Sophie (13 page)

With the same precision by which she guaranteed herself an IQ of 125, Sophie failed the scholarship exam. She must have been among the highest-scoring of the “failures,” however, because the school offered her a place without the need to take any further tests. Apart from some confused disappointment among her teachers, there was no real fuss made. Perhaps they had overestimated her somewhat. Perhaps she had just had a bad day. Sophie, smiling slightly, remained quiet, although she, too, was just disappointed enough to make people sympathetic. She was bright, but not quite
that
bright. And the one or two teachers who had maybe noticed anomalies in Sophie’s progress over the years—occasional flashes of brilliance, remarks that were precociously incisive for a child of her age—were reassured by this yardstick of her actual ability.

I knew well enough that her score in the exam had been deliberate, and I asked her about it.

“I don’t want to be too conspicuous; it doesn’t do. Besides, I got in, didn’t I? It’s only crummy prestige they were aiming for in any case. We don’t
need
a scholarship.”

“I s’pose so,” I said. “Do you think you’ll enjoy it?”

“Probably.” She sounded distant.

“Will you come home at the weekends?”

She laughed. “Don’t worry, I’m not deserting you. You’ll be OK. You will, won’t you? Not going to get lonely on me?”

“I’ll try not to,” I said.

“Good. 'Cos that wouldn’t do, either.” She sounded confident, and there was a strength in her voice that I hadn’t really noticed before—or at least, not to this degree.

“Right,” I said, and felt a bit better.

“And we’ve still got the summer,” she added. “Lots of time there. It’s not really a good-bye, after all.”

It was difficult to see in those terms. I looked forward to the summer as a time of ending; and when I look back, it still feels the same way.

The end of the school year hit us with an end of term show, presented outside and at the mercy of the weather, was a great success. The evening was fine, and the parents took their places on the rows of plastic seats while the action unfolded on a stage set up against the outside wall of the assembly hall. We both had parts—I as a spear-bearing soldier, Sophie as a lady. She had some lines, and delivered them clearly and with a touch of humour that lifted the scene she was in. At the end of the play, when the cast came together for a final scene in front of the cardboard battlements of the castle, the applause was loud and we were all tired. We cleaned off our makeup in the school bathrooms and waited for our mother to drive us home.

The last day was as mindlessly chaotic as usual. I met Sophie in the corridor, both of us hurrying on separate errands, and she smiled and raised her eyebrows at me.

“Everyone’s running around like chickens,” she said. “Half my class is hysterical. All the girls are crying.”

“Yeah,” I agreed. “It’s always like that.”

When the doors opened at four o’clock, the sudden exodus flooded the playground and the road outside until it was hardly possible to leave the school if you were in a car. Sophie surveyed the scene from the main steps.

“We’d do better going out the side gate,” she said. “Come on.”

It was a longer route, normally, but we avoided the crush and made it to our road without being stopped by anyone. The day was warm, and there was the anticipation of summer everywhere. I kicked a stone along the tarmac in front of me as we walked.

“Do you feel nervous?”

“No. It’s going to be fine. Let’s not talk about it, hey? We’ll just have a bloody good time for a couple of months. OK?”

“OK,” I said, and smiled. “That sounds good.”

Several things happened that summer, the summer before Sophie went away. The first part of the holiday was quiet; there was nothing to hint at what was to come. We both had our birthdays, and I was amused by the thought of Sophie being a teenager.

“What’s it feel like, being thirteen?”

“Same as being twelve,” she said. “Not any different. What’s it feel like being eleven?”

I grinned. “It’s OK.”

“I’m going down to town this afternoon. You want to come with me?”

“Where are you going?”

“Just shopping and other stuff. Maybe buy some clothes.”

“You have a uniform,” I pointed out.

She looked blank for a moment. “Oh. That’s for next year,” she said. “I meant for now.”

“I think I’ll stay here,” I said.

“Suit yourself. I’ll be back around five.”

My mother was quiet that summer, I remember. Like Sophie, I had learned how best to avoid her, how best to sustain the suggestion that there were no children in the house at all. We saw her at meals, when we ate at home, and I would sometimes pass her in the hall or if I was coming out of the kitchen. She almost never came upstairs. I can’t think of a time, after the baby died, that I saw her on the first floor of the house. And mostly, of course, she remained in her dry drawing room, filtering the daylight through heavy curtains and sitting, or walking, whichever fitted best with her moods.

