Читать книгу Alchemy - Margaret Mahy - Страница 6

Mr Hudson set a cardboard box on his desk, blinking at Roland in a judicial way as he did so. For some reason this single glance entirely changed Roland’s mood. He knew at once that he was not going to be praised, something he had been anticipating. Whatever it was that had caused Mr Hudson to hold him back from midday break was being heralded by an expression of disapproval – even, Roland realised incredulously, of contempt.

Flicking the box open, Mr Hudson thrust his left hand into it with the confidence of a conjuror who knows he is going to whisk a rabbit from an empty hat. He drew out, not a rabbit, but a plastic packet containing three fine-tipped pens – red, green and blue – which he set down in front of Roland with grim deliberation. Plunging his hand into the box for a second and then a third time he brought out something in a greasy paper bag, and finally a thick notebook with a red cover.

Roland’s reaction to these successive revelations must have satisfied a teacher trying to establish a small melodrama. His mouth fell open like an astonished mouth in some over-acted TV sitcom. He was more taken aback than if Mr Hudson really had produced a rabbit, and certainly far more alarmed. After shooting a startled glance at his English teacher, he looked back at the objects placed before him. A great blush swept through him, starting under his hair, and then, driven by powerful shame, burning down through his cheeks, chest and stomach. Of all the people in his class – in the school, even – Roland was famous for smart answers, but he had no answer to the silent accusation that those pens, the greasy bag and that notebook were making as they lay before him.

“Well?” said Mr Hudson at last. Roland gave a shrug so small it was nothing more than a convulsive twitch. He did not even try to look in the paper bag. He already knew what it must contain. Mr Hudson was confronting him with the exact duplicates of the articles he had stolen only a week ago.

“It’s not as if you couldn’t afford to buy them,” said Mr Hudson. “Shoplifting is a contemptible crime, don’t you think?”

Roland remained silent. There was no excuse for it; there was not any true explanation – not one that made any sense, even to him. Here he was – seventeen years old, licensed to drive, a moderately well-to-do seventh form student, a prefect, with the prospect of scholarship exams coming up at the end of the year. Not only that, he was going out with Chris Glennie who was possibly the brightest, and certainly the most beautiful, girl in the school. How could he have risked screwing things up by shoplifting three pens, a pie and a notebook? All the same, that was what he had done. The pie was gone, eaten almost immediately, but in the drawer of his desk at home, three pens in a plastic envelope, along with a red covered notebook, exact twins to the objects Mr Hudson had just set down in front of him, were lying, totally unused.

It had been one of those days – a day like today for that matter – when he had been allowed to drive his mother’s car to school, with the proviso that he bring home a few family groceries. He had parked, crossed the road opposite the café painted blue and silver, and, turning right into the arched mall, had walked along it into the ultimate temple of the supermarket. He could clearly remember the moment when the impulse overtook him, could even remember the people to left and right of him, all busy acting on impulses of their own. A mother with a baby in a pushchair went sliding past him. A couple of young women were fidgeting by the rack of greeting cards, showing the cards to one another and laughing as they did so. Just beyond them, a man in a long black coat held out a length of wrapping paper and stared down at it, apparently trying to work out if it were wide enough for his needs. The notebook had slipped into Roland’s back pocket, just as easily as the package of pens, less than a minute later, slid inside his open collar to nestle over his heart, the bulge well-hidden by the Crichton College blazer. Earlier, he had chosen a pie from a small oven set at eye-level on the wall in the fast-food section, and had placed it carefully in the supermarket trolley among the groceries his mother needed. Moving into the frozen food section, he had leaned across the handle of the trolley and, easing the pie out of its paper bag, had begun to eat it, almost absentmindedly. No one had seemed to notice, not even the young woman who had suddenly rounded the low, open-refrigerated section, advancing on him briskly in her blue supermarket smock. He remembered looking at her defiantly, expecting some sort of accusation. But she must have been concentrating on some internal supermarket errand, for she had hurried on without so much as glancing at him.

And now it appeared that Mr Hudson must have been somewhere close at hand – must have been spying on him down some oblique supermarket vista, and must have been watching him closely enough to know the colours of the stolen pens and just which notebook he had chosen. And then he had obviously chosen for himself the exact objects he had seen Roland stealing, presumably to add drama to this confrontation. Cheap drama, thought Roland, staring at his teacher with tattered defiance.

“Why did you do it?” asked Mr Hudson again. (“Why did you?” Roland wanted to retort, surveying at the objects on the desk in front of him).

“Dunno!” he said. To his embarrassment his voice came out as a guilty third-former’s mumble. It was a long time since he had said anything in any teacher’s presence that sounded so furtive and defeated. These days, if he were reprimanded (which occasionally still happened), he mostly succeeded in finding a reply that was literary or witty enough to win a reluctant grin. Mind you, it was a tricky thing to bring off. Clever answers could sometimes infuriate teachers who weren’t in the mood for them. It was important to get the balance right. Roland had always believed, however, that he had Mr Hudson well and truly sussed. For one thing, Mr Hudson was a terrific reader and responded warmly to other readers, and Roland vaguely imagined that, at the end of the year when school was finally over, they would shrug off their unnatural roles of teacher and pupil and would become friends of a sort, talking about books when they met, and joking with one another in a worldly way.

“I can’t just let it go,” said Mr Hudson. “I can’t overlook it.” He waited, but Roland had nothing useful to say

“I’ve obviously thought it over for a day or two,” said Mr Hudson. “You do realise, don’t you, that if I went to the principal he wouldn’t overlook it, no matter how sorry you said you were. He is a little – well, let’s say obsessed with the Crichton College image out on the street – which happens to mean behaviour in public places, such as supermarkets.” Roland thought of the school principal, Mr McDonald, who had never seemed to be impressed by Roland’s wit. “I don’t think he’d necessarily expel you, or anything like that…” Mr Hudson went on, giving Roland a faintly relenting smile as he spoke. Then he paused, looking at Roland in a measuring way before completing his sentence. “But I think he’d probably have you struck off as a prefect.”

Roland, who had been about to relax and even to smile a little himself, relieved at detecting the smallest degree of camaraderie, felt his face stiffening once more as he imagined the guessing and gossip that would blaze up around the school if he were toppled in any way. His friends probably wouldn’t desert him (though some of them might find their tolerance blurred with scorn and secret triumph), but his mother – his mother would be as degraded as if she had been caught shoplifting herself. The thought of his mother’s humiliation struck him like pain. As for Chris – sexy Chris with the long legs and the small, sharp breasts (dulled and camouflaged during the week by the Crichton school uniform, but joyously outlined by her weekend clothes) – Chris was ruthless with losers. Shoplifting! She’d dump him. No question. And then, as these thoughts flicked wildly through his head, it suddenly came to Roland that Mr Hudson was working his way towards – not a punishment, but a proposition. He looked up from the pens, the pie and the notebook and studied his teacher warily.