Billy searched the Wilderness from end to end. He retraced the path to the canal but there was no sign of her. He found only one small grey feather left behind on the grassy floor of the chapel where the cygnet had been preening herself. This and the fact that he was still soaked to the skin from the canal was enough to convince Billy he had not been dreaming it all. As he made his way home across the darkening estate, the blue-white lights of the television sets flickering through the curtains, he practised the words and they still flowed.
He expected and received dire admonitions and warnings from Aunty May who railed against little boys in general and the price of washing powder in particular before sending him to bed early. Billy smiled to himself in his bed, hid his grey feather under the pillow and when he slept he dreamed dreams of swans or angels – he was not sure which.
When Billy’s turn came the next morning to read his page out aloud in class, he stood up and looked about him deliberately at the already sniggering children before he began. Then, using his grey feather to underline the words, he began in a clear lucid voice to read. Mr Brownlow took the glasses from his frog-eyes in disbelief, and every smirk in the classroom was wiped away as Billy read on faultlessly to the end of the page. ‘You may sit down now, Billy’ was all Mr Brownlow could say when he had finished. ‘Yes, that was very good, Billy, very good indeed. You may sit down.’ And the silence around him, born of astonishment and grudging respect soaked in through Billy’s skin and warmed him to the bone.
CHAPTER THREE
AUNTY MAY WAS ECSTATIC ABOUT BILLY’S miraculous cure from his stutter. Of course she had her own theory about the cause of this, and was not slow to voice it to anyone who would listen. ‘I’ve always said that a happy home is the best cure for all evils. That’s all Billy needed, a happy, loving home; and he’s not the first, you know. Oh no, Billy will be the fifth foster child I’ve looked after since my own boys grew up and went away. And he’s a lovely boy, one of the best I’ve had. You know, no one else would take him. Well, poor little mite, I suppose he’s not much too look at, is he? But I don’t mind that. Eats me out of house and home but we mustn’t think of that, must we? And dirty? Is he dirty? You should see the state he gets in. But there we are. Boys will be boys. After all we don’t do it for the money, do we?’
And the school too claimed responsibility for Billy’s new-found voice. Mr Brownlow was congratulated by the Head Teacher at the end-of-term Staff Meeting. ‘Quite a job you’ve done there, Mr Brownlow,’ she said. ‘Should give Billy new confidence – and the Speech Therapist had quite given up on him you know. Any idea how you managed the impossible, Mr Brownlow?’
‘It’s a slow process of course,’ said Mr Brownlow, nodding knowingly. ‘All education is you know. But I’d say patience had something to do with it. Yes, patience and faith in one’s own tried and proved methods. They love to get up and read you know. All the others were reading well, and I suppose he didn’t want to be different. I mean, who does? That’s what did it I expect. Yes, I do believe he was shamed into it.’
But the self-righteous glow at home and school soon faded as it was realised that Billy did not wish to use his new voice. He remained as silent and withdrawn as ever, speaking only when he had to and then briefly. At school he would spend hours staring at the distant trees of his Wilderness through the classroom window, chewing the end of his pencil. His confidential report read: ‘Very much below average intelligence. He always seems to want to be somewhere else. Not a good prospect.’
At home Aunty May had discovered that to threaten to send him away did indeed bring Billy back home before dark, did bring him in on time for meals. And she was not too bothered what he got up to in between times just so long as he did not get into any trouble or get his clothes dirty. ‘I’ll keep him on for a while, but I don’t like the child,’ she told the Social Worker on one of his rare visits.
‘Who does?’ came the reply.
During that winter, whenever he was not in school, Billy spent every hour of daylight in his Wilderness. He often thought of playing truant and would have done so but he knew Aunty May would have him back inside the children’s home the next day if he started that. So immediately school was over every afternoon he would make for the Wilderness, his duffle bag full of the scraps he had secreted in his pockets during school dinner. It was a hard winter that year. The ground froze in late November and the first snow came early in December. Billy saw himself as the protector of all the wild things in his Wilderness. He would spread his scraps evenly throughout the Wilderness and then watch them feed. Rampaging rooks and slow crows came wheeling in first and he would drive them away with his catapult so as to allow the smaller birds first pickings – the robins and the hedge-sparrows and the blackbirds. But he could do nothing for the barn owls, nor for the family of kingfishers. He tried. He purloined sardines from Aunty May’s larder but the kingfishers ignored them. He took some of Aunty May’s stew and put it out on a gravestone for the owls but they never came for it. He broke the ice on the canal each day so that the kingfishers could fish, but it froze over almost as he watched. He had to stand by and see them weaken as the winter wore on.
And he had not forgotten his swan; he looked for her every day and searched the canal bank for her feathers. He threw bread out onto the canal to attract her back, but there was never any sign of her.
