SEVEN
I helped Mum do a few things, and then I got away as soon as I could, on my own for the first time all day. Upstairs, my new room in the attic was a mixed bag, two parts brilliant, two parts the opposite of that. It was the place where all the flies came to die. I watched them flitting and buzzing at the windows like crowds at the turnstiles, exiting their weightless corpses across the sills and along the very edges of the floor. Henry Lake’s boiled soup smell was strong up there too, but the space was massive, the whole width of that massive house. I’d never had so much space in my life. I explored a bit, poked around in its dark corners, tried to picture it all cleaned up and perfect, but the dust in there was threatening to kill me, so I took my book, made my exit, and climbed up through the skylight and down onto the flat roof below.
I was shielded by trees up there, kind of hidden, with a view of the street in front and the sea behind. I sat with my back against the wall. Warm bricks, salt breeze, sunshine. I took some pictures of the sky on my half-dead phone. Through the cracked screen it looked like someone had taken a hammer to the clouds. The sun was bleeding rainbows round their edges. Way above all the mess and the action, the world is forever a beautiful place. I read for a bit but my head was too crowded, so I shut my eyes and let the light push through my eyelids, coral and warm. Henry’s open window offered up some weird record, grown men singing through their noses, moaning all together like ten types of wind trapped down a well. There was a cricket match playing on someone’s radio, the low bellow of the docks, the muted crash and roll of all that water, and above me, when I opened my eyes again and looked up, the long straight out-breath of a passing plane in the blue.
The breeze dropped. I looked down sideways over the edge of my roof to the floor below. The straw-yellow bird was dancing about on Henry’s window ledge, the gulls on next door’s roof sizing it up, deciding just how and when to rip it to pieces and fight over the spoils. I waved my arms at them, international bird-speak for leave the little one alone, and they stood up, flapped, and shifted, flinging their eyes at me like stones.
“Parker?” Henry said. “Charlie Parker, come inside at once,” and it struck me, because the bird I’d always imagined Charlie Parker to be was something sleek and soaring like his music, not a fluffed-up, crapped-out old parakeet in a cage. I wondered if this Charlie Parker was even a tiny bit tempted to risk it, take its chances with the big world, and just fly. But birds like that don’t survive in the wild. Not here anyway. Maybe it traveled like Henry Lake did, not for real, just in its own head. Henry’s hand came out then and the bird hopped straight onto the bowl of his crumpled, ancient palm, and there was my answer. The window rumbled shut and I thought, Oh well, we’re here now, let’s see what happens. I bet it’s nothing at all.
Just how wrong can a person be?
Novo
You are the place I return to, in between times. My fulcrum, the point at my center, around which all of me turns. You are my chance at stillness. The rock in my water. I know you.
I wait for you to see me. I hope for it, that pin drop in my infinities. I know to hope, but not to be certain. It is never guaranteed.
I would show you all the magic there is if you asked me. I would bring you the universe on a plate, take you out from under the rules that apply, so that anything was possible. You could slip between layers of sky and count the atoms. You could reflect light like the moon. You could hear all the languages of the world, all their words and all the wordless ones too, and you would know them. You could fly in water and swim in air. You could spend a whole life’s worth of time in the moments it takes you to blink.
I would give you anything you asked for, in exchange for one of your looks.
EIGHT
Jude
I remember everything about the next day clear as glass, because it’s when Novo showed up. Nine thirty-four A.M. on the first of July is a page-corner, red-letter, highlighter-pen kind of Now. After it, nothing was, or is, or could ever possibly be the same. Nine thirty-three I was out front, reading in a sunlit patch of grass, medicating my sad situation with something made-up and far more dramatic, with better characters and sharper dialogue than my little life could ever muster, up until then. This thing happening, his car arriving, made me stop. Nine thirty-three was the quiet before the storm, the lull before the penny dropped, the last in-breath of life, as I knew it anyway. And then the miracle. Then Novo. I remember.
Out of nowhere, his battered black car banked the corner, shadowing the curb like a whale underwater, swallowing up the light. A trash truck was in the road, jaws grinding, and the whale-black car had to wait behind it, stuck there for me to study, covered in dents and scrapes, engine running, windows up, music loud on the inside, I could just tell. A boy. One hand on the wheel, one arm stretched long across the blood-red leather seat-top like the branch of a tree. He bit his lip, stroked his jaw with the flat of his hand. Straightaway I wanted to be in that car with him. It pulled at me, the way you feel a tooth being pulled, not just there in your mouth, but also somehow dead center in the hub of the wheel of your stomach. I don’t think I could have looked away if I’d tried, like he was the target and I was the missile—preprogrammed, set on lock, already hurtling.
He stopped across the street, outside Mrs. Midler’s. Louder music, door slam, and the car dipped and sighed, missing him already as he climbed out, tall with black hair and dark clothes, a streak of ink against the blotting-paper day. He checked his watch. He stretched his arms over his head and then spread them wide, open-handed, filling the space around him, eating it up like he was hungry. He looked up at the house, touched his fingers to his mouth, a habit I would come to know so well, and that first time there was nothing else in the world suddenly, for me, only those fingers and that mouth, only him doing that. Fast and strong as a big cat he stepped onto the bonnet and then the roof of his car and took in the view, turning a slow circle, stretching again like you do after a long sleep, rolling his shoulders, arching his back. The early sun glowed warm on his skin, carved out in light and sharp shadows the wide slope of his shoulders, his collarbones, the hollows at the base of his throat. The noise of his weight on the metal sat low in the air like a gong. Wild. Unparalleled. Shining.
He jumped down and then climbed the flat front of Mrs. Midler’s house, blatant, lizard-quick, balancing on the narrow ledge of an upstairs window, moving with the casual elegance of the high wire, like he was inches from the ground, not two whole floors. This boy was not afraid of falling. And he wasn’t worried about getting caught either. I’d never seen anyone who cared less about that.
It was from up there that he saw me. He looked down at me and for a moment everything about him stopped, the way an animal stops when it knows it’s been seen—so completely still that it hums with it, at some secret frequency, some planetary resonance, like a struck fork. Then it was over, so fast that I questioned it had happened at all. I don’t think I moved either. I didn’t blink. I must have stopped breathing, because it came to me from somewhere that I was running out of air. I wasn’t the only one. Every other creature in striking distance forgot what they were doing for a moment when Novo landed, derailed themselves mid-train-of-thought without knowing why. I guarantee. His brazen newness brought its own brand of silence with it. Someone’s cat broke from washing in a patch of sunlight, triangular, limbs stretched, feet splayed, eyes narrowed to slits. Even the gulls stopped their jaw and their hustle. It was only after he dropped neatly through an upstairs window and out of sight that the ordinary noise of things flooded back. My lungs regained their composure and the birds started up again and the cat slunk under a van and shot into a yard through a gap in the hedge. The old, always-gardening couple came out onto their porch like sleepwalkers, faces set to longing, leaf-blower to suck. The woman opposite-but-one came out and paused on her step for a second like she’d forgotten something, sniffing the air like a bloodhound, and then barricaded herself back in, kicking her door shut so hard it knocked over a plant and spoiled her spotless WELCOME mat with broken clay and clumps of thick black soil.