Catch Your Death

Inside was a fire and there were a couple of chairs set round a small wooden table. Two bowls, two plates, a couple of forks and a couple of spoons. A large metal pot dangled over the fire and a very good smell wafted out. Ruby suddenly felt a lot more awake. Emerson didn’t seem like such a hard nut after all – he could cook at least.

For the first ten minutes she said nothing at all as she slurped the stew.

‘Wow, you are wolfing that down Redfort. When did you last eat?’

She looked up. ‘It’s good,’ was all she said.

Later, after Emerson had got her to the light aircraft and flown her back to the outskirts of Twinford, Ruby finally clapped eyes on Hitch. He was waiting there in the darkness like some kind of guardian angel.

The first thing Ruby did was to ease her left boot off. She had been dying to remove it, but she hadn’t wanted Emerson to see the injury; she didn’t need it to become some sort of big deal – not yet anyway.

‘Sam bring you in?’ Hitch asked.

‘How dya know?’

‘I recognise his bandage work,’ said Hitch, glancing at Ruby’s foot.

‘How come he was tracking me?’

‘I put in a request.’

They got into the car and drove into the night.

‘So what happened out there kid, what took you?’

‘I fell,’ said Ruby. ‘Hurt my foot.’

‘That’s a consequence,’ said Hitch, ‘not the reason.’

‘I lost my glasses – they fell in the river.’

‘So?’ he said.

‘What do you mean, so?’

‘What I mean,’ said Hitch, ‘is why should that be a problem?’

‘Are you kidding me?’ said Ruby. ‘I can’t manage without them.’

‘What I’m suggesting,’ said Hitch, his voice calm and steady, ‘is if you’re saying your being thirteen hours late is really because you can’t manage without eyewear then what are you doing trying to train as an agent?’

Ruby just looked at him. Then she said, ‘You gonna tell LB?’

‘No kid, I’m not going to tell LB, at least not if you tell me what’s really the problem here.’

Hitch pulled the car over to the side of the road and let the engine quietly idle.

‘I don’t really get it myself,’ said Ruby.

‘Come on kid, give me a straight answer. You can flannel all of them – you can even get me to cover for you – but you can’t pretend like I don’t know something went wrong, something more than losing one geeky pair of glasses.’

‘Colt didn’t tell you?’ asked Ruby.

‘No, what Colt says to you is your business,’ replied Hitch.

Ruby took a deep breath. ‘If you really wanna know, Colt seems to think I rely on what I know instead of using my instincts. He says I got a throw away the rules and react to what’s happening out there.’ She gestured to the darkness beyond them.

‘So what’s the problem?’

‘I don’t think I know how to do that,’ said Ruby. ‘So, when I go and lose my stupid glasses, I might as well throw in the towel.’

Hitch thought for a moment before saying, ‘I think I might be able to help you there kid.’

‘Yeah?’ said Ruby hopefully.

‘Might take a while; she’s not the easiest person to track down.’

‘Who?’

‘I’ll let you know if I find her.’

‘So you’re not gonna tell LB about my eye trouble?’

‘Why would I tell her?’

‘Why wouldn’t you?’ shrugged Ruby.

‘Because kid, I can see that there’s a whole lot more to you than your bad eyesight.’

She sighed, relieved. ‘So you’re not gonna tell LB I flunked?’

Hitch didn’t answer immediately. He checked his mirror and made to swing back out onto the road and then he said, ‘No need. LB already knows you flunked kid. She knew before you did.’

Chapter 9.

HITCH AND RUBY ARRIVED BACK HOME at Cedarwood Drive soon after midnight. They walked up the steps in silence and once in the front door Hitch whispered, ‘Sleep like the dead kid,’ before making his way down to his small stylish apartment at the bottom of the house.

Hitch had been with the Redforts for approximately four months and he had turned their lives around. He was there in the guise of household manager (or ‘butler’ as Sabina Redfort liked to brag) and he was good at it; no one would doubt his cover story.

But his real posting was as protector of Ruby; he was there both to keep an eye on her and work with her. If Hitch made a good butler, he made a whole lot better bodyguard and Ruby never once took it for granted. She had known him since March and already owed him her life twice over.

