by Penni Russon
Phoenix enjoyed her company. There was something about Liv, as frivolous and light as her cakes, as solid and earthy and textured. She was kind of plump and pale, as if she spent too much time in her kitchen, though there was definition in her muscles and he knew she liked the beach, that she used to be a runner, that she danced without tiring, her eyes closed and her head back.
‘So what’s today’s word?’ she asked.
‘Confluence.’ It had come to him before he had even opened his eyes from grainy, gritty sleep. Spoken aloud now, it sounded new again, and he loved it; it was music.
Liv wrinkled her nose. ‘What does that mean?’ Phoenix liked that she wasn’t embarrassed to ask, she wasn’t afraid of looking stupid.
‘You’ve got a dictionary,’ he teased. ‘Look it up.’
‘I might,’ Liv said lazily.
Phoenix scooped up a forkful of cake. The top was crunchy and ever so slightly burnt and the cake tasted sweet and dusky from the fruit. It was a great cake. Not all Liv’s cakes were great – that happened sometimes with alchemy – but even her worst cake was still the best cake most people had tasted. But this one, this was a cake that would appear, a spectre on the tongue, in the middle of next week, or next year, or in years to come, making the rememberer yearn for one more taste.
But that was the thing with Liv. She didn’t replicate. Her cakes were transient, as true art must be. Each one was a once in a lifetime experience.
‘You coming tonight?’ Liv asked. ‘There’s a new band. Salt Child. They’re meant to be good.’
‘I might drop in.’ For a moment he felt a weightiness, the weight of summer’s last days, coming over him. But the moment passed. He winked at Liv, playing out a quick rhythm on the counter top with his fingertips. ‘I mean to. But you never know what might happen.’
He held the last mouthful of cake in his mouth for a moment, then washed it away with the dregs of his coffee before brushing a light kiss on Liv’s soft cheek and heading out into the breathless summer heat.
CHAPTER THREE
Undine was drifting again. It happened like this, early in the morning in the last hour of dreaming. She was still made of girl – skeleton, skin, hair, teeth – but the world was made of something other: cloudstuff, or sealight. She could feel herself falling away from it, or through it.
She tried to force herself awake. Sometimes she could just shock herself out of sleep and find herself utterly awake, the kind of awake she usually wasn’t until well after breakfast, when she was outside in the open air. But this morning she couldn’t snap herself out of it. She somersaulted through slippery space and she thought this time she might finally lose her grip on the world.
Her grip on the world, she thought hazily, and that’s what she did, she gripped, clenching herself like a fist in order to stay. She fought her way upwards through sleep and finally she really was awake. She shook her head, but sleep still seemed to claim at least some of her, she was woolly with it, and part of her still seemed to drift.
‘Stop that,’ she said sternly, and her head cleared a little. She struggled upright and tried to shake off the faint echo of dreaming. She looked at herself in the mirror that hung by her bed. The mirror was framed with a mosaic of blue tiles and smaller squares of mirror, so one whole Undine stared back from the centre of the mirror, but many other fragmented Undines also surrounded her.
Once she had watched Trout play with Photoshop, making a jokey birthday card for their friend Fran. Using the mouse he cut very carefully around a photograph of Fran lying on her stomach with her feet kicking up in the air and then dropped her into a picture of a palm-fringed beach in Fiji. At first glance the scene seemed real enough, but if you looked carefully you could see that Fran did not really belong. Postcard Fiji looked almost too real, the water was too blue, the fringed palms too … palmy. Everything glowed but Fran. That was how Undine felt now: she was Photoshopped too, kind of superimposed on this world, but she wasn’t quite real. She almost was, she was real enough, but she could feel the joins, feel where she was stuck on. The world was dizzying in its colour; Undine was ever so slightly grey.
And that was when Undine had realised that this wasn’t her world. That she had in fact travelled, by way of magic, from one whole world into another, an alternate world, like Alice stepping through the looking glass. Until then she had simply thought that her own world had altered, that Stephen, her beloved stepfather who, in her world, had been dead for five years, had been returned to her (when she first arrived she had woken in this bed and come down the stairs to find him, the solid, real, joyous presence of him, cooking bacon in the kitchen). Looking down at the slightly blurred edges of her own hand – lacking crispness and definition, as if she wasn’t completely here – she realised she didn’t belong. No one else had seemed to notice, yet once Undine saw it, it was painfully obvious to her.
