Drift

by Penni Russon

  About the Book

  In the spellbinding conclusion to the Undine trilogy, the girl and the magic must become one to quell the darkness forever.

  Undine thinks she could be happy living in a world where Stephen is still alive. Back in the real world, Trout could be happy too - as long as he doesn’t think about Undine’s disappearance, or why her shadow appears in his photographs.

  Phoenix is new in town, a drifter, passing through with his conjuring tricks. But they can’t keep drifting forever, and one hot summer night their worlds collide. Coincidence or confluence? Illusion or reality? Trout isn’t sure he wants an answer and Phoenix isn’t telling. All Undine knows is that she must find a way to return home. Someone is calling her name.

  Sister, come to me …

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Prologue

  Part One

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Part Two

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Copyright Notice

  Loved the book?

  PROLOGUE

  On the beach Jasper and Olivia dug deeper and deeper in the sand, until the bottom of their hole filled with seawater.

  Jasper said, ‘If I was a crab I would get my pinchers and cut your hair like this, snip snip.’ Olivia squealed and grabbed her pigtails.

  ‘What would you do if you were a crab who was a boy?’ she asked, delightedly.

  ‘I am a boy,’ said Jasper. ‘I am a crab who looks like a boy.’

  ‘I am a seashell, curled up and quiet,’ said Olivia. ‘I am a seahorse and under the sea I ride like this.’ She showed Jasper.

  ‘My sister is a girl, with butterfly hair.’

  ‘So am I,’ said the girl.

  ‘No, you’re not,’ said Jasper. ‘You’re a seahorse.’

  ‘I am so a girl. You’re a crab.’

  ‘I’m also a boy.’ Jasper looked at Olivia for a moment. ‘You can be a girl,’ he offered.

  ‘I am a girl.’ Olivia was getting upset.

  To mollify, Jasper said, ‘Look at this.’ And like a magician first he showed Olivia that his hands were empty, palms outwards. He closed them together like a clam shell. Then he opened them and out flew a butterfly, spiralling upwards into the empty sky.

  ‘Do that again,’ said Olivia. But her parents began gathering up their things – towels and bags and beach umbrellas and Olivia’s bucket and spade – and told Olivia it was time for tea. Jasper ran back to Lou; he had already forgotten his trick. But even when she was an old, old lady, Olivia never forgot the boy who made a butterfly fly from nothing, out of his hands.

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER ONE

  ‘Undine!’

  Undine laughed and kept running. She loved this. The grass was so vividly green it was as though she’d entered a painting; in her periphery gum trees twirled their branches in the close summer sky. She felt a hand grab her and she twisted away and kept running. She could hear more laughing behind her, the rest of them were catching up and she almost collapsed, laughter raking through her, making her weak. But she kept running.

  ‘Touchdown,’ she shouted as she put the ball down and raised her arms in the air, preparing to do a victory dance, when suddenly her knees went from under her and there was a pile of bodies coming down on her. She gasped, laughing so hard that for a moment she thought she might actually pass out.

  ‘Get off,’ she shouted, pushing arms and legs away from her. She screamed and laughed, fighting the mass of limbs. ‘Get off, you horrible things.’

  Bodies rolled off. Lying splayed on the grass around her were her family: Stephen, Lou, Jasper, and Stephen’s sister, Mim. Jasper kicked his legs in the air. Undine stretched out her arms and closed her eyes, feeling the warm sun bathe her face. It was a perfect day. The park smelled like summers past, a sort of sun-baked eucalypt smell.

  ‘We have to be the most unsporty family in existence,’ Lou said. Undine rolled over onto her stomach and pulled out a blade of grass and sucked the stalky end.

  ‘I am sure there are other, less sporty families,’ said Stephen, waving his arm vaguely in a direction where some unsporty families might be.

  Lou reached over and patted his pot-belly. ‘That’s right, darling. You keep telling yourself that.’

  ‘Did we win?’ Jasper asked.

  ‘I won,’ said Undine. She shouted to the blue sky, ‘I am the champion of the world!’

  ‘Your team won,’ said Mim.

  ‘Who was my team? I can’t remember.’

  Stephen, Lou and Mim put their hands up. Undine laughed. Jasper rolled and rolled in the grass. ‘We all win,’ he said happily.

  ‘Maybe we should learn the rules before we play next time,’ said Stephen, half-heartedly, lying on the ground and panting up at the sky.

  ‘I don’t think there are any rules,’ said Mim. ‘I think we’d have to play a real game for there to be rules.’

  ‘Pot-ay-to, pot-art-o,’ said Stephen. ‘We can make our own rules.’

  ‘Even when you were a kid,’ grumbled Mim, ‘you always had to be the boss of the game.’

  ‘Now, now,’ Stephen said to Mim. He waggled a finger. ‘You should respect your older, wiser brother.’

  ‘You’re such a boy,’ said Undine, ‘with your fancy rules.’

  ‘Can one of the rules be I get to lie here all day?’ asked Lou.

  ‘Yes. Rule number one even,’ said Stephen.

