Playing Hearts

by W. R. Gingell

  It wasn’t long before Jack sauntered into the room, his red suit coat hung over his arm. I leapt as soon as he carelessly shut the door behind him, landing lightly but bouncing a bit more than I expected to bounce. I had hoped to make him jump. Instead, Jack merely laid his coat over the back of a plush black chair, straightened his cuffs, and advanced into the bedroom.

  “I thought you might come back,” he said.

  “You’re no fun,” I said sourly.

  “What, because I didn’t jump through the roof?” He saw me briefly wrinkle my nose in annoyance, and laughed. “I’ll have to tell Mother to block those vents.”

  “Why didn’t she block them already? If a kid and a witless knight can get in, who can’t?”

  “Because she understands Underland. She knows how people think. No– she determines how people think. She’s very good at it, and she spends a lot of time in the Mirror Hall.”

  “She doesn’t determine how I think!” I said in annoyance. I still saw the Mirror Hall quite often in my puddle-gazing. In fact, the more I saw of it, the more it seemed to me that it was somewhere the Queen shouldn’t be allowed. Things were different there. Seen differently. Made differently. The Queen herself Saw and Made things that were contrariwise to what actually Was.

  “I’m beginning to feel that the only way she could do that would be to tell you to think the exact opposite. Perhaps she is. She’s incredibly off-putting that way. Shall I tell you stories of when I was a lad: how she tricked me into punishing myself?”

  I didn’t like the black look to his eyes, or the unpleasant tilt to his mouth. He was only eighteen. He shouldn’t look like that.

  I said: “If you knew I’d be here, why did you come back so early? I can still hear the party.”

  “It wasn’t for the pleasure of your company, if that’s what you mean. How did you get out of Mother’s curio room? I’d have sworn there was no way out but the door.”

  “None of your business!” I said. I was beginning to feel that it was a mistake to come back, but I had to know how to get to Hatter and Hare.

  “Well, that’s rude,” said Jack. “I suppose you want to know how to get to your other little friends? Or did you come back because you want to hear me sing again? I didn’t peg you as a music-lover, Mab!”

  “Call that music, do you?” I said scornfully, but Jack’s odiously self-satisfied smile didn’t even waver. “Sounded like a calf yelling for its mum.”

  “Has it ever occurred to you, Mab, that your method of obtaining help leaves a little something to be desired?”

  After a brief, exasperated pause, I said: “Yes. But you’re so annoying that I just can’t help myself.”

  “That,” said Jack, “Is the most egregious example of the pot calling the kettle black that I have ever heard. Do you or do you not want to find your friends?”

  “I do.”

  “Very well: follow me. I’ve made preparations.”

  Maybe I shouldn’t have followed him so trustingly, but I did. We didn’t go far: just to the bathroom, where the drawn bath was waiting.

  “Hey!” I said indignantly. “I might not be as squeaky clean as you, but I don’t need a bath!”

  “I could beg to differ, but I won’t. Whether or not you need a bath is entirely beside the point.”

  I looked suspiciously at him. “What is the point, then?”

  “I’ve got an idea,” said Jack. “If I did it myself it would be against the rules, but it wouldn’t be against the rules for you. And I have another idea that says you’ve probably already started practising by yourself.”

  “How did you know about the ripples?”

  “Call it intuition,” said Jack. “Only not in front of anything that doesn’t ripple. Mother can only use the flat reflective ones, so it should be safe enough.”

  “You mean I can talk to Hatter and Hare through the bathwater? I’ve never heard them before. And I don’t try to see them; it always just sort of happens.”

  “Which is why we’re starting with the bathtub rather than the wash-basin,” said Jack. “Much easier to work with. Oh, and also because of the vanity mirror over there.”

  “You’ve put a towel over it,” I said, after a wild, frightened look at it.

  “Yes, and that reminds me: stop making faces at me when I come to visit you.”

  “Visit? You mean spy!”

  Jack shrugged. “A rose by any other name...”

  “A rose by any other name still has as many thorns,” I said. “How do I call up Hatter and Hare?”

