Nigel Finkwatter, who had been watching the battle from the turret of his home, saw the falling gold and scrambled out onto his roof to gather it up. Then he saw it had also fallen onto the roofs of his neighbours. They were all much too busy watching the battle to notice him. So Finkwatter stuffed coins into every pocket. He took off his jacket and used it as a sack into which he could scoop yet more coins. Then he took off his socks and shoes and crammed them with coins. He sang as he went, surprised that he had not anticipated the profit that could be made from a battle.
About him vercaka were dropping like flies.
‘I think we’re going to be all right,’ Vivienne said to the Mayor.
She spoke too soon. For at that very moment two vercaka, bigger and possibly wiser than the rest, swooped in over the town. They were not distracted by silver fish and golden coins. One of them saw a man on a roof with no shoes or socks and scooped him up, flipped him about and swallowed him feet first.
Before he disappeared down its gullet, he was heard to call out, ‘Don’t you know who I am? I am Nigel Finkwatter, I am …’ and then he was gone. The bird flew on only for a moment, before it was poisoned by the gold in Finkwatter’s jacket and socks and pockets. The bird fell like a boulder into the Mabanquo River and was eaten by fish, which was entirely appropriate.
The very last of the birds soared over the Letitia Mabanquo statue and the piles of dead vercaka that lay all around it. On the balcony above the council chambers, Miranda Templeton was putting to her lips a horn with which she intended to announce the city’s victory. Perhaps it was her pink jacket, or perhaps it was the height of the Mayor’s fascinating hat, but whatever it was, something about Miranda Templeton caught the interest of the last vercaka. With deadly intent, it swooped in and plucked her up as if she were a cherry on a tree.
Vivienne leapt onto Baxterr’s shoulders.
‘Come on, doggo!’ she cried.
Baxterr spread his wings and sped through the air like a missile. Vivienne could see the Mayor screaming and kicking in an attempt to get free. Vivienne’s first arrow struck the vercaka’s head, her second glanced off one of its grubby wings, but still the bird refused to let go its catch. It banked and then soared towards the other world in the dented sky. It flew faster, wings beating furiously, but Baxterr caught up with it. Growling and snarling, the great dog ripped at the bird’s wing with his teeth and, for a moment, it appeared that the vercaka would let the Mayor go. But it did not. It circled about and mounted a counter-attack, hurtling towards Baxterr and Vivienne.
Vivienne screamed. ‘I think it’s changed its mind about what it wants for dinner.’
As the bird flew at Baxterr, its beak opened and Miranda fell. Baxterr changed course, plunging downwards towards the falling figure of the Mayor.
‘Food, food, food,’ squawked the maddened vercaka.
Baxterr swooped underneath Miranda, who fell onto his wide back, her hat all askew but, amazingly, still firmly pinned to her hair.
‘Hold on!’ Vivienne cried.
Then the vercaka was upon them. Vivienne and Miranda braced for the impact of the bird’s outstretched talons.
But then the world jolted. Everything moved, though not in any way anyone had ever experienced before. Seventeen faces fell from seventeen clocks. Twelve spires crumbled. The Mabanquo River lurched and slopped, and in one movement washed away jetties and docks and nests of ducks. There was a most peculiar grinding noise, and then, as people watched – wide-eyed and with mouths agape – the huge world that had crashed into theirs slid away. Shards of ice fell from the sky and one pierced the very last vercaka, stabbing it right through its head. The creature dropped onto the upward-pointing finger of Letitia Mabanquo in her shimmering fountain.
And at that moment, Baxterr, with Vivienne and the Mayor upon his back, pricked up his ears and gave a whimper.
‘What is it, doggo?’ Vivienne asked. ‘Are you hurt? No?’
‘Did you hear something?’ asked Miranda anxiously. ‘Is it more birds?’
It was not more birds, and Baxterr had not heard anything, precisely. What he had felt was not a sound, nor a smell, but a feeling, as if Tuesday were close by. Baxterr peered down into the city, where the residents were beginning to venture out from their homes and turn their faces upwards to gaze at the strange and beautiful sight of the other world disappearing into the sky, but Tuesday was not among them. He sniffed deeply. He could detect nothing of Tuesday’s scent. Yet she had been close. He was certain. But where?
