Where Peacocks Scream

  Also by Valerie Mendes

  novels

  Larkswood

  The Choice

  young adult novels

  Girl in the Attic

  Coming of Age

  Lost and Found

  The Drowning

  picture books

  Tomasina’s First Dance

  Look at Me, Grandma!

  Where Peacocks Scream

  Valerie Mendes

  First published in Great Britain in 2017 by

  The Book Guild Ltd

  9 Priory Business Park

  Wistow Road, Kibworth

  Leicestershire, LE8 0RX

  Freephone: 0800 999 2982

  www.bookguild.co.uk

  Email: info@bookguild.co.uk

  Twitter: @bookguild

  Copyright © 2017 Valerie Mendes

  The right of Valerie Mendes to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in a retrieval system, in any form or by any means, without permission in writing from the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  This work is entirely fictitious and bears no resemblance to any persons living or dead.

  ISBN 9781912362547

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  For Joe and Charlie

  Contents

  Cora

  On the Island

  Sculling Tomorrow

  A Cold Wind Blowing

  The White Cap

  Chasing a Shadow

  It’s the Brewery

  “Call me Uncle Frank”

  An Old Proverb

  The Invasion

  The Evil Eye

  Disasters

  After the Storm

  Seriously Useless

  Feathers

  Playing Detective

  The Same Face?

  The Barbecue

  A Plan of Action

  Second Thoughts

  A Moonlight Flit

  Haunted

  Keeping Watch

  A Flicker of Red

  The Next Train to Paddington

  Prisoner

  It’s Times Like These

  Double Bluff

  Into Thin Air

  Wild Horses

  Master of Surprise

  Cora

  “Nothing will ever be the same,” Daniel said.

  “Don’t be such a drama queen.” His mother swished her broom over The Riverside’s damp, early-morning flagstones. “That’s nonsense and you know it.”

  “Cora was special.” He stared down at his dead peacock.

  “I know you loved her.” Mum bit her lip. “But there’ll be others just the same.”

  “No, there won’t.” Daniel’s mouth tasted sour, as if lumps of sick were stuck in his throat. “I watched her grow from a tiny chick. Dad gave her to me, taught me how to look after her. She was my first—”

  “For heaven’s sake, Danny. Cora was only a bird.”

  “She was my special peacock and she was going to have chicks.”

  “Yes, well… ” Mum looked weary, as if someone had punched her in the stomach. “That’s life, isn’t it?”

  Daniel swallowed the lumps. “Why is it.” He knew his mother was upset but she didn’t want to show it. Like when she and Dad found out they couldn’t have any more children, a long time ago in London. She’d hugged him and said, “Sorry, Danny. No brothers or sisters. You’ll be my first and only. That’s good enough for me.”

  But he’d never been sure it was good enough; that he was good enough. Rattled by the memory, he plunged the knife in again. “Why is it ‘life’? It looks more like death to me!”

  Mum said slowly, “Because it’s in the cycle of things. If you’re going to keep birds, you’ve got to be prepared. This happens all the time.”

  “It’s never happened to me before. Cora was poorly for three days. She hardly moved. All she could do was sit down, and then she dragged herself into the bushes… Why didn’t the vet come?”

  “You know why. He told us on the phone. Cora could have had five eggs inside her.” Mum pushed her straggly grey hair out of her eyes. “He said there was nothing he could do.”

  “I was longing for Cora to have chicks.” The clump of brown feathers lay at Daniel’s feet, flattened and pathetic. “I was going to give them names.” His cheeks flamed with anger. “I didn’t even see her die. She must have been completely on her own.” He looked across the river. The seagulls screeched on the railings of the bridge, squabbling for space. “None of the other birds care. All they want is food.”

  “Speaking of which,” Mum shovelled dusty sweepings into a black bin bag, “the peacocks have collected in a drove as usual. They’ve been making one hell of a racket since half-past four this morning. Will you feed them, please?”

  “I can’t be bothered.” Daniel glared at her. “Ask Jimmy to feed them when he comes to do the garden.” He looked at Cora’s face, lying sideways on the flagstones; at her one brown eye staring vacantly up at him. “I’m going to dig a grave for my special peacock.”

  “You can’t do it in the gardens. Our customers—”

  “Not in the gardens,” Daniel said impatiently. “On the island.”

  Mum said, “I’ll have to ask your father.”

  “Why does Dad have to know? He’s not going to notice, is he? He doesn’t notice anything outside his office or the bar.”

  “Don’t be so horrid.” Mum frowned. “I suppose the brewery won’t mind. But remember to cover your tracks. I don’t want anyone to know. You can do it this afternoon… Now hurry up or you’ll be late for school.”

  “Too bad. There’s more to life than stupid rotten maths and boring old French.”

  “Please, Danny… If you start missing classes, you’ll be left behind… I’ll find a cardboard box for Cora and cover her up in it. She’ll be fine for a few hours.”

  “No, she bloody won’t.” Hot tears blurred Daniel’s eyes. He stumbled across the terrace. “I’m going to bury her properly, in a secret place. Nobody can do it but me.”

