Sabrina Fludde (7 page)

So when he yelled, ‘Jump!' Abren jumped. And maybe just for a split second she wished she hadn't, but then something hard rose up and smashed the soles of her feet. It was a floor! A good, solid, cold floor. Abren lay flat upon it as if she'd never get up again.

The boy struck a match. ‘All right?' he said in a gruff voice which couldn't hide the fact that he was impressed.

Abren looked around her. She was in a low, stone chasm, its walls oozing stalactites of slimy white-lime mortar.

‘Where are we?' she asked.

‘We're underneath the railway,' the boy replied. ‘Inside the arches, in the middle of the bridge. The station platforms are above us, and the river's underneath. But you'd never know it, would you? I mean, listen.'

Abren listened, but all she could hear was the boy shivering. His match went out and he lit another. Then he got up, pulling her after him.

‘Stay close or you'll get lost,' he said.

He steered Abren through the darkness, lighting matches as they went. She stumbled over litter, and ducked under service pipes every time he warned her to mind her head. Her ears began to tune in to the silence, which wasn't as complete as she'd first thought. Distantly, she made out the mumble of an electricity generator, and closer to hand she heard the cooing pigeons in their roosts.

‘And rats too,' the boy said. ‘There'll be a few of them about as well.'

They reached the end of the chasm, and the boy said, ‘Mind your head,' one last time. Abren stumbled up a short staircase and found herself before a metal-plated door, which was stuck ajar. The boy leant against it, shoved deftly with his shoulder and the door scraped open enough for them to slip through.

On the other side, Abren found herself in a space which she realised – with a shock – was actually lived in by someone. The boy switched on a single bulb hanging precariously from a swinging cable, and she saw a narrow room, full of what looked like rubbish, with a tea bar running down the length of it, complete with an old urn and stacks of china cups.

‘British Rail cups, left over from the old days before polystyrene,' the boy said.

Abren stared around her. Behind the tea bar hung a rusty advertisement for Cadbury's chocolate, and next to it hung a mirror on a piece of string. The walls were covered with embossed brown paper, which was peeling. There were no windows – at least not that Abren could see. The floor was cluttered with black bin liners and cardboard boxes, and out of them spilled everything from old toasters and books and jumble-sale clothes.

The boy clambered over them to fiddle with a clump of dangling wires and switch on a bunch of plastic, icicle-shaped fairy lights. These hung over a splitting horse-hair mattress, illuminating its greasy cotton-ticking pillows with no covers, and grey stinking blankets, in a grim parody of a Santa's grotto. Maybe the boy thought that it looked Christmassy with lights, but Abren shivered.

As if he thought that she was cold, the boy reached into the nearest box and pulled out a choice of jumpers and thick pleated skirts, shell-suit trousers and tweedy jackets, all with the same fusty smell.

‘You need to get out of those wet clothes,' he said. ‘Take what you want.'

Abren took the clothes reluctantly. The boy's hands were like ice and he was turning blue, despite his thick coat. Even his lips were blue, and his eyes were dead.

‘What about
you
?' she said.

Before the boy could answer, a bell rang out. His head shot up and he glanced at a door which Abren hadn't noticed before, at the end of the room, behind the tea bar.

‘What's going on?' Abren said.

The boy didn't answer, just started rushing about. Abren watched as bread and butter appeared out of a box, followed by a half-opened tin of peaches, a cup of chocolate raisins and a mug of tea. The boy piled them all on to a tray made out of a cardboard lid and headed for the door.

‘What's going on?
' Abren repeated. ‘What are you doing? Where are you going?'

The bell rang again, sharp and insistent. The boy pushed open the door and hurried through.

Abren followed, full of curiosity. On the other side she found another room which was as grand as the boy's was tawdry. Its floor was tiled and carpeted. Its gilt-framed mirror didn't hang on string. Its light wasn't a single bulb but a crystal chandelier. And beneath it stood not a tea urn with cheap cups but a fine piano with polished brasses and keys made of ivory.

