The Changeover Page 2

  "You've never mentioned anything of this before," said Kate. "You can't blame me for being doubtful."

  "I've always known!" said Laura, "but I know he doesn't mean any harm. He's hiding. He just wants to be left alone. He's never done anything really witchy. Just wants to be left alone. He just is, he never does."

  Kate never let herself be confused by statements like this. She was sometimes capable of making them herself.

  "I remember him buying two really sentimental love stories one day," she said thoughtfully. "He read the ends of them in the shop, looking really puzzled, and then bought them both."

  "He reads them himself," Laura said scornfully. "I saw him reading one once in the Mall teashop. He doesn't behave like a witch but I know he is one." There were many other things she did not add about Sorry Carlisle because they were too uncertain to describe, including the fact that sometimes, knowing himself recognized, he let her see another face — not the mild everyday school face but one which she found very exciting because it looked dangerous.

  "Well, I know he rides a motorbike, not a broomstick," Kate remarked, giving her long, curly grin.

  "A Vespa!" Laura said with a sigh. "I knew you wouldn't believe me."

  "Lolly, how can I?" Kate asked, stopping the car outside the school. "I've never understood your warnings — and be fair — until now you only mentioned them after something has happened, not before. But I do know this: I'm going to have to go because I'll be late for work, and what if I arrive to find Mr Bradley on the doorstep, fuming because I haven't opened the shop in time? But Lolly, be careful with yourself, and later on be careful with Jacko ... just in case." She gave Laura a quick, warm kiss.

  "Kissing tigers!" said Jacko from the back seat, turning them into animals just for fun, for he particularly liked tigers. Laura undid her seat-belt reluctantly and walked towards school while Kate and Jacko drove on to Jacko's babysitter and Kate's work.

  Laura was alone with the day. It panted at her with a stale sweetness on its breath, with a faint, used- peppermint smell that made her want to be sick in the gutter, but she shut her mouth tightly and walked on.

  "Hurry up, Chant!" said the prefect at the gate. It was Sorry Carlisle himself, checking that people riding bikes were doing so in a sober fashion, not doing wheelies or riding on the footpath. "First bell's gone!"

  He had grey eyes with the curious trick of turning silver if you looked at them from the side. Some people thought they looked dependable, but to Laura there was nothing safe about them. They were tricky, looking-glass eyes with quicksilver surfaces, and tunnels, staircases and mirror mazes hidden behind them, none of them leading anywhere that was recognizable.

  Laura and Sorensen looked at each other now, smiling but not in friendship. They smiled out of cunning, and a shared secret flicked from eye to eye. Laura walked past him in at the school gates, bravely turning right into the mouth of the day, right into its open jaws which she must enter despite all warnings. She felt the jaws snap down behind her and knew she had been swallowed up. The day spread its strangeness before her resigned eyes, its horror growing thin and wispy as it sank away. The flow came back into the world once more, and the warning became a memory, eagerly forgotten because it was useless to remember it. The warning had come. She had ignored it. There was nothing more to be said.

  2 The Jack-in-the-Box Man

  Every evening Kate would ask Laura, "Well, what happened at school today?" and Laura usually said, "Nothing!" meaning nothing she could be bothered to talk about. There was always school work, of course, somehow taking the interest out of quite interesting things, and then there was her school friend, Nicky, who was busy at present with a boyfriend. She was trying to find a boyfriend for Laura too, so that they could all go out together and she could tell her mother that she was going out with Laura without totally lying.

  "You're a bit dreamy," Nicky said at break. "Don't be such a dead loss! I'm trying to arrange your future happiness."

  "It's Thursday, you know, Thursday! Late night!" said Laura. "It's my day for domestic responsibility, not future happiness."

  "Couldn't you have domestic responsibility towards Barry Hamilton?" pestered Nicky, smiling triumphantly. "He likes you."

  "I'll bet you're just making that up," Laura replied, but felt flattered because Barry was quite handsome and was allowed to drive his mother's car to school some days.

  "I'm not," said Nicky. "He asked my brother to ask me if you liked him and I said you did."

