Deep Secret (14 page)

“It’s not that, lad. Wantchester’s one of the really potent nodes, and they don’t want any more trouble than they can help. They’re pretty nervous about you choosing it, as it happens. They say things could blow up in your face if you’re not careful. I got torn off a strip for letting you choose it. They said I should have reminded you of your Roman lore, and I said I couldn’t, could I?, when I’d forgotten it myself. It wasn’t,” Stan said, “a comfortable meeting.”

I should have remembered Roman lore too. Any town whose name ends in – chester will have been an ancient Roman camp. And the Romans always built these on nodes if they could. It was like plugging into the power-points of the country they were conquering. Roman survey teams had augurs with them as a matter of course, and most of these could divine a node at least as readily as a Magid can. I have always suspected that their chief survey-augur may have
been
a Magid: he was so accurate. And if there was a choice between one site with a lesser node and another with a greater, you can be sure he chose the latter.

“Ah well,” I said. “It’s too late now. We’ll just have to be careful. At least I’ve got a sound system in the car. Let’s get you a stack of Scarlatti tapes.”

Maree Mallory’s Thornlady

Directory: further extracts

[1]

I
haven’t had the Thornlady dream for two weeks now.

The ten-pound notes were genuine. I have been renovating my appearance with them. I had my hair cut and bought some clothes. Some of my old clothes were so terrible that I wasn’t even going to take them round to Oxfam, until Nick said he didn’t approve of throwing away clothes, because there had to be people worse off than me, so why not mix them with a bag of things he had grown out of? And I was glad I did. I found a really good leather jacket in Oxfam for only £5! I suppose it was too small for most people, but it looks good on me. And I’ve kept my old specs as a spare, even though I can hardly see through them since I’ve been wearing the new ones. I hadn’t realised how much my eyes had changed since I was sixteen.

[2]

Uncle Ted has been making the air loud with grumbles and indecision. It seems he was invited to a conference of some kind – last year, he says, when it didn’t seem real and, for all he knew, the world would end before a year as improbable as 1996 ever occurred – and now it’s only a week or so away and he doesn’t want to go. At least once a day, he thinks of a new excuse for not going. “I shall ring up and tell them Maree’s got meningitis,” was his latest one.

“Don’t be silly, dear,” Janine says. She says that each time. “You’re a Guest of Honour. You’ll let them down terribly if you cancel now.” Janine is very keen for him to go because she wants to bask in reflected glory. And she’s already got new clothes for it. Nick wants him to go because he’s going to fill the house with his role-playing-game friends while they’re away. I am the only one who’s neutral.

“Not cancel it,” Uncle Ted said. “They want me to confirm that I’m going. They keep asking. They’re getting quite neurotic about it, if you ask me, but of course I can’t go if Maree’s ill.”

“I refuse to fake meningitis,” I said.

“But you don’t understand!” Uncle Ted howled. “It’s interrupting my life! It’s interfering with my work. If I have to go and say things about the way I write, I shall end up thinking I mean them and not be able to write at all.”

“You always enjoy conventions once you get there,” Janine persuaded. “You meet a lot of people. You sell a lot of books.”

At this point I went away to a lecture (Robbie never goes to things where people just talk, so it was safe) and when I came back in the evening, rather depressed again, Janine had won. But at a cost. Uncle Ted had confirmed he would go to the convention on condition he was bribed with a weekend in Scotland playing golf. This doesn’t count as interrupting his life apparently. And Janine is a very keen golfer too. So off they both went, leaving me in charge of Nick “as an experiment”. Usually when they go away, they park Nick with one of Janine’s friends, but now they can use me. It’s just like the way Janine always used me when we were small. She left a list as long as my arm of things I had to do pinned to the kitchen board. I feel like Cinderella.

[3]

The whole thing was a disaster.

