Marcus dropped to his knees and crawled around behind the crowd, searching for a glimpse of Charlie’s dress. Nothing. He sprinted to the information desk by the entrance. No one there. No, of course not.
His heart hammered in his chest. He was painfully aware that the longer Charlie didn’t show up, the worse things would get. He took a deep breath and attempted to scan the area systematically. It didn’t work. His eyes darted left and right, every distraction, every flash of red colour was her, almost her, surely her.
He stumbled towards the main entrance of the library. At least if she was inside, he would spot her before she got outside. Hordes streamed in and out past him, excited, concerned, some laughing, some barely acknowledging the chaos unfolding.
In the blur of bodies, Marcus didn’t even register the uniform. Anyone asking to help was welcome as far as he was concerned.
‘Sir, are you alright?’
‘My daughter. She was just here. I thought she was here.’
‘Sir, calm down. What’s her name.’
‘Charlotte, Charlie. She’s Charlie.’
‘And when did you last see her?’
Marcus stopped and thought for a second. When had he last seen her? How long had he been arguing with Tanya before they realised the only thing they had worth arguing over was gone?
‘Um, I don’t know. Not long. Not long at all.’
‘Can you give me an estimate? It makes all the difference.’
‘I know. Ten minutes. Tops. Her mother is here too. She’ll be looking. And screaming. Screaming and looking.’
He runs through everything he should be doing: stay still, stay calm. A nauseous lurch flows through him as he realises what he is responsible for. His five-year-old is wandering unsupervised in an enormous public space. He delivers Charlie’s basic details and appearance to the security guard.
‘She’s smart! She’s really really smart.’
He wasn’t quite sure why he said that. Why that was important. Maybe he was saying it to himself. He dashed into the bookshop, the cafe, around the sculptures that dotted the concourse, and through the endless throng of people chattering, bustling, dawdling, and strolling. A clawing, gasping panic began to overtake him. Every minute makes a difference.
***
Not many people look up, but sometimes it’s worth looking for the lovely things up there. The atrium was nice, with its layer on layer of balconies and floors, but on the ceiling outside the bookshop, someone had placed giant bugs. Not real ones. Big metal things, not moving, just observing what was happening below. Near one of the giant metal bugs, a much smaller spider had built a web. Spiders liked ‘doing’ words, especially short ones. They wove them into the webs, linking them together, fanning out from the centre, one after another until all their meaning had been lost and they formed a new pattern all of their own.
Charlie liked spiders, usually.
Lately the spiders had been doing strange things with their webs, though, like this one. It had torn all the useful words out, unstitching them from the web and letting them fall. It was strange and unsettling. Spiders were normally so careful. It was like they were panicking, offloading what they didn’t need any more.
Finding the elevator wasn’t too difficult, but she was concerned she might not reach the buttons. Sometimes to get high up, you had be high up in the first place. But this elevator was fine. She couldn’t reach the top button, but the one below was in easy reach. Not much in the way of words in here. These librarians were absolutely diligent. That was a nice word she picked up outside the teachers’ room at school. She looked at the label next to the button she’d pressed.
Special collections.
Okay. She would go to special collections and see what she could find. She pressed the buttons and after a satisfying ping, the doors slid shut in front of her and carried her as high in the building as she could go.
***
The crowds were dispersing. They could see the bridges clogging up with traffic: cars and pedestrians. Everyone crossing north and south through the only routes available. Overhead, helicopters rattled and buzzed. Though the rain had stopped and the sun was shining, the sky maintained a brooding heaviness.
‘Spooky,’ said Whippo. ‘We really gotta go.’
‘We haven’t found Charlie.’
‘Dorkus is looking for her. He’ll text you when he finds her.’
‘Nigel, do you seriously think I’m going to leave without finding her?’
‘Don’t call me Nigel.’
Tanya had never really paid attention to the river until now. She knew it was there, of course, but how often do you stop and stare at the millions of litres that flow past?
Now she stopped. And stared.
The water had a hypnotic pulse to it. It eddied and sloshed and plumed and wrestled with itself. Great wells of water would rise up, propelled by some unseen force below, a bloom of whitewash within the background brown. The wells would appear, disgorge their watery content up, attempting to reach skyward, before running out of steam and settling back into the morass only for another plume to rise somewhere else. It never settled. It never stopped.
And it was loud.
‘Ha! Look at that,’ said Whippo.
A long sexy-looking speedboat, some kind of millionaire’s toy, had wedged itself into a bridge pylon.
***
A few people were around on this floor, but for the moment no one was worried about her. Charlie looked around, wondering which way the windows were.
This level looked different from the others she had seen. The others had rows and rows and rows of books, more than she had ever seen at the school library.
Charlie spent a lot of time with books. Books helped her make sense of the words she saw everywhere. They helped her understand how words went together and what they look like when people order them. Books were okay. But the way others talked about them, Charlie wondered if she was missing something.
‘I love books,’ said their teacher in the first week of prep.
