Alchemy

“Why did you do it?” asked Mr Hudson again. (“Why did you?” Roland wanted to retort, surveying at the objects on the desk in front of him).

“Dunno!” he said. To his embarrassment his voice came out as a guilty third-former’s mumble. It was a long time since he had said anything in any teacher’s presence that sounded so furtive and defeated. These days, if he were reprimanded (which occasionally still happened), he mostly succeeded in finding a reply that was literary or witty enough to win a reluctant grin. Mind you, it was a tricky thing to bring off. Clever answers could sometimes infuriate teachers who weren’t in the mood for them. It was important to get the balance right. Roland had always believed, however, that he had Mr Hudson well and truly sussed. For one thing, Mr Hudson was a terrific reader and responded warmly to other readers, and Roland vaguely imagined that, at the end of the year when school was finally over, they would shrug off their unnatural roles of teacher and pupil and would become friends of a sort, talking about books when they met, and joking with one another in a worldly way.

“I can’t just let it go,” said Mr Hudson. “I can’t overlook it.” He waited, but Roland had nothing useful to say

“I’ve obviously thought it over for a day or two,” said Mr Hudson. “You do realise, don’t you, that if I went to the principal he wouldn’t overlook it, no matter how sorry you said you were. He is a little – well, let’s say obsessed with the Crichton College image out on the street – which happens to mean behaviour in public places, such as supermarkets.” Roland thought of the school principal, Mr McDonald, who had never seemed to be impressed by Roland’s wit. “I don’t think he’d necessarily expel you, or anything like that…” Mr Hudson went on, giving Roland a faintly relenting smile as he spoke. Then he paused, looking at Roland in a measuring way before completing his sentence. “But I think he’d probably have you struck off as a prefect.”

Roland, who had been about to relax and even to smile a little himself, relieved at detecting the smallest degree of camaraderie, felt his face stiffening once more as he imagined the guessing and gossip that would blaze up around the school if he were toppled in any way. His friends probably wouldn’t desert him (though some of them might find their tolerance blurred with scorn and secret triumph), but his mother – his mother would be as degraded as if she had been caught shoplifting herself. The thought of his mother’s humiliation struck him like pain. As for Chris – sexy Chris with the long legs and the small, sharp breasts (dulled and camouflaged during the week by the Crichton school uniform, but joyously outlined by her weekend clothes) – Chris was ruthless with losers. Shoplifting! She’d dump him. No question. And then, as these thoughts flicked wildly through his head, it suddenly came to Roland that Mr Hudson was working his way towards – not a punishment, but a proposition. He looked up from the pens, the pie and the notebook and studied his teacher warily.

2. AN ALARMING PROPOSITION (#ulink_345bc2a8-ce9d-5af1-a7a0-8c11f4e29bb5)

“Help me to discharge my conscience,” Mr Hudson now suggested, right on cue. “Give me the illusion of having done something constructive about your stupidity – and I won’t go to the top about it. What do you say?”

He was about to propose a deal. Roland was flooded with such relief that he began blushing for the second time in five minutes. Still, he knew he couldn’t afford to feel at ease just yet.

“There’s a girl in your class who’s having some sort of problem,” said Mr Hudson. “Don’t ask me how I know about it. I just do know. Let’s leave it at that. But I don’t know exactly what her problem is. I’d like you to – well…” He paused. “I’d like you to take a bit of interest in her. Cultivate her. Find out what’s happening in her life and report back to me. Do you think you could bring that off?”

It was almost worse than being told he must confess to the principal – almost but not quite.

“Who is it?” Roland asked in a resigned voice.

Mr Hudson’s sigh was nearly inaudible. Roland’s apprehension suddenly deepened.

“Jess Ferret,” said Mr Hudson, and as Roland’s mouth fell open in silent protest, he added hastily, holding up his hands, palms outward, and shaking them at Roland as if he might need to ward him off, “I know she’s not one of your crowd but—”

“She’s not part of anyone’s crowd,” Roland was dismayed enough to interrupt him. “Sir, the Weasel – Jess Ferret, that is – likes being on her own. She says she does. I can’t push in on her. It wouldn’t work. I just can’t.”

“Are you telling me that someone as self confident as you can’t talk your way into a conversation with poor old Jess?” asked Mr Hudson derisively “After all, you talk your way out of plenty of situations – well, maybe not shoplifting,” he added rather meanly, “but I’ve heard you in action over and over again by now. And you’ve known Jess for years. It’s not as if she’s a total stranger.”

“Sir, everyone knows that Jess likes to be left alone,” said Roland, ashamed at the desperation in his voice. He was sounding utterly uncool.

