Lucy’s mother whipped around to look at Thomas. ‘Okay. I don’t get it,’ she said crossly. ‘What is this famous idea of yours exactly, what is this racket about?’
Thomas clasped his arms behind his back and puffed out his chest. Eagerly, he began: ‘Well, say you run into the enemy.’
‘What enemy?’ She stared at him as if he were one of the arthropods in his father’s book, one of the creatures that came way before the mice. ‘I thought you were talking about my pencils.’
‘I was,’ said Thomas, his big head wobbling from side to side. ‘’Cause, let’s say you don’t want the enemy to see you. Well, then all you do is, you poke him in the eye with your pencil. Then he’s blind as a bat, see? And then you make a run for it.’
It was brilliantly put. We had to hand it to him. We all looked at Lucy’s mum expectantly.
She seemed to be thinking it over, doodling on a piece of paper with a piece of charcoal. The marks on the paper kept getting darker and uglier.
Lucy stood up. ‘Well, we’ll just go up to the attic, then,’ she said uncertainly.
The charcoal snapped in two. ‘No you won’t,’ said her mother. ‘I have been giving you the benefit of the doubt, Thomas, but now it seems that you’re not only a little sneak, you’ve got a screw loose as well. You do come up with some sick ideas, don’t you, Thomas. Don’t you understand how dangerous that is? Why, it was just recently all over the newspapers, somebody was murdered that way! With a ballpoint pen in the eye!’
She was steaming mad now; we could practically see puffs of black smoke coming out of her ears. ‘I said to Duco just the other day, how can that happen? How is it possible—that an ordinary, everyday object like a ballpoint pen could actually kill someone?’ She looked back at Lucy. ‘Okay, that’s enough. I won’t have you hanging around with that little creep anymore, Lucy. Do you hear me?’
‘But Mum!’ Lucy started protesting.
We tried to look deeply preoccupied with pious, virtuous thoughts. Just remember, they used to tell us at home, life doesn’t come with a user’s manual. You could never tell what tomorrow would bring, but if things were going your way, you might as well make the most of it.
But nothing stands in the way of true love. That very afternoon we saw the two of them going off together, hand in hand. With her long, skinny legs and her shoulders indignantly hunched, Lucy looked just like a strutting heron. To keep up with her, Thomas had to take two extra skips for every one of her strides.
They made straight for Shepherd’s Close. There they installed themselves in the garden shed out back, where Thomas’s father stored his dirty work clothes. A sneak peek through the little window showed that they were sitting comfortably on a couple of overturned buckets and, with great gusto, were engaged in dismantling a potato crate with a pair of hedge shears.
At last the day dawned when our mothers were to take us to the big school. Since it was our first day, our teacher, whose name was Miss Joyce, allowed our mums to accompany us into the classroom, a room with tall windows that let the autumn sunlight in. It felt very solemn in there, like in church. Maybe that was why our mothers’ faces were graver than usual. As we hunted for a place to sit, they kept hooking their hair back behind their ears and licking their lips. The desktops were scored with angry, indecipherable marks left by children long ago.
Thomas was the only one of us escorted to school by his father. He was so very clean that he gleamed from head to foot, as if his mother had scrubbed him with disinfectant so he wouldn’t bring home any germs. His father’s head was bare, he wasn’t wearing his sou’wester, which made him look a lot less intimidating; he looked like someone you’d known all your life, like the Luducos. He stood in front of the classroom with his hands in his pockets, chatting with Miss Joyce in a loud, self-confident voice. He didn’t seem to mind that everyone could hear what he was saying. ‘Sadly, mine’s like a leaky sieve, you know, though one does learn to live with it,’ he said. ‘But I’m chuffed Thomas doesn’t seem to take after me in that department.’
We craned our necks to see that leaky thing of his. The thought that he might be wearing a nappy under his overalls made us collapse all over each other in hysterics.
‘Behave yourselves!’ our mothers hissed. But we paid no attention, because in here Miss Joyce was the boss, and she was talking to Thomas’s father matter-of-factly, as if that leaky thing of his weren’t in the least bit funny. If she was that open-minded, she probably wouldn’t even bat an eyelid if you asked her where babies came from. We were suddenly seized with a great fever for learning.
‘Perhaps you could give us a tour of the parks and gardens someday,’ said Miss Joyce. ‘We’d all enjoy that, wouldn’t we, boys and girls?’
‘Yeah!’ we cried. ‘Great!’ We drummed on the desks with our fists.
‘Okay, and now it’s time to say goodbye,’ she went on cheerfully, ‘because I believe we’re all here.’
That was when Lucy barged into the classroom. Her hair wasn’t plaited. She wasn’t carrying a backpack, either, or a yoghurt snack. She slid into the desk next to Thomas.
Our mothers were perturbed. They murmured, ‘Lucy, did you come all by yourself? Is something wrong? Your mummy isn’t ill, is she? We haven’t seen her for ages! Is there anything we can do for her? Come on, tell us!’
They were so insistent that it made us proud. We generally thought of mothers merely as people who ignored you when you said something sensible, but it seemed there was more to them, then, after all. Only, what were they thinking they could do for someone who was going to have to take on the Ten of Swords?
‘Ladies! You too, sir,’ Miss Joyce admonished them. ‘Out, please.’ She consulted the list that lay on her desk. ‘Was I supposed to have a Lucy? Was I?’ she muttered to herself.
The leaky father was last in the line of parents filing out. He gave Thomas a quick thumbs up. Then he, too, left the room.
Miss Joyce picked up a piece of chalk and listed our names on the blackboard.
If you recognized your name, you were entitled to come to the blackboard and draw a little star next to it with a piece of coloured chalk.
‘Thomas!’ He was the first to call out his own name. He jumped up clumsily. The chalk on the blackboard made a screeching, bird-like sound, which made us think of the egrets and sandpipers in our meadow. Thinking about all the stuff we already knew or had figured out for ourselves made us feel a lot better. We were going to be detectives when we grew up, or beauticians, and you didn’t need to know how to read or write to be those. We crossed our arms and leaned back.
‘So your father was right about you,’ said Miss Joyce with a smile. ‘It’s a good thing too, Thomas.’ Then she looked around the classroom, as if to say, ‘Who’s next?’
Barbara and Tamara guessed wrong, and so did Floris and Joris. Safranja, however, scored, and Sam with the shaved-chicken neck nailed his, too. Vanessa, at the blackboard, glanced triumphantly over her shoulder to see which of us dummies hadn’t been up yet, and then drew a silly little heart next to her name. Some people really had everything going for them. Because Vanessa also had a cat that had cancer of the ear. The vet had lopped off its ears two weeks ago and cauterized the stumps. So now the cat had a new lease on life, and Vanessa was the only kid in the whole wide world to have a cat that looked like a hamster.
‘Come on, children,’ said Miss Joyce, ‘who’s next?’ She tapped the floor with the tip of her shoe to encourage us. Across these floorboards, she told us, hundreds of children before us had taken their first steps in becoming readers; this floor had been here long before the polders were pumped dry, back in the time when most everything out yonder still lay beneath the endless sea; that’s how old