Switchers (6 page)

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ said Tess. ‘What difference does it make if you freeze instead of me? The point is, the whole thing sounds ridiculous to me. How can we possibly have any effect on the weather, whatever we do?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Kevin, zipping up his parka again, ‘but I do know this. Most of my life I’ve been going in and out of the animal world, and never before did they take any particular notice of me. But now they have. They know that I’m different and they’re asking me for something.’

‘I’m totally confused, Kevin,’ said Tess, ‘and I’m too cold to think straight. I have to go home.’

‘But we can go straight away,’ he said. ‘Come on. You won’t be cold once we get moving.’ As he spoke, he was pointing towards a large hole in the skirting beside the fireplace.

‘As a rat?’ said Tess.

‘Of course.’

Tess shook her head, and at the same moment changed back into an owl. She hopped out of the window and flew straight up and away towards the park. Gradually the activity warmed her and she began to feel better. The whole idea was crazy. All she wanted to do was to curl up in her own bed and forget all about it. But she was not allowed to. As she landed lightly on the edge of her bedroom window, she realised that Kevin was right behind her.

K
EVIN AND TESS STOOD
in her room, facing each other.

‘Goodnight, Kevin,’ said Tess.

‘Oh. You’re going to bed, are you?’

‘Yes.’ She wanted to close the window on the night and all that was in it and allow the room to warm up, but she couldn’t do that until he was gone. Instead, she climbed into bed and wrapped the covers around her.

Kevin wandered round the room, examining her things. It made Tess uncomfortable. It always made her uncomfortable when someone less well off than she was came to the house. She had no pride in her standard of living, and in situations like this she felt rather guilty.

‘You’ve got a lot of books,’ said Kevin.

‘Observant, aren’t you?’

‘Have you read them all?’

‘Most of them.’

He took a thick volume out of the book case and opened it. ‘You like mythology, then?’

‘My dad does. He buys most of that stuff.’

‘Do you read it?’

‘If I’m bored enough.’

Kevin leafed through the book. ‘This is a good one,’ he said. ‘I haven’t seen this one before.’

Tess sighed and tried to drop him a hint by turning her face to the wall, but he went on: ‘I spend hours in the library, you know.’

‘Oh? When you’re not rummaging through people’s dustbins?’

She couldn’t see him, but she could imagine the look on his face in the brief silence before he said: ‘Yes. Or raiding their kitchens or waking up their babies at night. Rats are OK, you know, you shouldn’t underestimate them. They have their own codes of behaviour, even if they’re not like yours. They have a language, too.’

‘All animals do.’

‘No, not really. All animals have ways of communicating, but the rats actually have a language, a sort of visual language.’

Tess said nothing, and after a while, Kevin went on: ‘I love all this stuff, though, all those heroes and gods and wonderful beasts. It’s the best thing about people, if you ask me. Their imagination.’

‘I didn’t ask you,’ said Tess, and as soon as she had said it, she regretted it. It was just one step too far.

Kevin hurled the book across the room. It hit the wall above her head with a loud crack and landed on the pillow in front of her nose. She sat up in bed.

‘For God’s sake, Kevin!’ she said, as loud as she dared. ‘You’ll wake my parents!’

‘Your parents? Your precious mammy and daddy? Who cares? Eh? As long as you’re all right, all warm and cosy with your feather duvet and your central heating and your own private little life. The rest of the world can go hang, can’t it, as long as you’re all right, Jack!’

‘Shh, Kevin, don’t shout! I don’t know what you mean, can’t you understand that? I don’t understand what you’re asking me to do.’

‘Nor do I!’ said Kevin. ‘But I know that it’s important. And even if it isn’t, I have to find out.’

He came over to her and sat on the edge of the bed. Tess’s nerves were on edge, waiting for the sound of her father’s feet in the hallway.

‘You have to help me, Tess,’ Kevin went on. ‘You just have to. I can’t do this on my own. For one thing, I don’t have very much time left.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘It doesn’t go on for ever, you know, this thing, this ability we have. Did you know that?’

‘No.’

‘Only until we’re fifteen.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Someone told me. She was one of us, too, but now she isn’t. She learnt it from another Switcher. After her fifteenth birthday she couldn’t change any more. That’s the end of it.’

