Inevitably, Joe himself fell ill. His temperature shot up to one hundred and three and the sweat poured off him as he tossed and turned in his bed. He hadn’t eaten anything for a week and his ribs were so pronounced that Wolfgang—much to everyone’s amazement—was able to use them to demonstrate his skill as a xylophone player. Doctors were called in and, after listening to Joe’s feverish cries, announced that he had been traumatized by his granny’s death. It seemed more than likely that he was about to join her.
Joe did have moments when he was cool and rational. It was at these times that he tried to figure out what to do. He knew he was afraid—that he was actually being scared to death by the memory of what Granny had said. And he also knew he had to tell someone about it. That was the only way to bring the nightmare to an end. Tell someone and they’d be able to face it together. But at the same time he knew there was no one. He couldn’t go to his parents. Mrs. Jinks and Mr. Lampy were both gone. He was on his own.
And then the postcard came.
It was addressed to him, written in neat block capitals. On the front was a picture of Bideford. On the back was a simple message:
THE TRUTH WILL ALWAYS COME OUT.
That was all. The card was unsigned.
Joe thought long and hard. He knew he had heard the words before but he couldn’t remember where. The only clue seemed to be the picture of Bideford. He had often wondered who it was who had freed him from the Enzyme Extractor while the lights were out, and had played the voice in his mind over and over again. He had always assumed that it must have been one of the grannies who had taken pity on him and who had perished in the blast. But now, looking at the card, he wasn’t so sure. The truth will always come out. Who had said that to him and when?
From that time on, Joe began to recover. It wasn’t just the fact that he knew that, after all, he did have a friend. It was also his belief in what the postcard said. The truth was important. The truth mattered. It mattered more than the fact that he was only twelve and that his story was completely preposterous. People like Granny, all bullies in fact, only managed to survive because they lived behind the truth. Once people knew them for what they were, they would be powerless.
One evening, a week after the funeral, Joe got out of bed and went downstairs. His parents were in the living room, watching television. It was The Money Program, his father’s favorite, but even so he pressed ahead.
Joe told them.
He turned off the television and told them everything that had happened since Christmas and the toy robot. He told them about the cream-cheese tea, the death of Mrs. Jinks, and his suspicions about the death of Mr. Lampy. Then he told them what had really happened in Bideford, what had caused the explosion, and how he had escaped.
Mr. and Mrs. Warden listened to all this in complete silence, but when he had at last finished, Mrs. Warden stood up.
“Is that all?” she asked.
“Yes,” Joe said. He cast his eyes down. The room was suddenly like a refrigerator. He could feel his mother’s anger, chilling him.
“You do realize that’s my mother you’re talking about?”
“Yes.”
Mrs. Warden let out a single sob. “We’ll discuss this in the morning,” she said, and walked out of the room with her nose in the air.
“Look where you’re going!” Mr. Warden shouted.
There was a loud clunk as Mrs. Warden hit the corner of the door. Then she was gone.
“Now look what you’ve done,” Mr. Warden snapped. He did the same to his cigar even though it was only half smoked. “Lost your marbles, have you?” he asked.
“Father…”
“I’ve heard some pretty wild stories in my time,” he said. “But that one takes the cake. And on the subject of cakes, it’s time for my hot milk. I’ll talk to you in the morning, young man!”
Joe watched his father leave. For the first time in more years than he could remember, he felt hot tears brimming on his eyelids. “I hate this house,” he muttered. “I hate them all.” He was still holding the mysterious postcard. Now he tore it into pieces. He didn’t care who had sent it anymore. Nobody would ever believe him. Nobody cared about him. He was nobody.
That was the truth.
Later that evening, Mr. and Mrs. Warden lay in bed. Mr. Warden had decided against the hot milk and was sipping a glass of brandy instead. Mrs. Warden was half concealed under an ice pack that was pressed against her face where the door had hit her.
“That story,” Mr. Warden muttered. “It was ridiculous.”
“Ludicrous,” Mrs. Warden agreed.