Down in the Mabanquo Square, people watched as the blue sphere they had always thought of as their sky sealed itself once more. Into the awed silence that followed, a horn sounded. And then an enormous, magnificent, golden Winged Dog soared to the square. The people of the City of Clocks clapped and cheered and broke into song. It was a truly magnificent sight, and nobody who saw Baxterr come in to land beside the fountain could possibly have guessed how heavy was his heart in that moment. For although he had helped to save the City of Clocks from the vercaka, all Baxterr could think of was that he had failed to rescue the person he loved the most.
High above the Conservatory, the world of Vivienne Small swayed against the far end of Tuesday’s boathook. It felt like having Jupiter on the end of a string. Already the icy ocean world had drifted away and out of sight in the swirling mass of globes. Tuesday watched in wonder as the glassy edge of Vivienne’s sky righted itself to an almost perfect curve. Still piercing the sky on one side were the jagged peaks of the Mountains of Margalov. She would need to fix this the next time the world came in for maintenance.
Still holding the loop of the world fast with her boathook, Tuesday wondered where Baxterr and Vivienne were, and what they had been doing at the moment the worlds came apart. As she tried to pull the world down, a multitude of other worlds got in the way, each one of them moving at its own speed. Some of the smaller ones orbited around like racing cars on a track, while some of the larger ones drifted by in lazy figure eights. It was like a huge, three-dimensional puzzle.
On the couch, Garnet stirred a little in his sleep.
‘You are the sky,’ he muttered. ‘Everything else is just weather.’
And while this made little sense to Tuesday, it nevertheless soothed her nerves. She pulled on the boathook, causing Vivienne’s world to inch down through the sky. She only narrowly missed a tiny world full of bright red flames, then had to rapidly swerve sideways to avoid a very large, dark world that sparkled with galaxies of stars.
‘The obstacle is the path,’ Garnet muttered in his sleep.
Tuesday turned back to her task, concentrating as hard as she could.
‘The obstacle is the path,’ she repeated, trying to keep her breathing even and her gaze focused.
And then something surprising was happening. The others worlds were shifting about, seeming to make a pathway. Tuesday drew the world down, nearer and nearer, and soon it was so close, looming above the Conservatory, that it obscured the view of almost all the other worlds. Hauling on the boathook, Tuesday towed it to the end of the narrow jetty, where she felt it click into place. She let the boathook fall to the floor, and took off at a run.
‘I’m coming, doggo,’ she said.
Chapter Twenty–three
The City of Clocks lost many people, many cats and even more fish on the day the vercaka were defeated. All were mourned, and all were honoured. In time, some new features were added to Letitia Mabanquo’s fountain. Standing on her shoulder was a cat, and at her feet were two gleaming silver fish.
For days after the battle, the City of Clocks was alight with fires burning the dead vercaka (‘If only they tasted delicious,’ so many people commented, but those who had tried vercaka assured their friends that they were tough old birds with a nasty bitter taste to their flesh.) There was bird slime to clean up and many buildings and clocks to repair; there were ponds and fountains to scrub clean.
Also, there was a lot of celebrating and feasting to be do
ne. The Mayor put on a great banquet in the square and invited every resident, cat and human alike. They ate, and played music, and read poetry, told stories and danced as if every one of them was young, until morning.
Every coin that could be collected from the insides of vercaka, or the few fish that had fallen into gutters and had gone uneaten, or the coins that had fallen from the fish rocket, were gathered up and redistributed. It was a thing of wonder for years to come, and caused many songs to be sung and legends to be born, that the gold returned to each resident was far more than any of them had contributed in the first place. And if, in the years to come, Mrs Finkwatter was happier, and her children better fed, it was certainly not because she kept all the gold in her husband’s den to herself. Where it went, only she and the Mayor would ever know.
