The Colors of Madeleine 01: Corner of White
Page 18
All four watched Sesame Street for a while, then Madeleine said: “How do you know you were a guinea hen? In your former life with Byron, I mean. Does a guinea hen know that it’s a guinea hen?”
“Well,” Jack conceded. “I’m not totally sure. I’ve just sort of pieced it together. See, I’ve figured out I was a small domestic animal in all of my former lives. Like a cat or a possum. And once, I was a Tasmanian devil in a petting zoo with a zookeeper that loved me.”
“Okay.”
“I remember being lower down than other people — there were always ankles around, see? Also, I remember they used to pick me up sometimes and cuddle me. So that’s why I know I was a small domestic animal.”
Madeleine considered this. “I think you’re remembering being a baby,” she said.
“No.” Jack shook his head. “I remember chasing pigeons. I remember kind of scrabbling away when humans tried to cuddle me. I remember this sensation of being helpless and wanting the things humans had, and I remember the noises I made. They were animal noises, like shrieks and things, and I felt good when I did that, but I also sort of scared myself. Plus I remember being a bear cub in a pit somewhere in Florence in the fifteenth century.”
“Okay.”
“That was lonely. In the pit.”
“I’ll bet. And you remember meeting Byron as a guinea hen?”
“It’s like this,” Jack said. “I was reading about Byron the other day, and did you know he lived in Italy for a while? Anyhow, he had horses, dogs, monkeys, cats, an eagle, a crow, a falcon, peacocks, guinea hens, and an Egyptian crane. I was reading this and the words guinea hens sort of caught at me and said: ‘Jack!’”
“Ah, then,” agreed Madeleine.
“He let all his animals live in the house. Peacocks and monkeys wandering up and down the stairs. Oh, except the horses. They weren’t allowed inside.”
“Poor horses,” said Madeleine. The girls were transfixed by the TV, so she leaned over and kissed Jack’s cheek. “I liked it better when you were Byron,” she murmured. “As sexy as a guinea hen can be.”
Jack turned back to the TV and sighed deeply. “Actually, now that I think about it, that’s all bollocks. Everything I just said. I was never a guinea hen. I am Lord Byron.”
He touched her thigh with a curled fist and she let herself lean into him.
“The letter of the day is J,” both girls shouted, suddenly turning and catching her quick shift back.
A key turned in the front door and a voice shouted, “The letter of the day is J, is it? But what is the name of the day? YOU DON’T KNOW, DO YOU?”
The girls ran down the hall, and Jack and Madeleine unfolded themselves from the couch.
There was Darshana’s voice at the door, but also another voice, an extra voice, laughing.
“Look who I’ve found, and she’s come to have morning tea with us,” called Darshana.
Holly Tully moved into the hallway light, smiling.
“We’ll have Science later,” Darshana said. “Or another day. Who cares. But, you small people who live in this house with me, you still have not told me the name of this day!”
“Saturday?” tried Rhani.
“Friday,” asserted Chakiki, confident.
“Ah! You are no children of mine!”
Madeleine looked beside her at Jack, with his smile and his cheek lit up by curtain-speckled sun. She looked down the hall at Darshana, still at the front door, still thundering; at the two little girls, swinging from mood to mood as if on a jungle gym; and finally, at her mother, straight-backed and bright, a spark in her eye, whispering fiercely to the girls out of the side of her mouth: “It’s Tuesday.”
There was that lift again, that surge of holiday, of blue-sky June — that certainty that everything was going to be all right — and then there was a curious sound, like a handful of pebbles spilling to the floor.
As Madeleine watched, the strangest quiver ran across her mother’s shoulders and down her right arm, and Holly Tully fell to the floor.
9.
It was autumn dusk in Bonfire, shadows closing in on themselves in the empty high-school grounds.
Elliot stood by Cody’s sculpture, reading the latest letter from the Girl-in-the-World:
Dear Elliot,
Strange day.
My mother fainted this morning. I was at my Science teacher’s house and there was a noise like pebbles falling, which turned out, actually, to be exactly that.
