The Colors of Madeleine 01: Corner of White (16 page)

They climb up to the bleachers, sit down, and hand another leaflet to the person beside them, saying, “Like to a dovecote in a gum boot, so are we with your picture-box repair,” while little Derrin waves at her grade-school teacher — Miss Hattoway — who waves back and smiles an upside-down smile.

Then somebody shouts that they need tickets to be up in the bleachers, and the Twicklehams laugh, embarrassed, and stand. Derrin’s face remains solemn as she makes her way back down the stairs. She pauses when she reaches the grass, and this time she’s waving more vigorously, a wave and a grin that fly across the field to her friend, Corrie-Lynn.

Corrie-Lynn is with her mother, both of them leaning up against Petra Baranski’s stall for a chat.

Petra shakes her head about her son. “He’ll be here in time — he always is — but he sure knows how to cut it fine.”

Alanna laughs. “Tell him I said thanks for getting the team into the finals,” she says. “The Watermelon’s jam-packed. Every room booked. I should be there right now making beds actually, but who needs that when there’s this?”

“Well now, it was the whole team who made it to the finals, not
just Elliot,” says his mother automatically, but they both know that it was mostly Elliot.

He jumps the fence.

He can’t jump the fence; it’s too high.

But he does.

He’s leaping, flying, sailing over that fence, and his foot catches the top ledge as he does, but his arm’s out, his hand’s out, his fingers are out, he can actually shift his body in the air, and he catches it.

The cold smooth surface of glass in the palm of his hand. He closes his fingers around it.

Time’s strange.

There’s enough time to think about how beautiful it is, to catch. How catching is the opposite of missing. How the opposite of missing feels so damn good. How this glass jar feels better in his hand even than the winning catch in deftball.

Then he hits the ground.

His head hits the dirt.

He sees it as he hits, the jar rolling slowly from his hand across the grass.

He’s flat on his back, and there’s the jar, stopped still now, and inside it he can see her, the tiny, tiny Butterfly Child. She’s sitting up straight at the bottom, and she seems to be looking at him. She’s holding a dress around her, such tiny hands, holding that dress, and the colors of it! Sapphire blue with deep russet spots, and she’s holding this dress close around her, like wings.

Elliot lies with his head on the dirt, watching her through the glass. He’s thinking about school.
You do one test, but then you’ve got to do another
, is what he’s thinking.

There’s always another test
, and he can hear the voice of his little cousin, Corrie-Lynn. She’s explaining something to him:
You’ve got to open the lid of the jar
.

She’s saying,
You’ve got to do it right away or she’ll suffocate
. Her voice is growing angry.
You’ve got to do it immediately!

But there’s some kind of a test he has to pass, and he realizes it’s this: He has to replay in his mind the way he hit the ground just now. The way his head, in particular, hit the ground and flew back up and hit again. The thump of his head, the percussion of that thump. So this might be a music exam.

There’s the Butterfly Child in her jar, and she’s not sitting straight-backed anymore. She’s sliding downward, kind of slumping, her tiny little chin, and maybe those are her tiny eyelashes.

His own shoulder is slumping too, and his ankle, now and then, has a wildness about it. That’s one thing, before he goes tomorrow, he’s going to have to give that ankle a good stern talking-to.

There’s a whole lot of Butterfly Children now, a whole lot of jars, with a whole lot of lids, rolling along the grass together, the lids of the jar are the lids of his eyes, and all of them closing tight.

The Mayor is at the field. Someone from the local paper is photographing her; she’s standing on her seat, ignoring the photographer and shouting to the crowd. She’s got a bottle of GC teakwater in her hand, and she’s holding it up, promising she’ll serve it at the after-party if they win.

“So I want to hear some
cheering
!” she cries. “I want you all to do some damage to your voice boxes!”

There’s cheering and shouting at this, and a lot of chatter, as word gets passed around about what the Mayor has promised. This gets tangled with the rumor that those strangers in red T-shirts are actually deftball selectors from Tyler University in Jagged Edge!

But that turns out to be just a rumor.

However, then it emerges that they
are
selectors, but from the University of Dentwood, which is not such a bad school, really! Even if it is just in the Farms.

Officials in white are doing final measurements of the furrows on the field. Patterns of orange light are rippling across the scoreboards. The teams are moving into formation.

