The Grasshopper's Child Read online

  THE

  GRASSHOPPER’S

  CHILD

  Gwyneth Jones

  Copyright Gwyneth Jones 2014

  All rights reserved.

  The right of Gwyneth Jones to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988. This is a work of fiction.

  Names, characters, places, and incidents are fictitious or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons or events is coincidental.

  The Grasshopper's Child

  Gwyneth Jones

  TJoy Books UK

  Table Of Contents

  1 The Grasshopper’s Child

  2 The Gardens

  3 The Door in the Wall

  4 Nightmare

  5 A Traveller On The May

  6 The Inspector and the Inquisition

  7 The Running Girl and the Hooded Boy

  8 Sharing The Care

  9 Follow The Money

  10 Changing The World Flamenco

  11 The Baroque Fountain

  12 Mother Courage

  13 The Tower

  14 The Cop In The Woods

  15 The Benefits Of Caring For Our Elders

  16 The Purple Suitcase

  17 Tangerine Dream

  18 Wild Garlic

  19 Pirates!

  20 Death Is Heartwood

  21 Dr Gunn

  22 No Take

  23 An Evening With The Immortals

  24 The Coutance Pistol

  25 An Intervention

  26 Quadding By Moonlight

  27 The Second Fountain

  28 In The Garden

  29 October Sky

  Dear Heidi

  Sources and Notes

  1: The Grasshopper’s Child

  The girl waited in a drab hallway, a small rucksack on her back, a suitcase at her feet. The suitcase was big, but battered. It had been bright purple, but the colour was faded and stained.

  She was tall, and naturally slim but right now looking skinny and hollowed-out: she hadn’t been able to sleep, or eat much, since the terrible thing happened. She was turning the pages of an old children’s picture book, called Tales And Fables From Many Lands, a book she’d loved when she was a little girl. She stopped at a picture she remembered well.

  The red ant, looking shiny and cross, and wearing an apron, stood in the doorway of its cosy house under a tree-root. It was holding the door just a slice open, and had the middle pair of its six legs folded grumpily. You could see the grasshopper wasn’t going to get in.

  The grasshopper wore her tattered wings like rags, and huddled her middle legs around her shivering body. Darts of snow were falling on her fast. Heidi held the book in one hand, pushing back a lock of thick, curly black hair that had escaped from its clip, as she read the words on the opposite page. It had always bothered her that they didn’t match the picture, but Mum said the picture still told the story. In her mind, she could hear Mum’s voice.

  The Ants and the Grasshopper

  The Ants were spending a fine winter's day drying grain collected in the summertime. A Grasshopper, perishing with famine, passed by and earnestly begged for a little food. The Ants inquired, ‘Why did you not treasure up food during the summer?' He replied, ‘I had not leisure enough. I passed the days in singing.’ They then said in derision: ‘If you were foolish enough to sing all the summer, you must dance supperless to bed in the winter.’

  Aesop's Fables Translated by George Fyler Townsend

  ‘Heidi!’

  Virtual Verruca had appeared: a slightly transparent woman in a glossy business suit, with a nipped-in waist, a nipped-in mouth, and an expression that made it clear you weren’t going to get anywhere, whatever it was you wanted.

  In ways she looked a lot like the ant in the picture.

  Her real name was Verushka, or something like that, she was Heidi’s Placement Manager.

  Her real body would be back at the Angel Care Company’s office, sitting at a desk in some big building as shiny as that suit. Heidi had never seen it: she’d only been visited by Verruca the Ghost, here at the Indentured Teens Residential Facility.

  ‘Come on Heidi, get a move on. It’s time to go.’

  Heidi closed the book, put it away with the rest of her entire life, and fastened the battered purple suitcase up again. It would be sent on; she wasn’t allowed to take it with her. She took her time, just to annoy Verruca, but she definitely wasn’t going to miss this place.

  The journey was long. First the Tube (for Heidi: Verruca took a cab); then a train and then another train. Verruca didn’t speak the whole time: just pointed a virtual finger when Heidi needed directions. The finger triggered a Wifi impulse that jerked on Heidi’s tag, so she had to come to heel like a dog. Another taxi was waiting for them outside the lonely country station. Heidi and Virtual Verruca got in.

