Loop (11 page)

How does he know she can be trusted?

He just knows.

Inside the capsule she leans forward and presses a button. For a moment there is nothing but a slight droning sound. Then the capsule simply disappears.

Barely a heartbeat later it is back, a few metres further down the gully and standing firmly on three spidery legs.

The hatch flies open and Brendan jumps out.

‘Aidan, boy! I can see. I don't know where she took me, but they fixed my eyes. I can see better than ever. It's magic, boy. That's what it is.'

White magic …

Aidan remembers the girl's words.

Rheika remains inside the capsule. Somehow he knew that she would.

I have to go, Aidan. I'm in enough trouble already. Thank you, my friend. Goodbye.

And then the droning starts and the capsule disappears, this time forever.

He looks down at the locket she gave him. There is a button on the side, and when he pushes it the two halves spring open.

Inside is a picture of the girl, the strange golden hair, the incredible blue eyes. And as he looks at it, the picture smiles at him.

Quickly he snaps it closed.

‘What's that, then?' Brendan has moved up beside him.

Slowly he opens his hand.

‘Faerie gold. Isn't it amazing what you find out in these woods?'

‘It is, lad.' The big man smiles and looks up at the moon for the first time in more than three years. ‘Sometimes you can just be lucky.'

Together they turn and head back through the woods towards the sleeping village.

TRULY, MADLY, DEEPLY …

I believe in getting into hot water.
I think it keeps you clean.

G. K. Chesterton

I knew something was wrong when I saw Nicole looking out across the bay towards the lighthouse on McKinley's Point.

She had that look in her eye.

You know …
that
look. The one I saw just before she rode her bike full-speed down the hill on Swanson Street, to prove that you really could stop before you smashed into the factory fence at the bottom.

You'd think that a broken arm and a buckled front-wheel would have taught her something.

And I guess it did.

‘You have to plan more carefully if you're going to try to prove something,' she told me when I visited her in hospital.
‘That's
the lesson …'

Unfortunately, it was a lesson she didn't learn all that well, so I get nervous whenever she gets that look in her eye. Because I know it's going to mean trouble.

Usually for me.

My sister Nicole is a maniac.

Of course, she just reckons I worry too much.

‘It's not really Ben's fault,' she said once. ‘I guess it's just what comes from having a twin sister who's four inches taller than you are, and can beat you in running, jumping, arm-wrestling, computer games and just about everything else.'

She was talking to her friend Emma at the time.

And I was listening in on the extension in the study.

I wasn't trying to spy on her or anything, I'd just picked up the phone to call Terry Simpkins. I needed to get the answers to the Maths homework, and Terry was born knowing the answers to stuff like that.

Of course, I would have hung up right away, except that she was talking about me, so I figured I had a right to hear what she had to say.

Especially as the last time I asked Nicole to be honest and tell me the truth about what Celine Hartnett thought of me, she answered – using her best Jack Nicholson impersonation – ‘The
truth
? You can't
handle
the truth …'

Which I assumed meant there wasn't much point in asking Celine to go bowling on Friday night.

So, I hung on the line just in case she might say something to Emma about me that she didn't think I could handle.

‘Don't get me wrong,' she went on. ‘He's not a wimp, not exactly. He just doesn't believe in taking chances … Hey, who's there?'

That was when I hung up.

No point in taking chances.

I suppose Nic has a point. I mean, I can't remember ever getting into trouble for doing something really brave or really stupid. But that is exactly what happens to her all the time.

It's no wonder she's popular with all the kids at school and I'm only popular with the teachers.

I guess maybe I am a wimp.

Anyway, there was Nicole looking out over the bay towards the lighthouse. And there was me watching her.

And I just
knew
she was planning something stupid.

I walked up behind her and said, ‘Okay, what is it
this
time?'

‘Oh, nothing much,' she lied. Then she turned and jogged back to where Mr Walker was trying to organise a volleyball game to keep all the ‘happy campers' happy.

School camps. Don't you just
love
them?

Here we all were, out in the middle of nowhere, sleeping in cold, insect-infested huts at night, while during the day a bunch of teachers kept trying to find new ways of keeping us from dying of boredom.

And failing.

They didn't even let us choose who we were going to share our huts with.

