Unconventional

by Maggie Harcourt

  “Whassup?” Sam grabs my elbow before I can move.

  “The Brother’s here,” I whisper, trying not to look in his general direction. Never make eye contact with the Brother. Eye contact is how he saps your very soul.

  “Oh, shitbiscuits.” Sam immediately adopts a rabbit-inthe-headlights expression. “He isn’t, is he?”

  “Right there, by the reg desk. Waiting.”

  “Like shingles.”

  “Huh?” I blink at her and she rolls her eyes.

  “Or like one of those old plague pits – you know the ones? Any time there’s archaeologists going into burial pits, they always have to be bio-suited up in case there’s still Black Death germs or spores or whatever knocking around down there. Lurking.”

  “I think you’ve finally reached peak zombie apocalypse. Lay off the undead for a while, maybe.” I pat her arm and trail off after Dad, taking a couple of deep, pre-emptive soothing breaths.

  The Brother is still poking through the freebie table as we get within earshot. He’s talking to himself as he holds up a three-chapter sample booklet from one of the publishers by its corner at arm’s length, like it’s a desiccated frog, examining it with an expression to match.

  “…sort of quality…” is all I catch before the Brother spots us and drops the sampler back on the table.

  “Damien! What a lovely surprise – we weren’t expecting to see you at this one!” Dad has his business smile on and his hand held out in greeting.

  The Brother – or Damien, as anyone he doesn’t piss off on a regular basis would call him, I guess, seeing as it’s his name – sniffs and wipes his nose on the back of his own hand. Dad’s smile doesn’t dim even a fraction. Say what you like about my dad, but he’s a professional.

  “Max. Still running your little old conventions yourself then?”

  There’s the slightest emphasis on the word “little”. Anyone else would miss it, but neither Dad nor I do. I make a mental note to temporarily lose the Brother’s membership badge when we register him later. The Brother himself, meanwhile, has put his hands on his hips and is fake-casually looking around, making sure we get a good look at the New York Comic Con logo on his souvenir T-shirt.

  “For now.” Dad adjusts the paperwork under his arm. “I always say the next convention is the last one…you know how it goes.”

  “I do, my brother. I do indeed.”

  And there it is. Even by his standards, that was quick. Sooner or later, Damien calls everybody – everybody male, at least – “brother”. Usually sooner. Hence the nickname.

  I tune them out while they run through the usual shop talk. The Brother – as usual – is name-dropping like a sailor throwing ballast off a sinking ship.

  Clang! A-list Hollywood actor!

  Clang! Major director!

  Clang! Super-reclusive graphic novel writer!

  Clang! Ridiculously famous author!

  Clang! Clang! Clang!

  The names hit the floor and pile up, one by one, in a giant steaming heap of show-offy-ness.

  He’s been doing this for years, I think. The Brother goes to everyone’s conventions. Everyone’s. I’ve no idea how he affords it, but it’s what he does. And then he goes scurrying back to advise the conventions he’s involved in, based on what everybody else is doing.

  Dad gives up on trying to hold onto the papers and hands them to me. I am demoted to “assistant”. The Brother beams at me.

  “And – hey! It’s Laura!”

  “Lexi.”

  “You get prettier every time I see you.”

  Because that’s not creepy at all.

  “Thanks?”

  I catch the sideways glance Dad gives me as he clears his throat and swerves the conversation away, presumably in an attempt to stop either of us from smacking the Brother in the face with a lever arch folder.

  “Lexi’s running ops for me these days. I’d be lost without her.”

  I know it’s for show. I know it’s the sort of thing you say to the sort of guy the Brother is. But even so…my heart feels like it doesn’t quite fit in my chest any more. Because even though it is true (and I know it is, because last year he managed to lose the entire guest list somewhere on his computer, and it took me four hours when I should have been writing an essay on Henry V to recover it), to actually hear it out loud, during a convention. When he’s usually too busy bossing me about to get even close to a compliment…

  It means something.

