Ferney (55 page)

In the car on the way home, as Jo waited without success for any mention of the songs she had sung in her first ever public performance, her mother said, ‘I’ve arranged for Maria
Reynolds to come and play.’

‘With me?’ asked Jo, surprised.

‘Well, of course, with you. Who do you think she’s coming to play with? Me?’

To Jo that somehow seemed less unlikely. The closest she had ever come to Maria Reynolds was in the brief moment before Maria had pushed her over in the playground. She said nothing.

‘Where do you get all these sayings from?’ her mother asked. ‘All this stuff you’ve been spouting in class about mists and frogs and jars. Have you been reading
books?’ It sounded like an accusation.

‘Someone told me.’

‘What someone?’

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 the 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.