The Changeover (18 page)

"I feel better than I did," Laura said. She half wanted Sorry to kiss her again.

Later, Laura woke up lying on the old settee in Sorry's study, a patchwork cushion under her cheek, and a rug over her. Sorry sat, not at his desk but beside her, doing some unspecified homework. Laura watched his hand move over the paper. It was brown and slightly angular and had a smear of grease from the Vespa across the back.

Sorry wrote steadily on, then suddenly said, without looking at her, "Chant, I rang your mother and either she or your father will be along to relocate you soon. She sounded very suspicious, I must say. Maybe you'd better start waking up and putting your shoes on. No sense in behaving impeccably and not getting the credit for it, is there?"

"Is it dark?" asked Laura.

"Twilight only," Sorry said. "Summer twilight, and I'm deep into parliamentary development under the Stuarts. Exams for me soon. Bursary exams and the end of school. It's quite a remarkable thought."

Out in the Reserve, unseen by either of them, a breeze blew around the base of the memorial to Councillor Carroll and set a few leaves scudding before it. The old man who had been observed by Sorry earlier, having drunk his wine and slept off some of its effects, picked himself up and began to go home. He was astonished to see a perfectly good suit of clothes lying on the edge of the paving around the memorial. He did not wonder why the shirt was inside the jacket and the shoes full of leaves. He gathered the clothes into a bundle and went on his way, ignoring a sudden gust that blew impotently against him, whining sadly as he stalked on through it and across the Reserve, laying a temporary trail of restless leaves behind him as he went.

"Here's Lolly," cried Jacko, as Laura came across the lawn. He bounced across to her and Laura fell on her knees to meet him for he was like a large, bounding puppy, expecting to be welcomed all over.

"How's your mother?" asked Mrs Fangboner tolerantly, bringing Jacko's basket, Ruggie neatly folded, and Rosebud smiling on top of everything else. "Getting on well with her new friend? I was round there the other day and he was cooking the dinner. That's nice, I thought. All home comforts."

"He's a wonderful cook," Laura said, exaggerating a little in order to irritate Mrs Fangboner. "But we still have fish and chips on Thursday. Ready, Jacko?"

"I'm all ready, and Rosebud's all ready," Jacko declared. "Off we go with Sorry."

"I see the Carlisle boy's got a car." Mrs Fangboner directed a sharp glance over the hedge to where the curved top of the Volkswagon showed from the road beyond. "All right to be some people, isn't it?" But her voice, though critical, was not unkind.

"It's his mother's," Laura said. "Now his exams are over, he's not going to school like the rest of us. He's doing work for the school community service, weeding old people's gardens, and things like that."

She picked Jacko up, though he was quite able to walk by himself.

"You carry me and I carry Rosebud," Jacko said. "That's fair, isn't it, Lolly?"

They said goodbye to Mrs Fangboner and went out to the car. Sorry was reading the afternoon paper. Laura put Jacko's basket into the back seat beside her school pack.

"All right! Off we go!" cried Jacko, for Miryam's car had come to seem like another family car where he was allowed to give orders.

"Seat belts on!" Sorry said, and they moved off, driving through Gardendale in moderate glory.

"Nothing at all about our departed friend in the newspaper, these days," Sorry said. "He's vanished off the face of the earth. How baffling!" A few minutes later he drew up outside Laura's house. "There you are. It's not so very far, is it?"

"It is if you have to walk with Jacko and carry a pack," Laura replied. She looked at him doubtfully. "Are you coming in?" Sorry was particularly colourful in an old, red shirt and blue jeans. He suddenly looked like a man and not a boy, and would look like a boy only once more in his entire life, when he put on his school uniform to attend the school break-up. In some ways he seemed a very different person from the one who, only six weeks ago, had pushed her against the wall in his study and touched her and asked her to invite him in, yet the memory of that occasion and of other less arrogant embraces lay constantly between them.

Something about the quality of the afternoon sunlight on his skin made Laura ask curiously, "Do you shave?"

Sorry, passing Jacko's basket from the back seat, gave her an amused and vaguely puzzled glance as he replied, "What do you think? I was a seventh former and old in my class, remember. Besides, how do you think I keep that satin finish?"

"It just seems strange," explained Laura.

"Yes, it is strange," Sorry agreed. "However, one thing Winter and Miryam forget when they talk about feminine mystery is that being a man is very mysterious too, and I suppose shaving's part of it."

