The Changeover (15 page)

"I thought you might like to take me instead," Laura babbled. "You could let Jacko go and take me."

Mr Braque looked astonished and shook his head.

"Oh, no! You just don't have the same quality of energy at all, and, though the element of self-sacrifice is interesting, curiously enough it's not particularly rare in my area of speciality." But for all that he continued to look thoughtfully at her, his round eyes widening, his tongue caressing his teeth.

"I'd be willing, you see," Laura whispered. "And I'd know about you. I'd recognize you all the time."

"I thought it might be interesting for you to have someone horrified by you, but prepared to submit," said Sorry. "It's its own form of speciality, isn't it?"

Carmody Braque laughed. "What a very discerning young man you are," he said. "But my poor young people... how could you dare to put such an idea into my head? I could have both — the little brother and the big sister. Not that I necessarily will! As I told you, I'm forced to be very choosy by now.

"Not everything works any more ... Still, show yourself, dear! You can't make an offer such as that and remain muffled up like a comic-book spy. After all, you constitute a luxury. So take off that jacket and those glasses and remind me just what you have to offer."

"If you promise to let Jacko go!" Laura said obstinately.

Carmody Braque ignored her words, simply grinning and repeating, "Show yourself!" But Laura did not move.

"Only for Jacko," she repeated, pushing her hands into her pockets and shrugging her shoulders as if she were drawing herself in, making herself a smaller target for his darting gaze to strike.

"You are in no position to bargain," said Carmody Braque, looking watchfully at Sorry. "Stay your distance, you witch, don't you dare move! Besides, you are saturating her with your power. I can't recognize her at all. She might just as well be your sister." To Laura he said, as if speaking to a stupid child, "I must know. How promising is your life to you? Are you worthwhile? Do you anticipate love for instance, or have you ... ?" He glanced quickly at Sorry and then back again with dreadful eagerness. Laura looked at him narrowly through the twin shadows of her sun glasses. He clicked his tongue impatiently.

"Come here!" he said, and put out his hand to bring her over the space that separated them, to know her and to take her or discard her at will. Laura heard Sorry hiss slightly with an unspoken command, but she was already moving. Her hand took on a swift life of its own, leaping from her pocket, through the air. Laura stamped her mark on Carmody Braque's outstretched palm as firmly and delicately as if she were giving him a flower.

"You've invited me in," she said. He looked down incredulously and saw her face smiling up at him from the surface of his own skin.

Sorry, moving as quickly as his black cat, came up behind Laura, reached over her shoulder and took her sunglasses off.

"Tell him!" he commanded urgently, while Carmody Braque looked back up at her, his expansive confidence draining away from him.

"What have you done?" he cried. Laura heard, in his changed voice, the first groan of mortality. Their eyes met. She knew at once that a gate had opened for her. He could not be private from her any more. Nor could his fingers, closing spasmodically over the picture in his palm, prevent her following the chemical electricity of this nervous reaction and exploding in his head, where she was immediately powerful. Like a model man he was under her remote control and no matter where he was in the city she could either consume or nourish him. It was so easy it was hard to believe such an ability had not always been natural to her. All the same, her skin crawled and her stomach twisted with horror. She had no mercy to offer. Sorry merely laughed.

"What is it?" asked Carmody Braque again, staring at his hand with the expression of someone seeing, in his own flesh, the symptoms of a catastrophic malaise. "What is this charade?"

"You know!" Laura said very softly. "It's my mark." She had not breath or strength to do more than whisper ominously, "My mark."

"But you're not... you weren't..." His affectation was eaten away by fear. "I couldn't be wrong."

"We worked a changeover," Sorry said, and wrote his initials on to the back of Laura's neck with his forefinger. It was as if he had lost interest in anything other than her, while, for Laura, the world suddenly altered, growing lighter and more luminous. An energy as strong and sweet as honey flowed into her, and Carmody Braque fell on his knees, just as she had once done by Jacko's bed, watching the reflection of this very man's smile play wickedly over her brother's face.

Now with shock and triumph she discerned her own ghost, looking back at her out of her victim's desperate eyes.

"Please ..." he cried, "my dear, young lady . .. I'm pleading with you! Is that what you want? I'll let the little brother go, of course. I'll find someone else. I didn't understand. Honour among thieves ..." He whined and wriggled closer to her, as if he might try to touch her. "I've never made this mistake before. There must be a way we can find common ground." Words poured out of him. He leaked desperation. "Now, please ..."

"No!" said Laura and walked away, while Carmody Braque scuttled after her, still on his knees, a frantic, stunted goblin. His hands were stretched out, clutching. For a moment he looked more like a desperate crab than any sort of man.

