Early in 1994, some United States F-16 pilots shot down four Serbian fighter aircraft over Bosnia-Herzegovina, for their violation of Operation Deny Flight. One of these aircraft rolled into and carved a profound trench through the main street of a mountain village called Jac'anska, just as Ruby Rowntree was preparing for this world, on a mattress protected with boiled and disinfected potato sacks, there in the little bedroom above the local inn, which had been closed by her father, the inn-keeper, for this special occasion.

Father's regulars, well, those he wished to keep sweet, although in empathy with his desire for a reduction in noise, cigar smoke and general to-do, had come to a compromise with the offer of tankards of beer and snifters of a thing or two stronger, through the side window, when he had the chance and not before. These they tasted in the sun, against a pleasant and cooling breeze.

"Shh!" One of them brought a wavering finger to his lips, then drew it up a ruddy cheek, before accepting a hopeful-looking measure of brandy, when it happened. Wings eventually flung free, the fuselage and cone of the MiG-29 cork-screwed, advancing through curtains of cast-off cobble and sand, as if keen for a good snifter itself, they agreed, until it spun into a jeep and a horse box, and pushed a old white broodmare through a dry-clean and mend tailor's window.

The pilot, who failed to eject, was not dead, and produced a pistol, with which he shot Ruby's father in the neck, as he was trying to help him from the burning aircraft. Ruby's mother, who watched the event from the bedroom window, entered long-term contractions without adequate cervical dilation, and was treated with intravenous and synthetic oxytocin preparations. She had a successful birth, however a weakened health, post-natal depression and mourning, resentment and a wretched poverty forced her to give her daughter up for swift adoption.

"This is a lovely time of year." Mrs Parish had announced, that morning, in assembly. "We are leaving behind the cold, dark winter and moving towards spring. New things grow and everything is changing. Lambs are being born. Buds on the trees. Birds singing, and we can now play outside."

As usual, Ruby had led the line-up into assembly. She was, herself, on the small side, and the line-up worked from smaller to taller; but she was on the bright side when it came to results and always had been; but on the unlucky side when she opened her mouth. She ended up at the front of the assembly, watching every pass of Mrs Parish's hand, and every turn of her head, and every held chin and solemn nod of the deputies.

Ruby was adopted, first by an Italian couple, who, after two years, tried to give her back. "She is not how we imagined." Despite protestations by the Italian social services that Ruby was now Italian, the Bosnia-Herzegovinan orphanage refused to put her on a plane back to Milan.

"Everything is changing." Val went on. "Traditionally, we may try to give something up at this time of year, like sweets or comics. If we have been bad, now is the time to turn over a new leaf, to renew our friendship with God. A new chance is being offered, offered to us all."

Ruby lived with a succession of Bosnian foster parents for the next three years, the first of whom slapped her legs when she used an Italian word, and second of whom were committed naturists. The naturists failed to declare this practice to the fostering agency and it was only discovered by a gas meter reader, who passed through an ajar side door without permission. Despite their protestations that there was nothing harmful with the practice, their failure to declare it lead to Ruby being taken from them. No-one, not even the gas meter reader, mentioned the fact that the mother of this family had, on occasion, a habit of applying a form of homemade lemon curd to her toes, for the enjoyment of the pet schnauzer and any friends that he had pursuaded home.

"Following an incident, security has been extended into the dining areas. To make sure we don't forget to say grace." Mrs Parish had smiled. "The first of many changes to come. Out with the dead wood, and in with the new. New living wood. Not new dead wood. That would be quite flawed." And then they sang.

Ruby looks up at the lens, poised as it was, over the darker corner of the canteen, and the collected shoulders of the lunchbox group. "Hello."

Hello. Lacquered blue box. Lid. Destiny Mackenzie was the only person in any way positive about Ruby's lunchbox, or bento, and she had yet to arrive at the table. And so, Ruby checks around, very used to new faces. New faces had been her life. New faces and no-one understanding, for a while. Two of the less-than-new faces were now looking back. "Go on." Someone says.

Onigiri rice easter eggs with a plum filling. Mixed sprout salad with mandarin dressing. Carrot crudités cut like bunnies.

"Oh. Sweet. Nevermind." One of them leans across, to pick out a bunny carrot, as Ruby's glance takes her from foiled-folded sandwiches to Trippple Fitz bars. A Trippple Choc trumped a Crème de Menthe or Melony Felon Fitz. A Driller's Dutch Original crowned a Nut Mumble or anything of that nature. The biscuit hierarchy was rigid and merciless, and bottom of the heap came no biscuit at all. Bunny crudités came even lower than that, if there was any mathematical way that this was achievable using standard organic root legumes.

