The Colour of a Streetlight (Part 2)

The second part is finally here! It's very much a rough draft, though, so I need the feedback. 

Any new readers should definitely give part one a look first, as this really will make no sense otherwise. 

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I don’t know why it didn’t end there. Two days later, I was shifted to a different dorm and given the name Rachel, and I came down with such a bout of summer flu that I couldn’t think of anything other than the snot in my nose. Tucked up in the infirmary and breathing through my mouth, I don’t think I thought of Joey once – much more pressing was the fact that my hands were too weak to hold a pen, and my voice so nasally that I couldn’t practise any of my accents.

Yet, after I recovered, I found myself taking walks. Wandering around the grounds at every opportunity, on my own, and practising my accents under my breath. Sometimes I’d recite multiplication tables or spellings, but it was just a distraction from what I was really doing.

I was halfway through my thirteen times table when I spotted him for the second time.

He was weeding the flowerbeds around the edges of the grounds, so far hunched over that I almost didn’t recognise him. There was a strip of sunburn on his neck.

I should’ve turned back.

I didn’t turn back.

“Hi.”

He looked over his shoulder, squinting in the dying light. “Who’s that?”

“It’s, uh-” I swallowed. “We talked in the kitchen garden a few weeks ago. I was Alesha.”

“Oh!” He wiped his hands on his overalls and shaded his eyes. “Sorry, I just- I didn’t recognise you. I mean, not that I would…” He rubbed the back of his neck and winced. “How are you?”

“I’m okay.” No other words came.

“Good. That’s good. Been, er, practising the accents?”

I nodded. Then I shook my head. “I’ve had the flu, actually. I couldn’t.”

“Really?” he said. “Maybe you should sneeze on me. Could do with a few days off.”

“That’s disgusting.”

“Desperate times, desperate measures,” he said. He grinned. “What if you cough on me instead? Or breathe heavily in my direction? Would that be easier?”

With the sun on my back, my hand fisted in my dress, and a little wind lifting the leaves of the bushes, I laughed with a friend for the first time in my life.

-

Joey must have had some idea that speaking to us was forbidden, because I don’t think he tried his luck talking to any of the other girls. He only worked three days a week, spending most of his time trimming hedges and mowing the grass in front of the house, but he’d always slip into the kitchen garden for an hour or so before dinner, to chat to me and ask how my lessons were going.

“How’s the Scottish accent coming?” he asked, biting into an apple. He was perched on his usual spot on the low brick wall, with me a few meters away on the bench by the greenhouse. The house threw long, evening shadows over the garden, but the air was too thick and humid for it to make much difference.

“Bad,” I said. “I can’t get it right. Teacher says I’ll have to go to an English family.”

“Or an Indian one,” he said, nodding. “You’ve nailed that accent now.”

That was true enough. There was something about hearing the actual accent, full of rawness and subtle tones, that made it easier to imitate than a recording. Not that it helped me much. The chances of an Anglo-Indian family taking an interest in me were slim at best.

“What’s India like?” I asked.

“I’ve not been since I was your age,” he said. “Remember it being colourful, though. A bit manic. And much, much hotter than here.”

“Even on days like today?”

“Oh, loads hotter. I remember this one time when I was visiting, I was wearing these jelly sandals that I’d got for my birthday, and it was so hot that they melted to the pavement and got stuck. That’s how bad it can be.”

I stared. “What are jelly sandals?”

He pulled a face. “They were all the rage when I was a kid. Little shoes made out of this shiny plastic – ugly as anything, actually. But everybody wanted them.”

Plastic was the material of pencil sharpeners and rulers. I looked down at my leather brogues.

“Joey?”

“Yeah?”

“Do they have places like Harigale in India?”

Joey shrugged. “I’m not sure. I imagine so.”

“The girls must get very hot if they have to dress like I do.”

“Well, I’d imagine they get to wear cooler clothes.”

“They’re lucky,” I said. I wiped my sticky neck with my hand and sighed.

“You want an elastic band?” he asked, digging around in his overalls. “To tie your hair with, I mean. I think I’ve got one somewhere.”