  But now the Brother’s getting to the real reason he’s loitering by the desk. All that name-dropping was just the warm-up…

  “Did you hear about our little coup for June?”

  “Mmmmm?” It’s pretty obvious that Dad isn’t really listening though; he’s fumbling in his pocket for something – and pulls out his phone, frowning at it.

  “We just announced…”

  Dad holds up a hand, then points to his phone, which is already halfway to his ear. “Sorry, Damien. Going to have to take this – lovely to see you. Lexi?” And he sets off at a brisk stride across the lobby. It’s only when he’s halfway across it that I realize I’m supposed to be following him…

  “You know your phone screen lights up when you’re actually on a call, as opposed to just pretending to be on one?” I say when I catch up with him. He sighs and holds out his hands for his papers.

  “If I never have to stand in another hotel lobby, listening to him tell me about yet another glittering career he has personally launched, or someone else he hand-picked all by himself right before they got huge…well, it’ll be too soon. That’s all I’m saying.” He ruffles the top few sheets of to-do list. “Sounds like sour grapes, doesn’t it?”

  “Sounds like you care about what you do.”

  He smiles. “This is why I pay you the big bucks, kid.”

  “Yeah, about that… And don’t call me kid, old man.”

  “Don’t push your luck, Lexi. Here.” He hands me the second sheet of today’s list. It’s single-spaced and double-sided…and he’s written extra points in horrible black spider writing all along the margins. Before I can even protest, he’s gone, “I’ll be on the walkie…” lingering on the air behind him.

  From the safety of the other side of a pillar across the lobby, I watch the Brother take a quick look around him…and then, when he’s relatively sure nobody’s watching, he sweeps an arm across the table and sends flyers, badges, postcards and bookmarks scattering across the floor. What a charmer.

  “Bit early in the day to be under there, isn’t it?” Sam’s shoes stop beside the table as I crawl out with the last of the bookmarks.

  “Sabotage,” I tell her, dropping them on the top of their pile. It’s taken me ages to put the table back together; time in which I have planned increasingly elaborate and unpleasant “accidental” deaths for the Brother. Several of these deaths are even theoretically possible to arrange within the walls of this very hotel. The last couple, though, probably not. I’m not sure where I’d be able to find a large enough jar of gherkins or three bald eagles at this kind of notice.

  “Did your dad check him in already?”

  “Nope. We have that joy ahead of us later. Who’s on registration for the day tickets this morning?”

  “That’s kind of what we’re all waiting for you to tell us.” Sam gestures to the others, loitering behind her. Whoops.

  Today’s list is already pretty scruffy from being shoved into my pocket while I crawled about the floor. “Should be floating cover from Eric…” I look around and see only an absence of Eric. “But I guess he’s still throwing up from yesterday?”

  Nadiya nods – and when Bede opens his mouth to ask her something she just shakes her head. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  Bede closes his mouth again…and catches me looking at him. He shakes his own head so fast that his whole face just becomes a blur. “No. No, no, no. You can’t make me.”

  “I can, actually,” I say.

  “Please. Pleas
e, please, please. Not after yesterday.”

  “What was so bad about yesterday?”

  “You left me on reg for hours. Hours.”

  “I did not leave you.”

  Bede raises an eyebrow at me.

  “All right, I left you. Fine.”

  “And what do we say, Lexi?”

  “We say ‘shut it or I’m putting you back on registration again’?” Before I’ve even finished speaking, I can hear Mum’s voice over the phone from last night. I groan. “Fine. How about I take the first shift on the desk? It’ll quieten down after that and we’ll close it at noon anyway. Will that make everyone happy?”

  “Delirious.” Bede – satisfied that he’s getting revenge – heads off to do the early-morning checks on the panel rooms, Nadiya disappears in the direction of the ops office and Sam scampers back to her room to change into today’s costume, leaving me to open up registration.

  Which is precisely what I’m doing when…

  “We should stop meeting like this.”

  “If only we could.” If it sounds heartfelt, it’s because I mean it to.

