Deep Secret (11 page)

I WON’T. I’d let my fingernails grow while I was looking after Dad. Now I swear not to cut them for a year. They can’t make me do work on animals with six-inch talons. So.

Oh FRUSTRATION!!! Applying for a new driving test took nearly all the money I had left. I had to tell Uncle Ted I’d pay him for my bed and board every six months. He took it well. He’s pretty rich anyway. And Janine seems to be made of money.

But God those two are so
boring
!

I don’t blame Nick for diving away into that basement of his every evening. Before I got it sorted out that I could go away to my attic and pretend to work, I spent several centuries-long evenings sitting in their living room with them after supper (hm. Supper. Janine doesn’t cook, you know. She has what she calls her menus in the freezer, pre-packaged slenderisers. Nick and Uncle Ted eat them with ten-inch-high piles of reconstituted potatoes. She and I just eat them. I keep myself awake rumbling with hunger every night, but it
must
be worth it). They never go out after supper. Apparently Uncle Ted once got struck with an idea for a book in the middle of the Welsh National Opera and they had to leave so that he could go and write Chapter One. Janine is opposed to wasting money like that, so they stay in now. They almost never watch television because it interferes with Uncle Ted’s ideas.

So there we sat. Now you’d think that a world-famous author like Uncle Ted would be really interesting to talk to. The very least you’d expect was that he’d discuss the vileness of his latest demons (
no one
does demons like Uncle Ted: they’re really horrific). But not a bit of it. He doesn’t talk about his work at all, or anything to do with it.

I asked him why, the second evening. Janine looked at me as if I’d remarked that the Pope was into voodoo. And Uncle Ted said he saved that kind of talk for public appearances. “Writing’s a job, like any other,” says he. “I like to come home from the office and put my feet up, as it were.” (He works at home of course.)

“Well, it’s a point of view,” I said. Actually I was scandalised.
Nothing
to do with the imagination should be just “a job”. My opinion of Uncle Ted, whom I’ve always rather liked and admired, went screeching downhill almost to zero.

Then it went down again, in a steady depressed trundle, like a sledge on a very small slope, because Uncle Ted started talking about the house. And money. Looking very satisfied with how much money he’d made lately, he told me just which bit of redecoration or alteration he’s paid for out of which book. And Janine nodded enthusiastically and reminded him that Nick’s basement came out of
The Curse on the Cottage
; and he retorted with the fitted bookcases out of
Surrender, You Devil
; and they both told me that after
Shadowfall
they were able to afford an interior decorator to revamp the living room. I thought that was an
awful
way to look at a book. I thought a book was a Work of Art.

“But we left the windows in all the rooms as they are,” Uncle Ted added. “We had to.”

Now I had been fascinated by the glass in the windows. I remember it from when I was small. It waves and it wobbles. When you look out at the front – particularly in the evenings – you get a sort of cliff of trees and buildings out there, with warm lighted squares of windows, which all sort of slide about and ripple as if they are just going to transform into something else. From some angles, the houses bend and stretch into weird shapes, and you really might believe they were sliding into a set of different dimensions. From the back of the house it’s just as striking. There you get a navy blue vista of city against pale sunset. And when the streetlights come on they look like holes through to the orange sky. With everything rippling and stretching, you almost think you’re seeing your way through to a potent strange place behind the city.

I knew Uncle Ted was going to destroy all the strangeness by saying something dreary about his windows, and I terribly didn’t want him to. I almost prayed at him not to. But he did. He said, “It’s genuine wartime glass from World War Two, you know. It dates from when Hitler bombed the docks here. This house was caught in the blast and all the windows blew out and had to be replaced. So we leave the panes, whatever else we do. The glass is historic. It adds quite a bit to the value of the house.”

I ask you! He writes fantasy. He has windows that go into other dimensions. And all he can think about is how much extra money they’re worth.

Oh, I know I’m being ungrateful and horrible. They’re letting me live here. But all the same…

Nick at least has noticed about the windows. He says they give you glimpses of a great alternate universe called Bristolia. And, being in some ways as practical as his father, he has made maps of Bristolia for a role-playing game…

[3]

…a low time. I ache inside my chest about Robbie. I go into the university but I just mooch about there really. One’s supposed to get over being crossed in love. People do. It was
months
ago now, after all. I don’t seem to be like other people. I don’t know what I’m like. That’s the trouble with being adopted and not knowing your real parents. They have little bits of ancestry you don’t know about, and aren’t prepared for, and they cone up and hit you. You don’t know what to
expect
.

