Waywood

by Sarah Goodwin

  I close my tired eyes and try to get some much needed sleep.

  Chapter Seven

  I wake up a couple of hours later, when Nara puts a mug of tea down beside my head.

  “Morning. . . again,” she smiles, sitting down on the edge of the mattress.

  “Hey,” I sit up, feeling dry mouthed and headachy; that after-sleepover feeling that demands tea and sugar.

  “I’ll walk you over to the payphone in a bit. . . everyone else is on their way to bed,” Nara says. She hands me a plastic wrapped flapjack. “Breakfast?”

  We split the flapjack and I drink the tea, which is hot and sweet, the way Mum always makes it for my breakfast. Nara and I go downstairs, through the empty, beer can strewn living room, and out of the window. I feel weirdly normal, like I’ve just woken up at Tasha’s after a party, not in an abandoned house in the middle of a field.

  The sky outside no longer looks like it’s been brushed over with dirty water, the sun is up and the surrounding trees look far less creepy than they had done earlier. We walk back through the village, this time taking a different route, directly to campus along a long concrete drive dotted with cow shit and cattle grids. The fields on either side of us are flat, and a strong wind whips across them, making my hair flutter into my mouth and eyes.

  “There’s no one around right now,” Nara tells me. “Earliest lectures are at nine, and they’ve already started. Anyone who doesn’t have one is still in bed, you can bet on it.”

  She takes me through a gate and over the road onto campus. Without hesitation she jumps up the steps to the library, opening the door and holding it for me. Inside it’s warm and smells like new carpet. I feel instantly scruffy and uncomfortable, it’s too much like school.

  There are terminals for taking out books and a hallway that stretches in either direction, but Nara walks straight to a door marked Refreshment Zone. On the other side is a bulletin board covered in posters, a payphone, and two vending machines.

  While Nara inspects the contents of the vending machines, I pop coins into the phone and dial my home number.

  It rings, on and on and on, until I think it’s never going to stop. The sound of it starts to make my ear buzz. Then Mum picks up.

  “Hello?”

  “. . . Mum? It’s me,” I say.

  Silence.

  “Is Dad at work?”

  “. . . yes.” She sounds cautious, like she’s not sure who I am.

  “Mum, please let me come home,” I beg.

  She sighs. “Michaela. . . ”

  “Tasha wouldn’t let me stay, and Chloe isn’t home. . . I’m on the street. You have to let me come back.”

  “I’m sure you can find somewhere else to stay. . .”

  “There’s nowhere. Unless you want me in a shelter with all the druggies and piss-stinking drunks.”

  “You’re on drugs, Michaela,” Mum says pointedly.

  “No I’m not. . .it was just some weed, and I’m not smoking it anymore.”

  “You said that last time.”

  “Mum, I promise.”

  “You said that too.”

  “Mum, please.” I can feel panic starting to crawl up my throat, cold fingernails scratching at my heart. “I can’t do this, I can’t...”

  There’s a long silence.

  “You’re going to have to,” Mum says, and it’s like all the shutters have snapped down, blocking out the sun. “You made this happen, you pushed us. And...I think it would be best if you didn’t try to see us, at least for a while.”

  I can’t believe I’m hearing her right. She’s my mum and she doesn’t want to see me. She doesn’t want anything to do with me. Neither of them do. I don’t know what to say. There’s just nothing in my head, only the circular, endless thought. I need to go home. They don’t want me to come home. I need to...

  The silence makes the buzzing of the line come through loud and clear. After a few seconds of just our breathing, Mum says, “I have to go now Michaela,” and she hangs up, just like that.

  I stand there holding the receiver, the dial tone screaming out of it.

  Nara comes over after a few minutes. She takes the phone from my hand and sets it back in place. There’s a chink as my leftover change drops out of the machine. An acorn falls out of the covered tray, dropping to the ground and rolling across the floor. I look at it, and it makes about as much sense as the words still ringing in my ears.

  Nara touches my shoulder, and I can smell biscuits on her breath. “Are you OK?”

