Chapter Thirty
Rain battered the living room window and fell in a long stream where the guttering was loose over the porch. The sky was dark for a July afternoon and the air was damp and cold. I shivered slightly and pulled my side of the woollen throw further over my lap. From the other end of the sofa, Chec huffed and pulled it back towards herself.
We had an assortment of snacks scattered over the coffee table, including chocolate - chocolate! - but for the moment I was busily making peanut butter lollipops. The only problem was there were no clean teaspoons in the drawer, so I was pretty much just gouging globs of peanut butter from the jar with my finger.
Mal, sitting cross-legged in front of Chec, turned, regarding me critically. ‘Classy.’ I flipped him the finger, which admittedly may have lost some of its impact owing to my cuticle being ringed with peanut butter, and he raised his eyebrow. ‘Mean,’ he said reproachfully. He swivelled his head backwards onto Chec’s lap. ‘Ro’s turned feisty since she’s been back,’ he stage-whispered. Chec smiled indulgently and ruffled his hair.
A crash from the kitchen made us all jump. Mum had been taking frequent days off from the reservoir since I got back. Today she was clearing out the cupboards but as far as I could tell this seemed to involve chucking plates and bowls onto the kitchen table with as much energy as you’d use to wrestle a cow to the floor. The sound of tin cans falling to the floor and then some swearing filtered through.
Chec gave the kitchen doorway an evil look and muttered under her breath. She leaned across me for the remote and turned up the volume on the television.
I shuffled round on the sofa and stuck my leg out, poking the kitchen door closed with my toe. The clattering stopped for a minute and the door was carefully and deliberately opened again.
So that was how it was going to be.
Fifteen days earlier I had turned up at the back door, heart in my throat, wondering what reception I’d be getting.
I let myself in - quick sigh of relief that they hadn’t changed the locks - and stood in the doorway to the utility room. Mum was sitting at the kitchen table with her back to me. The light coming through the kitchen window lit up her blonde hair making it glow. She had a cup of coffee on the go and was reading the Racing Post.
I dropped my messenger bag to the floor. Mum jumped about a foot out of her chair and tried to shove the Racing Post under a pile of newspapers, doing a double-take as she threw an overly-innocent look over her shoulder. ‘Francesca, don’t scare me like that,’ she tutted, relaxing and pulling her paper back out again. ‘I thought it was your dad. He-’ Then she stopped and her head turned slowly round again and she looked at me.
She stood up quickly, her chair thudding to the floor and crossed the room in two strides, crushing me to her in a hug. We were still standing like that when my dad came in from his studio over an hour later, neither of us saying a word.
The not-saying-anything didn’t last long.
After the initial frenzy of relief that I’d managed to survive my African Adventure (and seriously, I’d totally forgotten that they thought I’d gone to Africa) wore off, I received near-constant lectures about Irresponsibility, the Dangers of the Outside World, Respect for One’s Family, with a small tangent into You’re Not An Adult YET, Young Lady.
There were tears. There was jabby finger-pointing. There was a whole bunch of getting up out a chair in order to better make a point, only to collapse, arms crossed in disgust, back into said chair again.
They didn’t even bother to try the Good Cop, Bad Cop routine. They were just Bad Cop, Bad Cop. They pulled no punches when telling me exactly how badly I’d messed up by sneaking off in the middle of the night (‘Without even a phone call, Roanne! You didn’t even pick up the phone to tell us you were alright. Can you even comprehend how worried we’ve been?’).
Gradually, and by gradually, I mean over the course of nearly two weeks, the lectures finally slowed to a trickle, punctuated only by disappointed looks every time I happened to pass one of my parents in the hallway.
They told me it went without saying that I was grounded, and then proceeded to say a lot about it anyway. I was to confine myself to my room whenever possible in order to reflect on my misdeeds and I think if they could have confined me to a smaller space than that - a cupboard, the laundry basket - they would have. All car keys were being kept in the safe in the office, and my dad had even taken the tyres off my bike. I was not to set foot outside the house alone under any circumstances; when school started up again I would be escorted to and from the front office and it was made clear that hoping to see the outside world without a parental bodyguard this side of my thirtieth birthday would be foolish.
