Chapter 15: Lessons
Standing in the Logres common room doorway, the junior in charge of answering the front door stared at me. “But you’re here.” She didn’t understand why anyone wouldn’t want to speak to the magnificent Eddy Moon.
“I know, but look, I’m not in the mood. Tell him I’m not here, please.” I gave her an encouraging smile.
She left, but in less than a minute she was back. “I’m sorry Maddie, he knows you’re here.”
“Oh for God’s sake, you told him?”
She shrugged. “He asked me, and I didn’t know, I felt...”
I sighed. She was probably only thirteen. There was no way she could lie to Eddy, if he gave her the full regal treatment. “It’s okay.”
“Maddie, he said to tell you it’s his birthday.” Her eyes opened wide, I could tell Eddy had got her completely awestruck.
“Really? Oh no.”
I bet that she could remember every birthday she ever had. For me to sit there and ignore Eddy’s birthday request would rank me alongside murderers and cannibals. I had no way out. I stood up. “Alright.”
Her face lit up. “Oh good!”
I went out to the porch. “Hello.” I looked over Eddy’s shoulder, at the trees growing beside the path. I knew the effect his face could have on me. “Is it really your birthday?”
“Of course. Well, Mr. Neil said it was.”
I winced at the mention of his name. “So, um, happy birthday I guess.”
“Thanks Maddie.”
“So is that why you came? To tell me it’s your birthday? I’m sorry, I didn’t get you anything.”
“No Maddie, you don’t have to. I came to say thank you for all the stuff that you’ve already given me. Everything at Camelot is going so well, because of you.”
I couldn’t help myself; I flushed with pride and glanced up at his face. There it was, the serious, beautiful majesty that I loved so. I gulped. “You’re welcome, I suppose.”
“And how about you? How are you getting on?”
“I’m alright.” I sighed. “Actually no. I’m in the Southern Schools in two weeks, and it’s stressing me out and I’m confused. Who’s mental? Are you mental?” I pointed at him. “Or you and my Mum both?” I turned my other hand palm up. “Or maybe you’re both sane and it’s me that’s a loony.” I held my breath. Are you mental? Nice.
He grinned, a big toothy grin. “Pretty crazy, I know how it must seem. So that’s what I came to say. Can we put all that stuff on hold? Can we go back to how we were before?” He raised his eyebrows and opened his eyes wide. “Honestly, I really appreciated your help with the speechmaking stuff. It was absolutely brilliant. How smart you are.”
Eddy was playing me, but still I flushed. “I heard you won them all over. Well done.”
“No, I couldn’t have done it without you. It was as much you as me.”
“So what are you saying? We hang out, no more talk of me being Lady of whatever and...”
“And we just see what happens. How does that sound?”
I nodded. It wasn’t my best option. My best option involved touching my fingertips to the back of his big, golden skinned hand. Touching his hand and then...
“Maddie? Do you think it will be alright?”
I started. “Um, yeah. For now it’ll be okay.”
“Really?” Again he hit me with his beautiful, happy grin. “That’s great.” His arms moved outwards at his sides. For a moment I thought he was going to hug me, and my heart drummed in my chest. I hadn’t touched him since our moonlit ride across the fields.
Eddy clapped his hands together.
I sighed.
“So? What should we do? What should I do?” He looked at me expectantly. After the help I gave him with his public speaking, it seemed Eddy saw me as some kind of oracle.
“Well. I guess...” I sat down on one of the stone porch benches, and Eddy elegantly folded himself onto the one facing me. “So, Mr. Neil. He set up this school. He set it up for you?”
“For me?”
“For you and the others, the wakers. This place was put together to be your training ground.”
“You think so?”
I nodded. “I’m pretty sure. Why else would he start a school? A school like this? Why didn’t you come here earlier?”
“I didn’t want to. I refused.”
“You refused!” I stared at him.
“Kieran didn’t want me to come, and so I tried to get my own back by saying, you know, I didn’t care, I didn’t want to come anyway.”
I sighed. “You poor thing. Anyway, you’re here now. And I think, the thing is, to take as much advantage of it as you can. You know how important contacts are later on in life. Here at Levels you have the chance to make hundreds of really good contacts. You’re surrounded by people whose families are important, and who are going to be important themselves when they’re older. For example, what does Tiago Toscano’s family do?”
“His mother is Brazilian ambassador to China.”
“Exactly. My point exactly. What about, what about, Gennady?”
“Ivanovich? His father’s like, the second richest man in Russia. He owns half the aluminium in the world.”
I nodded. “Everybody says Brazil is going to be one of the most important countries in the world soon. And I saw this TV programme about resources. The conflicts of the future are going to be about resources. Do you read the Economist?”
“No.”
“You should start. And, and...” Ideas swirled in my head. The concept of Eddy as the once and future king, with the mission to save mankind, was intoxicating. It was a gigantic train rumbling past, while I tried to jump onboard. “With all these different nationalities here, you should learn languages. If you’re going to stop, like fighting and stuff, it’ll be huge if you can talk to people in their mother tongue.”
“I can speak French.”