For one thing, I can’t cook – and anyway I draw the line at cooking for seven – so Nick did it. He ignored all Janine’s lists and Janine’s freezer-menus and made several hundredweight of spaghetti. For another thing, Nick decided to have a dry run for the convention weekend and invited all his friends. For a third thing, they got bored with role-gaming and had a party in the living room instead. Nick wasn’t about to have a mess in his basement, not he! So they used the living room and invited more friends and everything was rather noisier than the sort of thing I’d left Aunt Irene’s to avoid. Aunt Irene’s kids aren’t into pop music yet. I never thought I’d miss anything about her house! And for the fourth and worst thing, the weather in Scotland was lousy and Janine and Uncle Ted came back after a day.

They arrived about an hour after I’d come down from the attic and read the riot act. I mean enough is
enough
. Even more of my fellow-students don’t get as drunk as those kids were.

I was standing on the stairs, bawling orders, sarcasm and abuse, while great big lads ran humbly about with empty bottles, carpet cleaner, pans of broken glass, sleeping bags, disinfectant and the furniture they’d moved to other places. I still wonder how I’d got them so thoroughly cowed. They were all a foot taller than me. But I was
furious
. I knew I was the one who’d get the blame. And Nick had
promised
me that nothing like this would happen. And the mess was – or had been – phenomenal. Even then the whole house smelt of sweaty teenage boy – with detergent, alcohol and disinfectant coming in as poor seconds. I RAVED.

And broke off sharpish when I saw Janine and Uncle Ted in the hall.

I thought they were about to turn me into the street there and then. I swore I saw it in Janine’s eye. I had time to visualise myself wrapped in a blanket, shivering in a shop doorway along with Bristol’s other homeless, and not even a dog to provoke the pity of passers-by, when I realised that by some miracle most of the abuse was not being directed at me. Nick’s friends were kicked out almost instantly – but they had homes to go to, so that was all right – and I had to help Nick clean up the rest of a mess I hadn’t made – but that was all right too – and it was Nick that Uncle Ted went for. I hadn’t realised what a sense of justice Uncle Ted has. Janine made one or two efforts to stand in front of Nick and blame me, but they were not her best efforts, until she went into the kitchen and found it draped in pasta, and recognised Nick’s touch. Then she went, “Poor Maree,” she went, “Maree’s not up to this sort of responsibility!” she went. And then she joined Uncle Ted in shouting at Nick.

I let the injustice of that go, I was so relieved still to have a roof over my head. To hear Janine, you’d think she hadn’t heard a word of my Sergeant Major act on the stairs. And I’d got it all more or less under control by the time they came home.

Nick was in deep shit for nearly twenty-four hours. Much of it was Janine or Uncle Ted snapping criticisms of every single thing he did or said – which form of nagging Nick avoided any time he wanted by going to ground in his basement – but some of it was Uncle Ted angrily totting up how much of his whisky Nick and his friends had drunk and demanding to be paid for it. For some reason, this was the part that truly upset Nick. That boy doesn’t know he’s born. He’s had to sell two CDs to pay for the booze and he was nearly in tears over it.

I kept out of the way of all of them as much as I could. So this Monday evening I was quite shattered to find I was being punished along with Nick. We are both being made to go to this thing of Uncle Ted’s over Easter. The Injustice! The Inequity. The Pettiness. It’s Janine. Janine sticks to her line of me not being cut out to look after Nick. She won’t even trust me with the empty house while they’re away. I ask you! It’s not as if I’d invited
my
friends in! And Uncle Ted says “Nick’s proved he’s not responsible enough to be left with anyone. He’s going to stay in Wantchester under my eye. And you, Maree, are to come to keep Nick off drink, drugs and smashing the furniture while I’m busy doing my act.”

I protested.

Janine said, “Well, dear, you
have
got a certain amount to prove, you know.”

Uncle Ted said autocratically, “There’s no argument. She’s rung up and booked you in, both of you. You come and keep Nick in order, Maree, or you can find somewhere else to live. It’s a simple choice.”

