The Fetch of Mardy Watt

CHARLES BUTLER

DEDICATION

To Alison Leslie

CONTENTS

COVER

TITLE PAGE

DEDICATION

1: FAT TUESDAY

2: LOVE POETRY

3: URANIBORG

4: LOSING WEIGHT

5: DOUBTFUL THOMAS

6: ARTEMISIA

7: HAL AND THE FETCH

8: IN DETENTION

9: STREETS, SLAVES AND A CANYON

10: ALAN

11: PENS FROM HEAVEN

12: PARIS IN THE WINTER

KEEP READING

ALSO BY THE AUTHOR

COPYRIGHT

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

1 FAT TUESDAY

MRS WATT CAME into the bathroom without so much as a knock.

“There’s no such thing!” she complained.

Mardy jumped hastily off the bathroom scales and reached for a towel. “What did you say, Mum?”

Mrs Watt was carrying a rolled-up copy of Fave! She waved the magazine in Mardy’s face. “‘How to find your perfect weight and stay there!’ Do they realise that growing children read this nonsense? The perfect weight! There’s no such thing.”

“If there was, I’d be two stone over,” Mardy concluded gloomily. She stepped past her mother, through the scented bath steam to the door.

“There’s nothing wrong with the body God gave you, Mardy. Now then, have you seen my hair dye?”

Mardy discovered it behind the spare toilet roll. She knew what was coming next.

“If you want to worry about anyone’s weight, worry about your brother’s,” said Mrs Watt. “He’s a shadow of himself.”

“Yes, Mum. That’s different.”

“Different because it’s real.”

Mardy pulled a face. When her mother mentioned Alan it always made her feel guilty, though she didn’t know why. Probably guilt was just another way of worrying, like Hal said.

“Are you going to the hospital today? I’ll come with you – I’d like to.”

“I was going to drop in on the way home from work,” said Mrs Watt briskly. “But if you want, I’ll wait for you here. Just make sure you’re back by 4.15.”

“I will.”

“I don’t want to be late.”

“Of course not,” muttered Mardy.

Her mother made it sound as if Mardy hardly ever visited Alan. Surely that wasn’t true?

She mulled it over as she walked the mile to school. Mardy usually went the longer way, skirting the park because of the men who sat there drinking cheap vodka, the ones her mother called Undesirables. The park railings thrummed by and, in between bushes, she saw the raked soil where flowers were set to grow in spring, the paths and sludgy leaves. She saw the men too, lying on benches by the War Memorial – all stubble and urine and wheezing self-pity. They seemed not to notice the weather or even their own sad condition. But they must, she thought … they must. It made her angry that they could waste themselves like that while Alan lay unconscious week after week. And over the railings tinkled a thin, beaded string of notes, plucked from an instrument that Mardy could not name. The music crept between the railings and followed her some way down the street.

Alan had been in the General Hospital for three months now. He was in a coma and nobody knew why. At first he had been very ill indeed. Her mother had not said so, but Mardy knew she had believed Alan would die. For days the house had been deathly still. Even to turn on the television would have felt heartless. Besides, there was nothing Mardy had wished to see or hear, except that Alan was well again. Photographs of her elder brother – humorous, elegant, ironic – sat on every mantelpiece. It had been a terrible time.

But Alan had not died. “He’s a fighter, that one,” the doctor had told Mrs Watt, the day his breathing had first stabilised. “We thought he was fading, but he just refused to let go. I don’t know where he gets his strength from.”

Mrs Watt knew. She said that Alan had his strength from her.

“He’ll never leave us,” she said.

Alan had not left them, but he had not come back either. Ever since, he had hovered between death and life. Sometimes, when Mardy visited, he seemed barely more than an object, a half-wrapped parcel in folded blankets. On other days his sleep seemed so light that she would not have been surprised to see him sit up and say “Morning, Spud! Did I doze off? I could murder a bacon butty!”

Mardy turned up the collar on her coat. She was walking down a long straight road with two lines of plane trees and Victorian, stone-clad houses behind them. The road itself was spacious and clean, and might have been called handsome but for the cars cluttering it on either side. But Mardy could never love its unbearable straightness and muscle-aching length. It made her feel small and lacking in purpose. Behind, the iron railings of the park were still visible; before her was the school itself. The two held her between them like a pair of cupped hands, and would not let her go.

As usual, Mardy stopped halfway down the street to call for her best friend Hal. Hal’s was a large stone house too, but where most had a patch of grass and a flowerbed in their front garden, his had gravel and a fountain. The fountain was made of a green, glowing, jade-like stone and on a grey day like this was the brightest object in sight. Hal’s family called it their “splash of colour”.

Hal’s mother was outside, raking the gravel. She looked up as Mardy’s watery shadow crossed her own and smiled. “Upstairs,” she said, with a jerk of the head. Mardy went through the kitchen, where Mr Young and Hal’s little sister were debating the nutritional value of Honey Loops, and so to Hal’s room.

Hal was tilting a tray of school books into his backpack.

“How’s our project going?” Mardy asked. “I want a full report.”

“See for yourself,” said Hal, nodding to a computer screen.

Mardy looked. One half of the screen displayed a photograph of a sheep in a field. In the other a second sheep (which Mardy vaguely recognised) was sitting in a railway carriage with some knitting. Above this picture Hal had printed “THE SHEEP OF THINGS TO COME?” in lurid letters, dripping blood.

“I know it’s not exactly right for the ‘Ethics of Cloning’, but I got carried away.”

“It’s great,” Mardy said encouragingly. “Just Yarrow’s thing. You’re a marvel, Hal, a marvel.”

Hal looked relieved. “I’ll work on it some more tonight.”

They left the house – Mardy leading, as was her right. At primary school Mardy and Hal had not been close. There, Mardy had been the queen of her own court, the most popular child in class. Hal, at best, had been her court jester. Popularity was a strange thing. Mardy had been neither the prettiest, nor the cleverest, nor the nicest person in her year. She dressed well enough, but was not spectacularly fashionable. She was barely above average in art, in sport decidedly below. Yet she was the one whose friendship counted – and whose dislike could send a child to lonely exile at the fringes of the class. Mardy could not have explained this herself, but had seen no reason to question an arrangement so much to her own advantage. She had assumed it would go on for ever.

Then came secondary school. Most of Mardy’s friends were heading to Marshall Community. Juanita, Carrie and Charlotte were all going there, along with half a dozen more of her hangers-on. The only one of her group destined for Bellevue School was Hal Young. At the time she had thought of Hal as a kind of consolation prize. Not that Mardy had been worried. True, she would miss her old friends, but soon she would be enthroned at the centre of a fresh set of admirers.

Yet Bellevue School had remained indifferent. Mardy’s face was just one among hundreds. Most of her new classmates had arrived with friendships intact and felt no need of her. She was not disliked, no one bullied her – but no one sought her out either. When it came to picking teams, she found herself relegated to the middle of the list.

