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“Need some help squeezing through the fire doors, Mardi Gras?”
Mardy was glad to get to the end of the day. All the same, the prospect of visiting Alan was beginning to send a series of nervous shivers through her mind.
She dawdled, going home. As she reached the park she heard again the strange plucked instrument she had noticed on the way to school that morning. It was this, as much as a wish to drag out the time, that led her through the wrought-iron gates and up one of three forking paths, to a circle of flowerbeds and asphalt. The Undesirables were nowhere to be seen. In the middle of the circle stood a granite cross. Steps led up all around the cross, and on the side visible to Mardy a bunch of winter roses had been laid. Lest we forget. She began to read a dizzying list of names, each belonging to a dead soldier. Terence Appleby, William Aston, George Aston, Charles Ayling … Once she had begun, in fact, she found she had to carry on. The music, which was very close now – just on the far side of the cross – seemed to insist upon it. Lest we forget. She could not move further until she had dutifully read and remembered the name of each Burgess, Butterell, Chandler and Crisp; and so to the next side of the cross, and the next, until John Zipes had at last been laid to rest. And still there was no sign of where the music was coming from, or who was playing it.
Even now she could not move away. Mardy had heard that just before death a person’s life flashed past – all in a moment. What happened to her now was like that, but much slower. She was unwillingly engaged in a laborious act of memory, unwinding each moment of her past like thread from a bobbin. She felt as if she had to or be turned to stone herself.
Finally – finally – the many-stringed instrument (a harp, was it, or a mandolin?) began drawing its threads of sound together. The tangle of arpeggios became more dense and knotted. Harmonies and discords vied dangerously, and at last a vast, enmeshed chord threw a net of closely-woven sound over her head. It billowed out and settled, dissolved at its edges and tightened at its centre, and bound her hand and foot. For a few moments she was no more alive than a wax doll.
Then the music was not there any more.
Mardy gasped, as if she had just broken the surface after a long, lung-bursting swim. She was panting. About fifty yards away, at the far end of one of the paths, a dark figure carrying a black instrument case was leaving the park. The musician – if it was the musician – must have stopped playing some time ago, to have packed up and be leaving already. But that final, calamitous chord was still shaking Mardy, body and soul. It seemed only a few minutes since she had entered the park and seen the granite memorial. Since the music stopped it had been no time at all. Yet her watch told her that an hour had passed.
The hospital! Her mother had been expecting her home thirty minutes ago! Mardy ran up the path and the short streets to her own house. She was there in less than five minutes. Her mother’s car was still parked in the road and the door was on the latch.
“Mum?” gasped Mardy breathlessly to the empty hall.
Mrs Watt was sitting on the living room sofa. Her visiting bag was beside her. She didn’t look up. “Haven’t you changed yet?” she asked coldly.
Mardy was too flustered to notice the oddness of this question. She plunged on with the excuse she had hastily prepared. “Sorry, Mum, I got held up at school. Mr Lorimer wanted to talk about the rehearsals.” She added quickly: “Hadn’t we better get to the hospital?”
Mrs Watt stood up. She was a tall woman and she towered over Mardy now. “I don’t know what you’re babbling about, Mardy. Rehearsals? What are you sorry about?”
“About being late from school. A little bit late.”
Mrs Watt shook her head. “I worry about you, Mardy, I really do. It was a good half hour ago you clattered up to your room to change. My only question is why you’re still in your school uniform. Well, there’s no time now. You’ll have to go to the hospital as you are.”
“Half an hour ago?” repeated Mardy, dumbfounded.
“At least. Now please get in the car. I don’t like to keep Alan waiting. Do think about someone other than yourself for a change.” Mrs Watt reached for her keys and purse. “Mardy! What are you doing now?”
“Just a moment!” yelled Mardy as she ran upstairs. She flung her school bag down on the landing and then stopped. She still had not got her breath back after her dash from the park. But something her mother had said was alarming enough for her to need to go to her room at once, even if it meant a shouting match later.
She had not gone upstairs half an hour ago. So who had?