That's how I got stuck with Andy Boyd, who snores and talks in his sleep, and Pete Maclean, who's scared of the dark but won't admit it so he lies there all night with his eyes open and the covers pulled up around his neck listening for footsteps outside.

Not forgetting Frank ‘the Fink' Wheatley, who just … smells.

On top of that, they were painting some of the camp buildings – a sort of olive-green, ‘environmental' kind of colour – and the suffocating paint smell was drifting in through the dilapidated screens of the windows, along with the mosquitoes, the flying cockroaches and the tsetse flies.

I didn't get a lot of sleep.

I hate camps.

But not because of the three misfits and assorted flying creatures I had to share my hut with. After all, they were nothing compared with Justin ‘Jay Kay' Kingston.

Mr Perfect. Football star, cross-country champion, top student. Legend.

I can't stand him.

Maybe it's because I can't do any of the things he's so good at. But I really don't think it's that. You see, I'm not the jealous type.

I mean, I don't hate Jamie Francis, Terry Simpkins or Maria Douglas, and they're all much better than me at just about anything to do with school – especially Maths.

The difference is, they don't rub it in.

Justin does.

He walks around like he owns the school, and he does pathetic imitations of ‘losers' – like me – which
he
thinks are Academy Award performances. The other kids
do
laugh at them, of course, which just encourages him, except it's partly through sheer relief that someone else is the one being laughed at, not them. But mainly it's because they don't want to get him offside, in case he imitates
them.

He pushes me around, calls me ‘Baby Benjie' and thinks it's his divine right to make the other kids laugh at me whenever I happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Which just happens to be
most
of the time.

Like on the first day of camp, when we had to run the obstacle course …

Sometimes, I really worry about teachers. I mean, they are trusted to guide the development of the next generation, when they couldn't organise a Bar Mitzvah in Tel Aviv.

Think about it. If you were trying to make a school camp fun and enjoyable for a hundred and fifty assorted students, like they claim, why would you force them to do something that was likely to hurt and embarrass half of them?

And give the other half a good reason to laugh at them …

You wouldn't – unless you were really dumb or you actually enjoyed watching people cry.

I
didn't cry.

Not quite.

Pete Maclean did, of course, but he fell off one of the logs and landed face-first in the mud. Justin had everyone laughing at him, making smart comments and doing ‘Poor Petie' Maclean imitations – which actually looked uncannily like his ‘Tiny Terry' Simpkins imitations or his ‘Baby Benjie' Palmerston imitations.

None of which the teachers did anything about, naturally.

If you're captain of the school football team and a champion cross-country runner – and your father has been president of the P&C for the last two years – you can get away with things that ordinary kids wouldn't dare to do.

I managed to make it through the whole obstacle course without falling in anything, so it wasn't as bad for me as it could have been.

Of course, I took six minutes longer to finish than Justin did – I'm no cross-country champion – and he let everyone know just how much of a no-hoper I am, so they all laughed.

But as usual Nicole came thundering to the rescue.

‘You
can't talk, frog-face,' she said to Justin.
‘You
can't even beat a girl.'

Personally, I don't think Justin looks anything like a frog, but that wouldn't matter to Nic. She just uses insults to get your attention.

She got Justin's.

He puffed up his chest, looked around to make sure everyone was watching, and said,
‘What
girl?'

As if the whole idea of anyone – let alone a girl – beating him was totally impossible.

Which it basically was.

After all, he was at least a minute faster than anyone else who'd done the course.

But then, Nicole hadn't done it yet.

Nicole didn't make the cross-country team, but that wasn't because she wasn't good enough. She is. And she'd probably have made the regional team too, except that she had a broken arm (from a freak bike accident) when they had the trials, so she couldn't run.

‘What
girl?' she said, managing a pretty reasonable Justin Kingston impersonation, while rolling her eyes with contempt at almost the same time. Not a bad effort, when you think about it, but girls are supposed to be better at multi-tasking than the rest of us.

Then her eyes went ice-cold, and I almost felt sorry for Jay Kay.

Almost …

When you live with the constant threat of Cyclone Nicole making landfall in your vicinity, you learn to close your shutters at the first sign of trouble. And the ice-stare is a dead giveaway.

