1

It was raining heavily.

Car headlights seemed to scowl around corners. Cyclists scowled back, wiping raindrops from their noses and eyebrows. Drainways and gutters gushed with water; tulips and daffodils trembled; and cherry blossom petals scattered from their trees, forming glowing veils of pink over slick brown mulch.

In the Cambridge Market Square, a man stepped in a puddle and the splash patterned out across a passing woman’s skirt. A small crowd of tourists shivered in the entryway to Barclays Bank. The market itself was closed and tightly wrapped, but a fruit-stall owner was still packing up the last of his oranges.

Just off the square, on St Mary’s Passage, cane chairs and tables were soaking in the downpour on the terrace outside a café. In its window was a stencilled image of a buxom woman offering a tray of tea. Auntie’s, said the flourish above her head, and below, more plain-speaking: TEA SHOP.

Inside Auntie’s Tea Shop, a girl was squinting hard at her friend. He, in turn, was lost in thought. He was tall and had golden-green eyes, and a wide mouth that seemed ready to form a big wide smile. These two were Belle and Jack.

A few streets away, in her attic flat, Madeleine was sitting on the couch. Her mother was at the sewing table. Rain streamed down the windows, and rain shadows streamed down Holly and Madeleine’s faces and arms. The quiz show played on TV.

Madeleine was holding a closed book.

ISAAC NEWTON said the cover of the book in big, proud blue and, beneath that, more humbly, the author’s name.

Did Isaac have a nickname? Did they call him Zac? she thought. Also: What does it mean if your name begins with ‘I’? What effect does that have on your ego?

She remembered that she’d dreamed about her iPod last night. In the dream, she had seen it on the seat of a passing train. Its music had been spilling everywhere, staining the seat. She’d been in one train, the iPod in another, and there it had gone, heading fast away from her, her hand reaching out through the window helplessly.

Where are they now? she thought. Her iPod, her iPhone, her iPad, the I-ness of her life? Her mind stretched around in its memories searching for her things: she saw her phone on the hotel bedside table in Paris; her iPad in her Louis Vuitton urban satchel; her iPod slipping from her pocket in the restaurant, the night before she ran away.

Then she saw her father’s face, and he was pointing out the iPod as it slipped toward the floor.

Madeleine’s memory slipped itself, and there was her dad again. He was pushing his chair back from the table, and leaping to his feet to demonstrate the odd way someone walked. The table was laughing hysterically. Other diners turned.

Now she saw her father crouch by her side when she was small: the intensity of his gaze while she herself counted the feet of a millipede for him.

She saw him at a hotel breakfast bar, pushing the collar of his shirt aside to show her a new tattoo.

‘Why’d you get that?’ she had said.

‘To see how it would feel.’

That was her father’s embrace of life. He did things just to see how they felt. He felt things more than most people did. He stopped still to laugh his big, full laugh, not caring if people had to wait or move around him. In an underground cave once, his laugh had echoed out, turning back on him, and he’d paused, surprised, and then laughed harder.

The expression on her father’s face when their car hit a dog in Barcelona; the expression when the vet said the dog wouldn’t make it through the night. Tears in her father’s eyes as he stroked the dog’s ears.

In Auntie’s Tea Shop, Jack and Belle were sharing the Hot Banana Cake with Butterscotch Sauce and drinking tea. The tablecloth was white lace, the chairs were loops of dark wood, and framed prints of Cambridge hung on the walls.

‘I had this dream last night,’ Belle said, her spoon cutting a crescent moon into the cake.

‘All right.’ Jack’s spoon hovered. ‘What was it?’

‘I had this dream where I kept kissing people and every time I did it was disgusting. I kept wanting to kiss random people—like the postman and that—but it was all wet, like saliva just pouring into the kiss.’

There was a pause. ‘That’s disgusting,’ Jack said.

‘Yeah, I told you that. I said it was disgusting.’

Their spoons cut at the cake, fiercely competitive for a while, until Belle said, ‘Hang about,’ and she sliced the cake in half, pushed half his way, half hers. ‘Now we can relax.’

They both sat back and looked around. A middle-aged couple pushed open the door with a jangle of exclamations about the rain. A waitress muttered, ‘We’re practically closed,’ but she smiled and seated them anyway. The waitress wore a black uniform trimmed in white at the collar and the sleeves, white apron over it all.

‘I love this place,’ said Belle.

‘It must have been drool,’ said Jack. ‘You were drooling while you were dreaming, so that’s why the kisses were like that.’

‘I don’t drool.’

‘Of course you do. Everyone does. Especially when you’re dreaming. You’re paralysed when you dream. You can’t move anything, not even your tongue, so you can’t swallow your spit.’

They both picked up their spoons again, thoughtful.

‘That paralysed thing,’ Jack added. ‘It’s probably why I have so many dreams where I’m trying to run or drive to get somewhere, but I end up going nowhere.’