If Mardy had been a weaker girl, or a more truly conceited one, she might have coped far worse. As it was, she was soon reconciled to her modest position. It was even a relief not to be continually looked to for her opinion. There was always good old Hal, she told herself, if she needed to practise her leadership skills. Next to Alan’s illness, what did any of it matter?

The plane tree road was longer than ever today. By the time Hal and Mardy reached its end a sharp hissing rain was falling.

Hal consulted his watch. “It’s 8.58 already, Mardy.” He was always precise about time, and kept and spent it carefully. “Better give Hobson’s a miss.”

Mardy paused, but only for a moment. She thought about her perfect weight briefly, but habit got the better of her. “I’ll only get the plain bar this time, not the double chocolate.”

She was already halfway through the newsagent’s doorway.

When Mrs Hobson saw her she reached automatically for the double chocolate Nut Krunch Bars, while Mardy found the right money. “Just the plain today,” Mardy told her virtuously.

“On a diet, Mardy?” Mrs Hobson smiled knowingly.

“Certainly not!”

But Mrs Hobson’s knowingness was proof against indignation. “I’ll be sure to lay in a stock of low-calorie bars,” she confided in a very audible half-whisper. The only other person in the shop – a twiglet in a mini-skirt – turned and looked Mardy over. Mrs Hobson continued: “I know just how hard it can be, believe me. Fighting Temptation.”

Hal was waiting by the school gate. “Got your chocolate fix? Then let’s go, before you rack up a detention.”

Two lates in one week equalled one lunchtime detention and Mardy was riding her luck. They skidded up the empty corridors of C Block to the corner classroom, where Mrs Yarrow was already halfway through the register. Luckily both their surnames came late in the alphabet. A number of children smirked as they came in together. One group in particular – that snooty lot from Bluecoat Primary – exchanged looks as if they were in on a scandalous secret involving Mardy and Hal. It didn’t matter that the secret wasn’t true. What mattered was being in on it.

Mardy sat in her place and answered Mrs Yarrow in her turn just as if she had been there all the time. She knew how seriously to take the Bluecoat lot. They knew nothing of her and cared even less. It was Rachel Fludd she was interested in.

Rachel was the only other girl who had arrived in the class without a ready-made set of friends. Her family had only just moved to the town, it was said. Rachel herself had a slight accent, pearled with rolling ‘r’s and lazy, hissing ‘s’s – but it was hard to pin her down. Sometimes, she would make a remark that suggested English was not her first language. She had odd little areas of ignorance, had never heard of Christmas cards, seemed not to know what milkmen were. But Mardy could never be sure, for Rachel was not communicative, on that or any other subject. She sat by the window as often as she could, and sulked.

Mardy was not quite sure how she had come to dislike Rachel so much. Both were strangers, both a little lonely: they could so easily have become friends. Yet even their likenesses drove them apart. Skinny, and taller than Mardy by two inches, Rachel might otherwise have been her sister. If Mardy had stood in front of a fairground mirror to see her reflection stretched out long and squeezed in thin, that reflection would have looked a lot like Rachel. But that just made Mardy remember how far she was from her perfect weight and she resented Rachel all the more.

Outwardly, Rachel took no more notice of Mardy than of the other children. But Mardy was sure that Rachel both recognised her own dislike and heartily returned it. It was a secret between them – the kind of personal, wordless secret usually shared only by close friends.

Rachel, naturally, had not even glanced up when Mardy and Hal had made their entrance. What she could see in the playground outside was bound to be more interesting, even if it was only a pyramid of swept leaves being rained on. Her hair was black like Mardy’s, but not well-brushed, and with a dusty look as if she had had to push through cobwebs to leave the house. Her clothes were dusty too, especially the hand-knitted cardigan she always wore, so small it barely covered her shoulders. But that face! Those dark eyes! Mardy was frightened by Rachel’s eyes sometimes – by the things they were looking at, that Mardy could not see. Her face was long and solemn when she was left to herself and that was most of the time. Spoken to, she started like a hare.

Mardy fumed. It was an act, it had to be. Probably Rachel was thinking of her at that very moment.

And – at that very moment – Rachel turned in her seat and looked directly at Mardy. She put her finger to her lips, and shushed.

“Did you see?” Mardy asked Hal in French, half an hour later. “As-tu vu?”

“Je ne comprends pas,” shrugged Hal.

“Blockhead!”

“Quiet, Mardy!” Mrs Mumm was listening in on her headphones.

“Did you see?” Mardy mouthed at Hal. “She must have heard me thinking about her. I always thought she could.”

Hal, quite reasonably, was unconvinced. “Mind games. Don’t let her get to you.”

Mardy looked despairing. “You don’t understand about Rachel at all.”

“What’s to understand? She keeps herself to herself, that’s all. Or would if people let her.”

This way Hal had of being ploddingly sensible about everything was more than Mardy could bear. She made a disgusted noise in French. And that, for the moment, was the end of it.

But even Hal had to admit that what happened next was no accident.

Mrs Mumm was checking last week’s homework, which had been to memorise the months of the year and the days of the week. She went round the class, asking each pupil in turn. Slim, pretty Mrs Mumm was another one who made Mardy think about her perfect weight. She seemed almost too young to be a teacher and so demure that an angry word would probably make her burst into tears – though her pupils soon learned that with Mrs Mumm appearances could be deceptive. Mardy liked her classes, but thought her far too fond of the language laboratory. The headphones made Mardy’s ears sting.

Mrs Mumm was talking to Rachel. It seemed that Rachel had asked a question about one of the days of the week.

“Gras means ‘fat’, literally,” Mrs Mumm was saying. “So Mardi Gras is just the last day before Lent – the last day of feasting.”

“Thank you,” said Rachel. “Mardi Gras. Fat Tuesday. I get it.”

“That’s the literal translation, yes,” Mrs Mumm agreed cautiously. “But Fat Tuesday isn’t really a phrase in English, is it?”

“Not yet,” said Rachel, in the same neutral voice she had used throughout. She hadn’t emphasised the words, not in the least. But then she hadn’t needed to.

By lunchtime Mardy simply was Fat Tuesday. It was the Bluecoat girls who took to it most enthusiastically. Rachel did not need to say anything. She had lit the touchpaper; now she could stand back and watch.

“Pass the ruler, Fat Tuesday!”

“Shouldn’t you be in the salad queue, Fat Tuesday?”

“Need some help squeezing through the fire doors, Mardi Gras?”

Mardy was glad to get to the end of the day. All the same, the prospect of visiting Alan was beginning to send a series of nervous shivers through her mind.

She dawdled, going home. As she reached the park she heard again the strange plucked instrument she had noticed on the way to school that morning. It was this, as much as a wish to drag out the time, that led her through the wrought-iron gates and up one of three forking paths, to a circle of flowerbeds and asphalt. The Undesirables were nowhere to be seen. In the middle of the circle stood a granite cross. Steps led up all around the cross, and on the side visible to Mardy a bunch of winter roses had been laid. Lest we forget. She began to read a dizzying list of names, each belonging to a dead soldier. Terence Appleby, William Aston, George Aston, Charles Ayling … Once she had begun, in fact, she found she had to carry on. The music, which was very close now – just on the far side of the cross – seemed to insist upon it. Lest we forget. She could not move further until she had dutifully read and remembered the name of each Burgess, Butterell, Chandler and Crisp; and so to the next side of the cross, and the next, until John Zipes had at last been laid to rest. And still there was no sign of where the music was coming from, or who was playing it.

