“We always eat in the kitchen at home,” I said, though that is not strictly true, but I thought it was best to be diplomatic.
“How quaint!” she said.
Her words seemed to ripple out of her mouth, as if she had some sort of word machine in there that just rolled them out as necessary, with no effort on her part.
“Is there any Perrier?” she asked.
Gillian put a two-liter bottle of Euroshopper water and a glass on the table.
Zelda made a face and helped herself.
“These hot dogs are delicious,” I said.
“Yes,” said Zelda, flashing a pink-and-white smile at me. “Thank you,” she added, mysteriously.
Zelda sipped some of the water and then wafted to the kitchen door without a word. She turned at the door and smiled at us. Her smile seemed to hang in the air after she’d gone, like the Cheshire cat’s.
“You see!” Gillian said.
I didn’t ask what I was supposed to see; I didn’t need to. I felt as if I’d eaten something very sweet and smooth and delicious but too filling, like strawberry cheesecake.
When we’d tidied up after lunch, we went upstairs to Gillian’s room. It was like a hotel bedroom. It didn’t look as if it belonged to anyone. There was almost nothing in it, just a bed with a yellow flowery duvet cover, a wardrobe, and a chest of drawers with a hairbrush on top and a small square mirror over it. No posters, no clothes flung about like in my room at home, no letters or concert tickets or telephone numbers tucked into picture frames—no pictures, anyway, to have frames—no desk, no computer, no shoes in a higgledy-piggledy line under the bed, no bookshelves, no toys left over from being younger, nothing but … air and furniture and a towel folded neatly on the end of the bed. Not even a calendar or a hook on the back of the door for your dressing gown. The curtains were bright, with big, splashy yellow flowers. They made me feel uneasy, though I couldn’t say why, exactly.
“So what’s this news, then?” I asked, though I’d lost interest at this stage. I was too busy looking around me at this peculiar house.
“The thing is,” Gillian announced, throwing her arms out dramatically, “I’ve been invited to audition for the Yehudi Menuhin school, in England.”
That was it. That was the news.
“An audition?” I said. “Like for a film?”
“No, not for a film,” Gillian snapped. “I just said, for a school.”
“A drama school, then? A film school?”
“No, you chump, a music school.”
“Oh,” I said. “But you’d have to go on a plane.” I suppose, looking back on it, this was not the most intelligent remark in the world, but it was the first thing that struck me. “It’d cost a fortune. And you mightn’t get in after all, and then think of the waste. And anyway, what d’you want to go to school in England for? It’s miles away. And it’s full of English people.”
She gaped at me when I said that.
“Not that there’s anything wrong with English people,” I said, hurriedly. I mean, I have nothing against English people, for heaven’s sake, not really. All I meant was, it would be strange to be in another country, all by yourself, where everything is different. “It’s just that they’re … well, they do different stuff at school.” I know this, because a friend of my father’s was a teacher in England. “They do Henry the Eighth and key stages. They think the Pale is in Poland.”
“I think I could manage that,” Gillian said crisply. “Henry the Eighth—six wives, closed the monasteries, died a fatso. The rest I can learn. Poland?”
“Is it a boarding school?” I asked. I was trying to sound interested. This was obviously a big deal for Gillian, and I wasn’t giving the kind of reaction she wanted.
“Of course it’s a boarding school,” she said. “I couldn’t commute there, could I? It’s a lovely place, out in the middle of the country. I have a brochure somewhere. An old house, like a gate-lodge, only bigger of course, with Toblerone roofs. Very pretty. And lots of music lessons.”
“I’d rather have Hogwarts,” I said. “Or Malory Towers.”
“Well, I’m not a wizard, am I?” Gillian retorted. “Hogwarts is not on offer.” She’d probably never heard of Malory Towers. You have to have a certain kind of aunt for that. “This place is very nice. I’m sure I’d like it there. It doesn’t really matter what you’d prefer.”
