The Future Is Blue, Page 29

  Alice’s eyes narrowed with concern. “Peter…I’m not sure I follow, dear.”

  “Yes, well, no one does. I don’t, when it comes down to it. If you don’t mind a confession before the main course…I…I went…well, all this about two Peters and suchlike…wound me up in a sanatorium. For a while. Not long. But…well, yes. Er.” He finished lamely, flushing in shame—shame, and the peculiar excitement of sharing a secret one absolutely knows is unwelcome and untoward.

  “Oh, Peter!”

  “Oh, Peter, indeed. It’s such a funny thing. Nothing in the world so much like Neverland as a sanatorium. The food isn’t really food, no one’s got a mother, there’s a great frightening man in a waistcoat who harries you night and day, and you keep fighting the same battles over and over, round and round in circles, forgetting that you ever fought the minute it’s over and the next one begins. All of us lost boys in that awful lagoon, dressed as animals, wailing for home.”

  She puts her hand on his. The tableware shifts beneath their fingers.

  “Did you ever feel…like that? Like there were two Alices?” he whispers.

  Alice laughs wanly. “Good heavens, no. There is only one Alice, and I am her. He only…took a photograph. One great, gorgeous photograph, where the sitting lasted all my life, and he sold that picture to the world.”

  Cinders All A-Glow

  Olive found that, if she walked very, very slowly, as though she were dragging her feet on the way to some unpleasant chore, she could speed along quite gaily through the shadowy glen. It hardly took a moment of glum shuffling before she stood at a tapering, rather church-like door wedged into the giant’s skeleton, just where its briary ribcage came to a Pythagorean point. It certainly was a door, though rather absurdly done. It made her think of all the overdecorated, slapdash rooms of Fuss Antonym, thrown up without reason or sense, for the door was spackled together out of pocket watch parts and butter and breadcrumbs and jam, and she felt entirely sure that if she were to knock, it would all come oozing, clattering apart and she should be billed for the damage.

  “Hullo?” Olive called instead, for she had forgotten her pocketbook on the other side of the looking glass.

  A slab of cold butter bristling with minute-hands like a greasy hedgehog slid aside. Two beady black rodent eyes peered down at her.

  “Password,” the Doorman whispered.

  “Well, I certainly don’t know!” Olive sputtered.

  Oh, bad form, Olive! she cursed herself. Haven’t you ever read a spy novel? You’re meant to say something extra mysterious, in a commanding and knowledgeable voice, so that the doorman will say to himself, “Anyone that commanding and knowledgeable has to be on the up and up, so it stands to reason the password’s changed, or I’ve forgotten it, or I’m being tested by management, but any way it cuts, it’s me who’s at fault and not this fine upstanding member of our society.” Now, come on, do it, and you won’t have to feel embarrassed when you think back on this later when you’ve gone un-mad.

  Olive stood on her tiptoes and stared commandingly into those black rodent eyes. Something extra mysterious. Something knowledgeable. Preferably something mad. Like a chicken in spectacles and a powdered wig.

  “Eglwysbach,” she said slowly and stoically, fitting her mouth around the word as perfectly as possible, even tossing in a proper guttural cough on the end.

  The eyes on the other side of the buttered watch-parts blinked uncertainly.

  “Er. That doesn’t sound right. But it doesn’t sound wrong. It sounds passwordy. Am I asleep?” the Doorman whispered.

  “We both are, most likely,” Olive laughed.

  “I’m not meant to sleep on the job. I’ll be sacked for wasting time, even though time doesn’t mind. He does need to lose a bit round the middle, to be quite honest. In fact, I wasn’t asleep! I heard every word you were saying. Very naughty of you to suggest it.”

  “I won’t tell. Now, if you heard what I was saying, then you heard me say the password very well and very correctly.”

  “Did I? That’s nice.” The creature yawned, but didn’t open the door.

  “Let me in!”

  “Oh! Please don’t beat me.”

  The pocket watch door wound open, leaving a slick of butter and jam as it swung. The Doorman was not a Doorman at all, but a Dormouse, standing on a tall footstool in a suit of armour bolted together out of pieces of a lovely china teapot with blue pastoral scenes painted on it. He stood rather stiffly, on account of the armour.

  “I feel most relaxed and un-anxious snuggled into my teapot,” the Dormouse said defensively, puffing out his little mouse chest. “So my friend Haigha invented a way for me to stay in it forever. In the future, everyone will be wearing teapots, mark my…mark…my March…”

  The Dormouse fell asleep stuck upright in his armour. He leaned back against the door so that it groaned shut under his little weight.

  Envious Years Would Say Forget

  Peter takes off his glasses and rubs the bridge of his thin nose. The musicians begin a delicate, complicated piece that is nevertheless easy to ignore.

