Jago (30 page)

For weeks she went around expecting something strange to happen, but it never did. Once, at break, some older girls made her play the Rhine game with an ordinary pack of cards. As good with fifty-two choices as with four, she was pleased with herself. But some of her friends didn’t want to be with her as much as they used to. As a joke, Annette said she must have put a curse on Jinx Weald, and Jinx dropped out of the chess club. One or two in her class were actually scared of her. She started thinking Witch Susan wasn’t such a good name. She stopped playing the games and admitted she didn’t really know how to read palms. She put David’s card in her bottom drawer, along with the dolls and books she’d grown out of, and forgot about it. For a while.

* * *

The light in the flat came on. Snowflakes fell like wet ants on her cheeks. She went up and faced Roger in the living room. He pulled off his purple paisley tie, stretching it like a thuggee strangling cord. Gold rings glinted as he flexed his right hand. Her arm and leg muscles were tense. She sucked in a double lungful of air. Her exhalation was loud, her breath frosting in the air like a phantom megaphone. The central heating hadn’t come on, its timer shot by the last power cut.

He didn’t hit her until she turned on the television. As the
Six O’Clock News
appeared, she rolled with his first blow and fell on to the settee. She held a yellow square cushion over her face, tasting tobacco and dust. She tried to form a foetal ball, elbows protecting her breasts, knees up over her stomach. He pounded the backs of her hands. She clutched the cushion, willing the pain away. His rings gouged her skin. Her wounds stung like bites. He was too furious to think, or else he might have found a way to cripple her. As it was, he could only hurt her, and she could put up with that.

Neither of them said anything. She couldn’t get through with words. He had to tire himself out. Each time his knuckles connected, he grunted in the back of his throat. She was nastily reminded of the wordless sounds he’d made the nine times they’d made love. She wished she could have that part of her life back and wash it. He hit her back and head and arms and shins, but couldn’t reach anything soft. She looked over the cushion at him, at the way his arms waved while he kicked. She noticed for the first time that one of his Elvis sideburns was longer than the other. He hit her again, aiming for her exposed forehead and eyes. His fist came down above her hairline and skimmed off the top of her head. She buried her face again and leaned forward, pushing him back. He grabbed a fistful of hair. This was really going to hurt.

He stopped and let her go. After a while, even though he didn’t call a truce, she lowered the cushion to her lap. They were on television. Roger was at the other end of the settee, cold air between them. His hands bleeding, he tugged at the sticky, red-smeared rings. When one came off, he ouched and plopped it in an ashtray. Droplets of blood rolled like mercury on the matted-in ash. He knitted his mashed fingers, trying to squeeze out the pain.

* * *

Four or five years after the card games, they still called her Witch Susan, but didn’t remember why. There was no first time. Rather, if there was she didn’t notice it. Things around the house started to break. She had a transistor radio in her room that worked most of the time, but got nothing but static two or three days a month. It wasn’t until Nett Post joked about the thing having cramps she realized the radio’s static patches coincided exactly with her periods. Her stepfather spent too much time on the roof adjusting the television aerial, and they never got as good reception as the next-door neighbours. None of the clocks kept correct time more than a few days, even the electric one in her mother’s Teasmade. Long before anything really happened, Susan was sure it was her fault.

At a party in Nett’s garden, spoons started bending. It was funny at first, and most of the others thought it a joke. Susan suspected Nett was deliberately giving her bent cutlery until Colette, now in the science stream, suggested they repeat the experiment under laboratory conditions. Nett fetched down an old dinner service and laid out knives, forks and spoons on the garden table. Susan picked a knife and held the neck of the blade between two fingers. Nothing happened. ‘Too thick,’ concluded Colette. ‘Too right,’ replied Nett, and they all laughed again. Feeling stupid, Susan picked up a fork. She had a pain in her temples, and the fork bent into a right angle. Susan passed it round. It looked as if it had melted in the sun but it wasn’t even warm. Nett gave her a spoon, and the same thing happened. They stopped chattering, and just looked at the bent bits of metal. Nobody thought it a joke any more.