She was not a mystery to me then; she had none of the romance of a mystery. She was just a part of life, one that was as much a background to my childhood as the wallpaper of the corridor or the smell of a classroom at school. The shadow she cast across us was never properly visible to me. When she died, I suppose I thought about her more in five days than, previously, I might have thought in five years. The mysteries that conspired to create my mother were never handed down to me; if they had been, I would have a clearer and more complete picture of my life, and of Sophie's, than I have. And so my mother, who in life had seemed to impinge upon my existence only in the most tenuous ways, attained a mystery in death, when I finally realized that the questions she raised would never be answered. She had married late, had children late, and my grandmother was dead before I was born. I have no knowledge of her whatsoever. Perhaps Ol' Grady evolved from some early precursor of which I know nothing; perhaps he had survived, in spirit, for generations before Sophie broke the chain and killed him. It is unreasonable to set limits or boundaries to a story when that story is, in essence, the lives of people. The only limits are those imposed by our ignorance.

It was at about this time that the real change in Sophie began to become evident. She had already found that clothes, and manner, could affect the image she created in the minds of others. This was something she was able to control, and she studied it as intensively as she could. But the chance combinations that go to make up physical beauty—the fluke that delineates between attractiveness and unattractiveness—was never accessible to her. And so she ignored them, and perhaps she, too, was surprised at what had been happening, gradually, over the past three years or so. Where Sophie had been unremarkable, neither noticeably plain nor noticeably pretty, she had begun to change. At first she simply crossed the line from unremarkable to pretty. There was a lengthening in her face and jaw that made sophistication of her childish pensiveness, and some unqualifiable alteration in the lines of her cheeks that left her with a striking maturity. She was never conspicuous, but a second glance at her was more than enough to establish her as pretty; and if you looked longer, you could see the first indications that she would turn into a beautiful young woman.

I noticed much of this for one good reason, I think. It was that, ever since she had dressed up in jeans and a shirt in her bedroom and made me believe for a moment that she was somebody else, I had been attuned to the way she looked. In this respect I was probably the best placed observer, having seen her every day throughout our childhood together, and having her face firm in my memory.

I always remember it as the summer that Sophie went away. In reality, though, it was more complex than that; I would have done better to call it the summer that Sophie moved on—moved on into something new, and out of what she left behind. I think she saw it this way as well, no matter what she said to me; it must have been impossible for her not to. The summer days we spent playing were the end of something that had started with my birth and lasted for eleven years. That the turning of a calendar page could tear it all apart so easily was difficult to believe, and I didn’t want to believe it. I wanted her there for longer. Until I was ready, I told myself; I wasn’t ready for this just yet. But there was another part of me—a silent, secret part—that was waiting without fear or pain, and with something like hope. The weeks of the holiday passed both slowly and quickly, and I no longer knew what I felt, nor what I wanted to feel.

Towards the end of the summer, preparations had to be made for Sophie’s move to her new school. My mother returned one day with a trunk she had bought in the town, and Sophie and I carried it upstairs to her room. Her face was thoughtful, almost sad, when we had set it down on her bed. It was large, a dark blue colour, with brass corner pieces and a brass lock. Sophie opened it, and the inside was lined with tartan paper. It smelled strange, unfamiliar.

“There’s too much room in here for my stuff,” she said. “It’ll all slop about.”

We stared at the trunk together, and didn’t know what else to say.

There was still a fortnight or so left to us, however; the countryside was ours to use, and we spent hardly any time indoors, unless it was in the barn. There, safely enclosed in our hidden room, we sat for hours, reading or talking, with Sophie telling me what she imagined her new school would be like, the things she might do there. I listened with a strangely potent mixture of envy and sadness, seeing her on the brink of another world, about to move off into it and leave me behind.

“You sure you won’t get bored with me?” I said. “When you’re at your big school.”

She blinked, and a curious expression came over her face that I didn’t remember having seen before.

“Don’t be stupid,” she said. “Of course I won’t. You know I love you, don’t you?”

“Yeah,” I said, unable to meet her eyes.

“Well, I
do
,” she said, fiercely. “And don’t you forget it, OK?”

“OK,” I said, and managed to smile.

“I’ll always be around. You’ll get bored with me, if you’re not careful.”

“No I won’t.”

“Then I won’t, either. Do we have a deal on that?”

I grinned reluctantly. “I s’pose so.”

“All right. So stop moping.”

“OK,” I said.

