Up on Cloud Nine

by Anne Fine

  “You've written ‘sheriff 's outfit,' ” I reminded him a few moments later. “And that's what I got. You got Fireside Football.”

  “It doesn't matter,” Stol said. “It's not a real letter anymore, after all, is it? No one will bother to read it. It's only manners.”

  “how could you do that?”

  This writing business landed him in trouble, not just at Christmas, but in summer, too. We took him with us once on holiday. We don't have anything like the money Esme and Franklin have, so we do house swaps.

  “They're very sensible,” Mum explained to Stol. “People who live by the sea love being in cities. And people who live in cities adore the beach. You tell me what anyone could possibly want on a fortnight's holiday that can't be found in someone else's house.”

  “A manicure?” suggested Stolly, who'd been dragged off to some pretty smart hotels by Esme when Mum couldn't baby-sit. “A full-body massage? World-class hair coloring techniques? All-day organic buffet breakfast?”

  Mum looked a bit put out. “Well, maybe so. But our family do house swaps.”

  And off we went to Norfolk, for two whole weeks. I had a grand time. So did Stol. He even kept a diary. And that was what caused the trouble, because he left it under the bed by mistake at the end of the fortnight, and one of the family found it and read it.

  I think these Pettifer people must be murderers. Why else are there so many dug-over patches around their garden? I expect they're for freshly buried bodies. They can't be compost heaps because Mr. Paramour says they're terrible gardeners. He says their rose beds are a fright, and their back lawn is not simply unkempt, it's also parched and infested. Sue says she thinks that's typical of their lackadaisical attitude all round. (She wasn't best pleased with the state of the kitchen.) She says the beds weren't aired, their sheets are stained and nasty, and, till she got at them, the cupboard doors were swarming with large greasy fingerprints.

  Ten Things That We Hate Most About This House

  It's cold.

  It's grubby.

  Their cat goes round shedding weird little scabs, without even scratching.

  There's not enough hot water for even one good shower, let alone two.

  Mrs. Paramour says either they haven't got any unchipped china at all, or they've locked it away rather meanly in some cupboard.

  They lied about how far the house was from the shops. By miles.

  Ian's dad says you can't call three steps down, around two corners, and halfway along a landing in the middle of the night “en suite.” Not with a bladder like his, you can't.

  Ian's mum says that if their washing machine does anything over and above swill the dirt round and round, she'll be astonished. It certainly doesn't begin to rinse properly.

  One of their daughters has left a pile of soiled underwear under her bed. Ian's mother says, even allowing for any last-minute rush, that is disgusting. But, then again, she says they're obviously extremely slack parents, and she'd not let any daughter of hers have such raunchy posters staring down from her bedroom wall. I told Sue my mum often brings home photo contact sheets of models looking far more pouty and undressed than that, and she said, “Let's change the subject, shall we, Stolly?” And it isn't as if these Pettifers couldn't have lashed out on a cleaner. They obviously don't waste money on clothes. If you look at the photo of Little Miss Stuff-Your-Knickers-Out-of-Sight way back in her pushchair, her dad's wearing this greenand-yellow-striped woolly. And when you look at the photo of her being given some certificate about eight years later, her dad's in the very same woolly, except even tattier.

  Oh, and they don't have a Ouija board, and I went and forgot mine.

  “How could you do that?” Mum wailed at Stolly when the Pettifers' letter came. “How could you leave your diary there and not say anything? If you had told us half of what was in it, we would have turned the car round and driven all the way back, rather than face this embarrassment.”

