Obsidian Pebble (29 page)

On the Saturday before the end of term exams started, Oz was in his bedroom grappling with science. But his mind, never keen on being shackled to the revision desk, was having trouble concentrating. Ellie had texted him the night before to say that she'd been picked for the school's under-fourteen hockey team, and would be playing that morning. It was an amazing achievement, given that she'd be going up against girls two years older than she was. Not that Ellie was bothered by any of that; Ellie wasn't scared of anything.

Oz would have gone to support her, but it was an away game against Reghampton in the neighbouring county. So, he'd gritted his teeth and attacked biology, with one eye on the school Christmas party as the prize. Unfortunately, his attack was being repelled at the gate and in the last hour he'd learnt nothing. Not that it had been a complete waste of time; he'd made a paper clip into quite a passable sculpture of a swan, rearranged all the pencils in his desk-tidy in size order, and drawn a dragon biting the head off a knight in the back of his revision scrapbook. And all this despite shoving his laptop under the bed, out of temptation's way.

But he had left his phone on, and suddenly it chirped plaintively, signalling the arrival of a text message. He was surprised to see that it was from Savannah Fanshaw.

Normally, Oz would have found a hundred reasons for not even contemplating such an offer, but after an hour and a half of trying to remember what a cell wall did, he was willing to try anything. Surprisingly, he had little difficulty convincing his mother of the merits of a visit to number 3.

“Uh, yeah, Mum, Savannah texted me. They're having a bit of trouble with science revision. I said I'd go over and help them for a bit.”

Mrs. Chambers was wrestling with a pile of dirty sheets and an overworked washing machine as Oz explained this. “You're so kind, Oz,” she said, looking very harassed. “Lunch will be at one or thereabouts.”

The twins came to meet him at the door of number 3, dressed in identical jeans and pink T-shirts.

“As you can see, one of us is wearing a purple wrist band so that you can tell us apart.”

Oz smiled nervously as the one with the wristband waved her hand and pointed to herself. “Savannah, as if you didn't know.”

Oz hadn't known, actually, but was not going to admit it.

“Come in,” said Sydney, and she turned and trotted upstairs. “We've been watching you trying to study.”

“Really?” Oz said weakly as he followed. He kept forgetting about their little hobby with the telescope.

“That school biology book you were reading looked awful,” Savannah said.

“It is,” Oz agreed.

“That's why we texted you. We've got exams next week, too, but we like biology,” Sydney explained.

“Even cell biology?” Oz said, not trying to keep the disgust out of his voice. “Chloroplasts and cytoplasm, ugh. It's just so confusing.”

“We know,” Sydney said.

“That's why we downloaded all the questions asked by science teachers to year sevens in two hundred schools across the country and found the thirty commonest ones,” said Savannah with a smile.

Oz followed them up to the attic room, where a pile of papers and white cards lay scattered over the floor between two bean bags. Savannah pointed a finger at a bowl of pink sherbet-filled flying saucers. “Want one?”

Oz did.

“Then we wrote out the answers, like the definition of plant cell and stuff, on cards,” Sydney went on.

“And then we play snap with them,” added Savannah brightly.

Oz was staring at them, his mouth full of tangy sherbet. He had no idea what they were talking about.

“Try it. First of all, we'll ask you ten biology questions, see how many you get right, okay?” Savannah said.

“We play biology snap for a bit and then we'll test you again. See how you do,” Sydney explained breezily.

Oz shrugged. Anything was better than staring at his mind-numbing school textbook.

He got a miserable four out of ten on the test. Sydney then proceeded to deal out thirty index cards to Oz and explained that he needed to look at them carefully, because some of them just differed by a word or part of a sentence. Oz did as he was told, and watched as Sydney took them back and gave them, plus another pile of thirty which were identical, to Savannah to shuffle. Oz had played snap many times before, but this was slightly more difficult. The first few times he got it wrong, and it made him look at the cards much more closely. It took quite a bit of concentration, helped a lot by pink lemonade and sherbet, but after fifteen minutes, Oz was getting a lot better.

