‘So, Zoe, where’d you disappear to at that gig? One minute you were being mauled by that creepy guy. Next you were gone.’
‘In a puff of sulphur,’ Zoe grinned. ‘Hah.’
‘I panicked though. Come on, what were you doing?’
‘What do you think I was doing?’ Zoe’s eyes had a wicked shine to them.
I raised my eyebrows at her. What was she telling me?
‘Anyway,’ Zoe went on. ‘That creepy guy is called Tom and I think he’s gorgeous. And he promised he’s going to get me some gigs with his band, remember? I’m going to dance for them.’
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘That.’
Later, we walked home together, arms linked. The fog had barely lifted that day but at least Kerry still hadn’t come back to pester us. ‘Tell me what your mum said, then,’ I pressed Zoe.
She shook her head. ‘It’s too boring. Let’s just say she didn’t miss the chance to have a good go at me.’
‘You never really tell me –’
Zoe waved her hand. ‘Don’t go on about it. I don’t want to even talk about her.’
We got to The Cut and I hesitated at the opening because it was so very fogbound. And I could hear loud voices. I looked at Zoe. ‘Should we go in there?’
The sounds got louder. Someone was crying and someone else was shouting. Then I recognised the voices. ‘I think that’s Kerry,’ I said, and without waiting for Zoe I marched into the Cut. I walked as fast as I could, but it was muddy and slippery underfoot. Zoe followed, making loud sighing sounds. Round the first corner, we came across two figures – Kerry and Jodie. Jodie had her arm round Kerry, who was snuffling. When I got closer I saw she was covered in mud.
Jodie glared at us. ‘Could’ve done with you two, five minutes ago,’ she said. ‘Your friend’s been beaten up.’
‘What?’ I stared at Kerry, who was leaning into Jodie’s shoulder and snivelling. ‘Who did it, Kerry?’
‘It was some girls from your school,’ Jodie said. ‘I came around the corner and they were laying into her. Calling her a grass or something. They left off when I said I was calling the police. I was just asking her where you two were.’
I reached out to pat Kerry’s arm. From the stench, it was obvious she hadn’t just been rolled in mud. I drew back my hand. ‘It wasn’t our fault,’ I said, quickly.
Jodie shook her head at us.
‘Kerry landed us in big trouble at the weekend,’ Zoe said, with a pout. ‘But we didn’t tell anyone to hurt her.’
‘They just use that sort of thing as an excuse,’ I said. ‘Sorry, Kerry. Are you OK?’
Jodie swore at us. ‘Does she look it? I think you should take her home.’
Kerry let out a blubbery moan. ‘I don’t want to go home like this.’
I looked at Jodie, hoping she had some bright ideas.
She closed her eyes and sighed. ‘All right, everyone back to mine and we’ll get Kerry cleaned up. And you can all sort yourselves out.’
I could tell she thought Zoe and I were in some way to blame.
We trudged to the flats, Kerry limping a little. The lift never smelled too good to start with and Kerry made it worse. Jodie ushered us all into her flat and pointed to the little bathroom. ‘Zoe, why don’t you put the kettle on and make us some tea? Anna and I can sort Kerry out.’
Zoe frowned, but did as she was told and to be honest I thought she’d got the better deal. I had to help Kerry wash her face and hands, which were grazed as well as caked in filth, and peel off her ripped school tights, avoiding a gashed and bleeding knee. Jodie found an old cloth and started sponging the mud off Kerry’s coat.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I hope you don’t think we wanted this to happen.’
Kerry shook her head, blowing her nose noisily on a handful of Jodie’s toilet paper. Zoe put her head around the bathroom door and held out a mug of tea. She wrinkled her nose at the lingering smell. Jodie offered Kerry a pair of her own black tights in a rolled-up ball and we left her to try to squeeze into them, closing the door behind us.
Jodie’s almost-empty living room was cold and still had a mouldy smell about it. Zoe stood by the window to stare at the view of the gloomy sky and the city lights shining fuzzily through the mist. ‘It looks like someone’s tipped out a box of gold chains onto a grey velvet cloth,’ she said, cupping her hands around her mug.