“That’s not really what I meant. I’m fairly certain Levels does GCSE Chinese and Arabic. You need to start off with those two.”
Eddy grimaced. “Really? That might not be easy.”
I frowned. “Come on, smart boy like you, you’ll manage.”
He nodded, then smiled. “Fair point.”
“Right.” I stood up. “Let’s get started now. Let’s see if we can get you enrolled on those language programmes.” I led the way to the school office.
The next day Eddy had his first Chinese lesson, the day after he began studying Arabic, and after two weeks he stunned Rami Ahmed by asking him about the rugby team in his mother tongue.
What with his extra studying, I saw Eddy less and less, but I wasn’t left sitting around fretting about it, as my own schedule became steadily more packed. With the Southern Schools swim meet fast approaching coach had me training six days a week, either before or after school.
History lessons were one of the few occasions we could be guaranteed one another’s company. Though I still sat next to Pippa, she packed up quickly at the end of the lesson and trotted out the room with the other students, leaving Eddy and I slowly squeezing textbooks into our bags.
Eddy looked up from his back pack, flashing his sculptured beauty across the classroom at me. His tan had faded, making his eyes even more extraordinary. “Good lesson.”
I gulped. “Mm-hmm. But I’ve been thinking. Maybe you should drop history.”
“Really? But I thought, you know, studying the great men of the past...”
“I know. But I think you’ve got the principles.” I zipped up my pencil case. “You can get most of it just by reading at home.” I realised I was cutting one of our only ties, but the realisation was overruled by my weird drive to help him out. “And I’m still studying it. I’ll tell you what happens.”
He nodded and did up the buckles on his bag. “So what do you think I should do instead?”
I hoisted my bag onto my shoulder. “Economics. Come on, let’s go and talk to the office about it.”
Eddy
sighed. “They’ll be sick of me, always changing my mind.”
I snorted. “What? Your guardian practically owns the school. Work it.”
He lingered in the doorway behind me.
I looked back. “What?”
“I don’t know.” He ran his finger under the number on the door. “I’ll miss this place. It’s where we met.”
With a hand on the cool, stone wall, I stopped. “I know.”
“I’ve never felt like I did when I sat next to you.”
I stared at him. Not once had Eddy ever given me any indication of this. “What do you mean?”
“At my other school I never really spoke to girls, but when I saw you there, with the empty chair next to you, I couldn’t stop myself.” He descended two steps towards me. “I remember your perfume, and the way you tucked your hair behind your ear. How huge and dark your eyes were when you looked at me. I had to focus so intensely to stop my hands from shaking.”
In the gloomy stairwell Eddy seemed to be floating above me, gigantic and ethereal.
“Really? I had no idea.” I swallowed, trying not to think about my racing pulse. “Do you still like my perfume?”
He flapped his hands in front of him. “Come on Maddie, I’ve got Chinese in ten minutes.”
I stepped sideways down the stairs. “So what happened?”
“I stopped thinking about it. When I knew we couldn’t... You know. I stopped.”
“And it’s that simple for you?”
“More or less. Come on.”
He was unbelievable. Just when I thought I had a handle on Eddy Moon he said something like that and stunned me. “Okay,” I whispered, and descended the stairs.
Out in the courtyard I looked at my feet as I spoke. “Actually Eddy, I forgot. I’ve got extra long swim practice, starting now. You’ll be okay at the school office?” I needed to escape him, to breathe. His presence over-powered me.
“Oh, alright. Thanks anyway. The competition is the day after tomorrow, right?”
The swimmers had been given Saturday off school, we were travelling by coach to an aquatics centre on the south coast somewhere.
“Mm-hm.”
“Well, if I don’t see you before, good luck. Short message service me how you’re getting on.”
“Thanks. Okay.” I hurried away from him, found a bench under a tree, and slumped onto it. How could he feel that way about me and say nothing? How could he feel that way about me and subdue it? Pretend it wasn’t there? I raked my nails along the rough grain of the wooden seat. What was going to become of us?
For the first time in my life I welcomed the building anxiety caused by the threat of a sporting competition. I imagined standing on the poolside, waiting for the gun, and the nerves fluttering in my stomach. The sweaty palms and the cold embrace of the water felt as real in my imagination as if they were actually happening two days early. The stress was unpleasant, but still better than fretting over me and Eddy, what I wanted to happen, what he wanted to happen. Worse still, Eddy and me and whatever stupid idea of fate he had that meant we were frozen in a weird, bloodless waltz of good advice and gratitude.
On Saturday I dragged myself out of bed at five and fumbled through dressing in the night chill. I woke Mum up, and she drove me to school to get on the bus at seven. I was representing the school in the two hundred metres freestyle, and the two hundred and four hundred metres breaststroke. In the morning I won all my heats, in the afternoon I won the semi-finals. The last one, the long breaststroke, I won by ten metres and when I got out of the pool a cluster of coaches stood under the clock, muttering to one another and looking at me from the corners of their eyes.
I wrapped my towel around myself and joined the rest of the Level’s swim team, on a row of plastic chairs along the tiled poolside.