Abren stared in amazement. Only later did she realise that the gilt-framed mirror was speckled with age, the ivory keys yellow and half the cut-glass droplets on the chandelier either cracked or missing. At the far end of the room stood an ornate marble fireplace, and in front of it sat a throne-like armchair, upholstered in red velvet and carved with leaves.

In the chair sat an old woman.

‘I know I'm late. I'm sorry,' the boy said.

He hurried to the chair, put down the cardboard tray, removed the bell from the old woman's lap and replaced it with the bread and butter. The old woman picked at it with spidery little hands, and he danced attendance, throwing a fresh log on the fire to bring it
back to life, then giving her the peaches, and then the raisins too, which she ate without leaving a single one.

All the while, she stared through the boy with flint-cold eyes. Stared as if he weren't there, and stared through Abren too.

‘Do you want your cup of tea?' the boy asked when everything else was finished.

The old woman didn't answer, just turned away. The boy looked up and saw Abren watching. He blushed as if she'd caught him out.

‘Meet Old Sabrina, queen of the river,' he said.

The boy lay covered up in blankets at one end of the mattress, and Abren lay at the other, curled up tight beneath a pile of old coats. The lights were out and in the darkness she could hear things scampering. She tried to sleep but couldn't. The day ran back through her mind, ending where it had started, with Santa's chocolates.

Now Dogpole Alley felt so far away, with its half-demolished turkey, its presents scattered everywhere and its glittering tree. Abren remembered Bentley playing ‘her' tune on his new saxophone. She was sure he hadn't known what he was doing, but if it hadn't been for him, she wouldn't be lying here now, telling herself that she was where she should be, and there was nothing to be frightened of.

Not even Old Sabrina.

Abren pulled the coats around her and thought of the old woman asleep next door. She remembered the boy running at her beck and call. He'd shaken when he'd crossed the floor carrying that tray of tea things. And Abren didn't blame him. There was something weird about Old Sabrina. She hadn't thanked the boy for anything, or even smiled at him. Hadn't done a thing to help herself, just sat on that chair in her tightly buttoned, holey cardigan and long dusty skirt.

The boy had fetched her blankets and pillows and a footstool for her blotchy feet. He'd made her
comfortable for the night – far more comfortable than he'd been himself in his wet clothes. But when he left the room, she still hadn't acknowledged him. It was as if she were a real queen and he her slave. When he'd said goodnight, she hadn't even answered him.

Abren shivered underneath the coats. Tried to forget the old woman and go to sleep. But how could she sleep when bursts of wheezy coughing kept firing off into the darkness, keeping even the rats awake.

‘You ought to see a doctor with a cough like that!' she said at last.

The boy didn't answer, just coughed into his blankets until Abren couldn't stand it any more. She sat up, switched on the fairy lights, pulled back the blankets and found him fully dressed, boots and all, lying bathed in sweat. His eyes were bright, his face was white and he was shivering all over. This was no ordinary cough! He had caught a chill. And it was all because of her – because he'd jumped into the river to rescue her.

‘You should have changed out of those wet clothes,' Abren said. ‘
I should have made you
. I could see how cold you were, but I didn't do a thing!'

She leapt off the mattress, overwhelmed with guilt, and went in search of the boy's grandmother, or godmother, or stepmother, or great-aunt, or whoever Old Sabrina might turn out to be. Never mind that she was weird! She was old, and would surely know how to nurse a sick boy.

Abren pushed open the door between the rooms, switched on the light and found Old Sabrina seated on the velvet chair exactly as they had left her, the only difference being that the fire had burned out. Abren
padded forward until she was close enough to see the old woman's crumpled face, like a piece of thick old parchment, her tight mouth, sharp nose and fuzzy grey eyes. They weren't exactly dead, those eyes, but they stared blankly, like windows in a house which nobody lived in any more.

‘Excuse me,' Abren said, ‘but the boy's ill. I don't know what to do. I think he needs a doctor.'

The eyes didn't move. Old Sabrina wasn't asleep, but it was as if she hadn't heard. Abren tried again, standing right in front of her, and then again, shouting in her face. But it made no difference. Abren could stay here all night if she wanted, but the eyes would never change. They'd never look at her. Never take any notice.

