Escape From Shangri-La

  All the while Mrs Davidson was eyeing me. I was sure she was beginning to recognise me.

  As we were leaving she took Popsicle by the elbow. ‘I think you’d better come inside now, Mr Stevens, don’t you? Bit breezy out here.’

  ‘I’ll be fine where I am,’ Popsicle pulled away. ‘I like a good breeze. Gets rid of bad smells, if you know what I mean.’ Mrs Davidson glared at him.

  When we said goodbye I held him as long and as tight as I could, so that he’d remember it when I was gone. It was all I could do to choke back my tears. ‘Don’t you go crying on me, girl,’ he whispered. ‘I’ve got enough on my plate without that.’

  My mother kissed him goodbye too. ‘It’s not for ever Popsicle,’ she said. ‘You do understand that. Just till you’re better. We’ll come again soon.’

  My father shook Popsicle by the hand. There was just a nod between them and a brief meeting of eyes.

  ‘You do see what I mean,’ said Mrs Davidson as we walked away. ‘He says such bizarre things. He does live in a bit of a fantasy world, I’m afraid, but he’ll settle down. They all take time to settle. I’ll look after him, don’t you worry.’ To me, that sounded more like a threat than anything else.

  We drove home in silence. I waited till the engine was turned off before I let them both know exactly what I was thinking. ‘I don’t know how you can do it, how you can leave him up there in that place with that horrible woman.’ They stayed silent, which simply provoked me to go further. ‘You don’t believe him, do you? You never do. If he says he lives on a lifeboat, then he does. Why should he make it up? You think he’s mad, do you? Well, you’re the mad ones. Why don’t you just trust him? Why don’t you ever trust him?’

  I lay there that night asking myself that very same question. Try as I did to dispel them, my doubts still nagged at me. Was Popsicle really in his right mind? How could he be living on a lifeboat? If I could find the Lucie Alice, if only I could prove there was such a boat . . . I knew what I had to do. I don’t think I slept at all.

  I was up early. I told them I was going for a cycle ride. I searched the marina from end to end, and the harbour beyond. There was no lifeboat. I went out after lunch and tried again. There was no Lucie Alice. No one had ever heard of her. So maybe they were right after all. Maybe Popsicle was sick in his head. Maybe he was barmy. I remembered what Mrs Morecambe had said about her aunt in the RE lesson, how she was dying of Alzheimer’s. I went and looked up Alzheimer’s in a medical dictionary from my mother’s bookshelf. It took me some time to find it, because I didn’t know how to spell it. Everything I read confirmed my worst fears. Alzheimer’s began with muddled thinking, with intermittent loss of memory. When I’d finished reading I was quite sure that Popsicle was in the early stages of Alzheimer’s.

  With two sleepless nights behind me, I was so tired the next day and so worried that I could hardly think straight at all. The last person in the world I wanted to have to face at school was Shirley Watson. I was sitting under a tree eating my lunch on my own, when I looked up and saw her coming towards me. There was nothing I could do to avoid her. She stood for a moment looking down at me out of the sun. I thought she was going to kick my head in.

  ‘You know that boat?’ Her tone was conciliatory, ingratiating almost. ‘Well, I’ve seen it,’ she said.

  ‘What do you mean, you’ve seen it? You bust it up, remember?’

  ‘No, I mean a big one, a real one. Down by the canal. By the lock. You been there?’ I shook my head. ‘I was fishing down there yesterday with my brother. There’s a whole lot of barges moored down by the old warehouses, and right at the end there’s this boat, and it’s just like the one your grandad made. Just the same it is. I’m not having you on, Cessie, promise. It’s there, really there. “Lucie . . .” something or other, it’s called. Great big yellow funnel. Blue, just like the one . . .’ She was shifting nervously from one foot to the other. ‘I’ll show you, if you like. After school?’

