Alma (2 page)

Penmanship began with a rustling of paper and scraping of shoes on the floorboards as the pupils settled down to work. Gripping her pencil the way she had been taught, Alma started with a row of capital
L’s
, the first letter to practise on Thursdays. Then a line of lowercase
l’s
. She tried to make all the loops exactly the same size. As she worked, she hardly noticed Miss McAllister and the visitor moving slowly up and down the aisles. She had reached
R
when they stopped beside her desk. She looked up. The visitor smiled. She had a round face and a space between her two front teeth.

“Keep working, Alma,” Miss McAllister said quietly. “Don’t let us disturb you.”

Alma bent back to her foolscap. The two women murmured quietly behind her, then moved on to the next desk, Louise Arsenault’s. Louise was Miss McAllister’s pet, and, although she knew she shouldn’t, Alma resented Louise’s new dress and shoes, and the covey of friends who followed her everywhere, chattering like sparrows and nodding when Louise spoke. The murmuring began again. Alma heard, “Actually, I think I’d prefer …” from the stranger before she fixed her concentration on her handwriting, carefully filling a line with
w
’s, her favourite letter.

She turned the foolscap over and began a new line. She lost herself in the loops and curves of letters, the sharp clean smell of the blue ink, until she heard Miss McAllister announce that it was time for art. When she looked up, the visitor had gone.

The bell sounded at the end of the day, and Alma and Louise were assigned to collect the crayons and coloured pencils and put them in the wooden boxes in the cupboard. They were
still sorting the crayons into colours when the other students filed quietly out of the room, free again until the morning.

Miss McAllister cleaned the boards with a dusty cloth, wiping up and down in long sweeps, making the bow of the smock she wore wiggle and jump at her waist. She took up a piece of white chalk and, in the top right-hand corner of the board, wrote the date for the next day: Friday, October 7, 1932. Then she examined the crayons collected by Alma and Louise. She picked out a dozen pieces worn down so badly that the paper wrapping had disappeared, so small they could hardly be held.

“You may discard these in the wastebasket, Alma.”

Alma cupped her hands and held them out to receive the waxy bits of crayon.

And then, without thinking, she closed her hands, dividing the collection of crayons into two. One handful plinked and clattered into the tin wastebasket beside Miss McAllister’s desk, the other she slipped into a pocket.

She held her breath. Had Miss McAllister noticed? But the teacher was tidying the spellers on the top row of the bookshelf, her back to Alma. Worse, did Louise see me
pocket the crayons? She would love a chance to tell on me. But Louise was walking to the cloakroom, humming tunelessly.

Alma’s heart bumped in her chest as she said goodbye to her teacher and followed Louise, walking a little faster than usual.

A
lma had just made the tea and was setting the kitchen table when her mother burst through the inside door. The “outside door” gave onto the alley. The “inside door” connected to the Liffey Pub’s ground-level storage rooms. The pub itself was on the second floor, right above them.

Clara pushed the door closed and locked it. “I’m back,” she said, “but I have to shove off again in a few minutes. It’s a madhouse up there this evening.”

On the small table, next to the two mismatched dinner plates that Alma had set out, she placed a bundle wrapped in newspaper that reeked of fish and cooking oil. Cod and chips,
Alma thought, snatched from the kitchen when Conor wasn’t looking. Conor was her mother’s boss and the owner of the Liffey Pub. He rented the three-room apartment to Alma’s mother.

Clara wiped strands of hair from her forehead with the back of her wrist and sat down. She opened the newspaper and used her fingers to divide the wilted french fries and pieces of battered, deep-fried cod between the two plates. Alma wrinkled her nose.

“None of your growling,” Clara said. “It’s still pretty warm. Put some malt vinegar on it to cut the grease.”

Alma hadn’t meant to grumble about the supper. It was all right. She knew her mother worked hard, clearing the tables in the pub, piling the dishes and soiled napkins, the cups and beer glasses into big tubs on a trolley, then pushing the trolley into the kitchen and unloading the dishes into the sink. It was the lowest job in the Liffey Pub. Her mother hoped to be promoted to waitress or barmaid some time. But it was low season now. The tourists had gone, and Clara’s hours had been cut to two days a week as well as Friday and Saturday nights.