  Verruca instantly noticed that the driver had flagged-up the massive penalty fare for a single passenger.

  ‘Hey. Can’t you see there are two of us?’

  ‘I see one passenger, one ghost,’ said the driver calmly. ‘Take it or leave it.’

  A taxi-driver was obviously God out here in the deepest sticks, where nobody had private cars and the trains and buses were few. He wasn’t impressed by a talking hologram. Verruca soon gave up the fight, but spent the whole drive bitching under her breath to someone back at the office, about dysfunctional yokel grifters, who ought to be in Adult Labour Camp. She looked dysfunctional herself, sitting there muttering and twitching her fingers, with her eyeballs jerking to and fro: like someone dreaming wide-awake. The taxi took them to an empty car-park, surrounded by bare and dripping trees. It was raining quite hard. ‘The Gardens are the Property of the National Trust,’ said Verruca. ‘Don’t leave the paths.’ She vanished.

  Heidi trudged alone, along puddled paths coated in sodden dead leaves, directed by spiteful jolts from her tag, until she reached an ugly, yellowish stone building. It had gingerbread-house pointed windows sticking out of the roof, and a row of twisted chimneys.

  At the front steps Verruca materialised again.

  ‘This is your placement,’ she said. ‘Follow me.’

  Heidi couldn’t follow Verruca, who simply walked through the door. She didn’t live in the world of free-roaming mobile avatars. She lived in the miserable, ordinary world that had been left behind.

  She located an ancient door-knocker, cold in her hand, and dislodged cobwebs to lift it. The tongue fell on metal with a harsh, doomy clang.

  The old wreck who opened the door wore a grubby floral dressing gown. Her feet were bare, her grey hair was a bird’s nest, and her breath smelled of alcohol. She didn’t say a word, just turned away and padded off. Heidi’s tag tugged her into a big unfurnished front room.

  Through the windows she could see the yellowish-stone archway that led to the Gardens, standing alone like the last fragment of a ruined palace.

  Virtual Verruca was there, looking disgusted.

  ‘I need to validate the transaction biometrically,’ she said. ‘It’s very simple.’

  ‘Put the papers in the post,’ said Old Wreck.

  ‘You don’t have a scanner? That’s not possible. What happens to your 3D mail?’

  ‘I never get letters. If I did, I’d get them the old fashioned way.’

  Heidi waited, keeping her distance and enjoying Verruca’s angry helplessness, until the Angel Care agent gave up saying she couldn’t possibly hand over Heidi without a biometric signature —and disappeared. Disconcertingly she reappeared almost at once, right in front of Heidi. ‘Do what you’re told,’ hissed the virtual menace. ‘And don’t cause any trouble. Just remember. Deadbeats like you an
d your mum are very lucky to be alive.’

  Heidi’s blood boiled. But she swallowed her spit, ducked her head and nodded. It was disgusting, horrible to say what Verruca had just said. It was against the law. But it was true.

  The young girl and the old woman looked at each other.

  ‘Are you sort of fostering me?’ asked Heidi, cautiously.

  ‘No, child,’ said Old Wreck. ‘Your daddy’s dead, your mother’s in the bin. You’re my Indentured Teen. You’re being hired out by the loan company to work off your dad’s debts.’

  ‘You mean I’m a slave,’ said Heidi (instantly forgetting she must not cause trouble).

  Old Wreck laughed, like muddy water cackling in a broken drain. ‘Certainly not. That would be unthinkable! Indentured means you signed a contract agreeing to work for nothing, of your own free will. Or the government signed it for you, more likely. My name is Tallis Maylock: I don’t suppose that brute told you. I’ll show you to your room.’

