Alchemy

“Well, actually, I’ve lined up a date with someone who’s crazy about me,” he replied. He and Chris often pretended to one another that they each had a string of secret admirers, but on this occasion his voice sounded flat and automatic in his own ears, rather as if he were giving out a recorded message.

“That’s right,” said Chris approvingly. “Make the best of it! Brave you!” She spoke without the slightest fear that anyone could ever win his attention away from her. “So will I! La la la!” she sang, smiling at him as if she knew all his secrets. And indeed she did know quite a few of them.

4. UNEXPECTED DIFFICULTIES (#ulink_3ef1d706-21c1-533e-9f73-bd9246c67fc2)

After school, Chris drove off with her parents who were waiting for her at the main back gate of the school in their four-wheel drive. She slung her pack on to the back seat, then scrambled in, flashing her long, elegant legs as she pulled herself up on to the high step. Grasping the edge of the door she twisted round to wave, then, a moment later, he saw her beaming and waving again, framed in the rear window as they drove away. Roland shot one arm into the air, grinning as he did so. Only he knew that he was merely copying his usual self. The framed image of Chris diminished and disappeared, waving to the last.

“Oh, man! She’s a real cockteaser,” said Stephen, and waited for some sort of denial or perhaps a knowing grin – anything that might give him a clue as to how far Chris and Roland had gone with one another. It was easy for Roland to fall silent, smiling enigmatically and giving nothing away. He already had Jess Ferret in his sights. There she was, wandering towards the small gate at the back of the school, talking to two other girls as she went.

“OK, mate! See you, then,” Stephen was saying, turning towards the bike-shed, and setting Roland free to jog after the three girls, ready to perfect an accidental approach.

Halfway across the intervening space Mr Hudson came striding towards him, and Roland wondered if he might be about to get some sort of extra instruction, but Mr Hudson walked on in the general direction of the staff car park, looking past Roland and waving to someone as he went. Glancing back over his shoulder, Roland saw two women (probably mothers), saw a man in a black coat and saw his fellow prefect, Tom, over by the bike-shed, doing a prefect’s check on those Crichton pupils who were claiming their bikes, and who were all supposed to be wearing approved cycling helmets. Nobody, as far as he could see, was waving back to Mr Hudson. Roland jogged on.

“Childe Roland to the dark tower came,” he muttered, quoting a line he occasionally called on in a joking way – the first line of a ballad by some nineteenth century poet. He knew that the world “childe” meant a young man of noble birth, but almost nobody else knew this, so he used it as a secret joke. Over by the gate the three girls were moving away from one another, two going right (one waving, one walking backwards for a few steps) while Jess turned through the gate and set off quickly along the street.

Roland speeded up. He overtook her and said, “Oh! Hi!” in a voice so mildly surprised and casual that it pleased him. But she did not reply and glancing sideways he saw her mop of badly cut, slightly frizzy black curls was tilted away from him. “Hi!” he repeated rather more insistently, and this time his voice must have registered for she slowly turned her familiar, round, blank face towards him. She wore the expression of someone waking, a little unwillingly, from a dream – a dream which must have taken her over during the few minutes she had been walking on her own.

“Hi!” said Roland for the third time. “Yes! Right! It’s you I’m talking to. Penny for them!”

“What?” she replied.

“Your thoughts,” he said. “You must have been thinking of something.”

“Whatever I was thinking of was worth a hell of a lot more than a penny,” Jess replied, taking him by surprise. He had not expected such sharp words to come from such a vacant face. Suddenly, though, Jess Ferret was far from vacant. Suddenly, she was all there – guarded, almost aggressive.

“Yeah?” Roland asked. “OK! So how much do you reckon they’re worth? Give me an estimate.”

“Miles more than you could ever afford,” she replied and, though she still sounded irritated, she smiled sideways at him in her particular Weaselly-Ferret way.

Back in the days when she had had to wear braces on her teeth, Jess had taken to smiling with her lips closed, which was how she smiled now – a smile directed outwards into the world but inwards too, back into some secret cave of thought where she stored a bit of unexpected mockery and sarcasm. Roland found he was disconcerted because she did not seem to be sufficiently impressed to have him walking beside her. He was instantly annoyed with her, but annoyed with himself too. He had caught himself being big-headed again.

