by James Long
But Jo had learned not to mention the friend she talked to every night when she went to bed – the friend who was there for comfort and for wisdom, who spoke to her from inside her head.
‘I don’t know,’ she said.
‘You’re getting very secretive. I don’t like it.’
That evening Jo sat in her room, getting ready to do her homework. Mrs Hedges had asked her to write another story.
She settled in her chair and opened her exercise book. ‘What shall we write about this time?’ she asked into the silence of her room and listened to the answer, smiling to herself.
Fleur came in much later, noticing the light still on. She had been on the phone for most of the evening trying to sort out the problems at the Durston barn conversion where the highways department were kicking up about access on to the lane. She tutted when she saw Jo lying asleep with most of her clothes still on, unbuttoned all she could and rolled her daughter under the duvet. Then she saw the open exercise book.
‘My Cottage,’ she read. ‘My cottage stands where it has always stood, under the edge of the hill, and it is made out of the bones of the hill. All its stones came out of the hill and its beams are made from the trees that grew on the hill. One day it will sink back into the hill but only if I am not there to save it.’
They lived in the heart of York, in a house made of good Victorian brick. Fleur tutted again. Mrs Hedges might like it, but imagination didn’t put bread on the table.
Jo wriggled away from the noise her mother made, burrowing miles down to the place where she really lived, in the cottage room under the eaves where the evening air, blown by birds’ wings, carried in the scent of kindly thatch.
After school the next day Maria Reynolds came to play. She loomed over Jo, blotting out the light and hissing murderous and mysterious words of ill omen at her whenever they were by themselves.
‘Have you been saved?’ she said. ‘You’re going to burn in the fire. Did you know that?’
For once Jo tried to stay as near her mother as possible to keep this fat malevolence under some sort of restraint, but Fleur shut herself away in her study, leaving her daughter to endure the pinches and the mean taunts. Even when Maria’s father came to fetch her, the misery did not end because Fleur poured him a glass of sherry and shut him inside with her. Jo set up the skittles just outside the window for safety and she could see them talking inside – saw her mother unfolding plans, laughing and smiling as she never normally did. They were at it for half an hour and whenever they were both looking the other way, Maria would throw the hard wooden ball at Jo instead of at the skittles.
‘I’m going to heaven,’ she said. ‘I’ve been saved. You haven’t. You’re a sinner. You deserve what’s coming to you.’
At the weekend, Fleur announced that they were going out for a picnic, which was not something they had ever done before.
‘Where are we going?’ Jo asked.
‘It’s by a river. There’s a field I want to see.’
It was usually houses and old barns her mother wanted to see and Jo was very used by now to hanging around while Fleur talked to men with clipboards and tape measures who got out of battered vans. ‘It’s what keeps us fed, my dear,’ was what Fleur always said if she thought she caught a look of boredom. ‘Your father didn’t provide for us, so I have to.’
A field sounded good until she asked the next question, looking at the hamper her mother was loading. ‘Will we eat all this food?’
‘We will, and Mr Reynolds will, and Maria and her little brother.’
It took them nearly half an hour to drive there. ‘Now, what I want you to do is take Maria and her brother off and give me some time to talk to their father,’ said Fleur.
‘Isn’t their mother coming?’ Jo asked hopefully.
‘She’s coming a bit later,’ said Fleur, ‘when she’s finished doing something or other for their church. They’re very religious, you know. There’s no need to make a face. There’s nothing wrong with believing in things.’
The picnic was indeed in a field on the edge of a river, but what Fleur hadn’t said was that the river flowed through a village that felt a bit like a small town because it had factories and a big caravan site on that side. The field was a bit further down the river but it wasn’t the sort of field that promised fun even if Jo had been by herself. Maria’s brother was called Simeon ‘With an “e”, he told her, ‘like in the Bible,’ and he joined in the game of bullying Jo with a zeal that showed how accustomed he was to being the usual target.
‘You don’t go to church, do you?’ he asked as soon as they were by themselves.
‘I’ve been to church,’ Jo said. ‘I’ve been to a wedding and a christening.’
‘That’s not real church. That’s misusing the church’s solemn fabric for earthly ends. If you don’t go to real church, you’ll go to hell. You have to be saved.’
‘She won’t be saved,’ said Maria with contempt. ‘Who would bother to save her?’
‘God the Father would,’ said Simeon. ‘He saves anyone who wants to be saved.’
‘Not her,’ said his sister. ‘Don’t talk about what you don’t know about.’
‘He’d save her.’
‘Who says so?’
‘I say so.’
Words came to Jo’s mouth. ‘ “They say so” is half a liar,’ she said quietly.