Mardy opened the door of her room. Perhaps her mother was simply mistaken. But her mother did not often make mistakes – and there was something odd about this day which had made her nervous. That final chord from the War Memorial was still quivering through her.
But – no. The room was empty, and as familiar as her own skin. She would have felt at once if an intruder had been hiding there. She knew every stuffed toy and CD box and pile of unwashed clothes in the place, and not a stitch of it had moved since she had left the house that morning.
On her desk lay her page-a-day diary. She kept it only occasionally. Daily life already seemed wearing enough: why fire herself out twice by writing it down? But sometimes she felt she would overflow if she couldn’t let out some of the things she couldn’t even tell Hal. Some of these were about Alan – especially just before Christmas when he seemed to have had a relapse and was terribly close to death again. That had been a long, dark festival. But in the last weeks most of the entries had been to do with Rachel. On the page that lay open was a single jagged sentence, obviously written in a hurry:
Rachel Fludd is a witch!
Mardy stared at it hard and wrinkled her nose.
“Mardy!” Mrs Watt was calling from the hall downstairs.
“Coming, Mum!”
Mardy gave one last glance round her room. Everything was as it should be. Everything was in its place … Except for that last sentence.
Rachel Fludd a witch? It was a suspicion she had often entertained, half seriously. It was certainly the kind of thing she might have put in her diary.
But, try as she might, Mardy could not remember writing it there.
2 LOVE POETRY (#ulink_17925ec3-a1e6-5348-a312-23721acc22f4)
“WHY DON’T YOU tell me what’s wrong?” asked Hal at last. They were nearing the end of Bellevue Road and Hobson’s was just in view. Mardy was already fiddling unconsciously with her purse.
“Uh?”
“Mardy, wake up! Have you heard a word I’ve been saying?” Hal did a little war dance in front of her. What he had been saying was not important – a mixture of football, geography and soap opera – but Mardy usually made a better show of listening than this. “Is your brother worse again?” he finally asked outright.
“Alan? No, no. I saw him last night and he’s just the same. A bit better if anything.”
“I’m glad.”
“His skin – you know it had that awful waxy look? Like a Granny Smith when you’ve polished it? That’s gone. He doesn’t look like he’s wearing a mask any more.”
Mardy relapsed into silence.
“But?” prompted Hal. “Come on, you know I can tell when something’s bothering you.”
“Only my mother’s got this way of talking like he was a saint. And he isn’t.”
Alan wasn’t a saint. Mardy loved her brother, but however much she tried to be pure and charitable, globules of resentment kept bubbling up through her mind whenever she thought about him, like marsh gas through a swamp. Little things, mostly, like the way he insisted on calling her Spud when he knew she detested the name. Or his habit of careless elegance which meant that, even lying motionless in his hospital bed, Alan was always the centre of attention. While their mother read Alan stories from the local paper, Mardy lurked in the background, picking off the less-wrinkled grapes for the man in the next-door bed and feeling like an imposter. She wished she could be filled with noble feelings, feelings of self-sacrifice and pity; instead, she wanted nothing more than to run back down the sterile corridors to her home.
They turned the corner to Hobson’s. Mardy looked with naked dislike at the camera mounted on the school gate, which they were obliged to pass. Cameras gave her the creeps and the hospital was full of them.
“Hal – would you think I was crazy if I said I thought I was being followed?”
“Followed!” repeated Hal, instinctively looking back down the tree-lined road. “Who do you think’s following you?”
“Don’t say it like that – like you think I really was crazy! Anyway, I don’t mean followed, quite. But watched. I think someone might be watching me.”
“Mr Shute through the CCTV?” suggested Hal. “It’s three minutes to nine again, we’ve got to hurry.”
Mardy looked annoyed. “You don’t understand,” she said. “Wait while I go to Hobson’s – I’ll tell you after.”
Mardy sprinted the fifty yards to Hobson’s, rather flustered. She really had meant to tell Hal what was bothering her, but found it was not so easy to explain. Rachel Fludd came into it, and the diary entry, and the strange thing that had happened at the War Memorial the previous afternoon.
