In Sarah's Shadow

by Karen McCombie

  ‘Course, there is one area where my best friend is scoring considerably better than me.

  “You said you’d show me the message Tariq texted you,” I nod in the direction of the bag Pamela left on the kitchen stool when she came round to collect me earlier.

  I know what the message says, of course: Pamela only told me about twelve thousand times this afternoon. But then she’s desperate to dig out her mobile and show me the message for real, and if that gets her smiling again then I’ll act surprised (as surprised as she was to get a message like that) when she sticks it under my nose.

  “Look, see?” she beams as, right on cue, the jumble of text letters dance in front of my eyes, just as I flip the kettle on.

  “Hi, Pammie – what’s up? Tar x,” I read aloud, my voice practically drowned out by Pamela hyperventilating.

  Not the most romantic message in the world; not exactly an excerpt from the love scenes between Joey and Dawson in Dawson’s Creek. But it’s enough to make Pamela feel like the most desired female in the Western hemisphere and I have to say I’m a tiny bit jealous, even though Tariq is the sort of boy I’d have to kiss with a paper bag on my head if we were ever in that last boy/last girl on Earth scenario.

  “See? I told you! ‘X’ is a kiss, isn’t it?” Pamela babbles, stabbing at the phone and nearly erasing her precious message.

  “‘Course it’s a kiss!” I grin, idly wondering if ‘x’ stands for kiss in all languages. What if ‘x’ is short-hand for ‘sod off’ in Vietnamese? But luckily for Pamela, Tariq is from north London, same as us, and so ‘x’ is most definitely a kiss and most definitely unexpected, since the only communication Pamela and Tariq have had so far is a few shy “hi”s across a crowded dinner hall. Who did he get her number from? What gave him the courage to call? And why’s he suddenly calling her “Pammie” when no-one else in the world ever has?

  “Pammie…” says Pamela wistfully, leaning up against the gently gurgling fridge.

  I guess it sounds more exotic than plain Pamela (in the same way chocolate digestives are more exotic than plain ones). Pamela Ann Jones: not the most memorable name in the world, as Pamela would be the first to agree. Not even an ‘e’ on the end of Ann for that extra scrap of glamour. But don’t get me wrong; I’m not putting her down for having a dullish name; after all, mine is only just a fraction more interesting. It’s just that it’s ironic, isn’t it, that my best friend happens to be called Pamela, while Sarah’s two best mates are named Cherish and Angel. Cherish Kofi and Angeline Girardot, to be precise. Memorable by name, memorable in the flesh, as most of the boys at Bakerfield School will happily tell you, if only they can get their tongues back in their mouths and their jaws off the floor. They’re like that about Sarah too (naturally), but I don’t want to sully my mind with thoughts of her right now. It’s been two solid weeks of Sarah, the competition and general parent hysteria about Sarah and the competition in this household and, right now, I’m kind of enjoying having the place to myself for five Sarah-free, parent-free minutes…

  “So, what are you going to text back to him?” I ask ‘Pammie’, handing her a mug of milky coffee.

  “God! I hadn’t thought about that!” Pamela suddenly switches from happiness to panic in half a split second.

  Lateral thinking: that’s when your mind spins off at different tangents from one particular thought. Pamela, bless her, doesn’t do lateral; her mind works in one direction at a time, with blinkers fixed to either side of her brain to stop her from being distracted by incidental stuff. Now I feel bad for her, the last thing I want is to spoil her happiness by making her tense up about a suitable reply.

  “How about…Hi Tar – hanging with Megan. What’s up with U? Pammie x,” I suggest.

  “That’s brilliant!” Pamela beams. “But could you key it in, Megan? My hands are shaking too much…”

  “Sure,” I shrug, taking the mobile from her and doing my good deed by tapping out the message.

  “Hey, that’s not right,” says Pamela, being a backseat texter and pointing out the mistake I’ve just caught myself making.

  “Hi Tar – hanging with Sarah—”

  My stupid brain has just subconsciously sent traitorous messages through my nervous system, all because I’ve just heard the front door open and my sister’s laughing voice drift down the hall towards us.

  “Oh,” says Sarah, stopping dead in the kitchen doorway. She’s got her wine-coloured velvet jacket on today, with those hipster Levi’s of hers that have worn in all the right places.

