The Colors of Madeleine 01: Corner of White

by Jaclyn Moriarty

  Here Hector had paused for a long time.

  “Again, I want to talk straight with you, Elliot,” he’d said eventually. “Purples don’t carry people away and let them live.”

  “But until we find them, until we find their bodies,” Elliot had persisted, “we don’t know for sure.”

  Hector had tilted his head, not a nod, but not a shake either.

  “Elliot, I’m not giving up. Like you say, until we find the bodies, we don’t know for certain. In a lot of ways, that’s the toughest kind of loss you can have, the one where you don’t know for sure. You can be 99.9 percent sure, Elliot, that your father isn’t coming back — but yeah, until there’s proof, there’s always going to be that glimmer. That tiny, tiny glimmer of hope. I can see it in your eyes all mixed up with the pain. And I’m not going to lie and tell you I don’t feel it too.”

  Then Hector had leaned forward.

  “The tough thing,” he had said, “is how to live with that.”

  For that meeting, those words — for Hector’s straight-talking — Elliot had been grateful.

  It was different from the gratitude he’d felt back on the day he was seven years old and he’d stolen his mother’s new quad bike — which she was crazy about — taken it for a spin and ended up in the river. He’d got himself out, but the quad bike was lost under the water. He’d known the trouble he’d be in, but worse, he’d guessed, would be the disappointment on his mother’s face.

  He’d run all the way to his dad’s repair shop and confessed.

  Without a word, his dad had got up from behind the workbench.

  He’d led Elliot out to the truck, waited while he buckled up his belt beside him, then driven to the river, speaking only once to check with him: “You mean right here? This is where it went in?”

  And he’d pulled it out. He’d pulled out the quad bike, dried it down, hauled it into the truck, taken it back to his workshop, and fixed it up. It took him hours. Hours of work, while Elliot watched silently — and he fixed it, good as new.

  The gratitude he’d felt! The hug he’d given his dad! And his dad had leaned down into the hug and said, “Ah, we all make mistakes — that’s one you won’t make again.”

  That had been pure, incredulous gratitude, whereas what he’d felt toward Hector was complicated, of course, and sharp-edged. Nevertheless, it was powerful: Hector had believed in Elliot’s father. He’d cleared away those rumors just as surely as if he’d taken his arm and swept the mugs and pie plates from the table.

  Only, now there was this.

  A missing magnifying glass.

  The ruefulness in Hector’s voice at the station today.

  Jimmy’s silence.

  A favorite possession. A keepsake, a memento.

  There was an urgent voice in Elliot’s head saying: So maybe he HAS run away with Mischka, after all. Well, that’s GOOD news. It means he IS alive, that he’s okay, and one of these days he’ll be back and begging our forgiveness.

  But another thought hit back at once, like a child having a tantrum: It WAS a Purple, and it’s not touched a hair on his body, and he’s alive and okay, trussed up in a cavern somewhere now, and as soon as I can get out of here, I’m going out to bring him home!

  “Ah,” Elliot said aloud, and it came out a growl. He swept it all off the bed — the coroner’s report, missing persons reports, papers, books, and folders. They tumbled quietly to the floor.

  Then he reached for a notebook and, sitting on his bed, wrote a letter.

  Dear M.T.,

  You asked if we had farming here in Cello, and yeah, we do.

  And you wanted to know something about technology here? Well, that depends on the province. In Jagged Edge, they’re all wired up. They’ve got whole cities made out of holograms, and computer programs that practically raise children. Golden Coast is similar, though they use it all for fun.

  In Olde Quainte they don’t even have the telephone or electricity. And in the Magical North and Nature Strip they’ve got most things, only their magic messes it up all the time.

  Here in the Farms we’re sort of coming around to computers. Some people use them to send messages but mostly it’s still faxes or just regular mail. Our TVs are still boxes that you set on a cabinet in your living room, not images that fly through the air like in Golden Coast.

  Farming’s getting more mechanized too. Like, we’ve got automatic openers now in our greenhouse to lift the windows and let out the heat. And the furnace that blows the heat in when it’s cold, that’s state-of-the-art.

