CHAPTER 21
“Singing?!?” cried Cat and Guy at the same time.
“Yes! It sang! Some very odd song about not worrying and being happy; it even had instruments playing with it.”
Cat threw back her head and laughed.
“My cell phone! Oh, too funny! That song is the dial tone; Nicky put it on there for me as a joke. So what did you do?”
“At first I thought you had become very small, and sunk into your satchel, and were singing from inside it. So I tried to open it, to find you, but it was fused shut at the top. Clasped together with very small teeth. And all the time it kept singing at me! And then, all of a sudden, somebody was screeching at me, and hitting me, calling me a thief and a rat and a scumbag and I don’t know what else.” He gave Cat a reproachful look. “Your friend can be very violent, you know!”
“Nicky? Oh dear! I was supposed to meet her at the museum—I suppose she tried to call me when she got there and I wasn’t outside waiting for her. That’s why my phone would have been ringing; nobody else ever calls me on that. So then what happened?”
“Well, I dropped your satchel and tried to protect myself from her attack. So she snatched it up, and then all of a sudden she was yelling that she had a mace, and she would use it if I tried anything—but all I could see was a little metal tube she was pointing at me, with her finger right on top—”
Cat clapped her hand over her mouth.
“Oh no! She didn’t!”
“Didn’t what?”
“Pepper-spray you!”
“Is that what it was? No, no pepper, fortunately. It makes me sneeze. No, I suppose that she decided I was harmless, or at least no ordinary thief, I dropped your satchel so quickly. But she kept yelling, asking me where you were, what I had done with Cat. So I had to tell her.”
“And she believed you?”
“Yes! Well, no. Well—eventually. She stopped hitting me, at least, and screeching. And when a large man came out of the musean and offered to help her—I believe he was a guardian of some kind—she sent him away again, saying she could ‘handle the situation’. I tried to explain to her what happened—but, well, you know how different it is there from here. I don’t know how much of it she believed, or understood.
“Well, yes. The long and the short of it is, we climbed on the large carriage—the bus (which is an experience all to itself, Guy!)—and she took me back to her rooms.” He shook his head in wonderment at all he had seen. “We spent—well, we spent the night there, and she gave me these clothes; she said it would make me less noticeable. And the next day, we looked for you. Or rather, she looked, and I came along.” (Hmm, thought Cat. She was sure he was leaving out some significant parts of that story.) “And then this morning, she suddenly thought of this friend of yours—this Ryan.”
Cat gulped.
“Ryan? Whatever made Nicky think of him?”
“I don’t entirely know—but I am glad she did. Because,” he turned to Guy, “that’s where we met Ashya.”
“What?!?” This was getting more and more bizarre.
Sepp was looking at his brother.
“She’s changed, Guy. She’s not the same woman—but yet, she is. It’s almost as if”—he paused for a moment as he was searching for the right words—“as if she was more herself than she ever was here. She seems to belong there. And she looks different. You know her hair, how long it was, always piled so high on her head? Now she wears it down her back, and it’s almost as if there was more of it. And it’s an odd colour, not quite the way it used to be. Still fair, but somehow, more fair than fair? As if it had been coloured somehow. As for her clothes—oh my.” He widened his eyes at his mental image. “Do a lot of women dress that way?” he asked Cat. “Nicky doesn’t, or you.”
“What way?” she asked, although she was beginning to have a very good idea of where this was heading.
“Women wear breeches there,” he explained to Guy, “tight breeches. But, well, Ashya, she had on something that might have been a skirt once, before someone took all the bottom parts of it and only left the top band.”
Cat nearly snorted her mint tea out through her nose. That was the best description of a miniskirt she had heard in a while.
“Her shirt, it was quite sparkly—and there wasn’t very much of it, either. As for her shoes, they looked like she was walking on little sticks. On end. Under her heels. Tottering. And this man she was with, this Ryan, he didn’t seem to think anything of it.”
“Ryan.” Cat said the name in a carefully casual tone. “Nicky thought he might know where I was?”
“Yes, in spite of my telling her over and over that you had just vanished, trying to explain about the bowls. It’s as if she wanted to believe me, but couldn’t, not quite. She did not think you were with this man, but she thought we should just make certain of it. I believe—she said he was your boy friend?”
Guy looked at her with an astonished expression on his face. Cat wanted to sink into the floor.
“Yes,” she said, doodling on the tabletop with her finger dipped in the water ring which was left where her mug had dribbled a little. “Yes, he was my boyfriend. He dumped me.” She looked at Guy, willing him to understand.
“Dumped you?” the potter said, with a frown.
