Mardi McConnochie is an award-winning novelist and screenwriter. Her novels include Coldwater, The Snow Queen and Fivestar, and she has written for a number of popular TV series, including Home & Away, Always Greener and McLeod’s Daughters. Mardi is currently writing the sequel to Melissa, Queen of Evil.
MARDI
MCCONNOCHIE
First published 2006 in Pan by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Limited
1 Market Street, Sydney
Copyright © Mardi McConnochie 2006
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.
National Library of Australia
cataloguing-in-publication data:
McConnochie, Mardi, 1971–.
Melissa, Queen of Evil.
For children.
ISBN 978 0 330 42245 1.
ISBN 0 330 42245 6.
I.Title.
A823.4
Cover model: Sarah Richardson
Set in 11.5/14.5 pt Janson Text by Post Pre-press Group
Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group
The characters and events in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Papers used by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd are natural, recyclable products made from wood grown in sustainable forests. The manufacturing processes conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.
These electronic editions published in 2006 by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd
1 Market Street, Sydney 2000
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Melissa, Queen of Evil
Mardi McConnochie
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Contents
The Cricket Gods Speak
The Bracelet
Mr Boris
The Forces of Destruction
Queen of Evil
Snowdome
Ravi
The Business
Perfect Outfit
Mr Granger
The Bargain
Ben
The Kiss
Vicky’s Revenge
Oubliette
The Social
The Forces of Order
A Blessing in Disguise
Catch
The Cricket Gods Speak
I should have known something weird was happening when I took that catch.
I never take catches. I’m hopeless at them. I see the cricket ball coming towards me, I put my hands up, and then something happens, I don’t know what it is, but somehow the ball always ends up on the ground and everybody on the team wants to kill me. But this wasn’t just a catch, this was a blinder.
I was standing out on the boundary as usual, and I saw the ball coming towards me. Normally I’d just think oh no because I know I’m going to mess it up, but this time it was like someone had flicked a switch inside me. Suddenly I could see every particle in the universe. I could slow down time. I could see the arc the ball was making through space as it skyed higher and higher and then started descending, dropping lazily down as it headed for the grass on the wrong side of the fence. If I missed it, it was going for six. But I leapt into the air and stuck one arm up over my head and the ball dropped right into my hand and snuggled there against my fingers. I had it, and I wasn’t letting it go.
For a moment my entire team stared in disbelief. And then they were all screaming and yelling and jumping up and down and racing over to hug me. Believe me when I tell you I have never done anything like that in my entire life before.
But that wasn’t the only weird thing that happened. A couple of overs later I bowled someone out. This is amazing because I’m a crap bowler. I’m a worse bowler than I am a fielder. When that ball comes out of my hand, I don’t know if it’s going to come out fast, slow, or spinning. If I hit the pitch I think I’m doing well. But that day I could feel the shape of the pitch, I could feel middle stump. As soon as that ball left my hand, I knew where it was going to go: I knew it was going to pitch way outside leg and then turn sharply, bouncing back to sneak between bat and pad and take middle stump. It was my first ever wicket, and the best part of it was, I clean-bowled Amanda Dean! (Amanda Dean, just so you know, is an amazing batter and the captain of the Eden Gardens Under 15 team, and she’s what they call a real competitor, which means she’s a bitch from hell.)
The Eden Gardens batting collapsed once I got Amanda Dean out, so it wasn’t long before I found myself heading out to bat. I can bat a bit. I mean, I’m not a legend at it, but I’m not the worst on my team. But that day, when the balls started coming down the pitch towards me it was like I already knew where they were going to go. I hit the first three deliveries for four.
Amanda Dean, who was the wicket-keeper, gave me the look of death.
‘What did you have for breakfast?’ my batting partner asked.
My second over, I hit two more fours and a couple of singles.
The next ball I faced was a dodgy one and some instinct told me not to have a stab at it. I got my bat out of the way and let it go through to the keeper and – let me be quite clear about this – I did not hit that ball. It didn’t hit my bat, didn’t hit my pad, didn’t clip the glove. I didn’t touch it, but Amanda Dean went up anyway, appealing for the catch, and every single one of her team-mates went up as well. The way they were yelling and carrying on you’d think I was the outest batsman they’d ever seen in their whole lying cricket-playing lives.
I knew immediately I’d been set up. Eden Gardens are famous for ganging up on the batting side and pretending they’ve got people out when they haven’t. It’s never happened to me before – I’ve never got enough runs for them to bother. But wouldn’t you know it? This was my day.
I’ve got to hand it to them, they were pretty convincing. They knew I wasn’t out, and they knew I knew they knew, but they also knew that if they sounded confident enough they might be able to psych the umpire into giving me out. And why shouldn’t it work? They’d done it before.