‘No. You have those dreams because you are going nowhere.’

‘Thanks,’ said Jack.

Earlier that day, Jack and Belle had met Holly and Madeleine in the café at Waterstones, when the rain was still high in the grey.

‘Begin,’ Holly had said, ‘by closing your eyes and breathing in the books.’

Belle and Jack did so, while Madeleine went to get extra chocolate sprinkles for her cappuccino.

When she returned, they had opened their eyes, sweet and startled, like small children waking from long naps.

Holly nodded her approval at them, and then she said:

‘She walks in beauty, like the night

Of cloudless climes and starry skies;

And all that’s best of dark and bright

Meet in her aspect and her eyes.’

‘Who does?’ said Belle.

‘It’s a nice line, isn’t it?’ said Jack. ‘She walks in beauty like the night.’

‘Do you know who wrote those lines?’ said Holly.

‘I did,’ said Jack, smiling with faint pride.

Belle regarded him, incredulous, then her face cleared.

‘Oh, right,’ she said, ‘so it was Byron.’ She turned to Holly. ‘Byron wrote it.’

‘Hmm.’ Holly squinted thoughtfully. ‘I thought so too, Belle, but Jack seems so sure of himself.’

So all three had explained to Holly about the names in the hat.

‘I didn’t have to become Byron,’ Jack added, ‘because I already am him, or anyway exactly like him. But without the poetry. Also, girls are not falling over themselves to have my children. As far as I know. If they are, they need to do it more loudly. Apart from all that, I’m just like Byron.’

‘The similarities are blowing my mind,’ said Belle.

‘Different names, too,’ Jack had continued. ‘Byron and I have different names.’

Now in Auntie’s Tea Shop, Jack fixed a critical gaze on the little shelf hanging on the opposite wall. Its edges swirled and curled, the wood getting carried away with itself. A copper kettle sat alone on the top shelf, looking slightly lost. Jack thought that the owner of the teashop had probably got that copper kettle for a present. And after the present-giver went home, the shop-owner had said, ‘What am I supposed to do with this bloody thing?’ and someone else had said, ‘Oh, stick it up there on the shelf.’

Jack turned back to Belle, tilted his head toward the kettle, and she raised her eyebrows, agreeing with all his thoughts.

‘I still think I’m like Byron,’ Jack said, suddenly moody. ‘He had this thunderstorm inside him, see? He was probably an Aries like me.’

Belle glanced up at the beams on the whitewashed ceiling. She took another mouthful of the cake.

‘Was he?’ she said.

‘Was he what?’

‘An Aries like you?’

‘That depends when he was born,’ Jack said patiently.

Belle blinked once.

‘Oh, right.’ He squinted into his memory, then gave up and rifled through the notes in his bag. ‘Huh. Twenty-second of January was his birthday, so no, he was an Aquarius. That’s all right though. I was an Aquarius just two lives back.’

‘You and your past lives,’ said Belle. ‘Maybe Byron had an aura like yours.’

‘You and your auras,’ said Jack.

‘I could read his aura for you if you want. Have you got a picture?’

‘You can read auras from pictures?’

Belle shrugged. ‘Dunno. Never tried.’

Jack poured himself some more tea. Everything on the table was white: cake plate, teacups, salt and pepper shakers. The teapot itself, also white, had a sort of attitude about it: tall and fancy, its handle like a hand on a hip, spout curving up and over like a wave, like it was dead keen to get into your cup.

‘I’m going to study it at university, you know,’ Jack said. ‘Astrology. Did I tell you that? I was thinking, it’s what I feel passionate about, so I should. You think you’ll study auras?’

‘Nope,’ said Belle. ‘Auras is a load of bollocks.’

Jack was so shocked he nearly dropped the teapot. Belle reached out a hand to save it.

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 placed 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 vanished.

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:

Dear M.T.

I think you meant this to go to a Parking Meter, but it’s come out here in Cello. It seemed like the best thing was to send it back to you, so here it is.

Now, your letter made as much sense to me as a fireworks display in a horse trailer but, setting that aside, I think you must be in the World.

It was those places you mentioned—Paris, Prague and so on—they jarred my memory, and then I got it. We talked about them in World Studies. I only took the introductory course—the compulsory one—not the elective. ( It’s been over 300 years since we last had contact with the World, so it seemed kind of a waste to study more.) (No offence.)

Anyway, I guess this means there’s a crack in the Bonfire High schoolyard. The crack must be right where my friend Cody put his sculpture, so your letter came through, and got caught in the sculpture. Not sure of the science.

We’re supposed to report any suspected cracks to the authorities, so they can close them up right away—that’s some kind of strict law or something. I won’t, though, cause I don’t see how it’s doing any harm, and I don’t like the idea, to be honest. If there’s a way to get a message through or across, well, it seems all wrong to me to shut that down.

But listen, I’m heading out in a few days—on a trip to the Magical North—so if any more of your letters come through, I won’t be here to send them back to you.

