Juby's Rook

Chapter One

It was the last year of the old century, and Midge Miller hadn’t smiled for a week. She was fifteen and bored out of her mind: away from home, friends, everything she knew, liked, owned, in the dullest backwater imaginable. There wasn’t even a TV in her room. Wasn’t a TV in the entire crummy house. Yet even here, in this mood, she couldn’t help a small laugh at the sight from her window above the bookshop. The gangling old man who’d parked outside the inn across the road had just struggled out of his prehistoric Volkswagen, and, straightening up, revealed that he was one of the tallest men she’d ever seen, which made his car seem one of the smallest. 
          ‘Juby!’ 
          She jumped – hadn’t heard the floorboards – and before she could turn, Inger was crouching at her shoulder, also peering out.
          ‘I was beginning to wonder if he was going to give this year a miss. He’s usually here before the second week if he’s coming. Must be slowing up at last. Or do I mean down, I can never remember.’
          ‘You know him?’ Midge said.
          ‘Oh, yes. An old, old friend. And he and Edwin were boys together. Juby comes over every August from Germany to prowl round childhood haunts.’ 
          ‘Germany?’
          ‘He lives there. In Wiesbaden. He could stay here when he visits, but him and Edwin – tuh! The tension when they’re together, you could cut it with scissors.’ 
          They watched the incredibly tall man lean into the car for the jacket that matched his sagging black trousers. As he attempted to put the jacket on, all arms and elbows that seemed uncertain which way to go, Inger rose from her crouch. 
          ‘What I came up for,’ she said, ‘was to ask if you’re helping in the shop again today.’ 
          Midge stiffened. Placed the thumb and fingertips of one hand on the window glass. Five tense digits. The other five a claw at her side. It was like being at home. You always had to be doing something. Couldn’t just sit at a window minding your own business, oh no. Criminal offence, looking out of a window. 
          ‘If you like.’
          ‘It’s not compulsory,’ Inger said with the kind of edge she usually reserved for Edwin. 
          Midge let her hand fall from the glass; tried to sound less fed up. 
          ‘No. Really. I don’t mind.’
          ‘When you’re ready then. No rush.’
          Then she was alone again, watching the ungainly old man negotiate the doorway of The Ferryman. To pass through the entrance – low even for people of normal height – he had to drop his head to shoulder level, but as his shoulders were higher than the top of most men’s heads he still managed to crack his skull. Again she laughed. Woh, two laughs in two minutes. A laugh a minute, have to watch that, people will think being abandoned by your parents is fun.
          Abandoned. Well, it felt like it. Most of the time her parents shuffled papers at the Earthsave International offices in Worcester, but every now and then some big threat to humanity would crop up somewhere in the world and they’d be off with a boatload of other superheroes to try and prevent it, frustrate it, or aggravate its perpetrators. This time it was some lunatic dictatorship (the Inanians, Dad called them) testing their latest weapon of mass destruction in the South Pacific. The long-promised trip to Orlando had been scrapped and they’d cast about for somewhere to leave her in a hurry. Usually when they went on these missions she was left with Nessa and her parents, but the Friedmans had gone away a couple of days before the Inanian thing came up, which reduced the alternatives to one: her grandparents in South Dorset. 
          She turned angrily from the window, into the gloomy little cell she’d been sentenced to for the best month of the year. Angrily because her parents made it plain (if not in so many words) that they thought more of others than of her. Didn’t they realise how unsettling this knowledge was? That their selfless efforts to protect the planet at her expense were the real reason her school work was suffering? She’d tried telling them this, but she always came badly out of such confrontations. Compared with their brazen humanitarian objectives, her pitiful attempts to present her case made her sound like a self-centred brat. 
          ‘If no-one reacted against such things, Midge, the world would be right up shit creek.’
          ‘It is up shit creek, you’re always saying.’
          ‘Yes, but someone has to try to make things better.’
          ‘Well, why can’t it be someone else?’
          ‘If we all said that, darling, nothing would ever improve.’
          The end result of which was that she ‘must be strong’ and look beyond her ‘own domestic preferences’: arguments she had no option but to submit to. 
          She wondered how Nessa would handle such parents. Better than her, no doubt. Nessa handled everything better. As well as enviably good looks and effortless charm, she could express herself concisely and tellingly and was good at everything she wanted to be good at – on top of which the boys only had eyes for her when the two of them were out together. She sometimes wondered why Ness bothered with her. Probably for no other reason than that they were next-door neighbours and had known one another for ever. Another year or so and she was bound to move on, find friends more like herself – attractive, quick-witted, mistress of any situation – while she, Midge, would continue to be condemned to cells like this because…
          She dashed an arm across her eyes and allowed them a watery inspection of the room she’d been so unceremoniously dumped in. What a hovel. No carpet, just a big square rug on bare brown boards: a thin faded thing with unravelling ends that she longed to tug till there was nothing left. Ornaments included an ancient jug-and-bowl set (bowl cracked, jug the last resting place of a dead spider), a pair of dusty Staffordshire dogs, ugly fragments of rock on every flat surface, a wooden chess set with a piece missing. On the walls, in thin black frames, there were a couple of dozen old photos that held no interest whatsoever. The pictures were wonky, all of them, and wonky they would stay. Nothing to do with her. Inger had attempted to make the room more welcoming by placing – side-by-side on the huge, badly-scuffed Edwardian chest of drawers – a pensionable china doll from someone else’s childhood and a one-eyed bear (with stuffing leaking out of its bottom) that might have been found on a council tip. Midge could take or leave the doll, but she’d hated the bear on sight and turned it to the wall so its single staring eye couldn’t watch her getting undressed. You never knew what went on in these old bears’ moth-eaten minds.
          Then there was the mirror: a creaky, full-length mahogany chevalier which seemed to catch her reflection wherever she went about the room. It was her general practice to avoid mirrors as much as she could. The obligatory peek before going out was rarely more than that; just a glance to make sure there was no sleep in her eyes, food lodged between her teeth, that her hair was reasonably tidy, and so on. Mirrors were a curse. They revealed what everyone saw when they looked at her: gawky frame, too-wide shoulders, big nose, patchy complexion prone to spottiness, hair like tangled rope if she didn’t wash it daily. If she didn’t look quite as bad in the chevalier, it wasn’t because its old specked glass possessed some special quality or power, it was merely that it was slightly darker than the mirrors she was used to, and reflected a different arrangement of light and shade than more familiar rooms. Maybe the girl in the mirror is the real Midge, she thought sardonically. The Midge in the mirror smiled. Clearly she’d been thinking that too.
          Then they both turned, one to the left, one to the right, and went out to their separate landings, where at least one smile quickly faded. Midge couldn’t speak for the real her in the mirror, but her day did not look promising. She might have viewed it with more optimism – or at least more interest – if she’d known that it would be a day that would reshape her life. Set the wheels in motion anyway. 
          And all without mirrors.