"Please, please talk," he cried. "Let's discuss this like reasonable people. We have to stick together, we funny ones. Is there something else you want? Money? Perhaps you'd like to take your little brother — the boyfriend, too— on a holiday. The Gold Coast! Or even the Isles of Greece, the Isles of Greece where burning Sappho loved and sang, as Shelley says."

"That's not a bad idea, Chant," Sorry said. Laura turned on him angrily, and he laughed at her indignation. "Mind you, I don't think it was Shelley who said that. I don't remember who it was but..."

"It doesn't matter who it was, we're not going," Laura declared. She marched around the house, Sorry beside her, Carmody Braque following, making sounds of threat and supplication. "Please ..." was the only audible word.

"Jolidays!" snapped Laura over her shoulder, pushing the gate open so fiercely that the bell rang cheerfully, regardless of the anguish of its owner. Once in the right-of-way, Laura began to run, and Sorry followed her back to the Vespa. Without looking, she knew Carmody Braque had stopped at the gate and would follow no further.

"Right on, Chant!" Sorry said. "Are your hands shaking? Would you like me to put your helmet on for you? All set? Let's blast off for Planet Earth. Does it exist? I don't think so, but we can't afford to ignore these myths, can we? Don't worry, Chant! It's all over for him. You did everything right."

"There's still Jacko," Laura pointed out. "It isn't over. What shall I do next?"

"Have lunch?" suggested Sorry. "Terror always makes me hungry." But Laura could not imagine eating. She thought she might not eat anything ever again.

"The hospital," she said. "I've got to go there."

"Oh, all right!" Sorry said, adjusting his helmet. "Just think ... soon you'll be able to forget all about this, and concentrate on what's really important."

"You, I suppose!" Laura cried derisively, scrambling on to the Vespa behind him.

"Bingo!" Sorry agreed. "Hold tight!"

Laura suddenly felt extremely fond of Sorry, who was making distance matter so little in her life, and held on to him with new confidence. In spite of his cool words he was trembling, and not just with the vibration of the bike. He had, she suddenly realized, been very frightened. The motor burst into life and they darted down the private road to be cheerfully received by the everyday rush and grumble of the city once more.

The hospital lay, like an island of concrete cliffs and caves, overlooking a crescent of lawn to the main road. After only one visit, it felt familiar to Laura, as if it were going to be part of her life for ever. Standing in the car park, recovering from their swift progress across town, she rubbed her flattened hair with her free hand and, even without looking at him, felt this innocent act touch Sorry in a way she could not define.

"To tell you the truth, I was terrified!" he said abruptly. "How about you?"

Laura turned to him in astonishment, for her own fear was put behind her. She had begun to think only of Jacko, while Sorry was still looking back to Carmody Braque.

"I wouldn't like to get into that state myself," he said, looking into the air absentmindedly. "I mean, being human isn't much, maybe, but I wouldn't want to be anything less."

"Well, you don't have to," Laura said, puzzled.

Sorry took her arm above the elbow as they walked through the car park.

"I don't want to feel too much," he complained restlessly, more to himself than to her, but then pausing as if expecting an answer.

"It's not a thing you can choose about," Laura said, thinking ahead to Jacko all the time.

"But I'm not like you," Sorry said. "You're part of a true family you have to love, I suppose. I mean, you just do love them, and that's it for you. But I need to choose, just out of ordinary self-defence."

"So?"

"So it's more risky not to feel than I thought. I think it leaves a dangerous space. Nature hates a vacuum."

"You'd never, ever turn into anything like him," Laura said scornfully.

"He began somewhere," Sorry answered. "He wasn't always like that. He was a baby and a boy and a man, and in the beginning he probably didn't seem very different from ordinary people. Somewhere along the line he made a wrong decision — I just know it."

"I'll bet he was an absolutely horrible baby," Laura said, as they went between restrained flowerbeds to the main hospital door. The sun shone down on her. The lawn was springy under her feet. She felt, with vague surprise, that she was totally alive. Each fingernail, each hair on her head, seemed to be enjoying something in its own right, not simply as a piece of Laura with no existence apart from hers. She smiled at her own thoughts, just as Sorry remarked in a puzzled voice,

"It suits you, you know. You look terrific. Is all this giving you a bit of a buzz?"

Laura just shook her head, still smiling, standing on the first of the hospital steps, one step above Sorry. She turned and looked directly into his eyes, on a level with her own.

"I don't know," she said. "I'll tell you what, though. You can take down that poster in your room. Keep my photograph, I don't mind, but not pinned to the poster." People came and went past them and he looked at her curiously, not so much shy as uncertain.