  “Oh?” I shrug back at her, hoping I sound edgier than I feel as I quickly slam down Pamela’s phone and fold my arms across my lopsided, satsuma-look boobs. (Wish I’d got Pamela to even up the straps at least…)

  Maybe it’s worked, me staking my finders-keepers’ claim to the kitchen and my right to a private conversation with my friend. Sarah’s looking weird: kind of flushed and surprised or something.

  And then I see why…and it’s nothing to do with me trying (and probably failing) to be edgy or tough with her.

  “Conor…” says Sarah, with her voice wavering and her hands fluttering, “this is my sister Megan. And that’s her friend Pamela.”

  Behind her in the doorway is this tall guy I vaguely recognise from the Upper Sixth, in a denim jacket, with shaggy, fawn-coloured hair flopping around his face and a guitar case – the flash guitar Sarah’s borrowed from the music department – slung across one shoulder.

  Instantly, I know that something is going on between the two of them. Sarah wouldn’t flush pink and act so flustered if it was just one of the regular boy mates she sometimes hangs around with. And regular boy mates don’t act the gallant hero and offer to carry your guitar home from rehearsal.

  And just as instantly, when Conor’s face cracks into a heart-melting smile in my direction, I know that the world is not a fair place.

  How else can you explain it when you’ve just set eyes on your soulmate…and realise he’ll never in a million years see you the same way?

  Chapter 3

  Good deeds = good luck?

  “Oh.”

  That ‘oh’ doesn’t sound too good. The cards on the table – some face down and some weirdly illustrated and facing up, spread out in some strange cross pattern – tell me precisely nothing. But for the old woman sitting across from me, it’s like she’s deciphering some ancient language or something.

  Or maybe she’s just making it all up as she goes along.

  “I see conflict with someone,” she mutters, shaking her head as she talks, sending minuscule whorls of peachy powder drifting from her face into still air that smells dusty, musty and Mr Sheen clean at the same time. “A girl. Someone close…close to you, and close in age. Does that make sense to you?”

  Two years.

  That’s all that separates me and Sarah, but it might as well be two decades or two continents for all we have in common. It’s been like that as far back as I have memories. Actually, my very first memory – when I was around two, which makes Sarah around four – is of being hot and uncomfortable, wriggling around in Mum’s arms in too many layers of knitted clothes and being told off. Why? Because I was distracting her and Dad from watching Sarah doing her one-girl singing sensation show – belting out Kylie Minogue’s I Should Be So Lucky. Ever since then it seems like I’ve had years of being told to shush and be quiet while Sarah has sung, skipped, tap-danced and dazzled her way through life.

  Me? I’m a trudger – trudging through shifting sands while Sarah jogs right past me on the pavement towards some bright, shining future, which now includes great boyfriends, if Conor is anything to go by…

  “It links in here, with this card that points to a feeling of unrest,” says the old lady, tapping a ridged, yellowish nail on the illustration of a stooped figure. “Almost of being weighted down.”

  I’m finding it hard to concentrate – now that I’ve let a thought of Conor into my head I know I won’t be able to shake his face f
rom my mind for hours. I wish I could stop thinking about him. I wish I could stop my hand from doodling his name every time I’ve come into contact with pen and paper over the last week. I even caught myself spelling ‘Conor’ with the alphabet magnets on our fridge door – I only just managed to scramble it (and the ‘Sarah sucks’ thing I’d spelt out a couple of minutes before) when Dad walked in on me.

  “This conflict…there seems to be more to it than meets the eye. Am I right?”

  Mrs Harrison tears her gaze from the cards and shoots me a look, which is kind of disconcerting. Well, the heavy blue eyeshadow is what’s really disconcerting. That and the peachy layer of powder covering her downy face, like some fuzzy mask. And the coral lipstick. You can’t miss the coral lipstick. Where can you buy make-up like that? Is there some secret, old lady make-up counter at the back of big department stores or something? The freaky make-up – that’s what’s made me (and every other kid in the street) avoid Mrs Harrison like the plague when I was growing up. The batty old mad woman at the house on the corner: she was practically guaranteed to get everyone under the age of twelve’s imagination going. If she was that freaky to look at, what must the inside of her house be like? Full of slugs and snails and puppy dogs’ tails?

