A Corner of White

by Jaclyn Moriarty

  It swung back and forth as the car sped, Nikki sped, Cody sped behind her, then somehow, between them, Nikki and Cody were dragging Derrin from the car.

  The car raced away.

  Its door rattled closed. It disappeared into the distance.

  The Sheriff’s car flashed by Elliot, siren blasting.

  There was another sound—loud and persistent—and the siren stopped suddenly, the Sheriff’s car slowing.

  It was the warning bells.

  Everybody stopped.

  The motor scooters. The Sheriff’s car.

  The warning bells chimed and chimed.

  It was the code for a first-level Yellow.

  Lemon Yellow.

  Most lethal Colour of them all.

  They hadn’t noticed Corrie-Lynn in the carpark.

  They got themselves into the Watermelon Inn: Nikki carrying Derrin in her arms like a baby; Gabe, Cody and Shelby running; the Sheriff reversing his car down the hill, then racing in after them. The shutters to the Watermelon slammed closed.

  That’s when they saw her.

  Through the gaps in the shutters, swarms of Yellow filled the air. These took the form of bright little darts, each group soaring low and sure.

  Lemon Yellows aim for the eyes and the heart. Each one blinds with its first strike, and kills with its second.

  They saw her all at once—Corrie-Lynn—still standing in the carpark, confused, and Alanna screamed and threw herself at the shutters, scrabbling to open them and get out.

  Then Elliot was there.

  Outside, flying past the shutters, running by the windows, into the carpark, to Corrie-Lynn.

  ‘He’s doesn’t have anything,’ someone said.

  ‘There’s nothing he can do.’

  He was there with her. He was trying car doors, but they were locked. He took Corrie-Lynn’s hand in his, looking back towards the Watermelon. The air was thick with the Yellow dart swarms; any moment now a swarm would aim at Elliot and Corrie-Lynn.

  In the Watermelon, Alanna kept screaming to get out to them, but guests gripped her elbows and dragged her back.

  Elliot and Corrie-Lynn were running, hand in hand.

  ‘They can’t make it,’ whispered Hector.

  A swarm cut them off from the hotel. Two more swarms drifted closer.

  At the edge of the carpark, Elliot and Corrie-Lynn stopped. They were surrounded.

  Elliot put an arm tight around Corrie-Lynn.

  ‘They’ve given up,’ murmured someone.

  They were going to die. Elliot and Corrie-Lynn were going to die right before their eyes.

  But now Elliot was crouching. They could see his lips moving—he was talking and crouching.

  He was doing something on the ground. He was at one of the faucets, and was turning it.

  Now Corrie-Lynn was on the ground at the other faucet.

  Then, all around them, the sprinklers shot up.

  Elliot called to her again.

  They were detaching sprinklers, and lifting them into the air, the water rising higher.

  A swarm of Yellow darts had seen them now.

  A second swarm swerved towards them from the east.

  They were tilting the sprinklers, lifting them, lowering them. Then it happened. Sunlight hit the water and faint colours wavered in the air around them.

  ‘Stop!’ Elliot shouted, so sharply it was audible from the Inn. ‘Hold it now!’

  Rainbows of colours shimmered around them in an almost circle.

  The swarms were almost on them. And then the strangest thing.

  The Lemon Yellows hit the rainbows and faded.

  They struck at Elliot and Corrie-Lynn, but over and over they hit the rainbows, and dwindled into something pale and listless.

  Other swarms attacked, but each Yellow that hit melted away—melted into something that wasn’t quite there, like mist on a window.

  Then there was a shift, and the swarms changed direction altogether.

  They swung around, flew away, and disappeared.

  Elliot and Corrie-Lynn stood in the carpark.

  The rainbows played in the air around them. The water drenched them. But still they stood, arms aching, sprinklers held high to catch the sun.

  2

  Isaac Newton liked questions.