And what could I do? I knew that sneaking off to ‘Africa’ in the middle of the night was even worse than being arrested for shoplifting, possibly even worse than terrorism or malaria, and I didn’t think that telling them I’d been busy saving the multiverse would cut any ice. So I sat with my head bowed and my hands folded in my lap and accepted my punishment without pointing out that if I hadn’t found the concept of messing with people’s heads so distasteful, I could walk out the door right in front of them and make them forget they’d ever seen me.
And being grounded was fine, really. There was only one place I wanted to go and if I decided to just up and leave, it would take more than locking the front door to stop me.
Through all of this, Chec remained with me, stalwart-like. The only problem was, for the first time in my life I didn’t want Chec around. Every time I looked at her, all I could see was The Girl I Made With My Brain. I found myself looking at her out of the corner of my eye all the time, scrutinising her, like a 3D Spot The Difference puzzle.
Chec looked at the carefully open door and rolled her eyes. ‘Please at least tell me you had a good time on this jaunt of yours. Seeing as you’ve got into so much shit over it.’
‘It was fine,’ I told her, digging a Bic pen into the peanut butter jar. No. Finger was better.
Chec rearranged the throw on her lap so that she could see her toenails. She picked at the side of her big toe before reaching into a satin bag beside her on the sofa and pulling out a candy pink nail varnish. ‘So tell me this,’ she said, dabbing at her toenail intently, craning so far forward her knee was level with her ear, ‘how did you manage to spend two weeks in Africa and not get a suntan?’
‘I was too busy helping people to sunbathe, actually,’ I said haughtily, scraping peanut butter out from my fingernail with my tooth.
She shook her head as if that was the most stupid answer I could possibly have given.
That evening I went to bed early even though I knew sleep wouldn’t come easily. It hadn’t for the last few nights and shadows were starting to bloom under my eyes. I tried to put it down to my injuries, but my wrist was as good as new and my chest hadn’t twinged for days; only a faded white line remained as evidence that I’d nearly been gutted like a fish.
I laid reading for a few hours, until mum and dad finally sloped off to bed and the house fell quiet. I put my book down and tried to nod off, but my mind carried on whirring as the silence closed in on me, oppressive like a thick blanket. The chill of the day’s rain storm had worn off and the night was warm and humid, making me itchy in my own skin.
Eventually, in desperation, I grabbed an old quilt from the hall cupboard and made my way downstairs in the dark. I headed out the front door, turning the front light on as I went, and set up camp on the swing on the porch. I picked up my book again - the joy of no longer being illiterate hadn’t worn off yet - and tried to concentrate.
The moon faintly illuminated the garden. The swing set that had been mine and Chec’s. Mum’s iron animal sculptures. The lilac thicket where Mal, Chec and I had made a den the summer we were nine before getting stung by wasps. I shook my head distractedly. No, it would have just been me and Mal.
Everything was so familiar but I found myself looking at it with different eyes, now t
hat I knew a whole other world existed just a hair’s breadth away. A world that strove to keep this one safe, so that it could be the sanctuary that the Three had intended.
I stretched my hand out in front of me, as if I could reach out and touch the Jeopardy if I concentrated hard enough. Then I remembered the malevolent portal that I’d managed to summon in my sleep and put my hand back in my lap.
I’d managed to keep my Blessings under wrap since I’d arrived back. Kind of. There had been a couple of mishaps. Like the other night, when my dad served up tagliatelle with a tomato and vegetable sauce for dinner. We all ooh’ed and aah’ed, mainly because it was something cooked by my dad and not my mum, but vegetable sauce isn’t really my favourite. All I did was idly think that meatballs would have been nicer.
The prickle at the back of my neck solidified into a stream of energy and before I could stop it or squash it down it burst through me.
For a nanosecond, we all stared at the brand new meatballs on the serving dish. Ignore it, I thought. Ignore it, ignore it, ignore it. We were always going to have meatballs for dinner. Something in me flexed and after a second, they all picked up their forks and started tucking in.
The resulting nosebleed had lasted for forty-nine minutes. I sat in the bathroom with a wad of toilet paper under my nose, waiting for it to stop, unable to get the image of my funeral out of my head.