“Something’s happened to her over the last day or two,” Mr Hudson persisted. “I want to know what it is. And as to her saying she likes to be alone, well, I don’t suppose it occurs to you that that’s what people sometimes say when they feel they’re going to be left alone anyway. They pretend (even to themselves) that it’s what they wanted all along. And just in case you’re in any doubt… No! I’m certainly not asking you to make a…” he hesitated, “…a close friend of her. All I’m asking is that you take a bit of interest in her and see if you can’t get her to confide in you a little. I mean, look at it this way – you’ve got status in the school and she’ll probably be flattered, deep down. She just might confide in you. And then you can report back to me. Once I’ve got a clearer picture of what’s going on, I’ll take over.”

It suddenly occurred to Roland that, even allowing for the fact that a caring teacher might scheme on behalf of some pupil who seemed at risk, there was something peculiar about this assignment. His eyes narrowing, he lifted his head and for the first time stared directly at Mr Hudson, only to catch a flicker of something eager yet furtive coming and going behind that expression of official concern. Their glances locked. Then Mr Hudson looked down rather quickly at the pens and notebook on his desk, drawing in a hissing half-breath, which he managed to turn into casual emphasis of an instant which was far from casual. When he looked up again, his expression was bland and judicial once more. What’s going on? Roland wanted to know. What’s really going on? But at that moment he felt too unsure of himself to ask.

“Well, I’ll try,” he said, giving in. He had no real choice. “But she mightn’t want to… I mean what if she tells me to get lost.”

Mr Hudson smiled a little. “Don’t worry about what she might say” Roland could almost feel him relaxing, there on the other side of the pens, the pie and the red notebook. “If she’s stubborn – well – we’ll talk about other possibilities. But for the present I suggest you get into conversation with her – you know – talk about books … films … cricket … whatever she’s interested in. She does read a lot. Oh, and science. She’s keen on science. Her father’s some sort of scientist. Ask about him, if you like. Her mother works, and so does yours. You’ve got something in common. Tell her about your parents and see if you can’t find out about hers. Parents are reasonably universal territory, aren’t they? We’ve all got them. Is it a deal?”

But this was no deal. It was an order.

“Yes sir. OK. But—”

“But me no buts!” quoted Mr Hudson, smiling now, not even trying to hide his pleasure that things were going the way he wanted them to go.

“But…” echoed Roland’s inner voice… the cautioning voice that had first spoken to him in his old nightmare. “But…” it repeated, without having any more to say.

And a few minutes later, Roland was walking down the school corridor, feeling a stranger to himself. Twenty minutes ago he had been in charge of life. Now he was tottering on the edge of disgrace. “But…” repeated that inner voice.

And this time something contrary and irrational leaped up inside him. It was as if he had been secretly hoping… well, certainly not for this, but for something dangerous and wild – something to override his everyday life, even though he had worked so steadily over the last seven years to set that responsible life firmly in place.

3. THE VIEW ACROSS THE SCHOOLYARD (#ulink_866e68f4-9caf-5924-bc9e-6ecb78898b39)

Roland crossed the long yard between the school and the school library, wondering if he would find it possible to eat the lunch he had made for himself that morning. As he walked, a sound that was not quite a sound assailed him. There it was again – that intricate breathing – bursting in on him, as it did from time to time, no matter how he tried to exclude it… Up, up, up! Up and out! Out! Transform, transform! It seemed, right then, like a command whispered with great privacy into his ear. Transform! it ordered him. “Ignore it,” his inner voice advised him, as it always did. “Keep clear.”

Mr Hudson was right about one thing at least. Roland had known Jess Ferret for a long time. They shared a birthday, and twelve years ago they had started school on exactly the same day. So Jess had been in his class for as long as he could remember, sitting, year after year, in desk after desk, more or less halfway down classroom after classroom, rarely putting her hand up or demanding attention in the way that he or Chris or Tom or Stephen did. Jess answered most of the questions she was asked in a serious, sluggish voice, and puttered along, doing well enough in most things. But she never quite made it to that top group with whom teachers exchanged sly jokes – the ones who read sophisticated books, firing quotations like arrows at one another, and dragging evidence of trendy reading into classroom discussion. Roland gloomily turned Jess over in his mind as he automatically looked for Chris, Tom and the rest of his gang. They were dominating the seats below the windows of the school library as they usually did during lunch hour.

“What did Hudson want?” Shelley Randall asked him as Roland collapsed, with exaggerated ease, into a space at the end of one of the seats.

“Oh, he wanted to remind me how great I was,” Roland replied, flicking his hand carelessly. “No big deal. Knew it already!”

They sat under the library windows, partly because it was sunny there, even in winter, but also because the library was on a slight rise and gave them a dominant view across the school yard, past a few well-established trees to the western end of the football field.

