“Our side?” I ask, wondering what she means.
“Outsiders,” smiles Freya. “Alternatives. Goths. They’re against the machine, just like us.”
I like this feeling. Like being part of the same swarm as Freya. I look at her out of the corner of my eye. So cool, so stylish: sitting there with her spell books and her dog-eared grimoires. Today she’s reading a tatty paperback: a strange abstract painting on its cover. Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy. She’s promised to loan it to me once she’s done. I’ll have to hide it from Dad. He doesn’t object to the blasphemy but he wants me concentrating on school work. Things have changed at school these past couple of years. The inspectors have been in. We have uniforms now and the yoga and reiki are strictly timetabled. All that stuff started being phased out once Mr Sixpence moved on. We still get pupils who haven’t done so well at other schools but we don’t spend as much time putting them right. Freya certainly doesn’t seem to have any issues. Doesn’t hear things or see things or spend her spare time holding the carp’s gills closed down at the ornamental pond. She’s just nice. She could have had her pick of friends. Instead she chose dowdy old me, Catherine Marlish, and Violet, who everybody else is a little bit afraid of.
“They wear those in Peru,” I say, pointing at his tatty coat. I’m remembering a picture in the parish magazine. “They’re made of alpaca.”
“What’s an alpaca?” snorts Violet.
“Like a lama. Apparently they’re dead warm, and they dry quickly too. They make them at one of the missions Daddy raised money for …,”
“I told you, stop saying ‘Daddy’,” snaps Violet, embarrassed. “It makes you sound like a baby. I’ve started calling my dad by his first name. He hates it. Then when I get in bother I call him ‘Dad’ and he’s like a toddler with a sweet. You should try it. Or call him Reverend! Did you hear that Freya? Did you hear what I said?”
Freya, chuntering to herself, makes a show of rummaging in her rucksack to find her cigarettes. Makes a show of lighting up, her black fingernails artfully chipped, skin pale against the black of her fingerless gloves. I suppose to the untrained eye we are all dressed pretty similarly but it is Violet who looks as though a lot of money has been spent to appear this carefree. She wears a black pleated skirt, eye-wateringly short, with knee high stripy tights and brand new Doc Martens. Her ankle-length greatcoat is black with silver buttons and matches the woollen hat that holds back her sleek black hair. Mummy brought it back for her from a trip to Camden Market, a place so remote and exotic to me that it may as well have been purchased at a vintage boutique on the moon.
I feels shabby by contrast. My coat came from a pile of donated men’s clothes, dumped in the doorway of the vicarage. It smells of old men; all talcum powder and slippers, Old Spice and fatty food.
“That language is mad,” says Freya, cocking her head towards the music. “What is it? I can’t make it out.”
“Probably gibberish,” laughs Violet, dripping with disdain. She doesn’t seem to be enjoying her cigarette. She winces with each drag. I can’t help notice that the smoke doesn’t seem to be going into her lungs. It just hangs around in her mouth before she blows it back out.
“He’s all right,” confirms Freya, casting a slightly more expert eye over the busker whose song echoes off the walls of the underpass. “He’s his own person. Nice voice.”
“I suppose,” says Violet, correcting herself. She’s in awe of the new girl.
“He’s stopping,” I mumble. “Oh God, he’s looking, he’s looking!”
It seems to take an age for the final note to fade. It echoes off the walls of the underpass. The singer has almost crossed the short distance between us before the cadence disappears into the misty air.
I glance at Freya. She’s altered her pose. Looks suddenly older. More like an adult than a child: eyes burning like cigarettes. Violet, at her side, allows a sulk to slip onto her perfect features.
Different colour eyes, I think, as his features become clear. One brown, one green.
All the little pieces of him drop into my mind like coins into a slot.
He’s got a tattoo on his neck.
There’s a silver cuff on his ear.
He’s wearing clown trousers.
Chest hair. Proper chest hair …
Her smells funny. Like the bottom of a pond. Like foxblood. Like raw meat.
He stops in front of us. He seems to be listening to something nobody else can hear. Violet gives a little giggle.
“Namaste,” he says, at last.
“Eh?” asks Violet, the noise coming out like spit. “Where’s that from?”
“It’s a greeting. A blessing. Loosely, it means I bow to the God within you.”
I already know what Namaste means, and Violet should too. Mr Sixpence used to say it – the quiet, kind man who used to talk to us about the colours of the soul and the importance of feeling at once with the universe. Up close, the singer sort of reminds me of him, though he’s probably forty years younger.
“You’re smoking a Bible?” asks Violet.
I look at his right hand. A thin grey-blue smoke is rising up from the thin cigarette he holds like a pen.
“That’s a Gideon, isn’t it?” asks Freya, quietly. She plays with her hair, red and fiery, and he looks at her the way I’ve always wanted to be looked at. .
He raises his cigarette to his lips and I hear myself let out a tiny gasp as I realise that his tobacco is contained within a page of a hotel bible. I see the word ‘mercy’ being devoured by the glowing red flame.
“I liked your song,” says Freya, head cocked, plaiting her hair with her fingers. “What language was it?”
Lazily, he flicks a glance in her direction. “I don’t know,” he says. “It just comes out of me. I think it might be Sanskrit.”. His voice is hypnotic. Accentless. “It’s the voice of those who walk with me. Of my guide. They lend me their strength as I search for my own.”
“What are you doing here?” asks Violet. “Not much money to be made on a damp Tuesday in Keswick …,”
“I go where I’m needed,” he says, and his smile shows teeth edged in brown tobacco stains. “Perhaps where I’m called.”
“What does that mean?” asks Freya.
He ignores her. Looks back at me. “You have an interesting aura,” he says, eyes fixed on hers. “Emerald green. You could be a healer. And the pink, it’s almost luminous. Sensitivity, compassion – you understand more than you allow others to comprehend.”
There’s a sudden gorgeous warmth inside me. I feel a pricking sensation across her shoulders; a suppressed shiver tickling the backs of her knees. It feels for an instant as if I can see the outline of things; the indigo-purple framework of the trees, the lights, the white-painted guest-houses with their rain-pummelled hanging baskets. It feels as if I could reach out and smear the colours into a new shape; as if I am looking at a world still painted in unfixed oils.
“The spot behind your heart,” says the man. He leans forward and touches my chest. “That is where our ancestors believed we kept our soul. If you concentrate, you can feel it. I can teach you how to feel it.”
I feel Violet’s hand at my hip, a slight tug upon my coat. Hear a rhythm, a beat like a train moving over railway sleepers. I become aware of a delicious golden heat spreading throughout my body. It is as if I’m elongating; stretching like a cat, becoming more. I feel sensuous. Feel delicious.