‘Duh!’
Rudger didn’t get any breakfast from Julia’s mum.
She didn’t seem to be as taken with him as Amanda’s mum had been. She’d always treated him nicely, said ‘Good morning’ to him whether he was in the room or not. Julia’s mother wasn’t like that.
While Julia was sat at the breakfast bar eating her breakfast, her mum was in the front room on the telephone.
‘I think she’s banged her head,’ Rudger could hear her saying. ‘She’s seeing things. I need an appointment urgently. I’m worried it might get worse.’
Rudger, or Veronica, sat on a stool at the breakfast bar next to Julia.
‘Julia,’ he said.
‘What?’ she said between mouthfuls of cornflakes.
‘Do you know about Amanda?’
‘What about her?’
‘Do you know she got knocked down?’
‘Knocked down?’
‘Yes, the other day. It was at the swimming pool.’
‘Knocked down? What, by a dog or something?’
‘No. By a car. In the car park.’
Julia put her spoon down.
‘No way!’ she said. ‘What an idiot. Who gets knocked down by a car in a car park? They’re parked.’
Rudger stared at her for a moment. He couldn’t tell if she was making a joke or not. If she was making a joke, he didn’t think it a very funny one. On the other hand, if she wasn’t making a joke, then she wasn’t being very sensitive.
‘No. It was moving,’ he said. ‘We were running away—’
‘I don’t want to know,’ Julia interrupted, holding her hand up to silence him. Then she leant in closer and added, in a whisper, ‘Is she…?’
‘No,’ said Rudger. ‘No, she’s not dead. I thought she was, but the cat told me—’
Julia held her hand up again.
‘Okay, Veronica,’ she said. ‘I know you’re new here, but I think we should set some rules. For a start, in this house we never begin a sentence with the words, “The cat told me…” Nobody says that. It’s mad. I don’t want a weird imaginary friend who sees talking cats. No way. Secondly, I’m pleased Amanda’s not dead, course I am, but can you please stop going on about her. You told me you’re my friend now. If you keep going on about how good everything was with her, then I’ll stop believing in you. Understand?’
Rudger was a little taken aback by this. Amanda had always said nice things about Julia, she said they had fun at school together and sometimes swapped sandwiches at lunchtime. But the Julia he was seeing told a very different story.
‘I need you,’ Rudger said. ‘I need you to take me to the hospital. I’ve got to see her. Amanda.’
Julia folded her arms. She shook her head.
Then she knocked her bowl to the floor.
It shattered in a puddle of milk and cornflakes and the spoon rattled across the tiles.
Her mum rushed in, banging through the door.
‘Darling? What happened?’
Julia screwed her face up tight and said, ‘It was Veronica. She did it.’ She pointed at Rudger for good measure.
Rudger was used to being blamed for accidents and for things which weren’t exactly accidents but which shouldn’t have turned out quite how they had. But whenever Amanda dobbed him in she had a twinkle in her eye, she did it with crossed fingers and a wink.
Julia’s eyes, on the other hand, twinkled with nothing but malice.
Amanda’s mum would listen patiently to her daughter’s finger-pointing and tell her to get the dustpan and brush or write a sorry letter to the neighbour and that would be the end of it, but Julia’s mum, like Julia, didn’t seem to understand exactly how having an imaginary friend worked.
‘Oh darling,’ she cried, and pulled her daughter to her bosom, patting her back and kissing the top of her head. ‘You poor thing. You poor, poor thing.’
The Radiche household seemed, to Rudger’s mind, to be a rather highly-strung place, with too much useless emotion sloshing round and about.
And coming here didn’t seem to have got him any closer to Amanda. In fact, after the way Julia had spoken to him, he felt further away than ever.
After the breakfast things had been swept up and the milk mopped (by a quiet woman in a pinny who came in two mornings a week to clean) Rudger followed Julia upstairs.
‘Today,’ she was saying to him, ‘is washing day. We have to get all the dirty clothes and clean them.’
