Quarter Square

by David Bridger

  “He’s the most wonderful person I’ve ever known.” Min’s voice fell away, and she studied the ground.

  I glanced at her face and thought I saw a faint blush. “You love him, don’t you?”

  “I love him. We’re beautiful together. Too beautiful to describe.” She halted and touched my arm. “This is private, Joe. Okay? This stays between us.”

  “I’ll never tell a soul.”

  She stared into my eyes. “I trust you.”

  A shiver ran right through me at the intensity we shared.

  We resumed our slow pace up the cobbled lane, our forearm hairs brushing together innocently, deliciously, and the theatre came into sight around the bend. The sudden blast of a motorbike engine bounced off the walls of the surrounding buildings and was gone instantly, as its rider sped past the bottom of the lane. I tensed my shoulders instinctively and winced at the loud noise.

  “Will told me about that fight outside the theatre the other night,” she said.

  Of course he did. I rolled my eyes at the mention of his name and caught her smile before she hid it. The subject needed changing.

  “What is the Wild? Yesterday it seemed solid and real, but today it’s like remembering a dream. Is it really as dangerous as it felt in there?”

  “The best person to ask is Andrew.” She grinned fondly. “He’s a bit of a scholar.”

  “I will.”

  For the rest of the day, while I strengthened the leg truss joints for my bench with countersunk screws and taught Min how to fashion walnut plugs for a decorative finish on each one, I wondered about this Cayal character who filled her dreams when he wasn’t around in the flesh and where Will fitted between her and this towering love of her life.

  I pushed these questions aside. They were unanswerable and only confirmed my status as an outsider in the most important sense of the word. I focused instead on my thoughts about the dangers of the Wild. I decided to ask Andrew about the Wild that evening, if possible.

  The garden was quiet at first. Min had another gig in the jazz club, and the other performers were taking advantage of the fine weather to extend their working day. Later in the evening people dribbled back into the square, and things livened up.

  I sat across the fire from Andrew and waited while he conducted one of those concentration sessions with Fliss and Linda, repairing some fading bits of the square. They finished their session with closed eyes and slow breathing, holding hands in silence.

  I couldn’t figure out how it worked. I was staring at Andrew when he opened his crinkly eyes and returned my gaze with amusement.

  “What?”

  “Sorry. I was just trying to work out how you do that.”

  “It’s magic.” He chuckled. “And you want to learn.” It wasn’t a question.

  “Yes. Will you teach me?”

  “Maybe. You might be able to learn my kind of magic. Or you might have a better chance learning some other kind. Not everyone can, you know. Doesn’t matter how they try. Some people just never get it.”

  “I understand. Can we try?”

  “Yes, but not tonight.” He glanced at the women sitting alongside him with their eyes closed. “I’m tired now. We’ll do it tomorrow.”

  “Thanks. My job will be a lot easier if I can pick it up.”

  “I don’t think so. Not how you mean anyhow. If you’re talking about using magic to renovate the theatre, forget it. You’re doing a good job with your hands and your tools, and once the work is finished, it’ll stay finished. Making a magic structure is one thing, but maintaining it is a whole nother thing.” He breathed deeply and held it in for moment before exhaling through his nose. His shoulders sagged with the release. “It takes a lot of energy to keep things upright.”

  Fliss and Linda shared tired you’re not wrong glances with Andrew as they stood and left us to our conversation.

  “How many kinds of magic are there?”

  “That’s like asking how many magic users there are. The answer is: many.”

  “What different kinds do people here use?”

  “You know, people don’t tend to ask questions like that in polite conversation around here. I’m not offended, but some might be. Okay?”

  “Thanks for telling me.”

  “You’ll figure things out as time goes on. Be aware, though, that a lot of folks will let you see some of their magic while keeping some hidden. This is not a community of open books.”

  “Got it.”

  “Some kinds are more obvious than others, though. You already know about Min’s magic, I think.” He smiled innocently across the fire.

  My face flooded with warmth. “Yes.”

  “Surface magic is easy to see when you know it’s there,” he continued as if he hadn’t noticed my embarrassment. “Glamour, for example—all the kids use that on the street.”

  “Glamour?” Min had used the word once, but I didn’t know what it meant in this context.

  “Illusions. Making something look like something else.” He cocked his head toward Will, in the centre of a rowdy group of newcomers as they settled at the other end of the fire and flipped the tops off bottles of German beer. “Will’s entire act is glamour. He and Danny use it to mask the real magic.”

  Will stilled and stared at us, apparently having heard his name through all the noise. Despite his wide grin, the coldness never left his eyes.

  Andrew seemed unaware of the renewed tension. “Flo and Tara’s healing talent is magic, of course. That’s as obvious as any you’ll find.”

  Ask him now. “What’s so dangerous about the Wild?”

  Someone picked up a fiddle, and people got up to dance, but Will remained where he was, sitting cross-legged and leaning forward slightly, his dark eyes shining like coals. He called out to answer my question in that bantering, challenging voice that drove me mad.

  “Nasty things in there, Joe. Things that’ll get you. Things that’ll eat you.”