That stung. The air between us crackled. (It didn’t actually crackle, of course. That’s just a turn of phrase to indicate tension.)
“I suppose there’d be houses and all that,” I said, trying to patch things over, “with competition between them? Even if it’s not Hogwarts. And studies and prefects and teachers wearing funny clothes? Midnight feasts? They sound good. And cinnamon toast.”
“I don’t know; that’s not the point,” Gillian said huffily. “It’s the best music school in the world. In my humble opinion. That’s the point. Listen, I need to practice for my audition now, so if you don’t mind.…”
“I don’t mind,” I said. “May I stay and listen?”
Gillian softened a bit. That was obviously the right thing to say, but I did really want to hear, I wasn’t just trying to get back into her good books. I’m not very good at getting into people’s good books on purpose, if I’m honest, which.… Sorry, I’m repeating myself.
“OK,” she said. “If you like.”
I sat down on the flowery edge of the bed.
“This is a gypsy dance,” Gillian said, and she tucked the violin under her chin and stuck out her bowing elbow.
She did the listening thing again, and then the music started. First, it was just this very high sort of tense music, which made you feel as if there were a teardrop inside you that was trying to fall, but couldn’t. And then the music got faster and faster and it was all swirling skirts and men laughing around a campfire, the clack of heels and the flicker of knees and the dancers flashing in and out of the shadows, and it suddenly made you realize that the teardrop hadn’t fallen but dissolved or turned into something else. It was like dreaming, only better.
Except that then you had to wake up. “Gill, dear,” came Zelda’s voice through the wall. “I’m trying to sleep. Could you, please…”
Gillian’s face actually fell when her mother called out, cutting across the music. I saw it with my own eyes, or I wouldn’t have believed it possible. One minute, there was Gillian’s face, all high and shiny and with a sort of sparkle to it, and the next, it seemed to be about level with her chest and it had gone porridgy again.
“Sorry,” Gillian called out, and lowered the violin. “You see!” she muttered to me again. “That’s the reason I practice in the woods.”
I felt sorry for her then. I’m a bit of a softy, deep down. I thought maybe her mother wasn’t very musical.
Gillian put the violin back in its case, patting it gently before she closed the lid, as if to apologize to it for putting it away.
* * *
“That’s why she has to get away,” I said darkly to Grandpa. I’d called in on him on my way home. “Her curtains match her duvet cover. And the walls, they’re painted to match too. The exact same shade of yellow, it’s … uncanny. Someone went to the trouble—”
“Yellow’s cheerful,” said Grandpa. “People say that.”
“But it’s depressing, everything matching like that,” I said. “It’s like living on one of those color cards from the people who make paint. And it’s all wrong for a musician.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, how can you make proper music if you live in a place that looks like a display area in a furniture shop? It has to be bad for your soul.”
“Your soul?” Grandpa said. “I didn’t think you had a soul, Mags Clarke.”
“That’s a terrible thing to say!” I said. “Of course I have a soul. I dare say even you would discover you had a soul if you heard her play, you old codger, you.”
“You think she’s leaving home because of th
e decor?” Grandpa said. “Mags, aren’t you being—”
I clapped my hands over my ears.
“Don’t say it!”
“Fanciful?” my grandfather finished.
“You said it!” I said reproachfully. “I read your lips. But you’re right. It’s not only that awful house. The other thing is that she wants to go to some place called the Yahooey Hooey school. They teach the violin, apparently. It’s specially for ‘musically gifted young people,’ she says. She’s dying to go there. Seems it’s the coolest thing if you’re into music. Only it’s way off in England somewhere.”
“It couldn’t be called that.”
“Well, something like that. She had to make a video of herself playing, and then they asked her to come for an audition.”
“She must be good,” said Grandpa, getting out a bottle of tonic water.
“She’s fantastic,” I admitted. “She can make you see things that aren’t there. With your eyes shut. I hate her.”
