Mistress of Night and Dawn (3 page)

The music ground to a halt and with it the deliberate whirlwind of dodgem cars sliding across the steel floor of the attraction.

Taking her eyes off the admiring boys, Siv seized Aurelia’s hand and led her to the metal red car they had spotted earlier and they sank into it, squeezing themselves onto the driving seat.

Aurelia noticed out of the corner of her eye two of the boys who had been watching them earlier make a beeline for a blue car full of dents. The third one had remained in place, and was now smoking a cigarette. As Siv took the simple steering wheel in both her hands, Aurelia detected a touch of malice in the watching boy’s eyes.

The loudspeakers roared into life again, the music beginning slowly, as if stretched like an elastic band until it reached a full crescendo. It was the same Taylor Swift song. The dodgem car twitched and Siv put her foot down on the pedal and it took off as if stung by a bee.

Siv glanced around her as she gripped the steering wheel, seeking out possible targets. But there were only half a dozen somewhat forlorn cars spread along the steel floor of the attraction. Before she could select a victim, there was a heavy jolt as the dented blue car driven by the two boys from earlier made a crunching contact with theirs, and their aggressors let out a whoop of frantic laughter.

‘Women drivers!’ exclaimed one of them, with a pronounced Brummie accent.

Siv quickly manoeuvred herself into reverse and with one deft movement swung around and before the boys could respond again she had pressed her foot flat onto the pedal, slamming the blue car against the side of the track. Aurelia lurched forward in her seat as Siv chortled and raced away again, the boys hot in pursuit. She managed to evade them for the rest of the ride, which came to a halt much earlier than they’d expected.

Extricating herself from the car, Siv extended her hand to Aurelia to help her out. ‘That’ll teach them,’ she said proudly, glancing back at the car to check the two boys’ reaction. They remained in place, already seeking out their next targets when the ride came to life again and apparently impervious to Siv’s attempts to get their attention. The third boy, the observer, had already faded away, seemingly bored with watching them.

Siv frowned, visibly losing interest in the dodgems as her target spun off in another direction without a backward glance. ‘We’ll use the other tokens later,’ she said. ‘Let’s see some of the other attractions.’

Siv and Aurelia stepped onto the grass. Away from the noisy cars, it now felt colder. Aurelia sniffed the air.

‘I think the weather is turning,’ she said.

Within a few minutes, the wind was rising in gusts and battering the tents that covered the green fields, sending the strings of beads that covered the nearby tarot reader’s awning clattering against each other in a tangle of multicoloured plastic. The Ferris wheel creaked and strained like an ancient behemoth struggling to tear itself out of the bolts that held its iron arms together and escape, octopus-like, across the open areas of the heath.

Aurelia raised a hand to her face and brushed away the strands of auburn hair that had uncurled from her hair band and were whipping out into the breeze like reeds in a stream. The wind felt like a cool pane of glass against her cheek. She fought the urge to lean against it, relax, and let it catch her or send her falling straight to the ground. Instead she turned her face into the cool air and opened her arms as if embracing the tempest that swept against them. She laughed.

‘Can you feel it?’ she shouted to Siv over the weather. ‘There’s something loose in the air tonight. It feels like Halloween.’

Siv laughed with her. The sound caught in the current and turned into a whistle. She hadn’t bothered to gel her cropped blond hair and the wind had pushed it up into tufts on her head so that she looked even more gamine than usual. Any other girl might have been offended by the number of people who mistook her for a boy. Not Siv. She delighted in her androgyny.

‘Let’s get back indoors,’ Aurelia added. ‘It’s going to rain.’ She dropped her arms to her sides and pulled her fringed black shawl tightly around her shoulders, though the thin fabric did little to protect her from the elements.

‘Come on then,’ Siv took Aurelia by the hand, pulling her along as was her habit, and they entered the nearest tent, an enormous dark-green tower that, despite its size, blended into its surroundings so well that they nearly walked straight past it. The canvas door flapped open and then closed again immediately behind them, swallowing them up.

Unpleasant smells of sweat and damp and month-old candy permeated the cavernous structure and left a bitter, metallic taste in Aurelia’s mouth, as if she had been sucking a penny.