The news came as a blow to Tess. She had always believed that her gift would be with her for the rest of her life, the one thing she could be sure of.

‘We all meet someone who tells us,’ said Kevin, ‘and we all meet someone we have to tell. I don’t know how it works or why, but it seems that it always does. Anyway, the point is, I’m nearly fifteen, you know? And I’m nervous about what’s happening.’

‘So you want me to come along and hold your hand?’

Kevin looked crestfallen, and suddenly Tess didn’t know why she was putting up such a resistance and being so unkind. She lay back on the pillow to think about it, and Kevin sat quietly, glancing at her from time to time in his nervous, sideways manner.

Tess realised as she lay there that there was nothing to think about. If she refused and sent him away, she would never know what it was about and whether her gift had given her a part to play in some scheme or other. She would have to live with that uncertainty for the rest of her life. No matter how crazy it seemed, she had to go. There was no choice.

She sighed and threw back the covers. A look of delighted surprise crossed Kevin’s face. He turned away quickly so that she wouldn’t see it, but she could still see the way he felt by the spring in his step as he crossed the room. She pulled on her jeans on top of her pyjamas, and then two sweatshirts, a thick jumper and two pairs of socks. Then Kevin waited in her room as she crept downstairs, feeling like a burglar in her own house, to get her down jacket and gloves.

Back in the bedroom, Tess hesitated. Whatever anxiety she had about the risk she might be running for herself was nothing compared to the feeling that gripped her now. For some reason she knew beyond any doubt that she would not be returning to that room before morning, and that her parents would have to face the shock of coming in and finding it empty. She felt sick, but there was no longer any question of turning back. With hands that trembled more from tension than from cold, she searched through the drawers of her desk for some notepaper that her aunt had given her for Christmas. The she sat down and picked up her pen.

The paper had delicate impressions of swans in blue and gold. Kevin leaned over her shoulder as she wrote. ‘Nice paper,’ he said.

‘Shh.’

‘Dear Mummy and Daddy,’ she wrote. ‘I have to go away for a little while. I’m sorry, but I can’t explain to you why. But you must trust me, just this once. Don’t send anyone to search for me. It would only be a waste of time. I promise that I will take care of myself, and you must promise me that you will do the same and not worry too much. I will be back as soon as I can. Love you with all my heart, Tess, XXXXXXXX’

‘Yuck,’ said Kevin. ‘“All my heart.”’

Tess swung on him. ‘Shut up,’ she said, in a vicious whisper. ‘Shut your filthy mouth. Just because you haven’t got anybody.’

He shrugged and turned away, and Tess was sorry, because she realised for the first time that it was true. He had nobody. Nobody at all.

She pinned the note to her pillow and took a last look round the room. Then, side by side with Kevin, she walked to the window.

The two owls swept away again over the city. Kevin led the way back towards Connolly Station, but instead of returning to the flats, he headed for a small patch of wasteland in the same area, where houses had been demolished to make way for some new building project which had never materialised. They overflew it once or twice, checking out the area, and then they began to descend.

There was a crowd of young men gathered around a car a couple of blocks away, but they were not close enough to be a danger. The owls flew a little lower over the wasteground again and, to Tess’s horror, her sharp night eyes saw that the whole area was swarming with rats. There was a high chain-link fence around the plot, but nonetheless the local people had managed to turn the place into a dumping ground for their rubbish. Mainly it was large things, old couches with the stuffing hanging out, broken TVs and fridges and mattresses with bulging springs. But there were black plastic bags there as well, spilling out their contents of empty tins and vegetable peelings and tea bags. A perfect breeding ground for rats.

As the owls spiralled cautiously downwards, there was a sudden flurry of rapid movement as the rats leapt for cover, and then there was nothing. Absolute stillness. Into this, the two birds landed, and before Tess could even take a breath, Kevin had dissolved before her eyes and become a rat.

It was strange to watch it happening. If Tess had been asked, she probably would not have been able to describe what it looked like, because it looked, in a sense, just the way it felt. She had the same dizzying sensation of the world losing focus and becoming fluid, as though the observer also were drawn into the process of change and somehow became part of it. She watched as Kevin trotted away a little distance, then stopped and looked back. Tess stood still, with her wings folded, looking around her with large eyes that missed nothing, even in the darkness. The rats were everywhere, poking their noses out of the tin cans and paper bags and carpet folds where they had taken cover. Kevin sat up on his tail and twitched his whiskers with that same nervousness that carried into his human form. Tess wanted to be with him, but she was stuck. She just couldn’t bring herself to make that change.

