Obsidian Pebble (6 page)

He didn't mind shopping, as long as it was for no longer than about an hour. After that, something started to happen to his brain. He found himself just saying “yes” to whatever the sales assistant suggested so as to get out of the shop as quickly as he could, and usually ended up hating whatever it was he'd bought as soon as he got home. How some people could actually enjoy the process, he had no idea.

“Just like your father,” was all Mrs. Chambers ever said when Oz drifted into bored and miserable mode.

As it was, they'd got jeans within twenty minutes and the shoes had taken only another half hour, so Oz was about at his limit by the time they got to the supermarket. Still, there he could at least mess about by riding the shopping trolley and browsing the latest DVDs. But it wasn't their usual supermarket and, because it was near the middle of the town, the shop had decided to stop anyone from taking a trolley off the premises by installing special wheels that locked as soon as they crossed a magical yellow line painted on the floor. So, grumpy and laden with shopping bags, Oz trudged after his mother towards the multi-storey car park. All he wanted to do was go home and have some tea, but Mrs. Chambers wasn't quite finished yet.

“Hang on just a sec, Oz,” she said as they passed another row of shops.

Oz groaned. The grocery bags were cutting into his fingers like cheese wires.

“What do you think of this one?” Mrs. Chambers asked.

Grudgingly, Oz walked over to the shop window. To his surprise, all he could see were small photographs of houses. He followed his mother's pointing finger.

“Very nice,” Oz said. “If you like that sort of thing.”

“Exactly. Imagine just having to look after three rooms downstairs and three up,” Mrs. Chambers said with what Oz suddenly twigged was an alarming degree of longing. He glanced up at the name above the window.

Gerber and Callow, Estate Agents.

“You're not serious, are you?”

“Why not?” Mrs. Chambers said, eyes bright with excitement.

“But…Penwurt's our house and it's brilliant. It's—”

“Huge and expensive to run,” interrupted Mrs. Chambers. “It needs a new roof, the council tax is enough to turn your hair white, and it needs decorating so badly, it's only at Halloween that it looks half-presentable.”

“Yeah, but…I mean, it was given to Dad.”

Oz saw his mother's shoulder's slump. “I know, Oz,” she said awkwardly. “It's just that—”

She was cut off by a man's theatrically cheerful voice behind them.

“And what do we have here? Is it a pair of Chamber pots I see?”

Oz and Mrs. Chambers turned as one. The voice belonged to a dapper-looking man with what looked like a stiff crow on his head, but which Oz knew was his carefully coiffured hair. Lorenzo Heeps' eyebrows were as dark as the crow hair, but his moustache and beard were grey-flecked. He wore these in what his mother had described to Oz as French beard. Oz wondered if he was trying to look a bit like Johnny Depp. If he was, then he needed to buy a new mirror. Mr. Heeps was also wearing a suit and tie under a fawn trench coat.

“Lorenzo,” said Mrs. Chambers, “what a nice surprise.”

“Looking to move, Gwen? Had enough of Penwurt?”

“Just testing the water,” she said with a nervous glance at Oz. “Just seeing how property is doing, you know.”

“Badly,” Heeps said, shaking his head. “Wrong time to sell or buy. Of course, an exceptional property like yours in a desirable part of town like Magnus Street could fetch a premium at any time.” He smiled and showed a row of very white, even teeth. Lorenzo Heeps worked at the university and had known Oz's dad very well.

“Yes, well…oh, hello, Phillipa,” Mrs. Chambers said.

Phillipa Heeps, or Pheeps as Oz liked to call her, stood behind her father, dressed as if she'd just stepped out from one of the shop windows. Oz couldn't remember ever seeing her with a hair out of place, a shirt untucked or a smidgen of a smudge on her pressed jeans or skirt. Today, as usual, her fair hair was styled perfectly so that it hung over one hazel brown eye in a carefully combed fringe. She was, he supposed, quite pretty in the way a carefully cared-for doll might be. But it was a package spoiled by a cruel mouth that enjoyed gossip and whispers far too much. Her smile in response to Mrs. Chambers' greeting looked about as genuine as one of the Fanshaws' pottery toads.

“Hello, Mrs. Chambers. Hello, Oz,” she said brightly.

Oz mumbled a grudging “Hi,” which earned a frowning glance from his mother.