Now alone, she hobbled on up the two flights of stairs to her own private floor. Her room was much as she’d left it. A selection of her dirty mugs, cereal bowls and banana milk glasses had been collected up and removed, but generally her room was an unchanged scene of devastation. On the floor was a trail of clothes that led to or spread from the walk-in wardrobe. Record sleeves stacked one on top of the other next to the still turning turntable; piles of magazines and journals on all subjects fanned out across the rugs, and on top of these were pens, papers, telephones – all sculpted in various ridiculous shapes, some comical, some unlikely, a squirrel in a tux, a bar of soap, a corncob, a dog bone; and these four were not even the most eccentric.

The only place in any way orderly in her room was the bed; this was neatly made with the clean sheets pulled tight over the mattress and the quilt on top.

‘Good old Mrs Digby,’ sighed Ruby.

Because Mrs Digby had been the Redforts’ housekeeper since always, she knew Ruby as well as she knew every cooking pot in her kitchen (as she was fond of saying). She might not interfere with the general appearance of Ruby’s space, but she was insightful enough to know that just about anyone would rather come home to a clean, made bed.

Ruby for one was sincerely grateful. She eyed the bed longingly, then, before she lost all will to do anything but fall on top of it, she dragged herself to the bathroom and examined her face in the mirror. She was looking unusually pale; her complexion, normally olive-oil brown and healthy, seemed to have faded to a sickly grey. Her green eyes were a little bloodshot and her long dark hair was tangled and without shine. Ordinarily, Ruby was very particular about her appearance, styling her hair into a side-parting so one eye was almost obscured by a heavy curtain of glossy black-brown and fastened with a barrette; tonight she barely recognised herself.

Is this the face of failure? she wondered.

She set the shower running and had a good hot soak. Once just about all the mud and leaf was washed away, she got dry and dressed. She dabbed a little Wild Rose perfume on her neck and wrists. Boy, it was good to smell of something other than mulch and river sludge. She chose the warmest pyjamas she could find, long striped socks that stretched from her toes to her knee tops and – swamping her tiny frame – an outsized sweatshirt.

Even so she still felt cold.

Back in the bedroom she stood in front of the huge bookcase that extended from wall to wall, floor to ceiling. The bookshelves held Ruby’s large assortment of written works: everything from spy thrillers and classic novels to encyclopedias, factual journals to comics, graphic novels and codebooks. All these books she treasured, reading them again and again, over and over.

She was standing there, wondering what book to pull from the shelves, when she heard the familiar squeak of her father’s new and expensive Marco Perella deck shoes – the squeak was coming from outside, which surprised her since she was sure her father was tucked up in bed. She dimmed the light and peeped out of the window to check out what he was up to, but it was not her father she saw, but rather their neighbour, Niles Lemon, putting out the trash. He had on the exact same deck shoes as her dad and they made the exact same stupid squeak when he walked. They were, as far as Ruby was concerned, label before style, a whole lot of cash to look like a nerd. The only thing was Brant Redfort pretty much managed to look good in anything and Niles Lemon did not.

‘What a bozo,’ muttered Ruby.

Mr Lemon didn’t have an original idea in his whole body. Last month he had purchased the same sunglasses her father wore and, two weeks ago, the same tennis racquet (it hadn’t improved his game). Ruby reached for her yellow notebook, notebook 624 – the previous 623 were kept under the floorboards. She wrote:

Niles Lemon has bought the exact same deck shoes as my dad. A total waste of several hundred bucks.

These yellow notebooks of Ruby’s were all filled with tiny and mundane incidents like this one. Every now and again an event of obvious importance would be added, but usually it was something pretty dull, funny or odd. Most of these happenings had taken place on Cedarwood Drive, plenty in Twinford and a few out of town. Ruby simply noted the things she saw, the everyday-ordinary and the once-in-a-blue-moon weird. This Niles Lemon incident certainly fell into the first category, but then one just never could be sure when something utterly banal was going to become significant. RULE 16: EVEN THE MUNDANE CAN TELL A STORY.

The pencil almost didn’t make it to the end of the sentence before her eyes closed and the yellow notebook fell softly to the floor and Ruby was plunged into dream-filled sleep.

She was attempting to scale a cliff face; a pack of wolves was snapping at her feet: she could smell their fur, feel their claws. She felt a tug on her sleeve and hot breath on her cheek. She let out a squawk and snapped the light on.