  As for what we grow, well, some people in Bonfire raise livestock, especially pigs, but most of us here are agriculture based. It’s mainly greenhouses because of the weather.

  That reminds me, I think you guys have rotating seasons in the World? Like seasons that come and go at the exact same time every year? Farming must be a dream. Seriously, you must grow stuff in your sleep.

  (Cello has a roaming climate: Seasons drift across the Kingdom, moving on whenever they get bored.)

  On my farm, we grow bananas, raspberries, quince, beans, and peas. We keep bees too, for pollinating.

  Other people around here grow pecans, macadamias, mandarins, defts, potatoes, wheat, and maize.

  When I say that we grow these things, well, the word “grow” is used loosely. Maybe PLANT is a better word — we PLANT them, but lately, mostly what comes out of the ground is weeds. Or crumbling, twisted pieces of nothing that die before they see the sun.

  Or nothing at all. Just soil that spills from the palm of your hand.

  Now, people will tell you the Butterfly Child is going to fix this. That everything’ll grow like wildfire any day. But I’ll tell you this, and keep it to yourself, we’ve had the Butterfly Child four weeks now, and all she does is sleep. Goes on adventures now and then, sure, goes off for a ride, which I imagine is plenty of fun for her, and then she comes back home and sleeps.

  She should have made a difference by now, I’m sure. She’s cute and all, but she’s either a dud, or she’s sick. All that sleeping, she might be sick, and you know what else, if she is sick, it’s probably my fault. ’Cause she was in that jar a long time. I watched her through my double vision, I saw her crumple up in there, I saw her little eyes start to close, and I still couldn’t make myself get up. It was like my snapped ankle was using up all the space. I tried, but I couldn’t. And when I did, when I finally crawled over there and got the lid off, really slow, like the useless piece of junk that I am, well, who knows how much time had passed and what effect it had had on her?

  Who knows? It took a good minute, maybe more, before she unrumpled, looked me in the eye, and bowed her tiny head.

  I’ll be honest, the only reason I’m writing to you now is that the hurting in my ankle is just how you described in your letter — like a jostling, like somebody’s in there wanting to mess with me. That’s the only thing I remember from your letter, apart from your question about farms and technology.

  But you’re right about the ankle, and painkillers don’t do a thing.

  One last thing, if you decide on writing back, you’ve got to at least pretend that I am real.

  ’Cause I’m not in the mood for being treated like I don’t exist.

  Yours sincerely,

  Elliot Baranski

  8.

  “She has the kissing disease! You had better not come in!”

  Olivia Pettifields, mother of Belle, and their teacher for both French and Citizenship, was standing with her back to her front door, breathless, giggling. She’d seen them through the window and rushed out, pressing the door closed behind her.

  “Vous feriez mieux de ne pas entrer!” she translated, remembering herself, and then repeated: “You had better not come in!”

  Madeleine and Jack stood in the front yard of Belle’s house — it was on Ross Street, way out near the station — holding their bikes by the handlebars.

  They looked sideways at each other. Jack rolled his bike back an
d forth slowly in the mud-grass.

  “She has glandular fever again?” he said, doing his own translating. “Is she okay?”

  Olivia Pettifields shook her head. Her lips were the same glossy red as the paint on the front door.

  “Belle is all right,” she said, with more giggles in her voice. “But she is sick as a dog!”

  It was tricky, figuring out how that made sense. And also what was funny about it.

  They looked up at the windows, which were curtain-drawn.

  “Should we come in and see her?”

  “You would catch it! Are you mad?!” Olivia’s laughter fountained, then she drew her mouth together, pulling the laugh back in. Still, she could not help a smile curling. “Here is your assignment for today! You must go away and speak French to each other! Or, no, no, I know it! I have it! Go into a café and order some things in French!!!”

  Jack and Madeleine gazed at her steadily.

  “But this is England.”

