Pandaemonium

by Christopher Brookmyre

  Deborah actually finds it a relief when Miss Ross comes by and tells everyone it’s time to go back to their own rooms. The vibe is still weird, uncomfortable, nothing like she imagined it would be. There’s not even been much drinking: everybody’s tired after the journey, and the consensus seems to be that they should save themselves - and the stash - for tomorrow night, when that Sergeant Sendak guy said they could set up a disco.

  Julie’s really been getting on her tits. She just won’t let up about Deborah sharing a room with Marianne. It has obviously been some kind of personal triumph for the chubby cow, and she’s seriously kicking the arse out of it. It’s all lesbian this and muff-dive that. God’s sake: get some new patter, ya fat ride.

  It’s not just Julie, though. Everybody’s happy to join in, even Gillian, and though they’re all acting like it’s Marianne they’re taking the piss out of, Deborah can’t pretend they don’t think the joke is on her too.

  She makes her way back to the two-bedded room, where she is greeted by the sight of Marianne dressed only in two towels, one tucked around her torso and a second wrapping her hair. There are wet footprints on the floor tiles. She’s just out of the shower, having opted to grab one late at night when they’re bound to be quiet. Smart move, Deborah thinks. It will be mobbed in the morning, unless she gets up before everyone else. Maybe she should set her phone alarm accordingly - she’ll be wanting out of this room as early as possible anyway.

  She’s hopeful that the vibe will be different in the morning. They’re going out on some kind of hike, so not only will there be none of this ‘we’re in, you’re out’ carry-on, but Julie is likely to be struggling to keep up. Plus, a night of listening to the tubby boot’s desperate patter while she’s trying to get to sleep would remind Gillian why it’s Debs she usually hangs out with.

  She should set the alarm for seven: half an hour earlier than Miss Ross told them they’d need to get up. She knows there’s a fair chance she’ll prize thirty more minutes in bed over feeling fresh when it actually comes to it (especially if they’re going to be tramping about getting sweaty and mocket), but she’d like to have the option.

  Deborah gets out her phone and hits the unlock code, intending to set the alarm, but finds it still on camera mode from the pics she took in the other room. On the tiny screen, she can see Marianne drying her hair, the topmost towel obscuring her face - and her line of sight - as she rubs vigorously at her straggly Goth mane. The lower towel is on the move too, the motion of her arms working it gradually free.

  Deborah feels this sudden thrill, a sense of opportunity, and instinctively presses the Shoot button as the towel drops, revealing Marianne’s skinny tits and modest wee bush. She only gets a glimpse, but she estimates that she’s naturally light on the thatch rather than manually kept in trim, and that Julie was probably lying about having seen her naked at the baths. Marianne reaches a hand blindly downwards, trying to retrieve the towel, then, not finding it, resumes drying her hair for a few seconds before bending to secure it again.

  Feeling her pulse race and her head spin a little, Deborah stares fixedly at her phone and pretends to text, making out she wasn’t looking. The picture is a good one: well lit and not blurry, with the goods all clearly on display. She feels something flush through her, fears her cheeks are glowing and may give her away. What if Marianne glimpses the phone? she wonders. She goes to save the photo so she can clear it from the screen, pressing the corresponding button with her thumb. At the top of the resultant menu, above Save and Delete, is the option ‘Send to’.

  She thinks immediately of Gillian. A picture of any classmate in the scud would be social dynamite, but given that it’s the creepy Goth weirdo, nobody would value this more. Oh the things they could do with it: pass it round, get it on Bebo. And the best part is, not only would Marianne be the last to know of its existence, but she couldn’t even prove it was her, as her head was obscured.

  Aye, she’s totally got to send this to Gills. There’s close to no signal round here, but maybe just enough for texting. Aye. A wee gift, flying from room to room over the airwaves: something secret just between them. It would get Gillian texting too: establish a special wee line of communication tonight so that they wouldn’t be so separate. And wouldn’t that put Julie in her place: Gills quietly texting Deborah in the dark instead of paying attention to all her rambling shite.

