The Wilful Eye Page 9

  I noticed that she did not turn for help to the child’s father, the king, nor to her parents, who have proven their inadequacy. A certain sort of woman would have crumpled into a terrified heap, incapacitated by terror and remorse, but I was never the sort for histrionics in the face of disaster and neither is my heroine. She has the courage to hope, and she makes lists of names and offers them to the dwarf as she awaits the return of her faithful servant whom she has sent to search for the name she needs. Luck comes to those who have the courage to hope, I believe, and so I have no trouble accepting that the diligent and faithful servant stumbled on the isolated campsite of the dwarf and saw him dancing a vicious triumphant gloating jig, singing out his name.

  The nameless servant is the only man in the story who is neither knave nor fool, and yet he is only a stalwart auxiliary character, never named. He deserves better, I decided, as does the queen. The latter exacts her own small revenge by guessing wrong a few times during her final appointment with the dwarf, but then she tells the dwarf his true name and Rumpelstiltskin is destroyed by his own rage.

  My story would go a little differently. I began to write, and immediately Moth stood up and brushed off her dress, pushing the wings of her pale smooth bob behind her ears, listening to her father’s bluster. She was, from the first, the perfect character – fully formed, pragmatic, sweet-natured, kind and brave. I loved her voice and trusted her to travel wisely and truthfully along the road this story would spin for her.

  That brittle night they danced they danced they danced, their knees on springs on feet on wings. Gerda and Kai, naturally high. Their breath came out in cumulus clouds as the ramshackle house sucked people in and out through its large damp lungs. Faces blurred, simple sentences fractured and slurred. They clung on and spun, giddy to rhythms that couldn’t keep up. They screeched and giggled and fizzled and sparked. Gerda thought someone in the corner nodded at Kai, but Kai just looked blank and shrugged: I don’t know anyone, either. As long as they were together, Gerda felt safe. She didn’t even know whose party it was, which suburb they were in. They came with some people who knew some people, but all of them had vanished. The house was half renovated, with excisions and entrails in odd little rooms. People looked up accusingly, as though you’d burst in.

  Gerda shivered, inhaling the chill of the house. She caught a boy looking her up and down, dark and intense and that cool bit older. Their looks snagged and he glided up beside her. He was swarthy and shadowed and the creases in his face made him more man than boy. Close up he touched her fingers thrillingly and tried pulling her away to where he’d been sitting. Gerda made a spastic stumble, avoiding someone’s empty stubbies. Then he offered something up, his fingers cradling the bulb in a way that reminded her of handling a pigeon. She saw it was a pipe: a pipe made of glass. She shook her head emphatically. Don’t smoke, she mouthed over a burst of electric guitar. Suit yourself, his shrug said, and his face closed up. His attention switched to Kai, who was hovering close.

  Gerda did a double take as Kai took a pull – they never touched drugs – then sank onto the couch. The man offered the pipe again, and Gerda felt the clamour of her own urge to please. He had a face that was hungry for something. She took a few quick puffs, trying not to think too much. But a wrong feeling needled her: the man’s hair was greasy and his collar was dirty. A wave of noise was breaking and she was tugged out on the tide. Then her mind just changed channels – she was off on a rollercoaster ride, avoiding a million collisions.

  They danced they danced they danced, hurling themselves into hypnotic rhythms she’d never fully felt, never truly heard. The music spiralled around and above them, pulsing over them and through them, pumping out their arms, animating their legs and thrusting through their hips. The dark man breathed unbearably close, his eyes darting everywhere and blocking her way. He danced like burning newspaper and his smell hung sharp on the air. Exit – no exit – she’d better find a toilet and hide. The dance floor was suddenly crowded with her critics, eyes piercing Gerda’s poise. Body slick, breathing hard, she tried pushing through the crowd to find her way to Kai. But Kai was somehow disconnected in a way that made her nervous, not seeking her out or meeting her eye. The shadow man was suffocating with his skin-crawler hands. Gerda felt all the lights exploding, and fireworks hailing down. She slid to the ground abruptly, spittle stringing from her mouth. Her shadow was behind her, lifting her too intimately under the arms. She pushed him away, panic roaring.

  ‘Bitch!’ she heard, and sensed the man raise a hand.

