The Treasure That Was Already There

The Bramble Wall

Book Two — The Treasure That Was Already There

It was the hottest Saturday of the summer so far, and Felix had a problem, and the problem was his own mouth.

"There's treasure," he'd told his cousins, on the phone, three whole days ago. "Loads of it. In our forest. We know exactly where."

Now Elfine and Marion were standing at the back gate with sun hats and empty rucksacks, seven years old and buzzing, and Felix was realising that "loads of it" was a much bigger promise than he actually had a plan for.

"Where's the treasure, then?" said Elfine, who was the taller cousin and asked things straight out.

"In the forest," said Felix. "Obviously."

"But where in the forest?"

"That," said Felix, "is the exciting part."

Alex, checking his radio at the shelf the way he always did, didn't say anything. But he'd heard the phone call three days ago too, and he'd been quietly thinking about it ever since. Felix had made a promise he couldn't keep on his own. So Alex had decided, without saying so to anyone, that he was going to help keep it anyway.

There were four radios today instead of two — Mummy had dug the spare pair out of the drawer, and now Felix and Elfine had one, and Alex and Marion had the other.

"You know the rule," said Mummy, tying her foraging bag on, sun cream shiny on her nose.

"We always go together," said Felix.

"We always have someone on the radio," said Alex.

"Good. I'll be along the old hollow way, looking for chicken-of-the-woods — I'll have my radio on, but I'm not with you, so mind the little ones and mind yourselves." She looked at Marion and Elfine. "Do everything the boys say about the forest. They know it."

"We know it," Felix agreed, with enormous confidence, given that he did not currently know where the treasure was.

Through the gate, up the footpath, and the trees closed over, and the sound went quiet-and-big, and it was a whole new world, same as always — except today there were four of them tramping through it instead of two, and the cousins kept stopping to look at everything.

"Is that the treasure?" said Marion, pointing at a stick.

"No," said Felix.

"Is that?" A leaf.

"No."

Alex, walking a little behind, caught Felix's eye. Felix's face had gone the particular shade of pink it went when a good idea was starting to feel like a less good idea.

"We'll find it near the fallen oak," Felix announced, because that was where all their best things had ever come from, and it seemed as good a place as any to start being right about something.

The first attempt was a rusty old drink can, half-buried, which Elfine dug out with a stick and held up like a trophy before everyone saw what it actually was.

"That's rubbish," said Marion.

"It's old rubbish," said Felix, weakly, and picked a new patch of ground on the strength of nothing at all — darker earth, a bit of a dip, it looked promising — and got all four of them digging with sticks and hands for ten hot minutes, for nothing but more dark earth and one confused worm.

"Sorry, worm," said Marion, putting it back.

Felix sat back on his heels, red in the face, sweat on his forehead, and the good feeling from three days ago — the big exciting phone-call feeling — had gone completely and been replaced by a hot, prickling, gone-wrong feeling that made him want to shout at somebody, even though nobody had done anything.

"I need a minute," he said, and walked off toward the shade of the bramble wall, and stood there breathing, the way he'd learned to.

While he did that, Alex crouched down where Felix had been digging and looked — properly looked, the way he looked at everything — not at the ground this time, but around it. At the shape of the clearing. At where the light fell. At the old fallen oak, mossy and enormous, that had given up the black stone last time without anybody having to guess.

"It's not about digging just anywhere," Alex said, when Felix came back, calmer. "It's about digging where the forest's already telling you to look."

So they did the looking game instead — Alex's kind, the quiet kind, the kind the boys had invented for themselves without ever writing it down. Read the signs a place leaves. Elfine and Marion picked it up fast, once someone showed them: crouch low, go slow, watch where the ground looks different, where something old might be waiting to be noticed rather than dug for.

And the forest, once they stopped attacking it and started looking at it, turned out to be full of things.

Marion found a stone with a hole clean through it, smooth as if a river had worked at it for a hundred years. Elfine found a curl of rusted iron, twisted like a snail shell, half-sunk in the black earth near an old scorched patch of ground. Felix found a feather, glossy dark blue-green, from some bird none of them could name. Alex, going still the way he did, found a lump of something black and glassy and bubble-holed, smaller than the first one but unmistakably its cousin.

"Is this the treasure?" said Marion, holding up her holed stone, and this time nobody said no.

"Yeah," said Felix, and something in his chest un-knotted. "Yeah. That's it. That's all of it."

They were crossing back toward the fallen oak, treasure-heavy and happy, when it happened.

Marion, showing off a bit, hopped up onto a big rolled log to walk along the top of it like a balance beam — and her welly slid into the gap where the log met a root, and wedged there, snug as anything, and she sat down with a bump, one foot stuck fast.

"I can't get it out," said Marion, and her voice had gone small and a bit frightened, though she wasn't hurt — just properly, thoroughly stuck.

Nobody had done anything wrong. It was just one of those things.

Elfine grabbed at the welly and pulled, and it didn't move, and Marion said "ow, not like that," and for one second everybody just stood there not knowing what to do.

