Switchers (3 page)

Her father stayed silent. He had become engrossed in an international football match on TV, so Tess and her mother took the bus to the centre of the city and had tea together in Bewley’s. Afterwards they split up to do a bit of shopping. Tess spent some of her pocket money on a book about rodents which had a whole chapter on chipmunks, and the rest on a huge bag of sunflower seeds.

When they got back, Tess went upstairs and lay on her bed intending to read the rodent book, but she was so exhausted by her squirrel adventures that she fell asleep and didn’t wake up until her father called her down for dinner. During the week the family ate formally around the dining room table, but quite often at weekends they relaxed in front of the living-room fire with trays on their knees. Tess sat down in an armchair and picked up her knife and fork. Her parents were watching a soap opera on the TV, but it was one that she found boring. Her mind wandered, back to the first time she had Switched and discovered that she did not always and evermore have to be just Tess.

She had been quite small, just seven or eight, and she had woken unusually early on a summer’s morning because she was uncomfortably hot. There were images in her mind of a strange dream that she had been having, but they vanished before she could capture them. She sighed, and it seemed to her as she did so that time had slowed down. The sigh took for ever, both coming and going, as though there was room in her lungs for more air than she had thought.

Outside, the birds were singing unusually loudly, and the sun was streaming through a gap in the curtains and on to her bed. She realised that this was probably why she felt so hot, but when she lifted her hand to throw back the covers, something brown and furry jumped up on to her chest.

Tess was not a screamer, even at that age, which was probably just as well. If she had attempted to scream at that moment, the noise would have woken half the street, and everything might well have been ruined. Instead she stayed motionless for a long, long time, waiting for the creature to show itself again. When it did not, she began to relax a little. Whatever it was wasn’t all that big, and surely she would be able to frighten it away. Slowly, carefully, Tess sat up. As she did so, she could see that the furry thing was still there on the top of her quilt. In slowly dawning horror, she realised that it was not a small creature, but the paw of a very, very large one. She swung round, expecting to see the rest of the beast crouching on the floor beside her bed, but there was nothing there. And as she turned back, she knew. She lifted her hand, and there was no hand, just the great, brown paw lifting to her face to feel the long snout and the round, furry ears. Tess had turned into a bear.

For a long time she stayed still. She had read about such things in fairy tales. They were usually caused by wicked spells or curses laid by witches or evil fairies. Tears of hopelessness rolled down her hairy cheeks and spilled on to the quilt, making a dark patch that widened and widened. She listened to the birds, wondering how they could seem so joyful when she felt so sad. She might have stayed there indefinitely, weeping a great stain into the quilt, were it not for the fact that bears find it uncomfortable to lie on their backs for so long.

Her fingers would not work properly. The quilt snagged in her claws as she tried to push it off, but she managed to get herself disentangled and scrambled down on to the floor. It was surprising to find how comfortable a bear can be, and for a while she just ambled here and there around the room, getting accustomed to her strange limbs.

After a time the sound of the birds and the fresh scent of the morning drew her to the window. On the third attempt, her clumsy paw caught the curtain and hoiked it to the side, and she stood on her hind legs and leant up against the windowsill, blinking in the bright light. The smell, the sound, the feeling of the fresh air in her nostrils was so delicious, it was almost magical. She was filled with delight at being a bear and she stretched her nose up towards the cool gap where the window was open. Just at that instant, however, she caught a scent, and then a glimpse, of the paper boy cycling down the road.

As quickly as she could, Tess dropped back to the floor and away from the window. The horror of the situation returned. What on earth was going to happen to her? From the room beside hers, she heard her parents’ alarm clock ringing, and put her heavy paws up to her ears in dread. Any minute now she would hear her father padding along to the bathroom to wash and shave, and then he would pop his head around the door and say, ‘Rise and shine,’ or, ‘Show a leg.’ Sometimes he came in and drew the curtains. Sometimes he even sat down on her bed and chatted for a while before he went down and put on the kettle. But what was going to happen now? What would he do when he saw, instead of his girl, a brown bear?

