He stepped back quickly. “Don’t be daft! I’m fine.”
For a moment she looked at him, then leaned over and pulled the door closed. Through the open window she whispered, “Merlin was right about us both hiding.” She touched the painted web on her cheek. “This isn’t permanent. It can come off. But I’m not sure if yours will.”
On the bus, all the way home, he brooded, obsessively picking at a tiny frayed thread on his sleeve. What was he doing with these people! Getting dirty and sweaty and learning junk about medieval warfare! He must be mad! Who did they think they were, talking about him like that, behind his back, discussing him? Hot, he looked at himself in the grimy window and swore he wouldn’t go back. He’d find other friends, he thought, or do without, because they weren’t anything like him. He liked things clean, and new and expensive, and he couldn’t understand why he wanted to be part of their crazy setup. It wasn’t him. Surely.
At the Chepstow bus station he bought some takeaway food, the cheapest he could find, as if to punish himself. While he was waiting he put the sword under one arm and stood by the window looking out into the street, ignoring the loud kids that came in, hating their tasteless clothes and filthy sneakers, hating them. Then the sword dug in his ribs, bringing him back from his annoyance.
There was a poster on the window. It was old, and people waiting had frayed its corners, and the adhesive holding it had softened so much that he could peel it off and it lay limp in his hand.
MISSING FROM HOME, it said, and there was a name, Sophie Lewis, believed to be in the South Gwent area, and an address in Bath, and a photograph of a girl in a smart school uniform smiling shyly, her light brown hair curly, her teeth in an ugly brace. For a whole minute Cal looked at it. Then he reached in his pocket and found a pencil; slowly he took it out and shaded the hair black and straight. The sodden paper tore softly; he held it together, coloring the lips a darker shade. Then, carefully, thoughtfully, he drew a cobweb over one side of her face.
“Your order, mate,” the shopkeeper shouted.
Cal squeezed the paper to a tight ball and dropped it in his pocket. Some people, he thought angrily, didn’t know they were born.
Chapter Thirteen
Don’t you think it right I should go and see my mother,
whom I left on her own in the wood called the Waste Forest?
Conte du Graal
“What IS that?” Trevor stood in front of the mirror straightening his tie.
“Opera,” Cal said shortly.
Around them the music soared, deep and strange. He was getting to like it. He couldn’t stop playing it.
“I know that! I mean which one?”
“Parsifal. It’s by Wagner. German.”
“Oh, the Quest for the Holy Grail. All that stuff.”
Cal’s pen paused over the paper. “What?”
But Trevor was absorbed in the accuracy of his tiepin. “Percival the wise fool,” he said absently.
Cal sat rigid. “Who was Percival?” he whispered.
“He left his mother behind and went off to be a knight.” Trevor stepped back and studied his appearance. “Does this look straight to you?”
Cold, Cal nodded. He was doing an assignment for college, but the figures kept jumping around in his head, so he put the pen down and said, “Going out with Thérèse?”
“Business. Round Table dinner.”
Cal almost snorted with laughter.
Trevor looked at him curiously. “What’s got into you? And why opera? Most kids of your age are into grunge and garage and all that claptrap.”
“I like the finer things,” Cal said acidly.
“Like that tie.”
Cal frowned. Yesterday he had had his first month’s salary; he had gone into the bank and asked for the balance of his account and stared at it in delight in the porch, pushed past by irate shoppers. Then he’d deducted the rent for Trevor and it hadn’t looked so great. Food for the next month. Christmas presents. And he should send something home.
But two shops down was the classy men’s wear window he looked in every morning on the way to work, and he’d gone in and bought the tie. Palest gray silk. Expensive. Tasteful. Designer.
Signing the check had been a moment of real pleasure; he had taken the slim box home wrapped in tissue paper and felt buoyed up by it, happy, almost as exhilarated as when he did well in the fighting with Hawk. At last he was getting somewhere, starting to be what he wanted to be, well dressed, confident, well-off.
Thérèse had seized on the box and opened it almost as soon as he’d got into the house. For a second he had been nervous, but she had whistled and felt the silk with her carefully manicured fingers.
“Nice! Pricey?”
“A bit. But it’s for work.”
She had held it up to his neck. “It suits you. You always know what you want, Cal. You’re like your uncle.”
But he still hadn’t sent any money home.
Now Trevor turned from the mirror and picked up the cream coat lying over the arm of the chair. He checked the pockets absently; watching him, Cal knew he was working out how to say something, and knew only too well what it would be. It had been coming for days.
Silver lighter, wallet, mobile phone. Trevor shrugged into the coat. Then he turned away and picked up his cashmere scarf and said it. “What are you doing about Christmas, Cal?”
At once Cal knew his mother had phoned again. He put the pen down and stared ahead. “She’s rung then.”
“Twice this afternoon. Look, I know how you feel.” He turned, and looked away, down at the CD player. “You don’t want to go back. I know, I’d feel just the same. But . . . well it’s Christmas. I think you should go, just for a day or so. If you’re short of the fare, I’ll pay it. She’s making a big effort. She’s desperate to see you.”
Cal was silent. A long time.
Trevor went awkwardly to the door. “Thérèse and I are going away on Christmas Eve, so you’d be stuck here on your own otherwise, and that’s no fun.” He turned, as if a sudden thought had struck him, and said firmly, “And I don’t want those eco-warriors round here while I’m gone. That’s totally, totally OUT, Cal. I have to say I wouldn’t have thought they were your type.”
“They’re not,” Cal growled. “I’ve finished with them.”
“Good. Well ring her, will you?” Trevor opened the door and paused, fussing with his scarf. His voice was a little softer when he said, “You’ll feel better when you tell her. She’s your mother, after all. You owe her that much.”
When he’d gone and the car had roared away the music rose from its background into a great soaring crescendo of passion.
After all, Cal thought, white with fury. After all the years of falling asleep in class because he’d been up all night waiting for her. After all the parents’ evenings she hadn’t gone to, the school plays she hadn’t seen, all the lies, all the days she hadn’t moved from the squalid sofa while the rubbish piled up around her. All the smells, the vomit, the nights under his pillow with a chair jammed against his door and next door’s baby wailing and her voice, talking, answering, screaming at the nonexistent people to go away, to stop, all the arguments, the long tirades of abuse, the holidays he’d never been on, the birthdays he’d loathed, the kids in school he’d had to fight. Years of living with two people in one, never knowing who’d be there when he got home.
He hated her. For a long time he hadn’t been able to think that, but he could think it now, from this distance. He hated what she’d done to his life. He wanted to love her but it was too late for that; sometime, years ago, all that had washed out of him and left a tiny hard core of bitterness and resentment and utter, cold anger. It was too late.
And Trevor couldn’t talk, because he had walked out of it years ago, and never gone back.