Magic or Madness

by Justine Larbalestier

  I nodded, though I couldn’t remember if they’d fit or not. “Thanks.”

  “Then breakfast? You must be hungry.”

  I nodded again, though I hadn’t realised I was until she asked. I wondered how long it had been since I’d eaten. The last I remembered it was January, with winter six months away.

  When she left, I looked around for the clothes I’d been wearing. They weren’t in the room. I went out into the living room. Jay-Tee wasn’t there, but my clothes were hanging to dry in front of one of the heaters.

  I took the opportunity to have a little look around. Two exits: the front door and a large window in the kitchen that led onto one of those weird metal outside staircases. The window was covered by a metal grate. I couldn’t tell by looking whether it was locked or not.

  Back in the living room, I found my shorts and T-shirt, the last clothes I remembered wearing. Somehow they’d made it with me from summer to winter, all the way here. Wherever “here” was.

  “You still haven’t showered?” Jay-Tee asked.

  I jumped. “You scared me.”

  “Sorry,” she said, though she didn’t sound like she was. “Can you hurry up? I’m starving. Sooner you shower, the sooner we eat.”

  In the shower I scrubbed myself so clean I took layers of skin away. My toes and fingers still felt strange from the intense cold of last night, tingling as if a thousand tiny needles had been stuck into each one.

  Jay-Tee’s flat had bars on all the windows, even the tiny window in the bathroom. It was like a jail. The front door and the kitchen window were the only exits. Of course, knowing the escape routes was useless information until there was somewhere to escape to.

  Where on earth was I and how had I gotten here?

  The menu was almost big enough to cover the table and full of things I’d never heard of: kielbasa, pierogies, kasha, macaroni. My head spun with it all. I couldn’t make sense of the menu, or the restaurant, or the East Village. I put the menu down and gripped the ammonite in my pocket, closing my eyes and letting its golden spiral unravel in my head, a cascade of Fibs, spreading out across the tables around us. Vainly trying to understand, trying to find something I recognised.

  “Reason? You ready to order?”

  “Huh?” I opened my eyes, the Fibs falling apart in my head. “Uh, sure. What’re you having?”

  She told me. I said I’d have the same, even though I had no clue what it was. I felt as if I was in a glass bubble. Everything was coming at me from a distance, light and sound distorted. I was like Sarafina, living in a slowed-down world while everyone around me went at their normal pace or faster, I guessed. Maybe someone had given me drugs and kidnapped me, taken me to this strange, cold city.

  I sat and watched as people dashed in and out. Sat, ordered, then seconds later shovelled food into their mouths as though they thought someone might snatch it from them. Then out the door again. I could almost see streaks of light trailing behind them. Zoom, zoom, zoom. Was this how Sarafina saw the world? Was this even real?

  “You’re not eating.” I looked up, confused. I hadn’t even noticed the food arrive.

  “I’m sorry. I guess I was distracted.” We were having breakfast, but it didn’t feel like breakfast time. “What time is it?”

  “Twelve-thirty.”

  “In the afternoon?” It made no sense.

  Jay-Tee nodded and gave me her are-you-mad? look again. Maybe I was. Nothing had made sense since I opened the back door at Esmeralda’s house. My world had become undone. If I wasn’t drugged, then I must be insane. Was someone in the real world trying to talk to me right now? Tom or Esmeralda? To them everything I was saying would be gibberish.

  The heat inside the restaurant had made the windows steam up, but I suddenly felt cold. I’d gone mad like my mother.

  “You should at least eat some of the kasha. The mushroom gravy’s really good.”

  I dutifully spooned some of the stuff into my mouth. What kind of a name for food was “kasha”? It looked and tasted something like porridge, only not milky or sweet, and it was more grey than white. Why would my brain create something so boring? I’d thought I had a better imagination than this.

  If, on the other hand, this was real, then I still had no idea where I was or how I’d got here, but I didn’t want to go through another circular conversation with Jay-Tee trying to find out. Had Esmeralda drugged me and shipped me off to Antarctica? Did Antarctica even have this many people? And if it really was winter, where had the last six months gone?

