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Being five, was a big year for Joanna Ross. During the Fall, she got sick, and had to stay home for several days. When she got back to school, Joanna found that she had missed The Test. She had no idea what The Test was about, but apparently it had been a big deal. The week before The Test, an important man from the government had come in and told them all about how doing well on The Test would mean that they would have all sorts of special opportunities. Joanna knew he was important, because he had worn a suit.
But, Joanna quickly forgot all about her disappointment when her little brother was born. Nathaniel was way more interesting than any Test: even if at first all he did was scream. She was very helpful to Mommy, and would carefully watch her little brother while dinner was getting made. After Nathaniel started walking, he took to following Joanna around. So, the pond incident was kind of her fault.
That happened a few years later. Joanna was now ten, Nathaniel was five, and he still followed his big sister around whenever he had the chance. They were watching the boats leave the harbor, and Joanna had walked right up to the edge. Nathaniel had mimicked her, but he was five and still hadn’t quite figured out balancing like his big sister had. With a scream and a splash, he overbalanced and fell off the dock. Joanna jumped in after him, and managed to keep them both above the water for the few minutes it took the adults to fish them out. It was a Big Deal: a newspaper photographer even took their picture!
A few months later, Nathaniel got to take The Test. A few days after that, while she was helping him with his homework, an important governmental man came to the house, and talked with their parents. Mom and Dad didn’t seem happy that Nathanial had done so well.
Over the next two days, her parents, who still seemed really unhappy, spent as much time with her and Nathanial as possible. They stayed up late and argued about what they should do. The last time Joanna saw her little brother was when their parents took him on a car trip.
When her parents got home, they immediately flew into a frenzy: taking down pictures, putting away books, and generally hiding every trace of Joanna’s little brother. The next day, a scary government woman showed up and searched the house. She found a picture that Joanna had drawn of her and Nathaniel. The woman shredded the image. Then she suggested –ordered - that they all just forget that Nathaniel had ever existed. They never did.
Years past in a blur. Joanna grew up, graduated, and discovered she was an amazing driver. She stared working for a taxi company. When she was 17, a magician named Simon Loveless tried to overthrow the government, but was stopped at the last moment by some brave apprentice whose name she couldn’t quite remember.
When Joanna was 19, her boss told her that someone important had noticed her driving skills, and he was referring her to a company that provided drivers to magicians. She recognized the look in his eyes from all those years ago when the magician had spoken to her parents: unease, resignation, and unrealized fear. Before she left, he advised her to try to tone down the stunts.
It came out that a Golem had been rampaging around London. The brave John Mandrake, who turned out to be the apprentice from the Loveless affair, had single handedly managed to save the government. He became the youngest minister ever. When he ended up hiring her to drive his car, Joanna took one look at her salary and decided that he was all right for a magician: even if he did spend more on his car then her parents spent on the house.
Privately she thought he was about the same age that Nathaniel would be. Hopefully, he was safe.
She got home one night, to find that she had nobody. Her parents had been killed in a tragic car accident. Joanna inherited the house. She generally just left it as it had been; two doors stayed closed: Nathaniel’s and her parents. She slept walked through life.
In a way, her father pulled her out of it: stuck in traffic, she was absentmindedly humming a song that Mom used to sing when she was little, and her father was suddenly talking to her. She whirled around, and reality reasserted itself. No, her father wasn’t in the back seat, it was just Mandrake.
The magician looked unnerved. She mumbled an apology for not hearing him and asked if he could repeat his question. Her answer seemed to unnerve him even more.
Then came more questions. They were dropped so subtly, that if Joanna hadn’t seen the look on his face that day in the car, she wouldn’t have noticed, but she had and did. The questions covered a ranger of personal topics: her family and friends, where she’d grown up, unusual things that might have happened to her as a youth.
Just as suddenly, the questions stopped. If anything that was worse. Mandrake was clearly planning something. Or, as it turned out researching something.
When he finally reveled the results of his research Joanna was convinced she was about to get fired. He’d called her in and there was this rather giant stack of paperwork on the table. To be fair, when she’d parked at Richman last week she had braked hard, dropped the car’s speed significantly, and shot sideways into a parking space. On some level, it was good to know that her driving caused almost as much anxiety as whatever latest national crisis was.
It had only taken a little bit for Mandrake – Nathaniel – her baby brother to prove his point. Once he had, Joanna had started balling, and hugged him, and pretended he wasn’t crying a little bit too.
After a few minutes of crying, Joanna pushed Nathaniel back a little to get another look at him. At least he’d got rid of that horrible coat: even if his hair would have had Mom reaching for a pair of scissors.
