The Game (5 page)

T
he next day, it was hard to believe that it had ever rained. Hayley woke to find the sky a bright heavenlike blue with great snowy clouds hustling across it. Aunt May woke her by coming in with an armload of clothes.

“Here, dear. Most of these should fit you. Try them on and make sure you're warm enough. The wind's chilly today. Breakfast in half an hour.” Aunt May's hair, because it had been soaked last night, was wilder than ever that morning. Half of it fell down as she crossed the room. And she seemed to have found a
whole lot of new necklaces. Red amber beads dangled clacking on her shapeless maroon dress when she threw the clothes on Hayley's bed and went dashing away downstairs.

Hayley got up and examined the clothes. There were shorts with pockets, trousers with pockets, jeans, socks, T-shirts, jackets with pockets, sweatshirts with both hoods and pockets, knitted things, but not a single dress or skirt. Hayley could feel her face settling into a beaming smile. She made a careful selection: trousers with pockets, because those were like the ones Troy wore, a T-shirt that said “HEADS I WIN, TAILS YOU LOSE”, thick yellow socks, because the trainers were rather big, and a red cardigan, because she suddenly discovered that red was her favourite colour. Feeling baggy and strange and comfortable, she looked in the mirror to do her hair and wondered what Grandma would say. Her hair had gone right out of control in the night. It radiated from her head in curls, tendrils, ringlets and long feathery locks. Hayley had a moment of terrible guilt. She was
never
going to get it neat! Then she thought of Aunt May and realised
there was no need to bother here. She dragged a hairbrush through the wildness and went downstairs.

There she was greeted as if she was the most important person in the place. It was almost overwhelming. Aunts jumped up from the big table and bent over her asking anxiously if she was all right and would she like sausages with her bacon and egg or just beans and fried bread. Harmony hurried over with a glass of orange juice for her, and cousins crowded forward with packets of different cereals. “These chocolate ones are
gorgeous
!” one of the girls said. “No, try the nutty kind,” someone else persuaded her. “Or would you prefer porridge?” asked Aunt Geta.

“I bet she wouldn't,” said Cousin Mercer.

He was right. Grandma had always insisted on porridge. Hayley looked round at the faces leaning eagerly towards her. She gave a beaming smile. “The chocolate ones, please,” she said. “And I'd like bacon and egg and sausages and beans
and
fried bread, please.”

Tollie was the only person not anxious to look after her. He looked up from a vast bowl of cereal and scowled.

Hayley turned her smile on him. “And fried tomato,” she added.

Tollie said, “Greedy pig,” and went back to his cereal.

“Yes, but I'm hungry,” Hayley said. She was too. She had no trouble at all in packing away the biggest breakfast of her life, with toast and marmalade and tea as well. When it was over she sighed – a comfortable sigh of regret that she could manage no more – and got up with the others to help carry plates and cups back to the kitchen.

Meanwhile, the aunts were discussing what needed to be done to clean up after the flood. Cousin Mercer said he would drive over to the Golf Club and borrow the rollers they used to dry the greens there.

“That'll help with the carpets,” Aunt May said, “but we're going to need some of their big blow driers too for the walls and ceilings. You can't repaint those until they're dry, Mercer. And we'll have to polish the floors and the stairs – it's going to take
days
! Harmony, be an angel and keep the children out of the way while we work.”

“The game,” said the eldest Tigh boy.

Everyone else clamoured, “Yes! The game, the game! You promised!”

“OK, OK!” Harmony said, laughing. “Wellies on, everyone. The paddock's bound to be soaking wet.”

There was a rush for the hall and the big cupboard under the stairs, which seemed to contain every possible size of rubber boots – though not many actual pairs. Troy ended up with one red and one blue boot. Someone found Hayley a pink boot with a white flower on it and someone else came up with another that was plain black. Then everyone galloped, in a stampede of different coloured feet, out through the front door and round the house, to a sort of sloping meadow at one side, where they milled around in the wet grass, impatiently waiting for Harmony.

