The Colors of Madeleine 01: Corner of White

by Jaclyn Moriarty

  She’d cycled fast, wondering at what point your stupidity undermined your smartness.

  There’d been a car parked alongside the meter. The car had had a smug look about it. The parking meter’s out of service, it had seemed to say, didn’t have to pay, did I? Or maybe it had been a defensive look. I WOULD have paid but I couldn’t — the parking meter’s out of service, see?

  Her letter had been gone.

  An envelope had been in its place.

  A long, thin envelope marked with a red M.T.

  Inside the envelope there had been two folded papers. One had been her own letter; the other had said this:

  Dear M.T.,

  I think you meant this to go to a Parking Meter, but it’s come out here in Cello. It seemed like the best thing was to send it back to you, so here it is.

  Now, your letter made as much sense to me as a fireworks display in a horse trailer but, setting that aside, I think you must be in the World.

  It was those places you mentioned — Paris, Prague, and so on — they jarred my memory, and then I got it. We talked about them in World Studies. I only took the introductory course — the compulsory one — not the elective. (It’s been over 300 years since we last had contact with the World, so it seemed kind of a waste to study more.) (No offense.)

  Anyway, I guess this means there’s a crack in the Bonfire High schoolyard. The crack must be right where my friend Cody put his sculpture, so your letter came through and got caught in the sculpture. Not sure of the science, to be honest.

  We’re supposed to report any suspected cracks to the authorities, so they can close them up right away — that’s some kind of strict law or something. I won’t, though, ’cause I don’t see how it’s doing any harm, and I don’t like the idea, to be honest. If there’s a way to get a message through or across, well, it seems all wrong to me to shut that down.

  But listen, I’m heading out in a few days — on a trip to the Magical North — so if any more of your letters come through, I won’t be here to send them back to you.

  Before I go, can I say a couple of things? First off, in relation to the foods you eat. What’s wrong with beans? Maybe spice them up with some garlic or thyme leaves. You could add chorizo sausage, or wood-smoked bacon.

  As for tarts and cupcakes, etc., I guess if you had fine baking once, and now it’s gone, that’s got to be tough. So, I’m sorry to hear about that.

  The other thing — my mother’s excited about you. She’s always had an interest in the World. It was her best subject, she says, when she was at school. She particularly wants me to ask if you’ve had any more trouble with republicans. Oliver Cromwell was the name, she recalls, but she says he’d be long dead by now.

  Anyhow, you take care, and if you want to reply and answer my mother’s question — in the next three days, if that’s okay — you’d make her day.

  Yours faithfully,

  Elliot Baranski

  Madeleine ran her hand along the side of the envelope.

  She thought about the poet Lord Byron.

  She knew he was born George Gordon Byron in 1788, and that his father married his mother for her money, then stole it, spent it, and gambled it. When Byron was still a baby, his parents unsurprisingly split up.

  She knew that when Byron was small, his father, who lived around the corner at this point, invited him to stay. The next day, he returned the little boy. “That’s enough,” he said, “I want no more of him.”

  She knew that his mother was frantic and vicious.

  That he was born with a twisted foot, a limp, and was always being bound up in metal contraptions, supposedly to untwist the foot, but they twisted him pale with pain.

  She knew that he wrote poetry, and that this was his way — his own way, his different way — of getting the message across. Of clearing a path through it all, clearing the cows from the tracks.

  Madeleine looked at the edge of the envelope again.

  The stranger who found her letter, the one who called himself Elliot Baranski — If there’s a way to get a message through or across, he had written, well, it seems all wrong to me to shut that down.

  Right in the middle of this strange letter, there it was.

  “Traditionally,” said the quiz show, cutting into her thoughts, “what is the colour of royalty?”

  “Orange!” cried Madeleine’s mother.

  “Purple,” said the TV contestant. “Or royal blue.”

  “Tch.”

  Madeleine looked up.

  “Can we change the channel?” she said.

  Her mother laughed. So did Madeleine.

  She thought of Lord Byron running through his life.

