The Grasshopper's Child Read Free

and shelves of stuff: toilet paper, pegs, carpet tacks, cleaning things; sacks of bird-seed. The second led to the kitchen.
The third was a grey slab of bare metal, padlocked shut.
    â€˜Creepy,’ muttered Heidi.
    The kitchen table was as long as the one in the ‘breakfast room’ and completely heaped with half-empty mugs, dirty plates, mouldering veg, piles of newspaper, random underwear, odd socks. There was a modern fridge-freezer (without much in it); a toaster and a gas hob (that both worked); and a microwave (that worked). An ancient double sink with hot and cold water. No sign of an oven. The room was very cold: the single radiator was turned off. The floor was stone flags, partly covered by grubby rag rugs. Heidi opened cupboards and found hoards of tinned and packaged food: luxuries she hadn’t seen on a supermarket shelf for years. Stockpilers, she thought. I suppose people get away with it in the country. She couldn’t find matches or candles, oil lamps or wind-ups. That was strange. Didn’t they have power-downs around here? By the back door sat a doorstop in the shape of a battered iron duck, missing most of its paint.
    Through the half-glass she saw a concrete yard, and sheds. A handmade notice saying KEYS in red marker-pen had been stuck to the wall above a hook, but the keys were missing.
    Heidi looked at the cluttered table and counters. It could take her a week to find anything.
She went upstairs and invaded the lamp-light room. It was no warmer than the hall, but felt cosier. Old Wreck was hiding in the depths of it perched behind an old desk, her knees up to her ears like a monkey. Books, books and books surrounded her: stuffed on shelves, falling out of stacks; layered on the floor with their pages open. The old woman scowled horribly as she watched Heidi approach.
    â€˜Go away. You’re not to come in here. Never come in here. Dinner at seven, breakfast at eight, lunch at one, and stay out of my sight .’ She scratched her crotch as she glared, as if Heidi the slave was hardly a person, so it didn’t matter what she saw.
    â€˜I need to go for a run to charge my phone,’ said Heidi. ‘I’m sorry to disturb you, but I can’t find the key to the back door.’
    Old Wreck’s scowl slowly morphed into a leer of triumphant cunning —as if Heidi had been planning for weeks to confound her with this puzzle, but Old Wreck had been wise to her game, and had secretly plotted so she could relish the moment of Heidi’s defeat. She held up a ring with one big old monster key on it, and one ordinary latch key.
    â€˜ These are your keys. Don’t lose them. They will not be replaced.’
    â€˜Thank you. I won’t.’
    â€˜There’s a bicycle for errands. You will find it in the yard. You must never use the front entrance. You must always use the kitchen door, and you must always keep it locked.’
    If I always keep it locked, how do I get out, thought Heidi.
    â€˜Okay.’

2: The Gardens

    The concrete yard was walled. It had a solid wooden back gate, which was locked, but the latch key opened it. A track led downhill, into the unknown. Heidi decided to leave that for another time. Instead she found her way to the front of the house, to the stranded stone archway and the National Trust Gardens. The rain had stopped. She jogged the paths she’d plodded, with a strange sense of freedom. It was easy to retrace her steps back to the car park: Verruca’s tag-stabs had fixed the turns in her mind.
    Her phone was charged by the time she got there. She still had no signal, but that didn’t matter. There was nobody she wanted to call, not even Immy. No message she wanted to send, no music she wanted to listen to, no game she wanted to play. The main reason why she needed the phone charged was so she could tell the time. And have a torch. She sat on a stone kerb, looking at the National Trust admission prices