The Grandest Bookshop in the World

by Mellor, Amelia

  Pearl wanted to throw the door open, to go back in and reassure her brother and keep Pa company in the last moments of his extraordinary life.

  But she still had a chance to put it right. Delicate beauty. That would be the Ornament Department.

  There was a heavy sliding thump, as if someone had fallen to the floor. She heard Vally sniff. ‘What am I meant to do now? What am I meant to do?’

  But there was nothing he could do now. It was all up to Pearl.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  WISDOM OF PEARL’S

  The rain had stopped. The moon was out, shining through the skylight. Silhouetted against it was the paper wagtail, perched on a slender crossbeam.

  ‘Stupid bird,’ said Echo.

  Pearl gave the cockatoo a little rub on the back of the neck and turned towards the stairs. The empty Arcade rang with her footfalls.

  The stairways were dark. With every step she took, the stairs groaned, as if the bookshop was now so frail that her movements were hurting it. Once, a stair split under her weight. Had Pearl not been holding the rail, she might have tumbled all the way down.

  She came to the second floor. The gas lamps were still lit. The sight of the skylight surprised her. Had it always been split like that, with a big strip of ceiling down the middle? As Pearl looked around, familiarities fluttered in her head, like the last leaves still clinging to a plane tree. That closed-off department on the short side of the building was her house. It was a good place to live because you could look out at … Kirk Street? Bourke Street. You could look out at Bourke Street and watch the people and the – what were they? – the small trains, going back and forth on their cables. Terambulators? No, that word was perambulators, babies’ prams. Traims? Tams?

  ‘Trams, silly,’ said Pearl aloud. It was annoying, trying to think with a brain missing so many years’ worth of knowledge and experiences and thoughts. It was an incomplete set.

  The other three sides of the second floor were dedicated to departments. The sign above one of them puzzled her, and she had to sound it out: Pa-ma-mull’s Gems. The largest department was filled with ornaments. She remembered the ornaments. Here were the plates so ornate they could only be used at Christmastime. Here, everything was cold and pretty and hollow. The name of this ornament place escaped Pearl at present, but her mother was fond of it. Among all the dainty things, Ma could take her tea in peace. Why was that? Was it easier to look down at everything below from here, or was it because the place was so full of ornaments that the children weren’t allowed to run?

  A giggle resounded through the maze of porcelain.

  ‘Who’s a cheeky girl, then?’ asked Echo.

  Pearl quickened her step. The laughter came again, closer now. It sounded like a child, somewhere in the section with all the fake Ancient Roman artefacts. Pearl peered around a massive amphora.

  Her dead sister sat among the armless statues.

  Only, she wasn’t dead anymore. Ruby was exactly as she had been before the fever, that last happy weekend in Camberwell with Cousin Lily. She had bright cheeks, wavy dark hair, big brown eyes, and a tension in her pose, like a kitten about to spring. She sprang up now, knocking over a miniature goddess. ‘You found me!’

  Pearl took a step back. She remembered Ruby as her bigger sister, but now she was oddly small. Eight years old, forever. She jumped like a … something, she grinned like a … shark?

  Ruby glanced at Echo. ‘When did you get a pet bird? Lucky!’ She tried to reach out to pat the cockatoo. Echo bit her finger, hard, and jumped off Pearl’s shoulder to stand on the balcony railing, flexing her crest aggressively.

  ‘Ow!’ Ruby curled up the bitten finger.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Pearl. ‘She’s a terror. Are you bleeding?’

  Echo nibbled Pearl’s hair. ‘Mind your head.’

  ‘I’m all right.’ Ruby grabbed Pearl’s hand. ‘I thought you’d never find me. You hide next.’

  Pearl did want to play. Ruby had been gone for a long time. But was this why she had come upstairs – to play hide-and-seek? ‘I think I’m supposed to be doing something else.’

  ‘Come on.’ Ruby pulled Pearl along, through aisles of stern china animals. ‘We don’t have to do hide-and-seek. Want to play dress-ups in the photography studio instead?’

