“Uh?”
“Mardy, wake up! Have you heard a word I’ve been saying?” Hal did a little war dance in front of her. What he had been saying was not important – a mixture of football, geography and soap opera – but Mardy usually made a better show of listening than this. “Is your brother worse again?” he finally asked outright.
“Alan? No, no. I saw him last night and he’s just the same. A bit better if anything.”
“I’m glad.”
“His skin – you know it had that awful waxy look? Like a Granny Smith when you’ve polished it? That’s gone. He doesn’t look like he’s wearing a mask any more.”
Mardy relapsed into silence.
“But?” prompted Hal. “Come on, you know I can tell when something’s bothering you.”
“Only my mother’s got this way of talking like he was a saint. And he isn’t.”
Alan wasn’t a saint. Mardy loved her brother, but however much she tried to be pure and charitable, globules of resentment kept bubbling up through her mind whenever she thought about him, like marsh gas through a swamp. Little things, mostly, like the way he insisted on calling her Spud when he knew she detested the name. Or his habit of careless elegance which meant that, even lying motionless in his hospital bed, Alan was always the centre of attention. While their mother read Alan stories from the local paper, Mardy lurked in the background, picking off the less-wrinkled grapes for the man in the next-door bed and feeling like an imposter. She wished she could be filled with noble feelings, feelings of self-sacrifice and pity; instead, she wanted nothing more than to run back down the sterile corridors to her home.
They turned the corner to Hobson’s. Mardy looked with naked dislike at the camera mounted on the school gate, which they were obliged to pass. Cameras gave her the creeps and the hospital was full of them.
“Hal – would you think I was crazy if I said I thought I was being followed?”
“Followed!” repeated Hal, instinctively looking back down the tree-lined road. “Who do you think’s following you?”
“Don’t say it like that – like you think I really was crazy! Anyway, I don’t mean followed, quite. But watched. I think someone might be watching me.”
“Mr Shute through the CCTV?” suggested Hal. “It’s three minutes to nine again, we’ve got to hurry.”
Mardy looked annoyed. “You don’t understand,” she said. “Wait while I go to Hobson’s – I’ll tell you after.”
Mardy sprinted the fifty yards to Hobson’s, rather flustered. She really had meant to tell Hal what was bothering her, but found it was not so easy to explain. Rachel Fludd came into it, and the diary entry, and the strange thing that had happened at the War Memorial the previous afternoon.
And Alan? Perhaps, thought Mardy furiously, perhaps everything comes into it. Perhaps it’s another way of saying that life is strange, that the sky is blue and water is wet. A way of saying not much. But I’m not the kind of person who gets in a state over nothing, she thought. I’m just not that imaginative.
Mardy burst into Hobson’s, steaming with frustration. Nut Krunch Bars, at least, were reliable.
Mrs Hobson looked up from her paper. “Oh. Hello, Mardy.” For some reason she seemed surprised to see her. “What can I do for you?”
“My usual Nut Krunch,” said Mardy. “I’ve finished with low-calorie imitations – they taste like cardboard. Back to double chocolate from now on.”
Again Mrs Hobson looked at her oddly. “Back with a vengeance, I’d say. Two in half an hour is pushing it, isn’t it?”
“What?” asked Mardy distractedly, as she placed the right coins on to the counter.
“Two Nut Krunch Bars in one day. You only just left the shop.”
“What did you say?”
“Oh, not that it’s any business of mine,” protested Mrs Hobson. “I know what it’s like, Fighting Temptation. Would you believe I used to have a twenty-six inch waist?”
“I haven’t been in here since yesterday,” protested Mardy.
“If you say so,” laughed Mrs Hobson in an infuriating, disbelieving way.
“But I haven’t!”
“Then all I can say is, your doppelganger was here ten minutes ago – and she likes double-chocolate Nut Krunch Bars too. Now, hadn’t you better get along? Your friend’s getting in a bit of a state out there.”
True enough, Hal was standing at the window between two pyramids of baked beans, frantically tapping his watch. Mardy muttered a goodbye and left.
“Don’t forget your chocolate!” called Mrs Hobson.
Another dash for the classroom. This time they almost ran into the school caretaker, Mr Bartok, who was screwing a bracket into the wall over the main entrance. “Mind my ladder!” he warned and teetered bulkily at the top.
Since Christmas the school had sprouted a ring of CCTV cameras. To keep out Undesirables, Mrs Watt had said, and a good thing too. But when Mardy saw Mr Shute, the headteacher, looking out over the playground from his first-floor office, she wondered. Perhaps it was the pupils, rather than any intruder, who were his main concern. She did not think she had ever been nearer to Mr Shute than the thirty feet separating them at the weekly assemblies, where he swept in, exhorted them and left. For all she knew Mr Shute might be a robot, or a hologram, or – or – anything …
Throughout assembly, Mardy kept looking up and down the hall, wondering who, if anyone, might have been mistaken for her. Perhaps, as Mrs Hobson had said, she really did have a double – or something close enough to fool the shopkeeper, who was shortsighted and always had her nose in the paper. Rows and rows of children surrounded her, short, tall, thin and fat, white, black and brown. From awkward Year 7s like herself to the willowy grandeur of Year 13, hundreds of girls in that room wore the Bellevue School sweatshirt. On hundreds of chests the same school logo was embroidered: a ship in full sail that actually looked more like a kitten being run over by a milk float.
Mardy couldn’t decide which struck her more: how very different everyone was or (in another way) how very much the same. They were all standing with their bored assembly expressions, as the head ran through arrangements for the Year 8 trip to the Science Museum. The same expressions persisted as he launched into the statutory hymn and warned them about the litter problem in the streets outside the school. But none of them, Mardy decided, looked enough like her to deceive Mrs Hobson.
Except, possibly, Rachel. But even Rachel was so much thinner, with her long blanched, moon face and coal-black eyes, that Mrs Hobson would have had to be blind not to see the difference. Rachel Fludd probably hadn’t eaten a Nut Krunch Bar in her life.
It might not have been so bad if Rachel hadn’t been writing in her notebook again at wet play that day. The children were kept in their classrooms, bored and out of temper. In the corner of Mardy’s class Mrs Yarrow sipped away at a mug of coffee, clearly wishing she could be in the staffroom instead. Hal and his chess-playing friends found a set and retired to the corner. The room was as sweaty as a boxer’s sock. Mardy, swinging her legs idly as she sat on the edge of a table, found without surprise that she and Rachel were the only two girls who had not attached themselves to some group or other.
Looking down at her own legs, she compared them with Rachel’s. Fat Tuesday. String Bean Sally. Rachel must be as far under the perfect weight as Mardy was above it. There must be some perfect girl of whom they were both just freakish reflections. Certainly, something seemed to tie the two of them together. In