The Fetch of Mardy Watt

They turned the corner to Hobson’s. Mardy looked with naked dislike at the camera mounted on the school gate, which they were obliged to pass. Cameras gave her the creeps and the hospital was full of them.

“Hal – would you think I was crazy if I said I thought I was being followed?”

“Followed!” repeated Hal, instinctively looking back down the tree-lined road. “Who do you think’s following you?”

“Don’t say it like that – like you think I really was crazy! Anyway, I don’t mean followed, quite. But watched. I think someone might be watching me.”

“Mr Shute through the CCTV?” suggested Hal. “It’s three minutes to nine again, we’ve got to hurry.”

Mardy looked annoyed. “You don’t understand,” she said. “Wait while I go to Hobson’s – I’ll tell you after.”

Mardy sprinted the fifty yards to Hobson’s, rather flustered. She really had meant to tell Hal what was bothering her, but found it was not so easy to explain. Rachel Fludd came into it, and the diary entry, and the strange thing that had happened at the War Memorial the previous afternoon.

And Alan? Perhaps, thought Mardy furiously, perhaps everything comes into it. Perhaps it’s another way of saying that life is strange, that the sky is blue and water is wet. A way of saying not much. But I’m not the kind of person who gets in a state over nothing, she thought. I’m just not that imaginative.

Mardy burst into Hobson’s, steaming with frustration. Nut Krunch Bars, at least, were reliable.

Mrs Hobson looked up from her paper. “Oh. Hello, Mardy.” For some reason she seemed surprised to see her. “What can I do for you?”

“My usual Nut Krunch,” said Mardy. “I’ve finished with low-calorie imitations – they taste like cardboard. Back to double chocolate from now on.”

Again Mrs Hobson looked at her oddly. “Back with a vengeance, I’d say. Two in half an hour is pushing it, isn’t it?”

“What?” asked Mardy distractedly, as she placed the right coins on to the counter.

“Two Nut Krunch Bars in one day. You only just left the shop.”

“What did you say?”

“Oh, not that it’s any business of mine,” protested Mrs Hobson. “I know what it’s like, Fighting Temptation. Would you believe I used to have a twenty-six inch waist?”

“I haven’t been in here since yesterday,” protested Mardy.

“If you say so,” laughed Mrs Hobson in an infuriating, disbelieving way.

“But I haven’t!”

“Then all I can say is, your doppelganger was here ten minutes ago – and she likes double-chocolate Nut Krunch Bars too. Now, hadn’t you better get along? Your friend’s getting in a bit of a state out there.”

True enough, Hal was standing at the window between two pyramids of baked beans, frantically tapping his watch. Mardy muttered a goodbye and left.

“Don’t forget your chocolate!” called Mrs Hobson.

Another dash for the classroom. This time they almost ran into the school caretaker, Mr Bartok, who was screwing a bracket into the wall over the main entrance. “Mind my ladder!” he warned and teetered bulkily at the top.

Since Christmas the school had sprouted a ring of CCTV cameras. To keep out Undesirables, Mrs Watt had said, and a good thing too. But when Mardy saw Mr Shute, the headteacher, looking out over the playground from his first-floor office, she wondered. Perhaps it was the pupils, rather than any intruder, who were his main concern. She did not think she had ever been nearer to Mr Shute than the thirty feet separating them at the weekly assemblies, where he swept in, exhorted them and left. For all she knew Mr Shute might be a robot, or a hologram, or – or – anything …

Throughout assembly, Mardy kept looking up and down the hall, wondering who, if anyone, might have been mistaken for her. Perhaps, as Mrs Hobson had said, she really did have a double – or something close enough to fool the shopkeeper, who was shortsighted and always had her nose in the paper. Rows and rows of children surrounded her, short, tall, thin and fat, white, black and brown. From awkward Year 7s like herself to the willowy grandeur of Year 13, hundreds of girls in that room wore the Bellevue School sweatshirt. On hundreds of chests the same school logo was embroidered: a ship in full sail that actually looked more like a kitten being run over by a milk float.

Mardy couldn’t decide which struck her more: how very different everyone was or (in another way) how very much the same. They were all standing with their bored assembly expressions, as the head ran through arrangements for the Year 8 trip to the Science Museum. The same expressions persisted as he launched into the statutory hymn and warned them about the litter problem in the streets outside the school. But none of them, Mardy decided, looked enough like her to deceive Mrs Hobson.