  Dress-ups. Yes. With Ruby. They used to have some fabulous costumes. Different colours. Different fabrics. There was the time they had all gone to Sydney, and Pa’s friend Mr Tart had bought Chinese dresses for the three youngest girls. And there was the time that … well, there must have been lots of times, even if Pearl couldn’t think of more examples. The point was, Ruby was alive. And she wanted to play dress-ups.

  In the middle of the night.

  Pearl pushed that last thought aside. She had Ruby all to herself. That was special because the others were usually around, and wanted to play, too.

  The others. Ivy. Linda. Ed. Vally.

  Pearl slowed, letting her hand slip out of Ruby’s grip. ‘I’m already playing with Vally.’

  ‘Who cares about Vally?’

  Something was off about all this. It was as if the ground under Pearl’s feet was on a slight angle. It was the middle of the night, and Ruby was alive, and she didn’t care about Vally.

  ‘I do,’ Pearl said. ‘He was upset. He forgot our whole life. And I left him downstairs.’

  ‘He’s with Pa, isn’t he?’ said Ruby. ‘He’ll survive.’

  Pearl didn’t remember telling her that. But then again, Pearl didn’t remember a lot of things. She looked down into the Book Arcade’s lightwell, towards where she thought Pa’s office was. In the dull light of the upstairs gas lamps, the Cole rainbows were almost bleached. Only a small, broken arch of pale purple remained.

  Pearl stopped still. She remembered. It was all in little bits and pieces, but she knew why she was here. Vally was drained and distraught in Pa’s office. Linda, Eddie, Ivy, Ma and the flat were all gone. And the Obscurosmith was minutes away from winning the game. Winning Pa’s life, Cole’s Book Arcade and … the other thing.

  ‘Ruby, you have to help me.’ Pearl looked around. Where was the Obscurosmith? Where was the paper spy? ‘There’s some kind of challenge up here somewhere. Probably a puzzle. We have to find it.’

  ‘I don’t want to do a boring puzzle,’ Ruby said. ‘Let’s just play.’

  There was that unbalanced feeling again. Pearl could understand that a person might think a specific puzzle was boring, or even that a tedious person might dislike puzzles in general – but not a Cole. What would a long journey be, without a book of Pa’s puzzles? How would the Cole children have passed the time waiting in queues, without Ma’s brainteasers?

  But Pearl was running out of time to think about why Ruby hated puzzles all of a sudden. She had to convince her sister to help her save Pa and the Book Arcade. ‘Please. We can play dress-ups after.’

  Ruby turned away. ‘I’ll race you.’

  ‘Roo, wait!’ Pearl said. ‘There’s a – some kind of trap here, too. We have to be careful, or we won’t be able to finish the seventh round. I’ll lose the game.’

  ‘Why don’t you want to play with me?’ said Ruby, her voice high and trembling.

  ‘I didn’t say –’ Pearl began, but Ruby interrupted her again.

  ‘I’ve been gone for three years, and you won’t even play with me.’ Her face twisted in a bitter expression and she looked down at her bare feet. ‘It’s like you don’t love me at all.’

  Pearl wanted to embrace her. She wanted to tell Ruby that of course she loved her. Most of all, she wanted to run off with her to play dress-ups, and pretend to be someone whose life wasn’t on the brink of falling apart. But just as Pearl was opening her mouth to reassure her sister, she saw Ruby glance up. As if she was checking Pearl’s reaction.

  It was all fake. She was a fake. She was the Obscurosmith’s creation from the storeroom. A copy of life, like the statues all around them.

  ‘You’re trying to distra
ct me.’

  The girl’s breathy whimpering stopped.

  ‘You’re the trap.’

  The copy’s hands fell to her sides. What was that other red gemstone called, the cheaper one? Garnet. Pearl would call her Garnet. ‘What gave me away?’

  ‘A few things.’ Pearl knew she would have been sure of herself sooner, if it wasn’t for all the gaps in her memory. It took longer to find the path through her head. ‘Echo bit you … and you didn’t bleed. But mostly, it’s the way you talk about our family.’

  Garnet sighed. ‘All right, I’m not Ruby. But you could teach me how to be more like her. If you forfeit this round, I’ll be alive by morning. Real blood, and everything.’

  ‘And what will happen to Pa?’

