Читать книгу Alchemy - Margaret Mahy - Страница 8

Roland crossed the long yard between the school and the school library, wondering if he would find it possible to eat the lunch he had made for himself that morning. As he walked, a sound that was not quite a sound assailed him. There it was again – that intricate breathing – bursting in on him, as it did from time to time, no matter how he tried to exclude it… Up, up, up! Up and out! Out! Transform, transform! It seemed, right then, like a command whispered with great privacy into his ear. Transform! it ordered him. “Ignore it,” his inner voice advised him, as it always did. “Keep clear.”

Mr Hudson was right about one thing at least. Roland had known Jess Ferret for a long time. They shared a birthday, and twelve years ago they had started school on exactly the same day. So Jess had been in his class for as long as he could remember, sitting, year after year, in desk after desk, more or less halfway down classroom after classroom, rarely putting her hand up or demanding attention in the way that he or Chris or Tom or Stephen did. Jess answered most of the questions she was asked in a serious, sluggish voice, and puttered along, doing well enough in most things. But she never quite made it to that top group with whom teachers exchanged sly jokes – the ones who read sophisticated books, firing quotations like arrows at one another, and dragging evidence of trendy reading into classroom discussion. Roland gloomily turned Jess over in his mind as he automatically looked for Chris, Tom and the rest of his gang. They were dominating the seats below the windows of the school library as they usually did during lunch hour.

“What did Hudson want?” Shelley Randall asked him as Roland collapsed, with exaggerated ease, into a space at the end of one of the seats.

“Oh, he wanted to remind me how great I was,” Roland replied, flicking his hand carelessly. “No big deal. Knew it already!”

They sat under the library windows, partly because it was sunny there, even in winter, but also because the library was on a slight rise and gave them a dominant view across the school yard, past a few well-established trees to the western end of the football field.

As Roland answered, gesturing grandly and almost spilling his sandwiches, he was peering between a broad scatter of fellow pupils to a particular seat under a particular distant linden tree. Yes! There she was, as big and boring as ever. Jess Ferret. Mr Hudson was right. It would be pathetically easy to get her attention. But not now. There was no natural way he could leave his friends and casually stroll over to talk to her without inviting derisive speculation, and probably embarrassing Jess into total silence. Working out a few possible tactics, he stared across at her while Chris and Tom slung off at him, telling him he was so far up himself that one day he’d come strolling out of his own mouth.

Jess Ferret, thought Roland. Why did it have to be Jess Ferret of all people? Even the name ‘Ferret’ was a school joke. (Question! Which girl out there is Jess Ferret? Answer! You can weaselly tell, because she looks stoatally different.) She did quite well in mathematics, he recalled, but then mathematicians were a nerdy lot. “Imagination beats calculation,” he had once declared, feeling he’d summed it up pretty well. Yet now, looking over at that solitary figure under the linden tree, Roland found himself wondering how he could possibly have spent hours each day, for years and years, in the same space as another person, and still know so little about her.

He seemed to remember that she was an only child, but realised he wasn’t quite sure about this. Mr Hudson had said that her father was a scientist, but that didn’t explain much – he could be a geologist, or a physicist, or could be, as far as he knew, involved in putting sheep genes into cows so that they would provide wool as well as milk. And Mr Hudson had talked about her mother, so apparently she had one of each (unlike some people, he reminded himself). He thought he might recognise her mother if he saw her, but not her father. And what sort of car did they drive? Or, come to that, did they drive at all? He did not even know where Jess lived – somewhere in the city, of course, but whereabout exactly? He had the impression that she always walked everywhere, so presumably her home was not far from the school.

“Whoo-hoo! Wake up,” called Chris, waving her hand in front of his face. “Stop dreaming about me! Here! This way! I’m over here, being sexy and fascinating.”

“He’s wallowing in Hudson’s praise,” said Tom, and Roland saw, rather to his surprise, that Tom really did believe that Mr Hudson had kept him back to make flattering comments on his work. After all, it was what he had half-expected himself. But Chris knew better.

“La la la!” she sang, looking over at Tom with her usual good-natured mockery. “He’s having you on, Tommy. Old Hudson gave him a rocket about something. He’s been munted. I can tell.”

If he confessed to some fault he’d get them off his back. They’d have a good laugh at his humiliation and then forget it. Roland tried a foolish grin, though foolish grins were not part of his usual repertoire.

“I blew it over that Kiwi film piece,” he said, inventing quickly. “I just put down the first shit that came into my head and Hudson decided to have a crack at me. You know! ‘You’re not in my class to coast along! Blah! Blah! Blah!’ Like that!”

“It’s what he’s paid to say,” said Tom tolerantly. “Probably a way of reminding himself he’s still alive.”

‘And anyhow Roley enjoys coasting along,” Chris put in.

“Roley by name, Roley by nature,” said Roland, shifting his gaze from Jess Ferret to Chris. Only yesterday afternoon, sitting in her bedroom, she had half sighed, half sobbed into his shoulder, “I do want to… I do…” But, having said this, she had added that her mother would be home soon and had pulled away from him. Now, she was deliberately reminding him, Roland supposed, that she still belonged to herself.

Their eyes met. She gave him her crooked smile which always reminded him of someone beckoning, then turned towards Stephen and Shelley once more. “We’re off to the West Coast this weekend,” she said. “The weather forecast’s great. I’m going to smother myself in cream, lie naked in the sun, and read.”

“You’ll be bitten all over by sandflies,” said Tom, while Roland, certain she was deliberately making this comment so that his head would be filled with the image of her nakedness, stared briefly at her neck and her fair hair caught back in a short, thick braid.

“Dream on!” he said, looking away once more. “Even if it’s fine, it’ll be miles too cold to swim, let alone sunbathe.”

Out under the linden tree, Jess was closing her book. Roland, gobbling the last of his lunch, determined not to waste it after he had gone to the trouble of making it, suddenly wanted to know what she was reading. Jess stretched her arm out, then hooked it back – to consult a watch, he supposed. It was a real watch-consulting gesture, though, of course, he couldn’t be sure, not from where he was sitting. As she did this, the bell rang. It was almost as if she had accurately anticipated the first stroke.

“Your lot are picking you up straight after school, aren’t they?” he asked Chris as they began to walk, side by side, towards the door nearest their classroom.

“’Fraid so!” she said, assuming he was a little melancholy at the prospect of a weekend without her. “Never mind! It’ll just whisk away – Saturday! Sunday! La la la.” She incessantly used fragments of song to emphasise or punctuate her dialogue, or to suggest that she couldn’t be bothered spelling things out to anyone too stupid to anticipate what she meant. Roland nodded vaguely.

“Go on!” Chris said, nudging him. “Try to sound a bit sorry that you’re not coming with us.”

“Well, actually, I’ve lined up a date with someone who’s crazy about me,” he replied. He and Chris often pretended to one another that they each had a string of secret admirers, but on this occasion his voice sounded flat and automatic in his own ears, rather as if he were giving out a recorded message.

“That’s right,” said Chris approvingly. “Make the best of it! Brave you!” She spoke without the slightest fear that anyone could ever win his attention away from her. “So will I! La la la!” she sang, smiling at him as if she knew all his secrets. And indeed she did know quite a few of them.