The Colors of Madeleine 01: Corner of White (3 page)

“Not the same sky,” Jack said thoughtfully. “It’s always shifting. Stars die and you’ve got yourselves black dwarves or neutron stars or black holes instead.”

“A lot of trees are dead too,” said Madeleine. “From bleeding canker disease.”

“I wouldn’t mind getting that,” said Belle. “It’d sound good, wouldn’t it?
Oh, sorry, I can’t do my homework, I’ve got the bleeding canker disease. Oh, no, sorry, I can’t spare any change, I’ve got a wicked case of bleeding canker disease
.” She touched her cheeks. “But not on my face.”

“Why do you need a disease to explain that you don’t have any change?” wondered Jack. “If someone asks for money, just say you haven’t got any.”

“I hope we’re not eating the same food the famous people did,” Belle said. “It’d be mouldy.”

“Or digested,” said Madeleine. “Cause they ate it.”

Federico ignored them.

“Now, can anyone name a famous person who was at Trinity?”

“That girl from the Matrix movies,” said Jack. “Hang about, no, she
was
Trinity. That was her name.”

“You are all so funny!” Federico grinned furiously, and then he grumbled, “Ah, the names are in my hat,” and held the hat out towards Belle.

Papers crackled beneath Belle’s fingers. At first she was concentrating, but then her head tilted slightly and she was lost, her hand gently moving around while she thought about something else.

They waited.

She remembered at last, pulled out a paper, and read it.

“Charles Babbage,” she said.

Federico gave one of his grimaces of pleasure. “Ah, now, Charles
Babbage
! Do you know who that is, Belle?”

“He’s the dad from
Mary Poppins
,” Belle said at once.

The others looked at her doubtfully.

Federico frowned. “This does sound like the name of a character from a children’s book, Belle, you are right. But it is not. Well, it is a never-mind. You will look it up! And you will tell us next week! And then you will
become
him! All right?”

“All right.” Belle folded the paper and refolded it again, until it was smaller than her smallest fingernail.

“You’ll lose that,” said Jack, but she ignored him.

Jack was next to pick from the hat, and he got Lord Byron.

“That’s the poet,” he said.

“Mad, bad, and dangerous to know,” Federico said. “The ladies, they liked this man.”

“That’s all right, then,” said Jack.

“You’ve got to walk around being
him
?” Belle said. “Ah, well, lucky you’re such a good actor.” She laughed so hard at her own joke they had to hit her on the back.

The hat was passed to Madeleine.

She reached in, then opened her palm, and there were two folded papers on it.

“Don’t unfold those papers!” said Federico at once, panic etching his cheeks. “Choose. Choose first! And you must only unfold the one you choose!”

Madeleine stared at her hand.

One folded paper was close to her wrist, the other was near her fingers.

A shaft of sunlight swung through the window and landed on her palm, splitting the papers.

They all looked at the window.

The rain had stopped. There was blue between the clouds. Outside, everything was very quiet, as if people felt unsure of the sunshine — even a single word might risk the return of the rain — then suddenly, somewhere, somebody coughed.

“Which one will you choose?” whispered Belle.

Madeleine chose the one closest to her wrist.

“It’s Isaac Newton,” she said, and then uncertainly: “Didn’t he discover gravity?”

2.

I
magine that
, Jack was thinking.

Sunlight glinted on wet cobblestones, and Madeleine was moving away from Jack and Belle. Her mother was approaching.

Madeleine’s mother, Holly Tully, had come to Cambridge eight months ago now, along with her daughter and her sewing machine. At first, Madeleine had enrolled at Netherhall’s, the school on Queen Edith’s Way, which is how Jack and Belle had met her. Within weeks, however, Holly had held a party at which she somehow persuaded Jack’s grandfather and Belle’s parents, along with Holly’s own new friends, Darshana and the computer-guy-downstairs, to start their home-schooling arrangement.

