‘He said he’s here with a business position,’ she said, handing over the card. ‘He said he remembers when all you had was a book wheelbarrow.’
‘Business proposition,’ Pa corrected her. ‘What kind of business?’
‘He didn’t say … but …’ She wanted to tell her father the rest of it, all at once. The eager look in the stranger’s eye when she’d said she was a Cole. The odd, unkind way he spoke about Ruby. The peculiar length of his legs, like a shadow at sunset. That deep-down squirming Brown Alley feeling, which wouldn’t go away. But she didn’t know where to begin, or how to explain her unease without sounding babyish.
‘Aha.’ Pa had figured out the trick of tilting the black card to make the letters shine. ‘That’s new …’
‘Shall I tell him to come back another time?’
‘What? No, I’ll see him.’ He stood up and attempted to tidy the desk. ‘Tell him I’ll be … just … a minute …’
Pearl went to the door. Resisting the urge to bolt it, she turned the handle and glanced at the business section. The Obscurosmith was gone. She gave a small sigh of relief.
‘Thank you, Miss Cole.’
She whirled around. He was leaning on the wall behind her, all careless elegance. ‘You followed me!’
‘So?’
It was the kind of thing Pearl herself would have said to annoy her brothers. She stared at him, mouth half-open. He was a grown man, he was in her house, and he was teasing her as if he were a child himself. What was he hoping to achieve?
‘Pa will be out in a minute,’ she said, and strode away, trying to look as if she was too busy for mysterious strangers.
The sense of being followed stuck to her like a spider’s web. She climbed the stairs to the first floor and looked over the railing at the door to her father’s office. It was shut, and gave away nothing. Atop the nearest obelisk, the paper wagtail stopped preening itself, and fixed her with its small white eyes.
Despite the heat, she shivered. This wasn’t Brown Alley foreboding anymore – the nervous feeling that warned her of trouble. It was the sense that she had made a wrong turn somewhere, and was deep in trouble already.
CHAPTER TWO
STRANGE BIRDS
The Tea Salon was bustling. Customers chatted and read, scribbled and nibbled, among clinking plates and potted palm trees. On opposite sides of the room, splendid scenes of India and China competed for attention: misty peaks, opulent palaces, well-dressed people riding through rainforests, beasts hunting, birds fanning magnificent tails. In a few paintings, the people had magnificent tails, and well-dressed beasts were riding through the forests – just as in Pa’s picture books. The Symphonion was playing ‘Daisy Bell’, the cheerful tune tinkling out as the silver disc turned.
And Valentine Cole was losing his brother.
He knew it from the moment Gao Meilin, the waitress, set their afternoon tea down on the table. The scones breathed sweet steam. The jam glistened like a jewel. It was the most delicious sight Vally had seen all week.
Eddie wasn’t even looking at it. His eyes were on Meilin, in her tight gold qipao.
Eddie had changed a lot recently. He was the same height now as their big sister. The boyish roundness had left his face, giving definition to an angular jaw, which he was now shaving every second day. Vally didn’t think he’d ever have Eddie’s confident good looks. He had his father’s oval face: the kind that managed to look childlike even with a luxuriant beard.
‘Well, anyway, I was getting to the good bit,’ said Vally, trying to salvage the conversation they’d just been having. ‘The master calls the marks and we get our tests back. And as we’re leaving, Henry Bramford goes, “Another A-plus for Val Colon. Got to study hard to be like his crackpot dad.” So I turn around and I go, “Don’t worry, Henry, you can always work on the family farm.” And he shoves me and says, “Because all farmers are stupid, are they?” And I go, “No, because you’re a donkey.”’
The kitchen’s saloon doors swung with Meilin’s passing. Eddie turned abruptly back to face his brother. ‘Sorry?’
Vally sighed. At the time, it had seemed like the perfect comeback. Henry Bramford hadn’t hurt Vally as much as he’d hoped to: nobody who knew Pa could deny that he was bonkers. A person would have to be, to write anything as joyously silly as Cole’s Fun Doctor, or the Funny Picture Book. No sane man could have dreamed up anything as wondrous, as magical, as downright peculiar, as Cole’s Book Arcade. But it was all right to be a bit eccentric if everybody loved you for it.
