Unbirthday

by Liz Braswell

  Then a trio of men exited the club next door, talking loudly and laughing uproariously, in fine—if raucous—spirits.

  “Oh, look, there’s Ramsbottom’s stupid event tonight,” one of the older men said, pointing his silver-handled cane mostly at Alice and her aunt, though meaning the building behind them. “I say! Let’s crash the party!”

  “George, yes, let’s do!” another otherwise distinguished white-haired gentleman agreed enthusiastically. “I hear they have quite the spread. Oh, it would be so fun to tweak the nasty little start-up—he daren’t order us out! He would just have to take it, hoping for our support!”

  “Perhaps not, gentlemen,” the youngest member of the party said soothingly, with patience and humor. “We should really call it a night…. Alice?”

  She had a terrible premonition just before he turned, she really did, of who it would be.

  (Terrible?)

  (Or hopeful?)

  It was A. Joseph Katz, Esq., of course, and those were most likely Alexandros and Ivy, also esquires, the partners in the firm where he worked.

  Any excitement she might or might not have admitted upon seeing the young man was immediately tempered by the look in his eyes: they flicked over to the house she and her aunt had obviously come from, and his face fell in disappointment when he realized why they were there.

  “I hadn’t realized you were so political after all,” he said with a forced smile.

  “I’m here because of my sister,” Alice said quickly, without even the courtesy of a proper greeting, too eager to correct his assumption. “I owed her a favor. That is all.”

  “Vivian, it’s been too long!” George (Alice assumed) called, waving his cane. “What the deuce are you doing at Ramsbottom’s?”

  “Stealing the silverware, of course,” Alice’s aunt quipped. “How is your wife?”

  “Oh, she’s a fighter! She’s doing just fine, the old lass! She’ll be up and about soon, and we’ll take that trip to Italy I promised her the moment she’s better! The air there will do her a world of good, I’m sure of it!”

  The other lawyer was still looking a little myopically at Alice and Katz, who were silently looking at each other.

  “You know this young woman, Katz?” he asked.

  “We’re acquainted,” Katz said shortly.

  “George, walk with me? Ahead? With your partner?” Vivian suggested, tilting her head at the younger people, giving her friend a knowing look.

  “Absolutely! Always willing to help out a damsel in distress!” he said, pulling Mr. Ivy after him.

  “But I should like to steal some silverware,” the other barrister said longingly. “Or at least a glass of port.”

  The three older people strolled ahead, and Alice and Katz, somewhat embarrassed, followed. Alice put her hand on his arm. They walked in awkward silence.

  “I think Ramsbottom is just terrible,” Alice finally blurted out. “He is loathsome. I don’t know why my sister supports him—she is many things, but not stupid. Anyway, I have paid up my debt to her and will not be returning for an encore.”

  “I’m glad,” Katz said with a smile.

  “Are you glad I do not support Mr. Ramsbottom? Or glad I will not be mingling with his supporters, perhaps?” she asked, a mischievous twinkle in her eye.

  Katz didn’t respond, at first looking chagrined and then smiling at his own obviousness. Alice felt a funny little thrill when he gave her a sidewise, conspiratorial look: oh, you got me there!

  “Both, if I may be honest. But did you ever resolve whatever park-tree-rabbit-friends issue you were having?”

  Alice laughed and it was perfectly natural, light peals that took a thousand stones off her shoulders.

  “No, I did not, Mr. Katz. I did not. And as mad as it all may seem, it still worries me. It’s all riddles and mysteries and things I’m beginning to quite forget, even though I really shouldn’t. None of it makes a lick of sense. Do you like riddles, Mr. Katz?”

  “Do you know anything about our legal system?” he responded wryly. “You have to love riddles in my job. Actually, I heard a good one the other day from a dear friend who—like me, like you—loves riddles as well.”

  “Oh, let’s hear it!”