  My voice is all stoppered up, so I shake my head, and feel tears tremble free from my eyes. Nara puts her arms around me, squeezing me tightly as I cry and make truly embarrassing snuffly, throaty sounds.

  “It’s going to be OK,” she says, patting my back gently. “Let’s just get you home, OK? I’m sure one of the others will come up with something.”

  I really want to believe her, to believe that there’s some magic trick that’ll get my old life back. But right now I don’t think there’s a spell in the world that can make my mum love me again.

  Chapter Eight

  Nara and I walk the road back to Waywood house. Before, it had seemed reasonably short, but now it seems to stretch on like a mirage. Outwardly I nod and force a smile at Nara’s words, my feet moving one after the other, on and on down the road. Inside, I’m spinning.

  My Mum doesn’t want me.

  My Dad doesn’t want me.

  Neither of them care where I end up. I could be in a shop doorway right now for all they know. They’d happily put me out on the street, like a pet they’d become tired of, that had scratched up the furniture too many times to be tolerated anymore. They were my parents, they were supposed to love me no matter what. If I got pregnant, or kicked out of school, bullied or diagnosed with some horrible disease, they were supposed to be there, taking me to pre-natal classes, or pushing me in my wheelchair. They’d decided to have me, hadn’t they? It wasn’t like I’d chosen to be born.

  As we walk, the wind whips into my face and stings the tear tracks on my cheeks, freezing the wet tip of my nose. I feel the hopeful, fuzzy thing in my chest die.

  My parents don’t want me? Fine.

  I don’t want them.

  If they thought, if they fucking thought for a second, that I was going to come begging, or end up in some reeking hostel, just because they weren’t looking out for me... Well, screw them. I wasn’t going to let that happen to me. I wasn’t going to give up. I was going to get myself a new family, and all the perks that came with it.

  Nara touches my elbow, and I realise that I’ve stopped on one side of a flooded cattle grid, my hand on the edge of the metal gate beside it.

  “Michaela?”

  “I’m thinking,” I say, and Nara stays quiet, looking at me with huge, sympathetic eyes. “I think that...maybe I want to stay with you. With all of you, here.”

  “Of course you can,” Nara smiles, “we wouldn’t just expect you to leave, not now.”

  We start to walk again, and even though I’m still cold, inside and out, I feel a flickering of satisfaction. I have a place to stay. I’m fine. My parents might still exist in that boring little house, imagining the disgrace I’ve fallen into. Well, let them wonder. I won’t be seeing them again.

  Nara speaks breathlessly, hard to hear over the wind. “I’ll ask Sophia, and we can initiate you tonight! We’ll have a party and everything. Oh, you’re going to love it. So much fun.”

  The weird thing is, I believe her. I couldn’t give one flying ferris-wheel for all this witchy nonsense, but a party? Fun? A few hours ago I thought that I’d never have fun again.

  What makes my decision all the sweeter is Cray’s face when we get back to the house and Nara tells him that I’m staying. He smiles at me and I grin back. There’s still a little punch of pain in my chest when I think about the phone call, but I am quick to push it aside. They don’t care. I don’t care.

  Most of the others are asleep now, having bee
n up all night. I’m wide awake though, not used to their upside-down way of life. Nara and Cray are apparently too excited to sleep. We sit in the living room, burning candles against the gloom, even though the sun is well and truly up outside. Nara drags out an old set of Monopoly and we play half-heartedly, until I put up a hotel, and no one can remember the rules for what happens next.

  Nara cuts me a look, one eyebrow raised before she gives a big fake yawn and heads off to bed. Cray looks like he knows what she’s up to, but he helps me to pack the board and paper money up. Then he puts the radio on, quietly, and we lie down on the cushions scattered on the floor, smoking. My stomach flips over and over, like a restless sleeper on a hot night.

  “I’m glad you’re staying,” he starts off, “I mean, it sucks, that your parents won’t let you come home...but I’d miss you, if you left.”

