To Julia, who was watching from inside the car, the sight of the entire windscreen covered by Veronica’s skirt was a bizarrely confusing and worrying experience. On the one hand, she could imagine what the other side looked like, and that was quite funny, but on the other hand, the entire windscreen was covered up with a skirt and her mother was still driving.
Julia didn’t know how to drive, but she had a feeling that being able to see where you were going was one of the things that drivers like.
‘Mummy,’ she said, anxiety leaking into her voice.
‘Yes, darling?’ her mum said.
‘She’s still there.’
‘On the bonnet, darling?’ Her mum sounded calm. Eerily so.
‘Yeah. Put the windscreen wipers on.’
‘But it’s not raining.’
‘Just do it.’
Julia’s mother, unsure what else to do with a daughter growing ever more hysterical in the back of the car, flicked the switch that started the wipers wiping.
Rudger clung on.
Eventually the car pulled up in the hospital car park.
‘Now, darling,’ Julia’s mum said as they climbed out of the car. ‘We’ve got to look for a sign that says “Child Psychologist”. Can you help me look?’
They walked off toward the huge building. Its hundreds of windows glinted in the sunshine like an illuminated cliff-face.
Julia looked back at the car one last time and gave a wicked little laugh.
By the time they’d come to a stop Rudger was sore all over and very cold up the skirt. The whole thing would’ve been easier to cope with in trousers. Amanda would definitely have given him trousers, he thought, every time. (Although, thinking that, he realised that, had Amanda known Rudger could travel on the bonnet of the car, she would’ve made him do it by now, just for fun. He made a mental note to never mention it to her, just in case.)
Once Julia and her mum had gone he slid himself off the bonnet.
He wobbled like a boy who’s just got off a runaway roundabout, or been through a washing machine.
He caught a glimpse of himself in the car’s wing mirror and saw the strange red-haired girl he’d become staring back at him.
When the world had finally stopped doing its impression of a rolling South Atlantic seascape, he stood up straight and walked towards the hospital.
Rudger had to keep brushing his hair out of his eyes and pushing his tatty skirt down at each sharp gust of wind. He’d had no practice dressing like this. It took getting used to.
He wondered how long it would last; whether, now Julia had disowned him, he’d change back to normal, or whether he’d be stuck this way forever. Or rather, until he Faded. The tingle had returned.
His first task was to find Amanda. That would be the answer, surely? She’d imagine him back the way he should be.
Rudger walked up to the glass doors at the entrance to the hospital. They slid apart as he approached. That was very welcoming. Very friendly. After all he’d been through, a little friendliness really lifted his spirits.
He walked into the reception area.
There was a counter with a sign saying Information hanging above it. They’d be able to tell him where Amanda was, except…
Except he was imaginary. The person sat behind the desk couldn’t see him.
But that was easy, wasn’t it? All he had to do was sneak behind the counter and find a list of rooms or something. How hard could that be?
In a moment he was stood behind the receptionist, looking over his shoulder at folders full of bits of paper. They didn’t seem to be any help. The hospital was a big place, the lists went on for page after page and Rudger didn’t understand what all the abbreviations and numbers next to people’s names meant.
This was worse than useless.
Maybe if he found a sign to the children’s ward (they’d put all the children together, wouldn’t they?) then he could just search bed by bed. Maybe that would be best.
As he thought that thought he happened to look up.
The automatic doors were sliding open and a man was coming in. Rudger recognised him in an instant. It was the way he ran his hand through his moustache. It was the way he slid his dark glasses up onto the top of his bald head. It was the way he looked exactly like Mr Bunting.
It was Mr Bunting.
Rudger crouched down and ten seconds later heard his voice addressing the receptionist.
‘Shuffleup? Does it have a room?’
‘Shuffleup? Do you have a first name?’
‘Me?’
‘No, the patient. Common name, you know?’
‘Oh. I see. Yes, of course. It’s called…Amanda Shuffleup.’