Miloska Dermin, at some point 'Ruby', was deemed young enough to be adopted, yet again. This time an English couple, the Rowntrees, proved successful. "You told them that you lived in the sad castle." Ruby explained to them, sitting up in bed one night. "You told them all that, to have me."

"What are you talking about, Ruby?" Her father would take her hand and ask.

"They wouldn't give me to anyone. They had to be very - very - careful. But we persuaded them, with drowned dragons and a crest. Showed them footage. And that was a lie. You entered an active war zone, and then lied for me." She hugged her father, for he was a very good man. And then she hugged her mother, for she was a very good woman.

The new camera blinks. Little red light. Perhaps a focal length was varying. Focusing hard on the crudité. Frisking its silhouette, assessing for the possibility of misuse. Any other rabbit snatcher (potato and leek beetle thief, or pomegranate spaceman bandit) would often, at this juncture, bite the head off the item and return it to the bento. But, today, they seemed reluctant to do even that. "What are you? What exactly are you?"

"He loves his curdy foot." Ruby smiles and announces, plainly, into the bento box, in Bosnian. "Give him curdy ankle, Ruby." She makes a claw, and grasps the carrot back from the one who failed to bite it, who tuts and screws up her face.


Badness must follow you in a way that goodness does not. "Maybe your dog died. Do you have a dog?" Ruby shakes her head. "Maybe they're moving. Maybe someone's been arrested?" Lunch in hand, Ruby had watched her parents' Volvo navigate slowly back through the school gates, with a perfectly counter-balanced mix of elation and dread, a white pit forming in her stomach.

Watching the expression change on her friend's face, Destiny Mackenzie decides to redirect the line of enquiry. "My uncle was arrested. Identity theft. Securing loans for a health spa. All he can think about is that spa, my aunt said. Did you know, Zara Phillips stayed near the spa? Bev, they're mentioning eucalyptus wraps on the television. We've got those. We've got those already, Bev. When she arrived at our house she was white, like she had recently puked, and she sat on the sofa for two days."

Ruby is very lost in her bento. Destiny watches. "Maybe they're arranging a hidden TV stunt where you come to school one day and everyone is a beach ball or something."

"They are?" Ruby asks.

"No." Destiny Mackenzie examines the chunky thoroughfare running into her salmon and spinach wrap. "Disturbing. If you haven't done anything. Maybe you blanked it out." She decides to postpone the next bite in favour of gooseberry smoothie, after which she picks at her tooth.

"My parents went off for the weekend, to a party with my dad's boss. Dylan's mates appear. Quelle surprise. They're such a pack of eugh. Drinking. Smoking. Doomed out music. And they decide to take mum's Renault on a joyride around the block. He has yet to pass his test, by the way. I told them the whole thing wasn't wise. Then they come home, long past midnight, with a dent in the near side. Dylan is bawling and his friends have gone silent and I'm lying in bed with a pleasant 'told you so' on my face."

Ruby, finishing her rice, manages to open her concord grape juice container on the first attempt.

"Anyway. I am about to go back to sleep when I hear more noise in the drive. Dylan etcetera, bending the aerial, twisting the wipers and scraping the bonnet with sharp stones and a bottle opener. To make it look like vandals did it. This is their plan."

Destiny sighs, looking to the ceiling. "Anyway I get out of bed to tell them. But mum and dad have got there before me. This party had been cancelled, by the way. Now all three of us are standing in a dark porch watching Dylan whimper about dad killing him as he lets down a tyre."

Ruby needs to belch and does so. "Meanwhile someone is pulling off the bumper and sitting on the drive going 'We left the front door open'." Destiny shrugs and makes a gently disinterested face. "My weekend. Tears. A packed suitcase. One death threat while I take my head rollerblading."

Ruby had nothing of that nature happen at the weekend. She'd spent most of her time drawing, if the truth be told. Her parents had moved to a bigger house, again, and she was just getting to know the kids on her street. The location was amazing but the nearest she had to a friend was four years younger and followed her around in an eerie kind of silence.

Their canteen table had emptied, and knots of pupils were filing past on their way to the good weather, when someone breaks from the pack. "Destiny, thanks for the essay, hon." Opportunity Newton draws over from the throng, to plop herself beside her classmate. "Broadband is a housecleaning issue in our house. Cruelty. Can I put it on the slate?" They begin to discuss while Ruby closes her box and tidies the table. Ruby wasn't bad, she had times when.. wires crossed. Boom.

