A Tangle of Gold

by Jaclyn Moriarty

  ‘Madeleine,’ he said for the third time, and she realised that his tone had been the same for each. Loaded with certainty. ‘I haven’t seen my wife or my home for over a year.’

  He paused, looking at her in the darkness.

  ‘For most of that time,’ he continued, ‘I have not been myself. I’ve believed I was somebody else. You remember we once talked about the concept of displacement?’

  Madeleine nodded.

  ‘To not remember your own self,’ Abel said, ‘is the greatest displacement that there is.’

  Madeleine stopped halfway to another nod.

  ‘To be dead,’ she argued, ‘is greater. I don’t trust this Keira. Who knows what she’s up to? And there’s no way she can guarantee that you’ll be safe. We need to think about this.’

  Abel shook his inhaler again and took a deep drag.

  ‘Cello is already starting to seem more theoretical than real. I could lose myself again, any time. As for Elliot, he says he knows who he is, but I suspect he just thinks we’re all insane. He’s playing along until he figures out what to do.’

  ‘No.’ Madeleine shook her head and right away remembered what Belle had said that morning: He doesn’t believe that the Kingdom of Cello exists, let alone that that’s where he’s from.

  She bit her lip.

  ‘It’s still better that he’s here,’ she said, ‘and safe,’ but she was thinking of that pleasant, neutral smile on Elliot’s face, and the despair that she’d glimpsed behind the smile.

  Abel watched her, waiting, then he spoke her name one more time: ‘Madeleine,’ he said, ‘we’re going home.’

  She wrote.

  Abel and Elliot will be in Berlin at midnight on Wednesday. What else do we need to know?

  *

  So that was it.

  Eight events and here they were at the station, saying goodbye.

  She pulled the tissues away from her face so she could hold up her fingers and see exactly what the number eight looked like, in terms of fingers.

  There was a rush of blood from her nose. She replaced the tissues.

  Ah, she knew what eight looked like anyway.

  Sure, maybe you could split some of those events into pieces and thereby increase the number, and there were probably a few minor incidents in between that she’d forgotten, plus there’d been the frenzied packing up of a flat and a business in the last two days—but still. Still.

  She’d had Elliot for a total of eight events, and now he was leaving.

  Since the day he arrived, they had not had a single conversation on their own.

  The train approached. Abel touched her shoulder.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said, ‘for everything.’

  ‘A pleasure.’ Her voice was muffled by the tissues.

  Other passengers were stepping around their group, pressing closer to the edge of the platform.

  Elliot looked at her uncertainly.

  ‘Are you okay?’ he said. He had picked up a suitcase. The train doors were opening, passengers pouring out.

  Madeleine nodded. ‘Yeah, this happens a lot. It’ll stop. It’s probably stopped now.’

  She pulled the tissues away. Elliot frowned.

  ‘It’s still bleeding,’ he said. ‘I think something serious is going on there. You need a doctor.’

  He looked sideways along the platform, thinking, but Abel had stepped onto the train.

  ‘Let’s go,’ he called.

  The automatic doors began to close.

  Elliot swivelled, grabbed the door and wrenched it open again. He glanced back at Madeleine, raised a hand at the others and jumped aboard. The doors slammed. She could see him through the glass, still with that vague frown.

  A whistle blew, then another.

  The shapes of them, Abel and Elliot, made their way down the aisle, looking at seats, not windows.

  The train was moving.

  ‘There go ICT and Geography!’ sang Darshana.

  ‘That is not their names!’ shouted her daughters.

  Maybe that was Elliot’s hand now, pressed to the window waving, or maybe not.

  The train picked up speed and fled, thrusting a storm of empty air behind it.

  The blood rained down her mouth and chin, the empty air stormed, and the tracks, the platform, the station—everything—disappeared.

  2

  Instead, there was a marketplace.

  A boy, about twelve years old, was running. He slipped and slid on cobblestones. His eyes and nose were creased by an angry scowl, but his mouth was loose and childish with fear. Bigger boys were chasing him. They ran through the crowded marketplace: sudden sideways darts and awkward elbowing. People stood about watching the chase, or not watching it, their backs turned to reach for apples or figs. Shadows overtook the boy. A shoe was flung, a wooden pail. Water flew, the boy cried out—

  Now the boy was in an office.