It took ten years, but finally Nathaniel came home. Uncertain wasn’t a word that Joanna would usually apply to a magician, but when Nathaniel stood in front of his old door, uncertain was the only word that fit. It was like he thought the door might bite him. Joanna gave him some space. When she got back, Nathaniel was sitting on his old bed, holding his teddy bear.
As she and her brother began rebuilding their relationship, Joanna began finding the fun in having her brother as her boss: she won the fight over the radio, and after he got promoted to Information Minister, Joanna really got a kick out of turning on the news and watching the faces he made. If he wanted the news to be more than white noise, he certainly could fix it.
She still got yelled at about her driving. Nathaniel had shown up vaguely green to several events and had even began hyperventilating in response to rush hour.
When Nathaniel turned 18, Joanna bought him a cupcake. She’d learned that he no longer loved chocolate cake and was saddened by his genuine surprise that someone would do something like that.
How can you raise a child so that their first reaction to a kind gesture is to look for an ulterior motive?
Everything came to a crashing halt over the next week. Quentin Makepeace was producing another of his horrible plays, and the useless PM was making everyone go. Joanna had offered to make them fashionably late, but was told no.
Nathaniel was running around ripping his hair out first over the State of the Empire, and then over the amount of pressure that the other ministers were loading onto him. He was barely 18 and Joanna was fairly sure that he was about to go grey.
His stress levels where not helped by Farrar being a total bitch to him: blaming him for that “top-secret” operation going belly up, or showing some basic decency to Bartimaeus. And as she told her brother when he actually defended that definitely-a-female-werewolf, it’s not slander if it’s the truth.
Ok, maybe her dislike of Farrar wasn’t helped by Farrar treating every vaguely attractive woman within 50 feet of Nathaniel as a romantic rival. First: Ewww. and Second: insecure much?
Day of that stupid play. Nathaniel overslept. Which meant he was either sick or emotionally exhausted. Joanna was betting on the latter. But, as much as she wanted to just let him sleep for a week, he had to get going. Once he’d gotten the other ministers off his back, then she was going to make her brother take a small vacation, see a therapist, or possibly both.
So, she borrowed the spare key hidden under a potted plant, and played ruthless big sister. Dragged him out of bed, and made him shower and eat, and watched in admitted fascination as he sent a group of demons off to capture some poor sap.
She was almost tempted to just let him forget the play. But, appearances where important and he needed the PM’s good will. At least she didn’t have to watch the thing. They left in good time, but ended up late anyway because Nathaniel just had to stop to talk to his crush. He claimed it was work related; Joanna didn’t push.
Said crush, a very pretty dark-haired girl, came along, and the car was filled with stony silence the rest of the way. Joanna wasn’t sure what her brother had said, but clearly nobody had taught him to talk to girls.
The main streets where jam packed with cars, so Joanna took a series of back roads, hairpin turns, and one 360 degree spin that miraculously no traffic cop saw. Nathaniel and his date did yell a fair deal though.
The car screeched to a halt at the drop off. They were just in time. Her slightly green passengers staggered out. Joanna went to get dinner, and surprise, Nathaniel had left his contacts case in the car. Again.
With a sigh, Joanna grabbed the black case that had fallen on the floor of the back seat, threw the car in neutral, and located an usher. She slipped into the darkened box to find Makepeace holding a knife to her brother’s throat. Oh he was so dead.
Not willing to take on a conscious magician, Joanna snuck back out of the box to find a weapon, only for her eyes to land on the fire alarm. Even though he was a total monster, Makepeace at least had a state of the art fire system. The entire theater was drenched in a torrential downpour: Nathaniel and girlfriend managed to get retrieve the knife with only a few scrapes, and Joanna got to hit a more-evil-than-usual magician with a folding sign. She might have also hit Farrar in the confusion, but who could really say.
Well, Farrar had a lot to say about it, but nobody was really
listening to her at the moment.
When she finally got her brother home, he was out like a light (Melatonin laced decaf will do that to you). Nathaniel is a lot heavier than when he was three, but Joanna was a lot stronger than she had been at eight.
He snores like Dad used to, and wouldn’t let go of her arm when she finally dumped him in his bed. After a few minutes of fruitless pulling, she managed to trade her arm for his worn teddy bear she found stashed under the bed. Next time, she resorted to drugging him, she was waiting until he was already home.
Then she tip-toed out. England would survive until tomorrow. Or maybe next week if Rebecca helped her loose his calendar.