The Switchers Trilogy Part 7

'Ooh,' said Lizzie. 'That did me the power of good, that did. Makes me feel young again.'

But none of the three goats understood a word that she said.

Tess and Kevin hopped over the stone wall which bounded the scrubby field and into a small orchard. Behind them they could hear Nancy bleating pathetically at the loss of her new friends. For a moment or two they dithered, drawn quite strongly by the call of one of their own kind, but then they moved off among the trees.

Tess knew immediately why the others had been so keen that she try out being a goat. She had been sheep, cattle, horses, and recently she had quite often been a deer along with the others in the Phoenix Park, but none of them had felt quite like this. She had realised quite some time ago that her ability to experience the lives and beings of other creatures had an effect upon her personality as a human being. Each time she changed, something of what she learnt of the animal character stayed with her. She had developed quickness of reaction and awareness of her surroundings from the timid creatures of the fields and woodlands: the mice and squirrels and birds. From the farmyard animals she had learnt patience and a kind of resignation. Now, as she felt the full-blooded mischievous nature of the goat, its sharpness and its love of life and wildness and freedom, she became aware of how tame and careful her life had always been. The values that she had absorbed in her succession of comfortable homes and high-cla.s.s schools had prejudiced her more deeply than she supposed. She had always avoided those animals which had characteristics that she perceived belonged to people of a different, inferior cla.s.s. She had never experienced life as nature's scoundrels because of her fear of their human counterparts. Foxes, bats, crows and magpies, rats and stoats were all villainous creatures in her imagination. She had seen herself as being on the other side of an ongoing battle between good and evil.

Now things were beginning to change. Some of that change was certainly brought about by the days and nights of existence as a rat, when she had experienced for herself how it felt to live outside the law, despised and hunted. But there had been good things about it, too. She had discovered a new sense of courage, and a willingness to stand up and put that courage to the test when she had to. It had been exhilarating. She remembered how she had felt when Long Nose had bitten off her tail. She had been utterly fearless at that moment. It had been a very different feeling from her prim and petty resistance of Kevin when they had first met, and she suspected that she would have more useful resources to draw on now if a similar occasion arose. Her time as a rat, and even more so this new, exciting exploration of goatness, had given her a new understanding of Kevin. He was the kind of boy that she knew her parents would view with contempt. They would mistrust his guarded and suspicious manner and be shocked by his outbursts of temper and foul language. He could not, by any stretch of the imagination be cla.s.sified as 'our kind of person'. But Tess had been into his world now, and experienced it from the inside. She knew how all those alien and conflicting feelings arose in him, and how he could not live the life he did without them.

As Tess mused, she and Kevin were wandering slowly through the orchard and browsing on the leaves and twigs that fell within their reach. There were windfalls lying on the ground, apples and pears, but they were small and hard and bitter because of the long spell of cold. The leaves had suffered too, and those that had not already fallen were fibrous and dry, but to a goat they were as delicious as mature cheese.

Tess was surprised by some of the things that she was learning. She found that it was a myth that goats would eat anything. On the contrary, her senses of smell and taste were so refined that she could tell in an instant whether a moth had laid eggs on a leaf or a bird dropping had landed there, even a month ago. She would leave anything that was the slightest bit tainted where it was on the tree, and eat carefully around it. She found that she had a rich and rare sense of her own independence, and that, much as she enjoyed the pleasure of Kevin's company, she would depart from him without hesitation if the need arose. Nancy was still bleating on the other side of the hedge, and although Tess recognised that the sound held within it the desire for company, she knew that Nancy was calling for more than that. For stronger than every other emotion in a goat's heart is the love of freedom. Even here, amid the luxury of the rich lands where food would never be scarce, her goat soul longed for the high, craggy places of the world, places which are of no use to mankind but are the wild, windy kingdoms of the goats.

She and Kevin browsed their way peacefully to the edge of the orchard where two strands of barbed wire reinforced a neglected hedge. On the other side of it, cattle were grazing.

Kevin turned to Tess, and the sly, mischievous glint was in his eye again. Tess knew that for the first time, she was returning it. Together they slipped through the fence as if it wasn't there and strolled out into the field.

The cattle stared, disconcerted, and swung to face them, blowing blasts of steaming air from their nostrils. For the h.e.l.l of it, Kevin jumped at them, and they spun on their heels with surprising speed and careered away across the field. A goat can't laugh, but Tess's heart stretched with mirth as she watched them. Stupid creatures. She despised them.