  “For a start, you don’t call them up,” said Jack, propping himself against the bathroom wall slightly behind and beside me. “It’s not calling, it’s seeing. They’re there all the time, you just have to be able to see them. As for being able to hear them, so long as you’re actively Seeing instead of passively seeing, there’s no reason you shouldn’t hear them, too.”

  “What do you mean, actively?”

  “I mean trying as opposed to merely watching things as they stream,” said Jack. “Indolent little thing, aren’t you, Mab? See them. Make the ripples do what you want them to do.”

  “Hatter told me about Seeing,” I said thoughtfully. “About Underland being a reflection of what we see– oh!”

  “DORMY!” yelled a familiarly frenzied voice. And then there they were, in the ripples: Hatter and Hare in all their gloriously mad familiarity. Maybe Jack was right about me being lazy. It hadn’t really taken much to see them.

  I couldn’t help the glad smile that spread across my face. “Hatter! Hare! I found you! It’s me!”

  Hatter’s purple eyes were wild and a little bit watchful, but he didn’t speak. It was left to Hare to add, at a bellow: “WHAT BIG EARS YOU HAVE, DORMY!”

  I looked back at Jack in confusion, and found that he was looking exasperated. He mouthed at me: They’re being watched. I mouthed back at him: Can I be seen?

  Jack shook his head while Hatter and Hare waited. I would have liked to have asked him if I could be heard by anyone watching them, but since he was already taking pains not to be heard and Hatter and Hare were talking in riddles more than usual, the answer was pretty obvious.

  Carefully, I said: “I’ve got a friend who’d like you to sew him a new, um, hat. He says you sew things very well. Only he can’t leave home at the moment.”

  “Hatters do not make house calls,” said Hatter. “You’re thinking of a doctor.”

  “Well, if you think a doctor can sew better...” I let the sentence trail off, and saw Hare bristle.

  “HATTER CAN SEW ANYTHING FROM REPUTATIONS TO WITS,” he said loudly.

  “No, you’re thinking of owls,” I said, hoping that they would understand. “They’re the ones that make to-whits and to-whos.”

  “I can sew a hat for an owl,” said Hatter, his eyes intent upon me and his pupils dilating. “Is it a very big owl? White? Black? Red? I’ll need to bring the right thread, you know.”

  “White,” I said, dizzy with relief. Hatter had understood. “And very big. He’s staying at a little waystation outside the Heart Castle.”

  “Good place for an owl,” Hatter said, and I felt warm with approval even though his tone was aloofly disinterested. “Lots of straw. Lots of mice.”

  “He’s expecting you,” I said.

  I wanted to say so much more. I wanted to tell Hatter that I’d seen them face the Jabberwock—that I’d seen them escape—that I’d helped them escape. I wanted to tell them that I missed them. I wanted to pass right through the ripples, and I had the feeling that maybe I could do it if I went right now. I made a tiny, involuntary movement forward, my fingers dipping toward the water, and then Jack’s hand was on my shoulder, fingers sharp and prohibitive. If he had been trying to keep out of sight, he’d just ruined it: Hatter and Hare must have seen him. They didn’t blink, but they faded from sight almost immediately.

  “Oh,” I said sadly, feeling deflated. “They’re gone!”

  “They are,” sai
d Jack, his hand still gripping my shoulder. “And it’s time that you were going, too, Mab.”

  He lunged for me so quickly that I was too surprised to defend myself. In short order I found myself bundled into an unwieldy ball of backpack, clothes, and limbs, held firmly in Jack’s shirt-sleeved arms without being able to do so much as wriggle.

  “Oi!” I said. “Put me down!”

  “Anything to oblige,” said Jack, and threw me in.