“Doesn’t sound like it,” said my grandfather, opening the tonic bottle with a fizzing sound.
“Well, but, she is super on the violin all the same,” I said grudgingly. “Doesn’t mean I have to love her.”
“Of course not,” said Grandpa. “Not in the slightest.”
Tonic glugged and splashed. Ice cubes floated to the top of the glass and clinked gently against the sides in the moving tonic water.
“Oops!” I said. “Sundowner time! I’ll be late, have to run. Bye, Gramps.”
I dashed out, leaving the back door swinging behind me. I usually do.
Grandpa is always saying, The day Mags Clarke closes a door without being specifically instructed to will be the day.… But he never finishes the sentence. He can’t think of a dire enough consequence.
* * *
Next-door’s baby got born and my mother went to pieces. I had heard that your mother could go totally soppy over a new baby, to the point where you felt completely neglected, but I’d always thought it had to be your brother or sister. I didn’t think it could happen with a neighbor, especially not a new neighbor.
“It’ll never fit into that cardigan,” I said to Mum, looking at the little scrap as it lay on its blanket, wriggling very slowly like an amoeba under the microscope, opening and closing its tiny fists and yawning.
“She will,” said my mother dreamily. “She’ll grow into it. You’ll see.”
It was a girl, evidently. I took their word for it—I certainly wasn’t going to offer to change its nappy to make sure, though my mother said there was no time like the present for learning how to do things like that. I just gaped at her. No way, José.
“You were that size once,” my mother told me.
“So were you, I’m sure,” I said. I didn’t see that having been that small once was anything to be proud of.
“Little precious,” my mother crooned.
I turned a startled face to her, then realized it was the baby who was the little precious, not me.
“So was Hitler,” I added darkly.
She didn’t get it. She never does.
They called her Lorna, which seems to me quite a nice name for a person, but not at all suitable for a baby. If your name is Lorna, there is no need to get insulted, because if you are old enough to read this, then you have already grown into your name, so it’s all right.
One useful thing about a baby, a bit like a garden in a way, is that they are a convenient time-measurement device. You can plot your everyday life against where the baby’s at now: opening its eyes, looking at you, smiling, eating off a spoon, laughing, teething, sitting up, saying “Dada.” Lorna was old enough to follow your finger when you moved it in front of her eyes before I saw Gillian again.
It was in the tunnel, my own special tunnel that I had made for myself at the edge of the clearing in the woods where the stream was. It was supposed to be a secret, but I had shown it to Tim. I knew I shouldn’t have, but I couldn’t resist it.
It was a sort of tubular hollowing-out in the undergrowth. I’d made it by wriggling in and out of the brushwood several times with my anorak zipped up and my hood pulled down over my eyes, until the vegetation got the message and started to form itself around the shape of my burrowing body. It was like being a hare, making a form in the grass, a hidey-hole shaped to my own body, a custom-made home. It smelled of earth in there, leaves and earth and damp, and it was cold, even on warm days, because of the shade of the trees all around, and dark, but green-dark, not black-dark, a sort of leafy twilight place. Once it was made, I wasn’t sure what I should do in there. There wasn’t much you could do, except lie in it, and that got uncomfortable after a while, but I was proud of it all the same, and I went and lay in it just for the sake of it. After a while, I got to judge the proper length of time to be in there—long enough to enjoy the sensation of being enclosed, secret, hidden, and not so long that you got cramped.
I met Tim the day after I’d finished it. Some mornings, I would see that the door to the foresters’ hut stood open. That usually meant he was in there, making the morning tea. There never seemed to be any other foresters about, though I could sometimes hear the whine of chainsaws in the distance, so I suppose they were off somewhere cutting trees down or planting them up or whatever they do. I think Tim was in charge of making the tea because of being the youngest, but they never seemed to come for it once he’d made it. Or maybe he took it to them and they had picnics out in the woods. When it was sunny, Tim took his chair and his mug out onto the porch, and then I could wave at him as I went by, on my way to the clearing.
