Outside

by Sarah Ann Juckes

  I thought there might be more books on the Outside, ones with stories in that can help me make sense of everything, like the ones I had Inside. Then finally I find one with real words in.

  The Life and Times of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

  Mozart. The person Willow said he’d go visit on his adventures with Angus. I pull out the book, all dusty, from its hiding place under all those others, and run with it to the bed to read it.

  My fingers are shaking as they poke at the corners. There are more pages in this book than any of the ones back in the Tower – not that I’m thinking of them. On the front is a picture of a person I guess is Mozart. His grey hair’s all rolled up like soggy paper, but he’s smiling anyway, looking pleased as Pigs in his smart red clothes.

  I open the book. And I read.

  It ain’t a book about no Ogres and Giants, but it’s good anyway. It starts with a little boy who makes all the Kings and Queens of the land happy by playing with something called a ‘piano’. He visits lands called ‘Munich’ and ‘Vienna’ and ‘Prague’. There ain’t no talk of Willow and Angus, but there’s lots of ‘concerts’ where lots of important people come to watch him play.

  I din realize playing could be so important.

  I read with my nose almost touching the pages. The book smells different from the ones I know. It smells older somehow, and I can almost smell Willow on the pages, even though I can’t see his name nowhere.

  There’s lots of talk of music in the book. So much that the words are almost singing off the page so I can hear them, long and sad, like Willow’s violin.

  Maybe it just feels sad ’cause of the ending. Mozart gets sick, just like I am. Instead of getting better, though, he dies. By the time I’ve finished reading, all the pages are wet.

  Zeb’s hands are reaching out towards me. His blue eyes are wide.

  I close my eyes and hug the book tight to my chest. Then I put it under the pillow.

  How to be an Outside Person – number twelve: Read all the books.

  There ain’t no more books in Willow’s room. I tip out all the clothes from his wardrobe and open all the drawers I can find, but I don’t find nothing but underpants.

  I’ll find more, though – more truths.

  I do find something else when I’m looking. It flashes on when I clear away some of the junk on top of the table near the bed. It shows me all these pictures, like a magic mirror. Most are of a lady I guess to be Willow’s Ashley-Mum, as the little ’un she’s swinging above her head looks an awful lot like Willow around the eyes. Whoever she is, she’s pretty. She has darker skin than even Willow, with big, wide eyes and hair all knotted into ropes, like someone has drawn it on. Something about her mouth makes me smile, even when she ain’t smiling in the pictures herself. Her lips are always pouted like they’re hiding stories. I’d like to have listened to them stories.

  I also found a window hiding behind the flat white bars that Willow called the ‘blinds’. I pulled them apart, stared out at the Outside and just about fell over at first. Turns out that I’m up high – higher than any tree I ever imagined – and I can see the grey world below, and it makes me feel weird and amazing at the same time.

  Now I know how Rapunzel felt in her Tower with the window.

  I saw my shed from above, the roof like a black drain. And I saw the walls, and I even saw other sheds and other walls way beyond that, and other houses and … and other windows like this. No one was looking back at me through them, but I felt like I might climb up on to any one of them roofs at any minute and go explore. ’Cause the world is big. Big and bigger than I ever thought.

  I’m going to explore it. And I’m going to find me some books when I do.

  I walk across to the bedroom door and my hand only hovers just a tiny bit before I swing it on open.

  Ezra-Dad is already standing there, hand on his face like he’s been wondering what to do about coming in, and when he sees me his forehead wrinkles up.

  ‘I’m gonna go Outside,’ I say, all breath.

  ‘Aye.’ He moves aside, so I can see some of the long room that’s on the other side of the door. ‘Ye’ll want tae go downstairs, then.’

  I nod, even though I ain’t knowing what ‘stairs’ are to go down. He turns himself round and I follow, looking all what way inside the new room, big and high and yellow, with lots of doors going off into other rooms that I can’t see –

  ‘Whoa!’

  My foot slips as the soft floor under my toes disappears. I look down, and the floor is suddenly miles below. My stomach is doing some falling of its own. I shout something like an ‘oh’.

