by Kaye Chazan
The End
What Aelister Found Here
By Kaye Chazan
4 June, Year of Our Lord 1888
The boy has managed, so far, to displace himself four meters off the ground. For his effort, he has earned himself one skinned knee and two raw palms, a magnificent rip in his short trousers, bark- and leaf-stains worthy of only the most daring forester, and a bruise on his temple that will blossom, in a few hours, into the shape of a hedgehog. The venture has cost him his pocket-handkerchief and two of the smooth, princely rocks he had been carrying in that same pocket, but perhaps he will find them when he decides to come down from the tree.
If, rather—if he decides to come down from the tree.
There is a certain difficulty in proceeding without a referent for the boy; after all, to go on with only epithets would prove a trial for author and audience alike. But said difficulty lies in that, while the boy’s parents have given him names—three, in fact—the boy insists that none of these are correct, and yet cannot come up with any alternative means of address that feels as appropriate as one’s true name. So let us proceed, and call him Aelister, because of all the referents the boy himself has come up with, this one displeases him the least. There is a mystery in it, and a Greek-ness (and the boy, before he was expelled from school, had excelled in Greek), and, by the accounts of all who hear it, an uniqueness he prizes above all else. No other boy he knows is called Aelister: therefore, if not precisely optimal, the name is at least suitable.
So Aelister, as I have explained, is four meters up a tree and counting. Perhaps it is strange of him to retreat vertically, as such, when he could more easily run away on the horizontal grass with no threat of gravity. Aelister does not think it strange at all now, but might if he dwelled on the matter. His concerns are, in short order, escaping the wrath of his mother when she receives the notice of Aelister’s expulsion from school, and even escaping this world entirely, which altogether feels like a dress shoe for a foot two years younger and smaller. The fact of the matter is, Aelister has not for a moment considered up an invalid direction, not for one moment in his twelve years living, and now is no time to change.
Besides, it’s not as if his mother or the servants can catch him, if he makes it to the top of this tree.
Six sturdy boughs higher, and a considerable amount of effort later, Aelister begins to wonder just how tall the tree grows. He has climbed this tree before, and thought, like all the other trees on his family’s property, it would get smaller as he grew. This one seems to go up and up forever, and as he stops to rest and wraps himself around the thinning trunk, he first looks down. Nausea tangles through him like vines up a fence, and he steadies himself, focuses on a shape in the grass. There is a perfectly ordinary rabbit sitting pert and unmolested on the protruding roots of the tree. It looks up at Aelister, then bows its little head to bat at its shapely whiskers.
“I say,” Aelister asks of the beast, “I don’t suppose you know how much farther it is to the top of the tree?”
The rabbit, predictably, says nothing.
It is petty and cruel of Aelister, but he is, after all, a boy of twelve years: he grabs a fistful of the tree’s sharp nuts and hurls them down at the rabbit. His aim is not particularly good but his strength and his anger are prodigious, and between the rain of nuts and his shrieking—“Talk, damn you! I know you can talk!”—he spooks the rabbit off, and tears more twigs and nuts off the tree and throws them. “You’re supposed to talk to me!”
Now, gravity, as laws go, is rather vindictive in its consistency. While there is a scientific explanation for this, owing much to the related physical concepts of friction and reaction, suffice it to say that it is unwise to exert a great amount of directional force when one is perched up high and has little to brace one’s feet against. So, in the spirit of gravitational vindictiveness, Aelister overbalances and falls out of the tree, hitting several branches on the way down.
From a short distance off, the rabbit watches, unperturbed.
Three places,” Aelister’s mother proclaims, as the doctor doubtless did before her. “Broken in three places, and on top of the money we’ll never be getting back from your school, not to mention what it will take to get another to let you in—I hope you know just what you’re wasting, child.”
“My time,” Aelister says, though it is a lie: He enjoyed some parts of school a great deal, like the numbers and the Greek and the parts where he and the other boys read plays aloud in class, though the teacher never called on him enough. “My time and my money.”
“Your father’s money.”
“Which he left to me,” Aelister makes quite clear, “and I can do whatever I like with it, and I don’t like going to a stupid school where they don’t teach me anything worth my time!”
Aelister’s mother slaps him, despite that he is already injured, and she yells at him by all three of his given names, none of which are Aelister. Aelister shouts back, more because he is in pain than anything else, but you know how these fights go (as you have doubtless had at least one in your life, if you are old enough to read this), and I will not trouble you with the details. Suffice it to say that the row results in Aelister locked in his room without supper, never mind the doctor’s orders to feed him well so that his broken bones will set faster.
Eight hours later, Aelister is climbing again, but this time the direction, though vertical, is down. As running away goes, Aelister has been rather sensible about it: He has had almost a good night’s sleep, and has brought all the money he could find in his room, and has worn good traveling clothes. He has, in fact, given a great deal of thought to running away, since no place he’s known has ever felt like somewhere he wanted to stay. Thus, however maudlin, his dwelling on escape has proven helpful, now that he has finally decided to try.