Before I go, can I say a couple of things? First off, in relation to the foods you eat. What’s wrong with beans? Maybe spice them up with some garlic or thyme leaves. You could add chorizo sausage, or woodsmoked bacon.

As for tarts and cupcakes etc, I guess if you had fine baking once, and now it’s gone, that’s got to be tough. So, I’m sorry to hear about that.

The other thing—my mother’s excited about you. She’s always had an interest in the World. It was her best subject, she says, when she was at school. She particularly wants me to ask if you’ve had any more trouble with republicans. Oliver Cromwell was the name, she recalls, but she says he’d be long dead by now.

Anyhow, you take care, and if you want to reply and answer my mother’s question—in the next three days, if that’s OK—you’d make her day.

Yours faithfully,

Elliot Baranski

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.’

‘Over a quarter of a million dollars,’ said Jack. ‘Over 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.’

‘What is that in pounds?’

She had to raise her voice. The newcomers were talking loudly. They were exclaiming about everything—roof beams, shelf unit, copper teakettle. Everything was darling; it was all exactly right.

‘I’m going to get the scones with clotted cream!’ cried one of the women, and the others overlapped her with agreement, their voices clotted with enthusiasm. They passed the phrase back and forth, as if trying out a new language.

Jack and Belle widened eyes at each other.

‘I don’t know,’ Jack said. ‘It’s changing all the time, isn’t it? The exchange rate. It’s a lot, but. That’s my point.’

‘Your emphasis was wrong,’ Belle reflected. ‘A quarter of a million. So what?’

‘Let’s change the channel,’ Madeleine said again. ‘Can we? For my sake. I just want something else.’

‘Sake,’ said Holly. ‘That’s a Japanese drink.’

‘You pronounce it sah-key.’ Madeleine looked for the remote.

‘You eat it with sushi and sashimi,’ said her mother. She rubbed her arm. ‘This arm keeps going numb. What’s that about? Too much TV?’

‘You don’t eat it. You drink it.’ They both laughed, and Madeleine took the remote from under a swatch on her mother’s sewing table. She changed the channel.

‘Your arm went numb the other day too,’ Madeleine said. ‘And you keep getting headaches and getting—confused.’ She pointed the remote at the TV.

Holly was quiet, watching the stations change. ‘What’s this then?’ she said after a moment.

‘It’s that Australian soap. Neighbours.’

‘Australia,’ her mother repeated uncertainly.

Madeleine laughed, and her mother did too.

‘We went there once,’ Madeleine said. ‘To Sydney. Remember, we saw the Opera House? We came into the harbour on a cruise ship and they had fireworks. And Dad really liked Vegemite.’

‘Vegemite?’ Once again, they laughed.

‘It’s like Marmite. Nobody likes Vegemite except Australians who grew up with it,’ Madeleine explained. ‘It’s disgusting. But Dad decided it was perfect with single malt whisky. He kept putting it on crackers, and making people try a sip of Balvenie then a Vegemite cracker, and saying, “Isn’t it sublime?” Remember?’

The waitress reappeared.

‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ she said to the table of tourists. ‘We’re closed now.’

‘Why does she not have any money?’ said Belle. ‘How can you go from being as rich as all that to having nothing? Why’s she so poor?’

Jack was standing up. ‘You mean Madeleine? Her parents separated.’

‘But that doesn’t mean the wife ends up with nothing,’ Belle persisted. ‘The wife’s supposed to take the husband for everything he’s got, and that.’ She tried the teapot again, but it was empty, so she stood too.

The tourists’ faces were wide with disappointment. ‘It doesn’t say you’re closed,’ they argued with the waitress, and she repeated, ‘Sorry, but we are.’

Jack was pushing open the door.

Belle was behind him, and she took a step into the rain, but then she turned and stepped back in.

She glared at the waitress.

‘Ah, let them have their scones with clotted cream!’ she snarled, and the room snapped into stillness as she pushed back out into the cold.

Madeleine was standing now. She was reaching for her jacket.

‘I think I’ll go out for a bit.’

‘But it’s raining!’ Her mother laughed and held her right arm in the air. ‘Can you see that?’

‘See what?’

‘My leg.’

‘That’s not your leg, it’s your arm.’

Holly nodded and turned back to the television.

There was an ad for flights to New York.

‘New York,’ said Holly. ‘Now that’s the big apple.’

Madeleine had opened the door. She smiled at her mother.

‘It is,’ she agreed.

‘Is it a crunchy one? An apple with a crunch?’

Madeleine laughed. She was standing in the open door and words were stepping out from behind her laughter. ‘You need to go,’ she said, and the words surprised her as she said them. She thought they would stay at this calm, even level, at the level of the laughter, but they didn’t. They surged up into a terrible kind of shriek: ‘You need to go and see a doctor!’ and she slammed the door behind her.

The slam ate the last half-hour of laughter.