The Library of Lost and Found

by Phaedra Patrick

  “No thank you, very much.” She tried to hold her skirt down as she clambered into the saddle.

  “Giddyup,” Zelda shouted and shook her reins.

  Martha cheeks glowed with embarrassment. She looked around her but no one else seemed to notice, or care, that two mature ladies were about to ride on the carousel.

  The circular platform started to rotate and Martha’s horse rose and fell. His name was embossed on his collar. Dobbin. “Well then, Dobbin,” she whispered. “Zelda really wants to do this. Then I’ll ask my questions.”

  “Yahoo,” Zelda shouted and lassoed her hand in the air as the ride grew faster. And Martha couldn’t help smiling.

  Round and round they went and Martha couldn’t remember the last time she’d had so much fun. When she got off her legs shook.

  “What do you recommend next?” Zelda asked the goatee-bearded man.

  “The Tornado is pretty crazy.” He grinned. “Though I think you could handle it.”

  “No.” Martha shook her head. “No. No. NO.”

  * * *

  The Tornado was a red-and-blue metal construction that looked like handwriting in the sky. It was thirty feet high with two loops in the rail. Passengers were secured in by harnesses that slid down over their heads, so their legs could dangle freely.

  “We’re not going on there.” Martha gulped. Nausea swept over her when she saw the carriages turn upside down and heard the people scream. “Let’s go somewhere else. Somewhere more—”

  “Sensible?” Zelda interjected. “Where you can question the life out of me?”

  Martha hitched her handbag farther up her shoulder. “You must have things to ask me, too. Don’t you want to tell me about what happened, all those years ago?”

  Zelda readjusted her headscarf, taking a long time. She didn’t speak.

  Martha waited as the Tornado carriages shot past her, the screeches assaulting her ears. She raised her voice above the noise. “I want to know why you left Sandshift.”

  Zelda twisted her head. She raised her hands to her ears. “Sorry. I can’t hear you.”

  Martha closed her eyes, took a deep breath and held it in her lungs. She waited until the carriages rattled and swerved away. She moved closer to her nana and bent over so her mouth was near her ear. “Don’t you want to know about Thomas and Betty? About me and Lilian, and how we all coped without you? We loved you, Nana...”

  Zelda patted her headscarf. She took hold of her wheels and spun them, almost running over Martha’s foot as she rolled away. “It’s much too noisy to talk here,” she said. “Let’s find another ride.”

  Martha grimaced as she watched the back of her chair. Gritting her teeth, she strode after her. Peppering her nana with questions wasn’t working and she needed something to make her more amenable. After discounting the Waltzer and the fun house, her eyes settled on the ghost train. “Would you like to go on that?” she pointed.

  Zelda gave a small, satisfied smile. “Okay. That looks ah-mazing.”

  A giant skull’s eyes glowed tomato red and its jaw opened and closed, baring broken teeth. Kazoo-like noises and the screeches of passengers sounded when the wooden doors swung open. The carriages featured vampire heads, grinning and baring bloodied fangs.

  Zelda parked up her chair again and hoisted herself out of it. They stood behind three men who wore white vest tops. “Do you want to go on before us, ladies?” one of them asked. He had a red devil tattoo on his left shoulder.

  “That’s okay. You go—” Martha started to say.

  “That’s very kind, gentlemen.” Zelda beamed and squeezed past them, to the front of the queue.

  When they sat down in their carriage, Martha tugged at the strap to make sure they were fastened in securely.

  The ride started off reassuringly slow. The carriage rattled along the track towards two swing doors. Then they were plunged into darkness. A neon-yellow tunnel rotated and their carriage seemed to rise sideways up the wall. Disorientated, Martha shut her eyes until they jerked around a corner.

  Three skeletons rode bicycles around a gravestone, and a man lurched forward in his electric chair before the power supply dial on his chair revved up to full power. With a crackle, he slumped back, his head lolling to the side. Martha tightened her grip on the bar as the carriage veered tightly around a sharp bend and out into the daylight. The people in the carriage in front screamed and dipped out of sight. Martha and Zelda’s own carriage slowed, allowing a glimpse of the oncoming drop.

