Escape From Shangri-La

  ‘Are you having me on?’

  ‘Cross my heart, Cessie. It works. Honestly. I mean, look at me. I’m feeling better already. That’s proof enough, isn’t it? You should try some. Do you good.’ I shook my head. It looked revolting. ‘Please yourself,’ he said.

  ‘It could’ve been the pills, couldn’t it?’ I ventured.

  ‘Don’t think so,’ said Popsicle, smiling sheepishly. ‘I haven’t taken them, have I? Not one. Just pretended. Spat them out again. Don’t like pills. Don’t trust ’em. Give me my old condensed milk any day. I’ll be right as rain now, in no time, you’ll see.’

  A sudden frown came over his face like a shadow. He beckoned me closer, and gripped me by the arm. There was a wildness in his eyes that frightened me. ‘Remember what I said, Cessie. Whatever happens, I don’t ever want to go up to Shangri-La. Never, d’you hear me? Never.’

  7 SHANGRI-LA

  WHETHER IT WAS THE CONDENSED MILK OR NOT, Popsicle was certainly a changed man. He was using his bad arm more and more every day, so that I now had difficulty in remembering which arm was supposed to be the weaker of the two. No one cut his food up for him any more. No one tied his shoe-laces. He did everything for himself. He was still absent-minded occasionally; but he was much happier in himself, so much so that by the time term began the following Monday morning, we were confident enough to leave him on his own in the house for the day.

  To my huge relief, school turned out not to be the nightmare I had been dreading – Shirley Watson was off sick, and she wouldn’t be back for a couple of weeks at least. When I got back after school the house had been cleaned from top to bottom and tea was ready for me on the kitchen table.

  ‘Marmite and hot buttered toast,’ Popsicle said. ‘Is that all right for you, madam?’ And he sat me down, pushing my chair in behind me. Normally I would have come home to an empty house and my own company.

  To her huge delight, my mother had the same waiter service when she came back from school, exhausted as usual. She could not believe what Popsicle had done around the house.

  Every day that followed was the same. The garden, muddied and blackened by the fire, was slowly being restored, and he had set about the building of a new garden shed. In fine weather, the patio became his carpenter’s shop. When it rained he used the garage. Within weeks the garden shed was up, much bigger and much better than it had ever been before.

  One windy autumn afternoon we held an opening ceremony. My father was speechless as he cut the ribbon, and still speechless when we were allowed inside for the first time.

  Popsicle, it seemed to me, was like a small boy out to impress his father – in this case my father – and my father was impressed, I could see he was. But he simply would not say so. All he said was, ‘Lot of work gone into this, I should think. Looks sound; but don’t go lighting fires too close, will you?’ It was supposed to be a joke, I think, but it just wasn’t funny.

  By now it was as if Popsicle had always lived with us. He’d wash the cars on Sundays, put the rubbish out for the dustmen on Tuesday. He’d even help me with my French homework – so much about him was completely unexpected.

  When I asked him once how it was that he knew so much French, he went strangely quiet on me. I should have known better than to ask. It was always the same. Any question that related in some way to his past he would deflect or simply ignore. He would sometimes talk wistfully about his years as a boatbuilder in Bradwell when he was a young father and a young husband, but that still seemed to be all he could remember – in spite of the condensed milk, which he took religiously every night. But at least his inability to remember did not seem to be lowering his spirits as it had before. No one was more chirpy about the house than Popsicle. He was the whistling outside in the garden and the singing up in the bathroom. He was the life and soul of the place.

  Home was happier now than it ever had been, despite my father’s continuing coolness towards Popsicle. And at school too life was proving unexpectedly good. Shirley Watson was back, but was ignoring me – so far. Things were set fair, I thought.

  These days, I noticed, Popsicle would often disappear into the new garden shed and lock himself in for hours on end. I asked him time and again what he was doing in there. ‘Tell you when I’m ready,’ he’d say, tapping his nose conspiratorially. ‘And you’re not to peek.’ I tried to peek of course, but he’d hung an old sack over the window. All I could see through a knot-hole low down in the door was a tray of onions on the floor. I was none the wiser.