‘Jeez Bug, what are you doing creeping up on me like that?’ Ruby sat up and scratched the husky’s head and he licked her cheek again before lying down on the mat next to her bed.

Ruby sighed, shut her eyes for a second time and didn’t open them until daylight crept into the room. The first thought that crossed her mind, the very first thought, was: I failed.

Chapter 10.

STRANGELY FOR RUBY, she had found herself waking early. It was probably to do with having slept in damp undergrowth for three nights – her body had got used to the idea that it didn’t want to lie down for longer than was totally necessary. Or maybe it was due to the lurking fear that gnawed at her dreams and caused her to stare up at the ceiling, wondering if this was the day when LB would kick her out for good; the Spectrum Field Agent Training Programme did not deal in failures.

She was shaken from her troubles by the marvellous smell which drifted up the stairs, reminding her that grubs and boiled-up bark weren’t on the menu in the Redforts’ architect-designed home.

Ruby pulled on jeans, a pair of Yellow Stripe sneakers and a T-shirt bearing the words don’t even ask. She secured her hair neatly with a barrette and put on her spare glasses. Then she made her way downstairs and into the kitchen.

‘Well, you could knock me over like a bowling alley skittle,’ said Mrs Digby, her hands on her hips and lips sucking in air. The sight of Ruby up before the crows always made the housekeeper react this way. Ruby was no early bird and it was more usual to see her go to bed at five in the morning than arise at that time.

‘How was camp?’ asked Mrs Digby, who was under the illusion that Ruby was on some scouting type of a trip organised by Twinford Junior High – she had been training for it off and on for the past several weeks.

Hitch had taken over all the liaising with the school regarding trips, holidays and general arrangements so the Redford household was in the dark about Ruby’s movements. It hadn’t occurred to Mrs Digby to wonder why on earth the scouting training should take place during school hours, rather than in summer vacation; if Hitch said it was so, then she didn’t question it.

‘It was pretty terrible,’ said Ruby.

Mrs Digby studied her face. ‘You do look terrible, I can see that with my own two eyes, but why is the question I ask myself – don’t you know how to have fun?’

‘Ah, you know what it’s like Mrs Digby, sleeping on bedrolls and eating oatmeal. What’s fun about that?’

‘You had bedrolls?’ exclaimed the housekeeper. ‘You young people don’t know you’re born. When I was a child, we would have thought it was Christmas to sleep in leaves let alone bedrolls. And as for hot oatmeal. . .’ She tutted and left the thought there.

Like Mrs Digby, Ruby also would have been grateful to have found some leaves to bed down in, but she knew if she mentioned how she had really slept and what she had really eaten, or rather not eaten, then the housekeeper would have by now been dialling the scout leader to give him a piece of her mind.

Ruby grabbed the pitcher of orange juice – she could use the vitamin C, her throat was bothering her and she was beginning to feel a bit feverish.

Hitch looked up from where he sat, reading the paper.

‘Nice to see you again kid,’ he said as if he hadn’t seen Ruby for several days. ‘Camp fun, was it? I’m guessing you kids spend your whole time singing and toasting marshmallows.’ He winked at her and she gave him a sideways look as if to say, You’re some comedian.

Mrs Digby tutted again at the mention of marshmallows and it set her off muttering about the privileged generation that was Ruby’s.

Hitch pushed a mug of something hot in Ruby’s direction. ‘This might help, at least for a few hours,’ he said.

Ruby gave it a sniff: it was the Hitch cure-all, his own familiar concoction and one that seemed to alleviate most ailments. He called it the nine-hour rescue because it would see you through for pretty much that time and then you would feel terrible again.

After Ruby had downed some pancakes and a quarter bottle of maple syrup (maple syrup being the reason for eating the pancakes), she headed off on her bike to the oak tree on Amster Green. She climbed it swiftly and was out of sight before anyone (if anyone had actually been around) could spot her.

She and Clancy had arranged via one of their long-distance telephone calls to meet early on Saturday morning, Clancy not wanting to wait a minute longer than necessary to hear about the survival training and, more importantly, to moan about his dad.

But Clancy wasn’t there – she guessed it was too early even for him.

