Twenty-Four Hours

by Margaret Mahy

  “You go down next!” he said, and saw, with a mixture of surprise and exaltation, that Christo was going to do exactly as he was told. Obediently turning, he lowered himself over the platform and slid down, first in to Jackie’s arms, then into the double embrace of Leona and Ursa. They could not, however, contain his final, tumbling descent. Nor did Christo try in any way to arrest his own fall. He fell heavily on to the balcony, and though he was not stunned, he lay where he fell, deliberately closing his eyes. They called his name, but he refused to look at any of them. Ellis followed. It was harder to slide down than it had been to climb up. He felt himself lose control as he inched downwards, felt Jackie seize him and wobble dangerously as he did so. They tumbled together on top of Christo.

  Suddenly, there were people milling around them. Names were being asked for. Someone in uniform was bending over Christo who lay, hugging himself, knees drawn up, his eyes resolutely closed. Then it was Ellis’s turn.

  “You were so marvellous,” Leona was crying, and she flung her arms around Ellis and kissed him, just as the heroine kisses the hero at the end of the story … but not quite.

  Ellis, hugging her back, took a breath and smelt that faint scent, in which once again he thought he could distinguish the sting of antiseptic. But this time he laughed. After all, he really was the hero, not just the boy being kissed by the beautiful girl, or the person who had saved the child, but the actor who had triumphed on the narrow stage.

  EPILOGUE

  3.00 pm – Sunday

  The next day, Ellis found himself returning to the Land-of-Smiles to collect his house key and driving licence, carelessly left behind in room Number 9. He biked across the city on a bicycle that he had not used since passing his driving test. Once at the Land-of-Smiles, he propped the bike against a fence and carefully locked it with a new chain and padlock. He looked at the rust and graffiti, then saluted the image of Phipps peering at him from the white wall on the far side of Kurl-Up & Dye. The last time, he was thinking. I won’t be coming here again. Yet, as he walked towards the motel door, he found that he was being welcomed. Harley, jogging by, waved at him. Then Prince appeared around the corner of the house. He did not pause but strode towards Ellis, holding his right hand high.

  “Give me five, man!” he said, words which Ellis thought belonged exclusively to American sit-coms. Hastily, he raised his own hand to slap Prince’s as they passed one another. “Yo, bro!” said Prince, walking on.

  However, it was the door of the Land-of-Smiles itself that welcomed him in, outlined, even in broad daylight, by the streaming electric arrows that rose perpetually on the right, arching above the door and diving into nothing on the left. He went through the lobby, through the dining room and made confidently for the kitchen.

  Ellis had only known this kitchen for a single day, but now it seemed as familiar as the kitchen in his own house. All the same, it was still capable of springing a surprise. Since yesterday, someone had set a Christmas tree in the corner. Though the dark branches were as yet undecorated, glittering worms of tinsel were tangled together beneath it, escaping from battered boxes that had obviously seen many other Christmases.

  Ursa was sitting at the table on her own, pages spread around her. She looked up suspiciously, then, seeing who it was, beamed at Ellis.

  “Hi!” she said. “Our hero! Our total, utter hero! Star of scaffolding and television! Grab a coffee.”

  Ellis, who had certainly not been planning to stay for coffee, found himself turning, like a Land-of-Smiles habitué, towards the coffee machine and tugging one of the waxed cardboard cups out of the holder.

  “You looked great on television,” Ursa said to his back. “Just right! Brave … modest … sweetly shy! Tired but gallant. Pity you didn’t have your curls, but not to worry. Might have been overdoing it!”

  “The day before yesterday,” said Ellis, “I was walking along planning the next year or two. Then I met Jackie and, in the following twenty-four hours, I did every single thing I’d been planning to do over the coming year. I mean, it was my first day home from school.” He looked at Ursa to see how she received this revelation. Ursa’s expression did not change.

