Sophie

by Guy Burt

  “Sophie?”

  She looked up. “Yes, Mattie? What is it?”

  “I’m bored,” I said. “Can I go and play?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Stick around, though. You can go up to the woods and so on. You got a watch?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then don’t be gone more than a couple of hours.”

  I could tell from her voice that she was half pleased. I scrambled down from the straw, ran across the barn and ducked out into the sunlight.

  “You didn’t really need me there,” he says. He doesn’t sound resentful; he is merely stating a fact. I allow myself to nod agreement. He continues, “I understood that better than you think. I knew what you were doing, and I didn’t mind. I thought—if she does this now, this finding out, then she’ll always come back later.”

  “You thought that?”

  “Why not? Does it sound unusual?”

  “For a nine-year-old, yes, it does.”

  He shrugs. “Maybe. I learnt a lot from you, remember. I could see you so easily vanishing into all the new worlds you’d find when you left home.”

  “Left you, you mean.”

  “If you like.” He stares at the floor, apparently thinking. After the sudden flare of temper a while ago, he is cool now, cautious. I wonder if he thinks I have been provoking him deliberately. He’d be wrong to think that, of course; that will come later, if at all. It’s too big a risk to play around with. For the moment, he seems withdrawn. I shift my balance a little, trying to relieve the pressure on my back.

  He says, “I think you underestimated me a lot.”

  That is certainly true. I tell him, “Maybe I did.”

  eleven

  When I got back to the farm, I was surprised to see, from the lane, a figure standing in the courtyard. As I got closer, I quickly identified it as Andy, and as I watched, he wandered into the open-fronted shed where Sophie and I had found the iron bar with which to break into the barn. Intrigued, I followed him, instead of going straight to see Sophie, and when I caught up with him he was sitting on a workbench at the end of the shed, swinging his feet and whistling quietly.

  “Oh!” he exclaimed, when he saw me, and then, “Hi. You gave me a fright.”

  “Where are the others?” I asked.

  “Still talking. Steve said I should go for a walk.” I sat down on one of the oil drums. Andy had light brown hair, and freckles across his nose. He didn’t fit my hazy memory of bullying at school, but then that had been—four years ago, I worked out. “Your sister’s something else.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He shrugged. “You know. She’s really strange. She must be bloody clever.”

  “She is, I think,” I said. I was cautious, but it didn’t feel as if there was any guile in Andy’s comments. If anything, he sounded puzzled, and a bit scared.

  “What do you think she wants?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. I don’t understand it,” I said. “Maybe she just wants to find things out.”

  Andy looked at me steadily. “I can believe that,” he said. “She’s pretty cool about it all. Like she’s halfway between a headmistress and Jesus Christ. I can’t believe the way she just said to Steve, 'Let’s do drugs,' or whatever it was. It was fucking unreal.”

  I grinned. “I thought it was funny,” I said. “Did you see what his face looked like?”

  “I’ll say,” Andy said. “Looked like someone hit him with a dead fish.” For some reason, I found this wildly appropriate, and snorted with laughter.

  “She’s sometimes a bit—surprising,” I said, when I’d got my breath back.

  “It must be pretty rough,” Andy said. “Living with her, I mean.”

  “Not really,” I said. The comment was unexpected. “She’s OK, really. She just doesn’t . . . get on with people too well. Other people. You know what I mean.”

  “Doesn’t make friends easily?”

  “I don’t think so. Not real friends. School friends, yeah, but not generally. I mean, everyone has school friends.”

  “You got any proper friends, then?” he asked.

  I thought about it. “I don’t know. Sophie, of course.”

  “Must be odd, liking your sister,” he said. “Steve and I can’t stand each other most of the time.”

  “Yeah,” I said. I didn’t know what else to say.

  Andy stretched, and then got down from the workbench. “Shall we see what’s going on?” he said.

  “OK.” We went back into the barn. Steven was smoking a cigarette, looking uncomfortable, while Sophie was sitting cross-legged, smiling slightly.

  “Hi,” she said. “Enjoy yourself?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “What have you been doing?”

  “Deciding things,” Sophie said, and then uncrossed her legs and stood up. Again, I was caught off guard by the way she looked; she seemed to be half someone else, someone I hadn’t seen before. “I reckon we’ve had enough. See you guys on Wednesday, then.”

  “Yeah,” Steven said. He was looking slightly nervous. “Look, if I get caught, what am I going to say?”

  “Just say it’s for you,” Sophie said. “You’re only fifteen. Nobody’s going to give a fuck.”

  He blinked. “Right, OK,” he muttered. Sophie smiled brightly.

  “Come on, Mattie,” she said. “Let’s go home.”

  The days until Wednesday passed with a strange kind of excited tension in the air. Sophie wandered aimlessly about the house a lot of the time until, early on Monday afternoon, she headed off to the quarry with me in tow, walking quickly and eagerly. We spent nearly three hours there, Sophie scribbling away for long periods of time and then pausing to stare thoughtfully at the sky or the ground, chewing the end of her Biro, her face frowning with concentration. I managed a few more cursory glances at the quarry books, but their ordered columns of nonsense words were nothing I hadn’t seen before, and I soon grew bored. I made a series of forays into the woods surrounding the quarry, doubling back every now and again to let Sophie know where I was. At night, I could hear her moving around her room long after she was normally in bed.