  20th of October. My twelfth birthday. It was a Saturday. When I came down there were three wrapped presents waiting for me on the kitchen table. Everyone was sitting there and singing happy birthday. I opened the cards first and then attacked the presents. I had a CD of Yehudi Menuhin playing Beethoven’s Violin Concerto from my father, and from my mother a video of The Black Stallion, my favourite film in all the world. I left Popsicle’s till last.

  ‘Go careful,’ he said, as I tore the paper away. It was a shoe box, but it wasn’t shoes inside. It was a boat, a model boat, blue with a single yellow funnel. I took it out. It looked like some sort of a lifeboat, with looping ropes along the sides. Below the funnel a man stood at the huge steering-wheel. He was dressed in a yellow sou’wester and oils, and he really looked as if he was clinging to the wheel in the teeth of a gale. The name Lucie Alice was painted in red on the side of the boat.

  I put it down very gently beside the Grape Nuts in the middle of the table. I looked at Popsicle. ‘That was my boat,’ he said proudly. ‘The Lucie Alice.’

  ‘Beautiful,’ my mother breathed. ‘Just beautiful.’

  ‘You made it?’ I said. ‘In the shed?’ Popsicle nodded.

  ‘Built in 1939 she was. Served at Lowestoft for thirty years. Reserve boat down in Exmouth after that. Know every plank of her, every nail. Don’t know why, but I do. She went to Dunkirk in 1940 too, in the war. Took hundreds of our lads off the beaches, she did.’

  ‘Where is she now?’ my father asked.

  Popsicle got up suddenly from the table. ‘How should I know?’ he said. ‘I just made it, that’s all.’ I went after him and caught him by the arm before he reached the door.

  ‘It’s lovely, Popsicle,’ I said. ‘Will it float? Can I float it in the bath, with Patsy?’

  ‘In the bath! With Patsy!’ he laughed. ‘This is my lifeboat you’re talking about.’

  ‘All right then. What about the pond? Could we float him out on the pond, in the park?’

  ‘Not him,’ he said. ‘She’s a she. All boats are shes. She’ll float all right, but she’ll do a lot more than just float, you mark my words. She’s got engines. I’ve tried her out. She’s had her sea trials. Goes like the clappers, she does. And she’s unsinkable too. Got to be if she’s a lifeboat. You want to see?’

  ‘Now?’

  ‘Why not? We’ll all go, shall we?’

  The ducks were not at all pleased with us. They must have thought we’d come over with our usual offering of breadcrusts. Popsicle ignored all their raucous clamour, started the engines and set her chugging off across the pond on her maiden voyage. Transfixed, we all stood there and watched her, until Popsicle said that one of us had better run across the other side to catch her before she ran aground and got herself stuck in the mud. My father raced round. He was there just in time.

  ‘She looks such a brave little boat,’ said my mother.

  ‘She was,’ Popsicle replied. ‘Saved a lot of lives in her time.’

  ‘You crewed on her, did you?’ my mother was delving, prying, and I wished she wouldn’t. ‘So you were a lifeboat-man, then?’ I expected Popsicle to clam up, but he didn’t, not this time.

  ‘I wish I knew.’ He was looking out over the pond as he spoke. ‘I know that she was mine once, that’s all.’ He put an arm round my shoulder. ‘And now she’s yours, Cessie, all yours. You’ll take good care of her, won’t you? Course, you can let your dad play with her from time to time.’ He chuckled. ‘Look
at him. Just like he was. Always loved boats, did your dad.’ My father was crouched down by the pond pointing the bow of the lifeboat right at us.

  ‘Ready?’ he called out.

  ‘Ready,’ said Popsicle.

  My father released the boat and then stood up to watch, hands on hips. He was beaming like a little boy.

  By now a dozen people or more had gathered around the pond to watch, Shirley Watson amongst them with her dog. Mandy Bethel was there too. The dog, a snuffling puggy-looking thing with pop eyes, yapped incessantly from the edge of the pond. That dog and Shirley Watson, I was thinking, they really suit each other.

