Looking up, he saw that it had leaked through the ceiling. From the labs on the next floor.
It was blood, of course. He recognised it instantly.
TWENTY-TWO.
Cadel stood in his bathroom that night, looking at himself in the mirror.
His hair was plastered down with Vaseline and darkened with comb-through "party colour". He had padded his waist with scarves and shoved gobs of Blu-Tack behind his ears, to make them stick out more. He had even applied fake tan, having stolen a bottle from Mrs Piggott"s cosmetics drawer.
The more he did to himself, the more ridiculous he looked.
"This isn"t a disguise," he muttered. "It"s a carnival costume."
His a.s.signment was simple: to come along to the Wednesday morning disguise cla.s.s as somebody else. Alias intended to grade and comment on every student"s effort. Cadel could just imagination what Alias would say about this attempt. "Pathetic," he would sneer. Or perhaps, "I"m in no mood for jokes, Mr Darkkon."
With a sigh, Cadel removed the Blu-Tack, which was hurting his ears. Slowly he unrolled the scarves and wiped off the tan. He didn"t know what to do. Alias had talked a lot about posture, presence and focal points, but Cadel couldn"t see how any of it would work, without expensive wigs and make-up and coloured contact lenses. Not in his case, anyway. Even when his distinctive blue eyes were shielded by sungla.s.ses, and his hair was slicked back like an otter"s pelt, he still looked like Cadel Piggott pretending to be cool.
"Cadel!" It was Mrs Piggott. "Where are you?"
"I"m in here!" Cadel cried. The sungla.s.ses belonged to Lanna. He took them off quickly, and stuck them in a drawer.
"What are you doing?" Lanna demanded.
"Uh a just having a shower!" Cadel knew that he would have to remove all the rubbish in his hair or face a barrage of questions. So he turned on the shower and began to pull off his clothes.
"Phone for you, Cadel!"
"Tell them I"ll call back!"
The hot water pelted down, filling the room with steam. When Cadel stepped into the torrent, he watched the water that was swirling around his feet turn black with hair-colour. So much for his first attempt at disguise.
He racked his brain for a solution. "Keep it simple," Alias had said. "Don"t go Hollywood on me. Like I told you a half the secret is att.i.tude."
Att.i.tude. Confidence. But could a swagger in your step really add a few centimetres to your height?
He was still stumped when he emerged from the bathroom, and approached Mrs Piggott. She was sitting at the dining-room table with about five hundred fabric samples strewn all around her.
"Who called?" Cadel wanted to know.
"Hmmm?"
"Who was on the phone? You said someone called me."
"Oh." Lanna dragged her gaze from the swatch of silk in her hand. "Oh, yes. They didn"t leave a number."
"Who was it, though?"
"They didn"t leave a name."
"Did they say they"d call back?"
But Lanna"s attention had wandered. She was staring at a price list and didn"t bother to reply. Cadel trudged into his bedroom, where he banged out a message for Kay-Lee. Sometimes I wish I looked different, he wrote. Do you ever wish that? Sometimes it"s like my outside doesn"t match my inside. In Cadel"s opinion, his outside had never matched his inside. If he had been tall and elderly, like Thaddeus, he might have been getting the kind of respect that he deserved, all these years. As it was, people took one look at him and dismissed him. They thought he was of no consequence.
It occurred to Cadel that, if he ever did learn to disguise himself, his life might improve dramatically.
"Cadel!"
He groaned. Lanna must have snapped out of her trance-like state.
"What?" he yelled.
"Come here, please!"
"Why?"
"I"m in my bathroom!"
Cadel winced. He knew what was coming. When he slouched into the Piggotts" en suite, he found it still damp from his recent shower. He also found Lanna standing on the rumpled bathmat, her hands on her hips.
"Cadel," she said, "you know I don"t mind you using this bathroom. I realise you like the jacuzzi in here. But I"ve told you before to clean up after yourself. I don"t want to find your dirty clothes on the floor, young man. I don"t want to find the lid of the shampoo open."
"Sorry," Cadel muttered.
"And what"s this?" Lanna pointed to a smear of fake tan that Cadel had missed. He hadn"t wiped it off the marble benchtop. "What have you been doing?"
"Nothing."
"Is that my foundation, Cadel?"
"No." Cadel put on his innocent look. "What"s foundation?"
The lines on Lanna"s brow deepened. "Have you been using my make-up?" she pressed.
"No!" Cadel tried to sound insulted. "Make-up"s for girls!"
And then the phone rang.
They heard it quite clearly, because there was a wall-mounted phone in every bathroom. Lanna only had to stretch out her arm to reach the one nearest them.
"Yes?" she said. "Oh yes. Hang on." She presented the cordless receiver to Cadel. "It"s for you."
Cadel wondered who could be calling him on the household number. He had his own mobile, after all.
"h.e.l.lo?" he said, with a wary glance at Mrs Piggott.
No one answered. But he could hear breathing at the other end of the line.
"h.e.l.lo," he repeated.
"I know it was you."
