A Corner of White

by Jaclyn Moriarty

  Belle turned away from him. Her hand reached towards Madeleine’s backpack.

  ‘Seriously,’ she said. ‘I need you to tip it up.’

  ‘There’s nothing in there,’ Madeleine said.

  Belle’s hand closed around the frayed strap of the backpack, and Denny took two strides across the room. He picked up a book that Madeleine had taken out.

  ‘Isaac Newton,’ he said. ‘You reading this for Science or for pleasure?’

  ‘She’s reading it for History,’ said Jack, and explained about the names in the hat.

  ‘She’s supposed to become Isaac Newton.’ Belle let go of the backpack and craned to look at the book.

  There was a portrait of Newton on the cover.

  ‘Long nose,’ Belle said. ‘You’ll have to grow your nose, Madeleine, to be him.’ She lowered her voice slightly. ‘You’ll have to tell a lie.’

  ‘Belle,’ murmured Jack.

  ‘What do you think of Isaac so far?’ Denny returned the book to Madeleine, poured coffee and tossed muffins onto plates, saying, ‘Ow, ow, ow,’ since they were hot.

  ‘I haven’t read it yet,’ said Madeleine. ‘Don’t want to. An apple fell on the guy’s head and he invented gravity. So basically he stopped people flying. Who wants to know about him?’

  Denny laughed. ‘Ingeniously flawed reasoning,’ he said, then he took an apple from his fridge and moved along the bench, dropping it on each of their heads.

  ‘Any of you come up with brilliant new thoughts about the universe? Gravity or whatnot? Huh! You didn’t? Now, see? It’s harder than it sounds. A little respect for Isaac.’

  He returned to his own bench and broke a muffin in half.

  ‘You know what Isaac Newton did when he was here at Cambridge?’ he said, facing them across the room. They waited.

  ‘His second year of university,’ continued Denny, ‘he sat down with a notebook, and he opened it somewhere in the middle. Left a few blank pages and started writing—he changed his handwriting to a whole different style from what he’d used before. And he started writing questions. Questions about mysteries in the universe. Air, meteors, reflections. Heat, cold, colours and the sea. Forty-five topics, he wrote questions about.’

  Madeleine, Jack and Belle watched Denny, not touching the muffins, not looking at each other.

  ‘He did it again a couple of years later,’ Denny continued. ‘This time he just chose twelve problems and made a promise to himself that he’d solve them in the next twelve months. Now here,’ said Denny. ‘Here’s a spot assignment for you.’

  ‘Isn’t this our coffee break?’ said Jack.

  ‘You can drink your danged coffee while you do this. Just don’t go spilling it, or getting crumbs in the keyboards. This is what I want you all to do. I want you to open a new document and type up a list of three problems in your life. Not the universe’s life—your own. Underneath, type the solutions.’

  ‘If we know the solutions,’ said Belle, ‘they’re not problems.’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Denny. ‘You do know the answers to most of your problems. Somewhere deep inside, you know. That was more or less what Isaac was getting at when he wrote questions for himself. And changing his handwriting—you see how that could work? How he could find another part of himself that way, the part that might know the answers?’

  There were faint shrugs; the remnants of tension still in the air.

  ‘You know, of course,’ Denny said abruptly, ‘you know that computer monitors generate and store a whole lot of voltages of electricity? And you know those voltages can still be around even when the equipment’s been switched off for a whole lot of time?’

  They stared at him.

  ‘Electrical safety,’ he shrugged. ‘I’m supposed to cover it—see, right here in the syllabus?’ and he got back to his own work.

  Madeleine opened a new document.

  Three Problems, she typed.

  Then she spent a while trying out new fonts, looking for one that would release the problem-solver inside her.

  Three Problems:

  1) I need to get my old life back.

  2) my mother won’t go to see a doctor.

  3) I think Belle hates me.

  She went back up to Problem Number 1, and right away she wrote the answer.

  write dad a letter!!! Explain things in the letter so he has to understand!! mark the envelope ‘personal’ so his assistant won’t read it!!!

