Deep Secret (10 page)

“Ordinary folks having fun, I expect,” he said. “Nobody’s really normal when you come down to it. But I’ll tell you something – they can’t draw.” He was right. The brochure – if that’s what it was – was decorated with blurred portraits of wizards, witches and girls wearing little but jewellery. All were extremely badly drawn.

“Oh, well,” I said, and sent the man Corrie a cheque.

A week later he sent me a receipt and a certificate to say I was now an official member of PhantasmaCon, with a room booked in the Hotel Babylon to prove it.

Otherwise, as I said, I was hard at work, both in the house and in the shed at the end of the yard. The shed is one of the reasons I bought the house. It is big and airy and someone had already laid a smooth wooden floor in it. I have added heating. That floor means I can chalk symbols and figures at need. For fateline work, you need, among other things, a double spiral Eternity, which is the very devil to get drawn right. Shortly after Corrie’s certificate arrived, I was crawling on the floor in my barn, dressed in my oldest clothes, chalking and rubbing out and chalking again, when I looked up to see Andrew standing in the doorway.

He gave no sign that he thought I might be doing something out of the ordinary. He said, in his vague, deadpan way, “I was wondering when you might be ready to give me a lift.”

I had forgotten his car had broken down. I got up, dusted my knees, and devoted the rest of the day to sorting him out. I remember that some time while I was driving him – either to Cambridge or Huntingdon or back – I said airily, “I do a lot of programming on my knees. It helps to see it all spread out.”

He said, “I do a lot of my thinking walking over the fields.”

I assumed all was well, but I took the precaution, when I went back to work next day, of putting heavy prohibitions round the barn, and round the house, the yard and my strip of front garden too. Then, confident that I could not be disturbed again, I went back to chalking and crawling.

By the early evening, I was ready to walk the spiral. It takes immense concentration, because you are pulling four people’s fatelines with you – not to speak of your own – and you can do a great deal of harm, to those people and to the rest of the other world where their lines connect to everyone else’s, if you get it wrong. I was shuffling forwards along the chalklines, with my arms spread to keep the world in balance, when I looked up to see a figure straddling the loop at the far end. I couldn’t see the person clearly because he was silhouetted against the stream of orange sunlight slanting from the high window of the barn. Chalk dust and motes from the barn itself were catching the light too and standing round him like rays. He looked vast.

You know that feeling when your stomach seems to drop away, leaving you cold and empty. I felt that. But I couldn’t stop. That would have been really dangerous. My first thought was, At least it isn’t Mallory! I wouldn’t have put it past her. Then I thought it might be Stan, made visible by the dust. But the figure was too huge. I had to shuffle on for another five minutes, until I came to a place where the sunlight lit him sideways from my point of view. Then I could see it was Andrew. He was just standing there, staring. He seemed totally bemused, but I could see his eyes watching me.

“You shouldn’t be here,” I said to him, when I could spare the attention.

He smiled. It worried me, the way that smile made him look so intelligent. But he seemed to be in a sort of trance-state in spite of it. I could feel he was, when I got close to him. Since he was across my chalk marks, I had to take him by the elbows and move him aside. He moved just like a zombie and stood where I put him. I shuffled on past and round the spirals at the top of the loop, hoping for the best. But when I had rounded the curve at the top to face the other way, I found Andrew had moved again while my concentration was elsewhere and was now standing straddling the loop at the opposite end. From there, the sun shone yellow on his blank, austere face.

Damn!
I thought, and shuffled on. I had to face the fact that Andrew had somehow got himself entangled in the fatelines I was manipulating.
He
had no idea of it, of course. He must have wanted to borrow some sugar or something, and arrived at just the wrong moment. When I had finished, I took him by one arm, led him across the yard in the gloaming, and let him out of the gate.

He came to himself as soon as he passed my prohibitions. “Thanks,” he said, as if he had now borrowed the sugar. “I’ll see you.” And he walked off beside the hedge to his own house.

“Look on the bright side,” Stan said when I told him. “It wasn’t Mallory.”

“God forbid!” I said. “But what do you think I’ve
done
to him?”

“Lord knows!” Stan said. “I’ve never heard of this happening before, but it may be just that Magids didn’t mention it. It can’t be too serious. I hope. Probably the worst that can happen is for our Andrew to take a whim to report to Gandalf as a hobbit.”

“I just hope that’s all,” I said.

From Maree Mallory’s

Thornlady Directory, extracts

from various files

[1]

O
K. So I’ve been behaving badly to Janine. As usual.

Janine was furious when I had to move in with them. She was so poisonous that I said to her, “
You
try living with your husband’s sister down the road!
You
try to write essays that are supposed to count towards your degree with seventeen children yelling round you!” My dad’s sister Irene has five kids of her own and two from her latest husband, but she finds life too quiet unless each of them has at least one little friend staying the night every night. Fortunately, the last thing my little fat dad did before they carted him off for chemotherapy – apart from giving me his car, that is – was to get on to his brother Ted and make Ted promise to house and feed me. So I told Janine to take her objections to Uncle Ted.

She said, “What’s wrong with university accommodation?”

“No room,” I said. “I was in a flat, but it was let over my head.”

That’s actually not quite what happened, but I wasn’t going to tell Janine. Robbie was sharing the two rooms with me (that I had used all my money paying for in advance) and then he just coolly moved his new bint Davina in instead of me. Or he said I could sleep on the sofa, I believe, though I may be wrong because I was too angry to listen at the time. I stormed off to Mum’s in London, swearing never to come back. And I meant it too, until Dad made me. He made me go back and I had to spend one glorious month in Aunt Irene’s house. And I told Dad, “Never again!” about that too, which is why he fixed things up with Uncle Ted.

