The Children's Writer Read Online Free PDF

shoes, seeing as I didn’t own any white leather shoes. (Not being a real estate salesman, as I pointed out.)
    But it was not the cricket flannels, nor the white tennis shoes, nor the $42.50 champagne that set me back that morning. It was the gilt dragon that Lootie stuck in my lapel.
    Before we had even left our place, as we were waiting for the cab in the patchy shade of the elm, she said, ‘Here, Charlie, turn around.’
    Did I have dandruff on my shoulders?
    ‘Other way, silly,’ she said when I had my back to her.
    I turned to face her, wondering. Had I dribbled on my clean white shirt?
    She dug in her change purse and pulled something out. ‘Stand still,’ she said, and put the something in my lapel.
    I looked down. As best as I could see, it was a kind of brooch. A little gold brooch, or stick pin, in the shape of a dragon. A dragon with its mouth open breathing gold fire, its pointed tail arched over its back. Maybe two centimetres long. On big fat me.
    ‘What is it?’ I wanted to know, twisting it around so I could see it better.
    Lootie slapped my hand. ‘A gold dragon,’ she said. ‘I bought it especially. For when you meet Sebastian.’
    ‘What?’ I said, but the cab pulled up.
    ‘Why?’ I asked when we were in the back seat. She didn’t answer. No matter how many times I asked. She patted my hand and looked out her window, as if to say, mother knows (as my mother did) and I had to be satisfied with that.
    The cab pulled up before a massive pair of wrought-iron gates set in a cast-iron fence with spikes on top. (They were probably fleur-de-lis, but being Chanteleer’s place, I imagine them as spikes, jousting lances at least.) The garden beyond was thick with glossy-leaved shrubs, camellias mostly, some protruding through the bars as if attempting an escape.
    Lootie pushed the gates open and I followed her through. The curved drive was paved in red brick with a circular bed of pansies, all scarlet and purple and gold—a cushion of velvet—squatting in the centre.
    I followed until we came to three stone steps leading to a portico. Lootie went on up; I stood back.
    The house reminded me of the whited sepulchres that Father Steven taught us about in chapel on Sunday mornings while my mother waited in the vestry. ‘Father Steven means you should watch out for frauds,’ she told me as we trudged home in the summer heat.
    ‘What?’ I said, not understanding.
    ‘Frauds. People who look like one thing and they’re another,’ she declared. ‘When they’re something else. They’re what you call “whited sepulchres”.’ For all of her explanations (and since I was so naïve, so ignorant, you might say), none of this meant anything to me.
    But standing in Chanteleer’s garden, and looking up at his house, was something of an epiphany. For all its apparent magnificence, the place was built of brick not stone. The notion of strength was borrowed from the iron in the surrounding fence, the illusion of wealth from the jewelled tapestry of the pansies. The bricks were old and ill-fired, the sepulchral white paint peeling off. A Greek pediment (empty of sculpture, streaked with bird shit), evidently provided a home for starlings; and while I stood on tiptoe to look inside, the faded corrugations of the threadbare curtains (once royal purple?) meant that I could see nothing.
    Lootie was at the front door, waiting for someone to answer. I stepped up beside her. The knocker was of some bright yellow metal in the shape of a dragon’s head. When I looked more closely, I could see a bar-coded price sticker still attached. I figured that Chanteleer must haveadded this bit of whimsy to suit his taste. If Eve (aka Red Lips) was to be believed, he had not been in this country all that long.
    Obviously no one was home.
    ‘Let’s go,’ I whispered, ever hopeful.
    (Would that I had grabbed her arm and run!)
    ‘They must be somewhere,’ Lootie hissed.
    She pulled me down from the portico and took a cinder