“When did I last take anything of yours? Tell me one thing in the last month!”
“My football shorts,” said Adiel promptly.
“I never touched your lousy shorts, I already swore I hadn’t!”
“I had to miss games again today because I didn’t have them, and I got a detention for it, so you can be grateful I’m only punishing you tit-for-tat and not bashing you in,” said Adiel with maddening calm.
Omri felt so furious he even wondered, for a moment, whether it was worth bashing Adiel in. But Adiel was enormous and it was hopeless. So after gazing at him for another moment with hate-filled eyes, Omri turned and dashed upstairs again, almost falling over Patrick on the way.
“What’ll you do?”
“Look for it, of course!”
He was turning Adiel’s room upside down like a madman when Adiel, slowly mounting the stairs in the direction of his homework, heard the racket and came running.
He stood in the doorway looking at the shambles of pulled-out drawers, degutted cupboards and furniture pulled awry.
“You LITTLE SWINE!” he howled, and dived at Omri. Omri fell to the ground with Adiel on top.
“I’ll tear everything – you’ve got to pieces – till you give it back to me!” he shouted in jerks as Adiel shook and pummelled him.
“Then cough up my shorts!”
“I HAVEN’T GOT YOUR BLOODY SHORTS!” screamed Omri.
“Are these them?” asked a small voice in the background.
Adiel and Omri stopped fighting, and Adiel, sitting astride, twisted his neck to see. Patrick was just lifting a crumpled navy-blue object from behind a radiator.
Omri felt the anger go out of Adiel.
“Oh… Yes. It is, as a matter of fact. How did they get there…?” But Omri knew perfectly well how; Adiel had hung them there to dry and they’d dropped off backwards.
Adiel scrambled up looking distinctly sheepish. He even helped Omri to his feet.
“Well, but you have hidden things in the past,” he mumbled. “How was I to know?”
“Can I have my cupboard now?”
“Yeah, it’s up in the attic. I piled a whole lot of stuff on it.”
Omri and Patrick took the stairs to the attic two at a time.
They found the cupboard quite quickly, under a heap of bits and pieces. But Omri had carried it down to his room again before he made the fatal discovery.
“The key!”
The little twisted key with its red satin ribbon was missing.
Once again Omri ran into Adiel’s room, to find Adiel uncomplainingly putting things straight.
“What happened to the key?”
“What key?”
“There was a key in the cupboard door – with a red ribbon!”
“I didn’t notice.”
They went out and closed the door. Omri was now feeling desperate.
“We’ve got to find it. It doesn’t work without the key.”
They searched the attic till suppertime. Never had Omri so clearly seen the point of all his mother’s urgings to tidy up and keep everything in its proper place. The attic was just a sort of glory-hole, where they could play and leave a total mess, and that was what they always did, only clearing spaces when they needed them for a new layout or for some special game. And their way of clearing was just to shove things aside into ever-more-chaotic heaps.
Underneath the heaps were all the myriad little oddments which were small enough to filter through the bigger things – marbles, wheels of Matchbox cars, bits of Lego, small tools, parachute men, cards, and so on and so on, plus all sorts of fragments which could have been almost anything. At first they just raked through everything. But after a while Omri realized that they would have to clear up systematically. Otherwise it was like the old saying about looking for a needle in a haystack.
He found some boxes and they began sorting things into them – Lego here, parts of games there, water-pistols, tricks and novelties in another. Bigger things they stacked neatly on to what his father rather sarcastically called ‘the shelves provided’, which normally stood empty since everything was on the floor.
In an amazingly short time the floor was clear except for a few odd things they hadn’t found homes for, and a great deal of mud, dust and sand.
“Where did all this come from?” asked Patrick.
“Oh, Gillon brought up boxes of it from the garden to make a desert scene,” said Omri. “Months ago. We might as well sweep it up.” He looked round. Despite his anxiety about the key, he felt a certain pride. The room looked entirely different – there was real playing-space now.
He went downstairs and fetched a broom, a dustpan and a soft brush.
“We’ll have to do this carefully,” he said. “It’d be terrible if we threw it away with the sand.”
“We could sieve it,” suggested Patrick.
“That’s a good idea! In the garden.”
They carried the sand out in a cardboard box and Omri borrowed his father’s large garden sieve. Omri held it and Patrick spooned in the sand and earth with a trowel. Several small treasures came to light, including a ten pence piece. But no key.
Omri was in despair. He and Patrick sat down on the lawn under a tree and he took the two little men out of his pocket.
“Where woman?” Little Bull asked instantly.
“Never mind the wimmin, whur’s the vittles?” asked the every-hungry Boone grumpily.
Omri and Patrick fed them some more Toffo, and, with a deep sense of misery, Omri produced the plastic Indian woman from his pocket. Little Bull stopped chewing chocolate crumbs the moment he saw her and gazed in rapture. It was obvious he was half in love with her already. He reached out a hand and tenderly touched her plastic hair.
“Make real! Now!” he breathed.
“I can’t,” said Omri.
“Why can’t?” asked Little Bull sharply.
“The magic’s gone.”
Now Boone stopped eating too, and he and Little Bull exchanged a frightened look.
“Ya mean – ya cain’t send us back?” asked Boone in an awe-stricken whisper. “Never? We got to live in a giants’ world for ever?”
It was clear that Little Bull had been explaining matters.
“Don’t you like being with us?” asked Patrick.
“Wal… Ah wouldn’t want to hurt yer feelin’s none,” said Boone. “But jest think how you’d feel if Ah wuz as big to you as you are to me!”
“Little Bull?” asked Omri.
Little Bull dragged his eyes away from the plastic figure and fixed them – like little bright crumbs of black glass – on Omri.
“Omri good,” he pronounced at last. “But Little Bull Indian brave – Indian Chief. How be brave, how be chief with no other Indians?”
Omri opened his mouth. If he had not lost the key, he might have rashly offered to bring to life an entire tribe of Indians, simply to keep Little Bull contented. Through his mind flashed the knowledge of what this meant.