Alchemy

Yet there is not one single frightening thing to be seen in the world around him. There is nothing he can reasonably shrink from. Hand in hand with his father, the child walks forward.

I’ve been here before, he finds himself thinking – finds himself knowing – as they idle along through the fair. People in the jostling crowd point things out, waving hot dogs, or ice creams, or balloons as they do so. Looking at the bright, bobbing shapes against the yellow-green of new spring leaves, Roland thinks, There they are again, and walks on beside his father – the very father who will disappear on the day that Roland’s youngest brother, Martin, is born. (How can I possibly know that? Roland is wondering. Look! That’s me walking along! I’m only about four years old. Martin won’t be born for years.)

Standing on the edge of a small circle of lawn, the man and his son listen as a girl sings a folksong, Then they watch a juggler juggle, and an acrobat flop-and-flip. And now, through the applauding crowd, comes a figure enveloped in a black cloak, with a black crown on his head, and pushing a long black box in front of him.

Beneath his black crown, this man is wearing a wig of black braids which frames a face so thickly covered with white paint that it seems almost featureless. It is easy to believe there is no face at all under all that blank whiteness.Roland finds he is imagining that this man might be young and handsome, perhaps because of his eyes which cannot be painted out. There they are – ginger-brown in colour – sharp and lively, dancing within the still mask. Two helpers advance, shaking out a banner and holding it high in the air.

The magician turns to face his audience. His eyes slide over Roland, then shift to his father. And here they pause. The magicians’s gaze sweeps around the attentive circle. “I am Quando the Magician,” he cries, his mouth a black gap in his face. Then his gaze comes back to Roland’s father and hesitates before focusing on Roland once more. And from then on it seems as if everything that is said is directed at Roland alone. “I work enchantments,” Quando is telling him, “but never forget, it is also my job to trick you. And it is your job to work out just where the trick leaves off and the true magic begins.”

Someone carries a small table set with cards and boxes and brightly-coloured scarves on to the lawn beside him. The show begins.

“Where did it go? Where did it come from? How did he do that?” Roland cries. “Magic? Is it magic?”

“Trickery,” his father replies, grinning as he speaks. “It’s trickery. Fun, though! Fabuloso!” “Fabuloso” was something he often said when he was taken by surprise. “That’s enough! Let’s move on. How about an ice cream?” Roland is enjoying the show but he likes the idea of an ice cream even more. The trick they are watching ends triumphantly. Hand in hand, they go on their way.

“You!” Quando cries. He is pointing at them commandingly. “One moment, sir! Yes, you, sir! You’re longing for adventure! Don’t deny it! I know you are.”

“Me?” Roland’s father replies, startled at being singled out in this way. “No, I’m all for a quiet life!” Magician and man stare at each other. Then, once again, Quando’s gaze drops to Roland.

“Well, what about your little boy, sir? He looks adventurous? Let’s ask him?” And he sinks on to his haunches in front of Roland. “You’d like an adventure, wouldn’t you?” he asks playfully.

Roland understands that the magician is not playing. Nor does he fancy an adventure without knowing, beforehand, more or less what sort of an adventure it is going to be. But he does like the thought of being part of a magical trick. Besides, he is always anxious to impress his father with his cleverness and courage. He grins and nods his head.

At first, his father seems to be holding him back. Roland can feel the fingers around his own fingers tightening… tightening until the grip is actually painful. But then they relax, and, laughing a little, his father pushes him forward. (He is being betrayed!)

“All right, go on then!” he says. “Rites of passage!”

Quando is opening the lid of the long box. “You’re not scared, are you? No! Not a brave boy like you!” He asks a question then answers it before Roland can reply himself. Brave! Yes, I’ll be brave! Who said that? Not Quando, becauseQuando is still talking. “You’re going to amaze everyone. Won’t that be fun?”

Roland glances at his father who is nodding and smiling on the edge of the crowd. Then Quando helps him climb a short blue stepladder, lifts him and settles him in the box (the coffin). It is padded inside and quite cosy. (How can a coffin be cosy? And how do I know it’s a coffin? Does any kid of four or so recognise a coffin when he sees one?)

Quando adjusts the box on its trolley, tilting it so that Roland can look at the crowd, and the crowd can look at Roland. Then the lid (its inner surface black… black… black) closes over him. Outside in the sunny fairground, someone – Quando! It must be Quando – knocks three times on the closed lid. The sound rings in the embracing darkness, twisting through the tunnels of Roland’s ears and spiralling into the very centre of his head. The wooden walls around him vanish. He has lost himself.

Suddenly, he is suspended in a space which falls away beneath him and yet somehow embraces him too. Roland blinks. Those distant grains of light are really suns. He blinks again, and silence shivers through him. It is all around him, yet he feels it deep inside his head like a song he has not yet sung aloud. He has still to find the best words for it. There is no feeling of rising or falling. In this endless space Roland feels he is both a grain of dust and a great flaring sun. He has found himself.

