Chapter 2

Aly woke up to a cool breeze on her skin where the blanket had slid down slightly. Goosebumps were raised on her arm and she looked up blearily as to where the cold was coming from. Somehow, the left window was open. It had ceased to snow but the wind was blowing and it was still cold; the aftermath of the storm. Or was it the calm before the storm? She didn’t really know.

Stumbling around the sofa towards the kitchen, she looked at her wrist before remembering she had lost her watch, and glanced towards the microwave where the time was displayed.

4.57

So she had slept for two, maybe three hours. Shivering and grabbing her hoodie, this time – the telephone-guy had presumably already taken his hoodie away, since it was nowhere to be seen, she pulled the cloth tightly around her, shivering as she did so. She decided, out of lack of anything else to do, to clean up the very little mess she had left from lunch. The hot chocolate cup had to be scrubbed out and laid on the drying board with its handle facing to the left at a perfect right angle, the crumbs from the table were swept away and the grill unplugged and stored in it’s original place in the larder.

After this, she decided to call up Amy’s mum and see if she could go pick up Claud. It wasn’t snowing anymore and the caterpillars had been by – those were the snow ploughs that scraped the snow from the road and sprinkled salt or grit after them to prevent the water on the roads from freezing and creating black ice.

Entering her mum’s office, Aly cast around for the little black book her mother always kept around somewhere convenient. Her desk was scattered with various papers and it took Aly a while to find what she was looking for. She rifled through her mother’s address book which was in the study and finally found Amy’s mom’s number.

Standing by the phone looking around quite impressed with the way her mum had done up the office since her dad had left, she tapped in the numbers and held the newly connect phone against her cheek. 0787253215. She listened to the dial tone and willed somebody to pick up.

“Hello?” a crackly voice came from the other end of the phone; of course, the connection would not be so good, having snowed and all. Either that or telephone-guy had done something funny to them. She wouldn’t be surprised if he had tapped the phone lines, he seemed like that sort of person who would do a thing like that.

“Hi, Mrs Mathews?”

“Yes, who’s speaking?”

“It’s Aly Cooper, Claudia’s sister.”

“Oh, hi Aly, how are you?” Before Aly could reply, she continued “Claudia is here, she’s fine but a bit upset she couldn’t go home sooner. We’ll be happy for her to stay the night if it’s an inconvenience for you to come over and pick her up.”

“No, no that’s fine. I’ll drive over now in fact – in case the weather gets even worse later on. I’ll see you in about twenty minutes.”

“Okay, see you then, goodbye!” She hung up the phone and decided to change into something slightly warmer before heading out. In her wardrobe, she pulled out some baggy jeans which settled about her hips snugly. Over this went a long sleeved t-shirt, followed by a short sleeved one to complete the ‘skater’ look as her friends called it, and then a warm fleecy jacket to keep the cold out.

She rummaged around in the boot cupboard for some snow boots but wasn’t surprised not to find any; either they hadn’t brought any, not really a surprise seeing as it was summer, or they hadn’t yet been unpacked. Instead, she slipped on her merrils which were clumpy black shoes, but comfortable and more importantly warm and waterproof.

Within three minutes flat, she was heading out of the front door, grabbing her car keys from the hook that was fixed on the wall next to the door. She smiled fondly at her old banger, it was extremely battered and had been blue, but now was so scratched and dented it was almost impossible to tell the colour.

It took three tries to get the engine started; it coughed and spluttered into life finally, and she shifted the gears into reverse to back out of the drive. Fixing the mirrors so that they were right for her height, she switched the wind screen wipers on, and set off to Amy’s house. It was close by, about twenty blocks away so short by car but just a little too far to walk, particularly in the cold and snow.

There was no traffic on the roads that afternoon at all, save one car which persistently followed her. She narrowed her eyes at it, but there was nothing she could do at all. Hopefully, it was just coincidence that it was going to the same place as her but if the driver was following her, she figured he’d probably go away when she went into the house.

She arrived, and glancing around to make sure nobody was about to grab her, she made a dash for the house, skidding along the sidewalk and managing to lock the car at the same time. She pressed the doorbell, attempting to appear as calm as possible for when the door opened. Mrs Mathews ushered her in, mistaking her flushed cheeks from the panic, for an on setting cold.

“Would you like something to drink? Hot chocolate? Or Coffee?” Aly shook her head trying to look polite as she blew into her hands rubbing them together for warmth. Clattering footsteps could be heard from upstairs and within seconds, Claudia and Amy had appeared almost out of nowhere and charged straight into Aly’s stomach, who had stood up as soon as she had heard them, and braced herself for the onslaught.

She laughed as she picked up Claudia, swinging her around.

