‘It’s your line, Fred dear.’
‘Oh, er,’ he put both hands on the table and stared at Daisy. This time she didn’t turn away, trying to get herself into the mindset of a young girl with a crush on an older guy. It wasn’t difficult. ‘If I profane with my unworthiest hand this holy shrine, the gentle fine is this: my lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand to smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.’
In the corner of her eye Daisy could see Kim cracking up, and it took all her strength to stop from joining her.
‘Good pilgrim,’ she said, her voice trembling.
‘Too soft, dear, they won’t be able to hear you at the back.’
Daisy cleared her throat, speaking louder, talking not quite to Fred’s eyes but to his chin. ‘Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much, which mannerly devotion shows in this; for saints have hands that pilgrims’ hands do touch, and palm to palm is holy palmers’ kiss.’
‘Good, Daisy,’ said Mrs Jackson, doing a perfect job of ruining the dramatic tension.
‘Have not saints lips, and holy palmers too?’ asked Fred.
‘Ay pilgrim, lips that they must use in prayer.’
‘O, then, dear saint, let lips do what hands do; they pray, grantest, lest love turn to, uh . . . despair?’
‘Close enough,’ said their drama teacher.
‘Saints do not move, though grant for prayer’s sake,’ said Daisy. Her pulse was quickening, so fast she could feel it in her temples, so fast that it felt almost like a double pulse, running side by side. Three more lines, then it was her favourite – and least favourite – part of the whole play. She took a sideways step to her left, Fred mirroring her.
‘Then move not, while my prayer’s effect I take,’ he said, using a fingernail to scratch a mark from the surface of the table. His cheeks were starting to glow as well. ‘Thus from my lips, by yours, my sin is purged.’
They both took another step to the side, converging on the narrow end of the table – ground zero.
‘Then have my slips the slin that they have took,’ she said, her tongue not working properly. ‘Sorry, sin.’
‘Sin from thy lips?’ Fred said, his voice a mumble, but for once Mrs Jackson didn’t comment. He stepped round the side of the table and Daisy moved with him so that they were facing each other, almost touching. Daisy’s head was pounding – not really painful, just a pressure there, like it might pop clean off. The theatre had never seemed so quiet, the gaps of silence between the words bottomless. Every single person was holding their breath. ‘Oh, trespass sweetly urged, give me my sin again.’
Fred leant forward. Daisy craned up, standing on tiptoes, falling towards him as though some invisible hand was pushing her. Her head was screaming now, a kettle coming to boil between her temples. Daisy’s eyes rose, she couldn’t stop them – up from Fred’s chin, past his lips, his nose, meeting his eyes as their lips converged.
She froze, suddenly breaking into a cold sweat, as if the temperature in the hall had dropped below zero. Fred’s eyes were empty, the unseeing, unfeeling black beads of a doll that looked as if they might just roll out of their sockets as he angled in towards her. She recoiled, but Fred kept on coming, craning over her, his teeth clenched, grinding.
Then his mouth opened, and he spat in her face.
Daisy’s heart stopped and for a moment she wondered if she’d died on stage. She could feel his warm saliva on her top lip – not much, just foam really, hot against her cool skin, but she couldn’t seem to lift her arm to wipe it away. She couldn’t move a single muscle.
Fred started to laugh, his lips pulled back over his teeth, those dead eyes still boring into her. Daisy staggered back, seeing Kim pointing at her and screeching with delight. The laughter was taken up by somebody else, and another, then another, until the hall reverberated with the sound of it.
‘You kiss by the book,’ said Mrs Jackson in between soft chuckles of her own.
‘What?’ Daisy asked, wiping her gloved forearm over her face.
‘Your line, dear, you kiss by the book. You kiss by the book.’ Mrs Jackson was tottering across the stage waving the script at her. ‘By the book, Daisy.’
Daisy bumped into one of the Year 7 extras, almost sprawling on her backside. It was all too much, the hall starting to spin. She turned and ran, thumping down the wooden steps and barging through the double doors, Mrs Jackson’s voice shrieking out behind her.
‘By the book, Daisy, by the book, by the book!’