“Go on! Try me!” he said. But to his surprise, Jess, without warning, stopped dead and turned to face him.

“OK!” she exclaimed. “What do you want?”

Roland came to a standstill too.

“Nothing!” he said a little incredulously. “I was just – you know – saying something slightly friendly as I walked by What’s the big deal?”

“But you’re not walking by. You’re aiming yourself at me,” she declared.

“Don’t you just wish!” exclaimed Roland. “Hey! I promise it wasn’t any major move.”

“No, but it’s some sort of a move,” she said, surprising him with her certainty. “Do you want help with your maths homework? Or is it a dare? Or what?”

She was right, of course. It was some sort of move. All the same, Roland felt as indignant as a man who is falsely accused of being a stalker.

“Oh, wow!” he said. “I’ll know better than to try out any friendly conversation on you again.” And he mimed zipping his lips together.

“Fair enough!” she said, and then surprised him yet again by turning the words almost back to front. “Air and fluff!” she added, grinning to herself as she walked on without once looking behind her.

The trouble was, Roland couldn’t allow her to walk away. He had to set up some sort of useful dialogue so that he could satisfy bloody, old, self-righteous Hudson. And suddenly there was a little more to it than that. Why should a reasonably plain, ordinary girl – one with bushy black hair, a slightly greasy fringe and a pimple forming just above her left temple – respond in such a careless fashion when one of the top guys in the school spoke to her?

Still standing, Roland called after her, “No! Hang on a moment!”

Jess turned, but kept on walking… walking backwards with surprising confidence.

“The thing is…” said Roland, rapidly improvising around an earlier thought and advancing cautiously as he spoke, “…I was thinking at lunch time how mad it was that there were people in our room that I’ve known for years and years… I mean people like Dick Peebles and Cathy Morpeth and you… and yet we’ve never really said anything to one another. I mean, you and me – we have talked about the weather two or three times, but that’s not much, is it, over twelve years or so…” He broke off and shrugged, falling silent and waiting to see what she might make of this declaration.

Jess’s expression changed. Now it was her turn to come to a stop, right in the middle of the footpath. But then, without turning, she stepped to one side, so that an elderly woman could walk past her unobstructed. There was something a little eerie about the accuracy with which she had moved out of the way at exactly the right moment.

“So you reckon I ought to be bowled over by you bending down out of the clouds and talking to me?” she asked.

“Yes,” he almost said, which would have been true. “No!” he exclaimed, anxious to wipe away her perfectly justifiable suspicion. “I just thought we’d talk a little as we walked along – that’s all. No big deal!” He was walking towards her, taking small, smooth, unthreatening steps, and at least she was not retreating.

“Talk? What would we talk about?” she asked.

“Anything… Pets! Parents!” He shrugged, then remembered something useful. “Books! You can read, can’t you? I’ve seen you at it. What are you reading?”

For some reason this question, simple enough when asked between one reader and another, seemed to disconcert her.

“That’s my business,” she said. “Look, Fairfield! I like being on my own, and having to talk to anyone ruins it all. You’re stalking me, but your talk spoils – and your stalk toils!”

Roland had to disentangle this. “What does it spoil?” he asked, almost wanting to know.

“It!” she answered, smiling, once again, her outward-inward smile. “Don’t you know what it means?”

Roland knew she was quoting something though couldn’t quite remember what, which was annoying for someone who was good at quoting himself. But at least they were talking once more, and he was once more looking into her eyes – eyes of a strong blue colour with, now he came to look at them closely, long, sweeping, black lashes and wide black pupils.

And then a peculiar thing happened. The irises and pupils of Jess Ferret’s eyes changed. Irises and pupils seemed to collapse into each other – to contract into long, intense slits of darkness. But before he could be sure of what he was seeing in them, they separated once more into perfectly normal irises and pupils.

Roland opened his mouth, fully expecting words to spring obediently out of it, but for once the tip of his tongue (that springboard from which they usually leaped so eagerly) was empty. He and Jess stared at one another for a full second longer. Then she laughed and turned, heading towards the main road. She walked so firmly that her footsteps seemed to echo, and Roland had a momentary illusion that there was something invisible following at her heels.

