Enchanted Glass

“We’ve just passed the boundary between the strange part my grandfather looked after and the normal places,” Andrew told him.

“Funny,” Aidan said. “I didn’t notice it when I was coming.”

“You probably had other things on your mind,” Andrew said.

This was true, Aidan realised. He had been twitching all over, in case the Stalkers followed him, in case the taxi driver noticed about the money, in case old Mr Brandon couldn’t help him. His whole mind and body had been roaring with nerves. Now his curiosity was aroused. “How big is this strange part?” he wanted to know.

“I’m not sure,” Andrew said. “Tarquin O’Connor has just been telling me it has a ten mile radius, but I’m not sure it’s that big, or not regularly. The boundary this side of the village is only two miles out. The boundary on the road to the University is probably five miles away, but that’s all I know, I’m afraid.”

“Don’t you know where the rest of it is that’s not on the roads?” Aidan asked.

“Not really,” Andrew admitted. He remembered long hikes with his grandfather, but he rather thought they had all been inside the boundary. The area of strangeness — if this was Jocelyn’s field-of-care — must actually be pretty big.

“You need a map,” Aidan said. “It would be really interesting to walk all round it, not on the roads, and see where it goes.”

Andrew thought. Tarquin had seemed to be saying that it was Andrew’s job to look after this area of strangeness in some way. “Not just interesting,” he said. “I think it’s necessary. Walking the bounds is something I’ll need to do.”

“I could help,” Aidan said. “I could take a map and do it like a project for you, if you like.”

He sounded as eager as Shaun. Andrew smiled. “We could make a start this weekend,” he said. “You’ll definitely need a raincoat.” He turned the windscreen wipers on as the rain came down again.

Aidan sat quietly, thinking. Andrew was being amazingly kind. Clothes cost a lot. Gran was always complaining about how much clothes cost and how quickly Aidan grew out of them. Another of Gran’s constant sayings was that one should never let oneself get into debt to anyone. “Debts get called in,” she said. Yet here was Aidan relying on Andrew to buy him a raincoat and other things. He felt very guilty. Andrew owned a big house and a car — where Gran had never been able to afford either — and he had at least four people working for him, but Aidan looked across at Andrew’s old zip-up jacket and his elderly jeans and could not help wondering if Andrew really was rich at all. And the only thing Aidan could do to pay Andrew back was to make a map of his field-of-care. That seemed pretty feeble.

It was still raining when they reached Melton and Andrew drove into the car park of the biggest supermarket. Aidan had another attack of guilt. Andrew was buying food for him too. Gran always worried about how much food cost. He felt so guilty that, in a weird mixture of hope and despair, he fetched out his old, flat, empty wallet and looked inside it.

He gasped. He went grey and dizzy with sheer surprise.

Andrew, in the act of getting out of the car, stopped and asked, “What’s the matter?”

Aidan had whipped off his glasses to make sure this was real. He was holding the glasses in his mouth while he slid the big wad of twenty-pound notes out of the wallet. There was masses. And the money was still there to his naked eyes. “Money!” he mumbled round his glasses. “This wallet was empty just now, I swear!”

Andrew sat down again and shut the car door. “May I look?” he said, holding out his hand.

Aidan passed the wallet over. “Somebody must have filled it somehow,” he said as he put his glasses on again.

Andrew felt the soft, old leather fizz faintly against his fingers. He remembered his grandfather explaining what this fizzing meant. “A fairly strong enchantment,” he said, “worked in while the wallet was being made. How did you come by this?”

“Gran gave it me,” Aidan said. “Last week, a couple of days before she — she died. She said I might as well have it, because it was the only thing my dad had ever given my mum — apart from me, of course.”

“And when did your mother die?” Andrew asked, slowly passing the miraculous wallet back.

“When I was two — ten years ago,” said Aidan. “Gran said that my dad had vanished off the face of the Earth before I was even born.” He took the wallet back and removed his glasses again to count the money.

“So would you say,” Andrew asked, thinking about it, “that the wallet fills with money when you need it?”

“Um.” Aidan looked up, surprised. “Yes. I suppose. I know it was empty when Gran gave it me. But it had my trainfare in it the night before I came here. And then the taxi money. Bother. I lost count.” He went back to counting twenty-pound notes.

“Then it looks as if you’re required to buy your own clothes,” Andrew said, in some relief. “Tell me, do you always take your glasses off to count money?”

Aidan lost count again. “No,” he said irritably. Must Andrew keep interrupting? “Only to see if something’s real — or magical — or real and magical. Or to keep it there if it’s only magical. You must know how it works. I’ve seen you do it too.”

“I don’t think I— How do you mean?” Andrew asked, startled.

“When you’re working with magic,” Aidan explained. “You take your glasses off and clean them when you want people to do what you say.”

“Oh.” Andrew sat back and let Aidan get on with counting. The boy was right. Times out of mind, he remembered himself cleaning his glasses while he forced that Research Assistant to do what she was told for once. He had got treats out of his parents the same way. And — he could not help grinning — he had once passed a French oral exam by cleaning his glasses at a particularly terrifying examiner. He supposed that was cheating really. But the man had frightened him into forgetting English as well as French. The real question was, how did it work?

