Birdseye Read online

  ‘It’s because the family are always the first suspects,’ Anthea said.

  Annie gasped.

  ‘Anthea,’ Orville warned. ‘Now isn’t the time for clever comments.’ Anthea flushed and I could see from the way her mouth turned down that she wasn’t trying to be clever. But even though Orville was frowning like he hardly ever does, Anthea wasn’t going to shut up. ‘It’s true,’ she said. ‘The family always has to be looked at carefully. They’re often the ones who’ve done something—’ her voice went wobbly.

  ‘I’m sure we don’t need to worry about anyone in your family, Miss Little,’ Detective Ace said kindly. ‘But as I’ve said, the sooner we talk to everyone the better. May I use your phone please, sir?’ he asked Orville.

  ‘Of course.’ Orville opened the door to the hall and Detective Ace stepped out. Soon we heard his voice, a low reverberation in the passage.

  ‘Don’t you worry,’ Detective Ace said as he stepped back into the room. ‘We’ll find your boys in no time. And look, I know this isn’t much help now – but they’ve probably decided to try some camping. Boys will be boys,’ he said, ‘and nine times out of ten they pitch up at the front door, wondering what all the fuss was about.’

  Annie tried a smile. ‘Thank you, Detective,’ she said.

  Detective Ace stood up. ‘Right then.’

  ‘I’ll see you out,’ Angela said.

  We heard a few more words in the hall and then the door closed.

  Angela came back in. ‘He told me the best thing we can do is try to get a good night’s sleep,’ she said.

  We sat in silence, then one by one we went up to bed, each of us stopping to kiss Annie and Orville and give them a hug.

  ‘Half past nine,’ I heard Annie say as I left the sitting room. ‘Where can they be, Orville? What has happened to them?’

  7

  I learned later that he spelled his name Uys, but to me he was Detective Ace, the man whose superpowers would help find my brothers and bring them home safely. Because that’s what we all thought would happen. On that first day, then the second, then the third. Hope burned bright, and every time someone knocked at the door, we’d run to it, convinced that the two boys would be standing there. But the man who brought reality crashing into our home every day was Detective Ace.

  At first we were eager to meet him, to answer his questions, or those of the subordinates he brought with him. Only much later did I learn that what Anthea had said was true. Family members are definite suspects and often, the worse the crime, the closer the relative who commits it. But at the time, all I wanted was to provide Detective Ace with as much information as possible. And he would listen to me. He’d bend down from his great height and call me Miss Bird and seat me at the dining-room table and ask me to tell him what I remembered and what I thought. I chattered away about Orville and Annie and what they did and said, and about my sisters and their friends and boyfriends. And I kept him up to date on their impressions of the investigation too.

  ‘So, Miss Bird,’ he would ask, ‘anything to report?’

  ‘Anything you can think of is important,’ he said to us over and over again, so I hunted for scraps, anything, no matter how small, to share with this gentle, deep-voiced giant.

  ‘I told you how Ma Bess is always complaining about their clothes, didn’t I?’ I asked on the second day he came to the house.

  ‘Ma Bess?’ He frowned. ‘Who is she?’

  ‘My grandmother,’ I said. ‘She lives upstairs. In a huge room, with a sitting room and a bedroom and her own bathroom. It takes up all of the top of the house. We all have to do things for her, up and down the stairs when she wants stuff, and Annie has to go up and get instructions from her every evening. Thelma’s job is to take care of her first and then us.’

  For once, Detective Ace wasn’t giving me his undivided attention. He stood up and called one of the men who had come to the house with him.

  ‘De Kok,’ he said to the narrow young man, ‘apparently there’s a grandmother here too?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ The young man had deep green eyes and a thin black moustache under a fine nose. I looked at him and wondered if Anthea had seen him yet. He was very handsome.

  I tuned back in to what Detective Ace was saying.

  ‘Has anyone interviewed her yet?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Well, sir, she lives up there all alone, never goes out. Doesn’t have much to do with the children of the family. I put her at the end of the list. We still have to interview the domestic staff. We’ll do them now, get on to the old lady this afternoon. After we’ve talked to the school friends.’