I needed to get back to Gileath. Not only was I desperate to start my training but, to my utter astonishment, I found that I missed Gileath. I missed the clean air and the cobbled streets, the simplicity and the complexity of existing amongst so much danger, the way it was so familiar and at the same time so peculiar. I missed it like I’d been born there and was being forced into the Sanctuary as some kind of bizarre punishment.
I missed Neve and her bossy ways and easy laugh. I missed Raelthos and his feckless, sex-pesty ways. God, I even missed Kallista. Well, kind of.
And I missed Oriel. I missed him so intensely, it was shocking. Sometimes it would hit me as I was just randomly walking around and it made me want to slump against the wall, my face pressed against the plaster, and groan with every breath.
For, like, the billionth time, I tried to work out what I needed to wrap up before it would be safe for me to return to Gileath. There wasn’t anything. I had the most vanilla life imaginable. My parents were embarrassingly happy together and were both successful in their respective careers. My sister was happy and healthy, even if she was technically thirteen years younger than she thought she was. I had vague ideas about going to university after my A-levels, but it wasn’t exactly a lifelong ambition and I hadn’t a clue what I’d study. Jesus, thanks to my dad’s weird program of Useful Life Skills, I even knew how to drive.
The porch door scuffed open, startling me out of my moody introspection and I instinctively made a grab for the dagger in my boot before remembering it was back at the storage room in the Griffin. I sighed as my heart rate simmered back down. There used to be a time when unexpected noises didn’t have me reaching for a weapon.
Chec shuffled out onto the deck in her sheepskin boots, a hoody over her pink pyjamas. ‘What are you doing out here?’ She squinted at me sleepily. ‘It’s like three in the morning, you complete freak.’
‘Couldn’t sleep.’
‘Yeah, well. You woke me up as you went past.’
‘Sorry.’
She grunted in response and sat down next to me, wiggling until I’d moved over far enough. ‘Fancy a cup of tea?’ she asked.
‘Yeah, okay.’
‘Make me one while you’re there?’
‘You go and make them, you lazy cow,’ I said, picking up my book again. She didn’t move, so I gave her a nudge with my toe and to my astonishment she actually got up and headed to the kitchen.
When she came back with the tea, I’d reclaimed my half of the swing. She settled down and opened a packet of biscuits. ‘Penguins?’ I asked. Mum only ever usually bought chocolate biscuits if she was feeling guilty about spending too much time on her boat. ‘Where’d you find these?’
‘The cupboard.’ Well, duh. ‘Mum’s feeling bad about keeping you cooped up like a battery chicken.’ Chec crammed the last of her biscuit in her mouth and screwed up her biscuit wrapper, shoving it under a cushion. ‘Ro?’
I nibbled the opposite corners off my Penguin and used it as a straw to suck my tea through. ‘Mmm?’
‘Do you reckon you’ll go back to Africa?’
I looked at her in surprise, and not just because she’d asked a question that expressed an interest in someone else’s life. ‘I don’t know,’ I replied truthfully. ‘There are a lot of problems...with my visa and stuff. I don’t know if I can go back.’
‘But you want to.’
I thought back to Gileath. I thought about living in the Citadel, about training, about meeting other people like me. I thought about staying in England and dying in eighteen months. I thought about seeing Oriel again. ‘Yeah,’ I said softly. ‘Yeah, I do.’
‘Wow. You must have had a good time,’ Chec said. I said nothing and felt rather than saw her eyes snap over to me. ‘Ro, you’re blushing.’ She gave a bark of laughter before her face fell. She pointed at me with a shaky finger. ‘Oh my god! You met someone, didn’t you? Didn’t you? And you’ve been back for two weeks and haven’t told me!’
‘I didn’t-’
Chec sat up on her heels like a dog begging, making the swing wobble dangerously. ‘Have you handed in your V-card?’ She was whispering, her voice shaking with something between excitement and laughter.
‘What? I just... No, I didn’t! God! And anyway, it’d be none of your bloody business if I had!’
Chec looked at me in bewilderment. The concept of there being something in either of our lives that we would not automatically share with the other was alien. I cast my mind back to the many graphic conversations she’d tried to have with me around the time of Condomgate and shuddered a little. I hadn’t been able to look Mal in the face for days afterwards.
