The Changeover Read Free

past and though all the houses were not exactly similar they were at least cousins, or maybe members of the same team. Laura and Kate were coming close to the gates of the Gardendale Secondary School and the footpaths began to teem with school uniforms all moving in the same direction. Taller than almost anything else in this flattened-out area of a flat city, the Gardendale Shopping Complex reared up ahead, a cross between the Giant Supermarket from Outer Space and an Industries Fair, for it had been designed to look jolly, and succeeded in its own way. Kiwi Car Sales, said a confident sign, and the salesman was already out whisking the night's dust from mudguards closest to the ground. Laura knew a lot of people despised the Gardendale subdivision, but she had grown fond of it and sometimes loved it for the very things that other people criticized it for — because it was new and raw and rough and filled with vandals who wrote strange things on walls with spray cans of paint. At night its streets became dangerous, but she frequently enjoyed this razor-edge of risk waiting outside their comfortable, family door. Laura thought about all these things in a single second while she prepared to tell her mother something she had known for a long time, but had never told anyone else before.
    "Sorry Carlisle is a witch!" she said. "No one knows but me."
    Kate did not laugh or tell her not to be silly. She knew when things were serious even when she was driving around a fairy ring of oildrums standing in the middle of the road.
    "Lolly, if you'd thought all day I don't know if you could have come up with an unlikelier witch than poor Sorry Carlisle," she said at last. "He's the wrong sex for one thing, which in these non-sexist days shouldn't matter much, but from what I can make out he's about the best-behaved boy in the school. You're always complaining about him because of it, and you can't have it both ways. Now," said Kate, starting to sound really enthusiastic, "if you'd mentioned his grandmother, Winter, or even his mother. Quite a different story — witches to a man — a woman that is ... They've got the sort of craziness that gives them class!" Kate added. "Mind you," she went on before Laura could say anything, "I can't imagine them bringing up a boy of seventeen or eighteen between them. Old Winter gets madder day by day and Miryam floats around staring into space as if she saw only tomorrow or the next day. But the boy seems as normal as the rest of you... with a slight edge towards good behaviour, perhaps."
    "Have you finished?" asked Laura. "Listen — I know all about Sorry Carlisle! No one notices but me. Mum, can't you see he's like a TV advertisement — matched up with an idea people have in their minds, not with real life. Even when he does something wrong you can feel him ticking it off on a sort of desk diary — '20 November — Please Note — think of something wrong to do!' And no one notices except me. He knows I notice, mind you!"
    "You've never mentioned anything of this before," said Kate. "You can't blame me for being doubtful."
    "I've always known!" said Laura, "but I know he doesn't mean any harm. He's hiding. He just wants to be left alone. He's never done anything really witchy. Just wants to be left alone. He just is , he never does."
    Kate never let herself be confused by statements like this. She was sometimes capable of making them herself.
    "I remember him buying two really sentimental love stories one day," she said thoughtfully. "He read the ends of them in the shop, looking really puzzled, and then bought them both."
    "He reads them himself," Laura said scornfully. "I saw him reading one once in the Mall teashop. He doesn't behave like a witch but I know he is one." There were many other things she did not add about Sorry Carlisle because they were too uncertain to describe, including the fact that sometimes, knowing himself recognized, he let her see another face — not the mild everyday