Except, possibly, Rachel. But even Rachel was so much thinner, with her long blanched, moon face and coal-black eyes, that Mrs Hobson would have had to be blind not to see the difference. Rachel Fludd probably hadn’t eaten a Nut Krunch Bar in her life.

It might not have been so bad if Rachel hadn’t been writing in her notebook again at wet play that day. The children were kept in their classrooms, bored and out of temper. In the corner of Mardy’s class Mrs Yarrow sipped away at a mug of coffee, clearly wishing she could be in the staffroom instead. Hal and his chess-playing friends found a set and retired to the corner. The room was as sweaty as a boxer’s sock. Mardy, swinging her legs idly as she sat on the edge of a table, found without surprise that she and Rachel were the only two girls who had not attached themselves to some group or other.

Looking down at her own legs, she compared them with Rachel’s. Fat Tuesday. String Bean Sally. Rachel must be as far under the perfect weight as Mardy was above it. There must be some perfect girl of whom they were both just freakish reflections. Certainly, something seemed to tie the two of them together. In the weeks since Rachel’s arrival they had hardly ever spoken; yet Rachel seemed to fill a bigger place in her life than anyone else except Hal and her own family.

The battered leather notebook in which Rachel was writing was much less plush than the diary Mardy kept at home, but even that seemed another unwelcome link between them. And how furtively Rachel wrote! As if she were an enemy spy …

Despite herself, Mardy was curious to know what so absorbed Rachel. She got down from the table and made her way to Rachel’s desk – not directly but by a route as aimless as possible. First, she stopped to check Hal’s progress on the chessboard: he had just castled and was preparing to do something devastating with his rook. His eyes for once were narrowed, his lip bitten white with controlled ferocity. Mardy moved on, exchanging pleasantries with Kylie and Susannah at the expense of their friend Michelle, who was off that day with a cold. And so (under the flickering eye of Mrs Yarrow, who was probably itching for a cigarette) she arrived just behind Rachel. Rachel had not seen her approach or she would certainly have put the notebook into her pocket at once. Even so, Mardy could not see what she was writing because Rachel had crooked her arm round protectively and she hung her head low over the paper with her hair falling raggedly around it.

So Mardy took a long shot.

“Who is he, then, Rachel?” she asked out loud. “Who are you writing love poems to?”

Rachel twisted round in alarm, blushed and hurriedly shut the notebook. A moment later it was not there – though Mardy didn’t quite see which pocket she had put it in. All this happened in an instant, during which Mardy found herself backing off from Rachel’s desk as though a hand had pushed her roughly away.

“Keep your nose out of it, Mardi Gras!”

Mardy staggered back to her seat. She was breathless and a little frightened at the fury she had managed to provoke in quiet, unobtrusive Rachel. But she was smiling too, because she had won some kind of victory. For Rachel to be made angry, she must have been touched at last. And Rachel did not like to be touched.

It didn’t take long for the news that Rachel was in love to spread to the Bluecoat girls. The rest of the morning Mardy watched them prodding her like a spider in a jar. English, where they were reading Romeo and Juliet, presented almost too many opportunities to be true. Biology was just as good. Rachel had to wait until the maths lesson after lunch for the teasing to die down. Even then, the mystery of Rachel’s boyfriend threatened to break out in unpredictable ways: an equation here, a co-ordinate there.

“And who are you co-ordinating with, Rachel?”

Mardy said nothing. She knew from her days as Queen of Fairlawn Primary just how little work was needed to start a rumour. Once the process was begun, any class would unite in the chase. Beyond Rachel herself, no one would suspect that Mardy was behind it at all.

Except Hal, of course. “Up to your old tricks, Mardy?” he said to her as they made their way down the corridor after maths. They were being buffeted like channel swimmers in a rough sea and it was with difficulty that Mardy managed to toss her head disdainfully and say: “I don’t know what you mean.”

“I’m sure you don’t,” said Hal, with his terrier face on. “I’m your friend, remember? I know the way you work.”

“Oh shut up, Jiminy Cricket! When I need a conscience I’ll advertise.”

