by Penni Russon
‘All right,’ said Lou. ‘We’ll meet you back here. But, Jasper, stay with Undine.’
Undine walked towards the crowd, holding Jasper’s hand. He tugged and jerked, pulling her forward. ‘Wait,’ said Undine. She was beginning to feel woozy again. ‘I can’t run.’
But Jasper couldn’t wait, and with one last wrench he pulled free.
‘I’m a bird,’ he called. He stretched out his arms and ran ahead, disappearing into the crowd, lost to Undine.
The busker was a conjurer. He worked the crowd, pulling a scarf from someone’s pocket, a rose from a girl’s hair, a twenty dollar note from a guy’s ear. He asked the guy to check his wallet and the man discovered it was his own twenty dollar note, now missing from his wallet. The busker mimed pocketing it before returning it, to the amusement of the crowd.
Then the mood changed. He moved back to the centre of the space he performed in. He lifted his arms in the air.
‘My lords, ladies and gentlemen,’ he shouted over the crowd, ‘it is my great pleasure to welcome you here tonight.’
A bird flew from his hands and into the air then disappeared, showering petals onto the ground.
‘Please, allow yourselves to be transported into a world where everything is not’ – the busker waved his hand and the petals disappeared – ‘as it seems. My name is Phoenix and I will be your humble guide.’ Phoenix bowed deeply.
‘Wow,’ said Lucy into Trout’s ear. ‘He’s amazing.’ Trout nodded.
The busker flowed seamlessly from one trick to another as if it was a dance. But Trout was distracted, in part by his encounter with Lou, but also the familiarity of the busker tugged at his mind, like a fragment of a song repeating over and over to which he could not remember the words.
‘And here, to the east,’ Phoenix was saying, lunging to the left, ‘there be dragons.’ A roaring sound came from somewhere beyond the crowd. A few girls screamed and everyone jumped, and then the crowd laughed.
As Trout turned with the others in the direction that Phoenix had thrown his voice, conjuring the phantom dragon, he saw Lou pushing her way through the crowd that had formed around him. ‘Trout,’ she said, panicked. ‘Have you seen Jasper? I turned around and he was gone.’ She half swallowed the last words. Trout shook his head. Lou looked stricken.
Lucy heard too. ‘I’ll help.’
They all worked their way through the crowd, Trout ducking his head to look for Jasper amongst the sea of legs.
‘Jasper!’ Lucy called. She wasn’t afraid to draw attention to herself. ‘Have you seen a little boy?’ she asked a group of teenagers. She described him and they shook their heads, but offered to look too.
Trout edged round the fringes of the crowd. He looked back. Richard was juggling three icecreams and a distraught Lou. Good. Although it seemed strange to pair them in his mind, he was the best one to comfort her. Richard was good with women. Like icecream, they melted in his hands. Had Trout not been so distracted he might have elaborated on the metaphor – something about sticky situations. Lucy’s widening girth was one of them.
Suddenly he saw a small blond boy who looked like Jasper. He was running towards Trout from some distance away, though it seemed a peculiar trajectory when he had watched Lou and Jasper move off in the opposite direction not long before.
‘Hey!’ Trout called. ‘Jasper!’
He saw Jasper look back and laugh, as if someone was pursuing him. He thought he heard a girl calling Jasper’s name, but though it had the timbre of a shout, it was very, very faint, as if it came from across a great chasm.
Under normal circumstances, Trout wasn’t a runner. In fact Trout and running had never seen eye to eye about anything. His asthmatic lungs were inclined to expire, and his legs wouldn’t always go in the direction he needed them to. He tried to do it as little as possible. But a summer on the building site had helped and as he jogged towards Jasper, now quite sure of his feet, he was actually enjoying it on some level. It made him feel strong and sprung and urgent, an engine firing.
As he drew closer, though, he was less certain it was Jasper. Though if it wasn’t it had to be Jasper’s long lost brother. They were so similar and yet … He stopped. Was it a trick of the heat, or did the air just shimmer before Trout’s eyes, as if he was looking through distorted bottle glass? And then, from out of the blue – literally, as if she had formed herself from the sweltering summer sky – stepped Undine.
‘Jasper!’
