A Corner of White

by Jaclyn Moriarty

  Even though she was not a crying kind of a girl, Madeleine was finding that her words were falling at such high speed, and they all sounded so unexpectedly true, that they were gathering into a storm in her chest.

  ‘Also my mum’s really sick.’ The storm broke and she pushed her chair back and ran from the tea shop.

  Jack and Belle watched her.

  They watched through the glass as her face crumpled and she ran along the path and across the marketplace.

  Then they turned to each other, raised their eyebrows, paid the bill, and followed.

  They found her sitting on a staircase, her arms folded around her knees, her head resting on her arms.

  Jack sat on one side, Belle on the other.

  ‘What do you mean about your mum?’ said Jack. ‘Has she got another headache?’

  Madeleine kept her head on her knees and told them about the doctors, the scans, and the biopsy, handing over all those words like sharp-edged stones.

  Jack put the palm of his hand on her back. Belle was silent.

  ‘Okay, cut that out.’ Madeleine lifted her face, which was damp and streaked, and narrowed her eyes. ‘Don’t go quiet like that. Mum’s going to be fine.’

  ‘She will be,’ Jack agreed at once. ‘Addenbrookes is one of the best hospitals in England. They’ll fix her up. But I can’t believe this has all been happening and you didn’t tell us. Why didn’t you tell us?’

  Madeleine chewed on her finger.

  ‘Because we weren’t talking to you,’ Jack answered himself. He took his hand from her back and sighed deeply. ‘See, the thing is,’ he said. ‘I shouldn’t have read your email to Tinsels. It was private.’

  Madeleine put her head back onto her knees, wrapping her arms around it as if to protect it.

  ‘And you’re allowed to be nasty about your friends in a private email,’ Jack continued. ‘I’ve thought about that. I mean, you were writing to your old friend so why shouldn’t you, sort of like, vent, yeah?’

  ‘But I didn’t mean to be mean about you . . .’

  ‘Sure you did,’ said Jack. ‘I’ve been thinking about that too, and it must be like culture shock for you. Being rich and then poor. It’d totally seem colourless here.’

  ‘It’s not, though.’ She sat up again, wiping her face with her sleeves. ‘You’re not colourless.’

  ‘Yeah, I know.’ Jack shrugged.

  Belle remained silent.

  ‘Another thing,’ Jack persisted. ‘You do belong with us. If Newton was crazy, well, so was Byron. He kept a pet bear when he was at Cambridge. Well, I think he did anyway. Nobody seems to know for sure. He had rocks in his head. His totally moral wife thought he had fluid on the brain. So, see, we’re connected too.’

  Belle finally spoke. ‘Ada wasn’t crazy, though.’

  ‘Sure she was,’ said Jack. ‘All mathematicians are. We’re like a circle, the three of us, and the best kind of circles are the ones that are sort of squashed—you probably already know this, with all that reading—but the more squashed and oval a circle it is, well, the more eccentric it is. That’s where the word eccentric comes from.’

  He stopped talking and looked at Belle. ‘I think I’ve lost my point. You say something nice now, Belle.’

  ‘Ah.’ Belle shrugged. ‘All right, Madeleine, you might be smart remembering all those facts and stuff, but you’re not exactly like Isaac Newton. Cause he was a genius, which you’re not. If that makes you feel any better.’

  Madeleine smiled. ‘Okay.’

  ‘And—’ Belle breathed in deeply. ‘The truth is, your aura’s looking a bit better just at the moment.’

  Madeleine burst into tears again.

  4

  On the stillest nights, you could hear the clock tower from all the way out on the Baranski Farm.

  Or maybe he was imagining that.

  Either way, it was midnight now, and Elliot’s eyelashes kept lowering. He shook himself hard and looked at the Butterfly Child again.

  Remarkably, she was awake. But she was sitting on the edge of her bed, poised as if she might, at any moment, curl herself back under the covers.