“You’ve gotten big, I think I won’t be able to carry you anymore for much longer” she joked and Claudia pouted at this idea.

“Aly, Aly pick me up!” protested Amy who was only five with curly blonde hair, a pale face and big blue eyes that were straight out of a storybook like goldilocks or something similar. Aly put down Claudia and whirled Amy around. Mrs Mathews watched her approvingly; smiling somewhat as finally she set the five year old back on her feet.

Claud tugged Aly’s hand, beckoning her to come upstairs and see what they had made.

”Aly, look what we did today, we used poster paints and glitter and glue and crepe paper!”

“And sequins too. And we made a tent” declared Amy, determined not to be left out. Between the two of them, they dragged her upstairs and into the attic which was usually a large bright room. Mrs Mathews had obviously placed the electric heater inside, otherwise it would have been unbearably cold. As it was, Aly was shivering a little already.

She was presented with many colourful pictures, with glitter stuck all over in swirls and spirals and paint was splattered in various different places. Claud, forever creative had gotten little bits of crepe paper and screwed the up and stuck them down to form little flowers. Her childish imagination had created a sweet little picture of a field with flowers in it, and white sand covering the ground as snow. Labelled standing there were her and Aly holding hands.

“Wow Claud, this is really good” whistled Aly, impressed. Though most people wouldn’t think twice, this was done by a six year old and was amazingly realistic, almost eerily so. Claudia was the little genius. Aly who was also extremely smart, had always stood in the background beaming at her little sister, increasingly proud at the extent of her workings.

“Tell you what, shall we frame it and give it to mummy for her birthday?” whispered Aly in an exciting voice to Claud who jumped up and down in agreement. “Yes, she always likes it when we make stuff for her, oh can we Aly…please?” She widened her eyes and fluttered her eyelashes and Aly nodded, grinning at her sister’s antics.

“C’mon, we should get going shouldn’t we? Before it starts snowing again.”

“I like the snow” stated Claud absentmindedly.

“So do I, but my car doesn’t.”

“Oh, can I sit in the front!” she asked, running downstairs and grabbing her coat.

“Claud, say goodbye to Amy and thank you to Mrs Mathews for having you over.”

“Thank you Mrs Mathews for having me over” she said solemnly holding out a hand to be shaken like she had seen her mother do on man occasions. Mrs Mathews laughed at the politeness of the little girl and shook her hand, taking her equally seriously. “Bye bye Amy, thank you for having me round! Can we go to the park some time?”

“Mummy and Amy’s mummy will arrange it sometime” coaxed Aly, almost desperate to get going now; she was sure, somehow, that it would storm again and she wanted to make sure they were barricaded safely in the house when it did, and not on the roads.

“Okay, bye then!” squealed Claud as she skipped out of the house and down to Aly’s car. She waited patiently by the door whilst her elder sister thanked Mrs Mathews fervently and apologised for any trouble they had caused and brightened up once she saw that Aly was heading down the path towards the car.

When they were both snugly inside and the heating had been turned to the maximum, Aly made sure Claud had her seatbelt tightly done up before starting the engine. This time, it started after the second try only, and they drove off towards home, Claud singing twinkle twinkle little star as they went.

It took slightly longer this time as, with her little sister in the car and the weather turning nastier again, Aly was taking the turns with a little less vigour and a lot more care. She turned on the radio after having unfortunately gotten stuck in traffic behind a snow plough.

These are some of the worst storms we have had for years…up to eight feet of snow in some places in an incredibly short amount of time… Seemingly came out of nowhere…

The headlines were scary, even to Aly. The storm hadn’t been predicted; it was the opposite, weather predictions had been for clear, sunny skies all weekend with no rain at all, even border lining a drought in measures of how dry it was going to be. This storm had come from nowhere, snuck up on them and it was impossible. One radio channel even went as far as to say it was ‘as if by magic’. That freaked Aly out. She had seen what magic could do, but who would want to cause a storm like this? Already there were casualties, five deaths and counting from children who had been swimming in the river when the snow started suddenly, to tramps who had frozen in their sleep on the streets.

It was truly terrifying, the reports they heard and by the time they arrived at home, Aly was extremely grateful to see her mother’s car parked outside the driveway, already covered in a couple of inches of a light dusting of snow; it had recently began again and was only becoming increasingly worse. Grimly, Aly parked the car and pulled up her hood, grabbing Claud’s small hand and pulling her up the steps to the house and inside the front door.

They leapt in, slamming the door shut behind them as the icy wind plucked at their hair and coats, sucking at any exposed skin.

