On Flip Side

by Nicholas Fisk

Genres: Science Fiction; Sci-fi Action & Adventure; YA Science Fiction

Synopsis

Lucas thinks his sister is barmy. She spends hours 'talking' to her pets. But when a world catastrophe threatens, Lettice's affinity with animals seems to offer a way of escape...

Release date: November 21, 2019

Publisher: Orion Publishing Group

Print pages: 320

Sample

Lucas said, ‘Oh, come on, Lettice. You did ask for it.’ But she just snivelled into her handkerchief and pulled her rabbit, Bunjy, closer to her. ‘It’s not fair,’ she whimpered. ‘Not fair.’

Lucas’s mouth opened but he closed it. Better not say anything. Better just to think it.

Lettice! What a name for this gangling sister of his! Twelve years old, almost as tall as he was at fourteen, purple-nosed with crying, blue-fingered with the cold – and crying like a child over a Rex rabbit called Bunjy. Bunjy …

‘You’ll soak Bunjy, crying like that,’ he said, trying to jolly her along. A mistake. ‘Oh, poor darling Bunjy!’ she moaned. ‘Darling, darling Bunjy! Does nobody love poor darling Bunjy, then …’

‘You can’t expect anyone to love poor darling Bunjy when he’s not house-trained and makes a mess on the rug in Mother’s bedroom,’ he pointed out. ‘A lambswool rug,’ he added.

But of course, Lettice skidded away from this commonsense point. ‘Nobody loves Bunjy!’ she cried. ‘Only me. Only Lettice.’

‘Rabbits love Lettice, Lettice loves rabbits,’ said Lucas, still feebly trying to be jolly. But still fighting against his inescapable dislike of his sister. He disliked her so much that they seldom quarrelled; quarrelling meant some sort of contact, some sort of closeness.

‘Well, I can’t help you,’ he said at last. ‘I don’t understand you. You bring the stupid bunny in when you’ve been told a million times not to; you let it make messes in people’s bedrooms; you get yelled at and kicked out; and now you want sympathy. I just don’t understand you.’

‘Nobody understands, do they, Bunjikins!’ she said to the rabbit. ‘Nobody understands me but you, nobody understands you but me.’

‘Oh, my gawd!’ said Lucas, and walked away fast, muttering a falsetto ‘We understand each other, don’t we, Bunjikins?’

Left alone, Lettice wiped her eyes with her hair then held up Bunjy with both hands around his chest. ‘We understand each other,’ she repeated softly.

She brought the rabbit closer and closer to her face, slowly, until they were eye to eye. At first the rabbit twitched; then it was still.

She looked into its eyes for a long time and said, ‘Oh, yes, Bunjy. We understand each other …’

‘A worry,’ thought Mrs Rideout. ‘Both of them a worry.’ She looked through the kitchen window at her son Lucas, striding along with shoulders humped. He paused to kick the head of a border pink hanging over the path. The flower head snapped off and arced through the air. Mrs Rideout flinched.

Worry. Lucas was a worry. He read and read and read, strange books, scientific books. But not science itself, not proper science, nothing useful, oh no … He was going to fail his exams if it went on like this. He was very clever, very clever indeed, they said so at school and in his reports. But he wasn’t getting anywhere. All theory, nothing practical. The sort of books he read would never get him through. Science fiction, psychology, genealogy. Never anything practical. Never the things the examiners wanted.

And Lettice. Oh dear, Lettice. Lettice was named after Great Aunt Lettice who was very well off and took a great interest in the children, a great interest. One day she would be gone, but all that money would still be there …

She picked up a stainless-steel vegetable chopper and began to chop celery very fast. Lettice! A pretty name, certainly, a feminine name, but not the right name for her Lettice, not the right name at all.

What would have been the right name, she wondered, looking across the lawn at her large daughter. Some rather shocking names suggested themselves. ‘Really!’ said Mrs Rideout sharply, and chopped away at the celery faster than ever.

Lucas went to his father’s room.

‘Bunjy at it again?’ said Mr Rideout, raising one eyebrow at his son. ‘A mess in the bedroom this time; wasn’t it? Bunjy and your sister Lettice. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear … Don’t come in, I don’t want you, I’m busy.’

Lucas said, ‘I’ll come in, then.’ He entered the ‘study’, and his father settled back in his armchair and glowered at him. But Lucas knew he was delighted to be interrupted; if he was careful, he might trap his father into playing a game of chess. Lucas had started playing two years ago but already he beat his father six and a half times out of ten – the scoreboard on the wall showed that.

‘Bunjy,’ said Mr Rideout, gloomily. ‘Bunjy and Lettice …’ he settled deeper in his chair. ‘If I were a proper scientist,’ he began, ‘instead of a science correspondent – that is, a hack – I would be able to tell you, in scientific terms, what’s wrong with your sister.’

