Un Lun Dun (2 page)

2

Signs

For the rest of that day Zanna tried to avoid her friends. They eventually caught up with her in the lunch queue, but when she told them to leave her alone it was in such a nasty voice that they obeyed.

“Forget it,” said Kath. “She’s just rude.”

“She’s mad,” said Becks, and they walked away ostentatiously. Only Deeba stayed.

She didn’t try to talk to Zanna. Instead she watched her thoughtfully.

That afternoon, she waited for Zanna after school. Zanna tried to get by in the rush, but Deeba wouldn’t let her. She crept up on her, then suddenly linked an arm into one of hers. Zanna tried to look angry, but it didn’t last very long.

“Oh, Deebs…what’s going on?” she said.

They made their way to the estate where they both lived, and headed for Deeba’s house. Her boisterous, talkative family, while sometimes exasperating with all their noise and kerfuffle, were generally a comfortable backdrop for any discussion. As usual, people looked at the girls as they passed. They made a funny pair. Deeba was shorter and rounder and messier than her skinny friend. Her long black hair was making its usual break for freedom from her ponytail, in contrast to Zanna’s tightly slicked-back blondness. Zanna was silent while Deeba kept asking her if she was okay.

“Hello Miss Resham, hello Miss Moon,” sang Deeba’s father as they entered. “What have you been doing? Cup of tea for you ladies?”

“Hi sweetheart,” said Deeba’s mum. “How was your day? Hello Zanna, how you doing?”

“Hello Mr. and Mrs. Resham,” said Zanna, smiling with her usual nervous pleasure as Deeba’s parents beamed at her. “Fine, thank you.”

“Leave her alone, Dad,” said Deeba, dragging Zanna through to her room. “Except for the tea, please.”

“So, nothing happened to you today,” said her mother. “You have nothing to report. You had a totally empty day! You amaze me.”

“It was
fine,
” she said. “It was same as always, innit?”

Without getting up, Deeba’s parents started loudly consoling her about the tragedy of how nothing ever changed for her, and that every day was the same. Deeba rolled her eyes at them and closed her door.

They sat without speaking for a while. Deeba put on lip gloss. Zanna just sat.

“What we going to do, Zanna?” said Deeba at last. “Something’s going on.”

“I know,” said Zanna. “It’s getting worse.”

It was hard to say exactly when it had all started. Things had been getting strange for at least a month.

“Remember when I saw that cloud?” said Deeba. “That looked like you?”

“That was weeks ago, and it didn’t look anything like anything,” Zanna said. “Let’s stick to real stuff. The fox today. And that woman. What was on the wall. And the letter. That sort of thing.”

It had been early autumn when the odd events had started to occur. They had been in the Rose Café.

None of them had paid any attention when the door opened, until they’d realized that the woman who’d come in was standing quietly by their table. One by one they looked at her.

She’d been wearing a bus driver’s uniform, the cap at a perky angle. She was grinning.

“Sorry to butt in,” the woman said. “I hope you don’t…Just very exciting to meet you.” She smiled at all of them but addressed Zanna. “Just wanted to say that.”

The girls stared in dumb astonishment for several seconds. Zanna had tried to stutter some reply, Kath had burst out with “What…?” and Deeba had started laughing. None of this fazed the woman. She said a nonsense word.

“Shwazzy!” she said. “I heard you’d be here, but I wouldn’t have believed it.” With one more smile, she left, leaving the girls laughing nervously and loudly, until the waitress had asked them to calm down.

“Nutter!”

“Nutter!”

“Bloody
nutter
!”

If that had been all, it would have just been one of those stories about someone a bit loopy on London streets. But that had not been all.

Some days later Deeba had been with Zanna, walking under the old bridge over Iverson Road. She’d looked up, reading some of the cruder graffiti. There behind the pigeon net, far higher than anyone could have reached, was painted in vivid yellow: Z
ANNA
F
OR
E
VER
!

“Cor. Someone else called Zanna,” Deeba said. “Or you’ve got long arms. Or someone massive loves you, Zan.”

“Shut up,” Zanna said.

“It’s true, though,” Deeba said. “No one else’s called Zanna, you’re always saying. Now you’ve made your mark.”

A little while after that, the day after Guy Fawkes Night, when London was full of bonfires and fireworks, Zanna had come to school upset.