The voice was raspy. Cadel couldn"t even tell if it was male or female. But he thought he heard a sob.
"Who is this?" he demanded.
"You b.a.s.t.a.r.d! How could you?"
There was a click, followed by the dial tone.
Cadel stared at the receiver.
"What"s wrong?" Lanna asked.
"Oh, nothing."
"Who was it?"
Cadel shrugged.
"One of your friends?"
"I don"t think so." Cadel was reviewing all the possibilities. He a.s.sumed that the call had had something to do with the Axis Inst.i.tute, and wondered uneasily if one of the crazier students had decided that he was responsible for a bad mark, or a successful piece of sabotage.
He hoped not.
"So you haven"t been playing with my make-up? Cadel? Do you know how much cosmetics cost, by any chance?" Mrs Piggott was saying. "If you"ve touched my lip-gloss there"ll be h.e.l.l to pay."
It couldn"t have been a dissatisfied customer from Partner Post, Cadel decided. Not one of his clients even knew that he existed, thanks to the way he"d shuttled his messages through a series of remailers. Could it have been some sort of test? Something that Luther had set up, or Maestro Max? Hmm.
"Cadel? Are you listening to me?"
"I didn"t touch your stupid stuff!" he cried, suddenly irritated beyond endurance. "Why should I?"
"Because you can"t keep your nose out of anything, that"s why!" Lanna snapped. She had pulled the bottle of fake tan out of the cosmetics drawer. "Look at this! Look! It"s almost empty!"
"Buy yourself a new one, then!" Cadel retorted. "I"ll pay for it, just get off my back!"
"Cadel, what on earth a "
"I was trying to cover up my pimples, all right? Are you satisfied?" As Cadel had expected, this excuse completely threw Mrs Piggott. She seemed to deflate, like a balloon.
"Oh," she said faintly.
"Can I go, now?"
"Yes, of course. But a there are creams, Cadel. Did you realise that? Special things you can get a "
"I know," he said, and made his escape. Lanna didn"t follow him. She was good at nagging, but not so good at comforting. It embarra.s.sed her.
He"d counted on that.
Upon reaching his bedroom, he checked his email, to see if it contained any eerie or threatening messages. It didn"t. So he spent the next few hours trying to trace the source of the mysterious call, hacking into phone company networks and databases.
When at last he came up with a name, it merely puzzled him.
Parsons. Matthew Eric Parsons. Who on earth was that? n.o.body Cadel knew.
Unless he was somehow connected to the girl at Crampton College a what was her name? Heather Parsons? The location was certainly right.
If Heather Parsons was Cadel"s nuisance caller, then she had to be calling about her Higher School Certificate marks. She had failed her exams, like everyone else in Cadel"s year. Surely she couldn"t have worked out that he was responsible? Possibly she was acting on instinct; there couldn"t have been a proper investigation.
Still, it was a worry.
Fretting over this unforseen development, Cadel checked his Partner Post email. He found a note from Kay-Lee. Dear Stormer, she had written, don"t get me started on appearances. Just don"t get me started. As far as I"m concerned, we"ll be a lot better off when we"ve evolved into disembodied brains floating in tanks. Have you seen that movie, The Man with Two Brains? I"d like to be one of the brains in that movie. Bodies are just a waste of s.p.a.ce. You have to feed them and clean them and take them to the dentist, and for what? So that they"ll let you down, again and again.
What I feel is this: Heaven, when we get there, will be Heavenly because we"ll all have left our bodies behind. But you"re not a girl, Stormer, so maybe you don"t really understand what I"m talking about.
There was more. A lot more. But Cadel didn"t read it until some time later, because as his eye alighted on the world "girl", he was suddenly visited by the most brilliant idea.
Girls. Make-up. Lip gloss.
Of course!
TWENTY-THREE.
"Cadel? Is that you?"
It was Abraham who first recognised Cadel. Having decided to disguise himself as a Buddhist monk, Abraham had shaved off what remained of his hair, got rid of his goatee, and somehow located a set of orange and purple robes. Cadel was very impressed by Abraham"s effort. Kunio, too, had done a pretty good job. He wore a beard, a moustache, horn-rimmed spectacles, a dark suit and a bowler hat; he carried a briefcase in his right hand and a rolled umbrella in his left. He looked like a business executive.
Poor Gazo, of course, hadn"t been able to do much with his suit. Behind the fogged mask of his headpiece, his skin was a curious, unconvincing chestnut colour. (Cadel suspected that he was trying to impersonate someone from India or Pakistan.) As for Doris, she was a pathetic sight. She had plastered her face with make-up, donned a corn-coloured wig, and squeezed herself into some very tight, very revealing clothes. Anywhere else, her appearance would have been greeted by howls of laughter.
No one waiting by the door of Lecture Room One, however, dared to comment on Doris"s outfit. They were far too intimidated. Abraham was also rather ill. And Kunio, for his part, was so fascinated by Cadel"s disguise that he didn"t appear to notice Doris at all. He kept walking round and round Cadel like a tourist inspecting a famous statue.