  “Brace yourself,” Zelda shouted.

  Martha did as she was told. “Argh.” The plunge made her teeth chatter and she nipped the end of her tongue. Zelda’s laugh bellowed, and Martha found that she was laughing uncontrollably, too, even though she didn’t want to.

  Their carriage rose up and they reached the top of another dip. A gust of air came at them, causing Martha to screw her eyes shut. When she opened them, Zelda had her arms raised, her hands snatching in the air. “My scarf,” she cried out.

  Martha turned her head to watch as the scarf hung in the air for a moment before it blew away on another blast of air. It looked like an exotic bird flying over the heads of the people below. “We can look for it when we get off,” she said.

  As she turned to reassure her nana, their carriage thumped into a set of double wooden doors with a Keep Out sign. Entering the darkness, Martha blinked hard, questioning what she had just seen.

  Zelda no longer had her blond princess curls.

  In their place were a few wispy gray strands, and nothing else.

  Their carriage shunted past a giant spider with moving mandibles and flashing green eyes, and something tickly trailed across their faces, but all Martha could picture in her mind was her nana’s smooth head.

  When the ride finished, she was glad to scramble out. She felt like she was still moving, her legs unsteady, as she offered Zelda her hand.

  “Shall we go on again?” Zelda asked.

  “Don’t you want to look for your scarf?”

  Zelda ran her hand over her head. She gave it a rub at the back. “Someone has probably found and kept it. Let’s not waste any time. We don’t have much of it left.”

  Martha looked at her watch. “We have twenty minutes before Gina arrives.”

  Zelda fixed her eyes somewhere in the distance and she touched her head again. She stared for a while, unblinking, before she cleared her throat. “That’s not what I meant,” she said.

  16

  Read Me

  They moved away from the ghost train and found a quiet spot behind the café. “Don’t tell Gina about the candy floss,” Zelda said.

  “I won’t do that.” Martha swallowed, lost for words as the music faded away. There were no longer any lights and bustle to distract them.

  “You may have noticed I have a shop dummy–look going on,” Zelda said.

  Martha nodded. Her tongue was dry and she tried to focus on her nana’s eyes instead of her head.

  “It’s okay.” Zelda sighed. “It’s quite obvious. You’re not being rude by looking. I can’t stand wearing wigs, they’re so scratchy. I thought you might have guessed about...” She ran her hand down the back of her skull.

  “No. I just thought you liked scarves.” Martha let her gaze follow Zelda’s fingers. She saw a scarlet scar that ran up the back of her neck to the top of her head. Hearing a gasp, she realized it came from her own lips. “Is that why you were in the hospital?”

  “That was for a minor op. The scar’s from an operation I had for a brain tumor,” Zelda said plainly. “They got rid of most of it, but my hair didn’t grow back properly. Two disasters for the price of one, eh? It looked a lot worse with the staples. Like I had a bloody small ladder running up my head.”

  Martha couldn’t absorb her words. She wanted to sink down and sit on the ground with her head in her
hands, but she told herself to be calm, for Zelda’s sake. “They got rid of most of it?” she repeated.

  “There was a bit they couldn’t quite get to, like when there’s some yogurt left in the pot and you can’t reach it with your spoon.”

  Martha squeezed her eyes shut. She wanted to shout out that this was so bloody unfair. She’d rediscovered this amazing woman, and she had been going through this. And without her family around her, too. “It’s not really the same, is it?” she blurted. “I mean, are you okay?”

  “I can’t complain. At my age, something is going to get me, sooner or later.”

  Martha held her hand to her mouth. “How can you be so bloody blasé about this?”

