Angels and Men (18 page)

The others had made their way down to the bank. She watched Johnny join them.

‘Do you suppose it's thick enough to walk on?' she heard Maddy asking.

‘No!' said Rupert and Johnny in unison. They were standing under the trees. Each twig was white with frozen snow as though an untimely spring had set them all flowering in the moonlight. Mara stumbled down the bank to the others.

‘Look, it's hard enough to stamp on,' Maddy was saying. Then there was a great shriek as her foot plunged through. Rupert shot out a hand and hauled her back on to the bank. Maddy stood howling and shaking her leg as the rest of them laughed.

‘It's not funny! Ow, ow! It's cold. Shut up, you fat bastards!'

‘The answer is, no, it's not thick enough to walk on,' said Rupert when he had enough breath to speak.

Mara wandered a little way upstream. Snow had fallen on the ice, and the river was a white road under the stars. Fast black water running underneath. She gazed at it. Surely it could bear her weight? It had been frozen for days. She stepped on it cautiously. The ice creaked but held. She took a few more steps. Her heart pounded. Walking on water. The others were still laughing on the bank as she moved silently across the ice.

‘I'll have to go home and change,' wailed Maddy. ‘I'll get frostbite and it'll turn to gangrene and my leg will have to be amputated. It's not funny, Whitaker!'

‘Serves you right,' said Rupert.

Mara stood watching them.

‘Where's Mara?' asked May suddenly.

‘Here,' she said from the middle of the river. They all wheeled round.

‘My God! Mara – come back! You'll fall through. You've seen it's not strong enough!' Rupert stood gesturing her back.

‘It's always thicker in the middle,' she replied.

‘I don't care. Come back now!'

‘Please, Mara!' begged May.

They were all pleading at once.

‘It's quite solid,' she reassured them. ‘Look.' And she jumped up and down.

To her astonishment Maddy began to cry, and Rupert started to talk to her as though he were persuading her off the railings of the Golden Gate Bridge. Surely they could see the ice would have cracked by now if it was going to?

Johnny made a move towards her, but Rupert held him back.

‘Don't, John. You'll both go through.' They all stood as if they were carved of ice themselves, and, seeing that they were genuinely frightened, Mara relented and turned to the bank again. She was about to walk back when Joanna began screaming hysterically. ‘She's going to die! She'll fall through! She's going to die!' Rupert shook her, saying ‘Shut up! Just shut up!' but the girl continued to scream. Mara turned, looked up the white river and changed her mind. She began to walk. No foot had ever trodden there. A mad glee seized her and she broke into a run. Their cries fell away behind her and she was running with the moonlight under her feet, and about her head a hundred thousand stars.

CHAPTER 12

It was mid-morning the following day when Mara unlocked her door. A note was pinned on it:
I want to talk to you. Rupert
. There was a sound. She jumped, but it was only the polecat.

‘Where have you been?' he asked.

‘In the library.'

‘What, all night?' She put on her most offensive stare. ‘Rupert and Johnny are after your blood. What have you done?'

‘Walked on the ice,' she said, letting herself in. He followed her without waiting to be asked.

‘Walked on the ice? You've got a death-wish, girl.' She gave him a sneering look and hung up her cloak and hat. ‘Is that what you have in mind? Drowning? You've given up the idea of slow starvation?'

What was he driving at? Suddenly she knew. ‘That's what you're supposed to ask, isn't it?' she said nastily. ‘So that when they come up with the stretcher you can leap out of your room like a nice helpful little doctor's son and say, “She always said she'd take a hundred paracetamol.” ' She saw that she had succeeded in angering him at last.

‘Christ, you're such a bitch!'

‘Well, get out if you can't take it, you interfering little –'

She froze. Footsteps on the stairs. Rupert and Johnny. She looked at the door, then back at the polecat. His eyes were full of malicious anticipation. They had been about three seconds from face-slapping, but the fight vanished like a burst bubble.

‘May I stay and watch?' the polecat asked.

Instantly Mara's heart hardened. She sat casually on the edge of the desk. ‘Tell me if I flinch.' The footsteps were almost at the door.

‘Flinch?' said the polecat. ‘You don't know Rupert. You're going to be flayed alive.' He arranged himself in a chair. There was a knock.

‘Come in,' she called.

In they came. One look at their faces told her that she had seriously underestimated what lay in store. Rupert bore down on her. Short of jumping out of the window, there was no escape. Instead she took mental flight off, away, out on to the moorlands of her mind, trying to block out his savage words. Phrases kept roaring across the sky, deadly as fighter jets. ‘
Your constant attention-seeking
. . .', ‘
Your contempt of other people's feelings and opinions
. . .' The moorland was beginning to slip away. She would burst into tears. Her only hope was to anger him into losing control. Her stare changed from vacant, to bored, to insolent. She saw it beginning to take effect.

‘You're not listening to a word I'm saying!'