Both Holly Tully and her daughter were oddly compelling when they spoke. Their voices seemed pitched in a way you had to bend your head to catch; in a way that hit Jack in his stomach, then rose pleasantly to the centre of the back of his neck.

Madeleine used her voice to talk about unexpected things like vanilla beans, taxes on cigarettes, the wingspan of a butterfly, and product placement on TV shows. Holly used it to go on about education, freedom, the quiz show she planned to win, and chocolate.

Here was Holly now, walking through the shadows and the sunlight. The heels of her boots were tap-echoing. She was wearing black jeans, her hair in a high ponytail that fell past her neck — a long neck, but more swan than giraffe, Jack thought. A pile of clothes, wrapped in plastic, was up over Holly’s shoulder, her thumb looped through the coat hanger hooks.

Madeleine reached her mother and turned to wave goodbye to Jack and Belle.

Imagine that
, Jack thought again, and this was the phrase that came into his head whenever he saw them together.

Madeleine and her mother — their bright eyes, their clothes from Oxfam, their attic flat —

And they used to be wealthy.

They used to live all over the world. In Paris, New York, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, and farther north in places he half thought were imaginary. There used to be yachts, hotels, champagne on terraces; they used to float on moonlight-laced rivers.

When Jack cast his gaze over Madeleine’s former life he caught glimpses of sails swelling in gusts of wind, reindeer stamping and breathing mist, diamonds woven through plaits and spilling like raindrops down a window.

Some of these images Jack had invented himself, but still.

There’d been a father too, who was something high up in a multinational corporation. The family had moved around the world with a
set of wealthy friends. The friends were of different shapes and sizes, but all had bewildering names.

Jack had gathered these names together by the stems; he’d arranged them in a vase that he kept to the right of his mind. At night, before he fell asleep, he’d breathe in the fragrance of each, the details that Madeleine had shared.

But she didn’t know half their star signs.

She hardly even knew her own.

Early on, when they’d just started home schooling together, he’d written a note on the margin of her page:
What’s your star sign?

She’d turned to him, “What does my star sigh?” and he’d seen how much she liked the idea that she owned a star, and that it sighed; he’d seen in her eyes that her mind was rushing through the possible words that it could sigh.

It’s true that his handwriting was bad: The
n
looked a lot like an
h
.

But when he’d crossed it out and written
sign
, underlining the
n
three times, a vagueness had wandered onto her face, and she’d thought for a moment, then said, “Pisces,” and smiled.

Madeleine’s family had been so wealthy, almost everything they’d done had been for fun or charity. One or the other.

Holly Tully had competed on that London quiz show once as a joke — or a stunt, or for charity — Jack was not sure which, he thought maybe all three. But now the sewing machine that she’d won was all they had left.

“So what happened?” Jack asked.

“It went like this,” Madeleine replied at once, her face breaking into a grin, as if he’d asked her to share her favourite joke. “We were in Paris for a charity gala, so I decided to take the Eurostar to London. Just, you know, for fun. For the weekend. I used to run away sometimes, see? But before this, I always came back. Anyway, I got on the train and guess what?”

“What?”

“Mum was there! Turned out she’d been thinking of leaving Dad, and when she realised I’d run away again, she thought: Why not come along?”

“Why not?” Jack agreed faintly. “All right, so you came to London on the Eurostar together, but how did you end up here in Cambridge?”

“We decided to let a random stranger decide our fate. When we got off in London, we saw a woman with a green umbrella standing on the platform. We followed her and this is where she came.”

Jack, who was never speechless, stared.

“You know the funny thing?” said Madeleine. Her smile faded, and Jack leaned in, expecting a tremble, maybe tears — that she missed her father, or her wealthy life, that she wanted to go home.

“In the entire seventeen and a half times that I’d run away from home before, my mother had never come once?” Abruptly, the shine and joke were back in her eyes, and before he could ask another question she was asking him instead.