But Justin was used to a more ‘temperate' climate. He just stood there basking in the warm glow of his own publicity, unable to see the dark clouds gathering.

‘This
girl, gorilla-breath.'

She stood for a moment eyeball to eyeball with him. Daring him to blink.

He blinked.

Then she nodded to Mr Walker who was holding the stopwatch and took off along the course.

We watched her running along the track, jumping over logs and small puddles, swinging hand-over-hand along the wooden climbing frame and climbing the net ladder over a high log-fence.

Then she disappeared on the far side of the course for maybe three minutes.

We waited.

Justin appeared nervous. She really did look good.

When she reappeared it was clear she was going to do it. She ran up the hill at the end of the course at least half a minute ahead of Justin's time, and stopped right in front of him.

She was breathing heavily, but she still looked like she could run the whole course again.

‘Want to try an arm-wrestle?' she asked. And I could hear a few of the kids laughing. Justin didn't say anything, but he looked across at me and I knew I was in trouble.

It happens all the time. Being the twin brother of someone like Nicole isn't the safest thing in the world.

But I didn't care. Not at the moment. It was worth whatever he might do later just to see the look on his face when she demolished him.

Then on Day Three it was Emma's turn to cry.

Emma is Nicole's best friend, but they couldn't be more different if someone had sat down and planned it.

She's a big girl. Not tall, just big-boned. And although she's a whole lot of fun, and everyone basically likes her, she doesn't have a lot of close friends – except for Nicole.

And me, I suppose.

She's definitely not one of the ‘in-crowd'.

How could she be? Suzannah Young owns the ‘incrowd'. She decides what they wear (which counts Emma out straightaway) and who they talk to.

And who they decide to go after.

Which, on the camp, just happened to be Emma.

They couldn't do anything on the day of the obstacle course, because Emma has asthma and so was excused from running it, but by Day Three they'd got to her.

Mean comments, hiding her stuff, notes on her pillow. If Suzannah Young decides to go after you, it happens, in a major way.

So Emma started crying.

And Nicole got mad.

Not
just
mad.
Just
mad was what happened with Justin Kingston.

She wasn't
just
mad, she was
quiet
mad. And that's a whole lot more dangerous.

If you've seen
The Perfect Storm
you have some idea of what she was capable of when she was
more
than
just
mad.

That's why I was worried when I saw her staring out over the bay. You see, when Nicole gets angry like that, she often decides it's time to prove something.

It started at lights-out, when Suzannah started whingeing about someone stealing one of her sheets.

Of course, it couldn't be just an ordinary white sheet like everybody else had. She had to bring peach-coloured ones, with fancy embroidery on the ends.

‘Oh, these old things,' she commented, when one of the teachers asked about them.

But all the ‘in-crowd' were suitably impressed.

Suzannah wasn't at all impressed when one of them went missing though. And the way she was going on, I got the feeling that maybe they weren't just ‘these old things' after all.

But it was gone, and watching Nicole I didn't think she looked at all surprised.

Or worried.

I
was worried.

Not about the sheet. But about what might happen next.

Nic isn't famous for being too subtle.

I think I mentioned she's a touch maniacal.

I think I also mentioned I wasn't getting a whole lot of sleep.

That night, Pete Maclean actually had his eyes shut for once. I guess exhaustion had taken over from his fear of the dark. And the teachers had actually made ‘the Fink' take a shower, so the hut didn't smell like a toxic waste dump.

Except for his sneakers – which I managed to drop out through one of the larger holes in the flyscreen.

Even Andy Boyd was only snoring quietly, and he'd stopped having midnight conversations with himself.

But I still couldn't sleep. I was worrying about Nicole.

That was when I heard the noise. It wasn't loud, and if I hadn't been awake already it certainly wouldn't have woken me. But it was there. Someone moving around outside.

I looked at my watch.

1 a.m.

I looked out of the window and I saw Nicole walking towards the trees at the far end of the camp. She was carrying a small bag over her shoulder and treading carefully so she wouldn't wake the teachers.

I was sleeping in my clothes, so I hurried to pull on my shoes and I followed her.

I couldn't catch up with her, of course. But that didn't matter. I had a pretty fair idea where she was heading – even if I didn't have a clue why.