  ‘De Kok.’ Detective Ace’s voice wasn’t soft any more. ‘We’re at the end of the second day and you still haven’t spoken to an immediate family member?’

  ‘No, sir.’ The young man’s face was deep red and his eyes looked angry.

  ‘De Kok?’

  ‘Yes, sir?’

  ‘See to it. Immediately.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ De Kok marched out, his back stiff. Detective Ace stared after him, shaking his head. He came back to the table and sat down.

  ‘I’m sorry, Miss Bird,’ he said. ‘What was it you wanted to tell me?’

  I told him about how Ma Bess had told Annie she should dress the boys in different clothes so that she could tell them apart, but that Ollie and Oz didn’t want to be different from each other.

  ‘They wanted to be exactly the same,’ I said. ‘Which makes sense, don’t you think? Because they are identical twins and identical means the same.’

  Detective Ace agreed. I liked speaking to him. He paid attention to me the way Orville did, only now Orville didn’t have any time to listen to anyone except Annie and answer the phone and to go to the printers and have posters made so that, when we drove along Beach Road, the boys’ faces flashed past us, grin after grin after grin from my brothers who still hadn’t come home.

  8

  One morning, shortly after the boys rode away, I woke up early. The sun was bright, beckoning. If we hurried, Ollie and Oz and I could work on our tepee. I’d found sticks the right length and a perfect place to spread them out, at the end of the garden. Annie had promised us an old sheet that we could paint. If we started now, before breakfast, we’d have time to get it standing, and then after school we could attach a second set of shorter sticks around the midsection of the apex (which is what Orville’s book, Adventure Books for Boys: Survive the Wild said to do). Then, if the boys wanted to go fishing again, at least I could paint the sheet. All they had to do was show me the patterns they wanted. I was very good at art; Mrs Booker said I was excellent, in fact.

  I’d ask Annie for the sheet right now, before she became too busy to look for it. I clattered down the stairs, then stopped dead in the kitchen doorway.

  Thelma was making my mother a cup of tea. Annie was slumped in a chair at the kitchen table, her legs white and shiny in the light that came through the open back door. Outside everything was green and alive, and the sun was shining on the mountain, but my mother’s legs were white and shiny and she wasn’t wearing shoes. Annie always wore shoes. Gardening shoes, sandals for summer, town shoes and house shoes. And her slippers – for after her bath, when she put on her dressing gown and sat brushing her hair and putting cream on her face.

  I leaned against the doorframe and watched her. There was no point in asking her about a stupid sheet for a stupid tepee. My brothers couldn’t help me build it because they weren’t anywhere to be seen or found. That’s what Orville had said last night: ‘Nowhere to be seen or found.’ And there was no point in asking Annie if I should get dressed for school. Even if I hadn’t been there for a week, and Sonja James might be best friends with someone else and forget me.

  Annie didn’t move, not even when Thelma put a cup of tea in front of her and said, ‘Come, Madam, you must drink this.’ She just sat and stared through the door at the green mountain. The sun came in and fe
ll on my mother’s hands, just lying there, in her lap, not moving. My mother was always doing something. Gardening, or arranging flowers, or reading, or sewing, or repacking the huge linen cupboard on the landing. She was always making lists – chores for Thelma or Koos to do, or things she had to buy for the weekly shop. It was more than a week now and my mother still hadn’t done her shop. The sun was falling on her hands and her legs, her skin was white and shiny and her body was still. I didn’t want to look at her face. I didn’t want to ask why she was she was just sitting there, with her hair un-brushed, wearing the same dress as yesterday.

  9

  The boys didn’t come home – not that first week, or the second or the week after that. So that one day, as I walked into the sitting room, it was to see Annie raging, up and down, from one end to the other.

  ‘Hopeless!’ she was yelling to Orville. ‘Hopeless! That’s what they are.’

  Orville drew her close and she melted against him, her head on his chest, and all I could see was his hand, stroking her curls, and all I could hear was his voice, ‘Hush, darling, we mustn’t give up. They’re out there, somewhere.’

