Ferney

by James Long

  Fleur eventually found her there, curled up in a ball and weeping. The Reynoldses were close behind her, the father and the mother, with Maria and Simeon hanging back behind them, grinning.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Fleur demanded, and Jo was too carried away to observe her usual silent discretion.

  ‘He was killed,’ she got out between sobs. ‘They killed him. He did it to save him.’

  ‘Who did it to save who?’

  ‘He did. Her son. Her brave, brave son.’

  ‘Whose son. Who is her?’

  But before Jo could find a way not to answer that, they both became aware of a mumbling from behind them. Fleur turned sharply to find Justin Reynolds’ wife, Leah, making the sign of the cross over and over again as she recited an incantation in a language Fleur did not recognise at all.

  ‘What on earth are you doing?’ she demanded.

  ‘Asking the help of the Lord for your poor daughter in her affliction. The Lord will come to her aid.’

  Fleur remembered just in time that she needed the Reynoldses and choked back her words.

  Leah Reynolds, warming to her task, gesticulated ever more violently, then knelt and put her hands on Jo’s head. Jo twisted to escape but the woman wrapped one arm right round her and held the girl’s head back against her chest with the other hand. Her husband watched with an expression of pride on his face.

  ‘She’s done this before,’ he said. ‘Casting out. She has special powers.’ Fleur thought hard about his position on the Planning Committee and did her best to smile, as Leah Reynolds continued to intone.

  ‘Let me go,’ said Jo quietly. Leah Reynolds ignored her. ‘What?’ said Jo. There was a silence, then she said, ‘You have no right to restrain me. Please take your hands away.’

  Leah Reynolds went on speaking in a monotone. Fleur thought perhaps it was Latin and then Jo started to laugh and laugh, not hysterically but in adult amusement. ‘Oh you silly woman,’ said the child. ‘Go on. Just get it over with.’

  Next week, her mother took Jo to a new person in a new office – a woman this time who was far less quiet and told her more than she asked her. After she saw the woman, her mother started to give her tablets and Jo could hear her friend telling her not to take them, to hide them in her mouth and spit them out later, and that worked for a week or so until her mother caught her and then she was forced to drink a whole glass of water and it was impossible not to swallow. The tablets made her feel sleepy and dull and not at all herself. The worst thing was that they pushed her friend away so she could only feel her, waiting anxiously, too far off to talk – her friend Gally.