Angelic Upstart (The Alex Trueman Chronicles Book 3) Read online

  “What now?” asked Alex.

  “Home, I guess,” said Kelly, thrusting her hands into her pockets.

  “I guess,” agreed Alex, frowning. “It just seems such an anti-climax after all that, you know...” A gesture of his hand encompassed all that had happened to them in Zanzibar.

  “Yeah, well,” said Henry, wiping his face with his sleeve. “I don’t suppose there was ever going to be a civic reception, marching bands, speech from the lord mayor and stuff, was there?”

  For a while they leant against the railings around the play area, feeling a sudden and strange awkwardness after months of close companionship.

  “I’ll be off then,” said Kelly at last.

  There were embraces, a brief kiss on the lips for Alex and then she was gone, swallowed up by a party of runners as she turned out of the gate into Livingstone Road.

  “That’s it then,” said Alex, glumly.

  “Yeah,” observed Henry.

  They walked away, Henry to the bus stop, Alex to his own home, each lost in their own thoughts.

  Already it was like a dream, all that had happened. There was another week of school and then the half-term holiday. The once distant prospect of examinations now loomed on the verge of Alex’s world like a thundercloud. He should revise – so his mother pointed out – but the holiday was surely the proper time for that, and for now his evenings were devoted to more important pursuits. There was his Xbox, for example, a glad reunion after long separation. And there was Kelly.

  “I thought you were supposed to be revising,” said his mother tersely, coming into his room un-announced to find him busy with the engaging world of social media. “You told me you were on a revision website.”

  There were all sorts of reasons for him to fear or resent such intrusion, but for now he merely sighed and positioned himself in a casual manner so as to obscure most of the laptop. A new message from Kelly slid up in the corner of the screen behind him.

  “I was,” he said, conscious of a flush in his cheeks. “I was just having a break.”

  “Huh!” snorted Mum. “You’ve got the attention span of a gnat. I’m warning you, Alex, if...”

  “Yes, okay. I get it,” interrupted Alex impatiently.

  “I hope you do,” said Mum with a significant nod, “because if you blow it with these exams, there’s going to be thin times ahead for you, Alex, very thin indeed.”

  Alex got it. He really did, and on one level he genuinely wanted to please his mother and do well in his exams. But there were too many other things competing for his attention, and after the heat, the colour and the excitement of Zanzibar, his own world seemed strangely washed out and dull. It was true that the threat of violent death no longer hung over him, unless he did really, really poorly with his exams, at any rate, but something about him was different now; it was as though his experiences had changed him in some permanent way. He had been a foreigner in Zanzibar, but now it felt as if he had become a stranger in this world, too. And then there was what he had come to think of as the ‘portal’, the dark cavern in the back of his mind – that strange and unique endowment which enabled him to move at will throughout space and time, a capacity of which even angels were in awe. It made him special, perhaps unique – but who could he tell?

  “Okay, Mum, I might be rubbish at Physics but I can travel to the other side of the world in a heartbeat, if I want to, yeah? Not too shabby that, is it? You gettin’ that? Huh?”

  He said this under his breath after her receding back. But he wouldn’t use that dark portal – couldn’t, perhaps. Audrey had made it quite clear that he should live an ordinary life, that he should not use that ability and that he was being observed. Even now Alex cast his eyes quickly around his room, as though he might catch sight of some angelic surveillance device. The idea that the angels might be observing his every move was most definitely an unsettling one. Some of his private moments might not make for the most attractive viewing.

  A chime from the laptop announced the arrival of another message from Kelly.

  It was only with Kelly, or indeed with the others, that he felt normal. Will proved to live only a few streets away but went to a different school, so they had never previously had the occasion to meet. It was easy enough to call on him and to walk to the park after school. Things were more difficult with Tanya, though. She lived in a large house on the better side of town, with ponies grazing in paddocks behind and woodland stretching away to the north. She was the eldest of three sisters, two of which were five-year-old twins. As a ten-year-old she was inaccessible through the usual social media channels, and as yet she had no phone of her own. Kelly called on her one night after school.

