The Unexpected Find Page 6

  “It seems that our road is the same, at least for a while. Perhaps we are destined to be travelling companions.”

  “I’m not sure…” Judy began, but she was cut off in mid-sentence.

  “Of course not, how could you be? Who is ever sure about anything? The people I have known who have been sure about things have been extremely boring and given to all sorts of odd behaviour, most of it not very nice. But the choice is yours.” Judy acknowledged that Mr Balderson seemed to have an answer to everything. She wasn’t sure that this was a good thing.

  It was just like the first time they had met, when she had made the tea instead of walking out. But this time was deadly serious. A lot more serious than sitting on someone’s sofa for an hour or two. If her Dad had been here… But he wasn’t, that was the whole point, wasn’t it? Now she had a real chance. Judy heard herself say,

  “If you really are going there, then maybe…”

  Mr Balderson stood up, reached into one of his voluminous pockets for some money to leave on the table, and strode out of the café. Judy quickly gulped the last of her tea and followed him.

  They drove through town. Judy said nothing. What was there to say? She was being driven somewhere by a person whom she knew practically nothing about, except that he was definitely not ordinary and possibly mad. Perhaps she should have been a lot more worried than she was. But she couldn’t get away from the feeling that in this story, or on this quest or whatever it was, Mr Balderson was not playing the part of the baddy.

  “So,” said Mr Balderson, breaking into her thoughts “Where are we off to?” He spoke quite loudly, above the sound of the engine that was located under its cowling between the passenger seats.

  Judy’s heart skipped a beat.

  “Well, Sweden…”

  “Indeed. But Sweden is rather a large country, is it not? Long.”

  “There was a sender’s address on the back of an envelope. The name of the town was half ripped off, but I saw the postcode. I remember it because the square root was a whole number.”

  “A whole number? You don’t say. Very Pythagorean. We go right at the roundabout, for the docks; we’ll worry about the rest later.”

  For a long time Judy had lived carefully, keeping everything under control. Then, after Mr Greaves’ fateful visit, she had just run off with no proper plans or purpose. Now she had a purpose, but all there was to do was sit and watch the countryside, houses, fields and petrol stations fleeing past. She had been like a tightly wound spring, driving herself, but now she seemed to have snapped. Soon her eyelids grew as heavy as lead, her head fell backwards, and she sank into a comatose sleep.

  6

  Judy woke up as they drove into the huge ferry terminal and parked in a long queue of vehicles. As Mr Balderson got out to get the tickets organized, Judy looked out at the big ferry waiting to depart; this was the point of no return. She was off on a journey with no clear idea of what was at the end of it. But at least there was some hope that it would lead her to her father. When Mr Balderson returned and the camper van was rattling up a ramp into the clanging bowels of the ship, bullied into the right place on the car deck by a man in an orange safety vest, Judy started to speak.

  “What if… I mean there is only a chance…”

  “There is only…” replied Mr Balderson, “action, or non-action. You have chosen action. That is enough. Do not act for the fruits of action, bound to the desire for a result. Just act. Let’s go up on deck and observe the gulls,” he added, as a great thundering clang announced that the bow doors were closing and the ferry was about to depart.

  “But I do desire a result; I really do. What’s wrong with that?” said Judy, as they climbed the stairs from the car-deck and emerged into the open air.

  “Nothing is wrong with that, but it is neither here nor there. Meaningless. Inconsequential. We cannot possess the future. Only the present is truly ours.”

  They walked to the stern rail, shivering a bit in the wind that struck the slab-sided ferry as soon as it left the river-mouth. A big black-backed gull slid past on the updraft as the ferry hooted a mournful goodbye to England. Judy looked at the rapidly shrinking coastline, the high terminal building already small and insignificant and the cars like little toys. She saw a small blue car turn into the parking area, driving much too fast and coming to a sudden halt. The driver jumped out and stood very still. It was too far away to see any details, and of course at that distance she couldn’t make out the number plate; but if it was Mr Greaves’ very nice friend from the social services department then he was too late. She had escaped.