‘Your daughter,’ Lucas said, slyly. His father disregarded him.

‘I’d have a name for her condition, a long scientific name,’ Mr Rideout said. ‘But as things are, I’d just say she’s barmy. Nuts. Loony.’

‘Slipped her trolley,’ Lucas said, in an American accent. ‘Blown her stack. Flipped her lid. Can I have a sherry?’

‘None left,’ his father said, blankly. ‘All gone.’

Lucas picked up the bottle and held it to the light. It was half full. ‘White man speak with forked tongue,’ he said in his Red Indian voice. The two of them were always harking back to the half-century-old radio and TV plays. Mr Rideout had dozens of them on cassettes.

Lucas poured sherry into dusty glasses. They drank silently. Then Lucas said, ‘You ought to clean this place up. If you don’t, Mother will.’

‘Your mother’s losing her steam,’ said his father. ‘She hasn’t been round here for months. Still, it could do with a wipe round or something.’

‘Fumigation,’ Lucas suggested. ‘Or a major fire.’

Mr Rideout looked round the room at the piles of manuscripts, the spilling files, the used cups and glasses, the dictating machine rimmed with dirt on the surfaces his fingers didn’t touch, the big old IBM typewriter. ‘Soon, very soon,’ he said, in the high, whispering voice of the High Priest of Infinite Space, ‘I must ascend to a higher plane … What you humans call Death. And then – and then – all this will be yours, my son!’

‘Golly gee!’ Lucas said wonderingly, taking the role of the Stardust Kid. ‘You gotta be kiddin’, Pops! All this mine?’

‘Lettice,’ said his father, in his own voice. ‘Do you really think she’s barmy?’

‘I don’t know. There’s lots of girls like her, mad about ponies and rabbits. Anything with fur on it.’

‘One pony, eight rabbits,’ Mr Rideout said. ‘And that stoat. The one that bit her. Hamsters, dogs, that hedgehog with the eye infection –’

‘That’s gone, Dad. Dead and buried. You remember, Lettice cried –’

‘Don’t remind me. I never knew the human body had that much moisture in it.’

‘She’s a good weeper.’

‘Four solid days. And she kept saying that she’d never been able to talk to it.’

‘Well, that was the eye infection. She can’t talk to them if she can’t look into their eyes,’ Lucas told his father.

‘Just what is this business about looking into their eyes? She spends hours at it. Just gazing. I’ve watched her. It puts me off my stroke.’ He waved a hand at the littered desk. Then he said, ‘It worries me, it really does worry me. Does it worry you?’

‘Everything worries me,’ said Lucas, prodding at the dictating machine. He was tired of the subject. ‘I worry me.’

‘With reason,’ said his father, suddenly angry. ‘I wish I knew where the hell you’re pointing, Lucas. I don’t want you to end up like – like –’

Lucas could have supplied the missing word – ‘me!’ – but didn’t. His half-brilliant, half-successful, half-baked father was the person he loved, the person he could talk to. Yet he despised his father in some ways. He despised himself in just the same ways.

‘I don’t know,’ said Lucas at last. ‘I don’t understand Lettice at all. I don’t think I want to understand her. I don’t go for this fur-and-feather thing of hers. It’s not my scene.’

‘I wish you’d speak English,’ said his father, still angry.

But then he too became tired of the subject and said, ‘All right. I’ll give you a game. Best of three, no more.’

They got out the chessmen. Shadows lengthened in the untidy garden. The room filled with smoke. Downstairs, Mrs Rideout made telephone call after telephone call about a jumble sale.

By the rabbit-hutches, Lettice sat immovable, holding up Catchmouse, the Rideouts’ short-haired tabby cat. The faces of the girl and the cat were separated by inches. The cat was almost as still as the girl; only the tip of Catchmouse’s tail twitched from time to time.

The air grew colder. The sun was down.

In the study, Mr Rideout moved his queen diagonally right across the board and took a rook. Lucas began softly to whistle between his teeth; his father had him this time. Next the knight, then he’d bring out his rook. Check, check again, mate.

Downstairs, Mrs Rideout, at the telephone, said, ‘No, she hasn’t telephoned, she said she’d telephone and not a word. I suppose I’ll just have to phone her, it’s too bad.’ She drank her cup of tea before it got too cold.

By the rabbit hutches, Lettice said, ‘It’s no good, Catchy, I just don’t understand. You can’t mean that, you simply can’t.’ The cat got up, stretched until its whole spine quivered and walked off, tail high, into a currant bush.

‘Come back, Catchy!’ Lettice called after it. B. . .