Bad Dreams

by Anne Fine

  But this was different. Imogen’s mother’s ‘Anything “special” happen?’ was clearly code for their little shared secret. I waited for Imogen to tell her. But she just shook her head.

  And Mrs Tate looked really disappointed.

  ‘Well, never mind,’ she said, in that exact same tone Miss Rorty uses when I don’t make my best time in the pool. ‘Never mind.’ She turned to me, and her face brightened. ‘A visitor! How lovely!’ She clapped her hands like someone in a pantomime. ‘We must have iced cakes and home-made lemonade!’

  ‘I really ought to be pushing off home now,’ I told her. ‘My mum will be—’

  But she’d danced off. I mean it. She was literally dancing up the garden path, flapping her shawl like a giant great butterfly. I glanced across at Imogen, but she clearly hadn’t even noticed I thought her mother was a little odd. And I can understand that. After all, if she came round to our house unexpectedly, and caught my mum all ratty and irritable because she’s worried about money, or about Granny going back into hospital, she’d probably think our house was strange, and I wouldn’t notice.

  But there was certainly nothing ratty about Mrs Tate. Having tea with her and Imogen was like stepping into one of those old books you sometimes find in charity shops, with thick spongy paper and coloured illustrations hidden under tissue. Everything was ‘thrilling’, or ‘perfectly wonderful’, or ‘absolutely scrumptious’, or ‘such, such fun!’

  I couldn’t wait to get away, back to my own mum.

  She wasn’t too pleased with me. ‘Next time you’re going to be an hour late, don’t just leave a message to tell me. Ask me the day before.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, and rushed into some story about Imogen really needing someone to walk her home. But it was still a good half-hour before she’d calmed down enough for me to get on with this homework I was planning.

  ‘What would you do if you found I could see into books?’

  ‘See into books?’

  ‘And photos.’

  Mum’s used to weird questions from me, depending on what I’m reading. But you could tell that this one baffled her.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well,’ I explained. ‘Suppose each time I touched a book, I knew exactly what was in it.’

  She gave a little snort of amusement. ‘Now wouldn’t your teachers all be pleased with that!’

  ‘But it felt real. And sometimes it upset me.’

  ‘Like when you read that ghastly book about that badger?’

  ‘Much worse than that.’

  Mum gave me a look. We both remembered what I was like, reading that badger book. She kept on trying to tug it away, but I kept snatching it back because, once I’d got started, I had to know what happened. But I couldn’t stop crying, right through to the horrible end. And the minute I’d finished, Mum stuffed it in the dustbin.

  “And every leaf that rustled seemed to shriek ‘Danger!’”

  ‘Well,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘If it was going to be worse than that, I couldn’t be doing with it.’

  ‘What about the photos? Suppose I could tell how everyone in a photo was going to end up?’

  ‘You mean, look at a school photograph, and be able to tell who’d end up in jail, and who’d end up prime minister?’

  ‘That sort of thing.’

  She shuddered. ‘I can’t imagine anything worse than being able to see into the future.’

  ‘You wouldn’t call it a gift, then?’

  ‘No, I certainly wouldn’t. It sounds terrible.’

  ‘And you wouldn’t encourage it?’

  ‘Encourage it? I think I’d forbid it!’

  ‘You can’t forbid magic,’ I reminded her.

  ‘Oh, can’t you?’ said my mum, in such a determined ‘I could’ tone of voice that I was practically assured on the spot that, if I’d been unlucky enough to be born with a gift like Imogen’s, my mother would have splatted it flat in my cradle.

  And wasn’t I glad about that!

  CHAPTER NINE

  I was called up to the desk about my homework. Mr Hooper swung round in his chair till we both had our backs to everyone.

  ‘Is this your idea of being a friend?’ he asked me crossly, flapping my ‘Compare and Contrast’ work under my nose.

  ‘I told you it was private,’ I said stubbornly. ‘And I put on a giant P.’

  ‘Melly, this piece is horrible.’

