The Grandest Bookshop in the World

by Mellor, Amelia

  And the more she thought, the more she found was gone. She reached for something of Ruby and could only find her as a part of a group: the three youngest girls, the children, everyone at Grandma’s. No individual Ruby. Worse still, no Ruby and Pearl.

  ‘Ivy, you can’t come with us,’ Vally said. ‘It’s too dangerous.’

  ‘I want to help.’

  ‘Then go home,’ said Pearl. ‘And keep your mouth shut, dibber-dobber.’

  Ivy gave her a cold look. ‘I’m doing it for Pa, not for you.’

  ‘We just don’t want you to get hurt,’ said Vally, more gently. ‘Look what happened to Linda and Eddie.’

  ‘I’ll remember things for you.’

  ‘We remember things just fine.’ Pearl started along the pathway. The wagtail danced to the next fern.

  ‘OK, then,’ said Ivy, sticking out her chin. ‘What are the dolls that turn the signs called, at the front of the Arcade?’

  Pearl could picture them – one lifting his bar as the other pushed his down. ‘The Small Sailors.’

  ‘The Blue Boys,’ Vally guessed.

  ‘They’re the Little Men,’ said Ivy smugly.

  ‘All right, you can come,’ Vally said. ‘But be careful, understand? If there’s something we need to do, let Pearl or me go first, or you’ll end up like the others.’

  She was already running down the path ahead of him.

  It was dark down that pathway, and the only insect Pearl heard was the high, uneven scraping of a tone-deaf cicada. The paper wagtail fluttered overhead, weightless and effortless as a shadow. The Coles had to climb and slip and struggle over the Fernery floor. The paved sections of the path were slick with algae, and in some places, the soil had consumed the bricks so completely that Pearl could not even feel their solidity beneath the layer of dirt. Ivy had to be helped across and lifted over logs and water features. At one point, Pearl sank to the ankle in deep mud, caking her boots. She was considering going barefoot, like the castaways and wild children in her favourite books, when Vally stumbled on a bit of rotten wood. He flipped it over with his toe and groaned.

  ‘Did something bite you?’ asked Pearl.

  ‘No.’ He motioned to the log. ‘There’s nothing there. Not even a slater. It’s not a forest anymore – it’s turning back into a greenhouse.’

  Ivy pointed to the ceiling. ‘It’s shrinking, too.’

  At first, Pearl couldn’t see it. Then one of the frames around a glass panel in the ceiling disappeared behind a tree, and she realised the whole ceiling was shifting. That was the high-pitched sound: not a cicada, but the tiny squeaks of wet glass in metal frames, magically shrinking, little by little. It wasn’t only getting narrower, either. It was losing height. The uppermost leaves of the forest canopy bowed against the slowly descending ceiling. As Pearl watched, the end of a branch broke off and tumbled through the air to land at the Coles’ feet.

  ‘The whole thing is going to come down on us,’ Vally said.

  As soon as he said this, the glass in the ceiling made a torturous juddering sound. One of the sprinklers tore from its mount and swung down, hanging precariously in the air.

  Pearl realised that she and her siblings were surrounded by an immense volume of glass and wood, held up and contained by a flimsy metal skeleton. The Fernery was like a cardboard box, slowly being crushed between giant hands. Before long, there might be sticks and glass all over the ground.

  In the middle of the Fernery, the Coles found a small clearing. Pearl was momentarily surprised. She’d forgotten about the feeding station, with its platforms and ropes and park benches. One of the platforms had a silver tray on it, covered by a domed lid. Exotic monkeys were swinging and foraging about the glade. Just as in Pa’s stories, they were all different colours. There was a yellow squirrel monkey with tufty ears; a tiny, copper-red lion tamarin; a long-armed white gibbon; a black capuchin with a wicked little goblin face; and a large dog-like monkey with olive-green fur.

  But where was the blue monkey? Come to think of it, what was a blue monkey?

  Then Ivy screamed. On the other side of the clearing was a terrible stern beast, staring at them from under his sloping brow. His beard was yellow, his nose was red, and his furrowed cheeks were an improbable bright blue.

  ‘Vally,’ said Pearl, fighting to stay calm, ‘we never had a baboon before, did we?’

  ‘It’s a mandrill.’ Vally was keeping his voice low, so as not to startle the monkeys. ‘And we didn’t.’

