A Girl Called Owl

by Amy Wilson

‘Family is all the parts, not just some of the parts.’

  I’m too cross, it’s not coming out right. I take a deep breath, leaning against the wall as she puts the plates on the table. She’s made naan bread and raita to go with the lentils, and my stomach rumbles treacherously.

  ‘Family is this.’ She gestures around the room. ‘Family is wherever there is home, and food, and love . . . Come, now. Come and eat, and we’ll talk.’

  ‘But it’s not—’

  ‘Here,’ she says, reaching into the fridge. ‘I got your favourite.’

  Mexicana spicy cheese. She smiles hopefully and my eyes sting.

  ‘I don’t want cheese.’

  ‘But you love it!’

  ‘I don’t want any of this. I want to know who my father is.’ I fold my arms, glare at her.

  ‘Owl!’

  ‘I need to know!’

  She puts her back up against the kitchen counter.

  ‘I’ve told you the story. I used to read it to you, don’t you remember? I told you how I met him, how beautiful—’

  ‘His name, Mum! Tell me his actual real proper name!’

  All the colour seems to drain from her face as she stares at me and realizes I’m not about to give in this time. My breath catches in my throat and suddenly I feel sick. I wish I hadn’t stormed in here, I should have let it go. I’m not going to like it, I can tell from the way she twists her hands; she’s scared.

  ‘Just do it,’ I whisper. How can it be that bad?

  ‘Jack,’ she says, looking me in the eye. ‘His name is Jack.’

  ‘Jack what?’

  ‘Jack Frost.’

  Laughing.

  Crying.

  She’s rushing over to me.

  I fight her off.

  Can’t breathe.

  Is my life such a joke to her?

  Is she mad, does she really believe what she’s saying?

  Her eyes are shining with the truth of it.

  But how?

  How can that be true?

  It was a day. It could have been a week, or a month, or longer. It could have been a lifetime. The days in that place did not work the same, and she was lost in the magic that surrounded her so that if it had been forever she would never have questioned it.

  The light was low and bright, when it broke through the haze. The mountains towered above them and there were living creatures there: goats tripping over the rocks, and eagles high overhead. A frozen lake opened out to the west of the dome and she was sure it had never been anything other than ice upon ice.

  The dome was his palace. Wrought of ice that fractured and splintered light upon shining blue-white floors, there were staircases that led nowhere, and others that swept up to new chambers. Over all was the frozen ceiling, covered in a layer of snow, and where he lit candles the light glanced off a million chiselled surfaces, making fractal shapes upon the floor.

  There was danger all around them in that place and she knew when she looked into his silver eyes that he could be just as terrible as any of the wolves, and just as treacherous as the ice.

  ‘What are you?’ he asked her. ‘How do you appear here thus?’

  I’m in my room, my stomach still churning, eyes stinging. I had to get away from Mum because it can’t be true. It can’t be. It’s ridiculous. Impossible. Plain bonkers. I’m shouting the words inside my head to drown out the other thoughts, but they filter through anyway. Because she told me, didn’t she, over the years, in all those moon-eyed stories of a winter wonderland, wild and beautiful. And I always knew deep down that my father was not going to be your usual sort of person, Mum being who she is. And then there are the things that have happened since the first frost fell two days ago.

  It shouldn’t be a big surprise.

  My father is an icon of winter, a spirit who spreads frost across the world.

  No need to overreact, Owl.

  ‘You knew it was going to be something freaky,’ I tell myself, catching sight of my face in the mirror. There’s a full moon tonight and my reflection is a warped glimpse of a new me, someone I suddenly barely know. Pale skin, pale hair, golden eyes – it’s me, it just all looks so different right now. The edges seem to blur and I could almost imagine the girl in the mirror is some sort of fairy-tale creature, proportions all slightly irregular, skin glowing with a strange silver sheen.

  What am I?

  Something pulls at me deep inside, a fear I never knew about before. What if Mum is right and Jack Frost – the figure she made so familiar with all her tales – is my father, what would that really mean? Tears gather in my eyes and when I blink they fall into my lap, where they gleam in the moonlight.

  Three tiny drops of ice.

