The Portal Read online

  Uncle Larry thought about it.

  ‘It might work,’ he said. ‘I’ll have a talk to her.’

  ‘She’s coming up to the farm at eleven,’ said William. ‘I’ll tell you when she’s here, shall I?’

  ‘That would be… Yes. Thank you.’

  ‘Right…’ William turned to leave. ‘And the bricks came ten minutes ago. You’ve got forty-three messages.’

  Uncle Larry stared thoughtfully at the door for several seconds after William had gone. The boy was more like his father than he had realized, he thought. He had that same knack of coming up with the solution to a tricky problem, but making it sound as if he was asking your advice.

  He smiled to himself and sipped his tea. He wasn’t sure why but for some reason he was feeling much more cheerful.

  The meeting at eleven o’clock lasted barely an hour. Uncle Larry, Brin, William and Mrs Duggan sat in the sitting room down in the station and Uncle Larry ran over what Mrs Duggan should do and how much she should be paid for doing it. Brin gave her a phone so that she could keep in touch with Emma even when she was out with the sheep, and William showed her how to use the lift down to the station by dialling 1066 on the office phone.

  The only problem, as Mrs Duggan pointed out, was what they should do if a passenger arrived while William was at school, and it was William who suggested that he didn’t go back to school at all.

  ‘There’s only three more days before the holidays,’ he pointed out. ‘How about someone rings in and says I’m still sick?’

  ‘Sounds like the simplest solution,’ Uncle Larry agreed. ‘Let’s do that then. Any other problems?’

  ‘Amy won’t mind, will she?’ William looked at Mrs Duggan. ‘Moving up here, I mean?’

  ‘Can’t see why,’ said Mrs Duggan. ‘Spends most of her time here anyway.’

  ‘And Timber?’ William looked across at the dog who had been following the conversation with rapt attention. ‘He’ll be happy sleeping in the kitchen or something, will he?’

  ‘He’s a dog,’ said Mrs Duggan briefly. ‘He’ll do as he’s told.’

  Both Uncle Larry and Brin left that afternoon. Uncle Larry left first, after giving careful instructions on what William should do if Federation Security got in touch with news about his parents.

  ‘You send me an emergency brick,’ he said. ‘Emma’ll tell you how. And if a problem comes up you can’t solve, tell Brin. He’s closest and he can be straight over.’ With a wave of his hand and a promise to be back in a week to see how things were going, he disappeared through the Portal.

  Brin left an hour later after a ferocious burst of cleaning that left the station smelling rather heavily of bleach. ‘You’ve got a passenger at four thirty,’ he reminded William as he made his way to the Portal. ‘You’re sure you don’t want me to stay and help?’

  William said he thought he’d be OK.

  ‘In that case I shall leave you to it…’ Brin polished an invisible smudge of dirt from the wall, before stepping on to the Portal surface. ‘Don’t forget now. A message every day to tell me how it’s going!’

  Ten minutes after he’d gone, Mrs Duggan appeared outside the back door with six suitcases she had brought up on the tractor. Only one of them belonged to her. The other five were for Amy, and William helped carry them inside and up to Daniel’s room. Mrs Duggan made up the beds and started unpacking, and then there was just time to get tea ready before Daniel and Amy got back from school.

  At a quarter past four William went back down to the station to greet his next passenger.

  Prince Helmut of Tarkis was a tall, good-looking young man, who was clearly a bit disappointed to find William in charge of the Portal.

  ‘I don’t mean to be rude,’ he said, ‘but I was really hoping to see your father.’

  ‘I’m afraid he’s away at the moment,’ said William.

  ‘Away? Do you know when he’s going to be back?’

  ‘Not really,’ said William. ‘Did you need him for anything urgent?’

  ‘Well, it wasn’t that important.’ Prince Helmut spread himself out on a sofa in the station sitting room. ‘I just wanted to tell him how well everything had worked out and… and say thank you.’

  ‘Oh,’ said William. ‘Thank you for what?’

  Prince Helmut’s family, it turned out, had ruled the tiny world of Tarkis for more than three hundred years, but recently there had been demands for the King to abdicate.