  ‘I think you already know,’ said Garnet, suddenly businesslike. It was unsettling, how fast her emotions seemed to change – as if she was testing a different weapon against Pearl’s defences with each one. ‘What’s the point in trying to save him, though, really?’

  It was such a cruel thing to say that Pearl couldn’t be sure she had heard right. ‘What?’

  Garnet shrugged. ‘He’s already sixty. He won’t live forever. What’s the point?’

  Pearl turned the question in her mind. She found herself missing Vally – the real Vally, not the poor amnesiac downstairs. Maybe he would have been able to think of a comeback.

  ‘Let me show you what I mean,’ said Garnet, when Pearl didn’t respond.

  Garnet moved like Ruby, full of happy careless energy. It made Pearl want to grab her and hold her still. It wasn’t fair that the Obscurosmith could squeeze Pearl’s heart like clay, the way he was doing now.

  Presently, Garnet came to a large mirror, set all around with flowers and scrollwork. She gave a little twirl as she stopped beside it. Her smile darkened from cheeky to wicked. ‘I should warn you, it’s shocking.’

  Pearl’s own mystified face stared back at her. ‘I do look quite tired …’

  ‘Not you.’ Garnet placed her hands flat on the glass. She closed her eyes and spoke to the mirror. ‘Show me Bourke Street … in the third millennium.’

  The girls’ reflections wavered, blurred, vanished into whiteness. The mirror was now a window, behind which was nothing but a blinding mist. Pearl turned her face from its brilliance, but Garnet grabbed her arm and pulled her to the mirror. ‘You have to watch.’

  The street in the vision resolved slowly, like a photograph developing. Tram tracks gleamed in the sun. Humanoid shapes walked the bluestone paths. Here and there, Pearl saw outlines she thought she knew, architecture jagged against the sky.

  Then the picture sharpened – and what an odd, hectic city swarmed before her. Like a Persian carpet, it was so rich with detail that she didn’t know where to look. This might be the future, but it couldn’t be Bourke Street. Her Bourke Street was all grand window displays, and carriages with big wheels, and ladies with bustles, and buildings with roofs like churches and castles.

  But then she saw the awning over the entrance to the Royal Arcade – the only one left of its kind, where there ought to have been a whole row of them across the southern side of the street. She saw the old Leviathan Building on the corner of Swanston and Bourke, dwarfed now by strange, sleek towers behind. Everything else had changed so much, Pearl couldn’t tell where Cole’s Book Arcade should have been. All she knew was that it no longer existed – like so many other pieces of her world. No more horses. No more dust. No smokestacks. Now trees and flowers grew in boxes on the street. The trams that passed each other were quick and streamlined, gliding to a stop for the people to pour out, or clamber in.

  Garnet tapped the glass. ‘Pearl. Tell me what you see.’

  ‘I see …’ Pearl searched the vision for a detail she knew how to describe. In the cloudless sky, a tiny shape glittered in the blue. She stared at it. It moved in a slow straight line, leaving a long white trail behind it.

  ‘I see a flying machine,’ she said. Not the frail, theoretical creations she had seen in books, but something strong enough to soar way up in the blue like an eagle. Magic? Engineering? Perhaps it didn’t matter which, when the result was this miracle. Could such a thing reach the other side of the world in less than a week, like Pa had predicted? Steamships took so much longer than that. It seemed impossible.

  ‘Not up there,’ Garnet said teasingly. ‘What do you see?’

  A little girl ran by in the vision.

  ‘Shorts!’ Pearl exclaimed, startling Echo into flight.

  Garnet frowned. ‘What?’

  ‘She’s wearing shorts! Like a boy!’ The future girl looked so free in the summer heat: bare brown legs flashing past, and nobody telling her to mind her manners. Pearl tore her gaze from the mirror to look at Garnet in astonishment. ‘Rational Dress must have really caught on!’

  She didn’t wait for a reply, but pressed her hands to the glass and drank the future in. The billboards were moving. They were like the slides in a projector lantern show, but crisp and bright and visible in the daylight, flashing and changing in the shop windows. The street was wide, clean stone. Instead of a poor boy sweeping, a man rode a little machine with whirring brooms affixed to it.

  And the colours. Such rich, vivid colours: the clothing, the window displays, the trams, and the people, who were every beautiful shade of humanity. She could even see a person whose arms were blue and green with tattoos.

