The Imaginary (9 page)

She
was on the ground. She'd been knocked over too. Her head rested on the tarmac in a small dark puddle. Her eyes were shut.

Her left arm was thrown out above her head at an unusual angle. She looked peaceful, but weird. Then he realised he couldn't see her breathing.

Was she breathing? He couldn't tell.

Before
he could run to her there were people everywhere.

The driver of the car had opened her door, was staggering, saying, ‘She just ran out in front of me… I couldn't stop… She just ran out.' Her face was grey. There were tears on her cheeks.

Someone was phoning an ambulance. Someone was listening to Amanda's chest, was holding the wrist of the arm that wasn't bent oddly. Someone was pointing back the way they'd come, where they'd run from, saying something.

The rain fell, harder now.

And then Amanda's mum was there, crying, lifting Amanda up. Someone tried to stop her, saying she shouldn't be moved, but her mum knelt on the tarmac and held her and stroked her hair.

And then the crowd of people blocked them from Rudger's sight and because they couldn't see him, he got nudged out of the way, further back.

And then the ambulance came and Amanda went away.

There was a hole in the middle of Rudger. A hole where his heart had been, or where he'd imagined it to be, or where Amanda had imagined it to be. He was hollow now, echoing like an empty can.

When he looked around he found he was still in the car park. The ambulance had gone ages before. Mr Bunting and the girl had vanished, scared off by the crowd perhaps. And now most of the cars were gone too. Amanda's mum's car was still there. She'd gone off in the ambulance. Would she come back for it? What did people do when such terrible things happened?

Rudger didn't know.

There was so much Rudger didn't know. He didn't know the way home. He didn't know if he still had a home. He didn't know if he would be welcome in Amanda's house without Amanda.
What
good would it do him to be there if Amanda wasn't there to see him?

What would Amanda's mum do in an empty house? To be all alone is a dreadful thing. He thought of the photographs of Amanda and her mum on the hallway wall, and of the one of her mum and her dad before he'd died, right back before Amanda was born. He thought of the pictures of her grandparents and her aunts and uncles. All photos of other people. There were none of him. None of Rudger.

Without Amanda there to see him, it wouldn't be his house any more, would it?

He lifted his hands up. They weren't see-through, not exactly
. He hadn't simply faded away like Amanda said he would, but they were definitely greyer, definitely fainter than they'd been before. There was something smoky about them. When he moved them quickly they left a wisp of a trail behind them.

The day had moved on without him noticing. The clouds had disappeared and the sun was now sinking behind the swimming pool. Shadows were creeping across the tarmac. As long as he stood in the car park the things that had happened there played in his head like a film. He had to get away. If he was to think straight, if he was to come up with a plan, if he was to work out what to do next, he needed to put the car park behind him.

And so, because he had to do
something
, and because he didn't know what, Rudger ran.

He
jogged past the last few cars and ran between the last swimmers leaving the pool. (They didn't see him, but felt the rush of wind curl between them as he ran by, and wondered at the faint grey gunpowder smell in the air.)

He ran down the path at the side of the big building. His lungs were fiery and his legs ached, but he kept running. The spiral tube of the water slide passed by overhead, and neat flowerbeds passed by on the other side. Gravel crunched under his feet. He dodged a pothole, jumped a puddle and suddenly he was running on grass.

Behind the swimming pool, at the end of the path he'd run along, was the town park.

It was green and wide and the sight of such a fresh open space lifted him for a second. It was just the sort of place Amanda could have, and would have, dreamt into becoming a whole new huge world. He stopped running and leant on his knees. No matter how hard he looked at the park, no matter what he wished it to become, it stayed a park. He didn't have the spark in his head that she'd had in hers. He didn't have the imagination needed to imagine new worlds.

In fact, he thought, feeling a strange faint tingling, he didn't even have the imagination to imagine himself.

He held his hands up and saw the outlines of trees through them. He saw the greens of trees through them too, faint, greyish greens, but greens nonetheless. He was fading away. Without
Amanda
to think of him, to remember him, to dream him, to make him real, he was slipping away.