When Harmony appeared – in knee-length green boots that must have been her own – she was carrying a folding card table and a large plastic shopping bag with an eye-splitting swirly design on it. Everyone cheered and crowded up to her while she opened the table and set it up firmly by digging its legs into the slope. Then she put the bag on it and fetched out of it
a big bundle of those kind of pointed plastic tags gardeners use to label plants. As she put those down on the table, she said, “OK, let's recap the vow first, since you haven't played for a year. Everyone say after me: I swear not to say a word about what we do in the game to anyone outside this paddock. You say it too, Tollie, and you, Hayley.”

Wondering very much about this, Hayley obediently chorused with the rest, “I swear not to say a word about what we do in this game to anyone outside this paddock.” Everyone was saying it, quite devoutly, even Tollie.

“Good,” Harmony said. “We don't want Uncle Jolyon to know, do we?” Everyone nodded, equally devoutly. “Now I'll go over the rules. First, I put one of these tags into the ground for each of you and that is where you have to start from. It makes a lot of difference where you start, remember? Then I give you each one of these cards.” She brought out of the bag a big bundle of cardboard squares held together with a rubber band. There must have been nearly a hundred of them. Some of them were old and tattered
and grey, some were quite new. Harmony put the bundle on the table and said, “You stand there and read your card and— “She dug into the bag again and brought out a large clock with Mickey Mouse on the front and put that on the table too. “When the clock starts, you get going and do exactly what it says on your card. And you
have
to get back before it stops or you'll be stuck out there. And— “She fished in the bag again. “The first one back
successfully
, without
cheating
, Tollie, gets this prize.” She brought out what was clearly a Christmas tree ornament, made of plastic, in the shape of a golden apple, and put it down with a flourish in the middle of the table. “There.”

“Harmony,” said the youngest Laxton girl, “I
can
go on my own this year, can't I? I'm quite old now.”

“Well, Lucy—” Harmony looked from Lucy to Hayley. “Yes, I suppose you are. You'd make two of Hayley. All right then.” While Lucy was dancing about delightedly, making heavy rubbery
flurps
with her boots, Harmony said, “Hayley, I was going to suggest you went with Troy, as this is the first time you've played. Is that all right, Troy?”

Troy nodded in his good-humoured way.

Tollie said, “And
me
– I go alone too.”

“You know you always do,” Harmony said. “Now—”

“Let's
start
!” Tollie whined. “I'm getting bored.”

“Yes,” Harmony said. She picked up the bundle of gardener's tags. Hayley saw that each of them had someone's name written on them. There was even one with “HAYLEY” on it. Harmony hurried up and down the paddock with the bundle, digging each one into the ground in a different place and calling out, “Lucy, you're down here. James, up here beside this bush, right? Tollie, off to left here,” and so on. Finally, she stuck two tags into the ground together, out to one side. “Troy and Hayley, over here, see?” Then she came back to the table, a bit breathless, and solemnly took the rubber band off the cards. She shuffled the pack, the way you shuffle playing cards. Everyone's eyes fixed on her hands as if this was the most exciting moment of the game. When she started passing the cards out, they were snatched from her and everyone except Troy and Hayley raced away to the markers.

“Harmony,” Troy said, lingering. “This is a bit fierce
for someone's first go. Look. Can't you change it?”

Harmony glanced at the card Troy was holding out. It was obvious that she saw what Troy meant, but she shook her head. “Sorry. No. I can't make it work with a change. The only thing you can do is not to play.”

“If we
do
play,” Troy said, “what sign of the zodiac are we under now?”

Harmony looked up at the sky with its scudding clouds. “Virgo,” she said. “Just passed the cusp with Leo. Make up your mind, Troy. Everyone's waiting.”

“I suppose Virgo's not so bad,” Troy said. “
You
decide,” he said, passing the card to Hayley.

The card was old and worn and floppy, and fawn coloured with age. When Hayley took it, she found it had once been a plain postcard on which someone had written – a long time ago, to judge by the way the ink had faded – in large, firm capitals: FETCH A SCALE FROM THE DRAGON THAT CIRCLES THE ZODIAC.

“What do you think?” Troy said to her.