"I'll shave when I'm grown up," boasted Jacko, and ran his hand over his face, buzzing to himself. There had been a new morning sound in the house sometimes recently, the sound of Chris's electric razor, and Jacko had been very excited by it. Laura was filled with a sudden melancholy at the thought of Jacko shaving.

"Wouldn't it be nice to stay three for ever and ever?" she asked in a sentimental voice.

"He very nearly did," Sorry replied ominously.

"Come on, Chant! Snap out of it! I'll carry your pack in.

"I can carry it myself," Laura declared immediately.

"I know you can," said Sorry. "But why not take advantage of me while I'm around. I'm not going to be here always. That's what I want to talk to you about."

"You want me to make you a cup of tea and whip up a batch of scones," Laura grumbled, as she and Jacko went up the path.

"And a fruit cake," Sorry shouted after her. "Let's indulge in a few traditional values while we've got the chance."

Laura did make tea, and cheese sandwiches. The old, whistling kettle with its slow leak had gone. Chris had bought Kate a shiny electric kettle which made life simpler, though Laura rather missed the frantic scream of the old one. When she entered the living room Sorry and Jacko were absorbed by a game on the floor. Laura put the pottery mugs down on the table, studying Jacko's soft, shining, golden-brown curls and Sorry's rougher, paler hair, bleached by the summer sun. Tonight, in his study, he would put on his black dressing- gown and his rings and become something different, a creature of the imagination, the enchanter of the dark tower, but either way he was a difficulty in her life, sometimes seeming to hurry her towards a conclusion when she wanted to go slowly, sometimes hesitating when she got impatient with mystery and wanted everything understood.

Now she saw with nervous pleasure that he had constructed a little farm on the carpet to entertain Jacko. His hands curved in the air, grassy hills grew under them, arched like the backs of green kittens as he stroked them into existence. There were little cows, little sheep, and pink and black pigs. There was a farmhouse with a flower garden in front of it and vegetables at the back, its cabbages the size of pin heads.

"Tell him it's not a toy," Laura said rather anxiously. "It's just a game, Jacko. It will melt away like an iceblock." But she kneeled down beside Sorry and watched over his shoulder as he drew a line with his finger and set a little river flowing from one worn place on the carpet to another one where it vanished into the weave and soaked away to nothing.

"You've missed something out," she said and leaned against his back as she stretched her own hand down to the river. An image formed in her mind and she let it flow through her, and take on its own reality in the farm. "Pink crocodiles."

Five or six pink crocodiles as long as darning needles basked on the river bank. Jacko flung up his arms, clasping them across his head with delight, but Laura and Sorry now became absolutely still, like people under a spell. She could feel the warmth of his skin against her own through her dress and his red shirt.

"I don't know," said Sorry at last. "It's my mother that ought to worry, not yours. I try to mean well, but you give me a hard time, Chant." Jacko now went to get Rosebud so that he could show her the little crocodiles, and Sorry and Laura kissed each other behind his back.

"Did you make that cup of tea?" Sorry asked, and Laura gave him his tea and put the plate of sandwiches on the floor between them.

"Picnic!" said Jacko, and it really was rather like a picnic by the little farm on the carpet.

"Miryam and Winter have conned you a bit," Sorry said. "They've been a lot easier since you came along. Until a few weeks ago Miryam was sorry she'd given me away, Winter was sorry she'd ever let Miryam have a child to save their old farm ..." He gestured at the farm on the floor between them.

"Aren't they still sorry?" Laura asked.

"Well, they think I've improved," he said. "I suppose they think there's hope for me, and that makes them happier. I saw Miryam looking at me this morning and she was almost complacent, instead of looking as if she had a dangerous pet on the end of a piece of rotten string." He smiled to himself. "I suppose I have kept them anxious on purpose, getting my own back, but suddenly I can't be bothered. It's like a dream of childhood. Yet only a few weeks ago I was quite certain I didn't want to feel fond of anyone ever again."

"I didn't want to have anything to do with my father," Laura told him, "but I don't mind now."

"Remember, I told you about the psychotherapist in Sydney?" Sorry asked. "She told them I was severely alienated. I looked it up in a dictionary and it said 'estranged' and 'diverted to a different purpose'. Well, we're both alienated now, Chant. I'm estranged and you're diverted to a different purpose. They thought of me as a sort of — say an uncontrolled charge of electricity, and you as a way of earthing the charge — bringing it back into line."

"What are you telling me all this for?" Laura said at last. "I know it already."