Rudger was being forgotten. He was disappearing. Evaporating.

He walked into the shade of a tree and touched its thick patchwork bark with his fingertip. It looked rough, gnarled, hard, but it was like marshmallow. His faint fading finger hardly felt it at all.

He slumped on the grass with his back to the tree trunk. It was comfortable. It was like resting on a pillow.

He was fading all over now.

He felt sleepy and sleepier.

He shut his eyes.

What would it be like to fade away? To vanish entirely?

Time would tell, he thought, soon enough, time would tell.

‘I can see you,' said a voice.

Rudger looked up.

Who'd said that?

At first he didn't see the black shape. It had grown dark under the tree. Night was falling, and the cat was simply a darker cat-shaped shape in the darkness.

A
cat
?

Had a cat just spoken to him?

He said nothing, unsure of what one should say to a cat.

‘Little boy,' the cat said. ‘I
can
see you.'

At
Rudger's back the tree was suddenly uncomfortable. The cushioniness of it had snapped back into the usual expected rough barkiness. He lifted his hands. It was hard to tell in the half-light of the evening, but they looked, and they certainly felt, like real fingers again. They'd lost their wispiness, their haze.

‘You can see me?' he said, feeling a little foolish.

‘Oh, I see you,' the cat said.

‘But no one ever sees me.'

‘Someone must do. Someone must have. I know your sort. I know what you are.'

‘Who are you?' Rudger asked. ‘
What
are you?'

‘Me? I'm Zinzan.'

‘Zinzan,' Rudger repeated, trying out the unfamiliar name.

‘Yes,' the cat said. ‘And do you have a name? I could just call you “boy”, but there are so many boys in the world it would become confusing.'

‘I'm called Rudger,' Rudger said.

‘Hmm.'

Rudger wished he could see the cat's expression. It was too dark to make anything out. Its voice sounded haughty, a touch bored, as if it wanted to be somewhere else, as if it had something better to be doing. He didn't know if the cat
was
bored, if it
did
have somewhere better to be, or whether that was just how cats sounded. He'd never heard a cat talk before. As far as he knew no one had.

He
wondered if someone was playing a trick on him, but then who
could
play a trick on him? You'd have to see him first, and the only person who'd ever seen him had been Amanda. (And, he remembered with a lurch, Mr Bunting.)

As he thought of Amanda he felt himself begin to fade again.

‘Oh no you don't,' Zinzan said. ‘I believe in you, Rudger. And I'm not going to have you Fade on me.' Rudger noticed the way the cat said the word, with a capital ‘F' as if it were a medical condition. ‘It's tricky, isn't it, these first few days? Being forgotten? But it happens to you all, sooner or later. Come with me. Come on.'

‘I've not been forgotten,' Rudger answered, half-angry. ‘Not
forgotten
.' He softened his voice. It wasn't the cat's fault and besides his heart was weighing the words down. ‘There was an accident. Amanda got knocked down, she was…' He paused before he reached the word he meant to say, and then said a different one. ‘…hurt.'

The cat said nothing.

‘I think…' Rudger went on haltingly, finding the words hard to say, but wanting to say them, needing to say them all the same. ‘I think she's…dead. They took her away. And I was left on my own.'

‘No,' said Zinzan casually. ‘I've seen what happens when someone dies, seen what happens to someone like you. They die; you vanish, like shutting a door. Gone in a second. No, you…you're just
Fading
, boy, and Fading means you're being forgotten, that's all.'

Rudger's
heart began to beat again. ‘She's alive?'

‘Evidently so, or I wouldn't be speaking to you.'

‘Then I've got to find her. I've got to go to her.'

‘And how will you do that, little Will-o'-the-wisp? Five minutes on your own and you'll blow away on the breeze. I've no time to look for your girl, but I won't leave you to Fade. I'm not heartless. I'll take you somewhere safe, somewhere useful.'

And with those words the cat turned and trotted off through the long grass, away from the tree and didn't once look behind to see if Rudger was following.

What choice did Rudger have?

No choice.

He scrambled to his feet and followed.