He was humming now in the bathroom as he shaved. Would her mother be more likely to understand? If she looked her carefully in the eye, would she recognise her own Tess?

Tess shambled miserably around the room, feeling huge and heavy and clumsy. As she went by it, she knocked over the dolls’ house. The crash it made as it landed scared her, and she jumped and knocked over the Lego. It scattered across the floor and as she walked the sharp edges hurt her paws.

The bathroom door clicked shut. Tess heard her father’s footsteps in the hall. She sat down in the middle of the room and prayed with all her might to be a little girl again.

The door opened. ‘What’s all the noise about?’ said her father.

Tess sat still and looked carefully up towards the door.

‘What have you been doing?’ her father said, as he came into the room.

Tess stared at him in astonishment. How could he not have noticed?

‘Are you all right, sweetheart?’ he said, squatting on his heels beside her.

She stared wide-eyed into his face, then looked down at her hands. She was Tess again, sitting on the floor in her nightdress, all warm and pink and human.

‘I was a bear a minute ago,’ she said.

‘A bear!’ said her father. ‘Well. No wonder you made such a mess.’ He righted the dolls’ house and began putting the things back into it.

‘But I was, Daddy, I really was.’

‘Well, you’d better be a tidy little squirrel now and pick up all that Lego before your mum sees it. You can pretend they’re all nuts.’

‘But I wasn’t pretending!’

‘Of course you weren’t.’

‘Do you believe me?’

‘Of course I do.’

But she knew by the tone of his voice that he didn’t. Changing into bears just wasn’t the kind of thing that adults did. They would be far too worried about what other people were thinking. So when, a few weeks later, Tess turned herself into a cat, she promised herself that she would never, never tell anyone ever again. And she never did.

That boy, that scruffy Kevin character, he couldn’t know. He just couldn’t. It wasn’t possible. All the same, there was something about the way he had looked at her that scared her and made her almost believe that he did, somehow, know what she could do.

‘Tess?’

‘Yes?’

‘You’re not eating your dinner, sweetheart.’

‘Oh. I was just listening to the news.’ She hadn’t been, but she did now.

‘Meanwhile,’ said the TV newscaster, his face impressively grave, ‘the freak weather conditions continue. The snow storms that have been ravaging the Arctic regions for the past eight weeks show no signs of abating, and their area of activity continues to increase. The death toll in northern Europe now stands at more than seventeen hundred, and there are many more people unaccounted for. Evacuations continue across the Northern Hemisphere.’

The TV screen showed a picture of a line of cars driving through a blizzard.

‘Inhabitants of Alaska and northern Canada continue their southwards exodus as weather conditions make their homes uninhabitable. Air-rescue teams are working round the clock to move people from outlying areas, and snow-ploughs are working twenty-four hours a day to keep the major routes clear. However, it is feared that there may be thousands of people trapped in snowbound vehicles on minor highways throughout the area, with no hope of relief from the already over-stretched services.’

‘There’s something fishy about all this,’ said Tess’s father.

‘Fishy?’ said her mother. ‘How can there be something fishy about the weather?’

‘I don’t know, but it isn’t natural.’

‘How can the weather not be natural?’ her mother asked. ‘If the weather isn’t natural, what is?’

‘Well, it’s not normal, anyway.’

‘Normal is a different question entirely. No one is saying this is normal.’

‘Shhh!’ said Tess.

‘The fourth land attempt to reach the weatherbound Arctic drilling station has had to be abandoned,’ said the newscaster above pictures of army snowmobiles and tanks. ‘Radio contact with the rig was lost soon after the storm conditions began, and successive attempts to reach it by air and by land have failed.’

An army officer appeared on the screen, dressed like a Himalayan mountaineer. Snowflakes whirled around him.

‘It’s just impossible out there,’ he said. ‘Conditions like these have never been encountered before. The temperatures are falling off the bottom of the thermometer and visibility is nil. With the best will in the world, it is not feasible to expose army personnel to conditions like those.’

Tess thought he looked scared.

‘I still say it’s fishy,’ said her father.

