The fox cubs were much altered since he first saw them. It was as if their white muzzles had somehow been stretched, and pulled out to accommodate their teeth. Their noses were no longer brown but black. Conversely, their dark chocolate coats had turned to milk chocolate and the sparse wispy hair had been replaced by a thicker woolly pile.
They seemed unsettled when he arrived; only the larger one sat on top of the mound, his tail curled cat-like around his feet. The others yapped and whined anxiously around him, but he paid them little attention. They did not sleep much all that day either and their games were brief and ill-tempered; and much to Billy’s disappointment they spent much of it underground. When they did appear, Billy noticed that one of them was listless, weak and unkempt. He felt something was wrong, but could not think what it was. He waited until it was dark for the vixen to appear, but again she did not. The cubs had gone below and were silent. Billy put his ear to the ground and listened. He could hear nothing. He left them to make his way home for supper.
He found a crowd gathered under the amber glow of the light outside the flats. Billy had to shield his eyes against the glaring headlights of a car as he ran towards it. Everyone was there – Aunty May running out in her fluffy mauve slippers and her curlers – and all the children were there in their dressing-gowns. But the crowd was strangely silent. As Billy pushed his way through he already knew what he would find. The vixen lay in the gutter, tongue lolling out, her unseeing eyes glinting fluorescent orange under the light. She was matted and muddied, and somehow smaller in death.
‘I tried to stop – thought it was a dog,’ said the man who was kneeling over her. ‘Just staggered out in front of me, she did, almost as if she wanted me to hit her. Looked to me as if she’d been hit once already – either that or she was drunk. She was dragging her back legs. I just finished her off. That’s all. Not my fault. Only a fox anyway. Don’t belong to anyone, does it?’ So many feelings were racing through Billy’s mind; grief at the vixen’s death, anger at its cause, and anxiety for the fox cubs left hungry in the Wilderness.
Everyone of course had to have their look. Someone wanted to cut off the brush for a trophy, but it was agreed in the end that the fox should be dumped in the dustbin for collection in the morning, before it began to smell. Billy made sure which dustbin it was before Aunty May took his hand and hauled him away. ‘I’ve been waiting for you for nearly two hours, Billy,’ she said. ‘Could have been you run over out there. I’ve told you time and again to get back home before dark. Worried sick I was. You got school tomorrow and you haven’t had a bath for days; and look at you, Billy, you’re filthy again. What do you get up to? No point in asking, I know. You never say anything, do you Billy? It’s not fair, Billy. It’s not fair at all.’
Billy stole out of the flat before first light, taking the trowel Aunty May used for her flower boxes and ran down to the dustbin. The vixen lay curled up at the bottom of the dustbin. Were it not for her unnatural stillness she could have been asleep. Billy cradled her in his arms, and keeping away from the street lights ran across the estate towards the Wilderness. The vixen was heavy, heavier than he had imagined, and he had to stop and put her down several times before he reached the fence. The Wilderness was alive with birdsong.
He removed the turf carefully. The earth was soft in the graveyard and within half an hour he had dug deep enough. He prepared a smooth earth bed and laid the vixen gently to rest. He hated to cover her up, but once he had begun the job he wanted to finish it and was quick about it. He laid the turfs back over the earth and trod them down with his foot. He stood for a moment looking down at the grave. ‘I’ll look after them for you,’ he said. ‘Don’t you worry. I promise I’ll look after them.’
He found a small branch that had fallen from the lime tree and pulled off the twigs until he was left with a cross. He pushed it firmly into the ground, picked a few primroses from the ruins and covered the grave with them. Then he turned away and left her there.
Inside the walls of the ruined chapel nothing stirred. Billy knelt down at the mouth of the den and spoke in a whisper. ‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘It’s Billy, Billy Bunch. I’m your mother now, d’you hear me, and I’m going to be looking after you. Be back at lunch time with some food. You’ll be all right. You’ll see.’ And he ran down to the canal and washed the earth off the trowel.