  Ever since Corrie-Lynn had left, Elliot had been trying to figure it out. The Butterfly Child was not helping. He’d been talking, talking, talking. Making suggestions, asking questions, even drawing notes and pictures on paper, for hours. And all she’d done was sit and stare, now and then taking a nap.

  ‘How do I listen to you? Is there a code or something I’m missing? A way you move your arms or legs? Can you nod if I’m getting close?’

  Ah, he’d already said all of this. All she did was sit there looking sleepy.

  He stretched his arms and heard the clock tower again, so then he knew he must be imagining it. It didn’t strike twice in ten minutes.

  Or maybe that wasn’t the chimes.

  Maybe it was that sound he’d been hearing lately—that low, flute sound like distant wind through trees; the one nobody else seemed to hear.

  It was kind of annoying, that sound.

  He might as well just go to sleep and try again in the morning.

  He stoked the fire half-heartedly, the sparks crumbling into ashes then brightening again. Thought about adding a log, but closed his eyes instead, leaned back on the couch.

  That chiming, long and low, deep in his mind. Seemed it was curling itself like falling leaves. He let it curl and fall, curl and fall, as he fell with it towards sleep.

  Then the chime stood up and spoke.

  ‘Sycamore bark is all very well,’ it said crisply, ‘but what I actually like is mulberries.’

  Elliot’s eyes flew open.

  Madeleine was sitting on the edge of her mother’s bed.

  Holly had woken with a headache, and now they were talking in the dim light of the bedside lamp.

  ‘We should reconfigure,’ Holly was saying. She was sitting up, her arms around her knees, looking at the shadows of the flat. ‘We should put all of this junk in the attic and start again.’

  ‘Great idea,’ said Madeleine. ‘Except that we are in the attic.’

  ‘Hmm. You’re right.’ There was a long silence. They were drinking cocoa, which was making Holly Tully happy. The idea of cocoa at midnight.

  ‘What’s your accent anyway?’ she said, abruptly.

  ‘Whose accent?’ said Madeleine.

  ‘Yours?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Where’s your accent from?’

  ‘It’s from all over. My accent’s an everywhere accent.’ Madeleine’s voice was rising. ‘Just like yours.’

  ‘Yes, of course. Well, it’s lucky you’re here now.’ Holly frowned into her headache again. ‘You can gather them all together, all those pieces of accent, and consolidate. Find yourself.’

  ‘Don’t do that.’ Madeleine was angry now. ‘I thought you didn’t know who I was.’

  ‘Madeleine,’ her mother put her cocoa down, and placed an arm around her shoulder. ‘No matter what happens with the doctors, no matter what the biopsy shows or what they decide to do, I promise I will never forget you.’

  ‘You can’t promise that. Nobody can. You keep forgetting everything. You used to know everything.’

  ‘Sweetheart, you just think I did. Kids always think that about their parents. But you’ve been overtaking me for a while now, and I think that’s how it’s meant to be.’

  Madeleine swung her legs onto the bed, lying down beside her mother.

  ‘I remember when you were three years old,’ murmured Holly, ‘and you pointed out a lavender bush. You said to me, “that’s lavender,” and I thought, So it is. I thought, This kid, she’s three and she’s already smarter than me.’

  She adjusted her pillow.

  ‘And I remember when you said “pieue” instead of “pillow”. You couldn’t make the “l” sound, see?’

  ‘I was cute, eh?’ said Madeleine, relenting.

  Belle and Jack were watching a movie at Jack’s place, but Feder
ico’s snoring was so loud they had to switch off the TV.

  ‘You ought to get some kind of a machine,’ mused Belle. ‘Like a soundproofing machine, and use it to soundproof your grandfather. Do they have them?’

  ‘No.’

  They were quiet for a while, then realised they were both half-swaying to the rhythm of the snores, and laughed.

  ‘Holly seemed okay, eh?’ said Jack. That afternoon, they had taken Madeleine home and stopped for tea and a chat with Holly. ‘I mean, it’s hard to tell because you can’t actually see inside somebody’s brain, but she seemed great. Poor Madeleine though, she must be so worried.’

