Sabrina Fludde (2 page)

‘Hey! You there!' she called. ‘
You!
Fellow! I've told you before! If you don't stop what you're doing,
right now
, I'll call the police!'

The Chadman carried on as if he hadn't heard, and Phaze II laughed into his collar. The idea that anybody – even the police – could change the Chadman's habits of a lifetime was amusing, to put it mildly. Phaze II watched the woman reach the bench and start chasing off the crows, shaking her newspaper at them. They made their getaway, flapping up on to the ruined
walls. The woman kept on at the Chadman, thrusting her newspaper into his face and shouting:

‘A public nuisance, that's what you are! Spoiling our square with your filthy vermin! I'll have you put away if you don't stop feeding those crows!
Do you hear me?
'

The Chadman didn't hear her – or so it seemed, sitting staring through the woman as if she weren't there. More furious than ever, she grabbed his bacon sandwiches and threw them into a nearby bin, plucked bits of meat, bread and birdseed off the ground
,
and binned them too. All the while, he sat and let her do it. Even when she thrust her morning paper at him again, he sat and let her. His eyes glazed over as if he were away somewhere else, in a dream of his own making.

The woman snorted with the sheer frustration of fighting someone who wouldn't fight back, gave up at last and stomped away. Phaze II saw her coming, and melted between the dustbins, holding his breath until she'd swept past. He had a name for people like her. People who ran the town as if they owned it. Who had everything, but you never saw them sharing it. Who always knew what was good for everybody else, and were always telling everyone about it. People who had lives to live and families to go home to.

Scuds, he called them.
Stupid scuds
.

The woman disappeared, slamming a door behind her. Phaze II prepared to carry on at last to Pride Hill, but something new caught his attention. A girl came slinking into the square in a way that Phaze II recognised as his own. As different from the striding woman as anyone could be, she edged along the
grassy mound, moving through the shadows with her head down.

Phaze II watched her with more than curiosity. He knew everyone by sight, but the way he knew this girl was different. His hair stood up on end.
He had dreamt about her last night!
Watched her turn her head and seen her face as pale as a ghost's, even as he saw it now. Her eyes had been full of sadness and in the dream he'd wondered why she was so alone. Now he wondered again, taking in the soaking dress sticking to her body, and nothing else to keep her warm but some scrappy little shawl-thing tied around her neck.

Phaze II followed the girl, Pride Hill forgotten. She reached the end of the mound where he could see her face-on. There was something strange about her – something eerie. It wasn't just the dream making everything about her seem strange, and it wasn't that she plainly didn't know her way around. Even a couple of of BC boys picked up on it. Self-styled Border Commandos, normally so tough – and normally no friends to strangers – but they let her pass them on the square without a comment.

Phaze II waited until they'd gone, then followed the girl down Dogpole Alley. She reached the Bytheways' house, where their front door stood open and a sweater hung over the railings next to a garden fork and a row of potted plants. Nobody was in sight, but Phaze II could hear voices in the house.

So, it seemed, could the girl. She looked both ways and suddenly Phaze II knew what she was going to do. The voices started growing louder and, as if she realised how little time she had, the girl snatched the
sweater and made off. She was very quick – but then she had to be. Only seconds later Mrs Bytheway emerged on to her front step, ready to get on with her potting.

‘My sweater!
My birthday sweater!
It's gone!'

She ran back indoors, calling to her husband that her special present had been stolen. Phaze II seized his chance and hurried after the girl. But when he reached the end of the alley, emerging on to Pride Hill, she had already gone. Everybody else was there – shoppers, business people, Buddhist boys peddling tracts, farmers in town for market day, buskers and tourists. But no girl.

Phaze II searched for her, all the same. It was a small town and she couldn't have gone far. He scoured Pride Hill, all the way up to the high town cross at the top. Then he scoured the new shopping mall, slipping like a shadow up and down its levels and in and out of its glittering shops.

