Arcadia

by James Treadwell

  He’s never seen an adult stare the way Silvia does, not even Kate. The thing with adults is you can tell they’re not really interested when they talk to you, they’re actually thinking about something else. Not Silvia.

  “Little man,” she finally says. “ ‘What’s the use?’ For men it’s never enough to know anything. Always everything is to use.” She flicks her eyes upwards, indicating the deck, where Lino and Per are. “Like them,” she says, with heartfelt emphasis, as if she’s exposing their most terrible secret. She slides close to Rory again, holding her balance as the cabin rocks and shudders. “I told you I have a gift? You remember?”

  “Yes.”

  “My teacher, who taught me to speak English, liked to explain this word. Gift. It’s not tool. It’s not power. It’s”—she cups her hands and presents them to Rory, as if offering him rainwater—“like this. A thing given. A free thing. Not for something else. You understand?”

  She can tell from his face that he doesn’t. She leans back and shrugs.

  “Let me tell you about Lino,” she says. “Then maybe you see what a gift is. I told you, his name means little bird? It’s not his real name, of course. Not from when he was born. He has a proper name, Antonio I think. But his mother and father call him Uccellino from when he is a small child. Because even when he’s this small he likes to climb up things and jump. All the time. He climbs from . . . What do you call the bed for a baby?”

  “Cot.”

  “He climbs from his cot and jumps out to the ground. He climbs onto chairs, tables, jumps off. Like he wants to fly. When he’s a bit older he climbs where the books are, high up. He’s from a nice family. Nice house, lots of books, up to the ceiling. They find him”—she stretches a hand above her head—“here. Curled up on the edge. He’s like this all the time. At first the nice family think it’s a joke, it’s funny, their little boy who likes climbing up things. They give him a special name. On the floors they put . . .” She pats the frayed foam padding of the seat impatiently.

  “Cushions?”

  “Cushions. They put cushions so he can jump and not hurt himself. They watch him, make videos, show their friends. Then one day he breaks his arm jumping from a window in the house. Now it’s not a joke anymore. They’re angry; they’re frightened. They tell him to stop but he doesn’t. He dreams all the time that he is flying. So they take him to doctors. Still he doesn’t stop. They find him sleeping on the roof. If he falls off the roof sleeping he will break his head open, so they put bars on the windows, they lock him in his room, OK, but he has to go to school, he has to play outside, they can’t stop that, and all the time he’s climbing trees, climbing walls. High, high up, as far as he can go. So the nice parents and the doctors, they decide the boy is mad.” She swivels a finger in the air beside her head. “They send him to a place, I don’t know how to say it in English. For mad children.”

  “Loony bin.”

  She raises an eyebrow slightly, but goes on. “It’s a nice place, I think. Not like my orphanage. His parents love him; they have money. They come to see him every day. So this is where he grows up. A locked room with bars on the windows. Hands tied like this when he goes outside to play, so he can’t climb. When he can’t climb his dreams get worse. He dreams he’s a bird, flying everywhere. Then, one night, he wakes up, it’s dark, and he’s outside, high above the town. He can see it all there below him. It’s not a dream, he’s sitting in the branch of a tree. He’s far away but he can see the window of his room in the . . .”

  “Loony bin.”

  “He can see the bars on the window. It’s summer; the glass is open. He can see his bed inside, where he was sleeping, but he’s not in the bed, he’s holding the branch of a tree with his feet. Then. He jumps.”

  Rory watches her make a long gliding motion with one hand. She looks at him as if to check whether he’s understood.

  “Then what?”

  “He jumps. From the branch of a tree, high. He doesn’t fall. He flies, like in his dream. All over the town.”

  Rory doesn’t say anything, so she shrugs again. “Then he wakes up again, in his room, behind the bars. But he’s naked. His nightclothes are lying on the bed and he wakes up on the floor.”

  She seems to have finished, so Rory says, “Wow.”

  “Let me ask you a question.”

  “OK.”

  “You met Lino on your island?”

  “Yeah.”

  “After the storm.”