  "I do quite like him," Laura replied, looking around the school grounds to see if she could see Barry, and imagining how it might feel to go out with him. "I mean, he's not outstanding, but he's quite nice."

  "You've got big ideas," said Nicky, rather annoyed, for she thought she had presented Laura with a jewel. "If you don't want him, can I have him?"

  "But you like Simon," Laura said, and Nicky grinned.

  "Nothing wrong with two," she said. "I've got two best dresses. Shall I get Jason to tell Barry to ring you up?"

  "I'm not on the 'phone," Laura said with regret and relief. She thought she liked the idea of going out with Barry more than she would enjoy actually going out with him and, besides, she knew Kate would not let her go. So after school she found herself walking to collect Jacko from the baby-sitter, alone and watchful, ready to hide from any car that looked as if it might escape from its driver's control and climb up on to the footpath, ravening after helpless pedestrians.

  Laura liked collecting names that ran opposite to the people who owned them. Her collection had started with her own name, Laura Chant, when she found she could not sing in tune. However the best in the whole collection so far was Jacko's baby-sitter, Mrs Fang- boner, who sounded as if she should drink blood instead of tea and sleep in a coffin rather than a 'Duchess' luxury bed with matching flowery sheets and pillowcases. She was a little, thin woman with very pretty, brown hair which she was proud of and which she had set once a week at 'Hair Today', the salon in the Gardendale Mall. Laura had never seen her without lipstick, had never seen her naked smile.

  "I've been married ten years and I've never let myself go," Laura had once heard her tell a friend, and had thought that, even if Mrs Fangboner did let herself go, she probably would not go far. She defended herself with lipstick, her garden, and cups of tea, and enjoyed her defences too much to leave them behind her.

  On this particular day she was punishing the grass edges with some instrument of gardening torture. The front step, laid out with secateurs, shears, long- handled clippers with blades like a parrot's beak, as well as stainless-steel garden forks and trowels, looked like an operating table. Jacko sat beside this terrifying display, with his Ruggie wrapped around Rosebud. On seeing Laura he did not so much run as bounce across the lawn in little jumps as if he were made of rubber and someone had cheerfully tossed him in her direction. First he hugged her and then pretended to growl and bite her. When he looked up and laughed at her, Laura felt her throat go tight inside, and her nose started prickling high up between her eyes, so that she had to shut them in order to avoid public tears. It was an attack of love and she knew how to cope with it... simply shut it away inside herself until it dissolved into her blood again. Sometimes it seemed to her that Jacko was not her brother but in some way her own baby, a baby she would have one day, both born and unborn at the same time.

  "We've had another good day," said Mrs Fangboner. "He's a pleasure to have around, I'll say that for him. He can be a real little devil, but nothing nasty or bad-tempered. Your mum will be in tomorrow will she, with the ..." She said this sentence every Thursday and never finished it, for she liked to pretend she looked after Jacko out of kindness, though she was glad to earn money without going out from behind her hedge.

  "It must be tough on you two," she said now, "with your mum working late on Thursday. Mind you, I'm in favour of having a late-night Thursday. A lot of people who work late Friday in the centre of town come out here and it brings a bit of busin
ess into the area. But you must get hungry waiting for the shops to close." She knew any implied criticism of Kate bothered Laura and had learned to offer criticism in the form of unwanted sympathy.

  "I take Jacko home and give him his supper, and Mum comes home later with fish and chips," Laura said. "It's good fun, really."

  She was still staring at Jacko, quite entranced by him although he was so familiar. His hair was as curly as hers but softer and fairer, and light seemed to shine out of it as if he were a lamp, each pale, curling hair a little filament glowing in the sunlight.

  "You'll be a mass of spots if you eat too much greasy stuff," Mrs Fangboner warned. "You watch it, Laura! You're just the age." Laura nodded as Jacko brought his basket and took her hand.

  "We eat salad the rest of the week," she said. "See you next Thursday!" and then set off to walk with her brother to the Gardendale Shopping Complex.

  Kingsford Drive plunged like a dagger straight into the collection of shops and offices that made up the Complex. It still looked new and uneasy, as if it had only just arrived and might actually be folded up by the developers and taken away tomorrow so that they could start another subdivision, advertising the building sites as, 'close to a new Shopping Complex with all facilities.' Sitting on the very surface of the city's skin it had not had time yet to sink down and become a true feature.

