I’m sick of adults saying this. But I reply: ‘I know. I’m sorry.’
At recess I make paper cranes so Theodore can have extra ones when he comes tomorrow.
But Theodore still doesn’t come to school on Tuesday. I spend recess and lunch on my own, making paper cranes and reading. I ask Mrs Harper if I can go on the computers because there’s so much more about Alemayehu online. She says no (she always says no). It rains on Wednesday and the library’s full of noisy people who think it’s okay to yell and run like they do outside. Mrs Harper’s useless at making them shut up. I make paper cranes for Theodore and hope he comes on Thursday.
When the bell rings to go home, Kay isn’t there. Well, I think she isn’t there. Then I see her by the gates talking to Stephanie, who’s crying and wiping her nose on her jumper. Kay nods, frowns and touches her arm. Stephanie then hugs Kay and leaves. Something feels bad. Where’s Theodore?
Kay says nothing but when we get home, she sits me down. I don’t want to have this talk. I don’t want to know what’s happened.
‘You know how Theodore’s been away?’
I nod.
‘His mum died on Monday.’
No.
‘Stephanie says it was unexpected. She’d been sick for a long time but they thought she was getting better.’
No.
‘We’ll go to the funeral on Saturday. It’ll help Theodore if you’re there.’
No, it won’t.
‘I don’t wanna go,’ I say.
‘Neither do I,’ she says. ‘But we will go.’
‘We can’t make it better.’
‘I know. But we still need to go.’
I look down. I try not to cry. Then I go to my room and get all the paper cranes I made for Theodore. I throw them in the bin, all of them. I push them down and cover them in paper towels so I can’t see them.
‘Go away!’ I yell at them.
‘We can burn them,’ Kay says.
‘Really?’ I think of how angry she was when I lit my wig on fire.
‘If it’ll make you feel better.’
I nod. Kay finds a ceramic pot outside. She pulls out the dead plant, digs out some of the soil and together we put the cranes inside. The soil is damp. It takes eleven matches to light them. They all burn to nothing.
We have leftover pasta for dinner that tastes like oil and feels like glue. I take my Alemayehu book to my room. I still can’t read it. I curl up in bed and cry.
Kay comes to me with the History. For once, I say no, pulling the covers up over my face. She touches my back gently through the doona. I scream at her to go away.
Jessie
We wake up late on Saturday. Kay begs me to come in the car so we can get to the funeral on time. I refuse. She grumbles all the way to the bus stop. When we get to the funeral home, she pulls me along to get me to walk faster. We slip into the chapel and sit at the back. The coffin is surrounded by flowers and photos of Theodore’s mum. Her smile, Theodore’s smile, shines out of all of them.
Theodore’s at the front next to his dad. Stephanie’s there too, with her arm around Theodore. He’s crying, I can hear him. Whimpery cries, like a sad dog.
Mr Park is called up to deliver a speech. For a while, he just stands there, staring at the coffin. Someone comes up and touches him on the arm. He blinks a few times, takes a bit of paper from his jacket, and then stares at it. Tears run down his face.
He reads in Korean. He speaks awkwardly, not fast and easy like Theodore when he sings his songs. His voice gets eaten up by his tears and soon, his words are replaced by these big ugly sounds. I’ve never heard a man cry like this. It comes from his gut. It makes Theodore cry more. I start crying too. Mr Park drops his paper and says, ‘I’m sorry, I can’t do this in Korean.’ He rambles in English about how he met his wife, how she was kind and funny and beautiful, and such a good mother.
‘She never stopped smiling, not with the diagnosis, not through all the chemo or the surgery or all the dashed promises of remission,’ he says. ‘She was always cheerful, even when she didn’t want to be. She did everything to spare us. Everything.’
I cry and cry and cry. I don’t even realise Kay’s holding me till after the service and some happy song in Korean comes blasting through the speakers.
When Theodore sees me, he hugs me. His tears make my shirt wet. I cry too and hug him. Even though I hate hugs, in this moment, it’s okay.