  He remembers: in the afternoon the sky turned green and then black, and that night he was in the Abbey because his mother had gone to Maries, and that’s when Lino jumped on him in the dark. “Yeah.”

  “Then later you saw our boat on the rock and you helped me and Per come ashore.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And Lino was with you already.” He nods as best he can. His neck’s getting stiff and achey from the way he’s bracing himself against the boat’s constant heaving. “So how did Lino come to your island?”

  “Right.”

  She pauses.

  “That’s my question,” she says.

  “Oh.”

  “You have to learn to think if you travel with us. Think. Me and Per came after, on the boat, when Lino lit a fire to show us where he was. How did Lino come? There is no other boat, no planes, no cars.”

  He remembers Lino pointing up at the sky. Like this one.

  “Flew?” Rory says.

  Silvia smiles at him.

  “So Lino can fly.”

  “Sometimes Lino is an owl,” she says.

  “He can turn into an owl?” The boat tips down the back of a particularly steep wave and thuds into its base, jarring the breath out of Rory’s chest. Even Silvia grits her teeth for a moment. They hear Lino whistle out on deck, Mamma mia.

  “No,” she says. “He can’t turn into an owl. Listen to what I tell you. I said: sometimes he’s an owl. You see how it’s different?”

  Rory says he does, though he really doesn’t feel like being interrogated at the moment.

  “Lino has a gift, you see, like me. Not a power.”

  She’s looking at him expectantly, so he says, “Oh.”

  “So maybe I shouldn’t tell you that I can see the future. Not like that, ‘I can see the future.’ I should say instead: sometimes I see the future.”

  She doesn’t say anything for a while after that. It’s awful when there’s nothing to distract him, so eventually he asks her:

  “What am I going to do?”

  What he means is Who’s going to look after me, where am I going to sleep, what will there be to eat, where is my home now? But she grins like it’s a joke, snapping out of a distracted trance.

  “You ask me this because I’m a gypsy?” She holds a hand out. “First you must cross my palm with silver.”

  He stares down, feeling horribly small.

  “Ah.” She relents. “I understand. Don’t be afraid.” She rubs his arm encouragingly. “We take care of you.”

  “Will I get back home?” He’d do anything not to cry but he feels so bleak all of a sudden.

  “This I don’t know,” she says, mistaking his whimper for an actual question. “But listen. Home, it’s not always where you think it is. Especially when you’re young. Home is the place where you come to rest. It’s maybe far away from where you begin, where your mother and father are. For me it’s not the orphanage where they are cruel to me, or the camp where they beat me all the time. It’s very far away. For you too, maybe it’s not that small island.” He looks up and finds that she’s once again staring at him with alarming intensity.

  “Am I coming with you then?”

  She looks around with an expression that says Isn’t it obvious? Here you are, before relenting again. “For sure we’re not going back. We will be OK. All of us. Me and Lino, we walked a long, long way together. Across Italy, France. We know what to do.” She taps him with the back of her hand. “You can help us in England. You speak better than me, yo
u can help talk to people. Hmm?”

  “OK,” he says, shyly, unable to imagine any of this.

  “And you have a gift too.”

  “I don’t. Do I?”

  She’s clearly not joking now. “You don’t know it. But you do.”

  “I’m just normal.”

  “Don’t argue with me,” she says, without rancor. “I see it.” She lowers her voice a little, though there’s no possible way Lino or Per could hear anything over the thrum of the sea and the boat’s spindly rattling. “I recognize you.” She nods at him as if to contradict his blank stare. “I see the truth.”

  The bleak feeling recedes a bit.

  “Maybe I can help you find . . .”

  “I think you can,” she says.

  “That ring. You talked about.”

  “Like I tell you,” she says. “Our roads go together.”

  “Where is it?” He’s muttering too, without realizing. “Is it ­hidden?”

  She shrugs. “In England.”

  “England’s big, isn’t it?”

  “Close. I know we’re coming close.”

  “How d’you know?” She frowns at him, and he realizes it’s a stupid question. “What happens when we find it?”

