In class, Miss Primrose, our form teacher, sits on her desk, nursing a huge mug of coffee.
Miss Primrose is usually lovely. She’s usually fluffy-kittens-in-a-basket lovely. She gives off a faint smell of clean things, and wears peachy-pink nail varnish.
‘Morning, class. Now, this week, we were going to study biodiversity, but d’you know, I think we’ll make a start on cultural diversity instead.’ There’s something about the way she says this that puts me on alert. A vacancy in her eye that reminds me of the way Mum’s behaving. Perhaps her eyes aren’t looking at us so much as over us.
Maria Snetter, the vicar’s daughter, sticks up her hand. ‘Does that mean studying the church, miss?’
‘Possibly,’ says Miss Primrose, drawing a long snake around the edge of the board. ‘But I was thinking of a culture much further away from home.’
‘India?’ asks Harish.
‘India?’ Miss Primrose stares dreamily out of the window. ‘It might be very interesting – but I’m feeling more South American.’ She wanders over to the window and picks up a feather from the making tray. ‘Yes, Mexico in particular.’
I hear a tiny high whine, and I realise that it’s Ursula’s camera. She must be filming from under her book.
Miss Primrose wanders back to the whiteboard and writes: ‘Tenochtitlan.’ She turns to face us. ‘The great city of the Aztec empire. Now, does anyone know anything about them?’
Maria Snetter sticks up her hand. ‘They worshipped the sun?’
‘They did,’ says Miss Primrose. ‘Anyone know anything else?’
‘They made floating gardens, and they had a feathered snake god called Quetz-something,’ says Rani Race.
‘Very good.’
‘Didn’t they drink blood?’ asks Ursula.
‘They probably didn’t drink blood, but they were a highly ritualised society.’
‘What’s “highly ritualised”, miss?’ asks Will Katanga.
‘Killing babies!’ yells Ricky, leaping from his desk and charging round stabbing everyone with a pencil case.
Miss Primrose ignores him, slicing the top from an old pillow with a craft knife. Thousands of feathers burst out of the cut and drift across the classroom, clustering under the desks, but Miss Primrose doesn’t seem to mind. ‘Now, I’d like some of you to find out some more about the Aztecs; what they ate, how they lived.’ She pulls a large black rubber thing and a tub of PVA glue from behind the desk. ‘Ursula, Sam and Henry, you can go to the library and look up the Aztecs, and the rest of you can help me stick feathers on this wetsuit to make a priest’s costume.’
Henry lags behind on the way to the library, and I do my best to lag behind with him.
‘C’mon, Sam,’ says Ursula. ‘Hurry up.’ She swings into the library, letting the door slam behind her.
I wish it wasn’t the three of us together. It’s difficult being with Henry and Ursula: if I side too much with Henry then Ursula gets prickly; the other way, and Henry looks like I’ve slapped him.
And I’m stuck in the middle.
I push open the library door. Ursula’s slumped over the desk, drawing vampires on the back of her hand. Henry and I stand in awkward silence next to the history section. He pulls out a book about South America. I find another, and open it on the desk, well clear of Ursula’s sprawling arms. Henry flicks through the books. ‘Here they are.’ He points at some pictures. ‘Shall I photocopy these bits?’
Ursula waves her arm at him as if he could photocopy the whole library if he wanted. ‘I’m bored,’ she announces. ‘This is the most boring place in the whole world, and the library’s probably the most boring part of it.’
‘Well, my house isn’t,’ I say. ‘Boring, that is. And I don’t think Miss Primrose is boring today – in fact, I think she’s gone weird, like Mum.’ I hold the photocopier lid open for Henry.
‘She’s just like normal – Miss Primrose is normal, she’s the essence of normal. Nothing more normal and ordinary than Miss Primrose could possibly exist,’ spits Ursula, pushing the photocopies to one side. ‘Too much time spent here makes you imagine things, Sam. I bet Mary Shelley was having a really boring time when she wrote Frankenstein.’
I watch the machine spit sheets of copied paper into the tray and think back to Miss Primrose in the classroom. The way she let those feathers spread all over the place. Adults never do anything like that – they’re always rushing around with dustpans. ‘I think she’s gone mad, like my mum.’
‘Hey,’ says Henry. ‘Look at this.’ He points to a pile of carefully arranged books, two candles balanced on top and a green lump of plasticine in the middle. The candles are lit.
‘What is that?’ I say. ‘And why haven’t the smoke detectors gone off?’