She started to say, ‘Sorry, what was that last bit?' when Johnny grabbed her and hauled her roughly to her feet. His face was white with fury. She cried out in fear.

‘You might not care what happens to you,' he shouted, ‘but I do.' He shook her till her head spun. Dimly she was aware of Rupert protesting. ‘Don't you ever fuck me around like that again!' He let her go and she stumbled back against the desk. The door crashed shut. There was a stunned silence, then she heard Rupert asking if she was all right.

‘Yes, thank you,' she answered coldly. But she was not. Johnny's anger had split open her defences like a shell, and all Rupert's corrosive words came pouring in.
‘Selfish . . .' ‘Manipulative . . .' ‘Behaving like a spoilt princess . . .'

‘You're going to have to face up to the consequences of your behaviour, Mara.' He put a hand on her arm. His voice was gentle now. ‘If you behave unreasonably, then I'm afraid that's how people are going to treat you.' It was a veiled apology for Johnny's violence.

She shook his hand off. ‘I don't give a toss how you or anyone behaves.' She stared at him, and saw not anger but something else in his face.

‘I think you've made that abundantly clear,' he said quietly. He went, closing the door behind him.

The moorland stood desolate, not a bird in the sky. Strange winds winnowed the hills. The aftermath of Armageddon. She turned to the polecat.

‘Ow,' he said. He was looking at her in awe, as though she had just climbed out of a wrecked car and was lucky to be alive. ‘Nice teamwork.' He rose to leave. ‘Sweet of you to let me stay, Mara. It's so frustrating trying to listen through the wall.'

She was too sick at heart to make any reply. The bells chimed eleven, and she listened to them stupidly. Was that the time? Her books lay on the desk in front of her. She picked one up and started to read. ‘
Awake, all you that are asleep, and stand up to judgement; the angel of judgement is come, and the time of harvest draws near
.' The words passed before her eyes, but they were meaningless. She could still hear Rupert's voice and feel Johnny's hands gripping her arms.

The days passed. Outside the temperature rose. Great sheets of ice began to glide down the river, and snow slid from the rooftops in sudden rushes down on to the streets below. Every tree and gutter in the City seemed to be weeping. Then the rains began. The river rose up as if it were possessed, tearing at the banks as it carried down branches and trees. Mara stood watching from the old bridge. She had not seen Rupert or Johnny since they had walked out of her room. Maddy and May were ignoring her. News of the incident had spread through the college. Mara had been sent to Coventry. Well, she thought, I've spent most of my life there, so I shouldn't mind.

She stared at the brown water swirling beneath her. To have had friends and then to have lost them. Why did I let it happen? If Joanna hadn't screamed . . . If the polecat hadn't provoked me . . . The bells chimed one. She would have to brace herself and go back to college lunch with everyone glancing at her and thinking things. And whispering. They were all calling her ‘Princess'. The polecat must have repeated what Rupert had said. She had pushed him too far. What else might he broadcast? She's scared of spiders . . . She thinks she sees angels . . . Everywhere she turned, she felt the words ‘And serve her right' quivering in the air. Well, I'll get over it. She could almost think ‘So what?' without some stinging phrase of Rupert's whipping through her mind. ‘You think the rules don't apply to you.' She began to walk back to college, gathering her defences around her. Pray to St Bartholomew, the patron saint of the flayed alive. In her mind's eye a trail of bloody footprints followed her up the street.

Her face was a stony mask during lunch. Maddy and May sat on the other side of the hall. Nobody spoke to her. She left and climbed the stairs to her room. She was feeling for her keys when the polecat appeared.

‘Coffee?' he said. This was the first conciliatory gesture anyone had made, but it brought out a perverse anger in her.

‘Been punished enough, have I?'

‘No one's punishing you.'

‘No one's talking to me, either.'

‘Well, you never talk to anyone.'

My fault, of course. She unlocked her door.

‘Look, if you just unbent a little, Princess, it would be all right. Come and have coffee.'

This left her with no easy way of refusing. She could see that this new nickname was going to be like a ring in the nose of a fierce bull. Anyone who dared come near enough to grab it could force her to do anything. She followed him into his room and sat down. The smell of coffee filled the air. I bet he buys it in Fortnum and Mason's. Hand-roasted and ground by Guatemalan peasants.
‘What's so wonderful about you that you can afford to despise everyone else?'
I'll never be free to think a single thought again. Her anger roused itself. The polecat was watching her.

‘ “Your face is as a book where men may read strange matters.” '

Macbeth
. How appropriate. Come in, Duncan. Sit yourself down. Everything all right? Sleep well.

The polecat handed her a cup of coffee. Her sense of general outrage sharpened and focused on him. ‘Why is everyone calling me “Princess”?'

She saw a flicker of amusement. ‘Who knows where these sobriquets originate? It's like speculating why everyone calls me “the polecat”.'

‘You can dish it out, but you can't take it.'

Then unexpectedly he smiled. ‘Have you thought of apologizing?'

‘What – to you?'