By the time the official histories of the great battle of the City of Clocks were written, most of the historians had decided that the great Winged Dog that had soared through the skies and alighted in the square at the moment of victory had been a shared vision, a magnificent illusion shared by the overjoyed citizens. After all, said the historians, the dog had never again been seen in the skies above the City of Clocks, nor even in its streets. There were people who said they had seen the dog shrink to the size of a large tomcat, but the historians argued that, even if this had been so, no such animal had ever again been seen in the city streets. Some recalled that at the height of the victory celebrations they had seen Vivienne Small, battle-weary and bleeding, walking out of the square in the direction of the home of the Mayor. And ever after, when anybody asked Vivienne about the great Winged Dog, she only shrugged her shoulders and said, ‘What dog?’
For the record, what happened was this. As Vivienne and Baxterr trod the road between the square and the Mayor’s house, Baxterr caught a scent that caused him to lift his dejected head.
You may not ever have thought of this, but one of the reasons blind dogs, and deaf dogs, get around so well is that what dogs see and hear isn’t even the half of it. It’s what they can smell that really matters. A dog’s sense of smell is so good that they can even smell if you’re happy or sad, anxious or angry. A dog will never be fooled by one identical twin pretending to be the other, because to a dog, every single person in the world has a smell as unique as a fingerprint. And a dog can smell out their special person, even if they are underwater, or quite deep underground.
‘Ruff, ruff, ruff, ruff!’ barked Baxterr, dashing ahead of Vivienne and then stopping abruptly at a door.
‘What is it, doggo?’ Vivienne asked.
The door was quite ordinary. Painted green, it was set into the garden wall of the Mayor’s house. Being a garden door it had no number, nor – Vivienne noticed – a handle. She stared at it and then at Baxterr, who was shivering with excitement. She remembered this door. She had climbed the wall, but the door led only into the Mayor’s garden.
‘Doggo? What is it?’ Vivienne asked.
Baxterr was worrying his nose into the gap under the door, as if he could smell rabbit or blueberry pancakes.
‘What is it, doggo?’ Vivienne laughed. ‘What are you trying to tell me?’
As you know, Baxterr was a dog of exceedingly good manners. But he forgot every single one of those manners when the green door to the Mayor’s garden swung open, and out stepped Tuesday. He hurled himself into her arms with the energy of a puppy, licking her all over her face, and she held him so tight she almost squeezed the breath out of him.
‘I know, I know,’ Tuesday cried.
Baxterr kept on licking her cheek, but if he could have spoken, he would have told her how small were her chances that she would ever be allowed out of his sight again.
‘You know,’ said Tuesday after a moment, holding her dog close, ‘you really smell.’
And he did. His golden-brown fur smelled disgustingly of fish and gold and vercaka. Tuesday didn’t care one bit.
‘Ahem,’ someone coughed.
It was Vivienne Small, leaning against the stone wall of the Mayor’s garden. Tuesday noticed that her knee was bleeding, her clothes were torn and there was a savage graze across one cheek. Tuesday would have liked to hug her, but instead she reached out and gently pulled a tangled lock of Vivienne’s dark hair.
‘We looked, and we looked, and we looked for you,’ Vivienne said with a scowl. ‘You can’t have been in the Mayor’s garden for all of this time. We would have found you.’
Vivienne tried to sustain the cross expression on her face, but a smile was twiddling around at the corners of her mouth.
‘Thanks for taking care of my dog,’ Tuesday said with a grin, and Vivienne couldn’t contain herself any longer. She threw herself at Tuesday and Baxterr and enclosed them both in a swift, bony embrace.
‘Actually, I think he took care of me,’ Vivienne said. ‘So, where have you been?’
‘I don’t know how to answer that,’ said Tuesday truthfully.
And Vivienne, who in her heart of hearts knew that Tuesday was in some important respect not at all like anyone else in her world, realised that she didn’t need to know. What mattered was that Tuesday had reappeared.
‘We took care of those stupid vercaka,’ Vivienne said, changing the subject.
‘Tell me,’ said Tuesday.