  9 GONE MISSING

  IT WAS A LONG WALK FROM SCHOOL TO THE canal, right across the other side of town. All the way I felt uneasy. Shirley Watson didn’t say very much. There was never a mention of the sinking of the Lucie Alice. She asked after Popsicle, and she seemed genuinely concerned, as if she really cared about him. It wasn’t like her at all. All the while I felt I might be being led into some kind of a trap. I stayed with her only because I knew there had to be some truth in her story. No one else could possibly have known what Popsicle had told me up at Shangri-La, about the Lucie Alice. She couldn’t have plucked the idea out of thin air. But Shirley Watson was Shirley Watson, so I stayed on my guard.

  As we neared the lock gates I was becoming ever more intrigued, but ever more anxious too. She stopped on the bridge and pointed. ‘There. See?’ I could see only the funnel at first, a yellow funnel beyond the line of brightly painted pleasure barges. But then I saw the side of the boat, dark blue, broader than the barges, her hull bellying out into the canal, a rope looping the length of her, just as there had been on the model Popsicle had made me. I looked around nervously, half expecting some kind of an ambush.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ Shirley Watson asked.

  ‘You,’ I said. And then I asked her straight. ‘What are you doing this for? Why did you bring me?’

  I didn’t know Shirley Watson could cry, but suddenly there were real tears in her eyes. ‘What happened to your grandad, I didn’t mean it to happen like it did. It just got out of hand. I don’t know why we did it, and I wish . . .’ She couldn’t say any more. She turned away and went off, leaving me alone by the canal.

  As I walked over the bridge it was coming on to rain. I hurried along the towpath past the barges – they had names like Kontiki and Hispaniola – and there in front of one was the vertical prow of the lifeboat rising majestically from the water, her name painted in large red letters on her side: Lucie Alice. I stepped over the mooring ropes and ran my hand along her side. She felt so solid, so sturdy.

  The towpath in front of me and behind me looked deserted, and so it seemed was the boat. I called out. ‘Anyone there? Anyone on board?’ Then I saw the huge wheel – polished wood and brass – as high as a man, and beyond it the dark of the cabin down below. The only difference between this boat and Popsicle’s model, apart from size of course, was that no man stood at the wheel in his sou’wester. In every other detail this was the same boat. I called out once more just to be sure. There was no reply, and there was no one watching except a pair of swans gliding past on the canal. It looked safe enough for me to go on board.

  For a few moments I stood at the wheel and just held it. It wasn’t hard to imagine the towering seas and the throb of the engines and the cries of the shipwrecked sailors. I could almost feel the spray on my face and the cruel wind whipping the seas into a frenzy all around me. I clung to the wheel now for dear life, just like the man in the sou’wester. I looked up at the funnel, but the rain stung my eyes at once so I had to look away. There was a gangway of some kind leading down, to the cabin perhaps, or to the engine-room.

  In the oily darkness below decks it was difficult at first to make things out. I could see the shapes of two bulky engines amidships, and beyond them a small door with a brass handle. I tried to open it, but it was locked firmly. I turned the handle again and shook it. I put my shoulder to the door and pushed. It wouldn’t give. Only then did it occur to me that I was trespassing, and more serious still, that I could be caught trespassing.

  The boat breathed and groaned around me like a living thing, as if she knew I was an intruder and was telling me exactly what she thought of me. My eyes were becoming more accustomed to the dark now, and I saw to my left, down a small flight of steps, what looked like a ship’s galley – a small sink, a worktop, a gas ring. There was a bottle of washing-up liquid on the shelf, and a couple of saucepans and a frying-pan hanging up on hooks above the sink. Everything was very tidy and in its place.

  I was reaching out to try the tap, to see if
it worked, when I heard a footfall on the deck right above my head.

  ‘Come on up, whoever you are.’ A man’s voice and it was not friendly. ‘I know you’re down there.’ I thought of hiding down there in the dark, but I knew there was no point. I had nowhere to run to. Sooner or later he’d find me. I had no choice. I climbed up into the glare of the daylight.

  He had a sailor’s peaked cap on the back of his head and wore a navy blue sweater that was full of holes. He was pointing his pipe at me as if it was a weapon.

  ‘And what the blazes do you think you’re doing down there?’ My mind was racing. I knew how guilty I must have looked. ‘Vandal, are you? One of those vandals?’

  ‘No,’ was all I could manage.