  She selects ‘Choose recipient(s)’, being very careful to select Gillian and only Gillian, but hesitates when it comes to pressing Send, a sudden onset of anxiety staying her hand. It’s that sudden, vertiginous sense that there’s no going back: she’s doing something she won’t be able to undo. A single tiny action of her thumb, setting a zero to a one inside the mobile, will commence a sequence of events that would be further and further out of her control.

  She can see Gillian immediately sharing it with the others: no secret stifled giggles and quiet wee texts, but instead cackling it up with Yvonne, Theresa and Julie, the source all but forgotten. No, the source would not be forgotten: quite the opposite. Jesus. She suddenly envisions the hidden implications of what she’d be bringing down upon herself. Taking secret pics of another girl in the buff: it’s actually Debs who’s the lesbian. Even if they didn’t believe that, even if they knew why she had really done it, it was in their power to pretend otherwise. She’d done it herself often enough: wilful misunderstanding, watching your victim squirm as her truthful and reasonable explanation is rendered irrelevant. This means what we want it to mean: that was the rule.

  She cancels out of the Send menu but finds the file has autosaved. That’s okay, she can delete it manually later. The main thing is she has stepped back from the brink of catastrophe. She puts down the phone like she’s putting down a loaded gun. Relief runs through her, but it’s not total: there’s a new anxiety creeping in; or rather, a new perspective upon an established occasional worry.

  Why had she really done it, she asks herself? That thrill had come over her before she even understood why, and she had acted upon it instantly, way before it occurred to her what she might do with the resulting photograph.

  A familiar debate gets rehashed in her head. She’s never done thinking about sex, speculating about sex: strictly heterosexual, boy-on-girl sex. However, it occurred to her recently that those speculations have never been about guys, only other girls: how far they’ve gone, what they have and haven’t done, even whether they stylise their pubes, for fuck’s sake. And now she’s sneaking pictures of Marianne’s nude torso. Does this mean . . . ? But if it did, wouldn’t she feel differently about her friends? Surely she’d be aware she wanted to feel physically closer to them; surely she’d have caught herself thinking she wanted to kiss one of them? She could not remember ever imagining kissing a girl, and the thought right now makes her go icky. And yet, there she was a minute ago, wishing for a kind of intimacy with Gillian, a secret bond, and feeling all vulnerable and excluded because she’s ended up in the wrong room.

  Marianne climbs into her cosiest pair of long-sleeved and long trousered pyjamas, then blows her hair dry so she won’t look too much like Helena Bonham Carter when morning comes around. She hasn’t traded a word with Deborah, though her room-mate has at least progressed from demonstrably ignoring her to genuinely seeming rather withdrawn and pensive, the latter an extremely uncharacteristic condition for someone who didn’t even have hidden shallows. She’d sat there rapt with her phone, like it was the Oracle at Delphi, then come over all ashen-faced like said Oracle had revealed to her the emptiness of her soul - by text.

  After dinner, Marianne had sat alone, reading, while everyone else scuttled in and out of each other’s rooms and pretended to themselves that they were in some lame teen movie. Too bad it wasn’t Scream. Nah, she didn’t mean that. Not entirely. Thirty per cent, at most. Maybe forty.

  Roisin had asked - politely and charitably - if she wanted to come next door where they were playing cards, but she declined, preferring to spend a little time on
cards of her own. She didn’t want anybody being ‘nice’ to her. Sure, it was a little sulky and masochistic, but in self-harm terms, it put her at the way-healthy end of the emo scale.

  This is her fourth secondary school, due to her mum’s job moving the two of them around. She has to go where the contracts are, keep the money flowing in. Her dad pays child support, but in her mum’s eyes, that has to be supplementary - she never wants to be in a situation where she is relying on anything from him.

