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.
After school, Chris drove off with her parents who were waiting for her at the main back gate of the school in their four-wheel drive. She slung her pack on to the back seat, then scrambled in, flashing her long, elegant legs as she pulled herself up on to the high step. Grasping the edge of the door she twisted round to wave, then, a moment later, he saw her beaming and waving again, framed in the rear window as they drove away. Roland shot one arm into the air, grinning as he did so. Only he knew that he was merely copying his usual self. The framed image of Chris diminished and disappeared, waving to the last.
“Oh, man! She’s a real cockteaser,” said Stephen, and waited for some sort of denial or perhaps a knowing grin – anything that might give him a clue as to how far Chris and Roland had gone with one another. It was easy for Roland to fall silent, smiling enigmatically and giving nothing away. He already had Jess Ferret in his sights. There she was, wandering towards the small gate at the back of the school, talking to two other girls as she went.
“OK, mate! See you, then,” Stephen was saying, turning towards the bike-shed, and setting Roland free to jog after the three girls, ready to perfect an accidental approach.
Halfway across the intervening space Mr Hudson came striding towards him, and Roland wondered if he might be about to get some sort of extra instruction, but Mr Hudson walked on in the general direction of the staff car park, looking past Roland and waving to someone as he went. Glancing back over his shoulder, Roland saw two women (probably mothers), saw a man in a black coat and saw his fellow prefect, Tom, over by the bike-shed, doing a prefect’s check on those Crichton pupils who were claiming their bikes, and who were all supposed to be wearing approved cycling helmets. Nobody, as far as he could see, was waving back to Mr Hudson. Roland jogged on.
“Childe Roland to the dark tower came,” he muttered, quoting a line he occasionally called on in a joking way – the first line of a ballad by some nineteenth century poet. He knew that the world “childe” meant a young man of noble birth, but almost nobody else knew this, so he used it as a secret joke. Over by the gate the three girls were moving away from one another, two going right (one waving, one walking backwards for a few steps) while Jess turned through the gate and set off quickly along the street.
Roland speeded up. He overtook her and said, “Oh! Hi!” in a voice so mildly surprised and casual that it pleased him. But she did not reply and glancing sideways he saw her mop of badly cut, slightly frizzy black curls was tilted away from him. “Hi!” he repeated rather more insistently, and this time his voice must have registered for she slowly turned her familiar, round, blank face towards him. She wore the expression of someone waking, a little unwillingly, from a dream – a dream which must have taken her over during the few minutes she had been walking on her own.
“Hi!” said Roland for the third time. “Yes! Right! It’s you I’m talking to. Penny for them!”
“What?” she replied.
“Your thoughts,” he said. “You must have been thinking of something.”
“Whatever I was thinking of was worth a hell of a lot more than a penny,” Jess replied, taking him by surprise. He had not expected such sharp words to come from such a vacant face. Suddenly, though, Jess Ferret was far from vacant. Suddenly, she was all there – guarded, almost aggressive.
“Yeah?” Roland asked. “OK! So how much do you reckon they’re worth? Give me an estimate.”
“Miles more than you could ever afford,” she replied and, though she still sounded irritated, she smiled sideways at him in her particular Weaselly-Ferret way.
Back in the days when she had had to wear braces on her teeth, Jess had taken to smiling with her lips closed, which was how she smiled now – a smile directed outwards into the world but inwards too, back into some secret cave of thought where she stored a bit of unexpected mockery and sarcasm. Roland found he was disconcerted because she did not seem to be sufficiently impressed to have him walking beside her. He was instantly annoyed with her, but annoyed with himself too. He had caught himself being big-headed again.
“Go on! Try me!” he said. But to his surprise, Jess, without warning, stopped dead and turned to face him.
“OK!” she exclaimed. “What do you want?”
Roland came to a standstill too.
“Nothing!” he said a little incredulously. “I was just – you know – saying something slightly friendly as I walked by What’s the big deal?”