  Wednesday, when it arrived, was a disappointment. Sophie and Steven sat and talked in the straw fort for a while, until eventually Sophie suggested that Andy and I go for a walk or something for a couple of hours. Quite able to recognize a hint, I thought about protesting, but then decided that it would probably not be worth the effort. Instead, I followed Andy out into the brittle daylight and we strolled around the farmyard for a time.

  I said, “We could go down by the stream and look for sticklebacks.”

  “I don’t know,” he said. I thought he looked uneasy.

  “What do you think they’re doing?” I asked.

  “Not much. Probably just smoking stuff. I bet your sister’s sick,” he added. “I was, first time I tried smoking.”

  “Were you?” I said, impressed. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen Sophie sick.” We sat down on the steps of one of the buildings, looking out towards the village.

  “Doesn’t she get ill, then?” Andy asked, half amused.

  “Not really. I can’t remember her being ill. Except when—oh,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Except that time at school,” I said, embarrassed.

  “Which was that?” he said.

  “You know. The one with—with the other boy, and you.” I knew well enough that I wasn’t making much sense, but Andy understood me. I watched, scared, as a shadow of emotion passed through his face; for a second, he looked genuinely angry, and I was afraid.

  Then, surprisingly calmly, he said, “You know that wasn’t me, don’t you?”

  “I—”

  The memory of that day had faded, so much so that I couldn’t recall the faces or names of the two boys involved—only that there had been two, and that Sophie had been badly hurt. But sitting there on the steps in the thin autumn sunlight, I thought that, inside my head, I could suddenly see our headma
ster’s study, and Sophie sitting on a chair, and people in the room. There was a bruise on her cheek, and my eyes focused mainly on that, and on the adults. But I clearly remembered her eyes, and, looking at them now across however many years, I could recognize that they were not hurt, or afraid. Maybe I’d even known that at the time.

  Andy said, “She did that to herself.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “Yeah. Thought you probably did.” He stood up, shoved his hands into his jeans pockets, and took a few steps out across the cobbles. He was looking across to the other side of the road, where the gentle curve of the hill opposite our house rose towards the village. He stood like that for a long time, while I plundered the fragment of memory for all I was worth, trying to root from it things that I didn’t want to know.

  “I’m sorry,” I said at last.

  I didn’t think he was going to answer. “Yeah,” he said at last. “It wasn’t your fault, though. I mean, there wasn’t anything you could do. I know I deserved—” He stopped, and then said, almost in a whisper, “We were just kids. Nobody meant any harm.” He seemed to be thinking, until he turned around and squatted down facing me. His expression was easier, more open, and I felt myself relax. “Do you like Sophie?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You love her?”

  “Yeah, I suppose so,” I said, uncomfortably.

  “Christ.” He shook his head. “She’s not normal, Mattie. You know that?”

  “I—I don’t know,” I said, and I think the intensity of his voice must have sparked something inside me, because I found myself on the edge of tears.

  When Andy saw that, he stopped, and swallowed. “It’s OK,” he said. “Just make sure you don’t get hurt. You don’t want to get in her way.”

  “Mmm.”

  I sat looking at my shoes until he pushed my arm gently. “Hey, don’t look so sad. If it makes any difference, she seems to give a fuck about you. Must be an odd feeling, having her around all the time.” He grinned. “Like having your personal nuclear bomb with you, twenty-four hours a day.”

  I smiled, rather tearfully.

  “What about we go and do something else? They’re going to be in there for another hour and a half, easily.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Smoking and being sick.”

  “Smoking and puking, right,” he agreed. “So. What d'you want to do?”

  I got to my feet. “I’m going to show you the woods, up there,” I said, pointing.

  “Sounds good to me.”

  Sophie was quieter than usual when we walked home. That evening, when I had got ready for bed and brushed my teeth, I went through to her room. She was sitting on her bed with her knees drawn up, staring thoughtfully at the ceiling.

  “Hi,” she said.

  “Hi. What happened?”

  “At the barn?” She raised her eyebrows, and I nodded. “Come and sit down, then,” she added. I knelt by the side of the bed and folded my arms on it, looking at her.

  “Not a lot, basically. We smoked some stuff that Steven brought. What are you laughing about?”

  “Were you sick?” I asked.

  “No. Why, did you think I would be?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe.”

  Sophie smiled, and then laughed. “Yeah, it wasn’t very nice to start with.”

  “What was it like?”

  She shrugged. “Not a lot, like I said. You feel quite calm, it’s quite pleasant. After you get used to the smoking part. That’s pretty odd. But other than that, you just feel kind of sleepy but without wanting to go to sleep.”

  “Oh,” I said. “That’s all?”

  “Yeah.”

  “If that’s one drug, are others different?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” Sophie said. “Maybe they feel different, but maybe it’s just the same effect, only stronger.”

  “Are you going to find out?”

