Earthborn Page 7

  When she eventually reached home it was almost dark and her mother was waiting at the bus stop under a big golf umbrella. Alison was relieved to see her daughter alight from the bus. Nesta’s clothes were soaked and her fine hair was so wet that strands of it were clinging to her cheeks.

  ‘I thought the bus would be late,’ said Alison. ‘It’s been on the local news about the traffic. I guessed you might have forgotten your umbrella. And I wasn’t wrong. You look half-drowned!’

  ‘I didn’t forget my umbrella,’ said Nesta with a hint of aggression in her voice. ‘It’s in my bag. I couldn’t be bothered to get it out. There’s not much I can be bothered with today.’

  They walked along the street in silence after that. Alison held the umbrella over the two of them. Nesta did not object. She kept her head down, looking at the pavement, making no effort to avoid any puddles. But, whatever it might appear to be, this was not adolescent rebellion. The feelings Nesta was harbouring were mature and terrible.

  ‘Go and get changed,’ said her mother as they entered the house. ‘And dry your hair. You don’t want to catch pneumonia, do you?’

  ‘I wouldn’t much care,’ said Nesta dourly. ‘Do germs diminish? Or will I be put into quarantine?’

  ‘We shall all have three years of quarantine,’ said her mother, ‘if you think of it that way. And there are wonderful treatments for all Earth’s ills in the ship’s medicine cabinet. But I would rather you stayed healthy.’

  As Nesta went up the stairs, she turned back and looked down at her mother. She had come to a decision. She would not ask them to stay. It could, if they liked, be a one-sided conversation. She would simply inform them that she was not going. It would be their job to sort it out.

  ‘I want to talk to you when I come down,’ she said. ‘No stopping for tea or trying to be ultra English. I want to talk straight away to you and to Dad.’

  Alison nodded.

  ‘Talking would be best,’ she said. ‘We do love you. Please don’t hate us.’

  It was not what Nesta expected her mother to say. It seemed uncomfortably perceptive.

  CHAPTER 15

  * * *

  The Man from the Ministry

  After his visit to Mrs Dalrymple’s, Rupert Shawcross was not satisfied. He knew she was hiding something and he couldn’t fathom what it could be.

  Back in Casselton, he looked around, saw some minor signs of change, but was pleased to see that the town was easily recognizable between visits. He left Inspector Galway at the police station and took a bus to Ferndale, an estate of bungalows that looked like toy-town. At Number 6 Pennington Close lived a cousin of his, a schoolteacher whom he had seen twice or maybe three times in the past five years. Normally it was she who looked in on him if she happened to be in Manchester.

  ‘Well, this is a surprise, Rupert,’ she said. ‘It must be ten years or more since you came this far north. Business, pleasure, or has somebody died that I don’t know about?’

  Audrey always took a mocking tone with her cousin. He seemed to her to be stiff and pompous, but not bad really. He did not resent being made fun of; he was simply puzzled by it.

  ‘Business,’ he said, ‘but not business I can readily discuss. You understand?’

  ‘All very hush-hush then, is it?’ she said. ‘Time for a cup of tea?’

  ‘Yes, please,’ said Rupert gladly, knowing that the tea would be accompanied by cakes and sandwiches. They had been childhood friends as well as cousins. That is something that never gets lost.

  ‘There is something you might be able to help me with. I can’t give you any details of course, but we are trying to trace a missing child. I have spoken to the woman who used to look after him, before he and his father set off for who knows where, and I feel sure she is covering something up.’

  ‘Not the missing child?’ said Audrey promptly. ‘The one who disappeared from Casselton General? How on earth does it concern you? I thought you were a government department, interested in international drug barons and that sort of thing.’

  ‘That sort of thing,’ mumbled Rupert as he chewed his sandwich.

  ‘No leads?’

  ‘Not really, but we are thinking that the boy may have given something away before the accident – told someone something that might give us a clue. Only it’s hard to know who to ask.’

  ‘Ask his teacher,’ said Audrey promptly. ‘She’ll be able to tell you who his best friend is. If he had a secret, the best friend is surely the one he could trust. All kids have their cronies.’

