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SOULMAKER

  by Nadine Cooke

  SOULMAKER

  by Nadine Cooke

  Copyright 2012 Nadine Cooke

  SOULMAKER

  Chapter 1

  Ashden Jaybanks pushed the last thumbtack into the corner of the poster and stood back to consider his fate.

  “You sure you want that up there?”

  Ashden barely acknowledged the teacher who passed him, scowling.

  “You bring it on yourself, you know that, don’t you kid.”

  “Not for much longer,” Ashden said under his breath, turning abruptly from the poster and heading down to the playground. A young redhead watching from the stairway, caught him off guard and in his effort to avoid her, he slipped sideways, lost his balance and toppled the rest of the way down.

  Before she could apologise, the bony fist of Oscar Rindman reached into the heap of Ashden’s body and pulled him up by the collar.

  “Watch where ya lyin’, Banksy. I almost stubbed a toe on you,” and he kicked Ashden’s ankle, smirking over his shoulder at his best mate, Mark.

  Ashden remained silent, staring at what ground he could see on either side of Oscar’s knuckles.

  “All right, back to sleep,” said Oscar, pushing him into the dirt.

  “Ooh, don’t cry, Banksy, don’t cry,” taunted Mark as they sauntered off, laughing.

  “You okay there, Jaybanks?” asked the teacher reappearing with newspaper in hand.

  Ashden glanced back at the boys, smoothing down his collar. He nodded, long strands of fringe falling into his eyes.

  “All right then,” the teacher said and disappeared.

  From inside the doorway at the top of the steps, the redhead watched Ashden pick himself up and walk to class. He pulled a toy from his back pocket, squeezed it in his hand then returned it.

  “Lucky Oscar missed that,” she said, turning to the library. Beside the door on the pin board was Ashden’s poster. Elanora Lacey stopped in front of it and shook her head, “But wait till he sees this!”

  By lunchtime the inevitable happened. Oscar found the poster and Elanora saw the consequences unfold from her hideout in the bush. Oscar got him just as he was heading for his favourite place under the old fig tree at the foot of the playground, thirty metres from where Elanora crouched. Ashden was sent sprawling onto the asphalt with an expert shove from behind. Oscar towered over him waiting till a sizeable crowd gathered. And it gathered quickly. Eager onlookers. Happy to cheer on the school bully if it bought them a moment’s peace.

  Waving about in Oscar Rindman’s fist, directly under Ashden’s nose, was the poster.

  Next Monday

  Donate your old toys for charity

  Soft animals only

  Collection at Assembly

  No adolescent worth his acne would let a boy sap about with anything soft and sentimental like a cuddly toy and get away with it. But no matter how many times Oscar beat this into him, Ashden never learned. Now he wanted everyone else to bring in theirs as well, with the weak excuse of donating them to charity. He was the charity, more like, and Oscar Rindman was only too willing to donate a fist full.

  Elanora had observed Ashden many times from her secret hideout. She watched the way he slunk in and out of school, soft toys in tow. How he sat so peacefully between the fig’s arching roots. How he never appeared to care what the other boys said or did to him, just went his own way, sometimes there, sometimes absent for days, always alone. Elanora knew about alone. Despite a stream of red hair, Elanora Lacey was seldom noticed by anyone. She was the kind of girl who blended so far into the background as to become part of it. Regardless of anything she said or did, no one ever rested their eyes on her long enough to form an opinion let alone take an interest.

  Her school reports were terrible. The teachers always forgot to mark her work or if they remembered, forgot to record it. Consequently she was a “passive student who failed to complete class work and assignments.” Last year she decided to stop bringing in her completed assignments and workbooks to prove them wrong. Instead she quietly folded her report cards and filed them in the bottom of her wardrobe. She had waited for her parents to ask for them, but they never did.

  All of which meant that Elanora had learned how to occupy herself. Alone. And since the discovery of the perfect hideout, found while scouring the bush for her toy pony that Oscar Rindman had drop kicked, that had been easy.

  She had been enchanted at first sight by the hide with its rusty panels angled like a moth eaten tent. Any supporting beams from the original shed had long since been digested by termites and what remained had slumped to the ground creating a small crawl space. Her toy pony, thanks to Oscar’s kick, had been wedged in one of the many rust holes with such a look of contentment that she had taken it as a sign and crawled inside.

  As the year drew to a close, Elanora found herself spending more and more time in her hideout staring out at the playground, fixated on the enormous spectre of a fig tree - The Strangler. There it stood, at the furthest edge. Six storeys high and two elephants wide. Anchored to the ground by vast multi limbed trunks descending from along its branches like extrusions of swamp mud, oozing and melting onto the encroaching asphalt. Its leaves were rubbery thick and the moment you braved its canopy it enveloped you in mystery. Though few could stand its shade. In the dark, its network of limbs and dangling roots were too much like sinew and skeleton. Looking at it for too long could trick your mind into seeing deeply buried faces screaming for release. It was safest to ignore the tree and glance only occasionally to check it hadn’t moved.

  An old rumour that a dog was found skewered by one of its fast descending limbs kept most people well shy of it. The fact that every so often an entirely new trunk appeared overnight, anchoring a thick branch to the ground, made the rumour all the more believable. And then there was the dead man found fifty years ago swinging from a limb, a noose of dangling roots around his neck.

