CLOCKWORK PHOENIX 2: More Tales of Beauty and Strangeness (2 page)

A phoenix can only endure its own friction for so long.

I never promised you a safe ride, friend, and surely you never expected one. Surely you desire this end as much as I do. Surely, you do.

The pain is exquisite and all too short, and you and I are now ash scattered out through the sky, our last thoughts raining down upon this single lonely house, itself as burnt to gray as we are.

Claude Lalumière

Part 1

Out of the Summer and into the Grey

That morning, so very near the end of summer, the Boy Who Speaks with Walls emerged from his parents’ house with his tote bag full of lollipops, just like he had every day since school had let out in June. As he walked down the three wooden steps of his front porch, he glanced back affectionately at the red brick wall of his house. He liked how, in summer, the corners were softened by the leaves and branches of oak trees. He wore a baseball cap to protect his bald head from the summer sun, faded beige corduroy pants (he never wore shorts because he disliked exposing his bare legs), and a T-shirt with an iron-on picture of Timothy Draxton, the star of his favourite television show,
The Adventures of Shade Savage
.

He crossed the street, to the house where the Girl Who Eats Fire lived with her parents. Actually, the Boy assumed that the Girl lived with her parents in that old broken-down house. He had never seen them, and the Girl never spoke about them. He knew better than to ask the Girl questions she didn’t want to answer. The house stood in the middle of a large lot, far from the sidewalk and from the houses on either side of it. The chipped, dirty bricks, the rotten wood, the rusted metal, the broken windows all fused into one stern grey mass that forbade colour. There was one old, dead, grey tree near the porch. The ground around it—and on the whole lot—was paved in concrete. People said the house looked like something from Greytown, and they avoided the Girl Who Eats Fire because of it. But the Boy didn’t care. The Girl was his friend, and that’s all that mattered.

He knocked on the door (the doorbell had been broken for as long as he could remember). Sometimes, it took several minutes for the Girl to answer his knock, so he was prepared to wait. In the meantime, he sucked on a lemon-cherry lollipop and lost himself in that bittersweet pleasure. After he chewed off the last pieces of candy from the white stick, he tossed it in the paper sack he carried in his tote bag for just that purpose. He thought,
The Girl never takes this long. Maybe she didn’t
hear me knock?
He looked at the house; he noticed—not for the first time—that a few of the windows were boarded up and that old paint was flaking off the crooked brick wall. Out of respect for his friend, he resisted the temptation to reach out and touch that old wall and ask it to share its secrets. He knocked again, putting all of his strength into it. This time the door gave and opened slightly. He heard a loud crash coming from inside the house.

There was a second, louder crash. And muted laughter. The Boy pushed the door open a bit wider and shouted: “Girl! Are you in there?”

There was no answer, and that frightened the Boy. He was worried about his friend. He had never been inside her house, and the thought of crossing the threshold filled him with a dread he couldn’t explain.

He forced himself to gather his courage. Sometimes, his friends teased him because of his cowardice, but he knew he was brave. It’s just that there was so much that scared him. Every day there were new fears to confront. Yes, he cried and sometimes froze with fear. But he didn’t run away, and he didn’t pretend not to be scared. Every morning, after his mom had filled up his tote bag with lollipops and kissed him goodbye, she smiled at him and said: “My brave little man!” His mother would never lie to him.

Suddenly, just as he was about to push the door wide open and run into the house in search of the Girl (or at least when he thought he was just about to), the door flung open and the Kid Whose Laughter Makes Adults Run Away stepped outside the Girl’s house. The Girl followed, holding hands with the Kid. Today her hair was white with jet-black streaks. She wore a torn button-up shirt. Black, of course. She always dressed in black. The shirt was so long that it covered up the usual black denim shorts that she was in all likelihood also wearing.

The Girl, her face impassive (as it so often was), closed the door behind her while the Kid, grinning wide, said: “Good morning, Boy!” The Kid chuckled. “Good morning! Ha! Did these walls tell you anything?” The Kid punched the wall of the house.

The Boy blushed. The Kid had been in the Girl’s house! No one ever went inside the Girl’s house. And why were they holding hands? Something new and different was happening, but he didn’t know what. He felt left out. No—more: he felt betrayed by his two friends, but he couldn’t articulate or even guess at the nature of this betrayal.

The Boy tried to speak, not really knowing what he was going to say, but the words were trapped by a stutter, and he repeated the same indeterminate sound several times until the Kid tickled him and then bolted from the porch, daring both the Boy and the Girl to catch up.

Without meeting his eyes the Girl squeezed the Boy’s shoulder, and they ran off together after the Kid. The long-legged Kid ran much faster than either the Girl, who tended to be easily short of breath, or the plump, short-legged Boy, who never cared much for physical exertion. After a block and a half of heavy breathing, they completely lost sight of the Kid.

The Boy, drenched in sweat, and the Girl, so pale now that she almost looked like a skeleton, plopped themselves against the wall of Venus & Milo’s High-Class Discount Beauty Salon, Coffee Shop & No-Nonsense Aquarian Therapy Clinic. The Boy, hunched over with his eyes half-closed, trying to catch his breath, heard the Girl giggle wheezily. He looked up at her, and she pointed at the large window of Venus & Milo’s. Inside, the Boy saw Milo parading around like a runway model, in what looked like a fancy, expensive dress. He walked in those spike heels like he was born to it. Venus lounged back in one the swivelling chairs that customers sat in to get their hair cut or styled, smoking a long cigarette and clapping his hands in delight. Milo’s legs were thick and hairy, and, to the Boy, the dress had a comical effect, but from the loving expression on Venus’s face the Boy Who Speaks with Walls knew that Milo was showing off for someone who thought he looked radiant.

