by Penni Russon
“So when were you in Berlin?”
“What?”
“You said you hung out with some hackers in Berlin. Is that where you live? I mean, before you came to Tasmania?”
Max shrugged. “I’ve been traveling since I finished Year Twelve.”
“No university? But you’re so…”
“Smart? Thanks.” Max winked. “No university; I’m a student of chaos. I’m conducting my own research.”
“What kind of research?”
“I’m developing a model of the universe—based on the principles of chaos, of course.”
“Really? A model of the universe? Ambitious.”
“Well, it’s not so much ‘uni-,’ as in a single universe. It is and it isn’t.”
“A multiverse?”
“Kind of. Not quite. More…many in one. It’s kind of layered. Dense.”
“Layered? Do you mean alternative universes?”
“Exactly. But not…What picture do you get when you think of alternative universes?”
Trout thought. “I guess…a house with lots of rooms. Or, infinite earths, side by side, maybe overlapping. Flowering outward.”
“Sort of…orderly, right? Neat?”
Trout shrugged. “I suppose so.”
Max leaned forward in her seat. “In my universe, the seams are more like the continental plates: shifting, colliding, stretching thin like mozzarella cheese on a pizza, like the earth’s crust.”
“Colliding?”
“Yes, violently. And they’re not exactly alternative, because they’re pressed in against each other, they kind of coexist, crushed together….”
“So the universe is folded in on itself? Like the strata of the earth’s surface? Like a…” Trout struggled for an analogy. “Like instead of rooms in a house, maybe it’s the different floors of a several-story building, and they’re all caved in and squashed up. So you go through a door in the second story and suddenly you’re in the third story, and something that happens on the fifth story, if it’s big enough…”
“Can affect the first story. Yeah, sort of.”
“And that’s where chaos fits in?”
“Chaos is the energy that binds it all together, like…”
Trout knew what she was going to say. “Like the ocean. How it separates the continents…”
“But joins them, too. Yes!”
They grinned at each other, Trout meeting the intensity of Max’s gaze briefly, until his eyes slid away, back to the road.
“So are you saying…?” Trout turned it over in his mind. “Are you saying that chaos is physical? Is it an energy of some kind? Is it matter?”
Max slumped backward. “I think the magic is the key.”
“Do you think Undine’s magic is a physical manifestation of chaos?”
“I don’t know. But I don’t think a…a sneeze in the fifth story is going to rock the first story, if you know what I mean. I think it’s just…immense power that would have that kind of impact.”
“So why does Undine, how does Undine…?”
“Why is she magic and not me? Or you?” Max shrugged. “I don’t know. But somehow she’s a conduit or…a physical expression of the magic. By studying her, and the events she’s triggered, I hope to find out a lot more.”
Trout shifted uncomfortably. To Max, Undine was a specimen, a phenomenon, something to be studied and analyzed. There were times when Trout had felt the same way, though his feelings for Undine were a constant reminder that Undine was a human girl, not a science experiment.
“So is it,” Trout faltered, trying to find a way to express himself. “Is it an atheistic universe?”
“Are you asking me if there is a God?”
She conveyed to Trout that the question was somehow a foolish one, that it betrayed underneath his bad-ass, mother-repelling exterior his true naïveté. But he struggled to explain. “I need to know…if the magic…if it’s meant to be here. Why Undine has it.”
Max snorted. “You want to know if it was a gift from God?”
“I…” Trout wasn’t sure what to say. He had never felt any need to believe in God before. Or to disbelieve. As a scientist, he had stayed away from the whole question of God. He didn’t like the idea of attempting to prove or disprove something so unobservable, unknowable.
Something caught his attention: a patch of unremarkable highway, with a grassy verge beside it and the swinging branches of an overhanging peppermint gum. He recognized it, though it was like recognizing something from a dream. It was the patch of road to which the magic had delivered him from the bay, like a clumsily wrapped and badly addressed express-post parcel, after he had almost drowned last year.