Finished and looking up, she notices a little finger clamped into Ms. Opportunity's grip. She was more than aware of the fellow standing there, for he is very difficult not to notice, and from several years above them. He is standing with his weight fully on one leg, singing to himself, rolling an eye under a tinted fringe pulled in a line. As he turns to collect his hand from Ms. Opportunity, Ruby notices a comic book swinging languidly in a pinch.

"'Okapiman'." He slips it onto the table. "Bitten by a radioactive okapi, a mild-mannered unemployee saves the world with profound backwardness." He lowers himself into the empty seat beside her, while the others discuss test answers, and turns a ring on his finger as he checks Ruby's face, a soft attempt at hauteur. "Runs into a phone box and stays there, shooting rays of shyness from his head." He illustrates. Ruby is wondering if he is tints his eyebrows when he reaches for the comic. "This is delectable. Two hoods are in a car, waiting for a yokel bank to open." He flaps it open, purses his lips on one side and then begins to read. "Do you know, I only just realised what we have in common. Ethnically? Do you know what that is?"

He glances over as if reading a bedtime story. "Not sure. Shoot."

"Brazil and Thailand? What do they have in common? Think about it. She-males. Rest of the world they're rare as ninepins but in our respective old-countries they pop up left, right, not to mention centre. Why is that?"

"She-males? Something in the water."

"You'd date a she-male?"

"Yes, I would."

"It wouldn't compromise your masculinity?"

"No. I'd do my best to make her feel a whole woman and we'd workaround the handicap."

"What if her bit was bigger than yours?"

"Nevertheless, I feel I would find the strength to rise above those kind of workaday doubts."

Ruby half-grasps the concept of illicit but half-can't classify the contents while it remained such a foreign language. Triton Ward is utterly undistracted when Ms. Opportunity Newton turns to give him a sour face. "Triton, pur-lease."

"You wouldn't feel like a mutt? What if she had a great job, a palatial home and a loving and supportive network of friends and family? A glowing future, as well as a monster weasel."

"Another workaround. We'd be in love."

"Would you speak to the mike?"

"No." He glances again, turning the page. Then his voice turns huffy.

"Wait a minute. Wait a minute. This golden angel has come home, she's flopping on the bed exhausted going 'Honey, it's been a nightmare day being Chairwoman of Consolidated frickin' Petroleum, come and relieve the stress, kitten. I need it.' You're saying you wouldn't do that for her?"

"I couldn't do that.”

"The girl you love. The girl with whom you found an inner strength to rise above every narrow piece of ignorance society threw at the two of you? You wouldn't bring her to orgasm orally? She's there. Pining. She's yearning. Her eyes are pleading. 'Please, baby, please.'"

"Maybe for Christmas. Maybe for her birthday."

"Would you kiss her balls for Christmas?" He pauses at another page turn, while Ruby's eyes are left to travel down his shoulder, then along the far wall.


"Sorry, schmoo. I didn't mean to dumbfound. I'm in that kind of mood." He leans back and fixes his fringe with the bend of a wrist.

Ruby turns her head. "Okapiman blushes them to death?"

"We wait and see. We leave them slipping in a special kind of fear vom."

He turns away, facing the new camera, caressing his chin, although an eye travels back to Ruby, inviting a mutual intrigue. "What's that?" She points to his ring.

"The Both Hands Congregation? It's an oath." He removes it, passes it to her. "The ultimate give. No shake. No wave. No V. Grabbing the world by Both Hands. They're a co-operative, refusing to co-operate with me. I used to be the keeper of the keys."

Ruby recognises this. "Weren't the locks all changed?"

"Mostly. But there is more to Bishop's Evenbridge than meets the eye. The Okap-eye. Anyway welcome to the gang. Sort their heads out for me."

Ruby tries it on as he resumes his gaze at the new camera. "Whose is that?” Ruby smiles and points to a love bite on his neck. "Ms. Opportunity?"

He laughs out loud. "How do I explain? Um. See. There's a woman in every man and a man in every woman. And a man falls in love with the man in a woman. And a woman falls in love with the woman in a man. Which means everything is as glamourous as it needs to be. Every minute. Every day."

Ruby guesses. "You're into boys?"

"Oh." He looks dismayed by this, and pulls up his shirt sleeve to expose a forearm. "I just set my she-wolf free. She's in charge. Touch her. She's right there." Ruby looks down at the tubular exposure of skin. "Careful."