Even now she could not move away. Mardy had heard that just before death a person’s life flashed past – all in a moment. What happened to her now was like that, but much slower. She was unwillingly engaged in a laborious act of memory, unwinding each moment of her past like thread from a bobbin. She felt as if she had to or be turned to stone herself.

Finally – finally – the many-stringed instrument (a harp, was it, or a mandolin?) began drawing its threads of sound together. The tangle of arpeggios became more dense and knotted. Harmonies and discords vied dangerously, and at last a vast, enmeshed chord threw a net of closely-woven sound over her head. It billowed out and settled, dissolved at its edges and tightened at its centre, and bound her hand and foot. For a few moments she was no more alive than a wax doll.

Then the music was not there any more.

Mardy gasped, as if she had just broken the surface after a long, lung-bursting swim. She was panting. About fifty yards away, at the far end of one of the paths, a dark figure carrying a black instrument case was leaving the park. The musician – if it was the musician – must have stopped playing some time ago, to have packed up and be leaving already. But that final, calamitous chord was still shaking Mardy, body and soul. It seemed only a few minutes since she had entered the park and seen the granite memorial. Since the music stopped it had been no time at all. Yet her watch told her that an hour had passed.

The hospital! Her mother had been expecting her home thirty minutes ago! Mardy ran up the path and the short streets to her own house. She was there in less than five minutes. Her mother’s car was still parked in the road and the door was on the latch.

“Mum?” gasped Mardy breathlessly to the empty hall.

Mrs Watt was sitting on the living room sofa. Her visiting bag was beside her. She didn’t look up. “Haven’t you changed yet?” she asked coldly.

Mardy was too flustered to notice the oddness of this question. She plunged on with the excuse she had hastily prepared. “Sorry, Mum, I got held up at school. Mr Lorimer wanted to talk about the rehearsals.” She added quickly: “Hadn’t we better get to the hospital?”

Mrs Watt stood up. She was a tall woman and she towered over Mardy now. “I don’t know what you’re babbling about, Mardy. Rehearsals? What are you sorry about?”

“About being late from school. A little bit late.”

Mrs Watt shook her head. “I worry about you, Mardy, I really do. It was a good half hour ago you clattered up to your room to change. My only question is why you’re still in your school uniform. Well, there’s no time now. You’ll have to go to the hospital as you are.”

“Half an hour ago?” repeated Mardy, dumbfounded.

“At least. Now please get in the car. I don’t like to keep Alan waiting. Do think about someone other than yourself for a change.” Mrs Watt reached for her keys and purse. “Mardy! What are you doing now?”

“Just a moment!” yelled Mardy as she ran upstairs. She flung her school bag down on the landing and then stopped. She still had not got her breath back after her dash from the park. But something her mother had said was alarming enough for her to need to go to her room at once, even if it meant a shouting match later.

She had not gone upstairs half an hour ago. So who had?

Mardy opened the door of her room. Perhaps her mother was simply mistaken. But her mother did not often make mistakes – and there was something odd about this day which had made her nervous. That final chord from the War Memorial was still quivering through her.

But – no. The room was empty, and as familiar as her own skin. She would have felt at once if an intruder had been hiding there. She knew every stuffed toy and CD box and pile of unwashed clothes in the place, and not a stitch of it had moved since she had left the house that morning.

On her desk lay her page-a-day diary. She kept it only occasionally. Daily life already seemed wearing enough: why fire herself out twice by writing it down? But sometimes she felt she would overflow if she couldn’t let out some of the things she couldn’t even tell Hal. Some of these were about Alan – especially just before Christmas when he seemed to have had a relapse and was terribly close to death again. That had been a long, dark festival. But in the last weeks most of the entries had been to do with Rachel. On the page that lay open was a single jagged sentence, obviously written in a hurry:

Rachel Fludd is a witch!

Mardy stared at it hard and wrinkled her nose.

“Mardy!” Mrs Watt was calling from the hall downstairs.

“Coming, Mum!”

Mardy gave one last glance round her room. Everything was as it should be. Everything was in its place … Except for that last sentence.

Rachel Fludd a witch? It was a suspicion she had often entertained, half seriously. It was certainly the kind of thing she might have put in her diary.

But, try as she might, Mardy could not remember writing it there.

2 LOVE POETRY

“WHY DON’T YOU tell me what’s wrong?” asked Hal at last. They were nearing the end of Bellevue Road and Hobson’s was just in view. Mardy was already fiddling unconsciously with her purse.

“Uh?”

“Mardy, wake up! Have you heard a word I’ve been saying?” Hal did a little war dance in front of her. What he had been saying was not important – a mixture of football, geography and soap opera – but Mardy usually made a better show of listening than this. “Is your brother worse again?” he finally asked outright.

“Alan? No, no. I saw him last night and he’s just the same. A bit better if anything.”

“I’m glad.”

“His skin – you know it had that awful waxy look? Like a Granny Smith when you’ve polished it? That’s gone. He doesn’t look like he’s wearing a mask any more.”

Mardy relapsed into silence.

“But?” prompted Hal. “Come on, you know I can tell when something’s bothering you.”

“Only my mother’s got this way of talking like he was a saint. And he isn’t.”

Alan wasn’t a saint. Mardy loved her brother, but however much she tried to be pure and charitable, globules of resentment kept bubbling up through her mind whenever she thought about him, like marsh gas through a swamp. Little things, mostly, like the way he insisted on calling her Spud when he knew she detested the name. Or his habit of careless elegance which meant that, even lying motionless in his hospital bed, Alan was always the centre of attention. While their mother read Alan stories from the local paper, Mardy lurked in the background, picking off the less-wrinkled grapes for the man in the next-door bed and feeling like an imposter. She wished she could be filled with noble feelings, feelings of self-sacrifice and pity; instead, she wanted nothing more than to run back down the sterile corridors to her home.

They turned the corner to Hobson’s. Mardy looked with naked dislike at the camera mounted on the school gate, which they were obliged to pass. Cameras gave her the creeps and the hospital was full of them.

“Hal – would you think I was crazy if I said I thought I was being followed?”

“Followed!” repeated Hal, instinctively looking back down the tree-lined road. “Who do you think’s following you?”

“Don’t say it like that – like you think I really was crazy! Anyway, I don’t mean followed, quite. But watched. I think someone might be watching me.”

“Mr Shute through the CCTV?” suggested Hal. “It’s three minutes to nine again, we’ve got to hurry.”

Mardy looked annoyed. “You don’t understand,” she said. “Wait while I go to Hobson’s – I’ll tell you after.”

