Just Dreaming Page 9

  So of course we had instantly exchanged our spades for the shopping basket, and we’d gone off all muddy and relieved before Ernest stopped smiling lovingly at Mom and realized that it didn’t really take two people to buy a pint of blueberries and some mascarpone.

  And we couldn’t have guessed that twenty minutes later, standing in front of the fruit display, we’d meet Anabel.

  In fact, on closer inspection, I saw that Anabel herself wasn’t perfectly styled. No doubt about it, in real life she was as pretty as in dreams, although so thin that her jeans were hanging loose around her legs. Her hair, always flowing over her shoulders in spectacularly shining waves in the dream corridor, almost looked a little dull in the artificial light of the supermarket. There were dark shadows under her unusual turquoise eyes, and while her fingernails were clean, unlike ours, she had obviously been biting them.

  But her voice was absolutely the same. “So you’re Liv’s little sister,” she said, looking at Mia with her head on one side. All the alarm bells instantly started going off in my mind. “You’re exactly as I imagined you.”

  “Oh,” said Mia. Secrecy had written a good deal about Anabel in her blog last year, and because of the photos, Mia presumably knew exactly who this girl was. But she had no idea of my personal experiences with Anabel: conjuring up demons in general and cutting people’s throats in particular. If she’d known, she probably wouldn’t be giving her such a friendly smile.

  “I love your door,” Anabel went on. “There’s something so optimistic about that forget-me-not blue. Self-confident, playful, and profound all at once, don’t you agree, Liv? Isn’t it surprising how much the doors can tell us about their owners?”

  I wasn’t sure whether the mention of Mia’s dream door was meant as a veiled threat (along the lines of We know where you live) or whether she was only beating about the bush a bit to find out if, and to what extent, Mia knew about the dreams.

  “Mia, this is Anabel Scott,” I said quickly. “Arthur’s ex-girlfriend—remember how Secrecy wrote about her last fall, when she had to go into hospital with a psychotic disorder?” That’s why she says all this confused stuff about doors and their owners. Unfortunately she’s stopped taking her pills. And if you knew that she poisoned her own dog, you wouldn’t be looking at her so trustfully.

  Anabel sighed.

  “Blue is my absolutely favorite color,” said Mia, whose unprejudiced smile hadn’t changed a bit. “And blueberries are my favorite fruit.” She was gazing sadly at the punnet in Anabel’s cart, and for a moment she managed to look much younger and cuter than thirteen. “What a shame those were the last. Lottie will be terribly cross.” She swallowed with difficulty. “It’s going to be ages before she gets another chance to bake us a blueberry tart.”

  Anabel sighed again. “Well, I can just as easily use frozen raspberries,” she said, giving Mia the blueberries.

  “Oh, that’s so kind!” Mia was beaming radiantly. “Thank you very, very much. You really are amazingly nice.”

  Yes, so long as there wasn’t a dagger lying around.

  “You’re welcome.” Anabel turned to me again. “Are we seeing each other this evening?”

  “You’re going to Jasper’s welcome-home party?” I asked, taken aback.

  The corners of Anabel’s mouth turned up in amusement. “I was thinking about it. There’s something I ought to show you.”

  Yes, several things. Like Senator Tod’s door, for instance. And how she’d managed to lock him into his own dream. But apparently Anabel was thinking of something else. As she pushed her shopping cart on, she bent her head and whispered into my ear, in passing, “He’s back!”

  And when she said that, my wretched goose bumps were back as well.

  Anabel gurgled happily. “See you sometime, Mia,” she said over her shoulder, in dulcet tones. “It was nice meeting you.”

  “Same here,” said Mia in equally dulcet tones. “And thank you so, so much for letting us have the blueberries!” She waited until Anabel had disappeared toward the frozen foods section, then grinned at me and said, “Totally nuts, poor thing! I’m surprised they let her out of hospital, aren’t you? But I expect she’s harmless.”

  Unfortunately not. Compared to Anabel, the orange terrorist montbretias were the purest of angels.

