A Tangle of Gold

by Jaclyn Moriarty

  ‘It’s like he never stopped shooting!’ Holly said. The others hesitated.

  ‘The cook’s hat,’ Holly reminded them. ‘The bottletops. And now the silver coins.’

  Madeleine felt exhilaration. Her mother had been listening! Her mother was perfectly healthy. Cook’s hat, bottletops, silver coins. This was more than a scarf or muffler of comfort: it was a fur-lined Russian trooper hat with ear flaps! She pulled it down over her ears.

  ‘What happened to Allegra in the end?’ Belle asked.

  ‘Claire kept asking for her back. She wrote letters saying, Please let me have her. But Byron wouldn’t even let her visit her daughter. Once she wrote this: I can no longer resist the internal, inexplicable feeling which haunts me that I shall never see her any more. I entreat you to destroy this feeling by allowing me to see her. But he still wouldn’t.’

  ‘This story’s getting sad,’ Holly said. ‘I hope Claire got her daughter in the end.’

  ‘When Allegra was five, Byron heard from the convent that she was ill. Dangerously ill, they said. Then he heard that she was dead.’

  There was a deep silence.

  ‘She did not die,’ Belle said angrily.

  ‘When Byron heard about it, he went pale as a ghost and sank into a seat. The convent sent him Allegra’s things: three coloured cotton frocks, a velvet frock, a muslin frock, a cap and gloves, a string of coral, and a silver spoon and fork.’

  ‘You can stop talking now,’ Madeleine complained.

  ‘And they sent Claire a little picture of her daughter, along with a lock of her hair. Claire couldn’t see scenery after that, she could only see her lost darling. That’s another quote.’

  Outside it had begun to rain. Madeleine looked at the window. It was crowded, not with raindrops, but with fine little dashes of rain, as if someone had scratched at the glass with tiny claws.

  Everyone listened to the rain.

  ‘Well, that explains your obsession with Byron anyway,’ Belle said. ‘It’s because he was always abandoning his kids, and you have abandonment issues.’

  Jack looked at her steadily. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I have no issues.’

  ‘It’s all about your parents,’ Belle persisted. ‘They abandoned you.’

  ‘They were killed in a car crash when I was two!’

  Belle shrugged. Her mouth curled. ‘Same difference. You know nothing about them.’

  ‘What’s that got to do with anything! And I know a lot about my mother! Her name was Teresa Lina Ballomabi, and she’s my mum in all my past lives. I’ll probably get to see her in the next life along!’

  ‘Oh. Your next life along. Right.’

  Jack stood abruptly. A cushion slid to the floor. ‘I’m going,’ he said, kicking the cushion aside and heading to the door.

  Madeleine found her voice and her body rising both at once. ‘No, you are not!’ she roared. ‘You are staying right where you are and you are both going to tell me what is happening! I’ve had enough of this secret fight that you two keep not having! As if it’s not enough to have the Kingdom of Cello sealed away, and my dad silent, and she’s got a tumour trapped inside her brain, and nobody’s talking about anything!’

  She stopped. There was a sharp, new silence. It flew in stares and glances, one to the other.

  Jack was breathing hard. ‘Holly’s not sick again? Are you?’

  Holly held her palms out. ‘It’s okay. It’s just I’ve been writing some nonsense without realising it, which is maybe a sign. But I feel fine otherwise, so it’s probably nothing.’

  ‘Ah, it’s not nothing,’ Belle said. ‘It’s in your aura, Holly, just like last time. I saw it when I walked in. You’re in trouble.’

  Madeleine wrapped her arms around her head. It was as if Belle’s words had taken out a central beam and the ceiling was collapsing on her.

  ‘But you got better last time,’ Belle continued, and Madeleine straightened. Belle’s tone was so unfamiliar. ‘So you’ll be all right. You’ll get better again. Have you called the hospital?’

  That’s what the tone was. Kindness. She had never heard Belle sounding so kind before. The ceiling was falling again.

  ‘Exactly,’ Holly said. ‘If I am sick again, they’ll fix it. And yes, I’ve got an appointment, so everyone stop looking so pale and desperate. It’ll be fine. Talk about something else. Like, what is going on between you two, Jack and Belle?’