From where she and Kevin stood, they could see the neatly trimmed hedges of the nearest house, and with another quick glance of agreement, they set out towards it. Behind them the cattle recovered themselves and followed cautiously, closely grouped for safety.

The garden they had seen proved to be impenetrable. The cattle were held back by barbed wire which prevented them from getting anywhere near the hedge, but this was no deterrent to the goats. Nor was the hedge itself, for it was immature and full of gaps. It was fortified, however, by a heavy chain-link fence that even a goat could not work loose, and the two sides of the property that had no hedge were guarded by a high stone wall. Tess and Kevin spent a while nibbling at the protruding sprigs of the hedge, but there was no damage they could do, so they left it and stepped out into the road.

A goat can see over great distances and hear sounds from miles away if it chooses to do so. In the normal course of events, however, it doesn't waste its attention in this way, but holds it to a much smaller radius around its immediate environment. It was not greatly surprising to either Tess or Kevin, therefore, when they found themselves stepping right into the path of an oncoming car. Nor was it particularly dangerous, because a goat thinks fast and acts faster. They sprang out of the way, feeling nothing more than a brief moment of excitement which made them jump and dance for a few yards along the verge, just for the joy of existence. The driver, however, got the fright of her life when the two s.h.a.ggy goats appeared from nowhere, and she swerved much more violently than was necessary to avoid them. When she eventually calmed herself down and reversed out of the hedge, there was a hole in it that would have taken the two goats a week to eat.

Lizzie was standing with Nancy in the scrub behind her house.

'Hush, now, Nancy,' she was saying. 'Shhh. Don't you worry about them two.' She peered between the trees. 'Where is they, anyway? They's gone out of sight, Nancy. They's disappeared.'

As it happened, they had disappeared from Nancy's mind at around the same moment, leaving an abrupt vacuum which she filled by lying down in calm detachment and chewing her cud.

'There's no sign of them at all, Nancy,' said Lizzie. 'I suppose they's forgotten us.' She was right.

The next house the two goats met was surrounded by a stone wall with a wide coping stone running along the top. The wall was high enough to deter a stray cow or sheep, and more than high enough to contain the little terrier who yapped at them from the other side of the gates. He was one of those pampered little dogs that are somehow never to be found in farmyards or houses that have children, and he had never in his life encountered a boot or a rough hand. To protect him against the cold, he wore a red tartan jacket which made him feel a lot bigger and stronger than he ought to have done.

Kevin hopped effortlessly up on to the top of the wall, and Tess joined him. The little dog began to yap hysterically, halfway between the garden wall and the safety of the house, halfway between rage and terror. Inside the house, his mistress turned up the volume on the TV to cover the noise he was making. He hadn't been outside for long, and the fresh air was good for him.

Kevin jumped down without warning and ran full tilt at the dog, who paused for an instant in astonishment, then ran yelping around the side of the house. When Kevin gave up the chase and returned to nibble the top off a young j.a.panese willow, the terrier took up a position on the corner of the house and stood there, watching, with his tail between his legs.

The hours pa.s.sed. Lizzie pottered around the house and garden and waited for her visitors to return. Around mid-afternoon she hacked a couple of parsnips out of the frozen ground of her garden, and collected carrots and a turnip from the potting shed where they were stored in boxes of sand.

'They shouldn't be hungry by the time they gets back,' she said to Nancy, 'but in my experience them teenagers always is, no matter how much you gives them.'

She brought the vegetables into the kitchen and ran water into the sink. Outside the window the sky had clouded over, and as she stood there wondering if it was going to start snowing, she saw a policeman coming down the path.

'Watch out, pussums,' she said. 'You'd better make yourselves scarce. Here comes trouble.'

CHAPTER TWELVE.

LIZZIE WENT OUT INTO the little hallway of her house and stood beside the hat-stand. The policeman knocked on the door. Lizzie sat perfectly still and waited. Moppet offered to sit on her knee, but Lizzie shook her head and held up a hand to stop her. The policeman knocked again. Lizzie reached out and rocked the hat-stand gently, so that it made mysterious creaking and rattling sounds. Then she waited again. After a while, the policeman knocked a third time and called out: 'h.e.l.lo?'

Lizzie stood up and opened the kitchen door and closed it. Then she did it again.

'h.e.l.lo?' called the policeman. 'Anybody home?'

Lizzie went into the kitchen and over to the window, where she made a big show of peering round the folds of the curtain. The policeman saw her, smiled, and lifted his cap.

'Who is it?' said Lizzie.

'No need to be afraid,' said the policeman. 'I'd just like a word with you for a minute.'

'What about?'