  She waved the letter. I couldn't see much over Stolly's shoulder. All I could catch was … deeply hurt … and … so upset … crying all night … and … never get over it …

  “Sorry,” said Stol. But it was obvious he wasn't really. He hung his head for only a few seconds, till Mum went off, and then perked up and cheerfully went on with the story he'd been telling me about some fancy old aristocrat escorting one of his lady guests in to dinner. She'd asked him, “And, tell me, Sir George, is this lovely ancient house of yours haunted?” Sir George had replied rather testily, “No, of course it isn't,” at which point his false teeth had flown halfway across the room and landed behind the fender because a ghostly hand had reached from the shadows and slapped him very, very hard.

  someone I've never seen

  While Mum was off prowling round Tanner Ward, checking the doctor hadn't forgotten her, someone I've never seen before popped her head round the curtain I've tugged a few inches along its rail to stop the nurse watching me scribbling.

  “Is this your brother, dear?”

  “Sort of,” I said.

  “Stuart Terence Oliver?”

  “That's right.”

  She looked a bit bothered. “He's got quite a fat file on him.”

  “Yes,” I admitted. “He does seem to fetch up having an awful lot of accidents.”

  She stared at the lashings of plaster bandage and the splints. “Done himself proud this time,” she said, and flipped through the armful of different-colored papers she was carrying, which I took to be hospital records of Stol's accidental poisonings, cuts, bone breaks, and concussions.

  Finally she looked up again. “So where's Mum, then?”

  I didn't think it would do Stol much good to say, “In Nicaragua.” So I just muttered, “Oh, around. Back soon.”

  “Good. Best have a little chat.” She peered at me. “It sounds like a rather strange …” She hesitated a moment. “… fall. Have you the faintest idea why Stuart here might possibly have been up there on the—”

  “It was an accident,” I broke in hastily. “He doesn't pay attention. He's famous for it. Ask the school. He's had an awful lot of minor calamities. And every time people have worried about them, they've realized in the end that that's what they are. Just accidents. Definitely.”

  She looked about as doubtful as you can get without calling someone a liar to their face.

  “Well, we'll see …”

  “Yes,” I said confidently.

  She stared me out. And then she turned and squeaked off down the shiny floor. I picked up a few sheets of paper drifting in her wake, and, since she'd vanished through the swing doors at the end, stacked them neatly on the swing tray of the empty bed behind me. Then I turned back to Stol. Up at the other end of the ward, a nurse turned off something I hadn't even noticed was whirring, and the silence around us was heartbreaking. Heartbreaking.

  there was a time …

  There was a time, on the fifth level of the multistory parking lot, when he got this weird look. I led him away from the edge we'd been leaning against, and once we were safe in the lift, I dared ask him,

  “So what was all that about? What were you thinking?”

  “Ah-may!-zing,” he told me. His eyes gleamed. “Everything made sense.”

  “What, everything?”

  “Everything. And I suddenly understood something really important.”

  I gave him a look. “Oh, yes? That little green men from Mars would like you to scramble up on a narrow concrete ledge and then jump from a great height?”

  “No, Mr. Sensible. Something about Time.”

  He said it as if it had a capital letter.

  “Time?”

  “All of a sudden, I realized that every single minute I've been on this planet since I was born has been just that.”

  “What?”

  “Time.” “So?” I said. “No call to go peculiar, is it?”

  “But don't you see? Time isn't anything real. It's only time. So suddenly I saw that all the time that's still to come wo
n't be real either.”

  “What, it'll just be time?”

  “Right. So it doesn't matter.”

  Whoa, there! I hear alarm bells… .

  He's got that mad glint in his eyes again. “So if that's all life's ever been, and all life's going to be—just time chewed up and gone—then I can do anything I want with it, can't I?”

  “Not around me,” I told him sourly.

  See? Away with the fairies. I am practically his minder.

  mum came back

  Mum came back with a giant, multilayered sandwich. “It's egg all through. All they seem to have is egg.”

  “I like egg.”

  While I was eating, I watched her slump in the chair and push back her hair. Her hand caught in a tangle, and I realized, looking at her anxious face, that she wasn't wearing makeup. Not even any lipstick.

  “This woman stopped by,” I warned Mum. “She had a file on Stol”—I spread my fingers—“that thick.”

  “Oh, God,” she said, and closed her eyes.

  I finished the sandwich and licked a few stray bits of cress off my fingers. “So what's the story with the doctor, then? Did you manage to find her?”

