by Amy Wilson
‘Ready?’
‘The rift grows, I have warned you of that, and now you bring this human girl’s SMELL into the house to further tempt them here. They will come through the rift in their dozens and they will strike at the barrier harder than ever – Bavar, are you ready to fight?’
‘Yes,’ I say. I look at the fire, so that I don’t have to face him when I lie, but it catches my confusion and roars, flames shooting up the chimney, sparks flying out in all directions.
‘You need better control of it all,’ he grumbles, as I tread on a couple of burning embers. ‘The house picks up on your mood; you should know that by now. And you can’t fight the raksasa with fire. They’re part made of it. So you’ll need to show your game face. Show me, Bavar!’
I stick my tongue out at him. His mouth twitches.
He’s not completely humourless, my grandfather. He just tries to hide it.
‘. . . and I’ve no idea what business Aoife has, bringing up notions of catalysts. Why would some insignificant VILLAGE girl be a catalyst?’ he blusters, almost as if speaking to himself. ‘How could she possibly be connected to us here at all?’
‘Connected?’
‘Can’t have a catalyst unless there’s a connection, can you, boy? What’s she got to do with it all, eh?’
I stare at him, tired and confused for about the billionth time today, and he stares back, unblinking. And then the window blows open with a bang.
Hot, fetid air pushes in through the room. Huge wings beat over the house, darkness obscuring the stars. Raksasa. However much I shore up the barrier, it won’t stop them getting through the rift.
‘Get out there! Make it go!’
‘It will go,’ I say, sitting on the edge of the desk and curling my fingers around the polished wood. I don’t look at him. I focus on the striped rug by the hearth. Orange, brown, yellow, blue. Orange, brown, yellow, blue . . .
‘Bavar!’
‘It can’t do anything,’ I say, keeping my voice level. ‘The barrier is solid; I’ve been working on it, like you said. It can’t go anywhere. If I go out there now, I’ll only antagonize it, make it worse.’
‘You cannot just hide away in here!’ Grandfather flexes his chest, making the pillar wobble. ‘Bavar, I command you!’
I swallow hard. ‘It’s my decision.’
The beating wings are like a heartbeat, a fluttering, broken heartbeat that speaks only of bad things coming. I wait until they quieten. Until the creature heads back to its home beyond the rift.
‘You see?’ I raise my head. ‘We just have to wait them out.’
He snorts. ‘You must show them your strength. Show them that there is a master here, who will fight with all of his might, as I did once. You may not stop them all that way, but you can make them FEAR you, and fewer will try. You cannot think just to hide in here forever.
‘Not forever. Just for now.’
He isn’t content, and we both know he’s right – the day is coming when I’ll have to face them, whether I want to or not.
I think I might have to move in with Bavar. No. I don’t mean that, obviously. But maybe I could put up a tent on that patch of grass, just be there in the peace overlooking the town. Things feel OK there. Unchangeable.
Everything here is change, and I never liked change. Mary’s macaroni cheese is made with all the best intentions, and orange cheese, and it’s so wrong – it sticks in my mouth and makes my nose tingle.
‘Come on. It can’t be that bad,’ says Mum’s voice, amused. ‘She probably thought it would be comforting.’
But it isn’t, I shout in my head. It’s all wrong, it doesn’t have bacon in it, and it’s not stuck in mounds that you need a knife to cut.
I never said it was all perfect. Dad was away a lot, with his research, and Mum was pretty busy herself, most of the time. And she wasn’t much of a cook. But that was OK. It was normal. This is just wrong. The sounds are wrong too. Not so much of the chatter, more of the fork-scraping-plate sort. The floral curtains have been drawn and the carpet is vanilla and I feel like I’ve been imprisoned in a cake and I can’t breathe.
I can’t breathe here.
They’re too quiet.
Pete clears his throat.
‘So. How was your day, Angel?’
‘OK.’
I stick a row of peas on to the fork tines; the pop of green skin is satisfying.
