Switchers (16 page)

And there was only one thing, as far as she could see, that could happen. They would walk into the snow and ice until they could walk no longer, and then they would die. She wondered what had happened to the other polar creatures, the bears and Arctic foxes with their silver coats, and she hoped that at least some of them had managed to stay on land and keep ahead of the storms. She shuddered and shook a crust of snow from her coat. Her fur was thick, but not thick enough, she knew, to protect her for much longer.

Kevin was still walking with silent determination, but the snow was getting deeper as they got further from the edge of the ice, and it was soft and powdery, which made progress slow and tiring. Tess’s eyes and lungs were sore from the bitter air. She dropped her head. White bears, white snow, white air constantly moving around them. The only change in all that whiteness was when, from time to time, Kevin turned around to make sure she was there, and then she saw his black nose and eyes.

It was almost a relief when night began to fall. To Tess, numb with cold and exhaustion, it no longer seemed to matter what form rest might take, as long as it came soon.

Kevin stopped. Directly in front of them was a miniature mountain, an iceberg which had been captured and imprisoned by the spread of the krools’ carpet. Some of its facets were too sheer for snow to lodge there, and the ice showed through, darkly opaque, like crystal. To Tess it represented an obstacle, but to Kevin it was a godsend. Because around its base the snow had gathered into wide, deep drifts. He began to dig.

In the middle of the night, Tess woke. It was absolutely dark in the snowhole. If any moon or starlight filtered through the clouds above, it failed to make its way through the tunnel they had dug and into their tiny cave.

It was surprisingly, luxuriously warm in there, from the trapped heat of their furry bodies. Tess would have stretched if there had been room, but they had made the space just big enough for the two of them to sleep curled up, so that they wouldn’t have to warm any extra air. She yawned and turned over so that she was facing Kevin, and now she realised why she had woken. It was a long time, who knew how long, since she and Kevin had talked together, and she wanted to do it now before daylight came and urged them into action. She Switched, and immediately felt a little frightened to be lying in total darkness with a large bear. She could smell bear fur and bear breath, and before it frightened her any further, she reached out and tugged at Kevin’s thick, warm coat.

He started, then grew rigid, and then the coat between her fingers was cotton, a little damp.

‘You idiot, Tess! Don’t ever do that again!’

‘What? What did I do?’

‘I was a bear, you fool. You woke me up. I nearly ripped out your throat!’

‘Wow.’

‘I only just remembered in time!’

‘Sorry,’ said Tess.

Kevin said nothing, but turned awkwardly in the cramped space until he was on his back. Tess was afraid that she was going to cry and, as if he realised, he reached out his hand and touched her arm.

‘It’s OK,’ he said. ‘I shouldn’t have shouted. I’m sorry.’

Tess turned so that she was on her back as well and their shoulders were squeezed tight against each other in the dark. For a long time they lay in silence breathing the warm, foetid air.

Tess’s mind was a jumble. She knew that the most sensible thing to do was to turn back and go home, but she couldn’t say it to Kevin. It would seem like a betrayal after they had come so far. And if they weren’t going to go back, what did you say to someone when it might be your last conversation with them? There was an awful sense of the executioner’s cell about the snowhole. And despite all they had been through together, Kevin seemed like a stranger again, lost in his own thoughts. But it was he who spoke first.

‘What did she mean, Tess?’

‘Who? Lizzie?’

‘Yes. About what isn’t?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘But what could she have meant? It must have been important or she wouldn’t have said it.’

‘I don’t know if that follows,’ said Tess. ‘Lizzie said an awful lot of things that weren’t important.’

‘Oh, come on, Tess. You’re not going to start backing off again, are you? It’s hardly time for it, you know.’

‘Maybe it is the time for it. Maybe it’s the only time. The last chance we have.’ She expected him to be angry, but his answer was surprisingly calm.

‘No, it’s too late for that now. We’ve come this far because we believed what Lizzie said. It’d be completely pointless to give up now, just when we’re getting to the heart of it.’

‘The heart of what?’

Kevin shrugged, and they were squeezed so tightly together that Tess’s shoulder rose with his. At another time she would have laughed, but at that moment laughter seemed to belong to a different life.