“You’ve got one already,” retorted Hal between buffets. “Remember Theresa Greystoke?”

“Oh, her!” Buffet. Buffet. “I just felt sorry for the little squirt.”

Mardy shifted herself so that she was separated from Hal beyond talking distance. She didn’t care to be reminded of Theresa Greystoke.

For a brief time Theresa had been Mardy’s rival at Fairlawn Primary. Beautiful, clever, an expert juggler and the owner of two ponies, Theresa had arrived from the north in her last year. For a while she had charmed everyone and Mardy had felt her own star beginning to lose some of its glitter.

But then a rumour started – and no one knew how – that Theresa Greystoke had had plastic surgery on her nose and ears. That those dazzling white teeth were dentures. That one of her bright blue eyes was actually made of glass. It was whispered too that Theresa Greystoke’s father had bribed the headteacher to get good test results. Overnight, and without realising what had happened to her, popular Theresa Greystoke became an outcast.

Very little of this had come from Mardy directly. She had started the first rumour – only half expecting to be believed – then watched, in growing wonder, as the torrent had swept her rival from sight. In the end, she had rescued her. “Theresa Greystoke is my friend!” she had announced fiercely in the girls’ toilets, where a Year 5 was scribbling something foul on the wall. It was enough. The word went out that Theresa was under Mardy’s protection: the persecution ceased. Theresa herself – poor, trusting Theresa – had been terribly grateful.

Only Hal knew the whole story. Not that Mardy had ever told him, but he kept his eyes open, Hal did, and he understood Mardy too well for comfort. Mardy thought it over. So Hal thought that Rachel might become another Theresa Greystoke, did he? If Mardy had still been Queen Bee, then yes – maybe. But Rachel and she were on equal terms here. The rest of the class thought little enough of either of them. That made it a fair fight, didn’t it? And it was Rachel who had started it. Mardi Gras!

The next lesson was chemistry. Outside, the sleet had turned stutteringly to snow. At first the flakes were too large to settle, falling flat on their watery faces. But a little later there was a mother-of-pearl sheen to the asphalt and on the larch tree the small twigs hung exhausted under the weight of newly-gathered ice. In thirty minutes the playground was choked with it. Silent snow. The more Mardy looked at it the more she felt that it wasn’t quite real, that the whole day had got off on the wrong foot and had better retrace its steps. She tried to concentrate on the test tube in front of her, on the blue flame from the Bunsen burner. In the distance – too distant to be made out clearly – there was a thin, whining hum. And plink – a sound like a string snapping or being plucked – and another … Water thawing and falling into pools of ice, ice breaking under its own weight and hunkering down into itself. And the burner’s furnace flame roaring …

“Ouch!”

Two rows in front of her, Rachel jumped back in her seat as a tightly-folded wad of paper bounced stingingly off her cheek. Mardy didn’t see who had thrown it. It must have flown past her own shoulder from somewhere at the back of the classroom. But from the way Rachel looked round as she bent to retrieve the paper it was clear whom she thought to blame. At her side, Hal too was peering at Mardy strangely: as if he hardly recognised her.

Rachel unfolded the paper. It was a piece of lined A4, just like the paper on a dozen pads all around the class. Just like the pad on Mardy’s own desk. As Rachel read what was written there, Mardy saw her face flush darker with embarrassment and anger. She really seemed to be on the point of tears. When she looked round again it was with an expression of such shame and such knowledge, such open dislike – that it was Mardy who turned away.

“Whatever did you write on that note?” hissed Hal.

“Nothing! I mean – it wasn’t me who threw it.”

“No?” replied Hal with frank disbelief.

“No!”

Hal crooked a smile and peered at her again with that look of strange half-recognition. “Have it your way.”

This made Mardy furious. “Why don’t you believe me? Friends should trust each other!”

For the rest of the afternoon Hal made himself very busy with chemistry notes. When the final bell rang, Mardy waited for him at their usual spot, under the larch tree in the front playground. The snow had stopped falling, had thawed a little and then frozen harder, so that the asphalt was growing a treacherous, invisible skin, with an inch or so of snow underfoot. She saw Hal at an upstairs window once, being hustled along by a group of larger boys. Five minutes later she spotted his back, already halfway down the road from school. That was odd – he must have passed right by her. Even if he wasn’t talking to her, how had she missed him?

