She stretched her arms into the air, as if pointing out the mouldings on the ceiling. Her phone made the squeaking noise that meant she had a text message (Jack said it sounded like a dying rat), and she raised her eyebrows thoughtfully and took the phone from her pocket.
Then she remembered where she was and put it back.
‘All right,’ she continued, irritably. ‘What I actually liked in the story of Charles Babbage was, see, there was this girl who was his friend, and she was wicked. So, I want to do her instead. Can I?’
‘You want to do a different person?’ Federico demanded. ‘A wicked person?’
Belle nodded.
‘This wicked person, she was at Cambridge?’
‘What’s that got to do with anything?’
Federico sighed flamboyantly. A gasp of a sigh this time, with a suspenseful break before exhaling.
Belle raised her eyebrows at the others.
‘He means cause this is supposed to be about people who were here at Cambridge,’ Jack explained.
‘That’s daft then,’ said Belle, ‘cause this was in, like, the olden days, when they didn’t let women in. They only let them in, like, yesterday. So that makes no sense, Federico. This is history, right? Well, my woman is from history. So. Therefore, and that.’
Federico lifted his eyes and his hands. Voices sounded from the corridor, and he dropped his hands and scratched his nose rapidly, until the voices passed.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘All right, switch your project. I am intrigued by your woman out of history who is wicked.’
‘Wicked doesn’t mean wicked—’ Jack began, but Belle was talking.
‘Okay, yeah, so her name was Ada Lovelace and she got to be friends with Charles Babbage. She really liked his computer machines. So she invented programming.’
‘Seriously?’ said Jack.
Belle nodded, then shrugged. ‘I think so.’
Federico was gazing at Belle. ‘Tell me now,’ he said, ‘this, what you have said, this is all that you know about Charles Babbage?’
‘That’s all there is to know,’ said Belle, sounding hostile. ‘And Ada’s the wicked one, cause this was in the old days when women, kind of like, didn’t know stuff. But she knew programming. So . . .’ She was trying to look at her phone surreptitiously.
Here, Federico seemed ready to engage in another theatrical exhalation, but a toilet flushed somewhere down the corridor and he blew the sigh away and moved to a new topic.
2
Wednesday night, they were sharing chips from the Van of Life in Market Square. Madeleine had just had a bleeding nose—she’d been getting them a lot since she came to Cambridge; something to do with allergies—and, as usual, Jack and Belle had argued about the solution. Belle wanted Madeleine to tip her head back, but Jack said she had to tip it forward. They batted her head back and forth between them until the bleeding stopped.
Now they were sitting on steps. It was late, and the vinegar was sharp, but the streetlights and moonlight were soft.
Jack said to Madeleine: ‘Does he ever call you? Your dad, I mean. Or write or, like, email or send you stuff?’
Madeleine shrugged.
‘It’s one thing,’ persisted Jack, ‘for your mother to split up with him. But that doesn’t mean he has to split with you. You should Skype. And he could be your Facebook friend. Open the lines of communication and that. He could LOL at your status updates.’
‘If they were funny,’ Belle put in.
Quiet circled the three of them.
Belle’s fingers scrabbled for the crunchier chips. ‘It’s lucky you’ve got Jack and me for friends now,’ she said to Madeleine. ‘Friends with regular names is what I mean. No disrespect to Tinsels and Warlock and whatever, but they’re not even names.’
‘They’re good names,’ said Jack with an edge. Belle raised her eyebrows.
‘Besides which,’ Jack continued, his words lining up along the edge, ‘besides which, it’s not that Madeleine’s lucky to have us, it’s the other way around. Belle and Jack. We’re just single syllables. Like a couple of cow turds. Her name’s a whole bubbling brook sort of a name. Three syllables. That’s a lot.’
Belle’s eyes began a rapid blinking, then stopped.
‘My name,’ she said, ‘is actually Annabelle.’
