And the Nominees for the Neev Book Award Are… | EXTRACTS

There’s not been much to celebrate lately, has there? Well, we have one reason right here – two of our titles have have made it to the shortlist for the Neev Book Award 2020!  And the nominees are All of Me by Venita Coelho in the Junior Reader category and Being Gandhi by Paro Anand under the Young Adults. If you haven’t got your copy of either of these yet, then read on to find out what you’ve been missing out on…

All of Me by Venita Coelho

Chapter 1

The House of Wonders

‘It’s been quite some time now,’ said Miss Trent.

‘Five days, seven hours and thirty-two minutes,’ said the Infant Prodigy. ‘That is six breakfasts, six lunches, five dinners and five teas that we’ve missed. I am very hungry.’

The darkness was dense. The belly of the house lay underground. No sunlight reached it, and the passage of days was left to the calculations of the Infant Prodigy. The candles had run out three days ago. They were down to their last bottle of water. The rats had been getting bolder. They could feel sly touches of whiskers, of cold paws as the rats skipped around them in the dark.

There was a sudden flurry in the darkness and a shrill squealing.

‘What on earth is that?’ said Mr Pickwick. ‘What have you got in your hands?’

‘A rat,’ said Skinner.

‘Put it down this minute!’ cried Miss Trent. ‘It’s got disease, plague, death upon it!’

‘It’s got meat upon it,’ said Skinner calmly. ‘We have to eat something.’

There was a shriek from Miss Trent. ‘Don’t you dare put that rat in your mouth! I shall wash your mouth out with soap!’

‘You shouldn’t say dare,’ said the Infant Prodigy. ‘Then he always does it.’

‘Please! I beseech you, dear boy. Oh, I shall faint! You can’t eat rats!’

‘There ain’t anything else is there?’

Mr Pickwick intervened. ‘He will come. He always does.’

‘He hasn’t come for four days,’ said the Infant Prodigy. ‘The organs of the human body sustain permanent damage within six days of starvation. And we haven’t eaten in four. We have to get out.’

‘We’re starving to death, that’s what we are,’ said Skinner. ‘What are we supposed to do?’

‘Pray,’ said Mr Pickwick fervently. ‘Is any amongst you afflicted? Let him pray. Is any merry? Let him sing. Psalms. Chapter Five, Verse Thirteen.’

‘Bah!’ said the Infant Prodigy, squeezing an ocean of scorn into the word. ‘We’re starving to death, and you want us to be merry and sing?’

‘We could break down the door,’ said Skinner, ‘and get out.’

‘Out?’ said Miss Trent.

‘Out?!’ said the Infant Prodigy.

‘Surely you don’t mean out by ourselves?’ said Mr Pickwick.

They hadn’t been out of the cellar in years. The thought of going out into the world startled and upset them. A flicker of memories moved though their minds. Memories of light and wind and green things.

The Boy spoke for the first time. ‘If we stay here, we will die. We have to do something. Let me think.’

No one said a word. They always listened to the Boy.

There was silence for a moment. In that silence, they heard a crash and the sudden thud of footsteps.

‘Blimey! Someone is in the house,’ said Skinner.

‘Someone has come for us!’ said the Infant Prodigy in excitement.

‘Someone has come for us!’ said Miss Trent in dread.

There was a sudden silence into which Mr Pickwick spoke. ‘They might mean us harm. Remember what he said? We were to hide.’

They listened intently in the dark, straining to hear the sounds. The footsteps fumbled and scraped. There was more than one person.

‘Come on! It’s our chance,’ said Skinner. ‘They can open the door. We have to get out.’

‘Uncle said we were never to go out. He said it wasn’t safe,’ whispered the Infant Prodigy.

‘He said we were never to leave the cellar without him,’ said Mr Pickwick. ‘He was most insistent that we were not to reveal ourselves.’

They sat in troubled silence, while the footsteps echoed overhead.

‘We cannot stay here,’ said the Boy, speaking up again. ‘We have no choice.’

Everyone fell silent.

Overhead, there was a sudden thump and a scream.

‘They’ve met Horace,’ said the Infant Prodigy.

‘Aargh!’ yelled Joshua, leaping backwards and stepping heavily on the Serjeant’s toes. ‘It’s a tiger!’

The tiger crouched, eyes glittering, ready to jump. Joshua felt the strength go out of his knees. He opened his mouth to scream again and nothing emerged but a squeak.

‘Geroff!’ yelled the Serjeant, rescuing his aching foot. He peered into the gloom. ‘It’s stuffed, you idiot!’

Joshua shut his mouth hastily and looked more closely through spectacles that were askew. The tiger was still crouched, unnaturally still. But now, Joshua could see that the glitter in its eyes was glass. Bald patches shone amidst the stripes.

‘Oh,’ said Joshua, trying to get his heart out of his mouth and

back into his chest. ‘Sorry.’

‘Blimey!’ said the Serjeant, wiping his watering eyes. ‘This ’ere is a house of wonders!’

Joshua raised his lantern and looked around. A gleam of blue and green showed where a stuffed peacock stood beside the tiger, flaunting its tail, a scatter of feathers fallen on the floor. A glitter of gold marked where a gilded howdah stood propped up against a wall. The light caught on strange statues and flung their twisted shapes on the walls. A collection of swords flamed in a glass case. One of them had a blade that curved like a snake. The room even smelled exotic, with a whiff of jasmine overlaying the general odour of decay.