  ‘Yeah.’ Belle paused. ‘You think you’ll get back together with her?’

  ‘I think she was into Lord Byron more than me. She had us mixed up, and as I am a strong, outdoorsy sort of bloke, and not a namby-pamby poet, well, I’m not her type.’ He took a handful of popcorn.

  ‘No,’ agreed Belle, then: ‘Doesn’t your grandfather get fined under some kind of local ordinance against noise pollution?’

  ‘You know what I just thought of?’ said Jack. ‘Normally, when someone’s sick, you start going on about how they should stay away from hospitals and do alternative therapies, like, what are those things? Light therapy, and chromotherapy, and acupuncture, or herbs, or whatever, for her aura. But you didn’t say a word about that to Holly today.’

  Belle started scraping up the popcorn that they’d dropped between the couch cushions.

  ‘Don’t eat that,’ said Jack.

  ‘All right.’

  ‘And you were weird around her. You kept sort of not looking at her. What’s that about?’

  Belle let the popcorn spill back onto the couch.

  ‘Well,’ she said, sighing, ‘not long ago when I was at their place, and you and Madeleine went to get coffee, Holly showed me this big jar she has. She said it was her jar to get back home. Cause she’d seen downstairs, she said, that Denny had his jar of coins, so she’d decided to start collecting too.’

  ‘Well, that’s kind of sad that she wants to get home, and it might take her a while, collecting coins, but you can’t blame her. She must miss being rich like Madeleine does.’

  ‘It’s more than that.’ Belle pulled on her lower lip. ‘Holly’s jar was full of pebbles.’

  ‘Oh.’ Jack thought about it. ‘Well, that won’t get her far.’

  He pointed the remote at the TV, started the movie again and sat back.

  Then he sat forward and switched it off.

  ‘Hang about,’ he said. ‘You didn’t answer my question.’

  Elliot was having a conversation with the Butterfly Child.

  Or was he?

  It was like Madeleine’s rainbow shadow, or the gongs she described from her hearing test.

  The voice in his head could be real, or it could be his own invention.

  He was standing in front of the doll’s house, and the Butterfly Child was still on the edge of the bed, looking up at him.

  ‘You like mulberries?’ he said in a low voice.

  The fluting in his head turned itself over again. ‘Right. I love them.’

  ‘This is freaky,’ he said. ‘And freaky’s not a word I often use. Is it really you?’

  ‘Of course it is.’

  ‘Well, nod or something.’

  The Butterfly Child gazed up at him.

  ‘I don’t do tricks. You know perfectly well it’s me.’

  Elliot breathed in, and trembled a little with fatigue.

  ‘I’m tired,’ he said. ‘I don’t know if I’m talking to you or to myself.’

  ‘To me,’ fluted the voice.

  ‘All right then.’ He tried to shake himself awake. ‘Well, why haven’t you talked to me before?’

  ‘Are you mad?’ Maybe he could see a flicker of something in her eyes at that moment. ‘I’ve been trying to talk to you since I arrived! I’ve been sending my voice all over this town! Do you realise how exhausting that is? Calling you, and calling you! Why do you think I sleep all the time?’

  Elliot raised his eyebrows. ‘I thought Butterfly Children were supposed to be sort of timid.’

  Now her face really did seem to take on a look of scorn.

  ‘We’re not all the same, you know.’

  ‘You’re not wrong there,’ Elliot agreed. ‘No offence, but crops around here look as bad as they did when you arrived. Worse maybe.’

  The fluting went dim for a moment and he pulled at his ear trying to get it back.

  ‘All right.’ The voice was clear again. ‘I’m not that good at the crop thing, but I blame you for that.’

  ‘It’s my fault?’

  ‘For not listening.’

  Elliot sighed. ‘That again. Seriously, couldn’t you have spoken in some other language besides flute?’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. Look, for Butterfly Children to be effective, we need to have a connection with our Finder. Our souls need to intertwine, if you will. We need to loop together like a skating figure-eight.’

