Andrew paused in laying asparagus carefully along the dips in the corrugated roof. “I’m not at all sure. Is the computer ready to use now?”
“Perfectly,” said Stashe. “And I’m hurrying off now so’s I can walk home and save Dad the drive. You wouldn’t believe the muddle he got in this lunchtime! He kept forgetting the car was adapted to drive with his hands.”
She beckoned imperiously. Andrew found himself bending double on the chair to bring his ear near her mouth. Bossyboots! he thought. But Stashe certainly had a way with her. He couldn’t help laughing.
“Thank you for what you did for Dad!” she whispered. “He was so depressed I was getting worried. How did you do it?”
“Um — his leg was almost still there,” Andrew said. “I just brought it back.”
“And will it last?” Stashe asked urgently. “I don’t think he could bear to lose it again.”
“I can always bring it back,” Andrew said, much more confidently than he felt. “Keep telling him that.”
“I will,” said Stashe. “Now I must fly. See you!”
She went rushing off at a smart stagger round the house. Andrew waved goodbye with the bunch of asparagus he was holding and almost fell off the chair. “A right fool I look!” he said to Aidan. “Next bunch, please.”
By the time they had finished, the woodshed appeared to be thatched in asparagus. Aidan could hardly wait to see what came and ate it. It was a good thing there was so much of it. He would have plenty of time to get downstairs with the torch as soon as he heard munching.
Aidan went to bed early, saying he was tired again, which was far from true. Upstairs, he propped all his bedroom windows open as far as they would go by wedging them with new packets of socks. He put on new pyjamas, new fleece and the new waterproof over those. Then he fetched the pillows from the bed to make the windowsill comfortable and settled down there with the torch to wait and listen. The woodshed was just round the corner. He ought to hear munching easily.
An hour later he was freezing, in spite of the new fleece, but nothing else had happened. Aidan had heard an owl hooting, cars on the road and people laughing in the distance down by the pub. But those were all ordinary sounds. An hour later still, when it was quite dark, he began to wonder if the mysterious visitor might be magically silent. Aidan was going to sit here all night and not hear a thing.
The idea panicked him and he saw that the only way to be sure of seeing anything was to go outside and wait beside the woodshed. He sprang up, clutching the torch, and tiptoed across the creaky floor, up the bulge in the middle and down to the bedroom door. He creaked the door open. Bother. Stupid. He should have oiled it. There was a can of WD40 in the kitchen, but he had not thought to borrow it like the torch. He crept along the corridor and down the stairs. They creaked too. Was there any way to oil stairs? Probably not. Things creaked when they were old. It was a relief to get down to ground level, where the floors were stone. Aidan scudded across the flagstones and along to the kitchen.
Andrew, sitting reading in the comfortable chair in the living room, heard light footsteps fleeing down the passage, and looked up. Aidan? Up to what? Hungry again probably and going to find the biscuits they had bought this morning. Not to worry. Andrew looked back to his book and, as he did, he heard the faint, distant sound of the back door being carefully opened and shut. Then he knew just what Aidan was doing. He swore and flung down the book.
Aidan tiptoed through the dewy grass, gasping at how cold it was. He should have put shoes on. Rather late for that now. He came to the corner of the house and, very cautiously, put his shoulder against the stones of the wall and sidled round.
The visitor was already there. It was enormous. There was a fitful moon that was rushing through smokelike clouds and Aidan could see the visitor against the sky, towering over the woodshed, stooping and strange. It reached out a piece of itself…
The Stalkers in London came instantly back to Aidan’s mind. For an hour-long minute, he was even more terrified than he had been then, paralysed with horror, while the great shape unfolded upwards and made mysterious movements. Then there was a crunch, followed by very large munching.
It’s a vegetarian, Aidan reminded himself. It’s eating the asparagus. He managed to take a deep breath. He lifted up the big torch, aimed it at the creature and switched it on. It made a fan of dazzling white light.
The visitor gave a yelping grunt and tried to hide its eyes with the bunch of asparagus in its huge hand. It said, quite distinctly, “Don’t do that!”
