The Explosionist (24 page)

Sophie buried her face in the pillows. First thing in the morning, she’d swear the others to silence. She certainly had no intention of becoming the on-call psychic for the whole of the fifth form. She fell asleep to the background of Nan’s quiet sobs and a faint whispered conversation between the other two girls.

W
AKING MUCH EARLIER
than usual, Sophie arrived at breakfast in time to bag one of the two much-coveted private tables, tables that seated only four instead of fourteen and were usually snapped up by groups of sixth-form girls who had no scruples about rousting out anyone who dared encroach on their territory. Several older girls loitered nearby with their trays, but Sophie glared at them until they went away.

Nan got there next. She and Sophie ate their cereal in silence until they saw the other two girls at the head of the food line. Then Nan turned to Sophie.

“I know you hate being thanked,” she said, “but it
mattered
to me to have that last word from my brother.”

Sophie felt awkward and irritable.

“I can’t ever do it again,” she warned, “and you mustn’t tell anybody else what I did, either.”

“Why ever not?”

“Because it’s too horrible, that’s why,” Sophie grumbled, mashing the Weetabix with her spoon.

“How can you say that?”

“It’s playing around with people’s emotions, and I really hate it.”

Jean and Priscilla slid into the seats across from them.

“You must swear never to tell a soul about what happened last night,” said Sophie, so loudly that one sixth-form girl looked over from the next table to see what was going on.

“We swear,” said Priscilla, her face drawn and tired.

“You two,” said Jean, “we’ve got important news.”

Sophie looked more closely and saw that Jean looked as tired as Priscilla, but more at peace with herself than she had seemed for months.

“We talked it all through last night,” Jean continued, “and Priscilla’s changed her mind. Assuming they’ll take us, we’re both going to join IRYLNS as soon as we’ve got our exam results.”

“IRYLNS?” Sophie said stupidly.

“That’s wonderful,” said Nan, mustering more enthusiasm than Sophie would have thought possible. “You two
aren’t cut out for the army, and IRYLNS is the best other way of serving.”

“Yes, and we have to thank you and Sophie for showing us the way,” Jean said, smiling at them. “The idea of service—it really makes sense of everything, doesn’t it? It did for your brother, Nan, and it does for you. And now it will for us as well.”

Sophie was so horrified she couldn’t speak.

“We’re going to see Miss Henchman straight after breakfast,” said Priscilla, “and tell her what we’ve decided.”

“You can’t!” said Sophie, finding her voice at last. “You simply can’t!”

She couldn’t believe that she’d contributed to this decision by her participation in the séance. She’d never forgive herself.

“Why not?”

“Because—because—”

She couldn’t tell them about what she’d seen, could she? The strict prohibition of the Official Secrets Act closed up Sophie’s throat so that she could hardly breathe.

But she had to tell. She simply had to. She fought to get control of her lungs and larynx and tongue so that she could speak the warning.

“Because IRYLNS will destroy you,” she found herself saying. She hoped she didn’t look as wild-eyed as she felt.
“They make girls into
monsters
—you mustn’t do it.”

Meanwhile Priscilla regarded her suspiciously, then broke into a delighted chuckle. Even Nan was smiling a little.

“Oh, Sophie, you can’t fool us,” Priscilla said. “It’s a good idea, to try and get back at me for teasing you about Mr. Petersen. But a tale about the gothic secrets of IRYLNS—we’re living in the twentieth century, after all!”

Sophie stared at the others. This was worse even than she’d imagined. She’d thought of the possible consequences of telling, the chance that she might have to endure prison and even perhaps torture or death. But it had simply never occurred to her that she might not be believed. Whatever would she have to do to convince them?

“Give it up, Sophie,” Nan said. “You know yourself it’s the best thing for these two.”

“I’m sorry about all that teasing,” Priscilla added, sounding really remorseful. “I don’t know what gets into me. My father always says there’s a kind of devil inside me that thrives on tormenting others. But I’m determined to become a better person, Sophie, and you have to believe me when I say that IRYLNS will be the best way for me to do that.”