She reaches out to touch, then recoils when he emits a strong whistle. "Whoo. Feeding cubs or something." He smiles and leans around until his fringe topples to his nose. "Do unchain your inner boy. Both hands. Had a boyfriend yet? Don't! Men only. Twenty one plus. Boys talk Horlicks. Stirrers. Plastic, including me. Current status: call it love. Call it constellations." His hand travels to one side of his neck.

After a brief time examining Ruby's eyes, he leans back to examine the ceiling. "The stars put our feet on the ground and our heads somewhere special. They make the time now." He closes his eyes and brings his hands into a prayer. "When in love, don't you find love all around? The stars take care of that. Do you know what a world is like with no enchantment? Little girls just aren't even here." Both hands drop past his knees quite suddenly. "They just aren't anywhere."

The two girls opposite have finished, and have turned around and are listening. "Here, Galileo." Opportunity Newton jumps to her feet and extends a hand towards him. From under the table, Ruby quickly reaches out something she has been fashioning without thought, from the nori that wrapped her easter eggs, although she suddenly becomes undecided about it. A ring, slate green, which he slips onto his finger.

"Aw, schmoo. Delectable." His eyes hang across the crumbs on the table. "This might be the last one I receive. I'm officially the wrong type of boy, you see."

He fans the comic, preparing to go. "Is there more?" Ruby asks. He looks confused. "Stars." She adds. "Of course there is." Triton Ward puts an arm on her shoulder and looks to the back of the canteen, the teacher's table, then the camera's little red light. Opportunity waves her hand away in frustration, resigned but smiling as she turns to run through the doors.

"In the stars, there are a thousand Rubys and you can choose whichever one you want to be." He gently scoops her hair to one side. "Tomorrow choose another. A thousand Tritons too, so we might never meet twice. And every day we dance till our calves ache. And words stop standing for the things we see, and we start seeing the things we say. And everything is beautiful if we say it should be. And I am in you, and you are in me."

He slips off the seat, eventually, correcting his tie. Singing, this time a little louder. "Black heart, white leather. Where to start, to find forever? In the star charts?" He curls a finger at his lip and holds out a hand as if looking for rain. "It's stormy weather."

Suddenly, Ruby's hand is raised and kissed. "A dark art, I rest you in feathers. Prize you apart. In the altogether." Then, passing two Okay signs to and fro across one another, he lopes off through the door. "Black heart.. white leather.."

Destiny shakes her head. "He's on form today. Chloroform. I mean, what?"

"Eeee." Ruby's eyes widen, and she fixes on the canteen doorway for some time. They pick up their things and examine the sunshine. "What happened to him? One year he's all chin-picking and stammer, and the next September he walked in.. that. Allegedly." They pass down the steps. "The shoes are fearful. Lose the shoes."

They aren't the first to spot the fire, for it is only a line of smoke when Ruby notices it - a black, dissipating veil lifting from the right hand side of the Science, Design and Technology block, which hugs the crest of long steps, high and beyond the main building. It looks like a crack in the sky up there, widening. A rip on baby blue.

"Uz-!" They skip more than gallop towards it. A fattish gulp of smoke snakes its way up the veil, and then another. "Meteor? Great shot, God!" They pause to hear the fighting grumble of the first interior burst, right at the back of the block, and then the smoke evolves into something black and spinning.

Destiny finds her phone. "I'll 999. You scout around for Ray?" No need. As they take to the steps, they join the caretaker, a ball of keys and a phone in hand. He tells them to stay where they are, or to try the alarm in the main building.

Ruby is very unsure if he should go into the block itself, sensing that dead wood would be too apt today, but it is too late.

 

"When she is good she is very good, but when she is bad she is wicked."

Oddly, Ruby's most vivid memory, of a stage in her personal history that Bishop's Evenbridge often reminds her should be departed, is not of the Bosnian naturists, but of the Italians. She is in a bakery, looking up at her mother discussing her daughter with an encountered friend. She examines the lowest shelf in the display case, at the Panettone and Torta Claudia, and then looks back up again, now at some flies circling a square box of flypaper hanging from the ceiling. See-sawing forward and around, they are probing their comrades, adhered indiscriminately over this motionless little box, perhaps wondering if they should attempt to rescue one or two, or perhaps filled with an awful fascination to see what The End looked like. Who isn't? Ruby's horror stories didn't bring her nightmares. If anything, her sleep was more agreeable for having read 'Feasts From The Threshold'. Simple scenes with a sensation of fresh air on legs, where a lady in a flowing white dress hangs amid the munificent grounds of a castle.