People go to Theodore and his dad and say how very sorry they are. We go up too. Kay is so careful. She holds Mr Park’s hands and says, ‘I don’t know what you’re feeling, but I remember how I felt. Please know … just tell us … if you need anything.’
Mr Park nods but looks down. ‘Thank you.’
How many people cry at funerals because they miss the person who died? I think more people cry because they feel sad for the people who are grieving. They cry because they remember people they’ve lost, or they imagine what it’ll be like when someone they love dies.
I cry for Theodore. I cry for Mr Park. I cry for me and Kay.
Later, at home, I scream at Kay. ‘WE’RE TOO YOUNG FOR OUR PARENTS TO DIE!’
She says, ‘Yes,’ with tears in her eyes, ‘but I don’t think anyone gets old enough for it not to hurt.’
People cry at funerals because they know this is the end we all face; not death, but grief. Like the people in Grandma’s nursing home. Old and lonely, everyone they know dead or dying. I remember the kids at my old school who cried when the accident happened. I now realise they didn’t cry because they felt sad about Mum and Dad dying. They felt sad for me. They felt sad because they knew their parents would die one day too.
At dinner that night, Kay teaches me the word ‘empathy’. I wonder if what we feel is really empathy or self-pity at what’s to come. She asks if I want to read the History, but I say no, I’m not ready for Alemayehu to die. She frowns at that but says nothing.
Mrs Moran’s at it again. One am. Vacuuming her driveway. It’s strange to see something so familiar after a day like this. Things just … go on. I feel angry at her, for still vacuuming her driveway when Theodore’s mum is dead. She looks like she’s singing something to herself, and she’s smiling. I wonder if she had a funeral for her husband. I wonder if she went and she just doesn’t remember.
‘This is what you do late at night, huh?’
Kay’s found me. I don’t care. I don’t even look at her.
She sits down on the little couch with me. Together, we look out at Mrs Moran.
‘Poor Mrs Moran. I think she’s a little crazy.’
‘She looks happy,’ I say.
Kay pauses for a moment. ‘You’re right. She does.’
Then she puts her arm around me. I shrug it off.
‘I have something here,’ she says.
I glance down. I expect to see the History but it’s my Alemayehu book.
‘You need to finish this so you can give me your mischief report.’
I turn back to Mrs Moran. She’s turned the vacuum off and is checking her work. I can just hear her singing something about sunshine.
‘I don’t want to finish it.’
‘Because Alemayehu’s going to die?’
I nod.
‘Then we change the ending,’ she says.
Kay opens up the book and takes out my bookmark. She starts to read from the part where Alemayehu finds the lions. This time though, he doesn’t lie by the cages. He doesn’t get a cold.
He lets them out.
‘Arise, good lions!’ Kay pretends to read. ‘Off to Windsor! Tonight you shall feast on royalty!’
I want to tell her she’s dumb. Alemayehu would never say that. But I don’t. And, I don’t mean to, but I smile a little.
Kay closes the book. Finished.
‘Want to give me your report now?’ she says.
I remember then what Kay said to Grandma, how she uses the History to make me behave and feel less sad. So I give her my report. I tell her ab
out Taytu and Balcha. I tell her about the articles that say Alemayehu’s bones were never returned.
‘I think the British are ashamed to admit that Bezawit rescued them,’ I tell her. ‘That’s why they keep saying no.’
Kay smiles sadly. I know she doesn’t believe in the History. She thinks those articles are right, that Alemayehu’s bones really are still there. I glance out at Mrs Moran and think of her husband and the A. Mischief card. Should I tell Kay? Maybe then she’d believe.
But then Kay says, ‘I bet you’re right. Taytu must have buried them in secret knowing Queen Victoria would never want to admit it. If they don’t admit the bones were taken, they can’t retaliate, can they?’
I smile. I think of that word again. Empathy. Kay always thinking of me. I think of Theodore. I hope, deep down, I can do this for him.
‘Time for the grumpy Englishman?’ she asks.
I nod. As Mrs Moran goes inside, we go to Kay’s bed and curl up. She opens the History. I can’t help but notice how little we have left.