  Byron didn’t climb like Charles Babbage, frowning back down at the rest of the world. Byron ran helter-skelter, always looking up at trees and skies. If he’d had a skateboard, he’d have skated fast down hills towards highways.

  Only, his life was riddled with potholes, and he kept falling. Falling and falling into potholes of love — everywhere Byron turned there was a beautiful woman, or a man with liquid eyes, and his heart thudded madly for them all. For baker’s wives, chorus girls, countesses, and cousins.

  She also knew this about Byron: that he felt the loss of love so hard he turned white and lost consciousness.

  The door to the tea room opened again and another group of rain-huddled tourists rushed inside.

  The waitress was out the back.

  “You know the kid in that show, Two and a Half Men?” said Jack. “Guess how much he gets paid for every episode.”

  “Can’t.”

  “A quarter of a million dollars,” said Jack. “A quarter. Of a million.”

  “Why do you keep saying ‘quarter’ like that?” Belle said. “Like that’s the important bit. A quarter’s not that big of an amount, you know. It’s not like a half, or a full, total million.”

  “It’s a lot but, eh? Considering it’s not even that good of a show.”

  “What is that in pounds?”

  She had to raise her voice. The newcomers were talking loudly. They were exclaiming about everything — roof beams, shelf unit, copper teakettle. Everything was darling; it was all exactly right.

  “I’m going to get the scones with clotted cream!” cried one of the women, and the others overlapped her with agreement, their voices clotted with enthusiasm. They passed the phrase back and forth, as if trying out a new language.

  Jack and Belle widened eyes at each other.

  “I don’t know,” Jack said. “It’s changing all the time, isn’t it? The exchange rate. It’s a lot, but. That’s my point.”

  “Your emphasis was wrong,” Belle reflected. “A quarter of a million. So what?”

  “Let’s change the channel,” Madeleine said again. “Can we? For my sake. I just want something else.”

  “Sake,” said Holly. “That’s a Japanese drink.”

  “You pronounce it sah-key.” Madeleine looked for the remote.

  “You eat it with sushi and sashimi,” said her mother. She rubbed her arm. “This arm keeps going numb. What’s that about? Too much TV?”

  “You don’t eat it. You drink it.” They both laughed, and Madeleine took the remote from under a swatch on her mother’s sewing table. She changed the channel.

  “Your arm went numb the other day too,” Madeleine said. “And you keep getting headaches and getting — confused.” She pointed the remote at the TV.

  Holly was quiet, watching the stations change. “What’s this, then?” she said after a moment.

  “It’s that Australian soap. Neighbours.”

  “Australia,” her mother repeated uncertainly.

  Madeleine laughed, and her mother did too.

  “We went there once,” Madeleine said. “To Sydney. Remember, we saw the opera house? We came into the harbour on a cruise ship and they had fireworks. And Dad really liked Vegemite.”

  “Vegemite?” Once again, they laughed.

  “It’s like Marmite.
Nobody likes Vegemite except Australians who grew up with it,” Madeleine explained. “It’s disgusting. But Dad decided it was perfect with single malt whisky. He kept putting it on crackers, and making people try a sip of Balvenie, then a Vegemite cracker, and saying, ‘Isn’t it sublime?’ Remember?”

  The waitress reappeared.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” she said to the table of tourists. “We’re closed now.”

  “Why does she not have any money?” said Belle. “How can you go from being as rich as all that to having nothing? Why’s she so poor?”

  Jack was standing up. “You mean Madeleine? Her parents separated.”

  “But that doesn’t mean the wife ends up with nothing,” Belle persisted. “The wife’s supposed to take the husband for everything he’s got, and that.” She tried the teapot again, but it was empty, so she stood too.

  The tourists’ faces were wide with disappointment. “It doesn’t say you’re closed,” they argued with the waitress, and she repeated, “Sorry, but we are.”

  Jack was pushing open the door.

  Belle was behind him, and she took a step into the rain, but then she turned and stepped back in.