  “What should you order? Hmm. Yes, you must order a pain au chocolat! Ah! Cheating! I just told you the French. You kids,” she scolded. “Always tricking me! I know — order the snails with garlic and the chicken with red wine and the crème brûl — ah, they will almost certainly have none of these things. In a café here at nine o’clock in the morning. Pfft. This place. And you will not be hungry enough yet anyway. I have a better idea! You must go to Luton, to the airport at Luton, and you must take a flight to Paris! There, you will speak French to your heart’s content! An excellent educational opportunity!”

  She flung her hands outwards. “Go! Shoo with you! Fly away!”

  “Tell Belle we hope she feels better,” said Madeleine, turning her bike, while Olivia laughed and called: “Do not forget to be citizens! In Paris! You will be citizens, won’t you?!”

  That was one thing that Olivia Pettifields had never stopped finding hilarious: the idea that they had to learn Citizenship. In fact, that’s why she’d offered to teach it.

  Jack and Madeleine wheeled their bikes slowly along the path, talking about Belle and her glandular fever, and Belle and her barking-mad mother.

  She had first got glandular fever when she was twelve, and it had come back twice since then. As far as they knew, she had always had the barking-mad mother. She had a father too, who seemed slightly more sane. Mostly he was bemused by his wife, but sometimes he found her almost as amusing as she found herself, and then he fell about laughing with her.

  Belle tended not to get the joke.

  “What’ll we do? You want to get something to eat?” said Madeleine.

  “You’re hungry at strange times,” Jack observed. “It’s like you’re constantly jet-lagged. Did you know that Lord Byron had a thing where he couldn’t eat if there was a woman in the room?”

  “Cause he had bad table manners or issues with women?”

  “Well, he’s dead now, isn’t he, so I can’t ask him. But I think it was a sort of an eating disorder. He used to do things like starve himself for days then go and eat plates of potatoes. I’m so much like him.”

  They had stopped at a corner and were waiting to cross the road.

  This was a strange time for Madeleine and Jack. Just the Thursday before, they had kissed on the sloping roof of Madeleine’s flat.

  It had seemed like the start of something but, ever since, they’d pretended nothing had happened.

  It was Belle’s fault. She was always around, and she was so real and sharp, and they had their pattern of being together. It felt impossible to shift.

  “Are you trying to say you’ve got an eating disorder?” Madeleine said. “Or that you like potatoes?” Her voice had an odd, angry challenge to it. She couldn’t figure out where it had come from, that voice. The road was clear, but they stood still anyway, looking at each other.

  Then she realised. She was trying to be Belle. There was a gap where Belle should be and she had sidestepped into it.

  “I’d never starve myself for days,” said Jack. “I’d get hungry. No, but, it’s seriously true that Byron and I are the same person. He used to talk a lot, yeah? Like, all night long. It was his favourite thing to do, which, you’ve got to admit, is an uncanny similarity with me.”

  The road was still clear, so they wheeled their bikes across.

  “I know what we could do,” said Madeleine. “We could go look at the statue of Byron. I think they’ve got one in the Wren Library.”

  “Byron’s in the Wren?!” exclaimed Jack.

  “Well, you’re the one who’s him, so you tell me.”

  So they rode to Trinity and found the statue, and Jack actually trembled, he was that excited.

  “That’s him,” he breathed. “Yes, that’s me. You see that soft drapey cloak thing he’s wearing?”

  Madeline nodded.

  “Well, I’d wear that too, if I had one.”

  He then pointed out that Byron was looking very thoughtful, which was something that he himself did on occasion: think; and that Byron was holding a book and marking its place with his finger, which also was something that Jack had been known to do, let’s say he was reading and got interrupted; and most of all, that Byron had curly hair!!

  Which Jack also had. Or at least, he would have if he let it grow. Although the curls on the Byron statue, well, they were sort of unlikely. They looked like seashells or seahorses, which you wouldn’t want crawling around on your head, would you —

  “They’re like giant slugs,” said Madeleine.

  She was still being Belle. Acidic and wry. She tilted her head and slapped at her ear, like somebody trying to get water out after swimming. Trying to get Belle out.