  In 1704, he published a book called Opticks, in which he described and analysed the nature of colour and light. At the end of the book, he appended a list of ‘queries’—questions without answers that leapt between topics—from air, honey, oil and sunrays, to comets, animals, backbones and atoms. Over the next several years, he returned to his list, adding to his questions, adjusting them, expanding on them.

  Whence is it that Nature does nothing in vain? And whence arises all that beauty that we see in the world? he asked. To what end are Comets and whence is it that they move all manner of ways?

  And so on.

  On the day that the neurosurgeon at Addenbrookes Hospital took Madeleine aside and explained that her mother’s collapse the previous night had been brought about by bleeding in the brain which itself was the result of a high-grade tumour; that the tumour had probably been growing for several months now; that this explained the irrational behaviour, the headaches, vomiting, confusion, numbness, memory loss; that surgery and radiation treatment might prolong Holly’s life for another few months, but that surgery itself could well kill her; that, however, without surgery, she would die within the next few days—on this day, Madeleine found herself ensnared by one of Newton’s queries.

  The query was this:

  What hinders the fixt stars from falling upon one another?

  Sometimes the query took the form of a bramble bush that wound itself tightly around Madeleine, muffled her mouth and scratched her skin, so that it was almost comical, trying to answer the doctors and nurses’ questions, and she actually giggled at one point.

  How could they expect her to speak with these thorny branches crossing her eyes?

  At other times, the query was more of an intransigent force; a vacuum that dragged her down with it; and then the difficulty was trying to walk or stand or move in any way.

  What hinders the fixt stars from falling upon one another?

  It was not so much that she had to answer the query, it was that she herself turned out to be the answer.

  She had to stop the stars from tumbling together. The query had given her the job. A sky full of stars was relying on her to keep her back straight, her shoulders firm, her head nodding now and then, her voice calm and polite—when they asked if there was somebody else she wanted to call, her father, for example, or a friend, she shook her head, no, it was just her. Because as long as she could keep the stars in place in the sky for just this day—as long as she did that, her mother would be okay.

  Obviously, the doctors were not in a position to take care of the stars.

  The choices they offered! Death by surgery, or death over the next few days. Didn’t they know about third options? They were quitters, these doctors, without vision. They knew nothing of problem-solving, the key to which, she had just realised, was finding the third option.

  For example, she now discovered that there were not, after all, two choices about crying. She had thought of herself as ‘not a crying kind of girl’, but today, neither crying nor not-crying was possible.

  This called for a third option, specifically: wailing, shrieking and smashing of windows. The hospital would frown on that, most likely. They’d sedate her, which was proof, again, that these people knew nothing of third options.

  So she did nothing, pressed her lips together and used them to form small smiles.

  Anyhow, it was lucky, she thought, while they took her mother’s blood, pinned her mother down with tubes and machines, as if they were worried she might escape—like those diamond pins the stylist used to put in her hair—they had kept her head in place, those pins, but not Madeleine herself; no, she had fled, trailing her mother behind her—and now their ad
venture had taken an unexpected turn; she supposed it had been following this path all along, and it was true that she had urged her mother to turn back, or sidestep, but she’d never tried hard enough. She’d been too busy with her summer romance, or with visions of her father in a punt—

  But still, it was lucky, she thought, while they conferred about her mother, it was just so lucky that she’d been reading Isaac Newton.

  Because now she knew about problem-solving.

  Even though the hospital did not.

  And this problem, Isaac had solved for her.

  All she had to do was keep the stars fixed to the sky.

  At some point that morning, Madeleine fell asleep in the hospital chair. She dreamed that she was a hat rack. The hat rack’s job was to hold up the stars; however, various people kept adding extra weight to it. Federico, Belle, Jack, the waitress from Auntie’s Tea Shop, two or three doctors—they were hanging decorations from the hat rack, as if it was a Christmas tree.

  ‘No, no,’ she explained, polite and smiling at first. ‘I can’t take the weight of this. My duty is to hold up the stars.’ But they smiled blandly at her, and kept on hanging decorations. Colours, lights, calculus, curves, alchemy, chemistry, mathematics, measurements, gravity, magnets—each of these things was an ornament that weighed her down. Then they started adding facts.