  If I’d had any idea what he was really doing, I would never have done it. But I was furious and determined that if I was going to be sopping wet, so was he– in all his carefully pressed glory. I seized his arm in one hand, clawing at his cravat in the other, and pulled him into the water with me. I knew straight away that it was the wrong thing to have done. Jack cannoned into me, his face for the first time utterly and completely surprised, and we flew through a substance that wasn’t water or air until we couldn’t breathe and our heads cleared the surface of a swiftly running creek. I paddled for the bank, pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to swim with my backpack. It was only when Jack boosted me up and out of the water, and the full weight of it bore down on me, that I realised he had been supporting me the whole time. That annoyed me, so I pointedly turned to help him out of the water instead of leaving him to scrabble out in all the mud as I would have preferred to do.

  When we made it to the grass, each of us as muddy as the other, Jack looked around at the grass, the trees, and then the sky. “Ye gods, Mab!” he said. “What have you gotten me into now?”

  Jack ended up staying with me for two weeks. At first we tried to get him back into Underland by having him jump back into the creek, but as much as that amused me, it did no practical good. At last, Jack, sopping wet and icily annoyed, refused to try again. As he explained it, him coming through to my world was very close to being Against The Rules, and barely possible. When I protested that I had brought him there, he only said: “Yes, but even if it’s not against the rules, she can still make things difficult for me. She’s obviously trying to teach me a lesson.”

  Fortunately, my foster family at that time was a lovely one, and they were happy to invite Jack in when we told them he was my cousin from Sydney. I did finally manage to send him back into Underland through a particularly inviting puddle, but it was as though a door that had been rusty and unwilling to budge was now oiled and gradually widening. I saw Jack more often in mirrors and reflections, and even his presence in puddles began to grow. I still made faces at him, but during those two weeks we had become cautiously used to each other, even if we didn’t particularly like each other; and if it hadn’t been for the Queen I would probably have taken down all my mirror-covers except the bathroom one.

  After that, Jack came back every birthday. Sometimes it was just to toss a wrapped gift at me and vanish again. Sometimes it was to pull me into Underland with him and show me somewhere I’d never seen before. And sometimes it was to spend a week or two wherever I happened to be living at the time. It always began the same way: a card on my pillow, no matter where I happened to be living at the time, and then Jack pushing aside the sheet, towel, or curtain that covered the most convenient reflective surface. I got used to him, arrogant, selfish, and annoying as he was. I still saw Hatter and Hare in the ripples and reflections quite often—could call them up in any reflective surface now—and somehow the real world and Australia began to feel less real, and my unreal world of Underland began to feel somehow more real. From my twelfth to my eighteenth birthday I spent more time in Underland than out of it, my foster homes changing with such regularity that at last they spoke of keeping me in the group home years earlier than normal. I couldn’t blame them– they thought I was running away. Maybe I was. I don’t know. All I knew was that, despite the darkness and the feeling of storms gathering that grew thicker the older I became, Underland felt more like home than anywhere I’d ever lived.

  When I was with Hatter and Hare, or Sir Blanc, we were always far away from the Queen. She was never really far distant, though. There was always the feeling that she could appear at any time, with her card sharks and casual violence, and cut off someone else’s hand. When I was with Jack it was more complicated. The Queen was technically closer—sometimes even on the same floor—but Jack was always a buffer between us. I was never quite sure whether she knew I was there or not, and I didn’t really want to know. I was afraid that she did know, and that it was all a part of her plan for me to be there. And some days I was afraid she didn’t know, and that when she found out she would kill me and stuff me and put me in her curio room just like she had done with Sir Blanc’s wits. Me, stuffed and under glass. Jack singing outside. It didn’t stop me going there, though: nothing did. My file at the assessor’s office began to grow fat with reports that said things like: Mabel is bright but disengaged; Mabel does not connect well with the people in her life; and Mabel’s continued truancy at school and disinclination to interact with the other children is severely hampering both her grades and her ability to settle into the school. It wasn’t long before they sent me to the school counsellor’s office; after that, the state counsellor; and when that failed, a psychologist. I briefly considered telling them about Underland—really give them something to take notes about!—but I had the feeling that it would be much harder to sneak away from a mental hospital and I didn’t like the idea of being locked up. They probably wouldn’t let me put covers over the mirrors there, either.

