The Golding

by Sonya Deanna Terry

  ‘I won’t tell you that, because it’s not the case. Sorry to disappoint.’

  ‘Bernie Weissler! Well, well! When was the last time the two of us caught up?’

  Angry the conversation was going nowhere fast, Dette employed a decisive tone. ‘Probably at Nan and Pop’s diamond anniversary three or four months ago.’

  ‘Didn’t go to that. Jackson was sick with an ear infection.’

  ‘Should’ve got a babysitter. You missed a great get-together.’

  ‘Jackson was sick. And strangely, Bernadette, even if he hadn’t been, my pay cheque doesn’t stretch that far! Babysitters to me might as well be pixies living on Mars.’

  ‘Not anymore.’ Dette scooped up a handful of foam and blew on the compacted bubbles. They puffed outwards and drifted back into the water in irregular gleaming fragments. ‘I’ve got a feeling you’ll soon find they do exist. Five hundred might get you a few evenings out minus the kids don’t you think?’

  A sigh and sniff on the other line hinted at late nights, early mornings, a severe case of survival stress and a run-down constitution. ‘Bernie, Bernie, Bernie,’ she scolded. ‘What are you up to now?’

  <><> XIX <><>

  In the depths of the royal residence was a silence so eerie that Pieter almost felt fearful. At eventide the forest became lively. Inside the Grudellan Palace, a heavy gloom tainted nightfall. Where the golden girl’s chamber lay was a chill that evoked Arctic fog.

  It was little wonder these people vacated their solid selves, in this uninspiring patch of time, to visit a realm more radiant. And yet, did they in go anywhere other than the Nightmare Realms in their slumber? Pieter was vexed by this question as he watched, from behind the scowling sun basket, the sleeping body-king daughter.

  Also unsettling him was the notion of having trespassed, of having followed a maiden into her home and of now observing her living quarters without permission during her private hours of sleep. When he’d stood outside the chamber door earlier he’d heard rabbitish snuffles and wondered whether this might be the sound of Fripso snoring. He’d discontinued weighing up whether tiptoeing into the maiden’s chamber was wrong once his beauty-creation powers allowed him to walk, invisibly, through a wall. If his intentions for doing so had been anything but noble, his kindness-fuelled magic would have refused to manifest. He would be careful not to disturb the slumberer. He would promptly retreat once he found the source of his search.

  While doing his best to adjust to the suffocating darkness, the elf thought about his clan and found himself missing the other Brumlynds. True, Maleika had said to feel blue, grey or black must be resisted at every opportunity, and although pain was rarely welcome in a sprite’s emotional sphere, Pieter could not deny he felt it in a fluttering, greater than insignificant amount.

  It was then that he heard the screams, crystal-sharp shrieks that made the room he was cringing in even colder. ‘Nay! Nay,’ the voice cried. ‘Dream Sphere ancestors, I pray that you help me!’

  Unable to resist rushing to the window and yet dreading what might be perceived, Pieter found himself at the arched stone vista—as if ushered there by invisible wings—staring out to an empty square courtyard where the shadows stretched menacingly across tiles of bronze and copper. Who had been calling out? Who was in peril? He looked up, not knowing what he was expecting to see. All that greeted him was a charcoal wash of sky and one lone meteorite, for its brothers were misted over by a cloud that hung above the Grudellan Palace.

  The sky in this part of Elysium, masked and muted by the palace’s artificial luminaries, was alien to the forest’s sky. There, after waking from the Dream Sphere, Pieter had only to look upwards to feel refreshed by the heavenward magic. Above the deliciously ethereal treetops was the dance of the cosmos where asteroids and planets made their brilliant entrances in an effervescent blaze. Pearly, incandescent, and blossoming into mirthful sparks, the skies of Elysium Glades never ceased to delight those below, those who were not too taken up with their own goings-on to witness them. In a timeframe further along, Pieter supposed, this spectacle might be compared with those bursts of fire future peoples used for celebratory purposes.

  Now, as Pieter scanned the lonely stretch of copper-bronze yard and thicket of poisonous thorns beyond, he became privy to a faint scuffle and glanced at the fountain where the gold-skins got their nourishment. Bubbling over with ferocity, hissing steam, glowing golden, a sorry reminder of dragon’s blood, of harmless animals’ lives habitually stolen.