  Now she looked at the next problem, and again, before she knew it, she was tabbing in from the margin and writing a solution.

  TRICK HER INTO GOING TO THE DOCTOR WITH ME.

  She was laughing now, quiet breaths of laughter. Who knew it could be so simple? At the computer beside her, Belle made an exasperated noise, her fingers clattering and flying. Beyond Belle, Jack was gazing at his screen, pulling at his lower lip.

  Of course.

  The person who knew Belle best was Jack.

  Madeleine typed her third answer.

  ASK JACK WHY BELLE HATES ME.

  She paused for a moment, then added.

  IM JACK RIGHT NOW.

  Obeying herself, she did. She IMed Jack, asking him to come over to her place later that day, so they could talk.

  She watched him blink as her message flashed onto his screen, then his hands reached to the keyboard, and his response appeared:

  You bet.

  At that moment, Denny said, ‘You know what? We’ve got time for one more spot task before lunch.’

  ‘But I haven’t solved all my problems yet,’ complained Jack.

  ‘Fast as you can,’ said Denny, ignoring him. ‘Fast as you can, tell me: is it true? The story about the apple hitting Newton on the head? Is that true? Did it really happen?’

  ‘What do you mean, “is it true”?’ said Jack. ‘It’s history.’

  Madeleine was typing into Google: Did an apple really fall on Isaac Newton’s head?

  I’ve heard that this is a myth, said someone on Answers.com, and somebody else had added, No, an apple didn’t fall on Isaac Newton’s head. He didn’t really like to be outside.

  ‘This is how Isaac told it,’ Denny began, and they looked away from their screens. ‘One day, he was out near the apple orchard and he saw an apple falling from a tree. It made him start thinking about gravity. Everybody knew about gravity already, of course—it wasn’t like he invented it—but he started thinking about how big it was, how far it went, the patterns to it, about universal gravitation.’

  ‘So it didn’t fall on him?’ said Belle. ‘You did that whole thing with dropping the apple on us for nothing? Thanks for that. I’ve still got the headache.’

  ‘An apple falls,’ continued Denny, ‘and Isaac sees it fall, and suddenly he thinks about the moon. He thinks that if an apple falls, then the moon is falling too. And if the moon is falling, why doesn’t it hit the ground like that apple just did? And Isaac thinks about how the moon is flying through space but it’s falling at the same time. The fact that it’s flying forward is what stops it from hitting the ground. The fact that it’s falling towards the ground is what stops it from flying out into space. See? Without gravity, it would fly forever, flying away from us, away into the nowhere. Lost. So, you see . . .’

  Denny had been packing his tools away as he talked. He leaned under the workbench and flicked a switch.

  ‘So, you see,’ he repeated, and this time he looked directly at Madeleine. ‘Sometimes it’s not really flying, it’s just being lost.’

  There was a pause in the room, then Belle said, ‘Ah, it’s all bollocks. Isaac probably made up the story about even seeing an apple fall.’

  Denny nodded slowly. ‘Why, yes,’ he said. ‘He might have.’

  ‘You never know when people might be making things up,’ Belle continued, her tone so loaded that Jack turned and squinted at her, ‘making things up about their lives.’

  On Belle’s screen, Madeleine saw, was a heading in huge, 24-point font: THREE PROBLEMS. A
nd underneath, Belle had repeated the words, Three problems, over and over. All the way down the page: three problems, three problems, three problems.

  Belle shut down her computer and its low hissing noise abruptly stopped.

  Later that day, Madeleine was sitting on the sloping roof of her attic flat.

  Jack was beside her. It was evening, the sky still pale but trees and buildings almost black.

  There were two or three stars out, and Madeleine’s eyes swung from star to star. She felt that the stars were folding into her chest; those sharp, shining, agitated pieces of excitement in her chest: they were stars.

  As soon as she’d left Denny’s place, she’d started taking action. The actions had tumbled one after the other, so simple and slick!

  She had written the letter to her father and posted it. He travelled constantly, but letters were always forwarded to him from a central post-office address. It might take a while but it would find him.