‘Let me see.’
The receptionist ran his finger down several sheets of paper before he found what he was looking for.
‘Fourth floor,’ he said. ‘Room 117. But visiting hours aren’t until after lunch. It’s family only in the mornings. Or…are you family?’
‘No,’ Mr Bunting said, shaking his head. ‘I’m not family. Just a family friend. This afternoon, you say? 117?’
‘Two o’clock onwards.’
‘Very good. I’ll wait.’
‘Okay,’ the receptionist said, looking down at his paperwork.
After a few seconds he looked up again.
‘Is there something else I can help with?’ he said.
‘Smell?’ Mr Bunting said, sniffing. ‘I smell something. Can you smell something?’
‘Oh, that’s the new cleaners,’ the receptionist said. ‘They only started on Monday and I’ve told them not to use the lemon fresh stuff. Some people are allergic, aren’t they? Peanuts and the like. I mean, this is a hospital, isn’t it?’
‘Mmm,’ said Mr Bunting, ignoring the receptionist and talking to himself now. ‘Not lemons. It’s…nothing.’
After another moment he walked away. Rudger heard the heavy footsteps retreating. There was a biro on the floor by the receptionist’s foot. He picked it up and wrote, ‘4’ and ‘117’ on the back of his hand. Mr Bunting had been helpful.
But why was he looking for Amanda?
And what had he smelt? Was it Rudger? They’d said he could smell Fading. That’s how he’d got what’s-her-name the other day.
Rudger peeked round the edge of the information desk. Mr Bunting was sat on a bench by the doors looking through a newspaper.
Rudger ran, as quietly as he could, over to a door labelled Stairs.
Rudger walked past doors that opened onto colourful wards full of poorly kids and past rooms filled with beeping machines and grim-faced grownups.
In one room a little girl sat on a chair by a bed. She looked up and saw him looking at her. She smiled.
Rudger smiled back.
He almost went in to talk to her, to say something like, ‘Look out for yourself. There’s a man downstairs in the lobby who eats people like me and you,’ but he didn’t want to worry her. Mr Bunting was here for Amanda and that meant, Rudger knew, that Mr Bunting was actually looking for him. He hoped it meant the others were safe for now.
He smiled at the girl again and looked at the room number: 84.
He carried on up the corridor.
It was long and smelt of cleaning chemicals and bandages. Porters pushed trolleys into lifts and a cleaner lazily mopped along the skirting board. None of them saw him.
Still, he had the oddest feeling he was being watched.
He looked behind him.
There was no one there. The little girl hadn’t come out of her room to look at him. No one was looking at him. The only people he could see were all real.
But still, as he walked down the corridor the oddest feeling tickled at the back of his neck.
He counted the doors on either side, watching the numbers grow bigger.
Round a corner and there was a storeroom on the left labelled 109. He hurried on and, four doors down, there was 117.
Rudger opened the door. Amanda’s mum looked up as he
came in.
‘That door again,’ she said, getting up and shutting it behind him.
Amanda was lying in the bed, a small shape under the blankets. There were machines to one side that had little red lights that blinked on and off. Her head was bandaged where she’d hit it and her left arm was in plaster. It must have been broken. Rudger remembered how strangely twisted it had looked when he’d last seen her.
She was sleeping.
He couldn’t tell if his heart had stopped or was beating so fast he couldn’t feel the beats, just a hum like a hummingbird caught in his chest. He was light-headed. Here was Amanda. Here he was and here was Amanda. After days apart, they were together again.
Rudger wept. (Just one tear. Any more and Amanda would take the mickey.)
There was a magazine on the chair by the bed. Amanda’s mum picked it up as she sat back down. She held it flat on her lap but didn’t look at it.
There was a little washbasin on one wall and a large cupboard next to it with a label saying, For patient use only.