  ‘It’s wonderful,’ Pearl breathed aloud. ‘Pa was right!’

  ‘You’re not paying attention,’ said Garnet, but Pearl was speaking over her.

  ‘They’ll have flying machines and picture lanterns! And look at that bicycle!’

  A man in a turban and suit strolled by, gazing at a little flat thing in his hand. Now that she was looking closer, she could see that lots of people had them. Some were frowning at them in thought. Some were smiling. ‘What are they doing? What are those things in their hands?’

  ‘Telephones,’ said Garnet.

  ‘They can carry them about? They don’t need electrical wires?’

  ‘Everything will be on a telephone,’ said Garnet smugly. ‘No newspapers. No letters. No cameras. They’ll stare at their telephones, stuck in mindless conversation with everybody and nobody, taking silly pictures of themselves –’

  ‘A picture on the telephone?’ Pearl was fairly jumping with excitement. She peered closer. Many of the people had little trinkets lodged in their ears, some with long strings, some without. ‘They look awfully funny with those things sticking out of their ears. Will that be the fashion?’ Then she remembered an old friend of her mother’s who was deaf, and wore small hearing trumpets, disguised as flowers, over her ears. ‘Wait, no, are those hearing aids? Is everyone going to be deaf in the future?’

  ‘Only to the world around them,’ Garnet said. ‘They’re so busy listening to their music that they won’t even –’

  ‘Music? In that little thing?’ Pearl pressed her hands to her face in astonishment. Pictures and letters and news and music and talk and every delight imaginable, all tidily folded up to be no bigger than a pocket address-book. It was too splendid.

  Even as she watched, more wondrous things unfolded in the vision before her. A little two-wheeled transport zoomed past on Elizabeth Street. A man – no, a woman in trousers again – lifted something flat and silvery onto her lap, and opened its covers. ‘Is that how books will be? Where are the pages?’

  ‘That’s an electric typewriting encyclopaedia.’ Garnet curled her lip. ‘They’ll hardly need books anymore.’

  ‘An electric encyclopaedia?!’

  ‘You’re missing the point!’ Garnet snapped. ‘Look at them! They’re not reading, and they’re not going into the Arcade!’

  Pearl looked at the Leviathan Building, and tried to guess where Cole’s Book Arcade should have been. ‘Where is it?’

  Garnet pressed her hands to the glass. ‘Show me Cole’s Book Arcade.’

  The mist rolled across the mirror again, and
the fantastic future city was gone. Now lights shone through the fog. A rainbow sign arched above a doorway – but it wasn’t the Book Arcade. It was a much smaller room, lined with books. Perhaps somebody’s sitting room, decorated like their favourite bookshop?

  But the books weren’t real either. They were only a design on wallpaper. In a glass cabinet, golden Cole medallions gleamed. A black and red metal chicken sat regally beside them. Something was familiar about it.

  ‘This is all that will be left,’ said Garnet. ‘The last pieces of the Palace of Intellect, dug up from the ruins.’

  Tiny labels were affixed to each display cabinet. It was, Pearl realised, a museum. The vision moved, as if Pearl was turning in circles to see it all. The sailor dolls stood frozen in time. The steel disc of the Symphonion shone inside the handsome wooden cabinet. ‘They remember us?’

  ‘Most won’t,’ said Garnet scornfully. ‘Pa’s books will fade and crumble. And you, Pearl – you’ll be nothing.’

  Pearl scarcely heard her. The people of the future were moving through the Book Arcade display, and they were as bizarre and lovely as they had been on the street outside. They were as curious as monkeys, the adults leaning in close to read the medallions, the children pressing buttons and jumping back from the Symphonion. Nobody that Pearl could see was tight-laced into an hourglass shape, or strangling on a starched shirt-collar. One child had twinkling lights in their shoes; whether enchantment or electricity, she couldn’t tell.

  But Pa’s books. She couldn’t see any on the displays. What had Garnet been saying about Pa’s books?

  Pearl looked up. ‘Did Pa’s books make it into the Condensed Library of the Future?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The Condensed Library of the Future. The hundred best books on the most important subjects.’

  ‘No such thing will come to pass. He’s wrong.’