Jack swivelled and looked at Belle. His mood transformed, the edges sliding right off him.
‘It is,’ he said, proud of her. ‘You’ve got all those syllables too! You’re not a cow turd at all.’
‘And yours,’ she continued, ‘is Giacomo.’
That made the three of them laugh loudly.
3
On Friday morning, Madeleine’s mother took them for English and Art.
Sometimes they met at the café in Waterstones, which is a bookshop, since every half-hour spent in the mere physical presence of books (claimed Holly Tully—she had heard this on the radio, she said) enabled your subconscious to absorb up to 1.5% of the contents of those books. Belle and Jack were keen on this idea, but Madeleine laughed about it all the time.
Today, however, they were at the flat. Madeleine and her mother were side by side on the couch, and Jack and Belle were on kitchen chairs facing them.
Holly Tully leaned forward, joining her hands finger by finger. Now her hands were steepled and she gazed over the spires at her three students in turn.
‘You’re trying to look like a teacher,’ said Madeleine.
‘Before we begin,’ said Holly, ignoring her daughter, ‘Jack, can you get that book on the sewing table? That big blue one there—no, that’s a pattern book and not in any way big or blue—yes, that’s the one. No, don’t give it to me, just hold it a moment.’
Jack read the title aloud: ‘One Thousand Random Facts.’
Belle leaned over. ‘One Thousand Random Facts,’ she repeated, placing the emphasis on the word ‘facts’ whereas Jack had emphasised ‘random’. Jack turned to her with an insulted expression, at which she shrugged.
‘That’s why you’re trying to look like a teacher,’ Madeleine said. ‘Cause you’re planning not to be one today.’
Holly continued to ignore her. ‘If you could just open the book at any page, Jack, and ask a question.’
‘All right.’ He flicked through the pages, whistling to himself, then said, ‘Here’s a good one. What is philematology?’
Now Holly turned to her daughter. ‘The only way this homeschooling thing is going to work,’ she said sternly, ‘is if you forget that I’m your mother and respect me as a teacher.’
‘You’re funny,’ said Madeleine. ‘It’s like you keep surprising me that way.’
Belle took the book from Jack’s hands and flipped it to a different page.
‘Who is Samuel Langhorne Clemens?’ she said. ‘I mean, who’s he better known as? Not, like, who is he? Cause you could just say Samuel Langhorne Clemens.’
‘You see.’ Holly turned again to Madeleine. ‘It’s true that this brief interlude of question-asking—it’s true that it might incidentally help me prepare for my quiz show, but its primary purpose is to enliven your young minds.’
Jack took the book back.
‘Should I run out and get coffees?’ he said as he flicked pages. ‘On account of, the moon is in Aries, which means I have a greater need for cappuccino than usual. All right, this is a good one. Where does gold come from, Holly? Originally, I mean.’
‘And then we’ll move straight on to poetry or art,’ said Holly, ‘with freshly enlivened minds.’
‘A win-win,’ Jack agreed, and then, ‘Hang about,’ because Belle had taken the book from him again. She was concentrating, shaking her head, turning a page, shaking her head again.
‘Just ask anything,’ Jack instructed her.
‘She’s not answered the first ones yet,’ Belle argued, and Jack said, ‘You’re taking too long, I could be back with the coffees by now,’ reaching for the book, and somehow it slipped from their hands and hit the flo
or with a slap.
At that point, Holly Tully changed.
The light on her face shifted.
‘I’ll tell you what,’ she said, speaking through the new shade of light. ‘How about you three go and do some sketches of Kings College chapel. For Art, I mean. As an Art lesson.’
The others gathered their things, chatting, but Madeleine was looking sideways. Her mother was weaving her hands together, but this time the weave wouldn’t work. The hands would not intertwine.
Something startled in Holly Tully’s eyes, and she pressed her fingers hard against her forehead.
4
Later that day, Madeleine was riding home alone.