  She glared at the waitress.

  “Ah, let them have their scones with clotted cream!” she snarled, and the room snapped into stillness as she pushed back out into the cold.

  Madeleine was standing now. She was reaching for her jacket.

  “I think I’ll go out for a bit.”

  “But it’s raining!” Her mother laughed and held her right arm in the air. “Can you see that?”

  “See what?”

  “My leg.”

  “That’s not your leg, it’s your arm.”

  Holly nodded and turned back to the television.

  There was an ad for flights to New York.

  “New York,” said Holly. “Now that’s the Big Apple.”

  Madeleine had opened the door. She smiled at her mother.

  “It is,” she agreed.

  “Is it a crunchy one? An apple with a crunch?”

  Madeleine laughed. She was standing in the open door and words were stepping out from behind her laughter. “You need to go,” she said, and the words surprised her as she said them. She thought they would stay at this calm, even level, at the level of the laughter, but they didn’t. They surged up into a terrible kind of shriek: “You need to go and see a doctor!” and she slammed the door behind her.

  The slam ate the last half hour of laughter.

  2.

  Thursdays, six P.M., the Bonfire Antelopes trained on the high-school deftball field. Jimmy Hawthorn was the coach, and today he’d invited his neighbor, Isabella Tamborlaine, to come along and watch.

  Deftball was invented in the town of Clark, the Farms. Clark’s primary crop is a root vegetable called deft, greenish in color, a little like a turnip. Unlike a turnip, however, when defts reach full maturity — and fields of them do at the same time — they shoot themselves out of the ground, curving high into the air. The catch is that you have to catch them. Hundreds of little defts flying into the air — and if they fall back to the ground, they will shatter or bruise.

  These days machines catch the falling vegetables, but traditionally, deft farmers arranged for teams of contract workers to run about with outstretched hands. Workers competed to catch the most, leaping to intercept defts.

  The game of deftball is loosely based on traditional deft harvesting. The playing field is ridged and furrowed; two teams, each holding small green balls, line up along the edge. When the starting gun cracks, each player tosses his or her ball into the air, attempting to curve it as far as possible ahead of the starting line. The idea is to race across the field, leaping over furrows, tossing the ball as soon as it is caught, and, whenever possible, intercepting the opposing team’s balls. Once you reach the end you turn and run back. Players on the sidelines, meanwhile, interject more balls into the mix. The scoring system is complex, and it’s largely a game about strategy, speed, peripheral vision, and the collection of small green balls.

  Although it is played throughout Cello, deftball is not as popular in the eastern province of Jagged Edge. In fact, it is often mocked there. Hence, Isabella Tamborlaine, a Jagged-Edgian who had arrived in Bonfire just a year before, had never seen the game.

  Now she watched the players stretching, and leaning into conversations, or sprinting up and down the furrowed field. She knew most of them from the school — a few were in her classes. There was Gabe Epstein, tall as a basketball hoop; Nikki Smitt, one of those girls who is so athletically self-assured they don’t seem to notice that they’re also beautiful; and, across the field, Elliot Baranski.

  Jimmy was snapping pictures of the kids warming up. His hobby — apart from deftball coaching — was portrait photography. He noticed Isabella, dropped the camera so it fell loose on its strap around his neck, and joined her on the sideline.

  “I can see why people say Elliot Baranski’s the best player,” Isabella said, watching the precision with which Elliot threw the ball.

  Jimmy nodded and looked sideways at Isabella. She was tall and thin, eyes like fern fronds. She always wore a green pendant around her neck.

  “You know something?” Isabella continued. “I feel guilty whenever I see Elliot. The only reason I’m here — the only reason I got this teaching post, I mean — is because the teacher, Mischka Tegan, went missing. And she went missing along with Elliot’s father on the night that Elliot’s uncle was killed. So, do you see what I mean? It’s like Elliot’s loss led to my gain. You could turn that around. My gain led to Elliot’s loss. I have this strange algebraic sense of backward causation.”

