The word daft.
Imagine if Belle knew that. Sometimes a fingertip of fear would press a spot just behind Jack’s ear, at the idea that he might accidentally tell her. He could be drunk or high. Or the sun could be shining on the Cam, and they could be sitting side by side on its banks, watching ducks and punters and tourists, and he could just come out and say it: “Whenever I see you, I think daft.”
You couldn’t forgive that, could you.
Especially as they were best friends.
Right now, though, what was bothering Jack was his hair. He kept touching it, hoping to find it soft after all, or at least to find a region of softness. It used to be as silky as a BBC announcer or a violin concerto, didn’t it, his hair, was the thing. Back when he was a kid? But it must have turned coarse when he was thinking something else, the roughness slipping in strand by strand, and today was the first time he had noticed this.
He took his hands down from his head and examined them instead. The new wart was still there. He’d been hoping it might have cured itself, but no, there it was, on the side of the middle finger. He was prone to warts.
Now, how could you have a nice simple fantasy about reaching for a girl’s hand if you always had to be adjusting the fantasy to make sure you were reaching with your non-warty hand?
Also: How could you imagine a girl running her fingers through your hair if you kept hitting the point where the girl pulled away and said, “Whoa, coarse hair, eh?”
These were very basic fantasies — holding a girl’s hand, letting her gently touch your hair — and not so much to ask.
Belle murmured, “There she is,” and Jack looked, and there she was, turning the corner from Sidney Street onto St. John’s.
Madeleine Tully, fourteen years old and a Pisces — her birthday had been just the other day.
She was wearing her red wellingtons and black leggings, her green skirt and her powder blue coat, that wide black-and-white chequered headband she liked — it was pulling her (soft, soft) dark hair away from her forehead — and she was carrying a tangerine umbrella.
She was walking through crowds of scowling people dressed in grey.
Here come the colours of Madeleine, thought Jack, and the colours went right through his bloodstream now, sailing on tiny boats — spinnakers fixed with little toothpicks.
My hair is like wolf’s fur, he thought suddenly. It appears to be soft — wolf’s fur — but it’s probably quite rough to the touch.
That made him feel better. Thinking of himself as a wolf.
Jack, Belle, and Madeleine were home schooled together, although not always at home.
On Mondays, it was Federico Cagnetti. He was Jack’s grandfather, and he taught them History.
On Tuesdays, it was Darshana Charan. She was a former microbiologist, currently a bedder (which is what they call a cleaner at Cambridge), and she taught them Science and Mathematics in exchange for free babysitting of her two little girls.
On Wednesdays, it was Olivia Pettifields — Belle’s mother — and her role was French and Citizenship.
On Thursdays, it was the computer guy who lived downstairs from Madeleine. He did ICT (Information and Communication Technology) and Geography, and he didn’t get anything in return. It was just, he’d been at the party when they agreed to do home schooling, and was halfway through his fourth pint.
And on Fridays, it was Holly Tully — Madeleine’s mother — and she did English Language, English Literature, and Art. (She also did general knowledge in the sense that she got them to help her practise questions for her quiz show.)
Today was Monday, so it was Federico’s day.
Federico Cagnetti was tufty.
There were tufty white eyebrows, tufts of hair on both sides of his otherwise bald head, and more tufts growing out of his ears and on his knuckles. He was tall but he was angled at about seventy-five degrees — his body stood up at a slope. Most of the time he scowled, even when his words were mild or friendly.
“The daffodils are tasting of the sun,” he might say in his Italian accent, “and I will tell you only this, that they are supreme above all others in their beauty!” and as he spoke, ferocious lines would deepen on his forehead. He only smiled when he was angry, nervous, or sad.
He was a porter at Trinity College — one of Cambridge’s more famous colleges — and on Mondays, they met him in the small office directly above the porter’s lodge. Nobody was sure if he had permission to use this office, and actually he smiled slightly whenever footsteps passed the door — or even at the faintest rustling from the hallway — so maybe he did not.