Aidan automatically said, “Sorry,” and switched the torch off. Then of course he could see nothing. He opened and shut his eyes to clear the dazzle off and thought about what he had seen. For a moment, he thought he had been looking at Shaun. But Shaun at least four times the usual size, almost five metres tall and wide with it. Shaun with wild hair tangling down on to his thick shoulders. But the grimy face up among the hair had not been padded with the fat of stupidity, the way Shaun’s was. No, it was not Shaun. It was something else.
“Let’s face it,” Aidan found himself saying aloud. “You’re a giant.”
“Not yet,” the visitor answered discontentedly. He ought to have had a deep, rumbling voice, but in fact his voice was quite high, rather like Shaun’s. “I grow slow,” he said. “Who you? You got windows on your eyes, but you not the usual boy. That one had hair like straw.”
“I’m Aidan,” Aidan said. And he thought, He must mean Professor Hope, when he was a boy! So Andrew did go and look! “And what’s your name?”
The visitor took a big bite of asparagus and answered as he munched.
“Pardon?” said Aidan. No one’s name could be crunch.
At that moment, Andrew said from the corner of the house, “Hallo, Groil.”
“H’llo, h’llo!” the visitor replied excitedly, waving two bunches of asparagus against the faint light of the sky. He waved just the same way that Shaun did when he was excited. “Who you? Not the usual old man, are you?”
“No,” said Andrew. “I’m Andrew.”
“Andrew! You grew quick!” the giant exclaimed. He swung a fistful of asparagus towards Aidan. “Then he—?”
“Staying here,” said Andrew. “Like I used to do. I hope Aidan isn’t disturbing you at your supper. My grandfather used to get very cross with me—”
At this, Aidan looked nervously from Andrew to Groil, but Groil simply crammed both bunches of asparagus into his mouth, crunched mightily, swallowed with the sound of a drain being unblocked and said, “Nah, nah.” In the grey, gusting light from the moon, he seemed to be smiling. After another drain-like swallow, he said, “Still wearing the jumper you gave me. See?” He plucked proudly at his chest.
Aidan was seeing quite well now. The thing Groil was plucking at might have been a jumper once, but now it was mostly holes, like a dark, irregular string vest, stretched very tightly across his great chest. Below that, he wore a loincloth that could once have been a bath towel.
“Aren’t you cold like that?” Aidan asked before he could stop himself.
“Sometimes,” Groil admitted. “In winter.” He picked up another fistful of asparagus and pointed it at Andrew. “He gave me clothes, see.” He stayed pointing the asparagus at Andrew. Aidan could see his big eyes shining rather sadly in his big face. “Then he grew. Everyone grows so quick except me. You look like the old magician now. Where is he?”
“He’s dead, I’m afraid,” Andrew said.
The eyes, dimly, blinked. Then they looked at Aidan for help. “What is dead?” Groil asked.
Aidan and Andrew both spoke at once. Andrew said, “Gone for good.”
Aidan said, “Not here any more,” and gulped back misery.
“Ah.” Groil munched asparagus for a while, thinking. “And then you ate him?” he suggested. “I ate a gone-for-good squirrel once. I didn’t like it much.”
“Well, no,” Andrew said. “Not quite. More like the squirrel before you ate it. He left
me in charge here. Let’s change the subject. Do you like the asparagus we put out for you?”
“This?” Groil scrabbled up another bunch of asparagus from the roof and held it into the moonlight. “Very tasty. Crunchy. A little bitter. It tastes green. Sparrowgrass, is it?”
Aidan thought of Mr Stock and tried not to laugh.
Groil grinned at him. Big flat teeth caught the moonlight. “I heard him shouting about it in the garden,” he said. “It’s a new word I know.”
So Groil must lurk about Melstone House somewhere, Aidan thought. “What do you do in the winter when it’s cold?” he asked.
“I curl down,” Groil said. “Under stuff. Earth keeps you quite warm.”
“Wouldn’t you like some more clothes?” Aidan asked.
Groil thought about it. “Something looser?” he said, plucking at the strands of wool across his chest.
“Then I’ll see if I can find you some,” Aidan said.
