Chris! Chris! How about a kiss?” he shouted. “Oh, what luck! We can have a—”
“Shut up!” yelled Mrs Fairfield, cutting in just in time. “Stop it, you kids. I hate it when you speak like that. Just ignore them, Roland.”
“I am! I do!” said Roland. “They can be as immature as they like. I don’t care. Anyhow, Chris is away for the weekend… on the coast with her family. And, by the way, that’s my game of Viper.” His brothers howled again, but this time with dismay as Roland, stretching nimbly over Martin’s shoulder, snatched the game away from them and pushed it into the pocket of his blazer. Then, hoisting his backpack once more, he made for his bedroom… his sanctuary.
But tonight when the bedroom door closed behind him, the events of the day came crashing over him like an avalanche. His backpack thumped on the floor and he tumbled forward on to his bed, boots on the quilt, face burying itself deep in his pillow. The family cat, Scruff, who had complacently folded himself beside the pillow, shot away, ears back, looking highly aggrieved. Finding the door firmly shut, he had no choice but to sit down and treat himself to a good, hard washing, while Roland lay on his bed, gazing into self-imposed darkness and feeling the weight of his remarkable afternoon bearing down on him. At first, it seemed like a single weight between his shoulders, but then it divided, becoming not one burden but several.
There was the central one, of course – his confrontation with Mr Hudson. Then there was his failed attempt to command Jess Ferret’s grateful attention, followed by the complicated excitement of tracking her home. And, mixed in with all this, was something else – something uneasy and shapeless, something he could not name. I’m altering, he thought. (“Hey!” his inner voice commanded him. “Forget all that! Pull yourself together, mate. You are, what you are, what you are! Don’t try to be different!”)
“I’m not trying to be different…” he mumbled into his pillow, then broke off. “Oh, forget it!” he told himself impatiently.
Really, he thought, I should tell old Hudson to get stuffed. I should tell him to go ahead and let McDonald know everything. (Old McDonald had a school, he and his friends had sung years ago, Ee-I, Ee-I, O! And every teacher was a fool! Ee-I, Ee-I, O!) He had already argued his way through all this earlier in the afternoon, but he couldn’t help going through it again and again and again. OK, so if he did confess to the principal it would mean having to surrender his prefect’s badge, but then at least the whole business would be behind him – over and done with, and there would be none of this sneaking around trying to strike up conversations with Jess Ferret, and being rejected with something close to scorn. And, after a week or two, some other school scandal would push his doings into the background. Most people would quickly forget his fall from grace.
But then the mocking image of Chris swam in his mind… really swam, because for some reason he found himself imagining her stroking towards him, gliding through rippling green water, slender and naked, with her hair billowing out around her. And then, before he had a chance to enjoy this vision in any way, his mother became part of it too, dog-paddling alongside Chris in her own determined fashion, wearing last year’s navy-blue swimsuit. Roland groaned softly. Chris’s probable scorn and his mother’s inevitable grief were not to be born. Why… why… why had he stolen anything in the first place? That was the rocky question. Why?
Turning his head wearily as if it were a dead weight that had to be rolled along rather than lifted up, he stared at his desk, half imagining he might, if he really concentrated, be able to see where the pens and the red notebook were still hidden, a somehow sinister presence in the darkness of a closed drawer. And at that moment, probably because the closed drawer suddenly reminded him of a coffin, the ancient and irrelevant dream of the magician, Quando, slid into his mind. (“Careful!”) Impatiently, Roland chased both the warning voice and the memory out of his head.
And, after all, he had half expected the voice. What he had not expected was that a strange irritated exhilaration should be suddenly active in him, edging its way through the humiliations of the day, glinting like a random gold thread in the dark weave of the afternoon. He had first felt it leap into life as Stephen turned away from him in the schoolyard; as if, from that moment on, he was set free of family and friends – even free of Chris – to live a life which would be exclusively his own. Of course, having to talk to Jess had been a bit of a drag, though that moment when she had suddenly stopped looking so utterly vacant and had snapped back at him was something to think about. But how could he possibly have enjoyed tracking her – stalking her, really, though the word ‘stalking’ had an ugly sound to it.
Stalk toils! Roland groaned again. He did not want thoughts of Jess Ferret to feel enjoyable in any way. And he did not want to think too much about that odd, sharp glance that Mr Hudson, his hitherto favourite teacher, had given him… a glance which suggested he was being used in some secret way and was not being told what was really going on.
Well, he had the whole weekend ahead of him. It wasn’t as if Mr Hudson had ordered him to come up with a written report on the Weasel by Monday or anything. And then, as Roland sustained himself by contemplating a couple of free days, he caught himself remembering Jess’s blue eyes looking at him under her long, black lashes, and the way her irises and pupils had merged into intense slits – slits which had seemed like peepholes to another universe – before immediately opening out into ordinary eyes once more. Here, alone in his bedroom, he was able to puzzle about that moment. If he had had the chance to look into those slits, would he have seen the curve of bone at the back of her head, or would he have seen himself hanging, arms spread, not actually dancing, yet part of the huge dance?
“Weird!” he said aloud, now staring at the ceiling and running the short memory through his mind over and over again, as if he were editing film. He considered not only Jess’s strange eyes but also the brief intruding reminder of his childish dream.
And at last his mother called him. The takeaways had arrived. Roland swung himself up from his bed and made for the door, pausing as he caught a glimpse of himself in his looking glass. There he was, tall, broad-shouldered, a little gangly but not too bad. His dark brown hair was worn as long as Crichton dress code allowed, which was certainly not very long. It made him look rather more conservative than he really wanted to be, but Chris had streaked it a little for him, so that he seemed to have grown a comb of brassy gold. He couldn’t help knowing that some people – his mother, of course (though she hardly counted), and Chris (because she had told him so), thought he was handsome. All the same, he could never see it himself. Every time he confronted his reflection he saw, yet again, the same old face, and he had no way of working out what it really looked like – except when he saw himself accidentally reflected in shop windows, or in a photograph. Then he knew he looked very like his untrustworthy father, which might mean that somewhere along the line he too would walk away from everything and dissolve into the world out there, never to be found again. Roland cleared his throat and straightened himself, assuming at least the outer appearance of a trustworthy man.
“Fabuloso!” said his inner voice, praising his resolve, and he repeated it aloud, though once the exclamation was alive in the outside world he found he didn’t believe it. There was certainly nothing fabulous about him right then. Quite the reverse.
Hungry! He suddenly felt hungry. How could he possibly have so many troubles and still feel hungry. All the same he welcomed the feeling. At least it proved there were some things in a shifting world that could be relied on.
Roland set off, pleased to have something to look forward to, but in the hall beyond his bedroom door he paused. The wall was hung with family pictures. There he was, as a smiling baby, as a toddler, as a boy of nine delighted with his birthday cake. There was a slightly blurred photograph of Martin in his pram and one of Danny on a rocking horse. There was his mother with her mother, and there was an old