Undine couldn’t keep up, the distance between her and Jasper growing. ‘Jasper!’ her voice struggled.
Suddenly she felt as if she were being torn from end to end. Her vision was blurred and her surroundings seemed hazy. The world around her seemed to bend, to balloon, as if she was enclosed in a bubble of glass. ‘Jasper,’ she whispered.
She looked up. Coming towards her, no, stopping now, staring, it was – oh my god – it was Trout. Not the thin, insubstantial Trevor-Trout with her vomit on his shoes. It was her own, dear Trout.
She shed the bubble, stepping out from it, and suddenly her pain was gone. It was as if gravity worked on her differently, pulling at her less, whereas before, some hidden weight had been pressing her in towards the ground.
Trout saw Undine too. Their eyes met, and for Undine everything slid away, except for him. She ached for him, wanted to touch his face, to feel the real of him on her fingertips.
And then beyond Trout, the crowd just seemed to leak away. Not magically, but because whatever had held their interest was over. Like a flower opening to reveal an insect, she saw what had been at the centre of the crowd – a young man much her own age but no one she knew. He seemed to know Undine though. His gaze was fixed on her despite the small boy standing beside him, tugging at his sleeves as if something might appear out of them. The small boy was tentative, scared even – what would come out? Snakes or flowers, birds or nettles?
As the scene behind Trout came into focus Undine realised the boy at the busker’s sleeve was also Jasper. She saw his hunger first, she recognised it before she recognised his thin, spindle-shanked frame. He was leaner than when she had last seen him. Loss had eaten away at him and left bones. She couldn’t bear it. She looked away, back to Trout’s face.
The other Jasper had stopped running too, disappointed perhaps at the dispersing crowd. He turned back to Undine, staring at her quizzically, and then turned again to look at Trout.
Trout stepped towards her, his mouth beginning to form her name. She walked forward, her hand held out. Overwhelmingly she wanted to fill the gap between them, to press herself on him and feel the warmth of his body against hers. It shocked her, how much she wanted this.
But, ‘I can’t,’ she said to Trout, though no sound came. She took Jasper’s fingers in one hand, her eyes filling with tears. As Jasper’s hand met hers she felt the tearing sensation again, as if her abdomen was on fire. Space itself shivered and groaned. The world began to vanish, a rising shadow blotting out Undine’s view of it. The busker disappeared and then so did Jasper’s hungry ghost. Trout alone stood before her for a moment, as if adrift from his world. ‘I’m sorry,’ said Undine, but by then Trout was already gone.
Phoenix didn’t see a girl step from the sky. His show was finishing as sparks of light flew from his hands into the sky, arcing back towards the ground and then exploding like tiny stars. The crowd breathed in: ‘Oh!’ they said, and, ‘Aaah.’
‘Our journey ends here. Thank you for coming. I hope you enjoyed the scenery.’ He gestured to his suitcase. ‘The tourism board would appreciate a small donation. Or a big one. Big donations are good too. Keeps the natives from getting restless.’
The crowd drifted away, dropping coins or sometimes a fluttering five or ten dollar note into the open case. But Phoenix wasn’t watching. He hadn’t seen Undine appear, but he’d felt it, felt the shifting of atmospheres, the tearing of the air. And now, he looked straight at her. There she was. It was almost physically painful to see her. There was a vividness ab
out her that seemed savage to his eyes.
And then he felt the slightest tugging at his sleeve. He smiled. He took his eyes away from Undine, so he didn’t see her disappear again, though he knew when she was gone.
He looked down at the boy who stood at his left arm. ‘Hello, Jasper,’ Phoenix said. ‘Where’s Lou?’
Trout closed his eyes and then opened them again. She was gone.
So was Jasper. He turned around. The audience had dissolved and there was Jasper, talking to the busker, pulling at his sleeve. Lou was already hurrying towards him, along with Richard and Lucy.
He met the busker’s eyes – or he thought he did, but then he realised the busker was staring just past Trout’s head. Had he seen Undine too? No one else seemed to have. People wandered past, licking the drips off their icecreams, throwing unwanted chips to seagulls. One couple kissed as they walked (though they seemed in danger of veering into the dock’s greasy water, love protected them). It was as though no girl had stepped out of the blue summer evening.
