Читать книгу Twenty-Four Hours - Margaret Mahy - Страница 6

Home. Home from school. Holidays. And here he was – out on the town, but on his own. As he walked through the early evening, bright with midsummer light, Ellis saw the city centre glowing like a far-off stage. But, although the sunlight was finding its way so confidently between hotels and banks, shops and offices, the city was threatened by a storm. To the north, between glassy office buildings, he could see bruised clouds, polished by a lurid light, rolling across the plain towards the town.

Most of the other people in the street were going in the same direction as Ellis, probably making for the cinema complex that dominated the eastern end of the city centre. He looked with interest at the few faces coming towards him, half-hoping to see someone he recognised. However, as yet, he had not seen a single person he knew.

I can always go to a film, he thought, and patted his back pocket as if the money there was a good-luck charm.

The traffic lights changed. Glancing to the left as he crossed the street, Ellis saw the city council had installed new street lamps since he had last walked that way. Retreating, like precisely spaced blooms in a park garden, they rose on long green stems which curved elegantly at the top, then blossomed into hoods of deep crimson. Foley Street, announced brass letters on a black background. At the far end of the street he saw the old library he had visited regularly as a child, bracing its stone shoulders against a constricting cage of platforms, steps and orange-coloured piping. Wide dormer windows looked towards Ellis from under deep, dipping lids, tiled with grey slate. Several streets away, a new library, complete with a computerised issue system and a much-praised information-retrieval programme, would no doubt be working busily. But the old building was still there, transformed into apartments – one of them owned, he suddenly remembered, by country-dwelling friends of his parents. He guessed, looking at the scaffolding, that the company which had bought the old library must be adding a third floor to the original two.

More changes, thought Ellis a little ruefully, although he also wanted the city to surprise him in some way – to put out branches … break into leaf … burst into gigantic laughter.

Free, thought Ellis, and he might have skipped a little if it had not been such a childish thing to do. Well, not quite free. University next year – OK! OK! That was decided. But, after all, the university had a drama society and a proper theatre, so they must need actors. And he would have adventures, moments of revelation, sex, even love. The coming year, he decided, would be a year of transformation. I’m going to be an actor, said the voice in the back of his head. I really am!

“I am going to be an actor,” Simon had also declared last year, casually but quite definitely. And then, later … “Forget acting! I’m into sex these days,” he had said when Ellis, excited by the prospect of the Shakespeare Fantasia planned for the end of the year, had auditioned successfully for the part of Claudio in a scene from Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure. But, only two weeks after saying this, Simon had killed himself. He had, after all, been into something much more dangerous than sex. He had been in love, and love had failed him.

Somewhere behind him in Foley Street a clock struck the quarter-hour with a soft but significant chime. “Now!” that final fading stroke seemed to declaim. “It begins now!” And, as it faded, almost as if its echo had triggered an event in the outside world, Ellis caught sight of himself in a looking-glass, framed by blue tiles, linking two shops. He saw, before he strode past, the long oval of his face smiling out of a halo of curls. Not bad! he thought, glad that the quickly-moving reflection had seemed to belong to someone so much older than seventeen. Yet, almost at once he felt discontented, for he did not want to look quite so wholesome – quite so new.

But now, out of nowhere it seemed, a huge wind came funnelling down the street towards him. Abruptly, the air whirled with leaves and rubbish, some of which danced higher and higher, lifting over the street lights, zigzagging, twisting, before tumbling away across roofs on the opposite side of the road. One piece of screwed-up red paper spun upwards as if it were about to go into orbit. A blackboard, advertising café meals, tumbled towards him like a square wheel, first one corner and then another striking the pavement. Ellis dodged it. The wind punched his face, at the same time stinging him with grit. Angry voices filled his ears, and a gliding figure, apparently lifted by the storm, leaped from the pavement on to a narrow empty strip designated as a bus stop. The skater swung so dangerously close to the line of slow-moving traffic that one or two drivers tooted their horns in outrage, and a passenger lowered his window to shout angrily, “What do you think you’re playing at, you bloody fool?” But the gliding man simply flung out his left arm, in a gesture both graceful and confident, and extended a single, insulting finger.

Another gust of wind tilted advancing pedestrians back on their heels, and the skater, perhaps taking advantage of their uncertainty, jumped from bus-stop space to pavement. Suddenly, Ellis and the skater were face to face.

For the first time that evening Ellis had recognised someone, and was sure that he, too, was recognised. The skater’s expression changed. Sliding past Ellis, he turned into a shop doorway, spun around, and then darted back again. He seemed to move without any effort at all … a young man in an ancient camel-hair coat, both elbows worn through, one of them blackened as if the wearer had casually leaned among red-hot coals.

A name came into Ellis’s head. Jackie, wasn’t it? Jackie Kettle? No! Not quite! A voice from the past spoke softly in his memory. “Funny name, isn’t it? It’s a fair cow.” Jackie Cattle! That was it. Jackie Cattle.