  ‘It’s true,’ I argued.

  ‘But you can’t write things just because they’re true.’

  ‘That’s the whole point of writing,’ I explained. ‘Books say they’re made up, but they’re actually a lot more truthful than real life.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, look,’ I said. ‘People feel safer if it’s in a book. You can read about the most terrible people, and hardly think twice about it. But if you hear something even a quarter as bad about someone you know in real life, everyone goes bananas.’ I pointed at my homework. ‘See?’

  That shut him up.

  ‘And,’ I went on, ‘you know what’s going on better in books.’ I pointed over at Imogen. ‘I’d have a whole lot better idea of what was going on in her house, and inside her head, if she were in a book. At least the person who wrote it wouldn’t be too polite to tell me. As it is, I just have to guess.’

  ‘Melly,’ he told me sternly, ‘I didn’t try and help you make a friend just so you could start being nosy about her private life.’

  ‘I thought people were supposed to be interested in their friends.’

  ‘Interested, yes. Nosy, certainly not.’

  ‘I don’t see any difference.’

  He couldn’t explain it, that was obvious. He flicked the pages I’d written between his fingers once or twice, staring at me anxiously, while I thought how useful it would be to have an author around all the time to explain people properly, without all that stuff that everyone knows is not true really but feels they ought to say to be polite, like, ‘Oh, I’m sure she didn’t mean it’, or, ‘I expect she just forgot, dear’, or, ‘No, she likes you really’. Authors are braver, and more honest. They would explain why Imogen’s mother was too wrapped up in planting silly joke gardens and thinking everything was fun and jolly, even to notice her daughter was being driven crazy because she’d had such a horrible gift passed on to her.

  A gift passed on . . .

  ‘Mel?’ Mr Hooper was still staring at me.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said hastily. But still the words snagged in my brain. ‘A gift passed on . . .’ They were reminding me of something, but I couldn’t think what.

  Now Mr Hooper was sighing. ‘You just don’t get it, do you, Mel?’

  ‘No.’ I was getting irritable myself now. ‘And I don’t think it’s fair, you ticking me off like this. You said, “Compare and Contrast”. You said we could do anything. And you agreed it could be private. I haven’t shown my work to Imogen. I haven’t hurt her feelings. I just chose something interesting, thought about it hard, and wrote it properly.’

  ‘But, really, Mel! To write a piece about how your two mums are so different!’ He peered at the top page in his hand. ‘“My mum might be horribly ratty, but at least she has a grip. You can depend on her.” And fancy writing—’ Again, he searched the page for the bit that had upset him. ‘“It must be awful having Mrs Tate as a mother. She might be the sort of person who can make a rainy picnic fun, or giggle about anything. But you couldn’t come to her with a problem. She’d just pretend it wasn’t there, or didn’t matter. ”’

  ‘She would, too,’ I insisted. ‘Maybe you haven’t met her, but I have.’

  He slid the paper-clip off my pages, and folded them over and over till they were small enough to fit in his trouser pocket.

  ‘This isn’t going in your folder,’ he said. ‘I’m burning it. I’m not going to run the risk of Imogen ever seeing it.’

  ‘Fine by me.’

  ‘And you’re to promise me you’ll never me
ntion it.’

  ‘I promise.’

  ‘Cross your heart?’

  ‘Cross my heart.’

  He gave me a good long look, and you could tell that what he really wanted to say was, ‘Mel, you’re so weird.’ But he controlled himself.

  ‘Right,’ he said, swivelling back to face the rest of the class. ‘This discussion is over.’

  ‘Except—’ I reminded him.

  ‘Except?’

  ‘My mark,’ I said. ‘You haven’t told me what I got for it.’

  Back came the stern look. ‘Melly,’ he said, ‘I wouldn’t mark this if you paid me my weight in gold.’

  ‘But, if you did . . .?’ I persisted.

  He rolled his eyes. ‘Mel, you’re incorrigible.’