  Beyond this, a pair of shadows smothered sparkles on the tiles. Pieter peered further out of the paneless window, then ducked himself back in again—mindful of being noticed—and took in two figures crossing the square, both cloaked in dark fabrics that melted into their even darker reflections. Gold-skins on their way to their sleeping quarters. Nothing unusual about that. No sign of anyone crying out to angel ancestors for help. A picture of simplicity, albeit bleak.

  One of the hooded heads turned, noticing a poktador slither towards a tunnelled-out burrow in the fountain. Pieter shuddered. Poktadors were nasty creatures indeed, a cross between a snake and a spider. They slithered and scampered, and sniped at anything living that got in their way. Two heads, four eyes, two deadly sets of fangs and the ability to spy, stalk and devour at a speed that was horrifyingly quick. The poktador that Pieter and one of the gold-skins now watched was monstrous in size. This one was larger than the whole of Pieter and dwarfed the two ‘midnight marauders’, who were giants of sorts themselves. It lashed its razor-edged tongue against the fountain’s cascade as though striving to slice from the liquid each suspended bauble of gold.

  Unlike his preceding moments spent in the palace, at this point Pieter felt gratitude for the shelter of that icy chamber. To share the courtyard with the gold-skins and poktador would be far from desirable. Able now to tear his eyes from the fountain-guzzling display, he espied the cloaked one watch the poktador, wondering in vague amusement whether he himself was also being spied on from some undetected corner. He noticed a flicker of movement. The hood of the cloak fell away, revealing a shock of curling hair, grotesque skin tone and glacier eyes. A ringed finger pointed. Sandalled feet with bejewelled toes, which the cloak only partially covered, changed direction and stepped lightly towards the fountain. The gold-skin bared jagged teeth that dazzled in the fountain’s glow.

  But then—and Pieter’s astonishment was absolute—the gold-skin’s face reduced in size. Smaller, smaller, shrunken, withered, purple, creased. The nose branched rapidly outwards like a tree growing in a faster timeframe. The eyes sank back in the head to become little more than black dots. With twisting talons the altered being grasped at the snake-spider. A beak came down upon the hapless creature. A scream of hideous proportions pierced the stillness.

  The bulk of the poktador had been swallowed, but the poktador’s tail was thrashing from the edges of its predator’s beak. The bird-monster threw its head back, gulped, and then voiced its satisfaction in a squeal that vibrated harshly in Pieter’s ears. Flinging its hood back over its head, it glared up at the princess’s tower window. Pieter slipped out of sight.

  From his new vantage point, Pieter could see that this body king, the poktador’s killer, had returned to his former identity. He was gazing up at the tower window with a sickening gleam in his pale, glassy eyes. He turned to his counterpart, at which point both bowed to each other and moved onwards, footsteps seemingly joined, necks folded at the same angle, marching with united finesse away from the elf boy’s line of vision.

  Pieter sat down, cross-legged, on a frozen floor. He concen­trated on conjuring a small healing to rebalance his emotions after the unexpected violence. As he did so, he felt the prickle of a warning that he was being watched. Someone was observing him…staring tensely.

  He jumped to his feet. The previously sleeping body-king daughter had risen. She stood not on the floor by the bed, but upon the bed itself.

  In her hand was a glinting slab of metal.
An axe! The body-king daughter was holding an axe made of gold.

  She proceeded to stomp towards him, the golden axe held high.

  <><> XX <><>

  His Clan Watcher had told him many a time that when elves encountered the threat of mortality, they froze for a second or two to calculate whether survival remained an option. This is exactly what Pieter did when he saw the glinting axe.

  Is this, Pieter wondered, the way I am to finish my assignment on Earth?

  And still, within this moment of crystallised mobility, he pondered the irony of expiring this way—under a slab of gold. He'd hoped his lifetime would see the cessation of body kings reigning over the sprites, that he'd succeed in persuading these war adorers to quit Elysium and take their tawdry residence with them. Alas, the elf's dreams were doomed, fit to crumble under a single strike of extravagant body-king weaponry.

  ‘Ah, our Pieter,’ he envisioned one of the Brumlynds saying in a tone that would primarily creak of affection. ‘He dissolved in the influence of body kings. Was taken to the palace against his will, or so the rumour goes, and it is confirmed by our Dream Master that he passed on to the Dream Sphere’s pearl-encrusted gates and will not be available to tell of his earthly demise until he has left the recuperation state.’