‘Don't be ridiculous,' he said, as though he were above such things. ‘To the others. To your erstwhile friends.'

She looked stubbornly down into her coffee. Apologies were the fines levied for social misdemeanours. Pay up, or we'll punish you in other ways. The idea that she might voluntarily apologize had not occurred to her. And yet she had done once already to Rupert, months ago, for calling him a prick. He had responded generously then. But she could not believe that this time so much damage could be undone by the word sorry.

‘It ought to work,' said the polecat, as though he were suggesting a method of starting a car on a cold morning. ‘It's the currency these Christians deal in, after all.'

She felt herself recoil from his cynicism. ‘You think they're stupid?'

He considered. ‘Well, I suppose it's a better system than escalating retaliation and reprisals. I just find the nicey-nicey atmosphere in this place so cloying.'

‘Which is why you like me, I suppose.'

Don't presume, said his look. ‘Why I sometimes enjoy your company, possibly.'

She looked at the rain running down his window. I don't have the energy to fight him any more.

‘You're getting soft,' he said.

‘I know.'

The polecat reached out and took her mug. ‘Look, go and find them and say sorry, for Christ's sake.' She started to protest, but he held out a hand to help her out of her chair. ‘Just do it.' He clicked his fingers. ‘Come on. The longer you leave it the worse it'll get.'

He was right, damn him. She took his hand and let him pull her up.

‘You're such a fool, Mara.'

‘I know,' she said again. Then she caught sight of his expression. ‘Piss off, you posturing little git,' she snarled and stomped out of the room.

As she walked through the college towards Coverdale Hall, she found herself thinking of a dozen things she really ought to do first. I never used to be such a coward. Her heart was pounding as she approached Rupert's door. I'll go from here to Johnny, then to Maddy and May. She paused before knocking. There was silence. Oh, let him be out! She tapped gently. The door opened. It was another Coverdale student. The room was full of people sitting with bowed heads. Oh, hell. I've interrupted a prayer meeting.

‘I'll come back,' she whispered, and started to walk away.

‘Mara.' She turned. It was Rupert. He came out into the corridor and shut the door behind him. For a moment they stood looking at one another. Her prepared words deserted her, but she would have to say something, now she was here.

‘Sorry,' she blurted out. She felt the urge to rush away, but was held back by the thought that above all else, she must not behave like a spoilt princess.

‘Thank you for coming, Mara.' He half smiled. ‘I'd almost given up hope.' The idea that he'd been waiting for days for her to creep penitently back was too much.

‘Well, you know where my room is. You could have come to me.' I'm doing it again. Her thought was mirrored in his face.

‘Hardly. You told me you didn't give a toss.'

‘I was upset.'

‘You were upset?' She saw he was going to start all over again. ‘I can't think why you should be. I don't suppose you heard one word in twenty.' She stared past him, saying nothing. ‘Look – you're not paying attention now, either! What
is
the point?' They were trapped in an endless destructive cycle.

She made one last effort. ‘Well, I'm sorry.'

He gave his slight bow. ‘All right. Let's just forget it, Mara.' But she knew he was thinking, That's all very well.

What more do you want? she thought. Blood? She felt tears rising, and turned away. Walk slowly. Not like a spoilt princess. She heard him going back into his room.

Her resolution to go and apologize to Johnny wavered. Supposing he shouted and swore again? She stood dithering in the corridor. Besides, she didn't know where his room was. But this sounded so pathetic that she stepped forward purposefully. How difficult can it be to find a room, for God's sake? It was up in the attics, somewhere. She turned a corner and caught sight of a notice tacked to the wall.
Johnny Whitaker's room
, it said, with an arrow pointing to a doorway. Another hand had scrawled underneath
One at a time, please, girls
. He was always the butt of college humour. And he never seemed to mind. Maybe he would greet her with that same easy tolerance now. She went through the door and up a narrow, twisting set of stairs. Her fingernails were digging into her palms as she approached his room. He was definitely in. She could hear music, and a brief snatch of whistling.

‘Come in!' he called before she could knock. He must have heard her footsteps. His was the only room on the corridor. She went in. He was at his desk.

‘Just a second,' he said without turning round. She waited while he finished the sentence he was writing, trying to use the time to gather up the right words. He turned, and she saw surprise, followed by his characteristic look of suppressed amusement.

I hate them both, she thought. This is the last time I apologize to anyone.

‘I came to say sorry,' she said tightly.

He laughed. ‘I could tell from your face. Come here.' He put out a hand.

She hesitated, then thought, Princess Mara, and went across to where he was sitting. Before she could stop him, he had pulled her down on to his lap as though she were a tavern wench.

‘You're completely mad, Mara, you know that? What made you do it?'

‘I don't know,' she said witlessly, not knowing anything at all, in fact – whether to struggle up from such an undignified position, what to do with her arms and hands, where to look, or what to think. Or whether she liked it. He wrapped his arms round her and gave her a crushing hug.