‘They ate grapes in the treetops together,’ Pa said. ‘What did you think of that, Miss Ivy Diamond?’
‘That was a good one,’ Ivy said, sounding squashed as Pa hugged her.
Pearl was still thinking of the red monkey and the bird. The Cole children accompanied Ma to church when they felt like it, but they were allowed to choose any religion they liked. Linda was interested in all sorts of mythologies, and claimed to follow a different religion every time you asked her. Vally was an atheist, and didn’t keep it secret. Pa was agnostic, fascinated by the similar goals and messages of different religions, and the people who followed them. Pearl wasn’t sure of her own beliefs, but she liked Pa’s way of looking at it: Let The World Be Your Country, And To Do Good Be Your Religion. ‘Is the bird supposed to be God?’
A smile tugged the corner of his moustache. ‘If you like.’
‘Is Heaven real?’ asked Ivy. ‘Will we see Ruby there?’
‘Which Heaven do you think she’d like?’ Pa said.
‘Definitely not the Asphodel Meadows.’ Pearl had read a little of the Ancient Greek myths. A field full of mindless shadows was not her idea of a pleasant afterlife.
Pa chuckled. ‘No?’
‘One of the paradises.’ Ruby had loved the Botanic Gardens, up on St Kilda Road.
‘If Heaven’s in the sky,’ Ivy said, ‘how come we can’t see it from a hot air balloon?’
‘Your mother probably knows more about that than I do. If you ask me, Heaven is any place where you’re happy.’ Their father stood up, a bit stiffly, and turned down the gas lamp until the flame was out. ‘You’re happy here, aren’t you, my little monkeys?’
‘No!’ said Ivy with a wink. She had just learned how to wink last week.
Pa winked back. ‘Bad luck.’
And Pearl said that she was happy, too.
But after Pa closed the door, she lay awake for a long time. Try as she might to imagine happy rainbow monkeys, her mind kept caging them in a stall in Paddy’s Market. Their shrieks added to the chaos of the fortune tellers and poultry sellers, the buskers and beggars, while a tall man sidled through the crowds, trading wishes for teeth.
CHAPTER FOUR
PEARL
AND RUBY
Over the week, something awful moved into Vally’s brain. However hard he tried to kick it out, it always crept back in, like a rat. He tried to starve it, but it was a keen little scavenger. It kept finding errant thoughts and odd details. Pa’s limp. The rasp with which he’d told the little girls’ bedtime story. A crack in the plaster. A fraying reading chair. The more of these it gobbled, the stronger it grew. By Thursday, the thing was trapped in his skull, too large to ignore.
It was a theory. And his theory was this.
Pa was coming down with something … and so was the Arcade.
Not the business. Not the management of the shop. The Book Arcade itself was ill, and Pa was affected by the same condition.
How, he didn’t know. Cole’s Book Arcade was suffused with so much of Pa’s passion and energy, and enhanced by so many of his carefully written spells, that it did seem to have a mind of its own. But a building still didn’t have organs or cells. Its skeleton was brick. Its insides were bright and dry. Vally could not have defended his theory if anyone had challenged him. Then again, plenty of sicknesses of the mind were yet to be explained by science. And Vally had found plenty of evidence that his idea, strange as it may have been, was true.
The rainbow sign at the entrance needed repainting. It was usually the brightest thing on Bourke Street, but as Vally jumped off the tram from school, the rainbow looked a little drab. The seven stripes had been touched up just before Christmas, but it seemed the summer sun had bleached the sign faster than usual.
The Little Men were out of time. The two mechanical sailor dolls worked at the mouth of the Arcade, day and night. Powered by a waterwheel, they rotated a set of metal signs that beckoned customers in. The rhythm of the flipping signs was as familiar to Vally as his own pulse, but by Thursday, they had lost their beat. It was supposed to go, Reading And Thinking Bring Wisdom. Clink! Welcome To Cole’s Book Arcade. Clink! Instead, the Little Men seemed tired. Federation Is Coming … clink. Two Million Books … clink. The pause was long enough that some customers were walking down the southern side of Bourke Street without hearing the clink. If they didn’t hear the clink, they didn’t look around for what made it. If they didn’t look around, they didn’t realise they were passing Cole’s Book Arcade. And if they didn’t see Cole’s Book Arcade, they didn’t come in.
