by Rhys Jones
“Lorenzo,” said Mrs. Chambers, “what a nice surprise.”
“Looking to move, Gwen? Had enough of Penwurt?”
“Just testing the water,” she said with a nervous glance at Oz. “Just seeing how property is doing, you know.”
“Badly,” Heeps said, shaking his head. “Wrong time to sell or buy. Of course, an exceptional property like yours in a desirable part of town like Magnus Street could fetch a premium at any time.” He smiled and showed a row of very white, even teeth. Lorenzo Heeps worked at the university and had known Oz’s dad very well.
“Yes, well…oh, hello, Phillipa,” Mrs. Chambers said.
Phillipa Heeps, or Pheeps as Oz liked to call her, stood behind her father, dressed as if she’d just stepped out from one of the shop windows. Oz couldn’t remember ever seeing her with a hair out of place, a shirt untucked or a smidgen of a smudge on her pressed jeans or skirt. Today, as usual, her fair hair was styled perfectly so that it hung over one hazel brown eye in a carefully combed fringe. She was, he supposed, quite pretty in the way a carefully cared-for doll might be. But it was a package spoiled by a cruel mouth that enjoyed gossip and whispers far too much. Her smile in response to Mrs. Chambers’ greeting looked about as genuine as one of the Fanshaws’ pottery toads.
“Hello, Mrs. Chambers. Hello, Oz,” she said brightly.
Oz mumbled a grudging “Hi,” which earned a frowning glance from his mother.
“It is so nice to see you,” Heeps gushed as he and Mrs. Chambers walked slowly down the street. “We really ought to get together to catch up. If you ever need any advice, please don’t hesitate to contact me, Gwen. I do know a little bit about the housing market, you know. In fact, I consider myself something of an expert, since I have a couple of properties of my own and I am a personal acquaintance of Mr. Gerber of Gerber and Callow, who as well as being Seabourne’s most successful businessman is, as you know, a generous supporter of the university…”
Oz tuned out the one-sided conversation and shook his head. Dr. Heeps was one of those people who asked you a question but then didn’t really listen to the answer. At the start, when his dad had died, Dr. Heeps had come around two or three times, but then when Oz’s mum had become ill he’d dropped off the radar. But then, so had lots of other people who used to visit a lot.
Oz sighed. The weight of the groceries was proving to be just a little too much for him, and he suddenly had an urge to plonk the heavy bags down on the pavement and rub at the marks on his hand.
“Careful, you might do yourself an injury,” Pheeps said in a low, mean voice meant only for Oz. “You might do yourself some real damage. Runs in the family, I hear.”
She said it in such a venomous tone that Oz could only stare at her in bewilderment. In return, she simply grinned at him malevolently.
“What are you on about?” Oz asked, his brows knitting.
“Come on, you two,” said Heeps from ten yards away. He lifted his eyebrows at Mrs. Chambers. “Just look at them gossiping like two old fogeys. What are they like?” His grin was snowy white. “Sure we can’t offer you a coffee? There’s a Costa just around the corner.”
“We’ve got to get back,” said Mrs. Chambers, much to Oz’s relief. “Thanks for the offer.”
“Oh, dear,” Heeps said with feeling. “Next time then, eh? Come on, Phillipa, let’s hit those shops. We’ve still to find those boots you wanted.”
“We’ve still to find those boots you wanted,” mimicked Oz as they slowly climbed the stairs in the multi-storey a few minutes later.
“Come on, Oz, they’re not that bad.”
“Yes, they are. You’ve got to admit, he is a bit smarmy.”
“Because he dyes his hair and whitens his teeth, you mean?”
Oz shrugged. “And Pheeps has more clothes than the rest of year eight put together.”
He wanted to tell her about Pheeps’ peculiar taunting, but he had the odd feeling that it was best not to, so he bit his tongue and waited for the inevitable rebuke from his mother. He just couldn’t understand why everyone seemed to think Phillipa Heeps was God’s gift to Seabourne. But to his surprise, Mrs. Chambers didn’t scold him. Instead, she took up from where she’d left off outside the estate agent’s.
