by Penni Russon
‘No,’ Undine said, confused. ‘That’s not what I want. I came back. I just want …’ She looked over at the sleeping boy. He was so blameless in all this, so tiny. She could put him in her pocket or nestle him in one palm. So tiny. ‘I just want Jasper. I want it to be right. The way it should be.’
‘The way it should be. Worlds pour in,’ the girl agreed, and Undine felt a cold shiver go down her spine. How many degrees stood between her and … and that thing? How close was she – all the time, every day – to becoming this dark girl, this half-thing, this nothing?
Her dark twin swirled curiously, as if she was thinking the same thing. ‘Girl. Meatheart. Pulse. Flutter. The in, the out, struggling lung. Why do you let it? Hurts all the time.’
Undine stared at her. How easy it was to be her. To be simply dark and awful. To live alone, to not love. To not feel. To live as the magic, walking a dead earth, to be only curious and hungry and wounded.
But how terrible it was too. Wanting to collapse all the worlds in on each other, to destroy everything, to bring only destruction. Wanting no rhythms, no hearts, no life, just black, swirling chaos.
Jasper slept on.
No Jasper. No Lou. Alone.
‘Why do I let it?’ Undine repeated. She thought about the answer. She advanced. ‘Because. Because I’m volatile. I’m capricious. I’m … I’m high-risk. Chancy. I’m mercurial, whimsical, perilous. I’m … I’m …’ she stumbled. The dark Undine used Undine’s momentary uncertainty to draw strength. She rose like an adder and thickened, pressing herself more darkly on the air. But Undine remembered the word she was searching for. ‘I’m skittish,’ she said triumphantly.
The dark Undine swirled backwards uneasily as Undine gathered her strength. Undine pushed forward. ‘You think I don’t know how to fight?’ she asked. ‘I’m better at it than you. You lay down. You lay down to the magic, and it took you. You’re not me. You borrowed my face. You borrowed my voice. But you’re nothing like me.’ Undine’s mind was clearing. She was magic, but she was the girl, the girl that Grunt had made a list for. ‘You’re weak,’ Undine said, and now her voice soft with dawning realisation. ‘I’m strong.’
‘Sister. This is what we want. Chaos. Pour the worlds in. Pour all worlds in. Let them bleed.’
‘That might be what you want. But I’m not. Your. Sister. And if you had any real power here, you would have used it already, brought your chaos in. It’s me. This is my power.’
Undine tore into space, she ripped it open. She could see greyness behind the girl, the grey world that lay just beyond this world. ‘Now,’ she said, ‘get out of my face and my world.’
There was a rift, a wound. Chaos: world pouring into world, no longer separate, spilling into each other. Greyness tried to leak in through the rent. The dark brewing clouds of the grey world’s sky spread at the site of the wound like a bruise. But Undine understood worlds now. She knew how to tame them. She held herself strong, and pushed back. With magic, she pushed back. She pushed with the force of all her will. ‘I’m strong!’ she said.
The dark sister flew up like an expansive black bird, and hurled herself at Undine’s face. But Undine caught her. She wielded space like a net, and the dark girl was trapped. Undine flung her deep into the dead heart of the grey world.
A great wind caught her and Undine felt herself being dragged inside, following her other self. It was hard to fight and she was tired. But she had to. Jasper slept in the heart of the tree. Smoke choked the air. The fire – she’d almost forgotten the fire – was advancing too. At ground level in the dry patches of grass were the first low, flickering flames. They almost seemed tame, almost harmless, but she knew the real fire was coming, a wall of flame and heat somewhere just beyond the glade.
She roared with effort as she hauled her magic up once more and threw it against the rent in space and plugged it. A piece of her magic tore from her and she screamed in agony. But it worked. The grey world pressed in but could no longer travel through. Undine’s magic sealed up the gash. The grey world was gone.
She turned to Jasper, who slept on in the heart of the tree. Now what? Did she leave him here, so that Phoenix might stay? Did she let the fire come? She coughed. The smoke was thick in the trees, and the heat ferocious. She could hear a booming, cracking noise as the bush erupted around them. Whatever was going to happen to Jasper, it would happen soon.
