But now, only six months after going off to war, he was back home again. From time to time Alfie would see him around the island, sometimes being pushed in his wheelchair along the path by his mother, sometimes limping on crutches, a couple of medals pinned to his jacket, his left leg missing. Jack could still put a brave face on it. He’d wave wildly at anyone and everyone he saw. Miraculously, despite his destroyed mind and mangled body, the heart of him still seemed to be there. Whenever he saw Alfie, he’d call out to him, but he didn’t know any more who Alfie was. Alfie dreaded meeting him. Jack’s speech would be garbled, his head rolling uncontrollably, his mouth slack and dribbling, one eye dull and blinded. But it was the tucked-up trouser leg that Alfie could not bear to look at.
Alfie hated himself for doing it, but once or twice he had even hidden himself behind some escallonia hedge when he’d seen Jack coming, just to avoid having to meet him. Sometimes though, there was no way out, and he’d have to force himself to go over and say hello to him, to confront again the leg that wasn’t there, the livid scar across Jack’s forehead where the shrapnel had gone in, and where, as his mother told him every time they met, it was still lodged deep in his brain. “How are you today, Jack?” he’d say. And Jack would try to tell him, but the words came out as scrambled as his mind. He would keep on trying, desperate to communicate. Humiliated, frustrated and angry, Jack would often have to turn away to hide his tears, and then there seemed nothing else to do but to leave him. It shamed Alfie every time he did it.
So during that summer, for Alfie, as for so many, the finding of ‘Lucy Lost’ – as she was now known all over the islands – had been a welcome distraction. She took everyone’s mind off poor Jack Brody, and the loss of Martin and Henry. The overwhelming shadow of the war itself receded. Lucy Lost gave them all something else, something new, to talk about. Speculation was rife. Imagination ran riot. Rumours were everywhere – plausible, or implausible, it made no difference. Stories and theories abounded, anything that might possibly explain how Lucy Lost had turned up alone and abandoned on St Helen’s, with nothing but an old grey blanket and a raggedy teddy bear with one eye and a gentle smile.
How had she got there? How long had she been there? And who on earth was she anyway? Everyone wanted to know more about her, and if possible to catch a glimpse of her. A few of the most inquisitive had even gone so far as to take a trip over to St Helen’s to scour the Pest House and the island for any telltale clues. They had found nothing. All anyone knew for sure was that her name was Lucy, that this was the only word the strange little girl had ever uttered, and that Big Dave Bishop had discovered the teddy bear and the blanket in the Pest House – both presumably hers. Big Dave had talked a lot about his discovery – but, true to his word, had made no mention of the name embroidered on it. There was so little to go on. But what the islanders didn’t know about Lucy Lost, they more than made up for by invention.
The stories became more and more fantastical. It was said that Lucy was deaf and dumb, and so she had to be “a bit mazed in the head”, like Uncle Billy. Just as he was ‘Silly Billy’ to some, so she was ‘Loony Lucy’. Others thought her mother must have died in childbirth, that she had been marooned on St Helen’s, deliberately abandoned there by a cruel father who had tired of providing for her.
There were other stories going round too, that she was the child of one of those unfortunates who had been quarantined in the Pest House on the island centuries before, that she had perished there long ago, and ever since had wandered the island, a lost soul, a ghost child. Or maybe, it was said, Lucy Lost had fallen overboard from some ship in the Atlantic and had been saved from drowning by a passing whale and carried safely to shore. It could happen, some argued. Hadn’t Jonah himself been saved just like that in the Bible? And hadn’t the Reverend Morrison only recently preached a sermon about Jonah in Bryher Church, telling everyone that these stories from the Bible weren’t just stories, that they were the truth, the word of God himself, God’s truth?
Then, most fantastical of all perhaps, and certainly the most popular theory of all, there was the mermaid yarn – Alfie had heard it often enough in the schoolyard. Lucy Lost was really a mermaid, and not just any mermaid, but the famous Mermaid of Zennor, who had swum over to the Scilly Isles from the Cornish coast many years ago, who had come up out of the sea on to St Helen’s, and sat on the shore there and sung sweet songs to passing sailors and fishermen, to tempt them on to the rocks, combing her hair languorously as mermaids do. But she had grown legs – mermaids can do that, some said, like tadpoles. Doesn’t a tadpole grow legs out of a wiggly tail every spring? All right, so they might not sing songs or comb their hair, but they grow legs, don’t they? All these stories were so unlikely as to be ridiculous, laughable, and quite simply impossible. It didn’t matter. They were all fascinating and entertaining, which was probably why the mystery of Lucy Lost remained the talk of the islands for weeks and months that summer.
