Sophie (10 page)

“No,” I agree.

He rubs his face. “Shit.” There’s a pause. Then he says, “You called me Mattie.”

“I did?” I can’t remember. Perhaps I did. Only because he keeps calling himself that.

“Yes, you did.” His eyes sparkle in the candlelight. “Strange. Some things never change.”

“That’s not what you said,” I say. Abruptly I am scared, not at all certain where the conversation has just gone. I can feel us brushing past things that I don’t understand. “You said that time changes things.”

He laughs softly. “Oh, very good, Sophie. Very good. But that’s not what I said; it’s what
you
said. So cut out the fucking game-playing, will you? I’m not a kid anymore. And I know you.”

I nod dumbly. He hasn’t raised his voice, but for the first time since he hit me I am afraid for my life.

After a long while, he says, “So. Let’s get back to it all.” I find that I am shivering uncontrollably.

Scrambling down the shallow side of the quarry, the loose scree kept slipping out from under our feet; it was slick with rainwater from the night before. The brown weeds at one end were even more ragged, while, at the other, there were trails of stain marring the rock just below the bars of the cages. Sophie went to get the quarry bag, while I feigned lack of interest, throwing stones into the weeds and wandering about aimlessly.

After a while, Sophie returned and set the bag down on a large rock. Still casually, I went over to join her, squatting down and picking through the old fossils in the bag. She looked at me—I thought I saw curiosity in the look—and I said, “When we’ve finished the plane, I could launch it from over there. From the top.” I pointed to the rim of the quarry above the cages.

Apparently satisfied, Sophie nodded. “Yeah, why not? If it does crash, though, you’re going to fuck up your plane pretty badly.” She opened the biscuit tin, took out the plastic bag with the books in, and opened it.

“What are you writing today?” I asked, knowing that I would only get half a reply.

“Just things,” she said. “What’s happened. You know.”

“Yeah.” I got up and wandered away again, feeling my stomach turn queasy. I still hadn’t had a look at the quarry books, but it was important that I didn’t show too much interest. It was also important that I didn’t show too little; being with Sophie had attuned me to the correct way of lying, and I was surprised—and vaguely pleased—to notice that she hadn’t seen anything odd. She was bent over the book, scribbling away in Biro, as I walked round the perimeter of the quarry as slowly as I could. I watched the sky, tried to think about the balsa Spitfire,
anything
to keep myself looking as I usually did. The problem was that I had no real idea of how I usually looked, while Sophie would know only too well. I turned and ambled back the way I’d come, aching to move faster, not daring to. I picked up stones and threw them, hummed songs from the radio. Eventually I decided it was enough; if I waited much longer, Sophie would finish up and the books would be put away. It occurred to me that I could always come back on my own, look at the quarry books at my leisure: but I dismissed the thought at once. The walk up to the top of the quarry hill was not really a long one—five or ten minutes, at the most—but the little path worn to the side of the dry-stone wall was exposed to view from our house, and if Sophie saw me, she would know where I was going. On top of this, although I had often replaced the bag for her at the end of a quarry afternoon, she always packaged up the books in their biscuit tin herself. What if there was some secret way of folding the plastic bag, or some particular scratch on the tin lid that had to be lined up? The possibilities were too numerous to consider.

I stopped by her shoulder. “I’m bored,” I said. “Are you nearly finished? I want to go to see the barn.”

“Nearly finished,” she agreed. She completed the line she had been writing with a funny slash mark and looked up at me. “Why don’t you go and see what the view’s like from your launchpad? See if it’s suitable? I’ll join you in a bit.”

“OK,” I agreed. The letters themselves were normal, but there were funny symbols like the slash mark, and the order of the letters made no sense. They were in evenly spaced blocks, as well, which didn’t look anything like normal words. “I’ll wave when I’m there.”

“Right.” She bent back over her work and I turned and left. I was trying to remember whether the quarry books had always looked the way they did now; it seemed to me that they hadn’t, that there had been a time when the strange scribbles looked more like normal words, only muddled and nonsensical. But I’d first seen the quarry books—when? When I was much younger, certainly. Perhaps as young as four, I hazarded; after all, they were so much a part of my life when I was five that I couldn’t remember a time without them. I worked my way carefully up the uneven slope towards the top of the quarry, watching where I put my feet among the loose shale. Perhaps the quarry books had changed. It didn’t seem to be unreasonable. Sophie was older, after all. Leonardo’s quarry-writing was very different—his was mirror-writing, Miss Finch had said—but I could see easily enough that the principle was identical, even if the method wasn’t. Leonardo had wanted to keep his inventions secret. Sophie’s secrets were probably very different, but her reasons were the same: she didn’t want anyone else to know. Out of breath, I reached the top of the quarry and paused to take a dose of the inhaler I kept in my pocket.