  Afterwards, when Judy tried to remember her journey north, she would find it quite hard. All the everyday worries that had nagged at her for months had fallen away. Now as the distance from England increased, there were moments of near-panic about what she had got into, but mostly tiredness got the upper hand and she spent quite a lot of the time asleep. Even awake, she was constantly half dreaming. Aristeas the camper had rolled off the ferry in Holland, and between Rotterdam and Utrecht the traffic moved like some dense, viscous syrup, twelve lanes across and carpeted with huge lorries from every nation in Europe – Polish, Serbian, Czech, French, Spanish, German, Turkish, Bulgarian. Judy spent some time working out which of the number plates were prime numbers, but she lost interest after a while. The traffic was so slow that there was time to look into the cabs of the trucks on either side, as Aristeas painstakingly overtook them or was passed himself. In every one a long-distance traveller, resigned to their work. Sometimes their eyes met. Rarely, a faint smile. Once, even, a wink. At one point, when four lanes packed with traffic were supposed, in some miraculous way, to turn into two, Mr Balderson took his foot off the accelerator to let in a huge sixteen-wheeler from Rumania, and as the great beast squeezed in between the camper and the truck in front, a lazy, hairy hand appeared out of the side window and made a little gesture of thanks. Not a wave exactly, but pretty close. At last after seemingly endless miles, the traffic started flowing faster as it headed east. And then, as one motorway fed into the next, they veered north. Night fell, and the lanes of traffic became a serpent of light, red on one side, white on the other. Big blue and white motorway signs passed overhead for Berlin, Bremen, Oldenburg, Hamburg and Lubeck.

  “Enough for today,” announced Mr Balderson, and they pulled in to a big service station, with a huge parking area already filled with lorries. They found a space between two of them, and snuggled in like a kitten in a pride of lions. Mr Balderson turned off the engine. He clambered back between the front seats. In the camper it was all very snug. There was a little gas stove at the back, and a sink, and a couple of cupboards, two upholstered couches on either side of a little table, and above the driving seats an alcove with a wooden ladder leading up to it. Judy felt very much at home. It was all a lot smaller than the narrowboat, but had the same air of efficient use of space and simple living.

  “I shall retire upstairs,” said Mr Balderson, gesturing towards the little ladder. “The table folds down, and converts into a bed. There is a quilt and a pillow in the space under one of the couches.” And without further ado he climbed up the ladder and into the alcove, politely drawing a little curtain that hid him from view. Judy worked out how to collapse the table, and turn the couch seats into a mattress. When the seat cushions were removed, she saw that the benches had hinged lids, making lockers for storage. In one of them were the water tank, some tools, and a mandolin. She opened the other one, and started back in shock. Someone was in there. Her first wild thought was that she had been horribly mistaken about nice Mr Balderson, but then she saw that in the bench locker, curled up and looking pale and tired, lay William Parkinson.

  Judy stared unbelievingly. William lay on top of a rather grubby flowery quilt, eyes closed, mouth half-open. He opened his eyes – Judy noticed them for the first time, pale brown, or hazel perhaps, the irises large, the whites very white. He looked up at her.

  “I fell asleep. Are you s
urprised to see me?”

  “What do you think?” said Judy as she worked on composing herself.

  William managed to sit up in the awkward space.

  “I think you are surprised, and mostly not pleased. But you don’t have to be angry. I thought I would hide and then when the van started moving I would come out and then I could come with you and talk about my find. If I had asked you, you would probably have said no.”

  Judy drew breath to get started on what she wanted to say to William Parkinson, but he went on,

  “I know you don’t want me to come. I can go now,” he sighed. Judy found her voice.

  “Go? Go where?”

  “Go home. I bet there’s a bus, and anyway I’m a good walker, Nan always says. Have we driven far?”