  Would their magical abilities be enough to see how he’d been dissolved in the earthly realm, or would they only be permitted to rely on hearsay? An unsavoury thought: that up until the complete healing of his more ethereal and passed-over Dream-Sphere self, an embarrassing misapprehension might prevail.

  What a useless way to pass to the next world, he told himself, still within this fragmented moment in time where an axe was meaning to conquer him cruelly. No pride, no heroes’ celebration, no certainty. Was this how he wanted to leave his sprite allies? Did he honestly wish to spend the entire duration of his Wake explaining to everyone what had truly occurred—the way Crookwell was obliged to do after he overdosed on Wondalobs water?

  Nay, not my fate he decided, and he slipped beneath the cane basket.

  There came a crash and a clack-clacking of wood.

  Pieter looked up to see the basket—the funny, idolised basket. It had split into two remarkably even halves.

  The body-king daughter, quite forgetting her previous moment of rage, had shed all signs of brutality. She threw down her axe. Whimpering now, she clutched at scattered basket pieces and held them to her heart. She was on her knees, rocking and clutching and squealing out pleas for forgiveness. Pieter now no­ticed her headdress, which would have been donned prior to her predatory shuffle: dull metal, a knight’s helmet almost. Protrud­ing from either side were horns. Mournful for the creature body kings would have slain for these, Pieter took a step back. Remem­bering Orahney’s coded warning to not be upset by anyone bearing bovine horns, he pushed the tragic thought away.

  A snuffling noise caught his attention. Knowing he was no longer in the hysterical maiden’s sights as a suitable chopping target, he darted across to the mysterious sun-faced basket with its odd capacity to make a gold-skin talk kindly to it—not to mention grieve over its demise—and found beneath it and before him, two sparkling, heavy-lidded eyes. Pieter recognised these eyes at once. ‘Ye Gods. Fripso! It is you.’ He shook his head in disbelief and sighed. ‘Thank the heavens no harm was done.’

  ‘Am I safe now, Pieter?’ said the long-eared captive.

  ‘You are safe, my friend. Thank the heavens and rejoice. You are safe, and, to my knowledge so far, so am I.’

  The darkness faded. Had it really been an entire evening since he'd infiltrated the palace?

  Within the orange veil of dawn, the Solen’s daughter was altered into a menacing array of golds, her skin grotesquely luminous. Strands of garish hair fell forward over eyes that resembled a frozen lake as she stared at the elf, agog. She removed Pieter’s friend from the damage and said, ‘You know my rabbit!’

  <><> <><><> <><>

  ‘By the way, Matt, Melissa’s posting the wedding invitations on the weekend,’ said Davo, fingers drumming the table. ‘I said I could hand you one on Monday, but she wants to mail them. She’s got a wax seal for envelopes that she’s determined to show off.’ He shook his head, amused. ‘Women and their weddings! Always want to do things the “proper” way! She needs your postal address.’

  Matthew didn’t want to answer that. He took another sip of black espresso. It was late afternoon. He and Paul ‘Davo’ Davison were taking a rare break to discuss the café meeting they’d just had with a representative from Gallilani’s. He could see the guy returning to his office on the other side of Martin Place, shackled to his briefcase, marching the worker-ant march along with every other eight-to-sixer. Matthew leaned back in his seat. For the first time since he could remember, he was not in a rush to get back to the twenty-third floor.

  Davo was watching him seriously, mobile poised for the address. He’d never noticed it before, the amount of tension in his workmate’s face. Of the two of them, he’d always considered Davo to be the more relaxed. Somehow things had changed since meeting Conan Dalesford. The trip to Alice Springs must have refreshed his outlook, but then ever since Dalesford had handed him that crystal, his perceptions seemed to have heightened.

  Conan and Jannali had made him feel understood, and Conan Dalesford had described with Sherlockian accuracy events in Matthew’s past. At one stage Dalesford had referred to Jannali’s umbrella as a ‘brolly’, adding, ‘For your sake, Matthew, seeing you spent a certain amount of your formative years in England during primary school, and probably most of high school too.’

  ‘How’d you know I went to school in England?’

  ‘From the way you round your vowels. You wouldn’t have been born there, that’s a different accent again, but you’ve sure as hell got most of their mannerisms.’