Mardy sprinted the fifty yards to Hobson’s, rather flustered. She really had meant to tell Hal what was bothering her, but found it was not so easy to explain. Rachel Fludd came into it, and the diary entry, and the strange thing that had happened at the War Memorial the previous afternoon.

And Alan? Perhaps, thought Mardy furiously, perhaps everything comes into it. Perhaps it’s another way of saying that life is strange, that the sky is blue and water is wet. A way of saying not much. But I’m not the kind of person who gets in a state over nothing, she thought. I’m just not that imaginative.

Mardy burst into Hobson’s, steaming with frustration. Nut Krunch Bars, at least, were reliable.

Mrs Hobson looked up from her paper. “Oh. Hello, Mardy.” For some reason she seemed surprised to see her. “What can I do for you?”

“My usual Nut Krunch,” said Mardy. “I’ve finished with low-calorie imitations – they taste like cardboard. Back to double chocolate from now on.”

Again Mrs Hobson looked at her oddly. “Back with a vengeance, I’d say. Two in half an hour is pushing it, isn’t it?”

“What?” asked Mardy distractedly, as she placed the right coins on to the counter.

“Two Nut Krunch Bars in one day. You only just left the shop.”

“What did you say?”

“Oh, not that it’s any business of mine,” protested Mrs Hobson. “I know what it’s like, Fighting Temptation. Would you believe I used to have a twenty-six inch waist?”

“I haven’t been in here since yesterday,” protested Mardy.

“If you say so,” laughed Mrs Hobson in an infuriating, disbelieving way.

“But I haven’t!”

“Then all I can say is, your doppelganger was here ten minutes ago – and she likes double-chocolate Nut Krunch Bars too. Now, hadn’t you better get along? Your friend’s getting in a bit of a state out there.”

True enough, Hal was standing at the window between two pyramids of baked beans, frantically tapping his watch. Mardy muttered a goodbye and left.

“Don’t forget your chocolate!” called Mrs Hobson.

Another dash for the classroom. This time they almost ran into the school caretaker, Mr Bartok, who was screwing a bracket into the wall over the main entrance. “Mind my ladder!” he warned and teetered bulkily at the top.

Since Christmas the school had sprouted a ring of CCTV cameras. To keep out Undesirables, Mrs Watt had said, and a good thing too. But when Mardy saw Mr Shute, the headteacher, looking out over the playground from his first-floor office, she wondered. Perhaps it was the pupils, rather than any intruder, who were his main concern. She did not think she had ever been nearer to Mr Shute than the thirty feet separating them at the weekly assemblies, where he swept in, exhorted them and left. For all she knew Mr Shute might be a robot, or a hologram, or – or – anything …

Throughout assembly, Mardy kept looking up and down the hall, wondering who, if anyone, might have been mistaken for her. Perhaps, as Mrs Hobson had said, she really did have a double – or something close enough to fool the shopkeeper, who was shortsighted and always had her nose in the paper. Rows and rows of children surrounded her, short, tall, thin and fat, white, black and brown. From awkward Year 7s like herself to the willowy grandeur of Year 13, hundreds of girls in that room wore the Bellevue School sweatshirt. On hundreds of chests the same school logo was embroidered: a ship in full sail that actually looked more like a kitten being run over by a milk float.

Mardy couldn’t decide which struck her more: how very different everyone was or (in another way) how very much the same. They were all standing with their bored assembly expressions, as the head ran through arrangements for the Year 8 trip to the Science Museum. The same expressions persisted as he launched into the statutory hymn and warned them about the litter problem in the streets outside the school. But none of them, Mardy decided, looked enough like her to deceive Mrs Hobson.

Except, possibly, Rachel. But even Rachel was so much thinner, with her long blanched, moon face and coal-black eyes, that Mrs Hobson would have had to be blind not to see the difference. Rachel Fludd probably hadn’t eaten a Nut Krunch Bar in her life.

It might not have been so bad if Rachel hadn’t been writing in her notebook again at wet play that day. The children were kept in their classrooms, bored and out of temper. In the corner of Mardy’s class Mrs Yarrow sipped away at a mug of coffee, clearly wishing she could be in the staffroom instead. Hal and his chess-playing friends found a set and retired to the corner. The room was as sweaty as a boxer’s sock. Mardy, swinging her legs idly as she sat on the edge of a table, found without surprise that she and Rachel were the only two girls who had not attached themselves to some group or other.

Looking down at her own legs, she compared them with Rachel’s. Fat Tuesday. String Bean Sally. Rachel must be as far under the perfect weight as Mardy was above it. There must be some perfect girl of whom they were both just freakish reflections. Certainly, something seemed to tie the two of them together. In the weeks since Rachel’s arrival they had hardly ever spoken; yet Rachel seemed to fill a bigger place in her life than anyone else except Hal and her own family.

The battered leather notebook in which Rachel was writing was much less plush than the diary Mardy kept at home, but even that seemed another unwelcome link between them. And how furtively Rachel wrote! As if she were an enemy spy …

Despite herself, Mardy was curious to know what so absorbed Rachel. She got down from the table and made her way to Rachel’s desk – not directly but by a route as aimless as possible. First, she stopped to check Hal’s progress on the chessboard: he had just castled and was preparing to do something devastating with his rook. His eyes for once were narrowed, his lip bitten white with controlled ferocity. Mardy moved on, exchanging pleasantries with Kylie and Susannah at the expense of their friend Michelle, who was off that day with a cold. And so (under the flickering eye of Mrs Yarrow, who was probably itching for a cigarette) she arrived just behind Rachel. Rachel had not seen her approach or she would certainly have put the notebook into her pocket at once. Even so, Mardy could not see what she was writing because Rachel had crooked her arm round protectively and she hung her head low over the paper with her hair falling raggedly around it.

So Mardy took a long shot.

“Who is he, then, Rachel?” she asked out loud. “Who are you writing love poems to?”

Rachel twisted round in alarm, blushed and hurriedly shut the notebook. A moment later it was not there – though Mardy didn’t quite see which pocket she had put it in. All this happened in an instant, during which Mardy found herself backing off from Rachel’s desk as though a hand had pushed her roughly away.

“Keep your nose out of it, Mardi Gras!”

Mardy staggered back to her seat. She was breathless and a little frightened at the fury she had managed to provoke in quiet, unobtrusive Rachel. But she was smiling too, because she had won some kind of victory. For Rachel to be made angry, she must have been touched at last. And Rachel did not like to be touched.

It didn’t take long for the news that Rachel was in love to spread to the Bluecoat girls. The rest of the morning Mardy watched them prodding her like a spider in a jar. English, where they were reading Romeo and Juliet, presented almost too many opportunities to be true. Biology was just as good. Rachel had to wait until the maths lesson after lunch for the teasing to die down. Even then, the mystery of Rachel’s boyfriend threatened to break out in unpredictable ways: an equation here, a co-ordinate there.

“And who are you co-ordinating with, Rachel?”

Mardy said nothing. She knew from her days as Queen of Fairlawn Primary just how little work was needed to start a rumour. Once the process was begun, any class would unite in the chase. Beyond Rachel herself, no one would suspect that Mardy was behind it at all.