  Jack moved back into the room and sat down. ‘It’s nothing,’ he said, sounding tired. ‘It’s what always happens—Belle gets mad and starts attacking me, and I can never figure out what I’ve done wrong, and we end up fighting and then we make up. It’s happened for years. I just don’t feel like doing it again. I’ve had enough.’

  There was a long quiet. Belle was studying her fingernails.

  ‘Ah,’ she said eventually. ‘It’s—I don’t know. I wanted to know if anybody had moved in downstairs.’

  The others widened eyes in confusion.

  ‘It’s not Jack’s fault,’ Belle said, and then her voice lowered and almost disappeared as she hunched downwards and spoke to her own hands at high speed: ‘It’s just I hate secrets, too, like Madeleine, I can’t stand lies, and I see them everywhere, all the sad, crappy auras, and people walking around pretending to be happy. And I can see that Jack’s sad about his parents being dead, and I can see he’s confused about it, but he just goes around pretending to be happy and going on about past lives and horoscopes and Byron, and it makes me so mad, cause all the time . . .’ The others leaned towards her, struggling to hear. She was talking into her fists now. ‘Cause all the time, I’ve got parents, and my mother’s the worst of the liars, cause she laughs all the time, like pretending things are funny when they’re not. And she doesn’t even like me—she got bored of teaching us, I mean, what kind of mother . . . and my dad doesn’t notice me—it’s just not . . .’

  Her words turned into sounds, and the sounds became shredded sobs.

  ‘Oh, Belle.’ The others reached for her.

  After a moment, Belle shook her whole body and stilled herself. ‘I can’t stand living with my parents any more. I was thinking I could move into the flat downstairs if it’s still empty.’

  She looked up, wiping her eyes fiercely. ‘This is so stupid compared to Holly’s situation. Sorry, Holly.’

  Holly shook her head. ‘I’m going to be fine. And it’s not stupid to be upset about your parents. Their behaviour is unforgivable.’

  ‘I think you should move out,’ Madeleine said.

  Holly looked thoughtful. ‘I agree, but I don’t see how you could afford the place downstairs on your own, Belle. As a student. You could move in here with us?’

  They all looked around the tiny one-room flat.

  ‘Nah,’ said Belle. ‘Thanks, though.’

  ‘Well, we’ll figure it out,’ Holly said. ‘I’ll ask Darshana and Federico for advice. Maybe you could even move in with Darshana for a bit? She’s got more space, and she might like your help with her girls.’

  ‘You could probably get some kind of government money to pay board,’ Madeleine said. ‘And Darshana laughs a lot, but she means it.’

  Ever so faintly, Belle smiled. ‘That’s true.’

  Jack looked at her. ‘Does this mean you’re going to stop attacking me now?’

  ‘I doubt it,’ Belle said, but she sounded cheerful. ‘You haven’t admitted that your Byron obsession is all about your absent parents.’

  ‘Ah, Byron was a complicated mixture of dark and light who wrote beautiful poetry and loved people deeply and his crap parenting is nothing to do with why I spend my days thinking about him.’

  Holly stood. ‘Everyone needs a break.’ She steadied herself. ‘You should all go out for coffee. Come back later.’

  ‘I’ll stay here,’ Madeleine said.

  They listened as Belle and Jack walked out, arguing about Byron down the stairwell.

  ‘You know,’ Madeleine said, once the voices had faded, ‘I al
ways thought Belle got mad at Jack because she fancies him.’

  Holly’s face was child-like with exhaustion. ‘I think she does. More than fancies him. He’s like her other half, and she can’t stand loving someone as much as that. She’s so fierce and independent. But he loves her right back, and she’ll see that one day. And what she just said was also true. Things are always so complicated. It makes me want to lie down.’

  Madeleine took her mother’s hand and led her to the bed. Holly smiled but the smile fell immediately: a kite swept up by a sudden breeze and then dropped. Her head fell onto the pillow. Madeleine touched a fingertip to a tear on her mother’s cheek.

  ‘I didn’t like Jack’s story,’ Holly said. ‘I should never have told him to research Byron. And I hate how Belle’s parents treat her. I hate it.’

  ‘Me too. Go to sleep.’