“Hey girls what’s up?” Their mum was back. Her name was Maria and she was a very well known business woman. She had developed the idea of tiger funds and predicted that the stock market would crash and then increase steadily for about twenty years. So far, she hadn’t gone wrong but as people said nowadays, any economist was an accident waiting to happen. Her mother agreed with this, and often said that she should quit while she was ahead – but of course she would never quit. Not whilst she could still work anyway; she loved her job way too much for that.

Though Maria had a brilliant mind she, like her daughter, was pretty messy – though not quite as bad. Moreover, it wasn’t disorganisation that was a problem, it was more the absentmindedness, the way she trailed off in mid-sentence only to say ‘I’ve completely forgotten what I was going to say.’

Her flyaway dark brown hair was damp from brief few minutes that she had battle the weather against, in the attempt to get out of her car door – which she had managed to shut her coat in, she proceeded to tell them, to the door. The process had taken at least four minutes and she had been frozen by the time she got in.

And this was the reason for the measly fire in the fireplace. She had attempted to make a roaring heat but so far, it wasn’t working, the cold gusts from the chimney suddenly blew it out. Aly sighed. She knew how to start a fire; DofE had taught her that.

That had been a painful experience. Four days of walking – eight hours each day, and then camping in a soaking sleeping bag with a thin layer of cloth as a tent protecting her, carrying half her bodyweight on her back…it was not fun. And then their examiner had had the cheek to suggest they should be able to light a fire with flint. Or tinder of some sort. By then, Aly and her group were fed up and in a futile attempt to stay warm, they had stolen the examiner’s matches and for their fire making skills later on, they had been given the 10 out of 10 mark.

Aly now took newspaper and scrunched it up, littering the now unlit fireplace with it. She set a sort of fuse of paper from the front, and then piled wood high on top of the grate. By the time the fire had eaten away at all the paper, this way, the wood would have caught alight.

She sat next to it, striking a match and setting light to the paper, watching the flame burn along the paper, twisting it into black ash which crumbled and shrivelled in the flickering light. Claud came and sat beside her, holding her hands out to try to get them to warm up a little bit.

“Aly, can we have marshmallows, please?”

“Ask mummy” Aly replied with an almost bittersweet smile from the memories she had.

“Mummy, can we cook marshmallows on the fire please? Pretty please?”

“Okay, but not too many; you’ll ruin your appetite for dinner”

“Thank you! Aly, we can make marshmallows on the fire” she notified her elder sister, who took this as a cue to get the marshmallows from the cupboard on the top shelf where they were kept, so that Claud, ever eager for sugar and sweetness, couldn’t reach them.

She had barely reached the marshmallows when she felt Claud at her feet, poking at her.

“Claud, if you don’t stop that I’m going to fall over. Claud, no, stop it right now.” That made her back off. The reality was not that Aly was scared of getting hurt. No, she was afraid that if she fell, same would happen as had that morning; she would be miraculously ‘saved’ by some invisible force, and that was not something she wanted her family to see, particularly not Claud who would pester her endlessly about it. Come to think of it, so would her mother.

Luckily, Aly made it down from the chair she was standing on unscathed, and with her, proffered a packet of marshmallows which Claud promptly grabbed off her. Her mum handed her the kebab sticks on which they would be able to hold the marshmallows in the flames with and they managed to scoff half a packet in five minutes flat.

It wasn’t that difficult, you held the marshmallow in the flame for a couple of seconds, just until it set alight, then watched it turn brown. After you blew it out, the outside would be a crispy shell, containing the gooey insides of mushy whiteness. Absolute bliss in both Claud’s and Aly’s opinion.

“I told you not to ruin your appetites” scolded Maria at them as they lay on the floor with their stomachs exposed.

“C’mon, I’m the bottomless pit” reminded Aly, jumping up as if to prove her point.

“Me too, me too” squealed Claudia leaping up next to he older sister. “My tummy hurts. What’s a bottom spit?” She wrinkled up her nose in confusion and Aly and their mum laughed at her, ruffling her hair fondly.

“Never mind. Let’s eat, shall we?” The table had already been set and now Maria brought three mugs of hot chocolate to the table and three heaped plates of spaghetti bolognaise their favourite. “Nothing like pasta to warm you up. And make you fat” said Maria, chewing thoughtfully. Claud just slurped her hot chocolate considerately before replying consolingly.

“You’re not fat mummy. You’re just right.”

“Aww thanks sweetheart. And so are you, my little angel. You’re perfect.” At this, Claudia grinned with all the innocence of her six years. She looked so young and sweet Aly could practically see a halo shining above her head of dark brown hair. Of course, she could be a little devil too when she wanted to.

The finished the meal, talking and laughing, remembering and reminiscing before moving onto other topics such as how had they found their first week here, did they like it and had they met anyone.