Andrew coughed. “Aidan, I think we should leave Groil to his supper now. My grandfather was always very strict about this. And you should be in bed. Don’t forget to bring the torch.”
“Oh.” Groil was not quite a vegetarian, Aidan realised. Someone who could think of eating dead grandfathers might not draw the line at living boys. “Oh, I— Goodnight then, Groil. See you.”
“See you, Edwin,” Groil said happily. His teeth closed on more asparagus with a snap and a great crunch.
Aidan, as he bent and groped about for the torch that he had put down in the grass somewhere, wondered crossly why it was that nobody could get his name right. He muttered about it as he followed Andrew round the house and into the warmth beyond the French windows. “I don’t want to go back to bed yet,” he said once they were indoors. “I’m too excited. Do you mind if I stay in here and make Groil some clothes?”
Gran would have said No and sent Aidan off to bed at once. Andrew simply asked agreeably, “How do you propose to make clothes?”
“I’ll show you.” Aidan put the torch on the piano and pelted off upstairs to his room. He came back with his old clothes — clothes he had worn for the best part of last week — and spread them out on the worn, patterned carpet. He took his glasses off. “Like this,” he explained to Andrew, who was now sitting in the good chair with his book again. “If I take my glasses off, things go larger anyway. I think I can make them go really larger.”
Andrew answered, in his polite way, “It’s certainly worth a try. I remember, when I was your age, getting pretty distressed at how cold Groil must be. When I first met him he had no clothes on at all.”
And how had he forgotten that? Andrew wondered. He had forgotten Groil completely. All he had remembered was that it was very unwise to try to see what, or who, ate the food on the woodshed roof. And he ought to have remembered. He had been in trouble with his grandfather about spying on Groil, and in trouble with Mrs Stock over stealing the bath towel. Then, when he got home, he had been in trouble with his mother about the missing jumper. She had knitted it herself for Andrew to wear in Melstone. All that was enough to make a person remember, you would have thought. But he had forgotten because when he was older, he knew that adults didn’t believe in naked giants at midnight.
Then there was the puzzling way that Groil looked so like Shaun. Andrew thought that he had probably given Shaun a job because Shaun looked familiar somehow. He had a dim feeling that his grandfather had talked about this kind of resemblance. It was another of the magical things Jocelyn had told him about. He suspected that, one way or another, his grandfather had prepared him quite thoroughly for this field-of-care thing. And Andrew had forgotten every bit of it.
“Did Groil remind you of anyone?” he asked Aidan.
“Yes,” said Aidan. “Shaun.”
Aidan was having trouble. The clothes were stretching, but very slowly and unevenly, and going spiderweb thin in places. Andrew took his glasses off and looked across at Aidan crouching on the carpet, staring, staring at a pair of jeans with one leg longer than the other. A couple of years ago he would have thought Aidan was mad.
“Try taking them back smaller, and then thinking of each thread as longer and thicker,” Andrew suggested. “Like looking at cloth under a microscope.”
“Oh, yes, but— Thanks,” Aidan said, flustered.
There was a pause, during which the sweatshirt grew at last and the jeans shrank.
“You know,” Aidan burst out in his frustration, “I do hate my name!”
“Why is that?” Andrew asked.
“No one gets it right!” said Aidan. “Not even Groil! And it’s an awful name anyway. Aidan’s a saint and Cain was the first-ever murderer. What a mixture!”
“Well, most people are that kind of mixture,” Andrew said.
“Yes, but they don’t have names that say so!” Aidan said disgustedly.
“True,” Andrew agreed. “But has it occurred to you that if those Stalkers of yours had called you by the right name, you might have gone out to them?”
“Oh!” Aidan was much struck by this. “Do you think I would have?”
“Yes. Names are powerful things,” Andrew told him. “It could even have saved your life that they got yours wrong. Besides, neither of your names means what you think they do. Here. Let me show you.”
Sick of brooding on things he could maddeningly not remember, Andrew sprang up and went to the bookshelves. Aidan distrustfully watched him seize two fat books and spread them open on the piano. Being a professor again, Aidan thought.
