The Changeover Read online

  "Chant, what are you doing wandering around in my head? Do stay in your own, there's a good girl."

  "I was thinking about the estuary," she said.

  "That's it then," he answered. "So was I. You know what this means?"

  "Yes," said Laura, "you'll be able to help me with my answers when I do School Certificate next year. I'll get one hundred percent and be top of all New Zealand."

  Jacko came over to Laura and leaned against her. "Sorry made a little farm," he whispered.

  "Yes," Laura agreed.

  "With little pigs and crocodiles!" said Jacko. He was holding his Ruggie and now began to suck his thumb.

  "I made the crocodiles," Laura pointed out, and lifted him on to her knee. She could smell the family shampoo in his hair and see his mouth turning up on either side of his thumb as he smiled.

  "Are you thinking of me, Chant?" Sorry said. "You feel very affectionate."

  "I'm cuddling Jacko," Laura replied. "You feel affectionate, too. Are you thinking of me?"

  "I was thinking of the pudding we're having for supper, actually," he said. "Gooseberry fool! Still, it's not so different, really."

  "You think I'm like a pudding?" Laura exclaimed indignantly.

  "It's my favourite pudding!" Sorry reassured her. "It's creamy and sharp at the same time. Chant, four years is a hell of a long time to wait, isn't it? Even three!"

  "The first hour's already gone," Laura answered.

  Kate and Chris danced almost in time to the music. Jacko leaned his head against Laura and watched them dreamily. Suddenly he thought of something and sat up, turning to face her.

  "Hold on a bit longer!" he said, remembering something strange, and looking at her face as if he were seeing it almost for the first time. "That's what you said to me, isn't it, Lolly? 'Hold on!' you said, and I did hold on. I held on like this..." He clenched his hands into fists and screwed up his face. "I held on, and you came and got me out."

  "Out from where?" Laura asked him in a whisper.

  "Out of the dark," he said uncertainly. "I didn't like it, Lolly. I held on, didn't I?"

  "You held on beautifully," Laura said, and he put his head back against her, nodding to himself and beginning to suck his thumb again, so he did not see her cry a little, head bent, in the room full of wine and dancing and music.

  In the darkroom, at the end of his garage, Sorry worked, developing photographs. He whistled softly to himself in the dark, then turned on a red light to watch his chosen images magically swim back out of the past, darkening on the photographic paper. The red light cast a demoniac glow over his face, his expression bright but unusually gentle. Laura slowly formed on the paper, reading, walking, laughing. Sorry washed the photographs in water.

  "You're a wonderfully developed girl, Chant," he told her, right across Gardendale.

  "Are you doing those photographs?" Laura asked him, and he groaned and said, "The romance is going out of my life before it ever got properly into it. I'm becoming an open book to you. Never mind. I'll fix you, see if I don't!" and he put the photographs in the fixing solution.

  "I know something you don't," Laura said, unexpectedly triumphant, for a certainty, as clear and sparkling as a sea wave, burst over her. "You're the one that's fixed, poor Sorry, fixed by love no matter how scared you are of it. You can't twist out of it. At least, I'm clever enough to know that."

  "An ever-fixed mark," Sorry said uncertainly, "looking on t-tempests and never b-being shaken, and all that? You might b-be right, but only time will tell. Time t-tells everything, given time."

  Outside in the city, traffic lights changed colours, casting quick spells of prohibition and release. Cars hesitated, then set off again, roaring with urgency through the maze of the Gardendale subdivision, a labyrinth in which one could, after all, find a firebird's feather, or a glass slipper or the footprints of the minotaur quite as readily as in fairy tales, or the infinitely dividing paths of Looking-Glass land. Kate and Chris danced, the potatoes over-cooked gently, Sorry carefully hung his pictures out to dry while his cat watched him, purring for no reason, Laura dreamed of many things, and Jacko, pleased and puzzled by other people's lives, fell asleep on her knee while the strands of wool along the edge of his Ruggie swayed backwards and forwards on the small tide of his even breath.