The Oakmen were meeting in the back room of The Lion and The Unicorn on Linden Street.  When Mariam and the others got there, they saw a circle of chairs- about twenty of them, ranging from heavy wooden ones with rectangular backs to tiny ones that were little more than footstools- and Shaun Mandeville, who caught sight of them, beamed, and waved them over.

They’d all seen the message Peps had found, and they’d come anyway.  Because, honestly, this was probably their best chance to actually work out what was going on.  ‘If you have trouble with the Oakmen…’  OK, but why would they be having trouble with the Oakmen?  And why not just tell them about it instead of leaving them a cryptic message and vaguely hoping they actually found it?

Alex had written it.  They didn’t exactly have to compare handwriting samples to figure that out.  Alex couldn’t be bothered to reply to any of Mariam’s texts, even after she’d had to deal with his crazy mother, but he could ruin the wall with the best of them.

Once the chairs had been filled near enough to capacity, Shaun looked around and nodded at the woman on his right, who got up and shut the doors.  As soon as she got back to her seat, Shaun sprang to his feet in the middle of the circle.  “Right!  Hello, everyone!  Thank you for coming out tonight!”  He and the man and woman on either side of him all wore white T-shirts with the Oakmen’s logo, a kind of stylised triangular leaf, printed on the front.  “We are the Oakmen, and tonight is going to be all about connections.  So, on that note, I want you to stand up, turn to the people on either side of you, and give them a big hug!”

It took Mariam a moment to realise he was serious.

Isaac and Peps were lucky- they’d sat on the inside of the group, so they weren’t stuck hugging complete strangers like Mariam and Natalie were.  Mariam and the girl on her right exchanged embarrassed smiles, and then went in for the hug.

It was strange.  Even with all her doubts about Alex, Mariam still found herself looking around the room before she sat down, to see if she could spot That Guy.

“Right!” said Shaun, “Let’s play a game!”  He smiled and waved his hands.  “You can stay sitting down for this one, don’t worry!”

(Mariam hadn’t seen That Guy.  Of course she hadn’t.  Even if he and the Oakmen were in cahoots, he wouldn’t be stupid enough to come to the same meeting as someone he’d met before.)

“It’s simple enough- you just introduce yourself.  Give your name, and an adjective that describes you… but the catch is, they both have to begin with the same letter.  Got that?  OK.  I’ll start- my name is Shaun and I am spectacular!”

He turned to the guy on his left, who said, “My name is Bradley, and I am badass!”

“My name is Debbie, and I am delicious!”

“My name is Janine, and I am joyous!”

“My name is Natalie, and I am not enjoying this.”

There was a little bit of laughter, but it quickly died out in the face of the stony, ominous silence coming from Shaun and his compatriots.  Mariam screwed her eyes shut.  Typical.  Can’t take that girl anywhere.

Shaun and co stared at Natalie for just long enough for it to be uncomfortable, and then Shaun cleared his throat and said, “OK, reminder- this only works if you’re prepared to be mature about this, OK?  Bring an open mind.”  The other two carried on staring, looking at Natalie as if she was something they’d found under their shoes.  Natalie herself had kept her face perfectly blank.  If they were waiting for an apology, they were going to be really disappointed.

The game continued, a little more chastened than before.  “My name is Isaac, and I am imaginative.”

“My name is Rosalyn, and I am relevant.”

“My name is Mariam, and I am marvellous.”  And, despite herself, she thought, That was a bit of an overreaction, wasn’t it?  Because yeah, OK, Natalie had been a bit of a dick just then, but you didn’t glare at somebody for nearly a minute just for not taking your vocabulary game seriously enough.  Not unless you had a serious stick up your arse.

They heard from the rest of the circle, and then the game was over.  Shaun sat down and ceded the floor to Badass Bradley, who rocked back on his heels, made thoughtful popping sounds with his lips, and said, “Show of hands- how many of you have ever had a recurring dream?”

A few people put up their hands.  Mariam couldn’t be bothered.

“Right!  Good!  Because I had a recurring dream once.  From a very young age, I would have this dream where I’d be running down the stairs in my house.  I’d be running, running, like there was something after me… and then I’d trip and fall.”  He paused, hands in the air near his face.  “But I wouldn’t hit the ground.  I’d float down the rest of the stairs.  And nothing bad would happen.”  He brought his hands together and smiled.  “When I got older and told my friends about that dream, every single one of them gasped and said, ‘You too?’”

Bradley clapped once, and did a sort of dance on the spot.  “And I found out, that dream… it’s one that nearly everyone has had at one time or another.  It’s in all our minds, waiting to get out.  So remember- don’t be too afraid of falling.  Because sometimes, when you fall… you float.”

*

Fifteen minutes later, they were all out of breath.  Shaun had got them to play a marathon game of Simon Says, and they’d hopped on one leg and done star-jumps and spun in circles until every one of their muscles ached.  Rosalyn fell back down onto her chair like a sack of potatoes.  She wondered if she’d see actual steam coming out from under her blouse if she knew where to look.

Shaun had sat down too, and Jo, an Oakwoman, got up to talk.  She was small and slight, with big teeth and glasses that made her look like a clever little mouse in a cartoon.  ”Humanity, let us say,” she intoned, “is like people packed in an automobile which is travelling downhill without lights at terrific speed and driven by a four-year-old child.  The signposts along the way are all marked ‘Progress’.”  She made a little ‘Ta-da!’ motion with her hands as she finished.

After a few seconds of confused silence, Jo spoke again.  “That’s a quote from the great intellectual, Lord Dunsany.”  She smiled wryly.  “By the way, you all know what an intellectual is, right?  It’s somebody who’s very stupid, but covers it up by using long words whenever they can.”

A few people laughed, including Natalie.  Rosalyn would have bet anything that she was thinking about that Bryn Cornwell guy.

“Because the thing about Lord Dunsany- and I want you all to be sitting down for this-is that he was a human, too.”  She made a shocked face, and slapped her hands to her cheeks like the Home Alone poster.  “You’ve got to wonder- would he have said the same things if he’d been born into a different species?  If he’d been a giraffe, would he have gone around talking about what a lifelong disaster it was to be a giraffe?”

They were back to animal metaphors again.  It was funny- Rosalyn had just been thinking that one of the things Bradley had said earlier sounded like a Kelpie and Silkie quote.  Sometimes, when you fall… you float.  It hadn’t hit her anything like as hard as the graffiti round the back of Fabric City had, but it gave her a warm, pleasant feeling whenever she thought about it.

“Because, yes, humans can be our own worst enemies… but we also have the intelligence and imagination to make things so, so much better.  We might have invented the atom bomb, but we invented heart transplants as well.  Remember that.”  Jo gave a little punch to the air- not much more than a flick of the wrist, really, but pretty charming anyway.  “And I’ll let you in on another big secret- all of our problems could be solved in an instant if everyone did what benefitted humanity instead of just what benefitted themselves.”

Rosalyn leaned forward, eager to hear more.

*

Natalie hated to admit it (especially after Shaun had been such a miserable git about the adjective game), but she actually quite liked that song they’d just sung.  The lyrics, about a guy called Thomas the Rhymer who’d spent seven years with the fairies and gained a lot of useful wisdom from it, had sounded like a traditional ballad, but the tune Bradley had played on the guitar had been more like something by Travis or Coldplay.  Natalie didn’t know if it was a new tune, or if it was just the way he’d played it.  She might look it up when she got home.

Shaun got up and jogged into the middle of the circle.  It was only a couple of steps, but he jogged anyway.  Because he was a wanker.  He looked up and down, trying to look thoughtful (because, again, wanker), then said, “Have you noticed how often people make themselves miserable for no reason?”

There were a couple of murmurs around the room.

“It’s true!  They worry about things that are ever going to happen.  They let things bother them for years after they’re over and done with.  So that’s the past and the future giving them trouble- what are they going to do about the present?”  He chuckled.  “No good ever comes of dwelling on your own misery.  And the crazy thing is, your own personal experiences have taught you that, but you carry on doing it anyway!”

Beside her, Natalie heard Isaac breathing funny.  His mouth had gone into a tight, straight line, and his nostrils were flared as if he’d just smelled something bad.

“Joie de vivre.  That’s what it’s all about.  Take as much joy out of life as you can.  And sooner or later, you’ll spread it all around you.”  He waved his hands around his head.  “And you’re saying, Shaun, it’s not that simple.  I’ve got responsibilities, there’s rules I’ve got to follow.  But I say, forget about the rules.  Forget about the boundaries.  Forget about the ideas you’ve been fed your whole life.  And once you’ve taken all that away, what’s left?”  He held out his hands to the people in front of him.  “You.  Your truest self.”

Natalie heard a chair scraping, and turned sideways to see Isaac spring to his feet and run to the door.  She was up and after him in a nanosecond.

Shaun’s friend, what’s-her-name with the glasses, got up and tried to head them off before they reached the door.  She had a slightly indignant look on her face, too, as if they were schoolkids trying to leave assembly early.  Anyway, it didn’t work- as soon as Natalie saw her in her peripheral vision, she stuck out an elbow and jabbed her out of the way.  There were a few seconds of light and voices as they raced through the pub, and then they were out and halfway across the road.

*

Isaac reached somebody’s garden wall, and couldn’t run anymore.  Natalie watched him fall to his knees and throw up on the pavement.

Isaac had tried to stick it out, he really had.  Even though it had been like having his head crushed in a vice, even though Isaac could feel the screws tightening every time that guy said the word “you,” he’d told himself that he was going to stay til the end.  But it had just got too much.  You think the wrong things.  You keep doing stupid stuff no matter how much everyone encourages you to be better.  You don’t even know who you truly are.

The all of a sudden, Isaac was kneeling on the pavement outside and staring down at the remains of his lunch.

He felt a hand on the back of his neck.  Mariam.  “What’s wrong, Isaac?  What happened in there?”

Isaac swallowed, took a few deep breaths, and looked up.  All three girls had gathered around him.  He noticed with some surprise that they’d got about a hundred yards from the pub.  He’d even crossed the road without noticing it.  He took another breath.  “OK,” he told them, “OK, listen.”

“What is it?” asked Rosalyn, inching closer.

Isaac swallowed again.  “That place was evil.  No matter what’s going on with Alex, we need to stay away from those guys.”

“Fine by me,” said Natalie, crouching beside him and Mariam.

“What do you mean, though?” asked Rosalyn, who was still standing a few steps away.  Probably didn’t want to crowd him.  Or didn’t want him throwing up on her shoes, which was understandable.  “What was evil?”

“Those people.  The Oakmen.  I don’t know if…”  He took a deep breath, and tried to get up.  “Rosalyn, I need you to promise me you’ll never go to one of those meetings ever again.”

Rosalyn stood still, tightly clutching her coat around her, and gave a little nod.  “OK.”

“We won’t either, Isaac, if that’ll make you feel better.”  Mariam squeezed his shoulder.

Isaac stared at the ground, because he was pretty sure that as soon as he looked up his eyes would start brimming over.  And the worst thing was that he couldn’t even have said why.  It made no sense that a bunch of smug jerks in the back of a pub had made him feel as if he was being shaped into something hideous against his will, but they had.

My name is Isaac, and I am imaginative.

After a few seconds, Mariam patted him on the shoulder again.  “Come on, let’s go and sit by the river.  Get ourselves some fresh air.”

At this time of night the river was just a freezing stretch of sinister-looking black water surrounded by weeds, but the air was fresh and it did make him feel better.  A couple of gulps of the stony smell, and you felt like yourself again.  Isaac saw Mariam messing about with her phone.  “Texting Alex,” she explained, “He’ll have to reply when he hears about this.”

It hadn’t rained lately, so they could sit in the grass at the banks without getting their clothes covered in mud.  “What do you think set you off?” asked Natalie.

Isaac stretched out across the dead grass.  “It felt like they were trying to get into our heads.”

Mariam tsked.  “People like that always do.”

“They wanted to… replace all our thoughts with other thoughts.”  Isaac shrugged.  “They wanted us to ignore our own judgement and listen to them instead.”

Rosalyn sang absent-mindedly.  “Preacher was talking, there’s a sermon he gave, he said every man’s conscience is vile and depraved…”

The four of them went silent, huddling under their coats as the cold river wind blew by.  Then Natalie said, “How much do you want to bet that the Oakmen were the ones who set that bomb in the park?”

It was a joke.  They could all tell that she hadn’t meant it seriously, just a dark little aside to laugh at for a second and then forget about.  But in the cold, dark night, as the wind whistled by, Natalie’s words gained a little more weight than they might otherwise have had.

Mariam made a little uneasy noise.  “No-one’s claimed credit for it yet…”

“Well, they wouldn’t, would they?” replied Natalie, “It was a dud.”

Mariam continued as if she hadn’t said anything.  “They showed up on campus two days after it happened, and they instantly tracked down me and Natalie.  Two of the people who’d been there at the park.  Other people too, yeah, but Shaun specifically went out of his way to talk to me.  And, Natalie, you said that girl looked back and gave you a dirty look…”

Natalie nodded.  “I don’t think I saw her at the meeting, though…”

“Right, but that doesn’t…  Look, you can’t have been the only person who threw away one of those leaflets after being given them, right?  But she definitely noticed when you did.  She was looking out for you.”

They all went quiet again, mulling over what Mariam had said.  Eventually, Isaac chewed his lip and said, “It’s all circumstantial, you know.  We’d never be able to actually prove anything.”

“No,” said Mariam, “Not even unofficially.  But at the very best, I think the Oakmen saw us getting hurt in the bombing as an opportunity.  Get ‘em while they’re vulnerable, something like that.”

Isaac sighed, and got to his feet.  “Come on, let’s go home.  If we’re going to have this conversation, we can have it somewhere warmer.”

Isaac’s first lecture on Tuesdays was at ten.  He didn’t know if the man had found that out somehow and made sure to be standing behind his front gate at twenty to, or if he’d have been prepared to stand there all morning on the off-chance that he’d come by.  Either way, when Isaac passed by the house on the corner with the green blinds, there was a man out front, staring right at him.