She leaned down and stroked Jasper’s velvety cheek. His skin burned hot. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said to Jasper, thinking of Phoenix, thinking of Jasper’s eyes in Phoenix’s adult face. ‘I’m sorry.’ She kissed his smooth forehead.
As sad as tears, she filled the sky with rain. She doused the bush, drenched the earth, soaking the soil and filling the rivers and creeks. All over the city she raised faces to the miraculous sky. She brought the change they’d been waiting for all summer. Undine, a girl, made it rain.
It was Trout who heard it first. He walked to the streaked window. ‘Is that …?’
Liv pushed the door open. Trout, Reina and Liv walked out into the street.
Rain filled the gutters and the road was a slick black river. There were no cars around, so Liv walked out into the road, lifted her head, pushed her drenched hair back and let the rain wash her face, soak her dress.
‘It’s amazing,’ said Trout. ‘I can’t believe it’s raining.’
Liv closed her eyes. Her shoulders heaved. She covered her soaking face with her hands. Sorrowfully, she cried. ‘Goodbye, Phoenix,’ she whispered. ‘Goodbye.’
Undine placed Jasper gently on his bed. She coiled one of his rain-damp curls around her finger. He had slept in her arms all the way home. Her back and shoulders ached from carrying him, but it was an okay ache. She rolled her shoulders, feeling her muscles stretch and contract. It was a good ache.
Jasper’s eyes opened. ‘Is this what it’s like having a sister?’ he asked.
‘Do you mind it?’
Jasper shook his head. His eyes drooped sleepily. His finger crept into his mouth and he sucked the end of it. To the sound of rain on the house’s tin roof, Jasper drifted into a deep and peaceful sleep.
Undine waited at the front door. She watched Lou’s car pull up at the bottom of the steps. Lou got out, slamming the door, and ran up the steps, taking two at a time. She stopped, a gap between them. ‘Is he—?’
Undine nodded. ‘He’s safe. He’s home.’
‘The rain? Is it—?’
Undine nodded.
Lou smiled, then said in a choked voice: ‘It’s beautiful.’ Lou flung her arms around Undine’s neck. ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘Thank you for bringing Jasper home.’
Reina and Trout walked home. They’d promised to come back and help Liv in the café the next day, but for now, she told them, she wanted to be alone.
And though Trout and Reina were sad for Liv, and for Phoenix wherever he was, they were happy for themselves because they felt clever for finding each other. They stood outside their house when they arrived, reluctant to go inside, to leave the rainswept sky.
‘Come on, Trout!’ Reina said, holding a hand out to him. ‘Let’s dance in the rain.’
‘I don’t dance,’ said Trout.
‘You’ll have to learn. Everybody dances in the rain in Paris.’
‘That sounds like a huge cultural stereotype to me.’
Reina laughed. ‘In my Paris they do.’
So Trout took Reina’s hand, allowing her to twirl into him. Reina hummed a familiar tune and together they danced in Undine’s rain.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
It rained through the night. The fires were extinguished. This was the night the heat wave broke, the night the long summer ended, and the next morning, when the rain was finally spent, the sky stretched out wide and blue with fat white and grey-bottomed clouds. The day was fresh and cool; it smelled of autumn, of the slow turning of leaves.
Undine rose early and left the house before anyone else was awake. She clung to the silver coin th
at Phoenix had given her. She knew she didn’t need it, not really. It was a prop, a trinket, a toy. But still, she chose to bring it with her on this last journey.
She walked down towards the city. Hobart was a beautiful town with its wide river and narrow islands, and its blue-backed mountain and the undulating hills. But she wondered if this was where she would end up. Her life stretched out ahead of her. Even if she left, she thought, she would take the island with her, searching for the shape of her mountain in somebody else’s sky. She thought about aeroplanes crisscrossing the world, imagined their flight paths like dotted lines scribbling the globe. She could travel through space, be somewhere else, somewhere new, but still be connected, moored by that faint thin line, to home.
The hospital was already awake when she arrived. That’s how hospitals were. They stirred during the night, their sleep disturbed, and nevertheless began early the business of administering to the unwell and the damaged, the dying and the newly born.