Your teasing and Jean’s jealousy, they’re
parts
of you, Sophie desperately wanted to say. You can’t just wipe them out like mistakes in your calculus homework. You mustn’t—

But there was no point saying it. It would only be her fate,
Cassandra-like, not to be believed. What powerful additional security for the secret keepers at IRYLNS!

“Aren’t you going to congratulate us?” Priscilla said.

“I must go,” said Sophie, piling her breakfast things onto the tray. She had to work out a way to convince them, but nothing she said now would change a thing, and it would make Nan think she was a bad person if she kept on saying bad things about IRYLNS—and Nan’s good opinion
mattered
. She needed hard evidence. But how would she get it? “I’ve got a few things to do before class.”

Then she stopped, inspired.

“If I had to make an excuse to go and see a very eminent doctor,” she said, “what do you think I should say?”

The other girls looked at one another as if Sophie had gone mad.

“You don’t need an excuse,” Jean finally said. “You’ve always got your limp.”

Sophie felt as if she’d been punched in the stomach.

She almost always forgot that she had a limp.

Did everyone think of Sophie as a person with a limp?

Did Mikael?

I
N THE SCHOOL LIBRARY
, Sophie headed straight for the city directories, the outlines of a plan taking shape in her mind.

The others would never believe what she said about IRYLNS. Telling them that she’d actually been there with Great-aunt Tabitha wouldn’t make any difference—it would just make her sound like a silly, self-important girl boasting about her influential relations.

But what if Sophie went back to IRYLNS, sneaked in illicitly, and took
pictures
of the abuse? Then she could show the photographs to Jean and Priscilla and persuade them to change their minds. Sophie might still risk prison or worse, but she felt she couldn’t
not
do it. She put out of her head the
thought that in another few months, it might be not just Jean and Priscilla but Sophie herself who would need to be saved.

She’d no hope of getting into IRYLNS through the front door. They took security seriously there. But IRYLNS stood alongside research institutes where doctors actually saw patients. She could steal into one of those and find a way to slip out the back, reach the garden behind IRYLNS, and get into the building that way instead.

The city council compiled a really useful directory that listed every Edinburgh street and its occupants, so that one could easily find, say, the names of every householder in Heriot Row, or the professor’s neighbors in back of the school tennis courts.

Sophie flipped to the entry for Buccleugh Place and made a list of names and telephone numbers on the flyleaf of her history textbook.

It was never easy to find a telephone at school. Girls were not supposed to telephone home without permission, so they had no regular access to one. Where could she find a telephone, and when would she be able to use it?

Just then the librarian appeared and Sophie slammed the directory shut and blushed. At least there was nothing racy about what she had been reading, not like that mortifying time she’d been caught returning an overdue copy of
Mesmeric Love
.

“Don’t worry, I wasn’t going to look,” said the librarian,
smiling at her. “I wonder if I could prevail on you to man the helm, though, while I run down to the refectory for a cup of coffee?”

“Of course,” said Sophie, who’d had a holiday job in the library the summer before. “Is there anything you’d like me to do while I’m here?”

“Well, you could go through the file and check for overdue books,” said the librarian. “I’ll be back in fifteen minutes.”

Sophie took her place behind the desk, sorted out the cards for the overdue books, and wrote out the notices. All the while, the telephone squatted like an alluring toad at the back of the office.

She wished she’d asked the librarian for permission to make a few calls. Surely she wouldn’t have said no, and then Sophie wouldn’t feel such a heel for taking advantage. It might be days before she got another shot at a telephone, though, and by the weekend all the doctors’ offices would be closed, so the phone at Great-aunt Tabitha’s wouldn’t do her any good. Anyway, she was contemplating breaking into a top-secret government facility. It was ridiculous having scruples about making a telephone call without permission.