This time I met him on the woodland path. He was carrying an axe or some sort of weapon like that—something to do with woodcutting—and I just blurted it out: “I’ve made a tunnel.”
He lowered his weapon and looked down at me.
“A tunnel? You haven’t been going tunneling in the woods, Mags? You can’t do that, you know, it’s government property.”
“No, no,” I reassured him. “Not a tunnel in the ground, just a sort of—oh, I suppose you could call it a den. Here, tell you what, I’ll show you.”
Tim wriggled his way in. His feet stuck out, and part of his legs too. I giggled at the sight of his shoes waving in the air. A space opened up between the tops of his socks and the bottoms of his trousers, revealing very white skin covered in sparse but very long brown hairs. He called out something to me, but his voice was muffled.
He worked his way out again.
“It’s like a big damp lumpy duvet with stones in it in there,” he said. “It’s not very comfortable.”
“But it’s a good hiding place.”
“Only for short people,” he said.
“Well then,” I said happily.
I didn’t think to make him promise not to tell anyone. I thought he’d have known, but he’s probably too old to understand that sort of thing. So that was obviously how Gillian came to hear about it.
Today (we’re in the future now, I mean, the future from the point of view of the bit we’ve just had, but the present from the point of view of the main part of the story; I hope you can follow that—if you can’t, you should go back a bit and read it again, most things come clearer if you just read the stuff carefully) I could see her shoes sticking out, runners with mauve stripes. They looked as if Zelda might have bought them.
“What you doin’ in thar?” I called, hunkering down to talk to her, putting on my gruffest woodland voice. It was bad enough having this girl invading the woods with her violin, but here—in my private place, in the tunnel I had made myself, to fit my own body. It was too bad.
“I’m running away from home,” said Gillian’s muffled voice.
“You can’t be,” I said, wriggling my way in past her mauvey runners to join her. “You haven’t got your underwear tied up in a spotted hanky like Dick Whittington going to London.”
There wasn’t really enough room for two. We had to sit—well, recline, really—very close together, so t
hat we could feel each other’s breath on our faces. Gillian’s smelled of mustard. It made me sneeze. I managed to catch most of it with my fingers, but some of it escaped and made a strangled wheezing sound out of the sides of my nostrils.
“Why are you running away?” I asked, after I’d elbowed my way into the pocket of my jeans to get a handkerchief.
“I need to find my father,” said Gillian.
“I didn’t know he was lost,” I said.
“Har-har,” said Gillian.
“Anyway, he’s definitely not in here,” I added grumpily. “This is a private place.”
“I’m sorry. But I couldn’t think of anywhere else.”
“To look for your father?”
“No, to think in.”
I remembered Gillian’s unspeakable mother and I felt sorry for her. Also, you certainly couldn’t sit and think in that bilious yellow bedroom. You’d get heartburn.
“All right,” I said forgivingly. I am actually a very kind person, in case you haven’t noticed.
I lay back and looked at the leafy roof of the tunnel.
“What happened to your father?” I asked. “Are you a love child?”
Gillian giggled. “I hope so,” she said, “though it’s hard to imagine anyone loving my mother, isn’t it?”
“That’s not what a love child is,” I said. “It means if your parents aren’t married, or they’re living together, I suppose, and you are a shameful secret.”
But, of course, there’s Tim, I thought. A love child is something you’re only allowed one of. After that, it starts to be something you have to explain.
“I know what it means,” said Gillian. “I wish I was. It sounds so romantic. Your father might turn out to be a prince, like in a story.”
“Or, of course, a criminal,” I said thoughtfully. “Your father might turn out to be a criminal instead of a prince. That’s more likely, really.”
“What do you mean?” asked Gillian, offended.
“Considering there are more criminals than princes in the world,” I explained. “Statistically, it is more likely. But how come you’re looking for your father? Are you adopted?”
Second Fiddle Page 4