Ruby searched the hollow in the trunk to see if he had perhaps left a message – he had. As usual, it was folded into a complicated origami shape (this time a weasel) and written in code, a code to which only she and Clancy knew the key.

Tau bs grm pqxi ybbqd, dg wifmsz Zmggc orraleq bh – EEIMVL.*

Ruby sighed. ‘Makes me glad I don’t have a sister,’ she muttered. She looked at her watch and thought she might wait it out. Hitch’s nine-hour rescue had kicked in and she had stopped shivering. It was a nice day and she wouldn’t mind the luxury of sitting still for an hour or two. Only thing was her mind kept circling round her failure, reminding her that all was not so rosy in Ruby world.

Chapter 11.

CLANCY, MEANWHILE, was wheeling his forlorn-looking, beat-up bike to the cycle store. He was furious with Minny; it was typical of her: first total her own bike then wreck his. Can it even be fixed? he wondered. He wasn’t feeling too optimistic about the prognosis. When he was within a couple of yards of the store, he stopped.

He’d seen it in the magazines a few times, he’d heard it was coming to Twinford, the bike guy had told him about it, but he hadn’t known that it was going to be in the store this weekend.

He stood there and looked up at the poster, just taking the thing in.

‘Some beautiful machine,’ he whispered. The poster, which showed the bike in fabulous colour with arrows pointing out all its good points, was displayed large in the bike store window. In huge print the poster warned: The Windrush 2000. ONLY available while stocks last.

Clancy gazed at it for some minutes before uprooting himself from the sidewalk and pushing his way into the store. He needed to get his old bike fixed (if indeed it could be fixed), but more than that he needed to know when the Windrush 2000 was coming and just how few were being delivered. I mean just how long did Abe the bike guy think stocks would last?

‘Ah, around a few days,’ said Abe. ‘If this bike is all they say it is, then I imagine it’s going to, you know, like whizz out the store.’ He made a whizzing motion with his hand as he said this. ‘I ordered what was available, but this baby’s in demand.’ He looked at Clancy with a serious expression. ‘You know what I’m saying man? It ain’t gonna stick around.’

Clancy did know what Abe was saying and he was beginning to panic inside. As a result, he was there a lot longer than he had meant to be and once he caught the time he ran like crazy all the way to Amster Green.

‘Where’ve you been buster? I’ve been hanging around up here for about a day.’ Ruby wasn’t bothered by the waiting, the truth was she really didn’t mind waiting, but she was irked that Clancy was late for her. Clancy Crew was rarely late for anyone.

‘Ah, sorry Rube,’ called Clancy, ‘I got distracted.’

‘Well, you missed some action that’s for sure. Mrs Beesman caused a collision when she let go of her shopping cart and it spun off into the street. This cheesy-looking guy in a big white Cadillac hit a fire hydrant and he got all hot and bothered and threatened to sue her and then Marla came out of the Double Donut and started hitting him on the head with a pancake flipper. Sheriff Bridges had to come and break it up. He had the siren on and everything.’

‘I’m sorry to miss it,’ said Clancy, with genuine disappointment.

‘Yeah, well, Marla really let that guy have it. Said he deserved it for picking on a defenceless old woman.’

‘I have quibbles about the “defenceless” part, but otherwise I’m with Marla,’ said Clancy. ‘Mrs Beesman might be a little strange, but I doubt she let go her cart on purpose; it’s like her prized possession.’

‘Yeah, she’s not bothering anyone, and ever since we cleaned out her yard that time I’ve kinda had a soft spot for Mrs Beesman, you know what I mean?’

‘No,’ said Clancy, who didn’t know why anyone would have a soft spot for Mrs Beesman; personally, she scared the life out of him, not that he would wish her any harm, but he wanted to avoid her at all costs.

Mrs Beesman was reputed to have at least seventy-four cats which all lived in her small wonky house on the corner of Cedarwood Drive. She spent her days pushing a shopping cart full of cat food and listening to her transistor radio as she trundled to and from the SmartMart. She never spoke to another human soul. Mrs Beesman rarely seemed to purchase anything other than pet snacks and it was thought she too probably existed on a diet of cat food.

‘Turns out she let go of her shopping cart because this mugger guy was trying to steal her cat, you know that big grey one she takes everywhere? I didn’t see that part, just the aftermath.’