And my money has dwindled away to almost nothing…

[4]

Well, what do you know! I got a letter from someone called Rupert Venables. I suppose he’s a lawyer. No one but a lawyer could have that kind of name. He says a distant relative has left me a hundred quid as a legacy. Lead me to it!

Those were my first, joyous thoughts. Then Janine put the kibosh on them by asking sweetly, “What distant relative, dear? Your mother’s, your father’s, or your own?”

And Uncle Ted chipped in. “What’s this lawyer’s address? That should give you a clue.”

Practical Uncle Ted again. The man Venables writes from Weavers End, Cambridgeshire. Mum’s family comes entirely from South London. Dad’s is all Bristol. And none of them have died recently as far as we know, not even my poor little fat dad, who is still hanging on in there, out in Kent. That only leaves real, genuine relatives of my own, who could have traced me by mysterious means. I was almost excited about it until Nick said he thought it was a cruel hoax.

Nick gave his opinion an hour after the rest of us had stopped discussing it. It takes Nick that long to stop being his morning zombie self and become his normal daytime self. He got his eyes open, collected his stuff for school and picked up the letter, which he subjected to powerful scrutiny on his way out through the back door. “The address doesn’t say he’s a lawyer. The letter doesn’t say who’s left you the money. It’s a hoax,” he said. He threw the letter back at me (it missed and fell on the floor) and departed.

Hoax or not, I can use the money. I wrote to the man Venables saying so. I also suggested that he should tell me more.

Today he wrote back saying he’d come and give me the money. But he didn’t say when and he didn’t say who’d left it to me. I don’t believe a word of it. Nick is right.

[5]

…and said I had passed my driving test! I was feeling so pessimistic by then that I didn’t believe him and asked him to tell me again. And it was the same the second time round.

I wonder if test examiners aren’t used to being kissed. This one took it sort of stoically and then climbed out of the car and ran. I vaulted out. I tore off the L-plates, shot inside the car again and drove off with a zoom. I felt a bit guilty about leaving Robbie’s friend Val standing on the pavement like that, but he had only sat beside me for the hundred yards or so between his flat and the test centre. Besides, Val gives me the feel that he thinks he’s going to get me on the rebound from Robbie, and I wanted him to know different. I drove to Uncle Ted’s and screamed to a stop, double-parked outside. Nick had some sort of free day off school and I wanted him to be the first to know.

Unfortunately Janine was there too. I think she runs that clothes shop entirely by phone. Uncle Ted was in London that day, so she had come back to make sure Nick had some lunch, even though she never eats it herself. A study in Sacrificial Motherhood (actually Nick, when left to make lunch for himself, tends to drape the kitchen in several furlongs of spaghetti, and I almost see Janine’s point of view on that). She was in the kitchen with Nick when I burst in.

“So you failed again, dear. I’m so sorry,” she says. How to replace joy with anger in eight easy words.

“No, I passed,” I snapped.

“
Excellent!”
says Nick. “Now you can take me for a drive round Bristolia.”

“Says you!” I said. And Janine put her hand on my arm and said, “Poor Maree. She’s far too tired after all that concentrating. You mustn’t pester her, Nick.”

At that, I realised that Janine was really here to prevent me risking Nick’s neck in Dad’s car. “Tired? Who’s tired?” I said savagely. “I’m on top of the world!” I wasn’t by then. Janine had put me in a really bad mood. “You just think I’m not safe to drive Nick anywhere.”

“I didn’t say that, Maree,” she said. “But I do know I only started to learn to drive
after
I passed my test.”

“That’s what they all say, but it’s different for me,” I said. “I practised beforehand and ruined your fun.”

“Maree, dear,” she said. “I know you love breaking all the rules, but you really
are
no different from everyone else. Cars are dangerous.”