“Well, we all know Amy already” declared Claud. Amy and her had been good friends until, a year ago Amy’s family had moved away – and now they were ‘reunited’ so to speak.

“Oh, a guy came to connect the phones today by the way” put in Aly pensively.

“Really? I don’t remember arranging that…but you know how I forget things.”

“Yes, we do” the two girls chorused, and laughed together. “So how is work going anyways?” asked Aly to her mother.

“Oh, the usual. This promotion is great but there’s so much more work to do now!” she exclaimed, looking surprised. Aly was shocked she hadn’t seen what was coming; promotions meant you were doing well, and therefore needed more work because you weren’t working to your full potential. That’s what she thought anyway, but then again, she had never gotten a promotion before.

It wasn’t that Aly didn’t work – she did, very hard. She did a whole load of odd jobs as well as a whole lot of charity work and fundraising when she had the time to. Her time that wasn’t spent doing school work was passed by tutoring for extra money, coaching sports or babysitting. For charity, she and her best friend Nicky had swum the English Channel. It had been extremely difficult but they had made it and in the process, raised twenty three thousand pounds, which was quite a lot considering it was only two teenagers who had completed the task.

Ramblings aside – Aly always thought that she drifted off in her own mind far too much for her own good; dinner was finished after half an hour. It wasn’t that it took them long to eat, but meals were family affairs. They usually – and not so often now, since her mum worked overtime both in the office and at home, ate all together around the table, and chatted as well as ate.

Maria did not believe in TV dinners, nor did she approve too much of fast food. Aly had to say, she partially agreed, but only because she hated fast food; well, burgers and fries and stuff like that. Pizza was good but she detested McDonalds and Burger King.

The children had been brought up not watching much TV so it had never been that much of an issue; occasionally they would sit down to watch a movie with a bowl of popcorn but more often than not, evenings – like this one – found them curled up around the sitting room reading books or in Claud’s case, dropping off to sleep. Aly was reading A Brief History of Time; she was fascinated by physics and science in general – which made the magic even harder to believe. Was it simply a phenomenon, surely it could be explained somehow. But Aly was uneasy about this, and itched to try out the power again, to examine it.

As soon as Aly noticed this, she pointed it out to her mother who was absorbed in her book, The Kite Runner a book which her eldest daughter had highly recommended, and for good reason; it was absolutely brilliant. Sighing, she decided it might be helpful if she took Claud upstairs so she scooped the six year old up in her arms and bundled her up the stairs into her own room, laying her on the bed and tucking her in.

Somehow, Claud remained asleep the entire time.

“Night Claud” murmured Aly, smoothing her hair off her forehead. Sometimes it seemed that Aly was more of a mother to her younger sister than Maria was, simply because she was always there, and also had that maternal streak that made her get along with kids and made it easy for her to look after and protect them.

Ruffling the top of her silky head – if she had kissed it, Aly decided, that would be way too much of a cliché – she headed back downstairs to find that her mother had fallen asleep, book on chest and reading glasses sliding down the bridge of her nose. She surveyed her intently for a moment or two.

“I am no way picking that up” she protested to herself.

You really have to stop talking to yourself like that.

Shut up.

And honestly, who argues with themselves? I call it schizophrenia.

Aly decided to be the ‘bigger person’ and blocked out her conscience, which was annoyingly awake and functioning at that moment. Shaking her mother awake, she explained that though she could carry Claud up the stairs, there was no way Maria would make it. She just yawned and turned over, still half asleep.

“Fine, suit yourself. But don’t blame me when you have a bad back in the morning” reprimanded her eldest daughter. She was only acknowledged by a groan which was muffled by the cushions that lay beneath her head on the sofa. “Okay, I’m going to bed now. G’night mummy.”

“Night sweetheart, sleep tight.”

Aly headed upstairs yet again, to her bedroom. She stripped off, after having made sure the curtains were most definitely closed and pulled on her pyjamas. It was silent in the house, but a different sort of quiet. It was a comfortable silence; the air was filled with the breathing of a little girl and a mother and that alone was enough to make Aly smile, reassured.

She decided to check on the snowflakes, mainly because she could scarcely believe what had happened. It could have all been a dream, she reasoned with herself as she lifted down the box from its place on the shelf.

But no, the pile of snow was still there, just as she had left it. It hadn’t even melted onto the smooth, aged wood that lined the box. Tomorrow, she would have to experiment with this new power she had. It was far too complicated for her tired brain to manage at that moment, and she carefully placed the box back where it had came from before climbing into bed, crawling under the covers and wrapping them tightly around her. Entering a meditative state, she weaved a cocoon of content around herself and soon fell asleep, as if in a safety net of her own.