Free Human Croquet by Kate Atkinson

Rice reappears just in time for Richard Primrose to snigger, a horrible kind of snarf-snarf noise, and say, ‘Mr Tapioca! Mr Semolina!’
    I tell him this is an old joke, but Richard isn’t interested in anything a girl says . Mr Rice is beginning to look like a pudding, now I think about it, a stodgy suet rolypoly one, with his pasty skin and currant eyes. Richard himself would make a very poor pudding. He’s a bespectacled and bespotted youth the same age as Charles and a first-year student of Civil Engineering at the Glebelands Technical College. Richard and Charles have several things in common – they are both equally potholed with acne and subject to a similar red-raw shaving rash. They both also smell faintly of old cheese rinds, although this is possibly true of all boys (except Malcolm Lovat, of course), and they both have a geekish, unsocialized quality which alienates them from both girls and their male peers. Despite their similarities they detest each other.
    There are some things they don’t share, however. Charles, for instance, is human (despite what he likes to think to the contrary) but Richard is possibly not. Possibly an extra-terrestrial experiment gone wrong in fact – an alien’s idea of what a human is like, put together from spare parts, the creation of a Martian Frankenstein.
    He’s the complete physical opposite of Charles, thin and lanky as a vine, his body dangling from his big coathanger-shoulders like an ill-fitting suit. Lantern-jawed, in profile his face is a concave new moon.
    Richard keeps trying to make sly physical contact with me, shooting out a surreptitious hand or foot and trying to rub them against whatever bit of my body he can reach. ‘Sod off, Richard,’ I say nastily to him and stalk off.
    ‘And this is?’ Mrs Baxter says warily to me, holding up a collop of singed flesh.
    ‘Poodle?’ I offer hopefully.
    ‘I think I might go home, dear,’ Mrs Baxter says hastily. ‘I should get back to Audrey.’ Audrey is still harbouring ‘Some kind of bug, summer flu,’ Mrs Baxter says, ‘probably.’ Whenever she refers to Audrey’s ‘bug’ I imagine poor Audrey playing host to some giant lady-bird or shining iridescent beetle. ‘What’s wrong with Audrey?’ Eunice asks, annoyed at a mystery that her click-click-click brain can’t solve.
    I wander disconsolately round the garden, the smell of sadness trailing at my heels – April’s perfume hasn’t been burnt up in the heat of June and lingers as a slight vibration in the air. Aren’t ghosts supposed to squeak and gibber? What is it? Who is it? I can feel its invisible eyes on me, perhaps it’s a manifestation of my adolescent energy, a mysterious poltergeist. If only Malcolm Lovat was here instead, following me around. I wish to go by Carterhaugh, to kilt up my skirts, forfeit the fee of my maidenhead and walk on the wild shores of sexual passion.
    ‘I saw you this morning,’ Eunice says, appearing at my side, a bloody smear of tomato ketchup on her face. ‘Pretty terrible barbecue,’ she says cheerfully, ‘I could have made a much better job of it.’
    ‘Where?’
    ‘Where what?’
    ‘Where did you see me this morning?’
    ‘In Woolworths, by the Pick ‘n’ Mix, you ignored me when I waved at you.’
    But I wasn’t in Woolworths, by the Pick ‘n’ Mix or anywhere else, I was in my bed, dreaming about Malcolm Lovat’s head. ‘Maybe it was your double then,’ Eunice shrugs, ‘your doppelgänger.’ My self from the parallel world? Imagine if you were to come around a corner of the world and meet yourself – what questions you could ask! ‘Do you have this odd feeling, Eunice?’
    ‘Odd?’
    ‘Yeah, as if something’s not quite right …’ But then the barbecue bursts into flames and the heavens open in an attempt to quench the fire and the social gathering comes to a wet and sooty halt.
    I go round to see Audrey to tell her she hasn’t missed much. Mrs Baxter’s sitting at the kitchen