The Hippo at the End of the Hall Page 6

  “Better run!” the hippo whispered.

  It was certainly too late to hide, so Ben fled.

  He dived for the hall, passing the mystery doorways, feet drumming on the wooden floor, past the cabinet of eggs, past the painting. He skidded to a halt at the front door, bewildered at the many knobs and bolts.

  While he hesitated, he heard a scrabbling sound nearby and then the door swung open of its own accord. Ben decided it must have been ajar and had caught in the wind. Anyway, there was only time to think about running, so he leaped across the threshold and galloped down the steps to his bike.

  The doors slammed behind him. He breathed in lungfuls of fresh air and reality. He smelled wet leaves and fog. He heard the roar of distant traffic and ordinary life — it was such a relief.

  From indoors he heard the doorknob rattle. But by then he was astride his bike and speeding into the twilight.

  And it was past dinnertime.

  He pedaled like the wind for home.

  “Where’ve you been?” said Mom. Her voice was like ice.

  Ben had rehearsed what he’d say. “I’m sorry I’m late, but —” He stopped. “Mom?” She looked greenish-white and anxious. He rushed to hug her. “I’m sorry,” he said again. “I went to that museum. You didn’t say I couldn’t — but then I couldn’t get in, and then I did, but —”

  “Do you realize how worried I’ve been?” Her voice cracked. “And today of all days.”

  Ben saw that papers from the shop were still strewn over the table. Usually the table would be set by now. Something was wrong.

  “What do you mean, today of all days?”

  Mom’s lips were pressed together into a tight line, as though she were trying not to cry. She was clutching a letter. Now she dropped it onto the table. There was something despairing about her gesture. Ben reached for the letter. She snatched it back. Then the scolding stopped and she hugged him.

  “At least you’re home safe,” she said. “So long as you’re safe, nothing can be too bad.”

  Ben found this more worrying than when she’d been angry. “I’m not that late,” he said. “What’s happened? Why is today different?”

  Her shoulders slumped.

  “Tell me!”

  She sighed. “I only got around to opening the mail this afternoon. There’s another letter from the landlord. It’s what I was worried about: he’s sold our building to a property developer called Pike Developments.”

  “Pike!”

  “Yes, it’s a nasty name, isn’t it? And they’ve got a dreadful reputation. They make it very difficult for tenants to stay when they want to develop an area. They’ll do what they can to get rid of us.”

  “Pike Developments?” said Ben. “Is that Julian Pike?”

  “Yes . . . I think that’s his name. How on earth d’you know that?” Mom drew out a pan and put it on the stove. Ben guessed they’d be having eggs again — they always had eggs when Mom hadn’t sold much in the shop.

  “That man, that Julian Pike . . . I saw him today,” he said.

  “Don’t be silly.”

  “I did. He was at the museum. He wants to knock that down too and —”

  “He . . . what! How do you know? What have you been doing?” Mom looked aghast. “I knew I shouldn’t have let you go near that place. How did you meet him?”

  “I didn’t exactly meet him.”

  “Then who exactly did you meet? What did you hear?”

  “Lots,” said Ben carefully. “I heard some bad things about that man, and some things that . . .” He paused, and then in a rush he cried, “I think they were about my dad. He took me there when I was little, didn’t he? I remember it.”

  She looked away, chewing the side of her fist.

  “Please, Mom.”

  “I think he took you once,” she muttered. She opened the fridge and took out the eggs. As she put three into the pan, she added, “So, was the old lady there? I can’t believe it. I don’t understand how she can still be alive.”

  “She is. I saw her. But . . . I didn’t speak to her either.”

  “Then who did you speak to?”

  Now it was Ben who avoided answering. He knew Mom wouldn’t believe the truth. He watched her cutting bread, attacking the loaf as if the slices might rise up like bread soldiers and fight. It didn’t seem the best time to mention talking animals. Instead he said daringly, “I need to know about my dad.” Then he scuttled off to fetch the silverware and glasses.

