Laura thought that there were quite enough people for her — even the small crowd was intimidating.
Grace came to meet the car. She put her arms on the sill of the driver’s window and leant in. ‘We were right to delay, Chorley,’ she said. ‘There are several reporters up there. They have cameras.’
Chorley told the girls to put on their hats and lower their veils.
Laura and Rose’s hats were new — bought to match their first full-length dresses. Before now the girls had worn skirts that stopped at the top of their boots, halfway between knee and ankle. The hats’ wide brims supported veils of bunched organdie. Laura and Rose realised that it was with this moment in mind that they’d got their new outfits.
Chorley said to Rose, ‘You do see now why we wanted you to Try on the quiet side?’
‘Yes,’ said Rose.
‘Thank you,’ said Laura.
‘I’m going to stop by the registrar,’ Chorley said. ‘As soon as I stop, you two get out and go straight to his table.’
Rose and Laura nodded. They turned away from the windows of the car and towards each other. Laura saw Rose’s eyes, wide and shining behind the lilac gauze of Rose’s veil and through the pale yellow of her own. Over Rose’s shoulder she saw a photographer’s assistant drop a burning match into a pile of magnesium in a flash pan he held aloft. There was a white flash and a puff of smoke rolled up from the pan. Laura’s vision filled with a shining cloud of green light. (And, a day later, there was her face in the paper, her black eyes huge and fearful. The caption took the tone of the article, which disputed the wisdom of letting girls Try at such a tender age. The caption read, ‘Age of Consent?’)
The car reached the registrar and abruptly stopped. ‘Out,’ Chorley said.
The girls clambered out and hurried to the registrar’s table. Grace waited for them, holding two pens — their forms were already filled in, and only lacked signatures. Grace pointed at each page, showed Rose and Laura where they must sign. Laura’s hand shook and the pen dropped blots beside her signature. Rangers had crowded around the two girls, jostling the newspapermen away from the table. But they let Chorley through. Chorley signed too — the forms required the signature of both parents for Rose, and two guardians for Laura.
‘Laura!’ a newspaperman shouted. ‘Do you have anything to say about the objection lodged to your candidacy?’
Laura looked around at the reporter, but the registrar was speaking to her. He told them to please make their way up to the line. They were holding up the proceedings. Laura looked around. She tried to catch her aunt’s eye to ask if she’d heard the reporter’s question and what it meant. But Grace had her head down over the permission forms.
Chorley repelled another camera and shouted, ‘Please! Let these young women collect themselves!’
‘That’s right, George,’ said one reporter to another. ‘Mustn’t put the girls off their game.’ Then, in an insinuating way, ‘It’s an inspiration seeing these girls going on the game.’
Chorley Tiebold gasped and lashed out. He knocked the reporter’s hat off. The man’s comb-over came unstuck and lay in oily tatters against his neck.
Grace grabbed the girls and thrust them before her, around the registrar’s table and up the slope to the line. Behind them they heard the registrar shouting, ‘Only dreamhunters, rangers and candidates are allowed past this point!’
Space had been reserved for the girls roughly in the centre of the line. Grace positioned them standing more than an arm’s length apart, and about three feet from the blue ribbon.
Rose hauled off her hat and dropped it on to the flowing mass of thick grass behind her. She raised her face to the breeze. Laura copied her cousin. Once she had abandoned her hat she could hear clearly, but she was still breathless and her heartbeat was shaking her body.
While Grace and the other officiating dreamhunter and rangers conferred, the registrar locked his box and left his table. He made his way up the hill, holding his coat tails free of the seeding grass. He was carrying a stopwatch — as if it really was a race that the candidates were about to run. He stopped on the slope and straddled one end of the ribbon.
Grace came up to her daughter and niece and touched their shoulders. ‘Don’t anticipate the signal, or you’ll look silly.’ Then she said, ‘See you shortly.’ She stepped over the ribbon, and disappeared into the air. The other dreamhunter and rangers did the same — as though showing the candidates how it was done.
It was the first time Rose and Laura had ever seen the phenomenon that they had known about all their lives and had always accepted without giving it any thought. Seeing the people disappear came as a shock. Rose called ‘Mother?’ — tears springing into her eyes.