Chec’s look turned sly. ‘But you’ve got a boyfriend, haven’t you?’ She stuck her foot out and started nudging me on the hip, hard. ‘Haven’t you?’
I thumped her foot and she pulled it away. ‘No.’ Chec sputtered a noise of disbelief. ‘He’s not my boyfriend. He’s just...’ How could I explain Oriel? ‘He’s just a friend, who happens to be a boy.’ A friend who I’ve known for longer than you’ve been alive, Chec.
‘A friend who’s a boy, who’s not your boyfriend.’ She sat back on the swing, nodding musingly, and started to rock us with her heels. ‘Is he fit?
I shrugged as if I’d never really stopped to think about it. ‘Yeah, I s’pose,’ I said, noncommittally.
She raised her eyebrows slightly and nodded. ‘Nice one.’
We sat in silence for a while, sipping our tea and fishing more Penguins out of the packet.
‘Chec?’
‘What?’
‘Can I ask you a completely random question?’
She tipped her head back, dropping the last of a soggy Penguin into her mouth. ‘Always.’
I hesitated, not really sure how to phrase what I wanted to know without sounding mental. ‘Can you think of any loose ends I’ve got in my life? Like, things that I need to get sorted out, or fixed or whatever?’
Chec regarded me over the rim of her mug. ‘Why do you ask?’
‘I dunno. Because it’s three in the morning, and three in the morning seems like the right time for random, existential questions. You know? Say I only had six months to live, or something.’ Eighteen months to live. ‘What do you think I need to do in my life?’
‘Why are you asking me this? Why are you being weird? Er? Than usual? Are you dying?’
I almost choked on my tea. ‘No-o-o-o. I was...just wondering.’
She frowned at me in the way that a tiny child would look at a spooky-looking clown. ‘Well, could you wonder about cheerier things, please, Mrs Morbid?’ She shivere
d and pulled the cuffs of her hoody over her hands. ‘It’s like when you were away in Africa. Obviously, Mum and dad were freaking. Out. You’d fucked off in the middle of the night to a third world country, so naturally they were concerned. But once the initial fear and annoyance had worn off, you should have seen the pessimism. They were convinced they’d never see you again. Very much Our Glass is Half Empty of Dead Daughter.
‘What I think they don’t understand is that you’re one of those survivor types. I mean, you’re all bookish and introverted and shit, but come the zombie apocalypse, I reckon you’d turn into a marine. I’d totally be one of the ones who got bitten in the initial outbreak, but you’d be the girl who manages to hike from one end of the country to the other to find the secret government base where they’re working on a cure.
‘Gotta say, though, the Roanne’s A Ninja theory was very much a minority opinion around here while you were away. They went on and on and on, like they’d lost all their children in one go. And I’m like, Hello? You do have another daughter, and hey, guess what? She’s right here. And looks. Just like. The daughter. You’re crying about.’
I sat watching Chec as she yawned, slumped back in the swing, still rocking us gently with the tip of her toe and felt a pride so intense it made my breath come in shaky gulps. She was perfect. Funny, intelligent and charming. And I’d made her all by myself.
I knew I had to leave the Sanctuary, and I knew it had to be soon. Every day that I stayed would make it that much more difficult to leave the life I knew, had always known. And as I sat in the moonlit garden with the perfect, vibrant girl I’d created, I finally realised what I needed to do.
The next morning I was lounging around on my bed listening to music and painting each of my toenails a different colour. The casual observer would be forgiven for thinking that I was just procrastinating. And by ‘the casual observer’, I meant Oriel. If he did happen to look through the Window right then he’d just think I was just dicking about and wasn’t bothered about coming back to Gileath, which wasn’t the case.
I flapped my toes to dry them off. The bathroom door slammed open and Chec wafted down the hallway on a cloud of my favourite perfume that I’d stupidly left lying around, and draped in what appeared to be every towel in the house.
It was time to put my plan into action.
I had a plan. It wasn’t what you’d call a fantastic plan, in fact as plans went it was pretty much Made of Suck. But I was confident it would work, and would tie up the loose ends of my life in the Sanctuary enough for me to return to Gileath.