  “I don’t care about them, I’d rather be here.”

  Cray sighs. “You don’t have to be like that. We understand. We’ve all been through it, and it hurts like hell when you have to leave your family.”

  I stay silent, unwilling to crack open the wall around me. Cray put his arm over my shoulders, a cigarette still smouldering between his fingers.

  “You’ll get over it. Eventually it stops getting to you. You just learn not to think about it.”

  I don’t want to talk about it, so I ask a question that’s been at the back of my mind since Cray had first told me about the way the group worked.

  “What’s going to happen, with the initiation?”

  “It’s not too scary,” Cray chuckles. “You get a new name and become formally joined to the group.”

  “What’ll my name be?”

  “Whatever Sophia thinks it should be. She picks them.”

  I still feel on edge about the whole thing, worried about what I’m getting in to, but I’m already down the rabbit hole, and there’s no going back. My parents have made themselves pretty clear about that. Of course, I could just wait, go and see Chloe when she comes back from her trip. Somehow, that idea seems to drift further and further into the past with each second I spend lying with Cray.

  Chloe. Tasha. My parents. They’re all part of a life that used to be mine, but isn’t anymore. Instead, it’s this weird squat, the fairytale stories of magic and secret ceremonies that are growing more real for me as the sun travels across the sky, bringing the night, and my initiation.

  *

  I walk back into Sophia’s room well after dark. It looks different now, less like a goth-shop and more like a scene from one of those films where the detective infiltrates a baby-killing, snake-vomiting cult and everyone takes their hoods off so you can see it’s the paediatrician from the village in the beginning, or that the Head Cultist was the detective’s mentor all along.

  A shiver runs through my stomach. Everyone is wearing hoods.

  From the numbers, I guess that Cray and all the other grunts are in the black cloaks, kneeling in a circle on the floor, each holding a candle. Chronicle and Ilex are standing up, wearing matching green cloaks. Chronicle has a kitchen knife in one hand, Ilex is holding a wineglass.

  It’s the sight of the knife that makes me pause, standing on the outer edge of a circle of candles that burn in cups and on plates and piles of bricks. Sophia, or at least, the purple cloaked shape of Sophia, appears between Chronicle and Ilex, holding out her hands.

  “It’s alright Michaela. We’re friends here.”

  Cray looks up then, and his hood tips back a little, showing me his crooked grin. These are the same people I’d been drinking with only that morning. A few bad Macbeth props don’t make them any more dangerous than they’d been then. Campion is still really Margaret, Cray is still Byron, and this room is still in a squat full of kids just like me.

  I step into the circle and kneel down in front of Sophia, as Cray had told me I’d have to.

  “Do you come here of your own free will, into this circle of the faithful?”

  “Yes,” I answer, though really, what other choice do I have? It’s this or the street.

  “And do you swear to keep our secrets, and to follow the rules set down by our Pagan ancestors? To know, to will, to dare, and to keep silent?”

  “I do.”

  Sophia takes the knife from Chronicle and points it up at the dingy ceiling.

  “Creatures of Air, invention and guile, I invoke you, join us and our Waywood sister this night.”

  I almost roll my eyes. I feel like I’m in an amateur production of The Craft, some teen horror thing Tasha made me watch.

  Outside, the wind slams something against the wall of the house, something plastic, maybe a chair. A quick, nasty flare of wind cuts through the gaps in the boarded windows. The candles flutter.

  I start to feel a little shivery, and not just because of the cold.

  “Creatures of Earth, strength and life,” Campion surprises me, and I almost jump at the sound of her voice. “I invoke you, join us and our Waywood sister this night.”

  Outside, a tree moans in the wind.

  “Creatures of Water, emotion and silence, I invoke you, join us and our Waywood sister this night,” says Cray.

  Rain spatters against the windows, sounding like fingernails tapping the glass.

  “Creatures of Fire, passion and power, I invoke you, join us and our Waywood sister this night.” Nara finishes.