Hayley had no idea what they were supposed to do in the game anyway and the card made her very curious to find out. Besides, everyone else was
standing by the markers jigging with impatience. James, who was nearest, said, “Hurry it
up
, can't you!” and Tollie, in the distance, was jumping up and down shouting, “Cowards, cowards, cowards!”

“I think we'd better try,” she said.

“Great!” said Troy. He seized her by one arm and towed her over to the double marker. “Leave the card on the grass for Harmony to collect.”

Back by the table, Harmony wound up the clock. It seemed to be a musical box as well as a clock. When Harmony set it down on the table, ticking loudly, it began to play a small tinkly tune. Grandpa had played the same tune to Hayley once and told her it was by Mozart.

“
A Little Night Music
?” she said to Troy.

He nodded. “We all hear different tunes,” he said. “Harmony's good at that. Start walking.”

All over the paddock the others were setting off. James charged downhill towards the orchard. Tollie came rushing back up the hill. Lucy was walking rather carefully in a straight line, looking nervous. Most of the rest were running towards the house.

“Some of them are cheating,” Troy said, pulling Hayley forwards. “Tollie always does.”

Hayley hastily dropped the card by the markers and let herself be pulled towards the garden shed at the side of the paddock.

It was a simple brick-built shed with a pointed roof, but when they came to it, Hayley was highly delighted to find that the top half of the door was of panes of stained glass, in nine different colours. As Troy pulled the door shut behind them, Hayley saw Lucy pass slowly across outside, from thundery yellow, to stormy red and then to twilight purple as she walked out of sight. Inside, the old lawnmowers and the stack of deckchairs were in a sort of rainbow dusk. Troy, keeping hold of Hayley's wrist, edged them past the lawnmowers – and through some thick, dusty cobwebs that caught unpleasantly on Hayley's hair – and on into coloured twilight beyond. Shortly, it was almost dark. But there seemed to be a passage there, or perhaps even a path, and Troy led her firmly along it.

Path, Hayley decided, as they brushed among leaves and out into some kind of cold dry place. It was very
dark here, but Tollie was clearly visible when he rushed suddenly and jeeringly across their way.

“Stupids!” he called out. “You're on the wrong strand!”

Hayley stopped.

“Take no notice,” Troy said, pulling at her. “He's always trying to put people off.”

“Yes, but where
are
we?” Hayley said.

“Out in the mythosphere by now,” Troy answered. “I think we're nearly halfway, but it's bound to get more difficult as we go on.”

“Then that's all right,” Hayley said. “I've been out here before with Flute. How can you and Tollie do it too?”

“Oh, we can all do it,” Troy said. “All our family belongs to the mythosphere, didn't you know?”

“What? Even Grandma?” Hayley exclaimed.

“Of course,” Troy said. “But she's one of the ones, like Mercer, who does what Uncle Jolyon says and—”

Here Tollie rushed across their path again, coming the other way. “I'm telling of you!” he shouted, and vanished away into the dark.

Hayley almost stopped again.

“Don't you believe it!” Troy said, hauling her onward. “If he tells tales, he couldn't play. Uncle Jolyon would stop this game like a shot if he knew we were playing it. And,” he added, “Harmony would get it in the neck worse than any of us, for inventing it.”

Hayley hoped Troy was right. She did not trust Tollie one bit.

They could see the strand they were on now, a silvery, slithery path, coiling away up ahead. The worst part, to Hayley's mind, was the way it didn't seem to be fastened to anything at the sides. Her feet, in their one pink boot and one black, kept slipping. She was quite afraid that she was going to pitch off the edge. It was like trying to climb a strip of tinsel. She hung on hard to Troy's warmer, larger hand and wished it was not so cold. The deep chilliness made the scrapes on the front of her ache.

To take her mind off it, she stared around. The rest of the mythosphere was coming into view overhead and far away, in dim, feathery streaks. Some parts of it were starry swirls, like the Milky Way only white, green and pale pink, and other more distant parts flickered
and waved like curtains of light blowing in the wind. Hayley found her chest filling with great admiring breaths at its beauty, and she stared and stared as more and more streaks and strands came into view.