‘Not the other way round?’ Rudger said, trying to make a little joke.
Julia stopped halfway up the stairs and turned to look at him.
‘Veronica Sandra Juliet Radiche. You are the most stupid girl I’ve ever met. Of course not the other way round. Who takes clean clothes and makes them dirty? I do wish you’d think before you speak.’
Rudger, who had never dreamt he’d have so many names, did think about it for a moment and said, ‘But if nobody ever takes clean clothes and makes them dirty, then why do we have to clean them?’
‘Because,’ said Julia, in the way that made the one word sound like the end of the conversation. ‘Just because,’ she added to drive her point home, before turning round and stomping the rest of the way up the stairs.
What surprised Rudger, when he followed, was that instead of emptying a laundry basket and carrying the clothes down to the washing machine, Julia sat down in front of a huge dolls’ house and pulled open the walls.
Inside were sat, neatly and upright at tables and in chairs, a dozen dolls of various shapes and sizes.
Amanda had had some dolls, but hers had never looked like this. Julia, it seemed, had never cut her dolls’ hair with scissors or glued tin-foil to their faces to make them look more like robots. It seemed such a shame.
‘Veronica,’ Julia was saying. ‘Pay attention. We’ll make a pile here,’ (she pointed to an area of carpet) ‘of the dirty clothes. You start on that side and I’ll start here.’
She carefully removed the first doll and began to undress it, laying the clothes out neatly on the bit of carpet she’d indicated.
Rudger sat down next to her, feeling the rough carpet tickling his legs. He shifted himself and tucked his skirt underneath him. If she had to have a girl for a friend, he grumbled to himself, well, he could just about live with that, but why not make him a girl with trousers? How hard would that have been?
He pulled a doll out of the dolls’ house by its feet.
‘No! No! Be careful,’ Julia said, getting flustered. ‘Brunhilde doesn’t like being upside down. Careful.’
Rudger set her down the right way up. Carefully.
He looked at the dress she was wearing.
‘This looks clean,’ he said.
‘Give it here.’
Julia held out her hand.
Rudger handed her the doll.
Julia looked at it closely, sniffed it and gave it back.
‘Dirty,’ she said.
After five minutes they had a pile of what Julia called dirty clothes, which to Rudger just looked like clothes, and a dolls’ house full of naked dolls.
‘Now to wash them!’ Julia said, stomping out of her bedroom towards the bathroom.
Rudger followed, a pile of clothes in each hand.
This wasn’t the morning he’d hoped for.
On the one hand, he was safe from Mr Bunting. Julia believed in him (well, in Veronica, at least) and he wasn’t Fading.
On the other hand, he was no closer to finding Amanda. Julia, who he’d thought would be a direct line to his friend, had turned out to be a dead end. She had no intention of going to the hospital and if she didn’t go, then Rudger couldn’t go either.
He had to come up with a plan. A new plan. An additional plan.
He tried to think while they stood at the bathroom washbasin washing dolls’ clothes in soap powder and cold water.
‘Mum doesn’t like me to use the hot water,’ Julia explained when Rudger asked. ‘You can burn yourself and it wastes electricity.�
��
How do you get to go to hospital? Rudger thought, as he perched on the toilet lid and hung the miniature clothes on a clothes line that dangled across the bath.
Amanda went there in an ambulance, didn’t she? And the ambulance comes when there’s an accident.
But Rudger didn’t think he could have an accident. Not the sort that would take him to hospital. For a start someone has to see you in order to phone for the ambulance, and for another thing you have to really hurt yourself, and he didn’t think he could do that.
He wasn’t real, and being hurt was something peculiar to real people, he reckoned. He’d been knocked down at the same time as Amanda, by the same car, but he’d just rolled across the ground and stood up with nothing more than a bruised knee and a scuffed elbow, and even those had vanished before he’d really thought about them.
For an imaginary to get hurt, their real friend would have to imagine them being hurt, just like Julia was imagining him in a skirt and with red hair. And that’s not the sort of thing friends do.
