The Changeover Read online

  His clothes, bought perhaps in the pleasant expectation of a continued, virile existence, hung on him, loose and dirty, his teeth had become a neglected goblin cemetery. Catching her eye, his smile stretched itself wide with anxiety. Behind him the Gardendale Reserve stood with its rather grimly determined commitment to recreation. It was land which had been held in the original subdivision and bulldozed flat for tennis courts, grounds for netball, cricket, rugby and soccer. There was a track around it where people went jogging. But from the gateway a short, paved path led to a memorial for a civic-minded councillor who had died while the Reserve was being bulldozed, and it was for this that Laura headed, with Mr Braque sidling and querulous, coming behind, alternately abusing her and supplicating. In the distance a man on a mowing- machine looked strangely archaic, as if he were driving some sort of mechanical chariot, and a team of minis- cule marching girls stepped in fairly straight lines, moving and gesturing to blasts of their instructor's whistle. Laura turned at last to face Carmody Braque.

  "Go back!" she said abruptly.

  "Go back?" he cried. "Go back? You've made me walk all this way and now you tell me ..."

  "Listen," said Laura. "You're already dead. Admit it. You're just left-over bits and not the best bits either." She made her voice as severe as she could. "Stop pretending to be human. Be what you truly are."

  "Oh, no!" screamed Mr Braque. "No ... I was invited ... I was called in ..."

  "I'm uninviting you," Laura said. "You've overstayed your welcome. OK? I was going to punish you slowly, but Sorry Carlisle says it might not be good for me. So go back and let's get it over and done with."

  As if her words had an immediate force, running like a disintegrating shock through the figure so barely held together, stretched thin by many, many years of ignoble survival, something horrifying began to happen to Carmody Braque. His voice was raised in shrill, whining expostulation.

  "Oh, don't make me — if only you knew — if only you knew ... I fell in love with the idea of human sensation, you see. I couldn't, no I couldn't give it up. And, you can't imagine, you take it all for granted — it's yours by right so you never think: the pleasures of touch and taste. Your skin alone — your skin affords you such — rapture!" cried Mr Braque, clawing at her. What remained of his face twitched all over, a tiny, violent quivering as if he had just been killed. "To eat a peach, picked straight from the tree and warmed by the autumn sun, to bite a crisp apple— the first juice— a revelation — or to feel the sun on bare skin. Salt! Salt!" cried Mr Braque writhing, "Salt on a fresh-laid egg, boiled for four minutes, or to lick fresh, human sweat." His face was slipping to bits, the right side rather more quickly than the left. His voice wavered, as if it were being played at the wrong speed.

  "Go back!" Laura whispered, trying to look away. "You're not going to do to anyone again what you did to Jacko — never!" But she could not take her eyes from her victim. She forced her gaze into ruthlessness and used it as a goad to drive Mr Braque back toward his beginning, murmuring his despairing catalogue of sensual pleasures. His face changed and changed again and bits of many faces looked out of it— men, women and little children, all of whom had taken various pleasures in being alive, and had fallen victim to the ravenous spirit pleading before her.

  "Let me feel — let me go on feeling..." Mr Braque pleaded. His voice grew more bubbling. "Let me ..." he said, and choked. His protruding tongue was now quite black and round, a parrot's tongue in a man's mouth. His mouth did not close properly again, as if the jaw had begun to dislocate, and his voice squealed on, increasingly incoherent. "To feel... to feeeel..."

  But Laura had feelings as part of her human right and did not need to steal other people's. "Feel..." said the hateful voice grown thick and churning, and Laura could only tell what was said because of what had been said before, and he continued to change back through the centuries of stolen life until his clothes collapsed around what at first appeared to be a rotting, heaving mass which lay still, at last, and was nothing but dead leaves.

  Mr Braque's clothes, which had recently looked grubby and limp on him, looked immaculate again when folded around the leaves— extended more or less in the shape of a man, a little damp, smelling of melancholy, but in the end not in the least horrible. Laura sat down beside them. She looked up at the sky which had nothing to say to her ... it just went on being blue in its implacable fashion.

