The Golding

by Sonya Deanna Terry

  ‘Um...nothing of importance. We weren’t having any sort of conversation.’

  ‘But I was sure I heard you speak to him. Something to do with a rabbit. That’s the second time you’ve muttered about bunnies in front of Charlotte and her dad. Any reason for that?’

  ‘I don’t like your tone, Isobel.’

  Izzie’s voice mellowed. ‘I didn’t mean to sound bossy. Is everything okay though?’

  How could she explain this away? Shaking her head at the likelihood of an animal vanishing into thin air, Rosetta drew in a deep breath to answer. She hesitated. Where would she start?

  ‘Er...Mum,’ Izzie had taken on an expression of concern. ‘Can people go senile at thirty-eight?’

  Nervously, Rosetta glanced away. ‘Not normally, honey.’ She darted to the side-table, and with forced enthusiasm, rearranged the autumn flowers she’d placed in a vase the day before. ‘Why do you ask?’

  Chapter Five

  Izzie found the leaves of paper she wanted in the corner of her local newsagency. Edged with silver, bronze and gold, each had a luminous watermark with hints of peacock and plum and watermelon.

  A chill slid over her arms. She lifted her head and glanced around the shop. No-one there except Marla’s dad Louey behind the counter, smiling calmly at the sunlight streaming in after a day of clouds. Izzie had got a lot of that lately, the feeling of being watched. She shrugged and returned to the paper shelves.

  A man’s shadow fell across the linoleum. Outside the shop a darkly dressed figure turned from the headline-cluttered window and disappeared up the footpath.

  Trying not to feel unnerved by this, Izzie concentrated on the papers and counted out twelve. Ideal for the invitations she planned to design. She would pay for them with the money she earned cashiering at the bowling alley on Saturday nights.

  Would he be impressed if he received a leaf of this paper in his locker? Or would he think her kooky and desperate if she, barely more than a stranger, asked him to her sixteenth birthday picnic?

  His accent was freaky, and yet hearing it was just as exhilarating as listening to Boyd Levanzi’s ‘Ain’t Been Nothing No More’. Izzie would have much preferred screen-saver images of the boy she was inviting to her birthday than images of Boyd Levanzi. The African American hip-hop phenomenon who teens referred to as ‘boydiful’, beautiful and all as he was with his puppy dog eyes and sensuous smile, was nothing in comparison to a certain person in tenth grade at Burwood High. A certain person who pronounced hello ‘halo’ and wore weird snow boots in a place where winters weren’t especially cold. Izzie knew nothing of the Dutch culture, except, perhaps, that if one of them asked you out to lunch, they’d probably split the bill.

  She would never have believed that she’d one day be interested in a Netherlands boy whose name suggested a distant galaxy. Glorion. Six feet tall and coolness personified. Eyes Izzie felt she could swim in. Lips that were a hundred per cent worthy of winning Best in the Solar System.

  The recurring dreams she’d had from the time she was seven were always about a tall boy appearing in her teenage future. She’d wake up marvelling at the memory of kind brown eyes and a husky voice. He’d told her she’d have some years to wait, of course, before they met. ‘And then,’ the Dream Boy had said, ‘the world is ours to share.’ Totally mushy these days and unchanged from the first dream all those years ago: the fairy-floss output of a seven-year-old’s subconscious.

  The fact that Glorion Osterhoudt looked exactly like the boy from the dream was too freaky to explain. She’d met him thirty-eight days ago when he’d bopped her on the head with his maths book in the canteen queue. Someone in her group had called a ‘first-to-the-canteen-queue’ challenge, but Izzie’s undone shoelace hampered her start. When the others rushed into the crowded canteen, she’d scrambled to the front of the queue, pushed in and stifled her giggles just long enough to holler, ‘I won!’ Her friends at the other end of the line had laughed along with her. She’d turned to the tall boy behind her, the new boy, and he’d playfully brushed that maths book over the top of her head. She’d said to him, ‘I’ll go. Just did that to surprise them,’ and stepped out.

  He’d grinned and said she was welcome to remain where she was, and when she’d protested, he’d murmured, ‘Please stay.’ Those eyes and that smile had felt bizarrely—and dreamishly—familiar.