“Been meaning to talk to you,” said the man.  It was hard to tell how old he was.  He had grey hair and the kind of thick, square glasses that Isaac associated with Seventies comedians, but you could see his muscles right through his T-shirt.

Isaac stopped where he was.  Five months him and his friends had lived here, and they’d never once seen any of the people who lived in the house with the green blinds.  Just heard their arguments and seen their rubbish on the lawn.  For all they’d known, there weren’t any people living in the house, and it was just haunted by a particularly messy poltergeist.  “…Yeah?”

The man leaned on the gate.  “The other night, I was coming home late, and I saw some suspicious types hanging around yours.  Looked as if they were trying to get over the fence into the garden.”  He smacked his lips as he thought.  “About half past midnight, this would have been.”

“Right,”  Isaac glanced at the end of the road, wondering how late he was going to be.  “When you say ‘suspicious’…”

“All dressed in black.  A couple of those black knit caps on.”  His lips smacked again.  “Twitchy, too.  Jumped about a mile in the air when they saw I was looking their way.”

“Then what happened?”

“They made themselves scarce, pretty quick.”  At a guess, the man was probably about sixty.  Maybe a bit younger, if you assumed he just had one of those faces that gets lines early on.  “Just wanted to talk to you about it.  It didn’t seem right for you not to know.  Not with all those girls in the house.”

“Right,” said Isaac.  In the front garden, behind the man, there were still little scraps of rubbish left over from the big pile a few weeks ago.

“Your mums and dads would want someone keeping an eye on you,” said the man, “Making sure you’re safe.”

And now he was really getting on Isaac’s nerves.  “Right…  Well, thanks,” he said, and began to walk away.

The man didn’t seem to notice.  “Got to look out for yourself, in this world.  Only way to survive is to be the scariest thing in the jungle.”

“Right,” said Isaac, taking another few steps away.

“Mark my words.  Only way to survive.”  The man turned round and began to wander back to the house.  Isaac made sure to get away quickly in case he decided to come back.

*

Rosalyn had got in touch with Judith and told her about Ben Sugar’s news.  The old railway bridge, somewhere in the woods, somewhere near Croydon.  When Judith suggested picking a random bit of woodland and seeing if they could find it, she’d probably just meant it as a joke.  But to Rosalyn, it sounded like a fantastic idea.

“So, what’s the plan?” asked Rosalyn, as they passed through the gate that separated the wood from the pavement, “Just wander about until we find something?”

Judith made an odd face, pressing her lips together and sticking them out like a duck.  “Hm…  The ‘finding something’ part isn’t actually necessary.”

Until tomorrow, it was still February, which meant that it was still cold.  But that didn’t stop it from being the sunniest day since October.  As Rosalyn and Judith got further into the woods, the light shadows cast by the branches cast ever more intricate patterns on the ground.  Spring was getting ready to come.

“I don’t know the names of any of these trees,” said Rosalyn, by way of small talk.

Judith hummed again.  “Well, that one’s a hawthorn.  They’re supposed to keep away ghosts.”

Rosalyn looked over at the spindly tree she’d pointed at.  It looked a little shabby without its leaves.  “Just ghosts?  Does it work on anything else?”

Judith shrugged.  “I don’t think anyone’s ever tested it.”  Judith had told Rosalyn that she was twenty-one.  She didn’t look it.  Or maybe she did, and Rosalyn was just really bad at judging people’s ages.  Both were possible.

There was something about her- maybe her smile, maybe her athletic build, maybe just the fact that she was wearing a skirt outside in February- that made Rosalyn think of characters in Enid Blyton books.  There was something about her that made you wonder if she was about to whip out a bottle of ginger beer and ask you to play hockey or solve a mystery.  She was the sort of person it was good to wander round the woods with. 

“What are we going to do if it rains?” asked Rosalyn, “Other than get wet, I mean.”

“Well, if we’ve found the railway bridge by then, we can hide under it til it stops.”

“That’s another thing I’ve been wondering about.”  They’d come to a sort of mini-hill, more of a rocky slope than anything else, and Rosalyn had to watch her footing so that she didn’t over-balance.  “If it’s a railway bridge, then what’s it doing in the woods?  Wouldn’t they have cut the trees back to let the railway through?”

“I don’t know,” said Judith.  They reached the bottom of the slope, and relaxed a little.  “We’re sort of going on third-hand information, aren’t we?  What Isaac said about what Ben Sugar said.”

“Yeah,” said Rosalyn.  She sighed.  “I still feel a bit guilty doing this without Isaac.  After he was the one who got all that information for us.”  She’d asked him to come, but he’d said he had lectures, and he’d come along some other time.  With that in mind, Rosalyn almost hoped they didn’t find the railway bridge today.  It felt like Isaac should be a part of that.  “But you mean there might have been a miscommunication, right?  Like, maybe it’s not really a railway bridge, but Ben Sugar picked the wrong word to describe it.”

“Maybe.  Or maybe it’s just a disused bit of railway that’s had all this grow up around it.  I’ve seen things like that before.”

“Me too.  There’s one near my grandma’s house in Oxford, an old wooden one.  Me and my brother used to walk along it and scare ourselves by pretending the train was about to come through.”  Rosalyn remembered staring into the distance, imagining that a random set of shapes on the horizon was an old steam engine, seventy or eighty years late.

Judith laughed, in a way that made her duck her head and show her front teeth.  “Did you ever see Stand By Me?  With the scene on the…”

“…railway bridge!  I can’t watch that bit!”

“Because how would you escape?  There’s a fifty-foot drop into the water…”

“You’d just have to decide whether or not that was worse than being squashed by a train.”  Rosalyn pantomimed a shiver. 

Up ahead of them were a row of bushes, a lighter green than the trees around them, and behind that was a row of fields.  It was just a few yards into the first field that Rosalyn saw the signpost.

It was about knee-high (the perfect height to trip over if you weren’t watching where you were going), and covered in chipped red paint.  In faded gold letters, it said, Chimps’ Tea Party 100 Yds.  An arrow pointed right, towards a nearby hill.

Rosalyn and Judith looked up from the sign and exchanged a glance.  Judith was the first one to speak.  “D’you think it’s still there?”

“The chimps’ tea party?”  Rosalyn looked back at the sign.  It was old- you could tell.  Of course, it would have looked pretty weathered even if it had only been outside for two weeks, but this sign had the look of something that had swollen and cracked every time it had rained in the last ten years.  Rosalyn found herself wondering how long chimps actually lived.  “It can’t be a real chimps’ tea party, can it?”

Judith shrugged.  “Probably not.”

“Do you think somebody stole it from a zoo and then put it where it would point right at their friend’s house?”

Judith laughed.

They began to follow the path, towards the hill and then up its side.  As they got closer, they saw that there was a small black building at the top, all canopies and verandas.  “Is that a pagoda?” asked Rosalyn.

“I think so,” said Judith, “It looks like it’s hexagon-shaped, doesn’t it?”

Rosalyn didn’t know if that was a requirement for something to be a pagoda, so she just said, “Hmm.”

Under the veranda, the building itself was covered in full-length windows, making it look like a cage at the zoo.  And inside the building…

“Do you think it’s taxidermy?” asked Judith in a whisper, as if she was worried about waking the chimps up.

“It definitely looks like it,” said Rosalyn, remembering the animals at the museum last week.  These chimps weren’t as well-put together as those ones, though.  Their mouths gaped.  Their eyes were at different heights.  The teacups hung from their hands at strange angles.  “It looks like something from a horror movie,” she said, “Isaac would have loved this.”

They looked around for a plaque or a sign on the wall that would tell them who’d put this together, but they couldn’t find one.  It was anonymous, just like Kelpie and Silkie.

Later, as they were walking back, Justine asked, “Does your university have a newspaper?”

Your university, Rosalyn noticed.  “Yeah, ‘The Bell’.  Why?”

“Well, you could apply to start a weekly column.  All the strange things you’ve seen on the trail of Kelpie and Silkie.”

Rosalyn grinned.  “I think that might just convince everyone that I was a bit nuts.”

“Go on.  I bet there isn’t anything half as interesting in it at the moment.”

“Mm.”  Rosalyn looked sideways at Judith, and asked the question that had been on her mind for a while.  “You never went to Berrylands, did you?”

“I never went to any university.  Couldn’t sit still for long enough.”  She laughed.  “I think I just naturally took to the working world.  Going out and making your fortune.”

“But that’s my idea of hell, having to stand behind a desk all day and talk to people.”

“Different strokes for different folks, I suppose.”  They’d come to the edge of the woods, where the pavement started again.

“Yeah… some people’s idea of hell might be to walk through the woods for hours and run into a bunch of taxidermied monkeys.”

Judith laughed again.  Rosalyn didn’t remember the last time she’d made someone laugh so much.  “You know they’re apes.  Not monkeys.”

“I don’t think that’s the point.”

“And I meant it about the newspaper, you know.  They’re probably crying out for decent content.  You’d be doing them a favour.”

Rosalyn smiled.  “We’ll see.”

*

It was two hours before Mariam got to clock off, and she wasn’t sure how she’d get through it without killing somebody.  She was concentrating firmly on sorting out the till, while Claire stood behind her, droning on in that way that made her sound as if her nostrils had been glued shut.  “It was supposed to be about Bertolt Brecht, right?  But all he did was try and relate it back to George W Bush.”

“Sounds annoying,” said Mariam.

“I mean, if it was up to me, I’d place an embargo on any more George W Bush jokes.  They’ve all been told already.  But Edwin actually got really angry.”  She pronounced it an-graaay.  “He said he was sick of only ever hearing one side of the story.  You know, talking about a left-wing bias.”

“He got that from a few George Bush jokes?”

“At the time, I was like, ‘Oh, come on,’ but I thought about it, and, you know what, he’s actually right.  You only ever hear one side of the story.”  Claire waved a hand at the nearest wall.  “I mean, look at these posters.  They’re all about freeing political prisoners and marching against the government, but if a Christian group tried to put a poster up in here…”

“They’d be fine,” said Mariam, trying not to sound surly, “There are loads of Christian groups on campus.”

“Yeah, but none of them ever put up posters in here.  Because they know how they’d be treated if they did.”

“I’m pretty sure they’d be fine.”

“I just don’t like it when they use lectures to push an agenda.  We’re paying to learn, not to have the lecturers’ opinions shoved down our throats.”

Mariam didn’t think that a couple of George W Bush jokes constituted throat-shoving.  You didn’t even have to be left-wing to think the man was an idiot- you just had to be observant.

Adrian came in from the kitchen, and instantly snorted in disgust.  “Look at that,” he said, nodding towards a group of girls sitting near the pool table, “Corpse Bride Barbie.”

The girls (who made up approximately thirty per cent of the customers in the Student Union this afternoon) all had dyed hair, heavy eye makeup, and bags and sweaters covered in the names of weird metal bands Mariam had only vaguely heard of.  They seemed to be minding their own business.

Robin, who’d been restocking the glasses under the bar, let out one of his honky-donkey laughs.

“Guarantee you, this time last week they were listening to Girls Aloud,” Adrian continued, “It’s all just a trend.”  He grimaced.  “And they actually think that’s how the world works.  Deluded children.”

Robin grunted in agreement.  “Hate stuff like that.  They’ll be sitting there talking about My Chemical Romance, and I’ll be like, stop now, before you embarrass yourself.”

Claire tutted.  “Yeah.  I mean, for some of us, it’s actually about the music?  Not just the pretty men?”

 “Nothing but unreflected fangirl wank,” concluded Adrian.  He wasn’t even bothering to keep his voice down.  The Weird Metal Band girls couldn’t have been more than three or four yards away.

It took Mariam a moment to decide what she was actually going to say.  Adrian, I actually like having customers.  Adrian, are you trying to get us fired?  In the end, she went with, “Adrian, if that lot put in a complaint, I’m not going to defend you.”

Adrian spluttered in outrage. “Suit yourself,” he said, with an air of great dignity.

“What’s the matter with you today?” Robin asked her.

Mariam made a split-second decision, and stepped out from behind the bar so that she could go up to the Weird Metal Band girls and clear away their empty glasses.  She told herself that she just wanted to subtly check that they hadn’t heard what Adrian had said and felt hurt, but she knew, deep down, that she also wanted to terrify him a little bit. 

“Everything alright?” she asked, transferring the glasses to her little black tray.

“Yeah, thanks,” said one of the girls.  Her friends variously nodded and held up their half-full glasses in a toast.

Out of the corner of her eye, Mariam could see Adrian shitting bricks.  She decided to linger for a few seconds longer.  “Oh, I can’t remember if you were told or not- you get a free refill on any non-alcoholic drinks.”

“Yeah, they did say.”  The girl smiled.

“Cool.  Good to know.”  Mariam turned around and went back to the bar, enjoying the scandalised gawp on Adrian’s stupid face.

“What did you do?” he whispered.

Claire was gawping too, in sympathy.  “Mariam!  You didn’t…”

Mariam walked past them into the kitchen, aiming to clear out the dishwasher now that things were quiet.  Adrian followed her in.  “Mariam, I swear to God, if you said anything to them…”

Mariam turned round and looked him in the eye.  They never expected you to do that.  “What?”

No reply.  Adrian, frozen mid-threat, shuffled a little awkwardly.  “So you didn’t, then?”

“Just let me do my job.”  Mariam turned her back on him and opened the dishwasher.

*

Rosalyn knocked on Isaac’s door. “I’m taking my laundry down. Do you have anything that needs to go in?”

Isaac’s voice came through the wood. “No, that’s ok.”

“Alright.” Rosalyn shifted the basket in her arms and walked on. She was a bit worried about Isaac at the moment. He never wanted to talk for long, and when he did talk, it always seemed to be with a weird, falsely-happy sheen over everything he said. Once again, Rosalyn wished he’d been able to come with her and Judith today. It might have cheered him up a bit.

