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The Changes Trilogy

The Weathermonger, Heartsease, and The Devil's Children

OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA

BECOMING A CANARY

"Nicola Gore," said Nicky. "I am Nicola Gore."

She turned on her right heel, kicking herself around and around with her left foot, until the leather of the heel began to drill a neat, satisfying hole among the roots of the six-inch grass.

"Nicola Gore," she said as she spun. "Nicola Gore. Nicola Gore. Nicola Gore."

She was talking to herself, of course, because there was no one else to talk to. The last living person she'd seen had been the one-legged old man who sat on his doorstep in the sun, waiting to die and talking about his boyhood in Hammersmith more than sixty years ago, when the noise of London traffic had been the rattle and grate of iron wheels on cobbles.

Now the only noise was birdsong, and Nicky saying her own name to herself, aloud in the enormous loneliness.

The old man had gone from his doorstep twelve days ago. She had promised not to try and look for him, because he had said his going would be the sign.

And it was nineteen days before that since she'd last talked to anyone she really knew, anyone who loved her. She turned and turned. It was taking longer to get dizzy now than it had when she'd first discovered the trick.

They weren't going to come and find her now, were they? She'd done what she'd always been told to, if ever she was lost—waited where she'd last seen Mummy and Daddy, waited for a day and a night and another day, watching the dull-eyed ranks of refugees straggle toward Dover. Then she had set her chin and walked the other way, back to the drained city, looking at all the faces of the people who were leaving but not answering any questions, no matter how kindly. If she went home, someone would come and look for her, surely.

But they hadn't.

Just in time, before the tears came, the long wave of dizziness began to wash over her. Nicky had discovered this trick quite early. If you could get yourself dizzy enough, you stopped being Nicola Gore, alone and frightened and miserable in great empty London, and you became a sort of daze without a name, a blurred bit of a blurred world. She went on turning as long as she could still stand. Then she fell.

When the blurs began to settle into shapes again they were the tops of trees. She lay on her back in the spider-peopled grass and looked at the blue, unmottled sky. It had been like that every day, except for the hideous thunderstorm on the road to Dover. Would it last forever? No, it was July now, but one day it would be winter. She'd have to go before then. She ought to go now, before she caught the sickness down the road, or another sickness from living on lemon soda and pretzels and nuts looted out of empty pubs. She must set her chin again, become hard and uncaring, endure a world of strangers.

She knew that when it came to leaving she would need something to make her do it, but the impulse to action levered her out of the grass. Listlessly she looked around the place which five weeks ago had been called Shepherd's Bush Green, London, W.14. A four-acre triangle of turf, crisscrossed with paths and dotted with trees; around it ran a wide road; blank shops lined the northern side, and unfinished towers of flats and offices rose to the south. Nasty engines squatted in the road, silent and useless; they were all dead, since the people who had once made them work and move had left, but even so Nicky preferred not to go near them. Luckily there were gaps between them, where Nicky could tiptoe through, then scamper along the pavement of Shepherd's Bush Road, around the corner and home.

That's where she ought to be now, waiting in case they came after all, but it was better here among the trees. This was where you could get furthest from the dead machines and the black unnatural roads that stank strangely under the downright sun. And she had pinned her notice to the door, saying where she was, just as she'd done for the last twenty-eight days. Still, perhaps she'd better go and see.

She turned listlessly on her heel again, knowing it was useless to go back home and that she would have to make the effort not to cry when she got there and found the notice untouched. Dully she kept turning, like a slow top, and felt her heel beginning to bite yet another neat round hole into the earth below the squashed grass.

About the ninth time she went around she saw a movement up at the east end of the Green.

At first she thought that it was just the dizziness, coming sooner than usual and making the world tilt about, but next time around she stopped being a top and stood swaying and peering. The movement was people.

For no reason she slid toward the nearest tree trunk and hid.

There were quite a lot of them, and the colors were wrong. It was like a procession in fancy dress. All the men had beards, and they wore mauve and pink and purple hats. No, not hats. There was a word for them ... and there was a word for the women's bright, slim dresses, which reached right down to their ankles ... and another word for these people with their strange clothes and beards and brown skins ... or was it all something she had once dreamed she knew about? There were blank bits in her mind nowadays. Perhaps it was the loneliness.

