A Corner of White

by Jaclyn Moriarty

  The door opened wide, and there she stood, Olivia Hattoway, smoothing down her curls. Her flannelette pajamas were patterned with hot-air balloons.

  ‘I’ve woken you,’ said Elliot.

  ‘How did you guess?’ Miss Hattoway smiled, which made her eyes disappear more deeply into sleepy lines. She was curvy in just the right way: as if a sculptor had smoothed her at the very point before curvy becomes plump. ‘Come in, Elliot,’ she said. ‘I know we’ve never met but I certainly know who you are.’

  ‘You teach my cousin, Corrie-Lynn.’ Elliot followed her in, half-smiling as he remembered Corrie-Lynn’s pronouncement that Miss Hattoway had a funny name. He tried to think of her as Olivia, but found he could not. She was Miss Hattoway.

  There was something else, something Corrie-Lynn had not liked about her teacher, but he couldn’t remember that part.

  ‘It’s small,’ Miss Hattoway was saying, holding both arms up, and pivoting slowly to display the apartment’s living room. ‘But the location’s wonderful. Right above the bakery. You can smell bread and pastries twenty-four hours a day! You smell that?’ She breathed in deeply, closing her eyes, and Elliot raised his eyebrows.

  Truth was, all he could smell was coffee and burnt cheese and something vaguely fishy, maybe sardines.

  ‘Let me get you a glass of milk and a piece of hazelnut slice—I’ve been baking today myself.’ She ducked into the kitchen and Elliot watched as she opened the fridge. He wondered, as any good Farms boy would, why people from other provinces thought they ought to bake. It made his heart sink, the idea of her hazelnut slice.

  He glanced around the living room. There was a window that looked over the square, a small table beneath it. Rugs in primary colours crisscrossed the carpet; three or four mismatched throws were flung over a short, fat couch.

  On the wall was a huge painting of a vase, flowers spilling over its side. There was something smudged and childish about that painting, something askew about the perspective maybe, or could be the flowers were out of proportion with the vase.

  ‘Mischka painted that,’ said Miss Hattoway. She was standing by his side holding a tray, which she placed on the coffee table. ‘We did an art class together, back when we were at teachers’ college. Mischka got this idea that we ought to stretch our artistic minds, or some such rubbish. Everything we painted was terrible! But we both agreed that that one deserved to be on the wall.’

  She beckoned Elliot to sit beside her on the couch.

  ‘Although now that I look at it again, well, it’s quite awful really, isn’t it? I bet that’s what you were thinking.’

  Elliot smiled faintly. He was thinking that Miss Hattoway seemed soft and warm, bright and giddy, like a grade-school teacher should, but there was also something perspicacious about her. She had slid the conversation straight to Mischka. She knew, even half asleep, that this was why Elliot was here and she’d smoothed the way to the point.

  He appreciated that.

  (Then, too, she had guessed his thoughts about the painting.)

  ‘That’s where you two met?’ he said. ‘At teachers’ college?’

  ‘Yes, we were roommates. And when we applied for our first posts, we decided to try for the same town, which was a long shot. But we got it! Listen, is it just me or is it freezing in here?’

  She stood up and switched on an electric heater, hitting it twice to make it work.

  Elliot took a bite of the hazelnut slice. It wasn’t so bad. A little dry maybe, but the hazelnut flavour was rich and subtle both at once.

  ‘I have to tell you,’ she continued. ‘This is a super town, of course, but it was so good having a friend from home. Did you know Mischka at all? Did she teach you? No? Well, the thing about her was, she seemed very shy and reserved, but she could be so ironic and witty. We used to play board games most nights—she always won, of course. Or we’d watch The Greenbergs together and eat marzipan . . .’ Her voice faded and she gazed around the room.

  Elliot also looked and caught more details. There was a bookshelf, a framed print of the Lake of Spells on the top shelf. Through the door, he could see the fridge in the kitchen, scattered with magnets, and he could just make out a handwritten note, headed: Healthy Foods You Must TRY to Eat! with a smiley face. On the window ledge was a jar of gold stars, and on the table, a scattering of papers, scissors and glue.