  “And I got drunk,” said Ellis. “And shot around in a car chase, and ended up on a sort of stage high above the city. I – I sort of fell in love …” (Once again he glanced a little defiantly at her but, once again, she did not look as if she were likely to laugh at him.) “And I brought back my mother’s car, smelling of stale piss, and with the back-door handle missing and a scrape along one side. And I was suddenly bald. And I’ve been tattooed, though I haven’t told my mum about that yet. Mum and Dad were furious with me when I finally did get home – I mean, not just grumpy, but really furious. But, suddenly, there I was on TV with people praising me! My father forgave me and my mother stopped complaining. After all, the car is insured. It’s gone to the panel beater to be assessed, so I had to ride over here on a bike. Bit of a comedown!”

  “Monty’s getting his car back today,” said Ursa. “We won’t need yours again for a while. Have you just called in for the fun of it?”

  “I left some stuff in Number 9,” said Ellis, pointing towards the door. “I’ll just go and get it.”

  “I’ll come with you,” said Ursa. “The door’s locked.” She walked over to the coffee machine and shifted it a little. Ellis saw with surprise that there was a small cupboard set in the wall behind it.

  “Leona said something about frightening you,” Ursa went on, opening the cupboard and taking out a bunch of keys. “My guess is she suddenly mentioned her work. It disconcerts a lot of people when they find out.”

  Ellis stared defiantly at the back of her head while she concealed the little door with the coffee machine once more.

  “It doesn’t matter,” he said.

  “Did you throw up?” she asked, turning and smiling. “Some people do. Well, metaphorically they do.”

  “I think I did – metaphorically, that is,” sighed Ellis.

  “It’s a private test of hers,” said Ursa, flinging wide the door to the line of rooms and looking out towards the rubbish bags with calm pleasure, rather as if she were surveying a well-kept lawn and rose garden. Ellis saw that she was wearing a ring on the third finger of her left hand – small, bright and ostentatiously false – a pearl held by shiny, gold claws.

  “A test? Well, I failed it,” said Ellis. Clutching his cup of coffee, he meekly followed Ursa to the door of Number 9.

  “Did she mention our own particular family soap opera?” Ursa asked, unlocking the door and pushing it open with her bare foot.

  “No,” said Ellis, and hesitated. “But Phipps did.”

  Putting his cup down on the chest of drawers beside the bed, he jiggled open the top drawer. There was his house key. There was his driving licence. He was being reunited with the bits and pieces that made him a man of the world.

  “Phipps loves the story,” said Ursa. “It’s almost like yesterday’s gossip to him. Of course, we’ve been neighbours for a long time.”

  Ellis tucked his key and driving licence into a top pocket, picked up his coffee and followed Ursa out of the room. After she had locked the door once more, he trailed after her to the kitchen.

  “How’s the coffee?” she asked.

  Ellis looked into the cardboard cup with the intensity of Fox gazing into her glowing crystal. It was certainly black. He already knew it was probably a little burnt.

  “You don’t have to drink it,” Ursa said, sitting down beside her papers and books once more.

  “I’ve actually grown to like it this way,” Ellis said, interested to find that this was almost true. How could one come to feel nostalgic about something like burned coffee within twenty-four hours? “It still tastes like coffee – just coffee on another planet.”

  Ursa nodded. “If you live our sort of life you get to love things that don’t turn out quite right,” she said. “You begin to enjoy the … the faultiness of the world because
it ties you into your real life.”

  “Hang on!” said Ellis. “Are you saying that being faulty is truer than not being faulty.”

  “It’s second-nature for me to think so by now,” said Ursa. “Something goes wrong! ‘Hey! There you are,’ I exclaim, as if I’ve met a dear old friend down at the shops. My dad was …” She broke off.

  “Oh,” she said at last, smiling the sort of smile that lifts one corner of the mouth and twists the other down, “he could be lovely … he was lovely, played games, joked, cuddled us, and rubbed us with his bristly chin before he shaved. Mind you, he did lose his temper from time to time. Mum called it ‘getting his Irish up’, though Dad wasn’t Irish in any way. We took it for granted for years, though I think Leo and I were beginning to understand there was something a bit excessive – a bit odd …” She paused, then began again briskly. “One night, Dad woke us all up – Leona, me, Wolf and Felix …”

  “Wolf and Felix?” Ellis said uncertainly.

