Kiss (8 page)

I sighed. I drew King Carlo in the middle of the page, between the Princess and the Queen. I hadn’t left much space for him so I had to draw a very slim, pared-down version of His Regal Majesty, leaving out his customary lengthy ermine train. I drew his crystal crown, each point studded with a round ruby; I drew the royal-blue sash over his shoulder; I drew his white silk suit, leaving most of it plain white page but carefully shading it with pale grey; I drew his ruby cuff links just peeping out from his sleeves; I drew his glass boots; I drew his dear face, big brown eyes, small neat nose, soft lips with a perfect cupid’s bow. These lips were smiling but his eyes weren’t looking left at me. They were turned to the right, towards the interloping Princess.

I suddenly scribbled all over her with my black felt pen, ruining my picture.

I made myself cheese on toast for lunch. I knew Jules wouldn’t mind if I went next door and ate with them but Carl had specifically said afternoon and I didn’t want him to feel I was being too pushy. I tried to work out in my head his definition of afternoon. I thought he probably meant three o’clock, but when it came to it I couldn’t wait any longer than two.

I went out of the back door and walked down our garden. It wasn’t a garden any more, it was
wilderness. Mum had long since stopped trying to mow the lawn or do any planting or weeding.

‘I’ve got to prioritize,’ she said defensively.

Carl’s father mowed our lawn several times the first summer my dad left us, but then he slipped out of the habit and Mum was too proud to ask him. We had a couple of student lodgers for a while and they sometimes had a go, but they couldn’t seem to work the lawnmower and go in a straight line. Then Mum caught them taking drugs and got rid of them in case I got corrupted and we all got prosecuted.

Miss Miles fiddled around planting a few pansies here and there, but she didn’t have the strength to mow the lawn. Mum wanted to get rid of the grass altogether. She had a vision of a Japanese garden, all smooth grey pebbles and decorative green shrubs.

‘One day, when I’ve got the time and cash,’ she said. ‘One day … when pigs start flapping their little wings and go flying through the air waving their trotters.’

I decided that when Carl and I published the Glassworld Chronicles and made our fortunes I’d treat Mum to her Japanese garden. I’d buy her an embroidered kimono to wear in it. She could lie on a little futon reading haikus and drinking green tea …

I waded through nettles and borage and dandelions to the door in the wooden fence at the bottom of our garden. I edged through it into the colourful flowery world of the Johnsons’ garden
and walked over to the Glass Hut. I rapped our special knock on the door but there was no answer.

I waited for a minute. I could walk up to the house and find Carl. Or I could go into the Glass Hut and wait for him there. Carl had never told me not to enter the Glass Hut without him. He hadn’t needed to. It was far more private than his bedroom. I only went there at his invitation.

I knew I should wait. But my hand was itching. It reached out as if acting independently. It seized the handle and opened the door.

I STEPPED INSIDE
and closed the door after me. I didn’t switch the light on. Red and blue and green glowed through the stained-glass windows, softening the gloom. I gazed at the neat glass rows. I reached out a finger and stroked the slippery hair of the Glass Boy. I lifted a glass goblet, pretending to take a sip. I took down the paperweights one by one and peered into each tiny world. My hand was trembling slightly, but I was very careful.

When I’d touched every single piece of glass for luck I took the big Glassworld book from the shelf and sat cross-legged on the sofa, flicking through the pages. We wrote it in an old marbled accounts book, so large you needed two hands to lift it. We’d stuck in so many paintings and drawings and general additions and
amendments that the pages stuck out like stiff petticoats, making it even more unwieldy to handle.

The first few chapters were a weird mishmash. I’d written this very babyish beginning, with lots of bad drawings, rows of Glassworld characters all smiling the same banana-shaped smile, batting their long eyelashes and looking to the left because I’d only just learned how to draw a half-profile and was proud of my accomplishment. Their feet all pointed to the left too because I hadn’t yet figured out how to draw a foot from the front. They looked like a mad chorus line about to start doing can-can kicks.

