Alyzon Whitestarr (20 page)

We sat at an ancient timber table long enough for us and all of the Rountree ancestors to eat with their elbows out. There was a red ceramic bowl in the center filled with flowers and tiny floating candles, the reflections of which gleamed softly on the water and on the old, very beautiful silver cutlery.

“It looks lovely,” I said.

Mrs. Rountree looked pleased. “I sometimes think I shouldn’t mind eating bread and water, as long as I was eating off nice china and there were flowers and candlelight.”

The room had begun to fill up with real scents of flowers and candle wax, which perfectly blended with the old lady’s smells of rosemary, blackberries, and peaches. I noticed Gilly watching her grandmother with faint puzzlement and tried to gently will the old woman to go on talking, guessing that her granddaughter did not often see this side of her. I felt her desire to be closer to Gilly, but she had no idea how to go about
it, and I reasoned that my willing her to talk was only helping her to do what she wanted anyway.

“There are so many sad and ugly things in the world that I feel I must try to counterbalance them with whatever beauty I can produce,” she said. “Setting a pretty table in a world of pain might seem callous, given that people are starving and living in dreadful disease and poverty. But in trying to create islands of beauty and peace, I feel I am honoring the dreams of the world.”

“That’s a good philosophy,” I said sincerely.

Mrs. Rountree flushed a delicate pink. “We all have strengths and weaknesses, but we must do what we can with what we have to make the world a better place.”

“My da says we have to live by our standards and beliefs no matter what other people do in the world or even to us. Otherwise we’re living by their standards,” I said.

She smiled. “It is pleasing to hear the wisdom of a father being espoused by his children. I think there are more and more people in the world who seem completely bereft of conscience or any idea of right or wrong.”

“I think that’s because people are spending less time thinking about the things they do,” Gilly said. Her cheeks were pink, and her sea smell was very strong.

Gilly’s grandmother sighed and said, “Everything moves faster and faster, and sometimes I feel just so exhausted with all the running here and there, buying this and that. I want things to slow down. I want there to be time to dawdle and time to dream and, especially, time to think.”

Gilly sat forward excitedly. “Thinking is out of fashion,” she said. “No one bothers making up their own mind. They can let magazines and talk-show hosts do it for them.”

Without warning, Gilly’s gran started to laugh.

“What is it?” Gilly asked, sounding offended.

“It’s you two, and me,” Mrs. Rountree said, giggling like a girl. “I sat around with my friends talking about saving the world when I was your age, and now here I am still at it. It seems I’ll never learn.”

Gilly laughed, too, then she said, “Isn’t it better to spend your whole life trying to improve the world than to give up on it?”

“Absolutely,” her gran said fervently. “To try when there is little hope is a beautiful kind of foolishness.” They smiled shyly at each other, and I thought how strange it was that in a matter of a few days, I had heard two separate conversations about changing the world. Maybe all over the world, people were having those sorts of thoughts and conversations.

On my way home later I sat alone on the plush leather seat looking at the back of Samuel’s head and feeling good. Whatever walls stood between Gilly and her gran had been undermined by our unexpected dinner, and I was gratified to think I had played a part in bringing them together. Gilly admired integrity, and there was no doubt the old woman had it.

I was beginning to nod off when the car pulled up to my house. Samuel insisted on walking me to the front door, claiming that it was at Mrs. Rountree’s request. “She’s an old-fashioned lady,” he said with a grin.

“You like her, don’t you?” I asked.

“Very much,” he said.

Making my way around to the kitchen door, I almost fell over Wombat, who materialized out of the shadows the way cats do. I stopped to pat him and make a fuss over him, because he had vanished after our “conversation.” I thought he might snub me, but he pushed his head against me, marking me affectionately with the scent glands under his chin.

“Hello to you, too,” I said.

I went to the back door with him weaving in and around my legs, almost tripping me up, and it occurred to me I might be the first person to learn why cats did that. I opened the door and was startled to find Aaron Rayc and Da seated at the kitchen table again, Da halfway through some story about a musician. Neither of them noticed my entrance, and I had the queer urge to back out, but Wombat pushed impatiently past my legs, insisting on being fed. I stepped inside and closed the door.

Only then did I see Dita Rayc sitting a little apart from them. This time she wore a blue velvet dress and matching cape and her hair was drawn into a complex braid at the back of her head. She was fingering a huge sapphire hanging from one earlobe, and my heart gave a little start because she was watching me, her mouth shaped into a wide frosted pink bow.

“Hello, Alyzon,” she greeted me in her husky, confiding voice. I disliked the way she said my name, but I disliked her cement-dust and overripe-banana smell more. I could have clamped my senses or moved out of range, but increasingly I
felt that stopping myself from smelling bad things was like an ostrich sticking its head in the sand. If I could smell something bad, then the badness was there, and I had better not ignore it.

I got out a tin of cat food and dished it onto a saucer as Wombat wove around my legs, purring and offering his approval and encouragement in scents that communicated their meaning as clearly as words.

“Hello, love,” Da said at last. “How was dinner with Gilly’s grandmother?”

“I … It was great, but I don’t want to interrupt ….”

Da shook his head. “You’re not interrupting. Aaron and Dita just dropped in on their way somewhere else.”

“I am here so often lately you must feel I am wanting to be part of the family, Alyzon.” The white-haired entrepreneur laughed his beautiful laugh. “But actually, I came to persuade your father to do another gig for me.”

“What kind of gig?” I bent down to pick up Wombat so I didn’t have to look at Rayc, because his lack of an essence smell made me feel uneasy.

“Another charity benefit,” Da answered.