At last, when she was alone with Deeba, Zanna had pulled a piece of paper and a card out of her bag.

A postman had been waiting outside her front door. He had given her a letter with no name on the envelope, just handed it straight to her as soon as she had emerged, and disappeared. She hesitated before showing it to Deeba.

“Don’t tell any of the others,” she had said. “Swear?”

We look forward to meeting you,
Deeba read,
when the wheel turns.

“Who’s it from?” Deeba said.

“If I knew that I wouldn’t be freaked out. And there’s no stamp.”

“Is there a mark?” Deeba said. “To say where it came from? Is that a
U
? An
L
? And that says…
on,
I think.” They couldn’t read any more.

“He said something to me,” Zanna said. “The same thing that woman did. ‘Shwazzy,’ he said. I was like, ‘What?’ I tried to follow him, but he was gone.”

“What does it mean?” Deeba said.

“That’s not all,” said Zanna. “This was in there too.”

It was a little square of card, some strange design, a beautiful, intricate thing of multicolored swirling lines. It was, Deeba had realized, some mad version of a London travelcard. It said it was good for zones one to six, buses and trains, all across the city.

On the dotted line across its center was carefully printed: Z
ANNA
M
OON
S
HWAZZY
.

That was when Deeba had told Zanna that she had to tell her parents. She herself had kept her promise, and never told anyone.

“Did you tell them?” said Deeba.

“How can I?” said Zanna. “What am I going to say about the animals?”

For the last few weeks, dogs would often stop as Zanna walked by, and stare at her. Once a little conga line of three squirrels had come down from a tree as Zanna sat in Queen’s Park, and one by one had put a little nut or seed in front of her. Only cats ignored her.

“It’s mad,” said Zanna. “I don’t know what’s going on. And I
can’t
tell them. They’ll think I need help. Maybe I do. But I tell you one thing.” Her voice was surprisingly firm. “I was thinking it when I looked at that fox. At first I was scared. I still don’t want to talk about it, not to Kath and that lot. So don’t say nothing, alright? But I’ve had enough. Something’s happening? Okay. Well, I’m ready for it.”

Outside it was storming. The air was growling and rumbustious. People crammed under eaves, or huddled into their coats and shuffled through the rain. Through Deeba’s window, the girls watched people dance and wrestle with umbrellas.

When Zanna left, she ran out past a sheltering woman with a ridiculous little dog on a lead. As it saw her, the dog sat up in an oddly dignified way.

It bowed its head. Zanna looked at the little dog and, obviously as surprised by her own reaction as by the animal’s greeting, bowed her head back.

3

The Visiting Smoke

The next day Zanna and Deeba wandered through the playground, watching their reflections in all the puddles. Bedraggled rubbish lurked by walls. The clouds still looked heavy.

“My dad hates umbrellas,” said Deeba, swinging her own. “When it rains he always says the same thing. ‘I do not believe the presence of moisture in the air is sufficient reason to overturn society’s usual sensible taboo against wielding spiked clubs at eye level.’”

From the edge of the playground, near where the respectful fox had stood, they could see over the school’s walls, into the street, where a few people passed by.

Something caught Zanna’s eye. Something strange and unclear. By a playing field at the end of the street, smudges were just visible on the road.

“There’s something there,” said Zanna. She squinted. “I think it’s moving.”

“Is it?” said Deeba.

The sky seemed unnaturally flat, as if a huge gray sheet had been pegged out from horizon to horizon above them. The air was still. Very faint dark stains coiled and disappeared, and the road was unmarked again.

“Today…” Deeba said. “It’s not a normal day.”

Zanna shook her head.

Birds arced, and clutch of sparrows flew out of nowhere and circled Zanna’s head in a twittering halo.

That afternoon they had French. Zanna and Deeba were not paying attention, were staring out of the windows, drawing foxes and sparrows and rain clouds, until something in Miss Williams’s droning made Zanna look up.

“…choisir…” she heard. “…je choisis, tu choisis…”

“What’s she on about?” whispered Deeba.

“Nous allons choisir…” Miss Williams said. “Vous avez choisi.”

“Miss? Miss?” said Zanna. “What was that last one, Miss? What does it mean?”

Miss Williams poked the board.