  I did try to be more careful about how long I spent in Underland at a time. A day here, a weekend there. I didn’t always visit Hatter and Hare, nor did I always wait for a card on my pillow that meant I’d been invited. I simply packed my backpack—it was pretty battered by now, but it still held all my stuff—and splashed through the nearest puddle. Sometimes I found myself in a garden where the flowers were as supercilious as they were beautiful, their charming tones a constant stream of rude advice on how to do my hair and remarks on my desperate need for mascara. Sometimes I was back in the Chessboard Woods, though I didn’t find Sir Blanc there again– I got the impression he was up to Important Business, and perhaps doing something rebellious. Hatter and Hare, when I visited them, wouldn’t talk about him; and the one time that I met with him again he was far from his old, cheerful, slightly silly self. It was stupid, of course: Sir Blanc with his wits was back to his old self. But I hadn’t known him when he had his wits—tired, sad, sharp-eyed and close-mouthed—and I was inclined to regret the change. He wouldn’t talk about the Important Business, and the word ‘Rebellion’ never again crossed his lips, but I knew he was up to something, and Underland itself was changing around me.

  By the time I was fifteen, there was no doubt about the change. I did more puddle-gazing than travelling, trying to keep under the radar at school and each current foster home, and what I saw in the reflections worried me. When I did go to Underland, I mostly visited Hatter and Hare. Though they didn’t encourage me to do it, they listened when I told them what I’d seen—the latest outrage or fracas, or the Queen’s sinister antics in the Mirror Hall—and they didn’t tell me not to poke my nose where it wasn’t wanted. As far as I understood them, they found my information useful, but didn’t want to push me to get it. They never said so, but I knew they were trying to keep me safe as much as they could. By now they didn’t question and even seemed to expect my constant presence in Underland: it was an attitude that most Underlanders took to me. I’d thought that my coerced engagement to Jack would have been enough to see me blackballed all over Underland, but to my surprise, I found that no matter where I went in Underland, everyone knew my name. More than that, they knew of me. People knew of my first journey to Underland. They knew I’d saved Hatter and Hare from the Jabberwock. It was a topic of dinner-time importance to decide which teapot I had popped out of in my second journey to Underland, and the rescue of Sir Blanc’s stolen wits was a story that was told to young Underlanders everywhere. I knew this because in my trawling of the ripples I had often
discovered myself to be the topic of discussion. More worrying was the edge I felt in the conversations: it was expectancy and tightly-repressed excitement. I tried to tell myself it was just the slight madness that everyone in Underland had, but I didn’t really believe it. It left me a little bit cold, and wondering what it was they expected me to do.

  I may have done more puddle-gazing than travelling into Underworld, but I did enough popping in and out of puddles to hone my skills considerably. I was old enough now not just to pop in and out of Underland, but to wonder how it was done and what I could do to make it more seamless. Before long I was slipping into Underland with barely a pause between leap and landing, and arriving within a metre or so of where I expected to be. I also began to make notes and draw maps, which I found more difficult than I expected: Underland’s geography occasionally shifted without notice. This made mapping slightly difficult, but was the cause of a useful development: it wasn’t long before I learned not just to move between Australia and Underland, but between here and there in Underland.

  The first time I tried to slip between places in Underland was more of an accident than an experiment. I’d been frustrated several times in my journeyings into Underland to find that I had appeared in the wrong place because another bit of it had shifted, and I’d already wondered if it was possible to travel by reflection in Underland. I was watching the ripples in the swimming pool this time: my current foster family was surprisingly rich, and my favourite thing about their house was the pool. By that time I had mapped most of the further reaches of Underland and was beginning to narrow my sights on the centre– the Heart Castle. That day I found myself snooping on the Castle itself. I was less frightened of seeing the Queen these days: I’d found that if I avoided gazing at smooth reflective surfaces and stuck to the rough, rippled ones, she wasn’t able to see me. That struck me as very useful, and I had been exploiting it for some weeks now in my search for information. I started with Downstairs, where the servants were hunched, hurried, and frightened. Now that I knew how to hear as well as see, it was a much more useful exercise. There was always someone saying something interesting around the castle’s environs.