‘Of what we are, I suppose,’ said Kevin. ‘Of survival, of freedom, of independence.’ He sighed. ‘But I don’t know what the problem is. My mind feels as if it’s shot through with steel cables, or something. Whenever I try to think about anything a bit different, like what isn’t, I just find myself running along the same old lines. I can’t seem to get anywhere.’

‘I suppose we haven’t done too badly so far,’ said Tess, ‘and most of the things we’ve done have been your ideas. The dolphins and the seals and the polar bears and this hole in the snow.’

‘Yes. But it’s all practical stuff, isn’t it? It’s all what is and not what isn’t. But the polar bears aren’t going to take us much further, are they? We couldn’t last much longer out there, and we can’t hole up for ever, either. We need something else now. Some leap of imagination.’

He fell silent again. Tess noticed that her eyes were flicking around in the darkness, seeking something to rest upon. She closed them, and must have dozed for a moment, because Kevin’s voice woke her from a dream.

‘Have you got your watch on?’

For some reason the dream was important, but when she tried to remember it, it slipped away from her. It was all snow, anyway, ancient and endless. She felt her wrist. ‘Yes.’

‘Has it got the date on it?’

Tess was already looking at it. ‘It says seven-thirty,’ she said, ‘but I suppose the time is different up here. I can’t see the date. That bit isn’t luminous. Why do you want to know, anyway?’

‘I was just wondering when my birthday was. It must be quite soon.’

‘What date is it?’

‘The thirtieth. Can’t be that far off now.’

Suddenly Tess realised why he was asking. She had an awful image of Kevin losing the ability to change and being stuck out there in the frozen wastes. He would freeze in no time in that stupid parka. He didn’t even have gloves. And going back would be just as dangerous. He might be in the middle of the sea when it happened, or up in the air. It was important to know.

‘Haven’t you got a match?’ she said.

‘Good thinking,’ said Kevin, fumbling in his pocket.

The first match he struck hurt their eyes so much that they couldn’t see the watch. As the second one was burning down, Tess held the watch up close to it.

‘The twenty-eighth,’ she said.

Just before the flame died, she caught the look of dismay in Kevin’s face. Their situation seemed even more hopeless than before, if that was possible. But Kevin said: ‘Never mind.’

‘Never mind?’

‘I was just thinking we might have had a bit of a party, that’s all. But we’ll have to skip it.’

‘A party? Are you out of your mind?’

‘No. It’s part of the tradition, apparently. The girl who told me about it had one. I didn’t really know her very well. She wasn’t like you. But she invited me to her party, and I went. The day before her fifteenth birthday.’

‘Why the day before?’

Kevin laughed. ‘You can’t very well throw a party if you’re an eagle, can you?’

‘An eagle?’

‘Yes. She was into discos and motorbikes and stuff. An eagle suited her, actually. It was her kind of thing.’

‘You mean … You mean you can choose?’

‘Of course!’ said Kevin. ‘Didn’t you know that? Whatever you are at the time of your birthday, that’s what you stay. You can’t Switch any more, that’s all. But there’s nothing to say you have to be human.’

Tess stared into the darkness, trying to take it in.

‘I’ve spent months worrying about it,’ Kevin went on. ‘Ironic, isn’t it? Months trying to choose between a rat and a sparrowhawk and an otter, and now it looks as if I won’t have a choice at all when it comes down to it. I’ll just have to take whatever I get.’

‘No, Kevin,’ said Tess. ‘We could still get back.’

‘How?’

‘Somehow. I don’t know.’

‘I don’t see how we could. But in any case, I don’t seem to be too worried about it. I can’t understand it, really, but ever since Lizzie said what she did, about us having more power than we know, I’ve had this kind of faith. I’m not worried about those things any more. They don’t seem to matter.’

‘But you can’t just end up as a polar bear or a walrus! You’re human, Kevin, you have to be human!’

He laughed again, and Tess felt her heart fill with despair.

‘Why?’ he said.

But she couldn’t tell him. She couldn’t explain that she wanted to dress him up and take him into a French restaurant, or that she would welcome him any time she got off the bus and found him waiting. Even if her pride would allow it, it made no sense out here, with the Arctic gales blowing all around them.