  This morning, Aidan is accessorizing his smug face with a grey T-shirt and a pair of faded old black jeans. His outfit, however, is the only thing about him that has changed.

  “Listen – I just wanted to apologize. For yesterday. I was a dick.”

  …Or is it…?

  I make a polite non-committal sound that also manages to show I emphatically agree, then turn my back on him and step behind the reg desk, heaving the archive box with all the remaining day passes and paperwork in it up onto the table.

  “Let me help…” he says, reaching for the box. I knock his hand away accidentally-on-purpose.

  “Thanks, but I don’t need your help.”

  “I’m just trying to—”

  “I said I don’t need your help!”

  “You really don’t like me, do you?”

  I lean on the box and take a good look at him. It’s hard to see the expression in his eyes behind his glasses, and I can’t tell if he’s joking or not. Fortunately, I don’t have to – as Sam’s dad arrives to help with the heavy lifting.

  He looks Aidan up and down. “Everything okay there, Lexi?”

  “Fine, thanks. Just telling this…visitor…where to go.” Sam’s dad nods and heads off to check the storage cupboard, and I give Aidan a smile that isn’t a smile, hoping he gets the message. He’s unreadable, but I can feel him reading me; those grey eyes measuring every part of my face. It feels like the moment stretches on for ever, hanging by a thread and spinning endlessly with just the two of us locked inside it… And then he makes a sound that could be a laugh or could be a cough or could just be the sound that asshats make in their natural environment – I don’t know.

  “Thanks for the directions, Lexi.” His lips curl like he’s about to say something else; something balanced right on the very tip of his tongue…and then he shakes his head and smiles and he’s gone.

  “What an arse,” says Sam, appearing from behind one of the lobby pillars. She’s changed out of the clothes she was wearing at breakfast and is now Clark Kent, even down to the glasses (and the Superman T-shirt showing underneath her shirt and tie).

  “He really is,” I mutter – and she laughs.

  “No, I mean…look at him go. In those jeans.” And she actually leans around the pillar to watch Aidan walk across the lobby to the lifts, passing her dad on his way back – thankfully still just out of earshot. “Oh, Lexi,” she says when he’s gone, “your face!” Still laughing, she takes the last tray of membership badges from her dad and starts arranging them on the table.

  “Sam?”

  “Mmm?”

  “Shut up and help me come up with an excuse for the English assignment I haven’t done for tomorrow…?”

  I can hear Dad shouting in his office, even with the door shut.

  Even though I’m standing in the hall holding the packet the postman just gave me for him, and he’s all the way up at the top of the house.

  Even the postman could hear him, based on the smirk he gave me when I signed his delivery sheet.

  It’s entirely possible that whoever he’s on the phone to up there could probably hear him without the actual phone – and who do we have to thank for this?

  Bea.

  Now there’s a date, there’s a wedding to plan. And that means Operation “Pay More Attention To The Wedding Plans, Max” has begun…and, wow, is Max unhappy about that. I don’t know who it is he’s yelling at up there, but a tiny (actually quite sizeable, if I’m honest) bit of me really, really hopes it’s Bea.

  Of course it’s not Bea.

  It’s never Bea, is it? She’s just the one who causes the shouting; usually because she’s rung from an airport somewhere demanding…I don’t know…tap-dancing alligators wearing Chanel jumpsuits or something – and then, oh look, they’re calling her flight and she’s got to run… She’s never the one actually getting shouted at as Dad’s stress levels rise. That’s mostly me today. Or whoever happens to be the next person to call. Or sometimes both simultaneously.

  It’s not even that I blame her – not really. If I were her, and it was my wedding and everything, I’d want it to be the way I imagined. It’s just that…it might be nice if everything was a little less traumatic for everyone else. And by “everyone else” I mean me, obviously.

  The volume increases exponentially the higher up the stairs I go, until it feels like he’s shouting inside my head. The pictures on the walls are rattling, and I don’t even bother knocking; he’ll never hear me over himself. Story of my life with dad, really. I stick my head round the door and catch him mid-pace across the floor, phone to his ear and his work Blackberry clutched in his other hand.

