LITMIR.BIZ

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bellies. When the others had gone home Alexander would stay for a while in the overgrown gully, and lie unseen within earshot of the path and listen to the talk of the people trudging up the hill towards the Heath. And when there was time he would then go to the place he called the Doodlebug House and continued to call the Doodlebug House even after his father told him it was not a doodlebug that had wrecked it but incendiaries and a broken gas main, many months before the flying bombs arrived.

      A flap of corrugated iron, daubed with Danger – Keep Out in wrinkled red paint, was the door to the ruin. The four outer walls still stood to the height of the gutter, framing a square of sky, and within the walls were piles of debris, embedded with fractured joists and floorboards and laths that were like the ribs of a scavenged carcass. Against one of the walls leaned a huge tent of roof tiles, protecting a mantelpiece that had not been damaged at all. A perpetual stink of damp plaster dust and cats and scorched wood filled the Doodlebug House, and silvery ash was in every cranny. Low on the walls were stuck little rags of ash that vanished when he touched them. A book with leaves of ash trembled under the block of the toppled chimney. A skin of ash, pitted by raindrops, covered the door that lay flat in the middle of the house. Lumps of ash like mushrooms lay around the sheltered cradle of broken boards in which Alexander would recline and watch his portion of sky, hearing in his head the doodlebug’s misfiring snarl and then the thrilling moment of silence before it plummeted, a silence that excited him like the moment before he let himself drop from the empty window into the pool of torn bedding and sodden clothes at the back of the Doodlebug House.

      Ash as slippery as sleet coated the joist by which Alexander would climb to the window at the side of the house, to sit between the battens that had been hammered crosswise into the empty frame. There, hidden from view, he would watch the people in the street pass by, or take out his Tales from the Bible, and read the story of the walls of Jericho or the Tower of Babel. Every time he came to the Doodlebug House he would go up to the window, until the day that Mrs Darling walked by and, without raising her head, called out ‘Be careful up there, Alexander’ and waved her hand behind her as if fixing a headscarf that had become unknotted. In later years he would often recall his lookout in the Doodlebug House, but most frequently he would revisit the part of the building that had once been the kitchen. Beached on a hummock that bristled with fractured pipes, there was a bathtub in which he sometimes dozed, and ten feet or so from the bath, wedged into the stump of the stairs, there was a wardrobe door that had a mirror fixed to it. The mirror was cracked from top to bottom, and the door was set at such an angle that, as Alexander neared the top of the hummock, he would find a place from which the mirror showed the wreckage to his left and to his right, but did not show any image of himself. Perched on a raft of wallpapered plywood, his arms held out like a tightrope walker, he stared in fascination at the reflection of the ruin, experiencing the smells and sights and sounds of the Doodlebug House, while apparently invisible. And he remembered that as he squatted on a beam and surveyed the rubble, a sadness seemed to flow through his body, a sadness that seemed to strengthen and purify him, to raise him out of his childhood for as long as it lasted. He was the guardian of the house’s relics, and such was his care for them that fifty years later he could draw a plan of the craters and barrows of the Doodlebug House, mapping the resting place of every item. Behind the bath there lay a washboard with barley-sugar glass rods that had not even been chipped by the blast; beside it was the brown canvas camera case that had been chewed by mice, and the cookery book with the spine that was a strip of bandage clogged with brittle glue. Closer to the wall there was the black iron mincer with its heavy crank attached, and the mangle with hard blue rubber rollers, and the soggy cartons of bandages and rusting nails. Some days he would touch one of the relics or raise it on his open palms and close his eyes, and Mr Fitchie would sometimes appear and look at him, as if across a river.

      Neither would he forget the only time he ever took anyone to the Doodlebug House. Mrs Evans was with them, wearing the big silver brooch in the shape of a sleeping cat, and her green felt hat with a pheasant’s feather tucked under its band. They were at the butcher’s shop, and Mrs Evans made up another rhyme: ‘What a peculiar thing to do, to spend all day in the butcher’s queue, and all for a sausage, or sometimes two.’ When a man behind them started swearing, Mrs Evans cupped her fingers over Alexander’s ears. ‘For what we’re about to buggering well receive may the buggering Lord make us buggering grateful,’ said the man, and from the sly way Mrs Evans looked at Alexander he could not be sure if she had not meant him to hear. Then Mrs Beckwith turned up with Megan, who was holding the shopping bag in front of her, gripping its handles in both fists as if carrying the bag was a serious undertaking.

      ‘Why don’t you two go to the park?’ said Mrs Beckwith.

      ‘We’ll come for you in an hour,’ said his mother. ‘Shall we see you by the pond?’

      Megan submitted the bag to her mother without saying anything, and the idea occurred to Alexander that he should take her to the Doodlebug House. ‘It’s wonderful,’ he told her as they entered the park. ‘It’s like being in a big well, or a castle. The walls are as high as that tree, on all four sides, and there’s nothing in the middle of them.’

      ‘How far is it?’ Megan asked.

      ‘Can’t tell you,’ said Alexander. ‘But we won’t be late back. Promise.’

      Megan looked at the tree to which Alexander had pointed. She made her mouth and eyes slightly smaller, as though she doubted what he said, but then she followed him to the Doodlebug House.

      ‘No one except me has ever been in here,’ he told her. He pulled up a corner of the corrugated iron sheet so that she could crawl in. ‘You mustn’t tell anyone,’ he said.

      Megan stood on a small rectangle of clear floor in the hallway, swatting the dust from her dress. Rising behind her, the walls seemed higher than ever, and the movement of the clouds that were edging over the Doodlebug House made the bricks seem to teeter. Alexander began to climb the joist to his window, but was stopped by Megan’s voice. ‘This is a pile of rubbish, Eck,’ she said, looking about her as if someone who had annoyed her was hiding in the ruin. ‘It’s nothing like a castle.’

      He could not think what to say. He rested one foot on the fringe of floor that stuck out from the wall and held out a hand, though she was a long way below him. ‘Look from up here,’ he said.

      ‘Don’t be stupid, Eck,’ Megan told him. ‘It’s dangerous. I’m going.’ She licked a finger and turned her attention to a mark on her dress.

      Despondent and resentful, he followed her away from the Doodlebug House. ‘You won’t tell anyone?’ he pleaded, when they were back in the park.

      ‘Of course not,’ she said.

      ‘Promise?’ he persisted.

      ‘God, Eck,’ she snapped. ‘Don’t be so boring. Why would I tell anyone? There’s nothing to tell.’

      Alexander returned to the Doodlebug House many times afterwards, and the echo of Megan’s voice was always there. He could no more rid the atmosphere of her irritation than he could get rid of the smell of cats. With his arms crossed he would sit on the lip of the bath and scan the shell of the building, as if waiting with diminishing hope for a friend to answer an accusation. ‘A pile of rubbish,’ he heard her say, and he could no longer bring himself to see it differently. Finally there came the day on which he found that he was in a place that felt like a copy of the Doodlebug House, and he resolved that he would never visit it again.

      He would always remember something of the evening of the day on which he left the Doodlebug House. Sitting on the grass in the garden, he closed his eyes and brought to mind the things that he had abandoned. He could see the slivers of grime between the rods of the washboard and the lustrous disc of white porcelain on top of the bath’s single tap. He could see the rake of shadows on the wall above the upstairs fireplace and the stiff blisters of paint on the back door. He could even taste the bitter air of the Doodlebug House. It was as if he were lying on his cradle of boards, and the Doodlebug House was again a place that belonged only to him.

      When Alexander came out of his daydream a red admiral was closing its wings on a dandelion beside

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