“Yes, here we are,” Andrew said. “Aidan is a diminutive — that means a smaller version or a pet name — of an Irish name that means ‘fire’. You are ‘young fire’. Think of yourself as crackling and throwing up long yellow flames. Sparks too. And Cain…” He turned to the other book. “It says here that Cain as a surname has nothing whatsoever to do with the first murderer in the Bible. It means either ‘war zone’ or ‘son of a warrior’. You can think of yourself as ‘Young Fire, Son of a Soldier’. Does that make you feel better?”
“Let me see,” Aidan said, jumping up. Andrew obligingly pushed the books towards him. Aidan bent over them and discovered that what Andrew said was quite true — except that Andrew had somehow made the meanings more colourful than the books did.
When he turned back to the garments on the floor, he found they were growing nicely all by themselves. They were now slightly larger than Groil-size and took up most of the carpet. No matter. Groil said he was still growing. “Stop!” Aidan told them, and they did. Aidan turned to Andrew, grinning with relief. “Quite a learning curve!” he said. “Spells and names.”
“The two things are often the same,” Andrew said. “But I do think that when people say ‘a learning curve’ they make a mistake. Learning to me always seems to go in a straight, ignorant line and then, every so often, takes a jump straight upwards. Wouldn’t you agree?”
Aidan considered this, and nodded. You always learned things suddenly, mostly because people came and told you things. He was beginning to think that Andrew was impressively wise.
“Now go to bed,” Andrew said. “Or I’ll tell Groil you want him to eat you.”
Chapter Six
Aidan went to bed, where he slept sweetly. Andrew, on the other hand, had a disturbed night, full of restless dreams, in which he was constantly searching for the things his grandfather had told him. In the dreams, he was always looking for his grandfather to ask him and his grandfather was never there. Once or twice he found Stashe instead, but she just said airily, “It’s all on the computer,” and went away. So then, Andrew dreamed, he looked on the computer and found information that was like coloured smoke and, like smoke, the knowledge escaped through his fingers when he grasped at it. At one point he half woke himself up, saying, “I suppose I have to work this out myself then.” This annoyed him, because it was going to interfere with his book. He finally woke up into a warm, grey morning, relieved that the night was over.
In the normal wa
y, Andrew would have got down to work on his book. But he needed Stashe, in order to start, and Stashe was not coming that day. Andrew grumbled to himself over breakfast, “Wasted day, wasted day.”
“Why don’t we take a map and walk the boundary then?” Aidan suggested.
“Good idea!” Andrew said.
Since Mrs Stock was late that day — if she was coming at all after her row with Mr Stock — Andrew and Aidan made themselves sandwiches and left Mrs Stock a note. Andrew discovered that he and Aidan took the same size in shoes — Aidan was obviously going to end up pretty tall — so Andrew, rather grudgingly, lent Aidan his second-best walking boots. They took waterproofs, found the map and set off across the damp, grey fields towards Mel Tump.
Aidan enjoyed it hugely. He had not expected to, being a city boy and not used to rough walking. In fact, when they crossed the ragged hedge opposite the woodshed, he was certain he was not going to enjoy this. Entering the first field gave him a queer, nervous feeling.
“It doesn’t feel nearly so safe out here,” he said to Andrew.
“No, it probably isn’t,” Andrew said. “I think I remember my grandfather saying that Melstone House and its grounds are a sort of safety zone. But don’t let that worry you. He owned — and I own now — all these fields, and the hill, and that wood over there. I rent them out for pasture, but they’re all still mine.”
Aidan wondered what it felt like to have a spread of land like this that actually belonged to you. Rather good, probably.
He did not enjoy the next bit either, when they met Wally Stock, the farmer who pastured his cows and sheep in Andrew’s fields. Wally was short and red-faced and gloomy. He wore a flat, gloomy hat and he was a great talker. Aidan stood impatiently by while Wally tried to persuade Andrew to take a whole sheep for his freezer as part payment for renting Andrew’s fields. Andrew knew this was a tax dodge and he was not willing; but then he looked round at Aidan, fidgeting beside him, and thought about how much Aidan ate. He agreed to the sheep and tried to walk on. But Wally was by no means finished.