"Wicked." Ruby's mother and her encountered friend lower their watchful stare at the girl. So, if countries were people, and they probably are not, Italy was a madman, Ruby recalled. But tempered by a love for its own madness, regarding it as special. Special and 'Fantastico!' The brother would point to the father licking clean his plate, who, in turn, indicates his tomato-sauced-up nose. Ruby's tears, scratches, the long nights in a wet bed, were greeted with no kind of amusement, just as the cool subterfuge of an invasive force.

"Ah told ya. Out, man." Ray closes one classroom door and slips down the corridor to another. "Anybody at home?" Ray she pictured standing at every grassy bend or blind corner, unexpectedly there and always blind to pupils, a regular eventuality picking its ear with a key and scrutinizing the results, then swapping the phone across to work the other. "A'm up to ma pal's hat in child maintenance. You're squeezing tha pips, man." He had once chuckled, into his phone, as she passed.

The corridor smells and has a green haze to it, but there is no visible smoke at the moment. Upon reaching the last door, the point of no further, the stringy caretaker hops and lowers towards the cracked, grey window of the chemistry lab. "Right." He yells, unhooking an extinguisher from the wall. "A'm goin' in." He opens the door with a fist and a foot, allowing billows to run over each other to reach him, then along the corridor ceiling.

Ruby found herself walking forward, and had no intention of stopping. "If it's chemical, tell Janice A'll see 'er down below. Do us a favour and double-check them rooms, pet. Then get yerself over tha road." Fire didn’t sound very wrathful, Ruby thought. More like cleansing. Without actually seeing it, well, it was just something to live on in the imagination. Something that would live in the school consciousness. She does stop at one point, imagining what she imagined she could achieve here. Wrath had something to do with it. The others - it wasn't real bullying, nothing was taken, just a response as dumb as anything that provoked it. "Dingbrain." "Wab." What was a wab, in any case? Just raising themselves up, above something. Often her, although more often Cockle-Picker Colin Parker, who lived on a barge. "You're alright saying dumb stuff. You just have to write a few poems to prove them wrong. I have to lose three stone." "I have to find a mum." Futures dreamt themselves fore and aft, sleek arenas built on impossible revenge. "I'll be a retail queenpin. Bankrupt Sluts R Us."

Ruby turns the ring, too big for any finger, in her pocket. Not that Ruby was proving rebellious. She was already thinking things like 'We call our parents tyrants because we're ashamed they are our slaves'. Suddenly, then, the alarms sound, gradually and all over, transforming the premises. She remembers Destiny Mackenzie, who, faced with another of Ruby's sudden silences, which, like her sudden and silent disappearances, she had grown accustomed to, had gone to spring the system. Destiny should go first, of course, but, if there was someone Ruby could send to the end of the corridor, to keep guard, it would be the kid who follows her in a kind of eerie silence. What good was she at all? If anyone should get burnt to death it should really be her. "Go on." "Me?" "Have a look."

This girl advances, catching a taste of the first roll of smoke as it searches overhead. Ruby checks, as if over her shoulder, into the emptied room. Something weighty but glassless crashes in Chemistry, "Nah, fanny". And then the silent girl glides quickly to the open door of Biology, a shining wire cage sitting by the window. Three chinchillas suck water, seemingly oblivious. The room is hazing fast, but clear of people.

"What's happening?" Summons the cage, somewhere in Italian. "Terrible kerfuffle." A second gargles. "Appalling chap just blanked us. I'm driven to drink." The third turns a plastic ball against a cage corner. "Suspect his head is a zoo already." Through the window, a glade with pots for rainfall and then a mesh fence, beyond which lay sparse forest belonging to an ex-governor of the school, but which they were permitted into, for its ferns and saplings and a lost multiplicity of moth.

Ruby swings across the room, amid fumes, a new treble-filled combustion and a crash as Ray drops the extinguisher into the corridor. She undoes the cage door as someone calls her name, possibly Destiny, to empty the containers from her bento and begin to load them in. Her head feels like a rubber band ball, suddenly balanced, dense and seeking the floor. And there was definitely someone, out beyond the mesh and the glade. Maybe more than one someone, passing through trees, or disappearing in front of them.

"Ruby?" Again, just as a third explosion is emphasising the second, the rip of glass fills the corridor and grounds. Ray isn't moving in the corridor, and Destiny is trying to slide closer through the smoke and glass.

"Aye, it's not so bad, y'know." Ruby does her best to slap him, and they try to pull him further along the corridor, until the smoke insists they leave.