And Alan? Perhaps, thought Mardy furiously, perhaps everything comes into it. Perhaps it’s another way of saying that life is strange, that the sky is blue and water is wet. A way of saying not much. But I’m not the kind of person who gets in a state over nothing, she thought. I’m just not that imaginative.
Mardy burst into Hobson’s, steaming with frustration. Nut Krunch Bars, at least, were reliable.
Mrs Hobson looked up from her paper. “Oh. Hello, Mardy.” For some reason she seemed surprised to see her. “What can I do for you?”
“My usual Nut Krunch,” said Mardy. “I’ve finished with low-calorie imitations – they taste like cardboard. Back to double chocolate from now on.”
Again Mrs Hobson looked at her oddly. “Back with a vengeance, I’d say. Two in half an hour is pushing it, isn’t it?”
“What?” asked Mardy distractedly, as she placed the right coins on to the counter.
“Two Nut Krunch Bars in one day. You only just left the shop.”
“What did you say?”
“Oh, not that it’s any business of mine,” protested Mrs Hobson. “I know what it’s like, Fighting Temptation. Would you believe I used to have a twenty-six inch waist?”
“I haven’t been in here since yesterday,” protested Mardy.
“If you say so,” laughed Mrs Hobson in an infuriating, disbelieving way.
“But I haven’t!”
“Then all I can say is, your doppelganger was here ten minutes ago – and she likes double-chocolate Nut Krunch Bars too. Now, hadn’t you better get along? Your friend’s getting in a bit of a state out there.”
True enough, Hal was standing at the window between two pyramids of baked beans, frantically tapping his watch. Mardy muttered a goodbye and left.
“Don’t forget your chocolate!” called Mrs Hobson.
Another dash for the classroom. This time they almost ran into the school caretaker, Mr Bartok, who was screwing a bracket into the wall over the main entrance. “Mind my ladder!” he warned and teetered bulkily at the top.
Since Christmas the school had sprouted a ring of CCTV cameras. To keep out Undesirables, Mrs Watt had said, and a good thing too. But when Mardy saw Mr Shute, the headteacher, looking out over the playground from his first-floor office, she wondered. Perhaps it was the pupils, rather than any intruder, who were his main concern. She did not think she had ever been nearer to Mr Shute than the thirty feet separating them at the weekly assemblies, where he swept in, exhorted them and left. For all she knew Mr Shute might be a robot, or a hologram, or – or – anything …
Throughout assembly, Mardy kept looking up and down the hall, wondering who, if anyone, might have been mistaken for her. Perhaps, as Mrs Hobson had said, she really did have a double – or something close enough to fool the shopkeeper, who was shortsighted and always had her nose in the paper. Rows and rows of children surrounded her, short, tall, thin and fat, white, black and brown. From awkward Year 7s like herself to the willowy grandeur of Year 13, hundreds of girls in that room wore the Bellevue School sweatshirt. On hundreds of chests the same school logo was embroidered: a ship in full sail that actually looked more like a kitten being run over by a milk float.
Mardy couldn’t decide which struck her more: how very different everyone was or (in another way) how very much the same. They were all standing with their bored assembly expressions, as the head ran through arrangements for the Year 8 trip to the Science Museum. The same expressions persisted as he launched into the statutory hymn and warned them about the litter problem in the streets outside the school. But none of them, Mardy decided, looked enough like her to deceive Mrs Hobson.
Except, possibly, Rachel. But even Rachel was so much thinner, with her long blanched, moon face and coal-black eyes, that Mrs Hobson would have had to be blind not to see the difference. Rachel Fludd probably hadn’t eaten a Nut Krunch Bar in her life.
It might not have been so bad if Rachel hadn’t been writing in her notebook again at wet play that day. The children were kept in their classrooms, bored and out of temper. In the corner of Mardy’s class Mrs Yarrow sipped away at a mug of coffee, clearly wishing she could be in the staffroom instead. Hal and his chess-playing friends found a set and retired to the corner. The room was as sweaty as a boxer’s sock. Mardy, swinging her legs idly as she sat on the edge of a table, found without surprise that she and Rachel were the only two girls who had not attached themselves to some group or other.