But it had also been a relief to realise it. There was something disconcerting about the idea of five years of Undine’s immediate past being obliterated by Stephen never dying. Like Jasper – her Jasper, the one from the world in which Undine had originated – wouldn’t even exist, would never have existed. And though Jasper here was happy and soft and loved, her own Jasper belonged to her in a way that nothing in this world really did.
She dressed and descended the stairs from her attic bedroom. Jasper was standing in the middle of the lounge room tolerating a rather vigorous hairbrushing from Lou. His fine blond curls looked angelic but Lou had always pronounced them devil’s work, for they knotted together dreadfully.
Stephen sat at the table reading the paper and drinking coffee. It was exactly how she remembered him from her childhood; it was how she often imagined him after he died. She touched his shoulder as she walked past, something she did habitually, as if her eyes believed but her hands just needed to check that he was really, truly alive. His skin felt alive. He smelled alive too, foamy and dusky and sturdy, like shaving cream, like an antique desk.
‘Morning, chicken,’ he said.
‘Morning.’
‘G’morning,’ said Lou. Jasper grinned and rocked from side to side. ‘Whatcha doin’ today?’ asked Lou.
‘Meeting Trout. He wants to go to the uni and get some of his textbooks.’
‘You want some money? You could pick up some of your books too while you’re there.’
Undine shrugged. ‘Okay.’ She was starting an arts degree in two weeks’ time, but it felt a million miles away. She had chosen it as a thing to do next, because she was expected to do something once Year 12 finished. But in the back of her mind, the idea made her feel restless and wandersome. More school – for what?
Undine cut herself a thick slice of still warm white bread and spread it with pale yellow butter and honey.
‘Are you going to my uni today?’ Jasper asked. He attended the creche on the campus.
‘Yes I am!’ Undine said. ‘Can I come and visit you?’
Jasper shook his head. ‘I’ll be pretty busy,’ he explained. ‘But you can wave at me through the fence if you want,’ he offered generously.
‘I’m gonna visit you,’ Undine threatened in a singsong voice. ‘I’ll come and give you hugs like this.’ She demonstrated, squeezing him tightly and lifting him off the floor. ‘And big squeaky kisses like this.’ She puckered her lips and made loud squeaking noises. Jasper wriggled away, giggling.
It shamed Undine that she had never realised, in her own world, how lean and hungry Jasper had looked, how wolfish and narrow, though he was not underfed. Here was a Jasper with a father and he looked soft and round and golden, like a loaf of Stephen’s bread. She realised that she had always underestimated what a loss Stephen had been to Jasper. Stephen had died when Lou was pregnant, so the world her Jasper had been born into was already one without Stephen in it. It was easy to believe he had felt no loss. But to take Stephen away from this Jasper would undo him, she could see that. To take any of them away, this whole Jasper would become as partial and w
olfish as the other Jasper she had known.
Stephen and Jasper left the house first, each carrying a bicycle helmet; Stephen rode Jasper to his creche every morning before continuing on into the city. This was Jasper’s last week of creche. The week after next he would be going to big school. Undine watched Stephen herd Jasper out the door and it squeezed her heart – a kind of painful joy – to see them together.
She sat at the table, sweeping her hair back and fastening it with a hair tie she’d found on the kitchen bench. She pulled her sandals on.
‘I’ve got to run, early appointment,’ Lou said, stealing a bite of Undine’s bread and honey while she sifted through the newspaper on the table, looking for her car keys. ‘We’ll see you tonight? Sixish? Do you want me to pick you up from somewhere?’
Undine stared at Lou blankly. She still hadn’t completely thrown off her dream. She wondered what would have happened if she hadn’t made herself wake. Would she have simply kept spinning forever, disappearing from this world? Or was dreaming just dreaming, and she was reading too much into it?
