‘Praxinoscope,’ Pearl said.
Praxinoscope. Praxinoscope. ‘Thanks.’
She said nothing – only stared at a mechanical puppet show of a ship rocking on the waves. She seemed to be trying to retrieve a memory, but it wasn’t coming back.
‘Want to check the sweetshop?’
She shook herself. ‘Lolly World, isn’t it?’
‘I think so.’
They ran across the Arcade. Lolly Land greeted them with riotous colours, fruity scents, the rounded forms of lollipops and Easter eggs and a hundred other kinds of sweets. Everything that magic had destroyed, it had restored again. As the bell rang over the door, Linda came stumbling out of the confectionery kitchen.
‘Linda, Linda, Linda!’ Pearl charged towards her.
‘What, what, what?’ said Linda, catching her on the run. She glanced at Vally and her brows rose. He realised he knew that expression. It was her way of looking for solidarity in a strange situation; a way of saying, can you believe this?
‘Where did you go?’ he asked.
Linda released Pearl. ‘I couldn’t see. It felt like I was floating.’
‘Inside the creature?’ asked Pearl, as she helped herself to an Easter egg.
‘In the air,’ said Linda. ‘It was sort of this weightless, empty place. I wanted a light, but I’ve never had much luck doing magic without an object. All I had to light was my clothes, and I didn’t want to set those on fire.’
It sounded almost pleasant to Vally, compared to turning into a doll. ‘Nothing happened to you?’
‘Well, I was offered a few deals,’ said Linda. ‘When I was really thirsty, this voice came from … sort of everywhere at once. He wanted a secret, in exchange for a glass of water. Then later it wasn’t a secret, it was five of my tears. But I didn’t feel like crying, and after what you two told me, I’d made up my mind to refuse him. His heart wasn’t in it, anyway. He sounded bored.’
‘He usually sounds bored.’ Vally walked slowly around the horseshoe of counters, taking in the colours and the jolly names and the memories that came with them. Yes to mint toffees; yes to sherbert lemons; sugared almonds, definitely not; yes please to the pink stick that let you whistle like a bird. It was as if each detail had weight – not a burdensome weight, but the comforting heft of his winter coat, of an old hardcover, of Ebenezer’s head resting on his thigh. His life was filling him up, stabilising him like a ship in the water. He had the bizarre impulse to give himself a hug. I missed you, Vally. Welcome back.
‘Next one!’ said Pearl, running to the door. ‘I have to find Ivy!’
Right. Ivy, kidnapped by the mandrill. Ivy, trapped in the painting. Once they’d found her, they could look for Eddie. Not that Ed would need the same reassurance that Ivy would; he could look after himself. But he had that sore hand. Vally ought to check on him.
Out in the Arcade proper, under the glorious full rainbows and packed bookshelves, there was no room to keep running. The staff had returned – which was confusing on a Sunday. They were all talking and looking about themselves in wonderment and disbelief. Had that really happened? Had they imagined being magically lifted out of the Book Arcade, and placed back in it unharmed? Mr Pyke the manager was explaining something to Pa, and Miss Kay the confectioner was hauling Miss Finch the pianist to her feet. The names and roles returned with each face: Mr Gabriel of the information desk, Mr Chillingsworth of the Music Department, Miss Fowler of the toyshop, Mr Yang of the Tea Salon, Syd Endacott of the army of shelving-lads. Someone had wound up the Symphonion, and it was plinking away in the Tea Salon, just as it did when the Arcade was open for business.
Linda followed Pearl and Vally as they headed for the Fernery. ‘You have to tell me what happened in the rest of the game. Did everyone disappear like I did?’
‘Almost,’ Vally said. ‘It was just us, Pa and one of the parrots in the end. And it didn’t get easier, either! Round Six nearly killed us. We thought it had killed us, right, Pearlie?’
Pearl didn’t respond. She had the distracted expression again, as if she was trying to think of something and it wouldn’t come to her.
‘The Fernery shrank down smaller and smaller,’ Vally went on. ‘And the trees were coming down, and one of them landed right on Pearl’s head. But Miss Kay’s magic lollies saved us. She’s invented one that lets you walk right through the wall!’
Linda raised a brow. ‘Is that right?’
‘What’s that look for?’
‘You said her magic saved you,’ said Linda, with a teasing tone. ‘So it can’t be all bad, can it?’
