The Truth
By Zizou CorderPuffin Books
Copyright © 2006 Zizou Corder
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780142407059
Chapter One
One Saturday afternoon in September Charlie's mum was on a ladderin the backyard, doing things to plants halfway up the wall.Charlie didn't know what, or care. He liked the yard, the gorgeoushoney-lemon smell of the flowers, and the great Christmas treethat hung over the back wall, with its shiny silver and green andpurple fruits that he would harvest toward midwinter and sell atthe market. He liked climbing around in the tree and in the ruinsbeyond, running down to the river, and talking to the cats that liveddown there. But he didn't care what his mum was doing on the ladder-untilhe heard a shriek and a clatter and a rude word, and heran out to see. His mum was on all fours, on the fallen ladder, on the ground,with festoons of the honey-smelling plant around her, her red hairwild and her face as white as ice.
"Stupid, stupid," she was muttering.
"No you're not," said Charlie. He offered her his hand and shepulled up to her feet, wincing. "You wouldn't be a professor if youwere stupid."
"Clever people can do stupid things," she said. "Let me into thehouse."
She hobbled inside and Charlie followed, worried but not worried,because his mum was the strongest, cleverest, bravest personin the world, apart from his dad, of course, and if anyone couldhandle falling off a ladder, she could.
"Owwwww," she said. Charlie had already passed her the aloe, apiece of chocolate, and a small bottle of her secret shock remedy,which she made in her laboratory and which smelled of comfortand brandy and sweet winter herbs.
"Best take a look," she said, and slid carefully out of the longleather breeches she always wore for outdoor work.
"Owww," they both said, at the sight of the raw red scratches,the pinky purple swellings, and the nasty gashes that adorned hershin. Charlie handed over a clean paper towel and Mum dabbed ather wound.
"Bring me some Bloodstopper Lotion," she said. "Twenty-sevenRed. It's in the rack." She handed Charlie the keys to her lab. Charliesmiled. Mum, Professor Magdalen Start, PhD, MD, PQRST,LPO, TP, kept her laboratory locked on strict instructions of thegovernment, indeed of the Empire, because her work was so importantthat no one was to be allowed to know anything about it.Except of course for Charlie's dad, Aneba Ashanti, Doctor of Endotericaand Tropical Sciences at the University of Accra in Ghana(currently on sabbatical at London University), Chief of Knowledgeof all the Tribes of Akan, and Brother of Lions, who knew allabout it because they worked together. Charlie's dad knew everything that had ever been known about the plants of the WestAfrican forests, what they were good for, and what was good forthem.
"Your mum and I have different ways of knowing about thesame thing," Dad would say. "Very good system."
Charlie was honored. Every day these days he was allowed to donew things: new things that showed they realized he was growingup. Last Christmas he'd been allowed to sell the shiny fruit at themarket by himself, alone; on his way home from his lessons he wasallowed to hang out for a while at the fountain, drinking sherbetsand playing football or aware with the other big kids. And now hewas allowed to fetch a lotion from his mother's lab. It felt good,being big.
"In the rack by the door," Mum said with a little smile.
He'd been inside the lab before, of course. As a baby, after they'dcome here to London from Africa, he'd practically lived in there.While Mum worked, mixing and smelling and flicking between herburners and her computer screen, he would paddle around theplace in a sort of pair of shorts hung on a wheeled frame: He couldscoot and whiz, and once disappeared completely under a table, soMum couldn't find him. He'd loved his shorts on wheels.
He loved the lab too. Because it was in a separate shed in thebackyard, it had always seemed like a different world. Pushingopen the door now, he got a waft of the smell of it: somewhere betweena cake baking, old books, sweet strong incense, and underneathit the hard cold smell of science. It looked like it smelled. Thewalls were old and paneled with well-polished dark wood. Thetables to the left were gleaming steel with glass cupboards, VDTscreens and instruments of the most precise and modern specifications,while to the left a huge old wooden table stood empty exceptfor a massive globe beneath a rack of hanging dried herbs. Alongthe back wall were stacked shelf upon shelf upon shelf of books-ancientleather-bound tomes, colorful paperbacks, smart-lookinghardbacks, parchments laid out flat, and scrolls, rolled tight andpiled carefully, plus CD-roms and DVDs, and old, old thick blackvinyl discs, which played on a machine with a huge curling horn. Itseemed to Charlie that all the knowledge in the world, past andpresent, lived in his mother's laboratory, and if it didn't you couldfind out here where it did live.