  ‘The people kept saying they wanted a parliament,’ the Prince explained, ‘and it looked like the end of the line for us royals. But then one day, on the way back from a holiday on Cygnus, your father tells my father that when the same thing happened here, your people chose to have a parliament and a monarchy. He told Dad exactly how they did it, Dad came home and tried it – and it worked! We’re more popular now than we’ve ever been!’

  ‘Oh, good,’ said William.

  ‘It is very good!’ the Prince agreed. ‘My father’s having the time of his life, going around giving state banquets and military parades and so on, but…’ His face clouded for a moment. ‘I’m not quite sure what I’m supposed to do. While I’m waiting to be king. I was hoping your father might know.’

  ‘We have a prince who’s waiting to be king,’ said William, ‘but I’m not sure what he does.’

  Prince Helmut looked up. ‘Is there any way you could find out?’

  William asked Emma to set up a connection with the Internet and then tapped Prince Charles into Google. There were quite a lot of sites about Prince Charles and Prince Helmut sat glued to the screen in the drawing room, furiously downloading notes on to a recording device that hung round his neck. ‘The Prince’s Trust…’ William heard him muttering, as he brought in tea and sandwiches. ‘…I want all the stuff on that. And the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award. And I want lots of pictures of this garden at Highgrove…’

  He was still at it nearly five hours later, when William brought him a last pot of tea and warned him it would soon be time to leave.

  ‘Nearly finished!’ said the Prince. ‘There’re some great ideas here! Can’t imagine why I didn’t think of them myself. I am very grateful to you!’ He smiled happily at William. ‘And I shall tell your father so next time I see him. Where is he, by the way?’

  William admitted that he didn’t know, and found himself telling Prince Helmut the story of his parents’ disappearance.

  ‘Extraordinary!’ said the Prince when he’d finished. ‘Has anyone thought of asking a Guardian?’

  ‘I… I don’t think so,’ said William, who had no idea what a Guardian was.

  ‘The Guardians have Touchstones,’ said Prince Helmut. ‘With a Touchstone you can find out anything that ever happened, anywhere.’

  ‘Can you?’ William wondered why Uncle Larry hadn’t suggested this himself.

  ‘Of course, everyone has lots of questions so there’s a waiting list of ten or fifteen years,’ said Prince Helmut, ‘but one of the benefits of being in a royal family is that you get automatic access to a Guardian once a month.’ He looked across at William. ‘I could ask what’s happened to your parents when I get home, if you were interested.’

  ‘Oh, I am,’ said William. ‘Very interested. Thank you.’

  When Prince Helmut had left, William came back upstairs and found Mrs Duggan clearing up in the kitchen.

  ‘Children both asleep,’ she said. ‘Put out clean clothes for Daniel, and Timber’s done the chickens.’ The dog lay curled up in his basket by the cooker. His eyes opened briefly to look at William, then closed again. ‘How did it go with His Majesty?’

  ‘Not too bad,’ said William.

  Mrs Duggan wiped her hands on a towel and glanced round the kitchen to check there was nothing out of place. ‘Thought I’d do the bricks tonight. Let you get a proper sleep.’

  ‘OK,’ said William. ‘And I’ll do getting up Daniel and Amy in the morning.’

  ‘Right.’ Mrs Duggan took a deep breath and looked o
ut the window at the night sky for a moment. ‘You reckon we can do this, do you?’

  ‘I know we can,’ said William. ‘We can do it easy. You’ll see.’

  And, as he spoke, he tried very hard to sound as if he believed it.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  In one way, at least, it turned out to be easier than William had expected. Managing the Portal, he found, rather to his surprise, was really no problem at all. Doing the bricks and looking after the occasional passenger was comparatively simple now that Mrs Duggan was helping out.

  The bit that wasn’t quite so easy, was Daniel.

  William was never sure how it started or why it went so badly wrong, but now that they were living in the same house, Daniel and Mrs Duggan didn’t seem to get on at all. In fact, in a matter of days, things had got to the point where they could barely talk to each other without one of them losing their temper.