‘Candidates! At my signal,’ the registrar bellowed.
Downhill the crowd was hushed. Up the slope, towards the blue air over the bluff, Laura saw a pair of skylarks start out of the grass and go up, singing. There was a thistle in the grass directly in front of her. It was a big, healthy thistle, with three bright purple flowers and a woody stem. Grace, oblivious in her sturdy walking boots, had positioned Laura where she’d have to take her few paces through that thistle.
Beside her Rose said, ‘Laura!’ Urgent.
Laura looked around. The registrar had dropped his handkerchief. It fluttered, snagged on the grass. The whole line was a pace ahead of Laura and Rose, already pushing the ribbon with their legs. Rose had waited for her, but was leaning far forward, as though she meant to throw herself on to the ground. Laura picked up her skirts and approached the thistle. She stepped gingerly over it, then jumped forward to catch up with the ribbon.
Where was it? She was too far behind. Laura let her heavy skirts drop — must she spend the rest of her life dragging about in all this cloth? She let out a sob of frustration. The skylarks had stopped singing. She couldn’t find the ribbon. The ground was bad. The grass had gone grey.
Laura came to a dead stop. She looked around. There was no ribbon, no candidates, no crowd of carriages, no village, no river, no quiet box beehives, no birds singing and no Rose. She heard feet running on hard earth. She saw the rangers converging on her — one girl out of that whole line. They came up to her — but Aunt Grace ran right past her, without a word or glance.
ROSE WALKED ON, pushing the line. She turned when she sensed Laura failing, saw how sick she looked. Laura was a walking corpse. Then she was a spectre. Then she was gone.
Rose stopped, and the shiny blue line of ribbon was carried off by the others ahead of her. One by one the other candidates came to a stop. Some abruptly, some gradually as if slowed by the drag of the grass. Some doubled back to pass again through the place where the Place should have been for them. Rose did too. She went and stood where Laura had been, where Laura’s trail of parted grass came to an end.
Rose felt numb. She didn’t know what she should do, so looked up to see how the other candidates were dealing with what had happened — or had failed to happen.
The staggered group, no longer in line, had all stopped walking forward. All but one. One girl carried the ribbon away. It flowed behind her trudging form, a blue V of wake. She began to run, knock-kneed, up the meadow.
‘Hey!’ Rose shouted. Then she went after the girl, tapping the next nearest candidate, a boy of her own age. ‘Help me,’ she said.
The girl was running, blinded by tears, towards the bluff above the river. Rose and the boy pursued her. The boy overtook Rose and tackled the girl. They went down with a crackling thump in the grass and Rose threw herself down beside them.
‘There’s a cliff,’ said the boy to the girl, who clapped her hands over her face and burst into loud sobs, her flesh quivering in her too-tight cotton dress, and her buttons shivering on their rusted wire posts. Everything the girl wore was made over, Rose saw. And Rose understood the difference between this girl’s dashed hopes and her own disappointed expectations.
‘I can’t!’ the girl moaned, ‘but I have to.’
‘None of us can,’ the boy said. ‘And if we can’t we can’t.’
The girl paused to listen, then continued to weep.
The boy said, ‘We’re hidden in the grass here and the grown-ups can’t see us.’
Rose leant up on an elbow and craned over the heads of the grass. She saw the dark trails the candidates had made, and the wind pushing at the rest of the meadow, making ripples of shadow. Rose saw her mother appear and spin to face uphill, searching for Rose. Her mother spotted her almost immediately and started forward — forgetfully, for she rushed straight back out of the world again.
Rose laughed. It struck her as funny.
Her mother came back, wringing her hands, and began to patrol an invisible line.
Rose decided to let her mother wait. Let Grace think about it — that her daughter was sitting somewhere where she, Grace, couldn’t ever reach her. The land between Doorhandle and Tricksie Bend, though open to almost everyone, was closed to Grace. As closed as the Place was to Rose.
Rose was angry with her mother, who, it seemed to her, had never encouraged her to consider the possibility that she’d fail her Try. Grace had wanted Rose to become a dreamhunter. Grace was clearly distressed — but was she upset for Rose or her own disappointed hopes? ‘I’m not going to cry,’ Rose thought. ‘And I’m not going to put up with her crying.’ She lay in the grass watching her mother’s misery and feeling a kind of spiteful satisfaction.