‘Do you like the school? Our two were always . . .’ He frowns. ‘Well, they seemed happy enough there. Didn’t they, Mary?’
‘Have to go,’ I mumble, lurching up from the table. ‘Homework.’
‘I’ll bring a cup of tea in a bit,’ says Mary behind me.
I imagine turning and letting out the scream that’s on my chest, shocking her out of her tea-making comfort. But I don’t. I head to my room, and I think about how Bavar suits his house, and how I don’t suit this one. And then I pull the battered old suitcase out from under the bed, and the smell when I open it is of home and . . .
help
I take the posters out, and the ball of Blu-Tack, and I wage a war on all the pastel pretty of this room, and it takes me a while and some of the time I can’t really see straight because of my traitorous crying eyes but I do it and I keep doing it and then it’s done. I shove the candle in the skull on to the desk, and when Mary brings the tea, her mouth tightens a bit, but she doesn’t say anything, and in a minute she brings matches, and a box of tissues, and she sits with me on the bed, looking up at it all, not touching me, just sitting there.
The new school is smaller than my old one. Smaller, and older. I kind of like it, the way the corridors tangle so you never quite know where you’re going. Plenty of places to skulk. I wait for Bavar by his locker in the morning. Every so often, as the second hand ticks on the clock in the corridor, I tell myself I’m being stupid, like some crazy stalker fangirl, but I wait anyway, and when he arrives with a crash of the double doors, I have to stop myself smiling at the sight of him. I don’t know why. Except I did think about it a bit last night and I reckon probably it’s because seeing him is like proof that I’m not round the bend.
I didn’t imagine it all last year. It wasn’t burglars.
I just need to work out how it’s all connected.
‘No basket today?’ I ask.
He gives me a blank look, as if he’s never heard of a basket before, and then the bell rings and kids start to swarm around us. Well. They start to swarm around me; he’s got some kind of invisible barrier around him, so they just avoid the space where he’s standing entirely. After a second, fed up with stares and jostles, I move into his space.
‘What are you doing?’ he protests, as I shove right up against him.
‘Hiding,’ I say.
I suppose it’s not the most dignified way to walk into a classroom, stuck tight against the side of the strangest boy in school, but it kind of works. Nobody looks up as we enter, nobody notices as we sit down. I mean, I don’t sit in his lap, or anything, just pull a desk up close to his and sit as close as I can.
And then I see it, right there, though he’s ducked his head down and his hair is hiding most of his face. He’s smiling.
‘Why don’t they see you?’ I whisper at him.
‘They don’t want to,’ he says.
I pull out my folder, plant it on the desk in front of my face.
‘But why?’
He gives me a long look. His dark eyes glitter.
‘Why do you think?’
‘Because you’re different?’
He nods.
‘But lots of people are different. So it must be more. Is it magic?’ I grin, as if I’m joking. ‘Or are you some kind of monster?’
The grin falls, my chest burns, and I guess we both wish I hadn’t asked that question. Because he isn’t saying no, and I knew that monsters existed. I just didn’t expect to be sitting next to someone who smelt like them, in my normal school day.
It brings it all back.
&n
bsp; Makes it real.
They all said it couldn’t be real. They said it was all in my head.
I look at Bavar. He’s not in my head.
‘You’re not, are you?’ I whisper.
‘No,’ he says. ‘No, I’m not.’
Of course I lose him at lunchtime. I turn around to put my stuff in my bag, and when I look up he’s gone. And everybody’s staring, because I’m new and I don’t fit and man, I used to fit. Before that night.
I don’t care.
I don’t care.
I hold my head high as I stalk past them all, and then I take my lunch and sit under the staircase on the science corridor and I make myself eat it, looking at all the different kinds of shoes people wear to school, the way they all walk, and after a while I can breathe again and then there’s a shadow over me and when I look up Bavar is there, stooping down, head tilted.
‘Why are you eating your lunch here?’
I shrug.
‘Are you hiding?’
‘Maybe . . .’
‘Why do you need to hide?’