  Zelda didn’t speak for a while. She seemed to diminish in size and suddenly looked really old. She fixed her gaze on the wooden clown menu and her fingers tightened on the arms of her chair. “Because the alternative is howling my heart out,” she said fiercely. “Getting angry would be a waste of my precious time. I’m here and you’re here. We’ve just been on the ghost train together, and who’d have thought that would ever happen?” She took a deep breath, as if steeling herself for her next words. “I never thought I’d see you again, before I...”

  Words jammed in Martha’s throat. It hurt when she swallowed. “Before you, what?”

  Zelda let out her breath in a whistle. “They tell me different things, those bloody doctors. I never know who’s right and who’s wrong, and they all just look like kids. I don’t have a crystal ball, but it’s unlikely I’ll see Christmas.”

  Martha’s stomach plunged, as if she’d stepped into an elevator shaft. “You have less than ten months?”

  “More like four.”

  Martha swayed and struggled to remain upright. Her future flashed through her head. She’d already pictured that Zelda would be a big part of it. She choked back tears and focused on the roof of the Waltzer. Someone had thrown a red high-heeled shoe up there, and a broken umbrella. A chill crept over her and she tried not to breathe in case she let out a cry. The top of her nose stung as she fought back her tears.

  The two women stayed silent for a while.

  Zelda slowly released her grip on the chair. “What will be, will be,” she said, her eyes shining with tears.

  “But we have so much to talk about. I need to know what—”

  Zelda held up her hand. “I only want to look forward and not back.”

  Martha pushed her striped hair back off her forehead. “How can we do that? My parents lied to me about your death. You’ve been missing from my life for years. We need to discuss it all.”

  Zelda shook her head fiercely. “Do we have to, Martha? Can’t we pretend that it didn’t happen? Can’t we just have some fun together?”

  “Blue Skies and Stormy Seas brought me to you. Why did you write it? You put a message inside a copy, so you must have meant to give it to me...” Martha reached out and gently took hold of her nana’s shoulder.

  “Gina warned me you’d have a lot of questions.” Zelda rubbed her nose.

  “I think that’s an understatement.”

  Without warning, Zelda jerked back. She grabbed hold of her wheels and maneuvered her chair. She rolled past the café and into the main body of the fairground again. “We should go to the entrance, to wait for Gina,” she said over her shoulder.

  “We haven’t finished talking,” Martha called helplessly after her.

  “We have, for today. And there’s something I want to do.”

  * * *

  Martha helped to push Zelda towards the entrance gate. She still had so many questions turning over in her mind as they neared the fiberglass ice cream cone. Keeping hold of her emotions was like trapping a whirlwind in her chest. She didn’t know when she’d see Zelda again, to ask her these things.

  “Pass me my bag, please,” Zelda said when they reached the entrance.

  In a haze, Martha reached down and pulled it out from under her chair. She thought that Zelda might want a drink of water, or to take a tablet. However, her nana took out a copy of Blue Skies and Stormy Seas. It had a burgundy cover and gold lettering, a pristine copy like the one at Monkey Puzzle Books. Surprised to see it, Martha let out a puff of breath.

  Zelda opened the book. She waited until a group of people approached. Then, hesitating like a conductor before they waved a baton at the orchestra, she cleared her throat. “Ahem. ‘The Puppet Maker,’” she read aloud. Her voice was as loud and clear as Rita said it was.

  Martha’s limbs grew rigid as a young couple paused to listen. “What are you doing?” she hissed.

  Zelda batted her hand and raised her voice a notch. “‘A puppet maker and his wife had been married for many years but couldn’t have the children they longed for...’”

  The young couple pushed their pram a bit closer. The three white-vested men from the ghost train stopped to listen. As Zelda read more of the story, a small crowd gathered around her. Two teenage girls laughed behind their hands. The young couple crouched down so their lips were level with their toddler daughter’s ears. The tattooed men shrugged at each other.

  Martha felt like her feet were set in tarmac. She wanted to walk away, to distance herself from this strange situation. But she had to wait until her grandmother finished the story, one Martha made up when she was a girl. She listened with a mix of dread and intrigue.