  The mandrill yawned, showing yellow fangs as long as fingers. With an unpleasant flutter deep in her stomach, Pearl realised she was looking death in the eye. No ten-year-old, no matter how brave or clever, had a fighting chance against an animal like that.

  ‘What do we do if they attack?’ Ivy asked.

  ‘I’ve read that monkeys only attack if you’ve got something they want,’ Vally said.

  ‘I’ve read that a mandrill in the Congo bit off a lady’s face,’ Pearl said.

  ‘Not helpful, Pearl,’ said Vally, through his teeth.

  ‘We don’t have anything they want, do we?’ Ivy was almost pleading Vally for reassurance.

  ‘Maybe they want what’s in there.’ Pearl went to the cloche. There was a small black scroll, tied with a ribbon to the handle on top. She tried to lift the lid, but it wouldn’t budge, so she eased the scroll from the ribbon and unrolled it. The silver writing was all loops and slanting stems. Where the blocks in the toyshop had been clear, solid capitals, this was as difficult to read as the scars on a scribbly gum.

  ‘Let me,’ Vally said – but even he read it a little slower than usual.

  ‘Six splendid rainbow monkeys,

  And one has your bouquet.

  He’ll trade it for the treat between

  The silver lid and tray.

  Count up all the monkeys,

  Then add the monkeys’ toes.

  Calculate the tails and hands

  Before the room implodes.

  Display the answer on the wheel

  And heed this sound advice:

  You have one chance to turn it

  So make sure to be precise.

  Best find the total quickly,

  Or your fate will be unpleasant:

  How many primates and their hands

  And tails and toes are present?’

  As Vally finished, he let out a huge sigh. ‘OK, this will be a quick one.’ He tested the cloche, but it would not lift. ‘Where’s the wheel?’

  ‘Over here.’ Ivy gestured to the other side of the tray. Pearl and Vally leaned around to see. The wheel was small and elegant – a dial, really – and appeared to be seamlessly blended into the design of both tray and cloche. Around its rim, little notches marked the numbers to two hundred. Every multiple of ten was marked with numerals.

  ‘So we just have to add four numbers together, turn it to the right number and one of these monkeys will give us a clue,’ Vally said. ‘Monkeys plus tails are easy – that’s six plus six.’

  ‘Twelve!’ said Ivy. ‘And they have twelve hands in total as well.’

  ‘Twenty-four,’ said Vally. ‘Plus six-times-ten toes, that’s –’

  One of the monkeys shrieked.

  They must have been fighting. They were closing in on the feeding platform, somehow creeping nearer without the Coles having noticed.

  But then Pearl realised they were looking past the Coles – and at that moment, something hit the ground with such tremendous force that the earth shuddered under her feet.

  She turned to look down the murky length of the Fernery. The trees were leaning, pushed in by the walls, crammed down by the ceiling, their sticks scraping against the glass like fingernails on a … on a writing thing. As she watched, two more trees lost their hold on the ground beneath them and collapsed towards the centre, their leaves streaming like a falling woman’s hair. They too landed with a dreadful noise – the boom of the trunks striking the ground, the splintering crack of the crushed undergrowth. S
creeching parrots flew away in search of escape.

  One of the monkeys began a crazy hooting. Pearl looked at them again. They weren’t sneaking closer. They were coming nearer to the Coles for comfort. The gibbon was singing her territorial war-cry, her voice building and building, then cascading into a sound like an intricate bird call.

  ‘Six monkeys, plus six tails, plus twelve hands, plus sixty toes is eighty-four,’ said Vally proudly. ‘Righto, girls – let’s turn that wheel and get out of here.’

  Pearl raised a hand. ‘Wait a minute, Val.’

  He stopped.

  Four of the monkeys were magnificently tailed. The mandrill’s tail was just a pointed tuft above his outrageous bottom. The singing gibbon, though, had no tail at all.

  ‘The gibbon isn’t a monkey,’ said Pearl. ‘It’s five tails, not six.’

  Vally looked at the scroll again. ‘So we take away a gibbon, a tail, two hands and ten toes – that’s eighty-four minus fourteen. Seventy.’

  ‘I’ll turn it!’ said Ivy.

  ‘Careful, now,’ said a high, hoarse voice behind them. ‘Who’s a clever birdie?’