“I’m not allowed, Joey.”

He stopped. “They don’t even let you tie your hair up?”

“Only in gym, when every girl has to.”

He sighed, rubbing the side of his face. “Don’t you get tired of all being the same?”

Even in the swampy heat, the hairs on my arms prickled. I stared at him. He bit his lip.

“Sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.”

I packed my things in my bag and walked out of the garden, not looking back even when he called out to me. But his words stayed with me for weeks.

Don’t you get tired of all being the same?

-

I’m not sure if that was why I started to avoid him, but I definitely kept my distance from Joey towards the end of the summer. I pretended it was because the weather was fading – ‘it’s much too cold to go outside so late in the evening’, I would tell myself – but I knew, deep down, that it wasn’t about that. The weather was fair enough so late in August, and the grounds no colder than usual. I was just spooked.

The trouble was that I couldn’t stay inside either. Not since that conversation with Joey. I’d settle myself in the common room, the library, my dorm, and then I’d be hit with this – feeling, I suppose you’d have to call it. Like being smacked in the lungs with something solid, so that all of the breath left me at once. And I’d have to stand up, make my excuses to the eagle-eyed matrons, and get away.

I found a new favourite spot pretty quickly. At the east side of the grounds, a clump of willow trees sprouted like spindly hands, their stooped branches trailing almost to the floor. The leaves weren’t thick enough for it to be a real hiding place, but it felt secluded enough – a good spot to sit and think, all while pretending to read a textbook. It was right by the perimeter fence as well, so you could gaze off through the bars and watch the sun slipping lower and lower in the sky.

I fell asleep there sometimes. I’d mostly stir to the crackle of breeze through the pages of my textbook, or to the bark of a patrolling matron rounding everyone up for dinner.

Just once, however, I woke to the sound of voices.

-

Cold. The smell of earth. Grass prickling my cheek. They were the first things I noticed.

The evening had turned grey as I slept, and the fronds around me waggled in the breeze, making great shushing sounds as they moved against each other. I sat up, looking from side to side. Dollhouse girls darted in the distance, capering about on the field playing some form of British Bulldog. Their voices were faint.

“Gimme a bit more- gimme that, you bloody-”

I froze.

“Where’s the- give it here-”

Voices. Behind me.

“-the cigs, pass me-”

Voices. On the other side of the fence.

Like an unoiled bicycle, I turned around, easing closer.

Two men – or boys, perhaps – were lounging in the field on the other side of the fence, half hidden by long, swaying grass and swigging from brown bottles. The last of the light made a sweaty sheen on their faces, and on the wind came the smell of something implacable, something fuggy and smoky, which rolled off them in waves.

“By fuck, look at- there’s a fucking changeling there.”

I flinched. One of them was pointing at me.

“It bloody is an’ all. Let’s have a look.”

The other one staggered towards me, dragging his feet. His eyes were glassy.

“Bloody is- bloody changeling, right there,” he mumbled, face right up close to the bars. He gestured to the other man. “Come look at it, Baz.”

My feet moved backwards.

“Don’t fucking run,” he said, pointing at me. He threw a backward glance to the other man. “Get here before it fucks off.”

Beyond the fence, the other man took a swig from his bottle, his throat pulsing with every swallow. He kept his eyes on me.

They were looking at me the way the girls would look at spiders. At wasps.

I ran.

-

“You alright, Ellie? I didn’t see you at supper.”

I rolled over on my mattress. Kaori, the girl who slept in the bed next to mine, was leaning over me. There was a smudge of sauce at the corner of her mouth.

“I felt sick,” I said, and turned my back to her.

“Oh,” she said. The bedsprings creaked as she settled onto her bed. “Have you gone to the nurse? They’ve got those tablets, haven’t they? The little raspberry ones.”

They tasted more like sawdust, maybe with a squirt of cheap raspberry sauce mixed in. Round, hard and chalky, with a bitter aftertaste that clung to your throat like the grime down a plughole. The last time I swallowed one, I chucked up in the corridor five minutes later.

“I’m not sure they’d help,” I said.

