The Changeover (7 page)

"He's terribly sick," Laura said.

"To hell with that!" Sorry exclaimed. "Take him to a doctor. I'll punish your enemy, cure warts, release the winds .. ." He raised his hand and a breeze actually rippled the pages of his seventh form chemistry, very eerie in the small room. "If you wanted to make a neighbour's goat have fits ... I'd be the right person then, wouldn't I?"

Laura knew she had hurt his feelings but could not see why.

"He's terribly sick," she said. "Sicker than anyone knows. A doctor won't help."

Sorry was still holding her wrist. He stood up. "You should be careful, knowing what you know," he said. "I might drive a hard bargain. I might ask to drink a pint of your blood or goodness knows what. Get a doctor. They're subsidized by the government. I'll see you to the gate."

"A doctor would be no good," said Laura, but she walked out of his room passively enough when he held the door open for her, though she felt her own anger building up in her in a gratifying way.

"Sorensen?" called a voice. "Does Laura drink coffee?"

"Not here she doesn't! She's on her way," said Sorry. "For eighteen months we've given one another these looks across the school playground and I thought she'd come because... well, never mind why I thought she'd come, and she thought I was a bloody witch doctor who could cure measles free."

"Sorensen, please don't swear like that," said the older Mrs Carlisle, old Winter, who, coming forward, looked exactly like Laura's idea of a witch, for she was getting ready for bed and wearing a dressing-gown instead of the tweed skirt and twin-set she often wore, and her white hair, usually pulled severely back, hung over her shoulders in two plaits.

"I'll tell you what," Sorry said, looking at her, speaking as if he had just had a brilliant idea, "why don't we put on the opening scene from Macbeth for Chant? You, me and Miryam.

'When shall we three meet again

In thunder, lightning ..."'

"We don't do Macbeth until next year," Laura interrupted him.

Winter ignored them. "Just how far do you have to go?" she asked Laura.

"I can easily walk," Laura said stiffly. "It's not far."

"She lives in Kingsford Drive," Sorry said crossly. "I'll run you home on the Vespa, Chant. Of course that might turn out to be more risky. You never know your luck."

He was starting to look more at ease, more inquisitive again, but Laura's anger was reaching its peak. Their tempers were not synchronized.

"Did you think I came because I liked you?" she asked indignantly, remembering, however, that she had felt jealous of another girl talking to him earlier that day.

"Why not?" asked Sorry. "Let's be honest..."

"Don't let's be honest!" his grandmother interrupted him. "Go and get your motorbike, Sorensen. I don't think Laura should walk home alone through these streets."

"I came by them," she replied. "At least I live a real life in a real house, Sorry Carlisle, not shut away behind a high hedge in a sort of museum — a museum of spare time."

It was impossible to be rude to Sorry, without being rude to his mother and grandmother, too.

"Look— stuff real life!" Sorry said. "I've tried it out and believe me it's nothing but rubbish."

"And double-stuff your broomstick!" Laura retorted in a low, fierce voice. "I hope you get splinters."

"Terrific!" said Sorry, walking out through one of the doors. But in the doorway he stopped and half turned as if he might be going to say something else.

However, if this was so, he changed his mind and walked away, shutting the door after him.

"At least come into the kitchen, Laura," said Winter Carlisle. "He will have to change his clothes and then he'll bring his bike round to the kitchen door."

Laura let herself be led into what was surely a farmhouse kitchen, though the farm had ceased to exist. In spite of the warm night she had begun to shiver, but she did not wish to show it. Also she found something sinister about the unremitting kindness these women showed her, for she had come as a stranger and quarrelled with a member of the family in their own hall. Besides she knew herself to be scruffy and tired and forlorn. They gave her lemonade — the second glass she had had that night, but this was not fizzy, shop lemonade; it was a home-made kind, made with real lemons. Indeed a slice of lemon floated in it like an opaque island. It was in her hands almost before she knew where she was, and a plate with tomato sliced over home-made bread was put in the other. They both watched her from under their peaceful eyelids and she felt the pressure of an unspoken expectation, and an anxiety which their calm faces did not reveal.

What's going on? she thought, wondering if she might not enlist these new witches — for looking at them she saw they could not be otherwise— on Jacko's behalf. Sorry's nature, when she first saw him, had been almost flamboyant in its declaration, but his mother and grandmother were softer and more secret. The faces of the witches looked out through their own faces as if through masks of grey lace.