Cal
Oakminster, 6.34 p.m.
‘Still can’t believe we thrashed them,’ said Abdus, breathless as he paddled past on his skateboard. He reached the steps that led to the small plaza outside the library, ollying down them but bailing before he hit the tiles. He recovered his balance, chasing after the rogue board before turning back to Cal. ‘Three–one!’
Cal raised both hands in a rock-star salute. He was sitting at one of the three metal tables outside the milkshake café that had become their favourite place to hang out, especially after a match. Called Udderz, it let you pick your favourite chocolate bar then blended it with ice cream and milk to make just about the best shakes on the planet. Cal was on his third of the afternoon, this one made up of Boost bars. It was making him feel a little queasy but he wouldn’t let that stop him from finishing.
The place was mobbed. Sharing his table were Megan, Eddie, Dan and the keeper Jack, who was perched on the edge providing a nice bit of shade from the evening sun. The other two tables had been occupied by the rest of the team, all except Steven Abelard who lived out in the sticks and always had to leave early. Several other kids from his form were scattered around, including Georgia, who sat just inside the large front window, behind the huge stencilled ‘e’ of Udderz, absorbed in whatever it was she was reading.
Cal kept looking at her – he couldn’t help himself, it was like his head and hers were connected by a string of invisible elastic. He could only stretch it away for so long before it snapped back. Whatever she was reading had to be good, though, because she’d not glanced up once. He didn’t think there’d ever been anything so depressing, and so frustrating, as the side of that girl’s head.
‘Want another?’ Dan asked, scraping back his metal chair and nodding at Cal’s shake.
‘I’m sorted,’ Cal replied. ‘Any more of these and I’ll be blowing chunks all over the plaza.’
‘Lightweight,’ said Megan, her lips wrapped around her straw, cup gurgling. ‘I’m already on numero five.’
‘Yeah, and it’s starting to show,’ Cal said, grinning. ‘That chair’s about to break.’
‘Shut up!’ Megan said, reaching over the table and slapping Cal on the arm, her face full of mock outrage. Megan was five foot nothing in shoes, and twig thin. She couldn’t have made that chair so much as wobble if she’d jumped up and down on it for a week.
Someone else flashed past on a board, a kid from the year below, Cal thought. He ollied onto the handrail that dropped down into the plaza, doing a sketchy grind then a trey flip, landing with nothing more than a wobble. He swooped round in an arc back to where a bunch of his Year 11 mates were looking up at the occupied tables, like they were planning an invasion.
‘So, fancy our chances tomorrow?’ Eddie asked, pushing his glasses up onto his nose. Eddie was asthmatic, he had it pretty bad, which meant he couldn’t play for the team. That was a shame, because whenever they kicked the ball about at lunch he was actually pretty decent.
‘12H are tough,’ said Jack without looking round. ‘They won it last year. They got that tall kid, Nasim, the one everyone said was being scouted by Arsenal.’
Cal snorted, pretending to be unimpressed. Truth was that Nas, a midfielder, was good enough to be signed. Last time they’d been in a match together Nas had run rings around Cal. But Cal was a hell of a lot better on the pitch now.
‘We’ll take them,’ he said. ‘Nas or no Nas.’
‘Well, if you can’t outrun him you can
always punch him in the face,’ said Megan, and everyone laughed.
‘Might not even get to play in the next game,’ said Jack. ‘If Platt has his way. Red card like that could get you shunted for a match or two.’
‘Nah,’ said Cal. ‘Frosty got sent off in the first match and he played against us in week two, remember?’
‘Oh yeah, slide tackled the keeper,’ said Eddie, shaking his head. ‘Stupid.’
One of the skateboarders took a tumble on the plaza, doing an impressive forward roll before lying flat and staring at the sky. Everybody cheered and clapped. Cal leant back in his chair, taking another sip of his super-sweet shake. It was so warm here, and peaceful. The sounds of the plaza – the constant, liquid murmur of talk and laughter, the clack and roll of the boards – were almost dreamlike.