She wanted to know where his parents were. Why he lived with his grandfather. Why he wore those high-top shoes. Whether he’d ever shaved his eyebrows. What he thought of economic liberalism.

Jack found himself telling her about the accident that had killed his parents when he was two, about the malfunctioning fountain in his grandfather’s hometown in Italy, his own alligator phobia, the time he’d tried to climb across a drainpipe five storeys off the ground to impress a girl, the fact that he had no clue what economic liberalism was — and she listened fiercely, her hand over her mouth, her laughter spilling over and over.

She often made Jack feel as if his future was in stand-up.

Her mother was like that too: You could get them both to fall into hysterical laughter with a flicker of your accent. A saunter in your speech. A dumb quip about a broken teacup.

Madeleine and her mother.

There they went now.

Turning to wave and grin once again, and then walking away. Trouser legs and pleated skirts streaming behind them; plastic that rippled with sun dapples.

Jack turned to Belle, and she turned to him.

“We’re meeting her later to ride to Grantchester?” Belle said.

Jack nodded. “Bit hungry now, though.”

“Chicken souvlaki?”

“You read my mind.”

“Your aura’s looking a bit off,” said Belle.

“You and your auras,” said Jack.

“Sort of flecks of grass on it. You getting the sniffles or something?”

Jack held up his middle finger. “Got a new wart,” he said.

“Ah. That’ll explain it, then.”

He flicked the side of her cheek, quite hard, and she said, “Ow,” and then they set off.

3.

T
hey were riding their bikes out to Grantchester — Madeleine, Jack, and Belle — along the path through the meadows by the river.

The wheels of Madeleine’s bike flew over dried mud, and she herself flew into a memory.

A cow sniffed and looked her way, and she was out of it again.

She told them the memory while they ate scones under the apple trees, deckchairs slung low to the ground.

“I was riding a skateboard — we were all on skateboards — going down a hill.”

“Where was this?” said Belle, eyes closed.

“Genoa. In Italy. We were there for a summer. I was going fast — I was ahead of the others and the hill was steep. The road swerved and suddenly there was an intersection with cars flying by in both directions. So I jumped off the skateboard. And that was when I realised how fast I was going. I did that thing where your feet go —”

She stopped and drummed her fists on the table.

“No. Wait. It was faster than that, more like —”

This time she drummed her fingers instead, fingernails clicking like a typist, fingers tangling and tripping one another.

“You know, when your feet are in a panic, trying to catch up with your body.”

She paused.

“I came so close to falling,” she said. “But I didn’t. I saved myself.”

She broke a scone in half, spread it with jam, and took a bite.

“That’s it? That’s the memory?” Belle sat up, and nearly lost control of her deckchair.

“No. There was a six-car pile-up. While I was saving myself my skateboard rolled onto the highway.”

“Oh, all right, then.” Belle regained her chair’s composure, and closed her eyes again.

Jack hit the side of Belle’s head. “
Oh, all right, then
? A six-car bloody pile-up.
Oh, all right, then
?”

Madeleine laughed, then looked thoughtful.

“Nobody was hurt,” she said. “Except the cars, I guess.”

They all reflected on this.

Eventually, Belle said: “Did you cry?”

“I never cry,” said Madeleine. “I’m not a crying kind of girl.”

“Who were you skateboarding with?” Jack asked. “Was it Tinsels and Corrigan and Warlock and that lot?”

“Your friends had the daftest names,” murmured Belle.

“My father was there too,” said Madeleine. “He was farther up the hill, on the side of the road. I remember, when I picked up my skateboard — it got thrown into an embankment along with pieces of broken windscreen, but it was okay — anyway, when I picked it up and started heading back, I saw my dad. That was the year he had a beard. He held his hands in front of his face, clenched them into fists, and swung them down through the air. I remember it looked like he was demonstrating how much longer he planned to grow the beard. Then he turned suddenly and walked away.”