The laundry room (if you could call it that) was in between Isaac’s room and the kitchen. It had a paved floor, bare plaster on the walls, and no heating. It felt like an afterthought. Apart from the washing machine, the only things in it were two doors- one for the downstairs toilet and the other for the garden. It was the one room in the house where you always had to wear shoes.

Rosalyn crouched down and started loading her clothes into the machine. She thought about what Judith had said earlier. Maybe the paper really would take her on as a writer. Natalie was always complaining about the articles in it. There had been one last month that had blamed Theodore from The Chipmunks for the child obesity epidemic, and Natalie hadn’t stopped grinding her teeth for days. Rosalyn was pretty confident she could do better than that.

She pressed the button to start it, and spotted something on the wall. It was grey, half-hidden behind the machine, and exactly at Rosalyn’s eyeline when she was crouched down like this.

She moved closer, and saw that it was a message written in pencil. If you have trouble with the Oakmen, go to Isaac’s boss – Kelpie and Silkie.

Mariam didn’t have any lectures on Monday morning, so she was the only one both in and awake when the doorbell rang.  She put down her book and went into the hall to see who it was.  Most of the time, the only people who used the bell were the pizza delivery guys, so Mariam didn’t know what to expect.  After Friday night, though, she was wary enough to look through the letterbox to see who it was.

She saw a short, scrawny woman with grey hair tied back in a ponytail.  Not an army of rampaging housebreakers, then.  Mariam relaxed a little, and opened the door.  “Hello?”

The woman grinned.  “Hi!  Are you a friend of Alex’s?”

“Um…”  Mariam hadn’t expected that question, and took her a moment to work out what to say.  “Yeah, I’m Mariam.”

“Pleased to meet you, Mariam.”  The woman nodded in acknowledgement, but didn’t take her hands out of her coat pockets.  “I’m Alex’s mother.  Can I speak to him, please?”

Mariam had never met any of Alex’s family before.  She had no way of knowing whether or not this woman was telling the truth.  True, she had brown eyes and a small nose like Alex’s, but so did a lot of other people. 

Luckily, though, Mariam remembered that she had a way out.  “Oh, I’m afraid he’s in Amsterdam this week.  He should be back the Monday after next.”

The woman’s grin didn’t change.  “I’d really like to speak to him, please.”

Mariam shrugged.  “I could give you his mobile number…”  It wasn’t until the words were out of her mouth that Mariam stopped to wonder why Alex’s mother didn’t have his mobile number in the first place.

The woman (Mrs Rudd?  Should she call her that?) chuckled.  “Look…  Mariam, is it?  I know you’re just saying what he told you to say, but this really is important.  Could you let me in so I can speak to him, please?”

Mariam lowered her eyebrows.  “Saying what he told me to say?”

“You’re not the first one he’s drawn in.  Believe me, you’re not.”  The woman sighed.  Her eyebrows went up in the same way Alex’s did when he was in a reflective mood.  “Please.  Let me in.”

“Look, at this point, even if he was in…”

The woman’s elbow jabbed into Mariam’s side.  It was more surprising than painful, but the result was the same- Mariam flinched backwards, and that gave the woman enough space to shove past her and dart up the stairs.

 Didn’t look like an army of housebreakers, eh? thought Mariam, while she steadied herself enough to follow her up.  At the last second, she remembered to shut the front door behind her.  There was already one intruder in the house- no sense in inviting any more.

Mrs Rudd, if that’s who she was, had stopped at the first door after the stairs, hammering on it and calling through the keyhole.  “Alex.  Alex, I know you’re in there.”

Mariam reached her side.  “For the third time, he’s in Amsterdam.  Not here.  Now can you please…?”

“Alex!” Mrs Rudd shouted, drowning her out.  She carried on pounding on the door.

“That’s not even his room,” said Mariam.  It was Natalie’s, and she wasn’t in, either.  Alex’s room was further down the hall, on the other side of the bathroom, but Mariam wasn’t about to tell her that.

 She wasn’t frightened.  Part of her thought she should be, but Mrs Rudd looked thirty years older and three inches shorter than her.  Even if she got really nasty, she didn’t look like much of a threat.  At the moment, it looked like all Mariam had to do was wait patiently until Mrs Rudd finally got it through her head that Alex wasn’t around, then escort her out of the house so that she didn’t break anything on the way.

“Alex!” yelled Mrs Rudd.  She turned to her left, finally noticing Mariam was there.  “Do you mind…?”

“I mind.  And he still isn’t in.”

 Mrs Rudd made a dismissive tutting sound, and hammered at the door all the harder.  At that point, one Miss Rosalyn Pepper appeared on the second-floor landing, drowsy and rumpled-looking.  She was all pinks and reds, her hair sticking up in a way that reminded Mariam of copper wiring and her face still warm and flushed from being pressed into her pillow for the last seven hours.  Peps caught Mariam’s eye and mouthed, “What’s going on?”

All Mariam could do was shrug.

“Alex!” snapped Mrs Rudd one last time before giving up.  She seemed to sink against the door.  “He’s not answering.”

“Because he’s not in,” Mariam reminded her.

Mrs Rudd gave her a dirty look, then spotted Peps at the top of the stairs.  “I don’t suppose you could tell me where I might find him?”

“What, Alex?”  Pepper blinked in confusion, then looked at Mariam.  “I thought he was in Amsterdam this week?”

Mrs Rudd scowled.  “Fine.  Don’t help.”  And she headed downstairs.  Mariam rushed to follow her in case she tried to check anything else out while she was here, but she needn’t have worried.  Mrs Rudd went straight to the front door.

She opened it, then paused.  “Nothing in life comes free, you know,” she said, looking over her shoulder at Mariam, “You might want to remind Alex of that.”

“Right…”

“I can guarantee you he’s not in Amsterdam.  Most likely everything he’s told you about himself was a lie.”  And before Mariam could ask her what exactly she meant by that, she was gone, with the door slammed shut behind her.

Mariam looked around and saw Pepper, halfway down the stairs, looking as if she’d just been slapped.  “What the hell was that?”

*

Natalie had actually really enjoyed today’s lecture, which had been on 19^th Century poetry and hadn’t involved any necrophilia at all, and she was just about to ask Felicity if she wanted to go down to the pub when she saw Rosalyn and Mariam waiting in the corridor just outside.

“Guess what just happened,” said Mariam, as soon as Natalie met her eyes, “Go on, guess.”

Natalie shrugged, and looked at Rosalyn to see if she could get any clues from her.  “Another Kelpie and Silkie note?”

“I wish,” said Mariam, “No, what actually happened was that some crazy woman knocked on the door saying she was Alex’s mother.”

 “What?”

“And then she wanted to go upstairs and knock on his bedroom door to check if he was really out, and she wouldn’t take no for an answer.”

“That was when I woke up,” said Rosalyn, smiling meekly, “I heard banging sounds from downstairs and I thought someone was in trouble.”

Natalie looked from Rosalyn to Mariam, thinking through what she’d been told.  “You managed to get her out in the end, right?”

“Yeah.”  Mariam sniffed.  “She left before she could do any damage.”

“And you told her he was in Amsterdam?”

“She seemed pretty convinced that he wasn’t.  But then, I don’t know if we should trust the judgement of somebody who thinks it’s alright to elbow her way into other people’s houses.”

Natalie tried to remember whether Alex had ever mentioned his family.  Obviously he was a bit older than the rest of them, so he probably hadn’t been living at home as recently, so references might well have been few and far between no matter what.  She remembered everyone else’s parents coming to pick them up for Christmas break, and she was pretty sure she remembered Alex saying he was going to spend the break with his older sister in Cardiff.  But she didn’t think he’d ever mentioned his parents.  Not once in the five months she’d known him.  “Do we know for certain that she is his mother?  Not some random lunatic who just wandered in off the street?”

Mariam shrugged.  “I guess we don’t.  But she did look a bit like him, for what it’s worth.”  She sighed.  “Anyway, I’ve sent Alex a text about what happened, but he hasn’t replied yet.”

“They can take a while to get through, overseas,” said Rosalyn.  (The other thing Natalie remembered about Alex last Christmas was that Rosalyn’s mum had flirted shamelessly with him while Rosalyn had been upstairs getting her stuff.  But she decided not to mention that.)

They’d been standing to the side, against the wall, letting the stream of people pass them by, but then, out of nowhere, one of them broke away and slapped Mariam on the back.  She started, then turned round to look at him.  “Shaun!” she said, with a big grin.

He was one of those tanned, square-jawed guys who always reminded Natalie of a Ken doll.  “Mariam!  How’s tricks?”

She laughed.  “Tricks are OK.”

Shaun the Ken doll nodded, then looked down and behind him as if he felt awkward about whatever he was going to say next.  “So…  Didn’t see you at the meeting on Friday…”

 “Yeah, sorry about that.  Our flatmate announced he was going to Amsterdam for a couple of weeks, and he wanted to take us on a goodbye museum trip.”

“And you couldn’t have done both?”  He said it with a laugh, but Natalie didn’t think that made it sound any less dickish.  If she was Mariam, she’d be congratulating herself on her lucky escape right about now.  “It’s OK.  I know it can seem a bit intimidating, the thought of all these ideas being thrown at you.”  He looked around at the three of them, probably trying to assess how many ideas would be too many for their tiny girly brains to handle.  “But if you do want to come, we’ve got another meeting on Wednesday.  You’re all welcome.”

“And do we have to talk about our favourite spoons?” asked Natalie.

The guy blinked.  “What?”  He looked to Mariam for help.  “Favourite…?”

“Like on the leaflet,” Mariam reminded him.

“Oh!”  He chuckled.  “That was just a joke, OK?  I wouldn’t want you to take it too seriously.”  He gave Natalie a pat on the shoulder, which was remarkably brave of him, under the circumstances.  “Anyway, I’ve taken up too much of your time.  Be seeing you, Mariam.”  And he walked off with a little wave.”

Natalie waited until he was out of sight, then turned back to the others.  “We’ve got to go to that meeting,” she told them, “I want to see just how big a trainwreck this can be.”

*

Isaac was cleaning up the seats in the back row when his chest started to feel tight again.  It was a pretty easy job, even after a big performance (the other attendants had told him horror stories about finding dirty nappies and used condoms back there, but he was pretty sure they just made that stuff up to scare the newbies), and that meant that your mind had plenty of time to wander.

It could happen at any moment…  It could happen at any moment…

He powered through, picking up the sweet wrappers and checking for spilled-drink stains on the chairs and carpets, and then, once he’d reached the end of the row, he went through again and double-checked it, because damn it, he had some professional pride. Then he went out into the foyer and fetched those leaflets he’d been told to put on display afterwards.

It could happen at any moment…  It could happen at any moment…

His hands were shaking.  He was trying to put a neat stack of each leaflet into each of the plastic stands, but it was hard to count them out.  It was hard to hold onto them.

Then two things happened, and, even in the moment, Isaac wasn’t sure which one triggered the other.  A voice from behind him said, “Are you OK?”, and he dropped a bunch of leaflets all over the floor.

For a moment, he just stood there looking stupid.  Bound to happen eventually, he thought, and he did his best to smile at the guy behind him instead of curling up into a ball and screaming a lot.  “Yeah- just a bit clumsy today, apparently.”

The other guy didn’t look like he was buying it.  He was small and young-looking (maybe a couple of years younger than Isaac), but he had a crumpled-up look, like a piece of schoolwork you forgot about and then found squashed at the bottom of your bag months later.  Creased clothes, tangled blond hair, and dark circles under his eyes.  “You’re Isaac, right?”

“Yeah.”  He looked for the other guy’s name badge, and saw that he wasn’t wearing one.  “And you’re…?”

“Denny.  I work up in the office most of the time.  Secretarial stuff.”  He pointed downwards, at the scattered My Fair Lady flyers on the carpet.  “I’ll help you with that.”  He crouched down and began to pick them up.

Isaac quickly dropped to his knees, as if he thought he could tidy up the whole thing under Denny’s nose if he moved fast enough.  “You don’t need to.  My mess.”

“It’s OK.”  Denny didn’t make eye contact as he spoke, just stared down at the leaflets and scooped them up as quickly as possible.

Isaac gave up on the idea of talking him out of it.  “How long have you worked here?

“About a year.”  He still didn’t look up.  “I’m not even here officially- I’m just a volunteer.  Helping out family.”

That sounded a whole lot like old Johnny Lambton was scamming him for free labour, but it wasn’t Isaac’s job to point that out.  “Something to look good on your UCAS form?”

“Hm?”  This time, he almost looked up.  Or at least, there was a twitch in that direction.  “Oh.  No, nothing like that.  Not really university material.”

That definitely sounded like a scam.  ‘Not being paid’ plus ‘not really university material’ equalled ‘basically slave labour.’  He didn’t know how Jonathan Lambton had suckered Denny into it.  Maybe that was something they taught you at business school- ‘Hoodwinking Kids into Working for Free 101.’  “Why not?”

Denny gave a bit of a shrug.  “Just kind of missed the boat.  I’m better off here.”

Isaac didn’t want to pry, but he might have done, if his hands hadn’t picked that exact moment to start shaking again and make him drop a whole bunch of leaflets.  Denny darted forward and picked them up.

Isaac watched him place them neatly in the plastic stand where they belonged.  At least someone was being professional around here.  “Look, um…  As a favour to me, can you not say anything about this to anyone else?”

“About what?” asked Denny, glancing backwards.

“You know, the shaking fingers and that.”  Something occurred to him.  “I’m not hungover!  It’s just…”

Denny met his eyes.  “You’re scared of something.”

“I…”  Isaac sighed.  There was no denying it when someone was staring right at him.  “Well, it sounds really stupid when you put it like that.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Not your fault.”  Isaac looked around.  He was the one avoiding eye contact now.  “Anyway, I think we’re done.  Thanks for helping.”

