The Beginning of the World in the Middle of the Night

by Jen Campbell

  Over Christmas, I went into Cath-Anna’s bedroom to tell her that dinner was ready, and I found all of her old exercise books from school spread out across the floor. She’d pulled them out from the cupboard. A long time ago, Cath-Anna and I covered our school books in wallpaper that we got from a shop, so that they would look more interesting. When we were in the shop, we had to pretend that we were decorating the living room and needed wallpaper samples. Mum called this a white lie. (Why do lies have colours?) But when I went into Cath-Anna’s room, all of her books were on the floor and she’d crossed out ‘Cath’ on every single one. It was as if she didn’t want to exist any more. That did something funny to my stomach, too.

  My sister has been acting differently for quite a long time now, but Mum says we’re not supposed to talk about it. I said this to Cath-Anna and she rolled her eyes and said that not talking about things is bad. She said that silence is suffocating, like being in a box. Then she told me about a cat in a box who can exist and not exist at the same time. She went on about this for a long time, then asked me if I understood. There are two things I don’t understand about this, Miss Winter: 1. Why is a cat in a box in the first place? This is a very cruel thing to do. 2. Where is the cat going? If he is in a box, is his owner moving house or something, and how long will it take to drive there (because there is only so much air in one box)? But when I said these things to Cath-Anna, she giggled and rolled her eyes, even though my answers were questions and that’s what she said all answers should be. Sometimes I think it is better to just let her talk about the cat in the box, even when I don’t understand, because she seems happier that way. Perhaps that’s fair.

  Cath-Anna likes balance and justice and fairness. But she says that things don’t always work out like that, and that’s why we have to work hard to change things. She says making the world a better place is part of our job. But my main job is to go to school, and your job is to predict the weather, and Mum’s job is in an office, though she had to stop that for a bit to do jury service. I thought Cath-Anna would be excited about Mum doing jury service because a courthouse is a place where they sort out balance and fairness. Mum said her case was a hung jury, though, which doesn’t mean that they tried to kill themselves but that they couldn’t think of an answer to whether the person was guilty or not. Mum said it was a shame, but that it was understandable because grown-ups don’t know what they are doing most of the time. Is this true, Miss Winter? That sounds a bit scary.

  As well as being worried about my sister, I am also worried about my mum. Cath-Anna and I have noticed that Mum buys flowers when she is stressed. She stands at the kitchen table and arranges them and then rearranges them so, if you come downstairs at nine o’clock at night and ask her where Dad is, you know that the answer will be one pink lily to the left, or one to the right, or a stalk snapped in two.

  We have a lot of flowers in our house these days, Miss Winter. Our kitchen looks like a garden. I decided to use these to draw pictures for my art homework. Taylor said I was gay for doing that and then he ripped up my picture and Miss Hudson got mad and gave him detention after school. Miss Hudson’s our art teacher, and she has big red hair, which looks funny when she gets angry because it matches her red cheeks. Sometimes she gets really cross and goes through a door in the corner of the art room and doesn’t come back for a while. We always thought it was a door to a staffroom, but one day a girl in our class opened it when Miss Hudson wasn’t there and it turned out to be a cupboard. That means that Miss Hudson had been sitting in a cupboard all those times she’d been cross. Like that cat in a box. I understand why she did it, though. Sometimes having walls around you makes you feel safe. That’s why I like the garden shed and our next-door neighbour’s garage and hiding under my bed. Most people laughed when we found the cupboard but not Jewish Anna. She stamped her patent leather shoes and told Taylor to shut the hell up. Perhaps she likes small spaces, too.

  Do you like small spaces, Miss Winter?

  A few weeks ago, I had to think of something to do for my end of year art project. Miss Hudson said we had to draw or paint a picture based on the work of an artist we like. When she said this, I did what Cath-Anna told me to do, and replied with a question. I asked her why. She raised an eyebrow and said, ‘Don’t be silly, Jacob.’ But I wasn’t being silly.