'Can I come in? It's awful cold out here.'

Lizzie went back out into the hallway, where she rocked the hat-stand again, tidied up a pile of newspapers and re-arranged the coats on their pegs. There was another knock.

'All right!' said Lizzie, impatiently. 'I's coming.'

At last she opened the door. The policeman made as if to come inside, but Lizzie stood solidly in the doorway and didn't move. He sighed. 'Garda John Maloney,' he said. 'I believe you're known as Lizzie?'

'That's right, yes.'

'Are you by any chance missing two goats?'

'Goats?' said Lizzie. 'I hasn't got two goats, so how could I be missing them?'

'I see. Your neighbours led us to believe that you kept goats.'

'I has one goat. Just one. Her name is Nancy and she's tied up out in the brambles where she always is. Who told you I keeps goats? If anyone has any complaints about Nancy they can bring them to me theirselves or else keep their mouths shut. Nancy has better manners than the rest of that lot put together.'

'No, no,' said the Garda. 'It's nothing like that. It's just that we've got rather a problem, you see.'

And they had, too. In a more built-up area, there might have been some chance of driving those two goats into a corner, but out there in the leafy suburbs, they hadn't a chance.

Tess and Kevin, communicating by a combination of goat gestures and Rat images, were having a ball. Three members of the Garda Siochana and a gathering of neighbourhood residents were red in the face with exertion and fury, but remained utterly helpless. The goats dodged and scrambled, jumped walls and pushed through hedges. They split up without hesitation when they had to, and met up again as soon as they could, and they avoided traps with uncanny and infuriating ease. A local farmer had been called in to help and he had arrived full of cool confidence with his two best sheep dogs. But ten minutes after he arrived, the farmer was coaxing the terrified creatures back into his Land Rover and wondering if they would ever have the courage to work again. Few dogs are a match for a full-grown goat, and a dog that has worked all its life with timid, flock-minded sheep is particularly helpless when it finds itself suddenly looking into the unflinching yellow eyes of one of their brazen cousins.

Lizzie's policeman rejoined the others, leaving her to carry on making her stew. It was simmering away nicely when she heard the two goats returning, their hooves clattering on the frozen ground as they came careering down her path. They swung at full speed into the yard at the side of the house and veered in through the open door of the woodshed. A few seconds later, Tess and Kevin emerged laughing, their eyes still shining with mischief. They had barely got inside the door of the house when three men came running down the path. They stopped outside the front door, blowing hard. One of them was the Garda who had visited Lizzie earlier in the day. The other two were local residents. Lizzie knew one of them, a short heavily-built man wearing a tweed jacket and white breeches. He was a banker, and he had tried on more than one occasion to get her to part with her land.

She got up from her chair and threw open the window. 'Clear off!' she said. 'We got no goats in here. We doesn't want you coming galumphing in here and frightening our chickens and our Nancy. Clear off.'

'But we know they're around here now, Ma'm,' said Garda Maloney. 'We followed them down your track.'

'Well they isn't here now, and we wants to have our dinner in peace. So clear off.'

Garda Maloney restrained his rising temper with some difficulty. 'I'm sorry, Ma'm,' he said, 'but those two goats have been causing havoc up on the estate up there.'

'Neighbourhood, Garda, if you don't mind,' said the banker. 'It's not an estate.'

Maloney sighed in exasperation. 'Neighbourhood,' he said. 'They've been causing havoc in the neighbourhood and I must insist that we have a look round.'

'Have you got a search warrant?' asked Lizzie and, before there was time for an answer, she shut the window and turned her back on it.

'Come on, Lizzie,' said Tess. 'Why don't you let them look? They won't find anything.'

'I don't want them poking around in my sheds and my garden, that's why. And I wants to have my dinner.'

'We'll show them around, then, me and Kevin. We'll make sure they don't go poking around. OK, Kevin?'

'Not me,' said Kevin. 'I don't like peelers. You show them around if you like.'

'Right then, I will.'

Tess went out and opened the front door to the three men. They had started out towards the yard, intending to have a look around whatever Lizzie might say. Tess joined them. 'I'll show you around the place,' she said.

Garda Maloney smiled pleasantly and said: 'Very good of you,' but he looked at her just a little too long, and all at once, Tess's blood ran cold. What a fool she was. What a complete and utter fool. Of course her parents would have told the police that she was missing, no matter what she had said in her note to them. She turned away and tried to collect her thoughts. 'Where do you want to look first?' she said.