"What did you want Sorry to do for you, Laura?" asked old Winter.

"My little brother is so ill," Laura began, but they were not really interested in Jacko, only in Sorry himself and for some reason in Laura, too. Miryam interrupted her, something Laura thought this polite woman would not normally have done, except that she was anxious to say something before Sorry came back.

"Please be patient with him," she said. "I know he can be very difficult at times, but for reasons I can't go into now I have to tell you that Sorensen's difficulties are partly my fault."

"But he's not wicked," said the older woman, more to herself than Laura, "not yet! A wicked witch can be a very terrible thing," she added, to Laura's further confusion. Laura took a mouthful of bread and tomato, not so much from hunger as from nervous politeness, and felt their anxiety ease a little though she had no idea why.

"He wasn't really so very difficult," Laura said. "It was more as if we started talking about two different things, but he's different from the way he is at school."

"Ah, yes, I imagine he is," said Miryam, "but he has to go to school, you know. He's talked a lot about you. It seems you recognized that he has this ambiguous nature and perhaps, by now, you can see that it's an inherited thing."

"I thought he was a witch," Laura said. "That's the word that came in to my mind."

"It's very much a feminine magic— or so we think," Miryam said. "And Sorensen sometimes resents it. He doesn't like being called a witch, although of course that is really what he is. Sometimes he feels that he's not completely a man or a witch but some hybrid, and he struggles too hard to be entirely one thing or the other. But he can't give up either nature. We do try to reconcile him, but so far, at least, our efforts have met with very mixed success. However, the real difficulty lies elsewhere." And once again Laura felt their glances fall on her, outwardly calm, inwardly concerned, as if they were depending on her for something, but could not tell her what.

"He thought I came to see him because I liked him," she said. "Not that I don't," she added hastily, "but— you know — because I specially liked him."

"Well, perhaps you do," suggested Miryam smiling at her. "Or perhaps some day ..."

"I wouldn't come to see him at night because I liked him," Laura said, horrified that they should think she might have. She stared down at the bread in her hand. There was only a crust left, and she was holding it between finger and thumb, as girls in old-fashioned pictures sometimes held roses. She couldn't remember eating it, though the taste of the salted tomato was fresh in her mouth. Already, out of nothing, she had moved into a vague alignment with these women, become a conspirator without knowing the nature of the conspiracy. She took a deep breath and turned to ask them about Jacko again, but in came Sorry himself in an expensive motorcycle jacket and blue jeans and wearing a motorcycle helmet which transformed him into a moon walker.

"I've got a spare helmet," he said. "Come on, Cinderella, let Prince Charming put it on for you. My darling, you must have the smallest head in the world."

Laura couldn't help laughing. The Vespa was waiting at the kitchen door. Sorry climbed on to it with the nimbleness of much practice.

"You'll come back again, Laura," said old Mrs Carlisle with satisfaction. "After all, you've eaten our bread and salt, and that's a sign."

"Did you?" said Sorry sharply. "Chant, you haven't got the sense you were born with. Mind you, everyone warns you to watch out for someone like me, but who's going to teach you to watch out for two nice, middle- class women with money and private-school accents?

OK, hop on the bike behind me. Hang on to me if you like, but don't pull me backwards too much, will you?"

"Take her straight home," said Winter as if this was in doubt. But the journey only took a few minutes and, since she felt very tired and the moon was now permanently hidden by a warm bed of nor'west cloud, she was glad of the lift and thought once again that life was very easy for Sorry Carlisle in the same ways in which it was very difficult for her.

At her own gate she hesitated, struggling with the unfamiliar fastening on the helmet until he began, rather impatiently, to take it off for her.

"By the way, Chant," he asked as he did so, "just what is wrong with the little brother?"

"He's bewitched," said Laura, "but
you
don't care."

"Not so very much," Sorry agreed. "Besides, most likely it's just chicken-pox or something."

"It's a sort of vampire," Laura explained, and he laughed.

"This isn't a village in the Carpathians. You've been watching the Sunday night horror movie."

"We don't have television," Laura replied shortly. "Besides it's not exactly a vampire. More a spirit, an incubus, a demon."