  “Well, if you must… I’ll ring the school and tell them you’re not well.” Mum called across to him, her voice shrill with anxiety. “Pretend you’ve got a stomach bug, OK?… Just this once, mind. I refuse to lie for you again.”

  “It’s not going to happen again, is it?” Daniel muttered furiously. “Cora can hardly die twice.”

  On the Island

  The earth under the thick, clove-coloured beech tree felt surprisingly tough beneath Daniel’s trowel. June had been warm and dry. The digging proved hard work. His arms ached. Sweat poured down his face. The sun rose, filtering its light through the trees, shimmering on the river, flecking its patterns through the leaves onto his hands.

  Nobody could see him from the house. To get to the island – Daniel thought of it as his own private garden, none of the public were ever allowed to use it – he had to cross the river by the narrow wooden bridge that the brewery had repaired two years ago. Mum and Dad had closed The Riverside for three months while restoration work was carried out to the pub and its riverbank. The
noise and dirt had been hellish but, as Dad said every morning, trying to keep up Mum’s spirits, “Worth it in the end.”

  The minute the bridge was repaired in the early spring, Daniel had leaped across it to explore the marvellous overgrown wilderness. His wilderness. It smelt of slimy riverbank, spruce red-coated foxes, sturdy grey squirrels, gloriously rotting fern. Sometimes if he was lucky he’d catch a glimpse of a fallow deer: fleet-footed, silent, vanishing.

  The place had become his private sanctuary. There were only two other people he allowed there. One was his best friend Joshua Stapleton. Josh was American. During term-time, he lived in Wolvercote, five minutes’ walk away, with his Auntie Ruth. Josh was special. They cycled to school together, hung out together, sculled as a pair together, talked about everything under the sun.

  Josh would be wondering where Daniel was… He’d better send him a text before he started to panic. “No school for me today. Come round after. Be quick.”

  The other was Chloe. She was Philip the Boatman’s daughter, and lived in one of the bungalows in the boatyard, next door to The Riverside. Daniel blushed even thinking about her. His marvellous, magical Chloe, twelve years old, same as him, with her sweep of fine, raven-dark hair and piercing blue eyes. She could tell what he was thinking even before he knew it himself. She played the violin in her school orchestra and wanted to be a professional musician. She could make her violin tremble with passion, sing like a lark – or, on a bad day, scream like a peacock.

  Nobody knew how he felt about her, not even Josh. But Chloe knew. Not that he’d told her. She just knew.

  He’d known Chloe for years, ever since that first day when he and Mum and Dad had arrived at The Riverside and he’d rushed down to the boatyard and introduced himself to Phil. He’d been fascinated by the river; immediately felt himself drawn to it, a part of its secret life.

  Phil had said, “And this is my daughter, Chloe.” Daniel had smiled and liked her.

  But last year, in the summer holidays, everything had changed in an instant. The world had both darkened and brightened, like the sky before a spectacular storm. He and Chloe had been up ladders, picking apples in the orchard beside the allotment the other side of the Godstow Road, talking and laughing, then quiet together, then talking again. Coming down her ladder, Chloe suddenly slipped and lost her footing. She cried out and fell to the ground.

  Daniel had scrambled down his ladder and picked her up. Chloe’s ankle was bruised and swollen, too painful to walk on. He’d lifted her into his wheelbarrow and taken her home. In his arms in that single bright moment, her skin tingling against his, her hair darkening his vision, all those sniggering boyfriend and girlfriend playground giggles seemed very far away.

  Chloe adored the peacocks. She’d be devastated to hear Daniel’s news.

  He’d wrapped Cora’s body in an old rug he found in the woodshed behind the house. Then, trying not to bump her around, he carried her in a cardboard box over the bridge. Now he pushed the box into the hole, covering it with fresh earth and old leaves, dried twigs: anything to fill it, make it so that nobody could ever find her.

  The brewery who owned The Riverside and its surrounding land weren’t interested in the island. They wanted it to stay exactly as it was: a haven for wild life, uninhabitable, neglected. But Daniel could never be sure that some stranger wouldn’t start snooping around it while he was at school. He felt like its protector against “the inexorable march of the modern world” like the newsreaders always said on TV. Down the Woodstock Road and into Oxford, every inch of green space had been swallowed up by another new house, another block of flats.

  Daniel was going to make sure that didn’t happen to his island. He imagined himself lying down in front of a bulldozer, refusing to budge, a notice saying HANDS OFF pinned to his chest… Oh, yes! He’d fight to the death for his precious patch of land, for his peacocks’ freedom to roam…

  He sat back on his heels, listening to the roar of the weir, the cackle of ducks, the murmur of voices as people gathered by the river for coffee. Then he stood up, brushing the earth from his jeans. He pushed his way through the undergrowth and sat down on the riverbank, facing away from the house.

  Mum and Dad would be working, their faces pink with heat: organising lunches in the kitchens; polishing glasses behind the bar; jabbering on the office telephone. Jimmy would be pruning, mowing, tidying the garden. Nobody would have time to think about him, let alone look for and find him.