The Serjeant scratched his head. ‘I guess the old man thought he was a Maharaja.’

The old man in question was missing. The kitchen boy had come into the police station to say that his master had not been seen for four days, and he was afraid that something was wrong. Serjeant Botham and the newest recruit had been sent to the house to take a look.

‘He’s a funny old coot,’ explained the kitchen boy, who had come with them to show them the way. ‘But he always opened the door before. Never goes anywhere. Ever. So it’s strange.’ He volunteered the information that they could get in from the kitchen, ‘easy-like’.

Easy-like meant breaking open the kitchen door to get in, a proceeding that left Joshua with an uneasy feeling of transgression. He had to remind himself that he was the law.

It was his very first day as a policeman. He had reported for duty in the morning and been assigned a truncheon and Serjeant Botham. Now, he clutched the reassuring weight of his truncheon as he edged away from the tiger’s frozen snarl.

‘Ain’t going to find the old man in his stomach,’ said Serjeant Botham, who was as unruffled as if he broke into houses every day. ‘We should go upstairs.’

A narrow curl of stairs led up out of the living room. It was an odd sort of house, added as an afterthought between two other houses. So, though the front door was fifty feet from the back door, it was only thirty feet across. It rose narrowly up three floors, with a spiral staircase connecting the floors. The river ran along the back, and the house was hung with the smells of fish and night soil and all the other nameless things that bobbed on the murky tide.

They went up the narrow stairs, Joshua making sure to stick as close as he could to the Serjeant. As they stepped onto the second floor, Joshua recoiled and cursed.

‘Ow!’ yelled the Serjeant, as Joshua landed heavily on his boot again. ‘Me poor feet!’

A company of men had risen to confront them. Joshua waved his truncheon wildly as he began to back away from them, nearly shoving the Serjeant down the stairs.

‘They ain’t real,’ said the Serjeant. ‘Look!’

Joshua paused. The men paused as well. Joshua realized that he was only looking at his own reflection in a collection of mirrors of every shape and size. They eerily multiplied his every move.

‘You stand away from me,’ ordered the Serjeant, and a hundred Serjeants pointed. ‘Right over there.’

The Serjeant looked around. ‘Mad as a coot, this old man. That’s more mirrors in one place than I’ve seen in my life.’

‘Yes, Sir,’ said Joshua. ‘Er – sorry.’

‘You go that way,’ said the Serjeant authoritatively. ‘Search the place. And if you see anything, don’t come running back to jump on me feet.’ He limped away.

Joshua raised his lantern and moved forward, his mirrored selves slipping after him, every step multiplied to infinity. In the centre of the room, he took a step forward – and

vanished. Every image from every mirror simultaneously disappeared. It so startled Joshua, he looked down to see if he was still there. He was, but the downward glance brought to his notice a pair of boots that stuck out from under a mirror on his left.

The shock made Joshua drop his truncheon. He bent to pick it up, but it rolled away from his scrabbling fingers. Panicked, Joshua reached for the one thing that had stayed with him for the last ten years, lodged firmly in the pocket of every coat, accompanying him everywhere. He produced Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language, and, inching carefully around

the mirror, he flung it with all his might.

The book was the size of a brick. Unfortunately, Joshua had terrible aim. It hit the mirror, which rocked and then fell. It exploded into fragments as it fell upon the man who huddled behind it. Joshua watched, horrified, as the man slid sideways and slumped on the floor. He lay there unmoving.

The noise brought Serjeant Botham running.

‘The mirror fell on him! I didn’t mean to kill him!’ said Joshua, aghast. ‘He was hiding behind the mirror.’

Serjeant Botham inspected the man that lay on the floor in front of the fireplace. The broken glass bathed him in a shower of brilliant shards. There was a dent in his forehead.

‘This ’ere gentleman met his death by the collision between ’is head and a very ’eavy object,’ said the Serjeant in his official voice. Then he took pity at seeing the fright engraved on Joshua’s face and added, ‘You didn’t kill this ’ere bloke. He’s been dead several days. I’ve seen enough of them to know.’

Timidly, Joshua bent over the man. The shatter of glass on the floor reflected Joshua’s white face a hundred times.

Despite the kitchen boy calling him ‘old man’, the man who lay dead was not very old. His hair was only touched with grey, but his face was lined with wrinkles, as if he had led a life filled with care. The kitchen boy had also forgotten to tell them that he had only one eye. Its singular bright blue gaze stared blindly up at Joshua. The other eye was hidden under an eyepatch. The trail of a savage scar started at the eyebrow, ran under the eyepatch and emerged to run down the man’s cheek.

‘Look!’ said Joshua, pointing at a scrap of blue held in the man’s right hand. It turned out to be a patch of thin fabric, torn from something.

‘’E pulled this off something before he died,’ said the Serjeant, abstracting it and examining it.

‘That material is too fine for anything but a woman’s dress. It’s Indian muslin,’ said Joshua, peering over the Serjeant’s shoulder.

Serjeant Botham looked at Joshua. ‘Know a lot about ladies’ dresses, do you?’

Joshua blushed a bright red and hastily denied it. They stood there staring down at the dead man. The single bright-blue eye stared back at them.

GET YOUR COPY TO READ THE REST!

Being Gandhi by Paro Anand