  Well, I’m here in Mrs Harrison’s house – a double first, since it’s also the first time in my life I’ve ever given her more that a vague, grunted “hello” as I scurried past her garden gate – and it’s a disappointment to my over-imaginative, eight-year-old self to see that it looks pretty ordinary. Like most old ladies the world over (my gran and my great grandma included) there’s a place for everything and everything in its place. Apart, of course, for the bookshelf that toppled over when she was dusting – the reason she called out to the first person passing (me) to help her lift it up.

  Shyness – make that wariness – made me say very little as I followed her inside and lifted the lightweight, flat-pack shelves back upright. Once the job was done, and I’d been in her house just long enough to be surprised by its ordinariness, I thought Mrs Harrison might let me go with a simple thank you, or try and press a Werther’s Original (or whatever other strange sweet old people like) into my hand.

  Wrong.

  And wrong about the ordinary stuff too. “Would you like me to do a tarot reading for you, as my way of saying thanks? I know you young girls love anything to do with horoscopes and seeing into the future.”

  What I don’t like is cliches – that girls my age should be into certain bands or certain TV shows or think certain ways, as if millions and millions of us can be lumped together as one dumb, trivia-obsessed bundle of raging hormones. But in this case, I had to admit Mrs Harrison had a point. Yeah, so maybe I’m the same as so many other people and not as individual as I want to be, but yes, I definitely wanted to see what the future had in store for me. Just as long as please, please, please don’t let it be more of the same…

  This conflict…there seems to be more to it than meets the eye. Am I right? I ran what she’d just said through my head again.

  “It’s my sister. We don’t get along,” I shrug, finally giving in and helping Mrs Harrison out with a confirmation or two. “My parents think I’m just jealous of her, but that’s not how it is. Not really.”

  “I see,” says Mrs Harrison, glancing from me to the cards that are already face up, and back again.

  Does she really see? Can those mass-produced, Lord of the Rings-style cards really let her peer into my mind, into my life? Can she tell how hard it is to be around someone who constantly puts you down in the smallest, subtlest, almost-invisible-to-the-human-eye way? A self-satisfied smirk in my direction here, a patronising dig there. A few of those a day add up to a lot of dents to a girl’s self-esteem over the course of weeks, months, years. Maybe that’s what Mrs Harrison is looking at now; not the ordinary, plain me on the outside, but the dented, bruised me on the inside.

  Then again, the way her eyes are darting up and down from my face to the cards spread on the table, she might have spotted my scars. Quickly, I pull the sleeves of my fleece down and clutch them tightly in my fists.

  An uncomfortable silence suddenly hangs in the air between us, which I realise is her waiting for me to say more about Sarah. But I won’t – if she really can do this stuff, if she really has some kind of a gift, then she doesn’t need me to tell her a thing. And if she’s just some batty old fake, then I’m not going to give her any more clues that she can use to make up some fantasy future for me.

  “Let’s take a look at these…” I hear Mrs Harrison say softly as her strong-looking but wrinkled fingers flip over the last three cards that remain unturned.

  The figures on them: they might as well be of Homer, Bart and Lisa Simpson, for all they mean to me. But not to Mrs Harrison, who makes the sort of small, appreciative “ooh” noise that my Mum does when Sarah does a turn in the living room, modelling her latest amazing outfit. Only this “ooh” is all for me…

  “I see change, lots of change. One phase of your life is ending and a new one is beginning. And with it being in conjunction with these other two cards…”

  She pauses, starting up with that tap-tap-tapping of her nail on the laminated illustrations again (but not drumming nearly as fast as my heart is now beating).

  “…it’s a change that’s going to make you very happy. And it’s coming soon – sooner than you think.”

  Change? Happiness? Coming my way soon? My heart is soaring so high I could kiss the thoughtful frown off Mrs Harrison’s forehead – only I won’t, since I don’t want to ruin a beautiful moment by getting peach powder in my mouth…

  I’ve been holding my breath, looking for early sightings of this earth-shattering change coming my way. But life has been depressingly normal: Pamela’s been bleating on about her non-blossoming romance with Tariq; every teacher has ignored the fact that there are other subjects – and other teachers – at school and has saddled me with mountains of homework; and Sarah swanned out last night on yet another date with Conor.