Rose’s father detached himself from the onlookers, skirted the barrier of officials and went to Grace. He didn’t offer his wife any comfort, but appeared to speak sharply to her. Then he pushed Grace forward, firmly, away into the Place again. He dropped his arm once Grace had disappeared and strode up the hill to Rose.
Rose’s father sat down with them. ‘That was quick thinking,’ he said to Rose and the boy. He took the boy’s hand and gave it a brief, approving shake.
The weeping girl spread her smeary fingers and glared at Rose’s father through them. Chorley reached into his jacket and pulled out a Farry’s toffee tin. He opened it and offered it around. Rose and the boy took one each.
Chorley said, ‘There’s plenty to be done by people who don’t spend their lives stupefied by one dream after another.’
The girl sat up, and thrust her blotchy face into Chorley’s. ‘That’s all very well for you! You’re rich. And she’s beautiful.’ She pointed at Rose.
‘And you’re ambitious,’ Chorley said, calmly. ‘Stay that way.’
‘I’ve always been frightened of dreamhunters, anyway,’ the boy confessed.
‘Me too,’ said Chorley. ‘But I rather like being frightened.’ He stood up and helped the tear-stained girl to her feet.
She accepted his help, but told him that he was an idiot.
‘Our people are waiting for us,’ the boy said. He was frowning downhill. ‘I bet mine are miffed.’
Chorley took Rose’s hand. ‘I’m not disappointed in Rose,’ he said.
‘I hope you’re disappointed for Rose,’ said Rose, her voice brittle.
‘Yes,’ Chorley said, and looked at Rose as though waiting for something more.
‘I won’t cry,’ Rose told herself again.
The girl was eyeing the ribbon. She said she wondered who got to keep it.
Chorley bent down, bundled it up and gave it to her.
LAURA SQUATTED in a circle of rangers. She crumbled the grey-white grass in her hands. She rubbed the turf bald. The grass would never grow back. A fire could have removed all the vegetation, could have inhaled and taken it. But, in the Place, it was impossible to strike a spark or kindle a flame.
Laura was wondering, her brain broached by the silence. ‘Shhhh,’ she said to the shuffling, murmuring rangers. Her hands were covered in dust. There was an idea in the silence. As she grew still, and the rangers hushed, the bubble of sound that insulated them collapsed and the silence swamped her. It had almost come to her, the thing she must think.
Then Laura thought, ‘Rose.’ The name was a blow that bruised her heart. She was alone. Moments ago she was a point on an axis, one child in a line of children — one beater on the heath, one soldier in the column. Now she was alone.
The shuffling circle of rangers parted to admit Grace, who knelt beside her. ‘Welcome, Laura,’ Grace said.
Above their heads the rangers murmured it too, ‘Welcome.’
‘We have to go out now, and get busy,’ Grace said.
Laura recalled that there were formalities, full registration, the appointment of a guide and — later — a trip to an outfitters. Laura got up and followed her aunt, out of the dry, colourless brightness.
INTO COLOUR AND sense and sound. The meadow was abuzz. Families who had hung back during the Try had reclaimed their children. They stood about in little groups, consoling one another. Laura saw Rose, her face pressed into her father’s lapels, her gold hair rippling as she cried. Grace broke away from Laura and hurried to them. Laura stopped. How could she move? She had always followed Rose. Rose stepped out, and Laura went after her. Even today. Rose stepped out, then stopped and put out a hand to Laura.
Now a curtain of nothing more than air — or time perhaps — had brushed Rose from Laura as Laura had gone through it. They were two pips in the core of an apple. But someone had cut the apple. Just now. The voices in the meadow above the river were the sound of a blade hitting a chopping board. Rose and Laura were cut apart. Laura stood, wounded and exposed. Then the rangers came through after her, and they stopped too, stood by her, a retinue for the day’s sole successful candidate.
Two
Following the Try, Laura’s days were taken up by a whirl of appointments. It was scary and celebratory at the same time.