“It is so nice to see you,” Heeps gushed as he and Mrs. Chambers walked slowly down the street. “We really ought to get together to catch up. If you ever need any advice, please don't hesitate to contact me, Gwen. I do know a little bit about the housing market, you know. In fact, I consider myself something of an expert, since I have a couple of properties of my own and I am a personal acquaintance of Mr. Gerber of Gerber and Callow, who as well as being Seabourne's most successful businessman is, as you know, a generous supporter of the university…”

Oz tuned out the one-sided conversation and shook his head. Dr. Heeps was one of those people who asked you a question but then didn't really listen to the answer. At the start, when his dad had died, Dr. Heeps had come around two or three times, but then when Oz's mum had become ill he'd dropped off the radar. But then, so had lots of other people who used to visit a lot.

Oz sighed. The weight of the groceries was proving to be just a little too much for him, and he suddenly had an urge to plonk the heavy bags down on the pavement and rub at the marks on his hand.

“Careful, you might do yourself an injury,” Pheeps said in a low, mean voice meant only for Oz. “You might do yourself some real damage. Runs in the family, I hear.”

She said it in such a venomous tone that Oz could only stare at her in bewilderment. In return, she simply grinned at him malevolently.

“What are you on about?” Oz asked, his brows knitting.

“Come on, you two,” said Heeps from ten yards away. He lifted his eyebrows at Mrs. Chambers. “Just look at them gossiping like two old fogeys. What are they like?” His grin was snowy white. “Sure we can't offer you a coffee? There's a Costa just around the corner.”

“We've got to get back,” said Mrs. Chambers, much to Oz's relief. “Thanks for the offer.”

“Oh, dear,” Heeps said with feeling. “Next time then, eh? Come on, Phillipa, let's hit those shops. We've still to find those boots you wanted.”

“We've still to find those boots you wanted,” mimicked Oz as they slowly climbed the stairs in the multi-storey a few minutes later.

“Come on, Oz, they're not that bad.”

“Yes, they are. You've got to admit, he is a bit smarmy.”

“Because he dyes his hair and whitens his teeth, you mean?”

Oz shrugged. “And Pheeps has more clothes than the rest of year eight put together.”

He wanted to tell her about Pheeps' peculiar taunting, but he had the odd feeling that it was best not to, so he bit his tongue and waited for the inevitable rebuke from his mother. He just couldn't understand why everyone seemed to think Phillipa Heeps was God's gift to Seabourne. But to his surprise, Mrs. Chambers didn't scold him. Instead, she took up from where she'd left off outside the estate agent's.

“The fact is, Oz, Lorenzo is a useful chap to know and in this case, he might just be right. Penwurt is in a prime location and it may be that we'll have to look at moving sometime. I mean, staying there forever might not be an option.”

Oz's insides suddenly knotted. He didn't like this conversation. “Why not? What's wrong with living at Penwurt forever?”

Mrs. Chambers stopped on the stairs and turned her face to Oz. She looked very serious and Oz had the impression that she desperately wanted to say something. Instead, she cupped his chin in her hands and he saw her eyes soften. “Nothing,” she said. “Nothing at all. Come on, let's go home. It's way past tea time and I don't know about you, but I am starving.”

* * *

After tea Oz heaved a great sigh.

“Homework?” asked his mother, wrinkling her nose as she said it.

“Bit of maths.”

“Oh, dear,” Mrs. Chambers said.

“And King Arthur stuff for English.”

“Gadzooks.” She made a face.

“That one's sort of cool, though. Knights that chop people's heads off, that kind of thing.”

“Lovely.” Mrs. Chambers nodded. “By the way, you have a rather dashing milk moustache.”

“Knew that,” Oz said. “Keeping it for later.”

Mrs. Chambers shook her head, ripped off a paper towel and handed it to him silently. Oz proceeded to make his lip milk-free and headed upstairs to his bedroom. The familiar sight of walls plastered with blue and white posters of Seabourne United greeted him. Next to his bed, a desk groaned under the weight of books about spies and wizards and vampires, a secondhand Xbox console he'd bought off eBay with two years' worth of birthday money and, of course, his dad's old laptop. Oz threw himself down on the bed.