The only thing that was dragging on the mood was his stupid head, still pulsing. It didn’t hurt, not the way a proper munter did. It was just uncomfortable – thump-thump . . . thump-thump . . . thump-thump – like there was something inside there, a dying bird slowly flapping broken wings, trying to lift off . . .
Christ, where had that come from? Cal shuddered, the image making his stomach churn even harder than before. Dan had reappeared, slamming back down into his seat and sucking on a brand-new shake. The gargling sound he was making seemed too loud, and it was a second or two before Cal realised that it was because the chatter in the plaza had softened. People were still talking, but in whispers. It was almost like one of those weird silences, the kind where everyone stops speaking because they think everyone else has, and they all look at each other for a minute wondering what’s going on, then laugh and carry on.
Only nobody was laughing. The Year 11 kids below were still looking up at the café like they wanted the tables. The skaters had stopped and were all staring this way too. Cal felt something dance up his spine, his arms erupting into goosebumps.
‘Creeeeeepy,’ he said, doing his best to smile. Eddie was observing him with an expression of intense confusion, as if Cal had suddenly sprouted a pig snout or panda ears or something. It wasn’t just Eddie, either. Megan was frowning his way, her nose wrinkled up. Cal’s head swung left and then right to see that pretty much everyone on the plaza seemed to be glowering at him. Even Georgia had finally looked up. It might have been the reflection of the evening light on the window, but Cal could swear her lips were pulled back, distorting her flawless face into a grimace.
He realised his heart was pounding so hard he could see each beat like a flash of light in his eyes. He scraped back his chair, getting uneasily to his feet, running a hand through his hair.
‘Ha ha, very funny, guys,’ he said, his lonely voice echoing across the plaza. ‘Grow up, won’t you?’
The three pints of milkshake he’d consumed that afternoon were now rioting in his stomach. Nobody replied, they were all just staring at him, their faces bent with the same stupefied expression. Cal pushed himself through the wide-eyed crowd, trying not to run as he made his way towards the steps. His throat tickled, the way it always did when he was about to hurl. The shake bar didn’t have a toilet, but the library did.
He crossed the plaza in a dozen strides, dashing through the automatic doors. He stopped for long enough to look back, relief flooding through him when he saw that one of the skateboarders was moving again, that Eddie and Megan and the rest of his mates seemed to be back to normal, chatting away.
They’ve had you good and proper, he thought as he walked towards the toilets. They’d been taking the mick, something they’d probably conjured up that afternoon while he was getting changed. It was like the time they’d nicked Jack’s school uniform after training, forcing him to spend the rest of the day in his goalkeeping kit. Or when they’d all told Megan that there was a teacher-training day one Thursday and she’d not come to school. They were always playing pranks on each other, and this was no different – Psst, at quarter past seven tonight everyone stare at Cal, see if we can freak him out, pass it on.
And the worst thing was it had freaked him out. He’d completely lost his cool.
He slammed open the outer door, pushed his way through the inner door and straight into the only empty cubicle. The second he opened the lid he thought his last shake was coming back, boiling up from his stomach. But after a couple of dry heaves he felt it settle. He stood hunched over the bowl for a minute more, just to be sure, then put the lid down and sat on it.
What was wrong with him? He was losing it. First the incident with Truman, the way that kid had glared at him. Now this. He’d always thought he was made of sterner stuff, but here he was in the toilet at the library ready to chuck his guts all because his mates had pulled some stupid prank.
Cal wiped a hand across his forehead, the skin damp, cold, then he walked out of the cubicle, splashing some water on his face and staring at his reflection in the graffitied mirror. He did look a little pale – peaky, as his mum always said. Maybe he was coming down with something. That would be his excuse, that he’d got swine flu, he wasn’t feeling himself. His mates wouldn’t buy it, of course, but he didn’t care. He was still Cal Morrissey, and everybody loved Cal Morrissey.
Feeling a little steadier, Cal made his way out of the toilet. He’d suck it up, let his friends have their victory. Girls liked a guy who could laugh at himself. Georgia was always saying that he took things too seriously.