Most of the islanders did realise, of course, when they really thought about it, that there had to be some more rational, sensible explanation as to why and how Lucy Lost had been marooned on St Helen’s, how someone so young could have survived. They all knew that if anyone had any idea of the truth of all this then it would very likely be Jim Wheatcroft or Alfie, who had found her in the first place, or Mary Wheatcroft who was looking after her at Veronica Farm on Bryher. Surely they would know. Maybe they did know. They were certainly being overly secretive about her and protective, as they always had been about Silly Billy, ever since Mary had brought him back from the hospital. They all knew better than to ask questions about Silly Billy – he was family after all – that Mary would snap their heads off if they dared. But Lucy Lost, they thought, wasn’t family. She was simply a mystery, which was why, wherever any of the family went, they were liable to be badgered by endless questions and opinions from anyone they met.
Mary was able, for the most part, to keep herself to herself, to avoid too much of this intrusion into their lives, staying inside the farmhouse and around the farm as much as possible. But she did have to leave Lucy alone in the house, and venture off the farm at least twice a day to visit Uncle Billy to bring him his food, and tidy up around him as best she could. She’d find him in the boathouse, in the sail loft above, or more often these days out on Green Bay itself, on the Hispaniola, but always working away.
She’d been bringing him his food, seeing to his washing, cleaning around him, looking after him, for five years or more now. She’d done this every day without fail, ever since she’d brought him home from the hospital in Bodmin, from the County Asylum, or the ‘madhouse’, as everyone called it. It was on her way to and from Green Bay to see to Uncle Billy that more often than not she’d meet one or two of her neighbours on the beach. Some, she knew, had been deliberately loitering there with intent to ambush her, and, whoever it was, sooner or later they would begin to ply her with questions about Lucy Lost. It hadn’t escaped her notice that before the coming of Lucy she had hardly ever met anyone on her way to or from Uncle Billy. She fended them all off.
“She’s fine,” she’d say, “getting better all the time. Fine.”
But Lucy wasn’t fine. Her cough may not have been as rasping, nor as repetitive and frequent as before, but at night-times in particular it still plagued her. And sometimes they could hear her moaning to herself – Alfie said it was more like a tune she was humming. But moaning or humming, it was a sound filled with sadness. Mary would lie awake, listening to her, worrying. Night by night lack of sleep was bringing her to the edge of exhaustion. She gave short shrift to anyone who turned up at the door ‘just visiting’, but quite obviously trying to catch a glimpse of Lucy. Her frosty reception seemed in the end to be enough to deter even the most persistent of snoopers.
It fell to Jim much more often to confront the endless inquisitiveness about Lucy Lost. Like it or not, he had to mend his nets and his crab pots down on Green Bay, where all the fishermen on the island
always gathered together to do the same thing when the weather was right. He had to see to his potatoes and his flowers in the fields. He had to fetch seaweed from the beaches for fertiliser, and to gather driftwood there for winter fires. Wherever he went, whatever he was doing, there were always people coming and going, friends, relations, and they all pestered him about Lucy Lost at every possible opportunity.
If Jim was honest with himself, he had at first quite enjoyed the limelight. He had been there with Alfie, when Lucy Lost was first discovered. They had brought her home. All the attention and admiration had not been unwelcome, at first. But after a week or two he was already tiring of it. There were so many questions, usually the same ones, and the same old quips and jokes bellowed out across the fields, or over the water from passing fishing boats.
“Caught any more mermaids today, have you, Jim?” He tried to laugh them off, to remain good-humoured about it all, but he was finding that harder by the day. And he was becoming ever more concerned about Mary. She was looking tired out these days, and not her usual spirited self at all. He’d tried to suggest, gently, that she might be taking on too much with Lucy Lost, that surely she had enough to do caring for Uncle Billy, that maybe they should think again about Lucy, and find someone else to look after her. But she wouldn’t hear of it.