  “Yes we have, William, we’re in Germany.”

  “I’ve never been to Germany before.”

  “Well you have now. Get out of there, will you?”

  William stood up and stepped out of his hiding place, looking around him. His eyes immediately fastened on one or two things that looked very interesting. On the shelf above the couch opposite him, for example, next to a brass telescope, was an odd little doll with small shells sewn on to it, and a piece of broken pottery decorated with what looked like dolphins. There were books, and pictures tacked to the walls, and a string of beads that hung from a peg together with a decorated leather belt and a wicked-looking knife. But there was no time to explore the camper, because Judy’s eyebrows were flat-lining, her nostrils were bigger than usual, and her eyes definitely flashed. In fact she looked pretty dangerous, although William knew perfectly well that she wasn’t really a dangerous person.

  “William, you great twerp, you have messed everything up! You’ve got yourself smuggled out of the country and we’ll have to get you back. I’ll get pinched and Mr Balderson will probably go to jail for kidnapping. Everything’s ruined. Oh my God, why didn’t I just leave those two morons to get on with it?”

  “Which two…? Oh, Josh and Tyler. But if you had left them to get on with it they would have taken my find, you know.”

  A solemn voice spoke from behind the alcove curtain, conjuring up in Judy a sudden memory of a school lesson about the tabernacle and Jehovah and the Ark of the Covenant.

  “Indeed, and had you done as you say you would not be here either, Judy. Cause and effect, the butterfly flaps its wings on the other side of the world, and the storm breaks above our heads. The marvellous way of the world, its exciting unpredictability.”

  It was true. If she had walked away from the business with Josh and Tyler, she would never have ended up hiding in Mr Balderson’s house, and … well, all the rest of it. She slumped on to the seat and rested her elbows on the little table, her head in her hands.

  Mr Balderson’s head stuck out from behind the curtain.

  “There’s always a saying to fit the occasion, I find. In this case I would opt for, ‘You can’t have your cake and eat it.’”

  William had been observing the head that had appeared above them. Now he said, “Hello.”

  “Of course, you are William! What a pleasant surprise – are you joining us?” Mr Balderson chuckled happily.

  “I wanted to talk about my find, and about the tree, but I fell asleep.”

  “I shall look forward to that,” said Mr Balderson. But now something else had caught William’s attention.

  “Why have you only got one eye?”

  “What a pleasure to talk to someone who says what he thinks, don’t you agree, Judy?” was Mr Balderson’s response.

  “Did someone throw a stone at you? Some people throw quite badly. Not Judy though, she’s very good at it.”

  “No, it wasn’t a stone. It’s a long story, William. There was a price to pay, and I paid it.”

  “Was it something expensive?”

  “Very expensive. Too expensive to be bought with money.”

  This was too much for Judy. She was trapped in a camper van in the middle of Europe with two people who were… Well, to call them odd was being kind.

  “Please stop this,” she yelped. “What are we going to do? William, how on earth did you find us and get in here?”

  “I looked out of my window and I was just thinking about if you were my friend and there you were going into the café across the road, so I…”

  “OK, I get it. And now your mother will be having hysterics and calling the police.”

  “No she won’t.”

  “Of course she will.”

  “She’s in Spain.”

  “Well, who are you staying with?”

  “Nobody. My nan’s in hospital, she fell down. I don’t know anybody else.”

  “Well, this is all absolutely fascinating,” interjected Mr Balderson. “We shall have lots to talk about tomorrow. I am looking forward to talking about your nan, William, and other things. The pattern is being woven, thread by thread. The journey has only just begun.”

  William wanted to ask about the threads and the pattern, but Mr Balderson’s head had disappeared again.

  “Shall I get back into the bench? You can pretend I’m not here.” William looked uncertainly at Judy, who sighed loudly.

  “Don’t be stupid.”