He walked over the plaza, keeping his head down in mock shame, dodging the skateboarders who criss-crossed the tiles, waiting for the catcalls, the whoops, the jeers. They didn’t come, and it was only when Cal had jogged up the steps that he realised the kids who were sitting there weren’t his mates at all. The Year 11s had occupied every single table, laughing and shouting at each other, a few of them eyeballing him warily.
What the hell? he said beneath his breath, scanning the inside of the café. Georgia had gone, everyone had gone. He swivelled, seeing no trace of them anywhere in the plaza or the two footpaths that led out towards the high street. He looked at the nearest kid, a girl with green hair and a Linkin Park T-shirt. ‘You see where they all went?’
‘No,’ she spat, like it was the stupidest question in the world. She turned away from him and made a comment to her friend, causing them both to snort.
Cal scratched his head then snapped his hand back down, not wanting to look weak, confused. They were still here, somewhere, he was sure of it. Probably wetting themselves laughing. Jesus, this hadn’t happened since he was eight years old and his three so-called best friends had run off, abandoning him in the middle of London Zoo. Well the hell with them, he wasn’t going to stand around like an idiot waiting for them to show their faces. He moved away from the café, his head banging as he walked alone into the hot, heavy summer evening.
Brick
Fursville, 6.56 p.m.
By the time Brick arrived back at Fursville the sun was well on its way towards the white heat of the horizon. It was no cooler, though, the coast flattened by an invisible muggy fist. He was dripping with sweat, not helped by the fact that he’d been sandwiched between the bike’s overworked engine and Lisa’s limpet-like grip for the last thirty-five minutes.
‘OMG, Brick, you’ve crippled me,’ she said as she clambered off the pillion seat, nursing her backside with both hands. ‘When are you gonna get a car?’
‘When I can afford it,’ he said, waiting for her to stand clear before swinging his leg over. His muscles put up a fight – that was nearly two hours he’d spent riding today, and another thirty minutes to go when he took Lisa home – but he ignored them. He stretched, hearing his spine pop, then he weaselled off his helmet. The pain of his pinned-back ears began to ebb, leaving the strains of an approaching headache. He recognised the discomfort, like the first rolls of thunder from a distant storm. It was nothing to worry about yet, but later that night he’d be lucky if he didn’t have a full-blown hurricane between his temples.
Why on earth had he brought Lisa here?
It h
ad been a spur-of-the-moment thing, a stupid spur-of-the-moment thing. After he’d picked her up they’d ridden over to Riverside, the leisure complex, stopping at his house for a spare helmet. She’d demanded that he take her to the cinema to make up for being so late, and he’d reluctantly agreed, even when the only thing about to start had been some awful romantic comedy with Jennifer Aniston and some guy he half recognised from a comedy show on the telly. Brick hadn’t laughed once during the whole thing except when Lisa had dropped her bucket of popcorn halfway through the big love scene while trying to fish her mobile out of her bag. And that laugh hadn’t lasted long because she’d made him go and get her some more.
After the film, Brick had been so relieved to be out in the sunshine again that he’d had a sudden rush of euphoric happiness. The only other place he’d ever really been this happy was Fursville, and in some bizarre and flawed twist of neural logic he’d decided there and then to let Lisa in on his secret.
‘You wanna see something cool?’ he’d said as they made their way back to the car park. ‘Come on, it won’t take long.’
She’d protested and grumbled and moaned, and it only took about five minutes of riding out towards the coast with her voice in his ear for Brick’s mood to plummet off its tightrope. He should have turned back, dropped her home, but for some reason he’d just kept his head down and roared east. Now here they were, in his haven, his hideaway, Lisa’s nasal whine like some invading naval fleet.
‘What the hell is this place?’ she asked, pulling off her own helmet, smoothing out her ponytail. For a second, as she did so, she looked unbearably pretty to Brick. Then her face crumpled up into that all-too-familiar mask of misery and disappointment. ‘Fursville? Didn’t this used to be an amusement park or something?’
Duh, thought Brick, glancing up at the big wheel, or what remained of it. With only one of its gondolas still attached and its broken spokes bent out at all angles it resembled some leprous, anorexic giant.