  My head ached. My nose had started to hurt again during the short journey from Jay-Tee’s flat to the restaurant. Outside, it was unspeakably cold. I’d had no idea cold could be that cold. It was like living on the inside of a freezer. The five-minute journey had been almost unbearable. I still couldn’t believe it was twenty-two degrees outside. Maybe I’d misheard Jay-Tee. Maybe she’d said minus twenty-two.

  Though it wasn’t snowing anymore, there’d been snow everywhere, piled up higher than the cars. On the sides of the road the snow had started to get dirty, turn grey. There were patches of yellow where dogs had peed.

  We’d walked here along a wet path, cleared of snow, with something sparkly crunching under my feet. “Salt,” Jay-Tee said when I asked. She didn’t explain why, but perhaps it would help dissolve the snow? If so, it was about the first thing I’d seen that made sense.

  There were lots of people, all of them huddled into huge winter coats—like the one hanging behind Esmeralda’s back door. They walked as fast as they could despite being weighed down by their heavy coats. It figured. Who’d want to stay out in this misery a second longer than they had to? The glimpses of faces I saw were pinched and set, red and blotchy, their lips grey.

  Out there in that unbearable cold, my nose hurt and my lungs burned every time I breathed. How could anyone live in this place?

  I had been grateful when we’d come in from the street and I’d found the restaurant as perfectly heated as Jay-Tee’s flat. A few minutes later I was sweating and had to shed the coat, gloves, hat, and then the jumper and long-sleeved T-shirt. I looked around. At every table sat at least one chair barely visible under a mound of clothing.

  What was this place? The East Village. Eleventh Street. The sky was grey, the people were grey, and the food was grey. The waitress hadn’t smiled as she took our order. I watched the waitresses taking other orders. They didn’t smile at anyone. No one had an accent like mine. Though they all sounded different from one another.

  “You don’t like it?”

  Jay-Tee was looking at my food. “No, it’s fine.” I spooned some more of the grey stuff into my mouth, dutifully swallowed. I sipped orange juice and then some of the coffee, grateful for normal tastes, though the coffee was more watery than I was used to.

  The last thing I remembered was walking through my grandmother’s back door; then my memories jumped to standing in the snow, at night in winter, in this grey prison world.

  The man at the table next to us unfurled his newspaper, rustling noisily, barely managing not to knock over the strange purple soup he was eating.

  “Can you remember anything about last night?” asked Jay-Tee.

  I shook my head, though I could. It just didn’t make any sense.

  “Do you think maybe you have amnesia? Should I take you to a doctor?”

  Amnesia, that was the word for losing a big chunk of memory. But before I could agree, I thought of what the doctors at Kalder Park had done to Sarafina and shook my head. “No, really. I’m sure I don’t need a doctor.”

  “Whatever you say.”

  Jay-Tee called for more coffee. I spread jam on a piece of toast and took a bite, chewing slowly. I remembered stumbling through the punishing cold barefoot. It had seemed wondrous at first. But not for long. I was unbelievably lucky that Jay-Tee had found me, that she was eager to help.

  I’d woken up in the night (if night was really what it had been) shaking, convinced I was still out there in
that incredible cold with no one to save me. I could have died. I’d fallen back to sleep almost instantly. One minute wide awake, the next my eyelids heavier than Uluru. I’d never felt so strange before.

  Something prickled inside me, calling for my attention, but it hurt to go anywhere near it. I wasn’t going to think about the boy who died. Drugs, I told myself. Or madness.

  A peal of laughter, almost like a bell, rang out in the restaurant. I turned. A man was standing with his coat half off. Two women at the table were looking up at him and laughing uproariously.

  “Take your coat all the way off!”

  “Fix up your cape, Superman!”

  The man was wearing a strange outfit. Red and blue. Skintight. I could see the exact shape of his bottom—I was glad I was sitting behind him. He still had on his winter hat and scarf. He looked ridiculous. I grinned too.

  “And you sing?” asked one of the women in between gasps of laughter.

  The man nodded. “C’mon,” he said. “Twenty bucks an hour. Under the table.”

  I looked at Jay-Tee with a raised eyebrow. What was this place? Jay-Tee shrugged as though the whole thing was perfectly normal, not worth noticing. Their accents were more like hers.