  8

  THE VICTORIAN ROW house where Jasper’s parents lived was so small and cozy that even with just the thirty guests officially invited to the party, there wouldn’t have been much space. But when Grayson, Henry, and I turned up at quarter past nine, there were at least twice as many people there, and we could hardly get through the door, the front hall was so full. We had to get past Emily leaning decoratively over the banisters on the stairs, wearing a short, tight skirt not right for her at all. She had obviously been waiting for Grayson. Lost in thought, she was playing with her necklace and acting as if she didn’t see us. Well, we could play the same game.

  Except for Grayson.

  We’d almost made our way to the kitchen when he turned back. “I know I ought to ignore her,” he said. “But she’s still wearing the necklace I gave her, even though she … oh, this is just too much. I must talk to her. Now.”

  “Have fun.” Henry playfully punched Grayson’s upper arm.

  “Call me if you need someone who can do kung fu,” I said.

  “Don’t worry, I can deal with this on my own,” said Grayson grimly.

  I’d have liked to go right back with him, so as to miss none of it, but Henry led me on. All the guests we passed were talking about Theo Ellis. His amateurish burglary of the jeweler’s shop in West Hampstead was the talk of the town. I had looked at the video posted on the Internet myself that afternoon. Theo’s confused behavior reminded me in every way of Mrs. Lawrence in the cafeteria on Tuesday. I was convinced that Arthur was behind it. He just couldn’t accept the little victory that Theo had scored in the school entrance hall. It was alarming to think that he’d needed only a single night to put his plan of revenge into practice. He was good at it. Diabolically good.

  It was really annoying to have to put my mind to him again, instead of just being a perfectly normal girl at a perfectly normal party for a couple of hours.

  “Terrific atmosphere, right? The beer ran out at eight thirty,” Jasper shouted on seeing us. We had found him in the kitchen, wedged in with half the basketball team and busy opening wine bottles. He favored us with exuberant hugs.

  France hadn’t changed him in the least, outwardly anyway. He still looked just like a live version of Barbie’s boyfriend Shaving Fun Ken, with his thick fair hair, bright-blue eyes, and three days’ growth of stubble, plus the beaming, always slightly dopey smile that regularly made not just Persephone but other girls, too, feel weak at the knees. I’ll admit that I had missed him a bit. Although so far Jasper had drawn the short straw where relationships were concerned, and was much nicer and less macho than everyone thought (including Jasper himself). He carefully polished up his image as a ladies’ man and a breaker of hearts, and it seemed to work splendidly, at least with the younger girls. They all thought he had done something totally scandalous at the school in France, so it had had to throw him out and send him home sooner than planned. Rumors ranged from an affair with the school’s married English teacher to getting the headmaster’s daughter pregnant.

  “None of it’s true,” he cheerfully explained to me as he took the cork out of a bottle of wine that he had brought up from his father’s cellar, along with several others, to make up for the shortage of beer. “I’m sorry to say!”

  Henry wiped dust off the labels with his fingertips, in the same cautious way that he sometimes used caressing me. As if I were something especially precious and fragile. Even watching him gave me butterflies in my stomach.

  “Are you sure your father doesn’t mind if we drink this?” Henry asked.

  “Of course he doesn’t mind,” said Jasper with total conviction, “or he’d have locked the cellar. They’ve locked the g
un cabinet and the bedroom. After my brother’s last party, Mum insisted on new mattresses. That was quite a party!” He sighed. “Whereas the French … I can tell you, they’re nothing like as free and easy and amusing as you might think from their movies.”

  “Not even the girls?” I inquired.

  “Particularly not the girls,” said Jasper.

  Well, that was good news for Persephone.

  Jasper pulled the cork out of the neck of the bottle and, with a flourish, poured wine into a glass. I’d been looking around for soft drinks, but like the beer, they all seemed to have gone already. And judging by the used plates standing on the work surfaces in the kitchen here, there had even been something to eat. Now there was nothing left but a single cube of cheese and a small sprig of parsley.

  Jasper waved his glass in the air. “Want to know the truth?”

  You bet I did.

