by Rebecca Lim
‘Delia—’
‘I’m not speaking to you, Ray Spark—’
‘Mum!’
Qing laughed suddenly, a rippling sound filled with genuine delight, and it was so unexpected that the three arguing Sparks fell silent in surprise.
‘You give me back life, Spark family,’ Qing replied in her low, resonant voice. ‘We have – how do you say? – guānxi now. Connection.’ She screwed up her face, trying to get the right words out. ‘Trust. The Children of the Dragon …’ for a moment Qing looked very sad, but then the look passed, ‘… will do all they can to preserve you.’
Delia nodded grimly, knowing it would have to do.
Ray added, ‘I’m meeting Harley straight off the plane in Singapore, Delia. Schumacher’s got him until then and you know Schumacher’s a straight-up guy—’
‘Yes, hallo, yoo-hoo,’ Schumacher interjected quickly from the side. ‘Mrs Spark, I am very straight-up, you know this.’
‘Singapore?’ Delia yelped in horror. ‘You mean you aren’t already together?’
‘Eight hours,’ Ray cajoled, ‘that’s all that’s separating me from Harley, Deels. I’m headed there right now. I’ll be there waiting for him. It’s a, uh, relatively easy fix, this thing me and the kids have to do together. Piece of cake. We’ll call you as soon as we’re all together, all right?’
Then Ray did something to the phone from wherever he was standing in a desert in Qatar, and the three-way connection went dead.
Schumacher showed them all over the plane while the two pilots remained discreetly locked behind the cockpit doors at the front. All Schumacher said was, ‘It’s better if they don’t see you. See me? Is okay. If someone asks them, Wo sind die kinder?’ – when Schumacher got a bit excited, his German kept bursting out – ‘the pilots, they can shrug and say, hand on the heart, What children? We have seen no children here.’
Everything was fascinating to Qing, who wanted to touch and prod every surface of the aeroplane. But it was pretty fascinating to Harley, too, because all the interior of the plane contained was a long, oval conference table topped with flame walnut wood panelling, surrounded by twelve comfy-looking leather armchairs – one at each end, five on either side – and a bathroom that featured a washbasin and a full-sized spa with real gold taps. Long cupboards, also in flame walnut, ran along either side of the plane beneath the windows. Having a meeting and then having a spa, or having a spa first and then a business meeting, was something Harley had never even contemplated. Adults were weird.
‘This is the strangest aeroplane I’ve ever seen,’ he whistled from where he was standing at the head of the meeting table; the locked cockpit door at his back, the soft gold carpet almost swallowing his damp, smelly sneakers.
‘It is even better below the decks!’ Schumacher crowed, opening two broad cupboard doors just outside the bathroom. ‘Follow me! Tight squeeze for me; not so much for you!’
Qing and Harley watched as Schumacher slid sideways into the empty cupboard bum-first, before tucking his knees against his chest and rolling onto his back.
Then he disappeared.
Qing blinked.
Harley sprinted across the cabin, kneeling to look into the cupboard where Schumacher had just vanished, running his hands along the empty shelving. Schumacher might never have been there but for his muffled voice crying, ‘Join me!’ floating up to them from somewhere under the cupboard floor.
Qing knelt too, astonishment on her face, pressing down on the apparently solid wood, which didn’t budge a millimetre. She stuck her head in the cupboard to see how the big German had done it.
‘How?’ Harley yelled back, feeling foolish. ‘How do we do that?’
‘Lie on your back,’ Schumacher bellowed up. ‘There is a catch where one panel meets another, near the roof. Deine zehen, your toes, you know? Just a tiny wiggle, you must feel it—’
Qing got into the cupboard, rolling up into a ball and feeling with one of her small slippered feet around the ceiling of the enclosed space. With a look of complete surprise, she dropped downwards, and the floor rose smoothly back up.
‘Okay?’ Harley heard Schumacher roar jovially. ‘Woo! Am I right?’
‘Woo!’ Qing replied, with laughter in her voice.
There was a hollow knock on the false floor of the cupboard. ‘Kommst du, Harley?’
Taking a deep breath, Harley shoved his bum into the cupboard, flipped over onto his back and toed the catch.