Alfie too, as time passed, was being given more and more of a hard time over Lucy Lost. Every day at school, he found himself being quizzed, by teachers and children alike, and teased too.
“How old is she, Alfie?”
“What’s she look like?”
“Your mermaid, Alf, has she got scales on her instead of skin? Has she got a fish face? Green all over, Alfie, is she?”
Zebediah Bishop, Cousin Dave’s son, who took after his father and was the laddish loudmouth of the school, had always known better than most how to rile Alfie. “Is your mermaid pretty then, Alfie boy? Is she your girlfriend, eh? You done kissing with her yet? What’s it like kissing a mermaid? Slippery, I shouldn’t wonder!” Alfie did try his utmost to ignore him, but that was easier said than done.
One morning, as they were lining up in the schoolyard on Tresco to go into school, Zeb started up again. He was holding his nose and making faces. “Cor,” he said, “there’s something round ’ere that stinks awful, like fish. Could be a mermaid, I reckon. They stink just the same as fish, that’s what I heard.”
Alfie had had enough. He went for him, which was how they ended up rolling around on the ground, arms and legs flailing, kicking and punching each other, till Mr Beagley the headmaster came out, hauled them to their feet by their collars and dragged them inside. The two of them ended up in detention for that all through afternoon playtime. They had to write out a hundred times, “Words are wise, fists are foolish.”
They were not supposed to talk in detention – you got the ruler if Beastly Beagley caught you – but Zeb talked. He leaned over and whispered to Alfie: “My dad says your mermaid’s got a little teddy bear. Ain’t that sweet? Alfie’s got a girlfriend who’s got a little teddy bear, and who’s so dumb she don’t even speak. She don’t even know who she is, do she? Doolally, mad, off her ruddy rocker, like your daft old uncle, like Silly Billy, that’s what I heard. He should’ve stayed in the madhouse where he belonged, that’s what my ma says. And that’s where your little girlfriend should go, and take her teddy bear with her. Not all there in the head, is she? And I heard something else too, a little secret my dad told me, about her blanket, the one my dad found on that island. I know all about it, don’t I? She’s German, she’s a Fritzy, your smelly girlfriend, isn’t she?”
Alfie was on his feet in a flash, grabbing Zeb and pinning him against the wall, shouting in his face, nose to nose. “Your dad promised he wouldn’t tell. He promised. If you say anything about that blanket, then it’ll make your dad a big fat liar, and I’ll—”
Alfie never finished because that was the moment when Mr Beagley came storming in, and pulled them apart. He gave each of them six of the best with the edge of the ruler, on their knuckles this time. There was nothing in the world that hurt more than that. Neither Alfie nor Zeb could stop themselves from crying. They were stood in the corner all through last lesson after that. Alfie stared sullenly at the knots in the wood panelling in front of his face, trying to forget the shooting pain in his knuckles, fighting to hold back the tears. The two dark knots looked back at him, a pair of deep brown eyes.
Lucy has eyes like that, he thought. Eyes that look into you, unblinking, eyes that tell you nothing. Empty eyes.
STANDING THERE IN THE CORNER, Alfie forced himself to go on thinking of Lucy – anything to take his mind off the agony of his knuckles. He decided he was in two minds about her. He liked having her there in the house. He hadn’t been sure about it at first, mostly because his mother seemed to have become so preoccupied with Lucy that she seemed to have less time for him or for anyone else. Alfie had seen her before like this. It was how she’d been with Uncle Billy, during her long search for him, then her determined campaign, with Dr Crow’s help, to get him out of the asylum in Bodmin, and bring him home so she could look after him. He had understood then why she had to do it, as he understood now that it was the right and proper thing to do, to take Lucy Lost in. He was doing his best to persuade himself not to mind too much.
But he did mind, and he knew his father did too, though nothing had been said. He remembered then what his father always said to him, whenever he needed cheering up: “Always look on the bright side, Alfie.” It wasn’t easy, but as he stood there in the corner feeling miserable, his knuckles paining him, he tried to do it.