  The blue flames from the stove top hissed against the pan as Mom rummaged in the cupboard for eggcups. He watched her spooning the eggs out: one for her, two for him. She motioned him to sit and sat down heavily herself. “Ben, I’m exhausted, and I’ve got a headache. I know there are things you want to know. It’s time I told you more — and I promised myself I would, soon. You’re old enough now, but it’s so complicated, and it’s been quite a day — I’m too tired tonight.”

  Ben stared at his eggs. Then he picked up his spoon and bashed the tops of them really hard.

  Mom sliced her own open and reached over to rescue his. Then she turned on the TV.

  Ben was starving. He had a vague feeling he ought to be too upset to eat, but he dunked a piece of bread into that liquid-dandelion yolk. The bread was crusty and fresh. The butter mingled with the egg and salt, and though there was a bit of a crunch from the mauled eggshells that had ended up inside the egg, it still tasted delicious. He gobbled it up, rammed his spoon through the bottom of the first shell to break it, then began on his second.

  Mom looked calmer once she had eaten. As usual, when she finished, she left her spoon in her shell, tempting him to reach over and push it through the bottom. This was a game they often played, so he knew that she’d whisk it away before he could break it. But Ben wasn’t playing silly games tonight.

  Instead he said abruptly, “You never tell me anything about Dad. I don’t even know where he grew up.”

  To his utter surprise she gave him an answer: “Not here,” she said. “His grandfather was English, but your dad grew up on the other side of the world.”

  Ben hardly dared breathe in case she stopped talking.

  “If you must know,” she added, “he grew up on an island called Yap — yes, it’s an odd name. It’s in Micronesia — oh, you may well gasp. I’d be surprised if you’ve heard of it. I hadn’t.”

  “Someone . . . mentioned Micronesia,” mumbled Ben.

  “It’s a group of islands in the Pacific,” said Mom. “That’s the big blue ocean that covers so much of the globe. His father was some sort of scientist there; so was his grandfather, come to think of it.”

  “There’s no chance he’s still alive?” Ben blurted out.

  “No chance.”

  That sounded very final, but Ben wasn’t going to let her stop now. “How do you know?”

  “Well, no one knows absolutely for certain, but they found something in some wreckage — that stone, the one with the hole bored in it.”

  “The one you gave me on my birthday?”

  “Yes.” She turned to him again. “I did intend to tell you more about it.”

  “Tell me now. Please!” Ben urged.

  “Someone found a sealed plastic box adrift among the wreckage of a boat,” said Mom. “It had my name and address on it, and the stone was in there too. I knew then that your dad must have known he wasn’t going to survive or he would never have taken it off. He was so superstitious about that stone — I mean, when he went sailing, he always wore it for luck. He used to hang it around his neck on a shoelace, said it had been his father’s before him and his grandfather’s before that. He used to say he wanted you to have it on your tenth birthday.”

  “But when you gave it to me, you never told me what it was!” said Ben.

  “I’m telling you now.” She looked directly at him then and sighed. “Ben, I’m sorry. I know I should’ve told you more. But . . . sometimes grown-ups feel so sad that it almost makes them ill. Losing someone
you love . . . it’s like . . . it can feel like losing a limb. And did you know that people who have lost a leg or an arm often feel pain in that leg, even though it isn’t there anymore? It’s a bit like that for me. It still hurts to talk about your dad.”

  “But I lost him too.”

  “I know you did, love. I know that.” She rubbed her forehead. He saw that her other hand was clenched tight. “But when it happened, you were so little. I couldn’t be ill because I still had you. I had to make a good home for you, and I had to do it every single day, no matter how sad I felt. If I thought about your dad too much, I . . . Look, I know it sounds like I’m making excuses, but I tried not to think too much and that’s how I got by. I know it’s time I told you more about your dad, and I will, but not tonight, Ben. I’m exhausted and I still have a lot of work to do.”