  Before she did the terrible thing, Heidi Ryan had been a teen with adult dependents, exempted from Ag. Camp because Mum and Dad couldn’t manage without her. Her mum had schizophrenia —which, as Immy, their social worker kept telling Heidi, isn’t a disease, it’s a name for a bunch of distressing mental health symptoms. Often Mum was disabled, but otherwise fine. Sometimes she was really ill, and had to stay in hospital for weeks. Dad’s issues weren’t so obvious. Nobody would know he was a BPD (Borderline Personality Disorder) unless they had to live with him. Basically, Immy said, he was a lovely man and a good dad, but he’d taken too many drugs when he was too young and had nobody to tell him any better, and now he just couldn’t make decisions. Or pay bills. Or generally look after himself, never mind anyone else. But that was okay, because Heidi was in charge. Or so she thought.

  It had been strangely lonely at her Learning Centre after the Agricultural Camps began, and nearly all the teenagers disappeared. Nothing much had changed for Heidi, otherwise. She’d never been able to go out, or have friends, much: Mum and Dad took all her attention.

  Her life was hard, but happy. Like chewing on a rock, but a rock with deep pockets of sweetness. To have people you love who love you back is the best thing in life, and Heidi had that. One day in January she walked home from school in a dream, thinking about a poem. Heidi was always thinking about a poem. This one was about the young trees that had been planted in her street. How they were like children without coats, shivering under the cold grey sky. Like hopeful children, clinging tight to their tiny buds, dreaming of spending their little bits of pocket-money on green leaves—

  She dumped her bag and wandered into the kitchen. The back door was swinging open. She shut it, and wiped the smeary doorknob clean, with a resigned sigh. The house was still full of winter daylight. ‘Mum? ’ she yelled, opening fridge and cupboards, checking to see if they’d eaten or otherwise destroyed the food she planned to cook. ‘Dad? ’

  She could hear a baby crying. The walls of these houses were cardboard, you could often hear everything that was happening with the neighbours. But the crying seemed to come from upstairs, so she went to see what was going on. Either Mum was crying in a weird way, or she somehow had a baby in the house—

  ‘Mum? Dad?’

  She stood in the door to her parents’ bedroom. She saw Dad propped against the side of the bed, legs in drainpipe jeans splayed out. Mum was crouched by the built-in wardrobe, wearing street clothes: Heidi noticed that, because often Mum didn’t get dressed all day. There was blood all over her, and a knife in her hand. There was blood all over Dad, too: it was pooling under him on the floor.

  ‘Mum?’ whispered Heidi, terror trapped in her throat.

  Mum stopped crying. She screamed and screamed, waving the knife.

  Dad’s eyes were closed. He was lying there bleeding, dying—

  Then Heidi did the terrible thing. She called the police.

  The scene played over in Heidi’s head, as it had done for days, as she followed the Old Wreck called Tallis through the ugly gingerbread house. There was Dad. There was Mum, all the blood and then the police, screeching their sirens, busting through the front door and crashing up the stairs. Hands lifting Heidi up. She’d been trying to staunch the blood, she was sure she could still feel a pulse. But they took her from her Dad, they said he was dead, not dying but dead, and she didn’t remember what came next, so the loop started from the beginning again; it just played over again, over and over again.

  If I hadn’t called the police. If Immy had answered the phone, before I dialled 999. If the ambulance had got to us first. If I’d got Mum to calm down, and tell me what happened—

  I wouldn’t be here. We’d still be okay, somehow—

  Days later, in the Angel Care Facility, she’d found a lock of her hair still stiff with his blood, and fought them viciously when they tried to wash it out. But she’d had to stop that kind of behaviour, or she’d have ended up in a worse place than this.

  ‘There’s the House,’ said Old Wreck Tallis, pointing out of a tall, churchy window.

  We’re in the house, thought Heidi. They seemed to have climbed hundreds of stairs. She could see nothing but treetops. A lumpy quilt of bare branches, and one towering evergreen.

  ‘My father burned it down in the Seventies, that’s the Nineteen,-seventies. He used to say he’d fancied a romantic ruin in his grounds, and took the simplest route. Drunk, of course. This is the Garden House, which survived. This is your room. Your bathroom has a toilet, it’s along the hall. I hope you don’t say loo. I despise false gentility.’

  Heidi shook her head. ‘What am I to do?’

  Old Wreck held tight to the front of her dressing gown, and twisted up her face in panic-stricken grimaces. ‘Cook and clean, I suppose,’ she said at last. ‘Aren’t you trained?’