Now, though, the argument seemed stupid and childish. ‘It was sort of only funny if you were there.’ Vally bit into a cream-covered scone.
‘Hm.’ Eddie’s eye was wandering again. Meilin was bent over the neighbouring table, gathering teacups.
‘Are you in love with Meilin, Ed?’ Vally whispered. ‘Do you want to marry her?’
To Vally’s surprise, his brother shrugged. ‘I’d have to learn Chinese.’
Vally didn’t know how to respond. He’d expected Eddie to punch him on the shoulder or flick a crumb of scone at him.
‘Maybe she could teach me Chinese, and I could help with her English.’ Eddie slathered more jam on his scone. ‘Don’t you think she’s pretty?’
Vally felt as if he was searching one of Pa’s picture puzzles for a hidden image: Here is a traveller in a forest. Find the bear. But Vally had never found that bear, and he couldn’t see what Eddie could see now. Perhaps one day, it would pop out of the image and he’d wonder how he ever missed it.
‘Come on.’ Eddie grinned. It reminded Vally of the warped reflections in the mirrors of Wonder Land, the Arcade’s hall of illusions. ‘You must be able to recognise a jammy bit of jam when you see her.’ He lifted his scone to his mouth. ‘And actual jam doesn’t count, by the way.’
A red-headed shop girl who worked across the street gave Vally a fluttery feeling in his stomach when he saw her, but the general idea of jammy-ness was foreign to him. The Tea Salon, with its fine china and sumptuous furnishings, suddenly seemed too grown-up. Vally found himself wishing they were in the lolly shop instead, where they could watch the confectioner smack and slap the oozing hot sugar into humbugs and raspberry drops. They used to go there for afternoon tea. They’d laughed so hard when Vally had put two voice-changing caramels in his mouth at once, and been stuck speaking in a thunderous bass all evening. Why had they stopped going?
‘Miss Finch,’ his brother challenged him.
Vally tried to recall the face of the sunny young woman who played the piano in the Book Arcade Band. ‘Pretty, I guess …’
‘Her, over there.’ Eddie gestured at a dour-looking grandmother on the far side of the room.
‘Pretty old,’ said Vally, but he regretted it. Quibbling with classmates was one thing. Judging people this way, as if they were animals in a livestock show, felt stupid and mean.
‘Right, then.’ Ed seemed smug, as if he had proved a point. ‘And how about Ma?’
The question felt like a trap. When Pa had put his Good Wife Wanted ad in the paper all those years ago, he’d hoped to meet someone intelligent, funny, kind and responsible, and he had. Eliza Cole was a bright sunbeam, who made friends wherever she went. She was stately. On special occasions, she was elegant. But there was nothing remarkable about her appearance. She was short and robust, reassuringly solid when you needed a hug – but not beautiful. At rest, her face looked stern. And because she and Pa were famous, people liked to gossip. On the tram, in the market, anywhere people could get hold of a newspaper, they’d eventually come to the Book Arcade ads. And then they talked.
‘Old Cole’s cooked up some outrageous fib about a sea serpent.’
‘His marketing is creative; I’ll grant him that.’
‘Did you know he advertised to find his wife? There’s a lesson in that – don’t forget to ask for a pretty one.’
And Vally would have to stare at the street, pretending it didn’t hurt to hear them talk about
his mother like that.
‘I don’t know, Ed.’ Vally stood, shouldering his school satchel. ‘See you at dinner.’
As he emerged into the Arcade proper, Vally felt brittle. He knew he wasn’t supposed to have favourite siblings, but he did. The two closest to him in age were – had been – closest to his heart as well.
Above him was Eddie, who was outdoors and sunny days, football and crude humour. They kept each other company on the tram. They talked across the darkness of their shared bedroom, although Eddie usually fell asleep first. They’d once hidden a dead rat in a teacher’s desk. When they were caned for it, the pain and humiliation were halved by Eddie bearing it beside him.