  She hugged him. Then she stood up and began clearing the plates. A story came on the TV news about a river bursting its banks, and she turned to give it her whole attention.

  But Ben wasn’t going to allow this conversation to end. “Just one more thing . . . please . . .”

  She sighed.

  “Why do I have your last name?”

  “Because you’re my son.”

  “But what was his name? Was it Garner-Gee?”

  “That’s two things.”

  “Did you ever meet Miss Garner-Gee?”

  “Ben, please! That’s enough! I told you. I’ve still got so much to do.”

  No, it’s not enough, thought Ben in silent fury. Not nearly enough.

  The news droned on: more floods somewhere in the north, then a story about the terrible damage that floodwater could inflict on buildings if they weren’t cleared quickly. Ben glanced at Mom and saw that she looked tearful.

  “I thought you might have fallen into the weir,” she whispered.

  “I’m not that stupid,” he retorted. He felt tears spring to his own eyes and angrily blinked them away. But truth be told, he’d had enough for one day too — and then Mom was spooning out apple crumble, and a TV program about equatorial rain forests was about to begin.

  “Can we talk about Dad tomorrow night, then? When I get home from school?”

  “Ben, I’m sorry, but I won’t be in when you come back from school. I’ve got to close the shop early. There’s a meeting with that property developer. Half the street is attending. It’s not only our shop that’s in trouble — Pike owns the whole block now.”

  “Can you stop him?” Ben asked.

  “I don’t know.” Mom shrugged. “We’re not sure exactly what we’re stopping yet either. He may not want to build immediately. But I should look through the lease before tomorrow, so . . .”

  “OK,” said Ben. The apple crumble had ice cream with it, and the TV program had begun. “After you get back from the meeting then?”

  Before bed that night, Ben went to his shelf of special objects and reexamined the blue stone with the hole that Mom had given him on his birthday. The stone was semitransparent, like a half-sucked piece of hard candy, and its shape was organic. It looked more like something that had been washed up on a beach than something crafted.

  He held it to his eye.

  Now his room floated in underwater blue, distant and magical. He examined the rest of his collection shelf. His treasures — mostly common rocks and a few beachcombed fossils — looked rare and precious now.

  “Ben, are you in bed yet?” called Mom.

  “Nearly.”

  He put the stone back and rummaged in the bottom of his closet for a shoelace. He found one of the dress shoes that Mom liked and he didn’t. It had a leather lace, so he unlooped it, then threaded it through the stone. He looked at it, trying to remember if Dad had been wearing it around his neck the day they had gone to the museum together. Tying it around his own neck, he looked at his reflection in his bedroom window.

  The orange streetlight outside was transforming raindrops on the window into little yellowish drops of light. A yellow light means get ready to go, he thought.

  For what?

  Would they have to move?

  He screwed up his face, trying not to cry. The shop and apartment were all he remembered, and Mom had worked so hard to make the shop a success.

  Was it a success?

  “Yes!” he muttered. “We’d be fine if the rent hadn’t gone up so much.” And he squashed down all thoughts of the unpaid bills, and only enough money for eggs for dinner, and Mom’s worried face, and he thought of Julian Pike and his bulldozers with loathing. But how could a boy and his mom get the better of a man like that?

  Then he thought of Tara Snow and her goggling, hypnotic stare. He’d have to get the better of her too. He held the blue stone up to his eye again. Now the window dripped green instead of yellow.

  Green for go? he thought.

  There was something he could do. He could try using magic. He could open that silver bottle. Yesterday morning he would have laughed away any talk of witches and magic, but tonight he wasn’t so confident. In fact, he felt a bit scared. He unlooped the lace from around his neck and put the stone back on the shelf.

  How do you know if a witch is good or bad? he wondered.

