Margaret Mahy - Twenty-Four Hours

Raised unnaturally high on his roller blades, Jackie was staring down at Ellis with friendly interest, but Ellis could easily see that something indefinable was going on behind those beaming, blue eyes … some sort of guess was being made. He knew he was being assessed. And now he remembered that, years ago, Jackie Cattle, a confused victim for the most part, touched by some oddity that Ellis had never really defined, had also had moments when he could seem quite sinister.

So he gave a hasty smile – a nod, a shrug – half-offering to move on. But Jackie smiled back at him – a smile bright with unconvincing innocence, revealing a clownish gap between his two front teeth. He grabbed Ellis’s arm.

“Long time no see, mate!” he shouted, the wind snatching at his words.

“I’ve been away,” Ellis shouted back.

“What? Inside?” Jackie asked with a sort of confused incredulity. “Jail?” Then he flung up his hands in a gesture of apology. “No! Of course not! Not you! Sorry!” All the time his eyes were flitting over Ellis with the attentive curiosity of someone planning to paint a portrait from memory. “So! Where the hell have you been?”

Automatically, Ellis was piecing together a memory portrait of his own. Before he had been sent to St Conan’s he had attended a small state school across the road from his home. Jackie Cattle had also been a pupil there, a boy at once exotic and pathetic, a year ahead of Ellis and old in his class. He must be nineteen by now, thought Ellis. Twenty, perhaps. In some ways he hadn’t changed much. He still had the same round, childish face, the same heavy-lidded eyes, the same sly, sideways smile.

“School!” Ellis yelled into the storm without thinking.

“School!” exclaimed Jackie, bending forward as if he could hardly believe what he was hearing. He sounded much more astonished at the thought of school than he had been at the possibility of jail.

“I’m out now,” said Ellis. “What about you?”

“Cross my heart, you wouldn’t want to know,” said Jackie, pulling a face.

He certainly looked disreputable – had always looked disreputable – and yet, for all that, he spoke with an accent that was almost elegant. His family had been well-to-do, hadn’t they? Adults had exclaimed over the contrast between Jackie and a clever, older sister. Anyhow, the contrast between the tattered camel-hair coat and the smooth way of speaking made Jackie hard to place. Ellis found he was not quite sure how to talk to him.

“Oh, well, see you around!” he said, knowing already that Jackie was not going to let him walk away. And sure enough, Jackie’s grip on his arm tightened a little.

“No! No, wait!” he cried, while his eyes ran over Ellis yet again with that same persistent speculation. “What are you rushing off for? You’re not meeting a girl or anything, are you?”

“No,” said Ellis a little aggressively, because Jackie had sounded so completely certain that Ellis would not be meeting a girl.

Jackie beamed.

“Well, that’s OK then! Let’s mingle! Be part of café society. I’ll buy you a beer.”

Why not? thought Ellis. I might as well find out what’s going on.

“Why not!” he said aloud. “I’ll pay,” he added, remembering the money in his back pocket.

“Even better!” said Jackie fervently. He twitched his battered coat into place as carefully as if it had been freshly cleaned and pressed and there was some reason for looking after it. Then he pointed backwards over his shoulder with his thumb.

“Follow me,” he said, spinning on the spot as he extended his arm, pointing dramatically. They moved off together, Jackie gliding at Ellis’s right shoulder like an escorting angel.

“So! School!” he reminisced. “School!” he repeated as if he were mentioning something so peculiar he couldn’t quite believe in it any more. “And what now? Got a job lined up?”

“I’m going to be an actor,” said Ellis, feeling he could safely practise this announcement on someone like Jackie. It came out well – crisp, assured and unapologetic.

“Crash hot!” said Jackie, though Ellis suspected Jackie would have said the same thing if he had announced that he was planning to be an accountant.

“I only got home last night. I’m just getting used to things again,” Ellis added quickly.

“Hey, you never get used to things,” Jackie said. “Take it from one who knows!” He had one of those faces that flared into life when he smiled. The little gap between his front teeth flashed – a flash of darkness. Ellis tried to imagine a gap-toothed Hamlet. Why not? There weren’t any orthodontists in Shakespeare’s day. For all that, he found he couldn’t quite imagine Hamlet with a gap in his front teeth. “Why did your parents send you away to school?” Jackie asked. “Were they trying to get rid of you, or what?”

“It was my dad’s old school,” said Ellis. “He loved it there, and he thought I would, too.”

“I’d have hated it,” declared Jackie with complete certainty.

“It was all right,” said Ellis.

The wind flung fistfuls of rain in their faces, drops flying towards them like transparent bullets.

“OK! Swing right!” Jackie commanded. “In here.”

A couple of minutes later Ellis was sitting at a table in a café bow window, with an oblique view of the city centre. Because it was so well lit, and yet a little distant, he was teased again by the idea that he was looking on to a stage, and that someone was busily operating a wind machine in the wings.

Jackie slid back from the bar where he had been talking in a familiar way with a barman. He was carrying two short, brown bottles of lager, a glass upended on top of one of them, and a bowl of mixed nuts and potato chips which he passed to Ellis. Then he slumped into his chair and put the bottle to his mouth, sensuously kissing its brown lips. Ellis put the glass to one side and drank from the bottle, too.

“Saves the washing-up,” he said.

Jackie grinned, his grin hyphenated by darkness. “So, let’s just watch the world go by for a minute or two,” he said. “Then, if you like,” he added with a slyness that was not intended to deceive, “we can take off to a party I know about. Well, we can if you’ve got wheels. Bigger wheels than mine, that is,” he added, glancing down at his skates.

“Oh, I see,” Ellis replied with satisfying irony. “You’re not just – you know – being nice!”

“No way, mate!” exclaimed Jackie indignantly. “This is straight-out exploitation. Trust me!”

“Suppose I don’t have a car?” Ellis asked. “What’ll you do? Skate to the party with me running beside you?”

“But you have got a car,” said Jackie. “I took one look at you and I just knew! ‘Now, there’s a man with a car,’ I said to myself, and I was right, wasn’t I?”

He spoke drowsily, almost absent-mindedly. But there was something far from sleepy moving in the eyes behind those heavy lids.

“It’s my mother’s car,” said Ellis. “I’m supposed to be home in …” he looked at his watch “… in about a hour.”

“Did you promise?” asked Jackie.

“Well, I didn’t exactly promise …” said Ellis.

Jackie relaxed. “Thank God,” he said. “You really frightened me then because you’re probably one of those pricks that keep their promises. It would have ruined everything.”

“What I am is the prick with the car,” Ellis reminded him. Jackie laughed and nodded.

“Yeah! Right! Nice one!” he said. “Now – this party! It’s out along the motor way … a country party. I could skate, but it would be easier if you drove me.”

Ellis remembered he had promised himself wild adventures and no apologies. And, after all, he had made his mother no real promises.