‘I never was any good at being human,’ he said. ‘Even with my family, even before I knew what I was.’

‘Why not?’

‘I don’t know. I just didn’t have the knack. My brother did. He was older than me, and he got along OK with everyone. My father’s a toolmaker, and he does a lot of work at home. Makes all kinds of bits and pieces that people want. My brother was always out in his workshop with him, helping him. But I couldn’t take an interest in it. I always got everything wrong, no matter how hard I tried.’

‘So what? That doesn’t mean anything.’

‘It did, though. It meant that I didn’t fit in with the men in the family, you see. And my mother …’ He stopped.

‘What about your mother?’

‘I don’t know quite how to explain it. She was always there, always. She never had a job, she never went anywhere, she was there every day when I came home from school and she did all the things that mothers are supposed to do. But in another way she wasn’t there at all. She wasn’t there for me. Her mind was always on something else, on what she was doing or on what’ she was listening to on the radio, or on something that she kept locked away inside herself somewhere.’

Tess noticed that the snow cave wasn’t as warm as it had been. The cold seemed to be creeping through her from below, and she turned on to her side to relieve the discomfort in her back.

‘When I look at it now,’ Kevin went on, ‘I see that she just didn’t have it, that thing, whatever it is, that attention that people give to each other. I don’t blame her for it. But at the time I used to think it was my fault, that I just wasn’t good enough to be worth bothering with. But then I got angry about it, and it worked, because at least when I was bad she took some notice of me. That was around the time I discovered I could turn into a rat. It was ages before I discovered that I could be other things as well. In those days I used to set off for school in the mornings and spend the day with the other young rats, and even when my parents knew I was playing truant, there was nothing they could do to stop me. If they left me to the school in the morning, I’d slip off somewhere at break and do a bunk. The other kids hated me because I was different, and I hated them because they weren’t.’

‘I know the feeling,’ said Tess.

‘Yes. And as time went by I stopped bothering to go home. When I did turn up from time to time, they used to get into this awful flap and talk about borstals and reform schools, so I thought it was best to just stay out of the way.’

‘Did you never spend time being human then, after that?’

‘Oh, yes. I still turned up for their birthdays and Christmas, things like that. After a while they just accepted it and stopped asking questions. And I told you I spend … spent a lot of time in libraries. Sometimes I’d meet someone on the way and hang around with them for a while. But I never had a real friend. Not until …’

‘Until what?’

‘Phew. It’s getting cold in here, isn’t it?’

‘Yes. We’re not as warm as the bears were. What were you going to say just now?’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

Tess rested her head on the crook of her elbow. She was colder than she had realised, and beginning to feel drowsy again. She knew that it was dangerous. She remembered reading about it, about how the cold sends you off to sleep, and then you never wake up again. For a while she resisted and pulled herself awake to listen to Kevin’s steady breathing in the darkness. What if they both fell asleep here? No one would ever find them. If the weather changed and the ice melted, their bodies would slide into the sea and be lost for ever. The thought of all those fathoms of dark water beneath them filled her with horror, but also a strange sort of resignation. They were so small in the middle of all this. Air, water, ice, and nothing else for hundreds of miles. Suddenly, there was no more resistance. She allowed her mind to drift away wherever it wanted, and there was a deep, deep sense of comfort.

The forgotten scene from the earlier dream returned. It was a landscape as bitter as the one outside their snow hole, but there was something moving across it, some kind of animal. And suddenly, Tess was wide awake.

‘Kevin!’

He jumped at the urgency in her voice and she knew that he, too, had been asleep. ‘What?’

‘I’ve got it! All that stuff about what isn’t.’

‘Have you?’

‘Yes. It’s so simple, I can’t believe we didn’t think of it before.’ She was determined to stay awake now, and she sat herself up so that the top of her head was wedged against the roof. ‘Lizzie was right. We’re completely caught up in the things around us, just trying to copy what already exists. But what about something that used to exist, and doesn’t any more?’

Kevin was holding his breath, and Tess could feel his sense of excitement. ‘Go on,’ he said.