The Cracks in the Kingdom Page 24

  Not to mention all the falling fridges.

  There was a long pause. Madeleine folded her hands under her armpits, and rocked up and down on her heels. The night was dark and chill.

  She watched the parking meter.

  Nothing happened.

  She sighed and gave the parking meter the sort of rueful, disapproving, resigned, I-am-a-complete-idiot-and-I-have-no-idea-why-I-am-doing-this-but-here-I-am-about-to-do-it look that her mother used to give when she gave in to six-year-old Madeleine’s begging for extra chocolate-toffee ice cream right at bedtime.

  Then she pulled open her plastic bag and started taking out the magnets. She waved one or two in the direction of the parking meter (and felt a tug, since the parking meter was metal — “This is ridiculous,” she said aloud), and stuck a few owl magnets and Paris magnets and Call Your Local Plumber magnets on the meter itself.

  Then she drew out the horseshoe magnet and aimed it at the crack where their notes came and went, swinging it around a bit listlessly. She directed a magnet into the plastic bag and let it collect a frenzy of paper clips. She fished out the sewing needles and rubbed them against a magnet for a while until they were themselves magnetised.

  She took a short break to widen her eyes at the stupidity of it all, then continued playing. She shuffled magnets around, built towers of magnets, forced magnets together when they didn’t want to go. She almost forgot Elliot; she disappeared into her own head.

  Facts flew at her, like the paper clips flying at the horseshoe magnet, and gathered there, darkening her mind. The earliest ships used lumps of natural lodestone to navigate. The finest kind was a rich deep blue from Ethiopia. In Isaac Newton’s time, the Royal Society used to measure a magnet’s power by the number of keys it could pick up.

  Compasses and keys.

  She brushed the paper clips from the magnet — or maybe she pressed another magnet to the parking meter — afterwards, she couldn’t remember what she had been doing, but whatever it was, the next moment she was not.

  She was clamped in a blackness of noise. Extraordinary noise. A clamour of roaring, clanking, and pounding. As if she’d been shut into the engine of a jet aeroplane, or trapped in a steelworks factory, or tied to the drum kit while a thrash band played while it was caught up in machine-gun crossfire. The sounds closed in around her face. She clenched her eyes, hunched her shoulders, the noise in her cheeks, grinding at her teeth.

  It was noise so powerful, it was lifting her into the air. Her body curled tighter, but the noise carried her higher and higher, and the more she rose, the louder it grew. Now it was blending with the rush of height itself, the blaze of wind, and her body, instead of being clamped, was tossed, pitched, and flung.

  The air pressure sealed her eyes closed, and she dragged her arms against the wind, forcing them through the pounding, until her hands were at her face. She felt for her forehead, found her eyelids, peeled them open, and looked.

  She was in a rush of grey, held by the force of the roar, and far below — impossibly far, impossibly small — she could make out a landscape. There was a pattern to the landscape — her eyes squinted in the wind, but she squinted them more, to make herself see — it was a pattern of squares, rectangles, fields. Her vision flared and flashed, then sharpened suddenly, and farms formed, farmhouses, barns, sheds. The streets of a town. A square. A clock tower. A schoolyard, a tiny, tiny figure — and she knew where she was. Bonfire, the Farms, Kingdom of Cello —

  And she was back.

  Standing by the parking meter, breathing fast and hard, her face wet with tears, heartbeat tumbling.

  Her breathing slowed. She wiped her face.

  She looked at the bag of magnets, still hung over her arm. Her body swayed.

  The parking meter gazed at her, implacable.

  A car started somewhere. A door slammed. Cambridge hummed.

  She put the bag of magnets down on the path, and took her pen and notepad. Her hand was trembling.

  The only thing she could think to say was:

  Huh.

  Exactly.

  I think I just saw your town from the sky — and maybe a tiny, tiny you.

  Are you okay?

  Not really. I want to go home.

  Tomorrow?

  Madeleine stared. She held her pen over the notepaper. Ah, there was only one thing to say:

  Okay. Night.

  Night.

  The following night, Madeleine regarded the parking meter.

  It regarded her right back. She raised her eyebrows at it.

  All day, she had felt an aching in her muscles, as if she had the flu, or as if she had spent the previous week climbing drainpipes.

  A message came through from Elliot.

  You ready?

  She thought of possible answers: Jack said my horoscope for today told me not to mess with kingdoms in parking meters, and Belle said my aura looked like it had been hit by a train, so no. (Actually, Jack had said her horoscope warned her to beware of clothes pegs, but it was true about Belle and the train-wreck aura.) Or: Let’s talk about the deftball scoring system instead. Or just: No.

  Yep.

  She unzipped her backpack.

  Then she wrote again:

  Before we start electrocuting ourselves/each other, this came for me today.

  She looked once more time at the envelope that had arrived in that morning’s mail. There was a row of Australian stamps, an Express postmark, and in large print on the back: DO NOT OPEN. SEND TO PRINCESS KO RIGHT NOW.

  She sent it through to Elliot.

  There was a pause, and then Elliot’s reply.

  It must be from Prince Tippett. That’s huge. Now I’ve got two letters to bring to her tomorrow. Good if I can also tell her we got through the crack. You got anything electrical there?