A minute later Sophie had the receiver in her hand and was asking the operator to put through a call. She let the phone ring for ages at the Osteopathic Consultancy and then at the Clinic for Research into Disorders of the Thyroid, but
nobody answered. Well, it was only just after eight o’clock. Most offices didn’t open until nine or even half past.

She put through a third call, fearing that she’d need to find another telephone later on in the day—the librarian would be back at any moment—when she was startled by a young woman’s voice.

“Braid Institute for Neurohypnosis,” said the telephone receptionist. “How can I help you?”

“You come very highly recommended by a friend,” Sophie said, trying to sound adult, “and I wonder whether you might squeeze me in for an appointment.”

She was proud of having used the word
squeeze
; it seemed like the kind of thing a woman in her thirties might say.

“We’re terribly busy just now,” said the receptionist, sounding genuinely sorry. “That is,” she added in a brighter voice, “unless you’d be able to come in at very short notice.”

Very short notice was exactly what Sophie wanted. She said as much, then listened to the girl on the other end of the line flip through the clinic appointment book.

“We’ve got a cancellation tomorrow afternoon—that’s Thursday the seventh—at four thirty. Would you be able to take it?”

Sophie felt like doing a celebratory dance right there in the office. Why, it couldn’t have been better if she’d picked the time herself!

The receptionist sounded delighted when Sophie accepted the slot.

“You’ll not regret it,” she told Sophie confidentially. “Our Mr. Braid’s a remarkable man, quite remarkable. And don’t forget your national insurance card, all right, hen?”

Sophie replaced the receiver in its cradle with relief. She’d have no trouble getting to that appointment—she’d go along with the others to tennis practice, pop in to say good-bye to Mikael (she ignored the feeling of her stomach turning inside out), and then take the tram down to the university. Since her appointment fell near the end of the day, it shouldn’t be hard to arrange to be somehow left behind when the building closed. The Braid Institute stood right next door to IRYLNS, and she could easily climb over the wall in the garden and go on from there.

Shortly after three o’clock the following afternoon, Sophie wriggled through the gap in the wall into the professor’s back garden. Mikael knelt by one of the flower beds, a heap of weeds at his side.

Beside him, the professor’s handsome Great Dane lay sprawled on the warm flagstones of the garden path, too lazy to do anything more than raise his head and greet Sophie with mournful eyes. It was ridiculous how sad that dog could look, she thought, leaning to scratch the ridges of his harlequin brow.

“Sophie!” said Mikael, scrambling to his feet and wiping his hands on his trousers. “I was afraid I might not see you before I left.”

His brisk, careless manner rubbed Sophie the wrong way.

“I can’t stay long,” she said, hating how stiff she sounded. She had Nan’s camera in her pocket with fresh film in it—Nan could refuse Sophie nothing now (a haunted generosity of which Sophie had promised herself not to take advantage). “I’ve got a doctor’s appointment near the university at half past four, and I mustn’t be late.”

Mikael gave her a sharp look.

“Anything I should know about?” he said.

She avoided meeting his eyes—oh, why did she have to be in such
turmoil
? “No, nothing,” she said, “just an ordinary appointment.”

Mikael frowned.

“Then why are you skiving off from tennis practice? Wouldn’t your school usually send you to the doctor with a teacher, or something like that?”

Sophie had forgotten Mikael’s quickness.

“All right,” she said, “it’s not just an ordinary appointment, but I’ve promised not to say anything about it.”

“Why can’t you trust me, Sophie?” Mikael said. He sounded angry, and it turned Sophie’s heart stony.

“I do trust you,” she said, patting the dog’s mastodon
skull. “But sometimes the fewer people who know something, the better.”

Why did she have such a strong impulse to punish Mikael just now, and how did it come about that not telling him things seemed the best way to do it?

Mikael looked hurt, then pensive.

“It’s almost as if you
want
me to be angry with you,” he said.

They went through into the house. The professor was out, but Mrs. Lundberg stepped out of the kitchen to give Sophie a kiss, throwing up her hands in despair when she realized that Mikael actually intended to wear his filthy gardening trousers outside in the street.

