Deep Secret

“I didn’t say that, Maree,” she said. “But I do know I only started to learn to drive after I passed my test.”

“That’s what they all say, but it’s different for me,” I said. “I practised beforehand and ruined your fun.”

“Maree, dear,” she said. “I know you love breaking all the rules, but you really are no different from everyone else. Cars are dangerous.”

Well, we argued, Janine all sugary sweetness and light and me getting more and more inclined to bite. That’s Janine’s way. She expertly puts you in the wrong and never loses her temper. Just smiles sweetly when she’s got you hopping mad. Nick simply watched and waited. And at the crucial moment, he said, “You know she’s been driving that car for years, Mum. Maree, if you’re not going to drive me, I may as well go and see Fred Holbein.”

“No, no. I’ll drive you. I’m coming now,” I said.

“Nick, I forbid you to go,” said Janine.

He grinned at her, meltingly, and simply walked out to the car. That was it. Master Nick had decided he wanted to show me Bristolia and the womenfolk did as he wanted. Actually, I felt quite honoured, that he trusted me both to drive him and not to laugh at his Bristolia game. It put me in a much better mood. “Where to?” I said.

Nick unfolded a large, carefully coloured map. “I think we’ll start with Cliffores of the Monsters and the Castle of the Warden of the Green Wastes,” he said seriously.

So I drove him to the Zoo and then past the big red Gothic school there. Then we went round Durdham Down and on to Westbury-on-Trym and back to Redland. After that, I don’t remember where we went. Nick had different names for everywhere and colourful histories to go with every place. He told me exactly how many miles of Bristolia we’d covered for each mile of the town. I did my best to keep an intelligent interest, but Dad’s car was not behaving very well. Perhaps it believed what Nick said. After he’d told me we’d gone seven hundred miles to the Zoo, it began making grinding noises and stalling on hills. I was a bit preoccupied with making it go. But Nick went on explaining eagerly, even though some of my answers were a bit vague and sarcastic. I don’t think he noticed. I was rather touched, to tell the truth, because we used to play games like this (but on a smaller scale) when I was fourteen and Nick was eight. And I would have died rather than hurt his feelings.

We were going steeply down towards the Centre, and Nick had just told me we’d now clocked up two thousand miles of Bristolia, when he suddenly said, “Just a moment. I think we’re being followed.”

I very nearly said, “Is this part of the Game?” and I am glad I didn’t, because I was suddenly quite sure he was right. Don’t ask me how. I just knew someone was behind us, looking for us, with serious intent to find us. It was not a nice feeling. I suppose Janine must have sent someone to make sure I didn’t kill her Nick. So I said, “What do you suggest we do?”

“Keep going towards Biflumenia – I mean Bedminster,” Nick said, “and I’ll tell you what to do then.”

Traffic was pretty thick by then. It was very useful to have someone with Nick’s encyclopedic knowledge of the place to tell me what turning to take. We both dropped the Bristolia game for a tense quarter of an hour or so, while we zipped up the opposite hill across the river, came back down another way, and took the road up to the suspension bridge. The creepy feeling of someone behind us trying to find us left us on the way. Nick sat back with a sigh.

“That’s it. We lost him. Now we’re in Yonder Bristolia where most of the magic users live.”

“Yes, but I wish we weren’t in line for the suspension bridge!” I more or less moaned.

“It’s all right. I’ve got money to get across,” Nick said.

“But it’s the place I have bad dreams about!” I wailed. I really didn’t want to go there. My bad mood was back. It was thanks to Janine. She’d stripped the joy about passing my test off the underlying misery and, though I’d forgotten it a bit during the tour of exotic Bristolia, it was still there, as bad as ever.

“I was hoping I’d stopped you being so gloomy,” Nick said.

“I can’t. I’ve been crossed in love,” I said. “And there’s my dad – not to speak of the dreams.”

I suppose it’s not surprising Nick got the wrong idea of the dreams. Clifton Suspension Bridge is notorious for suicides. “You mean you dream about jumping off?” he said.

“No,” I said. “They’re weirder than that.”

“Tell the dreams,” he commanded.

So I told him, though they were something I’d never mentioned to a soul before. I almost don’t mention them to myself, apart from calling this journal Directory Thornlady just to show I know about them really. They’re too nasty. They go with a horrible, depressed, weak feeling. I’ve been having the dreams for over three years now, ever since we moved to London and Mum and Dad split up, and they make me wonder if I might be going mad. I was sure Nick would think they were mad. But there is something about driving a car that makes you confiding – like a sort of mobile analyst’s couch – and after Nick and I had shared the feeling of being followed, I felt as if we’d shared minds anyway.

In the dreams I am always at the Bristol end of the bridge, and I go up the steep path that cuts into the bank by the footpath there and find I’m on a wide moorland by moonlight (not that I ever see the moon: I just know it’s moonlight). I walk until I come to a path. Some nights I find I can dig my heels in and refuse to take that path. Then I get punished. I get lost in the dream, wandering about in beastly marsh-like places, and wake up feeling incredibly frightened and guilty. If I give in (or can’t dig my heels in) and simply follow the path, I always come to a sort of horizon, where the sky comes right down to the moor, and there is a solitary dark bush in the middle of it. That bush is an old woman.

