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“Darling? Do you realize? Isn’t it fantastic? And you never said a single word!”
At this moment his father came in from outdoors. He’d been working in the garden, as he often did, until it was actually too dark to see. Now he stamped the mud off his shoes in the open doorway, but for once his mother didn’t care about the mud, and almost dragged him into the room.
“Oh, do come and hear the news! I’ve been bursting to tell you all day. Omri – tell him. Tell him!”
Wordlessly, Omri handed his father the letter. There was a silence, then his father whispered reverently, “God in Heaven. Three hundred pounds!”
“It’s not the money!” cried his mother. “Look, look what they say about his story! He must be brilliant, and we never even knew he had writing talent.” She came to Omri and smothered him with hugs. “When can we read it? Oh, just wait till the boys hear about this…”
His brothers! Yes. That would be almost the sweetest thing of all. They always behaved as if he were too thick to do anything. And telling them at school. His English teacher simply wouldn’t believe her senses. Perhaps Mr Johnson, the headmaster, would get him up at Assembly and announce the news, and they would all applaud, and he would be asked to read the story aloud… Omri’s head began to spin with the incredible excitement of it. He jumped up.
“I’ll go and get my copy and you can read it,” he said.
“Oh, did you keep a copy?”
“Yes, that was in the rules.” He stopped in the doorway and turned. “I typed it on your typewriter when you were out,” he confessed.
“Did you, indeed! That must have been the time I found all the keys jumbled together.” But she wasn’t really annoyed.
“And I borrowed paper and carbon paper from Dad’s desk. And a big envelope to send it in.”
His mother and father looked at each other. They were both absolutely beaming with pride, as they had when Gillon had come home and announced he’d broken a swimming record at school, and when Adiel had got ten O-levels. Omri, looking at them, knew suddenly that he had never expected them to have that look because of him.
“Well,” said his father, very solemnly, “now you can pay me back. You owe me the price of the stamp.” His face broke into a great, soppy grin.
Omri raced upstairs. His heart was pounding. He’d won. He’d actually won! He’d never dared to hope he would. Of course, he’d dreamt a little. After all, he had tried his very best, and it was a great story to begin with. Imagination and invention, eh? That was all they knew. The real work was in the way he’d written it, and re-written it, and checked the spelling until just for once he could be confident that every word was right. He’d persuaded Adiel to help with that part – without telling him, of course, what it was actually for.
“Stirrup? Maize? Iroquois?”
“Iroquois!” Adiel had exclaimed.
“It’s the name of an Indian tribe,” said Omri. Fancy not knowing that! Omri had now read so many books about American Indians that he’d forgotten that not everyone was as knowledgeable on the subject as himself.
“Well, I haven’t a clue how to spell it. I-R-O-K-W-”
“No it’s not, it’s like French. Never mind, I know that one, I just wanted to see if you did. Whisky?”
Adiel spelt it, and then asked, “What on earth is this you’re writing? What a weird bunch of words!”
“It’s a story. I’ve got to make it as perfect as I can.”
“But what’s it about? Let me see it,” said Adiel, making a grab at the notebook.
Omri dodged. “Leave off! I’ll show you when it’s finished. Now. Bandage?” Adiel spelt this (actually Omri had spelled it correctly) and then Omri hesitated before saying, “Cupboard?”
Adiel’s eyes narrowed.
“You’re not telling about the time I hid your so-called secret cupboard after you’d nicked my football shorts?”
“I didn’t…”
“The time the key got lost and you made such an idiotic uproar? You’re not going to put me into any stupid school story.”
“I’m changing the names,” said Omri.
“You’d better. Any more words?”
Omri read on silently to the next longish word. “Magnanimous.”
“Cor,” said Adiel with heavy sarcasm. “Bet you don’t even know what it means.”
“Yes I do. Generous.”
“Where’d you get it from?”
“‘The Iroquois were a tribe ferocious in war, stalwart in alliance, magnanimous in victory’,” quoted Omri.