Now, however, they were sitting in the office, and Federico was blowing his nose into a large white handkerchief.
He folded the handkerchief and pressed it into his trouser pocket, frowning deeply as he did so, as if the handkerchief had failed him in some way. Then he bent forward so that his chin was pressed against his chest. He always started off this way: without looking at them.
“So many people,” he said to his chest. “So many extraordinary people have come to this university! They might not be here now, but does that matter? Does it matter? Because are they not still here in their own way?” His voice, which had begun as a mumble, rose into a roar and he lifted his chin with his words and looked around at them furiously: “And what are we doing? Are we sitting here? Are we sitting here?!”
“Yes,” agreed Belle complacently.
Jack and Madeleine nodded too, and then Federico’s ferocity relaxed into a pleased sort of frown, and he reached back and poured himself a coffee.
There was comfortable quiet for a while. The rain fell outside and students’ voices rose up from the Great Court. “It’s not today, is it?” a girl’s voice was saying, and two boys were laughing and not answering her. “It’s not today?” she said again.
“Here we sit in Trinity College, which is an honour and a privilege, and why is that?” Federico’s chin was back on his chest. “Why is it an honour to be here?”
“Because you’re letting us,” said Belle. “And teaching us and that.”
“Why else?” said Federico irritably.
“It’s so old and that, and so historic, and they’ve got, like, so much money.”
“How old?”
“King Henry VIII started it, didn’t he?” said Belle. “And that was around about 1546, and what he did was, he got together two other colleges that were even older, from the time of the medievals, wasn’t it?”
“Everything very good,” Federico told her, “except for the bits where you say ‘didn’t he?’ and ‘around about,’ and all your other uncertainties. Who taught you this? I did. These uncertainties, they are an affront to my knowledge!”
“All right, then,” agreed Belle.
Jack was watching Belle’s face as she chatted with his grandfather, and he was thinking that she was actually quite bright. She just had a slow way about her at times.
When Belle gave aura readings she was whip-crack fast. But if you asked her a general question, even a basic one like, “All right?” she thought about the answer for too long. Sometimes it was because she was trying to make up her mind — she could be indecisive, being a Libra — but often she just forgot the question altogether.
More than that, though, were Belle’s features. Her eyes were big and wide, and she forgot about blinking for long periods of time. Other people blinked at regular intervals, but not Belle. Now and then her eyes would go into a flying panic where she’d blink and blink to catch up.
She had one of those sweet faces, the kind that people call soft, or baby-faced, with the top lip raised slightly, as if she was meant to have buck teeth but didn’t get them.
Finally, she actually believed in auras.
Whereas she mocked Jack for his interest in horoscopes.
With all that, it wasn’t surprising that Jack had got into the habit of seeing his friend Belle and thinking: daft.
“Here, then,” Federico was saying, and
Jack looked away from Belle and saw that his grandfather was gesturing towards a black bowler hat. It was sitting face-up on the table, next to his coffee pot. “Here then, inside my hat, I have hidden the names of famous people who were once here at Cambridge! You will pick a name from the hat, and then what will you do? You will read about them! And then, do you know what you have to do?”
“What?” asked Belle.
“Become them. You will become them! Because that is why you are honoured! You can walk the streets they walked, see the sky they saw, climb the trees they climbed, read the books they read, eat the food they ate, and so it carries on.”
“Not the same sky,” Jack said thoughtfully. “It’s always shifting. Stars die and you’ve got yourselves black dwarves or neutron stars or black holes instead.”
“A lot of trees are dead too,” said Madeleine. “From bleeding canker disease.”
“I wouldn’t mind getting that,” said Belle. “It’d sound good, wouldn’t it? Oh, sorry, I can’t do my homework, I’ve got the bleeding canker disease. Oh, no, sorry, I can’t spare any change, I’ve got a wicked case of bleeding canker disease.” She touched her cheeks. “But not on my face.”
