The Disco at the Heart of Dusk, Chapter Three

Then the girls really were hurrying, hand-in-hand with piteous screams. Their pursuers weren’t stupid, and knew about the oilseed, though some among them boasted a means of long-range capture as Gachna did. The ambitious knew what value there was in currying favour with that one, and the thought of restoring to him one of his truants held appeal. Most of the so-called big boys however were motivated merely by cruel enjoyment, and sought no reward more tangible than the pleasure of frightening an innocent victim.

They were succeeding in Sheila’s case. All day long it had nagged at her mildly that she didn’t know how to use the oilseed. On reflection, she should maybe have asked.

The big boys managed to part her from Miss Ugly, and three proceeded to harry the latter between them. She wasn’t fast in either form, and presently they had her surrounded.

Miss Ugly cast about helpless as the mob began to move in.

Sheila saw, and that was what did it. Her emotions couldn’t have surged so if she’d seen them mistreating a normal-sized duckling. Flat-soled little dancing shoes screeched on pavement.

“Know the worst thing about going after girls?” erupted Sheila, breathless from exertion and outrage. “One of them always gets your pants up your bum – like this!”

The plaza lit with waxy yellow. Sheila may have been a beginner, but she threw those supernal forces outward as Mini-Flash Juniper herself might have done. The big boys were scattered to every end of the street, and it wasn’t that Hamaunji earlier on hadn’t contemplated warning them that under certain stimuli, even harmless-looking little bunny-rabbits were wont to turn on you and bite. Then however it had struck him how much more amusing it would be to let his fellows find that out for themselves.

The girls guessed they weren’t likely to be left alone long, so linked hands again and made haste. “You did it, Sheila!” exclaimed Miss Ugly.

“Yes, I’ve finally proved myself,” Sheila breathed back, since that was the interpretation she’d chosen to place on the evening’s events. A welcoming world awaited and unto it she and Miss Ugly plunged, back to the spicy enfolding cloudbanks and glitter-ball constellations that wheeled. Some partygoers who’d been wondering where the pair had vanished off to gave them a round of applause, just as Owen Paul struck up his soaring magisterial refrain.

This wasn’t one you sat out. It had been the summer’s anthem, and there wouldn’t be another chance until tomorrow night’s junior disco.

Sheila and Miss Ugly threw their hands high, as to grasp the spinning stars.

They were at the heart of it.

They, and others like them.

People you met here, with whom you lived those experiences which happened nowhere else.

That was it was all about. Let the big boys believe they held sway. A power more benign and greater than theirs ruled the camp that night.

When it was over, much too soon, Sheila and Miss Ugly beamed at each other. In their eyes was every secret they’d shared.

“You’re my favourite waste of time,” said one.

“And you’re mine,” the other told her in return.

“You don’t know what you’re missing, Maureen,” Miss Ugly declared later. “Maybe you wouldn’t have liked the dancing, but the rest of it seemed to me very much your tempo.”

“I still say you’re both crackers,” Maureen replied. “Anything you need, Sheil?”

It didn’t look as if there could be. Sheila in her socks was all snuggled up in a folding bed alongside Maureen’s, and her expression was one of absolute and complete contentment.

“Only for this to never end,” she told her two friends dreamily.

Neither Maureen nor Miss Ugly was quite sure what to say. Both felt their comparatively short acquaintance with Gachna had been more than sufficient, without any need for him to have kept them prisoner on top of it. Each also bore battle-bruises from that subterranean altercation, and neither in the ordinary way would have held illusions these could compare to the psychological scars one in Sheila’s position should surely have been dealt. In short, the last thing Miss Ugly or Maureen might have expected was for Sheila to want to be within a mile of this place again. Yet all of that remained irreconcilable with the happy girl curled up before them, her face if anything more aglow than the perfumed nightlight suffusing the room.

“Flashsatsumas is a funny boy,” Sheila went on. “Is he from somewhere a long way away?”

“Been getting that impression, yeah,” Maureen couldn’t but admit.

“I thought so,” said Sheila with a little nod. “There’s such a feeling about him that he’s used to doing things differently. Do you know he didn’t understand why I wanted to come back?”

Miss Ugly and Maureen exchanged a quick glance.

“I could tell, the minute he met me at the gate, though I didn’t like to say anything,” Sheila continued, sounding just short of one final fumbling elastic-untuck before slumber.

“Oh, well, you know boys,” put in Miss Ugly at length. “They’re all a bit odd, no matter where they’re from.”

“Yeah, now you get some kip, Sheil,” added Maureen. “Been a big day for you.”

On that much the trio seemed to be in agreement, for the last of Sheila’s lingering unrest departed, and then there was only peace.

So it was that certain confessions were not to be heard at that particular hour, for example that Sheila had gladly left Peter and Robbie poring over their phone book, and perhaps harder still to own, that all the while she’d been bound and anguished in Gachna’s steely harness it hadn’t been to home her thoughts flew. Not to her mother and father, nor invisible netball in the garden, nor school and friends. Rather, the prospect that had sustained Sheila had been that of resting her head again in a chalet bedroom such as this, safe within its sheltering square-shaped cradle of plasterboard and plywood, and knowing the whole of the camp outside would be waiting for her when morning came.

Those late sleepy seconds in which that vision was realized, a conscious Sheila would have wished on every generous giving soul who’d touched her life that day.

Even the ones who didn’t yet understand just how much it meant to wake up here.

END OF CHAPTER THREE