  The truth was that Jasper had almost died of homesickness with his host family and had begged his parents, in tears, to let him come home early. Instead of wild parties and easygoing French sophistication, there had been nothing at all going on in that little French town. He didn’t even think much of the French food.

  “Totally overrated,” said Jasper, taking a large gulp of red wine, and then he made a disgusted face. “Yuck! The French can’t even make decent wine. Well, never mind that, if it works.”

  Henry had taken the bottle from him and was studying the label. “You do realize this is the 1972 vintage, don’t you? Tipping it down your throat like beer strikes me as positively criminal.” He placed himself protectively between the wine and the thirsty boys from the basketball team.

  “Oh, come on!” said Jasper. “We’re going to empty them all. Shut your eyes, and down the hatch! I want to celebrate being back with my friends at last. You’ve no idea how lonely I felt in that French dump!”

  He offered me a glass, but I shook my head.

  “In the end, I was so bored that I even read a book. Me! I read it from beginning to end and then began again at the beginning. When my mother heard that, she knew I was in a bad way.”

  “You poor thing. It sounds terrible,” I said. Henry had given up defending the bottles from the other guests, and red wine was gurgling into glasses on all sides. Henry took one for himself.

  Jasper’s forehead was wrinkled in an untypically philosophical frown. “Yes, it was ghastly. All the same, I gained by the experience. I’ve kind of matured. Now I know what really matters in life.”

  “Everyone knows that,” said Persephone. Even as I was trying to work out how she had managed to materialize out of nowhere beside us (quite apart from the fact that she hadn’t even been invited to the party), she reached over and poured some wine into a water glass for herself. The wineglasses had run out by now. “The only really important thing in life is love.”

  Jasper looked at her in some confusion, but he wasn’t going to have his train of thought interrupted. “Really? I was going to say friends! But it comes to the same thing in the end. Friends are the same as love.” Jasper’s philosophical frown had given way to his beaming Shaving Fun Ken smile again. “Did you come with your sister, Penelope?”

  Persephone raised the glass to her lips, and when she put it down again, it was half-empty. “No,” she said. “With my boyfriend. Gabriel.”

  “Oh, I just sent Gabriel off with Dave to organize a few more drinks.” Jasper looked around in search of them.

  “I know,” said Persephone, and she actually managed to empty the glass completely in a single long draft. “Gabriel’s tremendously good at kissing, you know.”

  But Jasper didn’t hear that; he had just spotted Grayson trying to squeeze into the kitchen and lunged at him to give him a hug. Unfortunately they both disappeared toward the living room. A pity. I’d have liked to ask Grayson how his conversation with Emily had gone. But first I had to look after Persephone, who was helping herself to more wine, even though she couldn’t usually tolerate alcohol at all. Still, she looked okay, apart from the little dark-red mustache that the wine had left on her upper lip—not a trace left of reddened eyes and swollen eyelids.

  “Didn’t you say Gabriel’s tongue feels like a slug?” I whispered to her. Henry was busy with his smartphone.

  “Yes, I did.” Persephone smiled happily. “But Jasper doesn’t have to know that. I want him to feel jealous, not sorry for me.”

  I was about to say, “That’s silly,” but unfortunately her abstruse line of reasoning struck me as familiar. Yes, I was the last person who could shake her head in disapproval. Unlike Rasmus, Gabriel really existed.

  “Do you like this dress? Pandora bought it today. She’s going to murder me when she sees me wearing it.” Persephone giggled. “But she’s babysitting for our neighbors, so she isn’t likely to turn up here before midnight.”

  “Oh. No. Shit,” said Henry, still staring at his cell phone.

  “What’s the matter?” I looked at him in concern. Hopefully it wasn’t something wrong with his family again. Last night, when he had disappeared from Mrs. Honeycutt’s dream so suddenly, his mother, trying to make an omelet, had burned her hand and arm badly enough to scream with pain. That had woken Henry, and he had insisted on taking her to the emergency room at the nearest hospital to get the burns treated. He hadn’t given me all the details, but I was assuming that someone who burns herself so clumsily making an omelet at 3:00 a.m. couldn’t have been stone-cold sober at the time. No wonder Henry was always on the alert for something to go wrong at home.