By the door was a tall flattish wooden rack, made up of rows ofshelves. On each shelf was a row of small, shiny, colored glass bottles,held in place by a little wooden bar along the front. If youlooked carefully you could see that the color was not in the glass,but in the contents of the bottle, and they were arranged in order ofcolor like a rainbow: Red Orange Yellow Green Blue Indigo Violet.Charlie craned up to where the reds began in the top left-handcorner, and scanned along the shelves looking for 27 Red. There itwas: a deep crimson, blood-colored, only not so thick-looking. Hereached up to take it and, giving the lab a last yearning look, took itback to where his mother was waiting in the kitchen.
"Thank you, sweetie," she said, and was just about to lift the lidand drip a drop of the lotion onto her still-bleeding wound, whenshe hesitated.
"Bring me a pen and paper," she said suddenly.
Charlie fetched one of the strong swirling glass pens that theyused for every day, and the green kitchen ink, and a scrap of envelope.
"Proper paper," she said, and he brought a piece of heavy cleanparchment from the drawer.
Mum pulled herself up, and as she did so the movement made theblood bubble a little more from her shin. She took no notice. Instead,she lifted her leg and laid it along the kitchen table, as if shewere doing her yoga, or ballet. The parchment lay on the kitchentable; the ink was ignored. Mum took the Venetian pen and cautiouslydipped it in the beading blood of her wound.
Charlie stared.
"Don't worry," she said to him. "I just thought of somethingI've been meaning to do for a while."
He still stared.
Mum started to write. By dipping the sharp little nib in her deepestcut she had enough blood to write a full, elegant paragraph, anda signature.
"What is it?" he asked, feeling a little ill.
"You'll know soon enough," she said. She flapped the parchmentgently and watched the scarlet turn to a delicate brown. It lookedlike a magical text, an ancient spell, a decree by some all-powerfuland long-dead king or queen.
"I'm putting it up here," she said as she rolled it up, tied itquickly, and popped it behind the photo of her and Aneba on theirhoneymoon in Venice, on the top shelf of the cabinet. "And Charlie..."Here she stopped and looked at him, her blue eyes sure andclear: "If you need to go anywhere, take it with you."
A sudden sharp sense of importance welled up inside him. Shedidn't mean "take it to the bathroom," or "take it when you goto bed." She meant something bigger, more grown-up, more important.Sometimes Charlie felt that the grown-ups around himexisted on that other level-talking of things they didn't mentionto him, taking care of things, dealing with things that were not todo with children. Until recently he'd ignored it, and carried onreading his book or taking extra cake while they weren't payingattention. But lately ... lately there'd been a lot of talking downstairsafter he had gone to bed, a lot of hushed telephone calls, andfurrowed brows. This look in his mother's eyes, this sudden mysteriouswriting in blood, were to do with the same things, he wassure.
Just then the great noise that heralded the Return of Dad startedup. There was a Ghanaian song about dinner-delicious mamunawith spicy dawa dawa-that he sang to himself whenever he wasn'tdoing anything else: "Tuwe tuwe, mamuna tuwe tuwe, abosom darama dawa dawa, tuwe tuwe..." You could hear it from the distanceas he strolled up the street. Then the firm, solid tread of hisfeet crossing the yard, and the jangle of his big bunch of keys becauseonce again he hasn't noticed that the door is unlocked."Three, two, one..." Charlie counted down in his head, and histiming was perfect: On "Blast-off!" came Dad's huge voice callingout, "He-llo! He-llo! Where's my family?"
Charlie's dad, you ought to know, was huge. Not just a big man,but huge. He wasn't technically a giant, but Charlie thought hemight have giant blood, and this worried him sometimes because ifhis dad had giant blood, then so did he, and that made the wholething of "you're a big boy now, growing nice and big like yourdad" a different ball game. Charlie was proud and happy to bebrown-both black like his dad and white like his mum, he said-buthe wasn't sure he wanted to be giant as well.
Once, in a museum, Charlie had seen some armor from ancientGreek times, a breastplate made in the shape of a man's body, withall the muscles and even the belly button molded in beaten bronze.That's what Charlie's dad looked like with his shirt off. Like he wasstill wearing armor. He had huge arms, and the veins on themlooked like rivers on a map, only they stood out; he had huge legs,and shoulders as wide as a small shed, and a neck like a tree, and hewalked straight and tall and smiling, and everyone got out of hisway and turned to look at him after he had passed. When he closeddown the smile in his eyes, and let his mouth lie stern, he was themost frightening-looking man. Then when his smile burst throughand his white teeth shone and his eyes crinkled up and his cheekswent into little apple shapes, he was like the god of happiness.