The family went back to Founderston. On the train Rose, quiet and red-eyed, retreated behind a barricade of bags and travel rugs, drew up her feet and seemed to sleep. The family was late home and went straight to bed.
Every day, for the next three days, Laura was up early. She went to the head office of the Regulatory Body to sign forms. She visited shops on the Isle of the Temple — dreamhunter outfitters. Grace bought her walking boots, trousers, silk socks and shirts and a fawn dustcoat. Laura went to a hairdresser to have her hair cut. Laura was out early and in late. She scarcely saw Rose. She wanted to talk to her cousin, but didn’t make an effort to do so. She was afraid she’d start to tell Rose about all the exciting things that were happening to her — and news, like how that boy from the infants’ beach was among the ten successful candidates from the Try at Doorhandle. Laura had passed him in the doorway at the offices of the Regulatory Body and had managed to give him a polite ‘Good day’. But, when Laura did see Rose, Rose’s silence silenced her. It was a neutral silence — Rose wasn’t punishing her. But it suddenly seemed that, having shared everything, the fact that they didn’t now share everything meant they had to learn how to talk to each other again.
FOUR DAYS AFTER the Try, Laura and the season’s other successful candidates were conducted into the Place for their first testing sleepover. They went In at Doorhandle, but were first briefed by the Chief Ranger at the Doorhandle headquarters of the Regulatory Body. The headquarters were in a large, two-storey timber building with a veranda that wrapped all the way around its ground floor and was the usual congregation place of rangers who were on their way In or had just emerged from the Place. The ground floor was full of desks, clerks and filing cabinets and, in fact, looked like any ordinary office. The top floor was taken up by a small locked armoury, and several large meeting rooms.
It was in one of these meeting rooms that the Chief Ranger briefed the eleven potential dreamhunters. He had given this talk many times before, and his tone was one of impersonal efficiency. As he spoke, the eager and restless candidates began to settle, even to sag a little in their chairs. They were tired, and the Chief Ranger’s manner was a bit of a comedown after all the fuss of their last few days.
The Chief Ranger began by telling the chil
dren that each must carry their own food, water and bedding. He said that it wasn’t necessary to take a change of clothes — for one thing they’d only be In ‘overnight’, for another they couldn’t expect any rain, or dewfall or any variation in the weather. They wouldn’t be getting wet: the Place was permanently set at what most of its travellers agreed was noon under a layer of thick white mist. A mist that hid the position of the sun, but never touched the ground, nor moistened the air. ‘The only reason anyone might take a change of clothes was if they were walking many hours In and cared to come out smelling sweet. You won’t find any water there,’ he said. ‘You have to carry it. Water is the weight you won’t ever dispense with. Even if you get rich and hire a ranger to carry things for you, he’ll still be burdened with his own supply.’
The Chief Ranger had packages of food on the table before him, which he held up, item by item. He showed them the strips of dried meat, cakes of pressed, dried fruit, strongbread loaded with nuts and chocolate, and ‘dreamhunters’ bread’ — wafers made of rice flour and powdered milk. ‘You’ll learn to live on this,’ he said. He cast his eyes over the eleven — eight boys and three girls. Several looked soft, were children who had never had to carry anything much heavier than a football or book bag. He took note of the two bandy-legged slum runts, and the remaining nine, who were only a little fitter. Behind the candidates were their guides, rangers and dreamhunters leaning on the briefing room wall, all thin and hardy from the repeated hikes into the Place.
‘Well,’ the Chief said to the candidates, ‘you’ll all build up to something better, I’m sure.’ His eyes lingered on the two who were clearly from wealthy families. They were already ostentatiously outfitted in walking boots and dustcoats. The girl had even had her hair cut short, which the Chief Ranger thought was rather tempting fate. After all, what the majority of these children would discover on this first trip was that they wouldn’t become dreamhunters. Just because they could penetrate the veil of the Place, it didn’t mean they could catch dreams or, even if they could, that they could do so with sufficient vigour to make their dream saleable. Most of these children would find employment as rangers — but the Chief Ranger knew of very few women who took up that option. The girl had sacrificed her hair to her vain hopes. He hoped she wouldn’t regret it too keenly, for he thought she was still rather pretty under her helmet of glossy curls.
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