  He remembered the day Dad had brought Cora home in a basket with her three brothers: tiny brown balls of weightless fluff. Now the other peacocks screamed and snorted: Toby, Percy and Frederick. They strutted along the river wall, picking their way among the tables, poking their elegant blue heads at anything that looked like food. Arrogant, greedy, noisy, quarrelsome, beautiful. Hardly pining for their dead sibling, oblivious to her death…

  But Daniel loved them. In a way, it was like having little brothers and a sister: creatures he could care for, talk to, watch out for. Who depended on him for their early-morning food. Who recognised the sound of his voice.

  They brought his gardens to special life.

  He lay back against the trunk of a tree, staring at the reeds, his head throbbing. His eyelids grew heavy. In his mind he saw Cora’s brown-feathered body lying at his feet on the damp flagstones, her one dead eye staring up at him.

  He slid further through the darkness and escaped into sleep…

  Sculling Tomorrow

  Joshua tapped on Daniel’s bedroom door and poked his head round it.

  “Hey, Dan! Got your text but it didn’t say much. Where were you today? Are you sick?”

  Daniel told him what had happened, his voice wobbling with sadness.

  “Gee, what a shame.” Joshua bounced on the end of the bed. “Cora was the best… How deep did you have to dig? Can I see the grave?”

  “Not now. There are too many people around. If they see us crossing the bridge they’ll want to follow… Come tomorrow morning, early, before school.”

  “Cool… Sorry and all that.”

  “Thanks.” Daniel’s head throbbed. He’d slept by the river for an hour and woken with a start, shivering with cold. “I’ve had this funny feeling all day.”

  “Because of Cora?”

  “Partly. But worse than that. Kind of black… Depressed… As if something awful’s going to happen… I can’t explain.” He stared out of the window at the line of poplars and jabbed a finger. “See those trees over there?”

  Joshua joined him at the window. “What about them?”

  “They’ve been there for years. And now, suddenly, one of them’s dying.”

  “Wow, so it is. I never noticed.”

  “Nobody knows why. Our Jimmy has looked after the gardens here for twenty years. He told me he’s never seen anything like it. One minute there’s a line of healthy poplars, stretching down to the boatyard. The next, one of them goes all leafless and spindly… You know that advert for the Lottery on TV?”

  “Which one?”

  “That Lottery finger. The one that points and says It’s You. It’s like it’s pointed at the poplar, only it’s brought rotten bad luck, not good news.”

  Joshua ran his hand through his unruly hair, making it worse. “I don’t see—”

  “It was the same with Cora. One minute she was fine, getting fat, going to have chicks. The next minute the finger has pointed. She stops eating, finds a place to lie down and never gets up. Three days later, I’m digging her grave. I never thought I’d ever have to do a thing like that… ”

  “Cheer up, Williams.” Joshua threw an arm round Daniel’s shoulder. “We’ve got sculling tomorrow, remember? That’ll take your mind off the dead stuff.”

  Daniel turned away from the window. “In French and history and boring old maths, I sit there thinking: in an hou
r I’ll be on the river, crouching in our scull, holding the blade, the water all sparkling and wonderful.”

  “Me too.”

  “I want to do it professionally. I decided last week. I want to be a cox. I want to scull on my own. As soon as I’m old enough, I’ll start to row. And when I leave school, I want to train properly. Do it all the time… Spend my life on the river.”

  “Coxes have to be small and light. You’d better stop growing right now.”

  “I’m half your size as it is.” Daniel grinned. “I’ll walk around with a brick on my head.”

  They laughed. Daniel suddenly remembered his last year at school in London. He’d been seven years old. The class bullies had ganged up on him for being small, made his life hell. They’d stalked him when he walked home, singing, “Mirror, mirror on the wall, Who’s the smallest of them all?” One of the worst days had been when the biggest, heaviest bully had stolen his trainers, and danced around the changing-room with them, chanting, “Look at Cinderella’s tiny slippers! These must fit the smallest feet in town!”

  Here at his Oxford school, nobody had ever made any comment on his size. Or if they had, it was to the opposite effect.

  “It’s quality that counts,” the sports teacher told him one afternoon, smiling his approval after Daniel had scored three goals in a football match. He’d felt ten feet tall.

  He picked up a pillow and threw it at Joshua. His headache seemed to have cleared. “So, what did you do today, smarty pants? Top of the class in maths again?”

  “Of course… We made bread and butter pudding in food technology.”

  “What did it taste like?”

  “Yummy. I took a slice home for Auntie Ruth. She says I can make it for her any time I like.”

  That night Daniel woke at three in the morning, stiff and cramped with the sharp memory of a terrible dream. He’d been running in the dead of night, down to the boatyard from The Riverside, screaming his head off, except his voice had no sound. All the poplars had shed their leaves in the middle of summer, every single one. Their bare branches creaked and groaned in the wind. Handfuls of leaves danced in front of his eyes, flew into his mouth, clung to his legs and feet. It was like trying to run through drifts of snow. In his arms he held three dead peacocks: Toby, Percy and Frederick. They’d been killed by the same disease that had attacked the trees. He was desperate to find Chloe, to tell her to shut herself in her bungalow and not come out in case the disease killed her too…