Jane Blonde: Twice the Spylet

by Jill Marshall

  Is it still Easter? thought Janey as she let go of her SPIV. She really had no idea what day it was, and if breakfast hadn’t been mentioned she wouldn’t have been too clear what time it was either. But Chloe was in the kitchen, rather pale but moving steadfastly around the room.

  ‘Two more for breakfast, Chloe!’ Janey smiled at her from the doorway.

  Chloe spun around. ‘Janey! That’s nice. You brought your cat. Does he have a full breakfast too?’

  ‘No, the other one’s for Alfie.’

  ‘Oh, sorry! What must you think? Full breakfast for a cat! I’m ridiculous sometimes. Ridiculous!’ Chloe shook her head as her eyes filled with tears.

  Janey stared at her, perplexed. She had to help her sister toughen up, somehow. ‘You’re not ridiculous, Chloe.’

  ‘But I’m not like you. Sorry, Janey. I won’t cry,’ said Chloe, but her face remained pinched as she fed bread into the toaster and slopped water into the vast teapot.

  Janey had no chance to say anything more as her father entered the room with Alfie. They both looked tired – the ‘man’s work’ must have been every bit as hard as her dad had suggested. ‘Alfie, I know you’ve sort of seen her before, but . . . this is my twin sister, Chloe.’

  ‘Hi,’ said Alfie shortly. He sat down next to Abe and waited for Chloe to put his plate in front of him, then wolfed down his food as the family members ate theirs at a more leisurely pace. At least Abe had stopped firing questions at him, thought Janey, which was just as well as he was obviously too ravenous to talk. She forked her food down, wondering why the mood was so sombre. Bert had gone off to see a potential sheep buyer for another breeding programme, and it was so quiet around the table that Janey quite missed him.

  ‘Sorry we’re not very chatty, Janey,’ said her father after a while. ‘We’ve got a big contract coming up, the biggest we’ve had – a couple of hundred sheep, all at once. It’ll set us up for life.’ And he winked at her so that she could see she was included in the plans for the rest of his life. Janey couldn’t help but smile back, although she did wonder when he planned to mention her mother. He’d mentioned Alfie’s after all.

  Much, much later in the day, when all the sheep had been inspected and moved down to the lower paddock in which Janey had first seen them, Janey cornered Alfie. He’d been avoiding her all day, and she was more than a little hurt. ‘Do you think my dad’s acting a bit weird?’

  Alfie shrugged. ‘Nope.’

  ‘He hasn’t asked about my mum yet, even though he asked about yours.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘Well, he wants us all to be a family together again, but that has to include my mum.’

  ‘Sure. He’s just waiting for the right time.’

  ‘I suppose so,’ said Janey. Alfie stared at the sheep he was grooming. ‘Do you know what else? G-Mamma says that this wool is merino sheep mixed with . . . human hair.’

  ‘Yeah, right,’ said Alfie flatly.

  It was hard going getting any response out of him. He really must be tired. ‘I haven’t seen Dad on his own yet. Did you ask about the email?’

  ‘It’s genuine, OK. He SPIraled to Scotland and sent the message just as a reminder for people to be cautious.’

  ‘What? “Be careful, spies disappearing” is just a general warning?’

  At this, Alfie threw down his brush. ‘Not “disappearing”, just “disappear”. In general, spies have to be careful. That’s all. Honestly, Janey, am I supposed to cross-examine people, like . . . all the time?’

  ‘Um, yes.’ Janey hadn’t seen Alfie like this before. He could be pretty sarcastic, and regularly got into spats with his mum, but he never really got wound up like this. ‘We’re spies, remember?’

  ‘Spylets. That’s what we are.’ Alfie shook his head angrily. ‘Little spies. Abe is a super-SPI, and my boss, and I respect him. So I’m not going to snitch on him, to you or anyone else.’

  ‘But I don’t want you to sni– He’s my dad, and I love him more than you do!’ Before Janey knew what was happening, tears were flowing down her cheeks for the first time since she’d become a Spylet. She’d had a real row with her best friend, and got into a competition about who loved her dad more. She couldn’t believe it! But of course she was the one to whom he meant the most – he might be Alfie’s beloved boss, but he was her father. Family. Flesh and blood. Why was Alfie acting like this?

  ‘You two,’ said a deep voice suddenly, sounding out a warning note. Abe was leaning against the fence, watching them curiously. ‘Not falling out there, are you?’