He fell so fast his stomach filled with butterflies.
When he threw himself out of the fake cupboard, which was already rising back towards the plush interior of the plane, Harley found himself in a cold, vast, dim space which ran the entire length of the jet. Harley blinked in astonishment as he scanned what had to be the cargo hold. The false cupboard had deposited them near the tail end, and between where they were standing and the nose of the plane, the hold was crammed full of dark, oddly-shaped things.
Harley did a double take. ‘Are those all … musical instruments?’ he asked Schumacher, who was standing a little hunched over because of his great height. Harley hadn’t known what to expect. Maybe a planeload of liberated Van Gogh or Picasso paintings, given the way Delia was always muttering darkly about Ray’s business interests. There wasn’t a sniff of antique bric-à-brac or artwork to be seen down here, and Harley felt a burst of relief. Maybe his mum had been wrong about his dad all along.
Around them were stacked large cardboard boxes which bore labels like Mixed Recorders or Flutes/Piccolos. Near the single cargo door at the midpoint of the hold was a cluster of six very large kettledrums, each standing on sturdy legs set into a big brass ring that went around the belly of each drum. There were a couple of upright pianos, one on either side of the hold near the front of the plane, and a couple of double basses in hard cases sitting flat on the floor at the plane’s nose-end. Around the prone double basses were at least a dozen cello cases resting on their sides. Strong black webbing held almost everything in position except for the pianos, which were strapped around their tops to the side walls. There wasn’t much space to walk around between the pinned-down cargo.
‘I show you something,’ Schumacher said, beckoning them towards one of the pianos.
The three of them squeezed past a box marked Tiger Bassoons, then another marked French Horns and stared at the piano, which was a glossy black with gold trim and a German-sounding name: Källtewelle. ‘My uncle,’ Schumacher said proudly, tapping the side of his nose, ‘he makes them special.’
Schumacher lifted the lid of the piano and Qing and Harley stood on tiptoe to see inside. ‘Good steel frame, see?’ Schumacher added, plucking at one of the golden piano strings. ‘Very sturdy. Last forever.’
He lifted the fallboard that covered the piano’s keys and grinned. ‘Play it,’ he urged them.
Harley reached forward and pressed one of the splendid high-gloss ivory keys with his index finger, but no sound came out. Puzzled, he placed both his hands on the keyboard and crashed them up and down as if he were Beethoven, but the piano remained completely silent. There was just a dead-sounding thump each time he pressed down on the keyboard.
Qing looked at Schumacher enquiringly, and Schumacher folded his lanky frame onto the ground beneath the keyboard, beckoning them to do the same. As they knelt by the pedals of the piano, Schumacher slid open a secret panel located just above the pedals that was controlled by a tiny catch, much like the one inside the false cupboard above their heads. Harley saw that the empty space was big enough to hold a person, sitting scrunched up with their knees under their chin. ‘A good hiding spot, ja?’ Schumacher said happily.
‘Do they both do that?’ Harley gestured at the other piano across the hold.
Schumacher shook his head. ‘Only this one. In case anyone is asking, the other one plays like a dream. And follow me now…’
They squeezed past a couple of boxes marked Triangles & Misc. Beaters and moved towards the two double bass cases that were flat on the g
round near the nose of the plane. They were hard to see among all the boxes and cellos, but strangely, one of them wasn’t strapped down. ‘This one,’ Schumacher announced, waving at the double bass case furthest from the cargo door, ‘is empty. Also good for the hiding.’
He stepped carefully over the cargo of webbed cello cases and bent down, opening the special black double bass case by flipping the catches on the side. Its interior was also marked with the gold Källtewelle maker’s label. Schumacher ran his hand across the fuzzy maroon pile inside the empty case and indicated a couple of very ingenious breathing holes carved into the area near the lid hinges that weren’t readily discernible from the outside of the case. ‘Very comfortable for you, ja?’ he said to Qing. ‘I think a good fit.’
