in it, he thinks I’m some kind of spirit or something. What I mean,” Omri persisted, as Patrick’s eyes strayed longingly to the cupboard, “is that if you put all those men in there, when they came to life they’d be real men with real lives of their own, from their own times and countries, talking their own languages. You couldn’t just – set them up and make them do what you wanted them to. They’d do what they wanted to, or they might get terrified and run away or – well, one I tried it with, an old Indian, actually died of – of fright. When he saw me. Look, if you don’t believe me!” And Omri opened the cupboard.
There lay the body of the old Chief, now made of plastic, but still unmistakably dead, and not dead the way some plastic soldiers are made to look dead but the way real people look – crumpled up, empty.
Patrick picked it up, turning it in his hand. He’d put the soldiers down by now.
“This isn’t the one you bought at lunchtime?”
“Yes.”
“Crumbs.”
“You see?”
“Where’s his headdress?”
“Little Bull took it. He says he’s a Chief now. It’s made him even more bossy and – difficult than before,” said Omri, using a word his mother often used when he was insisting on having his own way.
Patrick put the dead Indian down hurriedly and wiped his hand on the seat of his jeans.
“Maybe this isn’t such fun as I thought.”
Omri considered for a moment.
“No,” he agreed soberly. “It’s not fun.”
They stared at Little Bull. He had finished the shell of the longhouse now. Taking off his headdress he tucked it under his arm, stooped, and entered through the low doorway at one end. After a moment he came out and looked up at Omri.
“Little Bull hungry,” he said. “You get deer? Bear? Moose?”
“No.”
He scowled. “I say get. Why you not get?”
“The shops are shut. Besides,” added Omri, thinking he sounded rather feeble, especially in front of Patrick, “I’m not sure I like the idea of having bears shambling about my room, or of having them killed. I’ll give you meat and a fire and you can cook it and that’ll have to do.”
Little Bull looked baffled for a moment. Then he swiftly put on the headdress, and drew himself to his full height of seven centimetres (nearly eight with the feathers). He folded his arms and glared at Omri.
“Little Bull Chief now. Chief hunts. Kills own meat. Not take meat others kill. If not hunt, lose skill with bow. For today, you give meat. Tomorrow, go shop, get bear, plass-tick. Make real. I hunt. Not here,” he added, looking up scornfully at the distant ceiling. “Out. Under sky. Now fire.”
Patrick, who had been crouching, stood up. He, too, seemed to be under Little Bull’s spell.
“I’ll go and get the tar,” he said.
“No wait a minute,” said Omri. “I’ve got another idea.”
He ran downstairs. Fortunately the living-room was empty. In the coal-scuttle beside the open fireplace was a packet of firelighters. He broke a fairly large bit off one and wrapped it in a scrap of newspaper. Then he went to the kitchen. His mother was standing at the sink peeling apples.
Omri hesitated, then went to the fridge.
“Don’t eat now, Omri, it’s nearly suppertime.”
“Just a tiny bit,” he said.
There was a lovely chunk of raw meat on a plate. Omri sniffed his fingers, wiped them hard on his sweater to get the stink of the firelighter off them, then took a big carving-knife from the drawer and, with an anxious glance at his mother’s back, began sawing a corner off the meat.
Luckily it was steak and cut easily. Even so he nearly had the whole plate off the fridge shelf and onto the floor before he’d cut his corner off.
His mother swung round just as he closed the fridge door.
“A tiny bit of what?” she asked. She often reacted late to things he said.
“Nothing,” he said, hiding the raw bit of meat in his hand. “Mum, could I borrow a tin plate?”
“I haven’t got such a thing.”
“Yes you have, the one you bought Adiel to go camping.”
“That’s in Adiel’s room somewhere, I haven’t got it. A tiny bit of what?”
But Omri was already on his way upstairs. Adiel was in his room (he would be) doing his homework.
“What do you want?” he asked the second Omri crept in.
“That plate – you know – your camping one.”
“Oh, that!” said Adiel, going back to his French.
“Well, can I have it?”
“Yeah, I suppose so. It’s over there somewhere.”
Omri found it eventually in an old knapsack, covered with disgusting bits of baked beans, dry and hard as cement. He hurried across to his own room. Whenever he’d been away from it for even a few minutes, he felt his heart beating in panic as he opened the door for fear of what he might find (or not find). The burden of constant worry was beginning to wear him out.
But all was as he had left it this time. Patrick was crouching near the seed-tray. Little Bull was directing him to take the tops off several of the jars of poster paint while he himself fashioned something almost too small to see.
“It’s a paintbrush,” whispered Patrick. “He cut a bit of his own hair and he’s tying it to a scrap of wood he found about the size of a big splinter.”
“Pour a bit of paint into the lids so he can reach to dip,” said Omri.
Meanwhile he was scraping the dry beans off the plate with his nails. He took the fragment of firelighter and the privet-twigs out of his pocket and arranged them in the centre of the plate. He washed the bit of meat in his bedside water glass. He’d had a wonderful idea for a spit to cook it on. From a flat box in which his first Meccano set had once been neatly laid out, but which was not in chaos, he took a rod, ready bent into a handle shape, and pushed this through the meat. Then, from small bits of Meccano, he quickly made a sort of stand for it to rest on, with legs each side of the fire so that the meat hung over the middle of it.
“Let’s light it now!” said Patrick, who was getting very excited again.
“Little Bull – come and see your fire,” said Omri.
Little Bull looked up from his paints and then ran down the ramp, across the carpet and vaulted onto the edge of
