The Colors of Madeleine 01: Corner of White

by Jaclyn Moriarty

  He walked away from the sculpture, to the streetlight above the school gate, and unfolded the paper.

  It was not his father’s handwriting. Nor was it Cody’s.

  It was a rushed, flat scrawl and it said this:

  Dear Parking Meter,

  Me too.

  I mean, metaphysically speaking I am. I can’t figure out how to get away, or get back, and I really freakin’ want to, so in that metaphysical sense, well, I am also being held against my will.

  If you see what I mean.

  And if I’m using “metaphysical” correctly. Not sure.

  The thing is, my mother’s got us sort of trapped here. In a tower. Or anyway in a flat that’s high off the ground. No chance of rescue cause neither of us has hair long enough to let down, let’s say our names even WERE Rapunzel, which they’re not.

  You want to know what I used to eat? Jasmine gelato, lavender cupcakes, frangipane tart, and fine-spun toffee infused with rosewater. That was on an ordinary day.

  Here, we eat tinned beans. Specifically: fava beans, white beans, and, on special occasions, baked beans. (They make my mother throw up sometimes cause she’s used to the finer things in life.)

  Do you know what I USED to hear? Laughter like chime bells, my father playing his double bass, my mother singing, water features gurgling (that used to annoy me, actually, but I see now that it was beautiful), the teeny-tiny ding of the hotel elevator opening at the penthouse floor.

  Here, there are tourists saying the same thing over and over, in exactly the same tone, and students ringing their bike bells like scalpels, and the buzz of the sewing machine.

  In my life before, I never stayed still. I’d fall asleep in Paris and wake up in Prague. It was like I had wings, I was always flying or cartwheeling or floating. I was a girl who rode in carriages and sleighs, on ships and skateboards and skis, and everywhere I stepped there were white-gloved hands opening the doors to let me through.

  Here in Cambridge I only ride a rusty bike, and everywhere I turn I have to Keep Off the Grass. We can’t afford the bus fare to London, but my mother buys tickets anyway so she can take useless journeys to see about a quiz show.

  So that’s my story. What’s yours? Life as a broken parking meter. Kinda sucks, I guess.

  Yours sincerely,

  M.T.

  P.S. But if the note was actually left by a PERSON and you’re being held against your will? Well, I guess, ignore the above, cause it must sound mad selfish to you. Also, sort of irrelevant, considering your situation.

  P.P.S. And listen, you should maybe contact the police rather than leaving messages in parking meters. Just a thought.

  Elliot studied the note awhile. He leaned against the school gate. At first the words were like spark plugs, because they were not his father’s. Even dry electronics facts would have been a gift, and he’d been hoping for a gift, so this ignited something fierce inside him that scorched his eyes.

  But then the words settled into themselves and he began to disentangle a little of their meaning. He raised his eyebrows.

  He folded the note, put it in his pocket, drew out the deftball instead, tossed it high and straight into the night, caught it, and headed to his truck.

  1.

  It was raining heavily.

  Car headlights seemed to scowl around corners. Cyclists scowled back, wiping raindrops from their noses and eyebrows. Drainways and gutters gushed with water; tulips and daffodils trembled; and cherry blossom petals scattered from their trees, forming glowing veils of pink over slick brown mulch.

  In the Cambridge Market Square, a man stepped in a puddle and the splash patterned out across a passing woman’s skirt. A small crowd of tourists shivered in the entryway to Barclays Bank. The market itself was closed and tightly wrapped, but a fruit-stall owner was still packing up the last of his oranges.

  Just off the square, on St. Mary’s Passage, cane chairs and tables were soaking in the downpour on the terrace outside a café. In its window was a stencilled image of a buxom woman offering a tray of tea. Auntie’s, said the flourish above her head, and below, more plain-speaking: TEA SHOP.

  Inside Auntie’s Tea Shop, a girl was squinting hard at her friend. He, in turn, was lost in thought. He was tall and had golden-green eyes, and a wide mouth that seemed ready to form a big wide smile. These were Belle and Jack.