  Gerda ducked her head and slid under some other bodies, finding her way through them with desperate precision. Kai? Why so far away? Gerda saw the man hovering, hard-angled on the edge of the dancers. She scanned for Kai. He was there, catatonic near the centre of the floor. Gerda saw he was staring into the eyes of a very tall girl, a girl that nobody crowded. She was a stunning white-blonde creature with the long-legged look of a deer. The albino of some exotic species. No. Not a deer. Some lean kind of predator.

  Eyes like a snow wolf, the thought jumped into her mind. Then she wondered . . . a snow wolf. Does such a thing exist?

  Gerda saw the way Kai was looking at the girl, how his face seemed wreathed in starlight, some illusion of the room. Her eyes were slanted almonds, cheekbones high and broad and flat, her long hair fluffy dawn-clouds, snowy white. She stood lithe and elegant and still, inside a blizzard of swirling bodies. Gerda saw that Kai was her captive. She was glad the girl had kept him in the room. Gerda sidled over and touched his shoulder.

  ‘Earth to Kai,’ she said.

  Kai nodded, saying nothing.

  Gerda looked from Kai to the girl, and a thought leapt uninvited into her brain. The snow girl’s eyes glittered like two bright stars. Gerda was aware of a strange churn of thoughts.

  ‘Kai . . . introductions?’ Gerda heard herself say, quite loud. The girl stared down an aristocratic nose. Still Kai said nothing: it must be the stuff.

  Snow weighs heavy on branches in the laden silence of the night. Pine needles prickle the air, bright moonlight shivers silver on deep drifts. As you stop to listen harder than the hammer of your heart, a high faint keening carries on the air. Hugging your coarse cloak, you feel your feet stinging inside freezing leather. Gradually the ululation takes shape in your brain, hardens and intensifies into a howl. Pine needles carpet the wolf pack’s approach. Fear tears at your belly. Legs leaden and brain burning, you stare up at the pines, straight and unadorned as sentries. They seem impossible to climb.

  When the snow girl looked at Gerda, there was neither curiosity nor interest, but when she looked at Kai . . . it was as if a cold scatter of stars lit the brittle midnight sky.

  ‘Anya, this is Gerda,’ Kai shouted, finally, putting his new friend first, Gerda noticed. He should be introducing her to me.

  Gerda nodded, and saw that there was neither rest nor peace in those eyes. She looked back at Kai and shivered. The thread between them told her he was scrabbling to get back inside his body. He was no match for this snow wolf.

  ‘Anya’s from Norway,’ Kai yelled suddenly over the music, as though this ought to impress her.

  Gerda caught herself feeling a stab of . . . what? Jealousy? No! Since they were little, they’d been best friends. They’d lived in next-door terraces all their lives, and gone everywhere together.

  Kai and the girl . . . they just didn’t plait. The girl looked somehow otherworldly in her exquisite fur-lined coat, whereas everything about Kai was average. But did people less familiar see him differently? He had blond board-rider good looks, but so did every third boy in the city. A chill of insight told Gerda that the snow girl wanted something specific, yet she couldn’t have said what it was. The snow girl seemed to stand at the centre of a storm of white bees, and Gerda saw that Kai was spellbound.

  Don’t be uncool, she told herself. Leave him to his one-night stand. The snow wolf might maul him for a while – but she’d leave his carcass in the snow. Gerda
wanted to giggle hysterically. Should she take a taxi home?

  But she knew Kai would never leave her on her own and not quite in control. Gerda still felt high and strange and shattered, and wondered if the stuff was making her see the girl as some kind of ice queen, when she was perhaps just quiet and contained. Maybe even shy.

  Kai was valiantly trying the conversation thing, in a way he never needed to with her – they’d always been in tune. Gerda decided to keep watch from a distance. She wandered into a group discussing the American pariahs, trying to keep Kai in sight.

  ‘The terrorists don’t even have to do anything anymore,’ a tall, red-headed guy was saying, jabbing the air with his finger. ‘The environmental disasters and the food riots. They’re imploding all on their own.’

  Kai and the snow girl were drifting down a hallway sardined with bodies, and Gerda was about to lose sight of him. She slid along behind them, keeping her distance, feeling more a spy than a friend. The snow girl had taken his hand possessively. They slipped into a small side room, a bathroom: damn. Gerda couldn’t follow without being obvious. She hovered in the doorway, the weight of prowling bodies pressing in.