I turned round to the umpire – and saw his finger go up.
‘Come on!’ I said. I couldn’t believe it.
‘Dissent!’ shrieked Amanda Dean.
The umpire gave me a stern look. ‘You’re out,’ he said.
My batting partner just shrugged sympathetically. She’d seen it all before.
I started stomping back to the plastic fold-up chairs where the rest of the team was sitting. Words cannot describe how pissed off I was. I knew there was very little chance I’d ever be in such great form again. Today was my day to make a century, and now it was all over. Thanks to Amanda Dean. Shivery feelings began to rush up and down my spine.
A low rumble rolled across the ground. I looked up and saw black clouds drifting across the sky. Minutes ago it had been a bright sunny day.
I crossed with the next batter as she walked out to the centre. ‘Bad luck, Melissa,’ she said.
‘It wasn’t bad luck. I was Amandaed,’ I snarled.
There was another rumble of thunder. I walked back to my team-mates and sat down. The blood thrummed in my ears.
‘She did it again,’ our captain said.
‘I can’t believe she keeps getting away with it,’ said one of the other girls.
‘One day she’s going to go up for a fake dismissal and the gods of cricket are going to strike her dead,’ I said.
The bowler began her run-up. The batswoman took guard. And suddenly that feeling crept over me again, that feeling of being at one with the universe, as if fields of energy were radiating in me and from me and through me, and before I knew what was happening a huge jagged bolt of lightning came streaking down out of the sky, a bluish bolt of pure energy, and before it had even struck I knew exactly where it was going. Blam! It hit Amanda Dean on the crown of her head and jolted right through her, and although I was sitting a long way away from her I heard the sound of the sizzle, like fruit bread in a toaster, and there was a nasty hairdryerish smell of burnt hair, and then a huge thunderclap smacked us all in the head with a triumphant roar and Amanda Dean flopped to the ground like a rag doll.
‘The cricket gods have spoken,’ observed our captain.
‘Sounds like she totally deserved it,’ Soph said. ‘If you ask me, not enough people get struck by lightning.’
The match had been called off after Amanda was carted off to hospital in an ambulance, so I was hanging out in the pool at my place with Soph, who was my best friend.
‘And it was so weird the way it happened,’ I said. ‘The way those clouds just seemed to appear out of nowhere, and then as soon as the lightning hit her they started to blow away again.’
‘That is weird,’ Sophie agreed.
‘But you know what’s really weird?’
‘What?’
‘At the exact moment that it happened, I’d been thinking about how much I hated Amanda Dean for getting me out like that. And I said something like, “One day the cricket gods are going to strike her down.”’
Soph’s eyes went big and round with fear as she stared at me. ‘It’s almost like –’ she whispered – ‘you made it happen!’
We stared at each other and I felt a prickly sensation on the back of my neck. But then Soph started laughing so much she fell off her li-lo. She surfaced, still laughing, and coughed water out.
‘Remind me never to piss you off,’ she croaked.
That night we had a big slap-up family barbecue. The phone rang while I was helping Dad scorch the sausages.
‘That was your coach,’ Mum said, coming out onto the patio with the salad bowl. ‘She said Amanda Dean’s going to be fine.’
‘Pity,’ I said.
Mum gave me a look.
‘I mean, that’s good news,’ I said.
‘Poor girl, what are the chances of something like that happening?’ Mum mused. ‘The weather forecast hadn’t even mentioned thunderstorms.’
‘You should have seen Meliss in the field today,’ Dad enthused. ‘She took the most amazing catch.’
‘It wasn’t that good,’ I said modestly, turning pink with pleasure.
‘It was a classic catch,’ Dad insisted. ‘I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it.’
‘Everybody has to get lucky sometime,’ I said.
But it wasn’t just luck. It was weird.
The Bracelet
The weird things had begun when my dad gave me the snake bracelet.
My dad is an expert on dams so he spends a lot of time building dams and fixing dams and going to look at dams and going to conferences to talk about dams. He says it’s a very interesting field – draw your own conclusions. Interesting or not, it means my dad’s away a lot, and this means we get a lot of presents.
My dad isn’t usually an inspired present-buyer. He usually comes back with some heinous T-shirt he’s bought at the airport ten minutes before he got on the plane. This time round, me and my little brother had a bet going on whether we were going to get toy pandas or matching T-shirts in completely inappropriate sizes with ‘My dad went to China and all I got was this lousy T-shirt’ written on them.
So it came as quite a surprise to me when Dad handed me a little bag made of Chinese brocade. It was clearly not a T-shirt (although it might yet be a panda). I opened the bag, tipped it up, and a bracelet slid out into my hand. The bracelet was bronze-coloured, shaped like a snake, looped around twice. To lock it in place you tucked its tail into its mouth, where there was a hidden catch. There was something so sinuous about the snake’s curves, the subtle diamond marking of the scales, and the glitter of the two green gemstone eyes, that it almost looked like it was alive. I slipped it onto my wrist and felt a shiver run up the back of my neck.