  “Ah.” She barely mouths the word. Her eyebrows lift high. It’s another shrug, but a mysterious one: Who can say?

  “Are you going to . . .”

  “What?”

  “You know. Rule the world.”

  There’s a startled pause, and then she throws back her head and laughs and laughs, shrieking girly laughter. Lino comes scurrying to the hatch and puts his head in to see what’s happening. Rory turns away, cruelly ashamed, sick to his stomach and his heart, while Lino and Silvia have a rapid conversation in Italian, she struggling for breath still. She must be explaining what Rory said, because Lino barks his own delighted laugh when she reaches the punch line. “Évero!” he says. “’Obbits!” He scampers down into the cabin and says something to Silvia.

  “He says I make you sad,” she says. “He tells me not to laugh at you.”

  Rory won’t speak.

  “Maybe you’re right anyway.” Now at last she sounds like a normal adult, trying to cheer him up, not really meaning what she’s saying. It unlocks his misery at last and he starts to feel properly sorry for himself. He starts sniffling. Lino makes a long sympathetic noise, ehhhh.

  “You come look,” he says. It’s the way people talk to Pink when she’s crying about something stupid, trying to distract her. “Eh? Up. I want you see.” He waggles Rory’s shoulders gently. “Come with Lino. England!”

  Silvia starts up and squashes her face to a grimy porthole.

  “No no no. Come, up.”

  “Leave me alone,” Rory mumbles.

  But it’s impossible to sulk at either of them. Silvia doesn’t care enough, and Lino doesn’t understand, and anyway he keeps on jiggling and cajoling Rory until there’s nothing for it but to wobble to his feet, clinging to handholds as he goes, and follow the man up the companionway ladder. One look at Per, unmoving at the wheel, brandishing his walking stick in the air like a weapon, his long hair and beard matted and dark with spray, and he stops feeling sorry for himself again. He doesn’t dare.

  “Ecco,” Lino says, crouching and pointing ahead, between the underside of the boom and the port bow.

  It’s a cloud-colored smudge, but big, solid: a barrier in the sea, a wall on the horizon. The Mainland.

  For a year and a half it’s been no more than a thumbnail blur in the far distance on a clear day. As far as Rory’s concerned it’s been as remote as the moon: a place they say people once went to, in The Old Days, but now separated from the world by a vast and deadly waste. Now here it is, in sight and in range.

  His thoughts flip back suddenly to a different life, a different Rory. He’s getting into the back of a car, holding a bag of chips. At the same time his sister’s opening the front door of the car. She has a bag of chips too but hers have vinegar so they stink. They’re taking her to look at a big school on the Mainland. In front of their car is a whole row of other cars lined up along the side of a paved street; the street is lined in turn with shops, all bright clean colors with clear windows full of stuff. The backseat of the car is ridges of fuzzy fabric, and they catch his trousers as he tries to slide in: that’s the exact moment he’s remembering, the pinpoint, but knotted around it are a hundred other impossible things, chips, vinegar, cars, brightly colored stuff, school, his father and his sister, the Mainland, the whole business of arriving and leaving and traveling. In that moment all those things seem not only possible but ordinary, boring almost. But they’re not, they’re all as fantastic as flights to the moon.

  And yet there it is. It’s where they’re going.

  The Mainland disappears as the boat staggers down the slope of another wave. Rory clutches frantically at a cleat. He wants to retreat to the cabin but Silvia’s pushing up below him, trying to come out and see as well. He squirms around and finds himself looking up at Per.

  There’s a flicker in the air around his stick, an orange flash.

  If anything Per looks even bigger than he did on dry land, bulked out by a puffy jacket and a set of stained and oily overalls which have gone on over the rest of his clothes like armor. His lips are moving, silently. Over his head things like scraps of flame torn from the edge of a fire shimmer in and out of visibility at the speed of an eyeblink.

  “Stowaway,” he barks, without averting his squint-eyed stare from the horizon even for a moment, so that it’s a good while before Rory realizes that this is an English word, directed at him. Silvia’s nudging him out by Per’s feet, into the cockpit, exposed to the swing of the sea and the spitting air.