  But it wasn’t his family this time. “The 1972 Château Margaux they’re tipping down their throats here is traded on the Internet at over four hundred pounds a bottle.”

  “I could tell from the flavor.” Persephone swirled the wine around in her glass and smacked her lips like a real wine expert. “A really good vintage. Velvety and with an elegant aftertaste…”

  Henry grinned. “Not forgetting the slight blackberry note,” he said.

  “Exactly,” agreed Persephone.

  “Jasper’s father will kill him.” I was quickly counting the bottles that had already been opened. “Two thousand pounds down the drain, just like that. Put back by people who’d rather be drinking beer.”

  At the word beer, the boy beside me immediately perked up. “Hey, are there more supplies?” he asked, and put his half-empty wineglass down on the platter with the solitary cube of cheese. “Because this stuff tastes like horse piss.”

  Henry jammed the last two unopened bottles under his arm. “I’d better get these to safety.”

  “Wait a moment, I’ll come with you.” Persephone picked up the corkscrew and followed Henry through the crowd. Only now did I notice that the zipper of her dress was only half done up, and the two sides of the dress were open from the waist upward at the back, flapping about as she walked. I quickly chased after her. But it was some time before I could get from the kitchen to the living room, and when I finally made it, I couldn’t see Persephone and Henry anywhere.

  It wasn’t too crowded in here, but the stereo system was turned up so loud that the windowpanes were shaking. A few people were dancing, including Jasper with a bottle of wine in one hand and his half-empty glass in the other—dangerously close to one of the cream-colored sofas. I could only hope the sofa hadn’t been as expensive as the wine. I was beginning to feel really sorry for Jasper’s parents.

  Grayson was leaning back against the bookshelves and gave me an exhausted smile as I passed him.

  “What did Emily say?” I shouted.

  Grayson mimed that he couldn’t hear what I was saying. I shouted my question again, and Grayson yelled back something that sounded like, “Shot that muddy feckless mac.”

  “What?”

  “Sort out Sunday brainless quack!”

  “Really?” I asked incredulously. Why in heaven’s name would I do that? What sort of quack, a bird or a doctor?

  But Grayson nodded angrily. “The hell with it,” he seemed to be sayin
g if I read his lips. He jerked his chin at the other side of the room, where Emily was standing beside the music system jiggling her foot in time. A very unusual thing for Emily to do. She wasn’t usually the foot-jiggling sort.

  “Threw a bit of shellfish logistics!” shouted Grayson above the noise.

  I realized that acoustically we weren’t going to get anywhere if we carried on like that. So I just danced past Jasper and the others and over to the stereo system, ignored the foot-jiggling Emily as well as I could, and turned the sound down a bit. When no one objected, I turned it down some more. That was much better. The music was still rather loud, but at least the windowpanes had stopped clinking and my ears weren’t giving me so much trouble. I could even make out what Emily was saying when she leaned over and said, “Don’t be so stuffy, Liv! This is a party. People don’t want to talk; they want to dance.”

  Very odd to hear that from someone whose middle name might have been Spoilsport. Was she trying to make out that by getting into that daringly short miniskirt she had mutated from teacher’s pet to party girl? If so, she ought to have taken that sour smile off her face.

  I saw that she was no longer wearing the necklace that she’d been toying with so coquettishly earlier, and all at once I worked out what Grayson had been saying to me. It was really Got that bloody necklace back. Aha!

  “What did you say?” I shouted. “The music’s so loud I’m afraid I can’t hear you. Did you really throw a fit of selfish hysterics?”

  “Silly cow,” said Emily, back to normal again.

  “Thanks very much. Same to you!” As I moved away from her, I smiled as brightly as possible.

  Over by the bookshelves, I finally found Henry and Persephone as well as Grayson, and Jasper stopped dancing for a moment to hug his two friends again and tell them once more how glad he was to see them. In order to do so, he stood his glass of red wine on the white piano. Well, at least his father would have a memento of his good wine in the form of red circles left on the white paint.