Had he looked up then he would have seen the swan watching him, motionless in the black water. But he did not.
He turned and made for home. The street lights were still on as he raced across the estate. He had the presence of mind, before he climbed into bed, to take a tin of dried milk and two tins of corned beef from the larder and push them down to the bottom of his duffle bag. The rest he thought he would save back from his school dinner as he had done last winter for the birds.
At school they had an hour’s break for dinner. He usually ate alone if he could find an empty table, and he managed that today, so it was nothing to slip the beefburgers and treacle tart into his duffle bag, and nothing to hide away the two blue plastic bowls. He ran out of the playground and made for the Wilderness. The mound was deserted when he arrived and that suited him. He did not want to frighten them away before they had a chance to get to know him. He opened the corned beef and emptied it out in four separate piles, making a trail of corned beef crumbs right to the mouth of the den. He broke the beefburgers in half and put each half onto the piles of corned beef. The treacle tart had disintegrated in the bottom of his duffle bag, but he gathered the sticky bits to garnish each cub’s meal. The two plastic bowls he filled with water from the canal and then slowly sprinkled on the milk powder and stirred it with his finger until it became thick and creamy. Then he retreated behind his wall to wait. He heard the school bell go for the end of playtime. If he did not go now, he knew he would be missed, and that would mean trouble; but he could not bring himself to leave. He had to be sure they would take the food – he certainly didn’t want anything else to take it. The noise from the distant playground faded and he was left in the sudden silence of the Wilderness.
As he expected, the largest of them came out first. Hesitant and uncertain he sniffed at the corned beef, backed away from it, sat down and ignored it studiously, surveying all around for some minutes before he decided it was safe to try a taste of it. A short yap of command brought the other three tumbling into the open and they attacked one pile together, all four of them, before moving on to the next. It was not as Billy had planned it but he was delighted none the less. They found the milk and lapped both bowls clean. When he was sure they had had their fill he rose up slowly from behind the wall so that they could see him. All four stayed for just a moment by the bowls, looking up at him and licking their lips, before three of them dashed into the den, leaving only the biggest of them behind.
The boy and the fox cub looked at each other in silence for a full minute. Neither moved a muscle. Then the fox turned and walked away. At the mouth of the den he stopped to consider Billy again, sat down to scratch himself and then disappeared into the earth.
CHAPTER FIVE
BILLY WAS SO OVERJOYED AT HIS SUCCESS that he quite forgot to prepare himself for the onslaught that was awaiting him at home. Aunty May was at him before he could close the door behind him. ‘I want to know where you’ve been, Billy,’ she said, her thin lips quivering with rage. Billy looked up at her and felt sorry for her. ‘Mr Brownlow from the school rang me after lunch and told me you had vanished – just not come back, he said – and I’ve been worried sick ever since, sick, Billy. How could you do this to me? Five foster children I’ve had and not one of them ever played truant, not one, until you. And both my own boys never missed a day of school, not one day. It’s too bad, Billy, too bad.’ She was near to tears and Billy liked her at that moment for the first time. Then she spoilt it by following up with the usual threat: ‘Now if you don’t tell me Billy, right now, where you’ve been all afternoon, you know what will happen, don’t you?’
/> ‘Been out,’ said Billy.
‘Where?’
‘Dunno, just out. Didn’t feel well, did I? Came on all dizzy like.’
‘Then why didn’t you come home, Billy?’
‘Dunno. Couldn’t find the way, could I? Dizzy, wasn’t I?’
It was all on the spur of the moment, a lie that was wafer thin and Billy knew it; but as it turned out it was the very best story he could have dreamed up. If he’d had an entire week to make up the story it could not have been better.