There was no point, he thought, in pursuing her and trying to force any more conversation out of someone so unwilling to talk, and yet he couldn’t give up. He just had to feel he’d gained some territory. Stalk toils, he quoted to himself, and turning, he began to jog once more, patting his pocket to make sure the keys of his mother’s car were still safely in place. It was one thing for Chris Glennie to drive off, waving light-heartedly out of the back window. It was quite a different thing for Weaselly-Ferret to turn her back on him and to stump away without casting a single glance over her shoulder. “Air and fluff, eh?” he muttered as he ran. “We’ll see!” (“Careful,” advised his inner voice, probably already aware that, this time at least, he was going to ignore it.)

Roland reached the car, unlocked it and scrambled into the driver’s seat, tossing his pack behind him. Glancing quickly into the rear view mirror, he swung into the road. But, when he looked in front of him once more, Jess had vanished. His impression was that she must have turned to the right. After all she had been on the right-hand footpath when he had last seen her. Gunning the engine like a driver in a television car-chase, he reached the end of the street and swung dramatically into the busy main road only to find that his life as a tracker had become much more complicated. He was now part of a stream of traffic. Scanning the pavements for any sign of Jess Ferret wasn’t easy.

5. A COMPLICATED PURSUIT (#ulink_bf0351e8-6cbe-566b-a28d-68d9d44649c9)

Roland was now driving through a familiar shopping centre with cars moving slowly in front of him and closing in from behind. On his left he saw a favourite café and, directly beside it, the flamboyant arched opening to a mall crowded with shoppers. The entrance, illuminated even in daylight, often reminded Roland of the entrance to a church, somehow suggesting that shopping in the supermarket at the end of the mall would be a mystical experience.

A cluster of five Crichton girls stood peering at the windows of a trendy dress shop, talking and passing a bag around. Strictly speaking, it was Roland’s job as a prefect to remind them that they were not supposed to eat in the street while wearing school uniform, but right then it was impossible to be an efficient stalker and a prefect as well as a responsible driver. It came as a relief when the traffic lights turned red and he was able to come to a legitimate standstill. As people streamed across the road in front of him he hastily scanned the pavements to right and left, knowing as he did so that Jess could be looking at him from any of the shops and laughing at him. Tilting the rear-view mirror, he tried to check the five girls behind him in more detail. But then the light changed and he was obliged to shoot off again, jolting in a way that did not match his image of himself as a competent and cool driver.

Then he saw her. Once he had her in his sights he wondered how he could have ever imagined that any one of the girls peering into the dress shop could possibly have been Jess Ferret. She suddenly seemed unique. Anxious to keep her under surveillance, he tried to slow down, but the car behind him tooted sharply, forcing him to accelerate, to drive briefly alongside his quarry, then on past her. Desperate to keep her in view, he drew in illegally at a bus stop. Two boys with skateboards were also making use of this space, bumping over the edge of the gutter, then bouncing back on to the pavement once more. One of them gave Roland the finger as he moved in on their territory, but Roland was too preoccupied to take any notice. He was simultaneously tilting the driver’s mirror and shrinking down in his seat as Jess came striding towards him. Then she walked past, looking neither to right nor left, and moved ahead of him once more.

A useful space appeared in the traffic flow. Roland hastily drew out into it, anxious to take advantage of any good luck the capricious city might be offering him. But as he took possession of the lucky space, grinning with relief, Jess disappeared. He could hardly believe it. One moment she had been there caught in the mirror. Then she was gone. It was as if she had never existed.

As he struggled with surprise, Roland saw, some distance ahead of him, a silver car pulling out and leaving an empty parking space. He parked, and now he saw a sign he did not remember noticing before, though he had been up and down this road so many times. Perhaps it was only there if you knew where to look for it. An enamelled arrow, made almost invisible by layers of dirt and dust, pointed into a narrow slot between two buildings, and below the arrow were the words RIVERLAW RESERVE ACCESS. Up until now he had always walked past the paved alley the arrow was indicating, vaguely thinking it must be a private entrance of some kind. Now he peered hesitantly between largely featureless concrete walls. Rubbish bags jostled one another around a few closed doors, apart from which the lane was quite empty. All the same, Jess Ferret must have turned in here. There was no other possibility. Snaking between the rubbish bags, Roland set off in pursuit.