‘Birds aren’t like us, you know. They don’t go beyond.’
Gil moves the crumpled bird between his hands like he’s testing its weight or something. There’s hardly anything to it though, just a bundle of blue feathers, a pair of spindly legs.
‘Why would it do that?’ I ask, not looking at the little body. ‘Why would it fly into your shutters?’
‘She could be sending a sign.’
‘She as in …’
Gil glances at Brook, who’s looking from Gil to me and back again.
‘Dot.’
I tell Gil I didn’t know Dot sent signs. The Books don’t say anything about it.
‘If you think that, you haven’t read your Books properly. Book of Communication, Chapter 6,Verse 6: “Dot loves talking with her creations”.’
All sleepy, Fern goes, ‘That just means us talking to Dot in the gazebo.’
Gil sort of chuckles then, like he can’t believe Fern said that, let alone thought it to begin with.
‘Do you really think she’d ask us to talk to her and never say anything back?’
I totally see Gil’s point.
Dot’s kind. She loves us. It makes complete sense for her to talk to us when you think about it that way. And if she uses signs to do it, well, that’s her prerogative. She created us, she can do what she wants.
‘Okay,’ I say. ‘It’s a sign. So what does it mean?’
Gil stands up. He looks hard at me and says, ‘It’s a wren.’
He tosses the little feathered body and it lands on the fire, making the flames flare and spit. I give this small, sharp scream. I don’t know if it’s because Gil said the bird was a wren, or because he just threw it into the fire. Both, I guess.
For some prenormal reason, I kind of feel Gil’s just hurt me, not the bird. Plus, I’m suddenly getting this picture in my head. Flames. Flames accompanied by a huge, roaring whoosh and a tight sort of feeling in my chest.
‘Wren?’ says Gil. He’s sitting down again now, next to Fern, who already has her head in his lap.
Blaze is kind of hovering on the edge of things, still on the path, not quite a part of the group even though he’s been standing there the whole time.
And me? I’m on the top step, as far away from the bonfire as I can get. Gil tells me to come down but I don’t want to, not with the flames hissing around the broken bird and that picture in my head.
Plus, that prenormal thing with my eyes is happening again. Everything’s going from blurry to sharp, blurry to sharp, until I can’t really see much at all. I wonder if this happens to the others too. I wonder if they can tell it’s happening to me.
‘Coming!’
I go down the stairs, clinging onto the rail. I sort of squat, still a fair way back from the fire.
‘Sit closer,’ Gil has his hands in Fern’s hair, twirling it around one finger.
Brook’s on his side, sprawled full-length on the grass. I wiggle over. I’m shivering. Not from the cold, though. It’s that burning wren and, more than that, Gil’s bonfire itself. The way the flames flicker and move around … it’s like they’re waiting for the first chance they get to swallow me up. How come I never noticed that about fires before?
‘You don’t look very comfortable,’ Gil says to me.
Fern has her head in his lap still. Her eyes are closed and her hair’s all stuck to her cheeks.
I’m not sure what to tell Gil, so I do what I’ve been doing a lot lately. You know, blurt out a whole lot of stuff that sounds all fun and jokey and try to fill the silence. I want to at least sound like me even if I don’t exactly feel it right at this particular moment.
‘I’m supergood! Squatting’s really … nice. You should try it. I can personally recommend it.’
Blaze’s been following the entire conversation between me and Gil, I can tell. Now he leaves the path and comes and squats down next to me.
‘Can I show you something dotly?’
I’m pretty surprised. Blaze is so not the type to initiate things. He never splashes you in the lagoon or throws his arms around you during a really full-on dottrack in the gazebo or anything like that. As far as I know, he’s never hooked up.
‘What, your chub?’
There it is again, the blurting thing. Anyway, Gil and Brook laugh. Fern would have too,if she wasn’t asleep. Not Blaze,though.
‘Yeah, no.’
I think how much easier it’d be to get Blaze if he were more like Jasper or someone. You know, a guy who never takes anything seriously. Someone fun. Someone who wasn’t so sort of intense the whole time.