“The fact is, Oz, Lorenzo is a useful chap to know and in this case, he might just be right. Penwurt is in a prime location and it may be that we’ll have to look at moving sometime. I mean, staying there forever might not be an option.”
Oz’s insides suddenly knotted. He didn’t like this conversation. “Why not? What’s wrong with living at Penwurt forever?”
Mrs. Chambers stopped on the stairs and turned her face to Oz. She looked very serious and Oz had the impression that she desperately wanted to say something. Instead, she cupped his chin in her hands and he saw her eyes soften. “Nothing,” she said. “Nothing at all. Come on, let’s go home. It’s way past tea time and I don’t know about you, but I am starving.”
* * *
After tea Oz heaved a great sigh.
“Homework?” asked his mother, wrinkling her nose as she said it.
“Bit of maths.”
“Oh, dear,” Mrs. Chambers said.
“And King Arthur stuff for English.”
“Gadzooks.” She made a face.
“That one’s sort of cool, though. Knights that chop people’s heads off, that kind of thing.”
“Lovely.” Mrs. Chambers nodded. “By the way, you have a rather dashing milk moustache.”
“Knew that,” Oz said. “Keeping it for later.”
Mrs. Chambers shook her head, ripped off a paper towel and handed it to him silently. Oz proceeded to make his lip milk-free and headed upstairs to his bedroom. The familiar sight of walls plastered with blue and white posters of Seabourne United greeted him. Next to his bed, a desk groaned under the weight of books about spies and wizards and vampires, a secondhand Xbox console he’d bought off eBay with two years’ worth of birthday money and, of course, his dad’s old laptop. Oz threw himself down on the bed.
Ellie, of course, was right. He’d had a whole week in which to get everything done but hadn’t. The question on “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” stared back at him from his exercise book. “Just a couple of paragraphs on your feelings about the poem,” was how Miss Arkwright had put it. He’d have much preferred a proper title. As it was now, he had no idea where to start.
And then there was maths.
Oz got up determinedly, grabbed his maths books and went up to the library. He plonked himself down at the desk and opened his textbook. There were lots of a’s and b’s and x’s and y’s and a heading that said “simplifying.” Might as well have said “gobbledygook.” Oz felt a familiar dark hole open up in his stomach. Why did he find all this stuff so hard? But he knew the answer. It was the same one that Miss Arkwright, his form tutor at Seabourne County School, had been careful to point out to him on his very first day.
“When someone loses as much school as you have over the last couple of years, Oscar, it sometimes takes quite a while to catch up. So if you need any extra help, just let me know, okay?”
He could see Miss Arkwright in his mind’s eye, smiling down at him with her well-meaning expression. Up until that point Oz hadn’t really thought much about how much school he’d “lost.” Mrs. Evans at Hurley Street Juniors, where he’d been up until last September, had never said anything. When he stayed away for a week or sometimes two to look after his mother, all she’d ever say when he got back was, “Mum all right, Oz?”
He’d nod and then she’d say, “And are you okay?”
And Oz would nod again and just get on with things.
But he’d lost count of the times that had happened until Miss Arkwright had brought it up. The fact was that it hadn’t happened now for almost eight months, but for a long time after Oz’s dad had gone it had happened quite a lot. The fact was that, when his father died, something had died in his mother as well.
Once,
when things were really bad and with Mrs. Chambers desperate and miserable, paralysed by grief and confined to her room, Dr. Tarpin, the Chambers’ family doctor, had sat Oz down in the kitchen. He’d explained how Mrs. Chambers was very sad and how it was quite normal to get a bit depressed after losing someone very close. But he went on to explain that in Oz’s mum’s case that sadness had turned into an illness that needed treatment with medication. Oz had sat quietly and listened and asked no questions. But when Dr. Tarpin had left, Oz had picked up the sheet of paper upon which the GP had written the big words.
Depression. Reactive unipolar.
The second bit didn’t sound too bad when he read it back. In fact, it didn’t sound like an illness at all. Unipolar sounded more like something you might use to repair a broken radio. But there was nothing easily fixable about the way his mother wouldn’t eat, or didn’t want to be hugged, or didn’t shower, or slouched about in a dressing gown for days at a time. There was nothing he could buy from an electrical shop to stop her crying for hours on end.