"What are you trying to remind me of?" he said, after a moment. "I'll wait and see what happens. You might take off into the dim mists of the fourth form

again when all this is over."

"We're not dim," Laura said indignantly. "And how would you like it if I had a poster of a naked man and pinned your photo to it?" Sony's expression became amused and slightly shamefaced.

"You can if you like," he said. "I'll even give you a photo."

"I don't really want to," Laura admitted stiffly. "Anyhow my mother would never stop commenting if I did such a thing. It wouldn't be worth it."

She was anxious to go, but she hesitated a moment longer and put her arms around Sorry and said, "Thank you for helping me," and felt, as she said them, that her words were quite inadequate.

"That's nice," Sorry said. "But don't look so tense. It's all right. You'll be fine. Jacko too!"

"How can you tell?" Laura asked, half-whispering.

"Because you'll make it come right, won't you?" he answered, in a low, intent voice. "Your b-brother will catch survival from you. You know what you are, Chant, you're a born s-survivor." He struggled with the last word as if it were in a foreign language, but it was the sudden feeling that was difficult for him to cope with.

"You too!" Laura told him, setting him free and retreating up the hospital steps.

"Isn't that the Lord's t-truth," Sorry said, smiling, mocking his own intensity as he turned away towards the car park.

"Keep in touch," he called across the widening space. Laura did not stay to watch him go, but went in at the hospital door, and gave her name at the reception desk, wondering briefly how she could have hugged a male prefect so easily, and what it would be like watching him read notices at assembly next week at school.

She reached the waiting room at last, moving past screens and a notice commanding silence. It was next to the room where Jacko lay, precious and irreplaceable, but no longer a simple child. He was a medical puzzle, a hesitant pulse, an unreliable breath, an irregular electric pattern on a little screen. But if she, Laura, could make Carmody Braque fall on his knees, she could surely find and reverse the flow of life he was draining from Jacko. The waiting room was not empty. Her father and Kate were both there, talking to a doctor. There were bright cushions on the chairs and an attempt had been made to make the little room cheerful, although those who waited there could only be anticipating despair.

"He was drifting right away," the doctor was saying, "but his heart beat has picked up again. He's a remarkable child to stand all this. I can't say that he's any better, but he's not worse. It's progress of a sort." Kate saw Laura come in but did not say anything until the doctor had gone, and then she cried her name with bewildered relief.

"We've been trying to get in touch with you. They said you'd gone out with Sorry Carlisle on his motorbike." Kate sounded both hurt and puzzled, but Laura could not explain. They exchanged a troubled glance, each recognizing something new in the other, knowing it was the wrong time to ask questions.

"Hello, Baa-lamb!" said Stephen in a kind, tired voice. "Everytime I see you you look bigger and older and prettier than before."

"Each time you see me I am," said Laura a little cautiously, for she did not want to love him as much as she had once loved him, and his expression seemed to be inviting the old love back. She hugged Kate first.

"How's Jacko?" she asked, and felt her new strength falter before Kate, who was neither tearful nor distraught, but somehow without hope.

"Laura dear, the doctor doesn't think Jacko will live through the day," she said. "He was terribly ill early this morning. Chris has taken a few days' annual leave which was owing him, and Mr Bradley's showing him the routines of the shop. He's filling in for me, bless him, so that I can stay with Jacko until — for as long as I need to."

"I don't think he'll die," Laura said, but doubt had seized her at once. Her victory of less than an hour ago seemed like a fairy tale invented so that she could delay her own acceptance of a terrible reality. However, Sorry had said she was a survivor.

"I just don't believe it," she said. "I think he'll get better." Kate closed her eyes as if she were controlling an intense inner pain.

"You don't understand," she said. "He's too weak to stand up to those convulsions any more. I think I knew when he had that first attack that he was going to die."

She was cool and pale and tired and worn. Laura felt guilty about the rosy gold that was flooding through her at that very moment, for she thought that, in spite of eyes red from lack of sleep and old tears, in spite of the lines of thirty-five mixed years, Kate looked more wonderful than she herself could ever look, worn down and yet somehow noble, and Laura, who had often envied Kate her prettiness, yearned for something of this nobility. She also understood that her own heightened appearance hurt Kate, but only time could put the misunderstanding right. She could not explain that she had made herself shine with power because of Jacko, and not in spite of him.

"Am I allowed to sit with him?" she asked.

"We both will," said Kate.

"We all will," Stephen declared, but, as it happened,

Stephen could not do this for long.