‘Why?’ Charlie said.
‘Because books open up a whole world of possibility. Books are a window into . . . ’ Charlie lost track at that point. It’s not the only time she’s heard stuff like that.
For Charlie, books were useful, but the words in them were dead. Out here, words do all sorts of things. They combine and break up and move around and reform. They turn up in strange and wonderful places. They don’t stay still.
But this floor was not full of rows and rows of dead things. This floor looked more like a shop for antiques. And one antique caught her eye.
It was a large white vase with a picture on it painted in blue: birds facing each other, dancing together in silence, surrounded by strange looking trees and buildings. It was pretty.
And it was stuffed full of words.
Charlie stared at it. All the words she had ever found were on the ground, left behind on tables, hanging sadly from someone’s clothing or belonging. Everything from her collection was someone else’s junk. She’d never thought to look somewhere special.
Special collections.
An amazing thought occurred to Charlie. She took a deep, measured breath in. Her fingers and toes tingled with pins and needles.
Someone had put those words in there.
Someone like her had kept their own collection and stored it in a white vase with dancing birds painted on it in blue. What kind of words deserved such gentle and careful treatment? They must be words she had never encountered before. What’s more, someone—the same someone who collected them?—had placed the vase out there in the open on a desk. Just out of reach. Charlie inched her way closer to the vase, reaching her hand out, desperate to know what such precious words must feel like. They looked clean.
There are other people like me.
‘Hey there!’
Charlie jumped in fright and whirled around to find herself face to face with someone official. She wanted to run away, but she didn’t
want to leave the words in the vase without touching them.
‘Hey, it’s okay! You look very lost, there, sweetheart!’
She wasn’t old like a lot of the librarians Charlie had seen. She was much younger, probably younger than Charlie’s Mum. She had bigger boobs too. The name on the badge pinned to her shirt read:
SAMMI
The tag dangling from the lanyard around her neck added some more detail and an awkward photo.
Sammi BERNHOFF
‘What’s your name?’
‘Charlie.’
‘Charlie, I’m Sammi. Are you missing your mum or dad?’
Charlie blinked at her. Mum and Dad would be still talking, still sharpening their words and flinging them at each other’s faces. They took a long time doing that. Charlie wasn’t worried.
‘They’re downstairs.’
Sammi smiled with her mouth, but frowned with her eyes. ‘They’ll be looking for you. Everyone needs to go home now. Let’s go down there and see if we can find them.’
She reached a hand out to Charlie. A helicopter flew low over the building sending thick pulses of noise echoing down the atrium.
‘No! Wait!’
Charlie snatched her hand back.
‘Sweetheart, we have to go. You can’t stay here.’
‘No!’ Charlie would be happy to go once she had a closer look at the words in the vase. She wasn’t sure how to say that. She ran for it, escaping Sammi’s reach. She stumbled towards the desk where the vase perched and flung her hand for one tiny, small touch of what was inside it.
It rocked back and forth—once, twice—before falling on its side.
A guttural groan emerged from Sammi as she rushed past Charlie to stop the vase from falling off the desk and onto the tiles below. She pushed Charlie aside, clawing at it with her fingertips.
Charlie fell backwards onto her bottom and watched. As it rolled on the surface, a few words tumbled out and onto the desk. When it fell through the air, a few more of the lighter, more airy words fluttered out like ash fragments from a fire. And when it finally hit the ground—SMASH!—it contents exploded in a cloud of ceramic dust. Shards and fragments of the vase remained amongst the words.
Sammi dropped to her knees, her face white, staring at what was left of something that deserved the title special collection. But as Charlie craned her neck to see better what words had been left for her, she wondered why it was deserving of the name special. The vase contained no treasures, no new discoveries. No puzzling words she could turn over in her hands and investigate further. Every last word in there was the same ordinary stuff she saw everywhere. Doing words, naming words. Even little words like ‘if’ and ‘it’. They didn’t seem to go together particularly well. They couldn’t form sentences or even phrases.
What kind of collection was this? What was its purpose?
Sammi sighed and brushed some of the dust under the desk before turning to Charlie. She wasn’t smiling any more.
‘Why did you do that?’
Charlie jumped from the floor and ran. She found the stairs and tore down them as fast as she could. She had done something terrible and now everyone would be angry at her. From below, her mother’s voice rang through the atrium.
‘Where’s my daaaawwwwwtah?’
She couldn’t stand the thought that her parents might turn their sharpened words on her instead of each other. At least they could see what was coming at them.
***
She stopped on the bridge’s footpath, unnoticed by the people around her. They had their own worries. They were all trying to leave, they talked on their phones (those that could), marching quick step. They talked loudly at each other, asked about transport and carelessly tossed their words around, letting them fall where they may. The wind took their meaningless words up from the bridge’s surface and carried them down to the water.
‘Hey look, a couch.’
Debris from upriver was being carried out to the bay: mostly unidentifiable plastics, kids’ play equipment, camping gear, eskies. And now a couch.
