it’s valuable? Get real. The bank’s only for really valuable things, like jewellery or gold.”

  Omri bit his tongue and said nothing. He kicked the turf and stared at the toe of his trainer.

  “If I told Dad what it was—”

  “Tell him if you like.”

  “If I told him, he’d go straight away and get it out. It’s using up space. The bank safe isn’t for toys.”

  “You gave it to me. You should be pleased I like it.”

  “Yeah, but — the bank — it’s just stupid.” They stood for a moment, staring out across the acres of green, so huge, so different from the hemmed-in tarmac playground in town. “There’s nothing special about it. Is there?”

  “It’s special to me. It was smashed up in the storm, and I mended it. I don’t want anything else to happen to it.

  “And did you put the key with it?”

  Now Omri visibly jumped. “What key?”

  “The one you locked the cupboard with when you were playing with it. The one with the red ribbon that Mum used to wear on a chain.”

  Omri felt winded. He couldn’t think what to say, and every second he didn’t turn it all off with some careless remark made it more obvious to Gillon that he’d stumbled on a really important secret. He was staring at Omri now with an ever more beady look of interest and excitement.

  “I know there’s more to that cupboard than you’re telling,” he said at last. “I’m sorry I laughed about the bank. Maybe it really is valuable. I wish you’d tell me.”

  There was a long silence. Then Omri suddenly shouted, “Well, I’m not going to!”

  Turning, he ran fast towards the hedge at the far side of the playground. It was about a hundred yards away. When he got there, panting, he sat down on the grass in a hidden place. Gillon hadn’t followed him.

  Omri put his head on his knees. He was shaking. Something terrible had almost happened. He’d had a strong urge to tell Gillon. He had wanted to tell him. Gillon of all people, who made fun of him, who could never in a million years keep such a secret to himself. What had come over him? Why had he had to run away fast to stop himself from blurting it out?

  He didn’t understand this feeling. It felt more like loneliness than anything else. People did really crazy things when they were lonely. But how could he be? He had his family, he was making new friends at school… Of course he missed Patrick… and Emma… and what he thought about as ‘the old world’. But that wasn’t it.

  It couldn’t be old Kits, could it? You couldn’t miss a cat so badly that it made you weak and apt to do stupid things, blurt out a vital secret just to share it with someone?

  He’d have to watch himself.

  He heard the bell in the distance. He got up slowly and walked back to the school, saying over and over again, “Never. Never. Never. Never must I tell.”

  3

  Hidden in the Thatch

  Omri’s father lost little time in getting the re-thatching of the roof underway.

  He had been making enquiries among neighbours and people in their local village and pretty soon some men arrived in a beaten-up old car to inspect and measure the roof and talk money. A very great deal of it. That evening Omri saw his mother carrying a large tumbler of brown liquid across the lane to the big workshop his father had adopted as a painting studio.

  “Is that whisky, Mum?” asked Omri with interest. (The cowboy, Boone, had been a great whisky drinker, but his father wasn’t.)

  “Yes,” said his mother somewhat grimly. “Your father has had a shock. Alcohol was invented for times like this.”

  “How much of a shock?”

  “Fifteen thousand pounds’ worth,” she replied.

  “Blimey! Just for a bit of straw?”

  “Just for a bit of straw.”

  But it wasn’t only for that, of course. Thatching was a skilled craft, and not many people still knew how to do it properly. And it wasn’t straw. It was reeds, and the right sort only came from a particular place in France, because in Britain the reed beds were protected and couldn’t be used. The work would take about four weeks. And they had to do it at once because it couldn’t be done in winter - the whole of the old roof had to come off.

  “Like when the storm blew our other roof off!” said Omri the next day at tea when all this was being gone into.

  “Dad, it’s going to be so cold!” said Gillon.

  But their father said tersely, “We’ll all have to be terribly brave about that, won’t we, Gillon?”

  “Lucky old Ad, safe and snug at school,” muttered Gillon, who certainly hadn’t shown any envy for his older brother so far.

  “Look out of the window, boys,” said their mother suddenly. “We’ve got visitors.”

  They went to the window. On the lawn were three large magpies, gleaming black and white in the sun, strutting about and pecking at something that lay in the long grass.

  Omri had a moment of absolute horror. He knew magpies were scavenger birds — he’d seen them pecking at the remains of one of the fox-killed hens. What could be lying there, dead?

  He rushed out of the house, his heart in his throat. The birds flapped unconcernedly away just as he reached them. Hardly able to bear his apprehension,
Omri parted the grass and looked at the corpse.

  It was a half-grown rabbit without a head.

  The others, belatedly realizing what Omri had feared, trailed out after him.

  “It’s not her, is it?” called his mother.

  “It’s a dead rabbit,” said Omri.

  “Yuck,” said Gillon. “Those magpies have eaten half of it.”

  Their father bent down to look at it more closely.

  “I don’t think the magpies killed it,” he said. “Too big for them. It would take a fox to kill that, and why would he have left it half eaten? Looks more like a cat’s work to me.”

  Omri gazed at the dead half-rabbit with entirely new eyes.

  “You mean - a cat could kill a thing that size? You mean maybe Kitsa could have hunted it?”

  “It’s possible,” he said.

  Omri’s heart did an upward lurch. The hope he had abandoned rushed back, painfully, like the blood coming back into a numbed limb.

  “But if she’s around, why doesn’t she come home?”

  “Maybe she’s gone feral,” said his father.

  “Gone feral? What’s that?”

  “Wild. Cats do. Mainly tomcats, but queens do as well sometimes, when they’re moved. I bet she’s around, Omri. Keep your eyes open for her, and keep putting out her milk.”

  Omri put not milk but clotted cream out for her that night. In the morning it was gone.

  “Probably a hedgehog,” said Gillon.

  Omri wanted to hit him, but he felt too relieved. There was hope, after all.

  The thatchers arrived to begin work, and chaos came again to the just-organized-after-moving household.

  The garden, the hedge, the border of the lane, and all the paths vanished under masses of mouldy old thatch as the thatching team tore it off the roof beams. There was no point in clearing most of it till the job was done, but Omri was told to keep the route from the lane gate to the front of the house cleared. He did this after school. Every day for the first week it had to be done again. It was absolutely amazing how much old thatch there was - enough to make three or four haystacks. It kept piling up all around the house.