  ‘Owl, let me in.’

  ‘No!’ I brush the tears away, relieved when they melt at the touch of my hand.

  ‘Please, let’s talk about it . . .’

  Mum opens the door and lingers there, one hand on the knob.

  ‘I thought you were ready,’ she says softly. ‘I thought the stories I told you when you were little might have helped . . . that you would somehow understand. Isn’t it better to know?’

  ‘No,’ I say, and I mean to be brave and turn away from her, and not show her my new, uncertain self, but my voice wobbles and I find myself looking at her while more tears fall and I don’t mean to let them. I brush them away as soon as I can, but she sees. She sees everything.

  ‘Oh, Owl!’

  ‘I don’t know what to do! What is this? Why am I so different?’

  ‘It’s all right, my love,’ she breathes, rushing over to sit beside me on the old bedspread she made with my baby clothes. She puts her arms around me. ‘You are wonderful. You have always been my wonderful, special girl.’ She pulls away and looks at me, her eyes bright. ‘If it is more evident now, then it is not a bad thing, Owl,’ she says fiercely. ‘You are becoming what you were always meant to be. I have often wondered . . . and now winter has come, and you’re at the age where your body is changing—’

  ‘But not like this! Look!’ I howl, as the tears of ice keep on falling.

  ‘They’re beautiful . . .’

  ‘Oh, Mum!’ I swipe them away angrily, clench my jaw to stop more coming. ‘You always say that sort of thing but . . . they’re not, they’re not supposed to be doing that! What am I going to do? How am I going to go to school? What will I tell people?’

  ‘You’re upset,’ she says, ‘but that won’t last forever. And truthfully I don’t know what’s going to happen, Owl, and I understand – I understand that to be different is difficult, but you will be all right. Have I not always embraced the part of you that is only you?’

  ‘What do you know about being different?’ I demand, pulling away. ‘I mean, really. When did you last cry tears of ice, or half freeze your best friend with a touch? How do you know what it feels like?’

  ‘Owl!’

  ‘You can’t make this better.’

  ‘I’m not convinced it should be better,’ she says, looking out into the night sky, her dark eyes glittering. ‘But if you think there’s someone who can help you more, perhaps you should seek them out. I suppose you could . . .’

  ‘You mean him?’

  ‘I could never find him again,’ she says, her voice hushed. ‘But you’re different, as you say. You’re part of that world I told you stories about, Owl. Come, I’ll show you where it all began . . .’

  It’s an enormous book, covered in black leather, tucked into the bottom corner of the vast bookshelf that dwarfs the rest of the little sitting room. I recognize it immediately as the one Mum read from when I was a kid. The gold writing on the cover says: Fablef and Earth-fpiritf: How to Meet Them and How to Find Your Way to Your Own fpirit felf.

  ‘This . . .’ she says, leafing through the dry, yellowed pages, pulling me on to the settee and switching on the overhead lamp. She peers at me over the top of the book, her eyes twinkling. I think she’s enjoying this. It’s almost like she’s been jus
t waiting for it to happen. I scowl at her. ‘Well,’ she says, turning back to the book. ‘This is what took me to him. I was reading through it, thinking of all these places, of what it would be like if they were real . . . I was searching for something, adventure, I suppose. When I read out the incantation –’ she shakes her head, a funny little smile on her mouth – ‘well, I didn’t think it would work.’

  ‘But it did?’

  ‘Oh, it did,’ she says. ‘All the stories I told you, Owl; some of them were my own. That place I found myself, it was real! I woke in the morning, and I didn’t know how real it was – until I discovered I was carrying you.’

  They were her own stories.

  Not fables at all.

  ‘And you think I should try this?’ I ask.

  She bites her lip. ‘Honestly, I don’t think you’re ready. I think you need to find yourself, before you can seek answers from others. But . . .’ She waves off my protest. ‘But it’s up to you. How can I tell you what to do or what not to do, in this situation? There has never been another like you, Owl. You, more than most, need to find your own way.’

  ‘Oh, just give me the book,’ I say, taking it and hefting it back to my room.

  ‘Be careful, my love,’ she calls after me. ‘Please, be careful.’