  If Elanora ever passed too close to it her blood pricked her skin as if clotted with iron filings and the tree magnetised her towards its dark folds. In recent months the sensation had intensified. Yet in spite of her fear, Elanora was fascinated by the sight of it and spent hours spying on it from her hideout, which was how she had also become fascinated by Ashden Jaybanks; a scab kneed year niner with the occasional air of an adult but the embarrassing obsessions of a kid. The boy with the too-big clothes and the bag of toys. But the ease with which he moved about The Strangler made her curious. Everyone else kept a respectful distance. Except Oscar of course, who had to prove he wasn’t scared of anything. She wondered what could give Ashden such confidence. Unfortunately, he always hung under the fig so she could never ask, but her interest in him grew. It grew so much, that on that day when Oscar Rindman set to humiliate him once again, shaking him about like an under-stuffed toy, she snapped. Storming from her hideout, she ran directly down to that dreaded old Strangler.

  Couldn’t he retaliate just a bit? Elanora thought, squeezing to the front of the onlookers. They hadn’t made a complete ring around Ashden in case they came too close to the fig. Instead they formed a half circle at the canopy’s edge, with him cornered by its curving roots like a rabbit caught in a dragon’s tail. Beneath dark eyebrows, his eyes shone in the shadows. His ears were hidden by the wayward fall of his hair but every sound of the crowd washed into them.

  “How come everywhere I go today, you’re takin’ a nap?” Oscar said, surveying the group and giving Ashden a nudge in the ribs with his shoe.

  Blood shifted heavily in Elanora’s face as she poked her head through the crowd.

  “You want Mark to get your cuddly wuddly so you can have a little naptime, Banksy Baby?” sneered Oscar, putting his arm around his mate’s shoulders. “Or would y
ou wahva have mine?” They both sniggered as Oscar hovered his fist over Ashden’s jaw. It was too easy to tease this kid. Oscar gave Mark the nod and he lunged forward to wrench the soft toy from under Ashden’s arm. The crowd cheered.

  Mark Findle’s great paw of a hand closed around the leg of the bear and yanked it free. Oscar rushed in with a kick, stopping inches short of Ashden’s ribs. He then pivoted to land a hefty kick in the guts of his bulging backpack. Ashden’s hand shot out to grab it but he was too late. The violence of the kick dislodged the top flap revealing a tightly packed host of furry heads with glass eyes that stared out at the crowd. The students erupted like seagulls squabbling over scraps of his self-esteem.

  “Check this out,” yelled Oscar over the noise as he caught the bear Mark tossed him and drop kicked it over their heads.

  “Just stop, why don’t you?” said Ashden calmly, stirring up dust as he rose to his feet.

  “Ooh just stop, why don’t you,” Oscar mimicked, crumpling the poster he was holding into a ball. He drew back his arm aiming at Ashden’s face then lurched forward at the last minute to grab him by the scruff of the neck, forcing the paper wad into his mouth. “Here comes the aeroplane!” he chimed, high on adrenaline. Ashden spat it out as his body hit the ground again.

  Elanora hadn’t taken her eyes off Ashden’s the whole time and noticed how his focus had never left the far flung toy. He kept moving his head and his look of concern seemed more to do with losing sight of it than being beaten up.

  Elanora loved toys herself, but it was odd even to her to see such passion in the eyes of a teenage boy. But perhaps he would change once puberty really kicked in. Perhaps he would stop carrying them around as if they were babies but keep his soft side. For me? she asked herself. Elanora rolled her eyes and left the chanting crowd to scout for Ashden’s bear.

  Under one of the classrooms she found it, dusted it off then hid it in the arms of the jumper tied around her waist. As the crowd surged she dived back in and pawed to the front where Ashden was on his toes, eyes searching, while Oscar demonstrated how to unbalance your opponent with a well-aimed kick to the back of the kneecaps.

  “Bank-sy, Ba-by, Bank-sy, Ba-by,” the students chorused, clapping in rhythm.

  When Ashden was back in the dirt, Elanora eased the toy from her waist hoping to catch his eye. Ashden’s eyes locked on. With a resurgence of energy he rolled towards her, plucked it from her hand, grabbed for his bag then hurled himself into the forked roots of the fig.

  Blood began to pound her ears and heat her face. The heaviness in her head brought her to her knees where her hands involuntarily crawled forward in the dirt. As she reared back, her skin separated from her skull and her eyes bulged painfully. Through the distortion Elanora saw the colours behind Ashden smudge, erasing him streak by streak from the scene. There were short, diagonal blurs of tree root smeared through the brown earth that just as quickly blended into a blue uniformed shirt and, like an eraser rubbing in reverse, Ashden reappeared and the smudginess vanished.

  The pounding in her ears stopped, her skin settled into its proper contours and her eyes sunk back in their sockets. She shook her head and looked around, expecting to see astonishment on everyone’s faces. But there was nothing. The jeering continued as before making Elanora wonder whether she’d been mistaken. She looked back at Ashden. On his arm was a gash which she couldn’t remember him receiving from Oscar. His bag was still filled with furry faces, but she was sure these ones were different. There was no mistaking that to a toy-trained eye.

  The bell rang and one voice cut above the rest. “Teacher’s comin’!” and the crowd scattered. Oscar gave Ashden his wait-till-next-time smirk. The interruption didn’t worry him. He walked away as easily from bullying as he did from a drink at the bubblers. He even wiped his mouth in the same satisfied way.

  All that remained in the playground was a dishevelled boy with a bleeding arm and a girl with a puzzled expression on her face, backing step by step away from the fig.