'Everywhere,' said the banker. 'We'll start in here.' He looked into the woodshed, and the other neighbourhood resident, who was tall and thin and dressed in a ridiculous one-piece down ski-suit, peered in over his shoulder. Garda Maloney, however, seemed more interested in Tess. 'Are you a relative of the old bird, then?' he asked.

'She's not an old bird,' said Tess, thinking like a rat, thinking like a goat, wishing that she hadn't been so sn.o.bbish and knew what it was to think like a fox. 'She's my Aunt Lizzie. My great-aunt, actually.'

'Ah,' said Maloney.

Tess led the way purposefully towards the henhouse. Lizzie had been around feeding shortly before, and the hens were still gathered around the trough, pecking at the last crumbs of their mash.

The policeman watched them, absently. 'Just down for the day, are you?'

'Yes. My father will be here later to pick us up.'

'I see. You and your brother, is it?'

'Yes.'

He nodded, casually. He wasn't sure where it was he'd seen her face, or even whether he had seen it at all, but there was something about her that was ringing a bell. He could check it out later, when he got back to the station, but in the meantime it was important that he didn't raise her suspicions and drive her off.

'Nice part of the country, isn't it?' he said.

'Not particularly,' said Tess. 'I'd prefer to go to the sea if I had the choice.'

She led them on around the back. Nancy had been milked and put to bed in her own corner of the cowshed. 'If there were any more goats around,' said Tess, 'she'd be going ape. They don't like being on their own, goats don't. But you can look around in the field if you want to. And the orchard's through there.'

'Like animals, do you?' said Maloney.

'Not particularly. But Aunt Lizzie does. She never stops talking about them. There's nothing she doesn't know about animals. And,' she added, conspiratorially, 'nothing she doesn't tell you. Whether you want to know or not.'

Garda Maloney was beginning to think that he was mistaken. This girl was far too relaxed to be on the run. He smiled at her and she shrugged and lifted her eyes to heaven. 'Family duty,' she said.

The other two were just closing the door of the potting shed. 'Nothing there,' said the sporty one.

'No,' said Garda Maloney. 'I think we'd better call it off. With any luck they're on their way back to wherever they came from. If they do turn up again you can let us know, and we'll have another try in the morning.'

'You'll have to get your marksmen with tranquillizer darts,' said Tess.

Maloney laughed. 'Yes, we'll certainly need someone like that. Let's hope that's the end of them, though.' He followed her back to the front of the house and started with the others back up the track. 'Give my regards to your aunt,' he said. Tess looked heavenwards again and ducked in through the doorway.

Kevin and Lizzie were sitting in the fireside chairs. Lizzie was eating stew out of a jelly mould and Kevin was eating his out of a small, dented saucepan with a bent handle.

'We left the dish for you,' said Lizzie, pointing to the hob beside the fire.

'Never mind that,' said Tess, looking daggers at Kevin. 'That was a great bit of thinking, that was, Mr Rat, Mr Street-wise, Mr Hedgehog-brain!' Kevin stared at her in amazement as she went on: 'And you have the nerve to tell me that I'm all right, Jack!'

'What are you talking about?'

'I'm talking about you, looking after Number One. You don't like peelers, oh, no. What about me, then?'

'Children!' said Lizzie. 'Stop squabbling! Where's your manners?'

'Oh, shut up about manners, Lizzie,' snapped Tess. 'And we're not children. This has nothing to do with you. I'm talking to this selfish little swine.'

Kevin was growing darker by the minute, like a heavy cloud, waiting to burst. 'I don't know what she's talking about,' he said.

'I'm talking about the Gardai! I'm talking about missing persons, descriptions, photographs. I'm talking about being on their records!'

Kevin swore. Lizzie looked as if she might object, but changed her mind.

'You should have thought of that, Kevin,' said Tess. 'You should have warned me.'

'It isn't my fault! It was your idea. "Oh, la di da, come on, Kevin, let's show the nice gentlemen around." I didn't want to have anything to do with it!'

'But I don't think like you do. I wasn't brought up like that. It's your job to think of things like that!'

'And who do you think you are? Telling me what my job is!' He glared at her with such contempt that her anger evaporated and left a dull ache in the pit of her stomach.

'Come on, now, girls and boys,' said Lizzie. 'Stop arguing and eat your dinner while it's hot.'

Kevin poked around lethargically with his spoon. 'Did he recognise you?' he asked, sulkily.

'I'm not sure. I think he did, but I might have put him off the scent.'

'Not to worry,' said Lizzie. 'No sense in getting edgy, is there?' She handed Tess her stew in the dish they had saved for her. Tess looked at it gloomily. It had DOG written on the side.