  For Laura and Jacko the library was the first stop and, once there, Laura forgot to be cautious because she thought the library was bound to be safe. She simply concentrated on getting a new book for herself and three for Jacko. He always wanted to take a book he already had at home because he thought it would be the same book he liked but made different in some wonderful way. Laura checked the box of old books the library had cancelled and was selling for twenty cents each. Sometimes they found a treasure (Jacko's favourite tiger book was one such) but there was nothing today and Laura was grateful because it was not the week Kate got paid and consequently it was a week of poverty at home. Laura's books were stamped at the big desk, but Jacko went to the children's desk and stood on the special red box so that he could watch his books being issued and put safely into his basket.

  "Stamp please!" he shouted, and Mrs Thompson put a Mickey Mouse stamp on the back of his hand.

  "Two hands, please!" he begged for he knew there was a Donald Duck stamp hidden at the librarian's elbow. However, another family had come up, making a little queue behind them.

  "I'll stamp you twice next week," suggested Mrs Thompson in reply.

  "Two next time," Jacko said to Laura, reluctantly giving up his place at the desk and walking beside her out of the library, his hands held in front of him like begging paws.

  "This hand is sad with no stamp," he announced holding up his left hand. "It's lonely for a stamp, this hand."

  "Next time," Laura said, guiding him anxiously across the road, though it was actually very quiet. They were now on the corner of the original Gardendale shopping centre which had been called Soper's Corner in the old days. They stood under the verandah of Soper's fish shop. Next to them was the old Roxy Theatre, now transformed into the Gardendale Video Centre, twittering with electronic voices and there, tacked on to the end, as if the builders had had an extra yard or two of space to use up, was the smallest shop in the world, little more than a big cupboard with a tiny, angled window and little counter, all very, very thin. Once it had been used for selling newspapers, racing information, cigarettes and lottery tickets, but it had been closed for the last year. Jacko liked it and always looked in its empty window.

  "My shop!" he would say, and indeed it was easy to imagine it as a shop run by a child for other children.

  Today it was transformed, its window blossoming out into a cottage garden of tiny, pretty things: clothes- peg dolls, and doll's house furniture, matchbox toys, clear marbles with colour twisted in their hearts, pictures as big as postage stamps in frames carved from matchsticks, seven owls made of walnut shells, a peep- show shaped like an egg, and a box shaped like a book full of minute buttons and glass beads hardly bigger than grains of coloured sugar.

  "In we go!" suggested Jacko with great enthusiasm and, of course, in they went.

  OPEN THURSDAY NIGHTS, announced the notice in the window, LITTLE WHITE ELEPHANTS BOUGHT AND SOLD, and it was easy to believe that they would find a tray of elephants, small as grasshoppers, white as milk, milling around in the box on the counter, curling their trunks and trumpeting to each other in tiny, defiant voices.

  Yet, once in this enchanting shop, all Laura wanted was to get out again for it was full of the stale, sweet smell, laced with peppermint, that had assailed her in the morning— the smell of something very wrong and unable to conceal its wrongness. The moment for which the morning had tried to prepare Laura was upon her. Now ... now ... she would begin to come apart. Now the first crack would begin between her eyes though no one would know it was there but Laura herself.

  "Come on!" she cried to Jacko. "There's no one here." But at that moment, as if her voice had broken a seal of silence, a man suddenly rose from behind the counter where he had presumably been putting things away very, very quietly. He was grinning, his teeth apparently too big for his thin, rubbery lips to cover them. Indeed his whole face was somehow shrunken back around his smile so that he looked like a grinning puppet. He was almost completely bald, with what hair he had clipped very close, and there were dark blotches on his cheeks and neck, almost, but not quite, like bruises.

  "Oh..." he cried when he saw Jacko, "a baby!" He put a very heavy, bleating emphasis on the first half of the word. "A baaaab-y!" he exclaimed again in a high- pitched voice, breathing out as he bleated, so that the air became sodden with stale peppermint, breathing in at the very end so that the word was finally sucked away to nothing.