Alma sprinkled the fragrant amber vinegar onto her chips. She added salt and pepper. She
used her fork to cut the cod into bite-size pieces, then halved each french fry before she began to eat.

Her mother ate her supper quickly. She was constantly afraid of losing her job. They had moved three times, unable to pay rent, before Clara had been hired on at the Liffey and offered the tiny apartment. Last spring, knowing that her hours would be cut in the fall, she had found a part-time position at the library in the square two blocks away.

Setting down her cup, Alma’s mother said, “Your teacher called today.”

Alma’s fork with half a french fry pinned on the end froze in mid-air.

There was a pounding on the inside door. “Clara, we need you!”

“Quit your roaring—I’ll be along in a minute,” Clara grumbled too low for her boss to hear. “I’ll tell you about it later,” she said to Alma, rising and taking her plate and cutlery to the sideboard beside the sink. “Coming, Conor!”

Alma couldn’t move. Miss McAllister knew! Alma was a thief, and now she’d been caught. She thought of the crayon ends in the tin box beside her books. What would happen now?

“Relax, dear,” Clara said, pushing her chair against the table. “You’ve gone pale as a haunt. It’s good news this time.”

She kissed Alma on her forehead and pulled open the inside door. “Remember to put the latch on behind me.” And she disappeared.

Alma sat where she was. How could it be good news? Was Miss McAllister toying with her? Being cruel? Miss McAllister was strict, and sometimes at the end of the day she was grumpy, but never cruel. Perhaps she hadn’t been phoning about the crayons, perhaps it was something else. But what?

Alma heated water in the kettle, then washed the dishes in the sink under the window that looked out on the alley. She worked slowly, anticipating the moment she would curl up on the couch in her room and lose herself in a book. She dried the plates and tea mugs and cutlery and put them away. How nice it would be if all the dishes had the same pattern, if the cutlery was heavy sterling, if there was a proper milk jug and a proper sugar bowl instead of a chipped teacup with a tarnished spoon. Alma wiped the table down with the dishcloth, swept the plank floor and put the broom and dustpan behind the
curtain that hid the cubbyhole where coats were hung.

When she had filled the kettle again and set out the tea things for her mother’s return after midnight, she turned on the night light beside the toaster, switched off the overhead bulb, checked the locks on the inside and outside doors and left the kitchen.

Alma’s room was also the sitting room. There were a couch, which pulled out to a bed, and an easy chair with a threadbare rug between. Under the window was a bookshelf made of bricks and boards. The top shelf held books borrowed from the library, along with a cookie tin in which Alma kept important things, like the small pocket knife she had found in the alley last spring, a pencil sharpener, paper clips, a brooch with the pin broken off—and, recently, almost a dozen crayon stubs of different colours. Alma thought again about the phone call from Miss McAllister and wondered if she should throw the crayons away. Reminding herself that her mother had said the call was good news, she decided to wait.

The bottom shelf was given over to Alma’s own books. Alma’s mother had read to her
almost every night when Alma was little. She had encouraged Alma to get her library card as soon as she was old enough, but drew the line at buying new books.

“It’s not a waste of money, exactly,” Clara had said, “but it’s cash we can ill afford.”

But once in a while she would buy Alma books at the Turnaround, a used book store on Reedbank Road, and so there was a row of picture books and novels on the bottom shelf—the
The Rianna Chronicles, Hallsaga, Lords of the Marshlands
—some a little the worse for wear, but hers to reread whenever she liked. The honoured place on the row was given to the Centreworld Trilogy and the Alterworld Series of four books, all by RR Hawkins. They were Alma’s favourites. She treasured them most because of their stories and because they were a matched set with real cloth covers, scuffed to be sure, and each with
DISCARD
stamped on the inside of the cover—Alma’s mother had got her hands on them before they ended up on the “For Sale” table at the library—but each with RRH inscribed in golden Gothic letters just under the laurel insignia on the spine. They were the best of the best books Alma had ever read.