  “All right. Who knows—maybe solving it will help you work out your own problems. They work like that, you know. Expand the brain or exercise the mind or something. Make you think differently about things. Here goes:

  “I have mine and you have yours

  It’s needed in a painting

  But in the end none agree on

  The meaning of the thing.”

  “Oh, that’s a tough one,” Alice said, thinking. “It could be anything. Value? Color? What is it?”

  “You must figure it out yourself,” Katz said with one of his maddening little smiles.

  They had stopped walking and were right in front of Aunt Vivian’s house.

  Alice had the sudden thought that he was going to tweak her nose, or do something—when suddenly one of the senior partners noticed them again.

  “I say, is that a camera?” George asked, looking owlishly at her obviously technical satchel. “I’ve been thinking about getting one for myself or the wife—oh! Be a dear and take one of us three old codgers, would you? And print me up a portrait? I want to see what it will do!”

  “Of course, but the light…oh, you’re not listening anymore,” Alice sighed, feeling this was somehow familiar. Somehow Wonderlandy. The two old lawyers were utterly ignoring her, running hands over their hair and straightening their ties. Vivian gave her niece a sympathetic smile and carefully led them as close to a gas lamp as she could so the flames could illuminate their features at least a little.

  For a moment Alice wondered what Wonderland creatures they would be. And then she was taken suddenly by the thought that these three were old friends, all still getting along marvelously without all of Mathilda’s silly rules about what was proper behavior for men and women. She took the picture, trying to remember the Hatter.

  “Where does the picture come out?” the other lawyer asked interestedly.

  “Oh, don’t be ridiculous,” Vivian said, shaking her head and giving him a hug about the shoulders. “We must go inside and develop the plates. Actually, we must go do that after we take another portrait I have promised. Alice?”

  “Good night, Mr. Katz,” she said regretfully.

  “Until next time,” Katz said with a bow. “And Alice—do figure it out. I think you will find the solution may help you. And I depend on your answer!”

  “Oh, bother,” Alice said, for many reasons, not the least of which was the three older people watching them.

  Charlie was the name of the terrified little six-year-old Alice was meant to do a portrait of. She had beautiful, overcoiffed ringlets of black hair and a perfect little white dress with a blue sash such as Alice herself had worn at that age. With soft words encouraging the exploration of Vivian’s rather extraordinary bric-a-brac, Alice eventually managed to coax a smile out of the serious girl. She supposed the aunt wanted a proper old-fashioned pose, as was done with the large-format cameras in studios with velvet backdrops, but she also took one of the girl giggling and hanging off the divan upside down, the paintbrush tips of her thick black locks just brushing the floor.

  A hundred years from now, Alice thought as she developed the pictures, someone will see this photograph and really see Charlie. He won’t just wonder about the frowning little girl with the composed hands and face in the other photograph. He’ll have an idea of what she was actually like.

  She was a little surprised when the “fun” picture, once revealed, remained the same—Charlie upside down—but the serious photograph revealed a Wonderland umbrella bird. “I suppose all children make up the little creatures of Wonderland,” she said as the plate dried, thinking of Adina and how delightful that was. Although the umbrella bird in question seemed to be hiding behind a tree and peeping out from behind it nervously.

&
nbsp; Alice also developed the photo she had taken of Mrs. Yao and the deadly stone. But instead of an incriminating newspaper showstopper, the scene was of a person tall and stern, with dark skin and a dark circlet of black baubles upon her hair. She held her arms crossed over her chest and stared directly at the viewer with an appraising look. A strange weapon was gripped in her right hand, one with three bells or spheres at the end of its shaft.

  “A club?” Alice wondered aloud.

  Mrs. Yao was in the suit of clubs in the other world.

  But why?

  There had been nothing in her adventures so far that involved any suit besides hearts.