  ‘At 2 am on Christmas Day in 1642,’ said Jack, ‘he was born.’

  ‘And he was so small,’ added Belle, ‘that they put him in a quart pot.’

  ‘Two women,’ said the neurosurgeon who had spoken to her earlier, ‘were sent to collect items for the baby, but they sat down on a stile along the way, and they said to one another: “there is no occasion for making haste, for we are sure the child will be dead before we get back!”’

  ‘And he was so weak,’ piped a voice—and it was her mother! Madeleine rushed forward, elated, spilling ornaments and concepts, but Holly shook her head firmly. ‘He was so weak,’ she repeated, ‘that he had to have a bolster all around his neck to keep it on his shoulders.’ Then Holly pointed to her own neck, which was bolstered with something like a wooden frame, and she gave a wry, sad smile.

  ‘Who are you talking about?’ shouted Madeleine, shaking herself so that everything rattled, jangled and began to fall, including the stars.

  She opened her eyes and thought: Isaac Newton, of course.

  The dark red in her mother’s hair looked like streaks of blood or wine against the pillows. Her face had a pale greyness to it, like concrete. There was a small pimple on her mother’s chin, which Holly had pointed out the day before. She had explained to Madeleine, as she always did when she got a pimple, that chocolate was not the cause. It was more likely a manifestation of an unpleasant thought someone in the building had had.

  She ate too much chocolate. She had a pimple. She made dumb jokes about the pimple!

  It was impossible for her to die. The doctors were wrong.

  Madeleine was suddenly exasperated.

  She stood up, stretched her arms above her head, reaching absent-mindedly for lost stars, frowning, angry.

  ‘It’s twenty to, I think,’ said a passing voice.

  ‘Twenty to what?’ responded another voice—they all seemed to talk in that jokesy, blustering way here—their voices looming up and then fading into corridors.

  ‘Twenty to ten,’ called the other voice.

  Not even ten o’clock yet.

  There was another reason. It was not even ten o’clock in the morning yet! How could anything so serious happen before ten?

  And there it was.

  The third option.

  She put down the fixed stars and she ran.

  She was running in the rain.

  It’s a long way from Addenbrookes to downtown Cambridge—she remembered this as she ran, but it only made her run faster.

  There were cars, clouds, rain splatters, umbrellas, bicycles, and someone was walking a dog. Her chest was aching, her breath was heaving, her legs were shot through with needles or magnets. The closer she got, the more crowded the footpaths, and she was dodging and swerving. Some people scowled at her and this made her laugh aloud.

  My mother is going to die! she thought. And here I am running to a parking meter! Each breath of laughter was a spasm in her side.

  She almost fell as she slid onto the street, and there it was—the graffiti, the broken parking meter, a car with its hubcaps missing . . .

  Through the rain-blurring, she thought she saw the hint of white in the crack, but no! There was nothing. She was running, skidding toward the parking meter, and there was nothing in that crack, and through her gasps of air she was laughing and the rain was hammering her head.

  3

  The bells were ringing for the all-clear, and they were surging out of the Watermelon Inn. Someone was turning off the sprinklers; someone was taking these gently from the outstretched arms of Elliot and Corrie-Lynn; others were draping towels around their shoulders and leading them inside.

  They brought them into the front room, and Elliot and Corrie-Lynn were whiter than the Magical North, pale and trembling, but every other face was alive with smiles and wonder, and everyone was asking, ‘How did you know to do that, Elliot?’

  Eventually, Elliot shook the trembling out of his body, and half-smiled.

  ‘It was something that a friend told me once,’ he said, and then something seemed to turn over in his face, and his hand reached into his pocket.

  ‘What’s the time right now?’ he said, and when someone said it was just on ten, he seemed to fly from the room.

  They watched through the window as he ran through the carpark and away.