  Then hands are on my arm, hands holding me up, letting me get my feet on to the floor and my back against the wall. Hands as big as beds and rough as wall.

  I’m shaking all over. I look up at Ezra-Dad and see he’s looking pale and surprised.

  ‘Ye OK?’

  His hands are out, like he’s worried I might go and fall again. I want to prove that I’m fine, but my legs are feeling weird, so I slide down the wall ’til I’m sitting and can’t see where the floor dips away.

  ‘Didnae see the stairs, heh?’

  I shake my head, my chest feeling all tight.

  Ezra-Dad shuffles from foot to foot.

  There’s a bang, then a wallop of wind blows up to me from below the floor. There’s a thump, then some more, then a rustle and a sniff. Then Willow appears, and when he sees me sitting his forehead rolls up like Ezra-Dad’s.

  Ezra-Dad wipes his hands down his trousers.

  ‘Hey!’ Willow says, sitting down right in the spot where I almost fell to my death. ‘Er –’ he darts a look at Ezra-Dad – ‘what’s going on?’

  I swallow and don’t say nothing. Nor does Ezra-Dad.

  Willow raises an eyebrow. ‘You want to come downstairs?’

  I shake and nod my head at the same time so it comes out as a circle.

  Willow looks at Ezra-Dad again, who coughs. ‘She just … nearly fell.’

  Willow’s eyes are wide at me. ‘You OK?’

  I nod for true this time and look at Ezra-Dad, who saved me like a Woodcutter from a Wolf. He’s looking up at the ceiling.

  Willow creeps forward. ‘Want to try coming down with me?’

  I stretch my neck and try to look down the stairs, but Willow is in the way.

  ‘We’ll do it together. Kiddie-style, eh?’

  I shuffle towards the hole with Willow, who sits on the top like it ain’t nothing. I watch him use his hands and feet to slide his ass down bit by bit, kind of like how the Others used to shuffle themselves around the Tower.

  This ain’t the time to think on them, Ele.

  I try the stair shuffle. Then we do it together. It takes an awful long time, as there are as many stairs as I have teeth, but when I get to the bottom Willow helps me up with a hand under the arm and I’m feeling mighty pleased.

  How to be an Outside Person – number thirteen: Go downstairs.

  The stairs lead to a long white room with four more doors.

  Four.

  ‘Who’s in all of these?’ I ask Willow, my hand still gripping hold of the bar on the side of the stairs. All the doors are closed.

  Willow shrugs, pulling me forward. ‘No one. It’s just me and Dad here.’

  The door in front of the stairs is different to the others. It has a mouth in it that’s breathing the air of the Outside. We don’t go through that one. Instead, I follow Willow as he pushes the door to the left open.

  ‘This is the living room.’

  And it is. It’s beating red like the inside of a heart, with white shapes that look half chair and half bed, as well as a black square hanging on the wall over a hole housing a pile of sticks, like a Big Bad Wolf has blown something down in there.

  ‘This is your room, too?’ I say, my mouth all dry from being open so much.

  ‘Aye,’ Willow says. ‘And there’s more.’

  More. And then I realize. Of course there’d be
more rooms than in the Three Bears’ house and the gingerbread house. Willow is a Prince, so this must be a real-life castle.

  Willow pulls me out of the ‘living room’ and round the side of the stairs to a little door under them. Ezra-Dad tuts behind me. I peer in and see all sorts of things I now know to be shoes, all smelling a smell that zaps the top of my nose.

  ‘This is the shoe cupboard,’ he says. He smiles at the O of my mouth and shuts the door, shooting Ezra-Dad an I told you so smile.

  ‘And this is the kitchen,’ he says.

  When he opens the door, all I see at first is light. Then I see tables and chairs. Then food – more food than I could ever want. Then windows, promising more Outside than I might ever need. I see that shed of mine sitting Outside, and I see what Willow must have been seeing, thinking of me in there and him out here.

  And I watch him go towards another door in this room. A fifth door. Five doors. This one has light leaking in from the Outside. He’s gonna open it. He’s gonna open it and take me Outside.