‘Very poetic,’ I said, staying back from the window, tiny shivers zizzing down my legs and fingers. ‘It looks like fog and street lights to me.’
‘How could you two let those girls get Kerry like that?’ Jodie demanded. ‘You’re supposed to be her friends.’
‘Yes, well, you don’t know what Kerry did to us,’ said Zoe.
‘I don’t care. She’s – she needs looking after. Kerry’s not as switched on as you two.’
‘Switched on? She’s not even plugged in,’ Zoe muttered and I smiled. We could hear Kerry fiddling with the bathroom door.
‘Why do you even care?’ Zoe asked Jodie. ‘I know what it is with Anna here. She’s a complete sucker. She feels sorry for any old waif and stray. And she fancies Kerry’s big brother.’
Was it that obvious, I wondered? But Zoe always had a way of seeing into my head, somehow. She went on: ‘But what’s Kerry to you?’
Jodie looked out of the huge, bare window, one hand fingering the scar on her cheek. ‘I was bullied at school too, I know what it’s like. That’s all.’
‘You just have to learn how to scare them off,’ Zoe said, with a tiny shrug of her slim shoulders. ‘You never show you’re afraid, for one thing.’
‘We’re not all as cool as you,’ Jodie said.
Kerry came into the room. ‘Thanks for the tea,’ she said. She was looking at Zoe.
‘You sorted out now?’ Zoe asked.
Kerry nodded.
‘We’d better get back,’ I said. ‘Thanks, Jodie.’
Jodie held open the door. Dave was just coming in, with what smelled like a curry in a plastic bag. ‘Back again?’ he asked us. We pretended to smile at him.
Jodie held up her hand. ‘Take care of Kerry, you two,’ she said. She was looking at me.
‘Ambushed,’ said Zoe, under her breath. I knew what she meant. We’d just been charged with making sure Kerry stayed OK, whether we wanted to or not.
8
Witchcraft
For the next few days, Zoe was flush with cash. She said it was her birthday money, though I wondered why her mum was suddenly so generous and she’d never mentioned any doting aunties or grannies. But if Zoe didn’t want to talk about something, she was really good at avoiding it. Those bruises she sometimes had, for example. It was weird because they were never anywhere you could usually see. They were at the top of her arms or on her back, places she usually covered up. I’m sure I was the only person who ever noticed them, because I’d be next to her in the school changing rooms, or sometimes she’d get changed at my house, into stuff her mum wouldn’t let her wear. I tried a few times to ask about them. Once she claimed she was always falling over, though I’d never seen her do that when I was with her – in fact, she was much more graceful than I was. Usually, though, she just talked about something else altogether. I didn’t want to sound like a parent or a teacher, so I didn’t go on about it. Zoe could be really slippery, even when you asked her a direct question. I don’t think you could have got her to answer anything she didn’t want to, if you’d sat her in a chair with a light in her eyes and tried to torture it out of her.
So when I asked her how much she’d got for her birthday and she said she hadn’t counted it yet, I knew she was fibbing. Everyone counts their birthday money, don’t they? Usually more than once, just to be sure. But I wasn’t the pocket money police, was I? So I let it go.
We went to Dead Bouquet to find things to spend it on. It was the only place
we managed to escape Kerry and that was because she did some sort of thing at her church on a Saturday morning and didn’t come pestering us until later in the afternoon. Zoe once said that if Kerry followed us into Dead Bouquet she would have to kill herself.
Zoe zoomed in on the bookshelves. I hadn’t looked at them all that much, though I’d spotted books about goth bands and bios of dead people, some arty books about Aubrey Beardsley and medieval gothic art. I was expecting her to get something like that. But she showed me some books on witchcraft. They were hardbacked and wrapped in plastic so you couldn’t look inside them unless you bought them and they cost a stupid amount of money. One was about starting off in witchcraft and one was called Soulcraft and it was about calling on dead people to help get things that you wanted.
‘That’s really creepy,’ I said, but Zoe just laughed. ‘I have always wanted to read these,’ she said, her eyes shining. ‘It’s driven me mad that they’re all sealed up.’