  ‘Just tell me,’ I begged. ‘After all, I spent a good long time on it, and did it as well as I could.’

  ‘Oh, very well!’ he snapped. ‘Since you have promised you’ll never mention it again, I’ll tell you what you would have got for it.’

  I waited, knowing. And I was dead right.

  Ten out of ten. Perfect A. Excellent!

  Goody.

  CHAPTER TEN

  That afternoon, Imogen ended up in tears again. Our class was picking teams for indoor games. Arinda and Luke were calling.

  ‘Tom.’

  ‘Matty.’

  ‘Pats. No! Sorry, I’ve changed my mind. Louay!’

  ‘Then I’ll have Pats.’

  As I expected, Imogen was left even till after me. But, at the end, when he was still one person down, Luke turned away and started making plans. ‘Who wants to be shooter?’

  Me? I’d have been delighted if it happened. By the time Mrs Tallentire came back with the team sashes and ball, I’d have been tucked in the gap under the gym stairs, quietly reading. And if she was cross with me, I’d have been ready to argue. ‘Well, what was I supposed to do? Nobody picked me.’

  But Imogen stood there, drooping. (‘Like a lily in a flood’, as Mr Hooper calls it.) Her eyes were bright with tears. No-one in our class is positively spiteful. It was the old ‘drift-away’ business working again. Nobody else even noticed, not even Mrs Tallentire, who hardly gave Imogen a glance, let alone one of the sashes. So she did end up on our team, but on the very edge, along the wall, and I don’t think the ball was thrown in her direction once, for the whole game.

  ‘That’s it!’ I told her, after. ‘Tomorrow, after school, we’re off to the library.’

  ‘The town library? Why?’

  ‘You’ll see.’

  She kept up the pestering, but I wouldn’t tell, in case she wouldn’t come. Next day, we walked straight up the stairs to Reference, and still she hadn’t guessed why we were there. I left her staring at the huge Map of World Animals while I got started.

  Magic. Superstitions. Legends. If you don’t believe them, then they’re fascinating. I’ve sat for hours hunched over tales of banshees wailing to warn of deaths on the way, and soldiers who had died at midnight in a field hospital along the line scaring the wits out of their fellow officers by turning up again on the dawn watch.

  But if, like me, you have begun to think you’re practically living in one of these stories, you’re looking for something different. And it wasn’t there. I ran my eyes down list after list on the computer screen, and scoured shelf after shelf. There were whole books on tarot cards and palm-reading, half a bookcase on haunted houses, tomes on black magic and spell-making, lots about poltergeists, even a pamphlet on spirit-writing.

  But nothing at all about giving it up.

  Imogen wasn’t helping. ‘Look, Melly,’ she kept saying. ‘This isn’t your problem. Stop worrying about me. I’m perfectly happy with things the way they are.’

  ‘Oh, yes?’

  ‘Yes.’ She made a face. ‘I know it’s all sometimes a little bit upsetting—’

  ‘A little bit upsetting?’ I stared down from where I was balancing on one of the stumpy little library ladders. ‘You practically fall into the most upsetting books. You even know when members of your family are coasting towards accidents. Everyone avoids you, and you can’t even get on with your work. And you call that “a little bit upsetting”? Well, you must have nerves of steel.’

  ‘All right!’ she flared. ‘Sometimes it’s horrible, and I can’t sleep at nights. But I still can’t see what you’re hoping to find in all these books.’

  I reached up higher, to pull a couple of books without titles on their spines off the top shelf. ‘Listen, Imogen. There has to be some way you can get out of this.’

  ‘Get out of it?’

  ‘Lose this “gift” of yours. Turn back into a normal person.’

  ‘I am a normal person!’

  ‘You know what I mean. And if your mum’s right, and what you’ve got is like blue eyes, or curly hair, then you can’t be the first.’

  ‘So what are you looking for?’

  ‘A book,’ I said. ‘I’ll know it when I find it. It’ll be something that explains what all the people who were like you before did to get rid of it.’