Then Alex, who was on the radio pair with Marion, unclipped his radio from his chest, and pressed the red button on top.

Every other radio in the forest screamed at once — a loud, urgent, unmissable tone, cutting straight through the birdsong and the heat.

Far off, Mummy's whole body went cold for exactly one second. Then she was moving, running, radio in hand.

Alex pressed the talk button next, calm, the way Daddy had shown him. "Mummy. It's Alex. Marion's stuck, not hurt, her welly's wedged under the big rolled log. We're at the fallen oak clearing. Over."

A crackle. A pause. Long enough for a held breath.

"Coming now," Mummy's voice came back. "Keep her calm. Over."

Felix knelt down next to Marion, and for once he didn't have a big plan or a big idea — he just held her hand and said, "You're okay. Mummy's coming. It's not your fault, it just got stuck," which was, it turned out, exactly the right thing to say, in exactly the right amount of words.

Elfine, quieter now, stopped pulling and just sat with them, and somewhere in the trees they heard the buzz getting louder — not just Mummy running, but Daddy too, off his enduro and moving fast, radio crackling on his hip, because his had shouted the same as everyone else's.

It took both grown-ups, in the end. Daddy eased the log with his boot. Mummy worked the welly gently, side to side. No more than a minute, probably, though it felt like a lot longer to Marion.

Then the welly came free with a wet schlorp, and Marion's foot was fine, and Marion herself burst into the kind of tears that are mostly relief.

"Well done," said Daddy, looking round at all four of them, "pressing that button. That's exactly what it's for." He looked at Alex. "And you said where you were. That's the whole trick, and you got it right."

"We know the rule," said Felix, a little shakily, and for once didn't need to say anything bigger than that.

Marion wiped her face and, a moment later, grinned, because being rescued in under a minute by your own family, with your cousins right there holding your hand, is actually a pretty good story to have.

"I knew what to press," she said. "I just couldn't reach it myself."

"That's what the four of us are for," said Elfine.

Mummy checked Marion over properly, decided she was fine — just a fright and a wet sock — and, once it was clear nobody needed anything more, drifted back off toward her foraging patch, and Daddy back to his bike, because the rule still held: the grown-ups had come when it mattered, and now the forest belonged to the four of them again.

They went back to the den to cool off in the shade of it, and Marion, still a bit shaky, ducked inside first — and stopped.

"It hasn't got a door," she said. "Bugs could just walk in."

"It's never needed one," said Felix, "but it could have one," which was as close as Felix ever came to admitting a good idea wasn't originally his. Elfine wove a flap out of springy hazel and bracken while Alex held it in place and worked out the hinge — two loops of bark-strip, twisted till they held — and by the time they'd finished, the den had a door that swung, properly, and kept the bugs and the wind out.

Inside, Alex found a flat stone, wide as a dinner plate, and wedged it level on two smaller stones against the back wall, so it sat like a little shelf, low enough for four kids to reach.

"For treasure," he said. "The finding-here kind. Not the cache — that stays secret. This is just for looking at."

They laid the day's finds out on it for a moment, admiring, before deciding, one by one, what would go in the tin and what would come home.

"We should keep the rest," Felix said, once the shelf-moment was over. "Not take it all home. Keep it here. Our own hidden bit, just for us."

Alex was already moving, without needing to be told, scouting the base of the fallen oak for a gap in the roots deep enough to hide something in. He found one, a dry dark pocket under an old knee of root, and Felix produced — from deep in his rucksack, where it had apparently been the whole time, unused — an old biscuit tin with a picture of a Scottish castle on the lid, slightly dented, smelling of ginger nuts.

"I brought this in case we needed somewhere to put the treasure," Felix admitted. "I just didn't know we'd need it for this kind of treasure."

They put it all in together — Marion's holed stone, Elfine's curled iron, Felix's feather. Alex kept his black lump back for the windowsill; some things went home, and some things stayed. Then they wedged the tin into the dry gap under the root and covered it with moss, so it looked, to anyone else, like nothing at all.

"It's ours," said Marion. "All four of us."

"Next time we come," said Elfine, "we add to it."

They walked home slow and sun-tired, treasure-light now, radios clipped on, the forest going gold behind them in the late afternoon. Marion, walking next to Felix, looked over at him.

"You said there was treasure," she said. "I didn't believe you, a bit. But there really was."

"It just wasn't where I thought it'd be," said Felix.

"It was better," said Marion. "It was ours."

At home, on the shelf, Felix set down the feather — glossy, useless, not worth anything to anybody except the four of them, who knew exactly what it had cost to find it — and Alex put his little black lump beside the first, so there were two now, side by side in the light.

The radios went on the charger in a row, four little lights, all glowing red, filling up for next time.

And in the forest, under the moss, in a dented tin that used to hold biscuits, a small collection of nothing-much sat waiting to become something — the start of a treasure that was theirs before anyone else ever got the chance to find it.

The End.