  “Say hello,” she says.

  “Heya,” Per says, without looking and without warmth.

  “Rory is traveling with us.” The boom twitches and clanks above his head.

  “Another mouth,” Per says. The top of his stick sways as he leans on the wheel. Twists and curlicues of sunset light appear out of nothing and vanish as soon as they appear.

  “Small mouth!” Lino says, pulling himself up to sit on the edge of the cockpit, where he balances with acrobatic ease. “Little food. Easy.”

  “What is that?” Rory blurts out. Now that he’s out on deck he can see that the phantasmal ribbons in the air are all around the boat, circling the hull too quickly for the eye to catch up with them.

  Per looks down at him at last and sees him gazing at the stick.

  “You never touch it,” he says. Neffer is how he says it.

  “Per is keeping us safe from the sirene,” Silvia says, or shouts; human voices are nothing next to the cacophony of sailing. She’s halfway out of the hatch, clinging on as she searches the horizon for the Mainland. Rory jams his back against the side of the cockpit as hard as he can, wedging his feet and hands against anything solid he can find, as the sea rears up and all but rocks their pathetically little boat sideways. The grey surface with its windblown dusting of spray heaves and slides around them. Silvia works herself round to face him. “I told you he was a sailor? His ship was wrecked, like many others. He got in a tiny thing—I don’t know the word. For saving people. Like a tent floating. He was there for a day and a night, by himself, in the middle of the sea, waiting to die. He was bored waiting so he opened the tent to let the sirene find him and kill him and he saw it there, floating in the sea. This wood.”

  “Wood?”

  “Piece of wood.”

  “That stick?”

  “Stick. He picks it up from the water and it speaks to him.”

  “No more,” Per grumbles. He sounds angry, but then as far as Rory can tell he always sounds angry. Rory’s looking at the stick. He didn’t use the right word. It’s far too long and thick for a walking stick, even for a man the size of Per. It’s too heavy, too serious. The lines carved into it look serious too. They’re not scratches, they’re like words, but not written in prope
r letters, not the kind you can read. The stick is in fact—the word pops out of the pages of books or the panels of comics—a staff. A magic staff, like wizards carry. Per’s a wizard. He’s making the air dance with fiery light and keeping the sea-rainy away. Per’s a wizard, and Lino can turn into an owl, and Silvia knows the future.

  “Is good,” Lino says, patting Rory’s shoulder energetically. “Boy will be interprete. England boy.”

  “Have to land first,” Per says.

  “Do we have enough time?” Silvia asks him.

  “Mmf,” he grunts. “Perhaps.”

  “Eh.” Lino makes the sound into a little jolt of reproach. “Easy, easy. Look how near! England!”

  “Perhaps,” Per repeats. “Go watch.”

  “Si si, capitano.” Lino trots to the bows as easily as if he were jogging down the Lane by the church.

  Silvia glares at Per. “If they leave us before we reach land you will have to let me sail.”

  Per dismisses this with another grunt. He’s got a very expressive collection of grunts. This one manages to pour wordless scorn on the mere thought that someone other than him might be competent at the helm.

  “Do you know this coast?”

  “No,” Per says. “Doesn’t matter. No time to find haven. First strand we see.”

  Silvia looks worried. The sail loosens, slams tight, cracking the boat into the side of a wave with a ferocious thump.

  “I want to go back down,” Rory says. Per grunts a laugh.

  Silvia helps Rory to the ladder. “Not much longer,” she says in his ear as he lowers himself past her. Things are clattering around in the cabin as if the whole boat’s about to shake itself apart. He realizes he doesn’t care about being kidnapped, doesn’t care about his mother, doesn’t care about never going home, doesn’t care about anything except getting out of this sea and off this boat onto solid ground. Anywhere will do, though he really hopes they end up landing near that place with the bags of hot chips.

  * * *

  “Vieni,” Lino says, appearing in the hatch again. “Come. See.”