  Then she’d come back and mentioned to her mother that there was a strange pain in her side. Over the next couple of days she planned to keep talking about the pain in her side, until her mother insisted on taking her to the doctor’s. At the doctor’s, she would say, ‘Huh, actually, I’m better now, but listen, my mother . . .’

  So that was the second problem practically solved.

  Then, because she’d still had another couple of hours before Jack’s visit, she had run back to Denny’s and borrowed a computer. She’d lost all her email addresses with her iPad, but she still remembered Tinsels’. It was Tinsels33@gmail.com.

  She wrote Tinsels an email.

  She told her old friend about Cambridge and the attic flat. She made jokes about the beans, the damp, the winter cold, the rain, and how she and her mother had concussion from bumping their heads into the ceilings. She typed faster and faster. She said, Sorry it’s been so long! It’s been totally BIZARRO!

  She said, ‘But I’ve written to my dad so I should see you guys REALLY SOON.’ She told Tinsels about homeschooling, about Jack and Belle, about her mother SEWING for a living!!! The more she typed, the more she exclaimed and capitalised, the madder their life in Cambridge seemed and the better she felt. It was like she was shrink-wrapping Cambridge. Now here it was in the palm of her hands, and she knew, at last, what it was.

  It was impossible!

  Therefore, it could not be true!

  Her euphoria paraded around the room.

  Here she’d been thinking that this was their new life, but they were the ones who had run away! They’d locked themselves in a tower, they were playing at being trapped princesses, taking themselves at their own words.

  They’d lost themselves in her mother’s charade!

  Her real life was just a postage stamp, a Send button away!

  It’s not EXACTLY a holiday, she wrote to Tinsels. It’s more like one of those survival adventures people go on to the Amazon, or whatever. (No, I don’t mean the Amazon where you buy books, lol.) Or maybe it’s like a reality TV show, only without cameras? Like where they find out just how much people can stand.

  She wrote, Can’t wait to see you guys again, especially Warlock! Are you seeing much of him? How is the little guy? He must be getting so big! Tell me EVERYTHING you’ve been doing. LOTS AND LOTS OF LOVE FOREVER.

  She hit Send and ran back upstairs.

  Her mother had gone out.

  She stood on the couch, jumped to the floor and then did it again. Her excitement had nowhere to go.

  While she was waiting for her dad to come rescue them, she thought, she may as well embrace her time here. Now that Cambridge was just a quirk or a glitch, a curious patch in her story, rather than the story itself.

  She would read about Isaac Newton! He wasn’t such an anti-flying monster after all, he was a problem-solver! She’d read everything there was to know about him, and she’d make Federico happy by becoming him.

  Her backpack was on the floor and the Isaac Newton book was still inside it. She flicked it open, and it fell at once to the envelope, the one she’d found in the parking meter, from the boy called Elliot Baranski.

  Now she reread it.

  Ah, she thought, she might as well reply. It was some kid probably, a fantasy geek. He was lonely. Since he’d written his letter, he’d probably been back to that parking meter every day—whenever he could take a break from Call of Duty or whatever multiplayer computer game was big these days—hoping for a response.

  When she’d first found the letter, it had seemed like part of the psycho madness that was Cambridge. But now, well, it was just some poor schmuck trying to be clever. She felt free to make fun of him, but she also felt free to be kind.

  She wrote a reply. She was reasonably kind in her reply.

  She ran out and slid it into the crack in the parking meter, leaving just a tinge of white—then she came home, and Jack arrived.

  So, now, here she was with Jack on the roof.

  The earlier chill had settled in and they both wore hoodies, hands in the pockets for warmth.

  He was explaining about Belle.

  ‘See,’ he said, ‘it’s not about you. It’s about Belle and me—it’s something that goes back to when we were kids.’

  Madeleine wasn’t really concentrating. Now that she had reconnected with her real life, it was all theoretical, the Belle problem. It was irrelevant. She kept turning to Jack as he talked and letting smiles spill from her mouth, and then assuming a solemn expression again. Jack smiled back at her each time she did, smiling through his serious words.