By this time of the autumn, the quarry was rimmed with golds and coppers, the trees that normally fringed its edges turning to the colour of beaten metals. There was a deep layer of husks and fallen leaves on the ground where I ducked down under the barbed wire and made my way outside the fence that rimmed the quarry. The very edge was crumbling a little, and, as you came up the path from the quarry floor, you could see where the rock had fallen away and there was a protruding rim of packed earth, about a foot thick, that was unsupported from below. For these reasons, the plane launch would have to be made from about four or five feet back. I walked round through the woods until I was at the right place, and then pushed through the bushes to the fence, looking for a gap or a place to climb over. I found it easily enough, where a branch had fallen and brought the tangle of wire and grey boards to the ground. I stepped through carefully, and edged forward until I could see the floor of the quarry. For a few seconds it was empty, and then Sophie appeared, walking away from my vantage point towards the exit. She had been out of sight, replacing the quarry bag near the cages beneath me.

The thought of the cages made me shudder; wherever they went, it was somewhere in the rock under my feet.

“Hi!” I called out. Sophie stopped, turned, and waved silently at me before starting up the path. I backed cautiously away from the edge and went round to meet her. All the time, a tiny, triumphant voice inside me was exultant: it was nothing much, just a glimpse at the quarry books, but I had found out a weakness in Sophie. She didn’t believe that I could fool her, and I could, because she had taught me how.

He lapses into silence, leaving me with the last words he spoke running through my head. It’s ironic; Matthew, as a child, carefully gleans fragments of information about Sophie, gradually building up a better picture of this girl that he knows but doesn’t know. And now, years later, everything is reversed, and it is he who is under scrutiny, he whose every move is studied and appraised. And for much the same reasons.

ten

Wednesday came, and when we arrived home after school, Sophie began at once to change into her jeans and anorak. There was a fine drizzle falling outside, and the day was cold.

“Where are you going?”

She grinned. “Short memory, you have. Back to the barn. We said we’d meet Andy and Steve there today.”

“Oh, yeah,” I said.

“I’ve spoken to Mummy,” she added. “We can take tea with us.”

“Really?”

She nodded. “Get a coat on, for heaven’s sake. You can’t go out like that.”

“OK,” I agreed, and ran upstairs, wondering how it was that Sophie could extract concessions from my mother so easily.

We reached the barn first, as Sophie had intended. “Don’t let on about the second room,” she warned. “That’s still just for us. We’ll sit up here and wait.” We settled ourselves on bales of straw in the upper, open room of our straw fortress, and talked about school for a while.

After half an hour or so, there was a clatter from the metal sheeting and we both fell silent. The panel swung aside, and a hunched figure in a red anorak squeezed through.

“Shit,” I heard him say. “I think I cut my hand.”

“Get inside,” someone else said. “It’s cold out here.”

The second figure followed and straightened up.

“Anyone here?”

Sophie stood up and jumped over the wall of the fort. “Yeah. Hi. I’ve got Mattie with me today,” she said. “He’s nine but he’s OK.”

The older boy laughed. “You sound pretty cocky,” he said.

“She’s always cocky,” the other one said. Neither of them sounded very confident, though, and I felt some of the tension that had gathered in my chest dissipate. Try as I might, I couldn’t remember either of these boys, and yet the younger one—who must be Andy—was the one who had hurt Sophie at school.

“Come on up,” she said. They followed her awkwardly up the series of little steps until they were all in the upper room, looking about them diffidently.

“This is OK,” Andy said. “You do this yourself?”

“No,” Sophie replied. “It was all pretty much like this when we found the place. We shifted one or two of the bales to make that wall. They’re pretty heavy.”

“You’re pretty small, that’s all,” the older boy—Steven—said. He was grinning.

“Shut up,” Andy said uncomfortably. “It’s OK.” I realized, with insight that was unusual for me, that he had known Sophie for longer than Steven, and I wondered immediately what he was feeling right now. When Sophie spoke, though, she sounded neither tense nor affronted.

“Sit down,” she said. “It’s a bit rough, but so what.”

“How'd you find this place?” Andy asked.

“Just lucky, I suppose,” Sophie said. “It’s empty.”

“No shit,” Steven said. He took a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket and lit one, throwing the spent match over the side of the fort.

“You’re going to have to watch that, in here,” Sophie said quietly. “I can think of nicer ways to die.”

“Why, are you scared?” Steven said, grinning. There was a pause, and then Sophie grinned back.

“Can you smell burning?” she asked.

“Don’t be stupid. I blew it out.”

“You didn’t,” she said. “You waved it, but it didn’t go out. Now who’s stupid?”

I was watching this with wide eyes. When Sophie had spoken, I hadn’t been able to smell anything, but now it seemed that she was right; there was the faintest scent of burning straw in the air. I glanced at Andy, and by his expression I guessed he could smell it, too.