  That was a dangerous suggestion! In Belthorp lived Mickey Trent, Thomas/Tonitheen’s best friend. Mickey was one of the only two people on the planet who knew the truth about the Derwents. Rupert had got nowhere in his questioning of Stella Dalrymple. Might he fare better with an innocent child?

  Rupert tried to get a visit arranged the next day but the school was closed – teachers on a training course. So he had to be content to wait till Monday to check out the school at Belthorp. Friday was not allowed to lie fallow, however. There was this boy, James Martin, living right here in Casselton. The boy, by his own account, had known Thomas Derwent for no more than two days. It was a slim chance, but better than doing nothing.

  It was quite dark though still reasonably early when Rupert reached the house in Hedley Crescent where James lived with his dad and mam and younger brother and sister. It was six-year-old Carla who opened the door, followed by her mother and a white dog that might have been distantly related to a smooth-haired terrier.

  ‘Yes?’ said Mrs Martin sharply, holding on to the dog by its collar and pushing Carla behind her. ‘What do you want? I’ve got all the double glazing I need and I don’t wish to buy anything.’

  Calypso, the dog, struggled to be free. She did not bark. She just wriggled.

  ‘I wonder if you’d mind, Mrs Martin – it is Mrs Martin? – letting me have a word with young James?’

  ‘I most certainly would,’ said his mother. ‘I don’t even know who you are. And I think I should point out to you that this dog does not bark; but she bites quite hard if strangers attempt to cross the doorstep uninvited.’

  Rupert fumbled in his pocket for identification.

  ‘This is official business,’ he said. ‘We are concerned about the disappearance of Thomas Derwent. You will appreciate that we don’t take such disappearances lightly. If your son disappeared, just think how you would feel.’

  ‘I would feel desperate,’ said Mrs Martin, ‘but that doesn’t alter the fact that Jamie can tell you nothing. I only wish he had had the sense not to write to the paper about it. He’s too clever by half.’

  ‘That’s just what we need,’ said Rupert, smiling, ‘the evidence of a clever and observant boy.’

  At that moment, Jamie came up the garden path, his school bag slung on his back and a half-eaten packet of crisps in his hand. Calypso wagged her tail frantically but remained silent. Mrs Martin swooped on the crisps and said, ‘How many times have I told you! Get in and wash your hands. Your tea’s keeping warm in the oven. Why do you have to dawdle your way home?’

  ‘This must be James,’ said Rupert quickly. ‘My name’s Rupert Shawcross, James. I am one of the people looking into the disappearance of your friend Tonitheen.’

  He put out his hand to shake Jamie’s but, flattered though he was, Jamie knew condescension when he met it. He thrust his own hands deep into his jacket pockets.

  ‘I told all I knew in the letter to the Courier,’ he said. ‘I suppose that’s why you’re here.’

  ‘You mentioned in that letter that you would be willing to help him any time he needed you. Has he been in touch? Has he asked you for help?’

  Jamie gave him a look of contempt.

  ‘I don’t want to answer any questions,’ he said. ‘I think you should go away. Our dog doesn’t bark, but she sometimes bites, especially if she doesn’t like visitors.’

  ‘That’s what I told him,’ said his mother. ‘Now go upstairs and
get washed. It’s too cold to be standing out here.’

  Jamie turned his back on the stranger.

  Rupert, undeterred, called after him, ‘If Tonitheen does put in an appearance, you must let us know immediately. I’ll leave my card and telephone number with your mother.’

  Calypso at this point managed to break free and shot back into the house out of the cold and the dark. She was an animal very fond of her creature comforts.

  CHAPTER 16

  * * *

  I’m not going

  ‘I’m not going!’ said Nesta vehemently. ‘And nothing you say will make me.’

  The Gwynns were together in the sitting room. Matthew and Alison sat in the armchairs either side of the hearth. Nesta was sharing the settee with Charlie, the sleek, black cat, and a fluffy-dog pyjama-case called Percy.