  “Not just her. I found another as well!” She spoke as if, in this particular hospital, people in white coats were rare as four-leaved clovers. “And both said the chances were excellent that Stol would just surface from concussion with nothing worse than his breaks and bruising, and a shockingly bad headache.”

  It seemed almost too good to be true. “Just what the janitor said!”

  Mum flashed me a strange look, then said, “They did a brain scan. Two, in fact. And nothing showed.”

  “What sort of nothing?”

  “How should I know? Bleeding, perhaps? Or swelling? Both of them talked about those. One kept on assuring me, ‘No untoward pressure.' ”

  And Mum burst into tears. I looked at Stol, who's probably sent my mum into floods more times than I have, and thought, What your stupid brain needs, Stol, is a little more untoward pressure.

  To be used.

  rightie-tightie, leftie-loosie

  He was bright enough in school. They all said he had a great future ahead of him, if he could stay alive and learn to tie his laces. It was Mr. Fuller from Practical Workshop who worried most.

  “Come on, Stol,” he'd urge, drumming his fingers on the workbench. “We're not defusing a live sixhundred-pound bomb here. Just hold the screwdriver and twist.”

  He waited while Stol picked the screw off the floor and muttered, “Third time lucky.”

  “Don't I hope so! Mandy and Jason over there are busy building a wind-powered salt mill. I can't spend the whole forty minutes watching you try to finish your very first pair of plain bookends.”

  Stol gritted his teeth and leaned over the workbench, reciting one of the little chanty things my mother has taught him to try to help him remember.

  “Now then, it's Rightie-tightie, leftie-loosie, isn't it? So, if I want to screw it in, I—”

  It wasn't that he broke off muttering. Mr. Fuller clapped a hand over his mouth.

  “No!” he said, visibly unraveling. “No, Stol. I will not have these wretched nursery utterances echoing around my workshop. If you still need them, you must learn to say them silently, inside your head, or I won't be held accountable.”

  Stol despaired. “I'll never be a proper handyman, will I?”

  “No,” Mr. Fuller said. “No. You will never successfully put up a shelf, or fix a dripping tap, or screw the head back on your daughter's dolly.” He saw Stol's forlorn look. “But,” he said hastily, “that's only my opinion, of course. Do please feel free to look for some more ebullient view from anyone who's never taught you.”

  Stol still looked crushed, and so Mr. Fuller added kindly, “No one is good at everything. I'm told you're excellent on the violin.”

  “Oh, that,” said Stol. “That's just a gift from God.”

  Beside him, I gasped. I (who have only heard him practicing for hours and hours, and sat in cars while he's been taking grade exams from I to VIII) couldn't help saying, “A gift from God? Come off it!”

  But Mr. Fuller only shook his head and said gently, “Oh, Stolly! Why must you turn my workshop into a den of lies?” Then he wandered back to Mandy and Jason and their wind-powered salt mill.

  Stol put down the screwdriver and, seeing my reproachful look, tried to distract me with a bloodcurdling story about a spaniel who had started to scrape at the ground and unearthed a child's body.

  “A boy or a girl?”

  “Girl. Eightish. She had sweet blond ringlets and dark green—”

  “No! Don't describe her! It makes the nightmares worse. Just get on with the story.”

  His eyes shone. “Well, this spaniel dug her up, and she was still neatly dressed and everything.”

  “Neatly? From underground?”

  “Well, you know. Nothing missing. Except for a silver chain with a mermaid charm dangling from it that she always used to wear. Naturally, everyone was horrified, and searched for clues. But there were none, and so the murderer was never found. And years went by—”

  “How many years?”

  You'd never stump him. “Seventeen. And then one morning, two hundred miles away, a fisherman was digging for worms. His spade hit a tin box. He tugged it out, thinking it might be treasure, and inside were hundreds—hundreds!—of cheap pieces of jewelry—the sort little girls wear. You know. Bead bracelets. Homestrung necklaces. Plastic rings. And, in this box, right at the bottom, there was the little silver chain with the merm—”

  Just as Mr. Fuller had earlier, I clapped my hand over his mouth. “Don't tell me! I don't want to know!” I took my hand away. “It's not true, is it? Say it's not!”