Janine looked daggers at me. But she doesn’t go against Uncle Ted. If she did, he might notice the way she manages him. She’s going to bide her time and wait to work Uncle Ted round to thinking I’m impossible. So she did that thing she does, of pulling down the sleeves of her sweater so that her gold bangles jangle. Tug. Tug. Toss impeccable hair. Go away,
clack, click, clack
, to start phoning the unfortunate girls who mind the clothes shop she owns up in Clifton. She’s still sacking them for practically no reason. I heard her say to the phone as I went upstairs with another load of my stuff. “She’ll have to go. I’ve had quite enough of her.” She gets those awful sweaters she wears through that shop of hers. The one I hate most is the one she was wearing then, that looks as if she’d spilt rice-pudding over one shoulder. Nick says he hates the one with the bronze baked beans most.

And Janine thinks I’ll corrupt Nick! Or steal his affections or something. You couldn’t. No one could.
Nothing
can influence Nick unless he wants it to. Nick is sweetly and kindly and totally selfish. It says volumes that I never once set eyes on Nick while I was living just down the road with Aunt Irene. I asked him why when I was bringing my stuff into Uncle Ted’s house.

“That house is full of
children
!” he said, surprised that I should wonder. Nick himself, I should point out, is all of fourteen. He stood with his hands in his pockets watching me unload boxes and plastic bags from Dad’s car. “You’ve got a computer,” he observed. “Mine’s a laptop. What’s yours?”

“Old and cranky and incompatible with almost everything – just like me,” I said.

He actually picked it up and carried it to the top of his parents’ house for me. I think he was doing me an honour – that, or he was afraid I’d break it. He has a low opinion of women (well, so would I have with a mother like Janine). Then he came down again and looked at Dad’s car. “It’s quite nice,” he said.

“It’s my dad’s,” I said. “Or was. He said I could have it after I passed my driving test.”

“When did you pass?” he said.

“Hush,” I said. “I don’t take it till Monday.”

“Then how did you get it to Bristol?” he wondered.

“How do you think?” I said. “Drove it of course.”

“But—” he began. “All alone?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said.

I could see I had awed Master Nick. This pleased me. You have to keep someone like Nick suitably humble or you end up washing his socks while he walks barefoot all over you. (Robbie was the same, but I didn’t manage to awe him for long enough.) Nick has both his parents just where he wants them. I was delighted and highly chuffed to discover that Janine actually washes Nick’s socks by hand for him, because Nick claims to get sore feet if she doesn’t. Uncle Ted hands Nick ten-pound notes more or less whenever they pass on the stairs. And Nick has the whole basement of the house to himself. His parents have to knock before they come in. Honestly. He showed me his basement after I’d got all my things to the attic. I think that was another honour. It’s like a luxury flat down there, with all-over plum-coloured carpeting. And as for his sound system! Yah!
Envy!

“
I chose the carpet myself,” he said.

“Lovely funereal colour,” I said. “Like a bishop’s vest with mildew. You could spill whole jars of blackberry jam here and never notice.”

Nick laughed. “Why are you always so gloomy?”

“Because I’ve been crossed in love,” I told him. “Don’t push me about it. I get dangerous.”

“But you’re always dangerous,” he said. “That’s why I like you.”

Yes, Nick and I are getting on very well. Maybe this is why Janine objects to me. We seem to have been able to take up our old relationship exactly where it stopped when my parents divorced and moved to London. It goes way back, with me and Nick, to the time when Janine used to pay my mum to take care of Nick most of the time for her. The trouble was, Mum doesn’t go for babies (though she’s pretty good with teenagers, I’m here to tell you) and she used to push Nick off on to me as soon as I got home from school. Some of my earliest memories are of reaching up to push Nick’s great tall pushchair up the hill to the Downs, and when I’d toiled all the way up there, I used to fetch him out and we’d sit on the grass and invent stories. My first really bitchy row with Janine was when I was twelve and Nick was six and Janine discovered that Nick would rather be with me than go anywhere with her. She said I was putting fantasies into Nick’s head. I told her Nick was inventing most of them himself. She said he didn’t know truth from reality because of me. And I said that yes he did, because he knew he would be bored going out with her.

I suppose it helps pick up the old relationship that Nick is still exactly the same startlingly good-looking child he was when I wheeled him up the hill and old ladies used to stop me and say what a beautiful little brother I’d got (and I always said, “He’s not my brother, he’s my
cousin
”). Except that these days he’s about a yard taller and I have to crane upwards to see his face. He says I haven’t changed either. He’s right. I haven’t grown since I was twelve. And still the same round face, like a badly drawn heart on a school Valentine, and my nose never grew either, so my specs slide off all the time like they always did. Same mousy mane of hair, same lack of figure. And I did a lot of comfort-eating while I was with Mum (like a fool, I thought health foods were invented to
stop
people putting on weight) so now I’m truly FAT – and I always was on the plump and dumpy side. I looked in the mirror before I wrote this and wondered how Robbie ever fancied me…

[2]

…told me I’d failed my driving test. Well, it’s not
my
fault. Bristol is so confusing. I don’t think he should fail me just for getting us lost, though I did end up running backwards down Totterdown (I think the gradient is 1:5 there) because I couldn’t seem to remember how to do a hill start. Now I shall have to wait another month before I can take the test again. Pah.

I relieved my feelings by storming into the Vet Dept and applying to change to Philosophy. They said I was doing quite well and did I mean it. And I said yes. If they thought I was going to stick around watching Robbie Payne make sheep’s eyes at Davina Frostick, they thought wrong. They said that wasn’t a good reason to switch subjects. I said it was the only real one. So they ummed and aahed and said it wasn’t possible until after Easter, or maybe even until autumn, and obviously assumed I’d have changed my mind by then.