  “Hello? Do I know you?” asked Tanya’s mum at the front door. She was an attractive woman in her mid to late thirties, long blond hair pinned up on her head and an expression of perpetual mild harassment beginning to incise her forehead with permanent lines. A small child’s voice could be heard whining in protest from along the hall behind her.

  “I was hoping to talk with Tanya,” said Kelly in her best polite voice. “We met at the tennis club.”

  This was untrue, of course, but a story put together by Kelly and Tanya when it had become clear that they were soon going home. Tanya spent much of her time with her parents at the tennis club. Kelly did not move in the social circles where tennis club membership was the norm. Nevertheless, this seemed the only context where they might reasonably be expected to have met. Kelly knew the place well enough and had been to social functions there with friends.

  Tanya’s mum’s brows knitted together a little, but she opened her mouth and began to form her daughter’s name. Before she could finish uttering it, Tanya herself came bounding down the stairs and squeezed past her, an expression of huge glee transfiguring her face. She might have been about to throw herself into Kelly’s arms, but something in the cast of her friend’s features persuaded her otherwise. She stopped abruptly on the threshold, almost falling forward in her sudden change of pace.

  “Oh, hi, Kelly,” she gasped, twisting a lock of hair anxiously between fingers.

  “Hi, Tanya,” said Kelly, looking first at Tanya and then at her mother. “I was wondering if you might want to come up to the club? If that’s okay with you, Mrs Jeffries?” she added, with a glance in her direction.

  “Can I, Mum?” asked Tanya, tugging at her mother’s sleeve. “This is who I was telling you about.”

  The sound of voices raised in dispute came from along the hall and then of crying. The owner of this voice appeared, its small face reddened and contorted with indignation, tears starting from blue eyes.

  “Timmy’s mine!” she said. “Tell her, Mum!”

  Mrs Jeffries, distracted by this new crisis, turned to face it, raising a finger to her lips.

  “Shush!” she scolded. “In a minute!” And then she turned her attention back to the front door. “What are you going to do?” she asked, appraising Kelly with a glance. In truth there was nothing in Kelly’s dress or appearance that carried any threat, and her daughter had indeed spoken of her. “It’s been raining,” she added. “The courts’ll be wet.”

  “Not the all-weather ones,” said Tanya. “It’ll only take me a minute to change.”

  “My stuff’s already up there,” said Kelly by way of explanation for her own non-sporting manner of dress. “I’ll change when I get there.”

  “Mum...” insisted Tanya, fixing her with a steady gaze.

  “Yes, alright,” said Mrs Jeffries, capitulating as another gust of tearful petulance came along the hallway behind her. “But I want you back by six, do you hear me? And be careful how you cross the big road.”

  “I’ll make sure she’s back,” said Kelly, with a smile of pure relief as Tanya slipped on her shoes.

  But Mrs Jeffries had already gone, her own voice raised above those of her squabbling daughters, scooping the tearful one up in her arms and disappearing towards the kitchen.

  “I feel bad about lying to my mum,” said Tanya, frowning as they walked towards the tennis club.

  “Why didn’t you tell her the truth, then?” asked Kelly with a grin.

  “What! Are you crazy?” Tanya halted, eyes wide. “She’s never going to believe all that stuff.”

  “Just kidding,” said Kelly, tousling her hair playfully. “I hardly believe it myself.”

  It was the same for all of them. Alex and Will were waiting for them on the piece of lawn outside the tennis club, sitting in the slanting afternoon sun on the low wall that surrounded the car park. Will had come on his bike, which was an improbably small one for the size of him, while Alex had walked, grinning broadly now and coming across to kiss Kelly as she approached.

  “Where’s Henry?” she asked, swinging Alex’s hand.