The lid of the long box opens. Sunlight bursts in on him, making him blink, while the people out there peer at him, smiling, clapping and exclaiming. Quando bows, then gestures at Roland as if he himself had just invented the boy. Smiling, he helps him to sit up again. Roland is, for some reason, anxious to stand up on his own, but Quando catches his shoulders in an unexpectedly hard grip, and holds him still, looking sharply into his eyes. Their faces are only centimetres apart.

“Where were you?” Quando asks in a low voice. “You disappeared. Where did you go? What did you see?”

But then a new voice cuts in. That voice, heard for the first time, seems to come from deep inside Roland’s own head, warning him, and giving him urgent instructions.

“Shhhh!” it says, like a small wave breaking on an endless shore. “Shhh! Say nothing! Don’t let on!”

And now something else floods through Roland – mischief perhaps, or his own sort of secret greed. Those moments spent hanging in space, with no beginning and no ending, are going to be his alone.

“It was dark,” he says, looking innocently into Quando’s ginger-coloured eyes. “I was shut in, but I wasn’t frightened.”

Quando blinks, but his expression does not change. All the same, he expresses something very like relief as he straightens, laughs, then turns towards Roland’s father who is waiting a step or two behind them.

“So! Well! Thank you for trusting me with your little treasure, sir,” he cries. “Of course, he does have the gift, doesn’t he? Not many people would recognise it.” And Roland feels, just as surely if he were looking up at them, their glances lock somewhere above his head.

“A gift?” his father repeats. He laughs awkwardly. “We can always be grateful for a gift, can’t we?” Quando laughs too.

“Some day he may be as talented as I am,” says Quando. And he gives Roland a little parcel wrapped in silver paper, so that Roland knows he really does have a gift.

Then Roland’s father picks up his son and carries him off through the fair.

“What happened to you in that box?” he asks. “Quando took the box to pieces in front of us, but you weren’t there.”

“I was turned into a star,” Roland boasts.

“You were a star, all right,” his father replies heartily, but Roland has the odd feeling that his father is talking about something different. They sit down under an oak tree and Roland opens the silver parcel which holds six coloured felt pens, a little colouring book and a bar of chocolate. And it is now – now, when everything is over, after he has negotiated the coffin and listened to that inner voice speaking from deep inside his own head – it is now that fear strikes at him… He is being changed! He is being told something that he doesn’t want to hear. And he can’t block his ears because it is being said from deep inside him… said… said… said. An endless word going on and on. Roland has to break it down into short, repeated exclamations in order to understand! Yes! it issaying… Yes! Over and over again. Then, Up! Up! Up! And, almost immediately, that other inner voice speaks out once more, warning him, just as it had warned him earlier about talking too freely to Quando. Whoa! Careful! it says. Take no notice! It’s nothing. It’s nothing! It’s nothing! Three times, like a spell. But the other voice is strong. It rises in pitch and intensity. Up! Up! Up! Yes! it insists.

And suddenly he is terrified and begins to scream: “I don’t want it. I don’t want it. I don’t want to be twisted and changed.” Fear is making him sick… he is actually going to be sick… rendingly sick. He is going to be torn in two.

WAKING (#ulink_a7cd646d-c98a-5333-b163-1004b015ec9c)

Roland woke! He woke, straining and retching, soaked with perspiration though the night around him was cool. More than cool: chilly! For a second or two all he could do was struggle with his convulsing stomach muscles. “Stop it!” he exclaimed, commanding his stomach to behave, just as if it were a disobedient dog. “Be still! Down! Down!” Little by little, he relaxed against his crushed damp pillow, set free from the curious triple life of his dream, back in real time once more.

That dream! Yet again! Exactly as it had been every other time he had dreamed it. That first dreaming must have engraved itself on him in some indelible way. Always supposing the first dream had really been a dream…

“Careful,” said the inner voice (familiar by now) intruding as it always did at this point, warning him off… not that he needed to be warned. “Take care.”

So Roland was careful. He made himself think vague thoughts of school instead. And slowly the repetitive sighing eased and retreated; honest silence repossessed him, filling his head once more. Roland was able to lie in the dark and think things over.

Of course, other people also had dreams that repeated themselves, but this one seemed even harder to understand now that he was seventeen than it had when he first dreamed it at three or four. Because who could imagine hanging in outer space, and doing nothing except being there? Anyone set free from gravity would want to play some sort of somersaulting game, would want to kick out and dance among the suns, shouting, “Look at me!” And what was the endless word that had begun to sigh at him… that still sighed at him from time to time? It took concentration to hold that word at bay. And why did the sheer nonsense of this dream terrify him in the way that it invariably did? Why was it the harmless ending of the dream and not the darkness inside the coffin that frightened him so much? And why did he always wake out of it sweating and heaving? It was to do with the possibility of becoming something his father might not recognise.