  Alfie spoke first, concentrating hard on the back of the sheep before him. ‘Course not. Janey’s my best friend,’ he said in a flat voice that didn’t sound very convincing.

  ‘Janey?’ said Abe.

  She looked at her father, unable to say anything, eyes misty with tears, and the beginnings of a runny nose which reminded her of the SPInal cord she had stuffed up her nostril. Right at that moment she really wished for one of Alfie’s stack of handkerchiefs.

  ‘All right,’ said her father. ‘Time we wrapped up anyway. Why don’t you go ahead and let Chloe know we’ll be in soon, Janey? Alfie can help me do these last few sheep. Use your Fleet-feet if you like – Bert’s still out of town, so you won’t get seen by a non-spy.’

  ‘But, Dad,’ said Janey, trying to hold back the tears, ‘I want to help. What did you mean by your message? Spies disappearing? Which spies?’

  At this, Abe looked at Alfie, who shrugged. ‘You told me earlier, remember? Spies always have to be careful, because they are known to disappear.’

  Abe nodded slowly. ‘That’s it, Janey. Just as Alfie says. You should listen to him, you know.’

  ‘Right,’ said Janey, choked. She did listen to him. She always listened to him when he was being her friend. But not when he was sucking up to her dad like this!

  She dashed back to the house, using the speed of the Fleet-feet to pound out her anger on the parched grass. At the door, she stopped and called out for Chloe.

  ‘In my room,’ came the reply.

  Chloe was at her dressing table, combing out her thin beige hair. She looked at Janey in the mirror. ‘Oh dear. You look all hot and bothered.’

  ‘I am a bit.’

  ‘Well, good job you have a sister now.’ Chloe stood up and gestured to Janey to sit in her seat. ‘Let me brush your hair again. It’s really relaxing.’

  Janey felt a sudden rush of warmth for her twin. It was nice to have a girl to talk to and do girly things with, particularly if Alfie was going to start turning on her too. ‘Thanks, Chloe.’

  ‘No problem.’ Chloe removed the silver band holding Janey’s blonde ponytail in place and began to pull the wide brush through her hair in long fluid strokes. In no time at all the brush had established a calm, soothing rhythm. Brushhhh, pause, brushhhhh, pause, brushhhhh . . .

  It was quite hypnotic. Why was I upset? thought Janey, yawning. Why did I cry? Jane Blonde doesn’t cry. Janey Brown cries, but not Jane Blonde. Chloe cries too, but not Jane . . . She looked up at the mirror to see if her eyes were red, but the reflection swam in front of her. Chloe was looking rather sickly and wan again, but Janey blinked the image away. Jane Blonde never cries, she thought. It was a comforting thought. Never cries . . . She could just go to sleep . . . Jane Blonde go to sleep . . .

  And just as she was about to nod off, she heard a tiny whisper, a familiar voice, Abe’s voice, her father’s voice, creeping into a tiny space inside her head: ‘Jane Blonde, I despise you. Despise you!’ and she felt a terrible pain in her legs, then fell to the floor.

  cones and chloe

  It was Trouble, leaping on to her lap and sinking his talons into her thighs, who brought Janey round from her dream-like state, although in reality the dream had been more like a nightmare. Janey gulped. If her father hated her, it would be unbearable. For a while she lay curled up on the floor, staring into the hypnotic green eyes of her cat as he nudged her gently with his plushy nose. />
  Something was wrong, she knew it. The voice couldn’t have been a real voice but it was a symptom of something – some niggling doubt in her mind – that was making her very uncomfortable in the small kernel of emotions that sat inside her chest telling her what was right and what was wrong: her spy instincts. What was going on? Of course her father didn’t hate her. But he was very distracted, and now her best friend was acting strangely, and her sister was sickening for something. Suddenly, at the thought of her twin, Janey jumped to her feet. What had happened to Chloe? One minute she’d been there brushing Janey’s hair, and the next she was gone.

  ‘Come on, Trouble,’ said Janey. Together they ran through the house, checking the bathroom, the kitchen, even her father’s spotlessly tidy bedroom and Bert’s little suite of rooms at the back of the kitchen. There was nobody around. Checking that Trouble was still at her side, Janey ran out on to the veranda. Still nobody. Across the patch of land separating the house from the outbuildings, one small square of light was etched on to the grass. ‘The Spylab! Of course.’