“Bullshit,” Steven said, but he sounded less sure.

“I can smell smoke,” Sophie said. “If we sit here much longer, we’re not going to be able to get down.” She was speaking calmly, but there was just the right note of urgency in her voice to make it authentic. Abruptly, the smell of smoke in my nostrils died, became just the smell of straw and wet clothing. But I could see that Steven was smelling it now, and I could see that he was starting to believe.

“Shit, Steve,” Andy muttered. “I can smell it, too—”

“It’s bullshit,” Steven said, but he was standing up even as he said it, and there was ill-concealed panic in his eyes. “I blew it out—”

He crossed to the parapet and leant out over it, scanning the straw below.

Sophie grinned. “Just a joke,” she said. “You
did
blow it out. Really.”

There was a long silence. Steven turned round slowly and looked at her. For a moment, I thought he was going to hit her, and I knew that there was not a thing I could do to stop him.

“Steve—” Andy said again, and Steve laughed briefly.

“Pretty good, for a twelve-year-old,” he said, and the tension was gone as easily as that. He gave Sophie a curious glance, and then sat down again. I noted with interest that Sophie had gained a year in age somewhere along the way, but neither I nor Andy remarked on it, although Andy—if he had thought—should have realized that she was still only eleven, and would be for a good nine months yet.

“Yeah,” Sophie agreed, crossing her legs and smiling. “I would have thought Andy would have told you that.”

Steve nodded. “OK.”

“So, tell us about yourselves, Steve and Andy,” she said.

They looked at one another quickly. “What do you want to know?” Andy asked.

“What brought you out here?”

Steve answered. “I heard the place was empty, so we came up—just to see what was around, you know.”

“Throw a few stones, break a few windows?” Sophie said sweetly.

“That’s kids’ stuff,” he replied flatly. “No, just looking for somewhere a bit private. I thought we might be able to get into one of the farm buildings. I think you could get into several pretty easily, if you wanted to, but I reckon they’ll be keeping an eye on them.”

“They’re pretty obvious targets,” Sophie agreed. “So what do you get up to that you need your privacy so much?”

Steve laughed. “Nothing that would interest you,” he said. “Your brother doesn’t have a lot to say for himself, does he? Hey, you—do you talk?”

“Yes,” I muttered.

Sophie said, “One thing. Don’t fuck with Mattie, OK? Talk to Andy afterwards and he’ll give you some reasons why not.” She shot a glittering smile at Andy. “I’m older now,” she said.

“Yeah, all right, I understand,” Steve said, shaking his head. “Christ. You talk like a teacher, for God’s sake.”

“Something like that,” Sophie said. “Anyway, you’re more than welcome round here. We don’t mind sharing.”

“Yeah, sure. What if I decide I don’t want you around?”

Sophie looked at him, and then smiled. “You’re pretty bright,” she said. “I think we’ll get along OK.”

“Shit,” Steve said disgustedly. “I really don’t believe this.” He ground out the cigarette on the sole of his shoe; I noticed that he did so very carefully. Sophie’s smile widened a little.

“We’ll see you at the weekend, OK?” she said. “Saturday.”

We watched them out of the door in silence. When the metal sheet had dropped back into its place, Sophie leant back in the straw and grinned at me.

“This is going to be really good,” she said.

Friday school was chaotic, and by four o’clock teachers and pupils alike were glad to be finally heading for the gates. Sophie met me at the side of the playground and we walked home together as usual. She seemed elated about something, although she didn’t mention anything particularly exciting when we were chatting about our day. I supposed that she was looking forward to meeting up with Andy and Steven again.

It is perhaps curious that I felt no jealousy, however slight, that Sophie was taking so much interest in other people; I was quietly certain that, had it been I who had suddenly decided to spend time with new friends, Sophie would have reacted differently. But a part of me even felt something like relief that Sophie’s attention was being diverted a little.

That evening, I made myself a glass of squash and wandered out into the garden with it. It was cold; there was a damp smell in the air; overlaid with the smell of a bonfire. I wandered down towards the stream and the orchard, and was pleased to see that the bonfire was in our garden: a tall, neat pile of leaves and branches, smouldering damply like a sulking volcano. The evening light had started to darken, and the trees cast long shadows across the lawn. When I got back, the kitchen was empty. Upstairs, I found Sophie lying on her bed kicking one foot in the air.

“Hi,” she said. “Where’ve you been?”

“Walking round the garden,” I said. “It’s starting to get dark really early.”

“Yeah, that’ll keep happening for a long time yet,” she agreed.

“What are you doing?”

“Thinking.”

“What are you thinking about?”

She sat up, stretched, and looked at me with a hint of a smile on her face. “Shut the door. Can you keep a secret?”

“Sure!” I said, and sat on the edge of the bed.