"I'm going away," Sorry said. "Not immediately, but soon — early in January. I've been chosen as a trainee for the Wildlife Division. They only take on five people every two years so I'm really lucky. I went along with my bird photographs and, well, I know a lot about birds, and I've done a bit of tramping, and the long and short of it is I'm in."

Laura stared at him blankly. "You're leaving me on my own?" she cried incredulously.

"On your own!" exclaimed Sorry. "Yes, quite on your own, except for your mother, your mother's friend, your brother, my mother, my grandmother, your friend Sally, your friend Nicky, not to mention bloody Barry Hamilton and Lord knows who else."

"You know what I mean," Laura said. Sorry, who had been watching Jacko bent over his pink crocodiles, looked up smiling.

"I think it's just as well though, don't you?" he said. "I keep wanting to go to bed with you. At first it seemed simple. I knew I could make you want to. But it's not simple at all." Jacko was getting a little bored.

"My Rosebud likes those little crocodiles," he said. "Are there any tigers on this farm?"

"Tigers would eat the pigs," Sorry said.

"One tiger," said Jacko holding up his forefinger. "He can eat cabbage."

"Get your tiger book, Jacko," Laura said, for she knew it would take him a little while to find it. "We could have the tiger story." Jacko went off into his own room cheerfully enough.

"How could you be sure you could make me want to?" Laura asked, half curious, half scornful.

"How did you know I was a witch?" Sorry said with a shrug. "That was such an intimate thing to know about me, it made me feel we'd been lovers already. I felt you'd seen me naked. Winter and Miryam were delighted when I told them I'd been recognized by a girl, but they told me to wait until you were older, and I would have done, but you came walking in. Chant, I promise that when I looked up and saw you standing in the doorway I nearly melted away with astonishment. She's come to get me, I thought. My hour has come."

"It had, too," Laura agreed.

"Well, I don't think so — not quite!" Sorry said discontentedly. "You really are too young. It's not even legal, not that that matters so much, but you and Kate get on well together and I don't want to cause any more family rows. And besides, all the time I saw you at school, I thought you looked older than fourteen, but when you went to sleep on the sofa in my study you looked a lot younger. I wanted to protect you, and by t
h
en you only needed protecting from me."

"So you gave up all your other ideas!" Laura exclaimed scornfully.

"I haven't given them up," Sorry said. "They've just got mixed up with a lot of other things. You've got at least three years of school ahead of you, and I've got four years of training. Round about then we might, oh ..." he suddenly sounded irritated, "get married, I suppose. Live together somehow."

"You'll meet some other, older girl," Laura said resentfully.

"Give over, Chant!" Sorry commanded "We're both on the same side, you and me, remember? And anyhow you're as likely to meet someone el e as I am."

"Serve you right if I did!" Laura cried,.

"It would, wouldn't it?" Sorry agreed unexpectedly, thumping his knee with his fist. "Half the time I think I'm stupid. I don't know what's wrong with me. I don't want to be like this."

"Lolly, I can't find it," Jacko called.

Laura began to get up to go and help him, but Sorry took her arm and said, "Hang on a moment, Chant," and kissed her again. "I'm sickening for something dreadful," he complained. "Maturity or some other social disease!"

Laura felt his left hand, his sinister hand, between her dress and her skin. "You probably won't get a very bad attack," she said, nervous but enchanted. "Not a fatal one."

"Let's go through to your room now," Sorry suggested. "Come on, Chant! Invite me. If you think I'm doing the wrong thing, tell me what you want and I'll do what you say."

"There's Jacko," Laura said, "and Kate will be home in a minute." She could not see Sorry's face for he had hidden it in her neck and shoulder but she felt him smile.

"You're more anxious than you let on," he told her in a muffled voice. "You're more interested in romance than sex, and why not?"

"Lolly!" called Jacko plaintively, but Sorry still would not let her go. "The difficulty is I'm unreliable," he said.

"Do you love me?" Laura asked him. It was something she had wondered about a lot in recent days.

"How do I know a thing like that?" he answered restlessly. "It might be wicked lust. I might be a villain, not a hero."

"Well, I think I love you," said Laura. "So maybe that's what makes the difference."

"Lolly!" said Jacko again and sounded as if he were coming to look for her, so she struggled away from Sorry and found the tiger book almost at once, because she knew it was not with Jacko's other books, but hidden under his pillow.

When she and Jacko came back, Sorry was in the kitchen hurriedly scraping and scrubbing potatoes, a job Laura was supposed to do, and singing to himself under his breath.