Vally shrugged. ‘I guess not.’ Magic was fickle – but it had also forced him to test his limits during the game, and those had turned out to be a lot greater than he’d thought. Perhaps Vally would try the floating light trick again someday soon. He was older now. He was more in control of his thoughts. Ruby would have liked to see him get it right.
The Fernery door burst open. As Ivy ran out, Vally caught a glimpse of the forest beyond, green and alive. His little sister stopped, craning her neck to look at the upper floors of the Book Arcade. In an instant she was swept up between Linda, Pearl and Vally – another piece fitting back into its proper place.
Linda threw Vally a sidelong glance. ‘You did not involve Ivy, did you?’
‘She was actually a big help,’ Pearl said. ‘We couldn’t have done it without her.’
‘I solved a challenge for them!’ said Ivy proudly.
‘Part of a challenge,’ Vally explained, under his breath.
‘Pearl Adelia!’ Brisk footfalls thumped across the Book Arcade floor towards them. ‘Valentine Francis!’
‘You’re in for it now,’ said Linda.
It was their mother, followed by Eddie and Ebenezer and Pa and the gazes of all the staff. She looked as if she might, for the first time ever, give everybody a wallop – not just Pearl and Vally, but everyone in the room, right up to the mechanical chicken. But instead, she wrapped them both in her big soft arms, with a deep sigh of relief. ‘Oh, my little ducks.’ She had not called them that in a very long time indeed. Vally felt his face warming with embarrassment. ‘I was worried sick! You must never do anything like that again, do you hear?’
‘Yes, Ma,’ said Pearl.
‘Loud and clear.’ Over Ma’s shoulder, Vally locked eyes with his brother. Eddie’s hand was still in bandages. He was trying, not very hard, to keep a straight face.
Ma gave a small start as Pa’s arms slid around her waist, allowing Pearl and Vally to escape. ‘And how are you this morning, my queen?’
‘You won’t win me over that easily, Mr Cole,’ said Ma, pushing him away slightly. ‘I’m not finished with you.’ But as Pa stepped back, a rueful smile flickered across Mrs Cole’s face.
‘Come on,’ Vally said to Pearl. ‘Let’s check upstairs.’
They walked towards the lift – because they had to check that it was working, and, all right, because riding in the lift was fun. Eddie, Ivy, Linda and Ebenezer came along, too, without invitation. The dog trotted in excited circles around Vally’s legs as the Coles moved through the throng of red jackets.
‘Was anyone else drifting in space?’ asked Eddie, as they passed the art history section. ‘Before we came back, I mean?’
‘No, I was in a painting,’ Ivy said.
‘Yes,’ said Linda, hauling open the brass concertina door of the lift. ‘Did he try to do a deal with you? The voice?’
‘I wish.’ Eddie held the door as they filed in. ‘I would’ve told him to shove off. I could hear someone talking a long way away, but I couldn’t make out the words.’
‘I suppose he had a lot of you on his hands by then,’ Vally said. The effort of maintaining separate lightless, weightless voids for everyone he’d captured might have taxed even the powers of Magnus Maximillian. ‘And we kept him busy, didn’t we, Pearl?’
She didn’t seem to hear. Eddie closed the lift doors, Linda pushed the handle, and the contraption lurc
hed into motion towards the first floor.
‘What’s wrong, Pearl?’ asked Ivy.
‘Pa’s song for Ruby,’ said Pearl. ‘I can’t remember how it went. I keep getting it mixed up with some stupid nursery rhyme about a frog.’
‘But there is a frog in it,’ Eddie said.
‘There is, too!’ Linda laughed and shook her head. ‘She loved frogs. She thought they were the funniest things in the world.’
The lift bell chimed as they reached the first floor. Linda pulled the lever in the other direction, setting the brakes.
Ivy pulled the door across. ‘She’d even laugh at the word frog.’
‘She used to make Pa do a frog voice,’ Vally said, a little surprised at himself because the memory hadn’t been there a moment ago. ‘I can’t really do it, but …’
‘Go on, Val,’ said Eddie, nudging him with his arm.
Vally cleared his throat. ‘Come on, madam. It’s time to put on your pyjamas.’
‘There was more of a growl to it,’ Linda said. ‘How do you do? My name is Mr Froggy.’
The Coles got out of the lift and walked among the bookshelves towards the bandstand.
‘Show me how it went,’ said Pearl. ‘The song. She danced like a fairy …’
Linda and Ivy picked it up together. ‘She sang like a frog.’