  A few streets away, in her attic flat, Madeleine was sitting on the couch. Her mother was at the sewing table. Rain streamed down the windows, and rain-shadows streamed down Holly’s and Madeleine’s faces and arms. The quiz show played on TV.

  Madeleine was holding a closed book.

  ISAAC NEWTON, said the cover of the book in big, proud blue and, beneath that, more humbly, the author’s name.

  Did Isaac have a nickname? Did they call him Zac? she thought. Also: What does it mean if your name begins with I? What effect does that have on your ego?

  She remembered that she’d dreamed about her iPod last night. In the dream, she had seen it on the seat of a passing train. Its music had been spilling everywhere, staining the seat. She’d been in one train, the iPod in another, and there it had gone, heading fast away from her, her hand reaching out through the window helplessly.

  Where are they now? she thought. Her iPod, her iPhone, her iPad, the I-ness of her life? Her mind stretched around in its memories, searching for her things: She saw her phone on the hotel bedside table in Paris; her iPad in her Louis Vuitton urban satchel; her iPod slipping from her pocket in the restaurant, the night before she ran away.

  Then she saw her father’s face, and he was pointing out the iPod as it slipped towards the floor.

  Madeleine’s memory slipped itself, and there was her dad again. He was pushing his chair back from the table and leaping to his feet, to demonstrate the odd way someone walked. The table was laughing hysterically. Other diners turned.

  Now she saw her father crouch by her side when she was small: the intensity of his gaze while she herself counted the feet of a millipede for him.

  She saw him at a hotel breakfast bar, pushing the collar of his shirt aside to show her a new tattoo.

  “Why’d you get that?” she had said.

  “To see how it would feel.”

  That was her father’s embrace of life. He did things just to see how they felt. He felt things more than most people did. He stopped still to laugh his big, full laugh, not caring if people had to wait or move around him. In an underground cave once, his laugh had echoed out, turning back on him, and he’d paused, surprised, and then laughed harder.

  The expression on her father’s face when their car hit a dog in Barcelona, the expression when the vet said the dog wouldn’t make it through the night. Tears in her father’s eyes as he stroked the dog’s ears.

  In Auntie’s Tea Shop, Jack and Belle were sharing the hot banana cake with butterscotch sauce, and drinking tea. The tablecloth was white lace, the chairs were loops of dark wood, and framed prints of Cambridge hung on the walls.

  “I had this dream last night,” Belle said, her spoon cutting a crescent moon into the cake.

  “All right.” Jack’s spoon hovered. “What was it?”

  “I had this dream where I kept kissing people and every time I did it was disgusting. I kept wanting to kiss random people — like the postman and that — but it was all wet, like saliva just pouring into the kiss.”

  There was a pause. “That’s disgusting,” Jack said.

  “Yeah, I told you that. I said it was disgusting.”

  Their spoons cut at the cake, fiercely competitive for a while, until Belle said, “Hang about,” and she sliced the cake in half, pushed half his way, half hers. “Now we can relax.”

  They both sat back and looked around. A middle-aged couple pushed open the door with a jangle of exclamations about the rain. A waitress muttered, “We’re practically closed,” but she smiled and seated them anyway. The waitress wore a black uniform trimmed in white at the collar and the sleeves, whi
te apron over it all.

  “I love this place,” said Belle.

  “It must have been drool,” said Jack. “You were drooling while you were dreaming, so that’s why the kisses were like that.”

  “I don’t drool.”

  “Of course you do. Everyone does. Especially when you’re dreaming. You’re paralysed when you dream. You can’t move anything, not even your tongue, so you can’t swallow your spit.”

  They both picked up their spoons again, thoughtful.

  “That paralysed thing,” Jack added. “It’s probably why I have so many dreams where I’m trying to run or drive to get somewhere, but I end up going nowhere.”

  “No. You have those dreams because you are going nowhere.”

  “Thanks,” said Jack.

  Earlier that day, Jack and Belle had met Holly and Madeleine in the café at Waterstones, when the rain was still high in the grey.