There was one way though, he thought. A plan had just popped into his head. It was dangerous, it could go terribly wrong, but if it worked, if it didn’t backfire on him, then it would get him to the hospital.
But could he do it? Did he dare? Should he? It was exactly the sort of thing friends shouldn’t do to one another, but he felt he had no other choice.
‘Julia?’ Julia’s mum shouted up the stairs.
‘Yes?’ Julia shouted back.
‘Is…um…is Veronica still there?’
‘Yes, Mum. We’re in the bathroom.’
‘Um…what are you doing, darling?’
‘What do you think we’re doing?’ Julia shouted with a sneer. ‘I said, “We’re in the bathroom.”’
Her mum went away.
Rudger looked at his plan again. He looked at the row of little dolls’ clothes dripping into the bath and then he looked at Julia. This was what she did for fun, he told himself. The sooner he got back to Amanda the happier they’d all be. It was the only way.
‘What are we doing now?’ he asked. Julia thought for a second, drying her hands on a towel.
‘A glass of squash, I think. After all this hard work.’
She walked out onto the landing. Rudger followed.
He looked his plan in the eye one last time, hoped he was doing the right thing and said, ‘Sorry,’ under his breath.
As Julia got to the top of the stairs, he hooked one of his feet round her ankle, gave her shoulders a shove with his hands and sent her flying.
Julia tripped at the top of the stairs and plunged forwards into empty air.
‘Arrgghhh!’ she shouted as she fell.
At that moment, as if luck were on her side, her mother walked into the hallway, phone in hand, saying, ‘Darling, put your shoes on, I’ve—’
Faced by the sudden surprising sight of her daughter plummeting towards her, she dropped the phone and instinctively flung her arms out.
Julia landed on top of her and the pair of them fell backwards, not falling over, but banging into the front door.
‘What happened? Are you okay?’ her mum asked when she got her breath back.
‘Veronica tripped me,’ Julia said, almost in tears.
‘That’s it,’ her mum said calmly, but firmly. ‘I was just saying, I’ve managed to get you an appointment with a special sort of doctor.’
‘A doctor? I’m not ill. I don’t need a doctor.’
‘Oh, darling,’ her mum said, stroking a strand of hair away from Julia’s face. ‘You don’t know what you’re saying. If you’re still seeing this Veronica, if you really think she tripped you up just now, then I’m afraid you’re going to have to see him.’
‘I hate doctors,’ Julia said, pushing herself away from her mum. ‘They smell funny and have cold hands.’
Her mum picked her phone up.
‘Nevertheless, darling, we’ve got an appointment at the hospital in forty-five minutes.’
‘But…’
‘Put your shoes on.’
At the top of the stairs Rudger felt awful.
As soon as he’d hooked his foot round her ankle he realised that his plan was wrong, but it was too late then to stop his hands from pushing her. The plan wasn’t wrong in the sense that it might not work, but wrong in the sense that it made him feel bad inside.
As much as he needed to get to the hospital to find Amanda, he shouldn’t have to hurt someone else to get there. What would Amanda have said about it? She’d’ve been mad at him. Julia was her friend, and she’d be upset if Rudger hurt her.
He was just thankful that Julia’s mum had appeared when she had. It made him feel slightly better.
Then he heard what her mum had said. She was taking Julia to the hospital. This was it. This was the chance he’d been looking for. It had worked after all!
He watched Julia dragging her heels as her mum opened the front door.
‘Mum,’ she complained.
He crept downstairs.
Julia saw and gave him a dirty look. ‘You tripped me,’ she said.
Her mum pushed the door to and whispered, ‘Is she still here, darling?’
‘She’s on the stairs. I think she wants to come with us.’
‘Oh,’ her mum said. ‘I suppose the doctor might want to see her too.’
‘No,’ Julia said, gritting her teeth and turning away. ‘She can stay here. I hate her.’