  It puzzled William. Admittedly, it wasn’t easy living with someone who tended to leave parts of dead animals lying around, but that was just how Daniel was. Mrs Duggan, however, did not see it that way. When she found a half-eaten rabbit carcass on the breadboard, she would demand that Daniel throw it away. Daniel would say that he needed it for an experiment, Mrs Duggan would tell him not to argue, Daniel would argue… and in no time there’d be a full-blown row going on with all the sound effects of slamming doors and some very loud shouting.

  William wondered if part of the problem was Daniel having to share a room with someone whose clothes took up all of the wardrobe and a good deal of the floor, and whose beauty-care products had taken over the desk. But Daniel said he didn’t mind any of that. It was Mrs Duggan that was the problem and within a matter of days, the two of them could scarcely be in the same room together without one of them saying or doing something that made the other one explode.

  William didn’t know what to do. There had never been rows when his parents were here. He had seen arguments like this in his friends’ houses, but never at home. Disagreements at home were sorted out before they ever got to be rows, though – now that he thought about it – he wasn’t quite sure how this had happened.

  After one particularly violent argument over a dead pigeon in the fridge, William tried asking Daniel not to argue with Mrs Duggan. ‘She’s helping look after us,’ he said. ‘Please, be nice to her!’

  ‘Why should I?’ said Daniel. ‘She’s always picking on me!’

  William pointed out that he was the one who left dead pigeons in the fridge. ‘If Mrs Duggan asks you to do something,’ he said, ‘you just have to do it.’

  ‘No, I don’t,’ argued Daniel. ‘She’s not my mother.’

  ‘But she’s looking after us till Mum gets back,’ said William. ‘And we need her.’

  ‘I don’t,’ said Daniel. ‘And I’m not going to do what she says. She’s ugly, and she smells.’

  William was shocked. If Daniel had ever said anything like that in front of his father he would have… William thought for a moment. His father would obviously have done something to make sure it never happened again but… he wasn’t sure what.

  At the time, all William could think of to say was, ‘That’s very unfair. Mrs Duggan’s working really hard and the least you can do is keep out of her hair until Mum and Dad get back from holiday.’

  ‘When’s that going to be?’ said Daniel.

  And of course William couldn’t answer that.

  He did his best to defuse the situation when he could. He tried to make sure he was around at the times Mrs Duggan and Daniel had to be together – like at meals or bedtime – to keep things calm. The evenings were particular danger points. Daniel would be tired and in need of careful handling, but Mrs Duggan didn’t seem to know this. She would tell him not to do something, Daniel would do it, Mrs Duggan would shout at him, Daniel would shout back and off they’d go again.

  As long as William was around, he could step in and steer one of them out of the room, but sometimes he wasn’t there. Sometimes he was busy down at the station, looking after a passenger or the bricks, and it was on one such occasion that the Big Row happened.

  William was looking after a passenger called Mrs Wharton, an elderly woman who wrote children’s books and wanted to know what sort of stories William had enjoyed when he was smaller. He was telling her about The Very Hungry Caterpillar, when Amy rang down from upstairs and said simply, ‘They’re doing it again.’

  It was nearly an hour before William could leave and go back upstairs, and by that time he found Daniel in his bedroom – white, shaking with rage and silent. Somehow, the being silent was worse than if he’d been shouting and screaming.

  ‘She’s taken my skulls,’ he said when William asked what had happened. He pointed to the empty shelves. ‘All of them.’

  ‘Why?’ asked William.

  It turned out this argument, like most, had begun with something very trivial. Mrs Duggan had told Daniel to pick up a sweet paper, Daniel said he wouldn’t because he hadn’t dropped it, Mrs Duggan told him to pick it up anyway, and finally things had escalated to the point where she told him that if he didn’t she would take his skulls and throw them away. And she had.

  William could hardly believe it. ‘Why didn’t you just pick it up?’ he said.

  ‘Why should I? I didn’t drop it.’

  ‘Does it matter?’

  ‘Yes.’

  William sighed.

  ‘I can’t stay here,’ said Daniel. ‘Not with her. I’m leaving home.’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ said William. ‘Wait here. I’ll go and talk to her.’

