The Extraordinary Colors of Auden Dare

by Zillah Bethell

  “Go on, Boyle. Punch him.”

  “Yeah. Go on.”

  I looked at Vivi and smiled, but her eyes had a sort of scared look.

  The big boy leaned in closer to me. “What is it? I wanna see.”

  The stench from his breath nearly knocked me out, so I shuffled a little farther along the wall before pulling the magnifying glass out again.

  The boy stared at it. “A magnifying glass? What do you want a magnifying glass for?”

  I sighed. “It’s a long story,” I muttered.

  “Go on, hit him,” the kid on the left with the fat nose repeated.

  “Yeah. Go on,” the kid on the right with the swollen lips said again. “He’s asking for it.”

  “Leave him alone,” Vivi blurted out before looking scared again.

  The big kid leaned across me and glared at her.

  “You shut yer face, Rookmini. Or I’ll throw you halfway to those Ariel drones up there.”

  I shook my head. I’d had enough. “Look,” I said. “I don’t know who you are but we’ve done nothing to you, so why don’t you just leave us alone?”

  The big kid’s face screwed up into a ball of confusion and flushed even more. “What did you just say?” he almost whispered in anger.

  “I said—”

  “No one talks to me like that.” His hand seemed to curl up into a fist. “No one EVER talks to me like that. Least of all some magnifying-glass-wearing weirdo like you. I’m going to teach you—”

  “Belsey, seven o’clock!” the one with the nose squawked before turning on his heel and walking away, closely followed by the swollen-lipped one.

  The big kid straightened up and looked behind him to see the headmaster on playground duty. He turned back to me and pointed at my face.

  “Soon. I’ll get you soon. I’ll find out who you are and I’ll get you. No one EVER talks to me like that. Freak!”

  And with that, he twisted away and strolled back toward the football game.

  *   *   *

  “Who was—”

  “That was Boyle,” Vivi interrupted me. The bell had sounded and we were making our way back to the classroom. “Fabius Boyle. He thinks he rules the school. He doesn’t, of course. But that doesn’t stop him from trying.”

  “And what about the other two?”

  “Oh, just Putter and Keane. They’re probably the two people most scared of him, so they hang around and pretend to be his friends. They’re just hopeless.” She gave the side of her head a little tap. “Not exactly geniuses.”

  “Boyle didn’t sound too bright, either,” I said as we both sat back down at our table. “Did the football hit him hard in the head or something? Dislodge a few brain cells?”

  Vivi smiled.

  “No. He’s always been like that.” She looked serious again. “You want to keep away from him, though. He’s trouble. Just beats people up if he doesn’t like them. That sort of thing.”

  Well, one thing was for certain—Boyle didn’t like me.

  *   *   *

  PROJECT RAINBOW.

  I pinched the piece of paper between my fingers and held it up to the light, turning it over and over in the hope that some missing secret might just drop out of it.

  But it didn’t.

  Project Rainbow?

  Did it mean what I hoped it meant?

  Sandwich jumped up onto the bed and started one of her dribbly purrs, trying to edge her way into my lap. I let her and gave her a rough tickle around the chin—which she looooves. She pushed harder against my nails and rolled onto her side, her eyes all half-closed and dreamy. Then she began the terrible dribbling.

  I lowered the burned sheet of paper to the bed and tickled her with both hands—my mind a hundred miles away.

  Was Project Rainbow what I imagined it was?

  Was Uncle Jonah working on a way of helping me see color?

  *   *   *

  The first week of school shot past like a Scoot drone. Miss Holbrook was nice. Vivi was nicer. But nobody else seemed to even approach me. It was as if the incident with Boyle had already obliterated my reputation. He’d obviously been putting word around that I was a magnifying-glass-wearing oddball, and everyone else seemed determined to stay away from me. To be honest, it didn’t bother me. Well, not much, anyway. I’d had similar experiences in my old schools. I’d grown used to it.