  Madeleine looked into her backpack again.

  That afternoon, she’d run downstairs to Denny’s flat and asked him what games you could play with electricity.

  He had stared.

  “You repair computers, right?” she’d said. “So isn’t that, like, electrical?”

  “Electricity doesn’t come in to computer repair much. And I don’t do it for fun.”

  “Okay, not games. Very serious things that I could do with electricity.”

  Another stare, this time with wider eyes.

  “Serious things that won’t kill me,” she remembered to add.

  Denny had been sitting up at his workbench. He nodded at the opposite stool, meaning Madeleine should sit herself, and started talking about static electricity, conductors, insulators, semi-conductors —

  Madeleine thought of Denny’s accent. It was loose and easy, like a swinging footbridge. His words wandered across the bridge, only pausing now and then to get themselves untangled when they hit a patch of asthma.

  He was in a patch now. He had stopped talking and was leaning down towards the floor, reaching for something, and she could hear him working to breathe.

  “You have any thoughts about displacement?” she said.

  He straightened up with a wheeze like a whistle, and looked at her.

  “Displacement,” she repeated.

  He stood abruptly, walked around the bench until he was standing next to Madeleine, then carried on until he reached his seat again. He sat down.

  “Distance is the journey.” He spun his fingers in the air, to show where he’d just walked. “Displacement is the result.” He pointed to his own head and looked down at himself in mock surprise. “I got nowhere! Zero displacement.”

  “I’m talking about a different sort of displacement,” she said.

  He nodded as if he’d been expecting that, and bent down again.

  When he sat up, he was holding a sagging cardboard box. He placed this on the bench and drew out a coil of wire.

  “You know the story of Archimedes?” he said. “The King asked him to calculate the volume of his crown — so he could tell if it was made of gold or not.” Denny placed
the wire on Madeleine’s head, like a crown. “Archimedes is in a panic. He doesn’t know how to measure a crown! The shape’s all weird and crowny! So he has a bath. To calm down. And when he gets in? There’s a splash, I guess, and what happens to the level of the bath water?”

  “It goes up?” Madeleine guessed. “It gets displaced?” She tilted her head, and the wire slipped back onto the bench.

  “Exactly. Archimedes thinks: That’s it! That’s how you do it! Put the crown in water and measure the displacement of the water! From that, you get the crown’s volume! He was so excited, the story goes, he ran naked down the street.”

  “Nice story,” Madeleine said. “But that’s not what I meant either.”

  Denny took a couple of batteries and a ruler from the cardboard box, and placed these on the bench beside the wire. He picked up a fluorescent light bulb, considered it, and replaced it in the box.

  Then he looked across at Madeleine. “Displacement is a concept in psychology,” he suggested. “You’re mad at your boss, so you shout at your wife when you get home. Displaced anger.”

  “I haven’t got a wife,” Madeleine said.

  “Fair point.” Denny took out a piece of PVC piping and a pair of safety goggles. “Geological displacement? The displacement in the earth caused by a crack or a fault?”

  Madeleine shook her head again.

  Denny moved to his kitchenette, returned, and added a roll of paper towels and a handful of rubber balloons to the bench.

  “I mean,” Madeleine said, “displacement of a person.”

  The silence stretched across the flat. It woke Sulky-Anne, who was asleep on the bed. She sat up briskly, spilled onto the floor, and walked across to form a shadow by Denny’s knee.

  “Sure,” Denny said eventually. “Displaced persons. Wrong country, wrong friends, wrong family. Well, what are you going to do? Get your work done. Make new friends. Pat your dog.” He leaned down and scratched under Sulky-Anne’s chin. Then he grabbed her around the neck, and hugged so tightly that Sulky-Anne pulled back, appalled. Or pretending to be appalled. She might have had a secret smile.

  Denny raised his eyebrows at Madeleine. “You can be in the right country, right family, and still feel displaced,” he said. “Take Belle, for instance. I mean, she grew up here, still lives with her mum and dad, but sometimes …”

  He rolled the PVC piping along the bench, reconsidered, and started again.

  “Sometimes you need to be displaced to find yourself,” he said. “Or to find a better part of yourself.”

  “Like Isaac Newton,” Madeleine remembered suddenly. “You know he lived here in Cambridge for years and years, hidden away like a crazy professor? Then one day he moves to London. Next thing you know he’s got a social life. He’s President of the Royal Society and Warden of the Mint. He’s chasing down counterfeiters, and shaking the whole place up.”

  “Is that a fact? Well, then, great example.”

  “But say there’s a guy and he’s still sort of in the same place he’s always been,” Madeleine continued, “but his family have run out on him. Can that be the good sort of displacement too? The kind that might help him find his better self?”

  There was another long silence.

  “I honestly do not know,” Denny said.

  Sulky-Anne sniffed and returned to the bed.

  Denny looked at his dog, then back at Madeleine. “Let me tell you,” he said, “some games you can play with electricity.”

  * * *

  Now Madeleine stood in the dark street.

  She glanced sideways at the parking meter, as if it were a stranger standing next to her on a bus. She wanted to know what the stranger was thinking, but she didn’t want to be seen staring.