  She’d never thought cardboard could be a precursor for such good feelings; the very thing in fact, five-and-a-half weeks later, that reminded her of Glorion while wandering through Louey’s shop. Her gaze settled on a tray of half-price stationery. A book just like the one Glorion used, to pretend-reprimand her, lay atop a pile of A4 notebooks. It looked the same as his. Dark-green in colour with those large E’s zipping diagonally across the midline. Resisting the temptation to glide it across her head to check if it felt the same, Izzie turned her attention to the I-Candy chewing-gum. Ha! Eye candy. Why did everything remind her of the future boy?

  She paid Louey for the invitation papers. ‘You very quiet today, Izzie,’ he commented. ‘You freakin’ out or something?’ Chinese-born Louey never missed an opportunity to practice Aussie slang.

  Izzie assured him she was fine and stepped out onto the footpath. Honey-locust leaves, transparent and yellow with the afternoon light, quivered like butterfly wings in a barely-there breeze.

  Her birthday picnic. Brighton-Le-Sands was the perfect setting for fun and/or romance. If anyone mentioned that this happened to be the same area Glorion lived in, she would have to act surprised. Advice from her mother rang in her memory. ‘Never make it too easy for a guy you fancy, Izzie. Boys love doing the chasing.’ Was holding her party in Glorion’s home suburb considered chasing? She threw off the idea with a shake of her head. Rosetta’s advice was just a Greek matriarch's outdated notion that teenagers of today could ignore.

  She scampered towards the corner of Burwood Road and thought for the third time that day how unfair it was that the guy she liked wasn’t in any way mediocre. Glorion Osterhoudt’s ev­ery move literally screamed popularity. For admirers, this equalled the prickly prospect of competition. And could the others be blamed? Any suspicion Izzie might have had about shallowness lurking beneath an awesome façade was cancelled out when Glorion, in his role as captain of the Silver Tongues school debating team, stepped up to the podium on the library’s second floor. The topic had been The world is in need of an alternate exchange system, and Glorion’s team were arguing that money, and credit in general, had become a mouldy paradigm. He’d begun with, ‘Imagine a world that rejects the wheel of suffering, a world that refuses to perpetuate war.’

  Izzie approached the corner. Ahead of her was the same faceless stranger she’d glimpsed outside the newsagency window. Dark clothing. Head down. Wending around one of the trees lining the pavement. He made an abrupt turn back, leaf shadows veiling his downturned face, and hurtled towards the corner.

  Izzie started. Stepped sideways.

  Ker-thud!

  He’d smacked against her right shoulder. Izzie teetered. The stranger flung round to glare at her. Izzie stumbled backwards.

  Long black hair. Long black nails. Snarling red lips. The goth guy from the Punchbowl flats.

  ‘Sorry,’ Izzie said. But was she at fault?

  The goth said nothing, just slouched forward, staring wildly with pale eyes. Izzie turned the other way and quickened her step. She could still sense his presence.

  He was creeping alongside her!

  She wheeled round and hurried back to the newsagency. Once at a safe distance, she peered over the magazine rack to observe him.

  Louey’s voice filtered across from the counter. ‘I swear you freakin’ out, Izzie.’

  The stranger passed Louey’s shop and then turned into the next street. Izzie breathed in deeply, trying to calm the fear in her chest.

  Probably harmless. His clothes were normal enough: Coat, black jeans, black boots—no different to the garb of any other man wandering aroun
d. The neighbours had said he’d been spying on them. Could easily have been a rumour. Maybe the guy was just quirky and misunderstood. But the cruel stare and curling talons...Izzie winced and darted back onto the footpath.

  At their old place, her mother had crossed paths with him in the communal laundry. She ran into the flat looking like she’d spotted the abominable snowman in the detergent cupboard and said in an overly cheerful voice, ‘Next time you need to go to the laundry, honey, make sure you let me know, and I’ll go there with you.’

  Izzie had asked why. Her mother had murmured that the ‘weird window peeper’ had been in there and added that as long as they were sensible about where they went, he probably wouldn’t be a bother.

  ‘But did the guy act weird?’ Izzie wanted to know.

  ‘Sure did. Ah! There’s my ginger cake recipe. Yeah, I got out of the laundry pretty fast. Grant was there, and he chased him away.’