  Madeleine sat on the couch.

  ‘I’ll get better,’ her mother promised from the bed. ‘Just like last time.’

  Except that Madeleine did not have butterfly beads this time.

  This time, she did not have Cello. She was nobody. A girl sitting on a couch.

  She thought about Byron’s little girl in the convent, waiting for her father.

  Byron himself had been abandoned by his father. I want no more of him, the man had said after a visit.

  So had Leonardo da Vinci, she remembered. And Vivaldi had worked in an orphanage, teaching the violin to abandoned children. Newton’s father was dead before he was born, and his mother left him behind with his grandparents when he was three.

  In so many different ways, children got left behind. Each of her three hallucinations had been a story of abandoned children.

  They were a warning. She saw that now. Her own father had rejected her. And soon her mother would die.

  She was going to be left alone.

  Across the room, her mother was already sleeping. Her breath seemed shallow and uncertain.

  Madeleine felt a strange rocking motion in her chest, as if a small ship was trapped in there. Impossible sobs rose in her mind. She was silent.

  She stood suddenly.

  If the hallucinations were a warning, there must be a solution! Something to stop this. She thought of the little boy Isaac in his garret room, alone with a reflection of himself. His alchemy. The idea of an elixir. Of course! She needed to return to that idea!

  Alchemy had roots in Taoism, she remembered reading. The life force was the chi. Chi leaks away. You can accumulate life force and live for centuries. Chinese alchemists believed in drinking gold. Gold was the key to extending life. She needed gold!

  All she had to do was read more of Newton, study his codes, figure out . . .

  She stopped.

  Newton had never made gold. He had never created the elixir. If he had, someone would know. He sought magic, but found science. Here, in the world, that was all there was, and science would not cure Holly. If the tumour was back, the doctors would use the same, grim words: inoperable, untreatable.

  Magic was only in the Kingdom of Cello, and that had been sealed away from her.

  A sudden shriek darted from Madeleine’s throat, a sound like a chair leg scraping a tiled floor. She stopped herself. She would not cry. If she cried, she would turn into a howling freak.

  She needed some residue from Cello. A fragment, an echo of Cello.

  Maybe, she thought, with a flash of hope, Princess Jupiter is still here?

  She sat at the computer and opened her email account.

  Nothing from Ariel Peters.

  She hit refresh. Still nothing. She hit refresh again.

  An email arrived.

  It was junk. Someone named Gianni emailing her about ‘Monty Rickard’. There was a paperclip symbol meaning an attachment.

  Monty Rickard. They used offbeat yet commonplace names, these junkmail people. Names that sounded like people you knew.

  She was angry. She opened the email to be angrier. Maybe she’d even open the attachment, she thought, and give her computer an inoperable, untreatable virus.

  *

  Dear Madeleine, she read, and the ship inside her tilted as if it might capsize.

  Monty Rickard. She did know that name. It was the name Prince Chyba used.

  This was Cello. Here was Cello.

  She took a breath of jagged-edged hope, and read.

  You don’t know me, and I don’t know you, but here we are.

  My name is Gianni and I’m a good friend of Monty Rickard’s. I met him when he moved here to Boise, Idaho.

  I want to tell you something that happened yesterday.

  Yesterday, my buddy Monty called me up and he said, ‘Gianni, I want to do something dumb.’

  ‘What’s new?’ I said or something similar, but that was just talk, he was never dumb, or hardly ever.

  ‘And I want you to come with me,’ he said next.

  ‘You got it,’ I said.

  Turned out he’d heard from the ‘Kingdom of Cello’ again, and they were offering another chance to bring him home.

  ‘This is going to sound insane,’ he said.

  ‘Shoot,’ I told him.

  ‘Ever since that last time, I’ve had this teeny tiny piece of regret, like I should have waited a bit longer.’

  ‘Teeny tiny?’ I said.

  ‘Right.’

  Then we talked a while about the exact portion of regret: I wanted him to get more precise than ‘teeny tiny’. I was, like, teeny like an ant, or like a microbe? And we got into that for a while.

  Anyway, long story short, we went to the ‘meeting place’ he’d been given. Same intersection as last time. We were five minutes early. It was empty. Nobody around.