  We went to the art museum on a school trip to see some paintings and find inspiration. We had to go on the tube, which seemed to cause the teachers a lot of stress. Taylor was annoying because he kept trying to stop the doors closing at every station along the way. Taylor is an arsehole.

  Some of the paintings at the museum are larger than the walls in our house. They had some sculptures, too. One was very rude. It was called Humpty Fucking Dumpty. Miss Hudson made us hurry past when she saw that and looked nervous. I think it was because there weren’t any cupboards nearby.

  We walked around the museum and looked at all the different art. There were a lot of naked people (in the paintings, not in the museum), and lots of portraits of kings and queens. My favourite picture was called The Deluge, which is the biggest painting I’ve ever seen. It was in a room called ‘The Sublime in Crisis’. Cath-Anna says that the word Sublime means ‘amazing’ but that it can also mean other things, too. She says that it can be that feeling in the pit of your stomach when you stand on a high place and look around you, and you realise how big the universe is and how small you are in comparison to it. Perhaps you have this feeling, too, Miss Winter, when you fly in a helicopter to check on the weather in the sky.

  The painting made me feel very small. Have you seen it? It’s all waves and darkness. It shows the floods after Noah got away in the ark. I stood looking at the painting for ages, and then Jewish Anna came over and held my hand and looked at it with me, which made my stomach squirm. We didn’t look at each other. We just stood there in silence, thinking about how big the world is. Then Taylor knocked over one of the sculptures and there was a big argument between Miss Hudson and one of the museum workers.

  I really liked the painting, even though it made me feel tiny, and even though it was about something that happened in the Bible and I don’t know if I believe in those things. I’m still interested in them though, because they are very dramatic, like Coronation Street, and also like the news. Sometimes you talk about floods on the news, Miss Winter. Floods like the one in this painting. Floods are scary things because we cannot control them, apart from trying to stop climate change. My grandma doesn’t believe in climate change, though. She says we should pray for our souls, instead.

  Sometimes I worry that my sister has two souls – one called Cath and one called Anna, and they’re having a battle inside of her. But I don’t know if this is scientifically possible. What do you think, Miss Winter? My sister says that she didn’t want to be called Catherine, because it’s a name my dad chose for her. She said that having that name made her feel lost at sea. She said she wanted to reinvent herself. She chose the name Anna because it is the same on both sides, and she likes balance. I asked Jewish Anna if she feels more balanced because of the way her name is written, instead of being called Catherine or something else. She thought hard about it and chewed on the end of her pencil, and then she said that she had never been called Catherine so she couldn’t really tell, which is fair enough, even if it is a hung jury.

  What about you, Miss Winter? Were you born with your last name, or did you change it because you thought it would be a good name to have for your job? If you didn’t change it, do you think being born with it meant you were destined to talk about the weather? Is winter your favourite season? I would be very interested to know your thoughts on this. I don’t know anyone else called Jacob, so I’m not really sure what my name means or whether I am destined to become something specific. I will have to wait and see.

  For my art project, I decided to draw a flooded world. I used a mixture of pencils and oil paint and watercolour because I couldn’t decide which one I liked best. I decided to put
my sister in the painting. I put her right in the middle, lying on a raft on top of the waves. I only drew her as a stick person because I’m not very good at faces and because that way it was easy to make her look the same on both sides, like her new name.

  Miss Hudson said that when we look at a painting, we are looking into our souls, and I hoped that when I looked at my painting, I would be able to look into my sister’s soul (or two souls, if that’s what she has) and finally understand who she is and why she’s changed, and why she feels lost at sea.

  But when I finished the painting and looked at it, I just saw the colour blue, and all the wobbly lines, and I didn’t understand anything better. The reflection of the sky I drew in the water had stars in it, and these shone out like silver Smarties.

  Yesterday, my mum told me that we are going to move into my aunt’s house for a while. When I asked her why, she said it was a long story and she will tell me about it soon. She says Cath-Anna will come and visit us during the summer but my dad will be left behind.