Whenever she reached the final page of a story she particularly enjoyed, Alma would savour every word, linger over each sentence, reluctant to reach the end. She would close the book and slowly turn it over in her hands, run her fingers along the spine, read the words on the cover once again.

Sometimes Alma wished that they would put the author’s phone number in the book, on the page near the front that told the copyright date, so she could call and say how much she liked the story and ask the questions that overwhelmed her when she reached the end. Where do you get your ideas? Is the tale based on your life? Are the characters in the story like people you know? How did you make everything so
real?
But Alma would never have the courage to telephone a real author. She’d be tongue-tied. She’d be embarrassed and utter stuttering apologies for wasting the author’s time. She’d be frightened the author would be angry at her for disturbing him.

There were some stories, though, that captivated Alma so completely she felt that, if she ever did meet the author, it would ruin everything, diminish the enchanted state in which she found herself and which she would prolong as much as she could. At these times, Alma felt
that the story was hers, that, without
being
the characters in the story, she was still part of the narrative and it was part of her—so deeply that, if a teacher asked her why she liked the story she’d be able to say, “I didn’t like it; I loved it!” and that would be all.

One of the strange things about the magic of books and stories, Alma thought, was that, when she had to write a book report for school, she would always choose a story she hadn’t liked very much. It was easier to talk about. But if the tale drew her in and swept her away and made her a willing captive for as long as the story lasted, she not only couldn’t talk about it, she didn’t want to. Somehow, answering questions about main characters and crises and themes wrecked the magic, like breaking a china vase to see what the inside looked like.

RR Hawkins was one of the writers Alma wished she could meet or call up on the telephone—even though she would probably trip over her words. There were so many questions she would ask: about the language Hawkins had created for the Alterworlders to speak, about the invented places, like the Craggy Mountains or the Plains of Poison Grasses; the maps that showed mountains and raging rivers,
wide expanses of lake and sea and vast arid plains. About Centreworld and the creatures who lived there, the Renrens, who were just like people except their skin was a silvery scaled covering, and the Wairens, who used magic and nasty wiles to take over Centreworld and turn it to their evil designs. About how to become an author. Alma had decided long before that writing would be her vocation.

Early in her reading of Hawkins’s stories, Alma had pictured the writer as middle-aged, wearing a rumpled tweed jacket with leather patches at the elbows, with a floppy red bow tie, not a normal one, because he was creative and a little outlandish. He’d have a round face with rosy cheeks and a friendly smile and blue eyes twinkling behind wire-framed spectacles, and a domed forehead because his brain was so big. Bet he’s so smart people have trouble understanding what he says, Alma thought. Bet he memorized the dictionary when he was in school. She guessed at his names: Robert Randall. Rupert Rudolph. Richard Reinhart.

As soon as she finished the seventh RRH novel—it was just after school had let out last summer—Alma had paid a visit to the Turnaround. It was a shabby, narrow shop with
an antique spinning wheel in the front window. Alma had pushed open the door with the little bell overhead and approached the grey-haired man who had somehow made his way to the top of a ladder that stretched to the shelves near the ceiling.

“G’day,” he had said, placing a thick book on the shelf.

“Hello,” Alma said.

“Kin I do for you?” the man asked over his shoulder as he crept down the ladder. Alma wasn’t sure if it was the ladder or his bones creaking.

“Do you have any books by RR Hawkins?” she asked.

The clerk scratched his head. “Hmm. Believe I’ve heard the name.” He led her to the wall of books and ran his finger along titles under H. “There’s six of them here.”

“Oh,” Alma replied, scanning the titles. “I have those. And a seventh. I was looking for something else.”

“Don’t know if there’s any more,” the man said, pushing his hands into the pockets of his cardigan as if he wanted to stretch the garment to his knees. “But, to be sure, let’s take a look. Come this way.”

He led Alma down one of the two narrow aisles between tables piled with books to a counter at the back of the store. He pulled a thick red volume toward him and put on the half-moon glasses that hung from his neck on a black ribbon.

“This tells us all the books in English that are in print,” he explained, turning a few pages no thicker than onion skin, then running his finger down the columns of fine print. “Here, ‘Hawkins, RR.’” He squinted for a moment before going on. “No, nothing else listed.”