  The rain hammered on Madeleine’s head and she stopped laughing, stopped gasping and turned from the parking meter, where there was no slither of white, there was nothing—

  And then something happened. It was a fragment of time, a breath of time. It was like being in a car in pouring rain and driving under an overpass, and for just that second there is a profound, powerful sense of reprieve—the utter silence of non-rain.

  That was how it was—she was, for a fragment, without rain; she was somewhere silent and warm, and there was the flash of an image—a schoolyard, distant buildings, blue sky, intense quiet, strong sunlight, an odd pile of cement topped with a crooked TV, and beside her, right beside her, a boy in jeans, his head turned away from her; she saw dark-blond hair, a sun-brown neck—

  Then the rain again.

  She was back in the street with the parking meter, the chaos of the downpour and parked cars again.

  But now, in her hand, was an envelope. It was instantly sodden with rainwater, and she sat on the edge of the kerb, let the rushing gutter water swarm over her shoes, soak her socks, let the rain drench and drench her hair, the curling water rush past her eyes and tendril down her cheeks, and opened the envelope.

  A handful of little white balls.

  Were they children’s sweets? Were they aspirins? Were they mothballs?

  Whatever they were, she sat on the kerb, folded them tight in her fist, and the sobs gashed their way through her chest, surging against the flesh of her face, bursting out through her mouth and into the rain.

  4

  After he had delivered the envelope to the sculpture, Elliot returned to the Watermelon Inn, and was just in time to hear little Derrin Twickleham, the girl who could not speak, announce in a strident voice: ‘My name is not Derrin Twickleham.’

  There was a sudden quiet in the front room.

  Derrin explained that her name was, in fact, Libby Adams.

  For a child who could not speak, she was very vocal. In an Olde Quainte accent, she told the room that she had been taken from her home town of Gwent Cwlyd by a pair of Wandering Hostiles who’d brought her to Bonfire, disguised as a family called the Twicklehams.

  The real family Twickleham had a small daughter, so they had stolen Libby to play that role. It was her understanding that the real family had been s
ent a false note, telling them that the repair shop was no longer available.

  They had some Hostile mission here in Bonfire, the child continued, but she had not been able to figure out what it was, although she had tried and tried to drop in on their eaves.

  ‘She means eavesdrop,’ somebody murmured, and the others nodded or agreed.

  ‘There is also this,’ she said. ‘That I never got their real names. As to an apple in a seashell, so were they careful to call each other Fleta and Bartholomew, even when I was a-bed.’

  There was an impressed silence after this lengthy speech.

  Then Corrie-Lynn, who was still wrapped in a blanket in her mother’s arms, announced: ‘You can speak. I taught you how to speak!’

  Libby replied diplomatically: ‘You did a very good job trying to teach me how to speak, Corrie-Lynn. But actually I think I can probably speak now because the Mute Spell which they put on me would now be far away—away from this town it is going, in the back of Miss Hattoway’s car.’

  Everybody nodded. A spell like that would lose its effect with some distance.

  ‘Well, why didn’t you write me a note?’ Corrie-Lynn persisted. ‘You’re good at writing.’

  ‘I wrote a note to Miss Hattoway,’ Libby said, ‘on my first day at the grade school. She whispered that she’d help me, and that I had to lie low and not tell a soul. Of course,’ she added ruefully, ‘it soon became clear, as to a window in a wash-house when the door is open wide, that Miss Hattoway was actually a Hostile herself. And quite good friends with my kidnappers.’

  ‘You should’ve told me,’ Corrie-Lynn insisted.

  Libby shrugged. ‘But I didn’t want you to be in danger. And I did draw a picture to try to tell the Sheriff.’ Here, the Sheriff assumed a deeply sorrowful expression. ‘But my picture was probably confusing. Also . . .’ She scratched the inside of her ear thoughtfully. ‘Also, on my very first morning in this town, I scribbled a note and tucked it into an old TV machine in the repair shop—when we were being shown around, before it was cleared out. I was hoping that Elliot or his mother might find that note and save me.’