  “Not coming,” he said with a shrug. “Busy, apparently. He’s been a bit funny at school this week. You know, offhand, like.”

  “I had a nightmare,” said Tanya matter-of-factly, testing the bell on Will’s bike.

  Each of them had responded to their return to Reality in a different way. Will had immersed himself in his family, helping his mum with cooking and with jobs around the house, passing tools to his dad as he tinkered with his motorbike in the garage. It was as though he feared being alone, feared the silence of his room. Kelly withdrew to a world of books in her own room, reading one after another late into the night until a teetering pile grew at her bedside, losing herself in a world of fiction as though her own recent experiences might soon seem fictional, too. Her mum, senses dulled by the slowly encroaching tendrils of Parkinson’s disease, was unaware of any changes in her daughter. The walls were closing in on her own world.

  “So what are we going to do then?” asked Will, setting down
the plastic bottle of supermarket coke he had been drinking from and suppressing a belch, with indifferent success.

  “’Looks like this is the only place we’re going to be able to get together,” said Alex, glancing around him. “I mean, what with Tanya not being let out on her own and all that.”

  “But we do need to get together,” said Will earnestly. “We’re still the Outlanders, aren’t we? You know... just like back in Zanzibar.”

  Simply to mention the name was to conjure up visions of East Africa in a distant time and place. There was a thoughtful silence, broken only by the soft ‘plop, plop’ of tennis balls and the clink of a chain as a woman trudged past with a dog. Each of them re-visited memories, eyes cast down or staring sightlessly ahead, until Kelly broke the spell.

  “You know what?” she said, sitting next to Will. “I think we’re always going to be Outlanders now... even here.” She gestured vaguely around her.

  “I wish Henry was here,” said Tanya in a small voice.

  “We can’t make him come,” said Alex, “not if he doesn’t want to.”

  School was something of a trial for Alex in that long, long week before the half-term holiday. The familiar routines of the day, the content of his lessons, even the classmates around him – they all seemed stripped of relevance and of meaning. It was as though he had outgrown the world around him. His body, he knew, was several months older than it had any right to be, but his mind, his spirit, was older still, forged into a new maturity in the furnace of experience. The cheerful prattle of his peers at morning break or over lunch struck him as childish, petty and meaningless.

  “What’s the matter with you, Trophy?” asked his friend Callum at break on Tuesday. “Cat got your tongue, has it?”

  “No,” said Alex with a sigh and with exaggerated precision, regarding his friend pityingly. “The cat has not got my tongue.”

  “Well, why have you been mooning about like a big old, long-faced... er?” Callum waved his arm vaguely, a suitable simile eluding him. His hand held a plastic cup, some of the contents of which spilt onto Alex’s leg.

  “Hey! Look what you’re doing!” protested Alex, shoving Callum away.

  Callum was a thickset lad with a shock of unruly blond hair. His face was split by a broad grin now, made broader still as another boy, this one of oriental appearance, leant over.

  “I heard he’s got himself a girlfriend,” said Johnnie Wang, glancing about him knowingly from face to face.

  “Who’s told you that?” demanded Alex, although he had a shrewd idea. Where was Henry, anyway? He looked along the table but Henry was nowhere to be seen.

  “So who’s this Kelly, then?” demanded Callum, grinning. “That’s her name, isn’t it? She a bit of alright, is she?”

  “What?!” Alex found himself at a loss for words as his companions began speculating loudly about what Kelly must be like in order to see anything in Alex.

  “Looks like your luck’s out,” Johnnie told Jessica Murphy on the next table. “Alex’s already spoken for.”

  Jessica turned her large potato-like head towards the boys and knitted her brows in a manner that suggested a variety of emotions. A gesture of her hand spoke more clearly, provoking more jeers and whoops of delight.

  “So where did you meet the lucky girl, then?” demanded Johnnie, continuing to explore this rewarding theme. “What is she, blind or stupid?”