‘Is there anyone here?’ Aurelia whispered into the dark. A light bulb crackled and flashed. Both girls jumped and clung onto the other’s hand tightly.

‘Sorry,’ said a young man who was now visible at the counter. ‘Mechanical failure. With the light, not the ride,’ he added hastily. ‘Do you want tickets?’

A green rubber monster’s mask was pushed onto the top of his head and his messy ginger hair fell across his forehead. The elastic band that was designed to hold the mask in place over his face dug into his chin, leaving an angry red welt. Aurelia wanted to reach out and loosen it, but instead, she dug into her tote bag and withdrew the quilted coin purse with the gold clip that she had received from her godmother for her birthday.

‘What ride is it?’ she asked. The inside of the tent was bereft of signs or any other identifying information. They could have been anywhere.

‘The ghost train,’ replied the young man, in a perfunctory manner, as if he were announcing the departure of the next express service to London.

He stared at Aurelia’s fingertips as she counted out the change for two tickets. She had painted them that morning, a dark, rich navy blue that gleamed against her pale skin. Siv’s were bright green, the colour of the fresh limes she liked to add to her gin when she wasn’t drinking it straight from a hip flask.

Aurelia took the ticket stubs between her fingers. The young man held onto the slips of white paper a fraction too long before letting go. The nails of his right hand were bitten to the quick. The nails on his left hand were of ordinary length, and neatly filed. Aurelia was a keen observer of people, and she noted this snippet of information with interest. She wondered what other parts of the boy were frayed at the edges on only one side.

‘Through that door,’ the boy said, pointing to a thin black veil behind him, without taking his eyes from Aurelia for a moment. A grinning plastic skeleton hung over the opening; its once white bones now discoloured from old age and overuse. It emitted a mechanical wail when Siv pushed it impatiently to one side to let them through.

‘He likes you,’ she said matter-of-factly, punctuating her statement with another swig from the silver flask and nodding her head towards the ticket collector whose faint outline was still visible through the thin curtain, as if to confirm that she was referring to him and not the skeleton.

Aurelia shrugged. It wasn’t that boys made her nervous. She just happened to find the idea of romance uninteresting, and the few times that she had tried it, always as a result of Siv’s meddling, things had gone wrong in ways that seemed unbelievable in retrospect.

The first boy who had ever tried to kiss her had tripped as he had moved in to make contact, fallen flat on his face and broken his nose on the pavement outside her house. And only last year, at the school’s end-of-term disco, her date had managed to inadvertently lock himself in a broom cupboard, and hadn’t been discovered until the caretaker cleaned the hall the following morning.

Siv joked that she had Cupid’s nemesis resting on her shoulder and batting away the arrows of love. And if that were true, Aurelia didn’t mind. She was not unaware that sometimes men looked at her, or tried to strike up a conversation. She was simply ambivalent.

‘And he wasn’t bad looking,’ Siv added. ‘Ginger, but still cute. I think you should talk to him.’

‘I did talk to him.’

A single cart sat empty at the top of a gentle slope. It didn’t appear to be fixed onto rails. Aurelia waited for some sign to indicate what they should do next.

‘Do we sit in that, do you think?’

‘I meant
talk
to him,’ Siv replied. ‘And who cares, these rides are all stupid anyway. Is anyone else even in here?’

The sound of muffled voices and brash laughter reached them through the thin veil that blocked the ride’s starting point from the ticket collector.

‘Shhh,’ Siv said. ‘Someone’s coming.’

‘The cart’s not big enough for all of you!’ came the voice of the young ginger-haired man from behind the counter. ‘You’ll have to wait for me to set up another one.’

‘Hurry up then,’ a deeper voice replied.

‘Boys! The ones from the dodgems,’ Siv hissed joyfully. ‘Come on.’

She grabbed Aurelia’s hand and pulled her into the darkness of the tunnel, pushing aside the rubber spiders that fell down from the rooftop as they set off the motion sensors. Stale popcorn crunched beneath their shoes, crushed to fragments by the heavy weight of Siv’s favourite shiny purple Doc Marten boots with their garish black and yellow laces and barely touched by the soft tread of Aurelia’s ballet pumps.

The cart clicked and whirred into life behind them.

