Twenty-Four Hours. Margaret Mahy

between his front teeth flashed – a flash of darkness. Ellis tried to imagine a gap-toothed Hamlet. Why not? There weren’t any orthodontists in Shakespeare’s day. For all that, he found he couldn’t quite imagine Hamlet with a gap in his front teeth. “Why did your parents send you away to school?” Jackie asked. “Were they trying to get rid of you, or what?”

      “It was my dad’s old school,” said Ellis. “He loved it there, and he thought I would, too.”

      “I’d have hated it,” declared Jackie with complete certainty.

      “It was all right,” said Ellis.

      The wind flung fistfuls of rain in their faces, drops flying towards them like transparent bullets.

      “OK! Swing right!” Jackie commanded. “In here.”

      A couple of minutes later Ellis was sitting at a table in a café bow window, with an oblique view of the city centre. Because it was so well lit, and yet a little distant, he was teased again by the idea that he was looking on to a stage, and that someone was busily operating a wind machine in the wings.

      Jackie slid back from the bar where he had been talking in a familiar way with a barman. He was carrying two short, brown bottles of lager, a glass upended on top of one of them, and a bowl of mixed nuts and potato chips which he passed to Ellis. Then he slumped into his chair and put the bottle to his mouth, sensuously kissing its brown lips. Ellis put the glass to one side and drank from the bottle, too.

      “Saves the washing-up,” he said.

      Jackie grinned, his grin hyphenated by darkness. “So, let’s just watch the world go by for a minute or two,” he said. “Then, if you like,” he added with a slyness that was not intended to deceive, “we can take off to a party I know about. Well, we can if you’ve got wheels. Bigger wheels than mine, that is,” he added, glancing down at his skates.

      “Oh, I see,” Ellis replied with satisfying irony. “You’re not just – you know – being nice!”

      “No way, mate!” exclaimed Jackie indignantly. “This is straight-out exploitation. Trust me!”

      “Suppose I don’t have a car?” Ellis asked. “What’ll you do? Skate to the party with me running beside you?”

      “But you have got a car,” said Jackie. “I took one look at you and I just knew! ‘Now, there’s a man with a car,’ I said to myself, and I was right, wasn’t I?”

      He spoke drowsily, almost absent-mindedly. But there was something far from sleepy moving in the eyes behind those heavy lids.

      “It’s my mother’s car,” said Ellis. “I’m supposed to be home in …” he looked at his watch “… in about a hour.”

      “Did you promise?” asked Jackie.

      “Well, I didn’t exactly promise …” said Ellis.

      Jackie relaxed. “Thank God,” he said. “You really frightened me then because you’re probably one of those pricks that keep their promises. It would have ruined everything.”

      “What I am is the prick with the car,” Ellis reminded him. Jackie laughed and nodded.

      “Yeah! Right! Nice one!” he said. “Now – this party! It’s out along the motor way … a country party. I could skate, but it would be easier if you drove me.”

      Ellis remembered he had promised himself wild adventures and no apologies. And, after all, he had made his mother no real promises.

      “OK, then!” he said.

      Immediately, a new ease engulfed Jackie who flopped back in his chair.

      “Your turn to tell me,” Ellis went on. “What have you been up to?”

      “Oh, about up to here,” said Jackie, leaning sideways in his chair and holding his hand, fingers splayed, about an inch from the ground. “No real job. No self-respect. Mind you, the way I see it, self-respect is the easiest sort of respect to get, isn’t it? Me – I want respect with a bit more challenge to it.” He eased himself upwards in his chair once more as he went on talking. “I make a few dollars here and there, but basically I just fiddle around. I’m a born fiddler.”

      “Yeah, I can tell,” said Ellis.

      A piece of wastepaper whirled past the window and disappeared into the deepening, summer evening. The city was still embraced by a largely tearless storm.

      Jackie slapped his hand down hard on the table.

      “Five! Four! Three! Two! ONE!” he exclaimed, leaping to his feet and draining the rest of his beer. The movement upwards married into a movement forwards. “Blast-off!” he cried.

      Before Ellis’s eyes he become charged with both energy and mischief. Hastily, Ellis drank half his beer and then, remembering he would be the driver, left the rest of it on the table. He followed Jackie into the street and they wove their way, side by side, back to the parking lot where Ellis had left his mother’s car.

      “Straight down the Great North Road,” said Jackie, scrambling into the passenger seat. “It’s a sort of barbecue party. Begins – officially, that is – with five o’clock drinks. So, by the time we get there, they mightn’t care who’s turning up. Unless they’ve been rained out.”

      “If it’s an inside party they mightn’t let us in,” said Ellis almost hopefully. He wanted the adventure, but felt dubious about gatecrashing a private party.

      “Why not?” said Jackie, sounding affronted. “I mean, look at us: clean, smiling! Both respectable guys! Eh?”

      Ellis felt certain that Jackie had chosen him not merely because he had a car, but because his curling hair and tidy clothes might persuade someone, somewhere to welcome them in.

       5.50 pm – Friday

      As they surged on to the motorway, heading north, the suburbs fell away altogether. Moving deeper into the country, Ellis felt a change coming over Jackie Cattle. He had not understood just how tense his companion had been until Jackie shifted in the seat beside him, sighing as he relaxed.

      They crossed a long bridge curving over one of the five rivers that braided and divided the plains between city and mountains, and Ellis glimpsed below him threads of water winding, separating, then weaving together again, negotiating wide, flat beds of grey shingle. Gusts of wind beat the river surfaces into angry grey-green ripples ticked with silver.

      “Next turn-off, move into the left lane,” Jackie instructed, smiling in secret satisfaction.

      Oh, no! Ellis thought automatically. He had been driven along this motorway, turning left at that very corner, many times throughout his childhood, and never with any pleasure. Come off it! he told himself derisively, as they curved away from the motorway and on to a long, straight road with fences, hedges and occasional gateways on either side. Just because … he began thinking, then forced himself to notice the ordinary roadsides as if he had never seen them before. Some gates had signs beside them listing fruit and vegetables which could be bought during the day, but most signs were lying flat on the grass, flapping and bucking wildly as the wind pushed powerful fingers under them. One particular sign, hanging by short chains from a wooden support that reminded Ellis of a gallows, was stretched out almost parallel with the ground, straining to escape. The words, Fresh Lettuce, Tomatoes, Avocados, angled into sight, then vanished once more.

      But they were driving out of the path of the storm. The road ahead was suddenly dry. Hedges and trees which had been writhing on either side of the road were suddenly less convulsive, the sideways thrust on the car much less insistent.

      It was hard for Ellis to imagine any connection between the friends of his parents who lived along this road