Thinking about how, Andrew took a trolley and went into the supermarket with Mrs Stock’s list, in that state of mind that caused Mrs Stock to say, “Professors! World of his own!” Aidan also took a trolley and went to the other end of the store where the clothes were.

Aidan was expecting to have the time of his life. He had never bought clothes on his own before. He had never had this much money before. He was all prepared to lash out. But, to his surprise, he found himself almost passionately spending the money as economically as he could. He hunted for bargains and things that said “Two for the price of one”. He did sums frantically in his head as he went round the racks and shelves (it did not help that most things were So Many Pounds, ninety-nine pence). He saw the perfect pair of trainers and he painfully did not buy them because they cost too much of his money. He took ages. He put things in his trolley and then took them out again when he found something cheaper. He almost forgot pyjamas. He had to go back for some, because he knew he would need them when he sneaked outside tonight to see what it was that ate the vegetables. He bought a fleece to go over the pyjamas and a zip-up waterproof for warmth. He nearly forgot socks. He ended up with a high-piled trolley and just two pence left in the wallet. Relief! He had got his sums right. Pity about those perfect trainers though.

It was just as well he took so long. Andrew took longer. He spent much of the time standing in front of shelves of bacon or sugar, either staring into space, or taking his glasses off and putting them on again to see if the bacon or sugar looked any different. They looked blurred, but that was all. But whoever heard of enchanted bacon anyway? So how did it work? Was it, Andrew mused, that bacon to the naked eye had the possibility of being enchanted? Would this make it the real world? Then when you put your glasses back on, maybe you could see more clearly, but the glasses blocked out the reality. Was that it? Or was it something else entirely?

By the time Andrew had finally managed to put all the things Mrs Stock needed into his trolley and then pay for them, Aidan was waiting outside in the drizzle, wondering if he had found the right car.

The drizzle stopped while they drove back to Melstone, but Andrew was still more than usually absent-minded. He really was a professor, Aidan thought, looking across at Andrew’s creased forehead and intent stare. He hoped they didn’t hit anything.

They turned into the driveway of Melstone House and nearly hit Shaun.

Shaun was standing just beyond the bushes, doing his baby arm-waving thing, with his fingers out like two starfish. Shaun probably never realised how near he came to death. Andrew slammed on his brakes so hard and so quickly that Aidan looked at him with respect.

“What is it, Shaun?” Andrew asked, calmly leaning out of his window.

“I did it, Professor! I did it!” Shaun said. “She sings. She sings sweet. Come and see!” He was red in the face with pride and excitement.

Realising that Shaun must be talking about the motor mower, Andrew said, “Move out of the way then, and I’ll park the car.”

Shaun obediently backed into the bushes and then ran after the car. As soon as Andrew and Aidan had climbed out, he led them at a trot to the strange shed. Inside it, the motor mower was standing under the coloured window in a ring of rust. Shaun seemed to have polished it.

“Pull the starter. Hear her sing,” Shaun pleaded.

Dubiously, Andrew bent and took hold of the handle on the end of the starter wire. Normally, this felt as if you were trying to pull a handle embedded in primordial granite. On a good day, you could pull the handle out about an inch, with a strong graunching noise. On a bad day, the handle would not move however hard you pulled. On both good and bad days, nothing else happened at all. But now Andrew felt the wire humming out sweetly in his hand. When it reached the critical length, the engine coughed, caught and broke out into a chugging roar. The mower shook all over, filling the shed with blue smoke. Shaun had worked a miracle. Andrew felt total dismay. He knew Mr Stock would be furious.

“Well done, Shaun,” he said heartily, and tried to calculate how long it would be until Mr Stock felt moved to mow the lawns. “Er…” he bellowed above the noise of the mower, “how long is it until the Melstone Summer Fete? How do I turn this thing off?”

Shaun reached forward and deftly twitched the right lever. “Two weeks,” he said in the resounding silence. “Not for two weeks. I thought everyone knew that.”

“Then we should be safe from the Wrath of Stock until then,” Andrew murmured. “Good work, Shaun. Now you can get on and clean this shed up.”

“Can’t I mow the grass?” Shaun pleaded.

“No,” Andrew said. “That would be most unwise.”

Shaun and Aidan were both disappointed. Aidan had thought that taking turns with Shaun at chugging about with the mower would have been fun. Shaun looked sadly around the rubbish in the shed. “What do I do with the cement bags?” he said.

The cement bags had been there so long that they had set like a row of hard paper-covered boulders. “Better bury them,” Andrew said over his shoulder as he pushed Aidan out of the shed. “Come on, Aidan. We have to unload the car.”

As they crossed the front lawn to the car, Aidan looked meaningly at the grass. It was all tufts and clumps. It had a fine crop of daisies, buttercups and dandelions, and several mighty upstanding thistles. If ever a lawn needed mowing…