A. Mischief the One-Hundred and Ninety-Ninth
London, England 1890–1895
I ran as I’d never run before. My thief was quick, darting around cabs with the energy of a much younger man. The ground was slippery and a light but icy rain fell around us. I knew how to run in the wet. I’d spent my youth being the thief myself. Unfortunately, this man was just as skilled.
My thief darted onto Haymarket. I followed. He’d kept to quieter streets, ducking between terraces, houses and shops to switch between laneways, but now the streets were getting busier. I saw it before him; Pall Mall ahead. Any quest forward would bring him closer to the Palace and a bevy of law enforcement. Trafalgar and St James Square awaited him on either side.
He stopped, then darted alongside a theatre. I gained ground. The road in the alleyway was uneven. We splashed in the puddles collected in its potholes. I saw my chance, felt that mischievous spark. I froze the muddy slush beneath my thief’s feet. He slid and stumbled. I caught up, grabbing him by the collar, and threw him against the wall. My thief gasped as the wind was knocked out of him. He dropped what he’d stolen from me: the History.
The book splayed open and its pages landed in the half-frozen slush on the ground. I scooped it up quickly, more to save it from this fiend than any concern for the pages. The History had survived bookworms, fire, and decades at the bottom of the ocean. A bit of ice and mud was nothing. But for another soul to touch it. I remembered my first encounter with the enigmatic book and prayed it hadn’t spilled its secrets.
I observed my thief further. His hair was black and covered by a cap that bulged despite it being comically oversized, suggesting he had quite a head of hair. He was slim; his clothes stooped him. His face looked young with its smattering of freckles, but dark hollows under his eyes spoke of many years on this earth.
I took a step closer. A pair of bright blue eyes glared at me with a fierceness not seen in men thrice his size. Something wasn’t quite right.
Finally, I saw it. ‘Ah.’
I pulled a small penknife from my coat pocket. Those furious blue eyes went wide. I advanced on him, then, a sudden flick! – the blade cut through his shirt. The binding underneath split open, revealing the shape and cleavage of a woman’s bosom.
She seemed neither ashamed nor threatened by this sudden reveal. She just smiled.
‘You have bested me, sir,’ she said. Her accent was French, her tone exaggerated in the way women deliver their most insincere flattery. ‘Bravo.’
‘Bravo indeed,’ I said as I fished into the left pocket of her trousers in a rather ungentlemanly fashion and retrieved my pocket-watch.
‘I would like the book, sir.’
I was shocked by her brazen request. ‘You’ll be lucky if I don’t drag you to the authorities.’
‘Very well. You may keep the book for now,’ she said, and made to leave.
I caught her arm.
‘What’s your interest in the book?’
She tried to shake free. I held on.
‘Exit, pursued by a bear,’ she joked, eyeing my ill-kempt hair and the scars that ravaged my face.
‘What’s your interest in the book?’ I repeated.
‘I like to read,’ she said. ‘And I am very clever.’
I am very clever. I was reminded of an incident in the Reading Room, just a few weeks before. I’d found some obscure tome on botany thought lost in the 1700s. When asked how I’d found it, I responded with the exact same retort. I began to feel sick. Had those eyes that now bore into mine looked upon me before?
I felt it then – icy damp under my arm, right where I held the History. Was the book wet? How could that be?
She yanked free of my grip and ran off.
I hugged the History all the way home, too afraid to open it. I was apprehensive about my thief’s time with the History. I reached out to the door that led to my humble home and focused on the raindrops by the brass knocker. I imagined the twin molecules of hydrogen circling that single one of oxygen, then slowed them. The raindrops froze from the knocker out. I could still wield mischief. As I went inside, I flicked the air. The ice evaporated. Tiny wisps of steam danced across the polished wood.
I bolted every lock. I searched the rooms. No one. I checked the windows, bolted them too. I’d been cautious long before the History, with good reason, and praised myself for adding the extra security all those years ago.