She practised, becoming familiar with the sudden, nauseating headache that came when it worked. She bent, broke or melted a succession of metal and plastic things. Once, alone, she stood in the garage with her hands clasped behind her and tied the car aerial into a knot. It couldn’t be kept secret. Her friends told their families and someone told her parents. She had to do the spoon act in the living room for them. Her stepfather, the bank manager, had nothing apt in his repertoire of reactions, and so kept quiet. Her mother found it highly embarrassing, but couldn’t think of a way out. Susan knew—not felt,
knew
—her mother had dreaded for years the day her daughter would embarrass the family. She’d expected Susan to get pregnant, marry a black man or become a drug addict. Being a mutant was no better and no worse than anything else, so Susan was inclined to be proud of it. There were twelve-year-olds in Russia who could beat her hollow at chess, but no one she’d ever heard of could pick up an unattached lightbulb and make it come on by thinking electricity into it.

Then came newspapers, magazines, radio, television. Even before she was out of school, she was semifamous. She didn’t need a career option, didn’t need her O and A levels, didn’t need any of the university places offered her. She hadn’t even had to go on
Opportunity Knocks.
She’d been given something to do with her life. Somewhere along the way, it stopped being fun. Nett’s family moved away from Guildford, and Susan didn’t have anyone to talk things through with. Most of the other girls found boyfriends, but her celebrity isolated her. People were afraid of her again. She looked into her bottom drawer for David’s card but it had been thrown out with other rubbish years before.

Then Roger Breecher took over. Much older than her, Roger was one of the first to latch on to the story. He quit the local paper to guide her through the personality jungle. Unlike everyone else, he wasn’t interested in explaining her or proving her a fake. He positively encouraged her to believe in what she was. He kept her away from scientists, warning her against rat mazes and electric shocks. Her parents didn’t like him but by then she’d had enough of them and wasn’t inclined to pay attention. If her parents had liked Roger, she mightn’t have been stupid enough to hook up with him. He set her up in the London flat, which she was expected to share with him, and went round the publishing houses until a contract was offered. He did most of the writing of
The Mind Beyond.

* * *

On television, Roger—bright orange with a green bar over his eyes—was smiling and confident, tackling the presenter’s questions with calculated humour.

‘It’s too early to make promises, Michael, but who knows… maybe Susan is the alternative form of energy we’re all looking for.’

The studio audience laughed appreciatively. It was the Blitz spirit coming out again. Plucky little Britain gasping for petrol, workforce idle four days a week, getting by with a smile and a song and a cup of tea. It made her wish, not for the first time, she’d been born Italian.

She was talking now, reticent and nervy. Her hair had been done this morning and looked surprisingly all right. People said she was pretty, but she only saw slightly misaligned eyes and bad posture. Whenever she saw herself on television or in magazine photographs, she thought she looked younger than she felt. She was eighteen. She wasn’t supposed to feel old. But she was the first to admit she wasn’t normal.

She wasn’t embarrassed this time, because it was deliberate. She’d set out to make a bad impression. They edited out some pauses and unended sentences, cutting in shots they’d filmed earlier of the presenter nodding and listening. She still came over as vague and unsympathetic. One long, pointless anecdote was totally gone. The editor would want to get to the good stuff as quickly as possible.

They left in the bit where she got the title of their book wrong, saying
The Mind Behind.
The good stuff came. A pretty plastic girl in a knee-length lavender dress came on with a tray and put it on the low table in front of Susan. The camera zoomed in. She saw herself looking down at spoons and spinning tops. She picked a stainless-steel dessert spoon and said something stupid. She got a laugh. She balanced the spoon on her extended forefinger. It wobbled. Her hand was shaking, and she couldn’t get the balance right for long seconds.

Off camera, Roger said something soothing and inane. The spoon was balanced now. The TV people had dubbed in spooky music. Her other hand came into the frame. With the right forefinger she gently rubbed the neck of the spoon like a sore spot. Under the creepy music, there were coughs from the audience. Suddenly, her fingers twitched. The spoon clattered out of sight. She reached down. The camera pulled back, losing focus, then came forward again. She was holding the spoon, slightly bent. It was a pathetic kink. ‘You
bent
it,’ said an expert sitting between her and Roger. He was there as a sceptic.

