The Heartsong of Wonder Quinn

by Kate Gordon

Hollowbeak turned his head to give her a beady stare. Inside, he replied. He hopped his way down the corridor. Students, on their way to class, passed the trio. They gave Mabel sideways, squinty looks. Everyone knew about the pie and everyone knew Ms Gallow had only given Mabel a few lines to write, instead of a proper punishment. They wondered why Mabel had thrown the pie at the ground, and not at Georgiana Kinch.

  Everyone was now suspicious of Mabel Clattersham.

  Mabel didn’t seem to notice the stares, so intent she was on following Hollowbeak.

  As they began climbing the spiral staircase, Wonder felt her belly twist. ‘Hollowbeak,’ she asked. ‘Where are you taking us?’

  The archives, he replied.

  ‘My room?’ Wonder asked, confused. ‘There are no birds up there.’

  There are, replied Hollowbeak. He did not say any more.

  When they reached Wonder’s room, Hollowbeak led them over to the corner. He pointed up with his beak, towards the rafters.

  There, he said. Can you see the nest of starlings?

  Wonder thought of the night before, when she had heard a faint rustling above her. She knew Hollowbeak was telling the truth.

  ‘But how will we get up there?’ she asked him.

  It was Mabel who pointed at the locked filing cabinet. ‘We could climb on that,’ she said. Her eyes sparkled as she peered at Wonder. ‘Maybe we should open it first, though. I know how to pick locks, now. We could open it and look inside.’

  You could do that … said Hollowbeak, casually.

  Wonder began to back away. She shook her head. ‘No!’ she said to Hollowbeak. ‘No. I won’t do that. Not again. You tricked me, Hollowbeak.’

  Hollowbeak said nothing. His stare had a smugness about it.

  ‘You know I can’t do that,’ Wonder hissed. ‘Not ever again. Why would you suggest it? You evil, evil bird.’ She raised her voice. ‘Get out!’ she yelled. ‘Get out of my room now, and never come back. I never want to see you again!’

  Why are you so frightened? he asked. Why are you so frightened of the truth? Hollowbeak stared at her for a moment more. Then he lifted his onyx chin and flew away out the window.

  ‘It’s all right,’ said Mabel, flying to Wonder’s side. ‘It’s all right. I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Wonder.’

  And she held Wonder in her arms.

  She held Wonder.

  The girls remained enfolded together, standing in Wonder’s room that, for a moment, felt much bigger than it truly was.

  Wonder wished to never let go, and she mightn’t, if Mabel hadn’t gently moved away. ‘It’s all right,’ said Mabel, taking a step back. ‘I don’t need to hold the bird. It’s a silly thing. The whole …’ She coughed and placed a hand against her chest. ‘The whole list is a silly thing,’ she finished weakly.

  Mabel wobbled a little bit. Wonder reached out to catch her, but she wasn’t quick enough. Mabel fell to the floor.

  ‘Oh, dillweed!’ Wonder gasped. ‘What’s wrong?’

  Mabel curled into a little ball of bones and softness. She tucked her knobbly knees to her chest and gave a quiet moan. ‘I’m sorry, Wonder. I made you upset. I made you lose your friend.’

  ‘That’s all right,’ Wonder said, stroking her friend’s hair. ‘I have you now.’

  Mabel shook her head. There were tears on her cheeks. ‘I’m not going to be here for long, Wonder.’

  Wonder didn’t want to believe it, but in her heart of hearts she knew it was true. Maybe she had always known. Just like she knew why she could talk to Hollowbeak, and why Mabel believed she could.

  Her mother had told her, once, about what crows really are. And what they mean. And why only some people can see them.

  Hollowbeak was right. Mabel was going to leave her.

  ‘That’s what the list is about, isn’t it?’ she asked, softly. ‘You’re sick. You want to do those things because you might have to leave.’

  ‘They’re the only things I really want to do,’ Mabel whispered. ‘The only things I planned to do, before I came here. That and make a friend. I did that already.’ She smiled up at Wonder. ‘I think I can sit now,’ she said.