“Poor thing. Is it that bad?” she said. I fought the urge to shove her. “You missed out on spag bol as well!”

“I don’t like spag bol, Kaori,” I snapped.

There was a silence. Even though I wasn’t looking at her, I could feel her eyes flit from me to the matron lingering in the corridor outside.

“What’s the matter with you, Ellie?” she hissed.

She got to her feet and stomped in the direction of the washrooms. I pulled the covers over my head.

-

Two weeks came and went. Two names came and went. One dorm rotation, four new seating plans and three matrons came and went. But things didn’t get any easier.

I didn’t tell anybody about what I’d seen. More than once, I found myself outside the Mistress’ office, flexing and unflexing my fingers, trying to gather the courage to knock, but, for some reason, I just couldn’t. It was like when you try to jump across a gap in a wall, but your legs lock and plant roots and just say no, you’re not doing this. I couldn’t get the words out.

I managed to put it to the back of my mind, just about. I’d cake soap under my nails to stop myself from biting them, and surround myself with other girls at every spare second so that I had to interact. During the daytime, so long as I had my head in a textbook or a stupid conversation, I was safe.

It was only at night, when my thoughts had time to swill, that things started to get out of control.

-

End of September. Four weeks after the incident, and I was lying awake in the early hours of Sunday morning.

The monthly dares contest had been and gone, finishing rather abruptly when the challenger sullenly refused to lick another girl’s armpit. We’d gone to bed underwhelmed, crawling sluggishly beneath our sheets, without the usual whispered gossip that usually followed a contest. Within half an hour, it seemed that the entire dormitory was asleep.

Except for me. I lay twisted and tangled in my bedsheets, watching the creeping hands of the clock.

Half past one.

I thought of the men.

Quarter to two.

Changeling. That was what they called me. Like the word tasted bad. Like every syllable was sour.

Two o’clock.

I swung my feet over the edge of the bed.

-

After a few years at Harigale, you soon learnt that the night watch wasn’t quite as fierce as you thought it was. When I was six or seven, girls would spread rumours about glaring security cameras and trip wires, and sleepless matrons who frogmarched girls to the Mistress if they so much as popped out to pee. By the time I was ten, however, most of us knew that to be claptrap. The matrons might patrol until midnight, but then they’d retreat into their cubicles and get stuck into their glossy paperback novels, only looking in on us every hour or so. Granted, there was no light punishment if they caught you out of bed, but you’d have to be pretty stupid to let them.

So as I crept through the dormitory and out into the icy corridor, my heart beat steadily, and my breath was calm and slow. Light spilled from the window of the matron’s cubicle, dripping dim and yellowish over the floor, barely bright enough to see by.

Good. It was less exposing this way.

I sank into a crawl, the floor hard and cold against my bony knees, and shuffled past the window. I heard a ripple of pages, the squeak of a chair readjusting. The matron was still awake.

Past the window, further into the darkness. Another rustle of paper, but quieter. My knees ached. The torch, stuffed down my nightdress, was heavy against the fabric of my bodice, and swung with every shuffle.

I felt the wood beneath my palms turn smooth – the second-floor antechamber, with its polished floor and high walls, loomed above me.

Look left. Look right. Nothing.

I pattered across the floor, high on my toes. Ahead of me, a wide staircase sloped downwards to the lobby, stiff and pale in the moonlight. Shadows rose in odd angles, like shards of glass, with-

Footsteps. Behind me.

I lurched down the staircase, into the fold of those crooked shadows, and clamped my hand over my mouth. The footsteps swelled. And faded.

I counted the seconds. Twenty-eight, twenty-nine, thirty seconds of silence. Then I moved on.

-

When I pushed through the heavy doors of the library, I clicked the torch on, throwing light up the walls and across the floor. I’d never been inside a tomb, hadn’t even seen a picture of one, but, edging past the bookshelves and barely able to breathe, I doubted I'd ever need to. There was almost a physicality to the silence, like water or mud, something you had to wade through in strides.