‘Because,’ says Henry, pointing at the empty battery compartment of the overhead smoke detector.
‘It looks,’ says Ursula, ‘like a shrine.’ She focuses her camera on one of the candles.
‘To what?’ asks Henry, picking up the plasticine lump and pulling it into the shape of a snail.
‘Plasticine, of course, stupid,’ says Ursula.
‘Now you’ve got to admit something’s going on,’ I say, backing away from the shrine.
Ursula slumps back at the table, and looks through the pictures on her camera. ‘Sam – I really think you’re getting in a twit about this. Miss Primrose is reconstructing something because we’re studying it. If you remember, we built a grass hut and tried eating custard apples when we did Captain Cook, and I expect another class is studying…shrines.’ She glares up at me as if I’m wasting her time.
‘To be fair to Sam,’ says Henry, after a considered pause, ‘that business with the feathers is unusual; I’ve never seen her behave like that. I’ve never seen any adult behave like that.’
‘And my mum, with the beard?’ I ask.
‘Oh, honestly,’ says Ursula.
‘Beard?’ asks Henry, sitting down too close to me. ‘Your mum’s got a beard?’
I walk home with Henry. He’s all bouncy and keen, but I feel faintly sick, partly because I’m sure something’s going on and the only person who believes me is Henry, and partly because I’m exhausted by trying to keep the peace between him and Ursula.
I’m quite cross with Ursula; not that I’d ever tell her.
We walk past the new museum cafe. It’s already open and a divine smell of chocolate and coffee fills the air outside. We stop for a second to look into the window display. Alongside the bags of coffee beans, and ‘raw’ chocolate, wonderful cakes rise. Huge curls of chocolate fall delicately over scale cake models of Stonehenge and the Acropolis.
‘Wow,’ says Henry. ‘Makes you hungry.’ He grabs a wodge of biscuits from his backpack and crams them into his mouth.
‘Yes – it does,’ I say. ‘Henry?’
‘Yes?’
‘Do you think I’m worrying about nothing?’
‘What are you worrying about?’ We walk on out of the town square.
‘All the odd stuff. I mean, Miss Primrose isn’t as odd as Mum, but she’s definitely heading that way; it’s as if they’ve caught some bug. And there’s that shrine in the library.’
Two members of the rugby club march across the road and onto the pavement in front of us. They’re chanting something. ‘Sinister, dexter, sinister, dexter.’ One of them trips on the kerb. ‘Dexter, sinis…dex…dex…sinister, dexter. Consiste!’ they shout together. They pause, stamping their feet in time outside the rugby club shed. The smaller one pulls open the door and they march in, greeted by a huge chant of ‘AVE!’
We watch them disappear inside. ‘I’m sure that’s Latin,’ I say. ‘I’m sure Dad said something about sinister being left, and dexter being right.’
‘Fancy the rugby club being able to speak Latin. Perhaps they’ve always spoken Latin. Perhaps rugby’s played in Latin,’ says Henry, stuffing the end of his lunch sandwiches into his mouth; the crumbs tumble down over his sweatshirt.
‘I don’t think so,’ I say. ‘Anyway, Mr Dent’s part of the rugby club – he has enough trouble speaking English, let alone Latin.’ Mr Dent’s our PE teacher.
We walk on, but Henry turns to look back at the rugby club shed. ‘Now you mention it,’ says Henry, ‘that Latin business is definitely strange.’
I leave Henry near his house and take a short cut over the common.
In the distance a digger slices a long line of turf from the cricket pitch. I wonder if I should tell someone, because I don’t think it’s supposed to be there; it doesn’t look like a good thing to do before the cricket season.
Perhaps the rugby club is sabotaging the cricket club.
I think about the marching rugby players; they seemed quite cheerful, but Henry was right, it was definitely strange. And worrying.
Romans? Egyptians? Aztecs? And those cakes?
No – it can’t be, the historical thing must just be a coincidence.
Surely.
Dad pulls up beside me. ‘Lift?’ he asks.
I climb in. He’s listening to twangy music on the car stereo. ‘What’s this?’
‘Ancient music, from the Ptolomeic period. I found the cassette in the museum. Rather nice, isn’t it?’
Nice? I’d rather eat porridge.
‘Dad, there are lots of…odd things happening around the place. I mean, is “Aa-ve” a Roman thing?’
‘Yes – it means “greetings”, but you can’t trust those Romans,’ says Dad. ‘Always up to new tricks. Violent lot. Now us Egyptians…’
Us?
Egyptians?