“Right,” said Savannah, “let's test you again.”

“What is an organ?” asked Sydney, holding up a question paper and clutching it to her chest so that Oz couldn't peek.

He resisted, with great difficulty, the urge to say “a big thing with pipes that you hear in church.” The truth was he knew that one, anyway. He'd just won a huge pot of twenty cards on that very definition. “Umm, groups of tissues working together,” he said, almost automatically.

Sydney beamed.

They asked him another eleven questions and he got them all right.

“That's amazing,” Oz said after he got question number twelve on “name of cell that transmits nerve impulses” right, too.

The girls smiled at each other.

“Have you got cards for all of science?” Oz asked hopefully.

Sydney got up and walked to a bookcase. “Energy, gases or friction?”

“We've done all of those,” Oz said.

“So, let's play,” Savannah said.

At five to one, Oz called his mother and asked if he could stay at number 3 for lunch because things were going so well. By three o'clock, he'd cracked science.

“Of course, you can play on your own,” Sydney said as she packed the friction and gases cards away. “You just make two piles of cards and take from each pile in turn. It works just as well—”

“—but it's not as much fun,” Savannah added.

Oz had another go on their telescope again, and was pleased to see that they still had the SPEXIT. This time, he chose the Roller Coaster Reality ride. It was even better than Wild White Water. After three goes Oz sat back, exhausted, even though he'd been nowhere.

“You did say that these were made by JG Industries, didn't you?” he asked, hoping the room was going to stop spinning soon.

“Yes, they are,” Sydney said. “And Dad managed to get them to let us keep them for a bit longer.”

“Gerber came to my house a few weeks ago,” Oz said, unable to hide the distaste in his voice.

“Yeah, we saw him,” Savannah said.

“Creepy, isn't he?” added Sydney in hushed tones.

“Mega creepy. But he's nothing compared to his chauffeur.” Oz explained to them what he'd seen in the front seat of the Rolls. The girls listened with identical looks of distaste.

“Gerber's been here, too, a couple of times,” Sydney said.

“We didn't like him,” they said together.

“I thought that he and your dad were friends.”

Savannah shook her head. “Dad says it's purely a business arrangement.”

“Patent law,” explained Sydney.

S and S exchanged conspiratorial looks before Sydney said, “We heard Dad call him a very shady character.”

“Why?”

They didn't answer.

“Oh, come on,” Oz pleaded. “I need to know what Gerber's really after.”

“We know a lot about him,” Savannah said.

“A lot,” added Sydney, in exactly the same voice.

“Whenever anyone visits, we usually find out more than they want us to know,” Savannah said.

“We've bugged the whole of downstairs so we can listen to Mum and Dad talking about us—”

“—whenever we like.”

Oz didn't doubt any of this for one second. Surveillance was a pretty strange hobby for eleven-year-olds, but then, S and S were pretty strange girls.

“So tell me, you've seen him up close. What's with his face and hair?”

“He has a birthmark on his neck. A big red one,” Sydney explained.

“That's why he wears those funny high collars,” added Savannah.

“Really?” Oz said. “But his face…I mean, it's like it's made of plasticene.”

There was another exchanged look between the two girls and Sydney giggled. “Mum thinks he has a portrait in the attic.”

“A what?” Oz asked.

“You know, like in that book where this man had a painting made of himself and made a wish so that the painting grows old instead of him.”

“Oh, right,” said Oz vaguely. “So your mum thinks he's weird, too.”

Savannah nodded. “Dad just thinks he's had a lot of work done, you know, like plastic surgery.”

Oz nodded. The thought had crossed his mind, as well.

“So, why was Gerber at your house?” Sydney asked.

“Heeps brought him. If you really want to know, I think he wants to buy the place.”

The look of shock on the girls' faces would have been comical were it not for the fact that it was so disturbingly identical.