Four of the men came in front, carrying heavy sticks; behind them marched a big group pushing carts and prams or carrying bright-colored bundles; several children walked among the prams; one cart was covered with cushions, on which an old lady was propped up; at the back came another four men, also armed with heavy sticks. They moved very slowly, like a funeral, along the north side of the Green. They were quite silent, apart from the iron wheels of the handcarts grating on the tarmac, until they were nearly opposite where Nicky was hiding. Then a high voice shrieked an incomprehensible sentence from amid the group of prams and the whole procession halted. They all began talking together as they spread themselves out on the grass, sat down and started to eat the food which the women passed among them.

The dizziness had gone from Nicky's body but her mind still seemed fuzzy with it. These people ... she'd seen men and women like them before, strolling along these very pavements, doing their weekend shopping ... but that was in the part of her memories which nowadays she seemed to find it hard to think about, like dreams you know you've had but somehow can't bring back when you're awake. Now, staring at these dark-skinned, bright-dressed people, she only felt their difference and their strangeness.

But they were people, and they were going somewhere.

Her mind made itself up without being asked. She slipped away along the tree trunks, across the road at the gap between the bad machines, along the pavement to where the old traffic lights stood blind as stone, left down Shepherd's Bush Road—walking now, and panting with the heat, and her neck sore from where the collar of her filthy shirt stuck to the sweaty skin—and along her home street.

Not home anymore. The street was dead, and buzzing with flies in the stinking, tarry heat.

Yes, her note was pinned to the pink door, untouched; but this time she didn't feel her throat narrowing and her eyes peppery with useless tears. She pushed the door open and ran up the stairs to her own room. Even this, with its brown carpet and the pictures of ships on the walls, didn't feel like home now. She took her satchel from the shelf, wiped the dust off it with her sleeve, undid the straps and tilted the meaningless books out onto the floor. Into the bottom of the satchel she stuffed a jersey, a spare skirt, her party blouse, the socks she'd managed to wash in soda water, and her gym shoes.

Anything else which she needed or wanted? Not Teddy, comfort though he'd been. None of the school uniforms. Nothing to make her remember home or Mummy or Daddy. That was all over now—it had happened to somebody else, a girl with parents to love her and look after her. But Nicola Gore was going to look after herself, and not let anybody love her again, ever. It wasn't worth the loss.

Out of her desk drawer she took the blunt hunting knife which she'd bought with her own money at the fair when she was staying with Granny at Hertford; and from the blue jar on the mantelpiece she took the coral and gold necklace which one of her godmothers had given her at her christening, but she could never remember which.

Then she ran down to the kitchen, picking her way to the larder between the horrible smashed machines. Two bottles of lemon soda and one of soda water from her last pub raid; the packets of nuts and the salty biscuits. Her satchel was full now, and heavy too. She slung its strap over her shoulder, picked up her pencil from the hall table, and pushed the door wide open until she could lean against it to write on her notice without its moving away.

She crossed out her last message, about being up at the Green, and wrote beneath it "I'm going away now. I waited for twenty-eight days."

She was pulling the door shut when she thought that that sounded as though she was blaming them, so she pushed it open again and wrote underneath "I'm sure you would have come if you could. Love, Nicky."

When she pulled the door shut for the last time she felt that there ought to be some way of fastening it, but she couldn't remember how the lock worked. So she just made certain that the drawing pins were firmly fastened into her note, turned away and walked down the street without once looking back. She started to be afraid that she would be too late, but it was awkward to run with her satchel so heavy. It didn't matter; they were still there when she reached the Green again; the strange, dark children were playing a game of "touch" under the trees.

Beyond them the adults lolled or squatted on the grass. The whole group chattered like roosting starlings. The noise of their talk bounced off the shop fronts, and all of a sudden made the Green feel as though people were living there once again. Yes, thought Nicky, these foreign-looking folk would do. She could go with them, and yet stay strangers always. It was a good thing they were so different. She sidled like a hunter toward the scampering children.

She was waiting by a tree trunk, beyond the fringe of the game, when one of the smaller boys scuttered from an exploding group which the "he" had raided. He came straight toward her squealing with laughter until he was hardly six feet away; and then he saw her. At once he stopped dead, called with a shrill new note, and pointed at her. Then he stood staring. His eyes were very dark; his hair was black and gathered into a little topknot behind his head. His skin looked smooth as silk and was a curious, pale brown-not the yellow—brown of suntan, but a grayer color, as if it was always like that. His mouth pouted.