  "He's three," said Laura. "He's not a baby any more."

  "Oh, that's a baby to me," exclaimed the man with a gusty giggle. "If it comes to that, you're all babies to me. I'm extremely old, thousands of years old. Don't I look it?" he asked, and Laura thought he did.

  "Naughty girl!" he cried, chidingly, and actually put out his hand and touched her hair, as if he were curious about its texture. "You shouldn't look as if you agreed with me. But what a pet of a child your little friend — your brother is it?— appears to be. He looks so full of life, doesn't he? A rare commodity at my age—tempus fugit and all that— but he looks as if he had enough for two. He looks as if he sees colours the rest of us don't, or hears jokes we can't."

  Laura liked to hear Jacko praised, but the man leaned forward as he spoke and his dreadful smell struck her like a blow— a smell that brought to mind mildew, wet mattresses, unopened rooms, stale sweat, dreary books full of damp pages and pathetic misinformation, the very smell — she thought she had it now— of rotting time. It had to be the man's smell, for though they were surrounded with scraps of the past there was nothing else that could have smelt like that.

  "He doesn't seem to think much of me, does he?" the man asked, coming round from behind the counter, his voice tittering on as he moved. "He doesn't seem to care for me one teeny, tiny bit ... Oh, it's not fair, because I think he's absolutely scrumptious."

  "What's his name?" For all his horrid smell he was immaculately dressed in a pale pink shirt and a very smart plum-coloured suit.

  "Jacko!" Laura said, and thought to herself, Why am I telling him this? I don't have to tell him everything he asks.

  The man's hand was extended towards Jacko and below his neat cuff she could see another discoloured blotch as if he were starting to go bad. "We're just going," she said. "We don't have any money."

  "My name's Carmody Braque," the man went on, as if she hadn't spoken. "A name not unknown in the world of antiques and rare objects, and my shop is to be called Brique a Braque. Oh, I know what you're going to say," he cried, though Laura had not been going to say anything, "it's a wee bit obvious, isn't it? But how could I resist? And this isn't a serious shop you know— just a place to disp
lay a lot of little nonsenses."

  "We've got to go," Laura said, wondering why it was so hard to walk away from someone who was talking to you, even when you didn't want to hear what they were saying. "We just wanted to look around."

  "And so you did and so you shall," cried Carmody Braque with fearsome generosity, "and I'll make it up to the little brother, poor, wee lambie. Do I see a stamp on the right paw ? How about another on the left? Hold it out, you little tiger, tiger burning bright, and you shall enter the forests of the night."

  Jacko had been pressing himself against Laura with rare shyness, but he was lured by the idea of the stamp and half extended his hand.

  "Hold it out properly! Offer it to me or I won't be able to stamp it clearly," Mr Braque commanded. Jacko thrust his hand forward. Laura found herself putting out her own hand to stop him but Mr Braque pounced with great agility, like an elderly mantis on an innocent fly. Incredibly he had a stamp in his hand which he had snatched from his counter, or even out of the air and he pressed it on to the back of Jacko's hand triumphantly, as if he had been working towards that moment for a long time.

  "Look! Pretty picture!" giggled Mr Braque, but Jacko screamed as if he had been burnt and Mr Braque leaped back, still giggling.

  "Dear oh dear!" he cried. "It isn't my day, is it? I do hope I don't have this effect on all my customers." Laura picked Jacko up, bewildered by his cry.

  "Most children like a stamp," Mr Braque said through his smile, and — as Laura looked into his eyes, across Jacko's shaking shoulder— she felt something very old looking back at her, something triumphant but also unappeasable. Those eyes, round as a bird's but clouded and slightly inflamed, looked away from hers immediately. "Perhaps we'd better say bye-bye for the moment, hmmmmm?" he went on, gesturing to the door, and a moment later, Laura, still holding Jacko, was standing on the footpath amazed at her ineffectual self, feeling as if her mind had been glued up with the stale peppermint smell. Her clothes seemed to reek of it. She and Jacko had been lured in by pretty things, stupefied, and then quite ruthlessly thrust out again, having served some unguessable purpose.