Trout was frozen to the spot. He turned back to the space where she had been, reluctant to leave. But he was hanging on to nothing. There was nothing there, not even a hint of her, a breath, a fragrance, a single hair.
He walked back towards the group. Jasper was talking to the busker and the busker was smiling down at him, distracted, but kind. As Trout drew closer he could hear Jasper’s excited voice.
‘And then bam! It was gone, did you see, Mama? And how did you make the money get out of the man’s wallet? And the birds …’ Jasper thrust his arms up into the air. ‘Woosh! Did you see? Did you see?’
Lou laughed. ‘Jasper, stop! Give him a break!’ She smiled shyly at the busker. ‘Wow. I haven’t seen him like this for ages. You really have worked your magic on him.’
‘It’s always good to meet a fan. I’m Phoenix, by the way.’ He held out his hand and Lou shook it. Trout admired how sure of himself, how sure of his body, Phoenix seemed, even though he couldn’t have been any older than Trout.
‘I perform at Salamanca Market on Saturdays,’ Phoenix said. ‘You should bring him by, it’s good to have an appreciative audience.’
Jasper whirled round to Lou. ‘Oh can we, Mama? Please. Pleeaase? Can we go?’
‘How can I say no?’ Lou said.
‘Will you teach me how to do it?’ Jasper asked Phoenix.
‘Hmm … an apprentice?’ Phoenix winked. ‘I might have an opening.’
Lou noticed Trout. ‘Oh, thank you so much for helping to look for him. He was here the whole time!’ She ruffled Jasper’s hair roughly. ‘Rapscallion,’ she said with obvious restraint, as though she wanted to call him something much worse.
Trout smiled weakly. He didn’t trust his voice not to reveal something awkward and intimate and raw, a new hurt that would alert people to the extraordinariness of what he had just seen. Though extraordinariness was almost ordinary, almost mundane, when it came to Undine.
‘But where were you running to?’ Lucy asked Trout. Phoenix looked at him questioningly too, as if interested in Trout’s answer.
Trout shook his head dumbly.
‘Well, I hope I see you tomorrow,’ Phoenix said to Jasper, picking up his suitcase.
‘You will!’
After Phoenix had left, Lou fussed over Jasper. ‘You gave me such a fright,’ she said. ‘You mustn’t run away from me like that anymore. Remember? You promised.’
‘I didn’t run,’ said Jasper. ‘I just walked.’
‘Just like a man,’ said Lucy. ‘Lying with logic.’ She gave Richard a little push as if everything, somehow, was his fault.
‘Look,’ said Trout.
The sun was setting, orange flowing into geranium pink, spreading across the diminishing sky. The colour reflected on the white walls of the stone buildings across the street, giving everything a rose hue.
‘Wow,’ said Richard. ‘It’s beautiful.’
‘It really is,’ said Lucy.
‘It’s a bushfire sky,’ said Lou. ‘The island’s burning somewhere tonight.’
Undine was struck by a sudden deathly coldness. Trout was gone, but she couldn’t see Lou or Stephen either, and the docks had completely vanished. Jasper’s hand slipped from hers. ‘Jasper,’ she called. But her voice was lost, made dense and woolly by this place, or lack of place. Whatever it was, it spread out around her, and as she stumbled her hands reached forward and found … nothing. Although she had her eyes open she couldn’t see, couldn’t even distinguish dark or light. Instead she was blinded by a kind of speckled grey, as if she’d entered television static.
Also, she wasn’t alone.
She didn’t know how she knew that; she just knew someone was here with her, as close to her as her own skin. Fear clutched her. She was nowhere, she was nothing. The dark presence with her was almost nothing too. As it studied her she studied it, and she knew it felt itself in danger of ebbing away entirely. She could sense its overwhelming hunger, its woundedness. What could it be? What would live here, in this vacuum, this nowhere space between worlds? It prowled around her, whatever it was, so that she couldn’t place it as it kept moving. Her ears were as useless as her eyes, as her hands. But still, she knew something, someone was there, stalking the edges of this nowhere-nothing place.