“Why do you need a disease to explain that you don’t have any change?” wondered Jack. “If someone asks for money, just say you haven’t got any.”
“I hope we’re not eating the same food the famous people did,” Belle said. “It’d be mouldy.”
“Or digested,” said Madeleine. “Cause they ate it.”
Federico ignored them.
“Now, can anyone name a famous person who was at Trinity?”
“That girl from the Matrix movies,” said Jack. “Hang about, no, she was Trinity. That was her name.”
“You are all so funny!” Federico grinned furiously, and then he grumbled, “Ah, the names are in my hat,” and held the hat out towards Belle.
Papers crackled beneath Belle’s fingers. At first she was concentrating, but then her head tilted slightly and she was lost, her hand gently moving around while she thought about something else.
They waited.
She remembered at last, pulled out a paper, and read it.
“Charles Babbage,” she said.
Federico gave one of his grimaces of pleasure. “Ah, now, Charles Babbage! Do you know who that is, Belle?”
“He’s the dad from Mary Poppins,” Belle said at once.
The others looked at her doubtfully.
Federico frowned. “This does sound like the name of a character from a children’s book, Belle, you are right. But it is not. Well, it is a never-mind. You will look it up! And you will tell us next week! And then you will become him! All right?”
“All right.” Belle folded the paper and refolded it again, until it was smaller than her smallest fingernail.
“You’ll lose that,” said Jack, but she ignored him.
Jack was next to pick from the hat, and he got Lord Byron.
“That’s the poet,” he said.
“Mad, bad, and dangerous to know,” Federico said. “The ladies, they liked this man.”
“That’s all right, then,” said Jack.
“You’ve got to walk around being him?” Belle said. “Ah, well, lucky you’re such a good actor.” She laughed so hard at her own joke they had to hit her on the back.
The hat was passed to Madeleine.
She reached in, then opened her palm, and there were two folded papers on it.
“Don’t unfold those papers!” said Federico at once, panic etching his cheeks. “Choose. Choose first! And you must only unfold the one you choose!”
Madeleine stared at her hand.
One folded paper was close to her wrist, the other was near her fingers.
A shaft of sunlight swung through the window and landed on her palm, splitting the papers.
They all looked at the window.
The rain had stopped. There was blue between the clouds. Outside, everything was very quiet, as if people felt unsure of the sunshine — even a single word might risk the return of the rain — then suddenly, somewhere, somebody coughed.
“Which one will you choose?” whispered Belle.
Madeleine chose the one closest to her wrist.
“It’s Isaac Newton,” she said, and then uncertainly: “Didn’t he discover gravity?”
2.
Imagine that, Jack was thinking.
Sunlight glinted on wet cobblestones, and Madeleine was moving away from Jack and Belle. Her mother was approaching.
Madeleine’s mother, Holly Tully, had come to Cambridge eight months ago now, along with her daughter and her sewing machine. At first, Madeleine had enrolled at Netherhall’s, the school on Queen Edith’s Way, which is how Jack and Belle had met her. Within weeks, however, Holly had held a party at which she somehow persuaded Jack’s grandfather and Belle’s parents, along with Holly’s own new friends, Darshana and the computer-guy-downstairs, to start their home-schooling arrangement.
Both Holly Tully and her daughter were oddly compelling when they spoke. Their voices seemed pitched in a way you had to bend your head to catch; in a way that hit Jack in his stomach, then rose pleasantly to the centre of the back of his neck.
Madeleine used her voice to talk about unexpected things like vanilla beans, taxes on cigarettes, the wingspan of a butterfly, and product placement on TV shows. Holly used it to go on about education, freedom, the quiz show she planned to win, and chocolate.