Still haven’t figured out why Mum walked into the house with a handful of pebbles.
Anyhow, it was bad. There’s my mother on the floor, and the teacher’s little girls thinking she’s playing a joke, so they’re both HYSTERICAL, falling flat on their backs, jumping over her, squealing. The TV was counting blue hippos behind me. Darshana’s face seemed to snag on its own surprise so she just stood there with her eyes wide open (which really scared me — she’s usually a human iron lung), and my friend Jack started saying my mother’s name over and over, in this scary, questioning voice that gets louder and louder — “Holly? Holly? HOLLY?” like a dad about to bust a kid.
I just stood there, counting blue hippos.
ANYHOW, she’s fine.
When Chakiki (the younger of the girls) realised Mum wasn’t getting up, she emptied a flower vase over her face. (She’s still got half-dead tulip petals stuck in her hair, actually.) Right away, Mum choked, opened her eyes, and said a word that practically choked the little girls with the shock. They were still shouting it at each other an hour later, and using it as the punch line of jokes and the chorus of songs. (Darshana kept telling us, “Ignore them and they’ll stop,” and saying to the girls, “I’m not impressed, you know! I’m not bothered! I’m ignoring you and you will stop!” But they didn’t.)
Mum explained that she’d forgotten to eat breakfast this morning, and then she remembered that she’d ALSO forgotten dinner last night (I’d been at Jack’s having pasta, so I didn’t realise this), and everyone was like: NO WONDER YOU FAINTED, YOU STUPID IDIOT.
So we all ate masala dosa and drank tea, and my mother started to look less like a corpse.
I am now at home, and I’ve just made tofu fritters, which were okay. And she’s back at her sewing machine.
Anyhow, so, listen, I’m thinking you should choose something else for your “villains” (or “monsters” or whatever they are) in your Kingdom of Cello. Something other than Colours, I mean. Because, seriously, “a wave of Reds is coming”? Do you realise how racist you sound? (I’m thinking of the history surrounding Native Americans.) Even the word “Colours” sounds too close to another word, also from American history, right?
Or are you doing it on purpose? Like an ironic cultural reference?
Anyway, I don’t like it.
I guess, though, if you do keep them, it’s kind of funny that the colour Red travels in “waves.” Cause, well, all colours do that, right? Travel in waves, I mean.
I know this cause I’ve been reading about colours. My guy, Isaac Newton, was into them.
Have you done the research? I mean, got your colour science right? Because, okay, as I see it, there are two different kinds of colours, and I want to know which you have in mind.
There are true colours, and those are made of light. They come from the sun, and if they hit the rain in a certain way, that’s a rainbow. If you could take light in both your hands and fan it out, you’d see true colours, lining up, blending at the edges. (You can make your own rainbow. Just let the sun shine through water or glass. Did you know?)
Then there are what I call flat colours. They’re the kind we see around us. Like that bag over there is red and white striped, and that banana is (partly) yellow (mostly black), and the tiles in the kitchen are an unbelievably disgusting mottled pink, like a salmon that got old, died, then ate a boiled beetroot.
Now, if I’m understanding it properly, what the flat colours are is just a sort of conversation with light. Cause when light hits an object it
’s like it offers the object its handful of true colours, and the object says yes to some and no to the rest. So, some it absorbs (eats, takes in, loves, whatever) and the others it throws right back.
The colours that it throws back are the ones we see. The banana is yellow because the banana ate all the other colours but did not want the yellow.
It’s sort of ironic, yeah?
Anyway, I’ll finish this letter by sharing with you something that I can’t get out of my head. Isaac Newton once said this about fire:
“The flame is of several colours, as that of sulphur blue, that of copper opened with sublimate green, that of tallow yellow, that of camphire white. Smoke passing through flame cannot but grow red-hot & red-hot smoke can have no other appearance than that of flame.”