There’s an expectant quieting, then almost at once, a new murmur moves through the crowd.
Where is Elliot Baranski?
says the murmur. And focus shifts from face to face; Elliot’s mother, who is sitting in the front row of the stands now, shrugs slightly, then fixes her gaze back on the field. Jimmy is talking to his team, but his head keeps swinging away from them, to scan the crowd and the distance. The players themselves are not listening. Gabe and Nikki step away from him slightly, glancing at each other, then lifting their hands simultaneously to shade their eyes and squint around. The band is playing, but Kala, on saxophone, pauses, lowers her instrument, and twists around in her seat, eyes searching.

The Mayor is standing at the microphone, watching the scoreboard. She’s supposed to officially begin the game. She looks across at Jimmy with a question on her face, and he makes a decision, strides out across the field himself.

He joins her at the microphone.

“Anybody here seen Elliot Baranski?” he says, and there’s laughter at his informality, and because he’s turned all their thoughts into words.

The team from Horatio is protesting, though, and so are the Horatio supporters, and an official blows a whistle hard.

“Welcome, everybody,” says Jimmy into the microphone, stalling, “to the Bonfire Sports Field on this fine and beautiful day!”

There’s an obliging cheer from the crowd, and the Horatio team fold their arms, hostile — and then there’s the roar of a truck engine.

Everybody sees it, just over the crest of the hill: It’s the Baranski truck.

The cheer fades into the engine roar itself, and there’s a pause, and the truck door opens, and here’s Elliot. They watch him get out.

Now he’s crossing the empty field, heading for Jimmy and the microphone. He’s walking kind of slowly and oddly, limping a little, his shoulder askew, and his chin’s low, eyes down, like he’s studying the ground. Two or three times he nearly trips on the furrows, and each time a shadow flashes across his face. Over at the stands, his mother climbs out of her seat and starts heading fast in his direction.

But he reaches Jimmy first. They speak quickly to each other, and Jimmy’s face changes, confusion sliding down from his forehead to his chin. He leans his head close to Elliot, and nobody knows what they’re saying, but they’re both looking down. Elliot’s hand is in the pocket of his shorts, and he’s taking something out. Their heads bend low together, squinting.

Jimmy’s head swings back up. The light’s shining on his face again, and he’s got a smile as curved and bright as a wedge of orange.

“Well, here he is, folks,” he says into the microphone. “It’s Elliot Baranski, and you know what
he
found? You know what
he’s
got?” He pauses.
“He’s got the Butterfly Child!”

Some people catch it, the gleam of light and color in the palm of Elliot’s hand before he slips her back into his pocket, safe, and Elliot’s speaking to Jimmy again — “You think you could pop my shoulder back in?” is what he’s saying — but those words are swept and blown away by the roar from the crowd, the whooping and laughing and applauding.

Practically everyone is crying.

5.

“Y
ou could sew up the hole in your pocket.”

Belle laughed at that. “Ah, who sews? You’re funny.”

“Well,” said Jack. “I just think —” but then his knee hit a sandwich board outside a butcher shop. His arms flew up and curved down, body tilting forward from the waist.

“It’s like you’re worshipping those pork sausages,” observed Belle.

Jack regained his balance, stepped around the sandwich board, and looked at her with frank hostility.

“Don’t worry about it,” said Belle. “I fancy a bit of pork sausage myself sometimes.” She laughed hard, stretching the laugh into a chuckle that she carried with her for another block.

“You’re sounding like a low-volume jackhammer,” Jack told her eventually.

“Ah,” Belle shrugged, and let her chuckle go.

Jack and Belle were walking along Mill Road, their eyes searching the pavement and the gutter as they walked, looking out for Belle’s lost keys. It was a Thursday morning and they were heading to their ICT class. Or possibly to a Geography lesson. The computer guy who lived downstairs from Madeleine taught both, looping between subjects like a fish between the reeds.

“I don’t need to sew up my pocket, because whenever I put something in it,” Belle explained, “I keep my hand there as well. And hold on to it, see? So that stops it falling through the hole.”

“Didn’t stop your keys from falling,” Jack pointed out.

“Now, isn’t that the truth,” Belle sighed, shaking her head at the strangeness of the universe.

They passed Mike’s Bikes, a Subway, a dry cleaner’s, a pharmacy.

