The lift
, I thought. This was where Jay-Tee had taken me up in the temperamental old lift to the roof, where we'd thrown snow at each other. She'd said the lift liked me. The lift was a door.
I walked towards it.
"Can I help you?" asked a white man in a black suit and red tie, seated behind the big wood-and-leather desk. He looked at Esmeralda and then at me. Not the same man as when I'd come here with Jay-Tee. This man was much older. He didn't sound or look like someone who wanted to help anyone.
He had the smallest amount of magic I'd seen so far, but it was there, a fraction of a micron-thin layer sprinkled between his cells.
"I'm here to see Rebecca," Esmeralda said. She was concentrating hard. I could see her calling his infinitesimal fragments of magic to her.
"In 8C?" he asked, frowning. "She knows you're coming?"
Esmeralda said, "Yes."
She nodded. I stared at the 250 brass tacks that held the green leather to the wooden desk, all the factors tumbling through my head. "We haven't seen each other in ages," Esmeralda added.
"Was she your teacher?"
Esmeralda nodded. "She was wonderful. And now I want Rebecca to teach my daughter."
I had a sudden vision of a white-haired old woman teaching students to play violin. I'd always wanted to learn an instrument, but it had never been possible. Sarafina didn't play anything so couldn't teach me: besides, we travelled too light to carry any but the tiniest musical instrument. But we'd never had the money to spend on such non-essentials. I'd never even touched a harmonica.
"I miss her," Esmeralda said.
The man smiled. "She's a lovely old lady. Go on through. Eighth floor."
The lift looked as forlorn as it had before, but this time I could see its magic: all 907 of its tiny smudges, bound together with threads of misty light. A delicious prime. I could taste it on my tongue.
I pressed the button, waited with my breath held for the doors to open. Surely this door would co-operate, let me through to my mother. Jay-Tee had said it liked me.
Nothing happened.
Then I remembered that Jay-Tee had spoken to it. "Please," I said softly. "Please." When I got to Fib (17), 1,597 (also a prime), the metal doors groaned open.
I stepped inside, Esmeralda behind me, onto the carpet worn so thin in places I could see the metal floor underneath. There was no panelling on the walls, nothing covering over the nuts and bolts holding the lift together.
"Please," I begged the lift in a whisper. "Please show me the other place you're connected to. If you want to. If you'd like. It would mean so much to me." I wondered if Jay-Tee had known it was a door. Or had she simply been attracted to its magic?
The lift did not lurch into motion— its doors didn't even close.
I reached Fib (43), 433,494,437, and the doors were still open.
"Maybe the door doesn't like you," I told Esmeralda. "It didn't take this long last time."
"Last time?"
"When I was here with Jay-Tee. I didn't know it was a door then."
"The lift is the door?" Esmeralda asked. She didn't sound like she believed me. "And it doesn't like me?"
I shrugged. All around us I could feel the lift's impatience. I was increasingly sure it didn't want Esmeralda to be there. "If you wait in the foyer…"
Esmeralda cut her eyes at me. "Wait?"
"The lift doesn't like you." I was at Fib (61). "It would have moved by now if it did."
"It's only been a few minutes. You can't be sure."
The lift groaned, a high-pitched sound of metal scraping against metal, but its doors stayed open.
"See? If you'd just wait outside. Jay-Tee says it's cranky."
The groan got even louder.
"All right," Esmeralda said at last, stepping out of the lift.
The doors shut so fast they caught the back of her coat. I heard her yelp from the other side, and then her coat disappeared, and the lift shuddered, creaking into motion. I couldn't tell if we were moving up or down. I couldn't see out of the doors the way I'd been able to when me and Jay-Tee had gone to the roof. None of the buttons for the floors were lit up.
Fibonaccis stuttered in my head, giving me only primes: Fib(3), 2; Fib (4), 3; Fib (5), 5 (yes, that's right, Fib (5) is 5); Fib(7), 13; Fib (11), 89; Fib (13), 233; Fib (17), 1597; Fib (23), 28,657; Fib (29), 514,229; Fib (43), 433,494,437; Fib (47), 2,971,215,073; Fib (83), 99,194,853,094,755,497.
The doors concertinaed open, groaning so loudly I had to cover my ears. I blinked in intense sunlight. Keeping one foot in the doorway, I put the other foot on the step in front of me and peered at this new world.
Opposite me was a long wall. Every ten metres or so it changed colour, from brilliant blue to yellow to faded red-brown. Each section had a door and a window. The doors were small, the windows large. I was looking at a blue painted door and a large stone window, pots overflowing with flowers resting on the wide sill behind rusting metal bars. From the top of the wall, vines dotted with tiny blue flowers cascaded towards the street.
Three white butterflies fluttered by. Then a huge yellow one with a black stripe at the bottom of its wings. I'd never seen such an enormous butterfly before. So big it could simply glide rather than constantly flutter its wings. Bells tolled in a tumble that made it impossible to count how many there were.
I wasn't wearing a watch. I peered up at the sky. The sun was high, in more or less the same position it had been in New York. If I'd been able to see the sun there, that was. So roughly the same time of day. Was this another city in the United States? It didn't look like New York.
The door snapped shut on my heel, pushing me out of the doorway and stumbling onto the street, where a car honked at me. I jumped out of the way, back onto the step, which I now saw wasn't a step but a narrow, raised footpath. On the other side of the street was a path just like it, made of the same large, uneven stones as the road.
I turned to the door. On this side, it wasn't the entrance to a lift: it was a wooden door with a brass knocker in the shape of a hand, set into a stone wall.
I grabbed the handle and pulled. It didn't budge.
