“Nice tries. No, I do not mean the centaur. I mean all the rest of your young life. I mean what sort of stuff has your mother been feeding you all these years?”
“I— Not for at least two years now,” Nick said, aggrieved and defensive. “Not since I told her I didn’t believe a word of it. I mean, it was so peculiar that I used a lot of it for my Bristolia game.”
He broke off on a rising intonation and turned to look at me hopefully. Was he, I wondered, totally selfish, or simply just young? Whichever he was, bribery might help. “All right,” I said, sighing slightly. “If you tell me what you’ve been told, I’ll take a look at your Bristolia game and see if it has possibilities. That do? I can’t promise more than that.”
I could see in the orange light that Nick’s face was vividly flushed. The light made him pale indigo briefly. “I didn’t mean— It’s just that I do mind about— Oh shit. Thanks. All right, but it’s not much really. Ever since I can remember Mum’s told me Ted Mallory isn’t really my father, and about two years ago I got fed up with that idea and decided I’d adopt Dad anyway because I quite like him, and Mum never would tell me who my real father was. All she ever said was that he was terribly important and I’d be important too one day when I got my inheritance. That’s not a nice feeling. I mean, he could be anybody, and it makes you feel snooty, and then you turn round and think, Why am I feeling so snooty about someone who may be horrible and may be a pack of nonsense anyway? But you can’t sort of shake it off. I’d rather be you. You’ve got real secrets to be snooty about.”
Stan smothered a chuckle. I said, “She must have told you more than that.”
“Most of it was about things like stripping and that there were hundreds of other universes and lots more magic in half of them,” Nick said dismissively. “Stuff about magic gives her a buzz. She was on a high Friday night about things Gram White had been telling her and she kept wanting to tell me until I said it was all boring nonsense and went away.”
Ruthless child. I was al
most tempted to feel sorry for Janine, murderess though she was. Still, I remembered being like this myself at Nick’s age. My own mother survived it. “Has she known Gram White for long?”
Nick frowned. “I – think so. It was funny – I thought I’d never seen him before when we all went to supper on Friday, but halfway through, he said something and put his head sideways, and I realised I had seen him, quite often, when I was small. He didn’t have a beard then. He used to come to our house a lot. But I don’t think Dad liked him, and he stopped coming.”
“Did he – Gram White – tell you the same sort of things as your mother?” I asked and then held my breath. Rather a lot of my ideas hung on Nick’s answer to this one.
Nick frowned again. “I – I don’t remember. But I do remember Mum talking like that in front of him – how I was going to be important and about magic and so on – and he never stopped her, or told her it was nonsense like most people would. I think. But I was very young then.”
“And Maree,” I asked. “How much of this did Maree—?”
Stan interrupted me. “Rupert, I’m afraid this girl’s not on the way out quite yet. She keeps moving about. And I think she’s even trying to say something.”
That lost me Nick’s attention completely. He scrambled round to kneel on his seat and stare anxiously over its back at Maree. I adjusted the rear-view mirror so that I could see her too. My stomach kicked and sank at the sight. My inspirational workings just now had definitely affected her. She was shifting about, tiny, fretful movements of her hands, head and hips. Behind the blank moon-circles of her glasses, her eyes seemed to be half open, pallid as the rest of her, and small murmurs came from her colourless lips. I watched, wretchedly wondering how much I had prolonged this semi-life of hers. A few hours? A day? More?
“Say that again,” Nick said, bending down to her.
It was unkind of me, but while his attention was elsewhere I tried him with another question that seemed important. People will answer absent-mindedly, with things they might otherwise not say, when their emotions are concentrated on something else. “Nick, did your mother ever tell you why Earth was codenamed Babylon?”
“Someone with a name like Chorus or something got stripped here. She laughs about it. She says he was trying to conquer Earth and made the Tower of Babel instead,” Nick replied. He was thinking almost purely of Maree. He leant down across her and said, slowly and clearly, “No, it’s all right. He’s not giving it until tomorrow afternoon. You haven’t missed it.”
So that was all right. The codename was nothing to do with deep secrets. It was one of the versions of the death of Koryfos. There was some evidence that he had tried to conquer Earth before he died. “What is she saying?” I asked Nick.
“She says she’s promised to go and listen to Dad give his Guest of Honour speech,” Nick said. He scrambled round to face me, a different boy, galvanised with hope. “She’s going to be all right, isn’t she? She’s going to grow her other half back!”
I stared at him, wondering how to say it. I was astonished at how much I hurt. Feelings I had been carefully trying not to admit to blocked my throat and tore at my chest. It was a dry, strong, physical ache, as if someone had forced me full of little broken pieces of concrete. I was not sure I could speak through it.
To my intense gratitude, Stan answered for me. “No, lad. It doesn’t work that way. The most that happens is that the strong ones, the ones with the big personality, can carry on a bit like this. Your sister’s one of the strong ones, that’s all.”
“Not sister – cousin,” Nick said. “How long?”
“I won’t kid you,” Stan said gently. “Sometimes they can drag on for years.”
With another scramble, Nick was glaring into my face. The orange lights of the empty bus station caught the darkness of his eyes so that they shone into mine like spots of red agony. It was like having my own pain glare into me. “You said there was another way!” he blared at me. “What are you waiting for? Do it – do it now!”
“I’m not sure I… it’s a deep secret,” I said wretchedly.
“I won’t say a word,” Nick said. “Just do it!”
“It isn’t that,” I protested. “It takes quite a time. It might not work. I’ve never done it. It needs at least one other Magid and someone to go with her, and I’m not sure we’ve got—”
“You don’t understand!” Nick roared in my face. “I wasn’t alive until Maree came to live with us! She makes that kind of difference – she’s that kind of person!”
“I know she is,” I said. “But we may not have—”
“Rupert,” said Stan, “the lad’s right. Use the Babylon secret. You have to get this girl back because the more I see, the more I think she’s Intended to be your new Magid.”