‘What does that mean? That doesn’t mean anything. Are you saying I’m a liar?’ Maria stepped up to her, inflating herself and butting Jo with her stomach so that she had to step back.
‘I don’t think a real god would be like that,’ Jo answered bravely. ‘God tempers the wind to a shorn lamb.’
Simeon made a loopy sign with his hand. ‘You say stupid things,’ he said, and Maria pushed her so that she fell over backwards, then kicked her and walked off laughing. Jo felt tears coming to her eyes with the pain of the kick and reached out in her mind to her private friend, the wise and gentle one who was always there for her, but instead of that comforting strength she could only feel distant misery.
That was a shock. It was the first time there had been any distance at all between them. She could not remember the time before her friend. That calm, consoling voice had always been somewhere just there. If she could have reached inside her skull, she could have put her finger on the exact spot, towards the back and a little to the right. Now she could feel someone still close by, but not with her – and it was someone who was hurting even more than she was. Jo got to her feet and ran along the edge of the field, with the water flowing just beside her, past the twisted shopping trolley wedged among the stones and the pool where dark fish flicked their tails, all the way to the far hedge where she knew her friend was, where she was needed.
She knelt close to the riverbank right by her friend but there was a wall between them and she knew this best of friends didn’t want to drag her into whatever was happening. She persisted, opening herself up to the misery next to her until she broke through the barrier and found out, much too fast, what death and the sorrow of death felt like.
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 th
e 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.
CHAPTER 2
They left the house in York when Jo was twelve years old. She got up when the alarm went off on a perfectly ordinary Friday morning. There was no milk in the fridge, just two half-empty bottles of white wine and a carton of apple juice. She looked for bread to toast but had no luck there either, so she poured the apple juice over her cornflakes. It wasn’t good. She searched the ironing pile then went upstairs. Fleur was in the bath with the door ajar.
‘I can’t find my gym clothes,’ Jo said quietly.
‘Where did you leave them?’
‘In the washing. That’s what you told me to do.’
‘Did I? Look in the machine. You should get yourself sorted out. I did my own washing when I was your age.’
Downstairs, Jo found them, twisted in the middle of the sopping wet load. There was only ten minutes to go before she had to leave and she could think of no way to dry them in time to avoid all the trouble she’d be in if she didn’t have them. She squeezed them out as hard as she could but they were still completely and defiantly wet. She put them in the tumble dryer on full heat until the last possible minute and all the difference that made was that they were very hot and just as wet and the steam made her eyes wet too – unless she was crying, which she thought she might be. Somehow she had managed to annoy her mother almost every time she had opened her mouth that week, but when she cried Fleur got angry so Jo had saved her tears for when she was alone in her bedroom. The tablets didn’t stop the tears – they just made them seem to come from off to one side.
She put the hot, wet clothes in a plastic bag and tucked them in her backpack, imagining what the others would say in the changing room when she tried to put them on. They called her ‘Dopey Driscoll’ at school. Despite that, when she went to the front door she was relieved to be leaving the house. She enjoyed the moment of opening it, like a cork letting the pressure out of a bottle. The door was a wooden eyelid, blinking open to a street of old brick houses and parked cars, a street that smelt different every day, a quiet street with sometimes just a silent passer-by. Until that morning it had been a predictable process, that passage through the door, but as it started to swing open, before she could even see outside, Jo heard a noise like a mass intake of breath and a shuffling as if some large animal was preparing to pounce. A crowd of men were clustered around their steps, the closest of them actually standing on the bottom step. There were cameras pointing at her and a tall, bald man near the back shouted, ‘Is your mother in, ducks?’
Jo stepped back, stunned, and slammed the door. The wet clothes didn’t matter because she didn’t go to school that day and Fleur told her not to go near the front windows and not to answer the phone which rang all the time.
That evening they climbed the fence into the Robinsons’ back garden then squeezed through the hedge into the driveway beyond that, coming out into the supermarket car park and then walking and walking until they got to a small hotel on the Fulford road. All Fleur would say was that she would tell Jo when the time came.
At breakfast next morning the time did come when the newspaper arrived with the pallid scrambled eggs. It had a big picture of her mother on the front page.
‘Developer Accused in Planning Scandal’ was all Jo had time to see before Fleur folded it inside out and sat on it – that and a smaller photo of her mother and Justin Reynolds cutting a tape with a pair of scissors and a big smile.
‘Is it bad?’ Jo asked. It was the first time she had ever seen her mother look uncertain.
‘Nothing that won’t blow over.’
‘That was you and Mr Reynolds in the paper?’