  I drank my juice. I noticed other people who, like Mr. Superman and his friends, weren’t moving fast, who didn’t resemble prison inmates. On the other side of the restaurant, near the windows, a man was feeding his baby daughter in a wooden high chair, making airplane noises as he propelled the spoon toward her mouth. She squealed happily. Some of the mush even made it into her mouth.

  I turned back to my own mush, spooned a couple of mouthfuls in, swallowed. Jay-Tee had finished her breakfast and was looking at me like she wanted to say something. I raised my eyebrows. Jay-Tee looked away, took a deep breath.

  “Did you . . .” Jay-Tee said at last. “I was just wondering if you, maybe . . . Don’t get mad, okay? You said you don’t have amnesia, but you also say you don’t remember anything. I figure you might have, you know, run away from home. If you did, I wouldn’t tell. I promise.”

  I stared at her. It wasn’t what I’d been expecting her to say. I had been going to run away. My backpack had been all packed, ready. I’d gone downstairs looking for money. But then . . .

  I looked at Jay-Tee, stunned, not sure what to say. I guessed that I had run away. At least, I’d wound up pretty far from Sydney somehow. But the result was the same: I wasn’t trapped in Esmeralda’s house anymore. I just hoped I wasn’t trapped inside my own mind.

  I just smiled.

  “I thought so,” Jay-Tee said, nodding. “Me too.”

  She made a writing gesture in the air and one of the waitresses came over with a piece of paper that said how much we had to pay.

  Jay-Tee put her hand over the paper for a moment, concentrating. The air crackled, and I smelled something that wasn’t food. Then there was money underneath her hand. I was sure it hadn’t been there a second ago.

  “What?” I began, but let the question trail away. The expression on Jay-Tee’s face told me to stay quiet.

  Jay-Tee stood up. “Want to go somewhere fun?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Where?”

  “Top of the world.” She winked at me. We’re mates now, her wink seemed to say. Then she led me back out into the cold.

  15

  Top of the World

  We weren’t out on the street battling the slushy footpath and pushing past other Michelin men bloated with winter clothing for very long before Jay-Tee led me into a building. It didn’t look like hers, but I couldn’t be a hundred percent sure until we were inside. The outsides of all the buildings were nearly identical. Large brown or grey or red bricks with iron stairs clinging to them—fire escapes, Jay-Tee told me, making me wonder how many fires they had in this village.

  Once we were inside, though, this building was different. It had a huge foyer with a swirling floor of coloured marble tiles and an ornate plaster ceiling of interwoven doves carrying roses in their mouths.

  A man in a black suit and red tie sat behind a large wooden desk, the top made of green leather fixed to the wood with 250 brass tacks. He was mesmerised by a computer screen, occasionally clicking the mouse.

  “Playing solitaire,” Jay-Tee said, making no effort to keep her voice down. The man didn’t look up as we walked by. Jay-Tee giggled.

  There was a bank of four lifts, all with their doors open. I’d only been in a lift once before, in the courthouse in Sydney. Three of these looked as though they’d just been wheeled off the production line, never ridden before, the gold and glass of their insides gleaming, the rich red of their carpets dazzling, like something you’d roll out for royalty.

  Jay-Tee led me into the last one. It was nothing like the first three: threadbare carpet and no panelling—you could see all its workings. Jay-Tee hit the button for the top floor. The doors concertinaed shut with a shudder. I could see through the door. The other lifts seemed to be laughing at us for choosing their poor cousin.

  The lift creaked and groaned but didn’t move, as if it was considering Jay-Tee’s request but had by no means agreed that it wanted to go up. It might stay where it was, or perhaps descend, or possibly spin round and round on the spot.

  Jay-Tee pressed the button again, gently this time, and whispered something that sounded like, “Sorry.”

  The lift suddenly decided that up did, in fact, hold its interest, jerking into motion. We both lost our footing, and I stumbled into Jay-Tee. She giggled again.

  I pushed my hood down and began to take off my gloves, watching the identical floors roll slowly by. Each had cream wallpaper dotted with roses, and gold doors, the numbers painted in black, and a red runner carpet—older than in the brand-new lifts, but far from threadbare—over floorboards. Jay-Tee watched me, her eyes narrowed, like a cat tracking a skink. When I returned her gaze, she blinked.