  Izzie asked her mother then whether anyone had any proof he looked in windows. Radical hair and nails, she felt, shouldn’t automatically brand someone a burglar or a pervert. Her mother’s evasive answer concerning a neighbour telling a neighbour that they thought they saw him loitering one night was no proof of guilt. ‘He might just happen to live here,’ Izzie said. ‘He goes and washes his socks, and everyone gets their knickers in a knot.’

  ‘Believe me, Izzie, he was acting really weird, and he shouldn’t have been there. Be careful when you’re outside, okay?’ Rosetta was now emptying cupfuls of flour, sugar and soy milk into a mixing bowl with the zeal of someone competing in a baking race. She whirred a wooden spoon through the batter while humming a non-existent tune. The shuddery tone of her voice told Izzie that a few darker details might have gone unmentioned. From then on, Izzie made a habit of looking over her shoulder whenever she left the flat. She’d seen him skulking about twice after that.

  Today, after her flit from Louey’s newsagency, Izzie couldn’t help feeling some of the edginess she’d felt at Punchbowl. What was the matter with the Walk sign? The red pedestrian light seemed intent on holding it hostage. By the time it turned green, Izzie’s pace, along with her pulse, had quickened. Checking behind her every so often, she veered across to the more populated side of the street. She’d be home in another ten minutes.

  She wouldn’t tell her mother. Rosetta would only worry. Back when they were living in Punchbowl, Rosetta had gone all out to protect her from the suspected ‘peeper’: dropping her off and picking her up from school and delivering her door-to-door to friends’ places. Highly embarrassing. Izzie couldn’t bear a repeat of that. Moving to Burwood had meant moving to freedom.

  The goth guy was nowhere to be seen. Maybe just picking up dinner at the local Thai.

  Once the double-gables of the vintage home she’d grown to love came into view, Izzie raced down the footpath, hurried through her mother’s garden and leapt up the three verandah steps. Sidleta sprang from the hydrangeas and followed her. She let Sidelta in, locked the door behind her and called out, ‘Hi Mum.’ No answer. After-work grocery shopping most likely.

  She took a last look out of the sitting room window, shook off a shiver at remembering the coldness of the stranger’s eyes, then sat down at the dining table to write out her new party invitations with the metallic gold texta her mother kept by the phone. Her cat looked lovingly up at her with a small soft brrr.

  ‘Nice to see you too, Sidelta,’ Izzie said. She’d never been so glad to get home.

  <><> XIII <><>

  Pieter tried to remember how long he’d been away from his clan. He’d been distracted by a terrible event. An elf from a neighbouring forest had been taken away to the mines. Pieter had secretly followed the gold-skins responsible and had spent a number of evenings camped outside the Grudellan Palace trying to devise a way of freeing him. Alas, when the opportunity for escape arrived, the wretch was too influenced by their powers to leave.

  Which night, exactly, had this occurred? The last night he’d spent with his clan felt faded and far away. Maleika had been immersed in one of her Remembrance recollections, which she’d spoken of drowsily to Pieter’s younger brother, Kloory, a being of the sky. Unlike Pieter, who spent his days trundling through thickets and paddling through streams, Kloory was quite often found hovering above trees with the birds and butterflies.

  ‘Should have been a sylph,’ Maleika would say of him when he was found once again in his preferred element.

  ‘But my work belongs here,’ he would reply. ‘Although I cannot, for the life of me, let go of my other existence.’ His previous incarnation had been that of a cosmic cherub.

  Pieter had overheard, as he’d poured himself a cup of berry cider, some of Maleika’s gabble, and he’d understood only a quarter of it, for it was spoken in star language and needed to be interpreted by one from the galaxies. This was where Kloory’s help proved useful. Having lived more than one life in the Pleiades star system, Kloory understood much of their language and had managed to retain a smidgen of knowledge, despite body-king sorcerers having almost entirely cancelled out past-life remembrance.

  ‘Ah well,’ Pieter said, smiling at the recollection. ‘I shall see my clan again soon I expect, but not until I find a way to lead those captives to freedom.’ He found a clearing in the forest and settled down to sleep. When he arrived in the Dream Sphere’s Great Hall, Alcor wasted no time in ushering him through one of three doors.