  And suddenly I ain’t as ready to go as I thought I was.

  Thirty-Two

  I’m still in the kitchen when the sun has gone way down and Ezra-Dad has taken himself up to bed. Only Willow is left with me, hands propping up his chin and eyes rolling back into his head.

  ‘Show me again.’

  ‘’sake, Ele. We’ve been over it a million times.’

  But he slides off the chair and wanders over to me, bouncing round the ‘kitchen worktop’. He turns on the tap. It’s shiny and bent over a big bowl. A ‘sink’.

  How to be an Outside Person – number seven: Know all the Outside words.

  I’m learning so many Outside words.

  ‘Where does the water come from?’

  He yawns. ‘Some plant somewhere.’

  ‘Plant like a tree?’

  ‘Aye. Nae.’ He groans. ‘Who asks this stuff?’

  He fills a big white box with water, sets it down, then it slowly starts to crackle. It’s called a ‘kettle’.

  I open up a door to a box where the cups are kept. It’s called a ‘cupboard’ or a ‘press’. It squeaks something awful when it’s opened, so I do it. A lot.

  Willow groans again.

  The ‘tea’ is kept in the box labelled TEA. Tea is little black dust in a round bag. You put it in the cup.

  Willow sits back down again and rests his forehead on the table. I open the cold cupboard I now know to be a ‘fridge’, and a light comes on inside automatically, showing me three shelves and a see-through drawer. Inside the drawer are red and green balls called ‘peppers’, brown spotted balls called ‘potatoes’ – once Willow also called them ‘tatties’ – and a lighter brown ball with tufty hair called an ‘onion’, which made my eyes water when I licked it. The thing I want is hidden in the back of the fridge door, and it’s in a tall cup called a ‘bottle’ and is as white as paper. It’s called ‘milk’. I recognize that word from the Cow in ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’, but I ain’t never seen it in real.

  I pour it out into the cups with the tea and hot water.

  The teabags are taken out and the cups are stirred with a spoon, though we don’t drink it from there. You have to wait until it’s cooled down and then drink it from the cup. We go and sit at the table to wait for it.

  How to be an Outside Person – number fourteen: Make tea.

  This is our fifth cup. I wasn’t sure about tea at first, but now it’s my favourite.

  Sitting at the table with Willow is Three Bears short of a scene in a book. I sit myself down and try not to wriggle about as much as my back and legs want to. Instead, I watch the clouds coming from the tea do a little dance up and around.

  Willow rests his head in his hands again and looks at me. ‘I can’t believe you’ve not made tea before.’

  ‘I have!’

  ‘I meant before today.’

  ‘Where are all the other Outside People?’ I ask quick.

  ‘Around here?’ he says, blinking away his other thoughts. ‘Erm, well, this is Scotland. Everyone is really spread out.’

  Scotland. Willow’s Kingdom must be mighty big if it’s so spread out that you can’t even see no Dragons in the sky. That’ll explain why I ain’t seen nothing yet, though. They’re all hiding themselves away on other pages, waiting for me to go Outside and hunt them out.

  I edge myself a little further away from the door.

  That tired look is back in Willow’s eyes again. He pokes at a hole in the table between us. ‘There’s just us here, really. And a few weirdos.’

  I blow over the top of my tea and wish I was sitting on the floor.

  Willow rubs his eyes. ‘Things never used to be this quiet, though. When Mum was alive, there would always be sound somewhere. Singing. Music. Her cello. She was the one who got me into the violin, you know?’ He glances up at me and smiles slightly. ‘She said she needed a tenor to her bass. I wasn’t any good, really – not then. But it was nice, playing with her. I dunno …’ He rests his head back on his hand and his smile dribbles away between his fingers. ‘It all sounds a bit empty now.’

  And I know that. I knew it when Zeb went. All the Tower was filled with my own bad thoughts. There weren’t no smiles from Zeb to lift them off the floor, nor words to keep me running. If I din have those Others …

  I clear my throat. ‘You got Ezra-Dad, though.’