  One of the parrots was sitting on a grimy park bench. Its crest stuck out like the pigtail from a lawyer’s wig. When it had the Coles’ attention, it jumped from the bench, flapped over to the cloche, and leaned down to nibble the dial.

  ‘Echo!’ Ivy cried. ‘Stop it!’

  Echo. The word rang an echo in Pearl’s head. Echo the Major Mitchell. Pa had looked so happy playing with her.

  ‘A pink cockatoo,’ said Vally in surprise. ‘I’ve never seen one of those.’

  ‘Yes, you have,’ said Ivy, exasperated. ‘I said no, you stupid bird!’

  ‘Cheeky,’ Echo said happily. Then, in a whirl of rosy feathers, she leapt up in Pearl’s face and clamped onto her shoulder. ‘Careful, now.’

  Pearl peered into Echo’s shrewd reptilian eyes. ‘I think she’s trying to tell us something, Val. What do we have to count, again?’

  The glass screamed with the scrape of branches. The ground shuddered with dying giants.

  Vally threw a worried glance into the dark tangle of the Fernery, but quickly returned to the scroll. ‘How many primates and their hands and tails and toes are present?’

  ‘So we do count the gibbon!’ said Ivy. ‘She’s a primate.’

  A loud crunching of wood and glass came from the western wall as a branch punched through. The way back to the Book Arcade proper, between the surviving trees, was becoming narrower and narrower.

  ‘Come on,’ said Echo. ‘Come on!’

  ‘Eighty-three!’ said Vally. ‘We’re going to have to leg it!’

  ‘Wait a minute,’ Pearl said. ‘Read it again, Val.’

  A large, spiky fern crashed down in front of them, sending the monkeys into a scampering panic. A huge panel of glass burst into glittering fragments and tumbled to the ground. The shards scattered across the Coles’ path to the exit.

  ‘There’s no time!’

  Pearl clutched his arm. ‘Vally, if we miss something, we’ll lose just the same as if we run out of time. Please. Just a quick check.’

  He laid his fingers on Pearl’s hand, and she wondered if he was about to pull them away and throw her hand back at her. But he only gave a small squeeze, and read the poem again.

  ‘There’s something we’ve forgotten,’ Pearl said. ‘I know there is, Val – if I could just remember what a primate is …’

  ‘It’s another word for monkey,’ Vally said.

  Ivy looked shocked. ‘No, it’s not! Primates are monkeys and lemurs and bushbabies and apes!’

  ‘Are you sure?’ Vally flinched as the ground shook with another falling tree.

  ‘You’re the one who told me that!’ Ivy said. ‘You’re forgetting everything!’

  Apes. Pearl looked at the monkeys, and one ape, around them. Someone she knew was obsessed with monkeys and apes. The animal next to man, the person called them …

  ‘We’re apes,’ Pearl said, with dawning realisation. ‘We forgot to count ourselves.’

  ‘Nine primates!’ said Ivy. ‘And nine plus nine hands – eighteen!’

  ‘Plus ninety toes,’ said Vally, who was adding with his fingers.

  ‘Plus five tails,’ said Pearl, taking the knob in the centre of the wheel between pinched fingers. ‘Primates, hands, tails and toes equals …?’

  Her brother looked up from his calculations. ‘One hundred and twenty-two!’

  Pearl had no idea if that was right, but she trusted Vally to know. She turned the knob carefully, the wheel clicking from one number to the next. Echo watched from the top of the cloche, her head on one side.

  ‘Hurry, Pearl!’ Ivy cried, as another huge tree crashed across the path.

  One-one-five. One-two-zero. Pearl clicked the wheel two tiny increments. The lock seemed to stick, as if resisting her – as if it wanted to make her force it, so that it would click past her goal. But then, quite suddenly, it clicked to one hundred and twenty-two, and the wheel came free of the cloche and tray. Underneath was a bunch of the biggest grapes Pearl had ever seen.

  ‘Got it!’ said Pearl. ‘Which monkey do we give them to?’

  Ivy clapped her hands to her face. ‘Oh, no!’

  The mandrill was holding a bunch of pastel-coloured flowers in his foot.

  ‘Of course it had to be him,’ Vally groaned.

  The mandrill stared at them with wise, wild eyes.