I sigh. ‘Okay, what then?’
‘A pond.’
‘I have to say, a chub sounds waaaay dotlier. In my experience, anyway.’
And right in the middle of Gil and Brook laughing all over again, something kind of occurs to me. If I went to see this pond Blaze’s talking about, I could get away from the fire. It doesn’t even matter what the pond looks like. I mean, who actually cares?
I get up from my squat and straightaway Blaze does too.
‘But maybe I just haven’t seen the right ponds.’
Brook’s watching me really closely now.
‘If you two want to hook up,’ he says, ‘why not just say so?’
‘We don’t,’ me and Blaze say at the exact same moment.
And if you asked me, I couldn’t even tell you which one of us is louder. So I guess that sorts that out.
‘Enjoy yourselves,’ Gil calls out as I follow Blaze down the path, back across the lawn, away from the huts and the orchard.
I start talking, because it’s superunlikely Blaze is ever going to.
‘So, where exactly is this amazing pond?’
Blaze kind of points with his head but stays pretty much silent until we reach this clump of magnolia trees, all thick with flowers. Blaze shoulders his way through them and I follow him.
Only to stop in front of the plainest, globbiest-looking pond Dot ever created.
‘You brought me that entire way for this?’
‘Didn’t think you wanted to stay.’
Apparently my blurting strategy didn’t work on Blaze. That thing with the wren and the bonfire? I’m pretty sure he noticed. Just like he somehow guessed what was going to happen when I climbed the rocks earlier. Dot only knows how, but he seemed to understand how I’d be feeling even before I did.
Blaze slides his bare feet into the pond, just like at the rockpools. But then guess what happens? He swishes his legs in the water and, I swear to Dot, the pond lights up. Wherever Blaze’s legs move, these little specks of pale green light follow them. When he stops moving, the lights fade away.
‘How in creation …’
‘Little animals.’
Seriously, Blaze says the most prenormal things. I mean, there’s obviously no animals in the pond. It’s the rest of creation that’s teeming with them. Big cats dozing in the sun, deer cropping the grass, butterflies and monkeys chitter-chattering in the trees. Parrots, flamingos, eagles, macaws, snow owls and even wrens, when they’re not smashing into Gil’s shutters. But nothing whatsoever in the pond.
I don’t make a big point about it though. Mostly, I want to try the light thing out for myself. And when I slide my legs into the pond, the water does the exact same thing it did for Blaze. I try with my fingertips and the lights follow them as well. I smile and when I look over at Blaze – guess what? He’s already smiling at me.
‘Cool, hey?’
I’m leaning forward. It’d be so easy for Blaze to push me in, but I’m pretty sure he never thinks about doing that. It’d be totally different if Blaze were some other creation.
Jasper, for example. Jasper would have pushed me into the pond ten times over by now. And I would have been so busy trying to get him back that I wouldn’t have noticed the lights Dot put in the water.
For ages me and Blaze stay like that, trailing our fingers and kicking our legs. I keep on starting to talk but Blaze never really lets a
ny conversation get going. One time he even tells me I don’t have to talk if I don’t want to.
‘I do want to.’
‘If you’re always talking, there’s no time to think.’
Exactly.
Think too hard and you’re going to end up stuck on the things you’d rather forget. Such as the eye blurring thing, or that prenormal trembling in my hands. Feathered bodies in fires. Those things are way better ignored, in my opinion. I guess that’s where me and Blaze are totally different.
At one point Blaze gets up.
‘Where are you going?’
I don’t know why, but I want him to stay near me.
He disappears behind a magnolia tree and I hear the sound of liquid hitting the dirt. For some Blaze-ish reason I guess he feels like he can’t just go in front of me like anyone else would.
When he’s finished, I think he’s going to say we should go back to our huts but, surprise, surprise, he doesn’t. He slides his legs back into the pond and goes on stirring up the lights. Over and over, so mesmerising and peaceful and beautiful I’m starting to wonder if Blaze has a point about being quiet sometimes.