  <><> XIV <><>

  Back at Eidred’s place of dwelling, where the pterodactyls had burst forth into her tower room and caused her visiting faerie godmother to flee, Eidred was consumed with terror. Her hands were shaking the way grass shivers in a gale. Concealing them under the gold satin bed cover, she willed herself to sound puzzled at being the object of suspicion at an hour such as this. ‘Talking? You heard talking?’

  ‘Don’t be impertinent,’ they snapped. Eidred’s four minders all spoke in unison since pterodactyls shared the same mind. Their voices rang high. They rasped in a way that sent her blood cold; spat and hissed their words, forked tongues flashing from glinting beaks.

  ‘I could not sleep, and so I recited.’

  ‘Recited what?’

  ‘My times-tables in readiness for the morrow.’ Eidred held her breath.

  ‘Stupid girl,’ they sniped. Remarkably, they were satisfied with this answer. Without further questioning, they crackled and crunched their way through the chamber’s exit and down the stone steps, their horrid squeaks and squeals lingering long after their presence.

  Never failing to leave things as they weren’t, the minders had scraped a jagged hole in the door, and one of the chairs they’d thrown now had a loosened leg. As neatly as she could, Eidred straightened up the furniture, if only to destroy the memory of their invasion. She folded one of her tapestries into a cushioned wad and pushed it into the door’s splintered gap. The thought of awaking to witness cold, black, prying eyes peering through it was all too horrible.

  Although a feeble attempt at self-protection, the tapestry filler was in some way comforting to Eidred. Knowing it was there might allow her to succumb to the vulnerability of slumber. Despite this attempt at safeguarding her sanctuary, sleep was not forthcoming.

  The princess ran to her dressing-quarter at the other side of her chamber. She opened the quarter’s doors, although they were more like gates than doors, with jewel-studded vertical bars. Beneath an ornate seat that one could recline in while deciding what to wear, and hidden within the lining of a small silk cushion, was the crystal her nursery maid had given her many season-cycles earlier. The nursery maid had told Eidred, with quiet caution, of her royal naming ceremony in infancy when this crystal had been secretly placed beneath the pillow of her crib.

  The stone was imbued with calming properties that comforted Eidred whenever she felt distress. Now, as she tucked the crystal beneath her pillow, a feeling of floaty peace swam through her heart.

  Eidred had no sooner drifted off than she awoke to find she wa
s clad in a gown and not the plain calico nightdress she’d donned earlier. Peculiar, certainly, yet in its own way fathomable to Eidred whose body felt lighter than ever before. She looked down at her hands. They were filmy, ghostlike. It was as though she had died and become spirit.

  Eidred knew she should be afraid, and yet she felt nothing but a sense of peace. She felt in some way whole again, like a jigsaw puzzle having received the final piece.

  Below and far away was a round window edged with snow. Through the window was an image of herself, and this self of Eidred’s slept, golden hair fanned across the cushions of her chamber’s canopied bed.

  It had to be a dream. And her dream self was not within her mind, it was a separate entity, able to observe her denser body in slumber!

  The gown she now wore displayed colours she had never before seen nor imagined could be real. Colours Eidred could recognise were those similar to the sun’s fiery rays, the others watery yet metallically alive, swirling with a velveteen glow.

  Here she stood by a misty lake pondering over a name, a familiar sound that had whispered to her before she’d fallen asleep earlier in the evening: the name her fleeing faerie godmother had used.

  No longer was she acting out her role as daughter of the Solen, eyes closed in soft repose, wrapped in a room of moonlit hush. Now she was a being of greater significance possessing a depth of knowing. She even knew a boy was approaching and sensed the boy to be an elf.

  Filling the air was a lilting tune. Low and haunting. The soft, sweet whistle of a pipe made from reed. The boy emerged from a misty wood. He paused within a sweep of speckled shadows and concluded his spellbinding melody, then greeted Eidred with a gallant bow. He meandered towards her through dawn’s misty haze. Once at the lake’s shore, he drew to a stop.

  To Eidred, the boy was the most perfect creature she had ever seen. Lustrous brown skin, eyes as deep as the ocean, a sunburst of a smile so warm it could melt glaciers.