(From the SWLondonMums forum)

TequilaGal                                                                  Thursday 2^nd of March 2006

So, we live two streets down from Berrylands University, which leads to some… interesting interactions with the local students.  Picture the scene: it’s around eight yesterday evening, I’m taking the Littlun back from Brownies, and we’ve been stuck in traffic for an age.  All of a sudden, a young man runs out of a nearby pub.  As we watch in horror, he runs across the street, runs into a garden wall, and throws up extravagantly into some poor family’s front drive!

Luckily the traffic eased up and we were able to drive away before I said anything I might have regretted.  A few streets on, we stopped again, and I turned to my daughter and said, “I want you to remember something.  No matter what happens in life, it’s never OK to disrespect people’s property like that.  Life’s hard enough without people creating problems for each other, and a little consideration goes a long way.”

Say what you want about students, but they don’t half make useful object lessons!

If only the strong survive, nobody will.  Rosalyn kept turning that around in her head.  A message like that, hidden away at the back of an old fabric shop where barely anyone could see it.  Written in spraypaint when no-one was looking.  Five years ago?  Twelve?  Maybe even more than that?  Who knew?

Judith had managed to get them a list of names, people who’d worked for Fabric City twelve years ago and might know something about the note or the graffiti.  She’d told them to try cross-referencing them with a list of students who’d graduated from Berrylands University between 1994 and 1998.  “If they managed to get into the university library, then they were almost certainly a student there,” Judith had said, “And we can reasonably assume that they were somewhere in the Humanities department, considering the part of the library where they hid it.  So that narrows it down a little.”

Rosalyn had spent the last two hours back at the library, looking through the alumni list on the university database, and so far she’d found two names on both lists.  Kimberley Peacock (BA History), and Benjamin Sugar (BA Linguistics) had both graduated in 1996.  All she needed to do now was see if she could find any contact details on the internet.  And then all she’d need to do was pluck up the courage to call them.

If only the strong survive, nobody will.  If Benjamin Sugar or Kimberley Peacock had written that, then Rosalyn loved them, based on that alone.

Because she knew why they’d written it.  She knew the kind of thing that people said.  Survival of the fittest.  You’ve got to be a fighter.  Are you strong enough to survive, or will you fall at the first hurdle?

It felt like Rosalyn always fell at the first hurdle.  She’d never won anything.  She’d never pushed herself to the limit.  She was short, chubby and ginger, and she had to take pills every morning to stop her brain from falling to bits.  But to Kelpie and Silkie, none of that seemed to matter.

If only the strong survive, nobody will.

If it was the last thing she did, Rosalyn was going to find out who’d written those words so she could thank them.

She went across to the cafeteria, and got a cup of coffee from the machine.  There were still little piles of the university paper on some of the tables, complete with the headline about the bombs.  Rosalyn looked at the nearest pile as she waited for her cup to fill up.  There were the beginnings of an idea, gradually coming together.

She sat down a couple of seats away from the pile, and, after taking a couple of sips from her cup and checking that no-one was watching, she quietly pulled one of the copies towards her.  She opened it to page five, pretending to read it carefully, and slid a biro out of her bag.

Rosalyn paused for a moment, trying to think of the right thing to put, and thought of a trick her dad had told her about when she’d been little.  She uncapped the pen and wrote in the bottom left corner, Don’t think of an orange penguin- Kelpie and Silkie.

She kept the paper in front of her for a few minutes, in case anyone was watching, then put it back in the middle of the pile.  Sometime this week, someone else would come across her message, and be really confused, or amused, or inspired.  Rosalyn would probably never know who, or when, or what happened next, but sometime this week, she’d affect someone’s life.  The thought gave her a strange, shivery feeling.

*

Alex made an announcement at dinner.  “I’m going to Amsterdam next week.”

Actually, ‘at dinner’ was a bit of a misleading phrase- it wasn’t as if they were all sitting down to a shared hearty meal.  Alex, Natalie and Rosalyn had each separately microwaved something, Mariam had eaten earlier and was just kind of hanging around the kitchen, and Isaac, who hadn’t had much of an appetite lately, was picking at a tub of pineapple slices.  “Yeah?” he asked, “What are you going to do there?”

“Photography, Isaac.  It’s a fascinating city.”  And, before Isaac could make any insinuations about why it was so fascinating, he quickly added, “I’m leaving on Saturday, and I’ll be gone for two weeks.  So I want to take you all out before I go.”

“So we don’t forget you exist while you’re gone?” asked Mariam, with a grin.  She was leaning against the fridge and tilting her head in a way that made her fringe partly cover her face in a semi-transparent, blue-black curtain.

Alex smiled back.  “I’m hoping that absence will make the heart grow fonder.  Now, where would you like to go?”

Isaac dug a bit of fruit pulp out of his back teeth with his tongue.  He couldn’t think of anything he wanted to do.  If he wasn’t worried about sounding like a killjoy, he’d just suggest that they stay in and watch terrible horror movies.  After what happened last time they’d all gone out together, planning something else just made him feel uneasy.

“Something in Central London?” suggested Rosalyn, “Like one of the museums?”

Natalie nodded, swallowing a mouthful of lasagne.  “Can’t say no to dinosaur skeletons.”

Alex looked from one end of the room to the other.  “Mariam?  Isaac?  All in favour of South Kensington?”

“Sure,” said Isaac.  Not much point in saying anything else.

Mariam frowned.  “Are you alright, Isaac?”

“Yeah,” he said, taking another bite of pineapple, “I love dinosaurs.”

*

Natalie and Rosalyn ended up wandering around the shops after their lectures.  Neither of them really wanted to buy anything, but neither of them wanted to go home just yet either.  Natalie had told Rosalyn that if they spent one more minute in Superdrug she’d gnaw her own arm off, so they’d gone down one of the side streets to look round the second-hand shops instead.  This one was cluttered with an assortment of dusty, vaguely sinister-looking things, with a rusty clothes horse that looked as if it was about to come to life and rampage through the neighbourhood looming over life-sized statues of Laurel and Hardy and a mantelpiece fresco showing something called “The Helston Furry Dance.”  Rosalyn was crouched down by a little shelf of books (wedged between an old dollhouse and a willow-patterned tea set), and she was clearly up to something.

“You know what you were saying earlier?” she asked, looking up from the little bit of paper that had materialised in her hand while Natalie wasn’t looking, “About that guy in your seminar?”

“What, Kyle?”

“Yeah.  The one with all the opinions.”  Rosalyn was completely wide-eyed and earnest as she said this- not a smirk in sight.  Which was more than could be said when Natalie talked about Kyle.

Kyle had opinions, alright.  He believed that it was better to burn out than to fade away.  He believed that happy people never made good art.  He believed that all the best artists had burned through life as quickly and intensely as they could, destroying their health and alienating the people around them in their single-minded pursuit of truth and beauty. Kyle believed a lot of things, and he shared them at every opportunity.  At length.  No matter how quickly everyone else’s eyes glazed over.

“Well, what do you think of this?”  Rosalyn turned the piece of paper over in her hand.  In tiny, pencilled letters, it read, There’s a big difference between having an artistic temperament and just being a wanker- Kelpie and Silkie.

Natalie put her hand over her mouth to stifle a laugh.  “Perfect.  What are you going to do with it?”

Rosalyn ran her finger along the top of the books, and picked out the third from the left- something called How To Be A Wally.  “Give me a number between one and a hundred.”

“Forty-two,” said Natalie, and she watched Rosalyn flick through the book, fold the paper in half, and slip it in between pages 42 and 43.

“There,” she said, putting the book back in its place, “Now what should we do next?”

Natalie looked around.  There were only a handful of other people in the shop, and they were all on the other side of big piles of debris, so there wasn’t much risk of getting caught.  Not that writing notes and putting them in second-hand books was exactly a capital offence, anyway- at worst, the staff might suspect them of vandalising the books and make them pay for them.  “How about, I’m telling, you’re smelling, you went to Batman’s wedding?”

Rosalyn laughed.  “Why?”

“Why not?”

So Rosalyn tore off another bit of paper and wrote it down.  This one went between pages 42 and 43 of The Mr Men Annual 1986.  “Can you imagine how shocked someone would be if they bought more than one book from here?” asked Rosalyn, “And then they found that they all had weird little notes on the same page?”

“It’s like a free gift,” said Natalie, “So, come on, what’s the next one going to be?”

*

The giant sequoia piece was about three or four metres across, and exactly the same colour as those brownies they sold in the university cafeteria.  It was so smooth that it was hard to imagine it ever being sawn out of a real tree.  According to the sign, the original tree had started growing in 557- you could prove it by counting the rings.  557 barely seemed like a real year.  William the Conqueror had invaded Britain, the Black Death had wiped out a third of Europe, Henry the Eighth had beheaded his wives, Oliver Cromwell had overthrown the king, and all the while, halfway across the world, this tree had been there, digging its roots into the same earth.  How had anyone dared to cut it down?  Hadn’t they been worried that something that big and that old would have some hidden ways to protect itself?

Alex was beside her, an odd, taciturn look on his face, as if he was inspecting the exhibits for signs of forgery.  He noticed Rosalyn glancing at him, and said, “I read somewhere that the wood from giant sequoias isn’t very good.  It’s too brittle.  People would see how tall they were and cut them down expecting a big payday, but they’d end up with piles of splintery wood that they just couldn’t sell.”

“Serves them right,” said Rosalyn, with a laugh.

Behind them, just down the stairs a bit, Natalie and Mariam were talking about one of the other exhibits they’d been to earlier.  “Don’t you get holier-than-thou on us, Natalie.  You were enjoying it just as much as anyone else.”

“I didn’t say it wasn’t fun.  Just, imagine if you’d actually been in that earthquake, and then you come to London and find out that someone’s turned it into a ride.”

“If you think that’s in bad taste, I’m never taking you to the London Dungeon.”

“That’s different.  You’re allowed to make fun of tragedies that happened more than a hundred years ago.”

Further down, Isaac called out, “Hey, I think the queue for the dinosaurs has died down.”

Natalie took a couple of steps down, and peered over the bannister.  “You’re right.  Some of those school groups must have gone home.”  She looked up at the other three.  “Want to head over?”

Like she even had to ask.  They’d all wanted to go and see the dinosaur exhibit as soon as they got to the museum, but apparently everyone else here had felt the same way.  Instead, they’d gone to the ‘Creepy Crawlies’ section first, but only after Mariam had got Natalie to lead her around by the hand and tell her to open her eyes when there weren’t any spiders in sight.  Some of the other patrons in there had given them some seriously weird looks.

“OK,” said Rosalyn, “Then the V&A?”

“Why not?” said Alex.  He put his hand on Rosalyn’s shoulder and ushered her downstairs, towards the others.  Ahead of them, Rosalyn saw Mariam catch up with Isaac, touch his elbow, and say something she couldn’t hear.  Isaac grinned wide and shook his head.

“His cuts are healing up well, aren’t they?” Rosalyn asked Alex, taking care to keep her voice low.

Alex nodded, looking down at the others instead of at her.  “With any luck there won’t be any scarring.  He’s…”  Alex took in a sharp breath, and shook his head again.  “You never quite know what’s going on beneath the surface, do you?”

“No.”

“I wish he’d talk to us about it.”

“I’ve always heard that’s a lot harder for men.  Talking about your feelings, I mean.”  Heaven knew it sometimes felt like pulling teeth even for Rosalyn, and no-one had ever tried to make her feel like a disgrace to her gender for doing it.

“You know, Rosalyn, I think you might just have put your finger on it.”  They were moving a bit slower than the other three, thanks to Alex’s limp and Rosalyn’s short legs, so they didn’t have to worry too much about Isaac overhearing.  By the time they’d got to the foot of the stairs, Isaac was already joining the queue for the dinosaurs across the hall.

Rosalyn and Alex caught up with them just as Natalie was inspecting a plaque next to a stegosaurus skeleton.  “It turns out a lot of these are casts,” she told Rosalyn when she reached her side.

Rosalyn nodded.  Earlier on, they’d passed by a sign about extinct animals that said that no-one knew for sure what the dodo had looked like because there were no surviving specimens, and Natalie had got annoyed and insisted that there was a stuffed dodo in this very museum.  She’d led them all the way to the ‘Birds’ section to point it out… and then they’d noticed the little sign saying that it was a replica.  That had thrown Natalie for a loop.  She’d spent the next two minutes muttering, “I was so sure…” even after the others had tried to cheer her up by taking her to see the goofy-looking polar bear in the ‘Mammals’ section.  “Them, too?”

“Yeah,” Natalie said mournfully, “It’s like finding out that Santa’s not real, all over again.”

Mariam laughed.  “Not to rub salt in the wound or anything, Nats, but the blue whale we saw earlier was just a model.”

Natalie gave a dramatic gasp and clapped a hand to her forehead.  “No-o-o!”

Rosalyn’s gaze wandered over to a nearby wall display, with photos and dates to do with the first dinosaur bones identified and the archaeologists who’d found them.  They were black and white, those photos, showing serious-looking people in Victorian clothes, but compared to that sequoia slice upstairs, they were from about five minutes ago.  “Look at that,” she said, nodding towards the display, “Isn’t it weird how recent it all is?  Two hundred years ago, they didn’t have a clue that dinosaurs ever existed.”

“Mm,” said Natalie, “It’s not that they never found any bones until then, though.  They found them- they just assumed they were dragons.”

Rosalyn looked back at the stegosaurus skeleton, with its spikes and its funny little head.  You couldn’t imagine one of those devouring maidens and burning villages to the ground.  They looked far too approachable.

Natalie jolted her back out of her thoughts.  “In fact, that’s what Young Earth Creationists still think.  I found this website once, and you would not believe the kind of things they come up with.  Apparently, carbon dating is just God testing their faith.”

Rosalyn’s chest went tight.  She fought the urge to put her hands over her ears.  It’s alright, she thought, This is just a normal conversation.  You’re fine.

“I’m guessing any evidence they don’t like is just God testing their faith,” said Isaac over his shoulder.

“Not all of it,” said Natalie, “Some of it’s just been fabricated by the evil liberal media.”