I sigh, staring at him. ‘Why do you think you’re the only one who wants to?’
He’s silent for a while and I think maybe he’ll leave, but he doesn’t. He just lingers there, making us both uncomfortable.
‘Just come and sit, or something; you’re making me nervous,’ I say in the end.
‘I thought it might help, if I was here,’ he grunts, trying to fold himself into a very small space beside me. ‘Stop people seeing you, or something.’ He stares at me, blows his cheeks out. ‘I don’t know.’
‘Did you never speak to a person before?’
‘Not here,’ he says. ‘I mean, not . . . not a person like you . . .’
‘You’re a bit hopeless at it.’
‘And yet here we are,’ he says, the hint of a smile on his face. ‘Speaking.’
‘Hey, new girl,’ comes a new voice. A girl, tilting her head to look into our hiding place. ‘Why you hiding in there?’
She ignores Bavar as he scrambles out, shifting to one side to let him pass, her eyes still fixed on me. She doesn’t seem to register him at all.
She definitely sees me though.
‘I was just having my lunch . . .’ I start.
‘There’s a cafeteria, you know,’ she says, her voice full of scorn. ‘With tables and chairs, and everything.’
I grab my stuff and scuttle out of my hiding place, standing to face her. Her eyes glint with malice and I fold my arms, wondering what she’s going to do next.
‘I was going to ask you,’ she says, looking me up and down. ‘What kind of name is Angel?’
It doesn’t sound as if she really likes the name Angel. It’s become something twisted and ridiculous, the way she says it.
‘What do you mean?’ I ask, trying to keep my voice nice and light, despite the thump of my heart in my ears. I was kind of expecting trouble at some point, after my little lie-fest on day one. It’s taken a couple of days to build, and now here she is. Grace something, I think, ready to take me on. She has brown hair down to her waist, shiny and immaculate. She swishes it back over her shoulders in a practised move.
The funny thing is that I told her the truth. I lied to lots of people on that first day, but when she started up with the same old questions I got fed up of it all, so I told her exactly what happened, and that I was now living with foster parents. And I had a smile on my face at the time – I guess I was nervous – so she was the one who called me out as a liar. Which is ironic, really.
‘What kind of parents call their kid Angel?’ she asks now.
‘The kind that later orphan her,’ I say.
‘That kind of thing’s not funny,’ she whispers, leaning in to me. ‘You shouldn’t joke about it.’
‘I’m not joking,’ I tell her.
She advances on me, and then there’s a little blur to my left, and the world spins.
I’m outside, in front of the bike racks, and Bavar is standing before me, slightly out of breath. The school field behind him is misted with frost, and shadows stretch from the trees towards us. For a second it’s like the world is black and white, all angles and lurking things, and he’s the thing that stands between all of that and me.
The only thing.
I blink, and my head clears, the world starts to move again, kids jumbling past us, their heads down, laughing and battering at each other with bags and coats.
‘What was that?’ I whisper.
‘You looked sad.’
‘I was angry!’
‘Sad,’ he says, shaking his head obstinately.
‘So you’ve just propelled me out here? How did you do that? And what am I supposed to do now? Walk back in and pretend nothing happened?’
He shrugs. ‘She probably will. She’ll just think you ran off, or something.’
I stare at him.
‘People don’t like it,’ he says. ‘They pretend it isn’t happening. Most people, anyway – what’s different about you? Are you really called Angel?’
‘Yes, I really am,’ I say. ‘And I could ask you the same question – what’s different about you?’
He stands there looking at me, the shadows stretching around him. He seems to grow in that moment, and I tell myself he doesn’t frighten me, but all the little hairs on my arms are standing up because whatever that was, and however he did it, he did it. And it smelt of the monsters who came that night; it smelt of magic – dark and intoxicating.
‘Bavar . . .’
But I don’t know what to say. I don’t know where to start. And while I’m struggling to find the words, he turns and walks away.
I saw her in danger.
An angel, in danger.