  “I’m terribly sorry, Mrs—Alice. I thought I wanted to talk about this. I thought I wanted to talk about it with you. But I think perhaps I do not, not really. I’m an awful cad, but I’ve always been an awful cad. Even the best version of me is a cad.”

  Alice quirked one long white eyebrow. She leaned back in her chair and folded her hands in her blue lap.

  “Am I doing something wrong?”

  “Pardon?”

  “Am I doing something wrong? Am I not behaving as you imagined I would behave? Ought I to have ordered the mock turtle soup instead of the cucumber? Or perhaps you’d like us to leap up and dash round the table and switch places whilst I pour butter into your pocket watch? I could curtsy and sing you a pleasant little rhyme about animals or some such—I’m told my singing voice is still quite good.” Alice’s thin, dry mouth curled into a snarl. “Or shall we simply clasp hands and try to believe six impossible things before the main course? What would satisfy you, Peter?”

  Beneath the table, Peter dug his fingernails into his flesh through the linen of his trousers. He felt a terrible ringing in his head.

  “It’s nothing like that, Alice. I wouldn’t—”

  “Oh, I think it’s precisely like that, Mr. Davies. You ought to be ashamed. It’s disgusting, really. How could you do this to me? You, of all people? You didn’t come snuffling round my skirt-strings so that we might find some pitiful gram of solace between the two of us. You came to find the magic girl. Just like all the rest of them. You’re no better, not in the least bit better. Life has hollowed you out, so I and my wondrous, lovely self must fill you up again with dreams and innocence and the good sort of madness that doesn’t end you up with an ether-soaked rag over your face. Well, life hollows everyone, boy. I’ve got nothing left in the cupboards for you. Oh, I am disappointed, Peter. Rather bitterly so.”

  A kind of leaden horror spread over Peter’s heart as he realized he was about to cry in public. “Mrs. Hargreaves, please! You don’t understand, you don’t. You can’t.”

  Alice leaned forward, clattering the tableware with her elbows. “Oh— oh. It’s worse than that, isn’t it? You didn’t want me to be magical for you. You wanted to be magical for me. In the library. Just like a nursery, wasn’t it? And for once you would really do it, fly up to a girl’s window and sweep her away to a place full of crystal and gold and feasting, and she would be dazzled. I would be dazzled. You tell everyone else that you’re not him, to stop gawping at you and only seeing the boy who never grew up. But you thought I, I, of all people, might look at you and see that you are him. Or, at least, that you want to believe you are, somewhere, somewhere fathoms down the deeps of your soul. Only I’m spoiling it now, because an Alice makes a very poor Wendy indeed.”

  Peter Llewelyn Davies gulped down the dregs of his scotch and thought seriously about stabbing himself through the eye with his oyster fo
rk. It would be worth it, if he could escape this agony of a moment.

  “Very well, then, Peter,” Alice said softly. “I am ready. I am here. I am her. I am all the Alice you want me to be. Now that we’ve seen each other, if I believe in you, you can believe in me.”

  “Stop it.”

  Let’s Pretend We’re Kings and Queens

  The Tumtum Club was a wide, round room carpeted in moonflowers. Wide toadstool-tables dotted the floor, lit by glass inkwells in which the blue ink burned like paraffin, and all the sizzling wicks were quills. Creatures great and small and only occasionally human crowded round, in chairs and out, dodos and gryphons and lizards and daisies with made-up eyes and long pale green legs and lobsters and fawns and sheep in cloche hats and striped cats and chess pieces from a hundred different sets, all munching on mushroom tarts and pig-and-pepper pies and slices of iced currant cakes and sipping from tureens of beautiful soup. The revellers were dressed very poorly and very well all at once. Their clothes were clotted with sequins and rhinestones and leather and velvet, but it was all very old and shabby and worn through, and no one wore shoes at all. Advertising posters hung all round the mossy bones walling them in. One showed a rose with a salacious look in her eyes and two huge fans over her thorns, promising a LIVE FLOWERS REVUE. Another had two little fat men in striped caps painted on it yelling at one another, which was, apparently, THE SATIRICAL SPOKEN WORDS STYLINGS OF T&T, TWO WEEKS ONLY. On one end of the club stood a little stage ringed with glowing oyster-shell footlights. A thick blue curtain was drawn across the half-moon proscenium. Olive could hear the tin-tinning sounds of instruments warming up backstage. Whatever happened in the Tumtum Club at night had not begun to happen yet.

  On the other end of the room stretched a long bar made of bricks and mortar and crown moulding. It was manned, improbably, by a huge egg with jowls and eyebrows and stubby speckled arms and a red waistcoat and a starched shirt collar and cravat, even though he had no neck for it to matter much. An orchestra of coloured liquor bottles glittered behind him. A couple of chess pieces, a white knight and a red one, leaned past the empties to catch the eye of the egg.

  “I’ll take a Treacle and Ink, my good man,” the red knight said.