She watched it drift by.
She had been thinking about the words in the vase and about her own collection at home. Unlike the books in the library, Charlie didn’t keep anything ordered. She just liked to have them around her. She liked to think she looked after them better than the people around her. She was just like the person who had left the vase.
And now the vase was ruined. One small stupid act from Charlie and it was gone.
But the words that it contained still troubled her. When the words are everywhere, why keep them at all? A new thought occurred to her.
Maybe keeping them isn’t the right thing to do.
Charlie reached into her pockets and removed the few words she had collected in the library. She turned them over in her hands, watching the sunlight strike them. During their time in her pocket, they had rubbed up against each other. A couple had clung together in awkward compound words. One of the doing words had even attracted un ugly ‘LY’ at the end.
They were always doing that.
‘Charlie!’
Her Dad’s voice seemed like a long way away. Somewhere down at the sides of the river. She was going to be in big trouble when they found her.
Adults don’t seem to like words at all. They smear them over surfaces, slice them, smash them. But maybe that’s what they’re supposed to do with them.
Best to get this done now.
Charlie stepped up on her tiptoes and reached over the bridge’s handrail, tossing the words from her hand down to the angry water below.
She watched them spin and twist on currents, crash into each other and break into pieces as the water swallowed them. They were part of the world again, settling at the bottom of the river, eventually drifting away to the sea.
Maybe one day she would see them again.
Uninterrupted Study - Christopher Currie
‘So you’re actually not fucking with us?’ The guy called Tony or Toby or T-Bone—Han had never quite worked it out—made his face into a pinch of play dough. He had the same savoury smell as well. Something gone crusty in the folds of his hoodie. T-Dough.
‘You’ve never seen the ocean?’ This from the tiny girl who Han had sat next to in his first tutorial for a full five minutes before realising she was there. Her name was Koong-Say, but she had wanted him to call her Key.
‘Yeah,’ said Han. ‘I mean, I just never got the chance.’
‘You never got the chance?’ T-Dough chuckled, that deep bully chuckle that conveyed no humour at all. His bleached fringe moved in a single sheet.
‘It just wasn’t something I did. No big deal.’
‘I think that’s cool.’ This was Jarrah, who Han had already fallen in love with, and it was only just past lunchtime. She was the sort of girl he had spent his entire first month in Brisbane obsessing over: a smooth, sophisticated figure who looked so much at home in the terrifying expanse of a sprawling city that it was impossible not to reserve her a special place in your brain.
‘Thanks,’ said Han, trying desperately to plane any timbre of irony from his speech, which resulted, as it often did, in his voice breaking and a resultant pink flush. T-Dough barely stifled a laugh. Han stared up through the tiny slanted window above them, at the sky, which had turned a deep shade of grey, like a wet rock. Something about the sky, about the whole morning, had worried him.
It was two days from their presentation and this was the first time the whole group had met. It didn’t help that T-Dough never came to the tutorial, or that a whole week’s teaching had been cancelled because of the sandstorms. Key had started a group email that progressed in fits and starts but it wasn’t until the due date was nearly upon them that they had agreed to meet. Key had them ensconced in the very top level of the State Library, in a room that looked to Han as if it wasn’t supposed to hold study groups trying to unravel The Role of Technology in Storytelling in Modern Media. There were the usual tall shelves, but the boo
ks were strange shapes, some tied with string and others stacked haphazardly with the corners of old maps sticking out the side.
Numerous signs, in fact, warned that the area was not for public access without express permission, and banned the very laptops—and water bottles they all had scattered across the table. Han’s contribution to the discussion so far—after they spent an hour with earphones in reading articles on the free wireless—had been to nod along when someone suggested something, but the suggestions were very few and far between. The three others had laptops but Han just sat in their reflected glow with his exercise book, which had ‘Year 12 Biol’ crossed out on the front and ‘Intro to Media Studies’ scrawled over the top.
Somehow the topic had changed from key themes of Adorno’s media theory to who was heading to the beach the next day, following a much-publicised prediction of a rain-and-sand-free weekend. T-Dough waxed lyrical about the trip up the coast he was making in his newly-detailed car, the details of which Han didn’t care enough about to remember. Han had started driving at nine, but had little time for cars except as modes of transport and work. Ya just gotta get from A to B, his dad always said. Just need to get where you’re going.
It had been after Key said she was going to Southbank for the first time to swim at the fake beach, and after Jarrah’s thought that maybe she would head up to a friend’s beach house, when Han had offered his observation that he had never seen the ocean.
‘It’s kind of cool. I mean, I’ve never seen the bush.’ Jarrah made double-quotes with her fingers. ‘You grew up in the outback, right, so that’s the same thing.’
Han shrugged. ‘Don’t know if it was the outback, but it was pretty isolated, I suppose.’
‘Must’ve been,’ said T-Dough. ‘Did you take a sheep to your formal?’
‘Nice one.’
Willow Pattern Page 10