  ‘I will!’ I shout, dropping the book on the bed. I’m shaking, almost numb with exhaustion. I close the curtains and climb into bed, pulling the covers up and heaving the book on to my lap.

  I want to talk to Mallory. I look at the clock. Eleven. It’s still the same evening. The same day. Just a few hours since I saw her, even less since everything changed. She’d know what to say. I fumble for my phone. No texts, no missed calls. And she had her family evening. I put the phone on the bookcase next to the bed. It can wait. Honestly, what would I even say right now?

  ‘Incantationf,’ I mutter, opening the book and turning to the index at the back. It must be truly ancient – every single s is written as an f. Some of my favourite stories aren’t there, I realize as I flick through the pages. Of course. Because Mum made them up. They were her experiences of when she went to that other place, and met him.

  My father.

  ‘Let’s do this then,’ I say, shaking my head as I find a poem that looks a bit like some sort of spell. ‘Ridiculouf book . . .’

  Mallory isn’t telling me something.

  I mean, I’m not telling her something either, but whereas I’m trying to be normal while the name Jack Frost rattles about in the back of my head, she’s all bug-eyed and quiet, shuffling along to school, making absolutely no effort to appear normal, and she can’t possibly have a Jack Frost situation of her own going on.

  ‘Mall!’ I say in the end, after the fifth conversation I’ve opened gets shut in my face. ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ she says, shaking her head.

  ‘But wait, look . . .’ I pull at her arm. ‘Maybe I can help?’

  ‘No, you can’t.’

  ‘Mallory . . .’

  ‘I just. Can’t. I want to get through the day without thinking about it all. Can we do that?’

  ‘Of course we can,’ I say. ‘Just, you know, whenever you want to talk . . .’

  ‘Yeah, I know,’ she says, hitching her bag up on to her shoulder as we reach the main gates. ‘Did you talk to your mum?’

  ‘Uh, sort of,’ I say.

  ‘And?’

  ‘Just another bunch of rubbish,’ I sigh, brushing aside lingering thoughts of frozen tears and fathers with ice-tipped hair, and failed attempts to find my ‘fpirit felf’ with that silly old book. ‘So, let’s both get through the day, and maybe we could do something this evening?’

  Her face shuts down. ‘Can’t.’

  ‘O-kaaay,’ I mutter behind her back, as she storms off into school. Man, that is unlike Mallory. What the heck happened last night? I thought my evening was bad. I try to catch her up but she’s steaming through the crowds of kids and she’s got a very neat way of doing it. I have bigger feet or something, I just don’t slink through as easily.

  She had her family evening, I remember as we get into the form room. That must be it. Maybe they nagged about homework, maybe they didn’t like the B she got for maths last week? I look at her sideways. She’s all hunched and pale, playing absently with the zip on her pencil case. Something big’s happened. Mallory’s pretty tough with all the usual stuff. Maybe . . . maybe they want to move?

  ‘Mall,’ I whisper. ‘Mall, are you moving?’

  ‘What?’ She looks up, panic all over her face.

  ‘You’re not moving, are you?’

  And right there, in the middle of the form room, my ever-bubbly, sensible best friend starts to cry.

  ‘Mallory!’

  ‘God, Owl, why can’t you just leave it alone?’ she whispers, swiping tears from her cheeks and bending down to her bag, pulling a tissue from the great wad of them she’s got in there. ‘I told you, I just wanted to get through—’

  ‘I’m sorry, I was worried!’

  ‘They’re doing a trial separation,’ she says, keeping her head bent as others start filtering into the classroom. Conor starts to make his way over, a look on his face as though he’s about to start with pranking and winding us up and I shake my head, giving him a good strong glare, which is enough to make him frown and mouth things at me instead. I ignore him, and pretend I didn’t notice Alberic coming in at all, though part of me is treacherously aware of him all the same. ‘All the fighting, they say it’s not fair on me, they want to have a break from each other,’ Mallory continues.

  I shuffle closer, put my arm against hers.

  ‘Oh, Mallory . . .’