  ‘It’s mine. My grandad made it,’ I crowed. I knew as soon as I’d said it that I should have kept my mouth shut. The trouble was that I felt safe. Popsicle was nearby. My mother and father too. I felt suddenly brave, so I bragged on. ‘It’s called the Lucie Alice. It’s got real engines. It’s an exact replica of a 1939 lifeboat, a real one.’

  ‘Kids’ stuff, if you ask me,’ Shirley Watson sneered.

  ‘Well,’ I said, still full of bravado, ‘if you don’t like it, you don’t have to watch, do you?’

  Mandy Bethel gaped. She could not believe what she was hearing. Neither could I. No one spoke like that to Shirley Watson, no one in her right mind.

  Shirley Watson glared at me and stomped off in a fury. I knew, as I watched her go, that I had done something I would live to regret. I knew she was best not roused, not confronted, and I had done both. I knew there would be trouble.

  I soon discovered that Shirley Watson was putting it about at school that I had a crazy grandfather back at home, a drifter, a tramp, who wore his hair in a ponytail and looked like a pirate. That I could ignore, but there was worse to come – just looks at first, then whispers.

  Shirley Watson was spreading poison about Popsicle. She was telling everyone. He looked like a druggie, a weirdo. He was probably a dealer too, hanging around the park like he did. And she’d seen him talking to small children. It was a deliberate campaign of innuendo and gossip, and I hated her for it from the bottom of my heart.

  The mud was sticking. People were treating me differently. Some would not speak to me at all. I wanted to rise above it, to face them down, to be brave. I wanted to go out with Popsicle as often as I could, and be seen with him, just to show them exactly what I thought of them. And to begin with I really did try. But every time I went out with Popsicle, I was looking over my shoulder, dreading seeing anyone from school.

  Gradually my courage ebbed away, and I was cowed into staying at home. I had homework, it was raining, I had violin practice to do – any excuse to avoid bumping into that gaggle of sniggering tormentors in the park. I wasn’t proud of myself.

  Popsicle kept making minor adjustments to improve the Lucie Alice’s performance or her stability in the water. He had to test his refinements on the duckpond in the park. There wasn’t anywhere else. Luckily, there were long periods when he didn’t want to go there at all – whilst he was working on her on his bench in the garden shed. ‘Any boatbuilder worth his salt can’t be satisfied with getting it almost right,’ he told me one day, as I watched him at work. ‘He has to get it perfect. And I’m going to get this boat perfect for you, Cessie, perfect.’

  It looked quite perfect enough for me already, but I wasn’t going to argue. I was more than happy to sit and watch him at work, and happier still not to have to venture out into the park. But I knew the day must come when he would want to test the Lucie Alice out on the water again, and that unless I had a ready excuse, I’d have to go with him, my heart in my mouth all the time.

  One Sunday afternoon I was reading on my bed when he came into my room with his coat on, the Lucie Alice in the shoe box under his arm. ‘She’s ready,’ he said.

  ‘It’s raining,’ I told him.

  ‘Only drizzling, Cessie girl,’ he said. ‘Come on.’ I had no choice.

  I knew that Sunday afternoon was always the most likely time to meet some of Shirley Watson’s crowd in the park. They could be on their way down to the bus shelter, a favourite hang-out at weekends, particularly when it was raining. I was thinking about that as I followed him down the stairs. ‘But I haven’t done my violin practice,’ I said, stopping where I was.

  ‘It won’t take us long,’ said Popsicle, and I could see how disappointed he was at my reluctance.

  My father had heard us from the sitting-room. ‘She needs to practise,’ he said. ‘She won’t get her Grade Six by playing with boats, will she?’ There was no need to say it like that. I very nearly changed my mind, just to show solidarity with Popsicle. But I didn’t. Instead, to my everlasting shame, I gave Popsicle my scarf and sent him off to the park on his own in the rain.

  I went up to my room and pretended to practise, but of course my heart wasn’t in it. I spent all the time excusing my excuse, rationalising my chickening out. I just couldn’t concentrate. I kept thinking of Popsicle out there in the park, of what Shirley’s cronies might say to him if they caught up with him, how bewildered he’d be, how hurt. Then, quite suddenly, I could picture him in my mind. I knew they were there, all around him, laughing at him, jeering.