  Jimmy watched his players awhile. Then he breathed in deeply.

  “Well,” he said, “I can see how you could think that but it makes no sense at all.”

  Isabella smiled, then grew serious again. “I know the official word is that the missing two were taken by a Purple, but the teachers in the staff room have a different story. They say the Baranski brothers were wild their whole lives. That Jon and Abel had grown close to Mischka in the months before it happened. Something about drinking together at the Toadstool Pub every other night? They tell me Abel ran away with Mischka. Do you think that’s what happened? Or do you think they were really taken by a Purple?”

  Again Jimmy was silent.

  Eventually, he spoke: “It was Elliot that found his uncle, you know.”

  Isabella turned, her hand on that green pendant, and looked at Jimmy’s face. In his low, slow voice, he told her that Elliot used to jog along Acres Road every morning, early. One morning, he’d seen blood on the grass. Followed its line with his eyes, thinking a dead deer. Found the savaged body of his uncle. His father’s truck nearby, both doors open, engine running, his father gone.

  Now Isabella nodded, understanding Jimmy’s message: What matters here is Elliot. The aftermath, his loss. Not causation, not the details.

  Elliot himself was approaching now, from across the field. He and Nikki Smitt carried a basket of deftballs between them.

  They stopped nearby, dropped the basket on the ground, and both reached in.

  “You planning on doing any coaching tonight?” Nikki called to Jimmy.

  He laughed.

  “I’ll take the blame,” said Isabella, then she joked, “But listen, Nikki, do you and Elliot want to demonstrate those pitches for my calculus class next week? We’ll calculate the angle of the curves.”

  Elliot turned, his hand in the air. “I’ll be gone again next week,” he said.

  Nikki, beside him, watched his face.

  “Heading out again,” Elliot explained. “Soon as the finals are over.”

  Isabella glanced at Jimmy, and the thoughts ran through the air between them: But if it really was a Purple, then your father is dead. But if he ran away with that teacher, does he want — or deserve — to be found?

  They said nothing.

  Elliot and Nikki turned back to t
heir training. They crouched and threw, crouched and threw, until the damp, dusk sky was alive with small green balls.

  3.

  The following day, Elliot was at the Bonfire Library, doing some last-minute research.

  He sat at a desk near the card catalogues, writing in a spiral-bound notebook. Books and papers rose and fanned around him. He wrote fast, making lists of bullet points, linking these with arrows, sometimes underlining three or four times. Treat dragon burns with fish oil or the skin of a ripe pear, he wrote. GET A WHISTLE for use in werewolf territory. He read another paragraph and added ???? to his note about the whistle. Can PROVOKE werewolves if pitch too high — try stamping boots in constant rhythm.

  Large windows lined the east wall of the library, and afternoon sun soared through the glass. Elliot’s heel bounced on the carpet. He reached for a magazine, took notes on provincial pastimes in the Magical North in case that might somehow be useful. He scribbled about bear wrangling, snow attire, and the entrance fee to the Lake of Spells. Today’s Cellian Herald was trapped beneath some books, and he pulled it toward him, catching the toppling pile before it fell. He studied the front-page headline.

  RISING HOSTILITY, it said, and beneath that, in low bold caps: CELLO’S ROYAL DILEMMA.

  Elliot paused. Hostility was something he was hazy about. It had never affected Bonfire directly, and never been an issue on the other journeys he’d taken this last year. In the Magical North, however, he was actually more likely to come across a gang of Wandering Hostiles than a dragon or a werewolf. What did you do, did you stamp, blow whistles, play dead, or look them squarely in the eye?

  He smiled faintly. Politics was something that he’d always found tedious or pointless, so he’d never paid much attention. He guessed he should at least try to understand the issues now.

  Page four of the Herald gave a brief survey of the history of Hostility in Cello, explaining the truce that had been reached, almost a thousand years before, between agitators, whose goal was democracy, and Royalists. In recent years, the report said, doubts about the current Royal Family, and particularly about the competence of the King, had sent cracks and fissures running through the truce.