It is difficult going, with the use of only one arm, but down, as always, is easier than up. He makes it to the grass without hitting his broken arm on the scaffolding, and runs off without a moment to spare. The road that runs by his house leads to the nearest train station, and Aelister thinks that, since he has taken the train to Manchester before, he can certainly take the train to London instead.
It takes him an hour walking, since none of the passing carriages stop to carry him along. Just as well, thinks Aelister, since if they stopped, I’d have to tell them where I’m coming from, and they’d try to change where I’m going.
“And where are you going?” the ticket-seller at the train station asks.
“London, please,” Aelister says, pushing his money forward through the little cage they keep ticket-sellers in.
“Only you, lad?”
“Yes.” He thinks up a lie of the sort he’s considered for years in the dark. “My parents are sending me away to stay with my aunt.”
“Safe travels to you, then,” the ticket-seller says, and slides his tickets out of the cage.
Aboard the train, it is more crowded than Aelister expected: He finds himself in the company of some rather boisterous old ladies in terrifying hats, framed with silver mice running rampant through shimmering silk flowers, or feathers in colors so bright as to doom a bird as soon as it took flight. They pinch his cheeks and call him a dear and tell him he oughtn’t be so fretful about the journey (not that Aelister thought himself fretful at all), that London is perfectly lovely in summer, and the rain not nearly so dreadful as it is out here in the country.
“But it is dreadful,” says the one with the largest feathers, which flop about in wide ostrich arcs, “with the gutters all flooded, and all that filth just washing along. Rots the cobblestones, it does. You’ll be on the watch for that, won’t you, little lamb? Mustn’t go out playing in suchlike weather!”
“Too true, too true,” says the one with her hat-feathers peaked like a predator’s, curved cruelly but rather short. “It’s meddling about in the dark and the rain that’s trouble for the likes of you. Poor dears. You just make sure you’re never about after dark.
There may not be bears and badgers and dragons walking those streets, but it’s worse, far worse, when you can’t tell a villain from a chimney sweep.”
“For certain,” says the one with the silver mice—and a face like a mouse herself, Aelister thinks, with wrinkles for whiskers and a flat button nose. “But never fear, child. Never you mind the sad tales we tell. Buck up, sweet. There’s trials enough for you to find in happier times. Just pray the summer’s bright and the days are long—oh, dear. Have you a pocket-handkerchief? Mustn’t walk into the city with the dirt of the countryside on your face, now, mustn’t we?” She proceeds to wipe down Aelister’s face with her own linen and the rough pad of her thumb, then sees to powdering her own.
For what little remains of the ride, Aelister stares out the window. It is not like the train to Manchester: very little moves on the moor or the riverbank, neither fish nor fowl nor fauna.
But upon arrival at Euston Railway Station, there is so much more to see. The iron beams crisscross overhead, and the sun bears down between them, casting thick grey shadows every other step. Once the good ladies are distracted in search of their luggage, Aelister runs off as if there is, truly, someone he ought to meet. The thoroughfare is so crowded that either he runs the risk of bashing his broken arm into someone’s bustle, or cannot proceed very quickly at all. A crowd runs its own traffic, he thinks, but is thankful, at least to be so very small in comparison to the adults.
Once out on the streets, though, he feels barely three inches high.
The rail station opens onto a bright cobbled street, thick with hansoms that trail each other like great lost ducks, with shining cabbies for their bills and the most despondent horses Aelister has ever seen. The heat of the day is oppressive and threatening rain, so Aelister keeps to the shaded side of the street and walks, as woodcraft would have it, south. Three inches high indeed! For in a city such as this, with towers and bridges and stones that hide as many bones as secrets, there is enough power in London’s gravel blood to make even the greatest man feel small.
As such, and in keeping with the hubbub of the teatime rush, Aelister is bumped, prodded, tripped from the curb to the cobblestones, nearly flung into an unlit streetlamp, and told, all through, to watch where he is going. What a pity for him, I should think, walking hunched over his arm so, and so used to the slow ease of dirt roadsides and school halls.
It is no small wonder, then, that he finds himself shoved through the open door of a bakery just as the baker is letting the cat out. “Shoo,” she says, and other filthy things not fit for print. “Go on, you, I’ll have no more false mousing out of you today!—oh, dearie me, what have we here?”
Aelister thinks, clearly and somewhat hungrily, that he can at the least settle down, not that anyone is looking for him here. He rifles through his pockets for some of his money and says, “I’ve not had anything to eat yet today, ma’am—have you any bread to spare?”
“Oh, of course, dearie, if’n you’re paying!” (Really, it was difficult for Aelister to understand precisely what the baker said, being as it was Irish and Cockney all at once, but let it be rendered clear here in print.) She claps her thick, rough hand on his shoulder, which leaves a white print of flour on his jacket, and seats him right up at the counter. “Right queer of you to have coin to spare and nothing to eat ’til tea. And how did you break your arm, then?”