“Oh, I’ve heard of them.  Very evil.  Especially Channel Five.”

Some people just wanted to shrink the world and use God as an excuse.  They wouldn’t let you have dinosaurs.  They wouldn’t let you have space travel, or heart transplants, or cleaner energy.  They wouldn’t let you have ambition, or independence, or imagination.

Rosalyn felt something on her left cheek.  Alex had brushed some of her hair out of her face.

She turned sideways and saw the crooked smile on his face.  In a low voice, he asked her, “What is it the Dalai Lama said?  ‘My religion is very simple.  My religion is kindness.’”

She should have been embarrassed that she’d been so obvious that Alex had worked out, not just that she was upset, but what had upset her.  She should have been embarrassed that she’d let such a tiny thing get to her in the first place.  She wasn’t, though.  A warm feeling of relief worked its way through her, like getting into a hot bath on a cold day.

“Sorry about that,” she whispered.

“Nothing to apologise for,” he replied, putting his hand on her back as they walked on.

*

Natalie noticed Mariam staring critically at the crotch of one of the Ancient Greek statues.  “I heard something interesting once,” she said, “Apparently, they used to believe that a small penis was a sign that your focus was on spiritual matters, not carnal ones.  So the smaller the penis, the higher-minded you were.”

Mariam snorted.  “Keep telling yourself that,” she told the statue.

They were going up to the theatre section, because Rosalyn said she remembered seeing these neat little light-up dioramas of stage settings when she’d been here a few years ago, and she wanted to see if they were still there.  They also had costumes and clips from plays on display, so that would probably be fun, too.  “As long as it doesn’t remind Isaac too much of work,” she told the others.

Isaac rolled his eyes.  “I wish I got to design light-up scenery dioramas at work.  Instead of dealing with some jerk complaining that we don’t sell popcorn.”

“Why don’t you sell popcorn?” asked Natalie.

“The Lambtons are above that sort of thing,” Isaac said airily, “If it was up to them, we’d only serve roast pheasant.”

“I thought it was up to them.  Aren’t they in charge?”

“Yeah, but the RSPCA would have their arses if they tried it.”

They were halfway up the stairs, admiring the big dragon statues as they went, when Mariam remembered something.  “Fuck!”

Beside her, Alex stopped in mid-step.  “What?”

“I just remembered- the Oakmen meeting’s tonight.”  She didn’t remember what time it had said on the leaflet, but it was getting on for four now, it would take them a good forty minutes to get home, and they hadn’t even had dinner yet.  No chance of getting there on time now.  “It’s not that important,” she added quickly in case Alex thought she was implying that his goodbye trip was an inconvenience, “Just, I completely forgot about it.”

Alex didn’t reply right away.  He kept his gaze on her, eyebrows lowered in… concentration?   Concern?  Mariam couldn’t tell.  Alex just looked a bit intense sometimes.  You couldn’t get any more specific than that.  To make things worse, the other three had gone on ahead, so she was the only one here for him to be intense at.

“Mariam,” he said, after a few seconds, “when you met Shaun on Monday, he came up to the bar just after the man who asked you about our arms, right?” 

“Yeah, why?”

Alex took a deep breath.  “How soon after?”

Mariam thought back.  “I don’t know.  He was just behind him in the queue, that’s all.  I didn’t notice him until he started talking.”  She frowned.  “Why?  What’s this about?”

“I’ve… been thinking about what you told us on Monday.  And there’s some things that don’t make much sense.”  He counted on his fingers.  “The Student Union always has loud music playing, but Shaun heard everything the other guy said…”

“Well, yeah, he was standing right behind him…”

“But he also said he knew how you’d hurt your arm because he heard your friends talking about it earlier.  Would they really have been talking about your personal business in front of customers?  Loud enough to be heard above the music?”

“What are you implying?”  The words came out a bit more confrontational than she’d meant, but she definitely didn’t appreciate Alex dancing around the point like this.  “That Shaun put that other guy up to it?”

Alex sighed.  If he’d looked as if he was fed up with her, Mariam would probably have wanted to poke his eyes out, but he didn’t.  He just had a troubled, faraway look.  “I’m just saying, there are a lot of things that don’t make sense.”

“You’re reading too much into it.”  Mariam started climbing the stairs again.

“Maybe,” replied Alex, in that particular way that told her he still thought he was right but was prepared to drop it for now.  She supposed that was the best she could hope for.

*

Isaac’s chest was starting to feel tight again, but as long as he kept moving, he could distract himself.  He didn’t want to deal with the others and their concerned looks right at the moment, so he slipped sideways into one of those big white gallery rooms.  No-one else there.  Good.  He got out his phone and looked up the numbers he’d saved into it earlier.

Him and Rosalyn had managed to find two English Literature students who’d worked at Fabric City in 1994, and then they’d managed to find phone numbers for them.  Or for people with the same names as them, anyway.  And if Benjamin Sugar and Kimberly Peacock getting an annoying phone call was the prince of Isaac keeping his mind from cracking apart as badly as his face, then sorry, Benjamin and Kimberly, but you were going to get annoying phone calls.

He found the number for “KP,” pressed the green phone and listened.

It sent him straight to voicemail.  For a moment, he felt like chucking the phone right into one of those landscape paintings on the wall, but then he remembered that he was not, in fact, mental, and that Kim Peacock probably hadn’t turned her phone off just to spite him personally.  He hung up, and tried the other one.

It rang, and Isaac gritted his teeth.  This room was too big.  The slightest noise you made echoes for ages.  Any moment now, somebody was going to come in and ask him what…

“Hello?”

Isaac jumped a little.  “Hi, is that Benjamin Sugar?”

“The very same.”

He sounded as if he was in a good mood.  That put Isaac at ease, a little.  “My name’s Isaac Green.  I’m a student at Berrylands University.”

“Mm?”

“I’m sorry to bother you, but, um, me and my friends were doing a bit of research, and we found out that you worked at Fabric City in 1994?”

“I did, yes.  About five months, I think.”

Isaac swallowed.  “Can you tell me anything about Kelpie and Silkie?”

Ben Sugar went silent for two or three seconds, during which Isaac convinced himself that the guy thought he was a nutter.  Then he said, “Oh, you mean the graffiti round back?  Yeah, I’m pretty sure that was a couple of local boys on a dare.  There were a couple of teenagers who worked at the shop next door, and they were often hanging round the back.”

“Right.”  Isaac felt as if he should be making notes.  “You don’t remember their names, do you?”

Ben Sugar made a strained, thoughtful noise.  “I want to say Andrew?  Maybe Anthony?  Can’t be any more specific than that, sorry.”

“That’s OK.  It was twelve years ago.”  He sat down on a nearby bench.  His chest didn’t feel as tight as before.  “You’ve given me something to go on, anyway.  Thanks for your…”

“Oh!  Wait!”  Isaac thought he heard a crash on the other end, as if Ben Sugar had knocked something over in his excitement.  “I almost forgot- I think I know where they got the idea!”

“Really?” asked Isaac.  From the corner of his eye, he saw Mariam poke her head round the door to check on him.  At least if she saw him smiling, she wouldn’t worry.

“Yeah!  There’s another bit of graffiti up in the woods near Croydon.  I don’t know exactly where, but it’s on an old railway bridge, and it’s signed ‘Kelpie and Silkie.’”

That was less helpful- “near Croydon” could mean just about anything- but it was a definite lead.  Something to tell Rosalyn.  “Do you remember what it says?”

“Not exactly.  I only saw it once.  But it’s old-it was old even in 1994.  The boys couldn’t have written it themselves.”

“I guess not.”  Isaac stood up and began to walk up to where he’d seen the others last.  “Thanks for this.  You’ve been really helpful.”

They had a shop to track down- whatever was next to Fabric City twelve years ago- and a former employee called Andrew or Anthony or possibly something else.  They had an old railway bridge to find somewhere around Croydon- they could spend months looking for that.  Months on end when Isaac would have something to think about other than the tight feeling in his chest.

 Rosalyn was going to be over the moon when he told her.

*

Mariam woke up in the middle of the night.  Not gradually, not drifting in and out of sleep in a confused daze- this was a zero-to-a-hundred thing.  One moment she was off in the Land of Nod, and the next, her eyes were wide open and she knew something was wrong.

Mariam’s room was the closest to the front door.  If her curtains had been open, she’d have been able to look right at the front drive.  She’d have been able to see whoever was out there, and they’d have been able to see her, too.

There were voices, right outside the front door.  Not on the pavement ten feet away- right there.

Someone tried the front door.  Mariam heard it rattle.

She stayed frozen, lying there in the dark.  She didn’t know how much the curtains would block out.  If she moved from the bed, they might be able to see her shadow.  And if she turned the light on, they’d almost definitely see that.  There was a chance that they were just kids messing about or drunk people who’d got the wrong house, in which case seeing that someone was awake downstairs might scare them off.  But if there was something nastier going on, then that might spur them into breaking in, just to shut her up.

One of them laughed, and another one shushed him.  It made Mariam’s skin crawl.

The door rattled some more (How strong is the lock? wondered Mariam), and then the voices started up again.  She couldn’t make out any words, but she was pretty sure all the people talking were men.  At least three of them.

The voices continued for a while, then seemed to trail off.  Moving away? thought Mariam.  She didn’t dare hope.  And even if they did go away, there was nothing to stop them coming back later.  Maybe with better equipment for smashing down the door.

Mariam thought through all the objects in her room, wondering which ones she could use as a weapon.  The Norton Anthology was a few thousand pages long, and the size of a brick.  If she put that in a bag and swung it, she could probably knock somebody out.  And if she had time to get to the kitchen…

There was another noise, this time towards the back of the house.  It sounded like it came from the little hallway off to the side of the kitchen.  The hallway was a chilly place with bare plaster walls, and there were exactly three things in it- the washing machine, the downstairs toilet, and the back door.

The back door hadn’t been opened since they’d moved in.  No-one knew where the key was.  But if you were the sort of person who snuck into someone else’s garden at one in the morning, you might try and think of other ways to get it open.

Mariam crawled out of bed and up to the bookcase.  She felt around the bottom shelf, put her hand on top of the Norton Anthology, and crouched there in the darkness, listening.

There was a loud thump, then another.  After that, silence. 

Mariam stayed there, huddled in the corner by the bookcase, for another hour, but she didn’t hear anything else.  Whatever they’d done to the back door, it had held.

It was another two hours before she dared to turn the light on.

Isaac could feel a big, grey weight pressing down on him, but he could ignore it if he kept moving.  It was worst in the mornings, he’d found.  He’d have a few peaceful seconds and then then his wardrobe and the deodorant on his bedside table would come into focus and his heart would sink.  Oh.  I’m still here, then, and my face is still going to ache all day.  That was no way to start the morning.  Isaac wasn’t going to give those thoughts any more headspace than he had to.

Anyway, he had something else to think about now.  They’d found Fabric City.  They’d walked past it two or three times because the sign and display window were so unobtrusive, but they’d found it.  It was still there.

“We just need to be straightforward,” said Rosalyn, in that hushed, croaky voice of hers, as they stepped through the doors, “Let’s just go up to her and ask.”  She nodded towards the cashier, a tall, thin woman with long black hair.  She only looked a few years older than them.  Isaac didn’t know how she’d react to being asked for a list of every customer the shop had had in a particular year when she’d still been in school.

Luckily for them, there wasn’t a queue.  There were two or three customers knocking about, but they’d all gone off to opposite corners (dusty, cramped corners) of the shop, half-hidden behind aisles of material.  That gave Isaac and Rosalyn a straight line to the counter, and the woman behind it looked up and smiled as she saw them coming.

Rosalyn cleared her throat.  “So… bit of a weird question…”

“Hm?” said the cashier, but it was more of a polite squeak than anything.  The kind of noise that a pleasant customer-services mouse would make in a Disney film.

“I found this note in a book in the university library.  It’s written on the back of a Fabric City receipt.”  Rosalyn took the note out of the zip-up section in her bag, and handed it to the cashier.  “I know it’s a long shot, but do you think…?”

The cashier’s eyes lit up as soon as she saw the writing.  “Kelpie and Silkie!” she gasped.

Isaac gave a start.  He had not seen that coming.

“Do you know who wrote it?” asked Rosalyn, with the kind of smile that could blind you if you looked at it directly.  She hadn’t seen it coming, either.  According to all reasonable expectations, the cashier should have spent the next few minutes repeatedly explaining that, no, she had no resources with which to match a twelve-year-old receipt with a specific customer, and she wasn’t being paid enough to try.  She shouldn’t have instantly known what was going on before Rosalyn had even finished her question.

“I’m afraid not, but…”  The cashier put the receipt gently down on the counter, as if she was being extra careful not to rip it.  “Oh, this is so interesting.  There’s some graffiti on the wall around the back of the shop, and it’s signed ‘Kelpie and Silkie’ too.”

“Really?”  Rosalyn leaned a little way across the counter.  “What does it say?”

“I can show you!  If you just wait two minutes…”  She glanced up at the clock.  “My break starts soon.  Would you like me to take you to see it?”

For a moment, Isaac wondered if it was really a good idea to go into a back alley near a grubby little shop with a complete stranger.  Just because someone seemed enthusiastic and friendly didn’t mean they weren’t planning to knock you out and steal your organs.  But it would have taken a stronger man than him to look at Rosalyn’s expression right now and say anything negative.  “Yeah,” he said with a smile, “Sounds great, thanks.”

*

“I’d never have screwed it up like that if I’d known she was still looking,” Natalie told Mariam.  They were in the kitchen at Pallas House, comparing notes.  Apparently, they’d both encountered the Oakmen, and at more or less the same time, as well.  They must have covered every corner of campus with those flyers.  “But I don’t know why she was still looking!  She must have known that not everyone would keep the leaflets after she gave them out, right?”

Mariam shrugged.  “Who can say?  I had to pretty much talk the guy into giving me mine.”  There were three of them in the kitchen this afternoon- Natalie at the table, reading a book for her course, Alex pouring Mr Muscle down the sink so that it might actually start draining again, and Mariam at the cupboard, trying to remember what ingredients you needed for a flapjack.  In the midst of it all, in practically the exact centre of the room, Mariam’s mauve leaflet sat on the table.