They were deep inside the hospital here and the room had no windows, only a poster with a picture of a sunny forest scene pinned up beside the wardrobe. It wasn’t the prettiest of rooms, but it had Amanda in it.
Rudger stood at the foot of her bed and looked at her.
She looked peaceful. The noise of her breathing was the same as the noise she made at night, in her own bed. It reminded him of being in his wardrobe at home. He wished he could ask her mum (Fridge’s Lizzie, he thought with a smile) how she was. He longed to know exactly what had happened.
At the foot of the bed, hanging on the metal frame, was a clipboard with notes on, but it wasn’t this that caught Rudger’s eye. Instead it was the slender sapling growing from the bed-frame’s corner, like a single post of a four-poster bed. It grew straight up, only a metre or so into the air, but it had a couple of thin branches coming off it with a few leaves growing on each of them.
Importantly, it wasn’t real.
Even while she slept, Amanda’s imagination was making her room her own.
Rudger was proud of her. This was why he wanted to be her friend, not John Jenkins’ or Julia’s, but Amanda’s, because she had a real gift.
‘Amanda, darling,’ Amanda’s mum said to her sleeping daughter. ‘I’m going to get a cup of tea. You stay there. I won’t be long. Do you want anything from the café?’
Amanda said nothing.
Her mum smiled a thin smile as if Amanda had said, ‘No thanks, Mum.’
She looked ever so tired, Rudger thought. There were dark bags under her eyes and her hair wasn’t as neat as it usually was. It looked like she’d been here at the hospital all night. He wondered who was at home looking after Oven, the cat.
She went out.
Rudger dropped her magazine on the floor and sat in the chair. It was warm. He put a hand on the white sheet of the bed by Amanda’s shoulder, and brushed his long red hair out of his face with the other.
‘Amanda,’ he said. ‘It’s me, Rudger.’
He said it quietly, so as to not wake her. Which was silly, because he wanted to wake her, just for a moment, just to let her know he was there, that he’d come all this way and that he’d found her at last. Then she could sleep for as long as she wanted.
He prodded her softly.
‘Amanda?’
Had she stirred? Had her breathing changed? Had her eyelid flickered?
He leant over, leant on the bed and put his lips right up next to her ear.
‘Amanda,’ he said, squeezing her hand gently. ‘I’m so sorry I got you hurt. It was all my fault. If you hadn’t imagined me, Mr Bunting would never have chased us and you…you wouldn’t have got knocked down. It’s my fault. All my fault. I’m so sorry. Wake up soon. I miss you.’
It felt good to have said all that. It was a weight off his shoulders, though he’d have to say it again when she was actually listening.
He sat back in the chair and looked around the room.
One corner was darker than all the others.
It looked odd.
And then there was a flicker and a crackle and the lights went out.
Although the lights in Amanda’s room had gone out, there was still a shaft of light shining through the window in the door.
Rudger saw the girl, the dark-haired silent girl, Mr Bunting’s ice-fingered friend, as she stepped out of her cloak of shadows into the rectangle of light.
He was on his feet in an instant, leaping to the foot of the bed, putting himself between Amanda and the girl, which was both brave and foolish, he realised, since it wasn’t Amanda she was here for, but he didn’t care.
The girl tilted her head to one side with a bony clicking sound and stared at him as if she didn’t know who or what he was. He was, he remembered, dressed as a girl himself, all in pink.
She sniffed twice, then lowered her head and nodded. He was what she’d been waiting for after all.
What was Rudger to do?
‘Amanda!’ he shouted. ‘Amanda, wake up!’
There was no movement behind him.
And then the girl pounced, fingers out like talons (even the finger he’d bitten off in the alley was there, he noticed, stunted, stubby, but already re-nailed like a claw), and she was on him, hissing and grasping and struggling with him, and all the time staring her blank-eyed stare.
He banged back against the bed, her cold hands gripping him.
Hospital beds have wheels and someone had obviously left the brakes off on Amanda’s. Each time they knocked into it, as they struggled, it rolled backwards and bumped against the wall.