“You sound like Winston Churchill,” said Adiel, but there was a trace of admiration in his voice this time. “Don’t make it too show-offy, will you? You’ll only lose marks if your teacher thinks you’ve copied it.”
“I haven’t written that, you berk,” said Omri. “I’m just remembering what I’ve read in a book.” He was beginning to relish long words, though. Later he went through his story yet again to make sure he hadn’t used too many. His teacher was forever saying, “Keep it simple. Stick to what you know.” Little would anyone guess how closely he had stuck to the truth this time!
And now… Imagination and invention…
He paused on the stairs. Had he cheated? It was supposed to be a made-up story. It said so in the rules. Or had it? ‘Creative writing’ meant that, didn’t it? You couldn’t create something that had really happened… All you could do was find the best way of writing it down. Of course he had had to make up bits of it. Vivid as his memories of Little Bull and Boone were, he couldn’t remember every word they ever spoke. Omri frowned and went on up the stairs. He didn’t feel entirely easy in his mind, but on the other hand… Nobody had helped him. The way he’d written the story was all his own. Maybe it was okay. There wasn’t much he could do about it, anyhow.
He continued more slowly up the stairs to his room, at the very top of the house.
3 The Way it Began (#ulink_e0e821bd-b0e5-5042-a2ac-6eef43a770b9)
Omri was rather a private person. At least he needed to be alone quite a bit of the time. So his room, which was right up under the eaves of the house, was perfect for him.
In the old house, his bedroom had been just one of several opening off the upstairs landing, and at certain times of the day had been like a railway station. His new room was right off the beaten track. No one (in his opinion) had any reason to come up here, or even pass the door. There were times, now he had got it all arranged to suit himself, when he forgot about how awful it was living in Hovel Road, when it seemed worth everything to have a room like this.
It wasn’t a very large room, so his father had built a shelf high up under the skylight for him to sleep on. This was great, because he could look up at the night sky. Under this bed-shelf was his desk, and more shelves for his collections of old bottles, key-rings and wooden animals. The wall opposite the window was covered with his posters – a mixture of old and new, from Snoopy and an early Beatles, to the Police and a funny, rude one about a flasher who gets caught in a lift. In pride of place were two large photographs of Iroquois chieftains that he’d found in magazines. Neither of these Indians looked remotely like Little Bull, but they appealed to Omri just the same.
His clothes were stored on the landing, so his room wasn’t cluttered up with those. That left quite a lot of space for his beanbag seats, a low table (he’d sawed its legs half off after seeing a photo of a Japanese room), his cassette radio, and his most recent acquisition – an old chest.
He’d found this in the local market, coated with dirt and grease, bought it for two pounds after bargaining, and borrowed a marketeer’s barrow to drag it round the corner to Hovel Road. He’d cleaned it with a scraper and some sandpaper in the back garden, before hauling it up to his room.
It had ‘come up a treat’, just as the man in the market had promised. The wood was oak, the hinges iron, and it had a brass plate on it with the name of its first owner. Omri had hardly been able to believe it when he had cleaned the layers of dirt off this plate and read the name for the first time. It was L. Buller. L. Buller… Little Bull! Of course it was pure coincidence, but, as Omri thought, If I were superstitious… He rubbed up the brass every week. Somehow it, too, made him feel closer to Little Bull.
The chest was not only interesting and beautiful, but useful. Omri used it for storage. There was only one thing wrong with it. It had a lock, but no key. So he piled cushions and other objects on it and pretended it was a bench. That way nobody who happened to be prying about in his room (it still happened occasionally, mothers cleaning and brothers poking about ‘borrowing’) would realize that it contained a number of interesting and private objects.
Omri knelt by the chest now and shifted to the floor a pile of cassettes, a bullworker (he was bent on developing his muscles), some cushions and three copies of Mad magazine, among other bits of junk. Then he opened the top of the chest. It, too, was untidy, but Omri knew where to burrow. On their way down the left-hand side in search of the folder containing his prize-winning story, Omri’s fingers touched metal, and paused. Then, carefully, he moved some other things which were in the way, and eased this metal object out.