  Echo flexed her crest. ‘Don’t bite.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  AN INCREDIBLE PRICE

  Vally drew a deep breath. He didn’t particularly want to lose his face to the game, along with everything else. But Pa’s medallions said to Always Do What You Know To Be Right, and it was definitely not right to let a mandrill maul his little sisters.

  ‘You two head back to the Arcade!’ He picked up the bunch of grapes. ‘Won’t be a min–’

  But before he could finish, Ivy – quick as a greedy little monkey herself – snatched the grapes and ran away. Echo sprang out of her way in a squawking whirlwind.

  ‘No!’ The cockatoo launched herself at Vally, a deafening pink blur. He raised his arm to deflect her. ‘Ivy, get back here!’

  Echo perched on the arm instead, talons pricking Vally’s skin. ‘Get back here!’

  ‘Shut up, bird!’ Through the tremors and noise of the crumbling Fernery, Vally searched for a sign of Ivy. The forest was a mess of splinters and churning earth.

  Then he saw her. Ivy was sidling up to the mandrill, staring the beast right in the eye. She was stretching out one hand, with the grapes in the other. In a momentary lull, he heard her crooning, ‘Here, Mr Mandrill. Come on. Give us the bouquet and you can have these.’

  The mandrill took the flowers in his hand and stood up.

  ‘You like grapes, don’t you?’ Ivy said. ‘But you’ve got to trade.’

  The mandrill stalked nearer on elegant legs. Then he flung the bouquet aside, seized her by the wrist and grabbed the grapes by the stalk. A hairy arm snaked around Ivy’s waist. The mandrill was not a huge animal – not like a gorilla – yet those slender limbs hid a terrible strength. Ivy screamed. The mandrill didn’t seem to care. Cradling Ivy like an overgrown baby monkey, he loped away on his hind legs. The last Vally saw of either of them was the mandrill’s pink and blue backside disappearing behind a shrivelled fern.

  Timber cracked. Birds screeched. The other monkeys were making a great cacophony of hooting and shrieking as they bounded through the undergrowth on feet and knuckles, leaping over logs and ducking under broken branches. And in Vally’s head, his thoughts were screaming, too: save Ivy! Save yourself! Ivy! Yourself!

  ‘Ivy!’ Pearl lunged after her.

  Upturning roots shook the ground, making Vally stagger. He grabbed Pearl’s sleeve. ‘Pearl, no!’

  ‘Let go of me!’ Pearl tried to twist free. ‘Ivy!’

  Vally looked towards the door. The way was partly blocked, trees crashing down o
n both sides – but he could still see the open door, and if he and Pearl could just climb over those few logs …

  Echo beat her wings, her feathers slapping against his ear. ‘Mind your head!’

  She was right – he had to think rationally. On the one hand, running into the falling trees. Chance to rescue Ivy. Chance of losing the game. Chance of crushing death.

  On the other hand, running back to the Arcade. Keeping Pearl and himself alive. Continuing play. Chance to win. Chance to save Pa, Ivy, the Arcade … and what was the other thing?

  ‘Pearl, we have to go!’ The Fernery was growing darker every moment. Pieces of dirty glass fell from the ceiling like hailstones.

  ‘Not without Ivy!’ Her eyes were red, her voice piercing – and he realised she was crying.

  He made his voice as low and steady and as grown-up as he could. ‘One more round.’

  ‘Vally, I can’t –’

  He gripped her shoulder and looked into her eyes. ‘We can. We’ll get her back. But we’re no use to her if we get crushed to death. Are you with me?’

  ‘But the last thing we did together was fight!’

  ‘Are you with me, Pearl?’

  She glanced once more in the direction that Ivy and the mandrill had gone. Then she said, ‘The lollies.’

  ‘We finished the lolly challenge hours ago!’

  ‘In your bag!’ Pearl reached for Vally’s satchel. ‘She said they were for emergencies.’

  ‘Who did?’

  ‘The sweetshop lady! With the big hair!’ Pearl drew out a pair of green-striped spheres, like large marbles, wrapped in translucent waxed paper.

  The sight of them rang a faint bell in Vally’s mind. Someone had given him these, recently. They’re special, all right.

  With a quick twist of the paper, he unwrapped the sweet and shoved it into his mouth. It tasted like a vanilla cream. He and Pearl watched each other, waiting for the magic to take effect. Leaves and glass and water from the broken pipes hailed down around them.