But he had done as much as he could in other ways, like shopping for the two of them at Mr. Virdi’s greengrocery on Tricolour Street instead of the supermarket in town, and getting eggs and potatoes and bread from the milkman. Sometimes he’d decide that it was okay to leave her for the few hours of school. Sometimes it didn’t seem to matter because she’d ignore him altogether, turned towards the wall in her bed, unable even to respond to his questions.
Sometimes, though, she’d beg him not to leave her. On those days, Oz would do what she couldn’t, like the washing and ironing, or hoovering their kitchen and making spaghetti. And when he got back to Hurley Street School a few days or a week or two later, Mrs. Evans seemed simply to understand. He felt a dark, cold hand suddenly close around his heart. Although his mother was much, much better, a part of him lived in constant fear of things returning to the way they were. And he had a terrible feeling that Seabourne County would not be as understanding as Hurley Street Juniors had been about the Black Dog.
He forced himself to turn to the sheet of twenty questions set by his maths teacher. He’d done almost half of them and now there was nothing for it but to wrestle with the remaining eleven. Whoever had thought up algebra should have been hung in a gibbet, like they did to people in Sir Gawain’s time. He let his gaze wander to the oak panelling and the strange symbols carved in two great wheels on the oak. He had no real idea what any of them meant, other than they were something to do with astrology or astronomy or something beginning with an A. Come to think of it, they were a lot like algebra, really. And as was often the case when something in the house caught his attention, he thought of how easy it would all be if his father were there. Had things been different, he could have just nipped downstairs, knocked on the study door and simply asked, “Hey Dad, you know those really weird symbols on the panelling upstairs, what exactly do they mean? And who was the girl that appeared to the bell ringers in the Bunthorpe Encounter? Oh, and by the way, you any good at algebra?”
And Michael Chambers would take off his glasses and sit back, regarding Oz with his patient, amused smile. And Oz would listen while his dad explained, whatever the question. And ten minutes would turn into an hour in which books would be taken down from shelves and stories told of trips that his dad had made to strange, inaccessible corners of abandoned cities in countries with unpronounceable names.
But things weren’t different. They were the way they were and he was in the library at Penwurt, alone on a Sunday with eleven maths questions to finish and an essay to write on Sir Gawain. And all he really wanted to do was to talk to his dad and research ghosts.
Sometimes, life just wasn’t fair.
Chapter 4
Badger Breath Boggs
The following morning in room 33 at Seabourne County School, Oz’s class, 1C congregated for registration. As usual the room buzzed with a dozen different conversations, some louder than others.
“I went to my brother’s Halloween party,” boasted Tracy Roper to a bored-looking Sandra Ojo. “Me and my friend Zoe were the only ones under fourteen with invites, and I wore this wicked costume and mask which cost loads.”
“Waste of money,” said Lee “Jenks” Jenkins from the back. “Take a look in the mirror, Roper. You could have gone as you are now and won best monster prize, no trouble.”
The small posse of Jenks’ hangers-on clustered around him all sniggered, while Tracy Roper, whose pale skin was as thick as at least two rhinoceri, made eyes to the ceiling and shook her head in exasperation. Oz, sitting with Ellie and Ruff about halfway back under a poster of a rainforest, registered Jenks’ insults only vaguely because he was too busy trying to take in what had happened in Ellie and Ruff’s football game.
“Five-nil,” he said, aghast. “Why didn’t you text me?”
“No credit on my phone,” Ellie mumbled, and Ruff shrugged in agreement. The three of them knew that they could have emailed or Skyped instead, but Oz let it pass. Obviously, they’d needed to just lick their wounds.
“But what happened?”
“We were rubbish,” Ellie said despondently.
“Total cow dung,” Ruff said, turning a page on a well-thumbed gaming magazine someone had lent him that morning.
“And I think our goalie’s got narcoepileprosy,” Ruff explained, shaking his head glumly.
“What?”
“You know, that disease where people fall asleep all the time. He dived the wrong way twice and he scored an own goal when the ball came off the crossbar, hit him smack on the back of the head and went in.”
Oz suppressed a laugh.