We went to the little cafe next door and Zoe pulled the books out of their brown paper. ‘These books are going to change my life,’ she said, using her fingernail to slice through the cellophane. She told me she’d been on a website called SweetWitchTeen and it suggested these books for people starting off with ‘the craft’. She already started doing something called visualizing, which was imagining something you want and meditating on it. ‘I asked for some money to buy books,’ she said. ‘And.’ She held up her purse.
‘But you got the money for your birthday,’ I said. ‘Everyone gets money on their birthday.’
‘There’s no guarantee of anything in my house,’ Zoe said.
‘You can’t believe all that stuff?’ I asked.
Zoe shrugged. ‘It’s worth a try, isn’t it?’
I would’ve thought it was a joke, if she hadn’t just spent so much on the books. ‘Magic, though?’ I said, screwing my face up. ‘Come on, Zoe, you can’t think anything like this will actually work?’
Zoe squashed her fruit tea bag down into her mug. ‘No one tries it, not properly, because no one believes it. It’s not waving wands about. It’s more serious than that. Even scientists say you can make things happen by will power. I reckon it will be a good experiment.’
‘Whatever,’ I said, shaking my head. ‘But I wouldn’t hold your breath for the results. What’re you going to do a spell for, anyway? Lottery numbers? The maths exam questions?’
‘I know exactly what I’m going to do,’ Zoe said. She twisted her skull ring round and round her middle finger and smirked. ‘A vanishing spell.’
‘Who’s first to disappear? As if I didn’t know,’ I said, imagining Kerry going up in a blue flash.
But Zoe just said, ‘Maybe.’ She tucked the book back into its wrapping. ‘Better not show them to Kerry anyway. She’ll have her priest come and do an exorcism on us.’ She gave me a wicked grin. ‘Hey, maybe the books will be enough to scare her away altogether. That’d be pretty magic, eh?’
I sighed. ‘Don’t count on it. We need to wave more than a wand to get rid of Kerry now. I reckon we could throw a bomb at her and she wouldn’t budge. I don’t know how it happened, but we’re stuck with her.’
Zoe clenched her fists and made a strangled sort of noise. And I wondered whether Luke realised the sacrifice I was making just for him.
Later on, I had to meet up with my dad. He was taking me out for lunch. It was his new idea for seeing me, because I wouldn’t go to his flat, where his girlfriend lived, and there was a post-nuclear atmosphere when he came to our house. I asked him on the phone if I could bring Zoe along.
‘Can I bring Ellie along?’ he asked.
‘No way,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to have anything to do with her, thanks. I’ve told you that, hundreds of times.’
‘Then it’s just us two,’ he said.
The only good thing was that when he was with me he flashed the cash a bit. A sign of guilt, according to Mum. So I suggested that we went to the Italian where Luke worked. I had no idea whether he’d be on shift or not, but it was a weekend, so there was a chance.
Turned out Luke was there and he was the one who came over and showed us to a table. I was really glad I’d made a bit of an effort to get ready that morning, even though it was more to impress Zoe than anyone else. My black net dress and jacket might’ve been a bit too goth for Luke’s liking. My dad made his usual comments about Halloween being still a few months away and I just curled my lip at him, Zoe-style.
Luke gave us the lunch menu and winked at me. My dad clocked it. As soon as Luke left us, Dad leaned back in his seat and folded his arms. ‘So, any reason why you chose this place?’
I shrugged. ‘We came here last week for Zoe’s birthday. I thought it was nice.’
My dad sniffed. ‘Bit like eating in a dungeon, if you ask me. Still, I suppose it beats McDonald’s.’
We ordered our food. I reckoned Dad was giving Luke the evil eye, and I told him so. He just laughed. ‘All dads are like that. They want to protect their little girls from big bad boys, that’s all.’
‘Protect me?’ I took a swig of fizzy water. ‘But you don’t even live with me anymore. I don’t think you get much of a say in what I do now, to be honest.’
Dad closed his eyes for a second. ‘All right, Anna. It’d be nice to know when you’re going to stop being quite so angry with me.’