  ‘The thing about Belle and me,’ Jack was saying, ‘is that we fight about once a year. She always starts it. She gets sort of strange and suddenly she hates me. I can never figure out what I’ve done. I always try to ignore it but eventually it gets under my skin and I end up hating her back. Then we spend a week or so snapping like alligators, then we shout on a street corner and then we both cry. And make up.’

  Jack leaned back and looked at the crescent moon, so Madeleine did too. They were sitting side by side.

  From inside the flat, they could hear Madeleine’s mother sewing and watching her quiz show. Only, she was not calling out any answers.

  ‘It never gets personal,’ Jack continued. ‘Unless saying, “I hate your guts and I wish you would die in a pool of maggot blood” is personal.’

  He paused, sighed, and added, ‘Which I don’t think it is.’

  Madeleine considered this.

  ‘So the thing is,’ Jack finished, ‘the way she’s been around you lately—it’s not you, it’s just our thing. Or anyway, Belle’s thing. She flares up sometimes.’

  They watched the stars.

  ‘Well,’ said Madeleine eventually, ‘a flare is what people send up into the sky when they’re in trouble.’

  ‘That’s true.’

  ‘So maybe it’s her way of saying she’s in trouble?’

  ‘Could be.’

  ‘Only,’ said Madeleine, and now she glanced sideways at Jack, ‘if you’re in the way of a flare, you could end up getting burned.’

  ‘I guess,’ agreed Jack. ‘I don’t really know the true nature of a flare.’

  ‘I think it might be made out of fire.’

  They were both smiling a little—glinting at each other—and they were speaking in odd, lilting voices. As if they were playing at wisdom, or at psychology, even though they half-meant what they said.

  ‘So you’ve got,’ said Madeleine, ‘to be careful.’

  Jack leaned over and kissed her.

  His hands were in his pockets, her hands were in her pockets. Their heads turned sideways and the angles were perfect. Then he took out one hand and put it on the back of her head.

  To Madeleine, the whole thing was startling. For a start, she’d never kissed a boy before. She always acted like she’d kissed boys, so her first thought was that she had to maintain the illusion. She couldn’t let Jack know she was a beginner.

  Her second thought was that his lips wer
e kind of like snails, exactly like the texture of a pair of snails (only without their shells). That was a shock. She’d always thought boys’ lips would be like caramel.

  After a moment more, though, they stopped being like snails and started to feel softer and more interesting.

  Around then, the kiss ended. They stayed close for a minute, looking at each other.

  It was suspenseful. She didn’t know what you were supposed to do.

  ‘Well, you see,’ Jack said eventually—chattily, ‘it was those three problems. For one of mine I wrote, I want to kiss Madeleine. Then I wrote: Kiss her then. So I had to.’

  ‘Uh-huh,’ nodded Madeleine.

  ‘It was, like, part of an assignment or something.’

  Madeleine nodded again, more slowly, making him smile. He stroked her face with the side of his hand, but one of his fingernails caught the skin of her cheek and scratched her, just slightly. It felt good though, the scratch, like the edge of a tiny star.

  ‘Also,’ continued Jack, ‘it said in my horoscope that I had to do the thing I’ve been afraid of, and yours said somebody close would surprise you. What else could that mean? I had to do it.’

  ‘Practically compulsory,’ Madeleine agreed.

  ‘And we both had our hands in our pockets . . .’ He shrugged, and added, ‘I won’t do it again, though.’

  ‘Why not?’ she said.

  Surely that couldn’t be the end of her first kiss? It seemed sort of pointless, to do that once without doing it again.

  When she’d learnt to ice-skate, as a very small child, it had been strange at first. So slippery and awkward! But there’d also been a faint sense that this could turn out to be great.

  Kissing seemed exactly the same.

  So she kissed Jack herself, taking her hands from her pockets and crossing them together around the back of his head, looping her fingers through his hair. That felt sophisticated. Also, his hair was soft, thick and coarse all at once; and even better was the sense of him shifting, murmuring, some echo from behind the kiss.