“I’m going to school here,” he said to Grandpa Ted in the weekly phone call.
“I know,” Teddy said, sounding almost as miserable as Sunny felt. “Your mother’s cooked it up with Antonia. I’m going to try and do something about it, all right? Until then you’re just going to have to be a stoic, Sunny.” Sunny had no idea what a stoic was but it clearly wasn’t pleasant.
The few days before he was due to start school the weather was lovely, as if it had made a point of waiting until there was hardly any time to enjoy it. Sunny played in the overgrown neglected grounds all day long. It was boring on his own and he’d pretty much exhausted his capacity to be a solitary medieval jousting knight, Robin Hood or a jungle explorer. So it was a relief when his father said, “Let’s have an adventure, shall we, Phil?”
Sunny felt that he might have had enough of “adventure.” He had accidentally wandered into the maze a few days ago—he was “officially banned” from it by his grandmother, but as he didn’t even know what it was it was hard to avoid it. It was a terrifying place, completely overgrown, and he had turned back almost immediately—but too late! He was already lost, beset by thorns and hedged in by privet. It was dark by the time Thomas came looking for him, whistling for him as if he were a dog. Sunny had fallen asleep amongst the harsh roots of the hedge and was woken by Thomas flashing a torch on his face and giving him a little kick with his boot to encourage him to get up.
“Why did you do that when you were expressly told not to?” his grandmother shrieked. No care from anyone for the terror he had suffered, of course. He was pretty much used to that by now, so when his father said “adventure” a little voice inside advised caution. It was a word that usually promised much from his father but tended to deliver little. The opposite was usually true with Grandpa Ted.
“Yes, get him out of the way for the day,” his loving grandmother said.
For several days now Dominic had been painting, working all hours, night and day, splashing paint on canvas. “Inspired,” he said. “Doing some brilliant shit.”
Dominic shocked them all one morning by bounding down to breakfast, a meagre meal at the best of times, and calling cheerfully for “Your finest bacon and eggs, Mrs. Kerrich!” when she sidled in with her usual pot of watery porridge. She left griping, “Oh, Gawd, ’ere we go again. ’E’s on the up.” Neither bacon nor eggs appeared, which was no surprise to Sunny, who knew the state of the pantry better than most as he spent a lot of time smuggling himself in there to scavenge for food. Slim pickings, the odd pickled onion or cold potato. Sometimes he ran his finger nervously round the inside of the marmalade pot. Mrs. Kerrich was like a hawk.
Dominic seemed to forget immediately about the bacon and eggs and instead lit up a cigarette. His grandmother smoked a lot as well, the whole of Jordan Manor had a faint wash of yellow to the walls. Dominic’s eyes were bloodshot and he was as jumpy as a frog. “Come on then, Phil,” he said before Sunny had a chance to spoon his porridge into his mouth. “Let’s get going.”
They had walked for hours, sustained by one messy, half-melted Mars bar that Dominic pulled apart and shared. He had taken a couple of little pink pills early in the walk, showing them in the palm of his hand to Sunny and debating with himself whether or not to give a bit of one to him. “Like maybe just a quarter of a tab?” he mused. “Because to trip as a kid, imagine what that would be like.” In the end he decided against it because he would just get “a bad rap” from “the she-wolf.”
They drank water from a rather green-looking pond that Dominic said was a magic source of water and contained, deep down, a toad with a ruby in its forehead. “If you look closely you can see it.” Sunny couldn’t, to his father’s disappointment. They set off again, his father still rambling on about the toad. Sunny was exhausted by now. It didn’t feel much like an adventure.
“I’m tired,” Sunny said. “Can we stop for a bit?” He was worried about how they were going to get back to Jordan Manor. Not walk all the way surely? They had come miles and his legs were getting shaky with tiredness. If Grandpa Ted was here he would have given him a piggy back and said, “Oof, I’m getting too old for this.”
“It’s good exercise for you,” Dominic said, striding on. “Come on.”
Sunny’s face was burning. He knew he was supposed to be wearing a hat and sun cream. He was very thirsty and they hadn’t passed any more ponds, green or otherwise. It struck Sunny that he wasn’t with someone who was actually responsible for him. His father wasn’t really a grown-up, was he? A little spear of fear stabbed him in his tummy. He wasn’t safe out here.