Undine stood in the courtyard. She knew it was the last time she would come here. It didn’t take much to evoke the magic. There were no gestures this time, and the world didn’t shake in its boots. Simply, she was here now, and she had been there then. She had unravelled time, and was in the recent past, but this was the same world, her world – she took ownership of it, responsibility for it, like it was a child.
She walked to the elevator. People stepped around her, knew she was here. She wasn’t a wavering, insubstantial ghost. She was real.
This time, in this time, Prospero was less frail, though he was dying, Undine could see that. He sat in his chair watching not the deserted, fragmentary space of the old courtyard but the door and the hurrying everyday drama of the corridor, perhaps half hoping she might come. When he saw her, though, he closed his eyes, as if tempting fate to take her away again. Or perhaps he was afraid his eyes were unreliable, that Undine was a mere trick, an artifice, a hoax.
‘I’m real,’ she said. ‘I’m here.’
‘You’re back?’
‘Not yet. Not for you. I’m just visiting.’
‘I’m afraid you’ll just disappear.’
‘I won’t.’ This time she knew how to stay.
When it was time to leave, she kissed his weathered cheek. She didn’t wipe away the tears that fell.
‘I wanted to come,’ she said. ‘I had to say goodbye, this one last time.’
‘Will I see you again?’
‘You will.’ She touched the edge of the silver coin in her pocket. ‘Yes, you’ll see me. Just for a moment. But I won’t know how to stay.’ Undine took a deep breath. ‘And I won’t see you again. I can’t anymore. The magic. It has to …’ And Undine made her hands open outwards to show Prospero what she meant.
‘You’re giving it up?’ Prospero said. ‘You’re letting it go?’
‘I could keep it forever, close to me. Travel from place to place, visiting other futures, other pasts, other presents. But then I’d always be a visitor. Always passing through. And I don’t want to … I don’t want everything pouring in. I want to discover it as it happens, not … not make it. Not force it. I want to live it. As long as I have this magic, then the magic owns me, owns part of me. I just want to be … to be me. Whoever that is.’
‘Here,’ Prospero said. He held Undine’s hand. ‘I don’t have much. I never did. And now, with the treatments, the chemo, the drugs – I’m losing myself. But what I have is yours.’ He clutched her tightly for a moment and she felt his magic pass through his hand into her. Like Phoenix’s magic, Prospero’s smelled different from her own. It smelled like Corfu: old stone and damp earth, warm sky and musky goats. ‘You know it’s not what I wanted for you,’ Prospero said. ‘I wanted you to shine. But maybe you’re the brave one. You and your mother. Maybe it’s braver to live without it.’ He coughed. ‘God knows, it’s brought me more sorrow than joy. Living for the want of it. Waiting for my life to begin.’
‘But I couldn’t take it. Not from you. Couldn’t it … doesn’t it … ease your pain?’ Undine asked.
‘It keeps life in me. But this body is sick. I’m ready to let it go. So it’s yours. Everything I have is yours. Even the house and the land that it’s on. I bequeath you everything. I’ve told Lou. But you must use it how you think best.’
‘Thank you.’ Undine smiled sadly as she thought of the house on Beach Road. How empty it would be without Prospero. She would have to work up to visiting it. But it was a connection, a space where both the past and the present lived, through memory. Undine liked that idea. It would keep Prospero close, even after …
Carrying Prospero’s gift, feeling it ripple inside her skin, she walked to the door. She wanted to leave him as if she was an ordinary girl. She turned to Prospero and asked, curiously, suddenly uncertain, ‘Will I see you again?’
Prospero smiled. But as he shimmered and was gone, his words were lost so that Undine didn’t hear his reply.
As she walked up the street she saw Richard, but he didn’t see her. He was walking towards the hospital, a dazed expression on his face. He looked as if he’d lost something and found something all at the same time. She thought of Jasper, the day he was born, the bundle he was, all limbs and that arching backbone, his egg skull. The flutter, in and out, the struggling lung. It had hurt to love him, right from the start.