  An elderly, bearded man was seated at a desk. The man gazed in mild surprise at the boy. The boy panted noisily, his shoulders heaving. Water patched his shirt, and his face was as white as yoghurt. Behind the boy, a floor-to-ceiling window looked out onto high-rises, cables, and oddly shaped contraptions, a little like helicopters, flew sedately by.

  A sensation like reality tearing itself along a perforated line, and everything was back.

  3

  ‘What was that?’ Madeleine’s mother demanded.

  The train had gone. The platform was almost empty now, and the others were staring at her.

  ‘You went all spacey,’ Jack told her.

  ‘I was just about to slap you,’ Belle declared. ‘Quite hard.’

  ‘Everything disappeared! And I was in a marketplace and a kid was running, and then I was in an office, and there was this old guy with a beard, and weird things were flying by the window!’ Madeleine looked down. The bloody tissues were on the ground. She could feel dried blood on her chin.

  ‘It’ll be all the blood that you lost,’ Darshana said, laughing. ‘You see, it takes your brain cells with it! There are your brain cells all over the platform! Get away from Madeleine’s brain cells, children!’ Her daughters were crawling around on the platform, studying the blood splatters.

  Holly offered Madeleine water and told her to sit down a minute, and then they all set off towards home, away from the station. A small crowd swaying along, everything swaying as if Madeleine was on the train herself. The others glanced at her as they walked, checking on her, chatting about the sudden departure of Abel and Elliot, giddy smiles, wild smiles, everyone pretending to be happy.

  4

  That night, Madeleine lay on her couch-bed and felt the silence rising up from the flat downstairs. It joined the darkness in her own flat, injecting it with shots of deeper darkness.

  A thread of burning colours was coiling through her veins. A hot oil rainbow. It smelled like ink spilled from permanent markers, the high, poisoned sweetness of it.

  She was going mad.

  She got up to wash her face, and tried to close the bathroom door quietly. But you couldn’t. The door had swollen with damp, so to close it, you had to shove hard. It slammed.

  She stood, breathing hard, staring at the sound of a slamming door.

  The door is closed. The story is done.

  Then a crack of light ran through her. The story is not over! There were Cellians still in her world! The stranded Royals!

  She sat at the computer—Abel had given them a stack of computer equipment before he left—and opened a new document. Her mother slept across the room. She tried to type quietly.

  Dearest Royal Cellian,

  You might remember me as the girl who wrote to you about the Kingdom of Cello?

  I have no idea if you ever believed me. Probably not. You probably still think you’re someone else. (Don’t blame yourself for the amnesia. It happens to all Cellians.)

  BUT, if you did believe it, well, you might have gone to the meeting place I told you about, ready to be taken home. I
n which case, I am very sorry, because I now know that didn’t happen. You would have just stood there. You might have got cold and hungry. And depressed.

  The good news is that two people from your family DID get home: the King and the little Prince. So, if you remember who they are, you can rejoice, knowing they are safe. (Or you can feel jealous and bitter that they got home and you didn’t. It depends on your character.)

  (If you don’t remember who they are, you can just be like, ‘whatever’.)

  The bad news is that things went wrong, and now there are issues with getting you home, so you’re still here, stranded.

  I hope our World is treating you okay, and that the contrast between being a Royal in Cello and a regular person here is not doing your head in.

  Hopefully the issues will get sorted soon. In the meantime, if you want to talk to someone who knows a bit about where you’re from? You can talk to me. Any time.

  I plan to do what I can to help you.

  Best wishes,

  Madeleine Tully

  She found the addresses she had for Queen Lyra, who was in Taipei, Taiwan, and for Prince Chyba, who was in Boise, Idaho, and printed copies for them. She would post these the next day. She had an email address for Princess Jupiter, who was in Berlin, Germany, so she pasted the text into an email.

  She hit Send so hard that her mother startled in her sleep.