The Harigale library was small, with textbooks and nonfiction filling most of the shelves, and a rectangle of desks at the centre of the room where we could sit and study. The shelves towards the back were restricted, crammed with fiction and storybooks that you needed permission to read, but, for once, I wasn’t interested in those. I went straight for the shelves near the front.

Light skidded over the spines, illuminating the titles. I pulled a thick volume from the shelf, flimsy-paged and bound in white plastic, with a single word stamped in block print across the cover.

DICTIONARY

Lifting my shoulder and wedging the torch into the crook of my neck, I flicked through the slippery pages, my hands stiff with cold. The crackle of paper filled the silence.

‘A’ words. ‘B’ words. ‘C’.

I ran my finger down page after page, as if I were following a line on a map. Change. Changeable. Changeless. Channel.

Was it spelt differently to how I imagined it? I flipped several pages forwards, several pages back. Squinted at every single line. Read each definition twice, even as the clock crawled closer and closer to daybreak, and my eyes began to itch.

It wasn’t there.

-

Sunlight was skimming the horizon by the time I got back to the dorm, and two girls were awake and whispering.

Their eyes swivelled towards me as I entered, snapping to the torch in my hand.

"Been for a walk?" one asked, her voice low.

I tucked the torch back into the laundry basket, looping it in a cardigan, and then in a dress. Hands fisted in the material, I looked over my shoulder.

"You two ever heard the word 'changeling'?" I said.

One propped herself up on her elbows. "No. What's it mean?"

"I don't know. It's not in the dictionary," I said. "But I know it's a word."

She shrugged. "Maybe it's swearing. They took all the swears out of the dictionaries, I think, a couple of years back. Or it could be to do with sex. None of that's in 'em either."

"Yeah," I said, "Maybe."

I padded back to my bed and climbed beneath the sheets. Seconds later, the girls went back to their whispering, but it was quieter now. Barely more than puffing air.

-

The next day, I took a walk around the grounds.

The weather had turned truly cold now – foot-stampingly, knee-knockingly cold, as if winter were here already. Even though we'd switched to our warm uniforms, with thick tights and duffel coats, the wind still pushed itself beneath my collar like cold fingers, making me square my shoulders and curl my hands under my cuffs.

It cleared my head, though. It blew the dust off my thoughts, made them easier to unpick and organise, so I planned as I walked. By the time I reached the west side of the grounds, where the willow trees sprouted, I knew what I was going to say.

I found him near the Harigale gates, turning soil in the empty flower beds and uprooting the occasional fistful of nettles. His hair was longer than when I'd last seen it, curling down over his neck.

I couldn't ask him.

I had to.

"Joey," I said. He looked round.

I felt a pair of phantom hands reach inside my head and tear my script straight down the middle, scattering it like confetti. My mouth dried.

"I have to ask you something," I said.

He squinted at me. "Have we talked before?"

"I was Alesha. When you met me," I said. I thumbed my name tag. "It's Hilda now."

His mouth fell into a soft 'o' of surprise. "Wow. I didn't expect to..." he rubbed the back of his neck. "I thought I'd, uh, freaked you out for good when I…I didn't think you'd talk to me again."

"It's fine," I said.

"Have you been...doing okay?" he asked. He smiled uncertainly. "Accents going well?"

"Yeah.” My voice was unsteady. I tried again. “Yeah, they’re fine.”

"Good. That's good. I was worried that, uh-" he caught himself, and waved away the thought. "Sorry. Forget that. You said you wanted to ask something?"

Those phantom hands were back again, but now they were scrabbling about for the scraps of the script, grappling for the words, the letters - anything. I could feel phrases pressed against the roof of my mouth, persuasive little touches resting on my tongue, almost-words, ghost-words, so close to being said, but-

"I need you to tell me what a changeling is."

No build up. No preamble. Just ten words, and then the sight of Joey's face paling.

“Who said-?” he cleared his throat. “Where did you hear that?”

“There were men. On the other side of the gate,” I said. “They said it.”

“To you? When?”

“Weeks ago.”

He rubbed his forehead, smearing powdery mud up the side of his temple. His eyes wouldn’t meet mine.

“You know what it means,” I said.

He glanced over me, turning his trowel over and over in his hands. Seconds passed.