  Wonder nodded. Mabel pushed herself up.

  ‘The bird thing is … fine, though.’ She patted Wonder’s arm. ‘It was the least important thing. If you can’t go near the cabinet … for whatever reason.’

  ‘It has my secret in it,’ Wonder said, looking at her friend with prickling eyes. ‘I read it, once and I … I hate even thinking about it. If I don’t think about it, it might not be true. It might not be real.’ She shook her head. ‘It’s a silly thing. I know I won’t see it again if I go near the cabinet but … That’s why I sleep up here. Just to make sure nobody else comes near it and nobody else knows. And it’s ridiculous because nobody ever wants to come here. They never want to see the cabinet because it’s only full of ancient stories and nobody seems to want those any more.’

  ‘It’s all right. Really,’ said Mabel.

  She didn’t ask Wonder’s secret.

  Wonder hoped maybe it was because she was her friend. And friends don’t ask. Friends wait for you to tell.

  But Wonder thought maybe that wasn’t it at all. Maybe, in her heart of hearts, Mabel already knew.

  And maybe that’s what a friend was, actually.

  Someone who already knows.

  The two girls sat together, beneath the rough woollen blanket.

  They knew it was time for lessons – the bell had already clanged. They knew that Ms Gallow would be cross. They knew there would probably be an actual punishment this time.

  Ms Gallow did not abide students missing lessons.

  Wonder and Mabel didn’t care. About Ms Gallow. About lessons. About anything but this.

  This moment. This moment, only.

  They held, between them, inside their clasped-together hands, a baby bird.

  It was the next thing on Mabel’s list – her list of things she meant to do.

  The baby bird was small and warm and so unimaginably fragile. It had a beak as yellow as dandelions and its feathers were black like Hollowbeak’s, save for a fuzzy grey patch on its throat and on its tiny twig legs.

  Its mother waited, anxiously, a foot away, pacing and cheeping soothingly to her baby.

  It’s all right, Hollowbeak assured her, for the twentieth time. You can trust them.

  Wonder looked over at her friend with gratitude. After the way she’d spoken to him, she hadn’t expected him to return, much less come back followed by the mother and the chick.

  She should have known. Hollowbeak never left her. He was her constant. Her safety. He would be with her forever.

  ‘Thank you,’ Mabel whispered to the crow. ‘Can you tell him?’ she asked Wonder. ‘Tell him, thank you?’

  ‘He knows,’ said Wonder. ‘He understands.’

  Mabel took out her piece of paper again. ‘Will you cross out this line?’ she asked Wonder. ‘While I hold Pedro?’

  ‘Who is Pedro?’

  ‘The bird, silly,’ said Mabel, laughing.

  Wonder took Mabel’s list. It was warm, from being in her pocket.

  Steal something.

  Leap into the sky.

  Touch a star.

  Make someone feel pure happiness.

  Throw a pie.

  And now …

  Wonder crossed out the second-last item:

  Hold a baby bird.

  ‘Only one more to go,’ she said to her friend.

  Break someone’s heart.

  Mabel nodded, blinking quickly. She looked down at the chick, stroked its soft head. It looked up at her, calmly. It knew she was good. ‘It’s so new,’ she whispered. ‘So perfectly new.’

  Wonder reached over with a crooked finger and touched the small bird’s chest. She could fe
el its heart, beating so quickly. So few beats, she thought. So few beats before the last one and they are going so quickly already.

  ‘My mother and father want to take me away,’ Mabel said, to Wonder. ‘To a hospital. I don’t want to go away. I want to keep coming to school. I want to stay with you a little while longer.’

  Wonder nodded. ‘I want that, too. But’ – she gestured at the list – ‘there’s only one more thing. Does that mean …’

  Mabel grinned, her eyes shining. ‘There is another thing, also,’ she said. ‘It isn’t on the list.’

  ‘Why?’

  Mabel sighed. ‘I didn’t know … I didn’t know how far I’d get … how I would … be. I didn’t know if I could. And I didn’t want to fail.’