At least, he thought, he had a companion in the house now, a sort of sister, however strange, however silent. And he did like going upstairs to see her. He’d even read to her sometimes if his mother asked him to, and he’d never read aloud to anyone before. He hadn’t ever liked reading aloud at school, in case he made mistakes – Mr Beagley didn’t like mistakes – but with Lucy Lost he’d just read the story and listen to it himself as he was doing it. And he liked taking milk and tatty cake upstairs to her for her tea when he came home from school, liked being left in the house to look after her whenever his mother went down to Green Bay to see to Uncle Billy. But he was more and more troubled by her silence, by the vacant stare she gave him. He longed for her simply to say something to him, anything. He had tried to get her to talk, to ask her questions. But she would only lie there, looking blankly up at the ceiling. Asking questions wasn’t working, because she never replied. And talking to her didn’t work, because either she didn’t understand or she wasn’t listening. She simply didn’t react or respond in any way.
Despite all this, he did look forward to being with her, and he couldn’t work out why. It was, he thought, a bit like going to see Uncle Billy down on Green Bay. With Uncle Billy, Alfie would chatter away happily for hours, and all he’d get in reply was a grunt or two, yet he knew Uncle Billy liked him to be there, even if he was deep in one of his black moods. He was sad when he was like that. Alfie could see that Lucy was sad like Uncle Billy was, that she needed company just as he did. That was enough for Alfie. He liked being company for her, as silent and strange as she was. The truth was that, even so, he liked her company too.
Alfie’s knuckles were still tingling. He tried not to think about them and turned his mind instead to Uncle Billy. Alfie knew, as everyone in the family did, that the only way to get Uncle Billy out of one of his ‘grumps’, as they called them, was to talk to him, and go on talking to him. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t. You had to be patient. Uncle Billy could stay in one of his grumps for days sometimes, and, if he was really bad, he’d even stop working on the Hispaniola, and just sit there in his sail loft in the boathouse, staring into space, saying nothing, eating nothing that anyone brought him. But, sooner or later, he’d come out of it, and then there would be days and weeks when he’d be Long John Silver again, working happily on the boat all day, wearing his pirate hat, talking
and singing away to himself.
Whenever Alfie visited on days like this, Uncle Billy would prattle on and on, as he worked on the Hispaniola, about Treasure Island, quoting long passages from the book. It never ceased to amaze Alfie how Uncle Billy could do that. He knew the book by heart from cover to cover, and would talk of the characters in it as if they were real people. About Jim Hawkins, he’d often say: “A good lad and a lot like you, young Alfie.” He’d talk the same way of mad Ben Gunn, or of Captain Flint, the parrot, and of course of “the good ship Hispaniola”.
Whenever he spoke of Treasure Island, Alfie knew it wasn’t just a story to him, but a real and true happening, a story he had lived, was still living whenever he spoke of it or told it. Sometimes he’d even call Alfie “Jim lad”, and Alfie realised then that, for Uncle Billy, it wasn’t just a slip of the tongue, that there were moments when, to Uncle Billy, Alfie really was Jim Hawkins. And he himself was Long John Silver, building his boat, a new Hispaniola, which one day, he said, when it was finished, he’d sail away to Treasure Island again. On those days, he’d be busy from dawn to dusk, sawing or planing or hammering away on the Hispaniola, singing out his pirate’s song at the top of his voice. “Fifteen men on the dead man’s chest, yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum!”
Alfie stood, face in the corner, humming Uncle Billy’s ‘Yo-ho-ho’ song softly to himself, under his breath, so that Mr Beagley could not hear. It was a song of defiance as well as a song of comfort. To hum, to move, would provoke a whack on the head from Beastly Beagley. Lucy’s eyes, the twin knots in the wood panelling, stared back at him. Talking, he thought to himself, had never worked with Lucy as it could sometimes with Uncle Billy. She stayed locked away inside herself, no matter what he said, no matter how long he stayed with her, and to him there seemed very little prospect that this would ever change. Alfie flexed his knuckles. They were still stiff with pain. He would go on talking to her, keep trying. If it worked sometimes with Uncle Billy, then it could work with Lucy. “Always look on the bright side,” he whispered to himself, louder than he had intended.