  She thought back to two girls on a stifling summer day, long heavy curtains drawn in the study but seeming to hold the heat and dust in rather than keeping things cool. A pack of cards, divided, lay between them. Alice had a drooping red bow in her hair; Missy Fedgington a pretty little black bonnet that had fallen to the floor. Their fathers were friends, but these two were united only in boredom and age. Each flipped a card, and despite the extreme lassitude of the afternoon Alice couldn’t quite let go of the sting of defeat each time she lost a bout…. Little red and black queens, trading cards endlessly in a game neither much cared about.

  The memory came back to Alice with force, like a suddenly recalled dream.

  You just pull out your cards over and over again, and whoever has the most at the end wins.

  She looked at the picture. The black baubles almost looked like a crown the way Yao wore them.

  That was it!

  In Wonderland, her double was the Queen of Clubs!

  “There’s another queen,” she murmured. “There’s another queen in Wonderland! As powerful as the Queen of Hearts, and almost certainly her enemy. Maybe she can help us!”

  Alice studied the image in the photo. The woman in it seemed a bit severe and stern—but she didn’t seem mad. Or at least not frothing-at-the-mouth mad. Someone who maybe could be reasoned with.

  Well, it was the start of a plan, if Alice could ever get back to Wonderland. She cleaned up quickly, leaving the rest of the plates to develop another time, and practically ran out of the house.

  “I’m coming,” she promised the Hatter as she ran through the streets.

  “To sleep!” she declared, bursting into her house and running up the stairs to her room. “On the nonce!”

  (Which really wasn’t that hard; it had been an extremely tiring day.)

  But she woke the next morning with nothing more than a few half-remembered dreams of pink cheeks and wise eyes.

  So she tried napping in the large chair her father preferred to snooze in after dinner.

  She tried it on the couch, gazing at the image of the Queen of Clubs before closing her eyes.

  She tried it in the garden on a blanket in a warm corner.

  She even had a bewildered Mrs. Anderbee recite long and rambling stories about growing up in Yorkshire until she drifted off. The old woman was flattered, and Alice’s daydreams were full of berries and furze, clear cold spring water and turkey for Christmas. But there was no entrance to Wonderland.

  She might have been seeing things, but at one point it seemed like the Queen of Clubs in the picture had turned slightly to look at her. As if to say, Well, are you coming?

  Time was ticking, whether you were friends with him or no.

  “All right, let’s look at this logically,” Alice said, thinking about her friend Charles and his math.

  The first time, she had chased a rabbit into the other world; the second time, she had been pointed there by a duck. Perhaps sleep wasn’t the answer at all; perhaps animals were the interlocutors of Wonderland: the Nikes, the Charons, the Castors and Polluxes, the psychopomps. All she had to do was find the right one!

  This, of course, resulted in situations that went from mildly amusing to downright shocking. Despite never really having cared about what others thought of her, Alice still had to bear with comments from her family about the fox she chased into the garden, the Scottie dog she swore was looking at her funny, the rat that nearly made her usually stoic sister scream.

  (Rather than carefully avoid the furry monster the two sisters spied in the street, which is what sensible adults did when encountering the fat urban unafraid-of-humans variety of rodent, Alice knelt down and tried to reason with it. And when the right-thinking rat decided that this human was mad and therefore potentially dangerous, and tried to escape, she ran after it.)

  There was also the bright blue tit in her mother’s garden that she had merely wound up taking a picture of.

  All right, Alice said to herself. Perhaps I shouldn’t rely on randomly finding some animal citizen of Wonderland. I should take the situation in hand myself. What else has my crossing over involved?

  Her quick and analytical mind—which had resulted in many a triumph over her father at chess—picked through the things she knew about Wonderland and crossing over, and fanned them out for review: sleep, animals, Unbirthdays. She had been called to Wonderland the second time; had the first time just been chance? What else was there?

  Aha! Two people had been present when she had dreamed herself to Wonderland. The first was her sister; the second, Katz. And while her sister was downstairs and extremely easy, at least physically, to talk to, Alice didn’t imagine the conversation would go very far.

  “Excuse me, Mathilda, could you pause your pamphlet-folding for just a moment to cast your mind back to over ten years ago and remember exactly what I was doing before you woke me under the tree that time in the park?”