  Kai stood with the girl, holding up a bag of white stuff they’d been handed by two men who were watching them intently. One plucked the bag back from Kai and shook some kind of powder onto the vanity, then gave Kai a straw. The powder sparkled, dirty little diamonds under the light. To Gerda the men seemed hovering hawks, watching for prey with a raptor’s intensity. The ice girl stood stock-still, an accomplice. Gerda took a deep breath and stumbled in, fake drunk. Kai looked up angrily but the snow girl’s ice-blue eyes were unreadable. Gerda was stung.

  ‘Kai, please take me home,’ Gerda whined, in a way she never did, desperately hoping he’d understand. Kai hesitated, and Gerda could see he was torn. She stumbled again deliberately, and this time Kai stepped forward to steady her. But he bumped the mirror above the vanity and it crashed to the floor, scattering the coarse grimy crystals. Everybody jumped back, and Gerda gasped. The look that came from Kai was . . . pure loathing.

  Gerda burst into tears, hating herself. Hating herself for crying in front of the ice girl who had no compassion in her eyes, in front of the cruel men who hadn’t even blinked. They only had eyes for the powder. The cheap-shit mirror lay shattered at their feet in ten thousand ugly shards. Kai had blood on his shirt and a red bubble mushroomed in his eye.

  ‘Kai – you’re hurt!’ Gerda heard herself shriek.

  ‘Come on,’ Kai said, jerking her arm, ‘you bloody idiot.’

  They crunched out of the bathroom and he pulled her this way and that, dodging an army of bodies, down the stairs and out onto the street. Gerda tripped down the last step and the blast of cold air felt so intense she couldn’t catch her breath. She was sniffing and the tears kept snailing down her cheeks, but his face was red and rigid with anger.

  She knew she’d done right but to him it was wrong. Somehow someone had stolen the old Kai away. The snow wolf, the ice girl from Norway.

  ‘Come on, get going,’ was all he would say. Then she heard him mumble, ‘Technically it was still theirs. Can’t afford to pay for something I didn’t get.’

  As they tramped under a streetlight, Gerda noticed the blood on his shirt, just under his pocket.

  ‘You’re bleeding,’ she panted, ‘the mirror . . .’

  Kai turned and she saw his alarming red eye. He shook his head dismissively.

  ‘Hurry up. They might come after us.’

  The harbour bridge would be icy. The streets were slippery and bare, and the only sound was the dripping of icicles, and the miserable march of their feet.

  Gerda heard a thump through her bedroom wall: Kai’s room! Loud enough to be loud in her room. She heard a rumble of voices, and another thunck. Jesus . . . had those drug dealers followed them home? Were they trying to make Kai pay for the stuff she’d spilt? She strained to catch the words, but her heart thumped too loud to hear. Crash – was it Kai being thrown against the wall? It was all her fault. Kai. Was his grandma caught in the middle? They must be frightened out of their minds! Gerda ran for the telephone, then stopped herself, nearly falling down the stairs. If she called the police, she’d have to make a statement. Saying what? She’d stopped her best friend making a deal? And when the cops made enquiries, someone would say they’d used some . . . whatever it was. Not in the bathroom, but before. Gerda knew about druggies – they were being set up. They’d be blackmailed, or maimed, or killed. God, she couldn’t go to the cops! She remembered those men and their hard stares. There’d be no pleading. But somehow she had to help.

  Now Gerda understood Kai’s rage. Somehow he’d known this would happen. She sprinted downstairs, pushed past her mother dawdling in the hallway, and was at the door of the next terrace in three seconds flat. As always she let herself in. What the hell could she do? She heard another thunck! from the top of the stairs. She felt it. She had to stop him being killed. They wanted money. She’d empty her bank account, give them her secret stash, the coins lying lost under the couch, everything. But she’d heard about drug pushers. It’d never be enough. How could she be so stupid? Kai’s grandmother stood at the bottom of the stairs, her eyes round as a possum’s.

  ‘Wh-who’s up there?’ Gerda said, trying to sound braver than she felt.

  ‘Kai . . .’ Grandma said.

  Jesus, obviously.

  ‘He’s acting crazy,’ she said, throwing up her arms.

  ‘Grandma, stay down here,’ Gerda hissed. ‘Stay here, whatever happens.’