‘Some shabby little journalist has got the wrong end of the stick.’ Fleur looked around and lowered her voice although there was nobody else in the room. ‘I build houses for people to live in and nobody’s grateful. Nobody at all.’
Jo tried to feel sorry for her but nothing much came. Surely there should be a connection between us, she thought to herself, but the old familiar voice whispered in her head. ‘You’re not really hers,’ said Gally’s voice and tears came to her eyes – tears of relief that Gally was still there. Jo’s tablets had been left behind at the house, along with almost everything else. It was a whole day since she had taken one. She didn’t like her tablets. They wrapped part of the inside of her head in a fuzzy blanket that stopped her talking to Gally, stopped the parade of thoughts and pictures in her head, stopped her wanting to write stories. The tablets painted her whole life grey and made her heavy. ‘You’re not really hers.’ It felt a harsh judgement but she knew it was right.
Mr Reynolds’ wife came to the guest house that morning for a huddled conversation in the bedroom while Jo had to sit downstairs reading. Mrs Reynolds came into the room half an hour later.
‘Hello, Jo,’ she said. ‘Your mother asked me to give you some more spiritual cleansing. I’ve got a minute or two. Just kneel by my feet, will you.’
‘No,’ said Jo. ‘Thank you. There’s no need.’
‘Oh, but there is. That’s the Devil speaking. We must drive him out.’
‘Now listen to me,’ said Jo firmly. ‘You have very little understanding of these things and it is quite possible, though not absolutely certain, that you have a genuine wish to help me, although it is equally possible that you enjoy the power you can wield over less forceful people, but I have a different understanding of the way the world works. I believe there is no evil, only an absence of good from time to time. Nothing in me needs driving out and if it did, I would not choose you as the driver.’
Mrs Reynolds listened to her at first in surprise, and then in some kind of growing horror.
‘That’s not you speaking, Jo. Don’t you see? That’s the voice of the Old One. There is darkness inside you. I have to do what I have to do. You must be saved.’
She lunged forward and wrapped her arms round Jo, squeezing hard.
‘Let me go,’ said Jo, then louder, ‘Let go of me right now.’ Leah Reynolds put one hand over her mouth and began to intone ‘In nomine Domini, Gloria . . .’ ending in a scream as Jo bit her hand and burst out of her grasp.
‘I warn you,’ said Jo. ‘I don’t like hurting people unless I have no choice, and I’m smaller than you, but if you come any closer I shall hit you so hard that it wi
ll really hurt,’ and the voice in her head, the old one who was not at all the same Old One that Mrs Reynolds meant, cheered her as the other woman rushed out of the room.
There was a period after that when they lived an uncomfortable life in a chilly guest house in Scarborough. The only good thing about it – though it was a very good thing – was that her mother entirely forgot about the pills in her preoccupation, so colour came back into Jo’s life to liven up the grey, and her private friend came back to her completely. It wasn’t quite the same. Mostly, when Jo needed her advice or her support, she knew what Gally would say without needing to hear the actual words spoken in her head. Every now and then it was just like old times again and she would feel her friend really was right there, in her old place. Those were the times she liked best.
One day, when she was feeling queasy after a breakfast of undercooked fat sausages, she found a familiar plant growing at the far end of the guest house garden. She picked a leaf and was crumpling it in her palm, ready to chew the pieces, when an urgent voice spoke in her head – Gally’s voice.
‘No,’ it said. ‘Look again.’
So she inspected it and though it looked almost exactly like Holy Rope, she saw that perhaps it was not quite the same, so she threw the crumpled leaf away, took another one carefully from the plant and walked to the library to find a book that might explain her mistake. She could not find Holy Rope in the index, but after looking at all the pictures she had just identified it as Eupatorium when the young male librarian walked up to the table where she was bent over the book, took the leaf from her with a tutting noise and whispered, ‘I think I’d better throw this away, don’t you?’
Jo looked up at him in clear surprise and he whispered again, with a smile, ‘Oh, come on. You and I both know what this is. You’re a bit young for the weed, aren’t you?’
Jo’s blank expression made him stop smiling. ‘It’s cannabis, dear,’ he said. ‘All right?’ When he left her alone, she studied the pictures and noted the differences.
The effect of the pills was finally completely gone and she knew she had come back to life. Her old, secret friend now dwelt nearer Jo’s centre, usually silent but always there with a nudge, a thought or a different way of looking at things – more like a memory bank of wise advice now than an older sister. That left Jo a little lonelier but there were compensations. There was more acceptance at her new school, even people who were almost like friends, though she was not allowed to play with any of them outside school – for fear, her mother said, of drawing attention to themselves.
