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  “I’ll go, too,” said Dhikilo. “When is it? And where?”

  “I on’t know. It’s in the newspaper.”

  “What’s going to happen to Mrs Robinson?”

  “Who’s Mrs Robinson?”

  “The dog. The Professor’s dog. Don’t you remember her?”

  Molly’s eyes went unfocused and dull. “I on’t remember any og.”

  “Don’t say that, Molly!” exclaimed Dhikilo. “You can’t mean it. Mrs Robinson. We weren’t allowed to call her Nelly. She was his guide dog. She was dark brown.”

  Molly stared Dhikilo straight in the face. “Guie ogs are pale yellow.”

  “Molly!”

  Molly flinched, then looked as if she might start crying. “Please, Icky,” she said softly. “I want to be your frien.”

  “You are my friend,” said Dhikilo crossly. “Even if you can’t say the word all of a sudden.”

  A tear jumped onto Molly’s cheek. “You on’t unerstan,” she said. “I want to stay your frien.” She touched Dhikilo gently on the forearm, then ran away.

  A Note from a Parent

  Malcolm and Ruth weren’t enthusiastic when Dhikilo told them she wanted to go to a funeral.

  “It’s not as though you were family,” said Ruth.

  Dhikilo opened her mouth to say something about herself and “family,” but decided against it. “Molly’s mum isn’t family, either, and she’s going.”

  “But they were colleagues.”

  “Well, we were... I was his...what’s the word?”

  “Pupil,” said Malcolm.

  “Student. I saw him every day for a year. And when I was upset, he was very good to me, he was.”

  “Well,” said Ruth, “I hope we’ve always been very goo to you, too.”

  Dhikilo looked down into her mashed potato. “The school says it’s OK, but I need permission from you.” She was well aware that many other girls did whatever they wanted, even bad things, without bothering to ask their parents’ permission.

  “I on’t know,” said Malcolm uneasily. “A chil, on her own, at a funeral... Maybe I coul cancel my meeting...”

  “I’ll be inside a church,” said Dhikilo. “And Molly’s mum will be there.”

  That seemed to clinch it. A mother on the spot.

  * * *

  Later that night, after Dhikilo had gone to bed and was almost asleep, her bedroom door opened a crack and her mum—Ruth—was standing in the doorway.

  “Sweetie?”

  “Yes, Mum?”

  “i I ever tell you he was my teacher, too? The Professor? Many years ago.”

  “No, but he told me.”

  “I wasn’t very clever at History, I’m afrai. I suppose he tol you that?”

  “Not exactly,” said Dhikilo, searching for the right words. “He said...he said you had a brain.”

  “Well, that was...chivalrous of him.”

  Dhikilo turned over on the pillow to face the silhouette in the doorway.

  “What does that mean?” she asked. It wasn’t very often that a word she didn’t know came out of Ruth’s mouth. And learning new words was another of Dhikilo’s favourite things.

  Ruth hugged herself and sounded wistful. “It’s when someone’s a gentleman, an is amazingly respectful an treats a person as if she’s more special than she really is.”

  “Oh,” said Dhikilo.

  “Chivalrous,” repeated Ruth. “Goonight, sweetie.”

  “Goodnight, Mum,” said Dhikilo, getting settled on the pillow again.

  In the last moments before drifting off, she was picturing a strange new creature, a Shivalrus—half man, half walrus. It wore a saggy tweed suit and stood on all fours and had a kindly face.

  An Unacceptably Odd Burial

  Saint Ursula’s, the church which hosted the Professor’s funeral ceremony, was very beautiful and very ancient and very small, with a graveyard that wasn’t much bigger than the school canteen. The gravestones were all mossy and leaning sideways, and the writing on the granite was worn away by hundreds of years of wind and weather. No new bodies had gone into this ground since 1847 and Dhikilo wondered if the church was going to make an exception for the Professor because he was so old and extraordinary. But no.