“Outrageous.”
“Monstrous.”
“Your mother…she would never have behaved like that!”
“Of course not!”
“No.”
There was a long silence.
“She was rather horrible to me once or twice, though,” Mr. Warden murmured. “Of course I adored her. She was your mother. But she could be…difficult.”
“I suppose so,” Mrs. Warden agreed.
“I mean, she never liked me,” Mr. Warden went on. “When I asked if I could marry you, she poured tea over me. And her wedding present to us. Twelve fish sticks. That wasn’t very generous.”
“She could be worse,” Mrs. Warden murmured. “When I was a little girl, she made me share my room with two lodgers, one of whom —Mr. Baster—had very unsavory habits. And do you know, she never took me out once. Not in my whole life!”
“Really?” Mr. Warden was genuinely surprised.
“Not even shopping. She never had any time for me. She once told me she didn’t want children. She even tried to abandon me. She left me in a basket on the steps of a police station.”
“Good Lord! How distressing.”
“It was very embarrassing. I was sixteen years old!”
Mr. Warden reflected. “Your father adored her, though,” he said.
“Yes. He did adore her. Only he forgot their anniversary once and she never spoke to him again.”
“She was a hard woman.”
“Oh yes.”
Both of them sat in silence again. Then Mr. Warden scooped a cube out of his wife’s ice pack and added it to his brandy. “I suppose Jordan’s story could be true, then,” he muttered.
“Yes. I suppose so.”
“I mean, she was a hard woman.”
“Very hard.”
On the mantelpiece, the clock struck ten, although in fact it was half past nine. The clock had never worked properly since Granny, in a moment of anger, had stomped on it.
“Of course,” he went on, “it’s very sad, your mother passing away like that.”
“It’s devastating,” Mrs. Warden agreed.
“Tragic.”
“Terrible.”
“Too, too awful! I’ll miss her…” Mr. Warden took a large gulp of brandy.
“Will you?” Mrs. Warden asked.
“Well, I will a bit.” Mr. Warden swallowed.
“But to tell you the truth, my love, I wasn’t a hundred percent fond of her.”
“Not a hundred percent?”
“No.”
“Fifty perhaps?”
“Well…not even fifty.” Mr. Warden frowned. “I know it’s a horrible thing to say, my angel. But no. If you really want the truth, I wasn’t very fond of her at all.”
Mrs. Warden slid the ice pack off her head. Most of it had melted now anyway. “Nor was I,” she whispered.
“What?”
“Oh, Gordon! It’s dreadful of me. She was my mother. But I have to admit it. It’s true. I really didn’t love her.”
“I never looked forward to her visits,” Mr. Warden said.
“I dreaded them.”
“I hated them!”
“I loathed them!”
Mr. and Mrs. Warden looked at each other. And in that moment—perhaps the first true moment they had shared together in twenty years of marriage—they understood many things.
The first wa
s that they had lied to each other. The second was that they had lied to themselves. That was what was so odd and uncomfortable about this period of mourning. They weren’t really mourning at all. They weren’t glad that old Mrs. Kettle was dead. They would never have thought that about anyone. But they couldn’t honestly say that they would miss her—which was what they had been saying. That was all a lie.
Their marriage was full of lies, too. They could see that now, sitting in bed with Mrs. Warden’s ice pack dripping onto the electric blanket. And without saying anything, they knew they had come to a crossroads. Mrs. Warden was beginning to wonder if perhaps, just possibly, she hadn’t treated her only child just a little bit like her mother had always treated her. And Mr. Warden, too, was asking himself what sort of father he had really been. For that matter, what sort of husband had he been? What sort of man was he? Everything had been poisoned by lies.
And then both Mr. and Mrs. Warden had the same thought at the same time.
“That business about her…coming back,” Mr. Warden said.
“She won’t,” Mrs. Warden muttered. “I mean, let’s be adult about this, Gordon, dearest. It’s not possible.”
“It’s absurd.”
“Nonsensical.”