  The police did everything they could. They cast their net wide to find and talk to anyone who had been seen in and around Harbiton. They interviewed all the guests in hotels and bed and breakfasts and even sent teams of men in shiny blue uniforms onto the beaches. Sweating in the heat, they squatted next to families and asked mothers and fathers if they knew anything about the missing Little boys. Because that’s what my brothers had become, ‘The Missing Little Boys’. The search spread further, into the streets of surrounding suburbs, along the railway lines that carried so many travellers to and from Cape Town, up into the tangled growth of the mountain where sniffer dogs teased away at all the scents. But as the days wore on, and the crowds on the beaches thinned, Orville stopped talking about hope and not giving up, and Annie gave in and agreed to take sleeping tablets and stop her nightly vigil at the sitting-room window.

  We all had nightmares. I would wake in the night to hear Annie screaming. Anthea cried out in her sleep and woke the whole house.

  Every night before I fell asleep, I’d remember everything I could about my brothers. I’d see Annie laughing at one of their jokes, Orville explaining the mechanics of the steam engine to them, Anthea yelling when their clattering feet woke her on a Sunday morning, Alice looking at them, bemused, as though they were insects she had yet to name, Angela extricating Andy from their eager questions about rugby and cricket and swimming and fishing. And once I had them there, scarred knees and bright grins, away we would go on our adventures, hands linked, ready to brave whatever monsters and dragons and aliens and evil the lands of my imagination could throw up at me.

  My dreams weren’t what frightened me. It was waking up from them I was scared of – more than anything I’d been scared of before. I would lie there, staring at my ceiling, the white squares made ghostly by the night, and try my best to fall asleep again. Because if I couldn’t, new pictures would form in my mind.

  I’d see myself standing on the stoep, and Annie would be smiling at me, a goofy, big-toothed grin, and instead of saying, ‘Don’t be silly, Bird, you’re not old enough,’ she’d say, ‘Of course you can go with them, Bird.’ I’d clamber onto my red bicycle. It was always red, and always brand-new. No hand-me-downs for wide-awake nightmares. My feet would reach the pedals and I’d sail out onto the road. At the corner I would remember to turn and wave to Annie. She would be standing there, her hand raised, happy to be waving her children goodbye. And off we’d go. I didn’t have to call to the twins, ask them to slow down. I kept up with them, just a second behind as they zoomed along Mountain Road and around Moonrise Circle, bypassing the maze of streets that made up Harbiton Village. They knew their way, of course, turning here, stopping there. And then, as they approached the intersection at Beach Road, it would start. The slow melting of flesh that turned my brothers to bones and sinew and wide-grinning skulls.

  ‘No,’ I would whisper to the bone boys on their bicycles. ‘Go away. You aren’t my brothers. They’re alive. Detective Ace told us there’s a good chance. I don’t care about anyone else. The girls at school talking behind their hands, stopping when I walk up to them. I don’t care about Angela and her stupid idea that we should have a service, “in case their souls need peace”. My brothers aren’t souls floating around the place. They’re alive. With bodies.’ I’d lean over and switch on my bedside light and pick up a copy of the poster Orville had pasted all over town. ‘You’re alive.’ I’d run my fingers over the smooth paper. ‘You’re alive. All they have to do is find you.’

  ‘It’s hard to grieve,’ Anthea said one day, ‘when we don’t know anything for sure.’ I liked her for saying that. Because nothing was for sure. It was as if my brothers had been swallowed up. They were out there, somewhere, but they couldn’t find their way back home. Day by day, faster than I could stop it happening, they were vanishing. Orville wasn’t replacing the posters that had fallen from the telephone poles, the phone didn’t ring with reporters asking for comments about Oz and Ollie. Neighbours had stopped bringing food. Even Detective Ace wasn’t coming around that often. He’d phone us, though, just to make sure we were all right. And we’d say, ‘Fine, we’re fine. Thank you so much,’ because there was nothing else we could say. Ollie and Oz were fading out of our lives. Sometimes it was little things, like not seeing their clothes on the washing line, or their toothbrushes in the bathroom. Sometimes the pain of their absence slammed harder against my heart. Like the day the dining-room table became smaller.