  ‘What is it?’

  Again, like she had with the name of Georgiana’s sweetheart, Mabel leaned across to Wonder and whispered warm words in her ear.

  ‘But you’d need to stay here at night-time,’ Wonder said. ‘Wouldn’t your parents worry?’

  ‘Don’t you mind about them,’ Mabel said. ‘Will you do it with me?’

  Wonder nodded. ‘Anything,’ she breathed. ‘I’d do anything for you.’

  Mabel smiled. ‘I think I’d like to add to my poem now,’ she said.

  ‘Is it a poem about me?’ Wonder asked, her eyes opening wide.

  Mabel leaned her head to one side. ‘Well,’ she said, softly, ‘I thought it was a poem about me, but perhaps it’s about you, too. I started it when we were being punished, and then I wrote some more the next time we were being punished, but it never felt quite finished, and … I like to finish things. Finishing things feels more urgent, now. More urgent by the day. Do you have paper?’

  Wonder gave Mabel a piece of paper and Mabel gave Pedro to Wonder. And the mother bird – who was much braver than her size gave her cause at all to be – bobbed over to Wonder and cheeped, reproachfully.

  Wonder was torn, for a moment. Should she give Pedro back to his mother, or was he happier here, in her hands?

  In the end, Hollowbeak nudged her and said, Go on. He’s small. He needs his mother’s love.

  Wonder felt a quick, sharp pain in her chest when he said that. But she passed Pedro back to his mother and his mother nudged him, protectively, with her beak, and they both seemed so happy that Wonder knew she had done the right thing. But she could still feel the shape of Pedro in her hands.

  When Mabel finished writing, Wonder asked to read the poem, but Mabel shook her head.

  ‘Not yet,’ she said.

  And then she said, ‘But very soon, I think.’

  Hollowbeak sat in the silver birch tree on a branch as slender as a bone.

  As Hollowbeak watched, two girls ran through the darkness, shouting.

  As Hollowbeak watched, the moonlight turned them both into stars.

  As Hollowbeak watched, on their bare arms, tiny hairs stood on end. Even though one of them couldn’t feel the cold. Even though one of them was no longer scared of anything.

  Hollowbeak knew that Wonder was frightened and wished he could swoop down and pluck out her fear as if it were a worm.

  He loved Wonder and did not want her heart to break. Even though he had known, all along, that it would. Even though he knew he was right, he hadn’t wanted to be.

  And now, he knew there was nothing he could do.

  The two girls wore only their short-sleeved nightdresses, so thin and flimsy that they might have been wearing nothing at all. When Hollowbeak had asked Wonder why Mabel wanted to do this – to run in the moonlight in only her nightclothes – Wonder had replied, ‘Her mother and father never let her out at night. Her mother and father never let her run. She wants to be free.’

  Hollowbeak felt a heavy stone inside his heart when Wonder said that. Because freedom is wonderful. Freedom is life, but it is also dangerous. It seemed, to Hollowbeak, that freedom – this time – was the thing that would break everything.

  He wanted to forbid Wonder from doing this. He wanted to cage her, clip her wings, yell, NO, Wonder! and tell her of his fears … But he knew, somehow, that doing that would mean losing her forever.

  He knew that Wonder had to fly.

  And perhaps … perhaps this was the only way she could. Sometimes a twig has to break to force a bird to find their wings.

  Hollowbeak sighed, then, the way he often did. He sighed for what he used to be. He sighed for what he could have been, if the fire hadn’t eaten everything. What he and Wonder could have been. He used to shine so brightly, and now he was a strange, bent, twisted thing, but he loved her now as much as he always had.

  Probably more.

  As Hollowbeak watched, the two girls reached the limits of the grounds of Direleafe Hall.

  He heard one of them – the one that wheezed and coughed and choked – cry out as best as her lungs could manage: ‘I am free!’

  And then, as Hollowbeak watched, she fell to the ground. To the soft, dewy, emerald grass.

  And Hollowbeak heard Wonder howling.