Within the hour he was inside the doctor’s surgery and explaining the symptoms in more detail. The doctor, who had tufts of red hair growing out of his ears, pressed and prodded him all over, and Aunty May kept muttering that she’d always fed him right and that no child of hers had ever had this trouble before. In the end the doctor diagnosed a mild infection of the middle ear, gave him some antibiotic and said he should come back in a week if it wasn’t better.
‘What about school, Doctor?’ Aunty May asked, dragging Billy to the door by his wrist.
‘No school,’ said the doctor, without looking up. ‘Up and about at home, but no school. And best to wrap up warm when he goes out. And he should go out. Fresh air is good for all of us. Don’t coop him up.’
Billy could not believe his good fortune as he walked home that evening with Aunty May. She was going on about how she knew all along there must be something wrong with him to go wandering off from school like that, and how Mr Brownlow had no right to accuse one of her boys of playing truant. ‘Teachers these days,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘They’re just too young, like the policemen. It’s what I’ve always said – no experience. You need experience to look after children – and you have to be sensitive. That Mr Brownlow wouldn’t know it if he stepped on a hedgehog with his bare feet. Now Billy, dear, we’re going to have to feed you up and get you strong again, aren’t we?’
So long as Billy was smothered in at least two scarves, a coat and a Balaclava, Aunty May let him go out for long walks on his own, but he had to be back for meal times. Billy mentioned as casually as he could that his favourite food these days was corned beef hash. Of course he detested it, but it had the desired result. Aunty May went out and bought two dozen tins of it – it was cheaper that way – to join the others on the shelf in the larder. Billy thought that he could keep his foxes alive on about two tins of corned beef a day, washed down with milk. And it was not difficult under all his protective clothing to disguise the fact that he was carrying two tins of corned beef each morning when he went out and a plastic bag of milk powder. Aunty May did not seem to notice that the pile of corned beef tins at the back of the larder was diminishing rather too quickly, but just in case she did, Billy made a point of making himself occasional corned beef sandwiches which he forced himself to eat in front of her. And she never even looked in the old tin of milk powder. When it ran out after a few days, Billy spent all his sweet money on replacing it.
Fortunately the fox cubs never seemed to tire of their new diet and came out for it whenever they heard Billy coming through the Wilderness. They would be waiting for him on the mound and although they still kept their distance as he opened the tins and spooned it out onto the grass, they were coming closer to him each day. Billy was often tempted to reach out and touch them as they fed, but he felt that would be a risk, and perhaps a liberty this soon. They would come to him and want to be touched only when they trusted him completely. He would wait.
He would sit cross-legged on the mound, and the fox cubs would play around him now, for the most part ignoring him completely; but occasionally they would all four sit and look at him. He thought he ought to speak to them then, but decided words might be too sharp. So he would hum gently and when they became used to this he would put words to the tunes – his own words and his own tunes. And they listened, ears pricked, heads on one side, fascinated – for a time. But there were always interruptions to spoil his brief concerts – a tempting tail to pounce on, an essential scratch behind the ear, a dead leaf that just had to be chased. As Billy expected, it was always the largest cub that was his most loyal listener, his grey eyes never leaving Billy’s face as he sang.
This fox was the first to take food from Billy’s hand some days later. He was the first to submit to being touched, and once he had consented the others followed almost at once. Now they would play, not just around Billy as he sat on the mound, but with him. They sprang over his legs, hid behind his back, chewed on his shoes and lay up against him to sleep. He had their trust now, and their love. He had kept his promise to the dead vixen.
The absence of the swan was all that saddened him. Every day after he had covered the vixen’s grave with fresh flowers he would make his way through the graveyard to the canal just in case she should be there waiting for him. He was no longer offended that she wasn’t there. Curiously, he felt quite certain that he would see her again one day. Meanwhile he had his foxes to care for, and they needed him.
He stayed with them now every minute he could, only returning home for the obligatory meals and the inevitable questions from Aunty May that he fended off with increasing skill.