“We wouldn't like that,” they said in unison.

“We wouldn't want Gerber as a neighbour—” Savannah said quickly.

“—He's not very nice—” said Sydney.

“—He's done things—”

“—Bad things—”

“Once, when Mum and Dad were arguing about Gerber, Dad said that his family used to work for the Germans during the war—”

“Looking after horses for the artillery,” Savannah explained.

Somewhere, an annoyingly distant and tantalisingly significant bell rang in Oz's head, but he dared not interrupt the girls. They kept on talking, finishing each other's sentences, almost as if it were one person's thought process.

“Dad said that after the war, Gerber came over here—”

“—and they got into trouble for doing things—”

“—Animal experiments—”

“—Dad says that all the other stuff like the estate agent's business—”

“—it's all just for show, just a way for him to get money—”

“—so that he can do what he really wants to do.”

“Which is?” Oz demanded.

“We don't know,” Savannah said with disappointment, “but we think it has something to do with animals and the SPEXIT.”

Oz glanced across at the glasses with renewed interest, his mind roiling at what a roller coaster ride or white water river rafting had to do with animals.

“So, we don't want him as a neighbour,” Sydney said. There was yet another shy but knowing glance between them, and they said in unison, “We prefer you.”

Oz hurriedly gulped down some more lemonade. He quickly changed the subject by asking what the moon looked like through the telescope, and shortly afterwards went home with his mind buzzing, not from the satisfaction of having revised all of science, but with the twins' revelations. Was that why Gerber was so interested in Penwurt? Did he see the orphanage as a site where he could do something unpleasant in a quiet neighbourhood, where no one would suspect? But what sort of things were S and S talking about? How were animal experiments tied up with something as brilliant as the SPEXIT?

* * *

When Monday came along, Oz ran everything the twins had said to him about Gerber past Ellie and Ruff, but it still didn't seem to make much sense, something which Ellie, as usual, was quick to point out.

“Animal testing lab?” she said with a withering look. “There are millions of out of the way places you could use, where no one would ever visit. Why pick a house on one of the best streets in town?”

“Yeah, but that's where he's being extra-clever,” Ruff said, taking the exact opposite view. “No one would expect him to do anything like that. It's a double bluff.”

“Double cobblers, more like,” Ellie said.

As for the Gerber family's murky past, it simply reinforced Oz's first impressions of the man. But the truth was, none of them had much appetite or time for Gerber that week because the exams were upon them.

Oz had taken the twins' advice and had made notes of all the important points he had to remember for every subject; he played geography, history, French and science snap whenever he got the chance, both by himself and with Ellie and Ruff at school.

Somehow, they got through the worst of it, until finally they got to the following Wednesday lunchtime and their last exam. They were supposed to go back to normal lessons, but the teachers were all tied up with marking and invigilating the year nine and ten exams, so 1C were left to their own devices. That included reading or, more usually, playing games, so long as they weren't too rowdy. Ellie, Ruff and Oz played hangman and draughts and minesweeper on their phones, while Jenks and Skinner got thrown out for making silly animal noises at the back.

Wednesday afternoon's last lesson was French. But instead of letting them entertain themselves, Madam Chang announced that she had finished marking and proceeded to give them their exam results.

Oz felt his stomach clench. He knew that the school party was at stake here, and he waited nervously for his name to be called out. Even so, it was something of a shock when it eventually came.

“Marcel, très bien, soixante-quinze pour cent.”

“How much is that?” hissed Skinner, two seats behind Oz.

Ellie turned and said irritably, “Seventy-five percent,” and then added in a French accent for good measure, “imbecile.”

Ellie and Ruff did equally well, and as the results kept coming the following day Oz was astounded to learn that he had passed most things, and done pretty well in them, too. Apart from science—in which he had done brilliantly. That evening, his stomach fluttering, he felt at last he could broach the subject of the party over tea with his mother.