The greyness crept in, grasping her heart. Time seemed to stop. It was only a moment, but it seemed to last an eternity, and she thought she might die of it. Then she was frightened that she wouldn’t die, that she would live here forever.
Finally she felt something, really felt the dragging pressure of something clutching her hand. Air rushed past her ears, a whistling sibilance that seemed to call her: ‘Sisss …’ Her eyes opened and light poured in.
She was back at the docks. People walked past her without seeing her – or rather, they saw just the veneer of her, as if she were quite ordinary, as if she hadn’t disappeared then reappeared. She looked down the length of her arm and there was Jasper, peering up at her.
‘You went all funny,’ he complained.
‘Sorry,’ said Undine.
She gripped Jasper’s hand and they walked back to Stephen and Lou, who hadn’t even noticed Jasper run away.
‘What was it?’ Lou asked. ‘What did you see?’
‘It wasn’t a bear,’ said Jasper with a sigh. ‘It was nothing.’
CHAPTER SEVEN
That night Undine gave Jasper his bath. She sat on the edge with her feet in the warm water while Jasper tipped cupfuls of it over her knees. She patted him dry with his towel, filled his Buzz toothbrush with paste and put the tap onto dribble for him while she went out to the washing line to fetch some clean pyjamas.
When she came back, the water was still running but Buzz had been cast aside. Jasper was looking at himself in the mirror, sucking in his cheeks. Undine reached past him to turn the tap off.
‘Why did another Jasper look like that?’ Jasper wondered aloud.
Undine’s heart fluttered. ‘What?’
‘There was Jasper,’ he poked himself with his thumb, ‘and another Jasper. But he was all sucked in like this.’ He sucked his cheeks in, then puffed them out again and looked at himself critically.
‘Nah,’ said Undine, trying to keep her voice light. ‘It was just another little boy who looked a bit like you, that’s all.’
‘No, it wasn’t.’ Jasper wasn’t angry, just matter-of-fact. He was still scutinising himself in the mirror. ‘It was Jasper.’
He sucked his cheeks in again and this time he somehow managed to make his eyes look like the other Jasper’s – sad and hollow and hungry. Undine breathed in sharply. It was as if the other Jasper – her own true brother – was caught in the mirror, looking out at her.
‘It was an other Jasper,’ Jasper said again. ‘Only this time –’ he turned to look at Undine and Undine could see he was whole and golden again – ‘only this time, you saw him too.’
It wasn’t the first time Trout had seen Undine since she’d disap
peared.
The last of the pink sky was retreating into darkness by the time Trout arrived home. His housemates, Nick and Reina, were out. He found a note inviting him to join them at a café in the city where Reina’s band was playing. He checked the clock in the kitchen. It wasn’t even nine, though it felt much much later. He could still go. But he stood holding the note, barely reading it. His eyes itched, dry and sore, as if someone had poured salt into them.
In the kitchen he drank from the tap; water streamed over his face as he gulped. He splashed the soothingly cool water onto his eyes. He stared out the kitchen window for a moment, looking out into the garden at the gathering shadows.
The house had been built on a block that had once sloped savagely but had been excavated and levelled so that Trout’s room was below street level, as was Reina’s, though Reina’s was at the back of the house with glass doors that opened out into the garden. Nick’s was upstairs, also at the back of the house. It had once been a broad balcony but it had been built in some decades before, and now it protuded dangerously from the rest of the house. Nick’s room and the bathroom were competing for the honour of being the first to actually fall off the house. If you jumped on the spongy floor in Nick’s room, clouds of dust fell from the ceiling in Reina’s room below.
Although it smelled a little damp, Trout liked his room. He liked watching feet pass on the street outside. He imagined people from their shoes up. He discovered that you could tell a lot about people from their ankles or the shape of their calves. He and Reina had sat on his bed many times, laughing at ridiculously high heels or absurdly fat – p-h-a-t, Reina spelt it – sneakers. Reina hardly ever wore shoes. Her feet were like a bronze statue’s feet, hard underneath but smooth and flawless on top, with high rounded toes like jewels. Summer or winter, Trout always wore the same brown Blundstone boots. When the soles of one pair wore through, he went to the hardware shop and bought another pair exactly the same.