Max screamed.
Trout’s eyes snapped back to the road ahead, which was no longer ahead of them. The car was veering dangerously to the right. He wrenched the steering wheel too far to the left and the tires skidded across the road. For a moment time and space went wonky. A tree was hurtling toward them at 140 kilometers an hour, though the car itself moved in slow motion. Trout watched the scene unfold with interest, until he remembered he was not a passenger—he was in control. He wrenched the steering wheel again, and the tree was no longer in front of them. The car spun, the night whirled past. The car was filled with noise: of screeching wheels and the strangled, struggling whine of the engine and Max’s screaming, though Trout didn’t notice any of it until the car stopped and the engine stalled and everything, everyone, was suddenly silent.
Miraculously, they stopped on the correct side of the road, facing the direction in which they had been driving.
Max said nothing; she stared straight ahead, her face set hard and fierce as if she was daring the road to hit her in the mouth. Her chest was heaving up and down with fear, or exhilaration, or maybe both at once. He saw in her suddenly the solitary girl he had witnessed in secret all those weeks ago, and remembered that inside the fiercely independent girl who took so many risks with her own life was another Max, one who was fragile, vulnerable, scared of a group of silly girls.
It took his breath—it was like it was the first time he really recognized her. Suddenly it seemed less astonishing, less of a coincidence that they should be together and more to do with design, a pattern that had been laid out for them. And right now it didn’t feel like a cosmic joke. It felt…comforting.
Their eyes met, and Max stared at him for a moment like an animal caught in the headlights, dazed, dazzled, by their shared encounter with death. Trout knew he mirrored her expression. Then suddenly they were laughing: hysterical, relieved, adrenaline-filled laughter. The coarse sound tore at the rarefied air around them. It was a kind of wild, senseless laughing, and Trout loved it. It felt like living.
And then they were silent again, apart from the occasional gasp of leftover laughter. They smiled softly at each other, as the cool night air blew in through Max’s open window and across her skin to rest lightly on Trout’s, carrying with it her sweet and sour citrusy faint fragrance. Max’s face was lit by moonlight and Trout was struck once again by how beautiful her features were—somehow the moonlight on her pale skin made her seem at once more fragile and more resilient.
With surprisingly steady hands, Trout turned the key and fired the engine. His foot was firm but gentle on the accelerator as he drove the short distance to the turnoff to the bay.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
“Wanna come for a walk?” Sofia leaned in the open doorway of Undine’s hotel room. “Mum’s driving me mental.”
“Are you kidding? Your mum’s great!” Undine’s fingers were sticky from a huge slab of Lena’s homemade baklava. “Swap you.”
“As long as I get a cute baby brother with the bargain.”
“Sold.”
They headed toward the village, both of them scuffing their shoes along the loose, gravelly road. Their conversation was as winding and aimless as their walking. Sofia told Undine about her travel plans; Undine told Sofia—halfheartedly—about Dominic,
who she realized was still officially her boyfriend, though Undine had not thought about him at all until Sofia asked.
“He sounds cute.”
Undine shrugged. “He is…I guess.”
“Like that, is it? So why are you going out with him?”
“I don’t know.” And Undine realized she really didn’t know. Yes, he was there and convenient, and it seemed like she should have a boyfriend…but he was a person, too. He deserved a girlfriend who cared about—who even noticed—his finer qualities. “I think we’re going to break up. When I get home.”
Sofia nodded. They drifted for a few more minutes in silence.
“You’re in your last year of school, right?” Sofia asked eventually.
“Yep.”
“So what are your plans for next year?”
Undine always dreaded this question. Trout had any number of useful and fulfilling career paths ahead of him and rattled them off at alarming speed. Fran always laughed, declaring herself to be finished with school, though she didn’t lack ambition. Undine guessed Fran would end up working for her father in his real estate business—or rather, that Fran’s father would end up working for Fran. Even Dominic had known he wanted to be an architect since he was eleven years old. But for Undine the question immediately reminded her that her only vision of the future was of a ragged gaping black hole.