  She sat up very straight and stared not at either parent but at the flames of the gas fire. She had said her say. Now it was their turn.

  It was her mother who spoke first.

  ‘There’s not really a choice, you know,’ she said quite gently. ‘You are who you are. Deep down, you must have always known that you were special.’

  Nesta frowned but said nothing. The truth of the remark made her shiver.

  ‘Your father was given some of the background to our situation when he went into the ship. It appears that only two Ormingat children have ever been born here on Earth and entwined with the home planet,’ her mother went on. ‘You are one of them. You were part of the reason why the child Tonitheen was sent here. The Ormingat scientists needed a ‘control’: they wanted to know whether an earthborn child would be any different from a child born on Ormingat and spending his formative years on Earth. Things, as you know, went wrong when the boy and his father were involved in that accident. Now caution has made our return home an imperative.’

  ‘It’s not my home,’ said Nesta sharply. ‘My home is here, where I was born and have always lived.’

  ‘That is how you feel now,’ said Alison. ‘But your deepest being truly does belong to Ormingat and when we get there you will recognize it immediately.’

  At that moment, Nesta found herself remembering her mother’s fairytale description of the Faraway Planet, and she did not like it. She could not believe in those swirly soft towers and misty gates. It sounded too sickly sweet for words.

  ‘I don’t want to go there,’ said Nesta. ‘I don’t want to live in your marshmallow world. Earth is real. Ormingat sounds to me like a pathetic fairy story.’

  Charlie, upset at the argumentative sound of Nesta’s voice, jumped down and slunk into the corner beneath the television set.

  Matthew had sat silently listening. It seemed to him that Alison was not making the point very well. The old story was meant as a link, not an explanation.

  ‘We must tell her the truth,’ he said, leaning forward in his chair and looking earnestly from one to the other. ‘She is right. She is much too old for fairytales.’

  Alison was startled.

  ‘What is the truth?’ she said. ‘Do we know it?’

  ‘We know what we know,’ said Matthew firmly. ‘And that has to be enough.’

  ‘Well, you tell, Mattie,’ said Alison. ‘I wouldn’t know how to start.’

  ‘We must start from what we really do know,’ said Matthew, ‘what is incontrovertible fact.’

  Nesta gave her father a much kinder look than she had been able to give her mother. She knew absolutely that there were missing pieces in this jigsaw and she wanted them found and fitted into place.

  ‘Let’s begin with what you know, Nesta. You saw me disappear into the centre of the pond on Friday. You saw it with your own eyes and you were understandably shocked.’

  Nesta nodded miserably.

  ‘When I went down into the ground, I entered the spaceship and it was exactly as I have described it. There I talked to a screen that glowed green whenever it spoke back to me. It spoke in English, because for the time I am on Earth, I am an English speaker. My memory of the language of Ormingat is very hazy. A few phrases remain, and they are the voice of Ormingat, a voice I see disturbs you when I give the planet’s name its proper sound. When you say Ormingat it comes out as an English word, with English intonation. When I say it, there is a sort of resonance that does not belong here. Ormingat.’

  He said the word slowly and deliberately, smiling at his daughter as he did so.

  ‘Ormeen-in-ghat,’ said Nesta, trying and failing to get the right vibration.

  She frowned.

  ‘How could I learn a whole new language when I cannot even manage to say one word correctly?’

  ‘The body changes on the journey home and the different atmosphere on our planet when we get there makes it all possible. On Ormingat, you will forget all but a residue of Earth words and accents.’

  ‘Then I would stop being me,’ said Nesta harshly.

  ‘No, sweetheart,’ said her father, ‘that could never happen. You are your wonderful self for ever, wherever you may be. Just let me continue. This time when I visited the spaceship, it was to sort out the matter of returning home. On my normal visits, I have taken the research your mother and I have worked on year in, year out since we came here, under the guise afforded us by the human work we do.’

  ‘That sounds like cheating,’ said Nesta.

  ‘Not really,’ said Matthew. ‘Our motives are pure. For us, knowledge is an end in itself.’