  William found Mrs Duggan sitting on a log behind the barn, twisting and untwisting a length of barbed wire in her fingers, with Timber sitting beside her.

  He had to tell her, William thought. He had to tell her that taking away Daniel’s skulls for not picking up a sweet paper didn’t make sense. He had to tell her she was supposed to be helping and that, at the moment, she wasn’t. That with all the shouting and yelling, she was only making things worse.

  He sat on the log beside her, trying to think how to say it, but it wasn’t easy to tell someone old enough to be your mother that they were doing it all wrong and, without quite knowing why, he said nothing at all.

  In the end, it was Mrs Duggan who spoke first.

  ‘It was Timber,’ she said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘That’s how I knew about the Portal. It was Timber.’ Mrs Duggan put the barbed wire carefully on the log beside her. ‘Week I started work here, I ran over him with a tractor. Rope round his neck got caught in the axle, next thing, squeal, thump, and the back wheel’s run over his head.’

  ‘Oh,’ said William, not quite sure where this conversation was going.

  ‘Your dad heard the screams. Came running out with a medipac. I tell him it’s no good, the dog’s dead. He tells me to step back and then takes out this… this Life Support, and he picks up the dog and tells me to follow him inside.’

  Mrs Duggan shook her head slowly as if she still found the whole thing hard to believe. ‘Found out after what he’d done. Used his own life energy to keep Timber alive. Took him through the Portal. Got him patched up. Smarter than ever when they brought him back. Done something to his brain.’

  She reached out a hand to scratch the top of Timber’s head. ‘Dog was all I had, then. Your dad knew that. Never forgotten it.’ Mrs Duggan paused a moment before continuing. ‘So when you ask me to help. Course I say yes. Chance to pay back, you see. Chance to say thank you.

  ‘And I come up here and get it all wrong. Shouting and yelling. Make things worse instead of better. Wanted to help… Owed it to your dad… Wanted to help… Just get it all wrong…’

  Mrs Duggan stared at the ground and a tear trickled down her cheek. It was big, like everything with Mrs Duggan, and it splashed on to the ground leaving a puddle the size of a saucer.

  William had never heard her put so many words together in one speech – or in one week – and he reached o
ut to put an arm round her. Mrs Duggan was too big for the arm to go all the way round, but he did it anyway.

  ‘There has to be something we can do,’ he said, ‘to make things better.’

  ‘Too late for that,’ said Mrs Duggan gloomily. ‘Daniel’s never going to talk to me again.’

  ‘I’m sure it’s not too late,’ said William, ‘and you can leave Daniel to me. But I think we’ll need to give him the skulls back.’

  ‘Got them here.’ Mrs Duggan pointed to a black plastic bag at her feet.

  ‘Good.’ William took the bag. ‘He can have these when he’s apologized, then you two can hug and make up.’

  ‘Hug?’ Mrs Duggan looked rather alarmed.

  ‘It’s all right,’ said William. ‘It was a figure of speech.’

  Over the next few days, William spent some time explaining to Daniel how important it was to be patient with Mrs Duggan, and a lot of time talking to Mrs Duggan about the things that worked with Daniel and the things that didn’t.

  ‘Notice you never have a problem with him,’ said Mrs Duggan gloomily as they stood in the kitchen after lunch one day, watching Daniel and Amy build a bear trap by the outhouse. ‘You tell him to do something, he does it. I tell him and it’s like I’ve asked him to throw himself out of a train.’

  There was some truth to this but, thinking about it, William realized it was also true that he tried to avoid telling Daniel to do anything – unless it was something like not to use the chainsaw. Daniel was the sort of boy who, if you said he had to do something, would immediately want to do the opposite, and shouting at him would only make him want to even more. The trick with Daniel, if you really wanted him to do something, was to get him to agree to it in advance. Once he’d agreed to something, he didn’t mind being told when it was time to get on and do it.

  ‘And it helps, of course,’ William added, ‘if you’ve said nice things to him.’

  ‘Nice things?’ said Mrs Duggan. ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Well,’ said William, ‘it’s like what you do with Amy when you see her in a new outfit. You say “Oh, you look lovely, that really suits you!” That sort of thing.’