  ‘No!’ said Jasper. ‘Come and play.’

  He ran off with the ball, but no one had the energy to follow him. Undine propped herself up on her elbows and watched as Jasper whooped and hollered, throwing the ball and then running like crazy in the same direction, as if he were trying to catch his own throws.

  ‘What that boy needs is a dog,’ Lou said lazily, listening to his shouts.

  ‘Oh!’ said Undine, clapping at the idea. ‘A dog! Can we get a dog?’

  ‘A dog,’ mused Stephen. ‘I don’t hate the idea.’

  ‘I used to have a dog,’ said Lou.

  ‘Did you?’ Undine asked, sitting up. She couldn’t imagine her mother with a dog.

  ‘Long time ago now.’

  ‘Jasper would love a dog,’ Mim said.

  ‘He would, wouldn’t he?’ said Lou. They all watched Jasper running in dizzying circles, the ball forgotten.

  ‘I’m starving,’ Stephen said.

  ‘Such a boy,’ Undine said again, rolling her eyes.

  ‘Man,’ corrected Stephen, puffing out his chest a little. ‘Show more respect to your agèd stepfather.’

  ‘You’re not agèd,’ said Lou, lovingly. ‘Just a bit crinkly.’

  ‘Isn’t anyone else hungry?’

  ‘I’m lying here all day, remember?’ said Lou. ‘It’s in the rules.
’

  Stephen laughed. ‘I could get the picnic and bring it over here,’ he said, but he didn’t move. He looked wistfully at Undine.

  ‘Stay there, agèd one,’ she said. ‘I’ll get it.’

  She walked to the edge of the grassy playing field where their bags lay discarded on the ground. Lou’s laughter drifted across the grass. She could hear Jasper making bird noises as he careered around with his arms outstretched, flapping and shrieking, then coasting with the wind. She used to do the same thing as a kid, though for her it had been a plane; she recalled how aerodynamic she had felt, racing the wind. How tearing down a hill on a windy day it had been easy to believe that just for a moment she had been truly aloft.

  She remembered how real it was to pretend, as if she were just on the other side of a dream, pushing against it with her outstretched arms.

  She bent over, gathering the handles of the cloth bags together. For a moment she stopped and closed her eyes, shutting out the park, the lazy drone of summer, her parents’ and aunt’s voices, Jasper’s high pealing laughter. She drew in a deep breath and released it. As she heaved the bags up she said to herself, without bitterness or self-rebuke, ‘This isn’t your place. You don’t belong here. You know you can’t stay.’

  CHAPTER TWO

  Confluence. The word was written in chalk outside the front door of the stone house Trout shared with Reina and Nick in Battery Point.

  Words had been appearing all over the city that summer. Trout liked this one, it had a rhythm to it, like a song. Cool jazz in the dusty summer heat.

  The morning sky stretched, a fresh sparkling blue. He felt as if he leaned against it, walking down the steep gradient of Napolean Street. Trout’s feet were light, as though he were attached to invisible strings and the dome of the sky was a parachute, lifting him a little with each step.

  He arrived at work early. The structure was almost complete. Builders had been crawling over it like insects all summer, piecing the building together, making a big, solid something out of nothing. First excavating, raising the earth from the ground and levelling it. Pouring concrete foundations. Then Trout’s favourite part, assembling the skeleton of the apartment block in wood, so that you could see the shape it would take, you could stand in the kitchen, the toilet, imagine the theatre of people’s lives being performed in each room.

  The roof was tiled before the bricks were laid, making it look rather like a naked aunt in a very fussy hat. Then the windows, glass and all, had been installed; they also seemed absurdly superfluous when there were no walls. Then the bricks: Trout had stacked, cleaned and wheeled barrowloads of them. He had spent whole afternoons throwing one brick at a time from the ground up to the second level. The pads of his fingertips had been shredded by the overhandling of them; now he was beginning to develop hard calluses on his previously school-soft skin.

  He poured himself coffee from a thermos and sat down to wait for the others to arrive.

  He preferred being at the building site alone. It felt, for some reason, a bit like being in a museum. As if it was a few hundred years in the future and the block of flats was a relic in a state of coming undone, revealing the bones of itself. Parts of Trout were in this building: skin debris, fine lost hairs, even his blood. He would leave some of his history here when he moved on in a few weeks’ time.

  Thinking of moving on, Trout remembered the letter in his back pocket. He’d been carrying it around for a week, trying to get used to its contents. His fingers touched the edge of the paper and he was sliding it out, trying to surprise it into saying something different this time, when Craig’s ute appeared, bumping carefully over the university grounds to the building site. Trout walked up to meet him.

  Craig opened the driver’s door.

  ‘Morning.’

  ‘Morning.’

  The building site had been a new world to Trout, and he had had to learn a new language, with few words and measured stares. But even so, Craig’s world felt far more real than Trout’s own rather shadowy one. Craig’s world was made of gut and muscle and brick and timber and metal. Trout’s was of ideas and images, light and shade and, of course, whispering in the back of his mind like the memory of a dream, magic. (A memory that wore her face, her skin, but it was already fading, a photograph printed on air.)