"What a load of rubbish!" said Sorry derisively. "Which one is it?"

"I don't know," said Laura, "and that's a funny thing, because I knew what you were straight off, didn't I?"

She turned her back on him and marched up the little concrete path, its square edges lined by alyssum and a few poppies. The door looked very light and flimsy after the Carlisles' front door, which seemed to be built to withstand battering rams. Still she had lived a very happy life behind that door and was comforted to see it again.

"Hang on a minute, Chant!" Sorry called behind him, but she opened the plywood door, went through it and shut him and his blue Vespa out in the dark where he seemed rightfully to belong. He was something different from what she had thought him and she wanted to think carefully about him before she saw him again.

Inside the house, Kate and Chris Holly stared at her in a self-consciously innocent way.

"How's Jacko?" Laura asked.

"Very quiet," said Kate, remarkably cheerful. "He might sleep it off. You never know."

Laura, however, thought that she did know. She looked at them carefully. She had been away a great deal longer than she had implied she would be when she left, but they did not seem to have noticed. There was so much traffic up and down Kingsford Drive, even at this time of night, that Sorry's motorbike might easily have gone unnoticed, or perhaps they had been thinking of something else... She had a strong feeling that they had not missed her

"Laura! Laura!" Kate screamed suddenly, and then, "Laura!" again and, immediately terrified, Laura found herself on her feet, dizzy with the last traces of sleep and an early Saturday waking. Rushing into Kate's room she found something frightening in progress, something that she could only watch aghast, for Kate had called her out of the need for an instant companion, not because she really thought there was anything Laura could do. The room reeked of Carmody Braque and Jacko lay on his sheet drumming with his heels, his eyes open but turned up so that only the whites showed, his body arching before their eyes into a stiff bow, collapsing and arching again. A single drop of blood suddenly trickled from his left nostril and ran down the side of his face, as if something in him was being wrung out, reluctantly releasing its juice.

"Oh God! Oh God!" Kate cried, panting with horror. "Laura, he's dying!"

However, Jacko wasn't dying yet. He collapsed and grew limp at last, opened his mouth once or twice so widely they could see past his teeth, deep down into his throat, then fell into a quick, snoring sleep. Kate fluttered around him, longing to pick him up and hug him, terrified that she might harm him by moving him.

"Ring the doctor," she cried. "I must ring the doctor. Don't leave him, Laura."

"Run to Sally's," Laura shouted.

"They're out!" Kate replied. "Saturday morning — early swimming lessons. Where's the 'phone money?"

There was a frantic search for 'phone money, but though there usually seemed to be too many useless little coins in the world, when you really needed them they behaved like nervous beetles and crawled into cracks or under things and refused to come out. At last, after going through her coat pockets, sobbing and complaining, Kate found sufficient coins to make two 'phone calls if necessary and ran out, leaving the door open. Laura sat by Jacko, whose sleep grew quieter and easier as she watched over him, and then Kate was back, soft-faced with relief, for she had been lucky and, after one encounter with an answering service, had got on to the very doctor she had seen yesterday who was also the doctor on duty for the weekend. Perhaps her distress had carried conviction, for he had said he would come at once, something doctors could not be relied upon to do, and Kate, relieved of her first anxiety, was free to bend over Jacko once more and stare at him with desperate tenderness and sadness.

"He looks so old," she said, and her expression and her voice ached with such pain that Laura could scarcely bear to watch her. "I've heard of a dreadful disease where children turn into old men and women, but I don't think it comes on suddenly like this... Oh, Laura! Suppose it
is
that that's wrong with him. What could make him shrink like this? It must be something terrible."

"I don't know," cried Laura, affected as much by Kate's hysterical cry as by Jacko's spasm, and then she added, "Well, I do know, but you won't believe me."

Kate stood up in her old, blue dressing-gown that had once been so pretty. Laura could remember five long years ago, seeing her father notice Kate in the blue dressing-gown and embrace her and stroke her fair hair while Laura watched, impressed with the feeling of a grown-up mystery, and thrilled because she thought this might at last be the happy ending of their arguments and that from now on things would never go wrong again. Kate's eyes had been sleepy and smiling then. Now they turned on her, wide, distracted and beginning to be angry.

"You're blaming all this on the junk man and his stamp?" she asked disbelievingly.

