At the beginning of December there were a few days of snow. Frances and I were in a biology lesson when the first flakes began to drift past the window. The weather forecast had predicted a heavy fall and the sky had been the colour of porridge all morning. Frances was in disgrace because she had refused to take part in the dissection of a rat – had almost cried when she saw its pickled body pinned out on the chopping board, and insisted the smell of formaldehyde would make her sick. So while the rest of us clustered around Mrs Armitage’s desk trying to breathe through our mouths to avoid the stench of embalmed rodent, Frances was banished to the back of the room to stand near an open window and cut up a mushroom instead.
‘Ahem!’ Mrs Armitage stopped, scalpel poised, to admonish Frances who had thrown the window back as wide as possible and was leaning out trying to catch snowflakes on her tongue. An icy draught was sweeping through the lab rattling the pages on the benches. Already the playing fields and houses beyond were obscured by the blizzard. Frances withdrew her head and closed the window against the swirling mass of flakes which were blowing about like down from a burst pillow. It didn’t seem possible that the stuff could settle: most of it seemed to be flying upwards. By the end of the afternoon, however, the school was surrounded by a pelt of snow six inches deep. As we emerged after the final bell, awed into silence like explorers setting foot on a new continent, we could see Rad and Nicky waiting by the gate. They greeted us with a hail of snowballs.
‘What are you doing here?’ asked Frances, spitting out snow.
‘School closed early so we thought we’d come and meet you,’ said Rad, lobbing a snowball into the branches of a tree where it disintegrated, bringing down an avalanche on to our heads. ‘We can walk home through the woods.’
‘You might as well come back to tea,’ Frances said to me. ‘You can do our homework there.’ This decided, we set off as fast as Frances’ and Rad’s unsuitable footwear permitted. Nicky and I of course had come prepared with boots. The bottom of Rad’s trousers were already soaked, and Frances’ lace-ups were swamped within seconds. A few of the older girls looked at me and Frances with new respect as we passed. Rad was obviously an object of some interest.
We took the footpath to the woods in silence apart from the creaking of the snow under our feet. There was an unspoken understanding that hostilities would not start until we had reached the fields beyond the trees. The snow had stopped falling by now and the sky was already dark as we reached the top field. A single line of footprints was the only trail as far as the ridge of trees that divided the park from the main road. We hesitated a second and then, as if at a prearranged signal, ran whooping and screeching down the slope, kicking up as much snow as possible, leaving four ragged furrows in our wake. At the bottom of the dip Rad drew two lines with his foot about twenty feet apart. He and Nicky stood on one side of no-man’s-land, Frances and I on the other, and at the word ‘Go’ we began pelting each other with snowballs packed hard as glass. Soon this disciplined approach gave way to anarchy – Nicky broke across the line, rugby-tackled Frances and stuffed handfuls of snow down the back of her blazer until she screamed for mercy. I felt slightly dizzy with excitement at the prospect of being similarly molested by Rad, but, whether from politeness or reserve or sheer indifference, he confined himself to the decorous pitching of a few more snowballs before joining Frances in her counter-attack on Nicky, who by now had lost his glasses and was easy prey. It was only when they realised that I had so far escaped injury and was looking altogether too presentable that the three of them joined forces and practically buried me alive. Nicky and Frances held me down while Rad tipped my schoolbooks out of my bag, filled it with snow and emptied it over my head. We spent the next fifteen minutes looking for Nicky’s glasses which turned up, twisted but unbroken, caught in a hole in the back of Frances’ blazer. He dusted the snow off them and put them back on, the bent frames giving him an even more comical appearance than usual.
With streaming eyes and raw faces we limped home. By the time we reached the main road I had lost all sensation in my fingers, and my toes felt like loose pebbles rolling about in the bottom of my boots. Every so often a chunk of snow would drop from my matted hair and slip, melting, down my neck. There was no sign of Mr and Mrs Radley in the house, but someone had lit the fire in the dining room so Rad threw some more coal on while Frances made tea and toast, and we sat in front of the hearth to thaw out. Frances was trying to flirt with Nicky, brushing the snow out of his hair and teasing him about his glasses, and I found myself squinting at him through half-closed eyes to try and see what he would look like without acne, when he caught me and demanded to know what I was staring at.
‘Nothing,’ I stammered, lying feebly, ‘I think there’s something in my eye,’ and I retreated from the room on the pretext of going to investigate. When I returned they had obviously been plotting something as there was a densely conspiratorial silence. Rad was playing with the fire irons, shoving the poker into the coals until the end glowed orange. As I looked suspiciously from one face to another Rad got up and advanced towards me with the red-hot poker in his hand. I laughed and stood my ground until the tip, which had now turned white, was six inches from my face, at which point I lost my nerve and started to back away. He came at me, unsmiling. When my heels touched the wall and Rad kept coming I flinched and closed my eyes, and feeling a burning pain between my eyebrows, and hearing the hiss of searing skin, I let out a scream which brought Nicky and Frances leaping to their feet. There was a crash as the poker hit the floor and when I opened my eyes Rad was standing in front of me with his index finger still outstretched and a look of horror on his face.
‘What did you do that for?’ I said, tears leaping to my eyes.
‘Abigail. I’m sorry. I didn’t do anything,’ he stammered. ‘Did I?’ he appealed to the others. The three of them crowded round me now to examine my brand, while I stood there, still too dazed to move.
‘It’s scientifically impossible,’ said Nicky.
‘Totally freaky,’ agreed Frances.
It was some time before they could persuade me that what had actually happened was this: as soon as I had closed my eyes, Rad had put the poker down by his side and touched me lightly on the forehead with one finger. But there between my eyebrows like a Hindu wife’s tilak was a perfectly round burn which, in spite of the hasty application of an ice cube wrapped in a flannel, lasted in its most vivid form for several weeks and then faded to form a silvery scar, the ghost of a full moon.