Crunch crunch, like walkers on a gravel beach, the children left the school. Cars were waiting for many of them, lights on, moving tenderly up the road edges and away. Mardy hung back. She sketched a circle round the larch tree with her heel. She had not seen Rachel leave either and was thankful.

3 URANIBORG

AT LENGTH, MARDY sighed and started up the long avenue of plane trees to the main road and the tangled streets beyond, one of which was her own. Already, the road had largely cleared. There were only a few children in sight. Some were trying to make snowballs from a fall no more than a fingernail’s depth. The distracting snow suited Mardy. She did not want to talk to anyone. Now she had another incident to ponder and for once she did not miss Hal’s company. Hal would have irritated her by telling her that her imagination was playing tricks. But Mardy suspected that a ghost had preceded her home yesterday and bought a Nut Krunch Bar from Mrs Hobson this morning. Perhaps the same ghost had been responsible for hitting Rachel with a piece of crumpled-up paper this afternoon. It was possible, she supposed. Mardy had heard of such things: poltergeists, they were called.

She had heard of other things, too. People fooling themselves, for a start. If you disliked someone the way she disliked Rachel, perhaps you might chuck something at her and then deny it – even to yourself. No one wants to think of herself as a bully, do they? And no one wants to think of herself as the kind of greedy pig who would scoff two Nut Krunch Bars in half an hour. How much easier to blame it all on a poltergeist, a double, an imposter …

By this time she was more than halfway up Bellevue Road, and nearly at Hal’s house. Perhaps she would call on him after all. She could use some of his common sense now. Hal would keep her feet on the ground, frozen toes and all.

But there in front of Hal’s front gate was a most unlikely group. Rachel Fludd herself was nearest, with her back to the street – and either side of her stood two of the Bluecoat girls, leering unpleasantly down the road at Mardy as if she had turned up on the underside of a shoe. They weren’t just standing, either – they were standing guard: feet apart and waiting (Mardy was immediately certain of it) for Mardy herself. And from one of them came yesterday’s catcall: “Mardi Gras!”

That was just the opening round. Most of it came from the Bluecoat girls, but not all. Mardy was surrounded by voices. The leaden clouds themselves were echoing back their low opinion of her.

“Lardy Mardy!”

“Pink and sweaty, legs like a Yeti, hair like a plate of cold spaghetti…”

“Where do you get your clothes from, Mardy? A tent-hire shop?”

“And who are you calling a witch?”

The last voice cut through the rest and silenced them. It silenced everything. Mardy could not help looking towards it. There was Rachel, standing alone. Gone were the Bluecoat girls, gone Rachel’s own tearful sulk. Her dark eyes were trained on Mardy like shotgun barrels.

“Never,” said Rachel, in a voice as cold as flint, “do that again. Ever.”

She stepped into the road and began to cross without once taking her eyes off Mardy. Mardy realised with a jolt that Bellevue Road was not merely growing emptier as the school traffic cleared. It was quite deserted. The plane tree avenue stretched on into the distance and ended in a shimmer of sickly, yellow light that made her think of the smoke from damp leaves. It was the same both ways. No school any more, no shops, no people. Just two interminable rows of blinkered houses. Just Mardy and Rachel.

“Where is everyone?” Mardy asked, her voice trembling, as Rachel approached her. “What have you done?”

Rachel seemed different now, as everything was different: taller, more powerful. She did not speak at first. She was staring into Mardy’s face, apparently searching there for some concealed mark or sign.

“Stand still!” she commanded – but distractedly, as if Mardy were a needle she was trying to thread, rather than a human being.

“Rachel, what’s going on?” said Mardy.

“It must be here. Is it at the nape of your neck?”

“What?”

“Or inside your elbow? I’d have seen if it was in one of the obvious places.”

“Rachel, listen to me! I don’t know what you’re talking about!”

“I’m looking for your mark, of course! The Crescent of Initiation! How else could you know I was a witch?” asked Rachel irritably. “How could you know a thing like that without being one yourself?”

“Are you crazy?”

“You wrote that note, didn’t you? In the hieratic script! Foolish, foolish.”

“I don’t know what you’re-’

“And, if more proof were needed,” Rachel added in deep disgust, “here you are in Uraniborg itself.” She gestured around her, to the smoky, yellow horizons at either end of the endless street and at the blank-eyed windows facing them.