  ‘What then? It’s private property this. You can’t just go snooping about on private property whenever you feel like it. All the same these days, you young ones. Think you can do what you please. Well you can’t, not on my patch. I’m the lock-keeper. I look after all the canal moorings. My job. This boat belongs to a friend of mine, and a good friend too. Done it up himself. Pride and joy of his life it is.’

  ‘My grandad,’ I said. Gulls screamed overhead and suddenly I could see how it all fitted. ‘He’s my grandad.’ Everything Popsicle had said all along had been true. He could see the water from his windows. There were ducks on the canal, and gulls were always screaming around his house. His house was the boat, and the boat was called the Lucie Alice, all just as he’d said.

  ‘This grandad of yours,’ the lock-keeper went on, and I could tell from his tone he didn’t believe me, ‘what’s his name then?’

  ‘Stevens. Same name as me. But we call him Popsicle. Everyone does.’ He seemed taken aback, disappointed almost. I went on: ‘And he’s got long, yellow hair and it’s tied back in a ponytail.’ The lock-keeper took a moment or two to recover.

  ‘He really is your grandad then?’ I nodded. ‘Didn’t know he had any family. Is he all right? I haven’t seen him down here for ages. Must be a couple of months now at least. I know he’s always going off on his wanders; but he’s been gone a long time. I was getting worried.’

  ‘He’s been ill. He’s been staying with us,’ I said.

  ‘Not serious, is it?’

  ‘No, he’s better now, thanks. Trouble is . . .’ I said, inventing hard as I went along. ‘He wants me to fetch some things from the boat for him. But he never told me where he keeps the key to the cabin. It’s locked.’

  The lock-keeper smiled at me, and I knew then that I’d won him over. ‘That’s easy; and what with you being his relation, like you say, I don’t suppose he’d mind me telling you, would he? In the galley. He keeps it in the tea-tin under the sink. You tell him Sam sends his best, will you?’

  ‘You’re Sam?’ I asked.

  ‘That’s me,’ he said. ‘He’s told you about me, has he?’

  So this was the friend Popsicle had spoken of, the friend whose brother had been taken off up to Shangri-La, never to come out again.

  ‘Popsicle, he’ll be coming back soon, will he?’ said the lock-keeper.

  ‘Very soon,’ I replied.

  ‘Good,’ he said. ‘You take care now.’ And he was gone.

  I found the key in the tea-tin just where he’d said. The cabin door unlocked easily and I stepped inside. It was a whole house in one long room. The floor was strewn with overlapping rugs, all of them threadbare. His bed was at the far end, a radio on his bedside table. There were three armchairs grouped under a single oil-lamp which hung from the ceiling in the middle of the cabin, and the walls were stacked high with books all around. Huge though the cabin was – the full width of the lifeboat and half its entire length I guessed – it was somehow still snug and homely.

  To one side of me was a writing-desk covered with charts, a pair of binoculars and a photograph in a frame. I walked round the desk and sat down. I noticed then that not all of the books were in English. Some were in French. On every ledge and shelf where there weren’t books, there were models of ships: fishing smacks, clippers, super-tankers and dozens of different yachts. Across the cabin, opposite me was a workbench under the roof light. An unfinished model of what looked like a warship lay on its side, a chisel nearby, and a squeezed-out tube of glue; and there were pieces of used sandpaper scattered all over the place.

  I turned the photograph into the light so I could see it better. It was of my father. It was a photo with his printed signature on it, the one he gives away to his fans when they write in. I didn’t like him smiling at me, so I looked away. That was when I first noticed the wall behind Popsicle’s bed, in the darkest corner of the cabin. It was covered with a collage of newspaper cuttings. I knelt up on the bed to get a closer look. The biggest cutting was a photograph of a beach, a wide beach stretching away into the distance, with high dunes behind and plumes of black smoke rising from a town in the background. In the foreground there were long lines of men in the sea, soldiers in helmets, some with rifles held above their heads. Another photograph was of a lifeboat crammed from end to end with soldiers, a lifeboat with a funnel amidships and a bow that rose vertically from the water.