Here was Holly now, walking through the shadows and the sunlight. The heels of her boots were tap-echoing. She was wearing black jeans, her hair in a high ponytail that fell past her neck — a long neck, but more swan than giraffe, Jack thought. A pile of clothes, wrapped in plastic, was up over Holly’s shoulder, her thumb looped through the coat hanger hooks.
Madeleine reached her mother and turned to wave goodbye to Jack and Belle.
Imagine that, Jack thought again, and this was the phrase that came into his head whenever he saw them together.
Madeleine and her mother — their bright eyes, their clothes from Oxfam, their attic flat —
And they used to be wealthy.
They used to live all over the world. In Paris, New York, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, and farther north in places he half thought were imaginary. There used to be yachts, hotels, champagne on terraces; they used to float on moonlight-laced rivers.
When Jack cast his gaze over Madeleine’s former life he caught glimpses of sails swelling in gusts of wind, reindeer stamping and breathing mist, diamonds woven through plaits and spilling like raindrops down a window.
Some of these images Jack had invented himself, but still.
There’d been a father too, who was something high up in a multinational corporation. The family had moved around the world with a set of wealthy friends. The friends were of different shapes and sizes, but all had bewildering names.
Jack had gathered these names together by the stems; he’d arranged them in a vase that he kept to the right of his mind. At night, before he fell asleep, he’d breathe in the fragrance of each, the details that Madeleine had shared.
But she didn’t know half their star signs.
She hardly even knew her own.
Early on, when they’d just started home schooling together, he’d written a note on the margin of her page: What’s your star sign?
She’d turned to him, “What does my star sigh?” and he’d seen how much she liked the idea that she owned a star, and that it sighed; he’d seen in her eyes that her mind was rushing through the possible words that it could sigh.
It’s true that his handwriting was bad: The n looked a lot like an h.
But when he’d crossed it out and written sign, underlining the n three times, a vagueness had wandered onto her face, and she’d thought for a moment, then said, “Pisces,” and smiled.
Madeleine’s family had been so wealthy, almost everything they’d done had been for fun or charity. One or the other.
H
olly Tully had competed on that London quiz show once as a joke — or a stunt, or for charity — Jack was not sure which, he thought maybe all three. But now the sewing machine that she’d won was all they had left.
“So what happened?” Jack asked.
“It went like this,” Madeleine replied at once, her face breaking into a grin, as if he’d asked her to share her favourite joke. “We were in Paris for a charity gala, so I decided to take the Eurostar to London. Just, you know, for fun. For the weekend. I used to run away sometimes, see? But before this, I always came back. Anyway, I got on the train and guess what?”
“What?”
“Mum was there! Turned out she’d been thinking of leaving Dad, and when she realised I’d run away again, she thought: Why not come along?”
“Why not?” Jack agreed faintly. “All right, so you came to London on the Eurostar together, but how did you end up here in Cambridge?”
“We decided to let a random stranger decide our fate. When we got off in London, we saw a woman with a green umbrella standing on the platform. We followed her and this is where she came.”
Jack, who was never speechless, stared.
“You know the funny thing?” said Madeleine. Her smile faded, and Jack leaned in, expecting a tremble, maybe tears — that she missed her father, or her wealthy life, that she wanted to go home.
“In the entire seventeen and a half times that I’d run away from home before, my mother had never come once?” Abruptly, the shine and joke were back in her eyes, and before he could ask another question she was asking him instead.
She wanted to know where his parents were. Why he lived with his grandfather. Why he wore those high-top shoes. Whether he’d ever shaved his eyebrows. What he thought of economic liberalism.
Jack found himself telling her about the accident that had killed his parents when he was two, about the malfunctioning fountain in his grandfather’s hometown in Italy, his own alligator phobia, the time he’d tried to climb across a drainpipe five storeys off the ground to impress a girl, the fact that he had no clue what economic liberalism was — and she listened fiercely, her hand over her mouth, her laughter spilling over and over.
The Colors of Madeleine 01: Corner of White Page 2