  It probably didn’t help that I was friends with Vivi. She seemed a bit on her own, too. There was nobody I could really call her friend. Okay, she might pass the occasional word or two with a couple of the other girls, but nothing much more. In a way, she was almost as isolated as I was.

  One lunchtime, I decided to show off. Life’s too short not to show off sometimes; now and again you just have to do it. You see, it may surprise you to find out that I was the East London Under-Tens Gymnastics Club champion for three years in a row. I bet you thought I’d be a thin, pale, sport-hating boy who’d avoid all activity like some sort of disease, preferring to sit in a room playing computer games and feeling sorry for myself. But no. I’m not. I was the blond-haired king of the straddle jumps and double-front somersaults. My box splits were better than anyone’s and my work on the vault was usually spotless. For three years I was pretty much top dog in my category.

  But then I hit eleven and the competition suddenly got harder. Along with the fact that I was getting taller, and tall people don’t do very well in gymnastics. So a few months before moving to Cambridge, I gave it all up. It’s true, I miss it a bit. All the evenings spent stretching and jumping and spinning around.

  But in the end, it wasn’t for me.

  Also, you go through an awful lot of your weekly allowance of water when you’re training, and Mum and I couldn’t afford that. We had to hold back.

  However, I’m still as fit as a fireman, and a game of football would be a total breeze. So if anyone had asked me to join in with their lunchtime game, they would have quickly realized that I was pretty good with a football.

  But nobody did.

  So that lunchtime, I thought I’d show off.

  I got off the wall where Vivi and I usually sat, ran onto the pitch, and launched into a quadruple roundoff flip followed by a backward somersault. Landing perfectly securely on my feet, barely out of breath, I looked around.

  People stood still, mouths and eyes wide open. I even saw appreciative nods coming from Putter and Keane.

  “Whoa!” said a particularly short Year Four boy. “Whoa!”

  “Dat’s cool,” a thin Year Three girl with a runny nose said, and grinned.

  But everybody else just stood and stared.

  “Hey! Freak Show!” Boyle pushed his way onto the pitch and pointed his finger at me. Again. “Freak Show! Didya grow up in a circus, eh? Is that what it is?” Putter and Keane snorted unconvincingly. “Half man, half monkey, are you? Have to lock you up in a cage at night, did they? People pay to see you perform, eh?” He looked so bitter.

  Meanwhile, the looks of awe faded away.

  “Wanna keep that sort of behavior under control,” Boyle mumbled into my face. “Nobody likes a show-off. Speshally freaky ones that wear magnifying glasses. Ha!”

  He turned and walked off the pitch, Putter and Keane fawning close behind. Everybody else tried their best to ignore me.

  Not that I minded. Not at all. If that was the way they operated, then I wouldn’t want to play with them, anyway. They could carry on being scared of Boyle, keeping to themselves and casting the odd, untrusting, sideways look at me. Let them.

  I didn’t need them.

  I had Vivi.

  You see, Vivi Rookmini was funny, smart—and I mean really smart—and honest. She knew almost everything, and the things she didn’t know, she enjoyed finding out about. Knowledge was almost as important to her as water, and not a day would go by when she wouldn’t spill out a dozen newly learned facts like they were the most important things ever.

  Besides, Vivi Rook
mini was my friend—not just a New School Buddy.

  And I liked her a lot.

  CHAPTER 7

  HISTORY

  Miss Holbrook was a decent enough teacher. Not particularly exciting or inspiring—she fed us facts like they were vitamin pills—but her head was jam-crammed full of knowledge. And the sort of knowledge that seemed to take up most of the space had to do with history.

  She knew all there was to know about the Romans, the Vikings, the ancient Egyptians. There was no one to touch her on the Tudors and Stuarts, the Georgians and the Windsors. And as for the First and Second World Wars …

  “Please, select a monitor and turn on your QWERTYs,” she would say, and we would all swivel around and position ourselves in front of one of the screens placed along the edge of the classroom. Then we would tap on our wrist computers—our QWERTYs—and get them to project the image of a keyboard in front of us, before awaiting further instruction.

