Alice Falls Again, page 8
“I didn’t know hens were good at flying.”
“You’d be surprised what you’re capable of when you’ve been cooped up too long,” said Mrs MacDonald, brandishing the knife. “Even pigs can fly if they’ve the will and wherefore. They wrote a poem about it:
“Inkle oinkle little pig
Why d’you always grow so big.
Soon you won’t fit in your sty,
Spread your trotters, start to fly.”
Mrs MacDonald finished her peculiar poem just as they reached the barn.
“Here we are. Now do be careful not to let the mice out. You know what they say mice do when the cat’s away. Anyway, the mice are not well at the moment.”
They entered and Alice did as she was told by closing the barn door quickly behind her. It was a lovely old barn with haystacks, pitchforks and golden beams of sunlight coming in through cracks in the wooden walls.
“Now, you have a look for my cat,” said Mrs MacDonald. “I’ll just go and get the bread bin to put it in.”
Alice was happy to be left alone but not so happy to hear the farmer’s wife bolt the barn door from the outside. As the woman’s footsteps retreated, Alice tried the door but it wouldn’t budge. She turned to see if there was another way out but there was no second exit and no loose planks. She hoped the cat was indeed somewhere in the barn as Mrs M had mentioned mice and Alice disliked mice intensely.
At the back of the barn were a hundred or so bales of hay stacked willy nilly on top of each other. Gingerly, afraid she might uncover a nest of mice, Alice moved some of the loose bales in the hope of finding Mrs M’s missing cat. Within a few minutes, Alice was hot and bothered and sat down on some straw to rest. In next to no time, she was sound asleep.
As Alice slept, her nightmare about the tiger continued from where it had left off at Halfway House.
The tiger had begun running down the hill towards Alice and the courtiers. Alice turned and headed for a stone chapel she spied in the corner of the Queen’s garden. She reasoned that the tiger was more likely to hunt prey in the open garden before it ventured inside a building.
The chapel turned out to be a large mediaeval banquet room on the inside, empty apart from one long wooden table and some benches. Alice stepped up onto a bench and then the table, just in case the tiger decided to enter the room. By now, a steady stream of terrified people had followed Alice into the chapel. They milled around, trying to comfort one another by agreeing that they had found safe shelter. Not long after, however, the tiger slowly crept into the chapel and fixed Alice with a malicious stare. Though still large and scrawny, the tiger had somehow lost its stripes. Alice knew that this was one reason the tiger was so angry but as to why it should blame her for this, she had no clue. It prowled round and round the table, taking swipes with a huge paw at people unlucky enough to be within reach.
Alice suddenly realised she wasn’t safe as the tiger could easily jump up onto the table. She pinched herself hard in an attempt to wake herself from the dream but to no avail. She tried to shout and scream in a bid to end her nightmare but no sound escaped her lips. The tiger gave an evil smile as if it knew Alice was trapped in her dream. Not long now.
Alice woke with a start and saw Mrs MacDonald standing in front of her with a knife in her hand. Thankfully, she was not facing Alice. Flattened against the far wall of the barn were three large grey mice huddled together. They were frightened out of their lives. Despite them being the size of dogs, Alice felt pity rather than fear.
“Poor little things,” exclaimed Alice. “What’s wrong with them?”
“I had to cut off their tails with this knife and they haven’t grown back yet.”
“I very much doubt they will,” said a horrified Alice. “Am I right in assuming these mice are also blind and you cut off their tails with a carving knife because you thought that they were chasing you?”
“They’re not blind in the sense you mean. I mean, I don’t go around mutilating sight-impaired field mice. What kind of monster do you think I am? No, what happened was, they wouldn’t leave the fields even after I’d burnt down their houses. I reasoned with them but they just didn’t see my point of view. So in that sense, they were blind to reason. I just thought that they might not be so attached to the fields if they weren’t attached to their tails. Hasn’t worked though. They just stay huddled there in the corner.”
“Wouldn’t they leave now if you left the barn door open?”
The three mice nodded their heads excitedly and squeaked the word ‘yes’ over and over again.
“Possibly, but I want to nurse them back to full health first before I let them back into the wild. That’s the least I can do for them.” There was a resounding clang as the farmer’s wife slid the thick metal bolt across the inside of the barn doors to lock them all in.
“You’re not trying to talk again, are you?” she asked the mice. They shook their heads violently. “Good, because I wouldn’t want to have to cut off any other parts.” She turned to Alice. “I was wondering Alice, how are you at catching rats, mice and other rodents?”
The three mice looked in panic at Alice.
“Not good at all. I have a cat, Dinah. She is capital at catching mice.”
The mice looked as though their eyes would pop out.
“But she’s not here. And I’m useless at that kind of thing.” Alice was talking more to the mice, who both visibly and audibly gave a collective sigh of relief.
“Shame,” said Mrs MacDonald. “You see my cat’s gone missing. Not the first time. And one can’t run a farm without a cat.”
Or without crops and livestock, Alice almost said, but just managed to swallow the words back down in time. She thought the word “livestock” may have got caught just below her epiglottis, but she was confident it wasn’t going to get out.