‘She buzzed like a bee,’ sang Eddie, joining in.
Vally remembered it, too – the playful little melody, running up and down the octave. ‘She dashed like a dog.’ Not his dog, though. Ebenezer was too big – a lolloper, a bounder. Ruby was more like a terrier, bolting through a paddock after rabbits.
Now all but Pearl were singing together, their voices quiet and self-conscious, but steady. ‘Oh, yes, oh, yes! She did, she did! And Froggy played a tune.’
And although he had not seen her in a long time, Vally could feel his sister there with them. Not in spirit, for Ma’s seances proved that she had passed over peacefully; nor in body, for that lay in the earth, and the copy was destroyed. She was there in his head. She was there in their family resemblance – Linda’s curly hair, Eddie’s monkey grin, Pearl’s round cheeks, Ivy’s dark eyes. She was there in the history of Cole’s Book Arcade, climbing like a possum, skipping like a lamb, jumping like a wallaby. Oh, yes, she did. Energy and optimism. Ruby and Pa, through and through.
Vally leaned on the balcony, exhausted. Ebenezer nudged his hand, and the answering movement of Vally’s fingers over his old friend’s ears felt familiar and right. A tremor went through the railing as Pearl settled on his other side, her cheek resting on her fist. She caught his eye and gave him one of her sly little smiles that usually meant she was in a teasing mood.
‘What?’
‘Oh, nothing,’ she said, with pretended innocence. ‘I was just wondering who lives here.’
Vally bumped her gently with his arm. ‘I think we do.’
He searched the lightwell for the flutter of black paper – but he needn’t have worried. Sunlight shone on porcelain above him, people moved among bookshelves below, and all around were his father’s rainbows.
HISTORICAL NOTE
COLE’S BOOK ARCADE
Now that you’ve finished this book, you might be wondering: Melbourne didn’t really have a place like Cole’s Book Arcade … did it? Is that where Coles supermarkets came from? Where is it now?
The Grandest Bookshop in the World is a work of fiction. And it has nothing to do with the supermarket – Cole is a pretty common surname. But there really was an Edward William Cole, who founded Cole’s Book Arcade. Born in Kent on the fourth of January 1832, he was the second-eldest of his mother’s sixteen children, his father having died when he was small. After spending his early teens working on his stepfather’s farm, Cole left his countryside home with a modest inheritance to look for work in 1849. He spent two miserable years selling sandwiches on the overcrowded London streets, and another two working in South Africa. Eventually, he decided to do as his older brother had done in California, and seek his fortune on Australia’s goldfields. He arrived in Melbourne late in 1852, aged twenty. He worked his way up from being a prospector; to a lemonade-seller; to a carpenter; to a travelling photographer and field botanist; to a pie-man; to a beloved bookseller, author, father, friend, campaigner for equality and oddball Australian icon.
And he really did advertise in the papers for a wife, reasoning that he was more likely to find a good one that way than by chance meetings. Eliza Frances Jordan, born in Hobart in 1842, was one who had the courage to write to him. She was thirty, and he was forty – ages at which, in those days, you were expected to be helping your eldest children find someone to marry, not looking for a partner yourself. They found they had plenty in common, especially their sense of humour, and were married a few months later. They were well matched as business partners, too. Mr Cole had an incredible talent for marketing and creating a welcoming atmosphere, but he didn’t like to fire underperforming employees, or even tell them off. Mrs Cole took it upon herself to ‘prowl about’ the Arcade, keeping the staff on their best behaviour.
There were actually several Cole’s Book Arcades. Mr Cole’s first Book Arcade, which opened in 1873 at the eastern end of Bourke Street near Parliament House, was extremely popular. He also opened branches in Sydney and Adelaide in the early twentieth century. But the second Melbourne Arcade, on the southern side of Bourke Street between Swanston and Elizabeth, was the Cole’s Book Arcade, and it really did open on Melbourne Cup Day in 1883. In true Cole fashion, he spaced the ad out to fill a whole column of the newspaper, to be sure that everyone would see it. Surrounded by the word ‘READ’ repeated over and over to create a border, it said:
COLE’S NEW BOOK ARCADE WILL OPEN on CUP DAY. It is the FINEST SIGHT in MELBOURNE and the GRANDEST BOOKSHOP IN THE WORLD. Intellectual non-racing people are invited there instead of going to the RACES.