  “Begin,” Holly had said, “by closing your eyes and breathing in the books.”

  Belle and Jack did so, while Madeleine went to get extra chocolate sprinkles for her cappuccino.

  When she returned, they had opened their eyes, sweet and startled, like small children waking from long naps.

  Holly nodded her approval at them, and then she said:

  “She walks in beauty, like the night

  Of cloudless climes and starry skies;

  And all that’s best of dark and bright

  Meet in her aspect and her eyes.”

  “Who does?” said Belle.

  “It’s a nice line, isn’t it?” said Jack. “She walks in beauty, like the night.”

  “Do you know who wrote those lines?” said Holly.

  “I did,” said Jack, smiling with faint pride.

  Belle regarded him, incredulous, then her face cleared.

  “Oh, right,” she said, “so it was Byron.” She turned to Holly. “Byron wrote it.”

  “Hmm.” Holly squinted thoughtfully. “I thought so too, Belle, but Jack seems so sure of himself. Maybe Jack did write it?”

  So all three had explained to Holly about the names in the hat.

  “I didn’t have to become Byron,” Jack added, “because I already am him, or anyway exactly like him. But without the poetry. Also, girls are not falling over themselves to have my children. As far as I know. If they are, they need to do it more loudly. Apart from all that, I’m just like Byron.”

  “The similarities are blowing my mind,” said Belle.

  “Different names too,” Jack had continued. “Byron and I have different names.”

  Now in Auntie’s Tea Shop, Jack fixed a critical gaze on the little shelf hanging on the opposite wall. Its edges swirled and curled, the wood getting carried away with itself. A copper kettle sat alone on the top shelf, looking slightly lost. Jack thought that the owner of the tea shop had probably got that copper kettle for a present. And after the present giver went home, the shop owner had said, “What am I supposed to do with this bloody thing?” and someone else had said, “Oh, stick it up there on the shelf.”

  Jack turned back to Belle, tilted his head towards the kettle, and she raised her eyebrows, agreeing with all his thoughts.

  “I still think I’m like Byron,” Jack said, suddenly moody. “He had this thunderstorm inside him, see? He was probably an Aries like me.”

  Belle glanced up at the beams on the whitewashed ceiling. She took another mouthful of the cake.

  “Was he?” she said.

  “Was he what?”

  “An Aries like you?”

  “That depends when he was born,” Jack said patiently.

  Belle blinked once.

  “Oh, right.” He squinted into his memory, then gave up and riffled through the notes in his bag. “Huh. Twenty-second of January was his birthday, so no, he was an Aquarius. That’s all right, though. I was an Aquarius just two lives back.”

  “You and your past lives,” said Belle. “Maybe Byron had an aura like yours.”

  “You and your auras,” said Jack.

  “I could read his aura for you if you want. Have you got a picture?”

  “You can read auras from pictures?”

  Belle shrugged. “Dunno. Never tried.”

  Jack poured himself some more tea. Everything on the table was white: cake plate, teacups, salt and pepper shakers. The teapot itself, also white, had a sort of attitude about it: tall and fancy, its handle like a hand on a hip, spout curving up and over like a wave, like it was dead keen to get into your cup.

  “I’m going to study it at university, you know,” Jack said. “Astrology. Did I tell you that? I was thinking, it’s what I feel passionate about, so I should. You think you’ll study auras?”

  “Nope,” said Belle. “Auras is a load of bollocks.”

  Jack was so shocked he nearly dropped the teapot. Belle reached out a hand to save it.

  In the attic flat, the rain was thickening against the window, forming curls like drying sheets of bark. Only, the rain’s curls were elegant and glassy, turning and turning into themselves until they slid out of the curl and slipped away.

  Madeleine herself turned from the window. ISAAC NEWTON was still closed on her lap, and she was looking at the gap between the couch cushions. A thick line of crumbs. The TV quiz show filled the room with questions. A washing machine droned somewhere in the building, blending with the full noise of the rain, and the sporadic buzz of the sewing machine. Her mother shouted answers, and after each shout, when the correct answer was given, there was Holly’s thoughtful “Really?” or “Aah, should’ve known,” or just “Tch.”