  “Look, I know what the standard F and B rate is, and I’m telling you that you can do better. No, I don’t want to speak to…don’t you put me on hold…I…”

  He makes an exasperated noise and shakes his head at me. “They put me on hold.” He tosses his phone on the pile of roughed-out schedules for the next convention at the end of the month. “Can you give that publicist a ring for me from the landline? Anna something? I need her to confirm her people.”

  “A surname would help?”

  “In the Rolodex. She’s the only Anna.” He points at the groaning contacts wheel on his desk. I swear he’s the only person in the entire world who still uses one of those things – but ever since his last phone went nuts and spontaneously deleted all his emails, he won’t even use the contacts app. I drop the package on his desk and reach for the Rolodex.

  “This just came for you,” I say, pointing to it.

  “What is it?”

  “Feels like a book.”

  “Another one?” He eyes the teetering stack of book proofs on the floor under the window. They’ve been arriving thick and fast for the last week. If a publisher thinks they’ve got something coming out that would fit an Angelo convention, he gets an advance copy. He even reads some of them…

  He tips the book out of the padded envelope and skims the covering letter clipped to it with a few “Hmmmm” noises, idly picking up his phone again and tucking it between his ear and his shoulder.

  “Sounds like your kind of thing – like that one you love with the wizards.”

  “Jonathan Strange is not a wizard, Dad. He’s a magician.”

  “Mmmm. Want to take a…hello? Yes, yes of course I’m still here. Where else would I be?”

  Now he’s not on hold, I’ve lost his attention – but I’ve gained two whole jobs, as he thrusts both book and letter in my general direction and waves me out of the room, along with the Rolodex. This keeps happening – every time I set foot in that room, I seem to end up with more to do. I should just boycott the whole top floor of the house. Or barricade myself in my bedroom and pretend my coursework ate me.

  Before I tackle the hell that is Dad’s Rolodex, I need tea – and while I wait for the kettle to do something, I r
ead the letter that came with the book from Eagle’s Head. It’s the usual PR stuff: hype, hype, more hype.

  Big money, debut author, multi-continental auctions. Pre-orders, film rights, Hollywood. Blah blah blah. But beyond that, it looks like Dad’s right. This could be exactly my kind of thing.

  The Brother’s snide little comments from last month niggle away at the back of my head. He’s always so pleased with himself, finding the Next Big Thing before it actually gets big.

  What if this book – even through all the hype and the usual hot air – is it?

  And we’ve got it first.

  I drop the letter on the counter and actually look at the book. It’s only a proof, an early copy sent out for review, so the cover is pretty simple: dark blue, swirled through with grey like a mist curling across it – and on the front, just a couple of lines of silver text. I run my finger over the title.

  Piecekeepers.

  “Weird title,” I say to the kettle, slinging a teabag into a mug and pouring hot water over it. While the tea’s brewing, I flip to the first page – where there’s a quote.

  We have ripped the world apart – and that? That is the scar our magic has left upon it.

  And I don’t know how, and I don’t know why…but the second I read that line, I can tell that this book is going to change everything…

  Dear Max,

  Da Vinci. Titian. Caravaggio. Rembrandt. Some of the greatest artists the world has ever seen…but what if their paintings are concealing a secret – and what if it could destroy us all?

  I’m delighted to enclose a proof copy of PIECEKEEPERS: the thrilling debut novel by Haydn Swift.

  Meet Jamie, an ordinary History of Art student who is shocked to discover there is magic hidden in the world’s greatest masterpieces, put there by an apprentice magician at war with his teacher. After a fierce duel across the canals of Venice, neither the teacher nor apprentice was heard from again – but the magic remains. Only a select few are even aware of its existence: the Piecekeepers, a magical organization dedicated to keeping the secret.

  But either the magic was unstable or the spells are decaying, because the magic is getting out. The smallest leak will cause untold damage, as Jamie – who sees it first-hand in London’s National Gallery – is only too aware. The magic must be returned to the paintings and held there…whatever the cost.