  She folded down the table and organized the couch cushions, then took out her own sleeping bag and laid out the quilt and a pillow for William.

  “Right, you’re on this side. If you snore you can go up and sleep on the roof.”

  William crept under his quilt, and Judy turned off the ceiling lamp.

  “How will I know if I’m snoring?”

  “Don’t worry, I’ll let you know.”

  “I like being here, Judy.”

  “Shut up and go to sleep.”

  7

  So William came along. What else was there to do? He had no passport, and they couldn’t just put him on a boat. Besides, it seemed that nobody even had the faintest idea that he had left. Of course, that would change when his mother came home from Spain, or the school term started. Judy turned over various possibilities in her mind, but the main problem was that Mr Balderson was hopelessly uninterested in making any effort to get rid of William. Quite the opposite, in fact. Over their morning porridge, as the traffic thundered past on the motorway and a pale winter sun did its best to penetrate the low-lying mists of Northern Germany, he listened intently as William chattered about the great ash tree, and his mysterious find.

  “Our fate is a kaleidoscope,” he said, when William paused for breath. “All those little coloured pieces jumbled up, then a little twist and hey presto! The pattern appears. Each one of us is a little coloured piece. We all have our parts to play. Perhaps William here has the leading role? Is this really his story? Are you and I mere bit-players, Judy? Extras? Crowd scene? We do not know, we cannot say.”

  Judy took another spoonful of porridge. Normally she hated porridge, absolutely loathed it, but that might have been partly to do with her father, who said, How could a country that produced Isaac Newton and trial by jury create this? It really is a blot on their copybook. When she tried to refuse the porridge she had got a long harangue from Mr Balderson, who said that he had learned the true art of porridge-making from a crofter in the Western Isles, and that his porridge was a culinary masterpiece worthy of Escoffier, and that nobody who travelled in his camper van was permitted to refuse porridge, and generally speaking he had no truck with young people who didn’t eat.

  Actually, Judy found that piping hot porridge with syrup wasn’t a totally ghastly experience.

  She swallowed her mouthful. “If we are all just characters in a story, then who is telling it? Who is twisting the kaleidoscope?” she said to Mr Balderson, and he looked absolutely delighted. Sighing with pleasure, he leaned back against his seat cushion and took a sip of tea.

  “Oh yes. One of the great questions. One of the real questions. One of the questions that has a thousand answers or none.”

  “Thanks, very enlightening.”<
br />
  “At your age, a touch less uppitiness would suit very nicely.”

  Judy looked down at her bowl. She knew that she was like that, making sarcastic remarks, and it wasn’t one of the good things about her. If there were any good things.

  “Sorry. But things just happen, don’t they, one after another, in an endless line from the beginning. All these patterns and the warp and weft of fate…”

  “Well, well, you are an old fogey, aren’t you? The whole business of life is just bits of stuff bumping into each other, is it? Like billiard balls?”

  “Sort of, I suppose.”

  “Not many physicists would agree with you these days, but never mind that. What about this: to someone who is tone-deaf, a Bach cantata is just a long line of notes happening one after the other. Are you tone deaf, Judy, or can you hear the music? Do you even want to? And as for the composer, well, does it really matter? When you hear a wonderful piece of music – something that makes you happy and sad at the same time, something that makes the hair on the back of your neck stand on end – then the question of who or what made it is mere curiosity. And you know what they say about curiosity.”

  “I don’t know,” said William. He was looking a lot better than last night, but rather crumpled, and, thought Judy, not very clean. They would have to stop and at least buy him a toothbrush.

  “It killed the cat,” said Judy, and instantly regretted it.

  “Whose cat?” asked William.

  “Nobody’s in particular.”

  “How can you kill nobody’s cat?”

  “It means that cats in general are curious, and being curious can get you into trouble.”

  “Cats aren’t curious. Duck-billed platypuses are curious, though, they have beaks and fur and…”

  Judy frowned.