  That is another reason why her mum keeps upping sticks and completely relocating. Her dad was - is - an alcoholic; a recovering one, these days, but in the past an occasionally violent one. It wasn’t extreme; didn’t have to be. He hit her mum twice, or twice that Marianne is aware of; on both occasions just lashing out, as opposed to sustained attacks. Her mum said she’d only forgive him once, and she was as good as her word. He hasn’t fallen off the wagon since the divorce and is entitled to stay in touch with Marianne, but Mum doesn’t want to make that easy for him. A change of address every year or so seems to be part of the strategy.

  It’s always Catholic schools she gets enrolled in, even though her mum doesn’t go to mass or send Marianne there either. She can’t remember her mum ever going, in fact, though she knows she used to. She got Marianne baptised, but by Mum’s admission, that was largely to placate her grandparents. Yet every time they moved, she insisted on a Catholic school. It was some kind of tribalism, a running to what she knew because it offered a form of security amidst the unfamiliar. When you keep having to relocate to new places, you need the reassurance of certain things being consistent, even if they are consistently crap. That was why McDonald’s was so successful. People didn’t really like McDonald’s, same as her mum didn’t really like Catholicism, but when you were new in town, at least it was a known quantity. So that’ll be a Quarter-Pounder and a Communion Wafer meal-deal to go.

  But after four schools in five years, she’s long since done with making an effort to be liked. Thus, she’d rather be alone than be tolerated, and she’d rather be creepy and unnerving than popular.

  Her hair dried and tied back for the night, she settles down at the head of her bed, cross-legged above the covers. Having carefully arranged a couple of books on the occult where Deborah is likely to notice them, she then gets out her tarot pack and begins sifting out the major arcana from the deck. She has dealt ten of them into a Hagall spread on the bedcovers and is poring over them when her room-mate returns from brushing her teeth and performing her ablutions.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Deborah asks with a combination of scorn and anxiety.

  ‘Tarot.’

  ‘Oh no, cool the jets. You’re not trying to summon up spirits. That stuff pure freaks me out. My cousin did that once: had a seance, and all sorts of weird stuff started happening. I was terrified. The house has had a weird atmosphere ever since. My auntie ended up asking Canon Daly about it. He said it was very dangerous stuff and you shouldn’t be meddling in it. It’s a sin, in fact.’

  ‘I don’t think a bunch of girls getting hysterical at a sleepover constitutes dabbling in the occult.’

  ‘You weren’t there. Maureen contacted the spirit of Kurt Cobain, and—’

  Marianne tries to maintain a straight face so that Deborah will keep going, but she can’t hold back from laughing.’

  ‘Kurt Cobain? Are you serious?’

  ‘Aye,’ Deborah insists. ‘It was the anniversary of his death . . . what’s so fucking funny?’

  ‘I’m just trying to picture Cobain in the afterlife. He’s jamming with Jimmy Hendrix and Freddie Mercury, John Bonham’s on drums, but he blows them all off because he’d rather go communicate with some daft teenagers in Gleniston.’

  Deborah looks slightly crestfallen and a little confused.

  ‘I thought you were into all that stuff.’

  ‘Oh, I’m “into it” all right, a lot more seriously than your cousin. Which is why I know what I’m doing. It’s not about summoning up dead pop stars.’

  ‘So what is it about?’ Deborah asks.

  Marianne suppresses a smile. Come into my parlour, said the spider to the fly.

  ‘Dive over and I’ll show you.’

  Deborah does not dive, but approaches gingerly as Marianne gathers in the cards. She climbs on to the far end of the bed, taking great care to tuck her nightie over her knees and avoid exposing her knickers.

  Marianne deals out a new spread, four cards in a diamond shape with three more above and three below. Deborah watches each new card with both eagerness and unease, particularly when the Death and Devil cards are placed down. Marianne had, in fact, kept these to one side while poring over her previous spread, then slipped them in close to the top after shuffling the deck. They were her trump cards in this particular game. (Technically, all of the major arcana were trump cards, but when it came to freaking out someone like Deborah, these two were indispensable.)

  ‘Death?’ Deborah says.