There was a sketch, half a sketch anyway, in her backpack: a faint outline of the Kings College chapel with a detailed foreground study of the wrapping from a Twix bar.
Her mother would like that.
She was riding the dusk-grey spring-cold streets of Cambridge.
She turned into a quiet street. One or two parked cars and a roller door spray-painted with words—those strange crushed words that graffiti artists use.
Her foot hit the pavement and she used it to scoot herself along a moment. Something odd caught at her and she stopped.
A thin white line, the very edge of a folded piece of paper, was stuck in a crack in a parking meter.
She stood astride her bike.
The meter itself was out of service.
It was tilted, too, like a tree almost uprooted, the concrete at its base slightly split.
Madeleine looked away again and, as she did, everything she knew began to settle on her shoulders.
She knew this.
That philematology is the science of kissing.
That Samuel Langhorne Clemens is better known as Mark Twain.
That, originally, gold comes from the stars.
And that her mother knew none of these facts.
Madeleine gripped the handles of her bike: a big, bold statement was unfurling itself across her mind, and she didn’t want to see it. She turned away from it, reaching for more facts. She told herself: I also know this.
That Charles Babbage was born in 1791; that he was bad-tempered and brilliant; that he wrote letters to the editor complaining of the noises of the night: organ-grinders, hoop-rollers and street musicians just outside his window. That he closed his eyes and dreamed machines that could solve mathematical puzzles without making mistakes. That he filled every room of his house with almost-computers. Each time he got halfway through a machine, he’d think of a better way, then move to the next room and start again.
She knew that Charles Babbage clambered through life, leaping from foothold to handhold. But he couldn’t help noticing that everybody else was climbing wrong. They were missing the obvious routes, they were slipping and grazing their knees. He had to keep pausing to tug at his ear and call: Can you not see that you are doing that wrong? Ah, let me try to explain.
He wrote a letter to the poet, Tennyson, once, to complain about a line in a poem.
‘Every moment dies a man,
Every moment one is born.’
If this were true, wrote Babbage, sighing, the population of the world would be at a standstill. In truth, the rate of birth is slightly in excess of that of death.
He suggested that Tennyson say instead:
‘Every moment dies a man,
Every moment is born.’
Although, strictly speaking, he added, the actual figure is so long I cannot get it into a line.
His train stopped once—cows on the track—and instead of reading his newspaper, he invented a scoop. A metal scoop called a cowcatcher. Soon, all over England, they were hooking them onto their steam locomotives, sweeping the cattle away.
He saw things that needed to be fixed or unlocked—the postal system, lighthouse signals, life assurance—and fixed or unlocked them. He invented codes, untangled clues, made skeleton keys. He found ways to clear paths, get through and get across.
Madeleine knew all this because she had been reading.
When they’d first got here to Cambridge, she’d started collecting facts, half-joking, to help her mother practise for the quiz show.
But then she had realised, first, that Holly was serious about the quiz show and, second, that she forgot every fact Madeleine offered.
So Madeleine stopped sharing.
But she kept collecting. In her previous life, she had only ever read fantasy novels, but now she read facts and more facts: books, scientific journals, newspapers, travel magazines. It was a strange new addiction, but the fact was, facts took her sideways so she didn’t have to think.
Now she stood on the side of the street, astride her bike.
The statement was back, and though she scrambled for more facts, it blazed at her, and it was this: I want to go home.
That was wrong. They never had a home, more a lifestyle. What she meant was, she wanted her dad. She wanted to fly from this place, to fly into his arms. She and her mother had fun together, sure, but the true colour—the dazzle of colour, the firecracker sky in their life—that was her dad.
Her mother disagreed. ‘We don’t need him,’ she said. ‘This is our new life.’ She swooped and swerved around Madeleine’s arguments and questions. ‘Trust me,’ she said. ‘It’s better like this. We hardly ever saw Dad before! He was always so busy.’
‘Whereas now we get to see him all the time. Ingenious.’