“Well, I don’t know, really,” she said. “It was just an idea.” She straightened herself, and seemed to be deliberating as to what to tell me. Finally, she said, “How old do you think I look?”

“Huh?”

She scaped her hair back with one hand, and held the other at her neck, framing her face between her arms. “How old do you think I look?”

“I don’t know . . . ,” I said slowly. “Quite old.”

“Older than eleven?”

“Yeah, I suppose so. Yeah.”

“That’s what I thought, too. I think I look about thirteen, except for this crappy hairstyle and the fact that everyone knows how old I am. You know what I mean. People get so used to you that they don’t really
look
at you anymore. Maybe if I looked different, people would treat me differently.”

“Like who?” I asked doubtfully. “The people at school?”

“No way. I don’t want that lot changing their preconceptions right now.”

“Mummy?”

“She doesn’t matter. No, I was thinking more of Steven and company. Maybe if I looked a bit older, they wouldn’t keep treating me so much like a child.” She sighed. “He knows I’m bright, but it’s going to be no use at all if he knows I’m a bright
eleven
-year-old.”

“He thinks you’re twelve,” I said.

“Even so. Anyway. People don’t talk to kids, so I’d better not be a kid. At least for a while.”

“What are you going to do?” I asked, interested.

“Not much. Hang on a bit.” She was still wearing the skirt that was a compulsory part of the girls’ school uniform, and a plain white blouse. As I sat and watched, she opened her wardrobe and found a pair of jeans. “These’ll do. Wait here a while.” I blinked as she left the room, and I could hear her go to the bathroom, to the airing cupboard that the hot water tank was in. A few moments later she was back, carrying a white shirt that looked as if it must be my father's. “This is way too big,” I heard her mutter.

She shrugged off her skirt and pulled on the jeans instead, and then took off the blouse and substituted the shirt. Its cuffs hung down a good eight inches or so from her wrists, and I started to laugh.

“You look pretty silly,” I said.

“Yeah, sure. Wait a bit while I try and sort this out.” I waited as she patiently rolled up the sleeves of the shirt until they were bunched casually three-quarters of the way down her forearms. She tucked the loose billows of cloth into the waistband of the jeans. “I could do with a belt,” she said.

“I’ve got one.”

“OK, go and get it.” I hurried out and returned with the belt.

“Right,” Sophie said, as she threaded it through the waistband loops of her jeans. “Close your eyes.”

I giggled. “What are you going to do?”

“Never mind. Just shut your eyes, and don’t peep or this’ll be totally pointless.”

“OK,” I said, and did so. There was some shuffling, and then the rustle of a plastic bag. I giggled again.

“Shut up,” Sophie said, but I could hear the smile in her voice. There was a pause, and then the sound of things being rearranged on her dressing table. Then there was a very long silence, broken suddenly by the hiss of an aerosol spray.

“What are you
doing
?” I said, almost squirming with impatience. “Hurry up. You’re taking forever.”

“Hang on. I’m nearly done,” she said, but there was still an interminable wait before I heard her walk across to stand in front of me.

“Wait,” she said. “Don’t open your eyes yet. When you do, I want you to try and look at me as if you’ve never seen me before. Try imagining that it’s someone else here, someone you know, and picture them instead of me. When you’ve got their picture really sharp in your mind, open your eyes quickly. OK?”

“OK,” I said.

“Make sure you’ve got a really good picture of them first,” she said.

“OK, OK.” I concentrated on imagining one of the girls from my class. At first it was a nebulous attempt, but fairly quickly I managed to get an image of Jacqueline Tynes, who sat in the front row, steady behind my closed eyelids. The room was totally silent; I could hear only my own breathing. When I was almost convinced that it was Jacqueline, and not Sophie, who was standing in front of me, I opened my eyes.

It was a strange shock, but it hit me squarely. I had been concentrating so hard that I had pushed the image of Sophie herself right out of my mind, and when I saw the girl in front of me, two things struck me. The first was that she was not my sister, the second was that she was beautiful.

“How old am I?” Sophie said.

My voice was rough with confusion as I heard myself say, “Fourteen. I think. About that age.”

“Good,” she said brightly, and the moment she moved away from where she had been standing, that temporary illusion was gone. When I saw her walk, she was suddenly my eleven-year-old sister again.

“You looked really different,” I said, struggling to find a way to express what I’d seen. “Have you done something to your hair?”

“Yeah,” she said, and pointed to a can of hairspray on the dressing table. “No ponytail, see?”

“Yeah, of course,” I said, my voice still sounding odd. She had been astonishingly beautiful, for that single second before she spoke or moved. Now that I was able to notice the details of the change, I found myself more confused than ever. Her hair had been swept forward, so that it fell to the sides of her face rather than at the back in a ponytail; it was held like that with hairspray. And she’d changed her clothes; I’d seen that part.