We walked the lanes and tracks that spider-webbed across the hills around our house, and we gathered flowers and sang songs. Once or twice we sat and watched the sun go down over the trees to the west, and we climbed to peer into birds’ nests and threw stones into the middle of the stickleback lake. Sophie read to me from
Alice
and we made daisy chains, looping them over the branches of a rowan tree that grew by the path when we had done with them. In the evenings, if we were sitting across from one another at the supper table with my mother looking on coldly, we would exchange knowing glances, sharing the knowledge of what we had done—things that she would never know about, and in all likelihood would never have understood.

In this manner time passed quickly. But each night, before I was overtaken by sleep, I would think that the day past had narrowed the distance to the beginning of the next school year. I would be in a new class, enjoying some of the prestige associated with being in the lower of the two senior year groups, but not yet faced with the pressures and expectations of the final exam year. Also, though, I would have to walk home after school on my own, and there would be no one there to suggest a visit to the quarry or the holly bush. For the first time in my life, I realized, I would actually be alone.

“How long is it now?”

She looked at her watch, checking the date. “Another eight days. Stop counting the minutes, will you? Like I said, it’s not the end of the world.” But she sounded sad when she said it.

No, I thought to myself; but it will be the beginning of a different world, for me as well as for you. It was a complicated thought, although it had surfaced in my mind neatly packaged, as though it had rested there for some time, gathering itself. I turned it around and looked it over, and knew that it was true. I sighed.

“I guess not,” I said.

thirteen

“Mattie?”

I looked up from where I had been staring into the stream. “Yeah?”

“Want to go for a walk? There are some—there are one or two things I want to do.”

“OK,” I agreed readily. It was evening, about five o’clock, and tomorrow my mother would take Sophie to the station, put her on a train, and watch her disappear towards a place she had only seen once before. “Where are we going?”

“Places,” Sophie said vaguely. “All the normal places. OK?”

“OK,” I said again, and got up to follow her. I had noticed something odd about her speech, a hesitancy that was unusual for Sophie. She sounded as if she was uncertain of something, which was so unlike her as to be disturbing. We went back to the house, and I found my anorak. “Are we going to be gone for long?”

“Yeah,” she said. “Probably. Wait a minute.” She stopped in the downstairs hallway, head on one side, thinking for a moment. Then she said to herself, “Yes, that’s all.” She looked at me and grinned. “Sorry. Just sorting things out. Tomorrow’s the big day, after all.”

I nodded. “Yeah.”

“Well, come on, then.” We left by the front door, and immediately turned to pass the house and head up the hill towards the quarry. The late afternoon sunlight was still warm on the side of my face as we climbed the hill, and there was the familiar sound of birds calling in the wood. As we made our way up, Sophie hummed a tune to herself, something that I recognized from a long time before.

“What’s that?”

“Hmm? What?”

“The song.”

“Oh, right. Don’t you remember? 'The Raggle Taggle Gypsies.' “

“You sang that to me before,” I said, doubtfully.

“That’s right. When you were little. Must have been—what, five or six years ago. You’re getting grown up.”

“You are,” I said.

“Doesn’t mean I forget things, though,” she said seriously.

As we neared the crest of the hill, I said, “Sophie?”

“Yeah?”

“When are you grown up?”

She raised her eyebrows. “What, for good? I don’t know. I think it’s different for different people. Some people take longer than others. Do you mean your body, or the way you think?”

“Both, I think,” I said.

“Your body’s just about finished by the time you’re sixteen or seventeen, roughly,” she told me. “Or at least, it doesn’t change so much after that. Your mind’s different, though. I don’t know about that. I think we’re expected to grow up when we’re about eighteen, so most of us do. Perhaps if we were expected to grow up at fourteen, we’d grow up then instead.” She drew breath, and then laughed. “Where have all these complicated thoughts come from, anyway?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I got thinking about it last night.”

The woods were a warm green, thick with low sunlight and swimming with insects. Instinctively, I started to head for the track down to the quarry floor, but Sophie stopped me.

“Let’s go over here, first,” she said, pointing to the left. We scrambled through the undergrowth until we came to the fence; we had approached the quarry from the south side, the side where the cages were, where I had once stood and thought about launching the model Spitfire I had built a year ago. Wondering what Sophie was doing, I followed her as she climbed over the fence at much the same place that I once had, where a fallen branch had dragged the palings and tangles of barbed wire down to ankle level. I stepped over after her and we stood together on the four or five feet of turf between the fence and the lip of the quarry. I could see the far end of it, where the tall weeds had grown strong and green in the sun, curling purple flowers at their heads.