Looking down at her own legs, she compared them with Rachel’s. Fat Tuesday. String Bean Sally. Rachel must be as far under the perfect weight as Mardy was above it. There must be some perfect girl of whom they were both just freakish reflections. Certainly, something seemed to tie the two of them together. In the weeks since Rachel’s arrival they had hardly ever spoken; yet Rachel seemed to fill a bigger place in her life than anyone else except Hal and her own family.
The battered leather notebook in which Rachel was writing was much less plush than the diary Mardy kept at home, but even that seemed another unwelcome link between them. And how furtively Rachel wrote! As if she were an enemy spy …
Despite herself, Mardy was curious to know what so absorbed Rachel. She got down from the table and made her way to Rachel’s desk – not directly but by a route as aimless as possible. First, she stopped to check Hal’s progress on the chessboard: he had just castled and was preparing to do something devastating with his rook. His eyes for once were narrowed, his lip bitten white with controlled ferocity. Mardy moved on, exchanging pleasantries with Kylie and Susannah at the expense of their friend Michelle, who was off that day with a cold. And so (under the flickering eye of Mrs Yarrow, who was probably itching for a cigarette) she arrived just behind Rachel. Rachel had not seen her approach or she would certainly have put the notebook into her pocket at once. Even so, Mardy could not see what she was writing because Rachel had crooked her arm round protectively and she hung her head low over the paper with her hair falling raggedly around it.
So Mardy took a long shot.
“Who is he, then, Rachel?” she asked out loud. “Who are you writing love poems to?”
Rachel twisted round in alarm, blushed and hurriedly shut the notebook. A moment later it was not there – though Mardy didn’t quite see which pocket she had put it in. All this happened in an instant, during which Mardy found herself backing off from Rachel’s desk as though a hand had pushed her roughly away.
“Keep your nose out of it, Mardi Gras!”
Mardy staggered back to her seat. She was breathless and a little frightened at the fury she had managed to provoke in quiet, unobtrusive Rachel. But she was smiling too, because she had won some kind of victory. For Rachel to be made angry, she must have been touched at last. And Rachel did not like to be touched.
It didn’t take long for the news that Rachel was in love to spread to the Bluecoat girls. The rest of the morning Mardy watched them prodding her like a spider in a jar. English, where they were reading Romeo and Juliet, presented almost too many opportunities to be true. Biology was just as good. Rachel had to wait until the maths lesson after lunch for the teasing to die down. Even then, the mystery of Rachel’s boyfriend threatened to break out in unpredictable ways: an equation here, a co-ordinate there.
“And who are you co-ordinating with, Rachel?”
Mardy said nothing. She knew from her days as Queen of Fairlawn Primary just how little work was needed to start a rumour. Once the process was begun, any class would unite in the chase. Beyond Rachel herself, no one would suspect that Mardy was behind it at all.
Except Hal, of course. “Up to your old tricks, Mardy?” he said to her as they made their way down the corridor after maths. They were being buffeted like channel swimmers in a rough sea and it was with difficulty that Mardy managed to toss her head disdainfully and say: “I don’t know what you mean.”
“I’m sure you don’t,” said Hal, with his terrier face on. “I’m your friend, remember? I know the way you work.”
“Oh shut up, Jiminy Cricket! When I need a conscience I’ll advertise.”
“You’ve got one already,” retorted Hal between buffets. “Remember Theresa Greystoke?”
“Oh, her!” Buffet. Buffet. “I just felt sorry for the little squirt.”
Mardy shifted herself so that she was separated from Hal beyond talking distance. She didn’t care to be reminded of Theresa Greystoke.
For a brief time Theresa had been Mardy’s rival at Fairlawn Primary. Beautiful, clever, an expert juggler and the owner of two ponies, Theresa had arrived from the north in her last year. For a while she had charmed everyone and Mardy had felt her own star beginning to lose some of its glitter.