  ‘I try out all my craft activities at home,’ Miss Hattoway explained. ‘Mischka was so much better than me at crafts. Better fine-motor skills.’

  A sudden memory came to Elliot. At school, he’d known Mischka Tegan’s name, and he must have seen her around, but all this time, he hadn’t had any clear memories of her. Now he recalled an announcement she’d made at assembly once. Something about a class excursion. She’d read from a small piece of paper. Most teachers didn’t do that; mostly, they just leaned into the microphone and talked, remembering what they had to say and not caring if they got it mixed up.

  The paper had slipped from Mischka Tegan’s fingers while she talked and had fluttered very slowly through the air, and she’d watched it flutter for too long. Elliot remembered thinking that the fact that she’d dropped it must have stunned her. Then she’d snatched it from the air.

  That’s where the memory ended. Elliot must have stopped listening.

  ‘I guess you miss her,’ he said now.

  ‘Anyway,’ Miss Hattoway continued, ruffling her voice back into place. ‘Anyway, we had some lovely nights. Although, of course, that more or less stopped when she took up with the Baranski brothers.’ She glanced over at Elliot. ‘I mean with your dad and your Uncle Jon, of course.’

  ‘How did they get to be friends anyhow?’ Elliot asked, just as if they were chatting about neighbourhood acquaintances.

  ‘Oh, Mischka borrowed some equipment from your father, for an experiment at school. I’m not sure of the details. Anyway, they hit it off, and they started going to the Toadstool Pub every other night. I suppose Jon just joined the party. I used to watch them from here while I graded schoolwork.’

  She pointed to the window, and Elliot stood, moving closer so he could look out.

  Down below, the square was mostly dark and quiet, but the Toadstool was still open. There were clusters of people huddled around tables, coats on, collars up. By looking out, Elliot seemed to be fishing up sounds from below. Now he could hear small murmurs of laughter, a woman’s aggravated voice, the deep voice of a man curling into a joke, another murmur of laughter.

  He looked away from the Toadstool, and there across the square was Clover Mackie, rugged up in blankets on her front porch, a blue mug beside her as usual.

  Elliot smiled at that and turned back to Olivia, feeling stronger.

  ‘It was always the three of them?’ he asked. ‘Dad and Jon and Mischka?’

  ‘No, on occasion it was just your dad and Mischka. I suppose Jon had work to do back at the Watermelon. When the Toadstool closed, they’d come up here sometimes. I’d usually be in bed by then, and they’d listen to music and talk and talk. I’d have to put my earplugs in to get to sleep.’

  Elliot turned away again, staring at the window. The room seemed to swim with unasked questions.

  ‘You’ve been drinking tonight, haven’t you, Elliot?’

  Elliot turned, startled. There was that perspicacity again. But she was smiling in her warm, grade-school-teacher way.

  ‘You look like your dad,’ she added gently.

  He stared at her.

  ‘Most people,’ he said, ‘say I look more like my mother.’

  ‘No, no. You’ve got his eyes. And the lines across your forehead when you’re thinking hard, when there’s something you want to say, those are your dad’s.’

  He asked then, and the effort was like wrenching the plug out from a huge basin of water.

  ‘Were they planning to run away together?’

  Olivia Hattoway did not say anything. She looked at him and her eyes clouded with tears.

  For a
moment he felt himself swaying with heartache, then there was a hint of irritation in his chest. What was that supposed to mean? Silence and teary eyes? What did she mean by that?

  He asked a different question instead.

  ‘There was nothing missing from her things? That’s what you said in your witness statement.’

  ‘That’s right,’ agreed Miss Hattoway, and she sipped from her glass of milk. ‘That’s what I said. But do you want to know something ridiculous? I forgot all about her teddy bear.’

  ‘Her teddy bear?’

  ‘Yes, she had this teddy—from childhood, you know—used to keep it on her bed at college, and the same thing here. I would never have teased her because there’s the issue of my own fluffy rabbit.’ She paused, but Elliot did not laugh, so she continued. ‘Anyway, a few days after I talked to the Sheriff, I realised it was gone. The teddy bear was gone. I didn’t think it was worth wasting police time—amending my witness statement or whatever—because it was just an old teddy. Elegant in its way, and sweet too, which is just like Mischka actually.’

