Unfortunately Janine was there too. I think she runs that clothes shop entirely by phone. Uncle Ted was in London that day, so she had come back to make sure Nick had some lunch, even though she never eats it herself. A study in Sacrificial Motherhood (actually Nick, when left to make lunch for himself, tends to drape the kitchen in several furlongs of spaghetti, and I almost see Janine’s point of view on that). She was in the kitchen with Nick when I burst in.
“So you failed again, dear. I’m so sorry,” she says. How to replace joy with anger in eight easy words.
“No, I passed,” I snapped.
“Excellent!” says Nick. “Now you can take me for a drive round Bristolia.”
“Says you!” I said. And Janine put her hand on my arm and said, “Poor Maree. She’s far too tired after all that concentrating. You mustn’t pester her, Nick.”
At that, I realised that Janine was really here to prevent me risking Nick’s neck in Dad’s car. “Tired? Who’s tired?” I said savagely. “I’m on top of the world!” I wasn’t by then. Janine had put me in a really bad mood. “You just think I’m not safe to drive Nick anywhere.”
“I didn’t say that, Maree,” she said. “But I do know I only started to learn to drive after I passed my test.”
“That’s what they all say, but it’s different for me,” I said. “I practised beforehand and ruined your fun.”
“Maree, dear,” she said. “I know you love breaking all the rules, but you really are no different from everyone else. Cars are dangerous.”
Well, we argued, Janine all sugary sweetness and light and me getting more and more inclined to bite. That’s Janine’s way. She expertly puts you in the wrong and never loses her temper. Just smiles sweetly when she’s got you hopping mad. Nick simply watched and waited. And at the crucial moment, he said, “You know she’s been driving that car for years, Mum. Maree, if you’re not going to drive me, I may as well go and see Fred Holbein.”
“No, no. I’ll drive you. I’m coming now,” I said.
“Nick, I forbid you to go,” said Janine.
He grinned at her, meltingly, and simply walked out to the car. That was it. Master Nick had decided he wanted to show me Bristolia and the womenfolk did as he wanted. Actually, I felt quite honoured, that he trusted me both to drive him and not to laugh at his Bristolia game. It put me in a much better mood. “Where to?” I said.
Nick unfolded a large, carefully coloured map. “I think we’ll start with Cliffores of the Monsters and the Castle of the Warden of the Green Wastes,” he said seriously.
So I drove him to the Zoo and then past the big red Gothic school there. Then
we went round Durdham Down and on to Westbury-on-Trym and back to Redland. After that, I don’t remember where we went. Nick had different names for everywhere and colourful histories to go with every place. He told me exactly how many miles of Bristolia we’d covered for each mile of the town. I did my best to keep an intelligent interest, but Dad’s car was not behaving very well. Perhaps it believed what Nick said. After he’d told me we’d gone seven hundred miles to the Zoo, it began making grinding noises and stalling on hills. I was a bit preoccupied with making it go. But Nick went on explaining eagerly, even though some of my answers were a bit vague and sarcastic. I don’t think he noticed. I was rather touched, to tell the truth, because we used to play games like this (but on a smaller scale) when I was fourteen and Nick was eight. And I would have died rather than hurt his feelings.
We were going steeply down towards the Centre, and Nick had just told me we’d now clocked up two thousand miles of Bristolia, when he suddenly said, “Just a moment. I think we’re being followed.”
I very nearly said, “Is this part of the Game?” and I am glad I didn’t, because I was suddenly quite sure he was right. Don’t ask me how. I just knew someone was behind us, looking for us, with serious intent to find us. It was not a nice feeling. I suppose Janine must have sent someone to make sure I didn’t kill her Nick. So I said, “What do you suggest we do?”
“Keep going towards Biflumenia – I mean Bedminster,” Nick said, “and I’ll tell you what to do then.”
Traffic was pretty thick by then. It was very useful to have someone with Nick’s encyclopedic knowledge of the place to tell me what turning to take. We both dropped the Bristolia game for a tense quarter of an hour or so, while we zipped up the opposite hill across the river, came back down another way, and took the road up to the suspension bridge. The creepy feeling of someone behind us trying to find us left us on the way. Nick sat back with a sigh.
“That’s it. We lost him. Now we’re in Yonder Bristolia where most of the magic users live.”
“Yes, but I wish we weren’t in line for the suspension bridge!” I more or less moaned.
“It’s all right. I’ve got money to get across,” Nick said.
“But it’s the place I have bad dreams about!” I wailed. I really didn’t want to go there. My bad mood was back. It was thanks to Janine. She’d stripped the joy about passing my test off the underlying misery and, though I’d forgotten it a bit during the tour of exotic Bristolia, it was still there, as bad as ever.
“I was hoping I’d stopped you being so gloomy,” Nick said.
“I can’t. I’ve been crossed in love,” I said. “And there’s my dad – not to speak of the dreams.”
I suppose it’s not surprising Nick got the wrong idea of the dreams. Clifton Suspension Bridge is notorious for suicides. “You mean you dream about jumping off?” he said.
“No,” I said. “They’re weirder than that.”
“Tell the dreams,” he commanded.
So I told him, though they were something I’d never mentioned to a soul before. I almost don’t mention them to myself, apart from calling this journal Directory Thornlady just to show I know about them really. They’re too nasty. They go with a horrible, depressed, weak feeling. I’ve been having the dreams for over three years now, ever since we moved to London and Mum and Dad split up, and they make me wonder if I might be going mad. I was sure Nick would think they were mad. But there is something about driving a car that makes you confiding – like a sort of mobile analyst’s couch – and after Nick and I had shared the feeling of being followed, I felt as if we’d shared minds anyway.