“It wasn’t funny, Oz,” Ellie said, clearly not amused.
Oz tried to smother his laughter. But hearing Ruff describe the incompetent goalie was almost as funny as seeing Ellie’s sour expression.
“It’s even worse than you think,” Ellie added, looking distraught.
“Why?” Oz said.
“Jenks scored two. TWO!” she wailed before spitting out her favourite expletive. “Sugar!”
“His head’s so big I’m surprised he got in through the door,” Ruff muttered, drooling over screenshots of Death Planet Hub, which was his favourite Xbox game.
“Oh, no,” Oz said, and quickly glanced at Jenks, who was small in stature but very big in the mouth department and lightning fast on the soccer field. He was obviously reliving some manoeuvre from yesterday’s game and, when he caught Ellie glancing over, took great pleasure in flourishing a red card from his pocket and thrusting it up in the air.
“What’s that all about?” Oz asked.
“I got sent off,” Ellie said, looking suddenly very sheepish.
Oz’s mouth fell open. “What?” he managed to say after a few speechless seconds.
“Bad language,” Ellie said and then quickly added, “We were already four-nil down. But their centre forward is a nasty piece of work and he barged right into Niko, so I told him what I thought of him. I called him a vicious git.”
“But she got the words mixed up a bit,” Ruff said, stifling a grin. “I don’t know what vigous means, but you can guess what the other bit sounded like.”
Oz tried unsuccessfully to stifle another burst of laughter.
“He deserved it,” Ellie said.
“Trouble was, she yelled it out so loudly I’m surprised you didn’t hear it at yours,” Ruff muttered without looking up from his screen.
But this criticism was the final straw for a clearly upset Ellie, who suddenly rounded on Ruff. “Well, at least I cared enough to give him a mouthful. The rest of you just gave up after halftime. I mean, look at you. Just look at you. You can’t even be bothered to stop reading some stupid magazine to tell Oz what actually happened! I hate losing. I just hate it. Of all the teams in the league to get hammered by, the Skullers are the worst. But I honestly don’t think you care. I don’t think you care about anything.” She turned her back on them both and buried her head in her school bag, her mou
th a thin gash of anger.
Ruff looked across at Oz, his expression a mixture of confusion and irritation. It looked like he was going to say something, but Oz shook his head and waved his hand out of Ellie’s view as a warning; Ellie really did hate losing more than anyone Oz knew.
He risked another glance to the back. Behind Jenks sat his faithful shadow, Kieron Skinner. Tall and bony, Skinner usually wore a vacant expression and constantly picked at his forever running nose. But this morning he was grinning like a loon and smirking worse than Jenks was.
“So, did you get all your homework done, then?” Oz asked Ruff in an attempt at steering the conversation away from football.
“No. Just about managed to finish stuff for Badger Breath Boggs, that’s all.”
Oz groaned. “We’ve got maths first lesson, haven’t we?”
Ruff slumped in his chair. “Thanks a bundle. I’d almost forgotten about him.”
“Wish I could,” Oz said. “I just hope he doesn’t pick on me today. He has it in for me, I swear.”
“You and half the rest of the class.”
“You mean the bottom half of the rest of the class,” added Oz glumly. “It’s really weird. I used to like maths when I was in junior school. I was even quite good at it.”
Ellie turned back. Her face was still flushed and angry-looking, but it was obvious that she had to respond to what she was hearing. “Oz, Badger Breath doesn’t have it in for you because you’ve suddenly become a maths idiot,” she said.
“No,” Ruff agreed, “he has it in for you ’cos he’s a miserable gonk.”
There was no time for more chat about Boggs. The door to room 33 opened and in breezed Miss Arkwright, 1C’s form tutor. Oz quite liked Miss Arkwright because she was a bit different. She wore smock dresses and gladiator sandals and put “Save the Whales” and rainforest posters up all over room 33. She’d even worn a flower-print headband on a day trip to Techniquest once, and she knew absolutely loads about Xbox games. Okay, so she was a bit dizzy and sometimes forgot to take registration altogether, but 1C could put up with that, no problemo. The one thing that made Oz uncomfortable about Miss Arkwright was how earnest she was. Especially, for some reason, when it came to him.