  We all had QWERTYs. They were standard school equipment. If you ever went to school without your QWERTY you would be sent home to get it. Some people had newer, better-quality QWERTYs than others (mine was a few years out of date, Vivi’s was almost obsolete) but every single pupil in all the schools I’ve ever been to had a QWERTY strapped around their wrist. You could use them to access the etherweb, to phone, to send messages, to project images, to tell you your energy requirements for the next twenty-four hours, to read your blood pressure, to tell you where you were, to tell you where you should be, to stream your favorite music, to play games, to watch the news. Oh, and it could also tell you the time.

  Everybody loved their QWERTY.

  Anyway, Miss Holbrook would wait for us all to settle down before continuing, “Today, class, I would like you to research the battle of Agincourt,” or something like that. “Find out as much as you can and then write a seven-hundred-word essay on what happened and the effect it had on the world and its development.”

  We used our QWERTYs to piece everything together and type away on our virtual keyboards until we’d hit the golden figure of seven hundred words—very few people would have as many as 701.

  This was something Miss Holbrook regularly made us do.

  And I hated it.

  You see, I’m not the greatest fan of history. I really do not see the point. I mean, what can some old war or some old battle from hundreds and thousands of years ago matter? I’m sure that, while it was going on, the battle of Agincourt was an extremely important thing. For the people who were there it was probably the most important thing in the world. No question.

  But nowadays?

  Time moves on. It always does. That’s the point of it. It never stops.

  And history is all around us. It is here and now. Everything that happens now is a part of history. Every little thing. It all contributes. It all rolls together and becomes something bigger.

  So why waste our time on things long dead when we can discuss the world as it is now?

  Why do we hide behind the past?

  *   *   *

  We are at war.

  Over water.

  The whole world is at war over water. That simple life-giving substance that everybody once took for granted. That beautiful, silvery, fragile stuff.

  You see, there’s not enough of it to go round. Since the rains started to dry up more than twenty years ago, the only major source of water has been from the sea. And you can’t drink seawater. Nobody can. It has to have all its salt removed first. That’s why the government and the Water Allocation Board took control of the coastline all those years ago. The whole entire edge of Britain is now a protected area (I’ve never even seen the sea—not many kids my age have) and huge desalting units are busy sucking up the undrinkable seawater and turning it into something more pure. Something we can use.

  We’re lucky in this country. The sea is all around us. Because we’re an island, we are surrounded by it. However, there are lots of countries that aren’t. Landlocked countries stuck between others. Countries that are completely dependent on the tiny drizzles of rain that happen once or twice a year.

  Some countries have water. Others don’t. Some need to get it. Others are unwilling to give it up. Some countries want to share. Others just want to take it all.

  BOOM!

  War.

  That is why so many parents and siblings are away fighting right now.

  So, excuse me if I don’t get overexcited at the prospect of writing a seven-hundred-word essay on the Hundred Years’ War or the Battle of Hastings or something, because this war is more important. To me. To the rest of the class.

  This is our war.

  After all, not many members of the class have been unaffected by the war. Sofia Meacham’s father had only recently come back home in a coffin draped with a flag. Kai Everitt had had to move in with his aunt because both his father and his mother were killed fighting in Romania. Naomi Blackwell’s older brother had lost both legs after straying onto a minefield in Barcelona. And everybody else had at least one close member of the family who was away fighting.

  Everybody except Vivi, that is.

  CHAPTER 8

  THE SEAMSTRESS

  One day after school, Vivi invited me back to her house for tea.

  “Don’t expect too much,” she said as we put on our coats and made our way out through the school gates. “Mum’s not exactly a brilliant cook. Whatever she gives you, just try your best to nibble it and don’t make a face. If you can manage to swallow it as well, that would be a bonus.”

  We walked all the way into town, past the big hospital, past the big shops with the big CLOSED DOWN windows, past the big vending machines, and into the big area with the big old college buildings.