  As Zelda read on, Martha couldn’t enjoy her words. Her chest hurt and she raised herself on her tiptoes, looking for Gina. The recital was over in a few minutes but it felt like much longer.

  “The end,” Zelda announced as she finished the story.

  When she closed the book, Martha exhaled with relief.

  A few seconds of silence passed, before one person clapped, and then another. The man with the red devil tattoo whooped and his friend whistled. Zelda gave a small bow. She fumbled in her bag and took out a pen and pad of sticky yellow notes. After writing down a few words, she stuck a note to the front of the book. “Put it flat on the ground,” she told Martha.

  “The book?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “There’s no time to explain. I can see Gina coming.”

  Martha did what her nana asked. She placed the book on the pavement and stood up too quickly. With her heart leaping around, she took hold of the back of the wheelchair.

  The tattooed man peered down at the book and picked it up.

  And, as she began to push her grandmother away, Martha caught a glimpse of the words written on the yellow sticky note.

  “Read me. I’m yours.”

  17

  Puppets

  Betty, 1978

  Two years ago, on Betty’s birthday, she, Zelda, Martha and Lilian enjoyed a fantastic, too-brief, forty minutes at the funfair, sharing laughs and toffee apples. And when they crept back across the sand, all hand in hand, they shared secret smiles as they waited for Thomas to wake up.

  The girls did as they promised and didn’t mention the trip to their dad. Betty thought everything was fine, until Thomas bought a copy of the Maltsborough Times. “There’s a very interesting story about the fair in here, Betty,” he said with a smile.

  She knew from the singsong of his voice that something wasn’t right. His smile was too wide and fixed. “Why don’t you tell me about it?” she replied, feeling her cheeks beginning to glow.

  Thomas placed the paper down on the table and tapped it with his finger. “I’ll leave this here. You can take a look at it yourself. Then you might understand how disappointed and hurt I am by your actions. Have you forgotten how much I helped you, when we first met? My family warned me about marrying in haste and I wanted to prove them wrong. But, well...” He looked down and shook his head. “You’ve let me down, and you’ve let yourself down, too.”

  Betty waited until he’d left the room. Her hand shook as s
he pulled the newspaper towards her. There was a photo of Zelda, Martha and Lilian, sitting on a wall outside the hall of mirrors. Her mother gave a gap-toothed grin. The date was displayed on a wooden board behind them.

  Knitting a hand into her hair, Betty hissed. “Bloody hell, Mum.”

  Why the hell had she let a photographer take a snap? It must have been when Betty went to retrieve her purse after leaving it at the toffee apple stall. “The trip was supposed to be our secret.”

  She glanced up nervously at the closed door. Behind it, Thomas would be waiting for her explanation. She’d have to take full responsibility for the visit to the fair, or perhaps she could say that Zelda insisted.

  Now she had to face the consequences of her actions. It might result in a day or two of stony silence, or a cut to her household budget.

  Still, it was only what she deserved, she supposed. If Thomas acted a little too controlling sometimes, then she shouldn’t be surprised.

  After what happened before they married, she only had herself to blame.

  * * *

  Betty thought she saw Daniel today. He was down on the beach, standing next to the mermaid statue. His hair was mussed up from the wind and his cheeks red from the cold. She took a few steps down the slope towards him, his name on her lips. But she stopped herself from calling him, knowing it was no use. He wouldn’t see her or might not want to know her. After all this time, she should let things be.

  Then the man turned and laughed, and she saw it wasn’t him.

  Pressing her hands to the knot of dismay in her stomach, Betty twisted on her heels and walked back towards the town.

  When she passed a group of young women heading down to the beach, she couldn’t help but feel envious. They wore the new long floral skirts and blouses with big collars. She still sported the dress and shoes Thomas bought for her birthday, two years ago.

  The women were only a little younger than she was. No doubt they were going to chat and have fun, and she was married with daughters aged twelve and eight. She felt so much older. Ducking her head down, Betty looked at her watch. She said she’d be home within half an hour and picked up pace.