  The headline above it read: Dunkirk. Lowestoft lifeboat rescues hundreds. I could just about read the story below:

  The Michael Hardy of Lowestoft was one of sixteen lifeboats that took part in the recent heroic evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force from Dunkirk. Along with hundreds of other small ships, she went in and took the troops off the beaches, ferrying them to bigger ships standing offshore outside the harbour. Bombed and strafed continuously, the Michael Hardy went back and forth for two nights and two days. She was twice rammed in the darkness by German motor torpedo boats but returned under her own steam to Lowestoft, her brave work accomplished.

  There were several more articles like it, all with photographs. Some were of ships sinking, some of soldiers trooping wearily off ships. Others were of soldiers with their hands on their heads being marched away into captivity. Then I saw, right in the middle of this collage of war, a tiny sepia photograph – the only one that wasn’t a newspaper photograph – of a young woman standing in front of a town house. She was laughing into the camera. She was pushing her hair back out of her eyes. I unpinned it and took it to the light. Something was written on the back of it. Lucie Alice. Dunkerque 1940. Pour toujours. The writing was faded but just legible.

  I sat for a long time in the half dark of the cabin with the photograph of Lucie Alice on Popsicle’s desk in front of me, trying to make sense of it all. By the time I left, taking with me the photo of Lucie Alice and one of the newspaper cuttings, both pressed flat inside my English book, I had solved very little. This lifeboat, the one I was on, had been at Dunkirk – that was very evident. It looked exactly the same as the one in the newspaper cuttings. Then she had been called the Michael Hardy, and now she was the Lucie Alice, no doubt after the girl in the photo. But why the change? I stood on the towpath and looked up at the lifeboat. She was massive – I wondered how many soldiers she had carried out at a time, 200? 300? Popsicle must have been there. Had he been one of the soldiers rescued from the beaches perhaps? Or had he been a sailor on the Michael Hardy? And who was this Lucie Alice anyway? What did pour toujours mean? Was it Lucie Alice who had taught him French? Was that how Popsicle knew so much French?

  As I walked home in the drizzle, my head reeling with unanswered questions, it occurred to me that, for the moment at least, I probably knew more about Popsicle’s past than he did.

  I was home late, very late. They’d both been out of their minds with worry, they told me. They had been ringing everywhere to find out where I was. ‘I’ve just been for a walk,’ I said. ‘That’s all.’

  ‘That’s all!’ My father lost all patience. He glared at me for a while, and then stormed out, leaving me with my mother in the kitchen.

  ‘Why do you do these things, Cessie?’ she said, shaking her head sadly. ‘No one minds you going out for a walk, but you should’ve told us.’
>
  ‘Like you told me about sending Popsicle to Shangri-La, I suppose,’ I retorted.

  I could see that she too was at the end of her tether. ‘That was different. You know it was. I can’t talk to you when you’re like this. I’ve got some marking to do.’

  I helped myself to a yoghurt from the fridge and sat down to think things through. I couldn’t just leave it until visiting day the next Saturday to tell Popsicle of my discovery. The sooner he knew I’d found the Lucie Alice, the sooner he saw the photograph of Lucie Alice and the newspaper cutting, the sooner he might remember the rest. And, besides, I was burning to tell him. Perhaps, with these new pieces of the jigsaw puzzle in place, he might be able to put the whole picture together at last. I would cut school tomorrow and go up to Shangri-La. I’d forge a sick note and take it in the following day. Other people had done it and got away with it. No one would find out, not if I was careful. And I would be very careful.

  Playing truant was not nearly as easy as I had imagined. I left home at the normal time. That was a mistake for a start. I had planned to double back, wait for my mother and father to leave, take my bicycle from the garage and cycle up to Shangri-La. But I had forgotten something: on the way to school in the mornings, you were never alone, you were always one of a crowd.

  Mandy Bethel was there, as usual. So were all the Martins from across the road, and then Shirley Watson and a dozen others joined us too. We were all of us walking to school, not necessarily together, but we were all going the same way. I couldn’t just double back, not without questions being asked anyway.

  I was almost at the park gates before I finally worked out something that had a chance of being believed. I stopped dead and pretended to search frantically in my bag. As she came past, Shirley Watson asked just the right question.