Except Hal, of course. “Up to your old tricks, Mardy?” he said to her as they made their way down the corridor after maths. They were being buffeted like channel swimmers in a rough sea and it was with difficulty that Mardy managed to toss her head disdainfully and say: “I don’t know what you mean.”

“I’m sure you don’t,” said Hal, with his terrier face on. “I’m your friend, remember? I know the way you work.”

“Oh shut up, Jiminy Cricket! When I need a conscience I’ll advertise.”

“You’ve got one already,” retorted Hal between buffets. “Remember Theresa Greystoke?”

“Oh, her!” Buffet. Buffet. “I just felt sorry for the little squirt.”

Mardy shifted herself so that she was separated from Hal beyond talking distance. She didn’t care to be reminded of Theresa Greystoke.

For a brief time Theresa had been Mardy’s rival at Fairlawn Primary. Beautiful, clever, an expert juggler and the owner of two ponies, Theresa had arrived from the north in her last year. For a while she had charmed everyone and Mardy had felt her own star beginning to lose some of its glitter.

But then a rumour started – and no one knew how – that Theresa Greystoke had had plastic surgery on her nose and ears. That those dazzling white teeth were dentures. That one of her bright blue eyes was actually made of glass. It was whispered too that Theresa Greystoke’s father had bribed the headteacher to get good test results. Overnight, and without realising what had happened to her, popular Theresa Greystoke became an outcast.

Very little of this had come from Mardy directly. She had started the first rumour – only half expecting to be believed – then watched, in growing wonder, as the torrent had swept her rival from sight. In the end, she had rescued her. “Theresa Greystoke is my friend!” she had announced fiercely in the girls’ toilets, where a Year 5 was scribbling something foul on the wall. It was enough. The word went out that Theresa was under Mardy’s protection: the persecution ceased. Theresa herself – poor, trusting Theresa – had been terribly grateful.

Only Hal knew the whole story. Not that Mardy had ever told him, but he kept his eyes open, Hal did, and he understood Mardy too well for comfort. Mardy thought it over. So Hal thought that Rachel might become another Theresa Greystoke, did he? If Mardy had still been Queen Bee, then yes – maybe. But Rachel and she were on equal terms here. The rest of the class thought little enough of either of them. That made it a fair fight, didn’t it? And it was Rachel who had started it. Mardi Gras!

The next lesson was chemistry. Outside, the sleet had turned stutteringly to snow. At first the flakes were too large to settle, falling flat on their watery faces. But a little later there was a mother-of-pearl sheen to the asphalt and on the larch tree the small twigs hung exhausted under the weight of newly-gathered ice. In thirty minutes the playground was choked with it. Silent snow. The more Mardy looked at it the more she felt that it wasn’t quite real, that the whole day had got off on the wrong foot and had better retrace its steps. She tried to concentrate on the test tube in front of her, on the blue flame from the Bunsen burner. In the distance – too distant to be made out clearly – there was a thin, whining hum. And plink – a sound like a string snapping or being plucked – and another … Water thawing and falling into pools of ice, ice breaking under its own weight and hunkering down into itself. And the burner’s furnace flame roaring …

“Ouch!”

Two rows in front of her, Rachel jumped back in her seat as a tightly-folded wad of paper bounced stingingly off her cheek. Mardy didn’t see who had thrown it. It must have flown past her own shoulder from somewhere at the back of the classroom. But from the way Rachel looked round as she bent to retrieve the paper it was clear whom she thought to blame. At her side, Hal too was peering at Mardy strangely: as if he hardly recognised her.

Rachel unfolded the paper. It was a piece of lined A4, just like the paper on a dozen pads all around the class. Just like the pad on Mardy’s own desk. As Rachel read what was written there, Mardy saw her face flush darker with embarrassment and anger. She really seemed to be on the point of tears. When she looked round again it was with an expression of such shame and such knowledge, such open dislike – that it was Mardy who turned away.

“Whatever did you write on that note?” hissed Hal.

“Nothing! I mean – it wasn’t me who threw it.”

“No?” replied Hal with frank disbelief.

“No!”

Hal crooked a smile and peered at her again with that look of strange half-recognition. “Have it your way.”

This made Mardy furious. “Why don’t you believe me? Friends should trust each other!”

For the rest of the afternoon Hal made himself very busy with chemistry notes. When the final bell rang, Mardy waited for him at their usual spot, under the larch tree in the front playground. The snow had stopped falling, had thawed a little and then frozen harder, so that the asphalt was growing a treacherous, invisible skin, with an inch or so of snow underfoot. She saw Hal at an upstairs window once, being hustled along by a group of larger boys. Five minutes later she spotted his back, already halfway down the road from school. That was odd – he must have passed right by her. Even if he wasn’t talking to her, how had she missed him?

Crunch crunch, like walkers on a gravel beach, the children left the school. Cars were waiting for many of them, lights on, moving tenderly up the road edges and away. Mardy hung back. She sketched a circle round the larch tree with her heel. She had not seen Rachel leave either and was thankful.

3 URANIBORG

AT LENGTH, MARDY sighed and started up the long avenue of plane trees to the main road and the tangled streets beyond, one of which was her own. Already, the road had largely cleared. There were only a few children in sight. Some were trying to make snowballs from a fall no more than a fingernail’s depth. The distracting snow suited Mardy. She did not want to talk to anyone. Now she had another incident to ponder and for once she did not miss Hal’s company. Hal would have irritated her by telling her that her imagination was playing tricks. But Mardy suspected that a ghost had preceded her home yesterday and bought a Nut Krunch Bar from Mrs Hobson this morning. Perhaps the same ghost had been responsible for hitting Rachel with a piece of crumpled-up paper this afternoon. It was possible, she supposed. Mardy had heard of such things: poltergeists, they were called.

She had heard of other things, too. People fooling themselves, for a start. If you disliked someone the way she disliked Rachel, perhaps you might chuck something at her and then deny it – even to yourself. No one wants to think of herself as a bully, do they? And no one wants to think of herself as the kind of greedy pig who would scoff two Nut Krunch Bars in half an hour. How much easier to blame it all on a poltergeist, a double, an imposter …

By this time she was more than halfway up Bellevue Road, and nearly at Hal’s house. Perhaps she would call on him after all. She could use some of his common sense now. Hal would keep her feet on the ground, frozen toes and all.

But there in front of Hal’s front gate was a most unlikely group. Rachel Fludd herself was nearest, with her back to the street – and either side of her stood two of the Bluecoat girls, leering unpleasantly down the road at Mardy as if she had turned up on the underside of a shoe. They weren’t just standing, either – they were standing guard: feet apart and waiting (Mardy was immediately certain of it) for Mardy herself. And from one of them came yesterday’s catcall: “Mardi Gras!”

That was just the opening round. Most of it came from the Bluecoat girls, but not all. Mardy was surrounded by voices. The leaden clouds themselves were echoing back their low opinion of her.

“Lardy Mardy!”