So, why can’t I stop thinking about that? I guess it’s kind of poetic — sulphur blue, copper green, tallow yellow — but mostly I think it’s the way he talks about smoke and flames. Smoke goes through flame and turns red-hot, and red-hot smoke appears like flame. You can turn that inside out. You can say, smoke makes flame makes smoke makes flame. So what is smoke and what is flame? They’re looping in and out of each other, separate but also the same thing.
Like I said, that’s my final thought for the letter. But I want to know more about you. Like, what do you do for fun, Elliot? Got a girlfriend? Got any thoughts about smoke and flames?
Cheers,
M.T.
Elliot folded the letter, feeling strange. He felt free but clumsy, tall but childlike: It was his first day without crutches. The cast had come off his ankle a few days before, but today the doctor had said he should try walking on it. The red haze of the sunset seemed to echo the mild blaze, the low-level excitement, in his chest.
Except that, he saw now, that red haze was not sunset at all.
It was the first of them, the first one on its way, and Elliot was already pushing the letter into his pocket, half running, half loping, half limping, half tripping, as the warning bells spilled through the air.
With most Colors, the warning bells seem to suck people inside of their houses, or into the nearest shelter or shop — into anywhere with a door and lock-down shutters.
But a second-level Red (grade 2(b)) has the opposite effect. Doors and windows fly open and people pour onto the streets.
It’s the most luminous of all Colors, and it filled the sky over Bonfire that night like a dazzling fireworks display. Almost at once, the streets and square and rooftops were alive with people. The Sheriff had been taking a shower and he half ran, half limped down the pavement in bare feet and a bathrobe. A group of small ghosts and skeletons swarmed by (children from a fancy dress party); then came the Mayor — she’d just been having her hair colored and was still in the black salon smock, her hair folded helter-skelter into silver foil.
High above the town, the Red burst again and again — the heel of a hand slamming down on a giant raspberry, or enormous stoplights shattering. Light showered from each explosion, scribbling the sky, swerving in every direction.
The tricky thing, for the people of Bonfire, was to tear their eyes from the beauty of the sky, so they could concentrate on what they had to do. They had to find hoses, buckets, and watering cans. They had to drag safety tarpaulins over electrical units and fuel stations. They had to gather extinguishers, blankets, and coats; pull on boots; scatter themselves throughout the town, its gardens, parks, and fields, and watch.
Within moments of the first Red explosions, the sparks began to rain. Autumn had been hovering in Bonfire for a fortnight or more, long enough for the gold-red leaves to form drifts and piles, and these were the first things to catch. The sparks fell, flames leapt up, and the people of Bonfire moved. The local firefighters took up the corners and shouted orders. The fire truck spun around corners, dealing with the biggest outbreaks; but the entire town — children, the elderly, the sick — had to work.
Elliot Baranski stamped and stamped at sparks with his good leg as he tripped through the streets. He saw a ballet class in leotards passing buckets hand to hand from the fountain in the Bonfire Gardens. There were Gabe and Cody, running along rooftops, punching out fires in gutters and eaves. Freshly delivered newspapers flared up one after another, and little Corrie-Lynn ran from one to the next, her friend Derrin Twickleham beside her, each smothering fires with their coats. Derrin was more methodical, but also more whimsical, so sometimes she’d get distracted and stop with the fires altogether. Corrie-Lynn would step in at that point. They were a good team.
Litter caught fire — cardboard coffee cups and candy wrappers — and so did patches of overgrown grass, and dried bark, and a pile of discarded telephone directories, and the corners of wooden paling fences. A banner over Main Street announced the upcoming Craft Fair, and Elliot watched as it crackled alight, but before he could reach it, Jimmy Hawthorn was clambering up a telegraph pole and tearing it down. On the street below, Isabella Tamborlaine was ready with a tin can full of water. She and Jimmy gave each other a thumbs-up.