Then he looked in all the other places where he would have gone himself if he'd wanted to find a quiet corner to dry off. But the girl wasn't in the library in the hidden alcove between ‘Local History' and ‘Fishing'. She wasn't in the castle. She wasn't in any of the old churches. She wasn't in the bus station, or the railway station, or even sheltering in the warmth of the town museum. She wasn't in the all-day pubs in the wild west end of town, between the Welsh Bridge and the market hall. She wasn't even in the Mardol Cinema, disused and boarded up but easy to get into.

She wasn't anywhere. Or so it seemed.

Only at the end of the day did Phaze II catch sight of the girl again. He was down in the wild west end,
heading for the market to see if any of the traders had left anything behind. The market hall was locked but the girl stood outside its reinforced glass doors, gazing at her reflection. She was wearing the stolen sweater, which came down to her knees, and had found a pair of ill-fitting shoes to go with it. But it obviously wasn't them that the girl was looking at.

It was herself.

Phaze II stepped into the shadows so that the girl wouldn't see him. But he needn't have worried. There was something completely self-absorbed about the way she stared at her reflection. Something very odd. She wasn't preening. There wasn't anything self-pitying in her gaze. There wasn't even anything curious.

It was only later that Phaze II realised what it was. He was making his way up Pride Hill in the dark. The girl had long since gone again, melted into the night. All the shops were shuttered and only a few last workers were about, heading for the station while the town beggars called after them for small change.

Phaze II slipped past them all, in the shadows until he reached the bright lights of the shopping mall at the top of the hill. And suddenly there he was reflected in a window – a tall gangling boy in a flapping coat. He stared at himself and it dawned on him that the girl hadn't looked the way that he did, knowing what he'd find. She'd stared in the way people stared at strangers. As if she'd never seen that person reflected in the glass door.

Never seen herself before
.

Phaze II hurried on, telling himself that it didn't matter what the girl had seen or known or thought. It
had nothing to do with him. The first rule of life was not to get involved, and the second was
not to dream!

He passed the high town cross and started down the road on the other side. Time was ticking by and soon the town's nightlife would begin. There'd be people on the streets again, especially in the wild west end and around the railway station. People full of drink and maybe even fight. It could get like that on a Friday night. Especially when the BC boys were in town.

Phaze II hurried on, pausing only to rifle through a final litter bin down by the railway station. Here he pulled out half a mega-pizza in a box and a crumpled bag of chips. It was a major haul. Marvelling at what people threw away, he carried on. Old Sabrina would be waiting, and she'd be hungry. She had ways of punishing him if he left her for too long. She wasn't easy, Old Sabrina, but who could blame her? She had no one else to depend on. Only him.

The girl spent her first night in the old, disused Mardol Cinema. It took a while to get into, but was worth the effort when she found it dry and warm inside. Its emergency lighting system was still working and there were even chocolate bars to be found in the back of a cupboard. The floors were still carpeted, and she curled up beneath the empty screen, sleeping like the dead until daylight awoke her.

It came seeping through the cracks around the emergency exit, bringing no clues to the time of day. The clock had long since stopped, leaving cinema-time at an eternal midnight. The girl crept into the ladies' toilet – a marvel of dusty china basins, marble surrounds, shell-shaped lights and tall mirrors tinted pink. In these she could see her reflection again – a row of ragged girls with shoes too big to walk in comfortably. Her face was pinched, her hair a tangled mess and the grubby blanket, knotted under her chin, fit only to be thrown away.

But it was all the girl had brought with her. All she'd got, along with this reflection of a child she didn't know. She looked at her body with its thin arms, legs and chest. Who was she? Who and
what
? She didn't feel like a child inside herself – and yet why not?