  When she walked in, she was given a leaflet about the funeral by a dignified lady with a what-are-you-doing-here-this-is-not-your-place face. It was a look Dhikilo got all the time from people who didn’t know her and most people didn’t know her so she was used to it. She nodded thank you.

  There were about twenty other mourners here, the youngest of whom was Molly’s mum. There were some other middle-aged ladies and quite a few decrepit-looking gentlemen with wet noses and skin like bark. Dhikilo had thought the Professor was extremely popular with the Cawber School for Girls pupils but maybe, on reflection, he was just popular with her. Or maybe the other girls didn’t want to miss Art with Miss Meek and PSE (Personal & Social Evelopment) with Mrs Geering.

  Dhikilo sat down in one of the pews and looked around. Her mum and dad were not churchgoers and only took her along at Christmas “for the carols” (not to Saint Ursula’s, though—to a bigger, brighter church on the High Street). Saint Ursula’s was spooky and candlelit. There were paintings on the walls that depicted terrible things being done to holy individuals who didn’t seem particularly fussed about being shot with arrows, whipped, stabbed with spears and so on. That was the creepy part about churches. But they were kind of magical, too.

  Dhikilo examined the leaflet, which was actually just one piece of paper folded in half. It contained the words of two hymns to be sung, a tiny photograph of the Professor’s face and the dates of his birth and death. Also the location of the graveyard where he would actually be buried afterwards, which was quite some distance outside the town centre. A helpful map was provided. The Professor’s final resting place would be between Cawber Academy (the boys’ school) and the sad retail park where the bed showroom and the sporting goods superstore were. The Professor’s body would presumably travel there in the black limousine that was parked outside the church, but Dhikilo was pretty sure the Number 42 bus went the same way.

  The vicar shuffled up to the pulpit and began to talk about the Professor. Well, actually, not really. He mentioned the Professor’s name—“Charles Oerfiel”—and spoke for a few seconds about what an excellent and well-respected teacher the Professor had been, and then he devoted the rest of his speech to Go Almighty and Heaven. Then everybody sang “The Lor Is My Shepher,” except for Dhikilo, who put the Ds in. Pretty soon it was all over and the vicar was thanking people for coming.

  Four tall old men in black overcoats carried the coffin out to the hearse. Then they got into the car with the vicar, scrunching themselves up rather than taking their top hats off, which was odd, and the hearse drove off.

  * * *

  It was drizzling as Dhikilo hurried to the bus stop, and the sky was grey with rain that was all set to come down. Sometimes when she and Mariette and Fiona and Molly were playing—or whatever you were supposed to call what you did with your friends when you were too old to describe it as “playing”—Dhikilo would pretend she could change the weather. If they all wanted it to stay fine and the weather threatened to spoil everything, Dhikilo would raise her hand to the drizzle and say, “Sun!” and, more than half the time, the drizzle would go away and the sun would come back out.

  She raised her head and said, “Sun!” now. The drizzle intensified into proper rain. The bus pulled up, its windscreen wipers beating hard.

  * * *

  By the time she arrived at the cemetery, it was pouring. Nobody else got off the bus and there were no cars parked near the cemetery entrance. Dhikilo had assumed that the other people from the church service would come, too, but it seemed she was the only one who’d bothered. When she hurried across the grounds towards th
e right spot, she found that the four pallbearers and the vicar were already at the graveside and the coffin was already in the hole.

  Dhikilo actually had a small umbrella in her shoulder bag, but she felt it wouldn’t be right to use it, because the four old men didn’t have umbrellas. They stood as still as statues, their waterlogged hats tipped slightly forward, dripping from the brims.

  “Ashes to ashes,” the sodden vicar was saying. “Ust to ust.”

  Dhikilo walked nearer, but not right up close. The vicar wasn’t being very friendly—too wet and miserable, maybe—and the four men in black frightened her a little. This funeral was all wrong, somehow. When you planted a dead person in the ground, there should be lots of people singing and dancing and eating nice food and telling stories while the sun beamed down. Maybe that was a daft idea, but that’s how she felt.