Ellie, of course, was right. He'd had a whole week in which to get everything done but hadn't. The question on “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” stared back at him from his exercise book. “Just a couple of paragraphs on your feelings about the poem,” was how Miss Arkwright had put it. He'd have much preferred a proper title. As it was now, he had no idea where to start.

And then there was maths.

Oz got up determinedly, grabbed his maths books and went up to the library. He plonked himself down at the desk and opened his textbook. There were lots of a's and b's and x's and y's and a heading that said “simplifying.” Might as well have said “gobbledygook.” Oz felt a familiar dark hole open up in his stomach. Why did he find all this stuff so hard? But he knew the answer. It was the same one that Miss Arkwright, his form tutor at Seabourne County School, had been careful to point out to him on his very first day.

“When someone loses as much school as you have over the last couple of years, Oscar, it sometimes takes quite a while to catch up. So if you need any extra help, just let me know, okay?”

He could see Miss Arkwright in his mind's eye, smiling down at him with her well-meaning expression. Up until that point Oz hadn't really thought much about how much school he'd “lost.” Mrs. Evans at Hurley Street Juniors, where he'd been up until last September, had never said anything. When he stayed away for a week or sometimes two to look after his mother, all she'd ever say when he got back was, “Mum all right, Oz?”

He'd nod and then she'd say, “And are you okay?”

And Oz would nod again and just get on with things.

But he'd lost count of the times that had happened until Miss Arkwright had brought it up. The fact was that it hadn't happened now for almost eight months, but for a long time after Oz's dad had gone it had happened quite a lot. The fact was that, when his father died, something had died in his mother as well.

Once, when things were really bad and with Mrs. Chambers desperate and miserable, paralysed by grief and confined to her room, Dr. Tarpin, the Chambers' family doctor, had sat Oz down in the kitchen. He'd explained how Mrs. Chambers was very sad and how it was quite normal to get a bit depressed after losing someone very close. But he went on to explain that in Oz's mum's case that sadness had turned into an illness that needed treatment with medication. Oz had sat quietly and listened and asked no questions. But when Dr. Tarpin had left, Oz had picked up the sheet of paper upon which the GP had written the big words.

Depression. Reactive unipolar.

The second bit didn't sound too bad when he read it back. In fact, it didn't sound like an illness at all. Unipolar sounded more like something you might use to repair a broken radio. But there was nothing easily fixable about the way his mother wouldn't eat, or didn't want to be hugged, or didn't shower, or slouched about in a dressing gown for days at a time. There was nothing he could buy from an electrical shop to stop her crying for hours on end.

But he had done as much as he could in other ways, like shopping for the two of them at Mr. Virdi's greengrocery on Tricolour Street instead of the supermarket in town, and getting eggs and potatoes and bread from the milkman. Sometimes he'd decide that it was okay to leave her for the few hours of school. Sometimes it didn't seem to matter because she'd ignore him altogether, turned towards the wall in her bed, unable even to respond to his questions.

Sometimes, though, she'd beg him not to leave her. On those days, Oz would do what she couldn't, like the washing and ironing, or hoovering their kitchen and making spaghetti. And when he got back to Hurley Street School a few days or a week or two later, Mrs. Evans seemed simply to understand. He felt a dark, cold hand suddenly close around his heart. Although his mother was much, much better, a part of him lived in constant fear of things returning to the way they were. And he had a terrible feeling that Seabourne County would not be as understanding as Hurley Street Juniors had been about the Black Dog.

He forced himself to turn to the sheet of twenty questions set by his maths teacher. He'd done almost half of them and now there was nothing for it but to wrestle with the remaining eleven. Whoever had thought up algebra should have been hung in a gibbet, like they did to people in Sir Gawain's time. He let his gaze wander to the oak panelling and the strange symbols carved in two great wheels on the oak. He had no real idea what any of them meant, other than they were something to do with astrology or astronomy or something beginning with an A. Come to think of it, they were a lot like algebra, really. And as was often the case when something in the house caught his attention, he thought of how easy it would all be if his father were there. Had things been different, he could have just nipped downstairs, knocked on the study door and simply asked, “Hey Dad, you know those really weird symbols on the panelling upstairs, what exactly do they mean? And who was the girl that appeared to the bell ringers in the Bunthorpe Encounter? Oh, and by the way, you any good at algebra?”