  ‘Let’s hit the road,’ I said. ‘Nothing doing. Tick that teeny regret off your list, cos what’s life with regrets?’ Something like that.

  ‘No, let’s wait,’ he said.

  We crossed to the opposite side of the road. He wanted to do that. We stood and watched the corner, to see what would happen.

  A woman rushed along the pavement like someone in a hurry, and stopped at the corner. Breathless. We could hear this from across the road.

  Monty looked at her, and at me, and back at her.

  The woman didn’t look at us. She had a handbag over her shoulder. She stood on that corner, and unzipped the bag. Took out a pair of goggles, a bit like a welder might use. She put these on her head. Monty and I looked sideways at each other about that, then kept watching the woman.

  Now she took out this little piece that we both thought was a gun for a moment. We did a sort of instinctive ducking motion, both of us. Then we realised at the same time that it was more like a drill.

  The woman held the drill up. She didn’t switch it on. There was no sound. And then, as we watched, she made a sideways swipe at the air with it. I mean, she ran it across the air like someone with a squeegee washing a window. Only, no window.

  Monty and I looked sideways at each other again.

  The woman lowered the drill thing. Then she lifted it and did the swipe again. Around the same place in the air. Lowered it, lifted it, swiped again. This went on for a few minutes.

  Finally, she stopped and just stood there, staring at the air, her hands hanging by her side.

  A car drove by. The woman looked at it and then, as it passed, she looked beyond and saw us. She stared at us. Mostly she was staring at Monty. She stared in this really hard way at him.

  Monty gave her his grin. She sent it back as a scowl.

  Then she went back to looking at the air.

  ‘Let’s go,’ Monty said.

  We started walking back to my car. He wasn’t saying much, which isn’t like him. Monty, he knows how to talk. When he’s not talking to people, he’s talking to animals, and when he’s not talking, he’s making music. It’s like he can’t stop making noise.

  Well, that’s sort of funny what I just said.

  I’m going to tell you what happened next.

  We
stopped in a 7-Eleven. He got a Slurpee. I took a picture of him with it on my phone.

  Right after I took the picture, he handed me the Slurpee.

  ‘No, thanks,’ I said.

  But he shoved it into my hand. ‘Take it,’ he said, and that’s when I looked at him. His face was a whole other color. The kind of color you know right away this is something else, this is another place, a call-for-help color.

  ‘Sit down,’ I said, but he was already sitting, not sitting, more slumping, or falling. I don’t know. Right in the middle of the sidewalk, he was falling, and that color on his face getting worse all the time.

  I shouted at people. Someone called an ambulance. He died on the way to the hospital.

  That’s the story. That’s what happened yesterday.

  They said it was a massive coronary. Probably congenital heart disease, they said. He never knew he had it, or if he did, he never told me.

  And the reason I’m telling you this is I don’t know what else to do. Nothing like this has ever happened to me before. My grandpa died, but that was sort of awesome, I never liked him, and I got to take a week off school to go out to Sacramento for the funeral. The worst that has ever happened to me was my brother lost an arm in Iraq, and I was pretty sure nothing worse had ever happened to anyone or anything before.

  But this is worse. Monty was my best friend. I know I haven’t known him that long, but he was one of those people you know they’re true all the way through. Not in an in-your-face way, he was always funny and he liked to chill, but he was true. And he made things happen. Got us building computer games. Started a band. Got his own dog-walking business going.

  Which reminds me, who’s supposed to walk the dogs tomorrow?

  He was half-conscious in the ambulance, and he looked at me and his eyes had this sudden bright thing going and he said, ‘I know who I am.’

  ‘You bet,’ I said. ‘Just take it easy.’

  ‘It’s all true,’ he said. ‘I am Prince Chyba. I am from the Kingdom of Cello.’

  He was finding this funny. He was laughing, and each time he laughed it was like it hurt him a lot, so I was trying to shut him the hell up. The paramedics were trying to put oxygen masks or whatever over his face, and he kept pushing them off so he could laugh at me with his mad bright eyes. ‘Tell my family,’ he said, ‘that I said, hey, and tell them, don’t forget to feed the dragons in the Bay of Munting cos they go there when they’ve lost their hunting eyes.’