She left the cinema the way that she'd entered, slipping between loose boards. Someone shouted,
‘What d'you think you're doing?' and she ran off into a network of alleys. It was easy to lose herself. The town was like a maze. She rambled around, looking for clues to who she was and where she'd come from. She went down to the bus station, looking for destinations that might sound familiar. Did the same at the railway station. Looked at people's faces, wondering if she'd find somebody that she knew. Even stood in front of a television shop, waiting for a news item about a lost child – some frantic mother on the screen, calling for her daughter to come home.

But there was no news item, and night fell again. The girl headed back to the Mardol Cinema, but when she got there the boards had been renailed. What was she going to do? She tried the market hall, but it was locked for the night. Tried the shopping mall at the top of Pride Hill, but it was locked too. Tried the library, the castle and even the town museum. But everywhere was locked.

The girl ended up by the river, clambering beneath the castle wall, trying to find a way of getting in. Suddenly the ground slipped away beneath her. She hadn't realised how steep it was – and now it was too late. A landslide of stones and loose soil took hold of her and swept her down a steep bank to the wall which ran behind the river path. Along the top of it had been erected a barricade of iron bars, jagged bits of glass and barbed wire. And built above the wall, at right angles to it, stood the railway bridge.

Its top was lit by platform lights, shining green and orange through a row of arched window panes. But its underbelly was as dark as ever. The girl watched the river flowing under it out of sight. Above her, a voice
announced that the train due on Platform Seven was going to be late. Beneath her, a little mist rose from the river and drifted into the tunnel, where a wall full of graffiti announced:

NO HOPE!

NO LIFE!

GOD IS DEAD!

DIE BLOODY WELSH!

DIE BLACKS!

BLOODY FAIRY POOFTERS, OUT OUT OUT!

BORDER COMMANDOS RULE!!!

The girl shivered at the words, painted black, each dripping letter thick with hate. She turned to get away, as if the hate were directed at her personally. But more stones and earth came slipping down and she found herself trapped, unable to go forwards, unable to go back. Scared, lost and cold, she started whimpering. All the questions that she'd asked herself during the day came tumbling out.

‘Why me?
' she asked again. ‘What was I doing in that river? What am I doing here? Where have I come from? Where's my home? Where's my family? Why can't I remember anything? Do I have a mother? Do I
have a story? Do I have
anybody
out there?'

Desperately the girl struggled to remember back beyond that first moment on the river when the mist had parted and there she was. But there were no answers beyond the mist. There were no memories. For all her trying, there was nothing. She held her head and rocked back and forth.
What was she going to do?
She didn't know. She tried not to think. Closed her eyes, tried not to move, but succeeded only in bringing down more stones and earth.

The girl cried out and a low note answered as if on cue. It came twisting through the darkness – a lonely sound which could have been anything from the nightly haunting of the town ghost to a train screeching overhead. At first the girl couldn't make it out, but then she heard another note, and another. And then she realised. It was a tune.

A stupid tune!
The girl almost laughed out loud. What she wanted was her memory, to rescue her with answers. But what she got was music instead! She looked around, trying to see where it was coming from, but the river path stood empty, and so did the railway tunnel. Nobody was here to play to her, but she could hear the tune all the same.

The girl listened to it, reluctant at first, but slowly lulled despite herself. How could it be otherwise? The tune sang out as if it were a living thing, soaring and swooping among the girders of the railway bridge, echoing up to its black stone arches and rolling across the river like mist. And its notes were words, and every one of them a song of secret comfort.

‘You're fine,'
it sang out.
‘Really. Fine. You're brave and strong and where you should be. There's nothing
to be frightened of. Everything is just fine. Trust me.'

And the girl did! The notes seeped into her like an enchantment, and suddenly she
was
fine! She knew she was, just like the tune said. She didn't feel sorry for herself any more. She didn't feel frightened. She felt safe.

For the first time, the girl noticed how beautiful the night had become. She looked around her, and the air was glittering with frost. The bridge wasn't dark any more, but sparkling with jewels of ice. The stones and earth around her were covered with diamonds, and the glass along the top of the wall shone with bright spangles.