I went to my bedroom and locked the door. Only then, settled at my desk, did I open the History. It was wet. Pages sticking together. I carefully opened it to the section that had touched the road. A name was bleeding out of recognition, not in the way the History did when it hid itself, but like ink naturally dispersing from the touch of water.
When I first got the History, I’d thrown it into the fireplace. I’d poured a whole bottle of wine on its open pages. I’d left it in a fish bowl for a week. It always remained unscathed. Now this.
I tried to read the distorted name. I looked at the pages before it, trying to remember. Only three pages were affected. The water was being kept at bay, as if the History amassed a barrier between the sodden pages and the rest of the book. I remembered Bezawit. I still held her memories. I went back, to the man before her. An ocean. Flashes of war. Cannon fire. But those images dissolved, forgotten.
I lit the fire and sat by it, holding the pages out to dry. I tried to remember. Who came before? Me. Bezawit. Then who? I felt a sharp pain in my head, as if the memories were leaching away through burst blood vessels. Something horrible had happened. This book had survived thousands of years and countless attempts at destruction. I begged the paper to dry, the ink to reform. My nose bled. I wiped it absently on my shirt.
I sat in front of the fire until I ran out of wood. At least a day came and went. The pages dried in ripples like normal paper. Distorted, stiff, discoloured. Once I gathered the courage to finally close the History, the dried pages crunched. I took it to bed and cried, as no man should ever cry. Perhaps you’d concede that a man who worked and lived in the British Museum was a man unduly obsessed with the conservation of rare human relics, and as such, allowances could be made for such hysterics. As I drifted off to sleep, I knew that if the History was to record my feats, it would record the truth. I was afraid that this great gift was no longer mine.
‘Archie?’
How many times could I instruct Will to leave me alone? I wouldn’t say it again.
‘It’s been three days.’
It had been four. I resisted the urge to correct him.
‘Your absence has been noted at the museum. Mr Blythe visited this morning.’
Percy. The Superintendent of the Reading Room. How very boring.
Softer then, Will spoke. ‘Please, speak to me. Let me know you’re alright.’
I was not alright. Whatever was happening to the History was happening to me. I spent the days and nights in a fog, as a pain migrated through my head like a parasite feasting it
s way through my grey matter. My self-confinement had been filled with monstrous nightmares and wicked daydreams. Every time I slept, I met my thief again, this time in the Reading Room. The whole room was on fire, its Pantheonesque dome enveloped. Yet, nothing really burned. We sat together on the Superintendent’s desk, the flames licking at our bodies, untouched.
‘Isn’t it cold?’ was all she said to me.
On the third day locked away, I had tried a humble experiment. I added a drop of water to an as yet untouched page, testing if it would repel the liquid as normal. To my horror, the page sucked the water in. Once it dried, the spot was crinkled, minor water damage, but the name and memories that lived in the page survived. Still, I didn’t experiment again.
In all the History’s memories, nothing could explain what was happening. I hypothesised that perhaps the History was reacting against my thief, but the History had been stolen, abandoned, given away and lost countless times before. I couldn’t account for what caused this. Unless … there was something ominous in the book. A page at the back, stained with a name smudged out. I always forgot it was there unless something prompted me to look, a feeling normally, something unsettling. The foreboding that lived in that page hung in the air now. Was something leaching out? I couldn’t escape the thought that it was something I’d done.
Will banged on the door. ‘Archie! I will break down this door if you don’t speak to me!’
I relented. ‘I’m fine. Working.’
‘You’ve never locked me out before.’
I didn’t respond.
‘Has … something happened?’
I hated the way he said something. I cursed him for the bitter memories he invoked.
‘Very well,’ Will said. ‘I’m going to show a visitor around the museum. I thought you’d be good enough to assist, but never mind. I’m bringing a screwdriver when I return. If you’re not out by then, the door’s coming off.’
It was no idle threat.
I spent the rest of the day reasoning with myself. She’s a thief. Nothing more. Perhaps this is my great act of mischief. Repairing and saving the History. Years in the dark continent has left its mark. That’s why the book came to England.
The History of Mischief Page 21