In the end, I’m the first to suggest going to sleep. I’m shaking off my wet arms and legs when Blaze goes, ‘How about here?’
I’d been busy imagining the awesomely soft bed back in my hut. I definitely had not been planning on spending the entire night with Blaze. But now he’s said it, sleeping right here seems sort of okay. So I curl up in the grass and Blaze lies down beside me. Not touching or anything but nearby, definitely.
‘Comfy?’ I ask. ‘I can shift over.’
When I hook up with someone (which is basically the only time I’m ever sleeping beside someone else) I always have to be the last one to say something. Beside me, Blaze’s breathing has already gone all deep and slow.
‘See you in the morning.’
‘Yeah,’ he says. His lifts his hand and rests it on my lower back.
You’re okay, he seems to mean, without actually having to say it.
I tell him, ‘Goodnight.’
In a soft, blurry mumble he adds, ‘Sleep tight.’
And that’s when this cold, precalm feeling starts creeping its way all over me. Even though sleep tight doesn’t mean anything, it really feels like it does. There’s something about that combination of words, but I can’t say what. All I know is, I don’t want Blaze to keep talking.
Even though there’s no way I can know what Blaze is going to say, I know what comes next even before he actually says it.
‘Don’t let the bed bugs bite.’
Then Blaze makes this snuffling sound, which is how I know for sure that he’s asleep.
Not me.
Goodnight, sleep tight, don’t let the beg bugs bite keeps kind of rolling around and around in my head. And suddenly I’m thinking a whole lot of things that make no sense at all.
05
IT’S LIKE LOOKING at pieces of a broken water jug or something. That’s the best way I can describe it. All these fragments tumbling through the air and I can only glimpse each one before it’s gone. Except the fragments aren’t bits of clay or anything like that. Instead they’re images. Pictures inside my head.
I’m sitting on a bed, but it’s not my bed. At least, not the bed in my hut or anyone else’s either. I’m somewhere I’ve never seen before. Which, by the way, is impossible because I’ve been inside every hut in creation. I don’t recognise the bed cover, blue with a pattern of clouds on it. Or the wooden X hanging from the roof with all the coloured balls dangling off it.
A word swims into my head.
Mobile.
Is that what it’s called? How do I know that?
I see other things in the room. A fluffy purple animal with a bit of tongue showing in the corner of its mouth, not moving or anything. Apparently not real.
Rows and rows of what I somehow recognise as books. But they’re not the Books of Dot. They don’t even have screens.
Then it gets even more prenormal. Because next thing I’m looking at is a whole entire person I don’t know. He’s much smaller than any of Dot’s creations. Creations fell from the sky in all different sizes, sure, but there’s not a single one as small as this. As in, this little person is maybe half my height. Perfectly formed, only in miniature. Stunted, I guess you could say. And he’s just sitting all casually beside me in bed.
I reach out to smooth the little creature’s hair but as soon as I flatten one curl another springs up somewhere else. Seriously, it’s major stomach-flop material because I realise I feel something for him, whoever or whatever the creature is.
His hair isn’t even down to his chin, let alone covering his neck, which is the minimum length according to the Books. And the thing about that is, my own hair’s hardly any longer. It’s the usual reddish-brownish colour but it doesn’t spiral down my back the way it should.
That’s not the only way I look different. I’m wearing some kind of sleeveless sungarb and underneath it my skin is totally clear, not a single dotmark, as if I’d never had any to begin with.
Then the little creature cuddles up against me. The image in my head might be impossible but right then it feels completely real too. So real, I can feel a little body all warm and soft against my leg in the fuzzy red sungarb the creature’s wearing.
I see him hand me a book like he wants me to read it to him. There’s a picture on the cover, a fat shape with whirring blades on top.
Hector the Littlest Helicopter.That’s what the book is called.
Then comes a voice.
‘Is Julius asleep yet?’ it calls. It sounds all crisp and efficient, the kind of voice people listen to. When me and the creation hear it, we swap this look.We giggle. The two of us could not be closer.