Uraniborg. The word was strange to Mardy, but it seemed to waft through her mind like mist through moonlight, with a dreadful melancholy. She repeated, limply, that she wasn’t a witch and hadn’t called Rachel a witch – didn’t even believe in witches (Rachel snorted here) and had certainly never heard of Uraniborg. “I just want to get home,” she said.

Rachel did not seem to be listening anyway. Whatever she had been looking for on Mardy’s face was obviously not to be found. Finally, she put her hands on her hips and admitted defeat.

“OK – I was wrong. You’ve got Artemisian blood, of course, but you’re not an initiate.”

She still seemed to be talking to herself more than to Mardy. Standing there in her school uniform – one size too small – with her face screwed up as if she was in the middle of a tricky maths problem, Rachel looked for a moment as out of place as Mardy felt. She wasn’t at all Mardy’s idea of a witch. But for all that, Mardy did not doubt her. Whatever else the air of Uraniborg did, it made believing that kind of thing easier.

Perhaps Mardy’s eyes were only now growing accustomed to the strange light here; or perhaps it had only now chosen to show itself, but something was becoming visible at the end of the street – just where Bellevue School ought to have been. It was a tall, thick tower with a conical roof. Its walls, as far as Mardy could make out, were of rusty, red brick, but its roof was gold and in this sunless world it was the brightest thing she could see. Powered by some unseen engine, the roof was turning slowly and in complete silence. The golden tiles were revolving on the axis of that central turret.

Just coming into view was a place where the expanse of gold was broken by a small square of darkness. Mardy realised that this was a raised hatch: one of the golden tiles had been lifted on a hinge and propped open. And from the hatch a tube projected, crimson and silver.

“A telescope?” said Mardy.

“The Mayor…” breathed Rachel. “Quick, I’ll hide us.”

There was a new and urgent note in her voice. Rachel began rubbing her hands together, one over the other, as if she were washing with soap. Within moments her hands were no longer empty. They held an object the size and shape of a duck egg, a smooth bolus of yellow smoke. She threw it to the ground, where it cracked open and bubbled out a dull, tarry liquid. Steam rose, the same nicotine yellow as the air of Uraniborg, and hung in a thick curtain between them and the tower. The tower was invisible again.

“If he’s really looking hard for you, this won’t stop him, of course,” said Rachel. Even her voice was muffled by the curtain of yellow air. “Let’s hope it’s a routine survey.”

Clearly, she expected Mardy to understand what she was talking about. But Mardy’s incomprehension must have been obvious from her face.

“You really don’t know what’s going on, do you?” said Rachel.

“No. And I don’t think I want to.”

“I keep forgetting. It’s because you’ve found your way here even though you don’t understand about having a separable soul, and I don’t see you how could have … Oh, bother!”

Rachel looked petulant, as if she had failed to guess a simple riddle. She even stamped her foot. “Oh, bother!” she repeated. “I see it all now.”

She stood there biting her lip for such a long time that Mardy was eventually forced to prompt her: “What do you see?”

“What you’re here for, of course! We knew he was preparing the Binding Spell again, but I never thought he’d act so fast. Come to the horse trough and I’ll show you.”

Rachel took Mardy’s hand and turned about so that they were facing the blank wall between Hal’s house and the next. Only now the wall was no longer blank. Most of the pavement was obscured by a large stone trough and above it a tombstone-shaped plaque had been engraved in leafy letters.

Weary traveller take your ease

Lay down the burden that you carry,

It is compact of foolish cares

Then stay and by this fountain tarry.

Life’s a race not won by hurry

Chasing every flattering breeze

Let Fortune brag and Care be sorry

Weary traveller take your ease.

Near the bottom of the plaque a cherub puffed his cheeks and blew. A green copper pipe projected from his mouth like a pea-shooter and there was a pump handle.

“Don’t look so surprised,” said Rachel. “It’s been there all the time, you know.”

Mardy was quite certain that it had not, but she did not wish to provoke another of Rachel’s snorts by protesting. She noticed, however, as she and Rachel moved the few paces to the horse trough, that the curtain of yellow air Rachel had created followed them obediently, smudging the light as it came and blocking the far end of the street from view.