“What did you say his name was?” asked Alex, “Shane something?”

“Shaun.  Er, Mandeville, he said.”  Mariam didn’t think she’d heard that name before.  It sounded nice- kind of fancy and distinctive.

Alex pressed his lips together and shook his head.  “Mm.  Doesn’t ring a bell,” he said, as if he expected to know the name of every single student at the university when Mariam didn’t even know everyone on her course.  “What about the other guy?  Do you think you’d know him if you saw him again?”

“Dunno.  Maybe.”  She wasn’t particularly confident about that.  There must have been a couple of thousand short guys with brown hair coming through the student union every day.  “Why would I want to, anyway?”

“So you can ask him why he assumed that a girl with scratches on her arms must have put them there herself.”  Alex’s mouth was fixed in a grim half-smile.  “It must have been an interesting set of experiences that led him to that conclusion.”

“Nah,” said Natalie, “He just sounds like one of those guys who’s convinced that everyone else is stupider than him.”  She tutted.  “Girls especially.  And that’s why they won’t go out with him…”

Mariam laughed.  “Anyway,” he said, picking up the leaflet again, “It says here the next meeting’s on Friday.”

“You thinking of going?” asked Natalie.

“Why not?  They seem nice enough.”

Natalie’ mouth curled into a smile.  “But they might make you talk about your favourite spoon…”

Mariam grinned, and looked over at the washing-up waiting to be done on the counter.  “Whichever one’s clean and not covered with those weird rust spots, that’s my favourite.”

*

The cashier, whose name had turned out to be Judith, led them around the corner and into an alley, which did nothing for Isaac’s fears of organ-harvesting.  She turned her head and beckoned them to follow her with an eager smile and a fluttery hand motion, which allowed him to comfort himself with the thought that at least he’d be murdered by a cheerful serial killer.  At the end of the alley was a tall wooden gate, and Judith took a set of keys out of her pocket to unlock it.  “I don’t know how long it’s been there,” she told them, looking over her shoulder as she fiddled with the lock, “It could be older than the receipt you found, for all I know.  Nobody I work with’s been here for more than five years, so…  Ah, here we are.”  She opened the gate and led them through.  “And there it is.”

They were in a small, miserable triangle of concrete bordered by wooden walls on two sides and the back of Fabric City on the third.  But there, on the wall, there was a message in black spray-paint.  If only the strong survive, nobody will- Kelpie and Silkie.

Isaac heard a little gasping noise to his left.  When he looked over, he saw that Rosalyn was staring at the wall with tears in her eyes.

*

Denny kept thinking about Mr Rivers, his old English teacher, and what had happened when Denny had corrected somebody else without putting his hand up in one of his lessons.  Mr Rivers hadn’t been the sort of teacher who started yelling at you straight away.  He’d gone silent and tight-lipped for about twenty seconds, and then let everything out in a steady stream of venom.  “Bad enough that you disrupted the class, but you did it for the worst possible reason.  You thought that everyone needed to take a break from their learning to appreciate how clever you are.  Do you think people care that much about what you have to say?  Do you honestly think anyone’s impressed?”

It had felt like a knife between his ribs, but he still hadn’t learned.  The more Denny thought about it, the more certain he was that most of the problems in his life stemmed from him wanting to show other people how clever he was.  And he was never quite as clever as he thought he was, was he?

Today wasn’t one of those days when Jonathan or Tavia made him go out somewhere, so Denny stayed in his room, looking up at the ceiling.  If Jonathan and Tavia had any sense, they’d have made it so the door locked from the outside and then never let him out.  Instead, they just came upstairs and checked he was alright every hour.  Denny tried to be OK with that.  If he got one of those blackouts, there would be plenty of people between him and the front door.  It would be fine.

If Alex was here, he’d tell him not to worry about that.  Denny knew Alex meant well- of course he did- but he’d given up trying to talk to him about the blackouts and anything like them, because Alex had an excuse for everything.  Either it had been understandable under the circumstances, or it hadn’t happened how Denny remembered it, or it was OK because no-one had actually got hurt.  As if it was possible for Denny to never have done anything wrong in his life.  As if he was some kind of perfect saint.  Ridiculous.

He remembered Pinder, years ago, giving him a cool, disappointed look and saying, “I hope this is just a one-off and not you finally showing us who you really are.”  Denny had tried to make it a one-off, really he had, but it was just a part of who he was.  It was stuck fast and long since gone rotten.

Mariam was back at work right after the weekend.  They’d offered her a few more days off, but she missed getting paid.

She’d been pleasantly surprised by how her co-workers were behaving this morning.  It was all how are you and glad to have you back and don’t take on too much.  Even Wayne, who could usually be relied upon to rant for hours at the slightest provocation about how George Lucas had broken his heart and betrayed their entire generation, had told her to leave any table-waiting duties to him.  “Can’t have you pulling your stitches,” he told her, leaving her by the till.

She spent the morning pulling pints, noting down food orders, and collecting in the money.  It wasn’t bad work.  The Student Union was a crowded, dimly-lit place just to the left of the main university building, and it had a bar, a sandwich counter, and not much else.  When there was a lull between customers (not often), you could amuse yourself by checking out this week’s posters.  Just about every square inch of wall space was covered in them- adverts for events and clubs, political statements, charity appeals.  They got so many on, Mariam was surprised they didn’t try and put some on the ceiling and the floor as well. 

She’d just started reading about a benefit gig in a nearby pub when That Guy came up to the counter.  Afterwards, he was always just That Guy in her mind, pronounced with all the disdain her brain could muster, but at first he seemed perfectly normal.  Then again, didn’t most of them?

He asked for a pint of John Smith’s, and watched her pour it, eyes focused on her forearms.  She probably wouldn’t have noticed that if she hadn’t been so conscious of the bandages under her sleeves, but she was positive- whenever her arms moved, his gaze followed.  It was like hypnotising somebody with a watch.

It wasn’t until she’d already passed him the pint that he finally spoke up.  “I just want you to know- I think that’s pretty pathetic.”  He pointed to her right wrist, where her shirtsleeve had ridden up to reveal a centimetre or two of bandage.  “You’re just going to make your family worry themselves sick about you, and for what?  A little bit of attention?”

Mariam goggled at him.  She had got a bit of extra attention after what had happened at the park, but…  “You think I wanted that to happen?”

“I mean, cutting yourself,” said That Guy languidly, “Fucking emo chicks…  You don’t know how good you have it.  There’s people in the world with real problems.”

Mariam reached out and snatched the pint out of his hand, pulling it back across the bar.  It felt a bit childish, but it also felt satisfying.  “We have a policy against abusive language,” she recited, remembering her training back in October, “I’m refusing you…”

She would have ended by kicking him out of the Student Union and telling him not to come back until he’d read every single local paper from the last three days, but at that point, another person appeared behind That Guy.  He seemed to materialise at his shoulder.  The other man was tall and broad-shouldered, with the kind of hair that curled at the ends and always looked wet, and he was carrying a handful of mauve flyers.  He made eye contact with Mariam, then grabbed That Guy’s arm and wrenched him two steps backwards.  “So you’ve got nothing better to do with your life than go around bothering random women?”

That Guy struggled in the other man’s grip.  “She’s a fucking emo!  Just look at her arms!”

“She was caught up in a bombing on Thursday, arsehole, and she’s back at work already.  I’ll bet that if that happened to you, you’d still be at home squealing like a baby.”

That Guy struggled some more.  “Let me go!”

The other man let him go.  That Guy scurried towards the exit, elbowing his way through the crowd.  If one of them had wanted to chase him, they could probably have caught him in five seconds flat, but as far as Mariam was concerned, the further away he was from her, the better.

She looked back at the other man, and grinned.  “Right, I’d say you’ve earned a drink on the house.  What’ll it be?”

The man held up his hands.  “It was nothing, really.  Just, I overheard you and the other bar staff talking about what happened, and I figured you’d been through enough already without having to deal with creeps like him.”

Mariam’s face felt hot.  She tried to ignore it.  “I wouldn’t be that quick to turn down a free drink.  Are you sure?”

“Absolutely sure.”  The man put out a hand.  “Shaun Mandeville.”

Mariam shook it.  “Mariam Gharib.  What are those leaflets you’ve got, then?”

Shaun looked down at the papers in his hand and gave a start. As if he’d completely forgotten they were there.  “Oh!  They’re for a group called The Oakmen.  I’m meant to be giving them out.”

“And that’s, what, a band?”

“Hm?  No, we’re just a social group, really.  A way for people to meet up and talk.”  He scrunched his nose in a way that made Mariam think of a rabbit.  “People don’t talk enough these days, do they?”

“I guess not,” said Mariam.  She nodded towards the flyers.  “Can I have one?”

Shaun’s face lit up.  “Of course!”  He peeled one off from the stack and handed it over.  “Next meeting’s on Friday, in the back room at the Skillet.  Come along.”

*

Rosalyn lay on her bed in the attic, listening to Stevie Wonder and trying to forget about the word “fate.”  Mainly because she was pretty sure she’d tempted it.

She’d kicked up such a fuss about it, too, all starry-eyed and convinced the universe was trying to tell her something.  All fun and games until somebody lost an eye.  Isaac had been lucky not to literally lose an eye, in fact.

Obviously, Rosalyn knew she hadn’t willed the explosion into existence just because she’d wanted life to be exciting.  If she told anyone she had, they’d tell her to stop being ridiculous.  And, in fact, she’d been to two therapists, one here and one back home, so that she could stop being ridiculous at times like this.  But knowing something intellectually wasn’t the same thing as feeling it in your bones.

People like her should just avoid talking about fate and messages from the universe in the first place, she decided.  It never led to anything good.

There was a knock on her door.  “Come in,” she said, sitting up and turning off the music.

Isaac came in.  The bandages were off, but his face still looked pink and blotchy, and the stitches stuck out a mile.  “Have you still got that note?” he asked, breezily.

Rosalyn did still have that note.  She’d thought about chucking it out, just to draw a line under the whole thing, but that had seemed wrong.  It hadn’t seemed like her decision to make.  “Yeah, I put it back in the book.  Why?”

“Well, you said it was a receipt from some fabric shop, right?” He walked to the centre of the room.  “So it’s probably got a date on it.  Maybe even the shop’s address.”

“Yeah, maybe.”  She got up and took the book down from the shelf.  The note was back where she’d found it, in between pages 74 and 75.  It hadn’t felt right to move it somewhere else.

She handed it to Isaac, who turned it over and raised his eyebrows.  “Jesus!  April 1994!”

“Really?”

“See for yourself!”  He handed it back, and she looked through the small print at the bottom of the receipt until she found it.  Thursday 14^th of April, 1994.  This note had sat in the book, undisturbed by the outside world, for nearly twelve years.  Until Rosalyn had come along.

“You were right- there’s an address, too,” she told him, “Fabric City, 21 Browning Road.  Do you know where Browning Road is?”

Isaac clicked his teeth.  “I… want to say it’s one of those streets just behind the station?  We’ll have to check it out on a map.”

Rosalyn frowned.  She should have seen this coming.  “You want to try and find the shop?”

“Well, it might not be there anymore, but there’s no harm in checking.”  He shrugged his shoulders so extravagantly that the whole of his jacket moved up and down with them.  “Neither of us have lectures today, so why not?”

Rosalyn knew why not, but she couldn’t say so out loud without sounding mental.  There wasn’t any harm in checking.  But people like her probably shouldn’t.  “I don’t know…”

“Rosalyn.  Come on.”  Isaac gave her a warm smile.  “We had a bad shock last week, but lightening doesn’t strike in the same place twice, does it?  Worst case scenario, we’ll get to Number 21, find out it’s turned into a Starbucks, and have to head back home.”

“Well…”

“Rosalyn, there’s this really annoying proverb about falling off horses.  Please don’t make me use it.”

Rosalyn laughed.  “Oh, alright, then.  I wouldn’t do that to you.”

Isaac grinned.  Before Rosalyn knew what he was going to do, he’d already picked her up bridal-style, with his right hand between her shoulderblades and his left arm hooked under her knees.  “Where to, miss?”

*

There were free copies of the university paper (which was called “The Bell” for some reason Natalie had never bothered to find out) on every table in the canteen.  Not so strange- it came out every Monday.  But this week, the front-page headline read, Two Berrylands Students Injured in Park Bombing.

They weren’t actually allowed to name the two injured students (and neither were the proper newspapers who’d reported on it last Friday), but it couldn’t have been that hard to find out, because all five of Pallas House’s tenants had been stopped at some point in the last four days and asked for an interview.  They’d all said no thanks.

Natalie’s parents had asked her to come home.  She’d appeased them by promising to try and get down there this weekend.  She was pretty keen to stay with her housemates for the time being.

Natalie’s friend Felicity finally worked her way through the crowd and sat down opposite her.  She put her coffee down on the table, nodded backwards and said, “That’s my biggest argument against Anarchy, right there.”

 “Hm?”

“It’s like this- when I’ve got up at six in the morning, travelled an hour on a crowded train, sat through one of Bryn fecking Cornwell’s lectures and queued for ages to get a cup of coffee, and then some berk elbows into me and makes me spill half of it and burn the skin off my hand, the only- the only– thing that’s going to stop me from throwing it into their stupid ugly face is the knowledge that I might get arrested for it.”  She shook her scalded hand in the air.  “So, you know, it’s important to have laws.”

“Is your hand OK?” asked Natalie.

Felicity grimaced.  “I’ll live.”

“I don’t think the lecture was that bad.”

 “Oh, come on.  It was meant to be about Plato’s Republic.  How did it end up being about how the English language is dying out because of netspeak?”