  ‘Then you should stay here and go on studying,’ said Nesta sulkily. ‘That would save us all a lot of bother.’

  ‘Yes,’ said her father, ‘but we can’t, and since we can’t we must accept and even welcome what we must do instead. In two days’ time we enter the ship. It seals and we prepare for the journey home. We use these days to get settled in before take-off. There is a time when we shall be in complete darkness as all the power in the ship is gathered in the thrust of leaving Earth’s orbit. After that, it is just a long, but interesting, journey home. There is so much to do as we become our true selves.’

  ‘Your true selves,’ said Nesta sharply.

  ‘And yours. You are our daughter. Whatever, whoever, we are, so too are you. You have to understand that.’

  ‘And what of Ormingat?’ said Nesta. ‘What is it really like?’

  ‘It is fair and just and good,’ said Matthew. ‘Of that I am quite, quite sure.’

  ‘But what does it look like, what does it feel like?’ said Nesta, pursuing the point her father knew she would, asking the question virtually impossible to answer.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Matthew.

  Nesta felt stunned at his words. What a terrible admission!

  ‘I have a human brain with human knowledge,’ Matthew went on. ‘A vision of Ormingat is outside my range.’

  Nesta turned angrily to her mother.

  ‘What about the doors,’ she said, ‘and the walls that glowed?’

  ‘That was a story for a child, Nesta,’ said her mother. ‘I never pretended to you that it was true.’

  ‘And the twin suns, and the figure-of-eight orbit?’ said Nesta, remembering the story as well as she remembered ‘The Little Mermaid’ or ‘Aladdin and His Lamp’, better perhaps because she had heard it more often.

  ‘I made them up,’ said her mother. ‘At least, I think I did. I am never quite sure. We might get back there and discover it was true after all.’

  This was beyond Nesta’s understanding.

  ‘You said you were born there, grew up there, married there,’ she said. ‘If that is true, you must remember it.’

  She turned to her father for an explanation.

  ‘I have no recollection at all of Ormingat,’ he said. ‘Perhaps there is a silver stream meandering down a pale blue hill, but I tend to imagine things. I know only that it is a good place and often I ache to see it again, to be there and to be part of it.’

  ‘But why do you not remember?’ Nesta insisted.

  ‘Let me just try to explain,’ said M
atthew. ‘To human beings, the human brain seems infinite. It is not. The best memory in the world sometimes has to lose something to acquire new knowledge. So when we were endowed with human bodies for our time on Earth, you must not ignore the fact that we also had to have human brains. In them is embedded the knowledge of our fictional early lives in Boston. This is not simply a clever cover story. In a sense, we were there and the story is true.’

  ‘But no one in Boston will be able to remember you,’ Nesta objected. ‘Not if you weren’t really there.’

  Matthew smiled wryly.

  ‘Well, we shall certainly never go to America: that might stretch the illusion too far. But if someone from Boston walks into the bank – it has happened, a few times – he or she will promptly be made to recall knowing me at Boston Latin, or meeting me at the University Club or some such. What is more, I shall share the memory and know exactly what to say. I believe I even worked a spell at State Street Bank – except I couldn’t have, no matter what this brain of mine might tell me.’

  Nesta’s face was the picture of bewilderment. Matthew clasped her hand and said softly, by way of explanation, ‘That is the power of Ormingat: the power to create an illusion. It is a very, very small branch of Ormingatrig knowledge, the same knowledge that makes diminution possible, that makes travelling faster than the speed of light irrelevant. It is all part and parcel of our science.’

  ‘And that is why you cannot remember the place you were really born?’

  ‘That’s it. Our human brains are taken up with human knowledge. It is only within our deeper selves that intuition preserves a memory of the goodness and the love we know is there, waiting to welcome us home.’

  Nesta suddenly felt exhausted.

  Alison was quick to see her daughter’s tiredness, much quicker than Matthew.

  ‘Nesta needs time to get used to all these new ideas,’ she said. ‘We’ll have tea now and talk again later. That seems sensible to me. What do you think?’