  “They’re pastries.” Jack was still gazing at Byron’s hair. “Little croissants on his head.”

  Then Madeleine’s voice changed. “He’s got a beautiful nose,” she said, and she turned to study Jack’s face. “And so do you.”

  Her hand floated towards Jack’s nose and she startled suddenly. “I thought you were a statue!”

  That was Madeleine back; they both knew it. The strange Madeleine who forgot herself sometimes, and who liked stars, beautiful noses, and odd dislocations of reality.

  Jack caught at the moment fast. He took her hand from the air, ran his thumb over its palm, and let it go. They both smiled.

  So that was the real beginning of the Jack-and-Madeleine romance. It was also the beginning of a blue-sky June.

  For the next few weeks, while Belle was sick at home, they saw movies at the Grafton Centre, went to antique book shops and the Corn Exchange. They went to Pizza Express and practised doing double takes, because Jack said he’d read somewhere that the hardest thing for an actor to do is the double take. Not that they wanted to be actors, just for the challenge.

  They sat by the river, sharing Jack’s iPod and arguing in a pleasant, non-combative way about music.

  They went to their home-school classes (although not to French and Citizenship), and the teachers either ignored the shift or didn’t notice it (except for Madeleine’s mother, who was disapproving, teary, and delighted — she took turns of each).

  In Madeleine’s mind, it was exactly right. A holiday romance. A summer fling. Everything clamoured happily. June grew warm and festive. The Cambridge students had finished their exams and were having garden parties, planning May Balls (which, confusingly, took place in June), drinking champagne, and Pimm’s & Lemonade. Girls wore summer dresses and strappy sandals, boys had swinging ties and pink spots high in their cheeks. The mood was just the thing.

  Everything was solved, and Madeleine felt like a ballet dancer. The letter to her father would find its way to him any moment, she was sure. She wondered if he would reply, or sweep into Cambridge unexpectedly. That was more his style: He’d open the letter, and even as he scanned it he’d begin to roll his eyes and click his fingers for a jet.

  She kept catching glimpses of him emerging from a splash of sun, or punting up the river towards her. What would happen was, he’d fix
his gaze on her and raise the pole into the air in mock exasperation. Then he’d leap from the punt to the shore and take her in his arms, his navy linen jacket buckling against her, his beard scratchy as he kissed her cheek. (In her imagination, he’d grown the beard again — for comfort, probably, in the absence of her and her mother.)

  Speaking of her mother, it was now clear to Madeleine that Holly did not need a doctor! She was just misplaced. Like a swan that has flown from its glassy pond and is trying to set up house in a car junk-yard. The swan would also grow vague and absent-minded. Its feathers would rust as it tried to sleep on the ripped leather of car seats, and it would have occasional headaches too.

  Nobody would be at all surprised if the swan had difficulty answering the questions on a quiz show.

  (Also, most likely, Holly had never been as good at quizzes as they’d thought: That sewing-machine win had been a fluke.)

  Madeleine dropped her plan to trick her mother into going to the doctor. All Holly needed was a rescue and a salt scrub for her feathers. And if she was unwell, then Madeleine’s father would find the best physician in the world. (Not a doctor, a physician.) (She wasn’t really sure of the difference, but still.)

  And meanwhile, as she waited, there was the romance with Jack. Madeleine was so giddy, she sometimes found herself confusing Jack with Lord Byron, falling for Jack’s claims that he and Byron were one and the same. She would be swinging Jack’s hand — he often had a Band-Aid or two on his hand, and the edges of these, their soft coldness, seemed somehow more intimate than the hand itself — she would be walking along with him, swinging his hand, and she would actually believe she was with Byron.

  When they kissed in Jack’s room, or when they kissed outside on her sloping roof, or when his hand stroked her bare arm, she would close her eyes and think of poetry.

  She knew more about Byron than Jack did. She knew that when he was eight years old, Byron had loved a girl so much he would sit for hours gazing at her. He felt sorry for the girl’s sister, for not being as pretty as she was.