Catherine Fisher - Corbenic

He soaped and rinsed and scraped himself till it hurt. Then he looked in the mirror. His face was strange to him, hollow-eyed, thin, stubbled. He had lost weight; he couldn’t understand how much. He dressed in the jeans, and shirt. They were so baggy at the waist he had to use his old belt to keep them up, but they felt crisp and clean, and expensive. Rather than pull his mucky boots on he went downstairs in just the socks.

Shadow was putting the phone down. She turned. “That’s better!”

“Who were you ringing?” His voice was tense, paranoid.

“Trevor.”

“Shadow, you . . .”

“Oh Cal, for heaven’s sake! He’s been worried sick about you! Last month he was here begging me to help him.”

“Last month?” He stared at her. At the primulas behind her, through the window. The swans, he thought. The warm weather. How long had he been in the Waste Land? He sat down unsteadily. “What date is it?”

“The third.”

“Of?”

She came over, concerned. “April, of course. Tomorrow is Good Friday.”

“APRIL! It can’t be!” Three nights. That was all. If you say so , Merlin had said.

“Well, it is. Trevor hasn’t heard from you since the beginning of January. He’s been scared witless. He thought you might have . . . done something stupid.”

Cal knew what that meant. Struggling to keep calm, he said, “What did you tell him?”

“That I’d seen you here, in Bath, that you were okay. I told him you’d be ringing him tonight. You’re going to do it, too.”

He was stunned into silence. “It was only a few days.”

She smiled, too brightly. “Maybe you lost track of time.”

He didn’t want to think about it. “We’ve changed places,” he said gravely.

She laughed. “Sort of.”

“I suppose your parents will have a fit when they come home. Like Trevor did when you came.” He smiled sadly. “Though you were better off than him all along.”

“My parents won’t be home.” She stood up and went to the door, so that he couldn’t see her face. “Mummy’s in London, as usual. Dad’s abroad.” She opened the hall door and yelled, “Anytime, Marj,” and then came back.

Cal looked up at her. “Anytime what?”

“Food.”

It came on a trolley, and they ate it at the big table in the window, looking out onto a green lawn and flowerbeds of wallflowers and bluebells. In the spring twilight a flock of blue tits pecked and fought over a full bird table.

The meal was Italian, soup and then pasta, and he was glad it wasn’t spaghetti because he couldn’t eat that properly, and then some sweet like a trifle he’d never had before. Shadow had wine and he had orange juice. He ate quickly, trying not to. The stiff white cloth and heavy knives and forks, the starched napkins and the table settings made it seem like a restaurant, with Marj as the waitress. He thought of Hawk’s microwave. “Have you seen Hawk?”

Shadow sighed. She licked her spoon. “I’d better tell you what happened. After Trevor took you off that night, we went back to the farmhouse and the police were there. My parents were with them. My mother threw her arms round me; she wept and sobbed. My father looked embarrassed. Arthur was grave. Kai laughed. I knew I’d have to go with her. She would have made trouble for them all, for Hawk especially. If she even found out I’d been traveling with him . . . So I came back. It was blackmail, pure and simple. Though I told Hawk I’d be back in the summer holidays. I won’t lose the Company, Cal. They mean too much.”

He looked down. “How can you be unhappy here, Shadow? If I lived in a house like this, I could never be unhappy. Bath, your parents, it’s . . . it’s a world away . . .”

He stopped, as always. But she said, “You don’t have to clam up anymore. I know all about your mother, Cal. Trevor told me. He and Thérèse came here, like I said.” She put the spoon down angrily. “Why didn’t you tell me they weren’t your parents? Why didn’t you tell me?” But she knew why.

He left the table and went over to the window. So she said to his back, “My mother’s not like yours, no. A world away. She’s rich, she’s ambitious, she’s on TV, a media queen. My father’s in computing. He has his own firm. They live for their work. I never see them. I had a different au pair every year till I was twelve. Really privileged!” She got up and came behind him. “I live by myself, in all this splendor. I could have a car if I wanted. I could party and stay in the London flat and get high on drugs and they wouldn’t know. I have an allowance for all the designer clothes I want. I have a trust fund and a gold credit card. They think this setup makes us a family but we’re not. Her PA sends me my birthday present, can you believe that?”

Cal turned. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t understand.”

“Not your fault. Your mother . . . she was a mess, she ruined things for you, but she was there. Mine never is. She wouldn’t have been much bothered where I’d gone, except that some journalist got hold of the story and she thought it would spoil her precious career.”

She was rigid, stepped away from him, turned her back. Suddenly he felt he had never known her, that the shadow was back between them.

“You’ve always thought, haven’t you, that if you’d had money, it would have been different.”

He nodded, bleak.

“Well, it isn’t. Your life was worse than mine, I know that. But misery is misery, Cal. Loneliness is loneliness. And there’s one thing about your mother that I’d bet on, one thing I’ve never had.”

“What?” he whispered.

Shadow turned. Her eyes were wet; she smiled at him wanly. “I’ll bet she loved you.”

Chapter Twenty-three

Am I on the right road for the house of the Fisher King?

2nd Continuation

There were crystals hanging in the window. They swung softly in the drafts, and Cal watched the tiny brilliant rainbows they made on the walls, all moving together. He lay on the soft pillows, wonderfully comfortable.

Shadow’s spare room was twice the size of his old room in the flat, larger even than the bedroom at Trevor’s. The furniture was old and graceful, and the windows immensely tall, with white painted shutters that could close the night out. Now, late in the morning, he watched the sun, and thought of the Waste Land.

He had been wandering there three months. At least, out here it had been that long. For him, he didn’t know how long it had been. He could only remember fragments, the burning tree, the chapel. You couldn’t forget a whole quarter of a year. Unless your mind was breaking up.

In the comfort after his deep sleep he was oddly unworried. And that wasn’t like him. Maybe he should see a doctor. He examined the idea idly, mulled it over, saw himself in waiting rooms, and then explaining, trying to explain, to a man behind a large wooden desk. “It’s as if time went differently there. But Merlin said . . .”

The doctor would lean forward, interested. “Merlin?” he would say.

“Yes. One of Arthur’s men.”

The doctor would make notes rapidly.

Despite himself, Cal grinned and stretched. If he was going crazy, at least this morning he didn’t care. Until he thought of his mother.

He got up instantly, dressed in his borrowed clothes, and went downstairs, looking through the tall, sunny rooms of the house. Finally he found Shadow sitting out in a sort of conservatory, reading, a fat white cat on her lap. She looked up. “God, you can sleep!”

“I was tired.”

She was wearing the other clothes this morning, the ones she’d worn in Chepstow, the filmy black, the boots. It made her look more familiar, despite her clean face. She pushed the cat off. “Let’s go out for something to eat.”