  I am excited to move but nervous, too. Where do you live, Miss Winter? My aunt’s house is on top of a hill, and she has a cat. Once we move there, I will invite Jewish Anna round for tea and, if you say it isn’t going to rain, we will draw pictures of the sky sitting in our new back garden.

  At the moment, I am writing this to you lying under my bed. My mum is packing up cardboard boxes and I am eating strawberry fruit gums. I will put one inside the envelope in case you are hungry. Are you hungry?

  I will also include my painting, as a present. I hope you like it. Please take good care of my floating sister. I love her very much.

  The world is a strange place, isn’t it, Miss Winter? I hope we get to enjoy it for a long, long time.

  How are you today? Is the sun shining?

  (I would say I am sorry for asking so many questions but I believe that questions are very important things.)

  Yours sincerely,

  Jacob Quinn

  Plum Pie.

  Zombie Green.

  Yellow Bee.

  Purple Monster.

  When you grow up, who or what do you want to be?

  Out on the road, Jack came across a man who said he’d buy his cow for a handful of magic beans. Five, to be precise. He said if Jack ran back home and buried them in his garden, a plant would grow there. A plant so tall it would make friends with the sky.

  But what if Jack took those magic beans and planted them inside himself, instead?

  Swallowed them down so they were hidden away inside him.

  Growing, growing, glowing.

  Poppy lies down and covers herself in green leaves.

  ‘Am I alive or am I dead?’ She giggles, trying not to move her mouth.

  ‘You’re both,’ I say.

  ‘Wrong! Wrong wrong wrong.’

  She writhes on the ground like an animated rag doll. A sea of aquamarine.

  Ivy’s lounging in the tree house, wearing sunglasses shaped like clouds.

  Madame Honey wanders between the tents, covered in bees, ticking things off on her clipboard. She pulls out a tape measure and lines it along the shoots poking out from Clover’s torso. She scribbles down some numbers while Clover whistles, photosynthesising in the sun.

  I count seeds in the palm of my hand.

  One.

  Two.

  Tree.

  OK, bad pun. Sorry.

  This summer, when they collected us from the train station, Heath unfurled his hair, complete with twisting vines, and the buds swam along the path behind him like a bridal trail.

  Jasmine used twenty face wipes to rid herself of the white paint clogging up her pores, and her green skin shone.

  Daisy wouldn’t stop talking until the sun went down, and the young nocturnal ones sleepily chased their shadows around the lawn.

  ‘Welcome to this year’s Camp.’ Madame Honey’s smile was sickly sweet. ‘My, my, how big you’ve grown.’

  On the first evening, we collected deadwood for a bonfire. We burned the coral petals Rose pulled from her mouth, presents from the plants growing quietly in her throat, and we told stories of our springs.

  ‘I’m working at the greengrocer,’ Heath told us. ‘Trying to save up money for a trip.’

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘I want to find the umdhlebe.’

  ‘The umdhlebe?’

  ‘It’s a poisonous tree that feeds on everything around it,’ Heath said. ‘It hasn’t been seen in two hundred years but I bet I could find it.’

  ‘Why would you want to find a poisonous tree?’ Ivy snapped, hanging upside down from the tyre rope swing.

  ‘Why not? I read a book that says botanists in South Africa found it, its soil fertilised by all the things it’s killed.’

  ‘Cheerful!’

  ‘What will you do with it when you find it?’

  Heath looked a little embarrassed. ‘I don’t know,’ he shrugged. ‘I guess I want to study it. See why it’s feared. Perhaps sit with it for a while.’

  Rose coughed and a tide of petals fell into the flames.

  In the smoke, I saw a lonely tree, the ground around it littered with skeletons.

  Lily didn’t come back this year. No one got on at her stop.

  We looked all over the train, including the dark, damp corners, where she sometimes liked to hide.

  When we arrived, Madame Honey said: ‘Lily’s parents haven’t returned our calls.’