“Out of the question.”
Mr. and Mrs. Warden edged closer to each other in bed. Mr. Warden put his arms around Mrs. Warden. Mrs. Warden put her arms around Mr. Warden. There was a sudden fizz, a flash, and all the lights in the house went out as the electric blanket short-circuited. The two parents were plunged into blackness.
“She won’t come back,” Mr. Warden’s voice quavered in the dark. “She can’t…”
But they were still clinging to each other when dawn finally broke and the first fingers of light announced the next day.
10
GRANNY COMES BACK
Curiously, Granny wasn’t actually dead. This is what happened.
She had indeed been taken ill with a bad cold, and before she had even sneezed twice, she had telephoned for an ambulance to take her to the hospital. By the time the ambulance men had arrived, she had decided she was too ill even to walk and had insisted on being carried to the waiting vehicle. It was then that something very unfortunate had taken place.
As the ambulance men carried her out of the building, a neighbor had happened to walk past and asked them if they knew the time. Both ambulance men had lifted their wrists to look at their watches. In doing so, they unwittingly tilted the stretcher. This was a bad mistake. Granny gave a little scream and rolled off the stretcher, falling straight into a large puddle. The result was that by the time she arrived at the hospital, Granny’s cold really had developed into a mild form of pneumonia and she had to be given a bed.
Even so, her illness was not life-threatening. The doctors were sure she would be able to go home in a day or two and left her quite happily sitting up in bed with a furry knitted jacket and the latest copy of Hello! magazine.
Now, Granny had been placed in an ordinary public ward—in the geriatric wing. There were eight beds there and each one was occupied… indeed one bed actually had two elderly people in it, lying head to foot and foot to head. But despite the crowding, the nurses and doctors were as cheerful as possible, working long hours into the night, and nobody complained.
Nobody, that is, except for the woman in the bed next to Granny.
Her name was Marjory Henslow and she was a retired headmistress. Having spent her whole working life telling people what to do, she hadn’t allowed retirement to stop her. She treated the nurses, the orderlies, and her fellow patients like children, her face frozen in a permanent sneer of disapproval. She was a woman with opinions about everything and expressed them at all times of the day and night.
“Mrs. Thatcher? A wonderful woman! She showed them in the war. That’s what the train drivers need. A few missiles would soon show them what’s what! I’d blow them all up. And the miners! I say we should close all the pits down. What’s wrong with nuclear energy? Let’s drop nuclear bombs on the miners and the teachers and the train drivers. Bing! Bang! Boom! When I was a headmistress I used to flog everyone. It never did them any harm. I even used to flog the other members of the staff. And I flogged dead horses! Why not? A bit more flogging would put the Great back in Britain…”
This went on twenty-four hours a day (Mrs. Henslow even talked in her sleep). It was hardly surprising that she alone in the ward had no flowers or grapes. Nobody visited her. Nobody liked her.
One evening, she got to talking to Granny.
“This is a horrible place,” she said. “I wouldn’t come here if I wasn’t ill. These nurses!”
“I suppose so,” Granny agreed.
“This ward is so drab and uncomfortable.” Mrs. Henslow leaned toward Granny. “Well, tomorrow I’m moving to a different hospital.”
“Are you?” Granny quavered.
“Oh yes. You see, I have private medical insurance. Well, there was some sort of mix-up and it’s taken them a few days to straighten it out. But tomorrow I’m off to a private hospital outside London. And I won’t miss this place, I can tell you!”
“Lucky you,” Granny scowled. It had to be said that the ward wasn’t the most comfortable of places.
“I am lucky. Tomorrow I’ll have my own private room with a color television and a nice view. The food there is absolutely delicious, I’m told. Brought in fresh from Harrods’ Food Hall. You actually get a menu—not like here.”
Granny thought back to her lunch that day. It had been battered fish. It had been served underneath a battered tin dish. It hadn’t been very hot. And it hadn’t been very nice.