‘It’s Friday,’ Lou said patiently, as if she were getting used to Undine losing track of the days. Friday was fish and chips, down at the docks.
‘I’ll walk down to Stephen’s office.’
‘All right, meet you there.’
Undine watched Lou search for her keys. Like Jasper, this Lou had never lost Stephen and it showed. She moved more easily around the room as if the death of Stephen had been something she’d borne physically.
Undine kissed Lou goodbye and for a moment the smell of her, honey-sweet and warm, conjured the other Lou – her own – and Undine felt a sharp stab of homesickness pierce her below her ribs.
The world was quiet when Undine slipped out the front door and onto the steps outside. She listened for a moment to the light rustling of leaves, the distant hum of traffic. It was just another perfect day in paradise. She thought things like this sometimes, but she tried not to, because it made it sound as if she was dead and this was heaven and she was quite sure if she were dead she would feel … different. Deader.
She felt alive. Today, she felt even more alive than other days, if that was possible. Why? There was something in the air, a scattered kind of feeling that was about beginning and ending all at once. It reminded Undine of how the magic had felt when it first worked its way up to the surface of her from somewhere deep within. But there was no magic here, not in this world. From the moment she had first woken here, in the attic room at the top of the house, she’d known that the magic had left her. It had vacated her bones, her cells; where she’d been electric, alight, she’d become empty … even drear. It was worth it. For Stephen to be alive. Anything was worth it.
But oh, she thought now, how she missed it, the feeling of it rippling up her spine, singing in her hip bones, radiating through her sternum and ribs, right down to her fingertips, to the ends of her toes.
She walked slowly down the steps towards Trout’s house. She’d always half expected that, of anyone, he would notice the change in her. But he hadn’t. Perhaps there was no change, perhaps she was so precisely like the other Undine – the one who by rights belonged here, to this place, this earth, these steps – there was no difference to observe. Or perhaps the differences didn’t really matter, perhaps for the people who loved her, all they saw were the things that were the same.
Like the d-e-a-d word, she didn’t like to think about that other Undine much either, where was she? Had they swapped places? Had she woken one day to suddenly find Stephen gone, her whole world obliterated?
Trout opened the door, a whole piece of toast hanging out of his mouth.
‘Ready to go?’ Undine asked.
Trout said something along the lines of ‘urmble urmble’, which was the closest thing he could manage to ‘yes’ with a mouthful of toast. As he ducked back inside to get something he needed (communicated through hand gestures and further urmbling), Undine leaned against the brick wall at his front door and tried to forget the scattered, different feeling. She didn’t want to remember the magic, she didn’t want to remember how complicated everything was. She didn’t want to miss it. She didn’t want to … to want it. Even the desire for it felt dangerous.
Besides, she told herself, what was the point of missing it? It wasn’t as if she could just click the heels of her ruby slippers. Without magic, she was stuck onto this world as firmly as Trout, as firmly as toast or bicycles. Trout came out. ‘Ready?’ he asked her.
Undine nodded, though for a moment she was struck by a familiar and overwhelming desire to go back to bed, to hide from the day and all the complications it might bring.
CHAPTER FOUR
When Phoenix left Liv that morning, he went down to the city hall, following an eccentrically circuitous route for no real reason except that he liked to loop around the city blocks. It gave him a sense of freedom, he supposed, this living without a timetable and usually without even a destination. But he’d heard the cops were cracking down on buskers performing without a licence – the number of street performers in Hobart in summer swelled in February during a brief lull in the mainland festival season. Tourists and locals had the reputation of being generous down here, living was cheap, and the weather was usually mild. Though the heat of this summer belied that last fact and Phoenix, despite his happy looping, was relieved to duck out of the sun’s increasing intensity.
At the council chambers the air was rarefied and seemed to absorb some sounds, like the bustle and churn of traffic in the world outside, and emphasise others, like the door scraping on the floor as Phoenix entered the foyer.
‘Can I help you?’ the woman behind the counter asked, not looking up from her magazine. She wore many layers of red lipstick, as if she were lying to her face about how much she hated her job.
‘I was told to come here to see about a busker’s licence.’