  I really hope that it’s just my imagination, but I swear I can see the candle flames grow a little larger.

  Ilex steps forwards and kneels, holding up the wineglass. Sophia turns the knife downwards, dipping the point of it into the glass.

  “Goddess and God, Life Giver, Earth Mother...”

  I’m almost embarrassed for them, they sound like stupid hippies from TV.

  Finally, Chronicle comes forwards, lifting a bottle of wine and filling the glass. Ilex and Chronicle sit down, leaving Sophia with the knife in one hand, the wineglass in the other.

  “Come forward.”

  I take a step, and outside the wind and rain rattle the windows. I’m nervous now, but only because of what Cray told me has to happen next; The Rite of Blood.

  Sophia raises the knife and I hold out my hand. It’s just a little cut, a little blood for their gothic obsession. If it puts a roof over my head, fine. I can take it.

  The blade slides across my palm, and it hurts, it hurts a lot. Sophia lets the blood from my hand drip into the wine and the burning pain quickly loses its edge. I’m too distracted by what she’s doing now.

  Sophia lifts the glass to her lips and takes a sip.

  Disgusting. I shudder. She’s drinking my blood, how am I supposed to react?

  Sophia raises the knife again but this time she cuts her thumb, adding her blood to the wine. She passes the glass and the knife on to Ilex, who takes a drink, and then sets the glass down to lay the knife on his own hand.

  That’s when I work out that Cray left a little bit out when he told me about the ceremony. They are all going to drink from the cup, and they are all going to add their blood to it. I watch the cup go round the circle, my mouth dry and sour with dread and disgust. This is mental. It’s probably really dodgy, drinking someone’s blood, let alone lots of homeless peoples’ blood. God knows what kind of germs are swimming around in that wine.

  The cup comes around the circle, brimming with crimson as it makes its way back to me. Nara presses it into my hands, a line of blood running up her arm from the cut on her hand.

  My fingers are so reluctant to hold the glass that I’m worried I’ll drop it. It probably won’t change anything, they’re going to make me do this. I look down into the depths of the wineglass. It’s only like slurping the last of a sticky bottle of corner shop plonk, one that’s been shared around the group a few times.

  Only of course it’s not.

  As I drink it, all I can taste is blood, followed by the sour kick of the cheap booze.

  Sophia starts to say something, and the others join in. I can’t foc
us on the words. It’s like bats and other shadowy things are flocking around me, making things blurry and jumpy. I shake my head, trying to get rid of the rushing sound in my ears. Looking up, I see that Sophia is looking right at me, her mouth moves in a word, Stone.

  My knees buckle and I fall to the floor.

  Chapter Nine

  I jerk upright and a manky old flannel peels off of my face and plops onto the floor.

  My head is killing me, like I got utterly wasted and blasted heavy metal right into my ears all night. The room around me is dark, and I have no idea if it’s the night of my initiation still, or whether I’ve lost a day. It feels like I might have.

  I’ve also had the weirdest dreams, like I was playing all the characters in a fucked up play. I’d been lying scared in a bed with a cover that smelled like old vegetable oil, listening to heavy footsteps coming up the hall and thinking...

  Not tonight, please not tonight. One more night, just give me one more night. Please God just get me out of here.

  The door had opened, and a pair of men’s slippers, tucked under maroon pyjama bottoms, had been reflected in the mirror hanging over the end of the bed. I could see the sliver of deeper darkness that was the open door.

  “Nicky? Wake up princess.”

  I felt my stomach twist, the helpless, boundless rage and fear that hit me was so strong it almost blinded me to the sight of the man’s legs coming across the room. I watched him in the mirror and I wanted him dead even before he slid his hand under the covers and touched my thigh.

  Then, like the bed had turned upside down and dropped me into another room, I was somewhere new. In front of me was a big, tatty holdall, with my clothes in it. Only, they weren’t my clothes, I recognised them, but I knew I’d never seen them before. Next to the bag was a huge pile of books, library books. The topmost cover had A History of Modern Psychology printed on it.