I went downstairs and headed through the hallway into the kitchen, avoiding the living room. I quietly got a bin bag from under the sink and raided the cupboards and fridge for anything mum had bought for me, things that no one else liked. The Petits Filous went in, as did the big bag of sweet and salty popcorn.
Aware that, strictly speaking, I was supposed to be keeping to my room and contemplating what a Bad Daughter I’d been, I moved silently from the kitchen with my sack and skirted round the living room to my dad’s study, where I nosed through his papers and screwed up anything that mentioned my name, tossing it into my bag.
I spent the rest of the afternoon working my way methodically through the house. Photos, books, letters: everything that connected me to this family, this world, was tossed in. This was the best way, I said to myself. The only way. And I knew that if I kept repeating it, eventually I’d come to believe it.
Back in my bedroom, I started dividing up my belongings into two piles: ‘Throw’ and ‘Keep’. Anything I wanted to bring to Gileath with me I’d have to carry, so save for some photos, my birth certificate and a couple of other things I couldn’t bear to part with, most things went on the ‘Throw’ pile. I sighed as the number of black rubbish bags hidden in my wardrobe increased. I’d dump them in the communal bins by the shops later.
Sweating slightly from the heat of the afternoon and the exertion of erasing my life, I stopped at and rocked back on my heels, surveying the swathes of clutter, trying not to think what a crappy idea this was. It would only take a forgotten photograph, a missed note for someone to say, ‘Hey, who’s Roanne Harper?’ and my whole plan would go to shit.
My plan was simple enough. Destroy all the evidence that I’d ever existed and modify my family’s and friends’ memories so they’d forget about me.
For two weeks I’d sat and wondered what loose ends in my life needed tying up, until it finally dawned on me that it was my life that needed tying up. If I knew I had nothing to come back to, surely it would be safe for me to leave, to return to Gileath.
And after I was trained? Who knew? The images Coralin had shown me of my future kept fluttering through my mind. The first of my imminent funeral, the second of me as a Blessed warrior. Surely there had to be some hidden third path, a future where I was just...normal, living a normal life somewhere in the Sanctuary where no one knew who I was.
Because there was no coming back from this. If I went through with it, everyone’s recollections of me, everything they knew about me, would be wiped, like confetti scattered in the wind. Impossible to retrieve. Once my training was complete and I was free to come back to the Sanctuary, it wouldn’t be to here.
I leaned back against the foot of my bed and closed my eyes, trying to ease the painful knot in my throat that was threatening to dissolve into tears. This was the only way, I reminded myself. While my subconscious still wanted to be in the Sanctuary, there was no way to return to Gileath, and the increasing frequency of my nosebleeds and headaches told me in no uncertain terms that Gileath was where I needed to be.
I listened to the sounds coming from the kitchen downstairs. My dad was making dinner and singing while my mum and Chec argued. I wished I could canvass their opinion, but I knew this was a decision I would have to make alone. I thought again about their wrecked faces as they stood by my grave. When faced with the prospect of that degree of grief, surely it would be better to have never known me at all?
I worked solidly through the afternoon and evening and at last I’d got everything in bin bags and packed a duffel bag. I’d packed as many clothes as I could manage, mostly jeans and t-shirts and a couple of thick jumpers. Chocolate and vitamin pills. Tampons. I’d have to ask Oriel what to do about getting some winter clothes.
It was time. My parents and Chec had gone to bed a while back and the house was quiet. I sat cross legged on the floor at the foot of my bed and shut my eyes.
Oriel had told me that part of the Psion training involved meditation and my brow furrowed in concentration as I slowly went through the meditation tips I’d got from the internet. In the end it took about an hour because I kept having to scratch my nose or uncross my legs, but eventually I could feel my breathing evening out and my mind felt…smoother.
I envisaged drawing a thread of energy towards me. A tingle at the back of my neck told me that I’d got it right so I started pulling it up through my body until it reached my fingertips where it unfurled like the petals of a flower.
I risked a peek around my room to see if it was working and smiled when I saw what I’d done. The mauve walls had changed to a pale cream and where posters had been plastered, now hung innocuous framed prints. My messy bed had magically made itself and the covers were now a pale blue. It looked like a nice guest bedroom and I briefly wondered who would use it next. I quickly dismissed the thought - it was none of my business.