  I know this last fact because it was me who opened the door to him and had my second ever encounter with that smile. I tell you, no other boy has ever looked at me that intently or smiled at me so warmly in my life. Of course, it only lasted a nanosecond, before Sarah swooped on us, gathering up her coat and Conor, and practically hurtling the poor guy down our garden path.

  But I don’t care; one nanosecond of that smile will keep me going till next time, whenever that might be. My head’s got a snapshot of his face and those friendly, soul-searching brown eyes, firmly fixed, deep in my psyche. And there’s a soundtrack on loop too…“Hi, Megan! Hi, Megan! Hi, Megan!” (I’ve erased the part that said “Is Sarah in?”)

  “That one’s seventy-five pence, love.” A voice jars me out of my thoughts.

  I glance at the tatty copy of Catcher in the Rye I’ve been holding and quickly put it down.

  “No thanks,” I shake my head at the pushy guy behind the makeshift table covered in paperbacks.

  I’m on my way home from another Saturday hanging out in town with Pamela. This stall: it’s parked up outside our local supermarket every weekend afternoon and I’ve never usually given it a second glance. But a few minutes ago, I found myself hovering, scanning the rows of bright covers, thinking that maybe I should lose myself in a book, to help pass the time till this amazing change decided to make itself known.

  But I guess I shouldn’t be too impatient. It was only yesterday teatime that Mrs Fruitcake Harrison did her tarot thing on me.

  “Go on…I’ll make it fifty pence for you!” says the stall guy, forcing Catcher in the Rye under my nose again. “It’s a classic! It’ll be good for your schoolwork!”

  Which is exactly why I don’t want it. And probably the reason why I’d absent-mindedly picked it up in the first place – we’d read it already in English.

  I’m smiling and shaking my head, already stepping away from the book and the hard sell, when something catches my eye.
Witch Way Now? says a cartoony, gothic, black title on a blood-red book. Spells To Make Your Life Special! it says in smaller letters underneath. I can tell from the mock-serious lettering and the exclamation mark that this isn’t exactly some ancient tome of historical importance – it’s more like a tongue-in-cheek ‘spook’ cash-in on the back of the Harry Potter phenomenon.

  But, cynical or not, I find myself picking it up and flicking through the pages. ‘The It Should Have Been Me! Love Spell’ makes me smile. I could sure do with some of that. ‘The How To Make Him Know I Exist Spell’ makes the smile start to fade as I become more intrigued. And then I spot it…

  ‘The Change Your Life Spell’.

  “Fancy that one? Won’t get you many gold stars from your teachers, a book like that!” I hear the pushy guy guffaw. “Fifty pence for that one, love. As long as you promise to come back and turn it into a fifty quid note once you’ve got the hang of the spells!”

  He thinks he’s a real hoot, this bloke. He’s not going to get a laugh out of me with pathetic witticisms like that – all he is going to get is fifty pence, in the smallest, most annoying pile of change I can rake from the bottom of my purse.

  “Oi! You going to be the next Sabrina then!” I hear him call out to me when I’m already halfway down the street.

  Of course I’m not the next Sabrina. Of course I don’t really believe in magic. But what I do believe in are signs and gut feelings – and maybe (just maybe) this book is the start of it all happening.

  Maybe that’s rubbish, but so what – it only cost me a bunch of loose coins that were weighing down my bag anyway. And if I’m right, well, it could be the best fifty pence I’ve ever spent…

  Chapter 4

  Ice and fire…

  I feel ridiculous.

  According to the book, I need: a beeswax candle (is there any other kind?); a fresh sprig of lavender; an object sacred to me; and a peaceful, quiet room. The trouble is, I don’t have any of those. What I do have is a cinnamon-scented room freshener candle (unused, unloved Christmas present); some lavender aromatherapy oil (ditto); a copy of PJ Harvey’s Songs from the City, Songs from the Sea (my favourite rock staress, my all-time favourite CD and therefore my sacred object); and a room that is anything but peaceful, thanks to my dad roaring at the Manchester United versus Someone-or-other football match on the telly downstairs and Sarah twanging away on her guitar in her room across the hall.