Well, we argued, Janine all sugary sweetness and light and me getting more and more inclined to bite. That’s Janine’s way. She expertly puts you in the wrong and never loses her temper. Just smiles sweetly when she’s got you hopping mad. Nick simply watched and waited. And at the crucial moment, he said, “You know she’s been driving that car for years, Mum. Maree, if you’re not going to drive me, I may as well go and see Fred Holbein.”

“No, no. I’ll drive you. I’m coming now,” I said.

“Nick, I forbid you to go,” said Janine.

He grinned at her, meltingly, and simply walked out to the car. That was it. Master Nick had decided he wanted to show me Bristolia and the womenfolk did as he wanted. Actually, I felt quite honoured, that he trusted me both to drive him and not to laugh at his Bristolia game. It put me in a much better mood. “Where to?” I said.

Nick unfolded a large, carefully coloured map. “I think we’ll start with Cliffores of the Monsters and the Castle of the Warden of the Green Wastes,” he said seriously.

So I drove him to the Zoo and then past the big red Gothic school there. Then we went round Durdham Down and on to Westbury-on-Trym and back to Redland. After that, I don’t remember where we went. Nick had different names for everywhere and colourful histories to go with every place. He told me exactly how many miles of Bristolia we’d covered for each mile of the town. I did my best to keep an intelligent interest, but Dad’s car was not behaving very well. Perhaps it believed what Nick said. After he’d told me we’d gone seven hundred miles to the Zoo, it began making grinding noises and stalling on hills. I was a bit preoccupied with making it go. But Nick went on explaining eagerly, even though some of my answers were a bit vague and sarcastic. I don’t think he noticed. I was rather touched, to tell the truth, because we used to play games like this (but on a smaller scale) when I was fourteen and Nick was eight. And I would have died rather than hurt his feelings.

We were going steeply down towards the Centre, and Nick had just told me we’d now clocked up two thousand miles of Bristolia, when he suddenly said, “Just a moment. I think we’re being followed.”

I very nearly said, “Is this part of the Game?” and I am glad I didn’t, because I was suddenly quite sure he was right. Don’t ask me how. I just knew someone was behind us, looking for us, with serious intent to find us. It was not a nice feeling. I suppose Janine must have sent someone to make sure I didn’t kill her Nick. So I said, “What do you suggest we do?”

“Keep going towards Biflumenia – I mean Bedminster,” Nick said, “and I’ll tell you what to do then.”

Traffic was pretty thick by then. It was very useful to have someone with Nick’s encyclopedic knowledge of the place to tell me what turning to take. We both dropped the Bristolia game for a tense quarter of an hour or so, while we zipped up the opposite hill across the river, came back down another way, and took the road up to the suspension bridge. The creepy feeling of someone behind us trying to find us left us on the way. Nick sat back with a sigh.

“That’s it. We lost him. Now we’re in Yonder Bristolia where most of the magic users live.”

“Yes, but I wish we weren’t in line for the suspension bridge!” I more or less moaned.

“It’s all right. I’ve got money to get across,” Nick said.

“But it’s the place I have bad dreams about!” I wailed. I really didn’t want to go there. My bad mood was back. It was thanks to Janine. She’d stripped the joy about passing my test off the underlying misery and, though I’d forgotten it a bit during the tour of exotic Bristolia, it was still there, as bad as ever.

“I was hoping I’d stopped you being so gloomy,” Nick said.

“I can’t. I’ve been crossed in love,” I said. “And there’s my dad – not to speak of the dreams.”

I suppose it’s not surprising Nick got the wrong idea of the dreams. Clifton Suspension Bridge is notorious for suicides. “You mean you dream about jumping off?” he said.

“No,” I said. “They’re weirder than that.”

“Tell the dreams,” he commanded.

So I told him, though they were something I’d never mentioned to a soul before. I almost don’t mention them to myself, apart from calling this journal Directory Thornlady just to show I know about them really. They’re too nasty. They go with a horrible, depressed, weak feeling. I’ve been having the dreams for over three years now, ever since we moved to London and Mum and Dad split up, and they make me wonder if I might be going mad. I was sure Nick would think they were mad. But there is something about driving a car that makes you confiding – like a sort of mobile analyst’s couch – and after Nick and I had shared the feeling of being followed, I felt as if we’d shared minds anyway.