  ‘Is it,’ said Elliot, only not as a question. He looked around the room one more time. ‘I think I’ll go home now.’

  ‘All right,’ Miss Hattoway agreed. ‘I’m glad you came by.’ She walked towards the door and reached for the handle, then stopped.

  ‘Oh, and one other thing,’ she said. ‘Well, Mischka always wore this bracelet—it looked a simple thing, but she once confided in me that her dad gave it to her on her sixteenth birthday. The stones in it came from the Dark Caves in the Swamp of the Golden Coast—worth a fortune, stones like that. So, she’d have been wearing that on her wrist, of course. I mean, that wasn’t left behind.’

  Elliot nodded, and he reached for the door handle himself. But Miss Hattoway’s hand remained in his way, twisting the knob slowly.

  ‘The funny thing was, I was looking at Shopline—that network thing where people buy and sell things—I was looking at that a few weeks after the . . . the disappearance, and somebody was selling a bracelet just like Mischka’s. I thought to myself: If that’s Mischka selling her bracelet, she’ll be set up for life.’

  She took her hand away from the door and half-turned to Elliot.

  ‘I suppose I should have mentioned that to the Sheriff, but who knows how many similar bracelets there are in the Kingdom? Could be hundreds. And if it was her, if it was them, well, I guess it was kind of clear they didn’t want to be found.’

  Elliot looked at her, and she was gazing at him with something like compassion, those tears welling up in her eyes again.

  Now he remembered what Corrie-Lynn didn’t like about Miss Hattoway. It was the fact that she was always crying.

  Elliot didn’t much like it either.

  He closed the door behind him.

  He drove the truck home. He went right up to his room, pulled out his folders of research about Purples, carried them downstairs and dumped them in the trash.

  14

  Madeleine waited for almost two hours in the rain on Parker’s Piece.

  Then she went home.

  Her mother was sitting cross-legged on the couch, drinking coffee. There was an envelope in Holly’s lap, and as the door opened, she took this into both hands and held it in the air.

  But seeing the state of Madeleine, she let it fall again.

  Water trickled from Madeleine’s forehead and ran rivulets down her cheeks. Her eyelashes were wet. Her backpack was so drenched it was leaking black dye onto her shirt.

  She dropped the backpack onto the floor and sparks of water flew up. She drew out the book that was clamped beneath her arm, and it left behind a drooping water shadow. The book cover itself was looped with water stains, its pages clumped together and dissolving.

  Holly Tully couldn’t wait. She lifted the envelope again. ‘You wrote to him?’

  Madeleine snatched the envelope from her mother’s hand. Her body trembled. It was from her father! That was his address on the front in such familiar—

  Her excitement unravelled.

  The handwriting was familiar because it was her own—

  It was her letter to her father, stamped: RETURN TO SENDER.

  He’d sent it back.

  Madeleine shrugged. ‘Yeah? So?’ She went into the bathroom and returned with a towel around her neck.

  ‘You went out without an umbrella,’ said Holly.

  ‘It wasn’t raining when I left.’

  ‘This is England, Madeleine. Have you written to him before?’

  ‘No.’ She rubbed at her head with the towel, so her voice vibrated. ‘I also emailed Tinsels, but she pretended to be someone else. I know I had the right address—Tinsels33—she chose it cause 33 was the number of her favourite racehorse.’ She looked thoughtful. ‘Dad must have told her to pretend not to know me, on account of being so mad at me.’

  Her mother nodded.

  ‘He must get a lot of unwanted mail,’ Madeleine continued, ‘to need a stamp that says, Return to Sender. Don’t most people just write that on?’

  The mistake was, she tried to smile at that moment. The movement of her mouth sent a faulty signal to her cheeks and eyes, and it all fell apart and she was crying.

  ‘Oh, sweetheart.’ Her mother reached out but Madeleine covered her face with her hands and sobbed, ‘I am not crying!’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘It’s just—’ Her voice fought its way between the gasps. ‘I’m so selfish and stupid, and Dad was right! On the skateboard and his beard, and now we’ve lost everything! We’ve lost him and Tinsels and the others and our life, and we’re trapped here spinning straw in a non-life! And it’s all my fault! Cause I’ve always been so selfish! Always running away! And I’ve brought you with me, and I’ve brought it with me, too, haven’t I? My selfishness! I’ve killed Byron! And Elliot Baranski isn’t real!’