“This was the very first secret place,” Sophie said, looking down. “Do you remember? I brought you here and we sat in the sun and I waved flowers for you, and drew pictures on slate.”

I thought back. “I don’t think so,” I said.

“You were pretty small. I had to carry you up here. Took me most of an afternoon, but I wanted you to see. I used to come here on my own, before that. And then you got older, and you had that craze with fossils.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I gave you a fossil, once.”

“I’ve still got it. Come forward a little.” We went farther towards the edge, and more of the quarry came into view. The centre of the quarry floor, where we normally sat, with its familiar rocks and boulders, was stretched out below us, the pale colour of the slate in shadow now from the declining sun. There was only a crescent of light on the east side, at the top, where the track cut down, and even this was slipping surely away as we talked.

Sophie said, “Will you come here? When I’m away?”

“I don’t know. Should I?”

“Yeah, if you like. It belongs to both of us. It’s pretty good, sometimes, to just sit somewhere and know that no one’s going to find you. You need that, sometimes.” She exhaled gently. “People can get—very difficult to deal with. And secret places make that easier. You understand?”

“I think so,” I said.

“If you don’t right now, you probably will one day soon. Anyway.” She shaded her face and looked across to where the sun was starting to dip below the line of the hills. “Come here a sec.”

I edged forward a little way, until I was level with her. She was only a couple of feet from the edge.

“Be careful,” I said. “It cuts under all round here.”

“I know. I want you to see as much of it as possible. It’s safe enough.” She took a step back, behind me, and rested her hands on my shoulders. “This place is just as much yours as it is mine,” she said. “It doesn’t matter if you can’t remember when you first came here. Don’t let anyone else come here, OK?”

“OK,” I said. I was only a foot from the edge, and the drop to the quarry floor made my head reel. “Can we go back now?”

Sophie shifted her hands a little on my shoulders.

“Can we?”

Gently, she pulled me back a little way. “Yeah. I just wanted you to see it. Come on.”

We made our way round to the path down, and followed it until we were standing in the middle of the darkened quarry. Moving to one side, I could just see the tops of trees flaming in the light of the dying sun, but otherwise the empty quarry was a lake of shadows.

“I want to write something,” Sophie said. She went off to the cage and took the bag from beside it, returning to sit down next to me. “Won’t take long.”

I kicked stones from place to place, looking up at the rim of the quarry where we had been standing minutes before. Directly below that point was one of the cages; I charted the motion of an imaginary rock falling from that point, and then went over and stood on the place where I guessed it would fall. Looking up, the dark earth of the grass overhang was visible, a continuous flange running along the top of the rock. Looking back over to Sophie, I saw that she had finished her writing and was packaging up the books again. She really hadn’t taken long; I was surprised.

“Shall I take the bag back?” I asked, when I had rejoined her.

“No,” she said slowly. “No, I’m doing it this time.” She thumped the bag with her hand, and the tin inside made a muffled noise. “You want any of the fossils in here?”

“No thanks,” I said.

“Yeah, I thought not. We’re done with this stuff now, I think.” She walked briskly across to the farthest cage with me following. We stopped just outside it, and again I felt that queasy distaste in my stomach at the smell of it. In shadow, you could see hardly any distance into it at all. The thick iron bars and the huge padlock, thick with verdigris, stood mute sentinel.

I noticed that Sophie’s breath was coming quite quickly, as if she had run a short distance. The light was such that I couldn’t be sure, but I thought that her face was pale.

“Right,” she said quietly. Holding the bag in one hand, she worked it between the bars of the cage until it was hanging freely inside. I had a sudden, horrible vision of something rushing up to the bars from the inside to snatch at it, and felt my heart hammer abruptly in me. Sophie pushed her whole arm through, then swung the bag back and forth several times before letting go. It sailed a long way into the darkness, and there was a muted clatter as it fell among the beer cans and loose rocks of the cage. Sophie withdrew her hand carefully, rubbing streaks of rust from the sleeve of her anorak.

“That’s taken care of,” she muttered, more to herself than to me, it seemed. Then, more brightly, “Come on. I promised you a walk, didn’t I? Let’s get out of here.”

I glanced back at the cage as we walked away from it. The opening was dark and silent, and when I swallowed, my throat was dry.

“You said that you’d read the quarry books,” I say.

“That’s right. I went back there—afterwards—with the key to the cage. They were still there, in the same place.”

“You had the key?”

“Yes.” He says nothing more.

I search for something else to ask. “Why did you go back?”

“I wanted to be sure about everything. To find out as much as possible about you. To try to get to know you.”