It was all I saw, and the thing I’ve been denying all my life reared up. The world got darker, and she was the only bright thing. She was in danger, so I took her and I got her out of there. It was a rush of energy, a rush of blood to the head, something, I don’t know. I never did anything like that before.
And now she’s angry, and I’m confused. I always knew I didn’t fit in this world, but I thought I was the only one. That only someone like me wouldn’t fit. She doesn’t fit either. She’s all the right things on the outside, but something on the inside is different, like it’s seen things that it shouldn’t have seen, and so now she doesn’t fit.
What did she see, that made her like that?
I can’t stop replaying it in my head. That look on her face. The twist in my gut, and that thing inside – the thing that knows how to fight and how to kill . . . that thing is no longer content to curl up silent and small. It doesn’t care about the promise I made.
It’s ready for a fight.
I take my time walking back to the nice house after school. My head’s still spinning. I breathe slow, and the world is quiet around me, winter-slow, the sky bleak, trees unmoving. A normal November day, in a normal town. Except it isn’t. The yellow house perches above it all, and as I turn to look up at it, dozens of large black birds take flight from the frozen ground next to me, wheeling up into the sky like shards of night, swooping low over the rooftops.
Is that normal? I feel like it’s hard to tell now. Before, I would have told myself it was just a strange bird thing, but now it feels like it means something. It means monsters, and magic. Or maybe I’m going crazy – it’s hard to know. It’s like I’ve learned to hide from myself. I can be alive on the outside, and doing all the normal stuff, and on the inside . . . well, it’s a bit of a wasteland, really. Think of blackened trees and yellow, dusty earth. That’s what happens when you shut down. When bad stuff happens, and you have no control over it. And you hid in the cupboard, because your dad told you to, and you were a good girl so you did what you were told, but now you wish, wish, you hadn’t been so good, because hiding in the cupboard meant that they died.
And you didn’t.
I remember the sound of great flapping wings. Like a giant moth, battering at the bedroom wind
ow until it smashed, and there was glass all over the floor. I sat up and Mum and Dad rushed in, and there was a screech like a thousand nails being dragged over a board that made my spine turn to ice. A stench of metal, and darker things, and a warp in the air that made it hard to see. And Dad hustled me into the cupboard and I was too numb to argue, too dumb to do anything else.
I put my hands over my ears, when Mum screamed. And I didn’t hear anything else, and I didn’t even open my eyes until someone grabbed me, and I started screaming then, fighting and biting, but the voice was calming, and I realized after a while that it was a woman in uniform, a police woman, and she pulled me out of there, and she held me tight to her side, and she wouldn’t let me look. We walked over broken glass and around spools of darkness shining wet in the moonlight. Her black boots, my bare feet.
I never saw them.
They said it was a violent burglary, a burglary gone wrong. But I knew. I knew it was something unnatural.
I wish I’d stayed with them. I wish I’d fought with them. And I’m not delusional. I know I wouldn’t have made any difference – no human could have fought that creature. But I would have tried. And whatever happened, I could have held on to that.
‘Angel!’
I start. Mary is waiting for me at the door. All my senses fire up at the look of worry on her face.
‘What? What happened?’
‘Nothing,’ she says. ‘You looked like you were sleepwalking. I wondered if you were going to walk right into the pond!’
I look down at the pond in front of my feet. It’s about the size of a pound coin. Well. Maybe a bit bigger, but still. I probably would have survived it.
‘Come on, come in,’ she says. ‘I got crumpets . . . do you like them?’
I look at her; my heart is in my throat. I like crumpets. Who doesn’t like crumpets?
But what if she does them wrong?
‘Can I do them?’ I ask.
She grins. She has a kind face. Brown eyes, round cheeks, curly hair.
‘Yes!’
Up in my room, crumpet disaster neatly averted by yours truly, who knows how to wield a butter knife. Dinner was OK too. Pete was out, and somehow it was easier, just Mary and me, the TV on in the background. It was OK. I even saw the cat, Mika, for a moment or two before he showed me his bottom and left for better things. I didn’t blame him.