  “...for now an evermore,” said the vicar, making a special gesture like a dance move.

  Having finished his own contribution to the ceremony, he looked at the men in black, inviting them to speak if they had anything to say.

  “Marmalade,” said one, in a dull, distant monotone.

  “Soft grain bread,” said another, in exactly the same voice.

  “Coconut macaroons,” said the third.

  “Maybe a couple of bananas, if they’re ripe,” said the fourth.

  The vicar blinked in befuddlement. “Paron?” he said.

  “I have brought my own bag, thank you,” said one of the men in black.

  After that the weather got ridiculous, as though the sky was emptying huge buckets of water from a flood in Heaven. The vicar ran off as soon as he could. The pallbearers continued to stand utterly still, their hands hanging by their sides, their heads bowed, four streams of water pouring from their hats.

  Then, above the noise of the rain, Dhikilo heard a dog barking. The men lurched into movement, shambling single-file along a path between the gravestones, towards the great iron gate where the cemetery joined on to the public park where nobody ever went except the boys from Cawber Academy when they wanted to smoke. At the gate, hardly visible through the rain, a large dog was slowly pacing round and round.

  It’s Mrs Robinson! thought Dhikilo.

  The dog barked again, and the four men walked faster, in fact almost trotted out of the graveyard gate, and disappeared into the park.

  Dhikilo stared open-mouthed for a moment or two, then ran after them. The rain had made the ground boggy and she went up to her ankles in mud, almost slipping, but she didn’t care; she was soaked to the skin anyhow. Even so, the quagmire slowed her down, and by the time she got into the park, the dog was nowhere in sight. She heard some car-horn beeps coming from the streets behind the park, which might mean that Mrs Robinson was dashing across the road in a dangerous manner, or might simply mean that cars were having trouble seeing each other in the downpour.

  The four men, too, were nowhere to be seen, despite the fact that they were old and surely in no state to run. Dhikilo peered in all directions, breathing hard as the rain continued to plummet down. There was nothing to pursue. She would just have to go home.

  Her first steps towards the street felt so unpleasant that she had to stop walking—there was mud squelching inside her shoes; she could see it oozing out when she pressed her heel on the ground. So she leaned against one of the park’s litter bins and, standing on one leg, took off a shoe. She wanted to wipe the mud out of it, but the only wipy thing she had was some paper tissues in her pocket and those had turned to clots of mush. She lifted the lid of the bin, hoping there might be something more useful in there.

  Inside she found four black overcoats, four pairs of trousers, four sets of shirts, ties, underwear, socks and shoes, and four hats.

  Sniffing Out the Truth

  Back at home, Dhikilo rinsed out her shoes in the bathtub. They seemed to contain more mud than the volume of her feet, which was inconveniently amazing and made the bath look as though a gang of moles had had a fight in it. She knew that Ruth would want her to clean up the mess but she had urgent things to do. Like putting on fresh dry clothes and phoning Molly’s mum.

  “Do you know the Professor’s address?” she asked.

  “Yes,” said Molly’s mum.

  “Can I have it?”

  “Well, I’m not sure about that,” said Molly’s mum. “I mean, he’s not with us any more, so I can’t see what...erm...”

  Dhikilo looked through the window. The sun had come out. She considered making up a story about wanting to send a condolence card to the Professor’s relatives, who might be checking his mail. But she didn’t like to lie. Lying was wrong and also it was a lot of bother and when other people did it she just felt sorry for them, getting themselves so tangled up. Anyway, she wasn’t sure how to pronounce “condolence.”

  “Can I have it?” she said again. “Please?”

  So Molly’s mum told her the address.

  * * *

  Twenty minutes later, Dhikilo turned the corner from Oughty Yar into Gas Hill Garens. They were funny names for streets, in her opinion, but maybe they’d lost a D or two.

  The houses—or actually flats—were a long row of old buildings which were not quite historical enough to be protected by the government, so the people living in them had replaced the original nineteenth-century windows and doors with new ones, added modern security fencing and so on.