“Broke up with me, didn’t want me. Decided he had enough of being with me. It wasn’t really me he was interested in in the first place, just my position in the town—I worked at the library. Do you have those here? Places where you keep books for people to read? I haven’t even seen any books around anywhere.” She looked around the room as if she was hoping one had suddenly materialised on the mantelpiece.
“Oh, certainly, we’ve got books,” said Sepp. “It’s just Guy, he doesn’t like them much.”
Guy scowled at his brother.
“It’s not that I don’t like them,” he explained to Cat, “they’re just not much use for me. The letters never stand still long enough for me to read them. As Sepp knows full well.”
Sepp winked at him, and turned back to Cat.
“So, you were saying, this Ryan…”
Cat swallowed around the sudden lump in her throat. She had hoped her question about the library had distracted the men from wanting to talk about her sad love life, but Sepp was proving remarkably persistent.
“Well, I was just saying he wasn’t interested in me, really, just in my position, in who he thought I was. I suppose if I was a bit brighter I would have realised that.”
“Hmm, where have we heard this one before?” wondered Sepp, staring into the air over his head as if the answer to his rhetorical question was written there. “Interested in someone because of their position, or their family—and of course, being good-looking helps, too…”
“Oh, it wasn’t that,” Cat stated positively. “It was just the job; he thought I was important. He never thought I was good-looking.”
Sepp tilted his head, and gave Cat a carefully considering look.
“Hmm, this Ryan fellow, he didn’t look blind,” he said thoughtfully. “But in that place, it’s amazing the things they can do there. Perhaps they can make a stone-blind man look like he was in full possession of his sight? Sure took me in. It’s the only explanation, wouldn’t you say?” he asked Guy, whose mouth had quirked up at the corner again.
“No,” Guy said blandly, “not the only one. Blithering idiocy could be the other.”
“Oh, yes, quite!” agreed Sepp eagerly, settling in as if ready to discuss the mental or visual faculties of Ryan the Ex for the rest of the night. “I did see some signs…”
“Oh stop it!” said Cat, her face flaming. “Both of you!”
The men chuckled. A warm feeling spread out in Cat’s body, and out of the corner of her eye she saw the lopsided smile with which Guy was regarding her.
“So, this Ashya,” she said quickly, to change the subject, “what was she doing at Ryan’s house?”
“Apparently,” Sepp explained, “she is his new girl friend. Or
so he told Nicky, when she asked if you were there or if he had seen you. He had a new girl friend, he said, someone who suited him better, and here she was. And who was there was Ashya. Except he called her Ashley.”
Something clicked in Cat’s head. Ashley? With long blond hair, tight clothes, stiletto heels? A picture rose to the surface.
“Ashley?” she cried, “Ashley the Model? That’s Ashya?”
“You know her?” asked Sepp.
“Well, I know of her. Ashley the Model—oh dear yes, what a perfect match for Ryan. They would suit each other down to the ground. Nicky met her before, didn’t she say?”
“There really was no opportunity. She sort of pushed her way through the door into the rooms—the apartment, she called it; I think she had some idea that he was hiding you in there, Cat. The Ryan fellow, he followed her, probably to stop her breaking things. He should have kept an eye on me instead.
“Ashya recognised me, quicker than I her—I did say she’s changed. I think she was afraid I had come after her, to get her. So then she started telling me how amazing that place was, and how she was finally properly appreciated, and going on about having ‘found her neesh’ and ‘doing giggs’ and ‘having an agent’. I thought she could have at least pretended to be interested in, well, if not in you, Guy, at least in Bibby.” He looked at the sleeping baby on the bed, resentment at Ashya clouding his features. “I tried to talk to her about you, mentioned Bibby’s name, but all she had to say was, Oh, the baby was cute, but she wasn’t ever going to have another one, and fortunately they had ways to make sure about that there.”
“Oh!” said Cat. The men looked at her. “I think I just understood something!” she said. “But never mind, carry on!”
“Well, all of a sudden, I felt this pull, this irresistible yearning for home, as if something had called to me. And then I saw the bowl. Yes, this bowl.” He poked the shards on the table. “But it was still bright, as blue as the others. It was on a table in the first room, just beyond the door. Ashya saw me looking at it, and said that yes, that was what had brought her there, and she didn’t know how it had done it, but it wasn’t doing it any more. Then she turned and swanned out of the room, and I—well, I couldn’t bear to leave one of your bowls with her, Guy. So I picked up the bowl, and the next thing I knew I was on my backside in the Wald, in the Arbour. And I must say, I have never been so glad to see anyone in my life as you that moment, Guy…”
He was speaking to his brother, but he looked at Cat as he said it. She smiled at him. She liked this man very, very much, almost as much as… Stop, Cat. Don’t go there.
Suddenly she saw a light passing outside the window, in the darkness of the forest.
“I think someone’s coming,” she said.