The Changeover Read Free Page B

presented Laura with a jewel. "If you don't want him, can I have him?"
    "But you like Simon," Laura said, and Nicky grinned.
    "Nothing wrong with two," she said. "I've got two best dresses. Shall I get Jason to tell Barry to ring you up?"
    "I'm not on the 'phone," Laura said with regret and relief. She thought she liked the idea of going out with Barry more than she would enjoy actually going out with him and, besides, she knew Kate would not let her go. So after school she found herself walking to collect Jacko from the baby-sitter, alone and watchful, ready to hide from any car that looked as if it might escape from its driver's control and climb up on to the footpath, ravening after helpless pedestrians.
    Laura liked collecting names that ran opposite to the people who owned them. Her collection had started with her own name, Laura Chant, when she found she could not sing in tune. However the best in the whole collection so far was Jacko's baby-sitter, Mrs Fang- boner, who sounded as if she should drink blood instead of tea and sleep in a coffin rather than a 'Duchess' luxury bed with matching flowery sheets and pillowcases. She was a little, thin woman with very pretty, brown hair which she was proud of and which she had set once a week at 'Hair Today', the salon in the Gardendale Mall. Laura had never seen her without lipstick, had never seen her naked smile.
    "I've been married ten years and I've never let myself go," Laura had once heard her tell a friend, and had thought that, even if Mrs Fangboner did let herself go, she probably would not go far. She defended herself with lipstick, her garden, and cups of tea, and enjoyed her defences too much to leave them behind her.
    On this particular day she was punishing the grass edges with some instrument of gardening torture. The front step, laid out with secateurs, shears, long- handled clippers with blades like a parrot's beak, as well as stainless-steel garden forks and trowels, looked like an operating table. Jacko sat beside this terrifying display, with his Ruggie wrapped around Rosebud. On seeing Laura he did not so much run as bounce across the lawn in little jumps as if he were made of rubber and someone had cheerfully tossed him in her direction. First he hugged her and then pretended to growl and bite her. When he looked up and laughed at her, Laura felt her throat go tight inside, and her nose started prickling high up between her eyes, so that she had to shut them in order to avoid public tears. It was an attack of love and she knew how to cope with it... simply shut it away inside herself until it dissolved into her blood again. Sometimes it seemed to her that Jacko was not her brother but in some way her own baby, a baby she would have one day, both born and unborn at the same time.
    "We've had another good day," said Mrs Fangboner. "He's a pleasure to have around, I'll say that for him. He can be a real little devil, but nothing nasty or bad-tempered. Your mum will be in tomorrow will she, with the ..." She said this sentence every Thursday and never finished it, for she liked to pretend she looked after Jacko out of kindness, though she was glad to earn money without going out from behind her hedge.
    "It must be tough on you two," she said now, "with your mum working late on Thursday. Mind you, I'm in favour of having a late-night Thursday. A lot of people who work late Friday in the centre of town come out here and it brings a bit of business into the area. But you must get hungry waiting for the shops to close." She knew any implied criticism of Kate bothered Laura and had learned to offer criticism in the form of unwanted sympathy.
    "I take Jacko home and give him his supper, and Mum comes home later with fish and chips," Laura said. "It's good fun, really."
    She was still staring at Jacko, quite entranced by him although he was so familiar. His hair was as curly as hers but softer and fairer, and light seemed to shine out of it as if he were a lamp, each