Alchemy. Margaret Mahy

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       8. SATURDAY

      Saturday. Roland half woke, not to the usual luxurious, relaxed, inner-weekend silence, but to the sound of a storm. It took him a minute to realise that the fierce wind and distant thunder were all inside his head. Once he had come to terms with this, he lay still for a while, trying to force a weekend feeling to emerge. After all, he didn’t have to leap up, drag on his school uniform and then argue with his mother over whether or not he would be late unless she let him drive to school in her car. On Saturdays, he didn’t have to point out to her, yet again, that his school was much further away than her office block or that the bus, which stopped right outside their house, also stopped at the very door of that office. Saturday! Of course, he had assignments to do, but there would be time for all that, and time too to do his own thing – a bit of reading, a trek down to the park to play a round or two of tennis with Tom, and later to spend time with Chris. No! Of course, Chris was away for the weekend. Roland grimaced sleepily Saturday’s usual feeling of space and possibility were all in place, so why wasn’t he at ease with the world?

      Then, opening his eyes, he found he must have gone to sleep staring through darkness at the bottom drawer of his desk. It was the first thing he saw. So far, with his eyes tight shut, he’d been able to put off thinking about all that. But now – well, he had to face it, didn’t he? After all, it was going to be part of every minute of the weekend ahead of him. Roland shrugged, closed his eyes again and tried to settle more deeply into his bed. But there would be no comfort and ease on this particular Saturday morning. He might as well be up and doing.

      It all progressed in a way that was utterly usual, though from time to time, Roland caught himself feeling that he had been displaced and was watching himself from some other dimension, eating breakfast, exchanging a few ritual insults with Danny and Martin, and then helping his mother by loading the dishwasher and wiping the table top. He was watching his own hands as they touched, lifted, folded, opened drawers and held cups of tea, almost believing that they belonged to someone else. Later, he watched himself setting off with Danny and a friend from down the road to the park and the tennis club. Tom was waiting for them. There were often vacant courts at that time in the morning and, after all, it was autumn. Another two weeks and the club would be closing down until next spring. Tom and he slugged their way through a couple of sets, while that distant, observing self watched a little scornfully, knowing that, though all this was actually happening, it was not what was really going on. Roland was simply filling in time until… (“Your serve!” yelled Tom.)

      Roland usually beat Tom. He was better at coming up to the net and angling his returns into inaccessible corners, whereas Tom definitely was a back-line man, with long, strong, but largely predictable strokes. However, today Roland was playing carelessly – or perhaps, he told himself (determined to be fair), Tom was playing particularly well. It was hard to say, but one way and another, though he was usually determined to win, this morning he didn’t really care. In fact, he felt superior when Tom, though trying hard to be laid back about his victory, failed to hide his great delight. Later they sat side by side on a bank, watching two courts at once. Danny was playing on one, and there was a particularly lively doubles match on the other. One of the doubles players hit a massive smash, and the few watchers gasped and whistled admiringly as they clapped him.

      “Now, there’s style!” said a resonant but slightly lisping voice somewhere behind and above Roland’s head – a familiar voice, he thought. He had certainly heard it before, had heard it long ago, but recently too – somewhere on television, perhaps.

      Twisting a little, he tried to look carelessly at the man who had spoken, noting with a vague surprise that he was wearing a hat like a dark sombrero, and a long black coat which seemed a strangely heavy garment, even on an autumn day. Looking up at him from below, Roland made out a thick neck, the underside of a slightly sagging jawline, nostrils and the lower rim of a pair of sunglasses.

      There was a gasp from the crowd, and Roland glanced back at the game, just in time to see that one of the doubles players at the nearer end of the court had hit a high lob. The two players on the far side of the net ran frantically inwards, both concentrating on the ball and on nothing else. Colliding violently they fell, spread-eagled on the court, to the accompaniment of mingling cries of sympathy and derision. Fabuloso! he thought as he clapped, irritated to find himself using, yet again, his father’s insistent word.

      “Fabuloso!” exclaimed that slightly lisping voice behind and above him.

      Roland froze. He took a long, deliberate breath. Then he twisted around to stare for a second time at the man in the black coat, without trying to seem in the least casual about it this time. But the man was gazing at the court in a perfectly normal way for someone enjoying a tennis match. Roland, still looking up and under, could make out even less of him than he had done the first time – just the same powerful neck and the same pale skin beginning to sag under the long chin, and above that, the brim of the black hat. He tried to move forward, but there was someone sitting directly in front of him. How could it possibly be a coincidence that such an odd word had been used at the very moment he was thinking it? Yet how could it could it possibly be anything else?

      For a fantastic moment he caught himself wondering if the man in the black coat could possibly be