So why, when he was both frightened by it and impatient with the nonsense of it, did the dream also seem more important than anything going on in his outside life? And why, in spite of his fear, did he sometimes long to hang like a sun among other suns, set in a place into which he fitted perfectly? Maybe it was because he did not quite fit into any other place.

“Fabuloso!” Roland exclaimed softly in the darkness, copying his father’s voice. “Trickery,” he added, uncertain if he were the trickster or the man who was being tricked. This trickery (if it was trickery) not only worked inside Roland’s overcrowded, argumentative head – it seemed to work remarkably well for him in the outside world as well.

1. THREE PENS, A PIE AND A NOTEBOOK (#ulink_f85deb99-ca43-54c5-99d6-7c1d1c743801)

Mr Hudson set a cardboard box on his desk, blinking at Roland in a judicial way as he did so. For some reason this single glance entirely changed Roland’s mood. He knew at once that he was not going to be praised, something he had been anticipating. Whatever it was that had caused Mr Hudson to hold him back from midday break was being heralded by an expression of disapproval – even, Roland realised incredulously, of contempt.

Flicking the box open, Mr Hudson thrust his left hand into it with the confidence of a conjuror who knows he is going to whisk a rabbit from an empty hat. He drew out, not a rabbit, but a plastic packet containing three fine-tipped pens – red, green and blue – which he set down in front of Roland with grim deliberation. Plunging his hand into the box for a second and then a third time he brought out something in a greasy paper bag, and finally a thick notebook with a red cover.

Roland’s reaction to these successive revelations must have satisfied a teacher trying to establish a small melodrama. His mouth fell open like an astonished mouth in some over-acted TV sitcom. He was more taken aback than if Mr Hudson really had produced a rabbit, and certainly far more alarmed. After shooting a startled glance at his English teacher, he looked back at the objects placed before him. A great blush swept through him, starting under his hair, and then, driven by powerful shame, burning down through his cheeks, chest and stomach. Of all the people in his class – in the school, even – Roland was famous for smart answers, but he had no answer to the silent accusation that those pens, the greasy bag and that notebook were making as they lay before him.

“Well?” said Mr Hudson at last. Roland gave a shrug so small it was nothing more than a convulsive twitch. He did not even try to look in the paper bag. He already knew what it must contain. Mr Hudson was confronting him with the exact duplicates of the articles he had stolen only a week ago.

“It’s not as if you couldn’t afford to buy them,” said Mr Hudson. “Shoplifting is a contemptible crime, don’t you think?”

Roland remained silent. There was no excuse for it; there was not any true explanation – not one that made any sense, even to him. Here he was – seventeen years old, licensed to drive, a moderately well-to-do seventh form student, a prefect, with the prospect of scholarship exams coming up at the end of the year. Not only that, he was going out with Chris Glennie who was possibly the brightest, and certainly the most beautiful, girl in the school. How could he have risked screwing things up by shoplifting three pens, a pie and a notebook? All the same, that was what he had done. The pie was gone, eaten almost immediately, but in the drawer of his desk at home, three pens in a plastic envelope, along with a red covered notebook, exact twins to the objects Mr Hudson had just set down in front of him, were lying, totally unused.

It had been one of those days – a day like today for that matter – when he had been allowed to drive his mother’s car to school, with the proviso that he bring home a few family groceries. He had parked, crossed the road opposite the café painted blue and silver, and, turning right into the arched mall, had walked along it into the ultimate temple of the supermarket. He could clearly remember the moment when the impulse overtook him, could even remember the people to left and right of him, all busy acting on impulses of their own. A mother with a baby in a pushchair went sliding past him. A couple of young women were fidgeting by the rack of greeting cards, showing the cards to one another and laughing as they did so. Just beyond them, a man in a long black coat held out a length of wrapping paper and stared down at it, apparently trying to work out if it were wide enough for his needs. The notebook had slipped into Roland’s back pocket, just as easily as the package of pens, less than a minute later, slid inside his open collar to nestle over his heart, the bulge well-hidden by the Crichton College blazer. Earlier, he had chosen a pie from a small oven set at eye-level on the wall in the fast-food section, and had placed it carefully in the supermarket trolley among the groceries his mother needed. Moving into the frozen food section, he had leaned across the handle of the trolley and, easing the pie out of its paper bag, had begun to eat it, almost absentmindedly. No one had seemed to notice, not even the young woman who had suddenly rounded the low, open-refrigerated section, advancing on him briskly in her blue supermarket smock. He remembered looking at her defiantly, expecting some sort of accusation. But she must have been concentrating on some internal supermarket errand, for she had hurried on without so much as glancing at him.

And now it appeared that Mr Hudson must have been somewhere close at hand – must have been spying on him down some oblique supermarket vista, and must have been watching him closely enough to know the colours of the stolen pens and just which notebook he had chosen. And then he had obviously chosen for himself the exact objects he had seen Roland stealing, presumably to add drama to this confrontation. Cheap drama, thought Roland, staring at his teacher with tattered defiance.