‘It’s time he was asleep,Viva.’
Even though that’s not my name I’m still one hundred per cent certain it’s me the voice is calling. Somehow the sound’s as familiar to me as a dottrack. I even know who the voice belongs to.
Someone named Mum.
06
I JERK AWAKE, gasping. I say awake because I figure I must have been asleep. The things I saw, those prenormal images, were as dreamlike as it’s possible to get. And just because I’ve never had a dream with my eyes open before doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen. It’s the only way to explain all those impossible, nonexistent things. Miniature creatures and strange beds and someone called Mum calling me the wrong name …
That’s where I stop myself. It’s not even worth thinking about all that stuff because none of it is real. I must have imagined it. Somehow, for whatever reason, I made it all up.
Relief cools my flushed, sweating skin.
I’m still on the ground by the pond, next to Blaze. I feel like shaking him awake. A loose, wild kind of laugh is bubbling up inside me.
Guess what? I want to say. Can you believe what I just dreamed? Isn’t that ridiculous?
But I don’t. I leave Blaze to sleep, curled in on himself the way ferns do when the light fades. Dreams are never as interesting to other people as they are to the person who has them. Better to keep the whole thing to myself. Better, actually, to get away from here, right now.
So I creep past Blaze. All the way through the magnolias and back along the path, I remind myself it isn’t real, it isn’t real. But all the same I’m shaky and way overheated. Back at the huts, the open air is damp and the grass all wet with dew. Fern and Gil and Brook are sprawled out on top of each other near the cooling bonfire. I decide not to wake them up either.
Sleeping would be a relief right now. But even when I’m back in my hut, I don’t drop off the way I usually do. Nowhere near.
The Books are very clear on Dot’s creation. Dot made everything and everything stops at the fringe of trees and there’s nothing more past that except the beyond. Definitely nothing like all those things I saw. But what gets me is the pictures inside my head refuse to fade like dreams should. They keep hanging around, cl
ear as they were the first second I saw them. I end up lying on my bed for ages, staring up at the carved butterflies and the fan on the ceiling, watching the light through my shutters turn from cool silver to the soft grey of early morning. When I can’t stand that any more, I pick up my Books from the table beside my bed. I touch the screen and the text jumps straight to the bit about chosen creations.
I scroll past that and go to Communications, Chapter 6,Verse 6. Dot loves talking with her creations. And like Gil said, what kind of creator would Dot be if she asked us to talk to her but never talked back?
Maybe she didn’t use words, but lying there I’m suddenly pretty certain Gil was right. That wren, it must have been a sign. I guess Dot was trying to prepare me for the dream she was about to send me. That would explain why the two things happened on the same night. Not that I have any idea what it’s all meant to be about.
By the time I finish with the Books, the light on my ceiling’s turned pink. It’s morning, which makes it definitely late enough to go the gazebo and ask Dot if she’d mind giving me some answers.
In my personal opinion, the gazebo’s the dotliest thing ever. Some creations feel closest to Dot in the newfruit grove. For others, it’s when they’re swinging in their hammocks in Dot’s sunshine.
For me though, it’s totally the gazebo. I’ve always loved it there. First off, it’s supergorgeous. Completely white and everything, with walls that are just lattice to let the breeze blow through. On the inside, fixed to the lattice, are these big terracotta planters with flowers spilling over the side. Hanging from the ceiling, billowing, are silky banners with Dot’s picture on them. There’s always a dottrack playing, piped from these little black boxes in all four corners of the ceiling.
The floor’s just grass, but there’s these huge, squishy cushions to lie on, green, purple, raspberry pink and lemon yellow. And obviously, there’s the bubbles. The whole gazebo’s filled with them, which is how our conversations reach Dot all the way out there in the beyond. Whatever we think or say in the gazebo, the bubbles soak up. Then they drift out through the diamond-shaped holes in the lattice, into the fringe then into the sky. We only have to see the bubbles floating through the air to know Dot’s listening to us.
State of Grace Page 3