"Something is draining out of Jacko and into him," Laura said stubbornly. "It's his life force that's being stolen."

"Great Heavens above!" exploded Kate. "Don't frighten me any more with your Space Invaders rubbish! Don't make me think that you're going crazy, too." She stopped and took a deep breath, rubbing her cheek as if someone had struck her.

"I know you can't believe it," Laura said resignedly, "but it's true. Sometimes the room smells of peppermint and that was Carmody Braque's smell, horrible peppermint, and sometimes Jacko smiles with his smile. I have to say what I know. He's bewitched."

"It's not a game," Kate said. "I'd believe you if I could — I'd believe anything that would help me to understand what's happening. But your ideas are symbolic, like the terrible sherry ... whatever is true in them has disguised itself as a fairy tale."

The doctor came and looked at Jacko without enlightenment.

"I think we just might put him into hospital for observation, Mrs Chant," he said at last. "Can you afford a private hospital?" Kate looked doubtfully around.

"Not really ..." she began and then said, "Oh, his father can! I know he will, in a case like this. And if not — we can always sell the house. It's just a question of what's best for Jacko."

"It might be hard to fit him in at the state hospital," the doctor said with a sigh. "I'll ring, if I may,
and..."

"We're not on the 'phone," Kate explained and the doctor said he would go to the clinic and make arrangements from there.

Kate was to ring him in an hour or two and he would tell her what he had organized. Just as he was leaving, Jacko had another spasm, twisting and arching a little less alarmingly than the first time, but it was easy to see the doctor grow very concerned.

"The trouble is, Mrs Chant, I haven't the ghost of an idea what could be the matter with him. It could be some sort of epilepsy, but there are some other symptoms that just don't fit into that category at all. He's best in hospital. There's one doctor — Dr Hayden — he's very good. I'll see if I can't speak to him."

Jacko, in bed at home, already seemed to belong partly to the world of medical mystery, no longer a son or brother, but a puzzling case that would have to be solved. The doctor drove away and Kate looked unhappily at Laura.

"Well, that's that!" she said. "What shops are open on a Saturday morning? He'll need new pajamas at least. Isn't it mad to think of such a thing, but everything he's got is either too small or in the wash. I don't want him looking neglected."

"New Brighton's open on a Saturday," Laura said. "Have you got any money?"

"I'll write a cheque if I have to," Kate said. "Let me see — quarter-of-an-hour to get there, quarter-of-an- hour, say, twenty minutes to buy something for him, and quarter-of-an-hour to come home. It's the best part of an hour. I'd better not go. I wish you were old enough to drive."

"I'll stay by him. I won't move," cried Laura. "I'll look after him just as well as you would. But don't be long, will you?"

"After all it doesn't matter so very much," Kate said. "They'll only put him in hospital pajamas probably."

In their family most of their money went on outside clothes not private ones. Jacko was not neglected but his pajamas were, and Kate finally decided she must go. She went to the door, then rushed back and hugged Laura.

"Darling!" she said in a muffled voice. "Darling Laura! You're
both
so precious to me. Look after Jacko and look after yourself."

"You look after yourself," Laura said. "You're the one that's going out into the world, not me."

She watched through the window as Kate began pushing her car, leaping into it as it began to roll. A moment later she heard the sputtering rattle of the engine reluctantly consenting to fire. Laura was alone in the house. This house which had been a happy house now felt threatening, for its present desperation flowed back into the past and ruined not only the present day but the memory of all that had gone before it, which suddenly seemed to be only a mocking cat-and-mouse game the world had played with them. Jacko was lying very still, scarcely seeming to breathe at all. His fair hair was dull, his lips the colour of the clay used for pottery during arts and crafts at school. He had the slightly withered look of an apple unexpectedly discovered at the bottom of the fruit bowl. His skin was lined by tiny furrows as if it were becoming minutely loose on him, crinkling over shrinking flesh. Never had she seen a human being look so removed from the world, hidden behind closed lids, tightly sewn with invisible threads, and certainly looking as if they might never open again.

"Jacko!" she whispered. "It's me, Jacko! It's Lolly!"
But his eyes and lips remained sternly shut. She took his hand, and nearly dropped it, for it was cold with a still, deep cold, as if no blood or any other function of life moved in it. She held it and kissed the palm hoping he might respond to this small affection, but he remained inert and silent.