  I regarded him calmly, trying as always to hide my irritation, and returned my attention wordlessly to Andrew, who spoke as if Will hadn’t interrupted.

  “The Wild is dangerous because it’s lawless. It’s a different world.”

  “Give me a clue.”

  “Here’s the thing. There’s magic everywhere in the world. Always has been. But in most of the world it’s unknown. People stopped using it, believing in it, even, thousands of years ago…and hundreds of years ago…and tens of years ago. It seems that each culture and each generation rejects magic a bit more than the one before. Some cultures more than others, but the general trend is to ignore magic and eventually…to forget it.”

  Linda brought him a bottle of beer, which he accepted with an elegant kiss of her hand.

  “But in every culture, in every generation there are people who don’t ignore it. Some of them stick around in the normal world, and are often persecuted because of it. Many don’t stick around, though. They go into the Wild.”

  He took a long, slow drink.

  “Also there are times when a culture, one that has accepted certain kinds of magic to a certain degree, is conquered by another culture that doesn’t accept the native magic. So alongside the migrations and wars of the history books there have also been migrations of magic. There are feuds and wars in the Wild too. Some have been going on for centuries. You’ll find people from any era you wish to name. Ancient Britons? They’re there. Don’t go looking for them, though, will you? Some of the earliest ones will eat you.” He chuckled and winked.

  “Do only humans live in the Wild?”

  “No, and I think you guessed that already. There are other creatures. Lots of them.”

  “What kinds?” I was on a roll. I didn’t know if I’d find him in such an informative mood again, and I wasn’t going to waste this opportunity. “The magical versions of normal animals like we see on the outside? Or are there fantastic creatures?”

  “There is every kind of fantastic creature.”

  “Ha.�
� Will burst into mocking laughter, and even Andrew looked towards him. But Will’s scorn was for me alone.

  “That’s right, Joe Baby. There are monsters in there. Monsters and werewolves and vampires, and they’re all gonna come and get you.”

  “There are,” Andrew insisted.

  “Yeah, right.” Will turned his sarcasm on Andrew. “So how come none of us has ever seen anything like that, old man?”

  Andrew turned back to me. “Some dickheads think their reality is the only reality. Even so, such things do exist.”

  I was about to reply when a new commotion heralded Min, home from her gig. Her eyes shone hello from forty feet away. But before I could return her smile, someone got in the way.

  Will had jumped to his feet and grabbed Min. He swept her towards the dance and spun her around in that expert way of his. Min squealed with pleasure as they joined the dance.

  I watched them out of the corner of my eye, hoping my jealousy wasn’t burning a visible hole in my face. I tried to come up with something intelligent to say to Andrew, but the music changed, and I caught Will’s eye.

  His face was towards me, his chin resting on the top of Min’s head as they circled slowly to a romantic melody. For a moment, a split second, his face changed.

  A wolf grinned at me.

  Time shuddered to a halt. A heavy pulse pounded my eardrums, once, twice, and the moment threatened to last forever.

  Then Will’s sneer was back on his normal face, and the dancing couple disappeared into the crowd as my blood ran cold.

  Chapter Five

  I can neither move nor scream. Only a few feet away, hundreds of people stand chatting outside the opera house. A cry for help would bring at least some of them into the side passage, but I am frozen with terror and cannot even squeak. After an eternity compressed into an instant, the monster crosses the distance between us in two huge steps. Too late, I find my voice. It has my throat in its jaws, and the last sound I hear is my own destruction.

  I woke early. My determined banish-the-nightmare routine over, I considered Will.

  Yes, he’d pissed me off. And yes, his wolf-face stunt had scared the shit out of me. Did he know about my fear? How could he? Andrew had said something about “glamour hiding the real magic.” Might mind reading be Will’s real talent?

  I didn’t think so. He’d simply responded to the way the conversation had turned. He didn’t know I was terrified of wolves.

  Moving on deliberately from the scary stuff and leaving Will’s annoyance factor out of the equation, I realised he was like lots of other insiders with his blind spot about the Wild.

  Clearly insiders considered themselves to be freer than outsiders and more in the know. They felt superior, actually, and the youngsters definitely thought they were more street. I grinned. Well, they were more street.

  But if Will was a good example, they also tended to think the Wild didn’t matter much to them and their way of life. Despite all the differences between them and outsiders, their connections to the normal world appeared far stronger than their connections to the Wild.

  Insiders weren’t so different from normal people in their worldview. They might mock outsiders for being blinkered in their failure to see havens, but at the same time many insiders failed to see the significance of the Wild that I’d understood instinctively when Andrew spoke of it.

  Not Min, though. She didn’t say much, but I got the strong impression she knew all about the Wild. Sometimes when I looked deep into her eyes, I thought she had access to all the knowledge in the universe, and quite often felt as if she knew everything there was to know about me.

  I luxuriated in thoughts of her, pushing the dutiful nagging about getting up and getting on with the job to the back of my mind. And all my thoughts led me back to the fact that I was falling in love with her.

  Whoa.