Her mother sighed in exasperation. Tess stood up with her tray. ‘I’m going upstairs to read,’ she said.

‘Don’t you want any pudding?’ said her mother.

‘No, thanks.’

‘It’s lemon meringue pie.’

‘I’m not hungry. Perhaps you could leave me a piece for later?’

Tess took the tray out to the kitchen and went back up to her room. No one was saying it, but it was on everybody’s mind. If those snowstorms continued to spread, it would not be long before they closed in on Ireland, as well. And then what would it matter if that stupid boy did or didn’t know her secret?

I
N A PRIVATE OFFICE
in the Pentagon in Washington DC, the same army officer who had made an appearance on Tess’s TV was sitting at a table with several other men. One was his chief of staff, General ‘Whitey’ Snow, and another was the chief of staff of the airborne forces, General Wolfe. The others were ministers and advisors from the American government. There were no members of the public or the press among them.

The officer, whose name was Colonel Dale ‘Big Daddy’ Dunkelburger, got up and wandered restlessly across the floor for a minute or two, then took his seat again in a leather chair at the head of the table. On a trolley at his right hand was a large, square tape recorder and, in front of him, covering most of the tabletop, was a huge map of the Arctic Circle.

Colonel Dunkelburger sighed and rubbed his eyes. It had been a long time since he had slept, and it looked like being another long time before he would again. With an expression of grim resignation, he glanced across the table and nodded at General Snow.

The General stood up and cleared his throat. ‘Gentlemen,’ he said, ‘the matter we are here to discuss today is one of the utmost seriousness and gravity.’

There was a murmur of assent from the assembly.

‘Now,’ the General went on, ‘I know that all of us here are signatories of the State Secrets Act, and I know that you are all aware that the seal on the door of this office binds you to that oath. Even so, what Colonel Dunkelburger is about to reveal to you is so important that I want you to take another oath now, a personal oath, on whatever you hold most sacred, that what you are about to hear will not pass beyond these four walls, even if you might believe yourself that such secrecy is incorrect.’

One of the President’s advisors shook his head and sighed.

‘General,’ he said. ‘We all appreciate that there’s something here that you consider to be pretty important, but don’t you think that maybe you’re being a little melodramatic about this? Most of us here have to deal with State secrets every day, and I reckon the oath we’ve all taken has been good enough so far.’

‘I appreciate your point of view, Mr Dunwoody,’ said the General. ‘But I believe that when you hear the evidence that we have on these tapes, you may understand. We’re talking about an issue of global importance here, as opposed to state security, and I believe that it might unleash a world-wide panic if it were to become public knowledge. I have no intention of calling the Secrets Act into disrepute, but it might not be sufficient in this case to cover all eventualities. I hope you can understand that and appreciate that no disrespect is intended.’

Dunwoody nodded and, one by one, somewhat self-consciously, the assembly rose and swore their own personal oaths. When they were finished, Colonel Dunkelburger reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and produced a small tape which he fed into the machine beside him.

‘This, gentlemen,’ he said, ‘is the last message that our Arctic Surveillance station in North Alaska received from the polar drilling rig, a week after it was marooned by the storms. I think it’s worth saying at this stage that we have no reason to believe that this transmission was received by anybody else apart from ourselves.’ He switched on the machine. The reception was poor and full of crackling static but nonetheless the voices could be heard.

‘Yeah, boys, we’re still OK here.’ It was the voice of a young man, a bit of a wiseguy, but putting a brave face on a difficult situation.

‘Nothing to report?’ said the radio officer.

‘Yeah, a lot to report. A hell of a lot. But it’s all snow, you know? A hell of a lot of it.’

‘How’s the platform holding up?’

‘I guess it’s OK. The winds are as high as ever, though. There’s a lot of creaking and groaning going on, it’s pretty scary sometimes, but I don’t think there’s been any more damage since last Tuesday.’

‘You still got plenty of supplies?’

‘Yep. We’re having a ball, you know?’

‘So morale is OK?’

‘Good enough. We—’ Here there was a loud bang. ‘Whoops! Someone in a hurry with the coffee.’