  “My brothers,” said Ursa. “There were five of us back then. ‘We’re going to look at the stars,’ my father said. ‘I’ve got a telescope and it’s a lovely night.’ He made Leo carry Fox, while he carried the telescope – it could easily have been a telescope – wrapped in a bit of sacking.

  “So off we all went towards our front door. Mind you, I don’t think any of us really thought we were going to look at the stars … well, Felix might have, and Fox was only a baby. But Leo, Wolf and I knew that something else was going on. Hard to tell now, because you know how memories keep on shifting and changing. Anyhow, as we crossed the sitting room to the front door, I looked across into the kitchen. The door was partly open and I could make out bare legs, and the edge of my mother’s dressing gown, and her feet with only one slipper on. My father saw me notice, but he just smiled. ‘It’s a game, sweetheart … don’t worry, it’s just a game,’ he said.

  “So we went over the road to the cemetery – in at the gate we used today. And we stopped close to Rose Phipps – she was our Phippo’s great-grandmother, may she rest in pieces! We stood there in the night. It wasn’t dark. It never is, is it, in the centre of the city? That’s why we couldn’t really have looked at the stars.

  ‘“Life is too terrible to be lived,’ my father said, out there among the tombstones. Of course, it wasn’t a telescope he had in that sackcloth. It was a gun. Leo says she knew right then what he was going to do, even though she couldn’t actually see the gun. She screamed at him and tried to hide Fox. But, before her scream was properly over, my father had shot Wolf and then Felix …” Ursa scratched her head, looking at Ellis and pulling a rueful face. “Leo was hugging Fox like she hugged Shelley last night, sort of arching over her, doing everything she could to hide her. And Dad stood looking down at us, as if we were the ones who had done it all. We were yelling our heads off by then, and Dad was saying, ‘Shh! Shh! Shh!’ louder and louder – like an old steam train shunting. Then, suddenly, he – he just put the barrel of the gun in his own mouth and pulled the trigger.”

  Ursa stopped talking. They stared at each other.

  “Look,” said Ellis rather desperately. “I don’t know what to say to all that. It’s – well, it’s too much, isn’t it? Too much of something to reply to. If you’re trying to show me that things have been worse for you than they have for me … that I’m a lucky, rich, spoiled kid …”

  “No!” exclaimed Ursa. “Nothing like that. Mostly, I don’t tell this story because it’s all old stuff, though it’s part of us forever. But I’m telling you as a sort of, well, a sort of funny Christmas present. I’m giving you a bit of our lives because you saved Shelley. And Shelley saved … balances things out – just a little bit. And I also wanted to explain something about us, because for ages we’ve lived … eye to eye with death, and it’s not all that bad. From some angles, at least, there’s a bit of a lazy smile in those empty old eye-sockets. Sorry if I’m sounding a bit morbid, because I don’t think we are morbid, any of us. But we’ve had to make ourselves companionable with death. Leo, in particular, gets impatient with people shuddering. Me – well, I don’t blame the people who do shudder. After all, we’re engineered to live on and on, if we possibly can, and shuddering proves the engine is in good working order. It’s natural to die and it’s natural to fear dying, so it was really good that you managed to make Christo shudder last night … you and Shakespeare, that is.”

  “What happened to you afterwards?” asked Ellis, ignoring these comments.

  Ursa threw up her hands.

  “Oh, everything!” she said. “We lived with an aunt for a while, but there was trouble, trouble, trouble … and social welfare stepped in to find us a foster home. Well, we wound up with Monty during his grand days. He was quite the guru of foster-care back then … thrilled with the Orono Indians, thrilled with his own ideas, and thrilling a lot of other people with them, too. And we Hammonds had a happy time with Monty and his wife, May … they really came to love us. And we loved them. Then Monty had his great, devastating, mucky, middle-aged love affair.”

  The title of a book he had never read came into Ellis’s head. “Was it something like Lolita?” he asked.