“Why?”

He exhales. “Because I’d realized, by then, that I hardly understood my sister at all. I’d thought that I did, but I was wrong. I wanted to start again, to have another chance. . . . After you went away, it became important to do that. There was nobody to stop me, so I went back to the quarry, and I read the quarry books.” He smiles slightly. “It was a foul afternoon, drizzling, really cold. It seemed appropriate, somehow.”

“When was this?” I ask.

“When I was sixteen. I’m not sure why it took so long. I knew where they were, after all. Part of it was just—recognizing that I needed to see them, and part of it was working up the courage. I didn’t really want to go back. I hadn’t been back to the quarry since that night.”

“Not at all?”

He closes his eyes. “Not at all.”

“Tell me about when you did go back, then,” I say.

As I walked out along the road to our house, things hardly looked different, although I hadn’t been this way for five years. The sky was thick with clouds, and I could see a grey veil of rain drifting across the hills towards the horizon. I followed the road out of town, taking the same route that Sophie and I had walked every day after school. Fallen leaves were banked heavily to either side of the road, under the hedgerows. As I walked by the farm, the black, skeletal struts of the barn stood up sharply. There was a line of barbed wire across the top of the gate, and a notice warning of unsafe buildings. Slates had been torn from the roofs by the storms of several winters, and thick clumps of browning nettles rustled against the walls.

By the time I left the road and started up the hill towards the wood, the first drops of rain had started to strike the ground. The path, tight up against the stone wall, seemed much smaller than I remembered it. The rain began properly, then. It fell without much wind, slanting down into the hillside, until running water was carving little gullies in the path as I watched. The coat I was wearing was waterproof, but made not much difference; rain ran down my neck and soaked my shirt, and my shoes and the bottoms of my trouser legs were stained dark with mud. I continued up the hill, feeling the cold now through my clothing.

When I reached the woods I ploughed on through the undergrowth, trying to ignore the tugging brambles that had trailed across the path. Although it was the middle of the afternoon, the woods were as dark as dusk, lit by eerie storm light, hissing and thrumming with the falling rain. The way down the shallow side of the quarry was slippery, the shale loosened and treacherous. I made it halfway down without falling, and then had to sprint the rest of the way as the rocks began to shift and slide under my feet. I ran out a little way across the floor of the quarry and then turned to see what damage I had done; a delta-shaped slide of loose debris had slumped four or five feet down, and there were little streams of loose pebbles and pale mud running from it.

The quarry floor was dancing with the rain. It was falling more heavily now, so that the cages were almost obscured, reduced to dark blurs through the curtain of heavy drizzle. My hair was plastered down against my head, and I found I was shivering. I rubbed my arms against myself as I headed towards the cages. Once there, I grabbed the bars to steady myself, and, automatically, found myself looking to the right of the cage, at the place beneath the overhang where the quarry bag had always been. It wasn’t there any longer, of course. That was why I was here.

With numb fingers I fumbled in my pocket for the key-ring. The padlock on the cage door was, when you looked at it closely, relatively new compared to the iron bars. I unlocked it, took it off and set it on the ground. Then I shook myself, and heaved. The door was very rusty, and the hinges did not give easily. I set my foot against the rock of the quarry wall and, braced, pulled again, using my legs and back as well as my arms. There was a sound of tearing metal, a low shrieking, and the cage door came open. I rubbed my hands on my trousers, leaving ochre stains, and picked up the rucksack. The rain kept falling in the quarry as I shrugged at the heavy material of my soaked clothing, and ducked my head as I stepped inside the cage.

The quarry bag had fallen quite a long way back inside. I took out my torch, set it down on the floor, and into its triangle of light I set the tin. The metal had rusted thoroughly. I squatted among the rubbish on the floor and stared around me. The floor was littered with fragments of glass and old cans, gaping with rust holes. The cage, from inside, was more like a tunnel, leading back into the rock face and sloping upwards slightly. The rock was dry.

The lid was difficult to prise off after all this time. I managed it in the end by turning it on its side and stamping on it, forcing the metal out of shape so I could secure a fingerhold. Inside, the plastic bags were intact. Sophie had tied their necks, that last time, and the books appeared well preserved. I took them out, tucking them inside my coat carefully, and put the tin back in the quarry bag. The sound of rain outside was growing lighter.

I picked up the torch, and shone it for a second down into the throat of the cage. I could just make out the curve of rock where the tunnel angled to the right. I shivered, and turned again towards the quarry.