Alchemy. Margaret Mahy

       And suddenly he is terrified and begins to scream: “I don’t want it. I don’t want it. I don’t want to be twisted and changed.” Fear is making him sick… he is actually going to be sick… rendingly sick. He is going to be torn in two.

       WAKING

      Roland woke! He woke, straining and retching, soaked with perspiration though the night around him was cool. More than cool: chilly! For a second or two all he could do was struggle with his convulsing stomach muscles. “Stop it!” he exclaimed, commanding his stomach to behave, just as if it were a disobedient dog. “Be still! Down! Down!” Little by little, he relaxed against his crushed damp pillow, set free from the curious triple life of his dream, back in real time once more.

      That dream! Yet again! Exactly as it had been every other time he had dreamed it. That first dreaming must have engraved itself on him in some indelible way. Always supposing the first dream had really been a dream…

      “Careful,” said the inner voice (familiar by now) intruding as it always did at this point, warning him off… not that he needed to be warned. “Take care.”

      So Roland was careful. He made himself think vague thoughts of school instead. And slowly the repetitive sighing eased and retreated; honest silence repossessed him, filling his head once more. Roland was able to lie in the dark and think things over.

      Of course, other people also had dreams that repeated themselves, but this one seemed even harder to understand now that he was seventeen than it had when he first dreamed it at three or four. Because who could imagine hanging in outer space, and doing nothing except being there? Anyone set free from gravity would want to play some sort of somersaulting game, would want to kick out and dance among the suns, shouting, “Look at me!” And what was the endless word that had begun to sigh at him… that still sighed at him from time to time? It took concentration to hold that word at bay. And why did the sheer nonsense of this dream terrify him in the way that it invariably did? Why was it the harmless ending of the dream and not the darkness inside the coffin that frightened him so much? And why did he always wake out of it sweating and heaving? It was to do with the possibility of becoming something his father might not recognise.

      So why, when he was both frightened by it and impatient with the nonsense of it, did the dream also seem more important than anything going on in his outside life? And why, in spite of his fear, did he sometimes long to hang like a sun among other suns, set in a place into which he fitted perfectly? Maybe it was because he did not quite fit into any other place.

      “Fabuloso!” Roland exclaimed softly in the darkness, copying his father’s voice. “Trickery,” he added, uncertain if he were the trickster or the man who was being tricked. This trickery (if it was trickery) not only worked inside Roland’s overcrowded, argumentative head – it seemed to work remarkably well for him in the outside world as well.

       1. THREE PENS, A PIE AND A NOTEBOOK

      Mr Hudson set a cardboard box on his desk, blinking at Roland in a judicial way as he did so. For some reason this single glance entirely changed Roland’s mood. He knew at once that he was not going to be praised, something he had been anticipating. Whatever it was that had caused Mr Hudson to hold him back from midday break was being heralded by an expression of disapproval – even, Roland realised incredulously, of contempt.

      Flicking the box open, Mr Hudson thrust his left hand into it with the confidence of a conjuror who knows he is going to whisk a rabbit from an empty hat. He drew out, not a rabbit, but a plastic packet containing three fine-tipped pens – red, green and blue – which he set down in front of Roland with grim deliberation. Plunging his hand into the box for a second and then a third time he brought out something in a greasy paper bag, and finally a thick notebook with a red cover.

      Roland’s reaction to these successive revelations must have satisfied a teacher trying to establish a small melodrama. His mouth fell open like an astonished mouth in some over-acted TV sitcom. He was more taken aback than if Mr Hudson really had produced a rabbit, and certainly far more alarmed. After shooting a startled glance at his English teacher, he looked back at the objects placed before him. A great blush swept through him, starting under his hair, and then, driven by powerful shame, burning down through his cheeks, chest and stomach. Of all the people in his class – in the school, even – Roland was famous for smart answers, but he had no answer to the silent accusation that those pens, the greasy bag and that notebook were making as they lay before him.

      “Well?” said Mr Hudson at last. Roland gave a shrug so small it was nothing more than a convulsive twitch. He did not even try to look in the paper bag. He already knew what it must contain. Mr Hudson was confronting him with the exact duplicates of the articles he had stolen only a week ago.

      “It’s not as if you couldn’t afford to buy them,” said Mr Hudson. “Shoplifting is a contemptible crime, don’t you think?”

      Roland remained silent. There was no excuse for it; there was not any true explanation – not one that made any sense, even to him. Here he was – seventeen years old, licensed to drive, a moderately well-to-do seventh form student, a prefect, with the prospect of scholarship exams coming up at the end of the year. Not only that, he was going out with Chris Glennie who was possibly the brightest, and certainly the most beautiful, girl in the school. How could he have risked screwing things up by shoplifting three pens, a pie and a notebook? All the same, that was what he had done. The pie was gone, eaten almost immediately, but in the drawer of his desk at home, three pens in a plastic envelope, along with a red covered notebook, exact twins to the objects Mr Hudson had just set down in front of him, were lying, totally unused.

      It had been one of those days – a day like today for that matter – when he had been allowed to drive his mother’s car to school, with the proviso that he bring home a few family groceries. He had parked, crossed the road opposite the café painted blue and silver, and, turning right into the arched mall, had walked along it into the ultimate temple of the supermarket. He could clearly remember the moment when the impulse overtook him, could even remember the people to left and right of him, all busy acting on impulses of their own. A mother with a baby in a pushchair went sliding past him. A couple of young women were fidgeting by the rack of greeting cards, showing the cards to one another and laughing as they did so. Just beyond them, a man in a long black coat held out a length of wrapping paper and stared down at it, apparently trying to work out if it were wide enough for his needs. The notebook had slipped into Roland’s back pocket, just as easily as the package of pens, less than a minute later, slid inside his open collar to nestle over his heart, the bulge well-hidden by the Crichton College blazer. Earlier, he had chosen a pie from a small oven set at eye-level on the wall in the fast-food section, and had placed it carefully in the supermarket trolley among the groceries his mother needed. Moving into the frozen food section, he had leaned across the handle of the trolley and, easing the pie out of its paper bag, had begun to eat it, almost absentmindedly. No one had seemed to notice, not even the young woman who had suddenly rounded the low, open-refrigerated section, advancing on him briskly in her blue supermarket smock. He remembered looking at her defiantly, expecting some sort of accusation. But she must have been concentrating on some internal supermarket errand, for she had hurried on without so much as glancing at him.

      And now it appeared that Mr Hudson must have been somewhere close at hand – must have been spying on him down some oblique supermarket vista, and must have been watching him closely enough to know the colours of the stolen pens and just which notebook he had chosen. And then he had obviously chosen for himself the exact objects he had seen Roland stealing, presumably to add drama to this confrontation. Cheap drama, thought Roland, staring at his teacher with tattered defiance.

      “Why did you do it?” asked Mr Hudson again. (“Why did you?” Roland wanted to retort,