Charles Butler - The Fetch of Mardy Watt

CHARLES BUTLER

To Alison Leslie

COVER

TITLE PAGE The Fetch of Mardy Watt CHARLES BUTLER

DEDICATION DEDICATION DEDICATION 1: FAT TUESDAY 2: LOVE POETRY 3: URANIBORG 4: LOSING WEIGHT 5: DOUBTFUL THOMAS 6: ARTEMISIA 7: HAL AND THE FETCH 8: IN DETENTION 9: STREETS, SLAVES AND A CANYON 10: ALAN 11: PENS FROM HEAVEN 12: PARIS IN THE WINTER KEEP READING ALSO BY THE AUTHOR COPYRIGHT ABOUT THE PUBLISHER To Alison Leslie

1: FAT TUESDAY

2: LOVE POETRY

3: URANIBORG

4: LOSING WEIGHT

5: DOUBTFUL THOMAS

6: ARTEMISIA

7: HAL AND THE FETCH

8: IN DETENTION

9: STREETS, SLAVES AND A CANYON

10: ALAN

11: PENS FROM HEAVEN

12: PARIS IN THE WINTER

KEEP READING

ALSO BY THE AUTHOR

COPYRIGHT

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

MRS WATT CAME into the bathroom without so much as a knock.

“There’s no such thing!” she complained.

Mardy jumped hastily off the bathroom scales and reached for a towel. “What did you say, Mum?”

Mrs Watt was carrying a rolled-up copy of Fave ! She waved the magazine in Mardy’s face. “‘How to find your perfect weight and stay there!’ Do they realise that growing children read this nonsense? The perfect weight! There’s no such thing.”

“If there was, I’d be two stone over,” Mardy concluded gloomily. She stepped past her mother, through the scented bath steam to the door.

“There’s nothing wrong with the body God gave you, Mardy. Now then, have you seen my hair dye?”

Mardy discovered it behind the spare toilet roll. She knew what was coming next.

“If you want to worry about anyone’s weight, worry about your brother’s,” said Mrs Watt. “He’s a shadow of himself.”

“Yes, Mum. That’s different.”

“Different because it’s real.”

Mardy pulled a face. When her mother mentioned Alan it always made her feel guilty, though she didn’t know why. Probably guilt was just another way of worrying, like Hal said.

“Are you going to the hospital today? I’ll come with you – I’d like to.”

“I was going to drop in on the way home from work,” said Mrs Watt briskly. “But if you want, I’ll wait for you here. Just make sure you’re back by 4.15.”

“I will.”

“I don’t want to be late.”

“Of course not,” muttered Mardy.

Her mother made it sound as if Mardy hardly ever visited Alan. Surely that wasn’t true?

She mulled it over as she walked the mile to school. Mardy usually went the longer way, skirting the park because of the men who sat there drinking cheap vodka, the ones her mother called Undesirables. The park railings thrummed by and, in between bushes, she saw the raked soil where flowers were set to grow in spring, the paths and sludgy leaves. She saw the men too, lying on benches by the War Memorial – all stubble and urine and wheezing self-pity. They seemed not to notice the weather or even their own sad condition. But they must, she thought … they must . It made her angry that they could waste themselves like that while Alan lay unconscious week after week. And over the railings tinkled a thin, beaded string of notes, plucked from an instrument that Mardy could not name. The music crept between the railings and followed her some way down the street.

Alan had been in the General Hospital for three months now. He was in a coma and nobody knew why. At first he had been very ill indeed. Her mother had not said so, but Mardy knew she had believed Alan would die. For days the house had been deathly still. Even to turn on the television would have felt heartless. Besides, there was nothing Mardy had wished to see or hear, except that Alan was well again. Photographs of her elder brother – humorous, elegant, ironic – sat on every mantelpiece. It had been a terrible time.

But Alan had not died. “He’s a fighter, that one,” the doctor had told Mrs Watt, the day his breathing had first stabilised. “We thought he was fading, but he just refused to let go. I don’t know where he gets his strength from.”

Mrs Watt knew. She said that Alan had his strength from her.

“He’ll never leave us,” she said.

Alan had not left them, but he had not come back either. Ever since, he had hovered between death and life. Sometimes, when Mardy visited, he seemed barely more than an object, a half-wrapped parcel in folded blankets. On other days his sleep seemed so light that she would not have been surprised to see him sit up and say “Morning, Spud! Did I doze off? I could murder a bacon butty!”

Mardy turned up the collar on her coat. She was walking down a long straight road with two lines of plane trees and Victorian, stone-clad houses behind them. The road itself was spacious and clean, and might have been called handsome but for the cars cluttering it on either side. But Mardy could never love its unbearable straightness and muscle-aching length. It made her feel small and lacking in purpose. Behind, the iron railings of the park were still visible; before her was the school itself. The two held her between them like a pair of cupped hands, and would not let her go.

As usual, Mardy stopped halfway down the street to call for her best friend Hal. Hal’s was a large stone house too, but where most had a patch of grass and a flowerbed in their front garden, his had gravel and a fountain. The fountain was made of a green, glowing, jade-like stone and on a grey day like this was the brightest object in sight. Hal’s family called it their “splash of colour”.

Hal’s mother was outside, raking the gravel. She looked up as Mardy’s watery shadow crossed her own and smiled. “Upstairs,” she said, with a jerk of the head. Mardy went through the kitchen, where Mr Young and Hal’s little sister were debating the nutritional value of Honey Loops, and so to Hal’s room.

Hal was tilting a tray of school books into his backpack.

“How’s our project going?” Mardy asked. “I want a full report.”

“See for yourself,” said Hal, nodding to a computer screen.

Mardy looked. One half of the screen displayed a photograph of a sheep in a field. In the other a second sheep (which Mardy vaguely recognised) was sitting in a railway carriage with some knitting. Above this picture Hal had printed “THE SHEEP OF THINGS TO COME?” in lurid letters, dripping blood.

“I know it’s not exactly right for the ‘Ethics of Cloning’, but I got carried away.”

“It’s great,” Mardy said encouragingly. “Just Yarrow’s thing. You’re a marvel, Hal, a marvel.”

Hal looked relieved. “I’ll work on it some more tonight.”

They left the house – Mardy leading, as was her right. At primary school Mardy and Hal had not been close. There, Mardy had been the queen of her own court, the most popular child in class. Hal, at best, had been her court jester. Popularity was a strange thing. Mardy had been neither the prettiest, nor the cleverest, nor the nicest person in her year. She dressed well enough, but was not spectacularly fashionable. She was barely above average in art, in sport decidedly below. Yet she was the one whose friendship counted – and whose dislike could send a child to lonely exile at the fringes of the class. Mardy could not have explained this herself, but had seen no reason to question an arrangement so much to her own advantage. She had assumed it would go on for ever.