‘She gave me a tour of the place first. Animals everywhere. “Look where you’re going,” she told me. “I don’t want you treading on any of my family.” Some of the rooms had straw on the floor. Others had sawdust. She had covered the floor of one of the rooms about a foot deep in mud. It had grass and plants and flowers growing in it. It was just like being outside. Wasps buzzing around. Bees too. She had two bathrooms and both the bathrooms were like aquariums. Full of fish. On the third floor she had a snakehouse. A room that had been heated to a special temperature. Absolutely crawling with snakes. Ten she had, including a python. The whole room seemed to be alive and slithering about. And then there were the birds, of course. She let them fly all over the house. Wherever we went, they landed on her head, her hands, her shoulders, or talked to her from some perch up near the ceiling. Sometimes she waved them away, saying something like, “Not now, not now.”
‘Anyway, after she had showed me round, she insisted that I stayed for tea. “I expect you’d like some lemonade, wouldn’t you,” she said. “Little boys like lemonade.” I told her that I liked lemonade very much. So she led me along a gloomy passageway and down a flight of steep stone steps. We went through a door and she switched on a dim light. We were in the cellar. I looked round and saw rows and rows of bottles. They were all lying in racks like wine, but they weren’t wine, they were lemonade. She had stuck labels on all the bottles and every label had a year on it, the year that she had bought that particular bottle. Some of those bottles of lemonade were thirty years old. “I like to have lemonade in the house,” she said, “just in case the vicar drops in.” In her book, you see, vicars always drank lemonade. Vicars and little boys. She selected a bottle for me and held it up to the light. “1919,” she said. “A rather good year, don’t you think?” I thought it best to agree with her. So, for tea, I drank lemonade that was nearly twenty years old, ate a few stale wafer-biscuits, and talked to Miss Neville, who sat there with a dove perched on her head the whole time. She was bats, of course, but really very kind. Afterwards I thanked her and went home.’ The old man paused and scratched his beard, the part that nestled under his left ear. ‘Now remind me. Why was I talking about Miss Neville?’
Moses grinned. ‘You were going to tell us about how she tried to escape.’
‘Of course I was. That’s right. Christ, I’m getting old. Completely forgot.’ The old man tapped a cigarette on his thumbnail, stuck it in the corner of his mouth and lit it. The empty packet joined dozens of identical empty packets on the shelf above his bed. ‘It must have been a year or two later. 1938, 1939, something like that. A policeman, I don’t remember which one, found Miss Neville lying in a field on the outskirts of the village. It was dawn. She had broken her hip. She was wearing some sort of leather harness round the top half of her body. No sign of any sticks or crutches anywhere. After being taken to the doctor, she was interrogated by Peach. She didn’t deny having tried to escape. In fact, apparently she told him that the only reason she had left it until so late in her life was because she couldn’t bear to be parted from her animals. Then he asked her the obvious question, “How did you get as far as that without your crutches?” “I flew,” she said. “flewo?” Peach said. “My birds,” she said. “They carried me.”
‘And you know something?’ The old man leaned forwards, his speech accelerating. ‘I believe it. After what I saw in her sitting-room that afternoon I definitely believe it. There was a magic about that woman. Not strong enough to break the spell of the village, perhaps,’ and his hand twirled in the air again, ‘but what could be that strong? Can you imagine, though? Miss Neville being carried through the sky at dawn by a flock of birds. Like a parachute. A parachute of birds. What a sight that must’ve been! What a magnificent sight!’
Moses gazed through the window. He was trying to imagine a woman in a huge green dress flying through the sky. It was difficult. In this village he found himself approaching the limits of his imagination.
‘What happened?’ he asked. ‘I mean, how did it happen, d’you think?’
The old man shrugged. ‘Nobody really knows. She must have fallen, that much is obvious. Perhaps the birds lost their grip. Perhaps something frightened them. I don’t know. In any case, she was dead in two years. Complications with the broken hip.’
‘Sad story,’ Mary said.
‘Sad, but not so very strange. Everybody fails, you see.’
Moses smiled. ‘Not everybody,’ he said, ‘surely.’
‘Well, no,’ the old man admitted. ‘Not everybody, I suppose.’ He shook his head as if he still found the whole thing pretty hard to believe. ‘You see,’ he went on, ‘most people fail because they think that escape’s impossible and the police are infallible. When you’re faced with those two beliefs, it paralyses you. Escape is a dream, a song you sing, a story you tell, but not something you ever seriously think of doing. Not if you’ve any common sense. Anybody actually attempting to escape steps beyond the bounds of reality. They become unreal, even to themselves. They dress up as Tarzan, they build toy bombs, they pretend to die. No wonder they fail. In the end, all they succeed in doing is making the police museum the most interesting place in the village. The secret is to accept all that conditioning, be realistic about it.’
Moses looked puzzled. ‘Realistic? I don’t follow.’
‘I gave up the idea of trying to escape myself,’ the old man explained. ‘I knew I couldn’t do it. It was beyond me, quite literally. I decided to help somebody else escape instead. My son. You. And the whole time I was planning to get you out I was realistic about it. Because it wasn’t my freedom that was at stake. Because I had nothing to lose. As for you, well, you were too young to know what was happening, too young to have been weighed down, disabled by all those stories about the outside world, too young to be able to experience that sense of becoming unreal to yourself. If I failed to get you out, you wouldn’t go to pieces or turn into an alcoholic or end up in the mental home. You simply wouldn’t know any better. So you made it. The plan succeeded. And that’s what’s sustained me all these years as I’ve watched others fail around me. That and the idea that I might finally have got one over on old Peach — ’ The old man began to chuckle to himself. His cigarette shook in his curved brown fingers.
Moses now asked the question he had been dying to ask. ‘But how did you do it? How did you get me out?’
‘Oldest story in the world,’ the old man told him. ‘There’s a river that runs past the village. You may have noticed it. It’s about a mile away, across the fields. There’s one particular bend in the river where the current suddenly moves from the riverbank out into midstream. I tested it with twigs and cans. I waited for the right weather conditions, a misty morning, then I left you there, floating on the river in a basket made of pitch and rushes.’ He smiled. ‘Moses, you see?’
Moses shook his head in wonder. Then he looked across at Mary and knew that she knew what he was thinking. That pattern of light and shade. That sound of running water. Real memories.
‘So David was right all along,’ he said.
‘Who’s David?’ the old man asked.
‘David was one of the boys at the orphanage. I had a fight with him because he went round telling everyone that I’d been found by a river.’
The old man laughed, and, once again, the laughter triggered a fit of coughing. It shook him harder this time. His chest rattled like a bag of dice.