  The only building in the whole row which looked as though it hadn’t had anything done to it since it was first built was Number 58 and that was the number Dhikilo had written down on her scrap of paper. In fact, not only did the house look unmodernized, it looked uninhabited. It was three storeys high and every window in it was shrouded with curtains. Large shards of plaster had fallen off the exterior walls, exposing the brickwork underneath, quite a few of the ledges and arches and other decorative features were crumbling away, and the windows were all cracked in their handsome wooden frames, though none was actually broken. The tiny front garden was entirely dead and smelled of cat pee.

  Dhikilo stood at the massive oak door and knocked. The wood was solid and thickly varnished and made almost no noise. Knocking harder only hurt her knuckles. There was no bell. Two small drill-holes, clogged up with dust, could still be seen in the wood as evidence that there’d once been a doorknocker which had come off, or been removed.

  “Hello!” called Dhikilo. “Is anybody there? Hello-o!”

  She bent down and squinted through the big rusty keyhole. Immediately she yelped and jumped back, almost falling over backwards into the street. Behind the keyhole she’d seen an eye—definitely an eye—but not a human eye! Violet in colour, with a cat-like pupil, glowing as if it had a light bulb inside it.

  “H-hello?” said Dhikilo again, leaning her ear close to the door.

  “What do you want?” came the reply. “Why have you come here?” The voice sounded female, and not British, although you weren’t supposed to say that at Dhikilo’s school. “We’re all British, aren’t we? Even you,” her classmates would say. Well, the voice behind the door was very noticeably from somewhere far away. There was a weird hissing noise attached to it, as if the uttering of each word released a jet of steam.

  “I knew Professor Dodderfield,” Dhikilo called out uncertainly.

  “No, you did not,” came the voice again.

  “Yes, I did,” said Dhikilo. “I liked him. I think he liked me.” The last part felt a bit wrong to say, as if she was claiming knowledge that wasn’t hers, just to win an argument. She recalled how the Professor would exclaim, in his History classes, “Facts! Stick to the facts! That gets rid of 99 per cent of everything anyone’s ever said or written, which cuts your homework down to a nice manageable size, doesn’t it? Sniff out the truth!”

  Dhikilo waited for further communication from the strange female on the other side of the door. There was only silence.
r />   “Are you still there?” she called.

  “Go away.” The voice was like a stormy wind that rattles windows at night.

  Dhikilo leaned against the door, pressing her ear against it, and spoke to the old wood with her eyes shut tight.

  “I can’t go away... Madam. I can’t, because...” She thought fast. Because what? “Because I have some questions. About the Professor’s funeral, and the old men in black, the ones who carried the coffin. I don’t know the right word for them, is it pawbearers? And...and about the Professor’s dog. Mrs Robinson.”

  Another silence followed.

  “Your quessstions,” said the voice at last, “cannot be anssswered. Go away.”

  “I’m sorry, but who are you, please?” said Dhikilo, trying to sound polite, although it was hard to make a question like that sound polite. There was not a sound except for the traffic on the street. Dhikilo pressed her cheek harder against the door, and began to get the strangest feeling that time was running out, as if the house was about to move away from her like a train moving away from a person on a railway platform.

  “Please!” she called out. “Are you still there?”

  “No,” came the voice at last. “No, we are not.” And that seemed to be the end of that.

  Dhikilo waited for a long while before she had the courage to look again through the keyhole. When she did, it was dark. This upset her. The house really had left her stranded, it seemed. She started banging on the door with her fist.

  “Hello! Hello! Hello-o!”

  This racket fetched the voice back.

  “I have now called the police,” it said.

  “I don’t think you have,” retorted Dhikilo. She was amazed at her rudeness. But she hadn’t come this far only to be tossed back like a piece of junk mail. Anyway, the person behind the door was being very rude herself. So they were kind of equal. “I’m going to sit here until you open the door.”