“The cat went missing twice before. The first time was right after I clipped its tail for talking. It had apparently travelled all the way to London just to catch sight of royalty. It shouldn’t have done that.”
A cat may look at a king, thought Alice, recalling one of Cheshire’s remarks.
“It got into the palace through an open window but all it saw was a royal mouse under the throne. Complete waste of time if you ask me as there are plenty of mice here.
“The second time it skulked away in mid-winter to this barn to have a litter of kittens. Terrible fuss that was. It was so cold I had to knit gloves and scarves for the three kittens so that they would keep warm and their mother could get back to work, catching my mice. Do you think they were grateful? The stupid kittens were so careless with their new clothes – lost them, found them, soiled them, washed them, lost, found, soil, wash – you get the picture. The mother cat was so busy it didn’t catch any mice for over a month.”
“And now your cat’s gone missing again?”
“Not so much missing as presumed dead. I saw two boys from town in the farmyard the other day. One of them, that tearaway Johnny Thin, was trying to throw my cat down the well just because it was a good mouse-catcher. You see, the boys come here trying to catch mice for themselves. Some townsfolk are so hungry down at the market, they’ll exchange anything for a string of mice.”
Alice screwed up her nose in disgust. “Was the other boy called Tommy Stout?”
“Thomas as I recall, yes. His father, Peter Stout, is one of the town councillors and plays the flute.”
“Then I shouldn’t worry yourself too much. I do believe Thomas Stout may have pulled your cat out of the well.”
“I’m not sure if that’s such good news.”
“Surely it’s good if he saved your cat from drowning?”
“Not when you think that a nice plump cat sells for a barrowful of firewood in the marketplace.”
“He wouldn’t sell your cat would he?”
“He’d sell his grandmother if she were plumper. And alive. Once he stole a tray of fresh piggy doughnuts I’d put on the window sill, the knave! I caught him running down the street eating them and beat the daylights out of him till he saw stars. I also made him come back and play his father’s flute for us all. He could only play one song “O’er the hills and far away”. Trouble is he played it so well, everyone stopped work to listen. Then they felt compelled to dance. Couldn’t stop themselves. My children, the neighbours, the farmhands, even the animals started to dance. People stopped work, broke things and laughed until their sides split. Possessed they were! Rumour has it his father played the flute so well he could make people follow him out into the hills. The man’s working in Germany if I’m not mistaken.”
Alice felt there must be some rhyme or reason to everything she had heard, seen and done in Wonderland. But for the life of her she couldn’t make head or tail of it. Some, if not all of the animals she had met on the train had ended up in appalling conditions. Colonel Pavlov, the dog, and Chester, the wart-hog were older, helpless and vulnerable. Other animals, like the pigs, cat, mice and wildlife didn’t seem much better off. Of one thing she was certain, the farmer’s wife was mistreating the animals here; animals that could talk and had feelings. It was as if the woman were trying to build some strange menagerie. But why? So her children would return home? To keep her company? What did she have in the cot and where was Mr MacDonald? And why was she trying to keep Alice there? Alice realised she must leave at once for her own safety. And if she were ever to find her way back home.
“You have been a marvellous host, Mrs M. So kind. And I don’t know what you put in your plum pie but it’s the best I’ve ever had. But now I simply must be going or my parents shall wonder where I’ve got to.”
“Can’t you wait until Mr MacDonald gets back? He won’t be long now. It would be a little rude of you not to stay and say hello. I’m sure he’s dying to meet the Alice everyone is talking about.”
Alice suspected there was quite a bit of dying whenever the farmer showed up. She reached to unbolt the barn door.
“Very well,” said the farmer’s wife. “One little game before you go. One question about the mud flats. If you answer it correctly, you can return home right away. But if you get it wrong, then you have another piece of plum pie before you leave. Is that a deal?”
Alice knew she should simply decline and go but she didn’t want to be rude to her host. What could be the harm in humouring the woman with her riddle? Surely the worst that could happen is she would have to eat another slice of that delicious pie. Alice might have thought twice had she seen the frantic gestures of the mice behind her. She might have made a dash for the door had she heard them whispering “You can’t have your cake and eat it”. But as she didn’t, she agreed. And the farmer’s wife asked her riddle. It was about the mud flats Alice had just escaped from.
“As I was going to the flats, I met a dog with seven cats.
Each cat had seven rats.
Each rat had seven mice.
Each mouse had seven lice.
Lice, mice, rats and cats,
How many were there going to the flats?”
Alice had heard something like this before and knew there was a catch. The obvious answer was to calculate all the creatures together – something to the power of something, no doubt. The farmer’s wife grinned and waved her carving knife about, presumably preparing to cut another slice of plum pie. Then Alice remembered how to answer the conundrum.
“It depends. If they are all coming the opposite way, from the mud flats, then there was just one going there. Me.”
The farmer’s wife went red in the face and clearly wanted to throttle Alice for ruining her plans, whatever they were.
“Now,” said Alice, “you promised to let me go.”
“Promises are like pie crusts, made to be broken.” Then a smile slowly spread across Mrs MacDonald’s face and her eyes widened in malice. “Anyway, they weren’t coming the other way. They were going the same way as you? How many were there?” It was a last-ditch attempt to prevent Alice from leaving.