“How much do you know about what you’re here for?” he said eventually, in a far-off voice.

I stared. “We’re up for adoption.”

“Yes, but…” he was picking his words carefully. I thought of wobbly footed girls taking care not to step on the cracks. “Do you know anything about why they adopt you?”

A flock of geese passed overhead in a honking squabble, but I was only dimly aware of them. Everything was misting around the edges.

“Tell me what it means,” I said, instead of answering him.

His mouth bobbed open, bobbed shut, as if he was underwater. Everything stopped.

“No,” he said. “I can’t. I’m sorry.”

“Tell me or I’ll scream.”

He took hold of my wrist. It was only through my coat, and he was still wearing his thick gardening gloves, but it knocked the wind from me. The matrons never touched us, never even came close.

“Listen,” he said. “I’m sorry, okay? I am. But it’s too much. If they found out I’d- if I tell you, and they figure out it was me who told you what it meant, that’s it for me, alright? I’m finished.”

I snatched my hand away. “If you cared about working here you wouldn’t have talked to me at all.”

“I know, I’ve done some stupid- Christ, I just wanted to be friendly. You grow up, you don’t get friends or attention or- you don’t get treated like people, for God’s sake. But it’s not just- it’s not just losing my job. I tell you what it means, they could try and charge me with- with sabotage or something. It’s too much. I can’t.”

There was a tremor in his voice, and it reminded me of rubber bands, and how girls would stretch them over rulers until they twanged and snapped like a whip. I looked him up and down.

“I’ll tell them you’ve been talking to me,” I said.

He swallowed, Adam’s apple bobbing up and down. “I can't help that.”

Heat filled my chest. “I’ll tell them you said I was special and tried to make me kiss you. I’ll tell them you touched me.”

He flinched. “What?”

“I’ll tell them you made me change to look like you wanted, and that you threatened to hurt me if I told-”

“Alesha, what the hell are you-?”

“I’ll make them believe me,” I said, spitting the words out like pips. “It happened to another girl once. She told us what it was like.”

Joey stared at me, his eyes blown wide with fear. I forced myself to look at him.

“I’ll go back and do it right now unless you tell me what it means,” I said.

“No, you-” he said. “Alesha, you can't- think about this for a second, don’t just-”

I turned around and started marching towards the House. Blood pounded in my head.

“Wait- wait, Alesha, for God’s sake-”

I leaned forwards to run, but there were fingers grabbing the back of my coat, yanking me back. I pushed forwards, heaved, thought of tug of war with old rope in the summer – and then the fingers were gone, and I was falling and the ground was closer and I threw my hand out and-

Something cracked.

The world slid in and out of focus. I could taste mud.

“Oh my god, are you-? I didn’t mean to-”

Joey’s face swam in front of me, mouthing words from a million miles away. He tried to lift me up, his own hands shaking, but pain screamed up my arm and I screamed with it.

“Sorry, sorry! It’s your- you landed on your wrist, I think…”

I looked at my arm. In my dazed brain, I was reminded of bent pipe cleaners, stuck onto cards and crayoned drawings with peeling glue.

“Okay, we just need to…can you stand? You can lean on me, and- give me your good hand…”

My eyes burned. “Get off me.”

“I can’t leave you when you’re-”

“Get off me!”

My chest heaved against the wet grass. Over my sobs, I felt Joey straightening up, bit by bit, opening like crumped card.

"I’m- I’m going to get help, okay?”

I pressed my face to the ground and bit my lip. Joey’s footsteps crunched, faded, and disappeared into the distance, leaving me alone.

-

Next thing, I could smell disinfectant and rubber, and a doctor was easing me upright like an old, half-rotted deckchair. She prodded me with her gloved hands, asked me to tell her where it hurt, whilst the matron behind her paced like a caged animal. Joey watched on, but I didn’t look at him.

By the time we got to the medical wing – a small, blocky building hunched around the back of the house – my arm was throbbing up to the elbow, and felt as fat and heavy as a dumbbell. The indoor heat was hard to breathe in, pressed up against my throat like sweaty hands, and the pale light made my eyes sting.