  He put on his wise-old-owl look but didn't torment me by swearing it was gospel. And I must have spoken a whole lot louder than I thought, because a moment or two later Mr. Fuller was back at our workbench.

  “Am I going to have to separate you two?”

  “No, sir,” said Stolly. “I was just telling Ian here how to tie a proper hangman's knot.”

  The whole world's seen Stolly trip over his laces. Mr. Fuller reached under the workbench and pulled out a length of cord.

  “Go on, then. Show me.”

  It was embarrassing. Stol stuck up his thumb and waved a few loops about, muttering about bunnies scampering round trees and going down holes and such.

  Then he gave up.

  “It's on one of our tea towels at home,” he confessed. “Ten Very Useful Knots. But I can only do it if I have the tea towel spread in front of me.”

  “Fancy that!” said Mr. Fuller. “Because I can only not do it because I have remarkable self-control.”

  He strolled off whistling, and then, mercifully, the bell rang.

  best sandwich I have ever had

  When I came back from the lavatory, guess who was slumped in my chair, staring at Stolly.

  Mr. Oliver.

  He had his briefcase with him, but, just for once, he wasn't absently fingering it as if he longed to brush everything round him away and get back to the papers inside it. He was looking at Stolly. I didn't even think his face just happened to be pointed that way while he was thinking about Crown v. Next Villain. I truly believe that, just for this once, Mr. Oliver was looking at, and thinking about, Stolly.

  He heard my shoes squeak closer and swung round.

  “Oh, hi.”

  “Hi,” I said, perching my bum on the rail at the end of the next (empty) bed.

  “He doesn't look too perky, does he?” Mr. Oliver said. And then he dropped the bombshell. “Mind you, he did just flutter his eyes a bit.”

  “Did he?”

  I can't tell you how I felt. But I remembered something Mum once said about the people who work in day-care centers learning to keep quiet about when the babies they're minding say their first word or take their first steps. They don't say anything, she told me, in case the mothers are up
set they weren't around for something so important.

  At the time, I'd thought, So soft! But when I thought how I'd been sitting there all morning, waiting for Stol to show one tiny sign he might come back to us, and then along strolls Mr. Oliver and all of a sudden …

  Well, what Mum told me didn't seem so silly now.

  “Are you quite sure?”

  “Of course I'm sure.”

  I didn't know what to say after that, so I said nothing for a bit. And then: “They've got egg sandwiches in the cafeteria.”

  He dropped a hand beside his chair, to pat his briefcase. “That's quite all right,” he said. “Jeanine was good enough to send one of the juniors out for a sandwich, but I'm not at all hungry.”

  I put on my really hopeful look. It didn't work. Mum says that she's always suspected the best way of getting a subtle message through to Franklin is to hit him over the head with a heavy pan and then say whatever it was again very loudly.

  I took a simpler tack. “Well, can I have it?”

  “What?”

  “Your sandwich.”

  He gave me a bit of a Well-as-it-happens-I-mighthave-felt-like-it-later-on look, then handed it over. It was brilliant. The best sandwich I have ever had. It was organic avocado and cream cheese, with flecks of smoked wild salmon on olive ciabatta bread, studded with sesame. It practically made me change my mind about doing engineering. I wanted to switch to catering studies for at least half an hour after I scoffed it.

  We sat in silence for a while, and then he asked me, “Where's your mum?”

  I shrugged. I thought she might be back to grilling doctors. Or phoning Dad. Or Nicaragua. I'd been so busy writing, I hadn't asked. So I said only, “Did she tell you the good news?”

  He perked up. “Good news?”

  “About Stol probably being all right. Except for the bashes and breaks, of course. And a world-class headache.”