  I was down the stairs and out of the house before anyone could stop me. I could hear my father calling after me as I slammed the door.

  The traffic lights turned red at the right moment. I dashed across the main road, past the library and the bus shelter, and into the park. I hurdled the children’s play-ground fence and got a shrill rebuke from an angry mother seesawing her little girl, before I hurdled out again. I was almost there.

  To my intense relief there was no chanting, no jeering, just a commotion of quacking. There was no one about, only the ducks – that was how it seemed at first. But then I saw that the ducks were not alone in their pond. Popsicle was standing waist-high in the water, with his back to me. I called to him and ran down to the water’s edge. He didn’t turn; I ran round so that he’d have to hear me, have to see me. He had something in his hand. There was debris floating in the water all around him. I knew in an instant what had happened. I ran into the water and waded out towards him. He was holding the bow of the lifeboat in one hand, the stern in the other. The yellow funnel was floating towards me. I picked it up. I saw the wheel just under the surface and retrieved it. I looked for the lifeboatman in the sou’wester, but he was gone.

  ‘They just came,’ he said. ‘They were shouting things, horrible things. Then they threw stones, hundreds of them. They went on and on. I don’t know why. I don’t know why.’

  Nothing I said would persuade him to come out of the pond. He had to stay, he said, until he’d picked up every last bit of her. Then my father was there, and my mother too, wading out towards us. They took an elbow each and, ignoring all his protestations, led him out of the pond. When I looked back, the ducks were moving in amongst the last of the flotsam, pecking at it, then discarding it and finally swimming away in disgust.

  After the sinking of the Lucie Alice Popsicle went downhill again fast. Dr Wickens said he wasn’t seriously ill. He had a chest cold, that was all. But even I could see it was a lot more than that. He was sinking further and further into despair. Every day now was a black-dog day. He’d sit there in his chair, his eyes glazed, and unseeing. He wasn’t with us. He seemed lost in a deep sadness and could not bring himself out of it. I told him it didn’t matter about the Luice Alice , that he could always build another. I stroked his hand and told him we’d do it together. I think he barely knew I was there. He didn’t feel like eating. He even refused his condensed milk.

  The doctor came back one evening to give Popsicle an injection, just to help him along, I was told. I was sent upstairs for a while. They wanted to talk to the doctor in private. I heard the hushed discussions down in the kitchen, but the tap was running or the kettle was boiling and I could make no sense of what they were saying.

  At school it took a few days to screw up my courage before I could bring myself to do what I had to do,
to say what I had to say. Shirley Watson knew it was coming. There was guilt written all over her face. She couldn’t hide it. Day in, day out, I had eyed her from across the classroom, from across the playground, just to let her know that I knew it was her that had sunk the Lucie Alice , her and her friends. At first she tried to stare me out, but each time I won the battle of the eyes, and she’d have to look away.

  I waited for my moment. It came in break one day when I saw she was alone. I walked right up to her. We were face to face now. Somehow my courage held firm. ‘Why? What did you do it for?’ My voice was steadier than I dared hope. ‘My grandad made me that boat. It took him weeks and weeks. What you did, it’s made him ill, really ill. Does that make you feel good?’ I looked her full in the eye, unflinching. ‘Well, does it? Does it?’ Then, without a word, she turned and ran off.

  As I went home that afternoon I was singing inside with triumph. I told Popsicle all about how I’d faced down Shirley Watson. I wasn’t sure how much he understood, but he seemed to listen. After I’d finished he just touched my face, and smiled wanly. ‘Lucie Alice,’ he said. ‘Lucie Alice.’ And that was all.

  If there were warnings of what was about to happen, then I didn’t see them. Perhaps I didn’t want to see them. For a week or so over half-term, a nurse came each day to see to Popsicle, and the doctor was in and out almost daily too. I would see my mother and father walking around the garden, deep in earnest discussion from which I was always excluded. There would be long knowing looks across the table at supper, and my father, I noticed, was being unusually attentive and kind towards Popsicle.