Below him was the sister who was winter evenings in the warm flat, reading by rain-specked windows, indoor games, secrets, dreams, imaginings. The sister who’d never made fun of him for liking games girls liked, but let him join in. One day, she’d shown him how she could make a soft light, the size of a dandelion head, balance on her fingertip. She’d coaxed it and praised it to life, her powerful imagination making up a little for the shakiness of her seven-year-old articulation. When she’d tried to teach Vally, he’d struggled the most with conviction. After half-a-dozen tries, with Ruby’s encouragement, he got it – but then, as often happened with him, an intrusive worry had disrupted his imagination. The light had turned into a flame at the last moment, burning his finger and narrowly missing the curtain. Ruby had told their parents he’d been careless with a candle.
But she wasn’t around anymore. She hadn’t been, for a long time.
And now Eddie was on the train to adulthood, leaving Vally behind.
He felt a little better when he breathed in the rich tropical smell of the Fernery.
On the outside, the door was set in the middle of a bookshelf. On the inside, it was in the middle of a tree. Yellow butterflies rose in a whirlwind as Vally stepped through. The Fernery was one of the Book Arcade’s most marvellous rooms. From outside, at the Little Collins Street entrance, it looked like an ordinary greenhouse – but from the inside, it was enormous: taller and wider than any greenhouse in the world.
It had once been ordinary. Full of shady ferns and the calls of the birds in the aviary, it had been an oasis in its own right, a little spot of green in the middle of the city. On rainy days, when the sky was as dark as wet bluestone, Pa had often escaped his office and sat on a hidden bench, scribbling away at his letters and articles. One bitter Sunday in August, when the Arcade was closed, he’d come down to the greenhouse. There, alone and secure in the knowledge that he wouldn’t be interrupted, he had written the Fernery into its present vast existence. He had expanded the inner space, pushing the glass roof up to the height of the tallest church spire and the glass walls out to five acres. It would never have worked so well if not for Pa’s strength in all three principles of magic. Being a writer gave him an advantage in articulation. Being a visionary made his imagination both broad and minutely detailed. And being an optimist made his conviction more powerful than that of anyone Vally knew. Negative thoughts didn’t seem to touch Pa. Shoplifters and customer complaints didn’t bother him. If he’d burned his fingers conjuring floating lights, he would have simply brought a bucket of water next time.
In the years since, Pa had stocked the Fernery with plants and creatures suited to its climate. He collected some of his own specimens, and accepted others as gifts. Having failed to produce a miniature thundercloud, he’d installed a system of handsome brass sprinklers. But magic didn’t always do what it was supposed to. Spells and magical effects all decayed eventually, like anything people created, and the unstable nature of magic made it impossible to predict exactly how this might happen. Sometimes spells fell apart all at once, like a house of cards. Sometimes they wore away gracefully, like a castle. And sometimes, like coral growing on a shipwreck, they gradually transformed into something stranger. This was probably the case with the Fernery, because some of the trees had grown as much in six years as they ought to in a hundred. And now the Fernery was its own world, hot and green and glorious – a whole rainforest inside Cole’s Book Arcade.
Perhaps Vally would have a dip in the pond. He would have to hide his clothes, though, to stop the monkeys playing with them. He scanned the treetops for their telltale rustling. Last time, they’d stolen his trousers, tossed his underclothes in the water, and bounded away hooting. They might have been the animals next to man – as Pa called them – but Vally preferred them to be the animals far away from boy.
Something rustled in the undergrowth nearby.
He froze. It sounded big. A bear? A jaguar? A komodo dragon? Pa would never buy such beasts for the peaceful Fernery. But although Vally trusted his father, he didn’t trust magic. It was unpredictable, its laws and limits varying from one artist to the next. It turned every nice safe never into a shifty maybe. Someone could have smuggled in a cat and transformed it for a laugh. The Fernery might have spontaneously created some predator to control the monkey population.
He gave it another moment. The ferns were still.
Vally relaxed. It must have been a bird, then, shaking the fronds as it flew off. He could hear the parrots screeching, somewhere up ahead. He started towards them, passing where the leaves had stirred.
‘RAH!’
Vally jumped. Behind him, his attacker fell into a fit of giggles. He whirled around. ‘Pearl!’
She stood behind a tree, grinning like a pixie. Not a pretty one from a girls’ reader, but the wicked kind that stole babies and turned milk sour.
‘It isn’t funny,’ said Vally, his pulse still hammering inside him. ‘That’s the oldest trick in the book.’
