The Predictions (30 page)

Authors: Bianca Zander

Once more I scanned the terrace, looking for the trapdoor. Had I lost my bearings or was the air-raid shelter no longer there? Searching again, I found no trace of it, and surmised that it had been filled in or concreted over to prevent anyone’s falling in. Good job, I thought with immense relief, for a death trap such as that had no business being in a garden. Peggy had stopped snoring, and her breathing was weak but regular. When I picked up her hand, she didn’t stir. The room had become stuffy, claustrophobic, and I decided I had been there long enough.

Out in the hallway, trying to remember my way to the bathroom, I felt drugged, disoriented, as though Peggy’s medication had leaked out through her skin. On the wall next to the phone was a list of emergency numbers, one of which was Pippa’s, and I wrote it down on a dog-eared receipt from my pocket. Many of the rooms between Peggy’s and the bathroom had been closed up, sealed off, but the door to one of the bedrooms was open, and I saw a mess of books and boxes spilling out. That must have been Harold’s old room. How careless and wasteful, I thought, to have so many disused rooms in such a nice flat, when all I needed was one.

It was passing back through the drawing room that I saw her, and froze immediately with the rigid fear of a five-year-old.

How could I have missed her on the way to the bathroom? The statue of a young girl kneeling where she’d always knelt, on a dais between two faded velvet chaise longues that had once been cherry red. The dais was varnished mahogany, but the girl’s skin was the color of dirty cement. She was rough-hewn, abstract: her smooth granite eyes had no irises. Her tiny hands were folded in her lap, and her hair was in a bowl cut. She wore an old-fashioned smocked dress with a round pansy collar. Peggy had called her Madeline—referring to
her by name, affectionately and often, as though she were her daughter or a little friend.

She had been real to me too, though not in such a benign way. As a child, I had refused to be left alone with her, and even in a room full of adults, Madeline could freak me out. It was partly the blankness of her stare, a gaze that nevertheless followed me wherever I went in the room. And partly, it was that she was the same age as me but was stuck being that age and would never grow up. It made me think that inside her was a thwarted adult, who had grown evil over time because she was trapped in a noose of perpetual childhood.

Once, at one of Peggy’s especially raucous parties, there’d been dozens of adults in the drawing room, dancing, drinking, laughing, and I was there too, up past my bedtime, and giddily lost in the forest of their legs. For a brief moment, those limbs had cleared, and there was Madeline, motionless but hunting me through the trees. My screams had been so hysterical that I had been taken home immediately—the party over for me and my parents.

On the sofa opposite Madeline’s dais, I sat down to observe her from a safe distance. I was curious to know if she’d still have any power over me at twenty-eight years old.

To begin with I was fine, in control, but then outside, clouds passed overhead, casting Madeline’s features into shadow. She had not moved, but my first thought was that it was Madeline who had taken all the light out of the room, and before I could reason against it, a sensation of quickening vertigo came over me. When I stood up to move away from her, I felt dizzy and also that I was physically shrinking. Around me, the room seemed to waver, but in a way that was too subtle to grasp. I looked down at my scuffed and ill-fitting trainers, bought in a size too big because I’d meant to use them for jogging but never had. The shoes appeared familiar, but I was sure that the feet inside them weren’t mine—that these feet were tiny impostors. I held my hands out in front of my face, spread the fingers and wiggled them, but even these looked counterfeit, rogue hands on the ends of absurdly slender limbs. My perspective had shifted lower down, and for a few seconds, I was a child
again—a child who was pensive and scared.

I bit down hard on my tongue, and one by one, the walls of Peggy’s drawing room regained their density, and the weight of my adult feet sank into my shoes. Once more, I stood on solid ground, in a London apartment I had not been in for almost twenty years. An apartment so like a museum that briefly, I rationalized, it had pulled me back with it into the past. That I’d imagined the whole thing was plausible but that didn’t change how unsettled I felt—especially when I turned to leave the drawing room and had the uncanny sensation that I was being watched.

Too late, I realized I had turned my back on Madeline, and when I swiveled round to face her, I fancied she was gloating. This amounted to nothing more than a dead-eyed stare—but then again, it never had. The year after next I’d turn thirty, but Madeline still had it over me. Her power was intact, had perhaps even grown. In the old, cowering way, I turned and walked out backward, hoping to catch the very last rays of that untimely summer evening.

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ALSO BY BIANCA ZANDER

The Girl Below

PRAISE FOR BIANCA ZANDER AND
THE PREDICTIONS

“Bianca Zander’s
The Predictions
is an exhilarating and turbulent plunge into a fringe community—so alive with smells, sounds, and textures that you forget you are reading at all. An unforgettable novel about breaking away from others’ doctrines in order to discover what you truly believe and desire. Absorbing, compassionate, and filled with gloriously flawed characters that are sure to set off book club fireworks!”

—Susan Henderson, author of
Up from the Blue

“In
The Predictions
Bianca Zander creates pure magic in a nostalgic tale of the seventies and eighties with a twist. Life on a commune might be all about free love and free will, but for Poppy and Lukas, this life creates difficulties after a startling announcement rocks their idyllic world. When an alluring, mysterious visitor to the commune grants each of the children predictions for the future, and one of their own goes missing, Poppy and Lukas abandon the shelter of the commune and attempt to outrun their destinies by escaping into eighties heavy metal London.
The Predictions
is a wild and exhilarating ride, and Zander has created an otherworld where destiny collides with life and reality, where lust and love complicate and heal, and where fate and faith triumph.”

—Robin Antalek, author of
The Grown Ups
and
The Summer We Fell Apart

“A richly atmospheric, rollicking journey through two of our most socially controversial—and entertaining—decades. As tender as it is gripping,
The Predictions
is an unforgettable coming-of-age story that beautifully addresses what it means to move beyond the youthful winds of influence and into the hard-won rewards of
mature love.”

—Elizabeth Percer

“So funny and smart, so sharp and artful. In every sense, Bianca Zander is a fantastic writer.”

—Curtis Sittenfeld,
New York Times
bestselling author of
Prep
and
American Wife

“Zander shows novels can embody truth—in the dialogue that hits the perfect pitch, in the emotional span from glee to guts to grief.”

—
New Zealand Herald

CREDITS

Cover design by Mumtaz Mustafa

Cover photograph © by Gert Kreutschmann-ullstein bild/Granger, NYC

Illustrations from the Aquarian Tarot Deck
^®reproduced by permission of U.S. Games Systems, Inc., Stamford, CT 06902 USA. Copyright ©1993 by U.S. Games Systems, Inc. Further reproduction prohibited.

COPYRIGHT

This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

P.S.™ is a trademark of HarperCollins Publishers.

THE PREDICTIONS
. Copyright © 2015 by Bianca Zander. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

FIRST EDITION

ISBN 978-0-06-210818-0

EPub Edition May 2015 ISBN 9780062108197

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