Rami Ahmed nodded at me. “Well done Madeleine.”
“Um, thanks Rami.”
“You’re practically a lock for first place, nobody else is coming close to your times.”
“You’re not doing badly yourself.”
Rami grimaced. He represented Level’s in the freestyle and backstroke sprints. Though his swimming style was quite beautiful and he barely made a splash as he slid through the water, he wasn’t built for swimming. His heavy arms and shoulders dragged and weighed him down. “I’ll place, hopefully, top three.” His voice dropped to a rumble. “Now if this was polo, on the other hand...”
“All the horses would be wet,” somebody added from the back row.
Rami’s eyes narrowed for a moment. I could tell he didn’t like being taken lightly, but then he smiled. “And we’d need some extra large swimming costumes.”
The coaches fed us from cool boxes filled with sandwiches and fruit and then we prepared for the finals in the evening. Rami swam in his sprint and came second. He bounced out of the water with a huge grin.
I won the two hundred freestyle, but in the two hundred breast stroke my concentration wavered and a girl from a big London school caught me at the line.
I waited for the four hundred metre breaststroke final wearing a Levels towel and a frown. I knew I should have won the shorter race; I had it in my pocket but got complacent.
When the time came for the four hundred metres I flew into the pool and skimmed the first four lengths as quickly as I could. Turning into the fifth I saw that my closest challenger was half a length away. Careful not to relent I kept my focus, and willed myself into the feeling that I was swimming downhill. I finished a full length ahead of second place and in a record time for the Southern Schools competition.
Again the team congratulated me, but as I stood in their midst I saw surprised looks flickering across the features of those facing me. I turned to meet three coaches from other schools bearing down on us.
“So what’s the trick?” the first asked.
A second jabbed his finger at me. “Where did you get this swim suit?”
The third reached out and plucked at the shoulder strap. “What’s it made from?”
Rami shouldered his way to the front of the Levels team. “Get your hands off her.”
I stared at the coaches. “It’s a perfectly normal swimsuit. Nike.”
My own coach bustled over. “What’s going on here?”
The others turned to him. “You know something’s not right. She hasn’t got the build or the stroke for the kind of times she’s swimming.”
Coach’s face reddened. “What do you mean? Do you have a complaint?”
“We will do as soon as we know what’s going on.”
“There’s nothing going on. Leave her alone.”
The three coaches backed away. Just as he turned to go, the last of them pointed at my stomach. “How do you explain that, then?”
“What?” I looked down at my swimsuit.
The coach scowled. “It’s completely dry.”
He stomped away down the poolside, while I examined my swimsuit. He was right. A wide circle of fabric over my belly was pale and bone dry, save for a line of water beginning to run across it from above.
My teammates and coach stared for a moment, before I crossed my arms over it. “It’s just quick drying,” I mumbled, cheeks crimson. I hurried to my chair, where my towel waited for me, and wrapped myself in it. I slumped into the chair, sunk in thought. The coaches were right, there was a trick, but it had nothing to do with my swimsuit. Since September my swimming had got stronger and stronger and easier and easier, with no justifiable reason, beyond my constant sensation that the water itself was pushing me along. I had gone from an also ran in a school where nobody swam particularly well, to the best girl at my distance in the Southern Schools.
Morning after morning I cycled to school in the rain, and barely got wet.
I swam eight hundred metres, completely immersed in the water, and stayed partly dry. Something like a switch turned in my mind. Resisting had been hard work. It was much easier to accept that Eddy’s and Mum’s Lady of the Lake theory might be true. Look
ing up at the clock on the wall, I planned what I would do when I got home.
With impatience I applauded Levels swimmers through the final five races of the day, then changed hurriedly and stood by the side of the bus waiting for my team to join me. When the door finally opened Rami Ahmed and his friends from the rugby team got on first and headed down the aisle to the back seat. When I filed on the boys called out my name “Madeleine Bride and her magic swimsuit, come and sit with us.”
I pretended not to hear them and sat near the front, IPod plugged in. At Levels Mum leaned against her car, parked by the side of the road, and waved when I got off the bus.
“Hello love, how did you get on?”
“Oh, three wins one second place.”
“No? Really! Oh well done, how did-”
“Mum, can we go home please.”
In the car I tapped my fingers on my thighs, and when we got to Chalice Drive I ran into the kitchen. From under the sink I took a wrench and attacked the cold tap.
“Maddie, what on earth are you doing?”
I gritted my teeth as the wrench slipped. “Nothing Mum.”
“Well it hardly looks like nothing.”
“Just wait a minute. I need to try something.”
The tap handle suddenly came free and clattered into the sink. No water gushed from the hole in the pipe. I dropped the wrench on top of it. Holding my breath I held my hand over the hole in the pipe where the tap had been. Slowly I rippled my fingers, as if I was turning an invisible tap. Nothing happened. I sighed. Then, upstairs somewhere, something gurgled. I heard a familiar whispering in the pipes and water trickled from the tap opening.
“Oh. My. God.” I twitched my fingers and the water stopped, wiggled them again and it flowed. I turned to Mum. “Is there any point in us having taps at all?”