It wasn’t only as a human that she hated rats. Every creature that she had ever been hated them, too. The birds hated them because they would raid any nest they could reach and whisk away any hatchling or fledgling that got out from under its parent’s eye. Cats and dogs hated them because they were thieving and provocative, and because if they were hungry enough they would take even a young pup or kitten from its bed. Other scavengers hated them because they were greedy and aggressive and invariably got the better of an argument. Even the large and tolerant beasts like horses and cattle found rats distasteful, because they respected neither peace nor privacy, and they fouled whatever fodder they were unable to eat.

Kevin came back towards her. The other rats, sensing that she was not a threat, had begun to emerge from their hide-outs. She turned her head slowly from side to side. She was not afraid. An owl is a match for any rat. She watched them carefully, allowing her owl instinct to savour the idea of snatching the plumpest of them and bringing it away with her to the nearest tree. But it was not to be. From the street came the soft click-click of a dog’s claws on paving stones. The rats froze. As Tess watched, the dog appeared at the wire and stopped, looking straight at her. For a long moment, nothing moved. Then the dog, with a single, soft bark, announced its intention and ducked through a gap in the fence.

Looking back, Tess could never understand exactly why she made the decision she did at that moment. It would have been as easy, and probably much safer, to lift off into the air and fly away from the scene, but she didn’t. The sudden danger resolved her deadlock, and an instant later she was running for her life behind Kevin’s retreating tail and leaping for the safety of a dark hole in the side of an upturned couch. Together with several other rats, they wormed their way between the springs and stuffing into the safety of the deep interior. From there they could hear the dog sniffing and scratching at the torn fabric, but they were quite confident that he couldn’t reach them. Sure enough, he soon became bored and gave up. The rats wasted no time. Before he was out of sight down the street, they were out in the open again.

Suddenly, Tess found her mind full of vivid and disturbing images. The owl in the dog’s mouth with feathers flying. Herself as a rat being shaken in his teeth, and the horrifying sound and sensation of her spine snapping. She stood transfixed, trying to clear her mind, until Kevin caught hold of her by the whiskers and gave them a tweak. It was then that she remembered what he had said about the rat language, and she realised that he had put those images into her mind. He was angry. But before she could work out how to answer him, they were approached by another rat, and then another, and her mind was fully occupied by their expressions and the images they were passing.

‘Here among us, you two, huh? Days and nights, days and nights, us lot listening, looking, huh?’

Tess was surprised at how well she understood them.

‘You two sleeping, huh? Days and nights, days and nights. Stuffing fat bacon, huh? Trying to make a family, huh?’

Tess was shocked, but Kevin was angry. He jumped on the rat who had suggested it and bit his ear until he squealed. ‘Ear gone, nanananana! Sit down, calm, days and nights, you two, empty streets, empty skies.’

Kevin was giving images now. ‘Long canal, long towpath. Us two, many streets.’

Tess was grateful that he didn’t let them know that the delay was largely her fault. ‘Many streets, many streets,’ she thought, ‘yep,’ and she was surprised when the others nodded and twitched their whiskers.

‘Yep, yep, many streets. Many streets behind, many streets ahead, move, run, little old lady sitting beside a fire, looking you two, listening you two, run, huh?’

And run they did, straight away. Across the wasteground and down a hole which led under the foundations of the neighbouring house and through a series of underground passages lined with brick, earth and rubble.

Kevin went ahead with the rat whose ear he had bitten. The other stranger ran along beside Tess, watching her cautiously with what she interpreted as a rather stupid grin. From time to time the passageway grew narrow and the lead rat and Kevin would fall into single file until they were through. But Tess’s companion didn’t seem to understand. If she gained speed to go ahead, he gained speed as well, and if she slowed down to drop behind, he also slowed, all the time looking at her with that same, stupid expression. They survived a couple of tight squeezes, but managed to become completely stuck at one particularly narrow spot.