Other troubling details added weight to the theory. A shelf in the Ornament Department collapsed, shattering the merchandise. The lift got stuck for half an hour with a throng of customers inside, and some of them shouted at the poor lift-driver. A lamp plummeted through the lightwell from the very top of the second floor – in the middle of the night, luckily, otherwise it could have killed someone.
All the while, Pa was going to bed early. He was still limping a little from the fall in the Fernery, and leaned heavily on railings. And within Vally’s theory lurked another, scarier thought. What if Pa never got better, the way Ruby hadn’t?
He did his best to hide his feelings. Eddie and Linda would say he was being silly. The little girls didn’t need to be frightened. By Thursday afternoon, a kind of grim acceptance had taken hold of him. If the problem could be solved, Ma and Pa would solve it. If it couldn’t, it was out of Vally’s hands. He decided to spend no more time worrying over the things he could not change. All things, from mountains to species to people, rose and fell in their time – and this problem, one way or another, would pass. He would be calm. He would be level-headed. He would go and find something interesting to read.
‘What’s the matter with you?’ demanded Pearl, when he passed her on the first floor.
Vally looked up. The Constant Irritation was teetering on a ladder, armed with a butterfly net. At the top of the bookshelf, the willie wagtail surveyed the Arcade like an emperor.
‘Nothing,’ he said.
‘Val.’ She fixed him with a hard, steady look. ‘Have you seen your face?’
Annoyance prickled at him like an itch. ‘You wouldn’t understand.’
‘Tell me anyway.’
‘Why would I do that?’
‘Well, why do you talk to Ebenezer? He doesn’t understand you.’
‘Because he still listens,’ Vally said – and then realised that Pearl, in her own way, was offering to do the same. Maybe he was underestimating her. Linda was as old to him as he was to Pearl, and Vally didn’t like condescension from her, either. Pearl wasn’t a baby anymore. She’d seen Pa fall in the Fernery. And she’d said she had met the mystery visitor. Whatever was going on, she knew something about it.
Vally fortified himself with a deep breath. ‘I think our Book Arcade is sick.’
He braced for the dismissive laughter, but it didn’t come. Pearl only frowned. ‘Has it started sneezing or something?’
‘No,’ Vally admitted. ‘But things have been … well, strange. With the lift breaking down, and everything. And Pa sounds like he has a cold.’
Eddie would have snorted, and said something like, ‘Strange? Our Arcade? You don’t say!’
Pearl did not. ‘You’re saying that the lift broke down and the china shelf fell because Pa is ill?’
‘Or the other way around.’
‘Pa fell … because the Arcade is ill?’
‘It sounds like twaddle,’ said Vally quickly. ‘I just thought –’
‘I don’t think it’s twaddle.’ Pearl pushed against the bookshelf, rolling her ladder along its railings. ‘I think that’s quite a saga-see-us observation.’
‘Sagacious?’
‘Is that how you say it?’ She shrugged. ‘Anyway, it makes sense. Pa sort of is the Arcade, if you think about it.’
‘How does that make any sense?’
Pearl gestured broadly. ‘It’s like all the different part
s of his personality. He loves music. He loves nature. He loves books, and art, and different cultures. And us!’
Vally looked around at the hundreds of thousands of books. All around the first floor, they were stacked on shelves and packed in drawers and standing in towers. Pa did know an awful lot about an astonishing array of topics.
The wagtail looked about and fluttered down to a nearby reading chair. Pearl tiptoed down the ladder.
‘So you believe me?’ asked Vally.
‘I do.’ She tightened her grip on the butterfly net. ‘It’s all the Obscurosmith’s fault. I think Pa took one of his astonishing deals.’
Now she was the one talking twaddle. ‘Who’s Obscure Smith?’
‘Obscurosmith, Vally. The man from the other night.’ Pearl was as intent as a cat on the wagtail as it preened its paper feathers. ‘And when I catch this spy of his, I’ll burn it!’ She lunged at the wagtail, her net swooping down to trap it. It dived from the chair, somersaulted, and darted out of sight.
Pearl popped up on her toes to look over the railing. The bird was gone. ‘Oh, bum.’