  Ursa shrugged her shoulders. “Everyone mentions Lolita,” she said. “It might have been a bit like that. Anyhow, Monty not only wrecked his career, but he wrecked himself … everything. There was a court case, and we were divided between two foster homes for a while, Leona and me in one, Fox in another. We had to fight our way back together, and then fight to get back to Monty and May. Leo and I were determined, and we did get back with them at last, but it wasn’t the same. I mean, May had forgiven Monty – but then she died. And he copped out in quite a big way … said he wanted to ‘embrace the gutter’. So he bought the dear old Land-of-Smiles, and we’ve stayed here ever since because we’ve wanted to stay with him. He needs looking after. And we like it here. End of story.”

  “Don’t you ever think of shifting?” Ellis asked. But Ursa did not seem to hear him.

  “About the time Leona was looking for a first job, we went to a funeral. Leo met David Dommett and heard there was a job going at Dommett & Christie. It’s suited her well, because she needs to be with people to whom death is … just a part of things. Well, mysterious, maybe, but ordinary, too. No exaggerated reverence either, because that’s often disguised horror.”

  “No shuddering!” said Ellis.

  “Perish the thought,” agreed Ursa.

  The door to the dining room opened and Jackie waltzed into the room. He started back dramatically at the sight of Ellis.

  “Oh, wow!” he cried. “The Tarzan of Foley Street.”

  Ellis glanced over his shoulder at Ursa.

  “Does he shudder?”

  Ursa laughed.

  “Him?” she said. “He’s in a fairyland of his own. Did you ever hear the story of the boy who set off to learn what shuddering meant? That boy was Jackie, and he’s never learned.” Her derisive expression changed. “Well, he just might have, listening to you last night. Do you know what he said this morning? He said he might train for a job. I nearly fell over.”

  “Go on! Show him the ring,” said Jackie. “That’s evidence of a changed life.”

  Ursa held out her hand with the patently false-pearl ring. It glowed rather grandly.

  “It was in with the old Christmas decorations,” said Jackie. “It came out of a cracker last year. Like it?”

  “Very sincere!” said Ellis.

  “I’d have given her a real one,” Jackie went on, “but I’m opposed to the exploitation of oysters. They go to all that trouble improving bits of grit. I think they should be allowed to keep the pearls.”

  “I’ll always wear this one,” she promised him. “It’s more sincere than most.”

  They made Ellis promise to call in over Christmas. He laughed, finally agreed, and waved goodbye. Christmas, he thought, could only be an anticlimax to someone who had lived a whole life of love, adventure and little dances with d
eath – and all within twenty-four hours.

  As he left the Land-of-Smiles someone said his name in a low, insistent voice.

  He turned. Fox rose from behind the reception counter like a column of smoke, veiled in her drifting black shawls and holding her crystal before her.

  “You are leaving!” she intoned. “You are leaving the Land-of-Smiles.”

  “Forever,” agreed Ellis, not because he really believed it, but the occasion seemed to demand a dramatic statement.

  “Nah!” said Fox in her natural voice, then reverted, almost at once to her more portentous one. “Nay! You have become one of us. You will return. I see you dancing here when Ursa marries Jackie.”

  She slid from behind the small counter and followed him as he strolled towards his bike.

  “When Ursa marries Jackie? You might just as well say ‘Forever’,” said Ellis, grinning down at her, and thinking of the Christmas-cracker ring. “It’s more convincing than most,” Ursa had said, and Ellis felt sure she had meant it.

  “Anyhow, you’ll be back before then,” said Fox sternly. “You won’t be able to stay away. Not because of Leo, either. She’s going to marry David Dommett, and you’ll dance at her wedding, too.” She peered into the glass. Then she looked up.

  “You’re going to marry me,” she announced. “But not for ages yet,” she added comfortingly.

  “Oh, sure!” said Ellis, smiling again, unchaining his bike and pulling it away from the fence.

  “You’re seventeen now,” Fox said, “and you think there’s nothing left to look forward to. But you’ll be twenty-seven in ten years … and I’ll be twenty-one. Look forward to me! You’ll think I’m just amazing by then. I will be, too.” She gave him a clear, confident smile. Her teeth were very white.

  “How do you know I’m seventeen?” asked Ellis, lifting the front wheel of his bike out of the long grass and turning it towards Garden Lane. He paused, frowning. “How do you know that I think there’s nothing left to look forward to?”