“Sorry to have to tell you this,” said Jack, “but your horoscope for today did
not say a word
about finding your lost keys.”

“Did it say I’d have Frosted Flakes for breakfast? Did it say I’d hit my forehead on the whatsit thing with the shampoo on it when I picked up the soap in the shower? No, eh? Well, that’s weird, isn’t it, because I thought I did both those things.” Belle’s lips made a thoughtful pop-pop sound, like a child imitating a helicopter, and she murmured to herself: “Must have imagined it all.”

“What your horoscope actually said” — Jack glanced up just in time to stop himself headbutting a telegraph pole — “was you should take a stand about an issue that’s been troubling you, and stop biting your fingernails.”

“I don’t bite my fingernails.”

“That’s lucky, then, you’ve already done that bit.”

They passed Spice Gate, Café Brazil, Piero’s Hairdressing.

Jack stopped suddenly and crouched down in the gutter — but it was only a bottle lid.

“Everything glints,” he said, and gave a philosophical sigh.

They walked in silence for a while.

“My own horoscope said I should dive right in and try the thing I’ve been hesitating about,” Jack chatted. “And Madeleine’s said that someone close to her is going to surprise her.”

“Maybe her dad’ll turn up,” suggested Belle. “What race is she anyway, do you reckon? Her accent’s so mixed up.”

“That’s cause she’s lived everywhere in the world, and race hasn’t got a bloody thing to do with a person’s accent, you berk.”

Belle shrugged, and looked up, rubbing her neck.

“My keys aren’t anywhere, eh? Which is totally your fault for what you said about my horoscope. But listen, don’t you sometimes think that Madeleine doesn’t exist? Like, she’s not real?”

Jack kept his eyes down, flicking them from the double yellow lines in the gutter to the wheels of bicycles that drooped against each other outside shops. It seemed to Jack that he was being very methodical about the search for Belle’s keys, whereas Belle herself was not, and that this was why he kept tripping over things while Belle maintained perfect grace.

“‘Madeleine doesn’t exist,’” he repeated now. “What I sometimes think is, I sometimes think you haven’t got a clue what you are talking about.”

“Nah, it’s just that you can’t follow the complicated pathways of my brain. It’s like a labyrinth, my brain, and as beautiful as a brain can get. What I mean is, there’s too much going on with Madeleine. It’s like when you get every paint colour and mix them up, you end up with not a proper colour at all. Madeleine’s lived in so many bloody places and she wears so many different bloody colours. You know what I mean? So she’s not a proper person anymore, she’s just a mess. Like, she doesn’t exist.”

Jack stopped altogether and turned to Belle.

“You are being racist beyond all my abilities for measuring racism,” he said. “You don’t say someone who’s mixed race is a
mess
, Belle. Do you actually want to know what race she is? She’s part Iranian, part Somali, part Polish, part Irish, and a bit of Tibetan, and what she is, she’s not a mess, she’s beautiful.”

“You can’t be all those things,” said Belle, flicking his words away. “See, that’s my point. You can’t. That’s like five different people had to have sex to make her, which is not possible. Only two people can have sex.”

“I’m not sure you’ve got the hang of genetics.” Jack began to walk again. “Or of sex parties.”

They were reaching the residential part of Mill Road now, the shops and restaurants disappearing. Neither of them was scanning for lost keys.

“Ah, you know what I mean,” complained Belle. “I’m not saying her skin colour’s like a messed-up paint tray, you tosser. She’s got very
nice skin and that, like honey or whatever, and when I said she was a mess I meant because there’s so much going on with her past and that, and her clothes. But I’m very glad for people to come from everywhere and that. Although you’ve got to admit, she takes it too far. And actually, she takes it so far that sometimes I think maybe she makes things up. Like, can those stories of her being so rich
really
be true? Can she
really
be all those different races? I mean, if she is, she’s the poster bloody child for racial integration.”

“There’s something about her,” Jack said, “about her essence or her soul or whatever, and it shines with all the colours that there are. And listen, that reminds me, I have to tell you something. You know how I’ve become Lord Byron?”

“Byron? I’ll be honest with you, Jack.” Belle studied him. “I still don’t see it.”