  Grandma shook her head. ‘Bad, very bad,’ she said tragically.

  One way to put it.

  ‘Go to my mum,’ Gerda said, shuddering at another thump. It galvanised her. She leapt up the stairs two at a time, thinking she needed something to defend herself with, but what? Too late . . . she burst into the room carrying a chair she’d snatched up in the hall. And almost fell over it.

  Kai looked at her, astonished, nostrils flared, fist poised, knuckles white, the angry red bloom in the white of his eye. It made him look dangerous. He slammed into the wall with a bone-jarring thunck! and the plaster cracked. There was nobody else in the room.

  ‘Shit!’ he yelled, cradling his fist.

  ‘Kai! What the hell—?’ Gerda screeched. ‘What are you doing?’ She stood in the doorway panting, arm and leg muscles twitching.

  His desk was upturned, electronics gear and comics strewn all over the floor.

  ‘Kai, what’s wrong?’ Gerda said, voice cracking into falsetto. ‘Have they gone?’

  ‘Have who gone?’ Kai yelled.

  ‘Those men. From the other night,’ Gerda said, looking around nervously. They’d trashed the room: looking for cash?

  ‘What men? What the fuck are you on?’ Kai spat. He could have hit her in the stomach. This wasn’t Kai, her friend forever. Her Kai had gone off with the body snatchers.

  She heard the tromp on the stairs, Grandma and her anger swelling to fill the little attic room.

  ‘Kai, language! Gerda is your oldest friend!’ Grandma said, shrill.

  But Gerda looked back at Kai – Kai, eyes blazing, who was belting holes in walls. He could knock Grandma aside like swatting a fly. Bad thought.

  ‘Kai, what is it?’ Gerda said, voice shaking. ‘Why punch the wall?’

  Kai swung to face her, eyes dancing with rage, as if there weren’t enough words.

  ‘Why ask me dumb questions? It’s ugly anyway!’

  Well, it was covered in his posters – girl rockers, martial arts legends, hot rods and super cars. Why didn’t he change them? But she daren’t say a word. Beside her Gerda sensed Grandma was working herself up into a rant.

  ‘Kai, why don’t we go to the park?’ she said, to head it off. ‘It’s beautiful there.’

  ‘Yes,’ Grandma said. ‘Gerda should be the one.’

  The one to what? Gerda thought.

  But Kai roared, ‘No it’s not! The park’s pat
hetic! I hate it! And I’ve got nothing to talk to you about!’

  Gerda shrank from his distorted face, the ropy veins near his temples. He still wore the shirt from the other night with the blood spots on the chest, little red bullet holes. A tiny scab was forming under one eye. Feeling helpless, Gerda took Grandma’s hand: it was brittle twigs, trembling. Gerda felt close to tears as well.

  Kai grabbed the end of his quilt and jerked it off his bed, scattering clothes, discs and magazines. He rummaged in his wardrobe and pulled out his backpack, shoving in everything that had sprayed off his bed.

  ‘Fuck you, losers! I’m going. I hate it here and I hate you!’ he said, slamming the door.

  ‘Kai!’ his grandmother screeched, shaking, sinking onto his bed.

  Gerda looked at Grandma, who’d suddenly shrivelled to toy-size, and swallowed tears.

  For two days Gerda hardly left her room. In the mirror she looked much the same, one long wheat-blonde plait resting on her collarbone, her skin softly bronzed. But the whole world had changed. As she peered into her own brown eyes, she recalled that other ugly mirror. Somehow it was all her fault. She’d made the mirror fall, which spilt the powder, which freaked out Kai, who’d known something serious must follow. She’d ruined the deal as well as his chances with the snow girl. Worst, she’d driven off her closest friend.

  She watched for Kai as they’d always done, checking the attic window next door. As children they’d discovered they shared a special power: to look out along the line of bricks and find the other almost always looking back. But somehow the spell had been broken. Each time Gerda peered out she called him in her mind, but each time she tried and failed, she knew she’d weakened the magic. So she willed herself to stop looking, but still she felt compelled. As kids they made a telephone from empty tin cans joined with string. Over the years they’d had all kinds of secret codes, but in all their years as friends, they’d never used their messages to fight. They’d always been linked by an invisible thread. Now suddenly it had snapped and the magic was spent.