Laura went back into the big room and looked out of the window, though there was no chance that Kate would be coming back yet. A light rain had begun to fall. Outside, the world had matched itself up with her own grey, weeping mood. Outside there were two splashes of colour — the red telephone box at the corner of the picture, framed by the window, and the blue Vespa parked beside it. Coming up the path was a moon-walker in a white motorcycle helmet. Laura waited, like someone in a haunted house, for the knock to fall on the door. After a moment it came. Laura opened the door. Sorry stood with his helmet, like a spare head, under his arm.

"Good morning, Chant," he said in rapid but pacific tones. "I've come to make peace." Under his jacket he wore a high-necked black jersey which made his pale hair look a definite yellow. He was quite brown with summer and his light-coloured eyes were startling against his dark skin, but more ordinary this morning — less highly charged and threatening.

"What do you want?" she asked, thinking she sounded childish, rather than cool and slightly cutting as she would have liked to be. However, he seemed to be looking a little beyond her into their house, almost as if he were testing it for clues to other presences.

"Isn't your mother at home?" he said. "You have got a mother, haven't you? You don't run this place alone."

"She's out!" said Laura shortly.

"Good enough! I'll be normal then, not charming," said Sorry. "I've a good line for charming mothers, but I'd rather not. Come on, Chant! Take a risk! Invite me in!"

Laura stood aside to let him in but he still hesitated on the doormat.

"Ask me in!" he told her, smiling. "I have to be asked, but then— after that — I'm hard to get rid of."

"Oh, all right! Come on in!" said Laura rather impatiently and he stepped cautiously through the door.

"We call on each other at odd hours, don't we, but mine's a more respectable hour for a visit than yours. Do you always wear pajamas like that?"

Laura remembered how she had stared at him in his black robe the night before, and how she had looked critically around his room while the cat purred on his knee. Her own pajamas were scarcely more respectable than Jacko's, but at least they had all their buttons.

"It isn't my best pair," she said trying to joke a little. "I keep the black satin ones for special occasions."

"This
is
a special occasion," Sorry said, opening his eyes in apparent astonishment, "but don't rush off to change or anything. Tell me again, what's this about the little brother?"

"He's in here," Laura said. "But a doctor has been. He's going to hospital. It won't do any good though. Only I know what happened and Mum won't believe me. She can't. No one can."

"I promise I can believe six impossible things before breakfast," Sorry said. "That's why I gave breakfast a miss this morning before coming to test your hypothesis. Do you do science down in the fourth form? You didn't tell me last night."

"It's compulsory," Laura said. "I'm not too sure about a hypothesis if that's what you're asking, but I know
Through the Looking-Glass."

"A hypothesis is a suggestion of what might or might not be true," Sorry explained. "You can disprove it, but you might never completely prove it. I think that's how it goes — more proof the world's lopsided. Let's see the boy before your mother comes home and tears a strip off you for entertaining older seventh form men in your pajamas."

"You really do think you're terrific, don't you?" Laura said with a faint grin.

"Someone has to," Sorry replied, following her into Jacko's room. "Those harridans at home have
been...
Heavens above, Chant!" he suddenly exclaimed. "What's that smell?" Laura could almost have hugged him because he could smell the peppermint too, but she held her breath and waited while he looked at Jacko.

"Well, well!" he said after a moment. "You clever girl! You were right and I was wrong." Laura released a gushing sigh of relief. Sorry sat down on a chair by Jacko's bed — a chair draped in Kate's underwear.

"Go on! Tell me all!" he said, as he lifted first one of Jacko's eyelids and then the other, not so much to look at his eyes as to notice the way they closed. Laura told her story as tersely as she could.

"Demon! Spirit! Incubus!" said Sorry. "It sounds to me as if whatever faculty you have that makes you — you know — able to guess at some of the extreme people drifting around in the world — it sounds as if that faculty was stuck for the right word. Does this Carmody Braque have any — did he have a word branded on his forehead, say, or any mark that might have been a word crossed out?"

"No, nothing like that," Laura said definitely. "He was quite bald — his hair was thin and clipped very short. I'd have certainly seen it." Sorry appeared to abandon a briefly-held hypothesis of his own. He stared at Jacko — picked up his hand and sighed, shaking his head.