Then one day – it was just after Christmas – the owls were no longer in their arched window in the high stone wall of the ruin and that same day he found a kingfisher lying stiff and dead by the canal. He could see it was one of the young ones for it still had a white tip to its beak and a mottled breast. The ground was too hard to bury it so he carried it reverently in his hands down to the canal, hammered a hole in the ice and slipped it into the water. Hecould not cry – he was too angry for that. As he watched it disappear under the ice he vowed he was not going to let the others die. He turned on his heel and ran back to the chapel. He picked up any loose stones he could find and made a great pile of them on the canal bank. All day he went to and fro, until he thought he had collected enough. Then he began to hurl them violently at the ice that first splintered and then began to crack and break up. By the time darkness began to fall he had opened up a twenty-foot strip of canal water for the kingfishers to dive into.
He was back the next morning after bolting his breakfast. He had expected to find it iced over once again. But although the edges of the ice had encroached somewhat, the water was still open to the sky. He found this difficult to understand for the night had been as cold as ever. He did not have to wait long for the explanation. He had been there no more than a few minutes when he heard a strange slapping slithery sound, and into view came a swan, still brown in her youth, staggering ungainly across the ice before letting herself gently into the water. The neck was longer than he remembered and the grey had all but disappeared, but as she floated towards him now, the wings billowing like sails behind her, Billy had no doubt that this was indeed his swan come back to him.
‘So, it was you swimming around that kept the ice back,’ said Billy. ‘Grown a bit, haven’t you? Didn’t recognise you at first. How’s the wing then?’ And as if to reply, the swan rose from the water and beat the air about her before settling back into the water again. ‘Didn’t break the ice for you, you know. Did it for them kingfishers, so don’t you go frightening them off, will you now? They needto fish. Come to think of it, there can’t be much about for you. Is that what you’ve come back for? Not just to see me. I can still speak – been able to ever since that day, and I’ve still got your feather you know. I’ll get back home now and bring you some of Aunty May’s stale crumpets – she never eats them. Don’t know why she buys them. Don’t go away.’
The swan stayed for a month or more after that and by the end of that time was taking Aunty May’s crumpets out of Billy’s hand. He talked to her constantly and confessed for the first time what troubled him most – that he belonged nowhere, loved no one and wa
s loved by no one. Once or twice she clambered out of the canal and allowed him to smooth the feathers on her neck. It was just as he was saying goodbye to her one evening, running his hand down the neck and over her folded wing feathers that he saw a large ring of red plastic around her left leg. ‘Where’d you get that from?’ he asked. ‘You want to tell me, don’t you? Funny, isn’t it? I mean, you taught me to speak and you can’t even speak yourself.’
Between them the boy and the swan kept open the pond on the canal for the kingfishers to feed, Billy breaking away the edges each morning to keep the ice back and the swan endlessly circling the water so that it was hardly ever still and could not freeze. No more kingfishers died and with Billy begging stale bread all over the estate no other bird in his Wilderness died of starvation that winter.
Then one night in March the frost lifted and the warm spring rain fell in torrents. When Billy arrived early the next morning he found the canal turned to water again. The swan was not there waiting for him as usual. He called out for her and ran up and down the bank, throwing bread into the water in a desperate attempt to bring her back. But all the while he knew she had gone. He felt suddenly deserted and rejected.
For some days he returned to wait for her, but she never came back. He found he could no longer be happy in his Wilderness without the swan. So he made up his mind to leave the Wilderness for ever, and he promised himself faithfully he would never return.
He kept his promise for a month or more, but then both boredom and a new yearning tempted him back. It was a bright day in a spring still chilled by a fresh north wind when Billy clambered back under the wire into his Wilderness. Already the skeletal trees were filling out with a new growth of leaves and the creeper was green again on the ruins. Billy ran across the graveyard to the canal, suddenly convinced that the swan would be there waiting for him as he had dreamed so often she would be. But the canal was deserted except for a moorhen that scooted into the reeds on the far bank. Seized with terrible despair he called out over the canal, ‘Why don’t you come back to me? Why? I saved you, didn’t I? Didn’t I save your life? I thought you were my friend. Please come back. Please.’ But the whispering murmur of thousands of swarming starlings turned to a roar above his head and drowned his words.
Billy made his way back to the chapel and lay down out of the wind watching the clouds of starlings whirling in the sky over his Wilderness. He lay back on a mound in the middle of the chapel under the leaning lime tree and closed his eyes in an attempt to calm the anguish inside him, but all the misery welled up and he could not hold it back. He cried then as he had never cried before. The only hope, the only joy in his life had gone. All that was left for him was the thin-lipped Aunty May and the inhospitable hubbub of his school.