“Pink and sweaty, legs like a Yeti, hair like a plate of cold spaghetti…”

“Where do you get your clothes from, Mardy? A tent-hire shop?”

“And who are you calling a witch?”

The last voice cut through the rest and silenced them. It silenced everything. Mardy could not help looking towards it. There was Rachel, standing alone. Gone were the Bluecoat girls, gone Rachel’s own tearful sulk. Her dark eyes were trained on Mardy like shotgun barrels.

“Never,” said Rachel, in a voice as cold as flint, “do that again. Ever.”

She stepped into the road and began to cross without once taking her eyes off Mardy. Mardy realised with a jolt that Bellevue Road was not merely growing emptier as the school traffic cleared. It was quite deserted. The plane tree avenue stretched on into the distance and ended in a shimmer of sickly, yellow light that made her think of the smoke from damp leaves. It was the same both ways. No school any more, no shops, no people. Just two interminable rows of blinkered houses. Just Mardy and Rachel.

“Where is everyone?” Mardy asked, her voice trembling, as Rachel approached her. “What have you done?”

Rachel seemed different now, as everything was different: taller, more powerful. She did not speak at first. She was staring into Mardy’s face, apparently searching there for some concealed mark or sign.

“Stand still!” she commanded – but distractedly, as if Mardy were a needle she was trying to thread, rather than a human being.

“Rachel, what’s going on?” said Mardy.

“It must be here. Is it at the nape of your neck?”

“What?”

“Or inside your elbow? I’d have seen if it was in one of the obvious places.”

“Rachel, listen to me! I don’t know what you’re talking about!”

“I’m looking for your mark, of course! The Crescent of Initiation! How else could you know I was a witch?” asked Rachel irritably. “How could you know a thing like that without being one yourself?”

“Are you crazy?”

“You wrote that note, didn’t you? In the hieratic script! Foolish, foolish.”

“I don’t know what you’re-’

“And, if more proof were needed,” Rachel added in deep disgust, “here you are in Uraniborg itself.” She gestured around her, to the smoky, yellow horizons at either end of the endless street and at the blank-eyed windows facing them.

Uraniborg. The word was strange to Mardy, but it seemed to waft through her mind like mist through moonlight, with a dreadful melancholy. She repeated, limply, that she wasn’t a witch and hadn’t called Rachel a witch – didn’t even believe in witches (Rachel snorted here) and had certainly never heard of Uraniborg. “I just want to get home,” she said.

Rachel did not seem to be listening anyway. Whatever she had been looking for on Mardy’s face was obviously not to be found. Finally, she put her hands on her hips and admitted defeat.

“OK – I was wrong. You’ve got Artemisian blood, of course, but you’re not an initiate.”

She still seemed to be talking to herself more than to Mardy. Standing there in her school uniform – one size too small – with her face screwed up as if she was in the middle of a tricky maths problem, Rachel looked for a moment as out of place as Mardy felt. She wasn’t at all Mardy’s idea of a witch. But for all that, Mardy did not doubt her. Whatever else the air of Uraniborg did, it made believing that kind of thing easier.

Perhaps Mardy’s eyes were only now growing accustomed to the strange light here; or perhaps it had only now chosen to show itself, but something was becoming visible at the end of the street – just where Bellevue School ought to have been. It was a tall, thick tower with a conical roof. Its walls, as far as Mardy could make out, were of rusty, red brick, but its roof was gold and in this sunless world it was the brightest thing she could see. Powered by some unseen engine, the roof was turning slowly and in complete silence. The golden tiles were revolving on the axis of that central turret.

Just coming into view was a place where the expanse of gold was broken by a small square of darkness. Mardy realised that this was a raised hatch: one of the golden tiles had been lifted on a hinge and propped open. And from the hatch a tube projected, crimson and silver.

“A telescope?” said Mardy.

“The Mayor…” breathed Rachel. “Quick, I’ll hide us.”

There was a new and urgent note in her voice. Rachel began rubbing her hands together, one over the other, as if she were washing with soap. Within moments her hands were no longer empty. They held an object the size and shape of a duck egg, a smooth bolus of yellow smoke. She threw it to the ground, where it cracked open and bubbled out a dull, tarry liquid. Steam rose, the same nicotine yellow as the air of Uraniborg, and hung in a thick curtain between them and the tower. The tower was invisible again.

“If he’s really looking hard for you, this won’t stop him, of course,” said Rachel. Even her voice was muffled by the curtain of yellow air. “Let’s hope it’s a routine survey.”

Clearly, she expected Mardy to understand what she was talking about. But Mardy’s incomprehension must have been obvious from her face.

“You really don’t know what’s going on, do you?” said Rachel.

“No. And I don’t think I want to.”

“I keep forgetting. It’s because you’ve found your way here even though you don’t understand about having a separable soul, and I don’t see you how could have … Oh, bother!”

Rachel looked petulant, as if she had failed to guess a simple riddle. She even stamped her foot. “Oh, bother!” she repeated. “I see it all now.”

She stood there biting her lip for such a long time that Mardy was eventually forced to prompt her: “What do you see?”

“What you’re here for, of course! We knew he was preparing the Binding Spell again, but I never thought he’d act so fast. Come to the horse trough and I’ll show you.”

Rachel took Mardy’s hand and turned about so that they were facing the blank wall between Hal’s house and the next. Only now the wall was no longer blank. Most of the pavement was obscured by a large stone trough and above it a tombstone-shaped plaque had been engraved in leafy letters.

Weary traveller take your ease

Lay down the burden that you carry,

It is compact of foolish cares

Then stay and by this fountain tarry.

Life’s a race not won by hurry

Chasing every flattering breeze

Let Fortune brag and Care be sorry

Weary traveller take your ease.

Near the bottom of the plaque a cherub puffed his cheeks and blew. A green copper pipe projected from his mouth like a pea-shooter and there was a pump handle.

“Don’t look so surprised,” said Rachel. “It’s been there all the time, you know.”

Mardy was quite certain that it had not, but she did not wish to provoke another of Rachel’s snorts by protesting. She noticed, however, as she and Rachel moved the few paces to the horse trough, that the curtain of yellow air Rachel had created followed them obediently, smudging the light as it came and blocking the far end of the street from view.

The trough was empty, but Rachel began working the pump at once. At first, she produced nothing but a hollow clanking, alarmingly loud in the empty street. Then the clank got mixed up with a deep-throated gargle, the gargle progressed into a gloop and finally a stream of rather murky water spilled from the pipe. Filling the trough took some time, but long before Rachel had stopped pumping it was obvious that water in Uraniborg was not what Mardy was used to. As it rippled and spun at the bottom of the trough, mixing with dust and moss and fragments of twig, it also found time to glisten. It was thicker than ordinary water, with a metallic look to its surface, and somehow sluggish. What was strangest, amidst the scum and bubbles Mardy sometimes thought she caught a reflection of people or places quite unknown to her. A circle of women chanting in a forest clearing. The inside of a bedouin tent. A venerable Chinese face, frowning intently and just on the point of speech. Then the water would eddy and slide to a new angle.