  Mom knocked quietly on his door. Ben tried to rub away any signs of tears from his face as she came in. She sat on his bed and hugged him, and looked so fragile and headachy that he couldn’t bear to press her for any more information. Besides, he wanted to comfort her; truth be told, he wanted some comfort himself. So in an effort to make her stay longer, he mentioned a story with a witch in it that used to be his favorite when he was younger.

  “Tell me your egg story,” he said.

  She smiled then, and he guessed she was relieved it was all he had asked.

  “I thought you said you were too old for that nowadays.”

  “I am.”

  She laughed. “It’s OK to still want bedtime stories now and then,” she said. “They’re a comfort for grown-ups too, you know. That one reminds me of our happiest times, when we locked the world away and were just us.”

  “Tell it again,” said Ben.

  And this is the tale his mom told in her lovely, sad singsong voice.

  There was once a girl who noticed that when people ate eggs, they usually broke up the shells.

  “Why do they do that?” asked the girl. She was eating boiled eggs with her granny at the time.

  The granny replied, “People often do things without thinking or without remembering the real reason they do them.”

  “What is the real reason?” said the girl. “Do you know?”

  “There’s a rhyme about it,” said her granny, and she sang this song:

  Make a hole in the shell, my dear,

  Or a witch will make a boat, I fear,

  Then over the water far from home,

  Through the night the witch will roam.

  Well, the girl thought about that, and then replied, “I don’t see why the poor witches shouldn’t have boats if they want. We have boats.” And quick as a wink, she ran to the open window, lobbed her eggshell through it, and cried, “Witch, here is your boat.”

  To her amazement, she saw the shell whipped up by the wind and whisked so high that it disappeared into the clouds, while a thin, high voice called out, “I thank you.”

  The granny was upset. “No good will come of this,” she warned, and for a few nights the girl was frightened, but after that she forgot all about it.

  Many years later, when she had grown to be a young woman, she rowed out to an island to gather herbs. While she was busy, a sudden tempest hit the beach and a great wave washed her boat away. The tide rose higher and higher until only a tiny tip of the island was above

  the flood, and the poor young woman thought she would drown.

  She had almost given up hope when she saw an odd white boat riding the waves, bobbing and paddling toward her. The skipper was a woman with wild violet eyes and the coxswain who steered was a black cat — or at least the young woman
thought it was a cat, though it seemed to have extra limbs.

  “Jump in!” they said.

  And the young woman did, as what choice did she have? Without another word, they swept through the storm, scudding over the waves with more seacraft than ever a master seaman could muster. Only when they reached the shore did the witch speak.

  “When your feet tread the dry earth, you must turn three times widdershins and at each turn look at my boat,” she said.

  Well, the young woman was so grateful, she did just that; at each turn she looked at the boat, and at each glance the boat grew smaller, until it was the size of an egg. Then the now-tiny witch shook the rusty corkscrews of her hair and sang in a high, thin voice:

  This is the shell you threw to me.

  Even a witch can grateful be.

  And so singing, she vanished: cat, shell, and all, leaving the young woman alone and safe on the beach.

  After telling the story, Mom kissed Ben good night. There was something he wished he could say to her as she went. He had said it once, but he never would again because it had made her sad. He wanted to say, I wish a witch had rescued my dad.

  But that night he just said, “It isn’t true, is it?”

  “Of course it isn’t true.”

  “But you never put a hole in your eggshells.”

  “It’s just a bit of fun,” Mom said with a laugh. “An old superstition — I’ve told you that. I used to believe it when I was young, but then I stopped believing — like you did.”

  “But the witch was a good one — wasn’t she?”

  “That’s what I always thought,” said Mom softly. Then she hugged him one last time, and whispering “Good night,” she left with a smile in her voice.

  However, Ben felt as guilty as a fox.

  This was because he had decided that he was going to go back to the museum the next day. He had to. He was gambling that it would be one of those third Mondays in the month when the museum was open. Even then, it would only be open until four o’clock.