‘Who is he?’ Vally asked.
‘Pa says he sells things you can’t buy with money. Things like dreams and wishes.’ She swished her butterfly net to and fro. ‘He’s very tall, and he has a little beard, and a walking stick – but it’s secretly a magic wand. And he wears tails during the day.’
‘Hang on. Tails?’
‘Not a real tail, you donkey. A tailcoat.’
Vally’s last hope that she was making all of it up deserted him. ‘So can you wish for a million pounds?’
‘You could.’ Pearl brushed some dust off her skirt. ‘But Pa says you have to give something precious in return.’
‘Like selling your soul to the devil.’
‘Exactly like that,’ said Pearl. ‘Or Rumpelstiltskin.’
Vally looked around at the colourful spines of the books. He saw the rainbows shining down from the balcony above, the sparkle of brass and glass all around the Arcade.
The realisation landed on his shoulders, as heavy and cold as a sack full of stones. ‘Oh, no …’
‘Oh, yes,’ said Pearl.
The Arcade was their home. It was their neighbourhood and their playground. The joy and passion of their father’s enormous heart was woven into the reading chairs, buried in the wood grain of the shelves. Protectiveness surged up within Vally. ‘Pa can’t give the Arcade away! What could he wish for?’
‘Good question,’ said Pearl. ‘Let’s ask him.’
And before Vally could protest, his sister was striding away between the bookshelves, her butterfly net like a spear on her shoulder.
Pa wasn’t in his office. He wasn’t in the flat. Even Mr Pyke, the manager – who had worked with Pa for more than twenty years – hadn’t seen him all afternoon.
Pearl insisted on searching all the back rooms. By now, the Arcade was awash with sunset glow and gaslight. Hunger nagged at Vally as he climbed over a broken cabinet in the back room on the first floor. Maybe Pearl had fooled him after all, and this was just an elaborate game of make-believe. ‘Obscurosmith’ wasn’t a real word. Nothing was in the back rooms but boxes of dead stock and a few chairs, worn and vandalised. He was about to suggest that they return to the flat when Pearl, with a cry, knocked down a stack of pamphlets.
‘What have you done now?’
His sister didn’t reply. He heard her shallow breathing, the slap of the pamphlets sliding to the floor.
‘Pearl?’ Vally struggled through the dusty chairs. ‘What happened?’ He pushed through the piles of old paper towards the sound. There was his sister, pulling herself up.
And there was his other sister.
She was lying in the cot that each of them had slept in when they were little. Her bare feet just touched the end. She had dark curly hair like Ma’s. Her cheeks were smooth as porcelain. Her eyes were open. She was pale and still, except for her breathing.
It felt like reaching the top of a tree, and hearing the branch crack underneath him. Like a lightbulb coming on in his chest, only to shatter.
Ruby was dead. Ruby was three years dead and buried. She had died with the rash all over her, and what must now lie in her grave did not bear thinking about. This was a bad dream. A hole in time. A desperate hallucination of his grieving mind.
And still, Vally reached out to touch her. She would vanish. She would turn to dust. But he missed her so much. His fingers met the solid flesh of her face. She was cold. So cold it burned, like a steel rail on a winter morning.
Vally pulled back. This was no nightmare – it was worse. The experience was real, and Ruby wasn’t. She hadn’t moved: not to look at him, nor at Pearl. Her chest was rising and falling, but the rhythm was wrong. She didn’t pause between one breath and the next. And he remembered the bittersweet, lilting tune to ‘What Our Ruby Did’, which Pa had written for her the day she went to her last party in her fairy costume. She danced like a fairy, she sang like a frog! She buzzed like a bee, she dashed like a dog! The song had no verse for this quiet, still thing.
‘Who’s there?’ It was Pa’s voice, hoarse and angry – which was so unlike him that Pearl and Vally both froze. He came out of a supply cupboard in the back of the storeroom, with a blanket over his shoulder and two more in his arms. ‘You kids aren’t supposed to play in –’
He met Vally’s eye, and stopped dead.
‘We’re sorry, Pa,’ Pearl said. ‘We looked for you everywhere …’
Their father half-leaned, half-fell against a cabinet. Bracing himself on the edge of it, he drew in a long, shuddering breath.