‘Why would anyone try to steal that cat? It’s only got one ear and I’m not sure it isn’t a bit short of legs,’ said Clancy.

‘Who knows what motivates the criminal mind?’ said Ruby.

‘Well, we can be pretty sure it wasn’t motivated by the desire to win best in show at Twinford Cat Club,’ said Clancy.

‘So,’ asked Ruby, ‘what was the big distraction?’

‘Ah, nothin’,’ said Clancy, ‘I’m too depressed to talk about it. Fill me in on your training?’

‘I got lost,’ replied Ruby.

‘That doesn’t sound good,’ said Clancy.

‘No, I was meant to be lost; the training was getting myself unlost.’ She sighed.

‘So did you?’

‘I’m here, aren’t I?’

‘I guess you are. So you passed, that was good, huh?’

‘No,’ said Ruby. ‘It wasn’t and I didn’t. There was a time factor and I didn’t make it.’

‘Oh, that’s a drag,’ said Clancy, looking at her. ‘They gonna kick you out or what?’

‘Your sensitivity is appreciated,’ said Ruby.

‘I’m just asking.’

It was a question Ruby didn’t particularly want to answer. ‘Well, it wasn’t good. I was way too slow.’ She let out a heavy sigh.

‘So?’ said Clancy, shrugging. ‘You can fix that easy enough, just speed up.’

‘It isn’t that easy,’ said Ruby. ‘I seemed to royally suck.’

‘You can’t have flunked it all. So you got lost. I bet you were super good at everything else.’

‘I sort of flunked on the whole foraging thing too,’ said Ruby.

‘Food foraging?’ asked Clancy.

‘What other kind is there?’ said Ruby.

‘Fuel?’ suggested Clancy.

‘No, fuel there was plenty of,’ she replied. ‘I’m just not so good at rootling around for things that look disgusting and then eating them.’

‘I’m with you there,’ said Clancy.

Neither of them said anything for a minute or two.

Clancy was thinking about this new side to Ruby, Ruby the flunker. It sort of made him feel better somehow, her not being good at something. He didn’t want to feel good about something that made her feel bad, but it was a creeping satisfaction that he wasn’t in charge of.

‘So what you gonna do Rube?’

‘I’m gonna order a big plate of French toast and forget about it.’

Clancy smiled. ‘Sounds good to me.’

‘Let’s go to the Donut, get the skinny on what happened with Marla and the cops.’

Chapter 12.

THEY CLIMBED BACK DOWN THE TREE and were sitting at the diner bar counter two minutes later. The place was full of talk; everyone was discussing Marla’s heroic defence of the cat lady. No one had pressed charges and the cops were a lot more interested in the driver’s untaxed Cadillac than they were in the damage a shopping cart and a fire hydrant might have done to it.

Ruby ate fast, barely saying a word.

‘You skip breakfast or something?’ asked Clancy.

‘Nah, I had breakfast,’ she replied, ‘just can’t stop feeling hungry I guess.’

‘Maybe you got worms,’ suggested Clancy.

‘I doubt it,’ said Ruby. ‘I didn’t eat anything that could give me worms.’

‘There are other ways to get worms,’ said Clancy.

‘I don’t wanna think about those other ways, thanks buster.’

‘I was only saying,’ he muttered.

Silence again and then he asked, ‘So I’m guessing you did some fun stuff too. I mean you must have, right?’

‘If you count parachuting from a great height, rustling a horse from a ranch and riding it bareback across a river and then making your way in pitch-black to a valley, finding a ditch and sleeping in it, then yes, I guess it was exciting.’

Clancy’s eyes widened. ‘I do count that as exciting, well, all but the part about your sleeping arrangements.’

‘Yeah, I coulda done without the ditch myself, to tell you the truth, and the getting lost part wasn’t so cool either, nor were the rapids and the having my foot stitched without anaesthetic.’

‘I didn’t know you could ride bareback,’ said Clancy.

‘Neither did I – it wasn’t planned exactly – it was sorta necessary.’

‘So what kinda things are they testing you on?’ he asked.

‘Survival more than anything, dealing with everyday wilderness conditions, extreme wilderness conditions and some incidental challenges, like forest fires, getting caught in rapids, attack by wild animals – any in-the-wilds emergency I guess.’