As Roland answered, gesturing grandly and almost spilling his sandwiches, he was peering between a broad scatter of fellow pupils to a particular seat under a particular distant linden tree. Yes! There she was, as big and boring as ever. Jess Ferret. Mr Hudson was right. It would be pathetically easy to get her attention. But not now. There was no natural way he could leave his friends and casually stroll over to talk to her without inviting derisive speculation, and probably embarrassing Jess into total silence. Working out a few possible tactics, he stared across at her while Chris and Tom slung off at him, telling him he was so far up himself that one day he’d come strolling out of his own mouth.

Jess Ferret, thought Roland. Why did it have to be Jess Ferret of all people? Even the name ‘Ferret’ was a school joke. (Question! Which girl out there is Jess Ferret? Answer! You can weaselly tell, because she looks stoatally different.) She did quite well in mathematics, he recalled, but then mathematicians were a nerdy lot. “Imagination beats calculation,” he had once declared, feeling he’d summed it up pretty well. Yet now, looking over at that solitary figure under the linden tree, Roland found himself wondering how he could possibly have spent hours each day, for years and years, in the same space as another person, and still know so little about her.

He seemed to remember that she was an only child, but realised he wasn’t quite sure about this. Mr Hudson had said that her father was a scientist, but that didn’t explain much – he could be a geologist, or a physicist, or could be, as far as he knew, involved in putting sheep genes into cows so that they would provide wool as well as milk. And Mr Hudson had talked about her mother, so apparently she had one of each (unlike some people, he reminded himself). He thought he might recognise her mother if he saw her, but not her father. And what sort of car did they drive? Or, come to that, did they drive at all? He did not even know where Jess lived – somewhere in the city, of course, but whereabout exactly? He had the impression that she always walked everywhere, so presumably her home was not far from the school.

“Whoo-hoo! Wake up,” called Chris, waving her hand in front of his face. “Stop dreaming about me! Here! This way! I’m over here, being sexy and fascinating.”

“He’s wallowing in Hudson’s praise,” said Tom, and Roland saw, rather to his surprise, that Tom really did believe that Mr Hudson had kept him back to make flattering comments on his work. After all, it was what he had half-expected himself. But Chris knew better.

“La la la!” she sang, looking over at Tom with her usual good-natured mockery. “He’s having you on, Tommy. Old Hudson gave him a rocket about something. He’s been munted. I can tell.”

If he confessed to some fault he’d get them off his back. They’d have a good laugh at his humiliation and then forget it. Roland tried a foolish grin, though foolish grins were not part of his usual repertoire.

“I blew it over that Kiwi film piece,” he said, inventing quickly. “I just put down the first shit that came into my head and Hudson decided to have a crack at me. You know! ‘You’re not in my class to coast along! Blah! Blah! Blah!’ Like that!”

“It’s what he’s paid to say,” said Tom tolerantly. “Probably a way of reminding himself he’s still alive.”

‘And anyhow Roley enjoys coasting along,” Chris put in.

“Roley by name, Roley by nature,” said Roland, shifting his gaze from Jess Ferret to Chris. Only yesterday afternoon, sitting in her bedroom, she had half sighed, half sobbed into his shoulder, “I do want to… I do…” But, having said this, she had added that her mother would be home soon and had pulled away from him. Now, she was deliberately reminding him, Roland supposed, that she still belonged to herself.

Their eyes met. She gave him her crooked smile which always reminded him of someone beckoning, then turned towards Stephen and Shelley once more. “We’re off to the West Coast this weekend,” she said. “The weather forecast’s great. I’m going to smother myself in cream, lie naked in the sun, and read.”

“You’ll be bitten all over by sandflies,” said Tom, while Roland, certain she was deliberately making this comment so that his head would be filled with the image of her nakedness, stared briefly at her neck and her fair hair caught back in a short, thick braid.

“Dream on!” he said, looking away once more. “Even if it’s fine, it’ll be miles too cold to swim, let alone sunbathe.”

Out under the linden tree, Jess was closing her book. Roland, gobbling the last of his lunch, determined not to waste it after he had gone to the trouble of making it, suddenly wanted to know what she was reading. Jess stretched her arm out, then hooked it back – to consult a watch, he supposed. It was a real watch-consulting gesture, though, of course, he couldn’t be sure, not from where he was sitting. As she did this, the bell rang. It was almost as if she had accurately anticipated the first stroke.

“Your lot are picking you up straight after school, aren’t they?” he asked Chris as they began to walk, side by side, towards the door nearest their classroom.

“’Fraid so!” she said, assuming he was a little melancholy at the prospect of a weekend without her. “Never mind! It’ll just whisk away – Saturday! Sunday! La la la.” She incessantly used fragments of song to emphasise or punctuate her dialogue, or to suggest that she couldn’t be bothered spelling things out to anyone too stupid to anticipate what she meant. Roland nodded vaguely.

“Go on!” Chris said, nudging him. “Try to sound a bit sorry that you’re not coming with us.”