“Well, I was reading about him and do you know what? One time he was mad in love with his cousin, and he said that she had a transparent beauty and that she looked like she was
made out of a rainbow
. I read that line and I just got goosebumps. Because that’s exactly what
I’d
been thinking about Madeleine.”

He was quiet, and so was Belle. Their footsteps were slowing.

“Apart from anything else,” added Jack, “it was proof that I
am
Lord Byron, despite your unsupportive stand on the issue. Both him and me thought that a girl, a particular girl, had transparent beauty like a rainbow.”

They reached Madeleine’s building right at the word
rainbow
; it blinked in the air between them.

Jack looked up at the windows of the computer guy’s flat, and above that, Madeleine’s flat, and above that, the sky.

He kept looking at the sky because something had occurred to him, and it was this: Maybe he and Belle were having a fight.

Suddenly, unexpectedly: one of their fights.

Now he turned to Belle, and her face seemed to confirm his fear. She was leaning forward to ring the doorbell, and the ferocity on her
face was echoed right there in her index finger. He stared at the finger — straight, taut, the part around the nail turning pink, red, crimson, the rest turning lurid yellow-white, as it pushed harder and harder at the bell, until her finger had an otherworldly glow to it, ringing and ringing the bell — and suddenly, she took her hand away. She shook it in the air.

“Transparent bloody beauty,” she said. “You think Madeleine’s got transparent beauty like a rainbow? You realise that means you can see through her, right?”

“No, it doesn’t mean —”

“Go on, then.” Footsteps pounded down the stairs. The air reverberated with the leftover shrill of the bell. “You have a go at it today. See if you can see through her. I’ll stand behind her and you tell me how many fingers I’m holding up.” She giggled, suddenly hysterical.

There was a shadow behind the door glass — the computer guy downstairs was at the door; and Jack breathed it in, the sound of Belle’s giggle, with relief.

The computer guy downstairs had a name.

He was Danek John Michalski, forty-two years old, born in Wisconsin in the US of A, but raised in Kentucky. His interests included computers, travel, judo, and his dog, an Irish setter named Sulky-Anne.

He was asthmatic, which he tended to blame on whatever might be going on in the fields surrounding Cambridge. Belle always told him it was nothing to do with the crops, you berk, it was an allergy to dogs. Let an Irish setter laze about on your bed all day, she told him, you get what’s coming to you.

Danek called himself Denny (“No, not D
a
nny, don’t be calling me Danny”), and he smiled vaguely and kindly at Belle whenever she suggested the dog allergy.

His flat was one big room and a bathroom, the same floor plan as
Madeleine’s upstairs, except that his ceilings and walls stood up straight, whereas hers leaned into angles and slopes.

Also, the chaos in Denny’s flat was more extreme than in Madeleine’s. Rising from the chaos were two big workbenches that faced each other in the middle of the room. The bed was pushed against the far wall, and that’s where Sulky-Anne was always curled, fast asleep.

Denny’s teaching method was to follow the same three steps.

First, he made sure there was something baking in the oven when the kids arrived. It was his belief that the fragrance would stimulate their endorphins, making them work faster and sharper in a hedonistic rush towards their coffee break.

Second, he began by having them all, himself included, do ten star jumps (only he called them jumping jacks) to loosen up their minds (and for bonus endorphins). This was even though the star jumps produced the fragrance of sweat, which undermined the fragrance of baking; and even though Denny himself had been told by a physiotherapist that star jumps were
killing
his knees, and even though he was always rasping with asthmatic breathlessness by the time they were done, and (finally) even though the neighbour downstairs (who worked night shifts) frequently put notes under Denny’s door saying,
WHAT’S WITH THE STAMPEDING ELEPHANTS UP THERE?!! SOME PEOPLE ARE TRYING TO SLEEP!!

Despite all this, they always did the star jumps.

Third, still puffing and panting, Belle, Jack, and Madeleine would sit in a row at one of the benches, each in front of a computer. Their assignment for the day would be displayed on the screen. Denny would sit at the other bench and get on with his own work fixing computers.

Today, Denny’s face had a shadowed, stubbled look, as if the grey specks in his hair had spilled onto his cheeks and his chin. He was
even more asthmatic than usual, his tongue moving around in his mouth looking for air.

“It’s the harvest of the rapeseed,” he explained, following the just-arrived Belle and Jack back into his flat.