  She scratched her ear. “Probably not,” she said. “Steve’s practically shitting himself just because we did this. I don’t think he’d get hold of anything else. But at least I tried it.” She was looking less pensive and more pleased with herself, now.

  “Four more days to go,” I said. Sophie blinked, and then nodded.

  “Right. Didn’t know what you were talking about for a second. What do you want to do with your four more days of freedom, then?”

  “I’ve got a project to do,” I said reluctantly.

  “Yeah. Well, if you get that done tomorrow, we’ll do something different on Friday. I’ve got to go into the village in any case, so you won’t be missing anything.”

  “OK,” I said. “I’ve done my teeth.”

  “Off you go, then,” she said. “See you tomorrow.”

  “And you,” I said, and closed her bedroom door behind me. Downstairs, I could hear my mother walking round the drawing room, her feet slow and muted on the deep carpet. Every now and again a board creaked. I shut my door tightly, and climbed into bed. On the floor near the window was the textbook and the sheets of paper for the project. Sophie had said she was going into the village tomorrow, which meant she’d probably be going to the library, and would probably be gone most of the morning. I turned the thought around in my head, and looked at the clock on my bedside table. It was five past nine. I didn’t feel too tired, I told myself. I could stay awake quite a long time, if I wanted to.

  There was a pen with the paper. I gathered it all up, brought it back to the bed with me, and settled down with the book propped up on my knees as a support. Then I stopped, looking at the line of light from the hallway under the door. I got up again, took my dressing gown down from its peg, and laid it across the bottom of the door. Once I’d arranged everything again on the covers of my bed, I took the first sheet of paper and wrote carefully, Leonardo da Vinci. By Matthew Howard. I looked at the clock; it was eight minutes past, now. I grinned to myself and continued writing.

  “I think it was the first time I consciously set about deceiving you,” he says. “Sometimes I can’t believe I ever did it. And other times, I look at it and I can’t believe I hadn’t done it before.”

  “Never before?” I ask.

  “I don’t think so. Not like this—deliberately. I worked it out ahead of time, planned it. That was what you did. I wasn’t used to thinking that way, to begin with.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because you’d always been there to do it for me,” he says shortly. “The funny thing was, once I’d been at it for a while, it became easy. As if that part of me had been there all along, and only needed a little push to get going.” He looks at me, straight. “It was frightening, but I liked it.”

  “What did you like?” I ask, trying to keep him talking about this.

  “The feeling of exhilaration. Knowing that I could trick you.”

  I can’t help asking it. “It was that important to you?”

  “Damn it, Sophie! Of course it was! What did you think was going on?” He shakes his head. “Sometimes I used to think that, without you, I’d be nothing at all. That I’d just vanish. I could never even imagine a life without you. It was as if I had to draw on you for everything.” He runs out of breath and stops, looking dazed. There is a long pause. Eventually, his voice much quieter, he says, “I hardly realized this. Not in words. But the feeling was there constantly, you know? I couldn’t escape it. It was always there.”

  He lapses into silence once again. I wait patiently for him to continue.

  Sophie left soon after breakfast. I hung around the house for longer, taking my time; my mother was nowhere to be seen yet. Sophie had taken a plastic carrier bag with her, and was wearing what I had started to think of as her “new” clothes, the ones that made her look older. In fact, it was hard sometimes not to think of her as a “new” Sophie, since each day she became more at home with the persona she had adopted, and made it work for her better. So thinking, I pulled on my trainers, trying not to yawn. I had forgotten at what time I got to sleep t
he night before, but there were six or so completed sheets of project on the floor beside the bed, which was more than reasonable for a morning’s work, if Sophie chose to look at it. No, I corrected myself; the choice shouldn’t be left up to her. I would make sure that she saw what I had been doing, so that she would know I had been stuck in the house all morning. I brushed my teeth, without much conviction, and stared out of the window, and had some more squash, until a full twenty minutes had passed by the clock on the kitchen wall. Even then, I peered around the side of the house carefully, making sure the lane was free, before I started off across the garden and up the hill.

  I walked swiftly, setting my feet on the rocky outcroppings that marked where the path had been eroded. Hunks of brown vegetation had slumped in the shadow of the wall, testimony to the death of summer, and there were beadings of moisture on the nettle leaves and on the stones in the path. The laces of my trainers were soon soaked through with dew from the coarse grass that overhung the edges of the path. There was a thin, steady, early-morning breeze, and the sun, where it had come up over the tree line to my left, was pale.

  I reached the outskirts of the wood that surrounded the quarry and paused for a minute, crouched down by the wall. I was wearing the dark blue anorak that I didn’t normally wear; it was getting too small, and I had a much nicer one now. But the colour was sombre and wouldn’t, I thought, show up clearly from a distance. I knew that I was in all probability making too much of a fuss, but where Sophie was concerned this seemed less like paranoia and more like common sense. There was a keen, sharp excitement in my chest, as if the cold air had frozen something in there. When I had got my breath back somewhat, I crunched through the frayed rim of bracken that marked the boundary between field and trees, and stepped into the wood. There was a sudden crash and scurry, across to my right, and my heart leapt inside me for a second. Some wild animal, I told myself, and started on again. The birds overhead were circling and calling.