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.

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“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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