“That should be enough,” said Rachel at last. She sounded out of breath from all that pumping. She stood beside Mardy, waiting for the water to settle. In her hand was a pin. When the water was still, she took Mardy’s finger quickly and-

“Ouch!”

“Don’t be a baby. I only need a drop.”

Rachel had pricked the very tip of Mardy’s index finger. Now she was holding the finger over the trough, squeezing out a cherry-red bead of blood. Mardy seemed unable to do anything but submit and watch as if it were all happening to another person – though the pain in her finger was sharp enough.

“The pin’s silver – the only substance that will pass freely between the Mayor’s world and your own.”

“It still hurts!”

“The blood will earth you,” Rachel explained. “We must show the spirit the way to its lodging.”

She let the pin fall. As it hit the water it ripped a hole in its surface, like a bullet tearing through cloth. Through the hole Mardy saw things moving. Very small things, it seemed – or perhaps just a long way down. She was looking at the world from the bottom of a cloud. She blinked.

“That’s – here! Bellevue Road! I can see the trees, and people walking about in the snow, and—”

“Yes?”

“And me,” Mardy added weakly. “Only it can’t be…”

It was. Mardy saw herself plodding up the road from Hal’s house, her shoulder bag swaying to left and right as she hugged herself against the cold.

“You are there,” said Rachel. “In body, I mean. If one of your friends came along now and spoke to you, you’d smile and say hello and do all the things people do when they pass the time of day. And perhaps they’d never guess your immortal spirit was here in Uraniborg. Unless they looked into your eyes …’

“Just stop it!” shouted Mardy. “This is getting too weird for me. No one can be in two places at once.”

“Calm yourself,” said Rachel soothingly, and she laid a hand gently on Mardy’s arm. Perhaps she was trying to be kind, but Mardy knew that part of Rachel was enjoying herself thoroughly. Rachel could not quite keep a sneer out of her voice as she added: “Whoever said Uraniborg was a place? It’s a way of being, that’s all. A way of living in spirit.”

“It looks like a place.”

“Because you’re used to three dimensions,” said Rachel condescendingly, as if that were a common shortcoming. “You see it all that way, of course. You don’t know any better.”

“But whatever it is, I still don’t know why I’m here. Maybe you like it – if you’re a witch like you say.”

“Like you wrote!”

“I did not – I’ve told you! And what’s more,” Mardy added quickly, seeing Rachel about to interrupt again, “I don’t know anything about witches, and I’ve never seen a ghost, and I think Halloween is an advertising racket. I don’t like adventures, understand? And I’ve had enough of you treating me like some puzzle you’ve got to solve, Rachel Fludd.”

“Shh! Don’t say my name out loud. The Mayor’s got ears as well as eyes. Sharp, sharp!”

“There’s no need to twist my hand! I promise I won’t say your precious name again. Just tell me what’s happening.”

Rachel gave her a long, hard look. “It’s quite simple. It’s the Mayor. He wants your soul, to slave for him up there.” She gestured cautiously through the air-curtain, towards the tower behind it. “And if you’re already visiting Uraniborg, he’s well on his way to getting it.”

“Who’s this Mayor you keep talking about?” demanded Mardy. The bit about slaves sounded too alarming. “Is he Count Frankenstein or something?”

“You don’t think I know his name, do you?” exclaimed Rachel. “He’s – well, he’s a very strong enchanter, that’s all. He’s old, you see, and clever, and he knows all the Harmonic Combinations – he’s had a long time to learn them. Spells of binding and releasing, summoning and breaking – he probably knows more about them than anyone except the Artemisians themselves. And he’s got hundreds of spirits waiting on him and spying for him. There’s no hiding for long.” She added, a little resentfully: “He doesn’t like us Artemisians at all.”

“I see,” said Mardy, who didn’t, of course – but just now she couldn’t think of anything else to say. Except the most important thing and it took her a little time to summon the nerve to ask it. “These slaves. How does he get them?”

“By calculating their Reverberant Chord, usually. Everyone has one – unique, like a fingerprint – but it needs a great enchanter to work it out. Have you heard any strange music recently?” Rachel asked in a serious and methodical way. “String music – strings being plucked?”

Mardy thought immediately of the War Memorial and the thought-deadening music she had heard there. How it had seemed to pluck at her and shake the soul out of her body like a coin out of a piggy bank. “Yesterday – after school. I think I may have seen the Mayor, too.”

“His face?” asked Rachel excitedly.

“Just the back of him, as he was walking away. He had some kind of instrument in a case. Anyway, since then – things have happened to me. Odd things…”

Mardy told Rachel about her conversation with Mrs Hobson that morning and the intruder in her room. “I keep thinking I’ve got a double following me about.”

Rachel nodded. “That’s likely enough. A Fetch. Like the one we just saw. It’s a copy of you, made when the Mayor played the Reverberant Chord. Right now he’ll be nursing it up, getting it ready to take your place.”

“Take my place?” echoed Mardy.

“That’s the idea. You wane, it waxes. It’s not a straightforward process, mind. You’ll probably find it fades in and out for a while. But make no mistake, in the end the Fetch will be Mardy Watt and you’ll be a slave for ever here in Uraniborg. And none of your friends or family will know that anything’s changed.”

“Of course they will!” protested Mardy. “Do you think they wouldn’t notice the difference between me and a Fitch?”

“That’s ‘Fetch’,” corrected Rachel. “Oh, I don’t say they won’t see any change at all. ‘Mardy’s in a strange mood today,’ they’ll say. ‘She’s just not herself. And hasn’t she gone off her food? I hope she’s not sickening for something.’”

Rachel did her impression in a high, adenoidal voice, which made Mardy furious. She’s not even taking it seriously! she thought.

“The copy’s never perfect – but it’ll probably be good enough while it’s needed.”

Mardy sensed some hope in this. “So the Fetch won’t take my place for ever?”

“How could it? It’s not a real person, you know. More like a very clever clockwork toy. And eventually it will run down. That’s the way it works. Everyone thinks you’re getting sick – and sicker. No one knows what’s wrong. The doctors are baffled – nothing seems to help. A few days, a few weeks maybe, and it’s all over. Your family thinks you’re dead – but you’re not. You’re really up here, a slave for the Mayor. All that they bury is a body. But of course, you mustn’t let it get to that stage.”

Rachel paused, apparently unwilling to broach some unpleasant detail. Mardy asked reluctantly: “What do you mean?”

“Once the Fetch is dead, that’s it. There’s no way back. As far as the world’s concerned, that’s the end of you. Your soul will be stuck here for ever, here with the Mayor as your master. So you’ve got to act fast.” Rachel thought for a moment. “Is this the first time you’ve seen Uraniborg?”

“Yes.”

“Absolutely sure?”

“It’s not something I’d forget!” exclaimed Mardy.

“And you’d never seen your Fetch before? Till just now, I mean?”

“Not till just now – no.”