  It was only when we turned onto the small road leading toward Trinity that I started to wonder where it was she was taking me.

  “Er … Vivi,” I asked. “Where exactly do you live?”

  We stopped and Vivi pointed up ahead. “Here. Just here.”

  She was pointing to Trinity College.

  “Wait. Hold on. You live at Trinity?”

  She smiled at me. “Yes.”

  “But … but you’re not a student. And you’re definitely not a…” I struggled to pick out the right word. “A fellow. So you can’t live in the college.”

  “Oh, yes I can,” she said, before turning around and continuing. I watched her for a second before rushing to catch up.

  “But I don’t understand.”

  She explained. “Because my mother is the university seamstress, we are allowed to live in some of the rooms on the top floor. It’s part of the job. She fixes all the robes and we get to live there. Come on.”

  It had been a couple of weeks since my little visit to Uncle Jonah’s rooms and I suddenly found myself getting all nervous, and I started worrying about someone recognizing me. I pulled the collar up on my coat, bent my head downward a bit, and marched on.

  We passed through the pigeonhole area and stepped out into the quad. We tapped our shoes across the flagstones in the courtyard and went in through a tiny door in the opposite wall.

  The cold stone steps spiraled upward and we came out onto a long, narrow corridor with windows on the right overlooking the quad. It wasn’t that far away from Uncle Jonah’s rooms, I realized, and a horrible thought hit me.

  What if—

  “Come on.” Vivi waved me on before I could think any further. “This is it here.”

  At the far end of the corridor, Vivi pushed open a door and we stepped into her rooms.

  The word busy leaped to mind. If I could see colors, I’m sure I would have been hit in the face with an incredible rainbow of the things. For a start, small, even patches of cloth—each of them about a foot square—had been sewn together and pinned in lots of places to the long ceiling, so it looked like the ceiling itself was made of soft cushions.

  A beaded curtain split the room into two, hiding away whatever was beyond it from the front door. A scruff
y, threadbare sofa sat in front of an old fireplace on each side of which was a large cactus, and a really old black-and-white television set was positioned on top of what looked like a cardboard box covered in crepe paper.

  Near one of the dirty arched windows, a parrot sat on a swinging perch, its head twisting this way and that as it watched me enter the room. Next to that was a table across which were spilled hundreds of cotton reels and pieces of silky cloths and materials, and, dominating the far end of the table, a sewing machine looking more like an instrument of torture than something used to join things together.

  A dressmaker’s dummy—headless and limbless with an adjustable waist, draped with something unfinished—stood alongside a cluttered bookcase overspilling with books.

  And in an armchair, quietly stitching the brim of a hat, was Vivi’s mother. Her skin was darker than Vivi’s, but the shape of the face and the long flowing hair with the slight curl would give the game away in a matter of seconds.

  My mouth went even drier than usual.

  She was also the woman who’d found me in the middle of Uncle Jonah’s rooms just the other week.

  As we came in, Vivi’s mum barely looked up. Her eyes focused on the job literally in hand.

  “Mum,” Vivi said, dumping her schoolbag down on the sofa. “Mum. This is Auden.”

  “Ah.” She still didn’t look up. “Auden. I’ve heard so much about you.”

  Finally she stood up and propped the hat on top of the headless dummy before turning to me and shaking my hand.

  “I’m Immaculata.” Her voice had an accent to it, I now noticed. Something European. “It’s lovely to meet you.”

  Her eyes squinted momentarily as if she recognized me from somewhere.

  “Hello,” I replied, trying not to let my voice crack too much. “Good to meet you.”

  Behind the beaded curtain was a small kitchen and dining area where Immaculata had prepared some things for tea. Small triangular cheese sandwiches, quinoa biscuits, whole-wheat muffins. Vivi was wrong about her mother being an awful cook. The food was amazing. We drank milk from plastic cups as we ate and Immaculata watched me with her big dark eyes and asked questions. It made me nervous.