What could she be? What would the magic let her be? A florist, a baker, a teacher, a brain surgeon? These were all someone else’s futures, not Undine’s.
“I don’t know,” Undine mumbled, embarrassed. “I haven’t really thought about it.” She felt like a child and that Sofia, who had finished an economics degree, was the grown-up.
Sofia sensed Undine’s discomfort. “Plenty of time to decide,” she said.
“Yeah,” said Undine, but for the second time that day she had the peculiar sensation that time was rushing past, whistling by her ears, leaving her behind. The magic was outside time. It was ageless, or perhaps just very, very ancient: a human life was a mere blink to the magic, even Undine’s life.
Sofia was still looking at her. “You’re not upset about what that man said today, are you?”
“How did you know about that?”
“I overheard my mum telling yours.”
“Oh.”
“They reckon it’s to do with magic,” Sofia said casually, but she watched Undine for her response.
Undine was astounded. “You know about the magic?”
“Oh, yeah. It’s a bit of a family myth. I don’t believe in it, though,” she added quickly, her jaw hard with stubbornness. Suddenly, in a swift reversal, Sofia was the mulish child and Undine was old—older than anyone had ever been.
Undine laughed.
“What’s so funny?” Sofia asked.
“Oh. Nothing. Tell me the myth, then.”
“Something to do with some woman, deep in the family’s past. It’s actually like the real fairy tale, you know: a fisherman falls in love with a mermaid, so he hides her fish suit or sealskin or whatever so she’ll stay. And she loves him back and has babies with him, but she’s always staring longingly out to sea. Then one day their oldest child asks why their father keeps an old sealskin coat hidden in the house’s rafters, and the woman finds it and leaves her kids and husband and goes back to the sea. Do you know it?”
“Versions of it. Not about our family, though. Just in books.”
“The family story isn’t quite the same. Just that a woman washed up on shore—probably jumped off a slaver’s ship or something—and married a local and had babies, and then one day she swam out to sea and never returned. She probably just drowned. You know how stories get all twisted up by time.”
“And she was magic?”
“That was how the story went, that this woman brought some kind of magic with her. And then her children, and her children’s children and so on, all had a bit of this magic. Mum used to tell me when I was a kid, but when I realized she really believed in it, I was embarrassed and made her stop telling me. You know, like I ate Vegemite sandwiches and wagged Saturday morning Greek school to play netball, and made everyone call me Sophie. I didn’t want my wog mum telling me her wog stories. I don’t feel like that anymore, of course,” she added, “but magic? Come on. You don’t really believe in that stuff, do you?”
For the briefest of moments, Undine itched to show Sofia what she could do, to prove to her that she was more than an aimless, ambitionless child. The magic wanted to show off. Conjure up a storm or a girl, change a tree into a frog, or make snow fall from the clear blue sky.
But she did none of those things. She held the magic in, kept it safe and secret under her skin.
Grunt had not seemed surprised to see Trout pull up outside Prospero’s house close to midnight, though that was possibly because surprise was too exuberant an emotion for Grunt. Not that Grunt lacked emotion; he was just…uncomplicated. He took things as they came, and Trout respected him for it.
Together Grunt and Trout made up two beds while Max hung back—shyly, Trout supposed.
“Different rooms?” Grunt asked, his arms full of blankets.
“What? Oh.” Trout blushed. “Yes, please.”
Richard would have winked or made a bawdy joke; Dan’s voice would have been disapproving, even faintly loathing. But Grunt managed to ask it in the same voice he used minutes later to ask Trout how many sugars he took in his coffee, and Trout was grateful for it.
He found Max on the veranda. “Coffee?” he asked her. “Grunt’s making some.”