  10

  ‘What’s that, Dad?’ I asked.

  Orville was carrying a funny-looking handle. It looked like the one from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. We’d just seen the video at school, after we’d tidied the classroom and Mrs Booker had inspected all the corners and under the play mat to make sure that there weren’t any old apple cores lurking.

  ‘There’s nothing a peckish little mouse likes more than an apple core to gnaw on over the weekend, children. Nothing more. And much as Mr Disney likes our rodent brethren, I cannot say I am enamoured of them.’ That’s what I liked about Mrs Booker. She loved using big words and somehow, even though some of them were enormous and sounded very complicated, I managed to understand most of what she said.

  On a Friday, when the doll’s house was neat and tidy and all the books from the reading corner were facing the right way, Mrs Booker’s face would beam and her voice would boom across the classroom like the navy ships when they were letting off their twelve-noon cannons. ‘A clean classroom is a happy classroom, children. Squared away and shipshape,’ Mrs Booker said every Friday when chore time was over. And if we’d been very good for a whole month, she would give us a treat.

  We’d already seen Annie, which made me wish I had lots of red ringlets instead of my fine fair hair that slipped out of ribbons and elastics. I loved Annie. Daddy Warbucks made me wonder if there was hope for Ma Bess, but somehow I couldn’t see any miracles happening with me and my grandmother. Mrs Booker said we would be missing an important part of our education if we didn’t see Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.

  ‘Now I’ve got that song in my head again and I’ll never get it out,’ I announced as I followed Orville into the dining room.

  ‘What song, Bird?’ Orville asked. He had that sound in his voice that said he wasn’t listening to me, but I was used to that. Especially since Detective Ace came and the house had grown quieter and much more still. They’d all say ‘Yes, Bird?’ and ‘Really?’ or ‘That’s nice.’ And sometimes it wasn’t nice at all, like the time I told Annie about Sonja James not wanting to be my friend any more – not even when I promised her two slices of Thelma’s chocolate cake with extra-thick icing, which Thelma said she’d bake especially for me, even though it wasn’t a good idea to try to keep your friends by giving them pieces of cake.

  ‘“Chitty Chitty Bang Bang”,’ I said. ‘Mrs Booker showed us the movie at
school. And next month, if we’re very good, she’ll get The NeverEnding Story. Doesn’t that sound great, Dad? A never-ending story?’

  Orville grunted. He was down on his knees now, at one end of the dining-room table. He was using the funny handle, turning it round and round. As he did so, one end of the table slid towards the other.

  It was then that I saw that one part of our long dining-room table was missing. I looked around. The piece was up against the wall, and next to it were all of the dining-room chairs.

  ‘Dad,’ I said, ‘you’re making the table smaller. What are you doing?’

  But Orville didn’t answer. He turned the handle steadily, and the opening in the table grew smaller and smaller. When the space was just a sliver he went to the middle of the table and jiggled one of the halves so that small stubs of wood on the one side fitted into small holes waiting for them on the other. Then he went back to the handle and gave it one last twist.

  He got to his feet and looked at the chairs. One by one he picked them up and placed them around the table. When just two chairs were left, he stretched his arms high above his head and rolled his head in a tired circle.

  ‘Dad,’ I said, ‘we’re going to be all squashed. There’s not enough room for all of us.’

  ‘It’ll be fine, Bird,’ he said. ‘We only need six chairs for now. I’ll take these ones away.’

  Slowly the meaning of his words sank in. I looked from the table to the chairs and back up at Orville. He was blinking hard, scrunching up his eyes as if he had sand in them. ‘But you can’t,’ I said. ‘That’s not good, Dad. When the boys come home, there’ll be no room for them.’

  ‘I’m just putting them in the garage,’ said Orville. ‘If we need them, we can get them in a jiffy.’

  ‘No!’ I said firmly. ‘What if they come home while we’re eating? What then? They’ll want to sit down immediately. They’ll be starving. You heard what Mom said. Who knows what they’ve been eating? If they’ve been eating at all. They won’t want to wait while you get their chairs, Dad. They’ll be ravenous.’