  ‘All right,’ murmured her mother, standing up now, trying to hug her from behind, until the surges of sobs began to slow and fade.

  Then Madeleine sat on the couch. She wiped her eyes with the backs of her hands.

  ‘I wasn’t crying,’ she explained.

  ‘No, of course not,’ her mother agreed. ‘You weren’t making any sense either. A skateboard and a beard and you’ve killed Byron. What’s Byron?’

  ‘The poet.’

  ‘Well, you didn’t kill him. He’s already dead.’

  Madeleine burst into tears again.

  Holly waited.

  ‘Tell me,’ she said eventually, exasperated.

  So Madeleine turned her face into the couch, and began to speak.

  She told her mother everything, starting with her father’s warnings about her selfishness; the way he was after the skateboarding incident; that she knew it was her fault they were here because if she hadn’t run away that weekend, her mother would never have left.

  She told how Jack had found her email to Tinsels; that she’d realised Jack was the poet, Lord Byron; that she’d been leaving letters for a stranger in a parking meter; and that the stranger had not shown up at Parker’s Piece.

  When she finished, she was calm again. She straightened up on the couch.

  ‘So you’ve got a total loser for a daughter,’ she said. ‘Who knew?’ She scratched the side of her mouth. ‘I guess Dad did.’

  ‘Cut it out now,’ said her mother. ‘I’m trying to think. I need to get my thoughts in order and present them in an incisive, persuasive way. Because I’m the one with the answers today, which won’t always be the case—for instance, if you were weeping about a mathematics problem, well, I’d be clueless and we’d both end up weeping. Not that you were weeping, of course.’

  Holly reached for her coffee, which was now cold. She drank from it anyway. She needed a haircut: her fringe was so long it touched the coffee mug. She set the mug back down again.

  ‘Okay, I’ve decided to start simple and work back. So, I am now formally telling you, as your mother, that I want you never to become a smoker, nev
er to own your own motorbike, never to get a chess board tattooed onto your face—and never ever to write to an imaginary friend in a parking meter again.’

  Madeleine smiled. ‘It’s okay. I’m done with him anyway. He left me in the rain for two hours.’

  ‘Although we could hide out in the street and watch until he or she comes creeping up to the parking meter, and then we’d—but no. It’s dangerous. You know that. Elliot Baranski is imaginary, but the person writing these letters is not. I remember when you were little, you had so many imaginary friends. Your imaginary friends had imaginary friends of their own. So. Just watch your tendency to slip out of the real world. Come back and join us here, okay?’

  ‘Like I said, I’m already back.’

  Holly ignored her, frowning at the ceiling.

  ‘Jack and Belle! That’s easy, too. It’s sad that you hurt them, but we all hurt our friends sometimes. We feel terrible. Then we say sorry. Jack’s got a heart as big as a planet, and even with all her weirdness, Belle’s a good person. They’ll forgive you, I promise.’

  Madeleine shrugged, but Holly grabbed her shoulders and stilled the shrug. ‘This is not an issue on which you have opinions! Your face must flood with the revelation that I’m right! And then you nod gratefully. Which reminds me. Jack is not Byron. He’s Jack.’

  Madeleine almost shrugged again, but stopped at her mother’s warning glance.

  ‘And really, why shouldn’t you write to an old friend and complain about your life? It’s a huge change you’ve had to deal with—why shouldn’t you take a while to realise that it’s the right one? Or to see that Jack’s not just some temporary distraction, but actually a great kid?’

  ‘I should have realised,’ said Madeleine.

  ‘Hush. Now, about the skateboarding incident. Where was your mother?’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘When you were ten years old and speeding down the hill towards a highway, where was your mother? Where was I?’

  ‘I don’t have a clue.’

  ‘Exactly!’

  Now Madeleine kicked off her shoes and swung her feet onto the couch. ‘You were doing well for a while there,’ she said.