Carl had done drawings at the beginning too, but his were all very careful illustrations of Venetian glass-blowing. He’d constructed an entire Glassworld history from ancient GlassRoman times when the original Glass Palaces were erected. They were embellished wondrously by GlassVenetians, with brilliant chandeliers and mirrors and gigantic glass cabinets glittering with glass ewers, basins, bowls, pots, plates, candlesticks and every size and kind of drinking vessel.

I stipulated that there should be different Glassworld alcoholic beverages for each colour of glass: white wine for the clear glass, red wine for the ruby glass, blueberry wine for blue, cassis for purple, crème de menthe for green glass and whisky for amber glass. I spent ages
concocting colour-co-ordinated meals for the glass plates. I had multi-coloured tiny fruit sweets in the millefiori bowls.

We only got into our stride with the story line when we were nine or ten. We started writing proper Glassworld Chronicles, developing the royal family saga. They coped with births, marriages and many deaths. They went to war, fought off foreign invaders and dealt with a revolution by the workers in the great Glassworks. They shivered in their ermine robes during the Great Glass Ice Age and shuddered when a violent tempest cracked the Glass Palace from top to bottom.

Carl and I made it up as we went along, acting it out, interrupting each other excitedly, scribbling stuff down until our hands ached. We stayed cooped up in the Glass Hut hour after hour, never noticing the time.

It began to change when Carl started at the grammar. He had so much homework he didn’t have time to invent Glassworld – and when he did have the time he didn’t have the inclination.

I wondered if Carl had been making any notes. I looked around the hut hopefully. There were two black notebooks on the shelf but they were Carl’s proper glass books, one full of descriptions of glass in the Victoria and Albert, his favourite museum, and the other bright with paintings of stained-glass windows all over Britain. There was a square black sketchbook tucked behind them. I flicked through it,
smiling. There were drawings of Pre-Raphaelite stained glass, bright felt-pen sketches of Chihuly glass at the V and A, delicate pencil sketches of Lalique glass at Brighton museum. There were a few blank pages, and then, right at the back, there were Carl’s own designs, variations of the Glass Boy. He drew him standing on tiptoe, stretching, sitting, flying with swirled glass wings. As the sketches progressed the Glass Boy came to life. He was running, eyes narrowed against the wind, arms pumping, legs pounding. His leg was drawn back, aiming carefully, about to kick an invisible ball. He was leaping high in the air, arm punching in triumph.

I snapped the sketchbook shut and put it carefully behind the two glass notebooks at exactly the correct angle.

I thought about a glass
girl
. I tried out several self-conscious poses. Would Carl want to sketch me or would he laugh at me? He’d probably fob me off gently, the way he’d kissed me on the nose.

Why
wouldn’t he kiss me properly? I suddenly panicked, wondering if I had the most terrible bad breath. Andy hadn’t backed away from me, groaning, but maybe he was heroically polite. I tried cupping my hand in front of my mouth and breathing out. I could detect nothing but I still worried.

Maybe I didn’t smell repellent, maybe I
looked
repellent. I’d started to get a bit spotty,
though I tried hard to disguise it. I still looked embarrassingly young for my age, but I was starting to get a
little
bit of a figure now, though little was the operative word. I looked a sad scrawny baby compared to Miranda.

Did he secretly fancy her? I was his girlfriend, wasn’t I? Why didn’t he fancy me? Maybe I should simply ask him. It needn’t be such a big deal. He was my best friend, closer than a brother. Why did I feel so shy, so scared?

He came into the Glass Hut half an hour later.

‘Hey, Sylvie,’ he said, not sounding surprised, nor cross that I’d barged in by myself.

He was wearing a white T-shirt, blue jeans and white trainers, ordinary clothes I’d seen him wear a hundred times before, but he looked newly wonderful in them. I looked at the fair peachiness of his skin, the little hollow at his neck, the slight swell of the muscles on his arms, the tautness of his stomach emphasized by his plaited leather belt.

‘Budge up a bit, Syl,’ he said, gently nudging me with his trainers.

I sniffed his warm toast boy smell, but there was another sharp lemony scent, unfamiliar. I sniffed several times.

‘Are you getting a cold?’ said Carl, opening the huge Glassworld tome and flicking through the early pages.

‘What’s that smell?’

Carl sniffed too. ‘Your shampoo?’

‘No, it’s not me, it’s you.’ I got closer. ‘Definitely.’