“I fell from a tree,” Aelister says, without time to think of a lie.
“Oh, in one of the parks, right? Well, no wonder, did someone send you to bed without supper, and no breakfast when you woke? I’d do the same to my own boy, if’n he scared me to the devil like you! But of course I can’t fault you coming in here and buying your own bread, though dearie, if I was your mother, I’d box your ears if you didn’t buy me something nice to say you’re sorry for skinning a cat’s own lives off my heart!”
Now, while he is not, by most parental definitions, a good boy, Aelister doesn’t think himself heartless. But despite the long walk and longer train ride and the bustle of his arrival in London, Aelister has not given much thought to his mother since setting out. On the one hand, he does not think of his running away as spiting her, which is rather decent of him. But on the other, now that he does consider her, he is more afraid for what she will do to him than for what he assuredly has done to her.
“She doesn’t care much for cakes,” he says, which is true. “I may buy her a flower,” he adds, which isn’t. “One that sings something nice.”
“Oh,” the baker says, “such a good boy you are,” and she makes a sweep of her sagging arm to spread extra butter on his bread.
King’s Cross Station looms even larger than Euston, and even as the buildings grow and grow, Aelister cannot help but see it as more of a trap over a gaping hole in the ground. He turns away and sets off south again and now a little west, keeping closer to the shadows this time and walking faster now that he knows he should. He’s heard of some of the places he’s passing, the toy stores and sweet shops and things for fancy ladies, the gossip of the older boys in school. He oughtn’t think about school, he decides, considering he’s never going back, and he’ll never see those boring people again.
And then along the way, the stores taper off into theatres and pubs and strange buildings with the stairs on the outside. Music spills out of the doors, and smoke, thick enough that Aelister trips and coughs from it, and when he ducks his head to hide the bad air, he bows right into the splash of a cab-horse in the gutter. “Watch where you’re going!” the cabbies shout, and the people on the curb as well, and Aelister thinks, Then take those daft blinders off your horse so he can watch, too. But he doesn’t say it aloud, mostly because he’s coughing. He reels, as if he’s ill, and the crowd on the street grows far too thick, but the storefronts here are just as thick and blocked.
There, he espies, an alley, and ducks in, minding his feet in the filth. He’s not alone, he sees—there is a rather tall and hard-faced lady with thick face-paint and what must be a wig, for no real hair could be that shade of pink—but at least he can breathe, and rub at his arm, which has gotten rather sore from being knocked about so.
The tall woman lights up a pipe. “And who are you, lad?” she asks, amused and startled and—Aelister thinks—Scottish. Her voice is much deeper than any woman’s voice Aelister’s ever heard. He thinks it must be the pipe-smoke.
“—I don’t know, ma’am,” Aelister says.
“The lad doesnae ken who he is!” the woman laughs, “Well, that, you’ll have to explain.”
“I mean it’s none of your business, ma’am.”
“What, who you are? You’re right, but it isnae your business, then?”
“I suppose,” Aelister says. The pipe has a sweet smell, or perhaps it is the woman’s costume, which, like the excessively pink wig, must be a costume, for it is right out of a faery-tale, with a long glittering train that the woman holds draped over one arm so that her petticoats—and trousers?—show clean and white. “I think you ought to tell me who you are first.”
“What, you couldnae guess from the gown? I’m the wicked stepmother.”
“But I don’t need a stepmother, ma’am.”
The woman seems to find that wildly funny, for she nearly drops her pipe and leans against the wall, almost as if she’s fainting. “Are you sure? You could play a bonny Cinderella. By those trou, you have the legs for it.”
“And what does Cinderella need good legs for?”
“Wearing glass shoes.”
“But you can’t run very far in glass shoes.”
“Of course not, that’s why they fall off. Don’t tell me you dinnae ken the story, lad.”
“I would be lying if I said I did, ma’am.”
“Well, say you did, and we’ll take that for an audition, won’t we, lad?”
“With all due respect, ma’am, I’m not sure what I’m auditioning for.”
“With all due respect, lad, I’m no one’s ma’am.”
Ael
ister takes a closer look, and sees the sharp lines on the woman’s made-up face. Oh! he thinks, rather clearly for such an inarticulate thought, and then, oh, dear. “I am sure you have a Cinderella already—sir.”
“I’m no one’s laird either, but that’s a respect more due,” the stepmother—or rather, the Actor—says, and tips out what’s left in his pipe. “I mean it though, if you’re looking for work—though I dinnae mark you can pull in the curtains with only one arm like that. It wouldnae be the first time we’ve helped a lad out.”
Had Aelister been any other boy, he might have jumped at the chance. But honestly, the ease with which this Actor has fooled him has left Aelister rather embarrassed, and hot behind his ears. He is not sure what he says, but it comes out a stammer, and his hasty bow is sloppy and fretful as he backs up into the street, cradling his broken arm close so that no one bumps into it this time.
He swears he can hear the Actor laughing all the way to Covent Garden.
