Cuttlefish - By Dave Freer Page 0,2

was asleep, the deep sleep of absolute exhaustion, and, Clara realised, of relief.

Clara lay down on the thin horse-hair mattress and thought back about just how they'd ended up here. Parts of it cut at her like a knife.

On the day it had all started, Clara had not wanted to leave school. It was not that St. Margaret's School for the Children of Officers and Gentlemen in Fermoy, Cork, Ireland, was a place that she loved. She detested every inch of it, from the courtyard with its limp Union Jack, surrounded by three stories of clattering corridors and classrooms, to the coal cellar that Ellen—helped by the three terrors—had pushed her into last week. Clara knew that she should keep quiet, keep her head down…but she wasn't good at that. And the girls on the top of the pile were bigger than her, better at sports, popular with boys and with the teachers…but stupid, too.

Well, the library—with its tall stacks of slightly musty leather-bound books—mostly fifty years old, and, often as not, from parts of the Empire that had vanished beneath the waves in the Big Melt—was the all right part of the school. It had books and protection, in the shape of a librarian on duty. Besides, going in there was something the popular girls wouldn't be caught dead doing. So Clara had been lurking in between the stacks. She'd been looking at a book on the Australian Colonies, complete with pictures of funny-looking black men with painted throwing sticks and very few clothes.

No decent Englishman would be seen like that! Not even at New Brighton! The other girls would at least pretend to be shocked. That, and the angry expression on the man's face, made Clara curious enough to start reading. She'd read all the fiction in the place years ago, and besides, it was about a place that was a long way away, a place where she was unlikely to meet other St. Margaret's girls and be jeered at or, worse, sniffed at and turned away from. Books like this were good for dreams. She'd like to go there.…It would be far enough away from home so she would not have to explain to her mother that she had got a B for chemistry in the latest set of tests. It didn't matter that she'd got 98% for mathematics, no.

She looked at the leather cover: Queensland, the Dominion of Australia. Its People and the Quaint Customs of the Native Inhabitants. A place on the other side of the world…it would be far away from anyone who knew that her father was in prison. Clara wasn't sure if they regarded that as any better than her mother being divorced, but she knew that when you added the two together it made her life in Fermoy, and at St. Margaret's, barely worth living.

Then, to her utter horror, she'd heard her mother's voice. “Is my daughter Clara here?”

Did she have to come here?

“Yes, Dr. Calland.” The librarian sniffed. “I believe Miss Calland is in the geography section.” Disapproval was written clearly in the librarian's tone. Parents, even the daughters of an original founding lady-governor, were not welcome on the school grounds. They should hand over their child at the gate, and their money at the front office, and that was it. A divorced mother, wandering around unaccompanied, would be as welcome at St. Margaret's as leprosy.

What was her mother doing here? Clara wondered, caught between irritation and sudden fear. Something must be wrong. She should be at work, in her laboratory at Imperial Chemicals and Dyes.

Clara's mother was tall, elegant, and all the other things Clara had decided she wasn't ever going to grow up to be: womanly, and a research chemist. Her mother's hair was always so precisely pinned up, especially when she went out…but it definitely was not in perfect order right now. And she was very pale. The moment her mother stepped around the stack, Clara knew that something was very wrong.

The fact that she put her finger to her lips was also somewhat of a clue. “Ah, Clara,” said her mother, a little too loudly and cheerfully, quite unlike herself. “You must come with me right now. I have a motoring car waiting out front.”

A car? Almost no one had one of those. The trams ran well and to time. Fuel for motoring cars was ruinously expensive too. Well, in the British Empire. It was said that in America even a lot of ordinary people owned