  ‘He was packing when I left . . . he’s going to stay with my uncle for a few weeks.’ She puts her head in her hands, and I don’t know what to say. I just sit there, right up close to her so she knows I’m here, and then Mr Varley come in and starts shouting about sloppy uniforms and tardiness, and it’s probably the most normal thing about the day so far so it’s actually quite a welcome sound.

  ‘What’s with your friend today?’

  Alberic’s very tall, he seems to block out all the light when he falls in beside me on the way to geography. He frowns down at me as if he suspects all the wrong in the world is my doing.

  ‘Personal stuff,’ I say, trying to get around him.

  ‘Hey,’ he says, cornering me. ‘Wait a sec . . .’

  He reaches out as if to touch my face.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I jolt away.

  ‘It’s showing,’ he hisses.

  I put my hand up and feel a fine line of frost just along my hairline.

  ‘It’s nothing,’ I say, brushing at my hair as he watches.

  ‘We both know that’s not true,’ he says. I draw further away from him but it’s as though the world has shrunk around us. The air is heavy with the smell of woodsmoke. Is it him? Why would he smell of woodsmoke? I look him up and down, noticing again the copper glint in his eyes, the tawny hair that sweeps up into the Mohican, and my mind doesn’t want to go there but there’s something about him. Something that makes me think of that old book of Mum’s, and that other world of magic and impossible creatures.

  ‘You can feel it, can’t you?’ Alberic insists. ‘We’re the same. We’re from the same place.’

  This can’t be happening. This is my normal day. This is school; nothing’s more normal than school, and he’s ruining it all. I lean against the wall behind me, putting my hands against the smooth plaster, relieved to have something solid at my back, but my heart stutters as he watches me; my skin prickles and ice spreads around my fingers, blooming out across the wall. I can feel it, though I don’t turn to see. I don’t want to see. There’s a look of something like wonder on Alberic’s face for just an instant, and then he shakes his head and pulls me away from the wall.

  ‘You need to be more careful,’ he whispers. ‘Can’t you control yourself at all?’

&nbs
p; ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ I say, pulling away from him. ‘Who are you?’

  The main doors bang open and a flurry of autumn leaves spirals in on a cool breath, skittering down the corridor towards us. I gawp at the unnatural shapes they’re making and Alberic takes a deep breath, as if he’s about to say something, but before either of us can speak the bell rings, and he strides away from me into the classroom.

  Ice on the walls and autumn leaves with a life of their own.

  So much for my normal day.

  Nothing makes sense. I don’t know who Alberic is, or where he’s come from. How does he know what I can do, when nobody else sees it? Geography is torture, and then it’s art, and the owl I’ve been sculpting out of clay is suddenly cringeworthy. There’s something so naive about the way it stands there happily on its little branch, as though it’s never caught even a sniff of danger. I swear Alberic rolls his eyes when he sees it.

  How is he in all my classes, anyway? Not even Mallory is in all of them, and we deliberately tried to be.

  ‘Thank goodness that’s over,’ she says when we meet at the gate later, pulling her coat tight against the bitter cold. The sky is a relentless steel grey and the trees are starting to look stark without their leaves. ‘Nightmare day. Even Conor tried to be nice, and that was probably the worst of all of it.’

  ‘He’ll have forgotten by tomorrow,’ I tell her as we start towards home. ‘You did it, Mallory. You got through the day.’

  We got through the day.

  ‘Now I just need to get through the night,’ she sighs. ‘What’s it going to be like, Owl?’

  ‘I don’t know. Weird, I suppose. You could stay at mine . . .’

  ‘Can’t leave her on her own, can I?’ she says, scuffing her feet along the ground, her eyes fixed on the pavement. ‘Thanks though. Maybe at the weekend?’

  ‘Definitely. And you know, she’s got friends, hasn’t she? She’ll be OK, Mall.’

  ‘It’s just going to be so strange without Dad there,’ she says. ‘I mean, he’s always there. He’s not even one of those dads who goes away to work sometimes. He’s just always there, being annoying . . .’ Her voice trails off and I don’t know what to say. It’s funny, how different our home lives have always been. I suppose everyone’s home lives are different. At least I never had any of the fighting. Never really had to worry about Mum either, she’s always been so, well, Mum.