We cycled home from school together, Oscar and I. We both live in Jupiter Crescent, only he lives in the block that faces Jupiter Avenue, whereas Mum and I live in the one overlooking Mercury Street. They’re old buildings with high ceilings and tiny bathrooms. There’s a green area inside the courtyard with trees and bushes like chestnuts and lilacs, and it’s so overgrown that it’s like a wonderful jungle. According to Mum, my friendship with Oscar began when we were sat at opposite ends of the sandpit in the courtyard, took one look at each other and then crawled towards the other as fast as we could, spraying sand and knocking over plastic buckets and other kids in the process. Oscar’s mum is a single parent, too. Her name is Marlena and she is a lawyer in an office somewhere in the city.
We were able to ride our bikes next to each other on the cycle path for most of the journey. The weather was grey and foggy, and water splashed everywhere when we rode our bikes through the puddles. The cycle path ended when we reached Station Road, so I had to pull in behind Oscar and cycle single-file. Cars rushed past us and sprayed our legs.
“Very foggy, isn’t it?” Oscar called over his shoulder, slowing down.
And it was. The tarmac was shiny and wet. A clammy, grey mist lingered between the houses. It was so dense that the street lamps had come on though it was only two in the afternoon.
“We’d better get off and push,” I said. “It’s really hard to see where we’re going.”
We jumped off our bikes and pushed them on the pavement down the last stretch of Station Road.
“I can barely make out the traffic lights,” Oscar said.
And he was right. We had to squint to see whether the man at the pedestrian crossing was red; all we could make out was a faint red glow in the fog. When it changed to green, we started crossing. And then something really weird happened.
The pavement disappeared.
I know it sounds crazy. But when we reached the other side of the street, there was no pavement. Instead of paving stones and cobbles there was grass. Dense grass, ankle-high, like a lawn that hasn’t been cut for weeks.
I stopped.
“Oscar…”
“Yes?” he said.
“Where has the pavement gone?”
He didn’t say anything for a while. We both stood there and I couldn’t see anyone but him and me, our bikes – and then the grass, which shouldn’t have been there at all.
“Perhaps we wandered into someone’s garden by accident,” Oscar suggested.
“In Station Road? There aren’t any gardens.”
“Then we must be lost, I guess…”
The fog moved around us in slow, grey spirals. We couldn’t even see the house wall, though we must be standing right next to it. The traffic noise had faded away. And we could no longer see people, cars or bikes moving in the fog. I felt a strange, wet prickling at the back of my neck – as if a ghost were standing behind me, tapping my shoulder. I spun around. There was only more fog.
Suddenly a gust of wind swept the fog away. Or, at least, some of it. A kind of tunnel was created down the middle, a grass tunnel whose ceiling and walls were made of fog. And down this path something was coming towards me.
It wasn’t a human being. I’ve certainly never seen a human being with wings reaching a couple of metres above their head. It made her look enormous even though without the wings she was only slightly taller than me. And she hadn’t even unfurled them. They were closed and they weren’t white as I thought they would be, but brown and grey like the wings of a bird of prey.
Her face was also narrow and birdlike, with a pointy chin and a sharp nose that stuck out almost like a beak. And her eyes flashed yellow. I know this because she was looking straight at me.
“Witch child,” she said in a hissing, lisping voice. “Blood of Viridian. Come with me.”
I took a step forward without giving it a second thought. When an angel calls you, you come. And she had to be an angel, didn’t she? She had wings.
Then two things happened in quick succession.
Something struck the side of my thigh and I stumbled. Then a black shadow charged at the angel with a wild and piercing war cry, and I recognized the distinctive wet seaweed smell of the giant cat. The angel retreated a few steps and raised her hands – except they looked more like claws because her nails were twice as long as her fingers. The cat pounced on her. They both screamed, each as high-pitched as the other, and a thin fountain of blood spurted up into the air and turned into a spray of tiny, red droplets.
At the same time Oscar grabbed me and pulled me aside so we both fell over and landed in a jumble of bike wheels, arms and legs.
“Look out!” he shouted.