The game stopped at his call, not quite at once, but in spasms of scuttering which stilled into the same dark stare. Now the adults' heads were turning too; the thick beards wagging around; the worried, triangular faces of the women turning toward Nicky. One of the women called; two children ran to her side and stared from there. The other children melted back toward the adults, looking over their shoulders once or twice. Several of the men were on their feet, grasping their heavy staves and peering not at her but up and down the Green. Now the whole group was standing, except for the little old woman who had ridden on the cart; she still sat on the ground and gazed with piercing fierceness at Nicky from among the legs of the men. Then she cried out suddenly, only three or four words, like the call of a bird. The words were not English.

A big man bent and scooped her off the grass, like a mother picking up her baby; he carried her to the cushioned cart, which was brightly painted with swirling patterns—it was the sort of handcart that street-market stall holders had used for pushing their goods about. The old woman settled herself on the cushions, stared at Nicky again, and called another few words. At once the whole group trooped off the grass and took up their positions for the march.

Nicky ran forward from under the trees. They were all watching her still, as though she might be the bait in some unimaginable trap.

"Please," she called. "May I come with you?"

A rustle ran through the group like the rustle of dead leaves stirring under a finger of wind. One of the worried women said something, and three of the men answered her. Nicky could tell from their voices that they were disagreeing with her. The old woman spoke a single syllable, and the nearest man shook his head at Nicky. He was short and fat and his beard was flecked with gray; his hat was pink, only it wasn't a hat, of course—it was a long piece of cloth wound in and out of itself in clever folds to cover his head and hair.

"Please," she said again. "I'm all alone and I don't know where to go."

"Go away, little girl," said the fat man. "We can't help you. You are not one of us. We owe you nothing."

"Please," began Nicky, but the old woman called again and at once the whole group began to move.

They walked off quite slowly, not because they wanted to move like a funeral, but because they couldn't go faster than the slowest child. Nicky stood and watched them, all shriveled with despair at the thought of facing the huge loneliness of London once again.

She stepped into the road to watch the strange people turn the corner north. (If they'd wanted to go south they would have started down the other side of the Green.) But instead they went straight ahead, up the Uxbridge Road, toward the doorstep where the one-legged man had sat in the sun.

Nicky began to run.

Her satchel dragged her sideways and thudded unsteadily into her hip. A rat tail of dirty fair hair twisted into her mouth and she spat it out. Her soles slapped on the hot pavement and the echo slapped back at her off the empty shops. When she crossed the big road at the end of the Green the strange people were only a hundred yards down it, so slow was their march. She ran on, gasping.

They must have heard her coming, because one of the four men who walked in the rear came striding back toward her, his stave grasped in both hands like a weapon.

"Go away, little girl," he said sharply. "We don't want you. We can't help you."

Nicky stopped. He was taller and younger than the fat man who had spoken to her before, and frowned at her very fiercely.

"No! Don't go that way!" she said between gasps. "There's a bad sickness that way. An old man told me. He said he was going to catch the sickness and die. He made me promise not to go down there. He said he'd seen people staggering about and then falling down dead in the street."

The dark man moved his stave, so that it stopped being a weapon and became a stick to lean on.

"This is true?" he asked.

"Yes, of course."

He looked at her for several seconds, just as fiercely as before. Then, without another word to her, he turned and called after the procession in the strange language. Beyond him Nicky could see two or three faces turn. A cry came back, the man answered and another cry came. By this time the whole group had stopped.

"Come with me," said the man without looking around, and strode off up the street. Nicky followed.

Men, women and children stood staring and unsmiling, still as a grove of trees, while she walked between them. When they reached the cushioned cart where the old woman lay, the man stopped and spoke for some time. The old woman creaked a few words back at him. Her face was all shriveled into wrinkles and folds as though it had been soaked too long in water, but her thin hooky nose stood out of the wrinkles like the beak of a hawk, and her dark brown eyes shone with angry life. She looked like a queen witch.

"Tell your story again, please, miss," said the man.

Nicky had stopped panting, so she could fit her words together into proper sentences; but she was so afraid of the old woman that she found she could hardly speak above a whisper. She felt the other people drawing closer, so as to be able to hear.

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Excerpted from The Changes Trilogy by Peter Dickinson. Copyright © 1986 Peter Dickinson. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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