And so the girls sat, with their backs against the sun-warmed stone, with Baxterr panting happily between them, and talked. Tuesday ruffled Baxterr’s fur when Vivienne described how he had torn through the streets of the City of Clocks with almost every single one of its cats in pursuit of him. She shook her head at the stupidity of Nigel Finkwatter and was stirred by the bravery of Miranda Templeton. She had her heart in her mouth as Vivienne related how close Vivienne and Baxterr had come to being captured in the vicious beak of a vercaka, and she laughed at the tale of the great silver fish launching its deadly cargo into the sky.
‘You were amazing,’ she said to Vivienne.
‘Well, if the worlds hadn’t come apart at precisely the moment they did, then Baxterr and I would have been amazingly dead,’ Vivienne said. ‘Well that was a piece of luck.’
‘Yes, I guess it was,’ agreed Tuesday.
A small silence settled between them, for both of them knew what came next.
‘I have to go, Vivienne,’ Tuesday said.
‘Through there?’ Vivienne indicated the door.
‘Yes. Through there.’
Vivienne nodded.
‘I’ll see you again, won’t I?’ Vivienne asked.
‘Every chance,’ said Tuesday, wondering how soon she and Baxterr might be able to take a walk in the world of Vivienne Small. She wondered how long it would be before this world came in for routine maintenance. How much, she pondered, should a Gardener help with the clean-up in the City of Clocks, and how much ought she leave for the people of the city to do for themselves?
Tuesday scrambled to her feet and it was only then that she observed something rather troubling about the green door. It had no handle. Nor any keyhole. She bit her bottom lip in concern. And that was when Baxterr stood back and barked, very precisely, three times. At his command, the door swung open. Through it, Tuesday could see the jetty stretching up towards the glass door that led into the Conservatory. Vivienne, however, saw nothing but a corridor of pale mist.
‘You will be all right, won’t you?’ Vivienne asked.
‘You bet,’ Tuesday said. ‘Goodbye, Vivienne. Don’t stop having adventures.’
‘Never,’ said Vivienne, with a small salute. ‘Not ever.’
It seemed to Vivienne, then, that Tuesday and Baxterr simply disappeared into the whiteness of the mist. And almost the instant that the green garden door swung closed, Vivienne began to forget.
It wasn’t a bad sort of forgetting. Not like somebody having a car accident and waking up with amnesia. Or like pushing a bad experience deep inside yourself and hoping it will never surface again. Rather, it was like Vivienne’s mind gently moved Tuesday and Baxterr from the very front and ce
ntre of things to a drawer at the back – one that she wouldn’t be opening for some time.
This is how it is in the place where stories come from. For it is the job of characters to forget about us, their writers, and to get on with their lives and adventures as if we had never visited them at all. But perhaps, sometimes, we leave traces of ourselves in their hearts and minds, a bit like the way a dream leaves a feeling behind, even if we can’t remember what it was about.
And so it was that a few minutes after the garden door swung shut, Vivienne Small was a little perplexed to find herself standing alone in the sun outside the Mayor’s garden. There was a green door in the wall. It had no handle and no keyhole. When she scrambled up the wall and looked over, there was nothing unusual to see, only the Mayor’s neat and tidy garden, with beds for flowers and beds for vegetables, fruit trees, nut trees and a swing seat. She sat on the wall, puzzled. She felt as if she had forgotten something important.
Overhanging the wall was the branch of a lemon tree. It was weighed down by ripe, yellow fruits and Vivienne had a sudden desire to eat one. She reached out for the one she liked best, and as she did so, she saw something moving in among the tree’s glossy green leaves. It was a rat, and a very young one too, small and sleekly black.
Vivienne saw the rat, and the rat saw Vivienne, and for a moment the pair sat quite still, regarding one another. Then the rat nosed forward, sniffing in the small girl’s direction. Vivienne held out her hand by way of invitation and the rat stepped onto it.
‘Well, you’re a brave one,’ Vivienne said, then laughed. ‘I suppose you have to be, living in a city once full of cats.’
The rat ran up her arm and perched on her shoulder. Vivienne patted it.
A Week without Tuesday Page 17