She pushed aside ferns. ‘You were so scared.’
‘I was startled. There’s a difference.’ He set his shoulders. If anyone were to leap out from hiding and surprise their siblings – which was a stupid joke anyway – it ought to have been him. According to a thousand songs and pictures and stories, older brothers were bullies and heroes, while little sisters were subjects and victims. Perhaps that had been somewhat true of the Cole family once. It was true of Eddie. He used to come storming in like a giant while Vally and Ruby were playing Zoo Escape, kicking over the dolls and wooden animals, the tin soldiers and buildings. And it was true of Ivy, the baby. She was an innocent little thing, easily fooled, and afraid of the stuffed polar bear at the front door.
But then, Pearl had always been bricky. She was a meddler and a show-off, as curious and bold as the monkeys. She was the loudest of the Coles, the most liable to run off on family outings, the one who took the least notice of what was expected of her. She had a knack for finding the wettest or dirtiest corner of anywhere, and coming home wearing its souvenirs.
And the worst thing, for Vally, was that she’d always brought out the same wild side in Ruby. The Ruby who’d played with Pearl was like a different child altogether: one who bounced on furniture and rifled through other people’s things, and drew too much attention on the tram, and laughed in the faces of older siblings who lost their temper. It had come as no surprise to Vally when he’d read about pearls and their formation. When a bit of sand or a parasite got into an oyster, the mollusc would smother it in shell-like layers before spitting it out – and thus, the book had said, a pearl is the result of constant irritation. Vally had held onto those words: their pleasant cadence, their cruel wit.
‘You,’ he said, as Pearl extracted herself from the undergrowth, ‘are a constant irritation.’
‘And it’s lovely to see you, too,’ she said, striding past him into the jungle. ‘Come on. Pa thought you’d want to see our new cockatoo. It’s pink.’
‘Galah,’ said Vally, jumping over the low loop of a vine.
‘You’re a galah,’ said Pearl. ‘It’s a cockatoo. With a crest.’
The marvellous new bird was a Major Mitchell cockatoo, and as promised, it was pink. It stood on a platform in the feeding area, taking nuts from the hand of Vally’s captivated father.<
br />
‘Try it again, Echo,’ Pa said. ‘I love Cole’s Funny Picture Book.’
‘Silly bird,’ the cockatoo said, flexing its red and yellow crest.
Pearl narrowed her eyes. ‘Is it really talking, Pa? You haven’t done it with magic?’
‘No, no! It’s trained.’ The bird bit him. ‘Although how well trained is up for debate. Come and say hello, Val.’ Pa straightened, gesturing to a paper bag on a nearby picnic seat. ‘Watch your fingers, though.’
Vally took a handful of nuts. ‘Hello, cocky.’
The cockatoo gave an ear-splitting shriek. ‘Mind your head!’
‘Be good, you cheeky thing,’ said Pa, stroking its crest. ‘This is Vally. Val, this is Echo.’
‘Come on, birdies!’ the bird cried. ‘Tuck in for your feed!’
Vally stretched out his hand, offering the treat. The bird bit him instead. With a cry, Vally dropped the whole handful and the cockatoo hopped to the ground to gobble them up.
‘Echo, don’t bite!’ Pa made a frustrated noise. ‘You’re a naughty one, aren’t you?’
‘He’s a great talker, Pa,’ Vally said.
The parrot bobbed its head. ‘Clever girl, Echo.’
‘I do believe she understands every word we’ve said,’ said Pa with a chuckle. ‘Although I hope she’s not as cunning as our monkeys, or we’ll be in trouble. What do you think, Pearligig?’
But Pearl wasn’t listening. She had gone still and quiet, watching something flutter among the fronds high above. It moved like a wren, but its body seemed as slight as a butterfly’s.
‘What is it?’ Vally asked.
‘A paper wagtail.’ Pearl shaded her eyes against the greenish sunlight. ‘It’s been scrutta-nising me.’
‘Scrutinising,’ Vally said.
Echo flapped back to the chair. ‘Cheeky bird!’
Vally watched the paper bird wave its tail. ‘Is it one of yours, Pa?’
The Grandest Bookshop in the World Page 2