  Willow frowns. ‘Nae, I don’t. He doesn’t care about anyone but himself. You know we can go for days sometimes without even saying a word to each other?’

  ‘You don’t always need words, though,’ I say, squeezing the handle of my cup real tight.

  Willow sighs, sitting back and rubbing his face in his hands. ‘Aye, you do.’ He looks at me out of the corner of his eye. ‘What about your parents? Are they big talkers?’

  Parents? My belly jumps up like the lights have just come on. What are parents, anyway? In the books, fathers are people who leave you alone in the woods, and mothers send Huntsmen to cut out your heart if you’re too pretty.

  I shrug.

  Willow looks at me hard. ‘You can tell me, you know. Where you’re from. How you got here.’

  I try taking a sip of my tea, but it’s too hot and burns my lips. I wince.

  Willow shifts from side to side, drumming his fingers on the table. ‘Ele?’

  I disappear under my hair.

  ‘Your accent –’

  ‘I ain’t lying!’ I shout, banging my hands on the table and making Willow jump. ‘I’m from here, like I said, OK?’

  Willow blinks, his hands up. ‘OK, sorry for asking.’ He frowns. ‘But, you know, you should tell us. If there’s anyone looking for you, we should know.’

  ‘There ain’t no one looking for me.’ I keep myself bent forward, all the words I ain’t saying eating at my belly. The Others. Jack. All trapped Inside. Are they thinking of me?

  And Him. What about Him?

  How to be an Outside Person – number five: Don’t think about the Inside.

  Willow nods at me, but he knows. He can see my Inside on me like I have it written all over my skin.

  ‘Come on. It’s late.’

  He stands up noisily and I follow, putting the cups in the sink like he showed me. He stomps up the stairs on his feet like it ain’t nothing, and I follow him up with my eyes ’til he disappears. I try putting my foot on the bottom step and lifting myself up. It hurts my legs in strange places.

  I’m awful wobbly, so I sit down and try sliding myself up. But it ain’t the same without Willow here.

  It don’t feel right to be up there tonight, anyway. Not with his words ringing in my ears.

  I go into the kitchen again, and curl up on the shiny floor, instead.

  Even with the lights off, it’s mighty bright in here. There’s yellow light coming from Outside someplace and it’s making me think of suns. I lie awake on my back, staring at a long crack in the ceiling, stretching from the door to the dark light bulb.

&
nbsp; I got to be better at being Outside. Even making tea and speaking all the words ain’t enough. Willow knows something. And I know it’s only a matter of time ’til he goes and finds out about that Inside.

  And then what?

  Thirty-Three

  Willow comes down in the morning and finds me sitting in front of the door opposite the stairs, looking out through the rectangle hole in the middle of it. I got my hands poked through it and my nose buried deep in the Outside air, so I don’t hear him come down the stairs and up behind me.

  ‘Have you been here all night?’

  I jump and trap my fingers in the flap, cussing. I shake my head, sucking on my red knuckles.

  He raises his eyebrow, but I ain’t lying. I’ve been in the kitchen, trying to make myself come over to this door.

  ‘You can go out, you know. It’s not locked.’

  He leans over me, presses down the door handle and pulls it towards us. All the Outside comes rushing in at me all at once.

  How to be an Outside Person – number four: Go Outside.

  I push the door shut again.

  ‘That’s OK!’ I shout, my heart hammering. ‘I don’t need to go Outside. I’m fine looking through the hole.’

  Willow looks at me funny before smiling and helping me up. ‘Sure you are. I ran you a bath, actually, if you want it? I …’ He looks down at the hole in his sock. ‘I guess it’s to say sorry for barraging you with questions last night.’ He shakes his head. ‘I hate that.’

  I nod, trying not to look at him. I don’t want him thinking no more on last night.

  He leads me up the stairs, and I make it mainly on my feet this time, with him helping me. I’m wondering what a ‘bath’ is.

  He gives me a big orange blanket that feels like carpet, which is the soft thing on all the floors in here, and I follow him into the bathroom. I look into the large bowl in the corner and see a waterfall splashing up white and making clouds that settle on top of the water.