  She thought she would never move again but would sit there until she turned to stone and became part of the monument. Jacko was saved. Her enemy was gone. She had come to a stop at last. Laura felt wet all over and looked up with surprise although she knew the sky overhead was clear and there was no rain. She was dripping with perspiration, and very cold inside her head. A moment later she realized that the cold actually belonged to the stone against which her head was leaning. She was grateful for the discomfort which brought her back to life. A school shoe came into her line of vision.

  "There, you see..." said Sorry's voice. "I couldn't keep away. Forget him and come away with me. It's nothing horrible, is it? Only dead leaves!" As he spoke he was feeling gingerly in the pocket of the jacket on the ground.

  "What are you looking for?" Laura asked.

  "Car keys!" he said. "If I leave the keys in his car there's a good chance that someone will steal it and drive it away. It's not impossible, and the more confused things are, the better for us. Why did you come here, of all places? It's so public you could have sold tickets."

  "But it's the loneliest place I know," Laura said at last, in a puzzled voice. "On week days there's great spaces and nowhere for anyone to creep up behind you." The marching girls in the distance formed fours and saluted an imaginary dignitary. The mowing- machine clattered savagely.

  "It's certainly surrealistic," Sorry said, beginning to move back towards the road.

  "Don't let anyone see you at the car," Laura warned him.

  "School prefect arrested for car conversion," sighed Sorry, turning it into a newspaper headline. He walked across the grass to the bushes and trees that had been planted around the Reserve. Laura watched him and then blinked as he vanished. Five minutes later he reappeared, laughing. "The marching girls might think I went in there for a pee if they happen to be glancing this way," he said. "There's an old bloke in there with a bottle of wine — two bottles, I think. When I reappeared he said to one of his bottles, 'Don't worry, Dorothy. It's just the good witch of the North.' Who'd have thought that any one who'd read The Wizard of Oz would wind up as a wino in the Gardendale Reserve!"

  "Perhaps he just saw the picture," Laura said, and Sorry laughed.

  "It's over, Chant!" he said. Laura nodded, but did not move. Sorry squatted down in front of her.

  "Chant?" he said. "Didn't your mother ever tell you you get piles from sitting on cold concrete? Don't go all limp now! Get up. Be a man!"

  "I can be just as good not being one," Laura said, but she was glad to have an order to follow at that moment. She stood up beside him.

  "It's over," he repeated. "All over!" and stared down at the shoes, worn to match particular feet and a particular way of walking and now filled with dead leaves. For the second time that day he looked as if his true name was Sorrow. Then he laughed, hooked her arm through his and led her down the narrow path back towards the road.

  "Come back to my place," he tempted her. "I'll show you that space on my wall and make you a cup of — I don't know ..." He looked around vaguely. "Of cocoa, perhaps. That sounds homely and comforting. Don't look so deadly. You've won. Jacko's getting better, the bad spirits are flown and I think you've got beautiful legs. What more could you ask for?"

  Laura began to cry. She was puzzled by her own tears, for she was not feeling unhappy. Still, it seemed she had been saving them up for a long time and had to spend them freely at last. Once begun they would not stop coming. She trembled as if she was cold with a chill or burning with a fever. Her tears fell on and on like warm rain. Sorry looked at her with dismay.
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  "Here, no crying!" he said. "I can't stand crying."

  "I know!" Laura agreed, weeping generously. "All the disadvantages of being married and ..."

  But Sorry turned on her abruptly. "Shut up, will you?" he exclaimed. "I say stupid things at times. Don't bother remembering them! It's just that tears are catching."

  They were almost on the road, crossing the narrow belt of shrubs and trees that ran around the recreation ground.

  "Come in here for a moment!" he said. "Not that side! The old wino's in there." In the shadow of the summer leaves he began to kiss first her wet cheeks and then her mouth so that she tasted her own salt tears on him. "Go on— put you arms around me," he told her. "There — you hold me tight and I'll do the same for you. Forget Mr Braque — forget Jacko even — just think about this, Laura ... Laura ..."

  "I wasn't even sure you knew my first name," Laura said at last.