It was a small white cabinet with a mirror in its door and a keyhole – an old-fashioned bathroom medicine cupboard, in fact. He stood it on the Japanese table. The door swung open. Apart from a single shelf, it was quite empty – as empty as it had been when he was first given it, a rather odd birthday present from Gillon, just over a year ago.
Omri sat back on his heels staring at it.
How clearly it all came back. The cupboard. The strange little key which had been his great-grandmother’s, and which had mysteriously fitted the commonplace lock and turned this ordinary little metal box into a time-machine with a difference. Put any plastic object – an axe, an Indian tepee, a quiver of arrows – into it, close the door, turn the key – and those things became real. Miniature, but real. Real leather, real cloth, real steel. Put the plastic figure of a human being or an animal inside, and, in the time it took to lock them in, they, too, became real. Real and alive. And not just ‘living toys’, but people from another time, with their own lives, their own personalities, needs and demands…
Oh, it hadn’t been all fun and games, as Omri had naively expected at first. Little Bull was no toy, to submit tamely to being played with. He was, for all his tiny stature, a ferocious savage, war-like and domineering.
Omri had soon realized that if any grown-ups found out about the cupboard’s magic properties they would take it, and the Indian, and everything else, away. So Omri had had to keep it secret, and look after, feed and protect his Indian as best he could. And when Patrick had found out the secret, and sneaked a Texas cowboy into the cupboard so that he, too, could have a ‘little person’, the trouble really started.
Little Bull and Boone were natural enemies. They came close to killing each other several times. Even their respective ponies had caused endless difficulties. And then Adiel had taken the cupboard one day, the key had fallen out of the lock and been lost, and Omri, Patrick and the two little men had been faced with the dire possibility that the magic was dead, that these minute and helpless people would have to remain in Omri’s time, his ‘giant’ world, and in his care, for ever…
It was this, the terrible fright they had all had from this notion, that had finally proved to Omri that he would have to give up his Indian friend (for friends they were by then, of a sort), and send the little people ‘back’ – back to their own time, through the magic of the cupboard. When the key was found, that’s what they all agreed on. But it was so hard to part, that Boone (who was shamefully soft-hearted for a cowboy) had cried openly, and even the boys’ eyes were wet… Omri seldom let himself think of those last moments, they upset him so much.
When they’d reopened the cupboard door, there were the two groups: Little Bull and the wife Omri had found him, Twin Stars, sitting on Little Bull’s pony, and ‘Boo-Hoo’ Boone on his white horse – only now they were plastic again. Patrick had taken Boone and put him in his pocket. And Omri had kept the Indians. He had them still. He had packed them in a little wooden box which he kept safely at the very bottom of the chest. Actually it was a box-within-a-box-within-a-box. Each was tied tightly with string. There was a reason for all this. Omri had wanted to make them difficult to get at.
He had always known that he would be tempted to put Little Bull and Twin Stars in the cupboard again and bring them back to life. He was curious about how they were getting on – that alone tormented him every day. They had lived in dangerous times, times of war between tribes, wars aided and encouraged by Frenchmen and Englishmen who were fighting on American soil in those far-off days. Boone’s time, the time of the pioneering of Texas, a hundred years after Little Bull’s era, was dangerous, too.
And there’d been another little man, Tommy, the medical orderly, from the trenches of France in the First World War. They’d magicked him to life to help when Little Bull was kicked by his horse, when Boone was apparently dying of an arrow-wound… Tommy might, just might still be alive in Omri’s world, but he would be terribly old, about ninety by now.
By putting their plastic figures into the magic cupboard, by turning the magic key, Omri had the power to recall them to life – to youth. He could snatch them from the past. The whole business nearly blew Omri’s mind every time he thought at all deeply about it. So he tried not to think about it too much. And to prevent his yielding to temptation, he had given his mother the key. She wore it round her neck on a chain (it was quite decorative). People often asked her about it, and she would say, “It’s Omri’s really, but he lends it to me.”