But most people didn’t want to choose between books and bookies. Most wanted both. After the horses raced, the people raced to the new Arcade. They were so excited, and in many cases drunk, that the grand opening began to turn sour. In some places, people were packed so tightly between the shelves that they couldn’t move. Cole had his staff put up a barrier and charge the people threepence, in exchange for Arcade entry and one of his customised medallions, which could be used as store credit or kept as a memento. These medallions continued to be part of the Arcade experience for twenty years, and many Arcade visitors drilled holes through them to wear on necklaces and bracelets. Today they are popular collectors’ items.
No one could argue with Mr Cole’s ambitious claims: the 1883 Arcade was truly a marvel. Everyone who came to Melbourne paid a visit, from my own great-great-aunt to literary celebrities of the day such as Rudyard Kipling and Mark Twain. It was three storeys high, with a lightwell right through the middle. Mr Cole claimed it contained two million books, but this was probably an exaggeration. As much as he valued truth, he never let it get in the way of a good story, so long as the fib was harmless.
The Tea Salon, Book Arcade Band, confectionery department, Toy Land, Wonder Land, Perfumery, stationery department, music department, ornament displays, monkeys, Fernery, parrots, photography studio, Symphonion, Little Men, funhouse mirrors, soap mountain and mechanical chicken were all part of the Arcade, but not necessarily at the same time. The rainbow signs usually had eight stripes, rather than seven.
One thing that definitely was part of Cole’s Book Arcade in 1893 was the family flat. Mr and Mrs Cole lived there from 1887 with their six children, who went by the same names used in this novel: Linda (Ada Belinda), Eddie (Edward William Jr), Vally (Valentine Francis), Ruby Angelina, Pearl Adelia and Ivy Diamond (often Diamond to her father, Ivy to everyone else). According to Cole of the Book Arcade – a biography written by Linda’s son, Cole Turnley – they were a boisterous lot, who adored their eccentric ‘Pa’. Many of the anecdotes in the story you’ve just read are true, passed down to Turnley from the grown-up Cole childr
en themselves. Mrs Cole was fond of soirees, plays, seances, and the word ‘brainwave’ – and she did get sassy with her previous suitor when he threatened to jump in the Yarra. Pearl loved party tricks and brainteasers so much, she wrote a book of them when she grew up called Novelty Evenings.
Sadly, the part about little Ruby Cole is true, too. In March of 1890, aged eight, she passed away from scarlet fever – which we now know as the bacterial throat infection streptococcus, and can treat with antibiotics. Ruby’s father commemorated her in every subsequent printing of Cole’s Funny Picture Book No. 1 with the song ‘Ruby Cole and her Clever Frog,’ which he had written only weeks before her death. In fact, Mr Cole’s children all appeared in his books for young readers, as the subjects of nonsense verse, whimsical pictures, and mathematical puzzles – including a bedtime story about rainbow monkeys. He wrote and compiled a great many titles for the education and amusement of young and old. In the Arcade’s heyday, they were Australia’s most popular books for children, because they were affordable as well as engaging. One Melbourne father said of the first and most famous Funny Picture Book published in 1879: ‘A lot of stupid things are in it, but I can’t keep it away from the kiddies.’ As well as the Funny Picture Books, there were dozens of other titles such as Cole’s Family Amuser and Intellect Sharpener, All About Animals, Cole’s Fun Doctor and Childland. Some of the puzzles and poems in this book come from these volumes. Others are imitations of their style. Cole’s books and pamphlets were printed and reprinted many times at the Arcade’s publishing department, during the life of the 1883 Arcade.
You see, many other publishers thought Cole’s opinions were quite scandalous. He believed all religions contained the same essential messages of goodness. His use of the rainbow as a trademark frustrated pious people, due to its significance in the Old Testament. Even as an uneducated teenager, he deplored racism, and stood by his commitment to be good to everyone he met. He believed every person should have the same rights to a safe, healthy and fulfilling existence, regardless of class, race, religion or gender. He predicted that in the future, every person on Earth would be granted these rights. The right to education was especially important to him. Since his earliest days as a bookseller, Cole’s slogan was Read For As Long As You Like – No One Asked To Buy. His personal philosophy was that ‘the real salvation of the world must come about by every person being taught to read and induced to think’ (his emphasis). He was so committed to this position that he sometimes argued with his trusted manager William Pyke over the Arcade’s advertising catalogues: he didn’t like the word ‘buy’ to appear anywhere on them, for fear of appearing too pushy.
The Grandest Bookshop in the World Page 23