He must have cried himself to sleep for he was woken suddenly. He was lying on his side, his legs curled up so tight that his knees were touching his chin. At first he thought the sound might be the rustling of squirrels in the tree above him – he had seen them up there often enough before – but he had never heard squirrels yapping. Billy sat up. A blackbird piped at him from a blackthorn bush. Billy sat like a statue and waited. He allowed only his eyes to move and they scanned the trees above him, trained eyes now, keen and sharp. When it came again the sound was distant, yet it felt close, and it came not from the walls or the trees or the undergrowth around him, but from the ground beneath him, a curious squawking and squealing, almost bird-like, but no bird he knew could growl. He put an ear to the ground and listened. As he did so he noticed a strange musky smell in the grass. And from below the grass there was a dull yet distinct high-pitched yapping. Billy had heard enough and moved carefully off the mound, stepping slow and soft. He climbed over the stonework and settled down to watch, his heart beating in his ears.
One came out first, his white snub muzzle sniffing the air, and he was butted out into the open by the one behind. And then two more emerged, almost together, until all four fox cubs stood like ridiculous infant sentinels, each one facing outwards, noses lifted, ears pricking and twitching. One of them was looking now at Billy but seemed not to see him. It was the largest of the cubs with a redder face than the others and more sharply defined black streaks running from the eyes to the muzzle. The eyes were grey and the nose that pointed at him earth brown. The fox cub sat down neatly and yawned, and Billy found himself yawning in sympathy, a long yawn that lifted the shroud of despondency from Billy’s shoulders and left him smiling and happy once again in his Wilderness.
CHAPTER FOUR
BILLY LOOKED ON THAT DAY AS THEY gambolled over the mound, stalking and pouncing on each other, rolling locked together down the slope and then springing apart again to play a remorseless game of tag and hide-and-seek. Then, as suddenly as it had begun it stopped, and a prolonged grooming session began, followed by a snooze in the thin spring sunlight – a bundle of foxes breathing as one. A crackling of twigs in the undergrowth was enough to awake them and send them scuttling down into the earth. Billy was aboutto leave, believing the show to be over, when he saw the vixen, a pigeon hanging from her mouth, padding through the graveyard, her white-tipped brush trailing behind her. He froze and prayed he had not been seen.
The cubs came out one by one to greet their mother and looked on patiently as the vixen neatly pulled away first the long grey primary feathers, then the downy secondaries until the pigeon was plucked clean. She kept shaking her head to rid her teeth of the feathers. The meal of regurgitated pigeon was soon over and each cub lay back replete while their mother checked them over in turn. And every few seconds she would lift her black nose and look about her nervously. She vanished down into the earth soon after the meal, taking her cubs with her. Billy was cold to the bone and he needed to stretch his cramped legs. He had seen enough for one day.
He crept away from the chapel as if every blade of grass might creak like a floorboard, and then he was outside the fence and hop-scotching successfully all the way home, never once allowing his feet to cross the cracks in the pavement. That night he took out his grey feather, held it in both hands, closed his eyes and willed the foxes to be there the next day. He knew that if the mother had caught his scent she might well take her cubs elsewhere. It was this dread that kept him awake most of that night.
He approached the den the next morning with the greatest caution, a damp forefinger in the air checking the wind direction to be sure they had no advance warning of his approach. But in his anxiety to see if they were still there he went too fast through the undergrowth, stumbled over a root and almost fell. Cursing himself silently he tiptoed on. He need nothave worried, for the cubs lay in a pyramid on the mound just where they had been the day before, and Billy settled down to watch.
Each day during that first week of the spring holidays he came to the mound and sat behind the chapel wall to watch. After a week he could identify every fox cub, but his eye was always drawn to the largest of them, the boldest, the one that had looked at him that first day. This was the one that seemed to call the tune whenever the vixen was away hunting. The others went where he went. In any mock battles this one always ended up on top, astride his opponent and joyfully triumphant. This was the one that often stayed awake and on guard whilst the others slept, and Billy felt that only this fox cub was aware he was watching them, and he tolerated it because he understood that Billy was a benign presence that held no threat for them.
The vixen appeared to be hunting alone. If there was a dog fox helping her, Billy never saw him. The vixen was a splendid creature with a thick yellow-brown coat that bounced on her back as she moved. Billy admired her greatly, and not just for her looks. She worked tirelessly for her fox cubs. Every waking minute was devoted to their well-being. She was endlessly patient with them, supplying their every need, and seemingly spreading her affection and attention evenly between them. She brought back rabbits, mice, voles, minute shrews which the cubs threw into the air and juggled with; and judging by the variety of bones Billy found all over the
mound, she must have visited every dustbin on the estate at one time or another in her endless struggle to keep her cubs alive.
On the Sunday before school began again for the summer term, Billy took a picnic lunch with him and spent the entire day fox-watching in the ruins. He wanted to make the best of his last day of freedom. He had not seen the vixen for a day or two and did not want to miss her. So he got there early and planned to stay until after dark. Aunty May would fret and fume, but he would risk that this time.