  Craig looked at the blinding blue sky. ‘Bushfire weather,’ he said uneasily, and leaned back into the ute, passing his toolbox and a hard hat out to Trout. Trout looked up at the unreadable sky, then pushed his hard hat onto his head. ‘Here, mate.’ Craig put a tube of sunscreen on top of the toolbox. ‘Don’t want you getting burned.’

  To Craig, silence was golden. He wore it as if it were armour: smooth, slippery and protective. For him to come out with two unprompted statements in one morning was unheard of. Trout headed towards the vacant building, glancing back to see Craig squinting upwards, shaking his head nervously at the hot summer sky.

  Confluence. Phoenix wrote it with a flourish on the concrete wall, looping the f and giving the final e a long comet’s tail. His arm moved easily as he wrote, though his body still tended to curl around it, protecting the limb. As a child his arm had been badly broken and burnt and he had grown up twisted like a mountain ash. Recently the injury had mended itself – how he did not not know – and his arm had stretched out long and smooth and perfect as if it were carved from the living branch of a tree, or sculpted in chalk, like the polished stick he wrote with now.

  Confluence, he wrote again on the footpath. He liked the shape of it and the feel of it on his tongue. But despite the newness of his arm, his body carried a prior memory of itself, trying to hold on to the shape it used to be. It wasn’t that he didn’t appreciate his good fortune, but there were times when he found it unsettling that he no longer had a clear picture of what he looked like, what the boundaries were between his flesh and the outside world. He smiled. Perhaps what he meant was: it was unpredictable, being beautiful.

  He walked through the mall. Cafés were unfurling their outdoor umbrellas. He slipped the chalk into his pocket and brushed the dust of it off his fingers onto his shorts. He’d been up since before dawn, more or less alone with the city, waiting for the day to begin. In some ways he’d been waiting all summer. But waiting was the wrong word. Waiting made it sound as if he were wishing time away and if that’s what waiting was, then he’d been doing the opposite, because he liked time, he liked it to hang around, he liked it to stay where it was. To just kind of bloom eternally, a flower spreading its petals, so the days would last forever and summer would never end.

  He stopped at a shopfront in one of Hobart’s main streets. It had a rough wooden door the colour of sea-bleached driftwood. Over it hung a crazy metal globe: a dizzying silver pockmarked moon. It seemed dangerous, that moon, as if it had a date with gravity that one day it meant to keep, descending with blunt urgency to the footpath below. But it hadn’t yet, not for the whole summer, and Phoenix risked it, as he had risked it many times before, and pushed open the door.

  He had done a lot of not-waiting in the Silver Moon Café. It was a sort of hip hybrid deal: coffee and cake and all-day breakfast until the sun went down and then it was a licensed venue for live music. Occasionally they showed old films – at the counter a paper flier advertised last week’s Valentine’s Day screening: Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Summer was almost officially over though it was hard to imagine the heat wave ever ending.

  The girl behind the counter grinned when she saw him.

  ‘What can I get you?’

  She was the real reason Phoenix frequented the place. Liv. ‘Not,’ she had told him firmly when she introduced herself, ‘Olive. Not Olivia. And definitely not Lavinia. Just Liv. As in I want to. As in live and let.’

  He had looked through the window one cool December morning when he’d first arrived in this place. Her open face had conjured a memory of another face: some shining jolly girl from his childhood, a babysitter perhaps, or a friend of his sister’s. But it was her s
iren-song counter display that had drawn him in. She was a maker of cakes, and looking at her wares, he had found he had a sudden, gnawing hunger, a greed for cake. Not any old cake. Not counterfeit cake, not simple facsimiles of better, prior cake. Not the kind of cake you can buy in any café, in any town, or make from any cookbook. He was hungry for this cake; dense and magical, it seemed to exist in this time, in this place, for him.

  She had no recipe books and she kept no record of the miracles she performed in her kitchen. Each cake was pure invention: extravagant, yet nurturing; nonessential, yet somehow feeding a vital part of him that couldn’t be nourished by potatoes and bread and meat. That first time, she had recognised his hunger and had cut him a generous slice though he had no money to pay with.

  Today on the counter there were four. Blood plum and rhubarb, cracked across the top as if it had suffered seismic activity. A cake with an intriguing title on its handwritten sign, chocolate mystic. A sponge cake with a thick caramel and cream filling. And one thickly iced one that smelled of honey and almonds, called bumble.

  If he was going to have cake for breakfast he thought it ought to contain some kind of fruit so he chose the blood plum and rhubarb, noting with satisfaction as she sliced it that it contained large chunks of shining, slippery plum.

  Liv wiped her hands on her apron – she seemed to be wearing rather a lot of chocolate mystic – before she made Phoenix’s coffee. As usual he was her first customer. Liv had joked that she opened the café every morning an hour earlier for Phoenix alone. She made herself a coffee too, bringing it with Phoenix’s cake around to his side of the counter, and sat with him to drink it. She smelled buttery sweet.