But life bloomed in the smallest of cracks, in the darkest places – even far under the sea where there was no colour, no light. In coldness and darkness, life bloomed. And life was light.
At the corner she hesitated. She looked up Elizabeth Street towards the Silver Moon Café. That crazy moon was still aloft, that improbable orb, hanging by the slenderest chance. One day she would go and see Liv. Liv might hate Undine. Probably would. Undine had to live with that, with all the consequences of her decisions. And she could. She realised these were decisions she could live with.
Jasper led Undine into the clearing. She lay the disk on the ground.
‘Do you understand?’ she said again. ‘It’s not going to hurt us to do it, not if we’re ready for it. But it is going to finish things.’
‘I understand,’ said Jasper. ‘There’s holes. And we can fix them.’
‘Like sores. It hurts the world.’
‘I want to fix them. The sores.’
‘But it means we won’t have the magic anymore. The magic will be out there –’ Undine pointed to the world around them – ‘instead of in here.’ She tapped her chest. ‘It has to be your choice too. It means you won’t be able to do the special things.’
‘Like making rain?’
‘Like making rain,’ Undine agreed.
‘I won’t see me anymore?’
‘The other Jasper? No. He’d be tucked up safe in his world and you’d be here with me.’
‘You won’t go away again?’
‘I might. But just in a plane or a car. I can’t promise to stay here forever, but I’ll always be somewhere you can visit. You can ring me. I can write you letters.’
‘I’m not very good at reading w,’ Jasper said worriedly.
‘I can write whole letters without w.’ Undine thought about it. ‘Well, I think. But even with w, you’d have Lou to help you read them. And I’m not going anywhere yet, so you can learn before I go.’
‘Okay.’
‘So, do you want to do this?’
‘Yes. I want to fix the sores.’
Undine smiled. ‘Okay, then. Close your eyes.’
‘Do I have to? I want to watch.’
Undine shrugged. ‘Okay. There’re no rules. Leave your eyes open.’
First, Undine called the magic to her. She called all magic, from herself, from the Bay, from Lou, who had given Undine her magic too.
‘God knows, I don’t want it,’ said Lou, the night before. She and Undine had sat together on the back veranda, watching the slow rain continue to fall. ‘And what’s left isn’t much. But are you sure this is what you want? You’ve done beautiful things with it, as
well as dangerous ones. It could be … well, it could be a strength. In time you could learn to control it.’
‘Do you really believe that?’
Lou looked out at the glimmering night. ‘I don’t know. If anyone can, you can.’
Undine thought of the dark creature she’d encountered in the dead world, the girl all but gone, magic only, spilling beyond herself. To live with the magic was to live in conflict with her humanity and everything that made her human, including Lou and Jasper and all the people she loved.
But when Undine had taken Lou’s magic, sour and fragrant like lemons, she sensed ambivalence in Lou, maybe even regret, a sadness at letting go of the past.
‘I don’t know why I was even keeping it all these years,’ said Lou. ‘In fact, it never occurred to me that I could just give it up. Maybe because I didn’t want to, I was so used to living with it. Like being married to someone dangerous yet dazzling.’
Lou had harboured it, like a criminal. Prospero had romanced it, enraptured by its mysteries. Now Undine was letting it go. She called the paternal magic Prospero had given her in the hospital. It tasted salty and slightly bitter, like an olive.
She could see the world rotating on its axis, and intersecting it, travelling over its surface or running deep into the soil, through its centre, she could see the glistening magical threads, intricately networked, a fine, knitted mesh, encompassing not just the earth but space, deep space, suns, stars, nebula – Undine could see it all. Atoms, she could see, the minutiae of dust. She could see the scars she had left, where the worlds were weak and threatened to come apart, to bleed together.
She called the magic out of Jasper. She called it, but her lips didn’t part, her throat didn’t reverberate, her tongue was still. She could see it – the magic – rising from his chest, a golden globe, a spinning, pulsing light. Looking at it now, it seemed warm and radiant, and Undine wondered what she was taking from Jasper. But his face reflecting the magic was warm and golden too, and Undine realised she wasn’t taking anything he wasn’t willing to give.
