Part 12 (1/2)

'All talk,' said Alice. 'You're all talk. I'll match anything you do. But that's just it. You won't do anything.'

'You don't have to do anything,' Sam said acidly. 'You just have to be f.u.c.ked-up in the head.'

'Good.' She took off the denim jacket and lobbed it at Sam. 'Now give me my leather back. I've got to go.'

Reluctantly Sam handed Alice's jacket back to her. She put it on, pushed her way through the bushes and was gone, leaving behind her a unique silence, a rippling silence like the one that follows a stone tossed in a pond.

'Who is she, then?' Terry said after a while.

'Alice,' said Sam.

20.

Deep Mood The following morning, on the first day of the school's Christmas holidays, Sam lay abed consulting a dictionary.

Gossamer n. & adj. light, filmy substance; the webs of small spiders, floating in calm air or over gra.s.s; a thread of this; something flimsy; delicate gauze He heard from downstairs a knocking at the back door. After a moment his mother came into his bedroom. 'Terry's here for you.'

Sam dressed, went to the bathroom, squashed a wet flannel against his face and went downstairs, still blinking. Terry stood in the hallway, wearing gloves and scarf, his left foot turned inwards. 'You won't believe this,' he whispered. He fidgeted nervously while Sam ate a dish of breakfast cereal.

'What is it?' said Sam when they'd got outside.

'See for yourself.'

Terry led him towards Clive's house. After two hundred yards they pa.s.sed a tall, white-painted picket fence. Sam stopped in his tracks. Daubed in red paint, in broad letters three feet high, were the words REDSTONE MOODIES.

'Who . . . ?' said Sam.

'There's more. Follow me.' On the bus shelter further along the street, the same words: REDSTONE MOODIES. Then again a little further, on the white-painted side of the local pub, the Gate Hangs Well. And on the brick wall running beneath the window of the newsagent's. And on another garden fence. What's more, the large sign outside the library was overpainted with the words YOU ARE NOW ENTERING FREE REDSTONE.

'Jesus!'

'It doesn't stop here,' said Terry.

The graffiti ran on for half a mile. The artist, or the author, had obviously got bored at some point and started to introduce variations in the language. Royle's sweetshop was particularly targeted, splashed with the words DEEP MOOD and FINE MOOD. The same slogans cropped up intermittently, so the perpetrator, running out of walls and windows had painted the pavement. Even the church was daubed DEEP MOOD.

'Why,' Sam wailed, 'do I think this is going to come back on us?'

'Uncle Charlie saw it this morning. He questioned me about it, but then he said he didn't think that even we were stupid enough to do it right on our own doorstep.'

'I don't feel we should even be out on the streets.'

'Why? You didn't do it. Did you?'

' 'Course I didn't do it.'

'You certain?'

Sam stopped Terry with a look. 'You think I did it?'

'No, I suppose not.'

'You think Clive did it?'

'No.'

They were unable to call on Clive because he wasn't home. They knew he was spending that day, even though he was still not quite thirteen years old, sitting a degree-level examination.

'Perhaps you're right,' said Terry. 'We shouldn't be on the streets. They'll all think it was us.'

'I'm not going home.'

'All right, we'll go to my place.'

But when they got back to Terry's house, there were recriminations of another order, and for once the boys were not the target of parental outrage. In the lounge, Linda was in tears. Charlie and Dot stood over her, looking wronged, angry and bewildered all at the same time. The Chief Guide had called to say how disappointed she'd been that Linda hadn't turned up to lead the Commonwealth parade, and how everyone had missed her, and was everything all right? Dot and Charlie, who only the day before had seen her leave the house in her Guiding gear, and had indeed welcomed her return that evening in the same smart uniform, were dumbfounded.

Then it had all come out.

Linda's head was buried under cus.h.i.+ons. She was weeping bitterly. Charlie was shouting irrationally. 'You can't have boyfriends,' he stammered, 'if you're going to study! You can't!' Linda was, that year, preparing to sit her O-level exams. It had been widely a.s.sumed that she would stay on at school for A-levels.

'We don't know anything about this boyfriend!' Terry's Aunt Dot's voice was raised to a queer pitch. 'Nothing at all!'

'I'm sick of the Guides!' Linda shrieked through her cus.h.i.+ons and her hot tears. 'Sick of the Guides!'

'You can't be a scholar and have boyfriends!' Charlie bawled again. There was something odd about the way he brandished the antiquated word 'scholar', as if the sitting of A-levels implied the taking of certain vows. 'You just can't do it!'

'Nothing's been said about this boyfriend! We know nothing about him!' Dot turned to Terry and Sam, who were observing all this from the hallway. Her eyes bulged like those of a frightened horse. 'Do you two know anything about this boyfriend?'

'No,' they said together.

'And who carried the flag?' Dot wanted to know. 'At the parade, who was it that carried the flag?'

No one seemed to know whether the argument was about the Guides, Boyfriends, Completing One's Studies or Carrying the Flag. Linda swept away the cus.h.i.+ons and ran out of the room, shouldering Terry and Sam aside. She stomped upstairs and slammed her bedroom door behind her. Charlie ran half-way up the stairs after her. 'You can't! You can't do it!' He came back down the stairs, nostrils flaring, eyes rolling. He wagged a trembling finger at the boys. 'You can't be a scholar and have boyfriends!'

'We don't want boyfriends,' Terry said. He had to step back smartly to avoid Uncle Charlie's backhand.

Charlie stormed back into the lounge, s.n.a.t.c.hed up a newspaper and slumped into an armchair. The newspaper practically ignited in his hands.

'Do you know anything about this boyfriend?' Dot asked them again. 'Do you know anything?'

'Of course I didn't do it,' said Alice. 'What do you think I am?'

'You admitted to me you smashed up the gymkhana hut that time,' Sam put it to her.