  "I save it for best," he told her, looking thoughtfully around the narrow, green room of leaves within which they stood. "We'd better go, though. Don't get me wrong, but I think you should go to bed for a little bit and sleep everything off."

  "I feel better than I did," Laura said. She half wanted Sorry to kiss her again.

  Later, Laura woke up lying on the old settee in Sorry's study, a patchwork cushion under her cheek, and a rug over her. Sorry sat, not at his desk but beside her, doing some unspecified homework. Laura watched his hand move over the paper. It was brown and slightly angular and had a smear of grease from the Vespa across the back.

  Sorry wrote steadily on, then suddenly said, without looking at her, "Chant, I rang your mother and either she or your father will be along to relocate you soon. She sounded very suspicious, I must say. Maybe you'd better start waking up and putting your shoes on. No sense in behaving impeccably and not getting the credit for it, is there?"

  "Is it dark?" asked Laura.

  "Twilight only," Sorry said. "Summer twilight, and I'm deep into parliamentary development under the Stuarts. Exams for me soon. Bursary exams and the end of school. It's quite a remarkable thought."

  Out in the Reserve, unseen by either of them, a breeze blew around the base of the memorial to Councillor Carroll and set a few leaves scudding before it. The old man who had been observed by Sorry earlier, having drunk his wine and slept off some of its effects, picked himself up and began to go home. He was astonished to see a perfectly good suit of clothes lying on the edge of the paving around the memorial. He did not wonder why the shirt was inside the jacket and the shoes full of leaves. He gathered the clothes into a bundle and went on his way, ignoring a sudden gust that blew impotently against him, whining sadly as he stalked on through it and across the Reserve, laying a temporary trail of restless leaves behind him as he went.

  13 Gooseberry Fool

  "Here's Lolly," cried Jacko, as Laura came across the lawn. He bounced across to her and Laura fell on her knees to meet him for he was like a large, bounding puppy, expecting to be welcomed all over.

  "How's your mother?" asked Mrs Fangboner tolerantly, bringing Jacko's basket, Ruggie neatly folded, and Rosebud smiling on top of everything else. "Getting on well with her new friend? I was round there the other day and he was cooking the dinner. That's nice, I thought. All home comforts."

  "He's a wonderful cook," Laura said, exaggerating a little in order to irritate Mrs Fangboner. "But we still have fish and chips on Thursday. Ready, Jacko?"

  "I'm all ready, and Rosebud's all ready," Jacko declared. "Off we go with Sorry."

  "I see the Carlisle boy's got a car." Mrs Fangboner directed a sharp glance over the hedge to where the curved top of the Volkswagon showed from the road beyond. "All right to be some people, isn't it?" But her voice, though critical, was not unkind.

  "It's his mother's," Laura said. "Now his exams are over, he's not going to school like the rest of us. He's doing work for the school community service, weeding old people's gardens, and things like that."

  She picked Jacko up, though he was quite able to walk by himself.

  "You carry me and I carry Rosebud," Jacko said. "That's fair, isn't it, Lolly?"

  They said goodbye to Mrs Fangboner and went out to the car. Sorry was reading the afternoon paper. Laura put Jacko's basket into the back seat beside her school pack.

  "All right! Off we go!" cried Jacko, for Miryam's car had come to seem like another family car where he was allowed to give orders.

  "Seat belts on!" Sorry said, and they moved off, driving through Gardendale in moderate glory.

  "Nothing at all about our departed friend in the newspaper, these days," Sorry said. "He's vanished off the face of the earth. How baffling!" A few minutes later he drew up outside Laura's house. "There you are. It's not so very far, is it?"

  "It is if you have to walk with Jacko and carry a pack," Laura replied. She looked at him doubtfully. "Are you coming in?" Sorry was particularly colourful in an old, red shirt and blue jeans. He suddenly looked like a man and not a boy, and would look like a boy only once more in his entire life, when he put on his school uniform to attend the school break-up. In some ways he seemed a very different person from the one who, only six weeks ago, had pushed her against the wall in his study and touched her and asked her to invite him in, yet the memory of that occasion and of other less arrogant embraces lay constantly between them.