“It could have been worse.  Remember that story he set us that was all about necrophilia?”  It had been called ‘The Copulating Mermaid of Venice, California,’ and it had been about two drunk guys stealing a corpse and waxing poetic about how they were having sex with it.  Natalie had written a response story called, ‘The Wanking Dugong of Chessington, Surrey.’  She was still pretty proud of that one.

Just then, a girl Natalie didn’t recognise shuffled up to the table, hugging a set of mauve leaflets to her chest.  “Oakmen meeting on Friday,” she announced, throwing a couple of copies in front of Natalie and Felicity.  Then she shuffled off to bother people at the next table.

“Oakmen?” said Felicity, “That’s, what, an environmental thing?”

Natalie picked up the leaflet and read it.  She started frowning almost immediately.  It was the kind of leaflet that poked you in the face with capital letters and exclamation marks.  Then she read the second-to-last sentence, and made a noise like a cat coughing up a hairball.  “Apparently, it’s for people who want to talk about how much they love their favourite spoon.  Their favourite spoon.” 

She couldn’t have said why that particular sentence had struck her in the way it had. It made her think of a poster she’d passed on the way to school a few years ago, an advert for a nightclub that had said, SPICE UP UR MISERABLE LIVES!!!  By the fifth or sixth time she’d passed it, Natalie had been prepared to defend her miserable life to the death.  This was like that- supposed to be lighthearted, but with a weird undercurrent of aggression that affected the whole thing.

Felicity raised her eyebrows.  “Do you think it’s one of those ‘trying too hard to be random’ things?”

“It’s one of those ‘really wanting to be told they’re funny but not quite understanding how jokes work’ things.”  Natalie crumpled the leaflet in her hand, squashing it into a crinkly mauve ball.  As she did it, though, she caught sight of the girl who’d given them the leaflets.  She was still looking right at them.

All of a sudden, Natalie felt very small.  They’re just trying to have fun.  And it’s not as if ‘The Wanking Dugong’ was exactly Monty Python, either.

For a moment, it looked as if the girl was going to come over to their table and demand to know what their problem was, but instead she just pulled a face and moved on to the next table.

Isaac and Mariam’s cuts had a lot of glass in them, so the paramedics decided to take them down to A&E to look at them properly.  The other three had been lucky- barely a scratch on them.  Natalie in particular had lucked out, because by falling on top of her like he had, Isaac had ended up as a kind of accidental human shield.

“From what we can tell, it was a rather hastily put-together bomb,” said one of the policemen who’d come to the hospital with them, “If it hadn’t been so close to the big window, the only damage it would have caused would have been a few burn marks on the furniture.”

“It was probably meant to go off a lot earlier than it did,” added the other policeman (they’d told them their names, but for the life of her Natalie couldn’t remember what they were), “Most likely, while the club was in session.”  They were sitting opposite Natalie, Alex and Rosalyn in the hospital waiting room.  There had been no word from Isaac or Mariam yet, but the paramedics had assured them that they’d probably just need stitches.  Even so, Natalie wished they’d come out.  She wanted to know for certain that Isaac’s face wasn’t as bad as it had looked.

One of the policemen cleared his throat.  “Now, we’re going to need official statements from all five of you in the next few days, but you don’t need to worry about that right now.  Is there anything you’d like to ask us, while we’re here?”

Natalie and Alex spoke pretty much in unison.  Not surprising- there was one very obvious question.  “Do you have any idea who…?”

The policeman raised his hand and cut them both off.  “Wouldn’t want to rush to judgement before we’ve got any evidence.  If anyone claims responsibility for it, we’ll all know soon enough.”

They left soon after that, leaving behind contact numbers for a couple of victim support groups.  Natalie and the others sat in silence for a while.  Alex had got in between Natalie and Rosalyn, so that he’d be in the perfect position to put a comforting hand on their arms if they started to fidget.  It was funny- with most other boys (men really- Alex was twenty-three, after all), Natalie would have found that annoying.  It would have felt like they were staking a claim, or making a show of calming down the hysterical females.  But with Alex, there didn’t seem to be any ulterior motive.  Honestly, he barely even seemed to notice he was doing it.

“I wish I’d never found that bloody book,” Rosalyn said quietly.

Once again, Alex and Natalie spoke at the same time:

“No, you can’t think like that…”

“Don’t be daft, Rosalyn, you couldn’t have known…”

Rosalyn sighed.  “I know, but…  We got so excited over it, and look how it’s ended up.  We should have just stayed in and watched 24.”

If Isaac had been here, he’d have said something about how being sliced to bits by broken glass was much less painful than having to watch 24, but coming from Natalie that would probably have been in bad taste.  She wasn’t the one who’d been sliced to bits, for a start.  “We can’t do that every night.  We take a bigger risk every time we cross the road…”

“Rosalyn, listen.”  Alex sat up straight and put his hand on Rosalyn’s shoulder.  “We were all happy to come out tonight.  We all wanted to see that graffiti.  And if somebody else decided to ruin that, then it’s their fault, not yours.”

“But I made such a big deal about it. Going on about fate and stuff.”

“We’re students,” Natalie said with a smile, “We’re allowed to make a big deal about silly stuff without having to worry about ending up in hospital for it.”  She would have said more, but at that moment, Mariam came through the doors, her forearms dotted with white bandages.

“Mariam!”  Alex stood up to greet her, holding his arms wide.  “How are you?”

“Well, I need to come back in two weeks to get the stitches removed, but until then, they’re done with me.”  Mariam let herself be pulled into an awkward hug.  “Any news about Isaac?”

Natalie shook her head.  “Shouldn’t be too long…  They said his cuts weren’t any worse than yours, right?”

“Yeah, but on his face, though?”  Mariam sat down beside Rosalyn.  “I’m just worried about scars.”

That was what Natalie had been worried about, too.  Now that someone else had said it out loud, she felt a whole lot worse.

It hadn’t surprised her when Isaac had got excited about the graffiti in the park.  If anybody was going to get excited about some silly graffiti about gossipy bees, it was Isaac.  He was always bouncing from one thing to another, always making extravagant declarations for everyone else’s benefit, as if it was his job to keep them entertained.  And he should have been allowed to be like that without something like this happening.

Mariam’s eyes flickered from left to right.  Natalie saw her decide to change the subject.  “So, um, I think I worked out what the graffiti meant,” she said, looking at Rosalyn.

“Really?”

“Yeah- I got thinking about it while they were cleaning up my arms.  I remembered a book I read when I was at school.  They talked about an old beekeeping superstition where you’re meant to tell the bees any important events in your life, or they’ll get annoyed and stop producing honey.”

Natalie didn’t know why that made them all laugh so much.  It was something about the idea of a bee sulking, combined with how tense they’d been for the last couple of hours.  She’d heard people talk about safety valves, in situations like this.  “Stroppy bees,” she said, and that set Rosalyn off again.  Natalie caught her breath and managed to say something useful.  “There’s kind of an animal theme, then, with Kelpie and Silkie.  We’ve got bees, seals…”

“Horses,” added Alex, “Kelpies could transform into horses.”

“How are you an expert on kelpies all of a sudden?” demanded Mariam, still laughing.

“I used to live in Edinburgh!  They’re very proud of their folklore!”

Natalie glanced guiltily around the waiting room, but no-one else seemed annoyed by their giggling fit.  The nurses and receptionists had probably seen a lot worse, and the other patients all had bigger things to worry about.  “Do you think there’s other messages out there?” she asked the others, “Working their way through all the animal superstitions?”

Rosalyn’s eyes lit up a bit.  “There could be…”

“There’s almost certainly one about black cats somewhere.”

“Something about finding jewels in toads’ heads…” added Mariam.

Just then, the doors to the side of the desk opened, and Isaac came through.  “That was a bit of a palaver, wasn’t it?” he said in a loud, chirpy voice.

This time, all four of them jumped to their feet.  Isaac barely had time to get two yards from the door before they were crowding around him.  “How are you?” asked Mariam, taking his face in her hands.

It didn’t look good.  Isaac’s forehead, nose and left cheek were covered in gauze, and that was bad enough.  The little scabs around the edge were worse.  They gave the impression that he had barely any face left under there.

Isaac made a big show of shrugging.  “Not too bad, not too ba-a-ad…”  He winked at Mariam.  “They’ve loaded me up with the good stuff.  How about you?”

Mariam smiled.  “Some of it, yeah.  Just a bit of paracetamol in my case.”

It can’t be that bad if they’re not keeping him in overnight, Natalie told herself, but that didn’t even seem like the point.  All they’d wanted to do was enjoy their evening.  Those little pebble-dash scabs shouldn’t have been the end result of anything.  Isaac might have been shrugging it off, but Natalie felt just about ready to murder someone.

Alex had an arm round Isaac’s shoulders, and he was guiding him to the exit.  “Come on, let’s go home.  You can sit up front this time.”

Isaac glanced around at Natalie and Rosalyn.  “What, not in between two lovely ladies?  Aww.”

Mariam laughed.  “Alex is a lovely enough lady for anyone.”

Isaac really must have been on the good stuff, because he was practically nodding off by the time they got back to the house.  None of them could remember whether you were supposed to avoid falling asleep after taking painkillers or if that was just after a head injury, so they all spent the next few hours sitting in Isaac’s room, watching the noisiest DVDs they could.

At some point, Mariam remembered that they hadn’t had dinner, and sent Natalie outside to phone for pizza.  She went to the kitchen, so as not to talk over Armageddon, and made the call.  One large margherita, one large pepperoni, plus garlic bread and Pepsi.  The guy on the other end told her it would be about half an hour.

Barely ten seconds after she hung up, Natalie heard the kitchen door creak open behind her.  “Natalie,” said Alex, softly, so as not to startle her.

Natalie turned round.

“I just wanted to tell you- if you need to be alone for a few minutes, that’s OK.”  He had one of those voices that got slightly rougher as it got quieter.  “Everyone understands.” 

Natalie grinned.  “Trying to get rid of me, are you?”

She felt bad immediately after saying it- he was just trying to be nice- but Alex didn’t seem offended.  “You seemed on edge.”

Shit.  Was it that obvious?  “Well… aren’t we all?  It’s not as if I was the one who got my face filled with broken glass.”

“People react to shock in different ways,” said Alex, his big brown eyes wide and earnest.

“And apparently my way is not being able to concentrate on Bruce Willis films.”

“Well, Natalie, some might say that makes you the sanest one of all.”

They both laughed.  Not hysterically, the way they had in the waiting room when Mariam had mentioned the bees, but reassuringly.  Just a smile and a puff of air each, but it was enough to make Natalie relaxed enough to say things out loud.  “I don’t know what’s up with me.”  She kept thinking about a time not long after her little sister, Stephanie, had started secondary school, when she’d come home letting out the most heartbreaking sobs Natalie had ever heard because some of the other girls in her class had torn up her Geography homework after she’d worked on it all night. It was a really good thing that Natalie and Stephanie had been at different schools at the time, because otherwise nothing would have stopped Natalie from going after the little shits with a cricket bat the next day.  Isaac wasn’t eleven, wasn’t crying, and wasn’t her sister, but even so, it was the same feeling all over again.  “I feel like I’m either going to burst into tears or punch a wall.”

“Either would be fine,” said Alex.  He looked around critically.  “Although I’m not sure these walls would stand up to many punches.”

Natalie glanced at the cracks in the plaster.  “Yeah, you’d get three or four hits in, and then it would disintegrate.”

Alex nodded, and put his arms out by his sides, as if it was the natural thing to do next.  Natalie briefly felt like putting him off- I’m not five, you’re not our dad, if anyone needs a hug it’s Isaac and Mariam– but she didn’t.  She stepped forward, let him hug her, and hugged him back.  She was pretty sure that Alex was actually an inch or two shorter than her, but the way his arms squeezed around her back and shoulders made it feel as if she was being cocooned on all sides.

“I’ll come back in,” she said, “Armageddon’s not that bad.”

Alex laughed again, and let go.

*

There was a booming noise coming from the pillow just below Denny’s ear, as if a tiny army were marching through the bed and up to meet him.  He’d thought this before.  The image had been in his head since he was about six, ready for him to summon and use for exactly this kind of situation.  A tiny army, inside the pillows and mattress just below Denny’s head, dressed in shiny red uniforms, marching up a white spiral staircase until they reached the top.  Denny tried to think his way down.  He tried to sink into the pillow, through the mattress, until he could meet the marching army face-to-face.  He couldn’t be trusted anywhere else.

He’d done such bad things.  He was sorry, but “sorry” didn’t stop it hurting.  “Sorry” didn’t stop him doing the exact same things again next time.  His friends and family had all worked so hard, but Denny kept disappointing them.  There was just something wrong with him, really wrong, deep down.

He’d told himself he’d had good reasons for doing it, but it was a lie and he knew it.

(Patreon!)

“The idea of completed man is the supreme vanity: the finished image is a sacrilegious myth.” The Chrysalids, John Wyndham

*

February 2006

1

If Rosalyn hadn’t decided to do her Philosophy essay on Utilitarianism, her lecturer would never have given her a list of books on Jeremy Bentham she could use as sources, and if her lecturer had never given her that list of books, she’d never have gone to that section of the library to look for them.  And if the third and fourth books on the list hadn’t already been taken out by someone else, Rosalyn wouldn’t have been looking through the shelves for alternatives, and if she hadn’t been doing that, she’d never have spotted an old book called Daughters of Lilith.  And then she definitely wouldn’t have opened it and seen that folded-up piece of paper between pages 74 and 75.

“Fate,” she declared, to an unimpressed Mariam.

“Hm.”  Mariam picked up the piece of paper (a receipt from somewhere called Fabric City) and read out the message on the back.  “Every moment of your life so far has been leading up to exactly what you’re doing right now…  Sad, isn’t it?  -Kelpie and Silkie.”  Below the signature was a little squiggle that looked a bit like a seal.

“Sea monsters,” said Alex, who was standing at the counter, making a cup of tea.  Pallas House’s kettle was about twenty years old, and had probably been white once.  The same was true of the rest of the kitchen.

“What?”