Now for the tricky bit. I closed my eyes again. Rather than modifying each individual memory, which would take forever, I decided to smooth their minds over. If anyone heard my name, or saw a picture of me, or remembered something about me, their mind would just flutter over whatever they’d heard or saw or thought, paying it no notice.
I reached out slowly with my mind, letting my awareness spread out like a blanket around me, and gently began to feel. The first mind I found was Chec’s; it was a ring of spikes and red like she was having a bad dream. I felt further and found my d
ad’s, cool and green. Next to him was my mum, her mind like strands of gold wire, intertwined like a figure eight with my dad’s.
Balancing all three flows of consciousness, I imagined them thinking about me, seeing me and saw how their brains would react, like water flowing round stones in the bottom of a stream, putting the thought away in a locked box at the back of their minds. I pictured all of their memories of me fluttering away until there were none left, scattering on the wind.
I held my train of thought for a long time, ignoring the slow insidious drip from my nose that told me a gusher was on its way; I couldn’t afford to screw this up. The thought of my family wandering around with a half-memory of a girl they once knew chilled me.
Finally, it was done. When I reached out with my mind I could find no answer, no recognition, from theirs. It was as if I’d never existed.
I stood up, clamping a handful of tissues under my nose. I blinked and my vision blurred pink. Seriously? I was bleeding from my eyes?
Silently, I moved through the house, not putting on my shoes until I was downstairs and ready to go. I opened the front door and swung it back behind me carefully so it wouldn’t squeak. Once outside, I shifted my duffel bag across my shoulders and, not daring to glance back at the house behind me, set off down the street.
Chapter Thirty-One
The train out of Paddington clattered along the track. I’d brought my iPod with me, but it lay scrunched at the bottom of my duffel bag. I was saving its charge for emergencies. My book lay open in my hands at the same page I was on an hour ago.
I’d managed to hold off crying until I’d got on the train. The businessman sitting opposite me had remained in his seat for under a minute after the first wave of sobbing before he quietly got to his feet and moved somewhere else, maybe to give me some privacy, but more likely so no one would think my tears had anything to do with him.
When the train pulled in at Exeter, I picked up my bag and waited by the doors for it to stop. The sun was blazing high in the sky. Tying my hoody round my waist, I left the train and headed out through the side roads to the warehouse. The side door was still unlocked and I let myself in.
The portal was shimmering in the corner with a low thrum and I walked towards it. I said a silent goodbye to the world I knew and stepped through.
The storage shed was as cluttered and dusty as ever, but at least this time there were no Clingers. My Jeopardy clothes were folded neatly in a corner, waiting for me to return. I sat on the grubby floor to pull my boots on and my hand nudged against something metallic. My dagger.
Shouldering my bag and bow, I emerged from the storage room and stood for a minute, leaning up against the door. I ran my hands over my face steeling myself for the long trek ahead.
I wondered whether Oriel or Neve had seen what I was doing in time to send any money for me to take a coach to the Citadel. If they hadn’t, maybe the landlord would be able to lend me some. And if he couldn’t... Well, it was a good thing I had some decent boots.
From the main bar, the few patrons were roaring with something that could be rage, laughter, approval, or a mixture of all three. Just a lot of roaring in general, really. There was the smell of beer and sweat and horses. I smiled to myself. It felt good to be back.
Lost in my own little world, I didn’t register the presence of anyone else until my arms were being bear-hugged to my sides and I found myself being whirled off my feet. I shrieked and only just managed to hold back from blasting him to the other side of the bar as I caught his familiar scent of sunshine. I couldn’t believe he’d come for me himself. I squeezed my eyes shut and hugged him back, letting my pleasure at being back mingle with his palpable relief at my return. ‘You’re back,’ he whispered. ‘You came back.’
I pulled away slightly, already shaking my head. ‘I know, I know,’ he said hastily. ‘It’s three months. Just until you’re trained.’ He picked up my bag, slung it over his shoulder and grinned at me. I felt my stomach do a flip-flop. I’d missed that grin. ‘But you’re here now.’
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