  ‘We’ll come to that,’ Marianne replies, denying her the standard reassurance that ‘it’s not what you think it means’.

  Marianne spends a long time poring over the spread, partly to let Deborah’s anxious imagination get to work, and equally to choose which cards will form the most appropriate basis for the cold reading she’s about to give.

  ‘Is this supposed to tell me about my future?’ Deborah asks doubtfully.

  ‘It’s supposed to tell you about yourself. The cards can decode truths that are locked away inside you, if you know how to read them. There are truths older than history, things that remain true once you strip away all the trappings and fripperies of modern society, or of any society: truths about the essence of a person.’

  Marianne points out a card, the left-most of the three closest to Deborah. It shows a woman, naked, kneeling by a pool beneath a bright yellow star.

  ‘This is The Star. You see the woman holding two jugs: from one, she is pouring water into the pool, and from the other, she is pouring it on to the land. This represents harmony, balance, generosity and trust. But look alongside it: we have The Moon. Another pool, but a troubled one, and beyond it stormy seas. Instead of the woman and her tranquillity, we have dogs howling, and a lobster emerging from the water: a creature with a hard shell that lurks in the depths. The Moon’s face betrays concern, in contrast to the woman’s serenity.’

  ‘What does it mean?’

  Marianne cocks her head sympathetically.

  ‘It tells me there’s two sides to you that are very closely related and yet manifest themselves in completely contrasting ways.’ She adjusts her posture, placing her hands palm-up in her lap in an aspect of openness as she cues the first Barnum statement. ‘It suggests that you are a very considerate person, selfless at times, keen to offer whatever you can to those around you, and yet there are times, though you hate to admit it, when you’re aware of a selfish side to yourself. And it’s not like nasty selfish, more like sometimes you just think: “Sod everyone else, I’m having trouble handling things and I need to look after me right now.”’

  Deborah’s face is troubled, her forehead wrinkled up as she takes this in. Marianne can just about detect a hint of a nod. Marianne says nothing, confidently bides her time for another couple of seconds. Here comes the confirmation, the magic words:

  ‘What else?’

  ‘Well, the jugs of water here symbolise generosity and trust: giving without expecting anything back. Yet on the Moon card there are these stone pillars, symbolic of defensiveness, a barrier against the stormy seas beyond. It tells me that sometimes you fear you are too honest and open about your feelings, afraid you’ve given away too much, revealed yourself to people who may not be trusted. It also suggests you sometimes have the feeling that other people are having a better time than you, or getting on better at whatever they’re about, even though you know you shouldn’t complain about your lot.’

  Deborah’s visage is a study in concerned concentration, her eyes widening in d
isquieted response to how much she is recognising. She’s no doubt starting to feel very spooked about how Marianne can know this stuff about her inner feelings, but that discomfiture always comes in tandem with a compelling curiosity to hear more, if even just to find out how much Marianne knows.

  ‘What about the Death card. And that Devil beside it.’

  ‘We’ll come to that. There’s other things you need to know first, otherwise you might find those parts too disturbing. Look instead to the other card in the line nearest you. That’s The Lovers.’

  ‘Adam and Eve?’ Deborah asks.

  ‘Among others, yes. On this occasion it’s you and me, in a way.’

  Deborah looks up like a startled deer. Marianne takes note.

  ‘No, not the lovers. I’m the serpent in the tree, representing new knowledge. You’re leaving behind a state of innocence. You’re apprehensive, but it gets much more exciting when you succumb and try the forbidden fruit. Do you want to? Should I go on?’

  Deborah looks like she’s not sure, but curiosity inevitably wins out over her fear of being exposed. ‘Please,’ she says, a little uncertainly.

  ‘The Lovers represents doubt and difficult choices, as well as temptation and desire. It’s a significant card at our age. Passion, desire, affinities, all these things are welling up, and not just the sexual side, though we’ll get to that. Passion about music, for instance, desire for certain clothes, for an image. Things you want to identify yourself with: trends, singers, groups of people, individuals.’