‘Quick!’ cried Siv, as the boys bundled in, and pushed away the attentions of the red-haired ticket collector who was frantically insisting that they buckle up their seat belts. ‘Let’s hide.’

The tent seemed to go off for miles in all directions. It hadn’t seemed so wide from the outside. They found the metal rails that the carts ran along, and raced down alongside the track looking for a place large enough for the two of them to crawl into or disappear behind.

‘Here,’ Siv said, when they nearly toppled straight over a pair of elderly-looking vampires who were sitting precariously atop a fake-blood-covered rock.

They crouched down as the cart came rushing towards them, faster than they had expected.

The faces of the two vampires morphed into snarls as the cart set off the pressure switch, caught in the glare of a beam of light that flashed on, just in time to cast a vivid glow onto the twin moons of Siv’s buttocks as she leapt up and pulled down her shorts and tights, flashing her arse.

A boy shouted in surprise. ‘Hey! I think that was a girl,’ he cried behind him. The cart’s occupants tried to swivel around but it was too late, they had been whisked around the corner before they could catch another glance or identify the perpetrator.

Siv chuckled as she re-fastened the button on her jean shorts.

‘Are you quite finished?’ Aurelia asked her friend, between peals of laughter.

Siv snickered again in response. ‘No,’ she said, ‘I was hoping I’d make them crash.’

She pushed the silver flask into Aurelia’s hand. ‘Here, settle yourself down with a swig of this. And let’s keep exploring.’

Aurelia took a sip, and grimaced.

‘Ugh,’ she said, ‘I thought you said you were going to mix it?’

‘Not enough room in the bottle,’ Siv replied. ‘I didn’t want to waste the space.’

‘This place is huge,’ Aurelia marvelled, as they edged along another corridor. ‘And it doesn’t feel like a tent.’ She ran her hand along the nearest wall. It was as cool and damp to the touch as a stone in a river. Again she had a strange sense of excitement about the night, as if the fun fair was a place that sat somewhere on the fringes of reality, part of the world but not subject to its ordinary rules.

They continued walking. Aurelia had taken the lead this time, stepping into the dark with one hand still caressing the wall and the other holding Siv who trailed a step behind. By now the two girls were lost in the darkness, their movements under the canvas and along the elusive tracks no longer setting off the motion sensors, most of which had only been calibrated for the passage of the carts.

‘Use your phone. It’ll give us some light.’

It was like being in an obscure labyrinth. They could hear the faint sounds of the fair beyond the walls but were unable to orientate themselves and find the exit, the brightness at the end of the tunnel.

Aurelia squeezed Siv’s palm. She could sense her friend’s bravado diminishing as the darkness stretched out ahead of them and they both became apprehensive.

The track vibrated and a rumble neared them as a metal cart swam towards them out of the relative night of the ghost train ride. Above its clanky metallic din, there was a murmur of voices. She switched her phone off.

‘I swear she had her pants down,’ one of the boys said.

‘She had a good arse, even for a ghost,’ the other boy in the cart mused.

‘If we hunted her down, maybe she’d show us more than just her arse,’ the first one replied.

Siv giggled quietly.

‘Do you think I should give them an extra flash?’ she whispered, her fingers moving to the waistband of her shorts.

‘I don’t think they deserve it,’ Aurelia said. ‘Let’s scare them instead.’ She looked around for a suitable prop that she could hold up and jump out in front of them with, but before she had time the cart raced by, the outline of the boys’ heads visible in the penumbra and once it turned the corner. The two young women followed the tracks and finally made for the exit, once they had given the car a few minutes’ lead so that the boys could disperse.

A curtain of plastic skulls and bones rose and Aurelia, quite impervious to its effect, brushed it aside and they were assailed by the colourful lights and din of the surrounding fun fair.

‘That was dangerous,’ a voice said. He had been waiting for them at the ride’s exit. ‘And I was getting worried something might have happened to you inside there.’ The attendant with the ginger hair and the green rubber monster mask perched atop his untidy mop of hair lounged against the side of the tent, arms folded.

‘We didn’t do any harm,’ Siv insisted, standing her ground, almost provoking him. ‘Honest.’

‘It’s usually guys who cause problems,’ he said. ‘I didn’t expect it from you two.’ He looked Siv up and down, and his eyes flitted from her to Aurelia.