I took a deep breath. The door had let me through without a key, which meant that Jay-Tee was right: it liked me. Of course it was going to let me go back to New York City when I needed to.
I sat down on the stone step and worked on breathing evenly, not panicking. I closed my eyes, and the calm of Cansino's world washed over me. I searched for Sarafina. There were fourteen strong lights close by: none of them was my mother. Jason Blake wasn't here either. There was not nearly so much magic here as in Sydney or New York City. The bindings between the 907 lights were pulled tight and did not respond to my probing them.
I opened my eyes, felt the weight of the real world fall on me. I gasped, wondering why I had bothered to return to the real world. The few strong lights— none of them Sarafina— floated in my peripheral vision. I tried the door handle again. Nothing.
I leaned back against the door, looked at the plants cascading down the wall towards me. These were studded with white, red, and yellow flowers. I peered up at them. More butterflies drifted by, more of the white ones, and a lone yellow, and then a tiny bird zipped past, stopping to stick its long, narrow beak into one of the flowers, and, more remarkably, hovering in place, its wings beating so fast they were a near-invisible blur. Its tail feathers bobbed back and forth. Then, just as my eyes adjusted to seeing it, the bird zipped away, faster than I'd ever seen any bird fly. What was it?
Where was I? The same time zone as New York, more or less. Was it the same hemisphere? I'd have to wait for dark to see if it was a southern sky or not.
An old man with skin darker than mine and as wrinkled as a walnut walked by, leading a donkey carrying two large baskets full of firewood down the hill.
He tipped his hat at me and said something too fast to catch. I wasn't sure, but I didn't think it was English. But the only language I knew other than English was Kriol, and I suspected they didn't speak that much outside the Northern Territory. I smiled at him, pretty sure now that this was not the U.S.A., wondering if I was ever going to see Sarafina alive again.
Two old women, skin dark like the old man's, trudged up the hill. They held bunches of dried flowers, offering them to me. I shook my head and they continued on their slow way. They were dressed in colours as bright as the walls.
The sky was almost as big as it was out in the deserts of home. Brilliant and blue, threaded with cumulus clouds fluffier than balls of cotton and a contrail left by a passing plane. When I looked down again I half expected to see spinifex, a wedge-tailed eagle snatching up a rabbit.
Instead a four-wheel drive made its slow way down the narrow, steep, unevenly paved street. Beyond the car, a whole town was laid out. Square houses of faded yellows, browns, blues, and reds; flat roofs; trees and bushes and gardens; the occasional church steeple, arrayed in tiers down the hill. And past them a plain of greens and brown, and then, in the distance, a ridge of blue mountains.
I turned back to the door, reached for the handle that still didn't turn. "Please," I whispered as I had before. "Please. I'm ready to go back now."
The door would not open.
18
Morning After
Tom woke to the smell
of something clean and damp roaring in the distance, and a hard, cold floor under his back. He shivered and sat up, blinking to unglue his eyes. He was on Jay-Tee's bedroom floor. He rubbed his neck and turned to look at her, asleep, sprawled across her bed.
He grinned.
The roaring was getting louder. Rain, he realised. Drops were hitting the glass doors that opened onto the balcony. The clean, damp smell was ozone. He tried to remember the last time it had rained. Must have been when he'd shown Reason the cemetery and old lady Havisham and the Cansino family monument, but that shower hadn't lasted long. He hoped it'd last longer this time.
The phone rang. Tom jumped up, groaning at the effects of a night spent on the floor. There wasn't a phone in Jay-Tee's room. Was there one in Reason's room? He opened the door, and just as he found it on a small table in the hall, the ringing stopped.
Tom thought about lying down on Reason's bed and getting more sleep. He was tired. Somewhere outside someone was playing loud dance music. He smiled, thinking of the two of them dancing last night, of all their kissing. He wondered how late it was.
A different phone started ringing. His mobile. He lunged back into Jay-Tee's bedroom, to his backpack, fishing it out and answering softly as he slipped out into the hallway.
"Tom?" It was Esmeralda.
"Yes, it's me." The music was a lot louder out in the hallway. He wondered where it was coming from.
"How are you and Jay-Tee going?"
Tom glanced at the door to Jay-Tee's room. His cheeks went hot. "Good. We're good."
"Really? Jay-Tee hasn't been acting strange at all?"
"You mean about her magic being gone?"
"Yes."
"She's cool about it. She's fine."
"You're sure?"
"Uh-huh."
"Can I talk to her?"
"I, er," Tom stammered. "I just woke up."
"I thought she might be with you. She didn't answer when I rang my place."
"Huh," Tom said. "Have you found Reason's mum?"
"Not yet. Reason's looking. We haven't given up hope. Has the social worker phoned again?"
"Not yet, but we'll call the second she does. How's Reason?" Tom asked. "Jay-Tee said she was getting kind of weird. Glowing or something."
Esmeralda didn't say anything.
"Is she okay?" Tom asked again, wondering how powerful Reason had become. Turning Jay-Tee's magic off was intense. He wondered what else she could do.
Behind him he heard Jay-Tee yawn. She came out of her room still in her pyjamas and sat on the floor beside him, leaving enough space so that they wouldn't touch. He wondered why.
"She's changing," Esmeralda said at last. "It's hard to describe. Listen, I should go. If anything happens, let me know. And keep an eye out for Jay-Tee. I'm worried about her."
"Of course." He pointed at the phone and mouthed, "Esmeralda." Jay-Tee put her hand out for it.
"Thanks, Tom. I'll talk to you soon. Oh," Esmeralda said, as if suddenly remembering. "Where were you?"
"Oh, you know," he said, wondering why he didn't just tell her. "Around."
"That's what I told the girls. They seem to forget you have another life."