  “It’s one of the oldest elevators in the city,” she said. “Kind of temperamental. Won’t start for just anyone. Kind to runaways, though.” Jay-Tee grinned. “It always starts for me.”

  I nodded. Everything tends to get crankier as it gets older. Especially people. I wanted to ask Jay-Tee who she’d run away from, opened my mouth to do so.

  “Why’d you run away?” Jay-Tee asked instead.

  I closed my mouth, opened it again. Had she read my mind? “Er,” I said, not knowing how much to say. “My grandmother. Ran away from my grandmother. We don’t get on,” I finished pathetically.

  “Get on what?” Jay-Tee stretched out the a sound in the word what until it hurt my ears. Her hands were on her hips. She looked annoyed.

  “Huh?”

  “You and your grandmother. What don’t you get on?”

  “We don’t get on anything.” Why was she acting so weird? “We don’t like each other.”

  “Well, why didn’t you say so?”

  I had said so. Suddenly I felt unbelievably tired, eyes unwilling to stay open. I had to lean back against the lift wall. If I could’ve lain down, I would have slept for a month. “What about you?” I made myself ask.

  “I ran away from my dad. He beat me.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Jay-Tee shrugged. “I would’ve killed him if he touched me again. Better to run away.”

  I stared at her. Was she being serious? “What about your mum?”

  “My mom’s dead.”

  “Sorry.”

  Jay-Tee shrugged again. “She died when I was young. I never knew her. I don’t remember what she looked like. Just photos.”

  “Brothers or sisters?” I asked, half expecting Jay-Tee to call me a stickybeak and demand that I stop with all the questions.

  Jay-Tee shook her head. “Just me.”

  “Me too. Sarafina says it’s the easiest and hardest thing in the world being the only child. All that attention.”

  “Who’s Sarafina?”

  “My mother,” I said, careful not to say “mum” and set her off again. “How
long since you ran away?” The tiredness was gone, leaving me as suddenly as it had come. Strange.

  “A long time. No one’s looking for me anymore. I’m free. Stick with me and you will be too.”

  The lift came to a shuddering halt that ate what I was going to say. I stumbled, but Jay-Tee, expecting it, just rolled up onto the tips of her toes. Then silence. Several seconds of silence. The lift sat, waiting. I reached for the open door button.

  “I wouldn’t,” Jay-Tee said. “She needs to think a bit more.”

  She? I wanted to ask, but didn’t. A loud groan rattled through the lift; the doors opened slowly and, from the sound, painfully.

  Jay-Tee stepped out and I followed. We were in a red-carpeted corridor with cream rose-dotted walls just like all the other floors we’d passed. We walked by gold doors with numbers in black: 10E, 10D, 10C. I wondered which door we were looking for, but Jay-Tee led me past them all and up two flights of stairs. She stopped in front of a huge red door.

  “Pull your hood up, put your gloves back on.”

  I did. Jay-Tee leaned forward and pulled my hat lower and my scarf over my mouth.

  “Ready?”

  I nodded, though I didn’t know what for.

  Jay-Tee opened the door. Snow swirled around us, the wind fast and cold. Jay-Tee pulled me after her, slamming the door behind us.

  “Top of the world!” she screamed, laughing.

  We were up on the roof. I could see the whole city. Like I’d thought, definitely a city. Why on earth had Jay-Tee called it a village? Vast and high and crowded. Even more than Sydney. As far as the eye could see: nothing shorter than six stories. In the middle distance: tall, tall buildings everywhere, towering far above, their heads lopped off by the heavy grey clouds. City, city, city. This was what I had imagined that word meant: concrete and glass, grey and brown, towering buildings, some of them crowned gold. People made small like ants. No plant life at all.

  I pushed through the snow and wind—there was no salt up here, no ready-made paths—right up to the railing, sturdy and taller than me, hung with hundreds of little icicles glittering like diamonds. The street was a long way below, but not quite far enough to make ants of the people. I could distinguish the colour of their hats and coats from up here.