Dear Elliot

So, I wasn’t even going to look at that parking meter again.

I was totally going to shun it. Even if the parking meter was, like, drowning and calling out, ‘Madeleine! Save me!’ I was just going to shrug, and go, ‘Whatever.’

Even if it asked me to dance.

And I love dancing.

Cause you stood me up in the rain, buddy.

(Also, my mother made me promise never to communicate with Elliot Baranski again.)

But here I am.

What’s that all about?

Your guess is as good as mine.

Well, no, I doubt that actually. My guess would probably be better than yours.

What happened was, I was walking along, keeping my eyes away from the parking meter, but there was a car parked in front of it with its two front seats pushed forward. As if the two seats had just got bad news. The driver’s seat was resting its head on the steering wheel, like, completely overcome by the news.

I was, like, Oh no, guys, what’s wrong, what’s happened? but the seats didn’t say anything. And then I felt I should respect their privacy and so I turned away from them, and there was the parking meter. Right in front of my eyes.

With a REALLY fat envelope in it.

I had to WRENCH it out of the crack.

But I did. I wrenched it. And I read it.

The first thing I want to say is that I’m embarrassed that I gave away my name. So much for being a supercool, superspy, undercover, code-name kinda girl.

So much for protecting my privacy, I guess.

(And I never in my whole life thought of my initials as sounding like ‘empty’. Great. Thanks for that.)

Anyhow, I read your letter, and I started writing a reply in my head, but then a strange thing happened. Something slid sideways into my mind and said: I think it’s real.

And for a moment, I believed in the Kingdom of Cello.

Seriously.

Only for a moment, though. I’m over it now.

Anyhow, so that happened. And then, I’m walking home and I saw two cats. This was in a children’s playground. I stopped at the fence and watched them. They seemed young, like a cat’s whisker (ha ha) past being kittens. They were slender with bright eyes, and they were running side by side, exactly as if they had been choreographed. They slipped in and around the children’s play equipment, flying apart then coming back together. One found an old key on a loop of rope, and they tossed that around for a while. The pattern of their play felt symmetrical, and then I realised that the patterns on their fur felt that way too.

One was black, the other dark grey, but they both had a kind of shimmer of white at exactly the same points on their coats. It was like one was the cat and the other was the shadow of the cat.

I was watching them, and I thought of you and me. How we’re like shadows of each other, or maybe reflections. I ran away from my father; your father ran away from you; but both things have turned out to mean the same thing. That our fathers betrayed us. I’ve betrayed Jack and you’ve betrayed Kala. We’re both secretly afraid that it might be our own fault that we’ve lost our family and friends. We’ve realised how flawed our fathers are, and we think we might be flawed in the same way.

It’s like we’re complementary colours. (Sorry to be talking about colours again.) You know what those are, right? Colours that make each other disappear? So if you cross red with green—or blue with orange, or yellow with purple—you get a pale, pale colour, almost white. (Isaac called it a ‘faint, anonymous colour’.) (I’m not talking about paint here—red and green paint don’t cancel each other out, they just make mud-brown.)

Interestingly, though, if you put complementary colours next to each other, they make each other shine much more brightly. (‘They glow with more than their natural brilliance’, is how Leonardo da Vinci put it.)

I wonder what would happen if you and I met? Would we kill each other off, or make each other glow? Maybe both.

The point of all this is that even though I can’t believe in the Kingdom of Cello, I believe there’s truth in your writing. Maybe the essence of you comes through behind your stories? It’s like, the things you describe have happened to you—or something like them—and you’re translating them into a place called Cello. Maybe your father disappeared, and it’s connected with the colour purple, somehow? So you’ve created a monster out of purple? Maybe he was wearing a purple jacket when he left?

(If it makes you feel any better, they used to make purple dye out of the glandular mucus of a sea snail. So, you know, who likes purple? It’s just snot.)

Anyhow, Jack and Belle are still not talking to me. Well, they say words to me, but they’re the kind of words you’d say to a visiting great-aunt who’s sleeping in your bedroom and frying liver in your kitchen every morning.

Meanwhile, my mother finally went to the doctor. She got referred to a neurologist at Addenbrookes, and they’ve already done a CT scan, which apparently showed some kind of abnormality in her brain, but who knows what that’s all about? (That’s quoting the doctor, apparently—according to my mother. Not sure you can trust her on that.) She’s scheduled for an MRI in a couple of weeks, to find out just what that’s all about.

She says they all just shine lights in her eyes and make her do tests like what’s ten plus ten, or tell her to smile then frown, or they make her close her eyes and touch things and guess what they are. I asked her how she was going in her tests, and she said she got an A+, and I was like, ‘Did the doctor say that?’ and she said, ‘Well, no. But I could tell.’

So who knows?

She told me that she said to the neurologist, ‘Well, what might the problem be?’ and he said, ‘That’s a multiple-choice question.’

I guess we just wait. It feels good to have the professionals take charge. I think the job was kind of beyond me. (And I get the feeling they’re actually a lot more professional than my mother’s painting them. Plus, if there’s an abnormality in her brain, they’ll just, like, operate and take it out, right? That would’ve been totally beyond me. Brain surgery.)

Huh.

Did you catch that?
Something just kind of spun by my eyes, and it was the belief again, that the Kingdom of Cello is real.

(Gone again now.)

Best wishes,

Madeleine