But then a rumour started – and no one knew how – that Theresa Greystoke had had plastic surgery on her nose and ears. That those dazzling white teeth were dentures. That one of her bright blue eyes was actually made of glass. It was whispered too that Theresa Greystoke’s father had bribed the headteacher to get good test results. Overnight, and without realising what had happened to her, popular Theresa Greystoke became an outcast.
Very little of this had come from Mardy directly. She had started the first rumour – only half expecting to be believed – then watched, in growing wonder, as the torrent had swept her rival from sight. In the end, she had rescued her. “Theresa Greystoke is my friend!” she had announced fiercely in the girls’ toilets, where a Year 5 was scribbling something foul on the wall. It was enough. The word went out that Theresa was under Mardy’s protection: the persecution ceased. Theresa herself – poor, trusting Theresa – had been terribly grateful.
Only Hal knew the whole story. Not that Mardy had ever told him, but he kept his eyes open, Hal did, and he understood Mardy too well for comfort. Mardy thought it over. So Hal thought that Rachel might become another Theresa Greystoke, did he? If Mardy had still been Queen Bee, then yes – maybe. But Rachel and she were on equal terms here. The rest of the class thought little enough of either of them. That made it a fair fight, didn’t it? And it was Rachel who had started it. Mardi Gras!
The next lesson was chemistry. Outside, the sleet had turned stutteringly to snow. At first the flakes were too large to settle, falling flat on their watery faces. But a little later there was a mother-of-pearl sheen to the asphalt and on the larch tree the small twigs hung exhausted under the weight of newly-gathered ice. In thirty minutes the playground was choked with it. Silent snow. The more Mardy looked at it the more she felt that it wasn’t quite real, that the whole day had got off on the wrong foot and had better retrace its steps. She tried to concentrate on the test tube in front of her, on the blue flame from the Bunsen burner. In the distance – too distant to be made out clearly – there was a thin, whining hum. And plink – a sound like a string snapping or being plucked – and another … Water thawing and falling into pools of ice, ice breaking under its own weight and hunkering down into itself. And the burner’s furnace flame roaring …
“Ouch!”
Two rows in front of her, Rachel jumped back in her seat as a tightly-folded wad of paper bounced stingingly off her cheek. Mardy didn’t see who had thrown it. It must have flown past her own shoulder from somewhere at the back of the classroom. But from the way Rachel looked round as she bent to retrieve the paper it was clear whom she thought to blame. At her side, Hal too was peering at Mardy strangely: as if he hardly recognised her.
Rachel unfolded the paper. It was a piece of lined A4, just like the paper on a dozen pads all around the class. Just like the pad on Mardy’s own desk. As Rachel read what was written there, Mardy saw her face flush darker with embarrassment and anger. She really seemed to be on the point of tears. When she looked round again it was with an expression of such shame and such knowledge, such open dislike – that it was Mardy who turned away.
“Whatever did you write on that note?” hissed Hal.
“Nothing! I mean – it wasn’t me who threw it.”
“No?” replied Hal with frank disbelief.
“No!”
Hal crooked a smile and peered at her again with that look of strange half-recognition. “Have it your way.”
This made Mardy furious. “Why don’t you believe me? Friends should trust each other!”
For the rest of the afternoon Hal made himself very busy with chemistry notes. When the final bell rang, Mardy waited for him at their usual spot, under the larch tree in the front playground. The snow had stopped falling, had thawed a little and then frozen harder, so that the asphalt was growing a treacherous, invisible skin, with an inch or so of snow underfoot. She saw Hal at an upstairs window once, being hustled along by a group of larger boys. Five minutes later she spotted his back, already halfway down the road from school. That was odd – he must have passed right by her. Even if he wasn’t talking to her, how had she missed him?
Crunch crunch, like walkers on a gravel beach, the children left the school. Cars were waiting for many of them, lights on, moving tenderly up the road edges and away. Mardy hung back. She sketched a circle round the larch tree with her heel. She had not seen Rachel leave either and was thankful.