The Boy laughed along with the Girl. It was such a rare treat to hear her laugh. He caught her eye and was rewarded with a conspiratorial wink that soothed away the betrayal he had felt earlier.

Suddenly the door to Venus & Milo’s pushed open, and out poured Milo, in his low-cut blue velvet dress that showed off a thick patch of chest hair. “Boy! Girl! What a pleasure! Come on in!”

The Boy and the Girl sat down on the swivelling chairs, and, as they often did, spun them around, enjoying the dizzy feeling. Milo lit a cigar and then snapped open a Tupperware container, offering the children some doughnuts. “I made these last night. Go on.”

The two children each grabbed a sugar-sprinkled doughnut. “Thank you,” the Boy said for the both of them. “Where’s Venus? We thought we saw him through the window.”

Blowing out thick rings of smoke, Milo said, “He’ll be right out. He just went to—” Just then, Venus walked through the bead curtain that separated the front from the back of the shop, holding a tray, saying, “Herbal tea, darlings?”

Venus was slim and elegant. He wore black wool pants, a pocketless and collarless white shirt with the top button open, a trim black vest, and shiny black shoes. Black eyeliner highlighted his dark blue eyes. A red scarf, tied around his neck, added a flash of dazzle that was echoed by the red belt across his waist. His jet-black hair was gelled tightly on his head, and a pencil-thin mustache decorated his upper lip. He moved with the grace of a cat.

Venus winked at the children. “The usual?” The Girl nodded her assent, while the Boy grunted his: lemon-ginger zinger for the Girl, three-berry blend for the Boy, both heavily laced with honey. The adults drank mint.

“Isn’t the Kid with you today?” asked Venus. “That one dresses so well.” His eyes lost focus, as if he were staring into a dream.

The Boy, interrupting his attempt to cool down the tea by gently blowing on it, answered, “We were all together this morning, and then the Kid ran off, daring us to catch up.” The Boy took a sip of tea. “That Kid sure runs faster than we do. A lot faster. But we’ll find the Kid. We’ll get the Kid.”

For the next minute or so, everyone sipped their tea in silence. All around the shop, there were plastic plants (“So much cleaner!” Venus always said) in hand-painted pots (“It’s the inner me,” Milo often repeated about the loud colours and abstract designs). A long and narrow counter showcased a spectacular variety of coffee pots, coffee grinders, coffee makers, and all kinds of coffee paraphernalia that looked very strange to the Boy. Most of it was for sale, but some of it was to prepare coffee for customers. One wall featured a rotating gallery of Milo’s paintings (“The outside world’s not ready yet,” he would sometimes remark sadly). The wall facing it displayed Venus’s most recent photographs. The current series were all self-portraits in extreme closeup. Next to the door, hung a giant sign advertising the different products and services offered at Venus & Milo’s High-Class Discount Beauty Salon, Coffee Shop & No-Nonsense Aquarian Therapy Clinic.

The Girl Who Eats Fire slipped out of her chair and went to take a closer look at Venus’s photographs.

It occurred to the Boy that he had never been inside Venus & Milo’s without the Kid. “C-C-Can I ask you guys a question?” The Boy Who Speaks with Walls stuttered only when he was scared. (He scared easily.) It was much easier to speak with walls. He wasn’t confronted with all kinds of imagined expectations and judgments by gazing into the pool of their eyes, because they didn’t have any (at least not the way people understood such things). There was something about the question he wanted to ask that made him feel as if his feet were dangling off a precipice.

He didn’t usually stutter much with Venus and Milo.

They were different from other adults. Most adults forgot they had ever been children, but the Boy felt that Venus and Milo, even all grown up, had never completely stopped being children.

“Of course, Boy, anything!” Venus laughed reassuringly, lighting a long thin white cigarette.

“Ask away,” chimed in Milo, waving the butt of his cigar and brushing ashes off his dress with his free hand.

“Well . . . How- How c-come you guys aren’t afraid of- of the K-Kid? Most grownups always wanna run away from our friend. Especially when the Kid laughs, which is almost always, and then you should see the look in their eyes! B-but, you guys, you . . . you like the Kid! Why?”

“Well . . . ” said Venus. Milo noisily coughed up some cigar smoke.

“That Kid is pretty special, you know,” continued Venus.

“Milo and I, well, we . . . We like to be friends with people who need good friends. We’re your friends, too, Boy, and you, too, G—”

Milo nudged Venus and pointed toward the door with his cigar butt. There was the Kid, inside the shop, leaning on the doorframe and smiling an especially scary smile. The sunlight glowed like a crown around the Kid’s thick auburn curls.

The Boy exclaimed, “Kid! How did you—When did you—I m-mean, no one heard—”

Across the room, the Girl grinned.

“So, I’m special, am I?” That smile was really scary, thought the Boy.
If I were a grownup, I’d be running away
so fast!

“Special!” That smile was getting scarier and scarier.

The Kid moved slowly toward Venus and Milo, smiling.

Both Venus and Milo trembled a little bit. That smile sure was getting to them. Milo said, “Kid, we—we’re—we’re happy to see you.” Venus’s eyes looked like they were trying to retreat into his head.

“Special! I’ll show you special!” And then the Kid Whose Laughter Makes Adults Run Away laughed—a soft, menacing laugh. No one laughed quite like the Kid.