brushed his luxurious hair from his face and looked up. “Hmm? What?”
Thrasher and Clarabelle looked at him with real concern in their eyes. The old Scapegrace would have heaped scorn upon them. The new Scapegrace didn’t see the point.
“I was saying that I washed the floor in the pub, just like you asked,” Thrasher continued.
“And I was saying you shouldn’t get Gerald to do that every time,” said Clarabelle. “He’s not your slave.”
“I don’t mind, really,” Thrasher said, blushing.
“You should mind,” said Clarabelle. “Scapey, it’s just not nice, the way you treat Gerald. He’s your best friend in the whole entire world and you two are my best friends in the whole entire world and best friends shouldn’t treat each other like that.”
It had been a long day. All Scapegrace wanted to do was have a shower and go to bed. “You’re right,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
They stood there and blinked at him.
“You’re sorry?” Thrasher asked.
Irritation flared in the back of Scapegrace’s mind, then sputtered out. “Yes. I’m sorry.”
“You … you’ve never said that to me before,” Thrasher said, tears in his eyes. Dear lord, he was going to cry.
“Then I’m not sorry,” Scapegrace said hastily, in an effort to hold off an embarrassing display of emotion. “Does that make you feel better?”
Thrasher’s hands went to his mouth as tears spilled down his perfect cheekbones. “You’ve never cared about how I feel before.”
Scapegrace went to roll his eyes, but lost his enthusiasm halfway through and ended up looking at the ceiling.
“Are you feeling OK?” Clarabelle asked.
For the second time in the last few minutes, Scapegrace sighed. “I’m fine.”
“But are you really?”
“Of course. The pub is doing good business. We have a loyal customer base. Most of them are in every night. What’s to complain about?”
“I don’t know,” said Clarabelle. With natural grace, she sprang on to the kitchen table and sat there, cross-legged, while the dishes she’d knocked off crashed to the floor around her. “You tell me.”
Scapegrace hesitated. He’d always viewed himself as an old-fashioned type of guy, not the kind to talk about whatever was troubling him. But circumstances, he supposed, had changed. One glance at his reflection in the window proved that.
“I always wanted to do something important,” he said. “I wanted to be someone important. I wanted to make a difference.”
“You make a difference to me,” said Thrasher.
The old Scapegrace would have thrown something at him for that. The new Scapegrace didn’t bother.
“I never wanted to be normal,” he continued. “But here, normal is all I am. In Roarhaven, I’m … unexceptional.”
Clarabelle frowned. “Do you want to leave?”
“No. Nothing like that …”
“But if you do leave,” Clarabelle said, “do you promise to take me with you?”
“I’m not leaving.”
“OK,” Clarabelle said happily. “Just don’t decide to leave one morning before I get up. Then I’ll get up and you’ll be gone and Gerald will be gone and I’ll be all alone in this house and I’ll have no friends.”
Thrasher wrapped his gigantic arm round her shoulders. “We’re not going anywhere.”
She nodded. “Because I have trouble making friends. People think I’m weird, just because sometimes I see things that aren’t really there, and just because I say things they don’t understand. They don’t want to be my friends. But you guys don’t care about things like that. You two are really nice.”
“I’m not leaving,” Scapegrace said. “I’m just feeling sorry for myself, that’s all.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know, I … I suppose I can just see myself living out the rest of my life as an ordinary person.”
“You’re not ordinary,” Clarabelle said. “None of us are.”
“I get sad, too,” Thrasher said. “I don’t like to bother anyone with it, but … I mean, my new body is very nice. It really is. But every time I look in the mirror, I see someone that isn’t me. I don’t think that feeling is ever going to go away.”
Scapegrace nodded. “You’re always looking into the face of a stranger.”
“That gets to you,” said Thrasher. “After a while, the novelty wears off and you just want to see your own face again.”
“You forget where you came from,” Scapegrace said softly. “You forget who you are.”
Clarabelle leaned forward. “Would it make you feel better to remember?”
“It would.”
She smiled. “Then the news I have is good news. I went exploring today. I’ve never been to the left side of the Medical Wing before because, when I walk in the door, I always turn to the right.”
Scapegrace frowned. “Why?”
“I don’t know. I’ve always wanted to turn left, but I never do. I think I turned left once in a previous life and I was beheaded or something, so I’ve never even wanted to walk down that side. But today was different. I was playing with a Cleaver and we were both taking it in turns to spin around really fast. I was winning, because he kept forgetting to spin, and he just stood there and I spun and spun and spun, and by the end of the game I was really dizzy and I think I threw up on him a little bit. Just on to his coat, though. I don’t think he minded much. He just stayed standing there. He probably thought we were playing musical statues.”
She hesitated. “Maybe we were. Oh, I think we were. If we were, then he won, because statues aren’t supposed to spin around. Anyway, I was dizzy, and when I walked into the Medical Wing I started to fall. It took me ages to fall, and I knocked over a few people along the way, but when the dizziness went away I was in the left corner of the Medical Wing. It was amazing! The sights that were on show … You know the way tables seem really different if you look at them from a different angle?”
“Clarabelle,” said Scapegrace, “it’s been a long day. Could you get to the point?”
“Right, sorry. Anyway, there are all these rooms in the Medical Wing, so I went into a few of them. And in one of them there was a big glass tank full of green water, and there were two people floating in that tank. It was you. It was the two of you.”
Scapegrace