That wasn’t the whole truth. Omri had pressed it on her and begged her to keep it safe for him. Safe… not just from getting lost again, but safe from him, from his longing to use it again, to reactivate the magic, to bring back his friends. To bring back the time when he had been – not happiest, but most intensely, dangerously alive himself.
4 The Sweet Taste of Triumph (#ulink_5ac9bc86-c103-5bbc-bc22-ceeeba2c92cc)
When Omri came downstairs again with the copy of his story, his brothers were both back from school.
Noticing that their parents were fairly gibbering with excitement, they were both pestering loudly to be told what had happened, but, being decent, Omri’s mother and father were refusing to spoil his surprise. However, the moment he entered the room his father turned and pointed to him.
“It’s Omri’s news,” he said. “Ask him to tell you.”
“Well?” asked Gillon.
“Go on,” said Adiel. “Don’t drive us mad.”
“It’s just that I’ve won a prize,” said Omri with the utmost carelessness. “Here, Mum.” He handed her the folder, and she rushed out of the room with it clutched to her bosom, saying that she couldn’t wait another minute to read it.
“Prize for what?” asked Adiel cynically.
“For winning a donkey-race?” inquired Gillon.
“Nothing much, it was only a story,” said Omri. It was such a long time since he had felt this good, he needed to spin it out.
“What story?” asked Adiel.
“What’s the prize?” asked Gillon at the same time.
“You know, that Telecom competition. There was an ad on TV. You had to write in for a leaflet.”
“Oh, that,” said Adiel, and went into the kitchen to get himself something to eat.
But Gillon was gazing at him. He paid more attention to ads, and he had remembered a detail that Adiel had forgotten.
“The prizes were money,” he said slowly. “Big money.”
Omri grunted non-committally, sat down at the table and shifted Kitsa, who was still there, on to his lap.
“How much?” pressed Gillon.
“Hm?”
“How much did you win? You didn’t get first prize!”
“Yeah.”
Gillon got up.
“Not… you haven’t won three hundred quid?”
Adiel’s face appeared round the kitchen door, wearing a look of comical amazement.
“WHAT! What did you say?”
“That was the first prize in each category. I thought about entering myself.” Excitement and envy were in Gillon’s voice now, making it wobble up and down in register. He turned back to Omri. “Come on! Tell us.”
“Yeah,” said Omri again.
He felt their eyes on him and a great gleeful laugh rising in him, like the time Boone had done a tiny, brilliant drawing during Omri’s art lesson and the teacher had seen it and couldn’t believe her eyes. She’d thought Omri had done it somehow. This time was even more fun, though, because this time he had.
He was sitting watching television some time later, when Adiel came in quietly and sat down beside him.
“I’ve read it,” he said after a while. His tone had changed completely.
“What? Oh, my Indian story.”
“Yes. Your Indian story.” There was a pause, and then Adiel – his ten-O-level brother – said very sincerely, almost humbly, “It’s one of the best stories I’ve ever read.”
Omri turned to look at him.
“Do you really like it?” he asked eagerly. Whatever rows he might have with his brothers, and he had them daily, their good opinion mattered. Adiel’s especially.
“You know perfectly well it’s brilliant. How on earth did you dream all that up? Coming from another time and all that? It’s so well worked-out, so… I dunno. You actually had me believing in it. And working in all those real parts, about the family. Blimey. I mean it was terrific. I… now don’t take this the wrong way, but I can’t quite credit that you made it all up.”
After a pause, Omri said, “What do you mean? That you think I nicked it from a book? Because I didn’t.”
“It’s entirely original?”
Omri glanced at him. “Original? Yes. That’s what it is. It’s original.”
“Well, congratulations anyway. I think it’s fabulous.” They stared at the screen for a while and then he added, “You’d better go and talk to Mum. She’s sobbing her eyes out.”
Omri reluctantly went in search of his mother, and found her in the conservatory at the back of the house watering her plants. Not with tears – to his great relief she was not crying now – but she gave him a rather misty smile and said, “I read the story, Omri. It’s utterly amazing. No wonder it won. You’re the darkest little horse I ever knew, and I love you.” She hugged him. He submitted briefly, then politely extricated himself.
