The Colors of Madeleine 01: Corner of White (12 page)

In the attic flat, the rain was thickening against the window, forming curls like drying sheets of bark. Only, the rain’s curls were elegant and glassy, turning and turning into themselves until they slid out of the curl and slipped away.

Madeleine herself turned from the window.
ISAAC NEWTON
was still closed on her lap, and she was looking at the gap between the couch cushions. A thick line of crumbs. The TV quiz show filled the room with questions. A washing machine droned somewhere in the building, blending with the full noise of the rain, and the sporadic buzz of the sewing machine. Her mother shouted answers, and after each shout, when the correct answer was given, there was Holly’s thoughtful “Really?” or “Aah, should’ve known,” or just “Tch.”

Between the pages of the
ISAAC NEWTON
book was an envelope. Madeleine had stuck it in there earlier, at a random page, and now she ran her fingers along its edge.

She thought:
Who did I used to be?

Before I was a girl in a rainy flat in Cambridge — a girl who reads books filled with facts, facts that slide around her head like beans in a pot — who was I?

She knew who she’d been, but it felt like a dream. She’d been a girl who ran so fast, even down a hallway to her bedroom, she’d had to skid on her heels to stop. She’d talked like the rainfall. She’d loved the smells of things — cinnamon, coconut, lime; there’d been a special compartment in her luggage for her scented candles. She’d loved loud music, and dancing, and if she was that girl right now, she’d be with her friends and they’d lose their minds, open the window, throw the sewing machine out into the rain. Just to watch it fall four floors to the ground.

She would not be sitting here, watching the leak that spidered down the wall, the strange black splotches of mould slowly expanding. She’d get a sledgehammer and knock a hole in that wall. She’d climb through the window, abseil down the wall, kick aside the pieces of broken sewing machine.

Where was she now, the girl with the thunderstorm heart?

“Yeah,” said Belle. “It’s bollocks. Did you know that if two aura readers look at someone else’s aura, they just about
never
see the same thing? I mean, what does
that
tell you about the scientificness of it?”

Jack gazed at his friend. He shook his head slowly. He said, “I honestly have no idea what to say.” He said, “If this is — if you are — well, why have you bloody been talking about auras for the last five bloody years, then?”

“Oh, well,
I
can read them,” Belle said affably. “Just, nobody else can, see? So the science of it is total bollocks, which means, why would I waste time studying it, see? But I can read them. Don’t worry about that.”

Jack’s mouth split into its biggest smile.

“Yours is looking sort of peach-coloured at the moment,” Belle added. “You’re feeling tranquil and dreamy but sort of antsy too.”

The smile broke suddenly: He’d had a thought.

“You know what I just realised? You never read Madeleine’s aura,” he said. “Why’s that?”

The waitress took the empty cake plate and put down a glass in its place, bill curled inside.

“We never asked for the bill,” said Belle.

“We’re closing now.”

“Why not?” Jack repeated. “You’re always reading mine, and everyone else’s, and you’re probably about to tell me that the waitress’s aura’s gone crusty or something. But I’ve never heard you say a thing about Madeleine’s.”

“Ah,” Belle shrugged. “Madeleine wears too many colours. Clothes have an aura of their own, see, and they interfere.”

“Is that a fact?” Jack took his wallet and paid the bill. He looked around dreamily.

“You know what she’s like?” he said. “Madeleine, I mean. I’ve been thinking she’s like someone from a music video. You know in music videos, the way they’ll do fast cuts between shots? Like a wide shot of the band playing in a hayloft, then a kid in a school bus, then someone rolling a pen between their hands — that kind of thing. And they keep repeating the same shots in a loop. And they’ve got this one shot — say, the drummer’s a girl and she’s mostly in shadows, but there’s one shot of her looking down and just starting to laugh, with her eyes behind her hair, and then they cut away, before she gets to the full laugh. And each time you see it, you get this feeling like
that
shot,
that’s
the real sort of chorus to the song. That’s the tantalising bit, and you watch harder and harder, wanting more, and you get the feeling she’s really pretty, but you never see her face or hear her laugh. That’s what Madeleine is like.”

Belle looked away from the table.

“Madeleine’s always laughing,” she said. “And we see her face all the time. Don’t pay yet. I haven’t finished my tea.”

That morning, Madeleine had gone to retrieve the note she’d left in the parking meter. She’d been thinking how crazy it was, that she’d put her heart on the street for anyone to find. Sure, it was well hidden, but
what if somebody who knew her had found it?

For a smart person
, she’d thought,
I can be kind of stupid.

She’d cycled fast, wondering at what point your stupidity undermined your smartness.

There’d been a car parked alongside the meter. The car had had a smug look about it.
The parking meter’s out of service
, it had seemed to say,
didn’t have to pay, did I?
Or maybe it had been a defensive look.
I WOULD have paid but I couldn’t — the parking meter’s out of service, see?

Her letter had been gone.

An envelope had been in its place.

A long, thin envelope marked with a red
M.T.

Inside the envelope there had been two folded papers. One had been her own letter; the other had said this:

Madeleine ran her hand along the side of the envelope.

She thought about the poet Lord Byron.

She knew he was born George Gordon Byron in 1788, and that his father married his mother for her money, then stole it, spent it, and gambled it. When Byron was still a baby, his parents unsurprisingly split up.

She knew that when Byron was small, his father, who lived around the corner at this point, invited him to stay. The next day, he returned the little boy. “That’s enough,” he said, “I want no more of him.”

She knew that his mother was frantic and vicious.

That he was born with a twisted foot, a limp, and was always being bound up in metal contraptions, supposedly to untwist the foot, but they twisted him pale with pain.

She knew that he wrote poetry, and that this was his way — his own way, his different way — of getting the message across. Of clearing a path through it all, clearing the cows from the tracks.

Madeleine looked at the edge of the envelope again.

The stranger who found her letter, the one who called himself Elliot Baranski —
If there’s a way to get a message through or across
, he had written,
well, it seems all wrong to me to shut that down.

Right in the middle of this strange letter, there it was.

“Traditionally,” said the quiz show, cutting into her thoughts, “what is the colour of royalty?”

“Orange!” cried Madeleine’s mother.

“Purple,” said the TV contestant. “Or royal blue.”

“Tch.”

Madeleine looked up.

“Can we change the channel?” she said.

Her mother laughed. So did Madeleine.

She thought of Lord Byron running through his life.

Byron didn’t climb like Charles Babbage, frowning back down at the rest of the world. Byron ran helter-skelter, always looking up at trees and skies. If he’d had a skateboard, he’d have skated fast down hills towards highways.

Only, his life was riddled with potholes, and he kept falling. Falling and falling into potholes of love — everywhere Byron turned there was a beautiful woman, or a man with liquid eyes, and his heart thudded madly for them all. For baker’s wives, chorus girls, countesses, and cousins.

She also knew this about Byron: that he felt the loss of love so hard he turned white and lost consciousness.

The door to the tea room opened again and another group of rain-huddled tourists rushed inside.

The waitress was out the back.

“You know the kid in that show,
Two and a Half Men
?” said Jack. “Guess how much he gets paid for every episode.”

“Can’t.”

“A
quarter
of a million dollars,” said Jack. “A
quarter
. Of a million.”

“Why do you keep saying ‘
quarter
’ like that?” Belle said. “Like that’s the important bit. A quarter’s not that big of an amount, you know. It’s not like a
half
, or a
full
,
total
million.”

“It’s a lot but, eh? Considering it’s not even that good of a show.”