At which, her mother would turn on the sewing machine.
It was up to Madeleine.
She couldn’t convince her mother to go back, so she had to make her dad come here and fetch them.
Only, how could she get through to him? She could phone or email, sure, but that would achieve nothing. His assistants would answer. He was always doing something important or distracting. When he got the message, he’d be too angry to return her calls. Even if she found a way to speak directly to him, she’d have to get through layers of his anger.
And even if she did calm his temper, there’d be something else. Another layer that she couldn’t figure out but knew was there. Something that always seemed to block the pathway to her father, lately—to his heart.
It was impossible.
She could never unlock, untangle, decipher, get through. She could never fly back into her father’s arms. She was trapped and they would never get home.
As soon as she let herself think this, she knew it was true, and the truth draped itself onto her shoulders, like a child who leaps at you from behind, clambers onto your back, clings to your throat—
Madeleine got off her bike.
The funny thing was, she thought now, if she’d reached into Federico’s hat that day, and drawn out Charles Babbage’s name, well, she would have held a name that could clear pathways.
But she had chosen Isaac Newton.
The gravity man.
She wanted to fly, and she had chosen the man who would bind her to the ground.
She leaned her bike against a wall and saw it again—that fine line of white along the seam of the parking meter.
She tried to pull it out with her fingertips but it was too deeply embedded. By holding two fingernails, one above and one below, she managed to grasp the edge of the paper and slowly draw it out.
It was a thin piece of paper, folded in half.
She unfolded it and read:
Help me!
I am being held against my will!
She laughed aloud, looking at the base of the parking meter: the split concrete.
‘You’re trying to escape,’ she said, then glanced around to check that nobody had seen her talking to a parking meter. The street was empty.
It was growing dark, everything turning shades of grey.
The paper in the palm of her hand made her shudder suddenly.
I am being held against my will!
What if it was real? A message from a stranger who was trapped?
Strange place to put it, though, she thought
, and smiled again.
I am being held against my will!
On the darkening path, she took paper from her backpack, and she wrote a reply to the note.
She folded it and slid it into the parking meter until it, too, was nothing but a fine white line.
Then she rode away.
5
Rain was falling fast and sharp: streetlights and parked cars cowering out there in the dusk.
Jimmy Hawthorn, Deputy Sheriff, stood at the window with a whisky. Across the road, in the high-school grounds, Elliot Baranski was throwing a ball against a wall. Each time Elliot threw, the ball disappeared into an arc of half-light, then reappeared with a splash.
‘You got a fax there?’ Jimmy said, still watching through the window.
The Sheriff was at his desk; he eased back in his leather chair and reached behind him to the fax machine.
‘Ah, shoot,’ he said.
Jimmy watched as Hector pressed at the bandage on his right hand. Wide white bandages diagonalled across his cheeks; a smaller square was centered on his forehead.
‘They keep lifting off,’ Hector explained. ‘Taking the skin and blood with them. They all seem to be at the wrong angle—kind of angle where a bandage doesn’t stick. Worst one’s the back of the neck. Hurts like blazes when I reach around like so—.’
He tried to demonstrate, and winced.
‘Don’t do that on my account,’ Jimmy smiled. Then his smile changed to a mild frown, and he went to speak, hesitated, and spoke: ‘Hector,’ he said, ‘you read their column in today’s Herald? The Princess Sisters’ column?’
‘It’s out already?’ Hector looked around the station eagerly, and Jimmy reached for the paper and slapped it onto Hector’s desk.
The Sheriff turned to page 7, and read the column:
Dearest, Sweetest, Most Arduously Marvellous Subjects of this! our Fine and Salutary Kingdom of Cello! Hello!
And Welcome to this! the Third Week of our Tour, and I think this must be our Fifth Column for that sweetpea of a newspaper, the Cellian Herald [Editor’s note: it’s their sixth column, in fact.].
A Corner of White Page 4