  Janey sprinted across to the door of the laboratory, Trouble trailing in her wake. As they got closer to the door, however, their journey became much harder. A strong wind had whipped up out of nowhere; sandy earth, tufts of grass and the odd knot of sheep’s wool flew around Janey’s head. She felt like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. ‘Crikey, Trouble,’ she gasped, leaning into the wind to try to reach the laboratory door. ‘A hurricane. We’d better warn everyone.’

  Just as the angry gust of wind died away she reached the barn door that led into the Spylab and leaned on the doorframe, catching her breath. She’d been wrong about the light. There was nobody in the Spylab either. What there was, however, was an enormous funnel that had descended from the ceiling; an immense circle in the barn roof had been pulled into a point towards the floor. It floated there like an enormous metal ice-cream cone. The point of the cone hovered a few feet above the floor in the middle of the barn-sized Spylab. The top of the cone, where the ice cream should be, was suspended beneath a giant disk of open night air, and swirling in the hole in the roof was a whirlwind of grass and wool. Suddenly the wind dropped, the circling debris dropped down into the funnel and all at once the night sky was visible to Janey, standing below.

  Janey gasped. She’d never seen a sky like it. It was so black it was as though there was nothing there at all – just a void, as pitch dark and empty as the pupil of an eye. Across it lay a spangled road, glittering white with little swirls of misty cloud trailing along it. It looked to Janey like a path to the heavens. ‘Wow,’ she whispered.

  ‘It’s the Milky Way,’ said her father’s voice. Janey jumped. She’d been completely lost and open-mouthed with awe at the beauty of the night sky, but now she focused on the direction from which her father had spoken. He was leaning on the railing at the door high up in the wall where the SPIral staircase led in from the outside. At his side stood Chloe, smiling at Janey’s wonderment. ‘It’s amazing, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘Like you could just jump out into the galaxy.’

  Janey smiled back. ‘It’s so . . . beautiful!’

  ‘So you see why I like it here,’ said Abe, guiding Chloe down the stairs. She looked much better than before, but still slightly shaky on her thin legs, like a newborn foal. They crossed the barn and stood before Janey, Abe looking directly into her eyes. ‘It’s everything I could wish for. You see why I stay?’

  Janey nodded slowly. ‘Yes, I do see. It’s wonderful. But I’m not sure . . .’

  ‘What, Janey?’ he prompted gently.

  ‘I’m still not sure you’ll be happy, giving up spying for good.’

  ‘Ah.’ Abe frowned for a moment, his eyes flashing towards Chloe and back to Janey. ‘Well, spying isn’t everything, you know.’

  Chloe looked at their father uncomfortably, as if she’d just done or was about to say something wrong. Finally, after a struggle with herself, she spoke. ‘At least you got to be a Spylet, Janey. I just get to be . . . this.’ She spread her thin hands wide, looking pathetically at Janey.

  That girl could really do with a Wower, thought Janey. It would be good for her to experience the blast of invincibility that surged through Janey’s limbs whenever the Wower’s robotic hands and miraculous droplets got to work on her. ‘You’re not so bad,’ she said gently. Suddenly she had a thought. ‘I could train Chloe, Dad! Then she could be a Spylet! For a bit, at least.’

  Abe’s eyes sparked briefly. ‘I’m sure Chloe would make an excellent Spylet. After all, it’s in her genes every bit as much as it is in yours, Janey. But that doesn’t fit in with my plans, does it?’

  ‘Suppose not,’ said Janey slowly. Her twin raised her eyebrows in a gesture that said to Janey: ‘Thanks for trying’. She gave her a small half-smile back, then looked up as the high door in the wall was suddenly thrown back on its hinges.

  ‘I almost forgot!’ Abe took Janey’s hand quickly and led her across the Spylab floor. ‘There’s another important person who won’t need to be left behind any more if you’re not doing any spying, isn’t there? I thought you’d feel more comfortable if you were here together.’

  ‘M-Mum?’ Janey was so delighted she thought she might burst. So he hadn’t forgotten about her mother after all! In fact, quite the opposite: he’d gone back home, explained everything to Jean and persuaded her to join them all in Australia. ‘Fantastic!’

  She jumped on to the bottom step excitedly, ready to vault up them to give her mother a huge hug, but the person who stepped through the door was not her mother. The platform at the top of the stairs creaked loudly as a large body, flamboyantly dressed in a vast hat with dangling corks and a bouffant yellow sundress, wriggled through the narrow door.