  Dalesford’s guess was right. In 1978 Matthew’s parents bought a place in Wimbledon. He’d attended British schools from ages six to seventeen.

  ‘Your address, Matt.’

  Should he let Davo in on his uncomfortable secret? He’d have to tell him. He’d tell him now. ‘I don’t know whether that’s such a good idea,’ Matthew said, ‘inviting the two of us.’

  ‘Why? You’ve got plans?’

  Exactly what he didn’t have. There were no plans in place for Matthew and Bernadette.

  The traffic up on Castlereagh Street had fallen into its own kind of rhythm, a metropolitan throb that he’d never previously noticed. Everything seemed to have its own song. Even the sounds that used to grate on Matthew, had, in the past week, become more bearable...interesting even.

  ‘Davo, this is in confidence, right? Dette and I aren’t doing a lot together these days.’

  Davo did well in hiding his surprise, although Matthew could hear the whoosh of his breath as he exhaled. ‘Bad as that, huh?’

  ‘Yup.’ Matthew handed over the address. ‘Hasn’t been good for a long time. But we’ll make sure one of us attends your big day.’

  Davo waited for further facts. Whose fault had it been? Was one cheating on the other? ‘So you’re splitting up.’

  ‘Just working through it.’ Discussing the futility of the marriage wouldn’t be fair to Bernadette.

  Since his weekend away, the absence of a pre-nuptial contract had dramatically lost its importance. Financial damage loomed ahead of course. He’d accepted that. He’d also come to terms with the realisation that if he didn’t act fast in the divorce department, he could well be left with a lot less. Dette’s out-of-control spending might turn debt into a reality.

  Her shopping addiction had compounded with each year. And despite his ongoing reassurance that she was still young and would always be beautiful, she continued to visit surgeons who agreed to remove the invisible wrinkles the reputable ones denied were there. He wasn’t going to tell Davo that. Nor was he going to tell him that his other-half’s temper tantrums—typically winding up with screamed name-calling—humiliated him no end.

 
; ‘I need a holiday! I have to do something about my stress lev­els,’ she’d screech, but how would a second trip to Vanuatu in four months make her yell at him any less? If Bernadette had been happy in the relationship, her stress levels might never have got so chaotic. He was doing her no favours by staying.

  Matthew and his colleague finished their coffees in relative silence. Nearly six pm. Home-time for many. They’d remain at the office for another two hours, at least, while they finalised the logistics for the Gallilani deal.

  After-workers troop­ing towards the street were outlined in the gilded rays of a lowering sun, faces stiffening with impatience once the red pedestrian light blinked on.

  ‘Incongruous,’ Matthew said, mostly to himself.

  Davo took another gulp of coffee and flicked through the Gallilani file his assistant had prepared. ‘When relationships fall apart?’ he said. ‘Yeah, I guess it is.’

  ‘I was talking about us worker-ants.’

  ‘Us?’

  Matthew nodded towards the stampede outside the floor-to-ceiling windows. ‘We’re all trapped in the rat race and don’t know how to get out of it.’

  ‘That’s not incongruous. That’s just life.’

  Matthew gazed at the luminance enveloping each pedestrian paused at the lights. For a second he wished he were an artist able to capture the grandeur of that image, of the sun turning each of them golden. No longer were they worried, rushing little life-forms. To someone apart from them, who they would never know—someone observing them quietly from a café—they’d become magnificent. Solemn angels sporting afternoon halos.

  Incongruous, he thought. We’re all so unaware of our own empowerment.

  When he’d held that crystal at the bar on Friday night, something quite inexplicable had happened. It was as though he'd turned into Dr Suess's newly reformed Grinch, complete with ballooning heart and benign Grinchy grin. Driving home after his meal with the author, he’d sensed a lightness in his chest, and he couldn’t help smiling at things that would have previ­ously gone unnoticed. The crazy woman in the middle of the road, silhouette barely visible in the dark­ness, hadn’t annoyed him at all. When he’d searched for the next right-turn, he’d been startled to find the woman waving him to a stop before frog-hopping in front of his car and diving at the asphalt. She’d called out cryptically, ‘Wasn’t a rabbit,’ then wandered off with her head held high. Instead of zooming on­wards in anger, Matthew had sat back and laughed.