“Then that would be 2,802: one dog, seven cats, forty-nine rats, three hundred and forty-three mice and two thousand four hundred and one lice. Plus me.”
Alice found herself almost able to forgive old Mr Barnett, her maths tutor, for rapping her knuckles every time she got her sums wrong.
“But what I really don’t understand,” she continued, “is why they weren’t fighting amongst themselves because they would, you know. Cats and rats are not friends at the best of times.”
The farmer’s wife let out a yowl and looked up at the rafters as if trying to bring them crashing down on Alice.
Seeing her chance, Alice unbolted the barn door and bolted out. The farmer’s wife gave chase but the three mice dived between the woman’s ankles, causing her to stumble. Alice raced across the courtyard and out of the gate towards the road. The farmer’s wife was in hot pursuit, brandishing her knife. But just as she was gaining on Alice, she tripped over a chain, which had been pulled tight between the kennel and a defiant-looking Colonel Pavlov.
The sheep pulled an even longer face than she already had and her spectacles almost slipped off her nose. “It’s the perfect camouflage. Who would suspect a sheep of dressing up as a wolf?” Her voice shook and cracked as she whispered.
“Who indeed?”
CHAPTER 5
ALL ABOUT TOWN
Alice didn’t stop running until she was sure the farmer’s wife was no longer chasing her. When she did stop, she discovered that she was on a different-looking road to the one she had arrived on. She wasn’t quite sure if it was the right road, but she remembered the Cheshire Cat having once told her that if she had no specific destination in mind, then any road would get her there.
The road wound to the right up ahead and above a tall hedge Alice could see the steeple of a distant church. That must be Banbury, thought Alice, and decided it was a far safer place than the troubled farm.
After a couple more bends, the sandy road rose gently and straddled a small stone bridge that crossed a stream, which chuckled and sparkled in the sun. On the low wall of the bridge sat a rather portly man. It was difficult to spot where his head ended and his body started. His cheeks and chins were unshaven and clothes in tatters. His short legs, tapering from thick at the top to thin at the ankles, dangled over the edge of the wall like upside down dunce’s caps. Alice guessed immediately it was Humphrey Dunfry, the child the farmer’s wife had asked to mind the hens. But this was no child. He had grown up.
“Are you hungry?” asked the man as Alice drew level with him.
“Not particularly, thank you,” replied Alice.
“I have lots of eggs. I can give you one if you want.”
Alice saw that both pockets of Humphrey’s once-white trousers were stained yellowy-green, the consequence of years of unsuccessfully carrying hen’s eggs around in his pockets. He smelled rotten. It looked as if the knocks and bruises of life had left him a broken man and nobody had helped him to pick up the pieces. Least of all Mrs M, who had sent him packing.
“Is your name Mary?” he asked.
“No.”
“Oh. You look like a Mary to me. I get so confused these days. I’m Humphrey Dunfry. What did you say your name was?”
“Alice.”
“Did you? I don’t remember you telling me. Maybe I remembered that you were about to tell me. A liar should have a good memory, you know, but as I don’t tell lies, my memory sometimes fails me. It’s all because I used to go to the mud flats. It eats your memories, you know. Do you have a good memory?”
“Yes, I believe so. Or I used to until recently.”
“Oh,” said Humphrey, in a way that implied he thought Alice told lies.
“But I don’t tell lies.”
Humphrey looked very confused. “But if you do tell lies, maybe you told me one now, when you said you don’t lie.”
“That’s a good point. But on the other hand, how do I know you weren’t lying? Perhaps you were just pretending to have a bad memory.” Was Humphrey as sharp as a knife in reality? A second look at him told Alice he wasn’t. She felt sorry for him and thought she’d better cheer him up.
“It’s a shame you couldn’t stay at the farm, Humphrey. Mrs MacDonald said that all the hens flew away, so I suppose there were no more eggs for you to collect.”
“The hens didn’t fly away. She cut off their heads. One day, she was telling me about the curse of the mud flats. I said ‘curses are like hens, they both come home to roost’. She got it into her head that her hens were cursed and that was that. Out came the carving knife. The headless hens still laid eggs for months afterwards but the eggs came out with their tops already cut off.”
“How convenient,” said Alice, again looking on the bright side. She liked boiled eggs but always found cutting the tops off very difficult.
As Humphrey conjured up images of his days at the farm, he sucked on his soiled shirt sleeves.
“I wish there was something I could do to help you,” Alice said, thinking out loud.
Humphrey gave a small but kind smile as if he appreciated her concern.
“Oh,” he said, “don’t worry about me. I’ve survived just fine so far. You need to worry more about yourself. That’s what I say. Home again, home again, jiggedy-jig.” Humphrey looked Alice straight in the eye and said in a deadly serious voice. “While you still can.”
“What do you mean?” she asked, not sure if she should take advice from a man with egg on his face.
“These days, the best way to help anyone in Wonderland is to look after yourself. Look after the chicks and the hens will look after themselves and all that. And if you’re wondering, the egg came first.”