Schumacher stood and pointed at the kettle drums by the cargo hold door, indicating the tripod arrangement that held each of them up. ‘Two of them also can be accessed from beneath, but for you, Harley, very tight squeeze, I am thinking. Not the best choice.’ He pointed at a box in a narrow space near the nose of the plane. ‘That one is only half full of tambourines, but I do not recommend it. The slightest movement may be heard, I am thinking. And you will need to be very quiet when we land, you understand? Customs must be seeing only musical instruments, nothing else.’
Qing and Harley nodded solemnly in understanding. ‘There’s no way back up into the plane from here,’ Schumacher said as he led them towards the cargo hold door and released it, helping them back onto the brushed concrete floor of the hangar before closing the door behind them. ‘Once you are down, you are down. And you must be like the mice.’
As they filed back up the front stairs of the plane, he asked, ‘Any questions, kinder?’
Harley’s jaw dropped as Qing answered in what sounded like German, ‘Haben sie fisch oder wasser?’ and Schumacher threw up his large hands in delight. He started foraging in the supply cabinets along the right side of the plane for whatever Qing had asked for – Harley guessed either fish or water. Empires had risen and fallen since she’d last eaten, and she was starving and thirsty after the day’s shenanigans.
The jet took off not long after. While Qing ate tin after tin of tuna with a cocktail fork and practised with Schumacher the nineteenth-century-era German phrases she’d picked up from books inside the State Library, Harley threw his legs over one arm of the chairman’s seat at the head of the board table, and slept with his head thrown back and his mouth wide open.
Harley woke abruptly when the plane encountered heavy turbulence. Schumacher was asleep with his face on the meeting table and his pale death-metal hair spread out everywhere, but Qing was wide awake, surrounded by a mountain of empty tuna tins and bottles of water. She was staring out one of the windows across the cabin and looked terribly sad.
Harley yawned, stretched and sat up. ‘What’s wrong?’ he asked Qing without thinking. Asking a girl what was wrong was usually trouble, but Qing wasn’t like any girl he had ever met before, so the words came out before he could suck them back in.
She didn’t answer right away, and she didn’t look away from the window at Harley. If anything, the question made Qing look sadder. When it seemed like she would ignore him completely, she finally replied so quietly that he had to strain to hear her.
‘There is no one – out there,’ she pointed out the window, which was streaming with thin rivulets of rain, ‘like me.’
‘We’re all different,’ Harley said encouragingly. ‘That’s what Mum always tells me, anyway, when Reggie Brandis has been trying to shove my head down a toilet again. There’s no one like any of us, if you look at it that way. Nothing to feel glum about! We’re all islands, according to my teacher Miss Harris.’
Qing turned to look at Harley and the ring around her black irises seemed blue with a kind of actualised sorrow. She peered again into the dark turbulence outside as the whole aircraft gave an awkward lurch and roll that almost pitched a now-groaning Schumacher out of his seat. Harley clutched desperately at the armrests of his own chair so that he wouldn’t hit the carpet on his bum.
‘Out there,’ Qing said in frustration, trying to make Harley understand, ‘the sky is … empty.’
Harley’s eyes widened. ‘You mean, it didn’t used to be?’
Qing shook her head. ‘Before there were machines like this,’ her eyes darted around the interior of the jet, ‘we were there. Where have we gone?’
Harley was opening his mouth to pepper her with questions when Schumacher abruptly sat straight up and scooped his lank locks off his face.
‘Righto,’ he said looking from Qing to Harley, rubbing the sleep out of his ice-blue eyes, ‘time to get in the cupboard, kinder.’
In the hold, Harley could feel the strong g-forces of their descent. They vibrated up through the steel floor into his shoes and then into his bones. His teeth were chattering as he picked his way towards the piano with the false door at the base. Qing had gone straight for the double bass case with the air holes. They exchanged looks before disappearing inside their respective hiding places.
The landing was bumpy and uncomfortable. Secreted inside the piano, Harley bit his tongue when the wheels of the plane hit the ground. The iron taste of his own blood filled his mouth disgustingly as the aircraft coasted swiftly to a stop. Not long after, the cargo door opened and they heard Schumacher say in his loud, jolly Bavarian voice, ‘A very uneventful trip, my friend, nothing to report.’
A new voice replied dryly, ‘Although I must say, my friend, that you ate a lot of tuna for such a short trip! More than two tins per hour, if I am not mistaken, given the favourable tailwind on your journey.’