  She took a balloon from her backpack. It was a dark colour, maybe blue or green, hard to tell in this light. She shook it out and blew it up.

  It was blue.

  She wound the end around two fingers and looped it through to tie a knot.

  Then she rubbed the balloon against her hair.

  A man was walking down the path towards her. The streetlights caught his face as he came closer. Lined and creased, purple veins across his nose.

  He was wearing a suit coat, but on his legs were striped pajama pants, and on his feet, slippers.

  He stared at her. The balloon held to her head.

  She stared right back. His pajama pants and slippers.

  They held the stare.

  The man carried on walking. He reached the corner. He paused, as if he might glance back, then changed his mind and carried on.

  Madeleine rubbed the balloon against her hair again.

  It felt dry and scratchy. She lifted it away.

  Static electricity.

  This is stupid, she thought.

  But she wasn’t sure if she meant that.

  She thought about Benjamin Franklin flying his kite in a thunderstorm, a key tied to the string.

  Keys again.

  Keys to the Kingdom of Cello.

  Distance is the journey. Displacement is the result.

  She wondered what was keeping the Kingdom of Cello from the World, and Elliot from her. Was the distance between them an impossible journey, even though he was just fingertips away? Or was he right there beside her in the parking meter, displaced by a universe?

  She reached into her bag again, and found that she was vibrating.

  At first, it was a low trembling sensation, running across her body. It felt a little like how your lips feel when you play the comb with a tissue. Or how a car feels when you drive fast down a highway with one back window lowered. The faint juddering. She realised, vaguely, that she could only see darkness. The darkness sighed around her, intensifying to blackness.

  The trembling sensation continued, odd but interesting, then slowly increased. Now it was a jostling. A silent jangling. It grew uncomfortable. Her muscles tightened. It started to hurt. Her body was being jerked and flung in sharp, vicious movements like a fever fit. Something angry inside her started shoving back. She spoke. She didn’t know what she was saying. Phrases rushed past and she was catching at them randomly.

  There was a blinding flash of light.

  She was inside lightning, wrapped tightly inside it, as if lightning was a rope winding around her.

  No, she herself was being spun into lightning.

  There was a rush of colour towards her, a frenzy of colour, pieces of colour racing one another, or racing towards something, and the panic took her like a fist through the chest.

  There was another shove and she was back in Cambridge.

  She got her breath back. She leaned on the parking meter.

  She thought that might be a note coming through from Elliot, but she couldn’t tell because everything was blurred, and then she realised that the blurring was her tears.

  I’m done with this, she thought.

  4.

  Elliot ran to his truck.

  The moon was big in his chest. The stars hurtled through his bloodstream. His smile kept up with his heartbeat.

  That had been insane.

  He’d been doing mad things with wires, cables, clippers, big old batteries — his buddy Shelby, who liked to fly planes and blow things up, had given him a stack of electrical junk.

  He’d stood apart from the TV sculpture to do this: seemed like it might be a mistake to plunge an electrical charge into the open back of a TV.

  Then, out of nowhere, there’d been that wild shaking. Like being trapped in a stalling threshing machine, in the center of the darkest black —

  And then her voice.

  For the first time he’d heard Madeleine’s voice.

  Is anybody there? she’d said. And: What’s going on? And a tiny, distant, fading: Can somebody help me?

  Those pieces of phrases, pieces of voice, like a trail through the darkness.

  He hadn’t known people had voices like that. He hadn’t known voices could run soft palms across your juddering soul. H
e’d found himself reaching for it with both hands, reaching out for her voice, like a thing you could hold, trying to force his way through that impossible — that pressure that had stretched his cheeks so his mouth could not form shapes, his throat could not form sounds, and then there’d been the shock of brightness. The rush of color. As if her voice had made itself into a fountain of light.

  Ah, it was possible he’d never met anything as beautiful as that voice.

  He got into his truck, turned the keys in the ignition, and the vibrations took him back there. He sat a moment, following the rope of memory back, through that jostling, the voice, the colors, the light.

  This whole thing with Madeleine. He’d always liked chatting with her, sure. She seemed sort of funny and weird.

  But she’d never been real to him before. Well, he’d never even seen her face, so you couldn’t blame him for that. And more to the point, he’d been distracted.

  It was like this, he decided. His mind was a field, and its primary crop, its biggest earner — the thing that needed all his attention — was his missing dad.

  Say that his dad was carrots.

  Meanwhile, the Royal Youth Alliance had been a storm of leafhoppers that kept swooping in to infect his carrot crop. He’d had to keep dealing with them — getting them out of his way with sticky traps and insecticides or whatever — before he could go back to the work of the carrots themselves.

  Whereas Madeleine, she’d been a sort of cute apple tree stuck over in the corner of the field. Which the leafhoppers kept telling him to talk to. Which made no sense, but analogies were not really his thing. But anyway. So he’d been heading over, now and then, to prune the apple tree or train its branches — whatever you did with apple trees; he’d never grown them — and that was always pleasant. Like a little break from his real work with the carrots and the leafhoppers. But, to be honest, mostly he forgot that it was there.