  Between the pages of the ISAAC NEWTON book was an envelope. Madeleine had stuck it in there earlier, at a random page, and now she ran her fingers along its edge.

  She thought: Who did I used to be?

  Before I was a girl in a rainy flat in Cambridge — a girl who reads books filled with facts, facts that slide around her head like beans in a pot — who was I?

  She knew who she’d been, but it felt like a dream. She’d been a girl who ran so fast, even down a hallway to her bedroom, she’d had to skid on her heels to stop. She’d talked like the rainfall. She’d loved the smells of things — cinnamon, coconut, lime; there’d been a special compartment in her luggage for her scented candles. She’d loved loud music, and dancing, and if she was that girl right now, she’d be with her friends and they’d lose their minds, open the window, throw the sewing machine out into the rain. Just to watch it fall four floors to the ground.

  She would not be sitting here, watching the leak that spidered down the wall, the strange black splotches of mould slowly expanding. She’d get a sledgehammer and knock a hole in that wall. She’d climb through the window, abseil down the wall, kick aside the pieces of broken sewing machine.

  Where was she now, the girl with the thunderstorm heart?

  “Yeah,” said Belle. “It’s bollocks. Did you know that if two aura readers look at someone else’s aura, they just about never see the same thing? I mean, what does that tell you about the scientificness of it?”

  Jack gazed at his friend. He shook his head slowly. He said, “I honestly have no idea what to say.” He said, “If this is — if you are — well, why have you bloody been talking about auras for the last five bloody years, then?”

  “Oh, well, I can read them,” Belle said affably. “Just, nobody else can, see? So the science of it is total bollocks, which means, why would I waste time studying it, see? But I can read them. Don’t worry about that.”

  Jack’s mouth split into its biggest smile.

  “Yours is looking sort of peach-coloured at the moment,” Belle added. “You’re feeling tranquil and dreamy but sort of antsy too.”

  The smile broke suddenly: He’d had a thought.

  “You know what I just realised? You never read Madeleine’s aura,” he said. “Why’s that?”

  The waitress took the empty cake plate and put down a glass in its place, bill curled inside.

&nbs
p; “We never asked for the bill,” said Belle.

  “We’re closing now.”

  “Why not?” Jack repeated. “You’re always reading mine, and everyone else’s, and you’re probably about to tell me that the waitress’s aura’s gone crusty or something. But I’ve never heard you say a thing about Madeleine’s.”

  “Ah,” Belle shrugged. “Madeleine wears too many colours. Clothes have an aura of their own, see, and they interfere.”

  “Is that a fact?” Jack took his wallet and paid the bill. He looked around dreamily.

  “You know what she’s like?” he said. “Madeleine, I mean. I’ve been thinking she’s like someone from a music video. You know in music videos, the way they’ll do fast cuts between shots? Like a wide shot of the band playing in a hayloft, then a kid in a school bus, then someone rolling a pen between their hands — that kind of thing. And they keep repeating the same shots in a loop. And they’ve got this one shot — say, the drummer’s a girl and she’s mostly in shadows, but there’s one shot of her looking down and just starting to laugh, with her eyes behind her hair, and then they cut away, before she gets to the full laugh. And each time you see it, you get this feeling like that shot, that’s the real sort of chorus to the song. That’s the tantalising bit, and you watch harder and harder, wanting more, and you get the feeling she’s really pretty, but you never see her face or hear her laugh. That’s what Madeleine is like.”

  Belle looked away from the table.

  “Madeleine’s always laughing,” she said. “And we see her face all the time. Don’t pay yet. I haven’t finished my tea.”

  That morning, Madeleine had gone to retrieve the note she’d left in the parking meter. She’d been thinking how crazy it was, that she’d put her heart on the street for anyone to find. Sure, it was well hidden, but what if somebody who knew her had found it?

  For a smart person, she’d thought, I can be kind of stupid.