‘I was very hungry,’ Schumacher replied as the two men’s footsteps began to echo around the hold. ‘Tuna is my favourite food.’
‘The passenger manifest lists only your name, it is true. But seventeen tins of sandwich tuna in olive oil?’ the stranger replied doubtfully.
Inside their hiding places, Qing and Harley tensed at the scepticism in the customs official’s voice, sensing trouble.
‘I assure you,’ Schumacher said without hesitation, ‘I most certainly am the only passenger aboard this plane. And I most certainly ate all of that tuna. I love tuna. I dream about tuna when I am not eating tuna. It is the food of the brain.’
‘Mmmmmm,’ the other man replied as he took a few more steps forward into the hold, then stopped. ‘You say these instruments are all bound for a music shop in the suburb of Novena?’
‘Yes, sir,’ Schumacher replied, sounding less jolly as the man resumed walking into the hold, evidently looking around. ‘I explained all this to your colleague, Mr Low, when I called ahead to tell him of our arrival date.’
‘Mr Low is indisposed today,’ the other man replied sternly. ‘I am his supervisor. This seems like a lot of instruments for one shop to order.’
Harley stopped breathing as a set of heavy knuckles knocked on the lid of the very piano he was hiding in. He felt sure Schumacher had stopped breathing for a moment, too, because when Schumacher spoke again, his voice sounded high and funny.
There was a small creak and the cover on Harley’s keyboard began to open. Harley gritted his teeth together so hard that fresh blood welled in his mouth. If the supervisor tried to tinkle these ivories, he’d know for sure that something was even fishier than the empty tuna cans Qing had left behind upstairs.
Schumacher tore open the top of a box nearby and scooped up a handful of things that clinked wildly. ‘For the kinder,’ he said hastily. ‘A local school has placed an order for hundreds of these triangles.’
The supervisor placed the fallboard gently back down but Harley didn’t start breathing again until the two men’s footsteps moved further away. ‘Timpani from America, guitars from Andorra,’ Schumacher recited quickly, ‘violins and violas from an artisanal violineri in Venice, xylophones from Japan.’ Harley could hear Schumacher frantically throwing open box lids all over the hold.
‘What about those?’ said the su
pervisor, stopping with a scuff of his shoes.
‘The double basses?’ Schumacher sounded scared and squeaky again.
‘They are the same brand as the pianos,’ the supervisor mused. ‘Källtewelle. In my experience, makers of fine pianos do not ordinarily also make stringed instruments. Open the cases, please.’
‘Open the cases?’ Schumacher sounded the most terrified Harley had ever heard him.
‘Open the cases,’ the other man repeated in a voice both deeply pleasant and deeply menacing.
In the echoing hold, Harley heard Schumacher shoot the catches on the first case and wheeze, ‘See, the finest German maple wood, handcrafted in the forests of Bavaria, where I am coming from. Look at the flame pattern in the wood. So beautiful.’
‘The other case,’ the man insisted immediately, his voice dropping as he bent down to inspect the case that Qing had hidden in. ‘See, the catches are already open. All you need to do, my friend, is lift the lid.’
Schumacher shuffled his feet in agony.
Harley thought his head would explode in fear as Schumacher finally lifted the lid. Both men made an exclamation of surprise and dismay.
‘It’s empty!’ they both shouted at once.
Harley had been sweating into his clothes inside the piano’s hot and stuffy hidey-hole, but their words made him go ice cold. Empty?
‘How can this be?’ Schumacher howled, looking around the hold as if the missing double bass had gotten up by itself and walked away.
The customs official noted the German’s genuine surprise and anguish and reluctantly put his signature on the top page of the sheaf of customs documents on his clipboard. You couldn’t stop a shipment that didn’t conceal contraband even if it was, in fact, missing some legitimate bits. Still, it was clear from his face that the customs officer felt faintly cheated.
There was a long pause as the supervisor’s gaze swept the entire contents of the cargo hold one more time. ‘I should think that the folk at Källtewelle have fooled you out of one double bass, which is most irregular, but not irregular enough to stop you. You can tell your truck driver to take delivery now,’ the man added.