“I’ve heard this hospital is so nice,” Mrs. Henslow went on, “that people actually make themselves ill to get in there. My neighbor’s wife cut off her hand to be admitted and she said it was worth every finger!” Mrs. Henslow smiled. “Of course I’m sure you’ll get better eventually here. The hospital is wonderful really. If you’re too poor to afford better.”
By now Granny was dark red with anger—and when the doctor stopped by later, it was discovered that her temperature had gone up to one hundred and five. Everyone assumed, of course, that it was her pneumonia that had caused the rise. The doctor doubted she would even live to see the next day and this is what he had reported to Mr. and Mrs. Warden, who in turn had called in all the relatives.
But as it turned out, it was Mrs. Henslow who suddenly took a turn for the worse during the night and quite unexpectedly died. Granny was lying awake—she was too angry to sleep—and actually heard the other lady breathe her last.
And that was what gave her the idea.
Granny had been perfectly content in the public ward until Mrs. Henslow had described the hospital she was being transferred to. Food from Harrods? Color TV and a view? Why couldn’t she go there? Why couldn’t she? Granny gazed at the still and silent figure in the next bed. By chance, Mrs. Henslow was wearing a very similar nightie to her own. She was about the same age. And it was true, was it not, that one very old lady in bed with the sheets drawn up to her chin looks very much like the next. Mrs. Henslow had no relatives or visitors to give the game away. The nurses and doctors had for the most part avoided her. Nobody had examined her that closely.
So why not?
Why not indeed?
And so it was that Granny swapped beds with Mrs. Henslow and the following morning it was Mrs. Henslow’s death that was reported to Mr. and Mrs. Warden, while Granny, her eyes peeping out over the sheet, was carried into a waiting ambulance and transferred to the private hospital.
And for the next few days—while Mrs. Henslow was buried in the raging storm—it was Granny who reclined on goose-down pillows watching her own twenty-two-inch color television while popping grapes, lychees, and other exotic fruits between her lips. It didn’t even matter when she forgot to answer to the name of Mrs. Henslow. She was old. She was ill. She was bound to be confused.
Nobody noticed. It had all gone exactly acc
ording to plan.
There was an awkward silence at breakfast the next day. Mr. and Mrs. Warden hadn’t slept a wink and it showed. Mr. Warden had eaten his granola dry and then poured half a pint of milk over his toast and marmalade. Mrs. Warden had cleaned her teeth with her husband’s shaving cream and was quite literally frothing at the mouth. For his part, Joe hadn’t intended to come down to breakfast. But he was fed up being ill and wanted to get back to school—which meant he had to start eating.
“Jordan…” Mr. Warden said.
Irma, who happened to be passing at that moment, dropped her tray and gasped. In all the years she had been with the Wardens, she had never heard Mr. Warden address his son at the breakfast table.
“It seems we have matters to discuss,” Mr. Warden went on. “I suggest we meet this evening.”
“This morning!” Mrs. Warden interrupted.
“I shall return early from work and we shall meet this afternoon,” Mr. Warden decided. “Half past four in the living room. Irma will bake a cake. We shall have tea. As a family.”
“As a family!” Irma exclaimed. “Are you feeling ill, Mr. Warden, sir?”
“Yes. I am feeling extremely ill, as a matter of fact,” Mr. Warden replied. “But that is what we will do.”
After breakfast, Mr. Warden went to work. Mrs. Warden went shopping. And Joe stayed at home. His thoughts were buzzing. He had seen the change in his parents. It was incredible. It was astounding. Could it be that . . . ? Somehow, had they decided to believe him? Joe got dressed and went out feeling more alive than he had in weeks.
But neither Joe nor his parents had a particularly nice day.
I’ll come back…
Mr. Warden tried to concentrate on his work in his office, but Granny’s words echoed over and over in his head. Where would she pop up? Under his desk? In his filing cabinet? Outside the window…even if it was twenty-seven floors up? He reached for a cigar and rolled it against his cheek, taking in the aroma of the tobacco. “You’re being ridiculous,” he muttered to himself.