The audience laughed. Roger’s orange shaded red. Susan sat quietly, hands (and spoon) in her lap. The prerecorded piece was over, and the presenter was back live, leaning forward to take the viewing audience into his confidence. ‘Let’s take another look at that, shall we?’ It was better than she’d expected. They’d been filming her from several different angles, and they could slow down and/or expand the image like a football action replay. One camera caught her hand under the table, jabbing the spoon crooked against the studio floor.

They had a bit more of her talking, babbling an apology. Then the sceptic was sarcastic. Then it was all over. The presenter made an embarrassed comment, and the newsreader came on to talk about serious things. President Nixon’s tapes, power-sharing for Northern Ireland.

The TV went off, and the lights went out. Roger’s voice was hard in the dark. ‘Another bloody power cut!’

He swiped at her, but she knew it was coming. She pushed herself out of the sofa and moved silently to a corner. Roger was up, too, but he stepped into the coffee table. Something broke.

She was cosy in the dark. She knew where things were. She knew where he was now, where he would be soon. He came for her, animal noises escaping from his mouth. She reached behind him into the kitchen, to the four unmatched mugs hanging from hooks over the draining board and, one by one, made them pop into pieces.

It came now, as it hadn’t in the studio. The sickening lurch behind her eyes, like ice cream going to her head, that always accompanied the push. Her hands clenched tight by her sides, she reached out her mentacles for Roger, to stop him long enough for her to get out of the flat. He would be in trouble. The advance was spent. Deals had been made. He’d bought tickets to New York.

It would be a simple disappearance. Rodway was her stepfather’s name. On her birth certificate, in the Gideon Bible they had given her at school and on her UCCA form, she was Susan Ames. If Susan Rodway was Witch Susan, Susan Ames was damn nearly Susan Anonymous. In September, she could pick a university and read Eng Lit and be safely Susan Anonymous for the rest of her life. Superman had the right idea. If you were going to go through life with powers beyond the ordinary, the first thing you needed was a secret identity to keep the cash-in artists and psychos off your neck.

Outside, she’d know her way in the dark.

A
lder had changed overnight. The scenery was still out of
The Archers
or
Straw Dogs,
but the country folk were outnumbered by invaders, and the place had turned into a cross between Woodstock, Hollywood Boulevard and Harvest Home.

Looking across from the Pottery, Paul saw the garage crowded with late thirty-somethings in punitive-in-this-heat leather, crushing beer cans and comparing bikes with the enthusiasm of schoolboys seeing whose erection was longest. Allison’s facially impaired boyfriend was mingling with them, slapping gauntlets with Demon Scumsuckers from Hell who were probably accountants the rest of the year. Biker women sat on the low wall in front of the forecourt, pulling off boots and jackets to let their bodies breathe. Big breasts flopped under death’s-head T-shirts. Without goggles, the women had dusty cheeks and chins like survivors of a First World War dogfight.

Outside the Valiant Soldier, a young man in a flowered waistcoat, open suitcase balanced on his knees like an usherette’s tray, offered to sell a selection of controlled substances, liquorice lumps of cannabis resin, an assortment of pills and tabs, vials of suspiciously baking-powdery cocaine. There was nothing in the pharmacy for toothache. Paul told the dealer to ring up no sale, and the slick-haired hustler shrugged, turning his attention to the next prospective customer, a hairy youth with shorts, flip-flops, a headband and a back pocket full of disposable income.

Even before the official start, camp sites were thronging. Finding one kid in the crowd was impossible. Paul spotted a few lads, even a girl, with mohican haircuts—fifteen years after the Sex Pistols’ time in the sun—but none was the boy from the woods. The severely spooked kid could have bolted home. Paul wouldn’t blame him. Down by the festival site, at the edge of the Agapemone estate, there was already a holiday air. There were tents and vans in rows, and queues for the prefab toilets. Food stalls were open, and a fish-and-chip van from Achelzoy was doing excellent business. Litter was already underfoot.