  And we all visibly wilted.

  Lily was one of the best of us.

  At the age of eleven, her hair turned white overnight and she started humming funeral songs.

  That’s the year they brought her here.

  She always smelled of peppermint.

  Last August, she swallowed apple seeds behind the shower block and didn’t deny it when she was caught.

  She was obsessed with HTML colour codes called hex triplets, and we rolled those across our tongues to try and taste the witchcraft. Soil up to our elbows, creating earth angels in the dust, listing our favourite colours.

  They say that when you grow up you shouldn’t have things like favourite colours because there are more important things in life. But that is bullshit. Lily and I had competitions, reciting shades off by heart:

  Light Sea Green #20B2AA

  Medium Orchid #BA55D3

  Olive Drab #6B8E23

  Thistle #D8BFD8

  Seashell #FFF5EE

  Burly Wood #DEB887

  Tomato #FF6347

  Ghost White #F8F8FF

  We spat colours into the woods so the trees could swallow them.

  We planned to paint the world.

  And now we don’t know where she’s gone.

  We look for her in the undergrowth, and down by the stream. We scan the newspaper she used to love, in case she’s somehow made the headlines. While flicking through, the ink staining our fingertips, I remember the times we’d press flowers between the pages of a book of fables, trying to guess the type of tree it was made from. Pressing ourselves between the stories.

  Ivy steals Madame Honey’s mobile phone and we try to find Lily on the Internet, but we don’t know her last name, and time and time again search engines simply show us the flowers she is named after.

  But Lily isn’t just a flower. Lily is our friend.

  If Jack had taken those magic beans and planted them inside himself, he could have become one of us. He could have found himself in the headlines for different reasons, plastered to the side of Lily’s tent, where she used to stick all the important news.

  A doctor in Beijing has found a dandelion growing inside the ear canal of a sixteen-month-old girl. It had partially flowered, and was said to be very itchy. A Russian man, suspected of having cancer, was found to have a small fir tree growing inside his left lung. When they took it out, he took it home.

  These are our people.

  Once, in Spain, a lily was found growing from the heart of a boy who couldn’t read.

  We have
always tumbled out of newspapers and myth.

  Hyacinths flowered from the blood of Apollo.

  Carnations bloomed from the tears of Mary.

  Snowdrops are said to be the hands of the dead.

  You have to find us between the lines.

  How strange they think we are.

  Madame Honey passes out chalk, crayons and felt-tip pens.

  ‘I want you all to sit and draw for thirty minutes,’ she says.

  ‘Draw what?’ Clover scowls, her hair now peppered with flowers.

  ‘Whatever comes to mind,’ Madame Honey beams. ‘No conferring.’

  So, we pick up some colours and we all draw Lily.

  Sleeping Lily.

  Dancing Lily.

  Shouting Lily.

  Tiger Lily.

  Lily climbing up a beanstalk, her hair blending with the clouds.

  Lily locked up in a tower.

  Lily talking with the trees.

  Lily once told me that trees communicate underground. That they share food via symbiosis and don’t tell humans that they’re doing it.

  ‘You just think you’re looking at a forest, when you look at a forest,’ Lily said. ‘But that’s not it, not really. The trees are talking. You can’t see it, but they’re talking. Forests aren’t terrifying places. They just speak a different language.’

  Forest Green #228B22

  ‘Come on, Fern,’ Jasmine nudges me. ‘You’re the storyteller. Where do you think Lily is?’

  Well. Once upon a time, a king and queen were trying to have a baby. They tried for a long time, but each time the baby died. Then, many years later, the queen fell pregnant again. This time, she felt sure that things were different. She craved food she’d never tasted before: pickled seaweed, sour radishes, honeycomb and even flowers. One of the flowers the queen loved to eat was called the Rampion Bellflower, also known as the Rapunzel. It didn’t grow anywhere inside the palace grounds. It grew just beyond, in a secluded patch of earth, over the palace walls.