Rudger felt the faintest of tingles in his left foot as she said the words. He recognised it. He’d felt it before. It was the first hint of the sort of faint tingle that came before you started Fading.
He really wasn’t very good at this ‘being an imaginary friend’ business, he thought.
He’d messed it all up. Entirely.
Julia slammed the door behind her before Rudger could get through it.
He pulled at the handle, but Julia’s mum had locked it from the outside. He was trapped indoors.
He ran through the living room to the kitchen. There was a back door there. He’d seen it when they’d had breakfast, but when he tried the handle he found it was locked too.
The windows?
He’d have to climb up onto the work surface and then move that vase of flowers out of the way, but, never mind all that, they looked like the sort of windows that locked anyway and he didn’t know where the key was.
It wasn’t worth wasting time trying to look for it. Julia and her mum would probably be in the car by now and in a minute they’d be on their way.
He looked around. He’d come so close. Finally someone was going to the hospital, but it wasn’t him. He could’ve screamed with frustration. Instead, he kicked the stool he’d sat on at breakfast.
It fell over and rolled across the floor.
Rudger looked at where it had ended up, next to the back door and he noticed something he hadn’t seen when he was trying the handle.
There was a cat flap.
He knelt down and pushed his head through.
The flap was unlocked, which was a good thing, and his head was out in the fresh air of the garden, but his shoulders wouldn’t go through.
Somewhere nearby he heard the sound of an engine starting up, a car’s engine turning over.
Then there was that tingle in his feet, that tingle in his hands. If he was being ignored, being unbelieved by Julia, maybe he could use it to his advantage. He thought of Amanda, tried to remember what the feeling had been like before he had met Zinzan, when he had believed she’d gone and left him alone in the world. How soft, how wispy he’d felt then.
He had to think she was dead, had to believe Julia hated him. He tried to remember Emily, how she’d gone too, but found he couldn’t quite remember what she’d looked like. She was Fading in his memory, just like she had in everyone else’s.
There was a smell of gunpowder in the air, the whiff you get from firing a cap gun ten times in a row, but no one had been shot.
Rudger was Fadin
g.
He twisted and pushed and his shoulders grew soft.
The plastic rim of the cat flap felt like sand, like dust, and with a sudden fluff he slipped through, out into the garden.
Hitting the ground didn’t hurt.
He picked himself up. He felt so sad. His heart ached. He just wanted to sit down and let it all go, but then he heard the sound of wheels on gravel, the noise of a car moving off, and he remembered what he was doing this for.
He stood up straight, the crazy paving beneath his feet grew hard again, and he ran. He pulled the gate open and sprinted through.
There was Julia’s car, reversing away from him. He could see her mother looking over her shoulder, watching where she was going, and he could see Julia in the back seat pointing at him. She was saying something he couldn’t make out.
There was no way, he realised, Julia was going to let him in the car, so he did the only thing he could think of.
He ran at it, leapt up onto the bonnet and grabbed hold of the windscreen wipers.
Julia’s mother couldn’t see him, of course, so he wasn’t blocking her view of the road, but Julia could. She was pointing and shouting from the back seat.
Rudger couldn’t make out the words.
He knew one thing though. While he clung there on the bonnet, straight in front of her, there was no way Julia could not believe in him. He felt more real than he had all day: the hot metal under his chest, the cool glass against his knuckles.
And then they drove off, and the wind, which had been of no concern, suddenly became of no small concern.
Rudger had never ridden on the bonnet of a car before, and he had never worn a skirt before either. Amanda always encouraged him to be open to new experiences and this morning he was getting two of them.
The wind whipped his skirt up over his head, like a blanket covering the whole windscreen, exposing his legs, and whatever knickers Julia had imagined for him, to the whole world. Thank goodness, he thought, for not being real. (And thank goodness she’d imagined him having any knickers at all.) This could have been incredibly embarrassing, instead of just, as it was, very embarrassing.
The Imaginary Page 9