  And his heart did break, then. It broke for his darling girl.

  In her tiny cottage behind Direleafe Hall, Ms Gallow heard Wonder howling, too.

  It was the first time she’d ever heard her.

  It would be the only time.

  She dropped her knitting and put down her cup. She ran from her cottage, leaving the door wide open. She ran and ran and ran until she found the source of the sound.

  There, she found a small, pale girl lying in the moonlight, shining like a star.

  And her head, she noticed, was at a strange sort of angle. Almost as if it were being cradled in the arms of someone else.

  But there was nobody there.

  She breathed, for a little while. Small breaths – shallow and shuddering and so fragile, like the breaths of that baby bird.

  And Wonder felt like the mother of the baby bird. So frightened and so protective and so full of love, and that was the thing, wasn’t it? Love was so, so frightening. Because love was loss.

  But she breathed, for a little while longer.

  She breathed, while Ms Gallow scooped her up and ran with her to Direleafe Hall.

  She breathed, while the doctors came running, with their brown leather bags, stethoscopes flying behind them, reminding Wonder of the iron chain that still tethered her heart to Mabel’s.

  She breathed, while they set her down on the floor and pressed their mouths to hers and pushed on her small, bony chest and yelled words Wonder did not understand.

  And Wonder wanted to tell them to stop because they would crack her bones, surely. They would crack her right open. And she knew that the clockwork inside Mabel Clattersham was broken, anyway, and the dance was ending.

  She wished she could pick Mabel up and dance with her until it ended, because Mabel would have liked that.

  Mabel liked to dance.

  But Wonder could only watch.

  And she watched until Mabel did not breathe any more.

  And it was only then that she left her, because she wasn’t leaving at all.

  Because Mabel had already gone.

  Wonder Quinn and Hollowbeak sat together on the roof of Direleafe Hall. Above them, the sky was stormy. The clouds seemed to contain an impossible ocean of unshed rain. It felt as if they might, at any moment, collapse under their own weight and fall down on the roof of Direleafe Hall and smash everything to pieces.

  And this seemed entirely right. Entirely just.

  It seemed, to Wonder, a marvel that the whole world hadn’t broken apart already.

  Why were there still girls down there? Laughing, playing, running, breathing? Why was Georgiana Kinch down there, existing?

  It wasn’t right that the world continued when Mabel Clattersham did not.

  Wonder reached into her pocket and pulled out a pie
ce of paper. It wasn’t the list – that did not matter any more. Perhaps it never had. It was not Georgiana’s love letter.

  It was another piece of paper, filled to the edges with small, elegant letters, made by Mabel Clattersham’s small, pale hand.

  It was Mabel’s poem.

  She had finished it.

  Life is too tiny

  For lines,

  For boxes,

  For smallness …

  Life is too enormous

  For small people like me

  To make even a tiny mark on it.

  But a bird, flying through the clouds,

  Makes no mark on the earth and yet,

  Is happy,

  Is free,

  And it looks, when you see it next to a star,

  The very same size.

  I am like a bird.

  I am happy now.

  I am free.

  And so is Wonder.

  Wonder is more a bird than I will ever be.

  Wonder deserves the whole universe.

  I see her.

  I love her.

  Wonder deserves the sky.

  She made a mark on me.

  She gave me a full stop,

  Perfectly round and whole.

  I don’t know if I made a mark on her.

  I don’t know if I gave her all she deserved.

  But she gave me everything.

  She gave me everything I needed.

  She gave me my ending.

  She is my Wonder.

  The Wonder of my life.

  And when she shines beside me,

  I am infinite.

  When we fly together, to the stars,

  We are infinite.

  ‘She did make a mark,’ Wonder told Hollowbeak, as she folded the paper for the hundredth time and for the hundredth time slipped it back into her pocket. ‘She made a mark like an earthquake makes a mark. Why could she not see that?’

  Perhaps that is the beauty of humans, Hollowbeak said. You make marks as big as earthquakes in the lives of those who love you, but you disappear without a trace. You were here and you were not here, all at once.