Elliot darted from spark to spark, and it was dangerous but, still, it was hard not to let your heart go wild. There were bursts of rust red, paprika red, cinnamon red, and Elliot thought that as the sparks fell they formed other colors too — sulfur blue, copper green, tallow yellow. They swayed and bent like comet tails, star bursts, cattails, cottonwood trees, or like stems of straw snapped in two. He was kicking at cinders and charcoal, exhilarated by the mischief of the sparks; the ends of his hair were singed, the acrid smell of that, the smell of smoke, flames, wet burnt leaves, the heat on his cheeks.
Nearby, the edges of a woman’s frayed jeans caught, and Elliot pressed his own ankles against her legs, extinguishing the fire, and she grinned her thanks, then used her bare hands to clap out Elliot’s coat collar.
He looked up at the gold-silver edges of the sparks, the not-quite-there of them, the falling fireflies. He heard the crackle of flames, the shouts and warnings, the crumple-stamping and frightened laughter; and he saw behind his eyes an image of his father welding, visor down, impossible spray of sparks.
Then, abruptly, there was a quieting.
The Red had gone. The sky was musky gray with smoke, but blackening and brightening as the smoke drifted and the stars studded back into place.
There were occasional shouts and flurries still, as fires were spotted and put out, and then there was the engine of the crop duster — the little flying machine low and high then low again — swooping above Bonfire.
That was Elliot’s friend Shelby, flying rain over the town and surrounding fields, showering the last of the sparks.
In Elliot’s nose there was the smell of smoke, and behind his eyes was the afterimage of feathering flames. The words of the Girl-in-the-World ran through his head: Smoke goes through flame and turns red-hot, and red-hot smoke appears like flame. So what is smoke? And what is flame?
It was a strange coincidence, his reading those words — or her writing them — just before the Red arrived.
Around him, the people of Bonfire were turning to one another with breathless laughter, wide-eyed relief, startled and proud. They had done it, they’d saved one another and the town. Elliot shook the girl’s words from his head and smiled back.
The next day, he wrote a reply.
Dear M.T.,
I’m sorry to hear about your mother fainting. That must have been scary for you. But I like the sound of the little girl being inventive with the flower vase.
She’s got to eat better, your mother. You’re right about that.
Okay, you asked about Colors.
Well, I’m not so sure about this “true” versus “flat” divide of yours, but maybe it kinda works. We’ve got regular colors here, which I guess you’d call flat. I mean, my hair is dark blond and my jeans are dirty-blue — but we’ve ALSO got Colors with a capital C, and yeah, since they’re not a lie, I guess they’re true.
No, all Colors don’t travel in waves. Just the Color Red.
To be honest, I don’t think you could change their names either. Doesn’t seem likely to stop YOU from trying, though, ’cause you sure have a thing for name changing. What’s that about, you think?
Just occurred to me that you might not know what Color bending is. There’s Color Benders in Nature Strip, and some in the Swamp of the Golden Coast, and here’s what they do: They go into the sleeping lairs (caverns or hollows or tree stumps or whatever that particular Color’s preference is), and they steal the newest Colors — the babies — and bend them. If you bend an agreeable color, like Orange, say, and you bend a dangerous Color, like Purple or Gray, and you graft them together, that gets you a vaccination. Those are injected into protective gear and shutters. They don’t last more than a couple of years, though, so we’re always having to replace them.
And that’s if you don’t use them. Use protective gear in an attack and it’ll wear out faster than a tap drips.
Anyhow, let’s move on from Colors.
You asked if I have a girlfriend.
Her name is Kala and she’s the smartest girl I know. Lately she’s been thinking about applying for scholarships to boarding schools in Olde Quainte — they’re the best in Cello, and if you go to one of them you’ve got a good chance of getting into Brellidge University.
Her family moved here from Jagged Edge when she was nine, and they started a macadamia farm. Not long after they arrived, Gabe was cycling past one of their fields, and he stopped to let Kala know she was plowing in the wrong direction. They got into a fight ’cause Kala had researched the pants off farming, and she was sure she KNEW the right direction; but Gabe’s always had the instinct for farming — he could grow a ladder in a kitchen sink if you needed one. They ended up friends anyway, and now she’s one of us.