Jacko, in his hospital nest, looked dead already. Kate sat beside him quite calmly, wrapped in her own thoughts, but after a little while Stephen said, in a humble voice for such a confident man, that he could not stand it. As if the thought had shifted from his head to her own, Laura understood he feared not only for Jacko but for his new child coming into a dangerous world where both wickedness and blind chance might make you lose what you loved most for no real reason at all.

"I'll be back later," he said. "I really will."

Kate nodded and smiled. But Laura sat very, very still and, with the patience of someone mapping by night an archipelago of tiny crowded islands, began to search for her brother.

At first Laura stared out in to the room, but with her truest gaze she looked back into her own head, not into the forests, mountains and caves of the previous evening but into a simple darkness. Nothing happened. She made herself as aware, as sensitive as she could, and sifted through the blackness until at last something moved. Suddenly Carmody Braque himself was with her, shouting that he was draining away, bombarding her with pleading, promises and abuse. His complaints fluttered around her like horrid, blighted birds, wailing and demanding so vociferously that she was dazed for a moment. Then a calm bead of light rose up out of the night and gave her something else to think about, for she had the unconscious support and companionship of Kate. If she opened her eyes she could see her mother on the other side of the bed, leaning forward towards Jacko, quite still and apparently reflective, thinking of the first time she had held Jacko and had fed him, remembering his nose pressed into her breast. Unbound, his new, creased hands had made gentle swooping gestures in the air as if he were inventing a dance. Laura's mind was so mixed with Kate's that the memory seemed entirely her own. Then Sorry crossed a corner of her thoughts in an uneasy flare of colour. She felt the ghost of last night's kiss, not the clever one of Changeover country, but the soft, heavy, unpractised one he had given her when his mother and grandmother were watching. It had reminded her of Jacko at the time, and now, through the association, she found Jacko himself, faint and frail, but unmistakable, a dwindled thread of brightness. She felt how he had closed down — how he had sealed, Sorry would have said — against the assaults of Mr Braque. There was almost nothing left.

"Jacko!" she said in a friendly, sensible voice, speaking as if he had locked himself into the bathroom at home and must now be talked into undoing the bolt and letting himself out, "Jacko — it's me. It's Lolly." There was no response. "You can let me in. It's all right now! It's over!"

Carmody Braque beat against her, desperate to share the vitality with which she had begun to sustain her little brother, but Laura defended herself against him, and Jacko's frail light brightened a little. As he absorbed her love and energy, Laura opened her eyes, looked across at Kate, and smiled tentatively, but Kate did not smile back. Like Jacko, she had sealed herself, but into a powerful tranquility during which she looked at Jacko as if she would build him back in to her and contain him safely. Shutting out this distraction by closing her eyes once more, Laura began again.

"Jacko — it's Lolly. Listen, Jacko, you've been a good boy, a wonderful boy, but you can come out now. You can let go. The wicked wolf is gone and the little pig can come out of his brick house and play."

"What about me?" screamed Carmody Braque, fretting at the edge of her concentration. "You can't mean to ... you can't intend me to ..." Laura shut herself away from him. "Bitch! Bitch!" yelled his fading voice. "Listen to me... listen..." He was gone again.

"Jacko!" she said. "Would you like Ruggie?" There was a faint unfolding, a tiny brightening of assent. "Well, listen carefully. You're safe in bed. You're in a hospital, so that shows you how important you are. You've got a locker all to yourself with a jug of orange- juice on it. Mummy is on one side of the bed and I'm on the other and Ruggie is in the locker waiting for you to wake up. Rosebud's there too, I think. They're lonely without you, so hurry up and come back, Jacko. They miss you. We all miss you. See if you can't come back a little bit more." There was a further unfolding, nervous but definite.

"Lolly?" It was a lost echo rather than a real voice.

"Yes, it's Lolly. I promise it's me," she said. "Just you come towards me, Jacko." She reached out to him with her strange power and felt him turn towards her as if she were a source of light in the darkness. But suddenly Carmody Braque was with her again, not fretting outside any more but coming at her directly through Jacko. Laura was seized by an emotion which had no name but was made up of fury and joy, quite indistinguishably smudged into each other. She met her enemy in the strengthening citadel of her brother, and he gave way before her. She engulfed and dissolved his mark, comforted Jacko with promises of stories, family meals with fish and chips, all the strong, happy routines of everyday life, and as she did this she felt the psychical injury, which the mark had symbolized, heal, and knew that Jacko was safe from Carmody Braque for always. As this certainty established itself, she also felt Jacko alter in some way, felt him relax as if relieved of a persistent pain. Filled with passionate gratitude, she imagined herself as a torrent of fierce gold and let herself flood through him, giving him as much of herself as he could hold.