I swallowed. I always got a hard lump in my throat when I had to talk to Dad about the divorce. ‘Don’t expect any sudden changes of heart.’
Dad nodded and picked at the bread Luke had put on the table. ‘Fine. I might not get much of a say in your life, for now. But your mum’s quite worried about you.’
I blinked. ‘How d’you mean?’
‘I think she’s concerned about this friend of yours – Zoe? The one you went to that concert with.’
‘What about her?’
‘She thinks she’s a bit of a – er – an overpowering influence on you.’
I’d been about to bite into an olive. I turned it round in my fingers and all of a sudden it seemed too oily, too sour to eat. ‘You mean you actually talked to Mum? That’s a miracle.’
Luke turned up with two big steaming plates of pasta. He said: ‘Extra helping for my fave customer.’
I knew I wasn’t going to be able to eat it and Dad didn’t look like he was hungry any more. I looked at the bowl and said: ‘Phew.’
‘How are you his favourite customer?’ Dad asked.
‘I’m not, really,’ I said. ‘He’s my friend’s big brother, that’s all.’ I paused for a minute. ‘Not Zoe, another girl. Kerry. I don’t think you’ve met her.’
‘Another witch-in-training?’ asked Dad.
‘Ha, ha. Nope, quite the opposite. Actually, she just sort of follows Zoe and me around and we wish she wouldn’t.’
Dad frowned at me. ‘What’s wrong with her?’
‘She’s just – we just don’t like her very much. She’s a bit nerdy and she acts like she’s five years old some of the time.’
‘Why does she want to hang around with you, then, if you don’t get on?’
‘She’s really thick-skinned, Dad.’ I glanced around me to make sure Luke was nowhere in earshot. ‘I think we’ve made it pretty clear we’d rather she wasn’t around, but she doesn’t take the hint. Probably ’cause she just doesn’t have any other mates either. And that school... there are kids who pick on you if you’re on your own.’
‘Right.’ Dad poked at his food with his fork. ‘So she has to tag along with you, otherwise she’d be bullied. And alone.’
I nodded. ‘What would you do, Dad? To get rid of her?’
‘I wouldn’t,’ said Dad.
‘What?’
‘I wouldn’t get rid of her. It sounds like she’s quite lonely. I thought someone like you might have got that.’
I put my fork dow
n. ‘Well, I do get that. But why should it be my problem?’
‘Because you’re a nice person. Well, you used to be. I was always proud of your kind heart. I’m not sure I really like the person you’re turning into, though.’
It was a bit like being slapped, having your dad say something like that to you. ‘Thanks very much. Shouldn’t you be on my side? Isn’t that something else dads are supposed to do? You know, along with fending off boys. Oh, and not running off with stupid girlfriends, except you conveniently forgot about that one.’ I screwed up my eyes to stop myself crying in front of him. Wasn’t it my so-called kind heart that caused the whole Kerry problem, anyway?
Dad put his head in his hands for a moment. Then he looked up. ‘All right, you’re still raw about what happened with me and your mum. I understand that. But you know, ever since you were a little girl, you found it in you to be fair to people. I was always really proud of that. Your mum says now you hardly talk to her, you spend all your time with that Zoe or else texting or chatting to her over the laptop. You don’t even read much anymore and you used to love your books. She says you never wear anything she buys you, only all this whacky stuff that your new friend likes. She’s worried, Anna. What happened to you?’
I clenched my fists under the table. ‘Bad parenting? A broken home?’
Dad groaned.
And then a weird thing happened. A woman came up to our table and tapped Dad on the shoulder. It was a tall-ish blonde woman, sort of pretty, like a Barbie doll who’d got older and a bit chunkier round the hips. She gave my dad a glossy smile. ‘You’re still eating! Sorry! I didn’t mean to get here quite so early.’
So this was the dreaded Ellie and she was barging in on my dad and me. On purpose, I guessed. Although considering the way she’d barged through our whole family, I suppose this was nothing to her.
‘I didn’t know you were coming at all.’ Dad didn’t sound all that pleased.
‘Neither did I,’ I chipped in.
Dad gave me a warning sort of a look and pulled out a chair for Ellie.
The Misper Page 6