Don’t ask me how. Nick asked me how. I couldn’t tell him. She isn’t made of twigs. She isn’t the sky showing through the bush. She isn’t even exactly in the bush. But in my dream I know that the bush is the same thing as a narrow-faced severe old woman who is probably a goddess. I don’t like her. She despises me. And she’s brought me here to tell me off.

“Don’t ever expect any sort of luck or success,” she says, “until you stop this aggressive approach to life. It’s not ladylike. A lady should sit gracefully by and let others handle things.” She always says that sort of thing, but recently she’s been on about Robbie too. At first it was the immorality of living with him, and now that seems to be over she says, “It’s degrading for a lady to go pining after a man. You won’t have any luck or worth in your life until you give up university and marry a nice normal young man.”

“And don’t tell me it’s my subconscious talking!” I said to Nick.

“It isn’t. It’s not the way you think or talk at all. It’s not you,” he said decidedly. “I think she’s a witch.”

“I call her Thornlady,” I confessed. Just then it dawned on me that Dad’s car was making incredibly heavy weather of the hill up beside the gorge. We were crawling. The engine was going punk, punk, punk. And then I looked in the mirror (which I’d forgotten to do while I told Nick about the dreams), I could see a whole line of cars snorting and toiling and crawling impatiently behind us. The road behind us between the hedges was full of blue fumes. “Oh God!” I said. “What’s wrong? We’re breaking down!”

“You could try going into another gear,” Nick suggested.

I looked down and found I was in fourth. No wonder! I slammed us down into second and we took wings. The car gave a grateful howling sound as we hurtled round the last bends and swooped along to the bridge. Nick produced a lavish handful of coins and paid the toll machine.

“It’s an omen. You may have changed my luck,” I said as we shimmied across the gorge.

“I’ve been thinking about that,” Nick answered. “We ought to break that dream. Why don’t we—”

I knew what he was going to say. We both shouted in chorus, “Do the Witchy Dance for Luck!”

I stopped the car as soon as we were across the bridge. I vaulted out. Nick unfolded out, and we both rushed to the pavement beside where the path went up. The Witchy Dance was something we had done often and often when we were kids – we were convinced then that it worked too – but we were both a bit out of practice. I got into the swing of it fairly quickly. Nick was self-conscious and he took longer. We were into the third flick, flick, flick of the fingers before he loosened up. After that we were both going like a train when people began honking and hooting horns at us.

“Take no notice,” I panted. Flick, flick, flick. “Luck, luck, luck,” we chanted. “Break that dream. Luck, luck, luck!”

The horns seemed to get louder, but I had a strong feeling the Witchy Dance was really working – Nick says he had too – so we simply went on dancing. Next thing I knew, the man in the car behind me had climbed out and marched round to the pavement in front of me.

“Go and hold your Sabbath somewhere else!” he shouted. Oh he was angry. I looked at him. I looked at his great silver car and then back at him. He was a total prat. He had a long head with smooth, smooth hair, gold-rimmed glasses, a white strappy mac and a suit, for heaven’s sake! And instead of a tie he had one of those fancy silk cravat things. Businessman, I thought. We’ve made him half a minute late for an appointment. I took a glance at Nick to see what he thought. But Nick can be a real rat. He was busy injecting acute embarrassment into every pore of himself. He stood there and he cringed, the rat! It wasn’t me, sir! She made me do it, Officer! The woman tempted me and I did eat, Lord! I could have smacked him.

So I fought my own battle as usual by pushing my glasses up my nose with one finger in order to point a truly dirty look at the prat.

Unfortunately he was a tougher nut than he looked. He held his left lens up against his left eye and gave me the dirty look right back. In spades. I was about to resort to speech then, but the prat got in first. “I am Rupert Venables,” he snaps. “I’ve been looking for you all afternoon to give you this.” And he fetches out a hundred quid and counts it into my hand.

I was too gobsmacked even to get round to asking how he knew it was me. For that, blame the other motorists. There seemed to be several hundred cars lined up going both ways by then, and they were all gooping. When they saw the money, they began to cheer. I don’t think they thought the prat was paying me to move my car, either. Oh I was FURIOUS. And Nick was overwhelmed with genuine embarrassment as soon as he heard the name and saw the money, and he was no help at all. We simply got into Dad’s car and I drove us away. Rather jerkily.

After a while I said – between my teeth – “I hope for both our sakes I never meet that prat again. Murder will be done.”

Nick said, “But the Witchy Dance has worked.”

That inflamed my wrath further. “What do you mean, you rat?”

“You got a hundred pounds with no strings attached,” he pointed out.

“They’re probably forged notes,” I said.

“What are you going to buy with them?” Nick asked.

“Oh don’t ask – I need almost everything you can name,” I said. I suppose I was mollified. I know I haven’t felt nearly so depressed since.

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Rupert Venables for the