on his desk, drawing in a hissing half-breath, which he managed to turn into casual emphasis of an instant which was far from casual. When he looked up again, his expression was bland and judicial once more. What’s going on? Roland wanted to know. What’s really going on? But at that moment he felt too unsure of himself to ask.
“Well, I’ll try,” he said, giving in. He had no real choice. “But she mightn’t want to… I mean what if she tells me to get lost.”
Mr Hudson smiled a little. “Don’t worry about what she might say” Roland could almost feel him relaxing, there on the other side of the pens, the pie and the red notebook. “If she’s stubborn – well – we’ll talk about other possibilities. But for the present I suggest you get into conversation with her – you know – talk about books … films … cricket … whatever she’s interested in. She does read a lot. Oh, and science. She’s keen on science. Her father’s some sort of scientist. Ask about him, if you like. Her mother works, and so does yours. You’ve got something in common. Tell her about your parents and see if you can’t find out about hers. Parents are reasonably universal territory, aren’t they? We’ve all got them. Is it a deal?”
But this was no deal. It was an order.
“Yes sir. OK. But—”
“But me no buts!” quoted Mr Hudson, smiling now, not even trying to hide his pleasure that things were going the way he wanted them to go.
“But…” echoed Roland’s inner voice… the cautioning voice that had first spoken to him in his old nightmare. “But…” it repeated, without having any more to say.
And a few minutes later, Roland was walking down the school corridor, feeling a stranger to himself. Twenty minutes ago he had been in charge of life. Now he was tottering on the edge of disgrace. “But…” repeated that inner voice.
And this time something contrary and irrational leaped up inside him. It was as if he had been secretly hoping… well, certainly not for this, but for something dangerous and wild – something to override his everyday life, even though he had worked so steadily over the last seven years to set that responsible life firmly in place.
3. THE VIEW ACROSS THE SCHOOLYARD
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