Dust whirled in the air. Somewhere downstairs, a child squealed with laughter.
‘No, darling. I ought to be sorry.’ He glanced again at the quiet false daughter, breathing mechanically in the cot. ‘It serves me right for thinking this time would be different.’
Vally was trying not to lose his temper. He didn’t like fighting. He didn’t like the monkey inside that made him want to ball fists and bare teeth; that left him feeling ashamed and stupid afterwards, tasting bitterness. But the shock of seeing Ruby – only to have her torn away again – made him feel like someone was playing a cruel joke on him. His voice, when he spoke to his father, was harsher than he meant it to be. ‘What is this?’
Pa gave him a long look, as if he would only speak when everyone was ready to be rational.
That only stoked Vally’s fire. How dare he. Ruby wasn’t just another gimmick, another stunt to make people spend their money. ‘How did you do this? Why would you do this?’
‘You won’t show her in the Arcade, will you, Pa?’ Pearl went to their father and put her arms around his waist. ‘I know you miss her, but …’
‘She’s not for our Arcade, Pearlie.’ His voice was soft. ‘I thought if … if it worked, then …’
Vally wondered, with a jolt of alarm, if his father was about to cry. As far as the children knew, Pa had cried exactly once: when he was writing out the Ruby song to put in a new edition of Cole’s Funny Picture Book. Even then, only Linda had seen.
But Pa didn’t break down. He took out his hanky and gave it to Pearl. ‘Why don’t we go down to the office, and have some of our best China tea?’
Vally didn’t want tea. He wanted answers. He wanted the cot gone, and the fake Ruby with it, and the Arcade to go back to flourishing, and his father to be bright and quick and weird again. Fear and uncertainty belonged to the outside world. Home was meant to be safe and happy, a place where solving a problem was as simple as finding the right book.
But Pearl nodded, and leaned against Pa, hiding her face from the thing in the cot.
‘Go downstairs.’ He patted her back. ‘I’ll be there in a minute.’ He gave Vally a meaningful look.
Time to be the big brother and shepherd Pearl downstairs. How frustrating. Vally lingered at the storeroom door, making sure their father was really following.
He didn’t come right away. Instead,
he spread the blankets over the copy of Ruby. He stroked her forehead, the way he did when any of the children were unwell. He reached over and closed a storybook, which Vally hadn’t noticed before, on a crate beside the bed. ‘There you are, dear girl. I’ll be back at bedtime.’
The copy did not move.
CHAPTER FIVE
AN ASTONISHING DEAL
Down in Pa’s office, the clock ticked loudly. The waitresses brought the teapot and cups right to the door. China tea wasn’t sweet, but it was aromatic and soothing. Pa’s care in pouring it made Pearl feel right to trust him, even though her brother was sitting with his arms crossed and his lips pressed hard together. She felt she was on the edge of understanding. The tale of the red monkey and the clever bird was pressing at her mind. The red monkey fell through the trees. The other monkeys missed her. Then the old monkey met a bird who said he could bring her back.
Pearl had what her mother would have called a brainwave. As Pa sat down, Pearl fixed him with fresh attention. Vally was right. Pa wasn’t well, and nor was the Arcade, and it all pointed to the long-legged man who wore evening clothes in the daylight.
Pearl knew her father was putting off speaking about the thing in the cot. She could tell, by how he kept glancing away, that he was ashamed of it. Or perhaps he was ashamed that he had tried to protect his children from seeing it, and failed. Pearl decided to be brave.
‘Pa.’ She put down her teacup. ‘That little bird in your story … you were talking about the Obscurosmith, weren’t you?’
Pa looked up, alarmed, and a touch guilty.
‘I know I shouldn’t have peeked at his card the other day – but I did,’ Pearl said. ‘And since he’s been watching me with his paper bird, and since you said he sells impossible things … I’ve been wondering what he sold you, and now I know. You made a deal with the Obscurosmith to bring Ruby back.’
Her father frowned. ‘Well … when you put it like that …’
‘They go wrong, don’t they?’ Pearl said, sitting up a bit straighter – she was hitting her stride now. ‘His deals. He gets what he wants and it goes wrong for the other person.’
The Grandest Bookshop in the World Page 4