‘Do you like it?’ Dad asked anxiously.
‘I love it,’ I said.
I wasn’t just being nice, either. I know it doesn’t sound that great when I describe it, but there was something so beautiful and perfect about that bracelet that I knew right then and there I never wanted to take it off. Most of the stuff I own is cheap mass-produced crap, but when you looked at this bracelet you knew it was the only one like it in the entire world. I imagined some craftsman in a remote part of China labouring away until he made this bracelet, and once it was done, he knew that he’d crafted something so special he could never make another one like it. It had personality. It was strongly and intensely itself. It had presence in the world. You could almost feel the power surging through it – but I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me just say that from the minute I saw it I thought it was cool.
‘Thanks, Dad,’ I said, and hugged him.
‘Where did you find it?’ my mum asked, surprised and pleased for him. My dad didn’t often get that sort of thing right.
‘I was wandering through an antiques market,’ Dad said. ‘Most of the stuff’s rubbish – it’s not even antique – but there are a few good things there. And I just happened to spot this in amongst a whole pile of junk and as soon as I saw it I thought, that’d be good for Melissa.’
I was really touched. It wasn’t just that he’d spontaneously chosen something cool for the first time in his life, he’d actually thought of getting me something more than ten seconds before he got on the plane. ‘Good thought, Dad,’ I said.
‘So what did I get?’ asked Jason, my little brother.
Dad handed over his present. It was a T-shirt with a panda on it. But he also got a bunch of pirated computer games which had cost about 30 cents and some of them even worked, so Jason was happy.
That night – it was the night before the cricket match where Amanda Dean got struck by lightning – I went round to Soph’s place. It was a Friday night and I was going to stay over. Soph spotted the bracelet straightaway.
‘Where did you get that?’ she asked.
‘My dad gave it to me,’ I said.
Soph looked astonished. ‘Your dad chose that?’
Soph’s dad had a thing for practical presents. He bought all his Christmas and birthday gifts from hardware stores. Soph was the proud owner of a wide range of screwdrivers and spanners and she had a splendid 50-piece socket set.
‘He must have had help,’ she said.
‘Don’t think so. He brought it back from China.’
‘Business trip, huh?’ Soph said, knowingly. ‘You know, he’s probably got a mistress. He probably took her with him and got her to buy the presents to assuage his guilt.’
‘My dad? With a mistress?’ If you’d ever seen my dad, you’d know how ridiculous that idea was. ‘No, he was over there for a work trip and he was browsing through a market and he saw the bracelet on one of the stalls amongst a whole bunch of junk, and the minute
he saw it he knew he had to get it for me.’
‘It’s great,’ Soph said, looking at it enviously. ‘You’ll have to let me borrow it sometime.’
‘Sure,’ I said casually, although secretly I was thrilled. Soph has lots of cool clothes and I don’t have any, so I’m always borrowing her stuff and she never wants to borrow any of mine. (I mean, she does occasionally wear things of mine, but I think it’s mostly so I won’t feel bad.) ‘Try it on.’
I tried to take it off so I could give it to her. But the bracelet wouldn’t come off. Dad had told me it was from an antiques market, and I assumed the catch was a bit stiff with age. So I jiggled it and fiddled with it and tried to get the snake’s tail to release from its mouth. No dice. Tail stayed firmly in mouth. Bracelet stayed firmly on wrist.
‘I can’t get it off,’ I said.
‘Is it busted?’
‘I don’t know. I hope not. I could try soaping it off.’
But Soph had already lost interest. ‘Hey, did you bring the Summerdale High tape?’ she asked.
‘Of course.’
Soph grinned. ‘I’ll make us some popcorn.’
Summerdale High, in case you’re one of the few people who don’t know, is the best TV show in the world. It’s on every night at five o’clock and every week me and Soph tape it so we can zap all the ads and then watch it together in one big hit.
Popcorn made, we settled down on the couch in the kids’ room for our weekly fix. Soph’s so lucky – her parents built an extension on their house so they could live in one part and the kids could live in another, and the two generations hardly ever had to see each other. I dream of having a kids’ room – although I’d have to share it with my stupid little brother, Jason, who’s eleven and has attention deficit disorder. (Well I think he does, although nobody else in my family seems to have noticed it. They just say he’s a normal, healthy, active little boy. Believe me, I know normal and that ain’t it.)
So anyway, the opening credits had only just begun to roll when Soph’s brother, Felix, walked in. He stopped and watched for a while, a very adult sneer on his face.
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