  Memories of looking after Mum and Dad stung Heidi’s eyes with tears.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I’m trained.’

  ‘Then don’t ask stupid questions. When you’ve unpacked go to the kitchen, it’s in the basement, and do what needs to be done. My brother and I eat in the breakfast room. I expect dinner at seven pm. You do not eat with us. What else do you need to know?’

  ‘Nothing, not right now.’

  ‘Good.’

  She waited until Tallis’s padding footsteps had faded before she opened the door and dumped her rucksack. The room was cold and musty, but bigger than Heidi’s room at home. There was a single bed, a brown rug, a wheelback chair that had lost the rim of the wheel, and a rickety bookcase without any books; just a pile of old gardening magazines.

  This house wasn’t built of cardboard. When she’d struggled with the catch and got one half of the ivy-fingered window open, the thickness of the wall was like a tunnel. Red velvet curtains, worn to rust in the folds, silently coughed out dust when she touched them.

  The mattress was old and stained, but it didn’t smell bad and it wasn’t damp. The sheets, the pillowcases, the duvet cover and the limp old duvet —folded on it in a neat heap— were worn but clean. Heidi made the bed, and went to look for her bathroom.

  The passage outside her door was very gloomy. The bathroom had no shower, only a bath on big metal scaly bird-feet, like Baba-Yaga’s cottage in the fairytale. She tried the taps in the tub, and in the pedestal basin under the freckled mirror. Water came out, stone cold.

  But the flush toilet flushed, and it didn’t smell.

  She didn’t bother to unpack, just plodded down all the hundreds of stairs again. In the room where Virtual Verruca had argued with the Old Wreck she walked about, looking for the hotspot, but her phone could get no signal. It had run out of charge. On the other side of the front hall —practically wide as a street, but with no carpet, no rugs, just dirty black and white tiles— a glimmer of lamplight peeped from a door that stood slightly open. Heidi was going to knock, but she had such a sense of someone holding their breath in there, waiting for the intruder to retreat, that she decided against it.

&n
bsp; There were modern radiators in the hall, giving off an incredibly faint background heat; less than the government minimum. It was warmer than in her bedroom down here, but not by much.

  Treading softly, as if she might wake something dangerous, she found a small cloakroom in a nook under the stairs, with a new-looking toilet and basin, and a towel on a rail.

  Hot water in the taps!

  Further back there was a long room that she guessed must be the ‘breakfast room’, with a huge antique-looking dining table and matching chairs, all very shabby. Side-cupboards along the walls were full of dusty dishes and plates. There was a piano. Watery glass doors, ranked in a row along the far wall, looked out on a green lawn with high hedges around it.

  More stairs, beside the cloakroom, took her down into a dark, dank well. She groped around, found a light switch, and a dim bulb quavered into life, showing her three doors. The first door she tried led to a utility room, with a washing machine and shelves of stuff: toilet paper, pegs, carpet tacks, cleaning things; sacks of bird-seed. The second led to the kitchen. The third was a grey slab of bare metal, padlocked shut.

  ‘Creepy,’ muttered Heidi.

  The kitchen table was as long as the one in the ‘breakfast room’ and completely heaped with half-empty mugs, dirty plates, mouldering veg, piles of newspaper, random underwear, odd socks. There was a modern fridge-freezer (without much in it); a toaster and a gas hob (that both worked); and a microwave (that worked). An ancient double sink with hot and cold water. No sign of an oven. The room was very cold: the single radiator was turned off. The floor was stone flags, partly covered by grubby rag rugs. Heidi opened cupboards and found hoards of tinned and packaged food: luxuries she hadn’t seen on a supermarket shelf for years. Stockpilers, she thought. I suppose people get away with it in the country. She couldn’t find matches or candles, oil lamps or wind-ups. That was strange. Didn’t they have power-downs around here? By the back door sat a doorstop in the shape of a battered iron duck, missing most of its paint.

  Through the half-glass she saw a concrete yard, and sheds. A handmade notice saying KEYS in red marker-pen had been stuck to the wall above a hook, but the keys were missing.