All this time Aunty May suspected nothing. When asked where he had been Billy would always just reply, ‘Out’. Only once was his secret nearly discovered, and then it was the foxes’ fault and not his. It was the musky smell of the foxes that Billy brought home with him on his clothes that nearly gave the game away with Aunty May. As he came into the flat one evening, she wrinkled her nose up and insisted on knowing where he had been and what he had been up to. Billy parried the questions as best he could. ‘Then you been rolling in something, Billy,’ she said.
‘No, Aunty May,’ he said. ‘Don’t think I have.’
‘Well you smell something rotten,’ she said. ‘And don’t you come sitting on my good sitting-room furniture smelling like that. I don’t know what you get up to Billy, I really don’t. Sometimes I think I’d be better off without you, I really do. Now get those stinking clothes off. I’ll have to wash them again.’
After feigning another dizzy spell one evening as he got up from the kitchen table after tea, Billy managed to extend the doctor’s diagnosis of his middle ear infection for three more wonderful weeks. By this time, though, the cubs’ appetites seemed to have doubled. They always seemed hungry now, even after their meals, and Billy realised he was not going to be able to supply their food only from Aunty May’s larder for much longer without arousing suspicion. ‘I know you love it, Billy,’ Aunty May had said on more than one occasion, ‘but I must be buying in at least a dozen tins a week of that corned beef. Can’t think where you put it all. Eat me out of house and home you will.’
Suddenly, much to Aunty May’s relief, his dizzy spells ceased, and he returned to school where he had to endure Mr Brownlow’s inevitably sarcastic welcome. Billy had his reasons for going back. He knew that there were always vast quantities of left-overs after school dinners and they had to be put somewhere. He determined to find out where that was. His investigations led him to a row of black dustbins outside the kitchen door behind the school. They were conventionally hidden round the corner and not overlooked by any windows, and he was able to rifle through the dustbins with little chance of being discovered. There was enough there to feed an army of foxes, but he chose only what he thought the fox cubs would appreciate most – sausages, bread rolls and cheese.
As it turned out he chose badly, for when he emptied his duffle bag on the mound that afternoon during lunch break, the fox cubs simply played with the sausages, tossing them into the air and ignored the rest. He tried to encourage them by breaking the sausages open, but although they ate some of the cheese they were still unenthusiastic. ‘What’s the matter with you?’ he said. ‘I can’t get you corned beef all the time. They don’t serve it up at school – no one would touch it if they did. Look, I know it’s school food, but it’s food isn’t it? It’s not that bad.’ But the foxes clearly did not agree and they lay down togethe
r in a disconsolate, disappointed pile. ‘All right,’ said Billy, ‘I’ll see if I can find something better, but it won’t be until after teatime.’ They would not play with him that day, so he left them and made his way unhappily back to school. He would have to raid the dustbins once again, he thought. There was nothing else to be done.
Billy was sitting alone on the steps of the mobile classroom waiting for afternoon lessons to begin and wondering how he could lay his hands on a large supply of corned beef without having to shop-lift it when there was a scream of delight from the direction of the school gates. He ignored it at first, but then sauntered over to see what was up. The playground fence was lined from end to end with children, nosespressed through the mesh and clinging on with their fingers; and there was a rush of running children all about him and the teacher’s strident voice above his head. ‘What’s the matter here?’
‘’S’a fox, sir,’ said someone.
‘Foxes. There’s three of ’em,’ said someone else. Billy barged his way to the front of the crowd.
‘Well I never, bold as brass,’ said the teacher, standing beside him. ‘Never seen that before, have you, Billy?’
‘No, sir,’ said Billy quickly. ‘Never.’
Three fox cubs were sitting out on the grass in the open just outside the fence. The children cooed with delight, but the oohs and aahs were soon superceded by a vociferous band of hunters that aimed their fingers through the wire and blasted away at the fox cubs, who, suddenly alarmed by the distant hullabaloo, wriggled back under the wire and vanished into the undergrowth of the Wilderness beyond.