  Something about the quality of the afternoon sunlight on his skin made Laura ask curiously, "Do you shave?"

  Sorry, passing Jacko's basket from the back seat, gave her an amused and vaguely puzzled glance as he replied, "What do you think? I was a seventh former and old in my class, remember. Besides, how do you think I keep that satin finish?"

  "It just seems strange," explained Laura.

  "Yes, it is strange," Sorry agreed. "However, one thing Winter and Miryam forget when they talk about feminine mystery is that being a man is very mysterious too, and I suppose shaving's part of it."

  "I'll shave when I'm grown up," boasted Jacko, and ran his hand over his face, buzzing to himself. There had been a new morning sound in the house sometimes recently, the sound of Chris's electric razor, and Jacko had been very excited by it. Laura was filled with a sudden melancholy at the thought of Jacko shaving.

  "Wouldn't it be nice to stay three for ever and ever?" she asked in a sentimental voice.

  "He very nearly did," Sorry replied ominously.

  "Come on, Chant! Snap out of it! I'll carry your pack in.

  "I can carry it myself," Laura declared immediately.

  "I know you can," said Sorry. "But why not take advantage of me while I'm around. I'm not going to be here always. That's what I want to talk to you about."

  "You want me to make you a cup of tea and whip up a batch of scones," Laura grumbled, as she and Jacko went up the path.

  "And a fruit cake," Sorry shouted after her. "Let's indulge in a few traditional values while we've got the chance."

  Laura did make tea, and cheese sandwiches. The old, whistling kettle with its slow leak had gone. Chris had bought Kate a shiny electric kettle which made life simpler, though Laura rather missed the frantic scream of the old one. When she entered the living room Sorry and Jacko were absorbed by a game on the floor. Laura put the pottery mugs down on the table, studying Jacko's soft, shining, golden-brown curls and Sorry's rougher, paler hair, bleached by the summer sun. Tonight, in his study, he would put on his black dressing- gown and his rings and become something different, a creature of the imagination, the enchanter of the dark tower, but either way he was a difficulty in her life, sometimes seeming to hurry her towards a conclusion when she wanted to go slowly, sometimes hesitating when she got impatient with mystery and wanted everything understood.

  Now she saw with nervous pleasure that he had constructed a little farm on the carpet to entertain Jacko. His hands curved in the air, grassy hills grew under them, arched like the backs of green kittens as he stroked them into existence. There were little cows, little sheep, and pink and black pi
gs. There was a farmhouse with a flower garden in front of it and vegetables at the back, its cabbages the size of pin heads.

  "Tell him it's not a toy," Laura said rather anxiously. "It's just a game, Jacko. It will melt away like an iceblock." But she kneeled down beside Sorry and watched over his shoulder as he drew a line with his finger and set a little river flowing from one worn place on the carpet to another one where it vanished into the weave and soaked away to nothing.

  "You've missed something out," she said and leaned against his back as she stretched her own hand down to the river. An image formed in her mind and she let it flow through her, and take on its own reality in the farm. "Pink crocodiles."

  Five or six pink crocodiles as long as darning needles basked on the river bank. Jacko flung up his arms, clasping them across his head with delight, but Laura and Sorry now became absolutely still, like people under a spell. She could feel the warmth of his skin against her own through her dress and his red shirt.

  "I don't know," said Sorry at last. "It's my mother that ought to worry, not yours. I try to mean well, but you give me a hard time, Chant." Jacko now went to get Rosebud so that he could show her the little crocodiles, and Sorry and Laura kissed each other behind his back.

  "Did you make that cup of tea?" Sorry asked, and Laura gave him his tea and put the plate of sandwiches on the floor between them.

  "Picnic!" said Jacko, and it really was rather like a picnic by the little farm on the carpet.

  "Miryam and Winter have conned you a bit," Sorry said. "They've been a lot easier since you came along. Until a few weeks ago Miryam was sorry she'd given me away, Winter was sorry she'd ever let Miryam have a child to save their old farm ..." He gestured at the farm on the floor between them.