  5

  They were in Madeleine’s flat for their English lesson with Holly. Rain fell steadily outside, and the room was golden lit and shadowed. There was the usual clutter of fabric, tape measures and pattern books, but there was also a crowd of extra furniture.

  Abel had brought this upstairs before he left. As well as the computer equipment, there were two new armchairs, a standing lamp and a rice-steamer.

  The heat was turned high and the room was warm with baking.

  ‘It smells like muffins,’ Jack said.

  ‘No, it doesn’t,’ Belle argued.

  ‘Well, it does. Abel gave me some recipes before he left,’ Madeleine explained.

  Jack sighed. ‘I wonder if they got home okay?’

  ‘Oh, I’m sure they did.’ Holly spoke from the lamplight. ‘We’ll hear from them eventually. They’ll email.’

  Her three students glanced at each other.

  ‘Did Abel say he’d email you?’ Jack asked.

  Holly was holding a threaded needle in the air while she frowned down at a sheet of paper. She transferred the frown to a square of fabric, then took it back to the paper again. She looked up.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘But he will. Why wouldn’t he? I never called him Abel, you know. I kept saying Denny right up until they left. I don’t cope when people change their names. Even if I technically respect their decision, I feel like it’s a bit of a joke, like I’m humouring a kid who’s decided that his name is now Ultra Spidermonkey.’

  ‘My mother says she doesn’t want to be one of our homeschool teachers any more,’ Belle said. ‘Has anybody moved into Abel and Elliot’s flat downstairs?’

  Madeleine was in the kitchenette, peering through the dark oven glass. She looked up. ‘Seriously?’

  ‘I said, has anybody moved into the flat downstairs?’

  ‘We heard you,’ said Jack. ‘We’re considering the collapse of our homeschooling system. Why doesn’t she want to teach any more?’

  Belle and Jack gazed at one another. A silence formed between them. It widened and stretched. Eventually, Belle spoke.

  ‘She says it’s starting to get boring. So, has anybody moved in or not?’

  ‘No,’ Holly said. ‘The flat downstairs is still empty.’

  6

  Two days later, an email arrived.

  Madeleine was alone in the flat, sitting at the computer, eating a biscuit. She picked out a tiny crumb from between the ‘H’ and the ‘J’, and when she looked up again, the email was there.

  Ariel Peters.

  Who is that? she thought, but she knew the answer.

  Ariel Peters was Princess Jupiter of the Kingdom of Cello.

  Hi Madeleine,

  LOL. I can’t believe I’m hearing from u ‘Cello’ guys again. This is the maddest thing that’s happened to me EVER, only it’s totally not. Cos I think a lot madder things happened in my life only I fried my brains like scrambled eggs and so they’re gone. The memories of mad things, I mean, not my brains. Tho not sure that’s true either, how do u know if your brains are gone or not? Get a scan of some kind I guess. But who can afford that?

  Drugs! Don’t do them!!! Unless you’re already off your face so then you might as well do more.

  OK, I’m happy to be Princess Jupiter again, but if u want me to be a pole dancer/stripper Princess Jupiter? No. I’m taking pole classes at the moment but that’s totally my choice, my body, not yours, and there’s a lot of fitness and ingenuity that goes into pole which you just cannot take for granted.

  You are wicked lucky to be hearing from me cos I waited on the corner of Friedrichstrasse and Unter den Linden for SIX hours!!! Cos I BELIEVED there was a Kingdom of Cello and that I was the Princess Jupiter and I was going to be collected and taken home! LOL. You totally got me. I was so excited about meeting my own castle and my lady-in-waiting (what’s she waiting for? ME, I thought!) and having my own personal royal tattoo artist! (I love getting ink, it feels insane & that was going to be my first royal move: employ my own tattoo artist and get him/her a special wing of the castle, maybe even a castle of his/her own? for his/her equipment and to draw designs esp. for me all day long.)

  Anyhow, v. happy to hear more about your plans for taking me to Cello and my life as a princess, but I am NOT STANDING ON ANY STREET CORNERS MISSING SHIFTS AT WORK AND NEARLY GETTING FIRED AGAIN!!!!