A lorry appeared out of the fog. Headlights, squealing brakes, the roar of a diesel engine and a radiator grille, everything came thundering right at us and I yelped, a feeble, terrified squeak, and rolled out of the way as fast as I could.
There was a crunching sound and a strong smell of burnt rubber.
I lay on the pavement with my back pressed up against a wall with Oscar sprawled across my legs. The radiator grille of the lorry loomed large a very short distance from us and both our bikes lay crushed under its massive front wheels.
The door to the driver’s cabin was opened and the driver jumped out. His face was deathly pale under the shade of his trucker’s cap.
“What happened?” he said. “Are you OK? I didn’t see you because of the fog, not until the last minute. Please tell me that you’re all right.”
The angel had gone. The cat had gone. There was no longer a tunnel through the fog, and the fog itself was lifting.
I shifted, mostly to make sure that I still had my arms and legs and could move them. I could. But Oscar lay still.
“Oscar?” I whispered. And then much louder: “Oscar!”
“All right, all right,” he grunted irritably, as if I’d told him to wake up and go to school. “Ouch. Ouch, my head hurts.”
He half sat up and I saw a thin line of blood trickle from a cut to his forehead. He must have bashed his head against either the wall or the pavement. But at least he was able to sit up, look at me and speak.
By now several onlookers had gathered. One of them, an elderly lady in a shaggy green winter coat, had already got her mobile out and was making a call.
“Hello? Emergency services? We need an ambulance for the corner of Station Road and West Street. There’s been an accident…”
Oscar was admitted to hospital for “observation for concussion”. Fortunately, I was allowed to go home. I had a fresh graze to my elbow, almost on top of the one I got when I tumbled down the stairwell with the cat. I wasn’t concussed, but it felt as if everything inside me had been shaken up.
I had seen an angel. And I had come very close to dying. Were the two things connected? Had the angel come to fetch me when the cat attacked her? And what was it she’d called me? Witch child. And something to do with blood?
To an outsider it was straightforward: a couple of kids on their way home from school stray onto the road in the fog. A lorry driver slams on the brakes just in time, luckily. The boy hits his head, the girl is unharmed. End of story.
But that was only the half of it. The angel, the cat and the pavement that turned into grass… the police report made no mention of them because I was apparently the only one who had seen them. Not even Oscar. He had seen the grass, that was something at least. But not the angel or the cat. How could he not have seen something that was almost four metres tall? It was beyond me.
Mum rang up Marlena, Oscar’s mum, and learned that the hospital would keep him overnight, but that he was fine and would probably be discharged in a day or two.
“He saved my life,” I said. It sounded dramatic to say it out loud, but it was the truth. If he hadn’t pulled me aside, the lorry would have run me over. And then the angel would probably have taken my soul or whatever it was she had come for.
“You have to look where you’re going,” Mum said, and started shouting at me again because she was so upset. “It’s not as if you don’t know how to handle yourself in traffic!”
“Mum…”
“Yes. Sorry, Clara Mouse. I know it was foggy. But you have to look…”
It was the tenth time she’d said it, at least. I was so tired that I began to cry and I blinked to make the tears go away, but they refused.
“I was looking! It wasn’t my fault!” I couldn’t bear her telling me off any longer. Not now. “Something’s wrong. There’s something wrong with me, isn’t there? She called me a witch child…”
Mum froze. She was still holding the mobile in her hand.
“Who did?” she said.
“Her. The angel. But I was the only one who saw her, Oscar didn’t. And he didn’t see the cat either…”
And it all poured out of me, the tunnel in the fog, the pavement that turned into grass, the giant wings and the hissing voice, the cat’s war cry and the smell of seaweed.
Mum listened without interrupting. She sat down at the kitchen table next to me and took in everything I told her without saying a single word. It wasn’t until I got to the bit about the ambulance taking Oscar away and the bikes that were squashed and bent that she put her arm around me, held me close and murmured into my hair.
“We have to do it.”
“Do what?” I said.
“You and I are going on a little holiday. To your Aunt Isa.”