  Even if Mathilda didn’t dismiss it immediately as nonsense, the rest would still prove awkward and unhelpful.

  Katz…on the other hand…

  This was not, she told herself, also an excuse to see him (it was).

  He would not be compelled to discuss with her such nonsensical-seeming things merely because he felt about her a certain way (he obviously did).

  She was only doing any of this because it was vital for her return to Wonderland to save her friends (mostly true).

  There were two problems with her plan. One was that she didn’t have an answer to his riddle, and the other was that showing up randomly at his office might seem impetuous and a little desperate—especially to outside observers.

  So she would start at the Square, where apparently he spent some of his time.

  On the way there Alice stopped at the little fern (now a few inches taller and more unfurled) and paused to ask if it could help her.

  It remained haughtily silent on the matter.

  The Square was also strangely silent. There were fewer children than usual, and those extant were quiet and subdued.

  “Hello,” Alice said gamely to the closest boy. “Is Mr. Katz here, by any chance?”

  The boy shrugged. “Katz hasn’t been here today. We was hoping he’d come. Josh…they took Joshua away. And a bunch of others. Maybe Mr. Katz could have stopped it.”

  “Took Joshua away? Who did? Where?” Alice demanded.

  “The police and someone else with them. They said they committed a crime—broke a window or something. Josh owes me a turn with his ball. He owes me a turn with his ball and he was going to let me this afternoon.”

  He said it with the timbre of righteous anger but his eyes were wide and wet.

  “Broke a window? But that can’t be. It was Danny Flannigan. I don’t understand this at all. Tell me everything,” Alice said grimly, kneeling down to put her face even with his. That was the thing of dealing with children: you didn’t lie to them and you didn’t treat them like lesser beings. Alice had managed excellent results with her little models by being as respectful and polite as she would to a vicar.

  “Two cops just came and grabbed Josh and three of his other friends. Filthy orphans, they said. Josh is no orphan. He’s got a sister and a cat.”

  “Of course. Don’t worry—they are probably just down at the police station,” Alice said. “I’ll go find Mr. Katz and we will ha
ve this sorted immediately.”

  All right, maybe that part was a lie, she thought as she straightened up and hurried back out of the square. She wasn’t sure he shouldn’t worry. She wasn’t sure they could have it all sorted immediately. She wasn’t even sure where Katz’s office was. But she would find it.

  Alice hurried down the alleys and twisty little streets, picking up her skirts, heels pounding the cobblestones, foot strikes echoing off the walls. She knew a shortcut that would let her out almost directly on the high street where all the important businesses were; she was as at home here as a rabbit in its labyrinthine warren.

  She tried to sort through crazy thoughts and priorities as she fought for breath and ran. First she would try to see about Katz and tell him about what was happening with the children. Hopefully he would be able to do something about that. Then she would take the photograph of Mrs. Yao to the newspaper. Or maybe to the police. She wasn’t sure which. Then she could turn her thoughts back to Wonderland.

  So much to do—and how was it suddenly all up to her to fix things? She had no experience in social justice, newspapers, the police, or politicians. It was all ridiculous. Nonsense, really.

  Once again she passed by the little green fern and, looking at it instead of the cobbles ahead of her, almost tripped over the curb.

  A strong arm stopped her fall—and then grabbed her around the neck, a gloved hand over her mouth.

  “HAND IT OVER!” rasped a muffled voice.

  Alice tried to tear herself away from her assailant—whose face, she saw, was covered in a scarf to conceal his features. His coat was on inside out to hide any details.

  He wasn’t trying to strangle her, she quickly realized; he was just trying to hold her still with one hand while he fumbled for her bag with the other.

  “Get away!” she shouted, her voice muffled. “Villain!”

  She writhed and flailed trying to shake him off.

  “JUST GIVE ME THE BAG!” he…pleaded?—still in a fake, raspy voice.

  She gave the satchel one hard yank.