  ‘Hullll-lo Australia!’ shouted G-Mamma as if she was addressing a capacity crowd at a stadium. ‘Yo, spinny twinnies and your spy-licious daddy-o. G-Mamma’s in da house!’

  And Janey, quelling the initial stab of disappointment that it wasn’t her mother at the top of the stairs, threw back her head and laughed aloud. Her friends and most of her family were there with her – her father, her new twin, Alfie and now G-Mamma. She didn’t need to worry about spies disappearing. They were all appearing, right next to her. Her dad was doing everything he could to make her feel comfortable, at ease, wanted. And pretty soon, she was sure, her mum would be there too, and the family could start out. Together. Properly.

  sheep to keep

  By breakfast the next morning, G-Mamma had commandeered Bert’s little set of rooms at the end of the building as her own and eaten most of the contents of the humongous double-fronted fridge. She’d also given Janey a tight smile as the Spylet took out a portable Wower-head she found in G-Mamma’s case. ‘Oh yes. That. Thought you might like to get out of that SPIsuit,’ she said, with a delicate wrinkle of her nose.

  Janey had got so used to the suit that she’d stopped thinking about it, but now that G-Mamma mentioned it she realized she had been encased in silver Lycra for a very long time. She’d even slept in it the previous night, after Chloe had taken her back to her room, as Abe had been quite insistent that there wasn’t enough water for her to de-Wow. ‘Dad didn’t want us to use too much water.’

  ‘I won’t tell. Use my shower,’ replied G-Mamma grandly, ignoring the harrumphing sounds from across the table where Bert was pretending to read the paper. Every so often his eyes would dart to G-Mamma and fix on her in a puzzled fashion as he tried to work out how this strange woman had managed to winkle him out of his home and into a camp bed in one of the barns in less time than it would take him to shear a sheep.

  Janey noticed the affronted noises and decided not to offend Bert any further. ‘I’ll do it later,’ she said quietly, ‘and for now I can just borrow some of Chloe’s clothes again.’

  ‘Fine.’ G-Mamma swiped the last two pieces of toast and buttered then lavishly, then sandwiched her entire meal between them. Janey, Alfie and Bert watched, amazed, as the great chunk of breakfast h
eaded for G-Mamma’s mouth.

  ‘G-Mamma,’ said Janey, pointing at the sandwich, ‘did you know you’ve still got the plate in there?’

  At this the SPI:KE stopped, peered into the small loaf before her and extracted the white crockery from it. ‘Well, there’s a thing. Could have broken my teeth! And did you ever see such a wonderful set of gnashers?’ She curled back her lips at Bert, who threw down his paper and backed away from the table as if a gargoyle had just come to life in front of him.

  ‘Crazy Sheila,’ he muttered to himself as he left the room. ‘What kind of name is G-Mamma, anyway?’

  ‘Cheek!’ said G-Mamma loudly. ‘What kind of name is Bert?’

  ‘Actually, he’s got a point.’ Janey carried plates over to the sink, where Chloe was elbow deep in suds. ‘He doesn’t know any of us are spies, so we’re all using our normal names. Perhaps you should use your other name too?’

  G-Mamma burped extravagantly. ‘What other name?’

  ‘You know, your normal name,’ said Janey.

  ‘This is my normal name.’

  Alfie spoke suddenly. He’d been so quiet that Janey had almost forgotten he was there. ‘Normal name, not spy name,’ he said tersely. ‘Alfie Halliday, not Halo. Janey, not Blonde.’

  ‘Oh.’ G-Mamma stroked her chins thoughtfully. ‘I see. Soooooo . . . How about you call me Rosie from now on, but just in front of Bert? Bertie Bert-Bert Botty-Bert . . .’

  Janey threw some soap suds at her. ‘Don’t, G-Mamma. He’s actually quite nice. And he loves his animals.’

  ‘Aah, how sweet,’ drawled Alfie sarcastically. ‘I’m going to go look for Abe.’ He scraped back his chair and drifted out of the room before Janey had a chance to ask if he’d wait for her.

  ‘And I’m going to do some laundry.’ Chloe put away the last of the breakfast dishes. ‘Shall I wash your SPIsuit, Janey?’

  Janey looked down at it, surprised. She’d never really thought about how it stayed clean – just assumed that all that jumping in and out of the Wower kept it looking good. It was strange that she shouldn’t even think about it, while Chloe was mumsy enough to actually wash it. Sometimes they weren’t terribly alike at all. Janey nodded quickly. ‘I’ll bring it in to you in a minute.’