“Here we are,” the doctor said, guiding me into a small room at the end of the corridor. I saw the shapes of a sink, some cupboards, a computer. Lemon soap scratched at my nostrils.

She settled me on the bed at one side of the room, which was foamy and coverless, and eased my coat off inch by inch. With every shift of fabric, pain squeezed up my arm.

“I’m just going to roll your sleeve up a little,” she said, once my coat was to one side. Her fingers were deft and gentle, but I still had to grit my teeth.

“Joseph says he saw you take a tumble near the gates. Is that what happened?”

My eyes flitted to Joey and back again. I could feel him looking at me.

“Yes, I tripped.”

The doctor turned to the computer and tapped something on the keyboard. She unclipped the name tag from my shirt and turned it this way and that, then pressed it against a metal plate on the desk. From a sideways angle, I saw a file pop up on the screen. She stared at it for a few seconds, nibbling at her lip.

“Well, we’ll get you x-rayed as soon as possible,” she said, and her eyes flickered to the matron. “But from the look of it, I’d guess we’ll need to operate.”

“Is she going to need a cast?” the matron asked.

“Yes, for a few weeks. But they heal quicker than most, these girls. She’ll be fit as a fiddle by Christmas.”

The matron rubbed her jaw. “Could I speak to you privately?”

The doctor cocked her head and gestured to the door. The two stepped outside, leaving Joey and I alone. I kept my eyes on the lino.

“Thank you,” he whispered.

It was quiet enough to pretend I hadn’t heard.

-

They kept me on the ward for several days, even after my arm had been wrapped up and I could move about quite easily. When I asked the nurse why, in between my pared back one-on-one lessons, he told me it was so they could monitor my condition and make sure I recovered as quickly as possible, but his eyes shifted as he said it.

I had my own cubicle, with a firm bed and a desk for food and schoolwork. A tutor came each day to test me on writing and arithmetic, as well as art. She had me copying sketches out of a plastic folder - big, bouncy drawings in metallic colours, like nothing we’d been asked to draw before. I’d never used gel pens in the past.

There was a window of free time in the late afternoon, when I was allowed to walk around and stretch my legs before supper. The medical wing wasn’t large, but every room and corridor had the same stinging smell, the same polished surfaces, so I got lost once or twice. Sometimes I passed other girls as I wandered, all of them droopy and grey in their nightgowns, but they never looked my way, and it soon became apparent that we weren’t supposed to talk.

Yet on my fifth day on the ward, as I turned the corner back towards my room, there was a girl waiting at my door.

-

I wondered if there was something wrong with her head, at first. That happened to girls sometimes – their speech would start skipping, and their memories would get jumbled, and they’d be taken away by the nurses. But she didn’t look lost; her neck was awkward and strained, and she was rubbing her thumb and forefingers together, trying too hard to look nonchalant. When she caught sight of me, she beckoned with the tiniest curl of her hand.

“I was told to give you this,” she murmured.

I felt hard edges and tissue, something oblong being pressed into my hands. I stared at her. “What?”

“Some man gave it me.” She shrugged. “A matron, I guess.”

A lump thickened in my throat. “Why?”

“Didn’t ask.”

She sidestepped me, but I grabbed a fistful of her nightgown. “What did he look like?”

Her eyes moved to my hand, reproachful. “Curly hair.”

My fingers slackened. I pushed my shoulder to the door, the parcel pressed flat against my stomach, and clambered onto the bed. Heart thumping, I pulled off the first covering of tissue. Then the next.

Letters showed clearly through the last layer. Oxford English Dictionary.

Hands shaking, I lifted it out, cupping it in my palms. The cover was shiny. It smelt of advesives and fresh ink. As I smoothed open the first page, a note fluttered into my lap.

Destroy it after.

I swallowed hard. My fingers flicked ahead, the paper rustling. With the edge of my nail, I traced the columns, scanning each definition in turn. I stopped.

Changeling /ˈtʃeɪn(d)ʒlɪŋ/ n. - a child believed to have been secretly substituted by fairies for the parents' real child in infancy.