Damn! And I’d hoped to earn some money over Easter – enough to afford to go and see my dad in hospital at least. I’m divided between thinking that Uncle Ted so hates being a guest artiste that he’s determined we shall be miserable with him, and thinking that Janine is the one who wants me there, bored and penniless and running round after Nick. She looked so smug while Uncle Ted delivered his ultimatum. I suppose she wants to queen it and not have to spend time making sure Nick survives in the mornings.

And damn again! I had the Thornlady dream again on Monday night. The woman in the bush told me to search my mind and work out why I couldn’t cope with normal life. Cheek, I call it. Sitting in a bush and making other folk feel one-down.

[4]

END OF TERM!!! Perhaps I shall be a philosopher when we start again, Robbie…

…Sometimes Uncle Ted can be quite reasonable. These last few days he’s been really woebegone, sitting in his study composing what he calls his State of the Art to the Masses speech, which he has to give at the convention next Sunday. Every so often he trudges out, grabs whichever of us happens to be passing, and demands to be told a word that’s on the tip of his mind, only he’s forgotten it; or a joke –
any
joke.

Janine just shrugs. Nick supplies jokes. I seem to be so good at coming up with the word or thing that Uncle Ted wants that he’s started to call me his peripatetic encyclopedia.
Not
the snappiest of job descriptions. The last time he did it – “Maree, for God’s sake that constellation with the belt and the sword – fellow who rode on the dolphin’s back –
you
know” – and I told him, “Orion,” he stopped as he was going back into his study and wrote
Orion
on the back of his hand so as not to forget it again. Then he said, “Maree, do you have
any
money at all?”

“No,” I said. The hundred quid is gone now and not for worlds am I going to go and beg Robbie for what I paid for our flat. “Not until next term,” I added hastily, remembering I am supposed to pay Uncle Ted rent. It wasn’t quite a lie. After all, some other prat might make me a present of another £100. Who knows?

“Then you’ll need some for the convention,” he said. “They can be quite expensive.” And he gave me this wad of money. When I counted it, it was £75. All he had in his back pocket. Then he went on – I nearly fainted – “And I’ll pay your petrol if you’re driving there.” Then he rushed back into his study before I could even start to thank him, muttering, “Orion. Orion.”

Well, well. Poor Uncle Ted. He’s so dreading making this speech that he seems to have forgiven me for Nick’s little caper. He’s forgiven Nick too. Nick has his usual lavish pocket money. I shall go and buy a spare pair of jeans. Then I can wash these I have on.

[5]

Poor Uncle Ted. On the Thursday – I started writing this when it was still Thursday, but it’s turned into Friday now – he was pale and trembling and kept having to dash to the loo. He couldn’t pack – at least, he did pack, but he left all the clothes out except for a sweater and half his pyjamas – and Janine had to do it again for him. He left his speech all neatly piled up on his desk and got into the car without it. Janine had her hands so full of him that she seemed quite relieved when I said I was driving myself to Wantchester in Dad’s car (I didn’t mention Uncle Ted had paid for the petrol). Nick promptly said that he’d come with me. I think Master Nick hoped, or thought, that this meant we’d be skiving off and staying at home, but apart from the fact that I’d promised Uncle Ted that I’d FAITHFULLY listen to his speech and applaud it at the end, I was intrigued. I wanted to know what kind of event could make him so terrified.

Well, now I know. To some extent.

Nick and I set off about an hour after his parents. This was because I filled Dad’s car with all my worldly possessions. Nick wanted to know why.

“Other people have security blankets,” I told him. “I have a car filled with everything I own.” I didn’t like to confess to him that I keep having this strong feeling that I am going to be homeless after Easter. No – worse than that: it feels as if the world is going to end then, and I have to carry everything around with me and make sure that, when I’m crouching in a cave after Armageddon, I at least have my computer and my vet-case to hand (both of which will be very useful, of course). I don’t know what’s making me feel this way. It could be the Thornlady dreams. It’s not my dad. I’ve rung him and he swears he’s improving (except I know he’s saying that to make me feel better). It’s just that I have this gloomy conviction that’s settled on me like a rainy week. I even phoned Mum about it. She was her usual cheery self.