  She looked quite blank.

  ‘Listen,’ I told her patiently. ‘You don’t think you’re the first of your sort to be unpopular, do you? I’m sure seeing into the future has never been the best way of making and keeping friends. Don’t tell me all those early soothsayers were daft enough to stroll around turning ashen every five minutes, and pointing at the next person who was going to fall down the well, because I don’t believe it. The rest of the villagers would have stood for it only once or twice, and then drowned them in the duckpond.’

  Imogen was silent. I do believe it must have been the very first time she’d given a thought to all the people who’d had the gift in centuries before. But that’s one of the things you get from reading all the time – a sense of other places, other times, and other ways of doing things.

  ‘So what are you telling me?’ she asked at last.

  ‘I’m not telling you anything,’ I said, ‘because I don’t yet know. But you can be pretty sure that, whatever it is you want to find out about, somebody wanted to know it before you. And books have been invented for over four hundred years. So there’s usually one about it somewhere.’

  Again, I reached up to the very top shelf, this time for a volume called Magical Thinking which had caught my attention.

  ‘My bet’, I told her, ‘is that most of these special people must have had the sense to lose this so-called “gift” of theirs as fast as they could. And I’m going to find out how they did it.’

  ‘I bet they didn’t all want to lose it,’ she said stubbornly. ‘I bet some of them thought that it was interesting.’

  ‘Or fun,’ I said scathingly. ‘People like your mother.’

  I heard the sharp intake of breath. But, struggling with my balance on the top step, I must have missed the sound of her footsteps walking away, and the swish of the swing doors closing behind her.

  That, or another of her skills was Levitation. Or even Vanishing. Because, when I looked round again, Imogen had gone.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  When someone storms off like that, you’re not quite sure if they’ve gone off for good, or if they’re going to show up again in a few minutes, pretending they just went off to buy sweeties or gum.

  So I sat on the ladder a little while, hoping she’d reappear, and flicking through Magical Thinking by Prof. J. B. Blackstaffe. It was a bit of a surprise, that book. You’d think someone like me, who reads so much, would have got used to the fact that titles so often turn out to mean something quite different from what you imagined when you first saw them on the shelf. I would have thought that Magical Thinking would be about spells, or the power of thought, or voodoo, or something.

  In fact, it was poor old Professor Blackstaffe trying to persuade us to use our brains.

  He posed little problems at the top of each page, and asked you questions. Then he told you what the Great Thinkers of the Past would have thought about eac
h one.

  While I was waiting for Imogen, I read the first.

  Your good friend is wasting time

  in terrible company. One day, the wastrels

  move, and ask you to pass on their new

  address and phone number.

  Do you:

  A:Refuse to accept the task?

  B:Take the details, rip them up, and say nothing?

  C:Pass the information on, with your usual warning?

  Most of the Great Thinkers of the Past turned out to be Stellar Fusspots, too, if you want my opinion. They mostly went for A or C. (I’d have picked B.) But when it was obvious Imogen wasn’t coming, I gave up and put the book back on the shelf, and went on home.

  I hoped by morning she’d have forgiven me for being so rude about her mother. But when I took my place beside her in the class, she turned away.

  I tapped her shoulder. ‘Look,’ I said. ‘That was a horrible thing I said, and I’m really sorry. But I was only trying to help you.’

  ‘Help me?’ She glowered. ‘You mean, bully me, don’t you?’

  I stared at her. ‘Is that really what you think I’ve been doing?’

  ‘Well, isn’t it? Dragging me off to the library when you can’t find exactly what you want here in school? Making me hang around while you peer into every single book?’

  ‘I’m only trying to find something that has to be there.’

  Her eyes flashed. ‘Oh, yes! It has to be there, of course! You know! And that’s the trouble with you, Melanie Palmer. You think you know everything. But it doesn’t even seem to have sunk into your big, fat, book-swollen brain that in that library there were about a billion books about harnessing the ancient mysteries, but none at all about giving it up!’