“Back shortly, Aunt Solvej,” he said. “Sophie’s not stopping for tea; she’s got a doctor’s appointment. I ban you from lifting even a finger in the garden while I’m gone—I’ll have plenty of time to finish the weeding before tea.”

At the tram stop in Canongate, they checked the timetable. Sophie had just missed a tram, and it would be ten minutes before the next one.

She and Mikael looked at each other, neither quite knowing what to say.

“Don’t worry, Sophie,” Mikael said. “You’ll work it all out. Look, can I buy you an ice cream?”

The unexpected niceness of the suggestion caught Sophie off guard. Mikael smiled back at her, and some of
the tension between them fell away.

“So what about that ice cream?” Mikael said, pointing to the small shop on the other side of the road.

“I’m not really hungry,” Sophie said, realizing with dismay that she could hardly
bear
the thought of Mikael leaving.

“But it’s Luca’s! You can always eat an ice cream from Luca’s, can’t you?” Mikael said.

It was true that Luca’s ice cream, manufactured in Musselburgh and sold in shops and kiosks all over Edinburgh, was smoother and whiter and colder and creamier than anything you could imagine, like something the twelve dancing princesses might have eaten out of crystal goblets at their nightly balls.

So Mikael bought two ice cream cornets and they sat and licked them on the bench at the tram stop, Sophie trying hard not to jump up every minute to look out for the tram.

“Sophie?” Mikael said.

“What?”

“I really want you to come with me to Denmark.”

Sophie had prepared herself to greet such an observation with indifference, but she felt a deep stab of regret that she couldn’t shuck off her responsibilities and go with Mikael to København. Adults would laugh at the idea of a schoolgirl having responsibilities, but they’d forgotten what life at this age was really like.

Tears welled up in her eyes and she shook her head with great vehemence instead of answering Mikael in words. Oh, if only she hadn’t realized she was in love with him! She couldn’t shake the feeling of Mikael making this offer out of something like pity. She would be
damned
if she’d accept an invitation chiefly motivated by pity. Better to stay and risk the consequences.

“I know what you’ll say,” Mikael went on, ignoring Sophie’s psychic plea for him to shut up. “Your exams. Your great-aunt. Your school friends. The minister of public safety. The Brothers of the Northern Liberties.”

As he ticked each item off on his fingers, Sophie painfully regretted not having told him anything about IRYLNS, in some ways the most clear and present danger of all. If he knew about that, he’d insist on her coming with him. If only she could tell him!

She clamped her lips tightly shut.

“You can change your mind, you know, Sophie,” Mikael said. “Changing your mind isn’t a bad thing. You’re free to decide you’re not responsible for the whole world. My mother will take you in, no question, and there’s a good English-language high school that’s even on the right tram route. I can’t imagine your great-aunt would kick up much of a fuss, not if she thought you really wanted it. I don’t know—I can’t explain, exactly—but something in you just isn’t
thriving
in Edinburgh.”

With great relief, Sophie saw the tram come around the corner. She surprised herself by flinging her arms around Mikael. Then she pushed him away and got in line to board.

But Mikael’s hand rested again on her arm, the stickiness of the ice cream attaching his fingers lightly to her skin.

“Won’t you go now?” she cried out.

“Sophie, my ship’s the
Gustavus Adolphus
, sailing on Saturday at nineteen hundred hours—that’s seven o’clock in the evening—from pier sixteen at Leith. Will you remember that? Just in case something blows up between now and then—”

Sophie winced.

“No, not literally, you idiot. Figuratively. If something goes terribly wrong and you decide things have changed—that it’s too dangerous to stay here and you’ll come with me after all—you can still change your mind, as long as you reach the ship in time. Don’t worry about the visa. There are ways of getting around it. My brother will help you if you need it. Oh, Sophie, just be careful, won’t you?”

“You, too, Mikael,” she said. “Do take care!”

The driver had stopped. If she didn’t hurry, she’d never make the appointment on time.

She tore herself away from Mikael and up the steps into the tram.