She pushed a form at him as she turned the page. An article headline shouted out in lewd red letters, ‘Why Size Matters!’
Phoenix reached over the counter to her desk and borrowed a pen from a cup on her desk without asking. He walked over to a nearby group of chairs to fill out the form. Name, he read. First and last. Well, that was a tricky one to start with. He had only chosen the name Phoenix at the beginning of summer and he hadn’t ever decided if it was a first name or last. He had his other names, of course, his proper ones, but they hardly seemed to fit him anymore and he had not spoken them aloud for weeks.
He moved on. Date of birth. That was okay, he could make something up. Address. He twirled the pen in his hand. He scribbled in the address of the Silver Moon, borrowed his sister’s birthdate and, after a moment’s thought, used Phoenix as both first name and last. In the box asking him to describe his performance he wrote, ‘illusionist, conjurer’.
He returned to the counter. The woman scanned it. ‘Your name is Phoenix Phoenix?’ she asked, affecting just the right tone of scornful disbelief.
‘Just Phoenix,’ he said.
‘Like Madonna?’
‘No,’ said Phoenix. ‘Like Phoenix.’
She sighed, as if he had come up with the name specifically to annoy her.
‘All right, Mr Phoenix, I need photo ID and forty dollars.’
‘Where am I supposed to get forty dollars if I can’t busk without a licence?’ Phoenix asked virtuously. He didn’t add that he possessed no identification.
‘Um …’ The woman did a slow, exaggerated blink and then looked towards the ceiling as if she was seriously thinking about it. Then her eyes opened wide and she smiled, though it looked more like a cat yawning. ‘I don’t really care.’ She turned back to her magazine. This time the headline was ‘Women Who Love Love’ in achingly faint pink letters. He crossed his arms, grinning lazily and waited.
‘Are you still …’ she began, looking up at him impatiently. He caught her eyes this time and the last word became a breath, losing its questioning curl: ‘… here.’
‘You’ve got something in your hair,’ Phoenix said. He reached over and touched her carefully curled hair. She sat perfectly still, not even breathing as his hand brushed the skin on her face. He pulled his hand back and showed her. Sitting on his palm was a golden winged butterfly. Its antennae trembled.
‘Oh,’ she sighed. As the butterfly flew upwards in light breezy spirals towards the vaulted chamber ceiling, her eyes followed it. She blinked when it seemed to disappear in a little puff of dust and air.
She wrote out the certificate while he waited, not noticing when the glossy magazine slipped from her lap onto the floor with a flutter of pages.
He left, twirling her pen.
As they waited to cross the main road at the end of their street, Undine couldn’t shake the fluttery strangeness of the day.
Cautiously, she asked Trout, ‘Do you believe in other worlds?’
‘You mean like, what? Spamworld? Where everything’s made of spam?’ He shuddered for effect. ‘Spam cars, spam aeroplanes. Spam mothers kissing spam babies.’
‘No, no. I’m serious.’
Trout stopped joking. ‘You mean out there?’ He pointed upwards, doubtfully. ‘Other planets, intelligent life?’ He twitched. Undine could see he was itching to make another joke, but he held it in.
‘No. A world like this one, but … not.’
‘Ah,’ said Trout. ‘Alternate realities. Parallel universes. String theory. Physics.’ He thought about it. ‘I guess I don’t not believe it. But it’s hard to imagine how it would work. Practically speaking.’
‘Try.’
‘To imagine?’ Trout shrugged. He wasn’t her Trout. He was like her Trout. But he was kind of tame and fluffy, like a kitten. Like her Trout used to be, she thought guiltily. Before the magic had tunnelled through him, leaving holes where naive certainty had been. But interesting holes, Undine admitted to herself. She’d even started separating the two Trouts in her head. She called this one, the one who walked beside her now, Trevor-Trout, and her own, dear Trout was just Trout. She wondered what her Trout was doing now, in the other world. Sharply and suddenly she missed him, with a kind of bodily force. She even longed for him. She looked sideways at Trevor-Trout. She couldn’t imagine longing for Trevor. Was she … did she … have a crush? On Trout? No. It was a ridiculous thought. She pushed it away.