  “She’d have to be both!” contributed Jack Davy, a boy from the year below, whose intervention caused Alex a new pang of resentment. “I mean, look at his ears!”

  Alex, the size of whose ears had aroused no controversy at all in Zanzibar, felt as though his head must surely explode as rage contested with shame and humiliation for dominance within him. He felt a red flush suffuse his face – and indeed his ears. A hand reached out to tweak one of them. The only permissible course of action under these circumstances was to join in with the mirth, to add to the jokes that were being made at his expense, and yet he found that he was unable to do so. He wanted to push back his chair and run away from all of it, although he knew that this would amount to social suicide. Instead he bowed his head for a moment, looking inwardly to the dark portal within the back of his mind. It was so tempting. He knew that a moment to focus his thoughts in the right way would be enough to whisk him away from all of this and place him beyond reach of these idiots, with their stupid grinning faces and their inane chatter. And yet he dared not. Audrey’s warning rung in his ears. He did not wish to incur the wrath or indeed the disapproval of Elysium. And yet there was another place, another passage, quite close to the dark portal in his mind, a passage that he recognised now as though perceiving it for the first time. Had it always been there? With a warm glow of relief he slipped through – into Intersticia. And it was Intersticia. It was so easy, requiring almost no effort of mind or body. His schoolmates were frozen all around him now, a blissful silence replacing the noise and the clamour.

  “Ha!” exclaimed Alex, a broad smile spreading across his face. “Ha!” he repeated.

  Already, it seemed a lifetime since first he had stumbled into Intersticia. The delightful possibilities of mischief had come crowding in on his mind on that occasion. Now, it was enough to sit quietly for a moment, surveying the press around the hatch where snacks and refreshments were served, looking along the row of motionless faces at his side. Callum’s head was thrown back in laughter, his drink, in its polystyrene cup, still held in one hand. Out of a sense of duty to himself more than anything, Alex prised the cup from Callum’s stony fingers and held it in his own hands for a moment before the hot chocolate it contained became liquid once more. It proved to be no more than tepid. After a moment’s consideration, Alex poured it carefully into Callum’s crotch, before setting the cup back in the boy’s hand. It seemed unlikely that such a small alteration would endanger this section of the Interstice. Then he crossed to the windows that looked out on the quadrangle, stepping carefully through the crowd of stiffs.

  Outside, all was as motionless as it ought to be. There was no sign of activity, and here at least no movement of passing manatees or dugongs to disturb the quiet air.

  “So, Henry,” said Alex out loud. “Where have you been hiding?”

  Unusually, Henry had not sat next to Alex in French that morning, apparently preferring the company of Jamie Duff, the introverted and studious boy, who wore the thickest glasses Alex had ever seen anyone wear outside of a movie.

  He found Henry in the IT suite, in the act of printing out his Biology homework ready for next lesson, talking in apparently animated tones to a couple of younger boys whilst the librarian looked on disapprovingly.

  ‘Thanks for nothing, nobhead!!!’ Alex wrote at the top of Henry’s homework, making some effort to disguise his handwriting.

  He had known, somehow, that it would be perfectly easy to re-enter Reality now, and so it was, requiring no screwing up of the eyes, no frantic shaking of the head. He resumed his position at the table, adjusted his posture to that which was required of him and slipped back through the corridor that led to the real world. He marvelled at the simplicity of it now, and within a moment or two the focus of hilarity had shifted from his own supposed love life to the status of Callum’s crotch. Callum, leaping to his feet, looked down, aghast at the spreading stain on the front of his trousers.

  “Nice work, Callum,” said Alex with a slow nod. “How on earth did you manage that?”

  Henry made no mention of Alex’s note on his homework next lesson, which meant that either he had not noticed or he simply preferred not to mention it. Failure to notice it would certainly bring on a rebuke from Mr Whitlow, the Biology teacher, who might perhaps assume it was addressed to him. It seemed, on balance, likelier that Henry was ignoring it. This troubled Alex.