Wombat struggled in my arms and gave off an annoyed smell.
I want to eat more
, his scent told me. I scratched under his chin, and after a brief grumble he succumbed to pleasure and began to purr. I looked back at Aaron Rayc and saw his eyes were on Da again, the pupils huge as if he were looking into darkness rather than light. A chill ran down my spine, and maybe I gave off a scent because Wombat stopped purring.

“Are you all right?” Da asked me. “You look a bit pale.”

“I … I’m just tired,” I said. “I’d better go to bed. Don’t sign any contract until you read the fine print,” I added lightly, as if it were a joke, but I willed a mountain of caution at Da.

I let Wombat down and bade them all good night, interested to note that Wombat gave Dita a wide berth curving back to his food bowl. Later I would ask him why he had done that, although I suspected I already knew the answer. He could smell her, just as I could, and he didn’t like the smell.

What had happened in the kitchen filled me with an aimless urgency, and suddenly I could not face having to see Harlen at school the next day. I had to know what made him tick. I decided I would go to Shaletown High the next day, and hope that the rumor that Harlen had gone to a private school was just that—a rumor.

When I finally slept, I dreamed again that I was a wolf, sitting on a wide stone sill in a half-crumbled stone wall, looking over the ruined city. The air was thick with scents, but my wolf nose separated them easily; spoiled milk, rotten meat, and the smell of wet cement dust and banana.

* * *

The following morning, I called Gilly and told her that I had a routine doctor’s appointment in Remington. I didn’t want to tell her the truth, in case Harlen asked about me. Somehow, I didn’t think she would be a good liar.

“So dinner at your place is off?” she asked, sounding disappointed.

“No, it’s still on. I’ll get off the train at the stop near your
place and get a lift home when Da picks you up. Why don’t you come straight from school and meet me at the station?”

“Your da isn’t driving you to Remington?”

“He has a rehearsal,” I invented quickly, then said goodbye because someone was knocking at the front door.

It was Rhona Wojcek, and after letting her in, I escaped upstairs, ostensibly to get ready for school. I emptied my piggy bank for the train fare, tipped the schoolbooks from my backpack into the bottom of my closet, then packed a light coat and some other things. Then I did my hair and put on my uniform. By the time I got downstairs again, Da and a sleepy-looking Mum were up listening to Rhona talk about reorganizing the exhibition that had been put off. She had found a new gallery that would be perfect, and a new approach.

Rhona gave me a wary look, as if she expected me to suddenly throw a fit and fall to the ground frothing at the mouth just to spoil another show opening. She always took things personally. If a bus was in her way, she felt like the bus driver had stopped there to spite her. She left as soon as she had secured Mum’s agreement, refusing coffee or tea.

While I ate breakfast, Da started to tell Mum about Aaron Rayc’s offer the previous night. My ears pricked up.

“Don’t you want to do it?” Mum asked, in that way she has of seeming to hear things that are left unsaid better than the things that are said aloud.

Da ran his hands through his hair and sighed. “The trouble is that it’s just me he wants. He says the whole band is too big for the venue and the occasion, but I just feel it’s not fair
to the others. I mean, the songs I play are Losing the Rope’s songs, even though I write most of them.”

Mum spread her hands like two butterfly wings. “Ask Neil.”

“Oh, Zambia. He’ll say I should do it. They all will,” Da said, but Mum was no longer listening. You could see it in the way she had turned her face from Da’s to the table, where an ant was excavating a pile of crumbs. It was running all around the edges and waving its feelers frantically as if it were sending out a semaphore signal to other ants.

I looked up and saw that Da had stopped talking and was watching Mum with a combination of longing and, strangely, pity.

Getting off the train in Shaletown, I felt that it must be obvious to anyone that I was skipping school, even though I was wearing my uniform and had a clipboard clutched to my chest.

I didn’t know exactly where the station was in relation to anything else, because Da had always driven us there in the past. But I had picked up a map of Shaletown at the station, and once I’d found a quiet place away from the streams of people, I unfolded it and studied it. Shaletown High was about twelve blocks from the station. It looked simple, but I set off with trepidation, because I am a genuine map idiot and I couldn’t believe that my enhanced senses would have changed that.

I was right. Somehow I got turned around twice, and both times it took me ages to find my way back to the right road. The day, which had started out gray and dreary, grew steadily brighter and warmer until I ended up having to carry my blazer. By the time I got to the school, I had my sweater off as well, but I smoothed my hair and put the blazer back
on before I entered the yard. The neater I looked, the less likely that I would be stopped and questioned by a teacher. I wasn’t worried about having the wrong uniform, because there were often kids at our school in different uniforms, either new arrivals or visitors.

Because of my woeful navigational skills, I had arrived later than I intended, and the recess bell was ringing. I gave up my immediate plan of finding a toilet and headed for the door where kids were spilling out into the yard. I calculated that I probably had fifteen or twenty minutes of recess in which to find out if Harlen had attended the school, and why he had left.

A group of girls looked to be my age, but I dismissed the idea of approaching them. They were a flock of golden-haired beauties with snooty expressions and, in my experience, exactly the kind to sneer at newcomers or outsiders and enjoy giving them misinformation. I wandered around the side of the building into a big courtyard in the middle of the school. Some of it was marked into a soccer field, and there were a few people watching a game.

I studied the watchers and ended up settling on two plump girls sitting together on a bench. They both glanced at me as I approached, and I did a double take because they were identical twins.

“Hi,” I said brightly. “I was just wondering if someone I know used to go here. His name is Harlen Sanderson.”

They exchanged a look, as if deciding who would speak, then the one on the left said, “I don’t know any Harlen. What
year was he in?” I told her, and she shrugged. “Maybe you should ask Glad.”