  Best wishes,

  Ariel (Princess Jupiter)

  PS I work at a bar. I live in a room upstairs from the bar. That’s sorta part of my pay. So do you see what I’m saying here? If I lose my job, then i ALSO lose my HOME!!!! & I don’t know anyone else in Berlin, and I don’t even speak German!!! (But I’ve learned a bit since I got here), and not everyone believes me when I say I’m 18 (LOL, cos I’m NOT!!—i don’t think—i’m a lot younger—but can’t really remember), and it’s TOO COLD TO SLEEP ON THE STREETS AT THE MOMENT!! So, just don’t make me nearly lose my job again, OK?

  PPS But you told me about that mad trick where if I squeeze lemon juice into my inner elbow it makes a colourful pattern. And u said it meant I was from the Kingdom of Cello cos that’s the only difference between ‘Cellians’ and ‘Worldians’. Remember?

  So i tried it and it made the colourful pattern! I love it more than I love Comets and Tornadoes, which I totally do, both the cocktails and the actualities. I was gonna get the pattern tattooed there, like a reminder, but then I realised it’d be cheaper just to carry a lemon around.

  PPPS I do the trick all the time now, in the bar, with the lemon and people love it. One lady said I must’ve got struck by lightning once and it’s the residue of light making the pattern. LOL. And NOBODY ELSE CAN DO THE COLOURFUL SPECKLES THING (everyone always tries). So I want to thank you for that. I have no idea how you knew I could do it, but if you know anything else I don’t know about me (eg can I make my ears light up by rubbing watermelon into them?), well, TELL ME!!!! BYEEEE.

  Madeleine gazed at the screen.

  After a moment all she could see were exclamation marks. She looked away. Somewhere, someone was drilling.

  She wrote a reply.

  Dear Princess Jupiter,

  I’m very happy to hear from you, and to hear that you forgive me for sending you to a street corner for six hours while you nearly lost your job. (I THINK you’re saying you forgive me, anyway.) Now I feel guilty about that, and I also feel guilty for writing to you at all, cause maybe it’s given you false hope that I can get you home, and I’m actually sorta useless to you. I’m not in contact with people in Cello any more. You could easily be, like, who even IS she? And what’s th
e POINT of her?

  And you’re right: I don’t know how to help you, but I promise I’ll keep thinking about it.

  And in the meantime, at least I could tell you what I know about you? Maybe I can help trigger your memories?

  I’ve never been to Cello (not properly anyway—I’ve seen glimpses of it), and I’ve only ever met two people from there. One was Elliot Baranski. He lives in a country town called Bonfire in the province of the Farms. He and I were writing to each other through a crack in a parking meter for a long time, before he ‘stumbled’ through to Yorkshire. (‘Stumble’ is a technical term—people fall between Cello and the World sometimes, in situations of absence and strong emotion.) He ended up here in Cambridge for a couple of weeks. He’s gone back now.

  So everything I know about you and Cello comes from my late-night starlit conversations with Elliot. Here’s what I know.

  Your name is Princess Jupiter.

  You disappeared from the penthouse suite at the Harrington Hotel, Ducale, in Golden Coast. Your father is King Cetus, your mother is Queen Lyra. You have a sister, Princess Ko, and two brothers, Prince Chyba and Prince Tippett.

  I think you mostly lived in the White Palace, which is in the Magical North, but you travelled a lot, like to boarding schools and to the different Palaces—I can’t remember what the other palaces were called, but there was a Cardamom Palace in Jagged Edge.

  And finally, no offence, but I remember Elliot once told me that you’re the princess with the reputation. For being wild, out of control and a trouble-maker. I hope you don’t have me executed or something for saying that. I thought it might help. And actually it’s sort of consistent with the identity you’ve created for yourself?

  The only other Cellian I’ve met is Elliot’s dad, Abel Baranski. He used to live downstairs from me and my mum. Actually, he was the first person we met when we came to Cambridge. We were sitting in a café counting our money (not much) and possessions (hardly any, just a sewing machine really) and wondering what to do, when this guy at a nearby table introduced himself (two-day-old stubble, cute accent, slight breathlessness which made him seem sorta vulnerable). He said that he couldn’t help overhearing we had nowhere to live, and that the place above him was currently vacant.