Rachel looked relieved. “Then the spell’s not too far advanced. With luck. The best thing you can do—”

Rachel was about to say more, but something behind Mardy’s back had caught her attention. Mardy turned – to see a large, cumbersome vehicle coming down the street towards them. It was still some distance away, but Mardy could already see that it ran on caterpillar tracks like a tank. There did not seem to be anyone driving it. It was wide too – wide enough to fill the entire street. Slowly as it came, there was no escaping it.

“It’s the street cleaner,” said Rachel and she sounded more nervous than she had since Mardy had entered Uraniborg. “The Mayor must have spotted us. Prepare to get wet.”

Mardy saw what Rachel meant. Fitted at intervals along the sides of this contraption were jets of water and big tumbling brushes like those in a car wash. Everything in the street was getting soaked. There was something so relentless about it that there seemed no point in even trying to run away. In fact, as the machine drew closer (and already it was surprisingly close), Mardy saw through the jets that the street itself was melting at the touch of water. Between her and the street cleaner lay Uraniborg, a smoky, yellow suburb of nowhere at all. Behind it, Bellevue Road itself was springing back into being: the school, snow-bound trees, Hal’s parents’ splash of colour. And now the machine was upon them. Rachel’s smokescreen dispersed instantly as a spurt of water crashed into it.

At the last moment Rachel took Mardy’s hand: “Just close your eyes and try not to make a noise,” she hissed.

Then Mardy felt the water burst on to her and through her. It was worse than she could have imagined. She had expected to get wet and had been gritting her teeth for the feeling of ice-cold water on her skin. But she had not expected the water to jet right through her body, melting her lungs and heart and bones and brain, or to leave behind it (the last thing she noticed before her nose too disintegrated) such an oily, chemical smell. There was no pain. But the atomising fear was worse than any pain. “I’m a ghost!” thought Mardy. Then there was no Mardy any more and nothing more to be thought.

At least, not in Uraniborg. In Bellevue Road Mardy was catching her breath. She found herself near the park, leaning shakily against a wall. She looked down at her own hand, which only a moment before had been pocked with holes where water from the street cleaner had begun to spray her. Her clothes were not even damp, though there was still a cold, metallic feeling where the water had struck her tongue, as if she had spent the last half hour sucking an icicle.

Rachel was gone. A white transit van was driving slowly down the street, probably looking for a house number. In the time she had been in Uraniborg the snow had decided to thaw again and was already slushing in the gutter. She hurried to her own house and let herself in, shedding her coat and shoes in the front hall.

“Mum? You home?”

From beyond two closed doors her mother shouted a reply, but the words were impossible to make out. Mardy didn’t mind. She had just wanted to make sure she wasn’t alone in the house. Her mother might be hard to handle, but she was not the sort of person who would easily be whisked off to Uraniborg. She was far too solid for that.

Mardy was surprised – even shocked – to discover that she was hungry. In the kitchen she made herself a honey sandwich, being careful not to spread the butter too thick. Then a mug of hot chocolate to sip at in front of the television. Style Squad was doing a special today on ‘Makeovers for your Pet’ which sounded just right. She would sink into the largest beanbag, watch and try to forget about Uraniborg.

Holding her mug in one hand and her plate in the other she backed into the living room door. For some reason the door failed to slam back into wainscoting. Mardy had to push quite hard to open it wide enough to enter. She peered in to see what was causing the obstruction.

The room was hardly recognisable. Cushions and blankets were scattered across the floor; plates and mugs (including Mum’s Jubilee mug that no one was allowed to touch) had been tipped over and hot chocolate was seeping into the new cream carpet. Next to the sofa lay discarded video boxes, tissues, magazines, half a dozen cushions from the sofa. The scene would not have looked particularly strange in Mardy’s own room. But Mrs Watt’s living room was always immaculate. It was one of her points of honour – and Mrs Watt was a very honourable woman. It had been tidy when Mardy had left for school that morning, she was sure of it.

So what – or who – had happened?

Mardy didn’t get a chance to wonder for long. Her mother was standing just behind her.

“That’s right,” said Mrs Watt softly. It was her gentle voice, the one Mardy dreaded most. “Take a good, long look.”

“It – it wasn’t me, Mum,” she began.

“Don’t talk. Look,” Mrs Watt suggested. She walked Mardy forward, not roughly but irresistibly. “Here – fifteen wrappers from your favourite sweets – that minty chewy concoction. And here (watch out for the orange peel, mind your feet) is where you’ve been writing on the back of Alan’s armchair. ‘Rachel Fludd stinks!’ – a charming sentiment…”

“But I never—”

“Mardy, if you can’t be bothered to hide the evidence, at least don’t make it worse by lying about it. Who exactly am I meant to think was responsible? Did a burglar come and slob in front of the TV half the afternoon? Has the house been visited by sweet-toothed aliens?”

“It’s not impossible…”

“Or has my daughter simply mistaken the living room for a doss-house? Well, Mardy? Well? Look at me!”

Mardy looked at her. The sequence was always the same with her mother. Quiet first, then sarcastic – and then there was a point where the sarcasm swelled like a toad’s throat and out came a flood of anger no one could control. Mardy could only wait and hope it would go no further. But even as she groped for the right, calming words, questions were burning in her own head: Who did this? And where are they now?

At that moment, the floorboard above their heads creaked, just the way it did when Mardy walked from her bedroom door to her desk. She and her mother looked up at the same time, so it couldn’t have been imagination.

“Did you hear that?” Mardy said quickly, sidestepping her mother and making a dash for the door. “There’s someone upstairs.”

“You will not run out of the room when I’m talking to you!” screamed Mrs Watt. “I won’t have it!”

But Mardy had already gone – and she was shaking so much as she climbed the stairs that she had to grab the banister to keep from stumbling. The thought of what might be waiting in her bedroom frightened her, but her mother’s voice did so no less. She had always been scared of that voice. It could hold her just as tightly as any magic dreamed up in Uraniborg, and cut as deeply too. But she had to see what was in her room …

The door was open. No lights were on, but even by the dim, snow-reflected glow of the street she perceived the outline of a girl sitting in the chair at her desk. She didn’t recognise her at first. Mardy had never seen herself from behind. But the Fetch had undoubtedly heard her come in, for it turned slowly in the chair, placing its hands on its knees. With its grey, dead eyes, it was looking directly at her.

“Hello Mardy,” it said with Mardy’s voice. It smiled Mardy’s smile, as if it were about to share a deep, delicious secret, just between the two of them. “I’m you.”

4 LOSING WEIGHT

MARDY STARED. IT was herself. Perfect as a mirror’s reflection. But where a mirror would have shown the horror now growing in her own face, the Fetch’s expression did not falter. The Fetch laughed and shook its hair back over its shoulder, just as Mardy did forty times a day. And these actions, so familiar and instinctive as to be part of her, made it more alien than any stranger’s face could be. Mardy screamed. She shut her eyes, opened her mouth and let the scream block everything: the Fetch in front of her, her mother coming up the stairs behind. It all became light-headed blindness, white noise, a tingling in her fingertips and toes, and then the relief of her own conscious mind buckling under these things and – gratefully – nothing at all.

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