“This one?” she said. “Vous avez choisi.
Vous:
you plural.
Avez:
have.
Choisi:
chosen.”

Choisi.
Shwazzy. Chosen.

At the end of the day, Deeba and Zanna stood by the school gate and looked out at where they had seen the marks. It was still drizzling, and by the playing fields, the rain looked to be falling as if against resistance, as if it had hit a patch of odd air.

“You coming to Rose’s?” Kath and the others were standing behind them.

“We…thought we saw something,” Deeba said. “We was just going to…”

Her voice petered out, and she followed Zanna. Behind them, a scrum of their classmates were rushing by, heading home or meeting their parents.

“What you looking for?” said Keisha. She and Kath stood watching quizzically as Zanna stood in the middle of the road a few meters away, and looked around.

“I can’t see nothing,” she whispered. Zanna stood for a long time, as the others huffed impatiently. “Alright then,” she said, raising her voice. Kath had her arms folded and one eyebrow raised. “Let’s go.”

The stream of their classmates had ended. A few cars emerged from the gates and swept past them as their teachers headed home. The little group of girls were alone in the street. With a sputtering crack, the streetlights came on as the sky darkened.

Rain was coming down hard like a typewriter on Deeba’s umbrella.

“…don’t know
what
she’s doing…” Deeba heard Becks saying to Keisha and Kath. Zanna walked a little ahead of them, her feet sending up little sprays of rainlike mist.

A lot like mist, a dark mist. Zanna slowed. She and Deeba looked down.

“What now?” said Keisha in exasperation.

At their feet, a few centimeters above the dirty wet tarmac, there was a layer of coiling smoke.

“What…is that?” said Kath.

Wafts were rising from the gutters. The smoke was a horrible dirty dark. It emerged in drifts and tendrils, reaching through the metal grilles of the drains like growing vines or octopus legs. Ropes of it tangled and thickened. They coiled around the wheels of vehicles and under their engines.

“What’s going on?” whispered Keisha. Smoke was beginning to boil out of the sewers. A smell of chemicals and rot thickened in the air. Far off and muffled as if by a curtain, the noise of a motor was audible.

Zanna was standing with her arms out, focusing intensely into sudden fumes that circled them. For a second, it looked as if the rain that was pelting them was evaporating, like drops on hot metal, a few millimeters
above
Zanna’s head. Deeba stared, but dark drifts hid her friend.

The motor was louder. A car was approaching.

The girls were shrouded in gritty smoke. They spluttered in panic and tried to call to each other. They could see almost nothing.

The noise of the motor grew, and glints of reflected streetlamp-light winked momentarily through the fumes.

“Wait a minute,” Zanna shouted.

Through the fog headlights suddenly flared, heading straight for Zanna. Deeba saw her, turned in to a shadow, sidestepping neatly as the lights bore down, her hands seeming to glow.

“It’s my
dad
!” Zanna shouted, and moved fast as the car raced into the smoke, and there was a rush as the fumes dissipated and—

—there was a
bang,
and something went flying, and there was silence.

The clouds undarkened and the rain stopped. The strange fumes dropped out of the air and flooded like thick dark water back into the gutters, gushing soundlessly out of sight.

For several seconds, no one moved.

A car was skewed across the road, with Zanna’s dad sitting in the front seat looking confused. Someone was shouting hysterically. Someone fair was lying by a wall.

“Zanna!” Deeba shouted, but Zanna was beside her. It was Becks who had been hit, and who lay motionless.

“We have to get a doctor,” said Zanna, pulling out her mobile and starting to cry, but Kath was already through to 999.

Zanna’s dad staggered out of the car, coughing.

“What…what…?” he said. “I was…what happened?” He saw Becks. “Oh my God!” He dropped to his knees beside her. “What did I do?” he kept saying.

“I’ve called an ambulance,” Kath said, but he wasn’t listening. Now the light was back to normal and there was no fog lapping at ankle-height, people were peering out of doors and windows. Becks moved uneasily, and made groggy moaning noises.

“What happened?” Zanna’s dad kept asking them. None of them knew what to say. “I don’t remember anything,” he said, “I just woke up and—”

“It hurts…” Becks wailed.

“Did you see?” Zanna whispered to Deeba. Her voice sounded as if it were cracking. “The smoke, the car, everything? It was all thick around
me.
It was trying to get
me.
”