  But there it was. This wasn’t a rebound thing. I’d hardly thought of Carole since we started work on the theatre, and when I was with Min, it was almost as if my wife had never existed.

  The only time in my life I’d felt this way was when I woke from one of those soul-mate dreams. In those brief moments before the magnificent knowledge slipped out of reach, the memory was of a powerful love like the one that was growing in me now.

  A hot shower didn’t distract me from my fantasies or stop the delicious stomach lurches. Nor did it wash away my sense of impending doom when I considered Min’s relationship with Will.

  I toasted a slice of bread and ate it while I dressed, then wandered onstage to find Andrew sitting on a sawhorse, waiting for me.

  He nodded towards my gleaming new bench. “Impressive.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Ready to learn some magic?”

  “I’m ready.”

  “We have the place to ourselves today. It’s sunny out there and the tourists are swarming, so all the insiders are out earning money. First thing we’ll do is find out if you can pick up my kind of magic. I call it threading, which is the nearest English equivalent I can find for the Diné word bitah. Fliss and Linda call it seeing, but it’s the same magic.”

  “Dye nay?”

  “The language of the Navajo in Arizona. They helped me find this magic.”

  “Are you Navajo?”

  “I’m Californian.” He stood behind me and placed his fingertips on my temples, directing my line of sight towards a pile of rusty old scaffolding poles on the far side of the stage. “Tell me what you see.”

  “Scaffolding.”

  “Concentrate. Look at the rust.”

  I did as I was told.

  “Tell me what you see.”

  “Rusty scaffolding.”

  “Okay. I’ll show you what I see.”

  He removed his hands from my head but stayed close behind me.

  I studied the scaffolding. Maybe I was going to see some sort of trick.

  The shadows around the edge of the stage began to lift. It wasn’t like a light shone into the gloomy corner of the stage. It was more as if the air itself started to glow.

  The scaffolding had my full attention. The poles were outlined with faint light, each pole delineated as if someone had traced it with a fine-tipped pen. So were the stage floor and the wall behind the scaffolding. Everything was connected by fine golden lines.

  “What do you see?”

  “It’s like everything is coming alive.” I found myself whispering and cleared my throat.

  “Everything already is alive. Always has been, only now you can see it.”

  I peered towards the back of the theatre below the circle, and the darkness was broken by countless golden threads joining everything. I assumed Andrew had followed my gaze and was lighting the place up for me.

  “Watch the scaffolding again. Focus on the rust.”

  I did so and saw tiny movements within the corrosion.

  “Closer.”

  I squinted with the effort, but nothing changed.

  “Okay. You can’t zoom in. Go over there and see it.”

  The threads parted like water when I walked through them. No, not like water, like air. I reached the scaffolding and studied one pole. The movement I’d noticed was easier to see from here. It looked like millions of tiny golden dancers, grabbing partners and holding on. The air above them shimmered as if their iron dance floor radiated heat.

  “What is it?”

  “Molecular activity. Oxidation.”

  “So you’re not making it happen?”

  He laughed. “You think I’d waste my time making things rust? The only thing I’m doing is colouring in what’s already there, so you can see it.”

  I nodded at the golden lines in the air between us. “What’s all this, then?”

  “I told you. Molecular activity. It’s what the universe is made of.”

  He waved me back towards him, and all the illumination disappeared. When I reached him, he put his hands on my shoulders and turned me towards the scaffolding again.

&
nbsp; “Now that you know it’s there, can you see it on your own?”

  I stared at that bloody scaffolding for about ten minutes, but not a single golden line appeared. Andrew sat on the sawhorse and watched patiently. Eventually I gave up and turned to him with a shrug.

  “Doesn’t look like I’ve got it.”

  “You haven’t given it much of a chance. I was fourteen days in the desert before I saw it.” He chuckled at the face I pulled. “Patience isn’t your strong hand, eh?”

  “Well, you know.”

  “Tell you what. I’m going down to Cap’n Jaspers and eat. You sit here and concentrate. Or not. Up to you.”

  “Tell me about the desert.”

  “What about it?”

  “What happened to you there? How did you find the magic?”

  “It was a long time ago. I was about your age. How old are you?”

  “Thirty-three.”

  “Younger, then, but not by much.” He stared out into the auditorium as if he was looking at the past. “The initiation is eighteen days alone in the desert. Nothing happened for the first five days and nights. Not a thing. I was in a world of emptiness, wondering if anything would happen at all, but the old Navajo woman who’d prepared me warned me it would probably be that way.”

  He raised his hand to the turquoise stone threaded into his hair, and rolled it between his forefinger and thumb. “She gave me this sacred stone to hold on to while I waited. On the fifth night something flew high over the desert in a big arc from east to west. It glowed like a spaceship reentering the atmosphere, but it wasn’t. Wasn’t a meteor neither.” He paused.

  “What was it?”

  “An angel.” He closed one eye and peered at me with the other.

  “An angel.”

  “Yes.”

  “How do you know it was an angel?”

  “Because I met him nine days later when he walked out of the Wild. He was hurt, torn up real bad. Stayed with me for a night. I fed him, patched him up the best I could, and the next day he went back into the Wild.”