Alchemy. Margaret Mahy

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СКАЧАТЬ you just wish!” exclaimed Roland. “Hey! I promise it wasn’t any major move.”

      “No, but it’s some sort of a move,” she said, surprising him with her certainty. “Do you want help with your maths homework? Or is it a dare? Or what?”

      She was right, of course. It was some sort of move. All the same, Roland felt as indignant as a man who is falsely accused of being a stalker.

      “Oh, wow!” he said. “I’ll know better than to try out any friendly conversation on you again.” And he mimed zipping his lips together.

      “Fair enough!” she said, and then surprised him yet again by turning the words almost back to front. “Air and fluff!” she added, grinning to herself as she walked on without once looking behind her.

      The trouble was, Roland couldn’t allow her to walk away. He had to set up some sort of useful dialogue so that he could satisfy bloody, old, self-righteous Hudson. And suddenly there was a little more to it than that. Why should a reasonably plain, ordinary girl – one with bushy black hair, a slightly greasy fringe and a pimple forming just above her left temple – respond in such a careless fashion when one of the top guys in the school spoke to her?

      Still standing, Roland called after her, “No! Hang on a moment!”

      Jess turned, but kept on walking… walking backwards with surprising confidence.

      “The thing is…” said Roland, rapidly improvising around an earlier thought and advancing cautiously as he spoke, “…I was thinking at lunch time how mad it was that there were people in our room that I’ve known for years and years… I mean people like Dick Peebles and Cathy Morpeth and you… and yet we’ve never really said anything to one another. I mean, you and me – we have talked about the weather two or three times, but that’s not much, is it, over twelve years or so…” He broke off and shrugged, falling silent and waiting to see what she might make of this declaration.

      Jess’s expression changed. Now it was her turn to come to a stop, right in the middle of the footpath. But then, without turning, she stepped to one side, so that an elderly woman could walk past her unobstructed. There was something a little eerie about the accuracy with which she had moved out of the way at exactly the right moment.

      “So you reckon I ought to be bowled over by you bending down out of the clouds and talking to me?” she asked.

      “Yes,” he almost said, which would have been true. “No!” he exclaimed, anxious to wipe away her perfectly justifiable suspicion. “I just thought we’d talk a little as we walked along – that’s all. No big deal!” He was walking towards her, taking small, smooth, unthreatening steps, and at least she was not retreating.

      “Talk? What would we talk about?” she asked.

      “Anything… Pets! Parents!” He shrugged, then remembered something useful. “Books! You can read, can’t you? I’ve seen you at it. What are you reading?”

      For some reason this question, simple enough when asked between one reader and another, seemed to disconcert her.

      “That’s my business,” she said. “Look, Fairfield! I like being on my own, and having to talk to anyone ruins it all. You’re stalking me, but your talk spoils – and your stalk toils!”

      Roland had to disentangle this. “What does it spoil?” he asked, almost wanting to know.

      “It!” she answered, smiling, once again, her outward-inward smile. “Don’t you know what it means?”

      Roland knew she was quoting something though couldn’t quite remember what, which was annoying for someone who was good at quoting himself. But at least they were talking once more, and he was once more looking into her eyes – eyes of a strong blue colour with, now he came to look at them closely, long, sweeping, black lashes and wide black pupils.

      And then a peculiar thing happened. The irises and pupils of Jess Ferret’s eyes changed. Irises and pupils seemed to collapse into each other – to contract into long, intense slits of darkness. But before he could be sure of what he was seeing in them, they separated once more into perfectly normal irises and pupils.

      Roland opened his mouth, fully expecting words to spring obediently out of it, but for once the tip of his tongue (that springboard from which they usually leaped so eagerly) was empty. He and Jess stared at one another for a full second longer. Then she laughed and turned, heading towards the main road. She walked so firmly that her footsteps seemed to echo, and Roland had a momentary illusion that there was something invisible following at her heels.

      There was no point, he thought, in pursuing her and trying to force any more conversation out of someone so unwilling to talk, and yet he couldn’t give up. He just had to feel he’d gained some territory. Stalk toils, he quoted to himself, and turning, he began to jog once more, patting his pocket to make sure the keys of his mother’s car were still safely in place. It was one thing for Chris Glennie to drive off, waving light-heartedly out of the back window. It was quite a different thing for Weaselly-Ferret to turn her back on him and to stump away without casting a single glance over her shoulder. “Air and fluff, eh?” he muttered as he ran. “We’ll see!” (“Careful,” advised his inner voice, probably already aware that, this time at least, he was going to ignore it.)

      Roland reached the car, unlocked it and scrambled into the driver’s seat, tossing his pack behind him. Glancing quickly into the rear view mirror, he swung into the road. But, when he looked in front of him once more, Jess had vanished. His impression was that she must have turned to the right. After all she had been on the right-hand footpath when he had last seen her. Gunning the engine like a driver in a television car-chase, he reached the end of the street and swung dramatically into the busy main road only to find that his life as a tracker had become much more complicated. He was now part of a stream of traffic. Scanning the pavements for any sign of Jess Ferret wasn’t easy.

       5. A COMPLICATED PURSUIT

      Roland was now driving through a familiar shopping centre with cars moving slowly in front of him and closing in from behind. On his left he saw a favourite café and, directly beside it, the flamboyant arched opening to a mall crowded with shoppers. The entrance, illuminated even in daylight, often reminded Roland of the entrance to a church, somehow suggesting that shopping in the supermarket at the end of the mall would be a mystical experience.

      A cluster of five Crichton girls stood peering at the windows of a trendy dress shop, talking and passing a bag around. Strictly speaking, it was Roland’s job as a prefect to remind them that they were not supposed to eat in the street while wearing school uniform, but right then it was impossible to be an efficient stalker and a prefect as well as a responsible driver. It came as a relief when the traffic lights turned red and he was able to come to a legitimate standstill. As people streamed across the road in front of him he hastily scanned the pavements to right and left, knowing as he did so that Jess could be looking at him from any of the shops and laughing at him. Tilting the rear-view mirror, he tried to check the five girls behind him in more detail. But then the light changed and he was obliged to shoot off again, jolting in a way that did not match his image of himself as a competent and cool driver.

      Then he saw her. Once he had her in his sights he wondered how he could have ever imagined that any one of the girls peering into the dress shop could possibly СКАЧАТЬ