Anyone in the corridor outside would have seen a bed banging itself against a wall, in the half-dark. No wonder people believe in ghosts, Rudger thought. But ghosts were of no use to him. What he really needed was help, and help wasn’t coming.
He knew what was coming though, what must be coming, what was almost certainly on its way up the stairs even now, never mind visiting hours and hospital rules: something big, something bald and something hungry.
The bed banged a third time against the wall and there was a groan from behind him. A small one. Then a cough and a moan.
‘Oh,’ groaned Amanda in a small, sleepy voice.
‘Amanda!’ Rudger shouted, a sudden bubble of hope bobbing up inside him.
The girl, clutching him coldly, hands like knots of seaweed, hissed in his face. Her breath was dead. It was death.
He twisted enough to see the outline of Amanda sitting up in bed. She was touching her bandaged head with her good arm.
‘Amanda, help!’ he cried, between breaths.
But she didn’t hear him. She didn’t see him. She didn’t see either of them.
With one hand he gripped the slender sapling, and heaved himself up so his backside was resting on the frame of the metal bedstead. He was able to lift his feet up and get them against the girl’s chest. With all his strength he half-pushed, half-kicked her off him, knocking the clipboard to the floor in the process.
Amanda yawned.
Where was she? She looked around blearily and yawned again.
It didn’t look like her bedroom. It didn’t smell like home. She’d been having the strangest dreams.
Then the bed rocked. There was a clatter as something fell to the floor.
This wasn’t normal.
She felt light-headed and groggy, she ached all over, was thirsty, hungry and ever so tired, but when the bed shook again she blinked away some of the sleep, pushed the pain to one side and sat up straight.
She looked around.
She guessed she was in a hospital. Her left arm was in a plaster cast and throbbed dully. Her mum’s coat was draped on the back of the chair by her bed. Her head ached terribly. She’d been in an accident of some sort. She remembered running and there being a car. A hospital was the right place to wake up.
None of that surprised her. But there was a tree growing from the foot of the bed. A sapling, she t
hought. And it was wobbling. That was odd. The way it wobbled like that, as if it had been caught in a breeze, was weird because there was no breeze.
It was a pretty tree, she thought, and as she watched it grew taller, pushing aside ceiling tiles and letting daylight into the room.
She felt better with the addition of a little light and wondered where her mum was.
And then the door opened.
Mr Bunting shut the door behind him.
As he glanced at the imaginary tree he sneered and it withered. The leaves shrivelled on the branches and the branches wizened and drooped.
‘You’re awake, little girl,’ he said, his moustache fluffling with each word. He looked round the room. ‘But not, I think, awake.’
‘Who are you?’ Amanda asked. ‘Are you a doctor?’
‘No!’ Rudger shouted. ‘He’s not a doctor!’
He was still struggling with the girl. She’d twisted around and managed to bend one of his arms up behind his back. She’d wound his long red hair tight in her other fist. The fight was more or less over. He was caught.
She pulled him backwards, into the middle of the room, and offered him to Mr Bunting like a cat offers a twitching bird to its owner.
The man held out his hand and touched Rudger’s cheek.
‘Are you sure this is him?’ he asked.
A putrid hiss escaped the girl’s lips.
‘I see. Well, Rudger the Pink, you’ve been a nuisance. Given us a right run around and about, haven’t you? See this?’ He pointed to a graze on his forehead. ‘Falling over your badly-mannered stinking cat, that was. You hurt me, little Rudger. But, my dear little pink-frocked friend, even luck has a date of expiration, and guess what? Yours is today.’
Rudger knew what would happen next, he wanted to run, to fight free and leap away, but the girl had him frozen to the spot.
‘No,’ he said.
It took most of his strength to say the single word. The girl’s ghoulish grip had drained all his energy. He was beaten. Finally done for. For good.
The Imaginary Page 10