“Kelpie and Silkie.  They’re monsters from Celtic myths.”  He turned to face them, a big, interested smile on his face.  Alex was twenty-three, about four or five years older than everyone else in the house, but Rosalyn had never got the impression that he was just humouring them when he joined in whatever dumb thing they were talking about.  “I believe the kelpie was a close relation of the Loch Ness monster.  The silkie was more of a shape-shifter.”

Mariam pinched the bridge of her nose, as if they were giving her a headache.  “Alex, please don’t convince Pepper that a Celtic sea monster wrote her a note and hid it in an old book on feminism.”

“But that’s the other amazing thing!” said Rosalyn, “That it’s old!”  She opened it up so that they could see the inside front cover.  “Look at the return record- no-one’s taken it out since 1985!”

“Peps, they don’t even use those return record things anymore.  It’s all done on the machines.”

“Yeah, but those wouldn’t have been installed until, what, 1999 at the earliest?”  She glanced at Alex, who shrugged.  “That’s still more than a decade that it definitely didn’t get taken out.”

“If that’s actually the front page.”  Mariam lifted up the return record, and looked at the three or four pages glued underneath.  “There could have been others that just fell off when the glue dried up.”

Rosalyn pointed at it.  “There’s a gap at the bottom- see?  It would have been stamped there the next time it was taken out.”

Mariam glanced at the gap, then looked back up at Rosalyn, giving her one of her weird crooked smiles, the ones that went at an odd angle and seemed to dig into one side of her face.  “Alright then.  It really hasn’t been taken out since 1985.”  She didn’t add anything about that fact not automatically proving the existence of fate.  Rosalyn thought she was probably hoping to convey that through the smile.  “So who do you think wrote the note?”

“Somebody who knows a lot about sea monsters,” said Alex, placing cups of tea in front of Mariam and Rosalyn.  Neither of them had asked for one.  Alex just tended to assume everyone wanted tea.

“Somebody who knows their names,” said Mariam, “Their names aren’t ‘a lot.’”  She paused, then added in a quieter voice, “And thanks for the tea.”

“My pleasure,” said Alex.  He sat down and put his elbows on the table, leaning forward and grinning as if he was about to share some ancient wisdom.  “You know, there are a lot of legends about buildings and towns having guardian spirits….”

Mariam put her head in her hands.  “Oh my God, you do think a sea monster wrote that note.”

“Well, not a sea monster per se.  This book was in a library about a hundred miles from the sea, after all.”

“Right, because that would be too much of a stretch.  That a sea monster would be in a landlocked library.  If we were in Brighton, we could totally believe it.  They probably visit libraries there all the time.”

“Well, Brighton’s a town with a lot of historical significance, but I think you’d have better luck in Cornwall or Inverness.  The original myths say…”

At that point, they heard the front door creak open.  Their other flatmates were home.

“Isaac!  Natalie!” called Alex, “Pull up a chair!  We’re discussing guardian spirits!”

“No, we’re not!” squawked Mariam.

Isaac and Natalie wandered in, looking bemused.  Natalie looked from Alex to Mariam, and decided to address her question to Rosalyn instead.  “Guardian spirits?” she asked, her mouth curling up in a smile.

Rosalyn shrugged her shoulders, then felt a little bad about it.  It felt as if Natalie was drawing her into a joke about how badly Alex and Mariam were overreacting, which would be a bit hypocritical on Rosalyn’s part, since she’d started it.  “I was just telling them what I found in the library.”  She handed Natalie the note.  “It was folded up in this old book that hasn’t been taken out since the Eighties.  It’s probably been there for years.”

Natalie took it and read it.  “Kelpie and Silkie?”

“Alex says they’re sea monsters,” said Rosalyn, grinning.

“Technically water monsters, in the kelpie’s case,” added Alex, “They live in Scottish lochs.”

“I see,” said Natalie diplomatically.  She looked at the receipt again.  “This is pretty cool.  Leaving a note in a book for a stranger twenty years in the future.”

 “We don’t know the note’s been there for twenty years,” said Mariam, but without much rancour.  At this point, she was just playing out the role she’d been given at the start of the conversation.  You always needed a hapless sceptic to ignore.

 “I think I’ve heard that before,” said Isaac, “Kelpie and Silkie, I mean.”

 “Well, they’re mythical…” began Alex.

“No, no- I’ve seen something signed ‘Kelpie and Silkie.’  Some graffiti somewhere.”  Isaac stared down at the note, as if he was trying to intimidate it into giving up its secrets.  Isaac had a thin, pointy face that tended towards exaggerated expressions.  If he was even slightly annoyed, he looked as if he was plotting to tear somebody’s heart out with his bare hands.  He usually wasn’t.

Alex raised his eyebrows.  “Something around here?”

“Dunno.  Maybe.”  Isaac had his hands on his hips and his elbows stuck out in perfect triangles, like a stick figure cartoon.

“Oh, speaking of weird things around here,” said Natalie, “You know that house on the corner?  The one with the green blinds?  Well, they’ve had garbage all over their driveway for the last three days.”

“What kind of garbage?” asked Mariam.

“Just… the entire contents of their bins, it looks like.  Food wrappers and tampon boxes and stuff that’s gone off.  I mean, if it was any other house, I’d just think they’d gone on holiday and a fox got at their binbags, but…”

The others nodded.  The house with the green blinds was just plain weird. 

“Has anyone ever actually seen the people who live there?” asked Rosalyn.  The others made vague, negative noises.

“I definitely heard them once,” said Natalie, “They were yelling at the tops of their voices.  It sounded like a man and woman.”

Mariam grinned.  “And then, the next day, there was a sinister bloodstain on the front door?”

“Like you’d even notice.  The whole place is covered in sinister stains.”

Isaac twitched.  It was a whole-body twitch, as if he’d just put his fingers in an electric socket.  “I know where I’ve seen it!” he said, looking up at them in sheer delight, “It’s at the park!  On one of those old brick walls!”

It took Rosalyn a couple of seconds to remember what he was referring to.  “The Kelpie and Silkie graffiti, you mean?  What does it say?”

“Something about bees, I think.  Do you want to go and see it?”

The other four glanced at each other.  “What, now?” asked Natalie.

Isaac shrugged.  “Why not?”

*

Realistically, there was no reason for all of them to go down to the park, but nobody wanted to be left out.  Of the five of them, only Alex and Mariam had driving licenses, and the only car Mariam was insured for was her parents’ Mini back in Bradford, so Isaac spent the journey crammed in between Natalie and Rosalyn in the back of Alex’s tiny Ford Focus.  He’d had worse evenings.

One of the things Isaac liked best about university were the endless opportunities it provided to go out and spontaneously do something pointless.  Back home, your friends would need to check their schedules and your family would want to know exactly why you wanted to go to the costume shop halfway across town (to pick just one example).  Here, they mostly just agreed, because the alternative was usually hanging around the pub or, Heaven forbid, getting a head start on your coursework.  You could actually do something in the evening without having to spend an hour justifying it.

Mariam was in the passenger seat, complaining about her job.  Mariam worked at the Student Union on campus, and, according to her, most of her duties involved herding irritating manchildren.  “You know, since starting there I’ve got completely sick of the word ‘retarded’.”

Natalie shrugged her shoulders, which had the effect of dragging Isaac’s shoulders along for the ride.  “Well, as words go, it’s an easy one to get sick of.”

“I didn’t even find it offensive until they started saying it.  It’s their go-to word every time something doesn’t go their way.  And they all say it in the same whiny voice, too.  ‘That last episode was totally re-taaaaaar-ded’.”

Isaac shifted.  It was hard to know what to do with your arms in a situation like this.  Fold them, and you looked like you were sulking.  Stretch them out behind both girls’ shoulders, and you just looked like a wanker.

“The worst part- the worst part, right?- is when we have to host those bloody anime and video game clubs.  There’s always some twat who talks over everyone else and acts like the whole club’s just their loyal court.”

“You get that in any group, though,” said Natalie, “You should see our English Literature seminars.”

Mariam grinned.  “Let me guess- ‘People who say Shakespeare had more cultural impact than Christopher Marlowe are just ignorant children who don’t yet understand how the world works.’”

Natalie laughed, inadvertently tossing her hair into Isaac’s face.  For as long as Isaac had known her, Natalie’s hair had been shoulder-length and neatly cut, but it still managed to look like something out of a Renaissance painting.  It was a mass of strawberry-blonde waves that made you think of sunsets and apricots.

“‘All those Jane Austen fangirls who drool over Mr Darcy make me feel ashamed to be female.  I wonder if they’ll ever realise how re-taaaaar-ded they sound,’” continued Mariam.

“Yep, you’ve got it.  Just add a bunch of pontificating about how there are only seven basic plots and there hasn’t been a decent novel written since Ernest Hemingway died.”

“Right, so imagine that, but about Legend of frigging Zelda.”

Alex pulled into a parking space and undid his seatbelt.  “Here we are!” he said (a bit unnecessarily, since they all knew what the park looked like, but Isaac supposed it was more polite than, “Get out of my car, you bunch of freeloaders!” or something).

It was one of those February days that tricked you.  The weather was fresh and temperate, and so warm that you started to think that spring was finally on its way.  Which meant that tomorrow there would probably be a blizzard.

“How’s your job going?” Mariam asked Isaac as they crossed the road.

Isaac shrugged.  “Not bad.  You get the odd annoying customer, but management lets you shoot them.”

Mariam nodded, keeping her face straight.  “Oh yes, the famous Lambton Theatre shotgun.  We’ve all heard stories.”

Isaac found what he was looking for on an old crumbling wall near the cricket club headquarters.  Going out to do something pointless was its own reward, obviously, but the way Rosalyn’s face lit up when he pointed out the graffiti made his heart grow three or four sizes in a second.  There was something about Rosalyn that had that effect on you, and it probably had something to do with her height (five foot nothing) and her big, sad eyes.  She was like a tiny kitten that had been transformed into a human being and forced to go to university.  “If you’ve got any gossip, tell the bees,” she read, “For the love of God tell the bees!  Kelpie and Silkie.  What do you think it means?”

Isaac shrugged.  “Bees like them some gossip, I guess.”

“It’s definitely the same signature as the one from the book.  That squiggly line.”  Rosalyn inched forward to point at it, but didn’t quite dare to touch it.  You’d have thought it was a museum piece.

Alex circled around to get a better look.  Isaac noticed, for the fourth or fifth time, that he walked with a limp.  Not a massive one, or anything- just, one of his legs always seemed to move slower than the other.  “You’re right,” he told Rosalyn, “It does look like a seal.”

Natalie took a couple of steps closer.  “Shame none of us are studying forensic science,” she said, “Then we could…”

And that was when the bomb went off.

Not that any of them realised it was a bomb right away.  It just looked as if somebody had thrown a brick through the cricket club windows from the inside.  A thousand shards of glass sprayed out over the patio and grass around the building, and when Isaac flinched away, he crashed into Natalie and sent them both flying.

Then, all of a sudden, it seemed like everyone else in the entire park was running toward them.  Isaac hadn’t even noticed more than about half a dozen people as they’d walked towards the graffiti wall, but now they seemed to be coming out of the trees or something.  Isaac, sprawled across the grass, struggled to pull himself up.  Almost immediately, he felt Natalie’s hands on his shoulders.  She’d managed to move quicker than he had, then.  “Don’t get up too fast,” she told him, “You might make things worse.”

“What things?” he asked, “Anyway, I’m sorry for knocking you over.”

Natalie patted his shoulder.  “Don’t worry.”

There were voices coming from every direction, mostly ones Isaac didn’t recognise.  Questions like what the fuck was that and has anybody called an ambulance, one old woman wailing oh my God, oh my God over and over, a few people exclaiming about terrorists and criminals and what should be done to them.  Behind it, he caught Alex, Mariam and Rosalyn’s voices a little way off, so at least he knew they were still alive.

His forehead felt damp.  He put his hand up to check, and it came away covered in blood.

He glanced up at Natalie.  “It doesn’t even hurt,” he said, almost laughing.

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Just so you know, everything from the “Angst Sudoku” tag is part of a shared universe.  And I thought of a better title!

*

(Two documents, autumn 2005)

The Oakmen

Do you have a big dream you want to fight for?  Society will always try to stick a label on you and file you neatly away.  We’re here to show you something different.

We all know we’re up against something dangerous in this life.  The question is, do we try and hide from it, or face it head-on?

Come meet us and discuss literature, art, music, global politics, the way in which the cadences of a language affect its poetry, whether human beings might one day gain the power of flight, and how much you love your favourite spoon.  Every meeting’s different!

*

Ground Rules

At the founding of the great nation of Pallas House (a satellite state of Berrylands University), the happy citizens formed a constitution, agreeing to guarantee certain rights and certain laws.  These laws are as follows:

1. All tenants shall take their turn vacuuming the hallway carpet (including the stairs).  This should be done once a week.
2. Tenants will not allow more than four (4) plates or mugs to pile up beside the sink before washing up. Yes, Mariam will probably do it for you if you leave it.  No, it is not fair to take advantage of your flatmate’s OCD.
3. Rosalyn would like it to be noted that OCD doesn’t actually work that way. Sorry, Rosalyn.
4. In the interest of being considerate neighbours, all tenants will wear headphones when listening to music after 8pm.
5. Anybody caught playing “The Crazy Frog” at any time of day will be burned at the stake. (Isaac insisted on this being put in, but nobody else seemed to have any objections.)
6. Any post shall be arranged into separate piles according to the person to whom it is addressed, so that it can be easily found and taken up to the appropriate tenant’s room. Any letters addressed to the landlord shall be placed on the telephone table by the front door.  Any junk mail, political circulars, etc will be read out and mocked the next time the tenants get drunk.
7. No lines from “The Young Ones” shall be written in the rule book, so please stop asking, Natalie.

These laws were agreed upon and signed by the tenants…

Alexander Rudd (scribe)

Mariam Gharib

Isaac Green

Natalie Clements

Rosalyn Pepper

…on Monday the seventh of November, 2005.

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