"We're in the kitchen," called Mum.
"She's broken," called Charlie.
"No I'm not," said Mum, finally dripping the Bloodstopper Lotiononto her cuts, and the evening descended into a sweet time ofMum lying around telling jokes, Dad cooking dinner, Charliewatching The Simpsons and staying up late because there are no lessonson Sunday. He forgot all about the parchment written inblood, and didn't think of it again until six months later, when hecame home to find that his parents had disappeared.
Chapter Two
He'd been at his lessons with Brother Jerome: Arabic, Latin, mathematics,music, and the history of human flight, and his head wasaching from the amount of studying he had done. Mum said helearned more being on his own with a tutor and no doubt it wastrue, but sometimes he just wanted to fool around a bit during hislessons, like he'd read about in stories, and how could you do thaton your own? So after his lessons on that day he headed down tothe fountain to play football with the schoolkids. Steve Ubsworthmight be there, or Lolo and Jake, or Becks and Joe Lockhart. None of them were around. But Rafi Sadler was. He was leaningagainst the tree and calling younger boys to him with a flick of hishead, and whispering to them. Rafi certainly wasn't a schoolkid,and he was too old to be called a boy, but he wasn't really an adulteither. Everybody knew Rafi. He was tall and handsome with sleekshaved black hair, and he gazed at you from big brown eyes withthe thickest lashes-almost girly lashes, but no one would say that.He wore a long leather jacket and had a funny little light beard,shaved into shape. He wasn't really old enough to have a beard andit wasn't a very good one. He always had money and adults sometimeswondered where it came from.
Today Rafi deigned to join in the football for a minute or two.People let him through, and didn't tackle him, and not just becausehe was strong. Soon he went back to leaning, and talking on his cellphone. Part of Charlie longed for Rafi to call him over, but Rafi hadnever taken much notice of Charlie.
The football had made them hot, so they all got some cherry sherbetoff the guy with his white wooden cart piled high with crimsoncherries and jugs of sugar-cane syrup, and drank it frothy and coolfrom his tall glasses. One of Rafi's boys took him a glass, but hedidn't touch it. Instead, he strolled over to where Charlie was.
"Nice haircut," he said. Charlie's mum had shaved his head theday before. This time she'd cut in a design of two crocodiles withone belly-each had a head and a tail and four legs, but they wereset like an X, and the center of the X was their shared belly. It wasan Adinkra symbol from Ghana: It was about how, though we alleat with different mouths, we have only one belly between us.
"Thanks," said Charlie, surprised. Rafi never talked to him. Charlie'sparents used to know his mum, Martha, and Charlie knew thatRafi lived alone with her, and had left school years ago and hadbeen in trouble, and he knew that Rafi was not the kind of guy whowould talk to him. That's all he knew.
Charlie couldn't think of anything else more interesting to say.He smiled again, and then kind of nodded. Then Rafi had strolledaway again, and Charlie was so embarrassed that he went home.
The sun was heading west, and as he got back toward his streethe could smell the evening river smell rising up cool and damp tomeet the evening cooking smell of woodsmoke and garlic. Theflowers hung heavy on the trees in the front gardens as he turnedinto his street. He was wondering what was for supper and hopingthere would be some cherries left over from breakfast. He'd besorry when the cherry glut was over-but soon the gardens wouldbe full of strawberries, so there was that to look forward to. Andwho knows, maybe a ship full of fruit would come up from thesouth. As he approached his house, he was fantasizing about theold days, when you got all different kinds of fruit at all differenttimes of year, coming in airplanes from far, far away ... Ah, well.Cherries would do for now.
When he got to his front garden, the door was closed. Therewere no lights on, and there was no good smell seeping out. Hebanged on the door: nothing. He peered through the window: Hecouldn't make out much in the dim light, but he could see there wasno movement, no sign of life.
Charlie went around to the back. Back door shut, no lights. Hebanged on that door. Nothing. Turning to the wall to see if therewere any cats around, whom he could ask if they'd seen anyone, hesaw something that clutched his heart. The door of his mother's labwas open. Not just unlocked-open.
He stared at it for a moment.
Continues...
Excerpted from The Truthby Zizou Corder Copyright © 2006 by Zizou Corder. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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