“Don’t you ever sleep?” she asked. “I’m exhausted.”
Trout blinked in surprise. “Um. Didn’t we sleep this morning?”
“Some people,” Max said, as if she was revealing a great secret, “sleep every night. Eight hours. More, even. You should try it.”
Trout looked at Max, again remembering the nights he had seen her, weeks before, when she hadn’t been sleeping. He remembered especially the night she had sat up in her flat, unable to sleep, glancing at the door where the brick had been thrown. Of course he didn’t mention it, but he couldn’t keep the tone of sympathy out of his voice as he joked, “Eight hours? Really? And you recommend it?”
Max glanced at him curiously, but went along with his banter. “Good for the soul.”
“The soul? I thought you didn’t believe in God?”
Max’s voice took on an American evangelist twang. “I believe in sleep.”
“Sleep’s for wusses.”
“That’s another finger.”
“What?”
“Another reason my mum wouldn’t like you. Early to bed, early to rise.” Max yawned as if to make her point. “Take me to bed or lose me forever.”
Trout blanched.
“Joke,” Max said. “Except I do really need to go to bed.”
Trout showed her to the room farthest from the front door, where a fold-out bed sat in the middle of a sea of boxes and other junk.
“Sorry about the mess,” Trout said, though he could hardly be blamed for it.
“Polite, though. That’s one finger in your favor.”
“Just one? Tell her I came third in the national math competition last year. Mothers like that sort of thing, don’t they?”
“Third? I’m impressed.”
Max seemed to hover beside Trout as if she expected something. He looked at the rounded, luscious shape of her mouth.
“Good night,” she murmured.
“Good night,” Trout said, and shut the door on those lips. They reminded him why he was here. If he could reclaim his life, perhaps he could legitimately claim those lips, too.
Third in the national math competition, and yet still the most profoundly stupid boy Max had ever met. So why did it bother her so much that he didn’t want to kiss her?
Suddenly Max missed Europe. She missed its cities—cities of chaos: Madrid, Berlin, Amsterdam, London, Athens. They stayed up all night dancing; they wielded weather with celest
ial humor, weather that spun you around; they were cobbled and cluttered and crowded. She knew where she was in a city. She could look in a map, read a guidebook, and learn which streets to avoid after dark, where the crazies and the druggies and the desperates hung out. But here, on this island, the hazards were hidden; there was no map. She didn’t know which streets, which mountains, which other beautiful, gilded landscapes to avoid. All of them were treacherous. Yes, she knew where she was in a city. There was no Mount Wellington hovering at the periphery, watching your every move with the mild reproval of a remote parent; no mountain which could just as easily gobble you, digest you, and leave only the bones of you. There was no…this place, mysterious, secretive, entirely unavailable to her. There was no…
There was no Trout.
And now she didn’t know which places to avoid within her, because she could be traveling along quite nicely, and all of a sudden she would turn a corner or cross a road and there she would be, moving with a dangerous velocity toward him. Not Trout, her father. His image was everywhere; his face was scorched into the mountain’s rugged side. He was everywhere, but he was nowhere—every street corner she turned she wanted to find him, she expected it, that he would be magicked out of the island’s very air. But she found nothing. Nothing but those beautiful gilded boys, all shining and earnest and resonating with love. Like that other one, Charlie, the one she had almost managed to forget. But the love wasn’t for her, was it? Not his, nor Trout’s. Always instead for some island girl, shimmering with gold on the outside but silver as ice within.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
That evening, when Jasper and Lou were taking a swim in the last of the day’s light, Undine said to her father, “He was right, wasn’t he?”
Prospero drifted and drowsed.
“What?” he asked, thick with sleep. “Who?”
“Last year, when I was in the sea, I became more the magic and less the girl, less human. I don’t belong here. I don’t mean Corfu, I mean…” and Undine gestured expansively around her. “I’m from—parts of me—are from somewhere else. Somewhere…remote.”