‘Are you saying I pong?’ said Carl.

‘No. Well, yes, but pleasantly. Like perfume.’

‘I’m not wearing perfume! I was just trying out a tiny drop of Jake’s aftershave, that’s all,’ said Carl.

I stared at his smooth skin. ‘You don’t shave!’

‘That doesn’t mean I don’t want to smell OK,’ Carl said. ‘
You
wear perfume sometimes.’

I’d once snaffled some of my mum’s French perfume but it was old and stale, a long-ago birthday present from my dad. The bottle had been gathering dust on her dressing table ever since. I was simply trying to use up the perfume so that Carl could have the pretty cut-glass bottle for his collection, but Mum got cross and Carl moaned about the smell, saying it made his nose prickle and his eyes sting.

He seemed totally unaffected by his own aftershave. I wondered if he had put it on for my benefit. My heart started thudding.

‘I love that smell,’ I said hurriedly. ‘It’s much nicer on you than it is on Jake.’

Carl smiled at me, still flicking through the Glassworld Chronicles. ‘Do you think King Carlo and Queen Sylviana wear perfume?’ he said. ‘Aha, they’re forced to wear pungent oils and bury their regal noses in silken handkerchiefs during the Great Summer Stench when the Victorian Glassworld sewers collapse …’

‘Oh
yes
, because an enemy spy slipped down a manhole and blew up the brick sewer, so that not only is half of Glassworld mired in filthy mud, the entire royal family having to be carried by sedan chair so that the royal feet aren’t sullied, but also giant rats have now escaped from the depths of the stinky sewers and now there is a plague of them, over-running Glassworld, biting babies, getting in all the food cupboards, running over people’s faces in bed at night.
So
, Queen Sylviana gives her splendid Siamese cats the task of killing all the rats—’

‘But they are totally useless little lap-cats. They cower away from the rats and hide behind Queen Sylviana’s velvet sofa, mewing piteously. No, no, we need a Pied Piper, fresh from Hamelin. King Carlo spots him strolling nonchalantly through the palace grounds. His pied cloak trails on the filthy floor but none of the mud sticks to it, and his feet in their natty mismatch boots stay surprisingly mud-free too. His red and yellow garb looks curiously like a football strip. Indeed, as he nears the palace he starts kicking one of the prize pumpkins in the royal vegetable gardens. He breaks into a run, dribbling it nimbly down the ruby gravel driveway, all the while piping away. Queen Sylviana peers round the royal velvet curtains at the Piper. She catches her breath at the sight of his sweet face, his broad shoulders, his well-muscled long legs in their pied tights—’ ‘No she doesn’t! She wonders who this mad
fool is, dressed so bizarrely. Red and yellow look ridiculous worn together. How dare he pick any of the pumpkins! Queen Sylviana wants this impertinent interloper punished. He is banished to the dungeons—’

‘OK, he shrugs his shoulders and does not struggle because he sees that Queen Sylviana is quite mad. Maybe she’s so aware of his physical charm that she’s temporarily unbalanced. Whatever. So the Piper lurks in his little dungeon. He’s been put on bread-and-water rations but he’s still got his pumpkin, so he passes his time gouging out the flesh with the end of his pipe, munching his monotonous vegetable meal. The rats gather in force, their yellow teeth glinting by the light of his one flickering candle, but if he plays just eight bars of his haunting melody they are hypnotized, utterly catatonic. Ha,
rat
atonic! They stay motionless, in aural ecstasy. King Carlo visits this strange new prisoner and sees for himself the extent of his powers. He sets him free and commands him to walk around the town playing his pipe, similarly enchanting every single rat. He succeeds in just one quick circuit, and then he leads them up up up to Mount Eruption, the terrifying Glassworld volcano, and all the rats scamper madly because the mount is red-hot and burning their paws. The Piper is far fleeter, his boots barely touching the ground, so that he isn’t even slightly singed, and he strides unharmed to the very edge of the fiery inferno,
still playing persuasively, and all the rats tumble down down down in a squealing squeaking flurry and are all burned to a crisp. So the general stench in Glassworld is given an even more rancid reek of roasted rat flesh, so the problem is even more dire, soooooo …’