  ‘Well, I’m happy to go skating with you, symbolically speaking, if you could do something about the crops. And you think you could spin those healing beads as well? If I let you twine up my soul, or whatever?’

  ‘This is not a matter for jest.’

  ‘Okay. Well, seriously. Please?’

  ‘I can’t do anything.’

  Elliot chuckled. ‘Ah then.’ He let his eyelids rest a moment then opened them halfway.

  ‘The reason you haven’t been hearing me,’ the voice was saying, ‘the reason our souls have not intertwined, is simple. You do not like me. And that, Elliot, offends my feelings.’

  ‘There’s a sound missing,’ whispered Holly, and Madeleine, who was almost asleep, lifted her head.

  They had switched off the light to go to sleep.

  ‘What sound?’

  ‘Something I used to hear,’ Holly said into the darkness. ‘It’s all sliding away, you know, like thoughts just before sleep. Like the feeling in my hands sometimes—they go numb, they slide away from me. Have I mentioned that to you?’

  Her words seemed to creep into the room, like creatures crawling from the opening of a shell.

  ‘It’s a thick sort of custardy grime in my head,’ muttered Holly. ‘And my knee does this thing where it wants to dance a jig.’

  Madeleine was silent.

  ‘You know, of course,’ Holly added, ‘that Tinsels and Corrigan and Warlock were just your imaginary friends.’

  There was a shot of ice through Madeleine’s chest.

  ‘No,’ she said firmly, trying to warm the ice. ‘They were real. You’re just forgetting them.’

  ‘They were special, very special, to me and to you, but entirely imaginary.’

  Madeleine switched on the bedside light again.

  Holly sat up, and looked at her daughter closely. ‘They were your brothers and sisters,’ she said.

  Madeleine shook her head.

  ‘Or maybe,’ Holly added thoughtfully, ‘maybe Tinsels was a cat.’

  Tears were spilling and spilling, and Madeleine kept shaking her head.

  ‘Of course I like you,’ Elliot was saying.

  ‘Nonsense.’ The flute sound struck a new pitch. ‘Nonsense.’

  ‘Well.’ He sat on the couch and looked across at the Butterfly Child. ‘Look, if I haven’t liked you, I’m sorry. I guess maybe I blamed you for keeping me here. I wanted to go find my dad, see. I was planning to go to the Lake of Spells the day after I found you and it’s not your fault or anything, but you kind of trapped me here.’

  ‘I know that.’

  ‘Well then.’ Elliot tried to lift his hands in the air, but they were too heavy.

  ‘It’s more than that. You dislike me for something other than that, but I don’t know what it is, and this—the fact of your dislike—it offends my sensibilities.’

  ‘No, it was just that. Which I feel bad about, cause it was obviously not your fault.
I’ve been blaming all the wrong people lately. See, I was wrong about wanting to go anyway, and now I’m planning to stay. So you know, I like you just fine, and we can intertwine souls for as long as you need me. If you’d explain just exactly how to do that.’

  ‘Oh, nonsense.’

  The Butterfly Child maybe folded her arms at that point, which again matched up with the words. Or maybe he was seeing things through his half-closed eyes. Everything was blurring.

  ‘Tell me,’ she persisted, the flute notes piercing now. ‘Tell me why you don’t like me.’

  ‘Ah,’ murmured Elliot, shifting on the couch, closing his eyes, and he wasn’t sure if he was speaking or dreaming. ‘Just didn’t want to like you, I guess. Seeing as you can leave at any time. What’d be the point? There’s my dad gone. Uncle Jon dead. Now Kala gone too. Any moment, any second, so they say, you’ll be gone too. Why would I bother getting to like you? I mean, you’re so tiny, you’re already not here.’

  And his voice folded itself into sleep.

  Belle sighed deeply, and scowled.

  ‘Maybe I don’t want to answer the question.’

  ‘Are you saying you didn’t suggest alternative treatment for Holly because she’s loopy? Because she collects pebbles?’ wondered Jack. ‘But doesn’t pebble-collecting make you, sort of like, the perfect candidate for acupuncture, if you get my point?’