Abren left the room. Perhaps the old woman was crazy. Perhaps that was what it was. Back next door, she found the boy on his feet, staggering about as if her shouting, though it hadn't stirred Old Sabrina, had certainly stirred him. A kettle had been plugged in, and he was rummaging through boxes containing magazines, rat poison, bath oil, soap, computer games and mounds of clothes, looking for medicine. This he found at last in a zip-up bag containing everything from aspirins to plasters and honey linctus syrup, which was a wonder cure that ‘did for everything', according to the boy. He glugged some down, despite the warning on the bottle about proper measurements, dissolved a lemon cold-cure in some water from the kettle and returned to bed.

Abren returned too, but only after making sure that the door was tightly shut between her and Old Sabrina. Then exhaustion overwhelmed her and she
fell asleep. It happened very quickly. One minute she was drifting off, her thoughts returning to Dogpole Alley, and the next minute she was waking up, still thinking of it but a whole night had gone by.

Abren lay in the darkness imagining her empty bedroom, with Christmas-stocking paper strewn about and nobody around to pull back the curtains. She wondered if Bentley would be awake yet. And Fee and Mena. Had they been up all night, searching for her? Been to the police and told them all about her? Taken down the decorations, Christmas forgotten as if they knew that she wouldn't ever come back?

For the next few days, the boy was sick. Abren wanted to look after him, but he made her go and look after Old Sabrina. Her need was greater, he insisted. She couldn't even hobble to the toilet without help.

Abren didn't want to help the old woman, but with the boy threatening to drag himself off his sickbed and do it instead, she had little choice. In the mornings, she made up a fire. Then she fed Old Sabrina out of what the boy called the ‘Best-by-End-of Chest' – a rat-proof metal box with a tight lid, into which he put the food he'd either bought with cash or scrounged out of bins. Then she bathed the old woman's face and hands and blotchy feet. Then she tidied up her bird's nest of white hair – though why she bothered she didn't know, because it was always messy minutes later.

Then she stayed close by, dancing attendance should Old Sabrina need to be taken to the rusty-chained toilet or require more fuel on the fire. She brought food when the bell rang, and even chased spiders out of the old woman's lap when they started making
webs as if she were a dead object, not a person. And she tried to talk to the old woman.

In this last effort, Abren's time was wasted more than in any other. Old Sabrina obviously didn't want any conversation. She wouldn't look at Abren, let alone answer any of her questions about who she was, how long she'd been here, how she'd found this limbo-land of old abandoned waiting rooms, and where she'd come from in the first place. She never asked for anything except by using the bell, and at the end of each day, when Abren had prepared her for the night and was heading off through the door, she didn't thank her for anything.

‘How do you stand her?' Abren asked one night, flopping down on her end of the mattress.

‘I keep my head down and I don't think. Don't ask questions – just get on with it,' the boy said.

The next morning, to Abren's relief, the boy was better. He got up looking like a new boy, washed himself in a kettle full of water and introduced himself by the unlikely name of Phaze II. His cough hadn't cleared up, but he was in good spirits. He ate a quick breakfast and went to ‘do' Old Sabrina.

She didn't ask if he was better, but he didn't seem to mind. He washed her like a baby – face, neck, arms, hands, feet – struggled with her tangled hair, brushed a mixture of crumbs and dust out of her lap and found a new cardigan, which he buttoned over the previous ones to keep her warm. Finally, he produced a pair of socks which he pulled over her blotchy-looking, red-and-blue feet.

‘Keep them on,' he said. ‘Don't mess around and pull them off. I'm going out for food. You'll be all
right, won't you? I'll see you later.'

Later
meant that night. It was a long day for Abren without the sound of his coughing, which she had grown strangely attached to. But finally he came back, scrambling through a boarded-up window which Abren hadn't even known was there, bringing mackerel, olives and chocolates with him. They had all passed their sell-by date and the chocolates had acquired a speckled bloom. But Abren scoffed down everything she was given – and was promptly sick.

Phaze II took her out on the girders to get some fresh air. He said this often happened, eating old food past its prime.