  “It’s very provoking,” the bartender answered, filling up a pint glass, “to be called a man—very!”

  “I’ll have an Aged Aged Man, Mr. D,” the white knight whispered. “Or should I spring for a Manxome Foe? Oh!” the knight fretted and pursed his horsey muzzle. “Just mix a bit of sand in my cider and don’t look at me. You know how I like it.”

  The egg-man turned to Olive. “And you, Miss…”

  “Olive.”

  “Ah, with a name like that you’ll want a martini. With a name like that you’ll be small and hard and bitter and salty. With a name like that you’ll be fished out when no one’s looking and discreetly tossed in the bin!”

  The notion of being served a martini, no questions asked, rather thrilled Olive. Darling Mother was very strict with everyone’s indulgences but her own. “I can’t pay, I’m afraid. I haven’t got half a crown to my name.”

  “No crowns allowed at the Tumtum Club, my dear,” the white knight whispered, “Not even one.” And before he was done with his whispering, a cocktail glass slid down the bar into Olive’s hand. Whatever was inside was nothing at all like a martini, being completely opaque and indigo, but it did have an olive in it. Frosted letters danced across the base of the glass: DRINK ME. So she did.

  A voice like a crystal church bell wrapped in silk rang out over the club.

  “Will you all come to my party?” cried the Monarch to the Throng

  “Though the night is close around us and its reign is harsh and long?”

  A long, slim, orange and black leg slid out from behind the curtain. A rude and unruly applause burst through the room, catcalls, foot and hoof-stomping, snapping of fingers and claws, a great pot of hollering and whistling stirred too fast. A long, slim, orange arm emerged from the blue velvet, its elegant fingers curling and dancing with each new word.

  “Gather eagerly, my darlings, tie your troubles in a bow

  For the Tumtum Club is open—are you in the know?

  Are you, aren’t you, are you, aren’t you, are you in the know?

  Are you, aren’t you, are you, aren’t you, aren’t you ready for the show?”

  Olive stared. This was, perhaps, a naughtier show than she really ought to be seeing. But then, if the mad are naughty, who can scold them? She scrambled for an empty seat among the toadstool tables. Only one remained, far in the back row, wedged between a large striped cat and a thin, nervous-looking chess piece, a white queen, knitting a long silvery shawl in her lap.

  A huge saffron-coloured wing spooled out over that coy leg like a curtain all its own. It was speckled with white and rimmed with jet black and veined with ultramarine. Finally, a head emerged: hair like a beetle’s back, skin the colour of flame, eyes as green as swamp gas and cut-glass. The girl swept and twirled her massive butterfly wings like the fans of a harem-dance and sang for the roar of the crowd:

  You can really have no notion how delightful is our art

  In here there is no Red Queen and there is no Queen of Hearts

  Only me and thee and he and she all in a pretty row

  Alive as oysters, every one—now, shall we start the show?

  Shall we, shan’t we, shall we, shan’t we, shall we start the show?

  Shall we, shan’t we, shall we, shan’t we, shan’t we set the night aglow?

  “The Queen of Hearts?” Olive whispered. “I read a book with a Queen of Hearts in it once.”

  “You must be very proud,” yawned the cat.

  It Must Sometimes come to Jam to-day

  The candlelight lights up her cheekbones ghoulishly. She has the look of a fox on the scent of something small and scurrying and delicious.

  “I shan’t stop,” she needles him. “If you know any bloody thing at all about Alice, you know that she doesn’t stop. She keeps going, all the way to the eighth square and back home again. She’s the perfect English Girl, greeting the most vicious of things with an ‘Oh My Gracious!’ and a ‘Well, I Never!’ You haven’t the first idea what sort of stony constitution it takes to go through life as the English Girl. At least your Other One got to be wild and free and rule-less. A man can aspire to that. My Other One cannot rise above charmingly confused, because no English Girl may be allowed to greet nonsense with a sword or else all Creation would fall to pieces. But you wanted to meet me. You wanted to compare notes. You wanted a sympathy of minds, so no Oh My Graciouses for you, Peter. Only Alice, and Alice will have her tea and her crown if it’s the death of her. Alice is curious, don’t you remember? It is her chief characteristic. Curiouser and curiouser, as the meal goes on. Tell me everything. Leave off this poor mad little me act. What was Neverland really like?”

  Peter coughs brutally. His vision swims with liquor and humiliation and the violin and the cello and the love he had prepared so carefully for this person, only to find it spoiled in the icebox. With the perfect timing of his class, the waiter appears with steaming plates of beef bourguignon and quails in a cream-mustard sauce, ringed in summer vegetables glistening with butter.

  “You’re mocking me, Mrs. Hargreaves. I never imagined you could be so vicious. I might as well ask you what Wonderland was like.”

  “You might at that. It smelled much better than New York, I’ll tell you that much. But no more. I am operating a fair business here, young man. Show me yours and I’ll show you mine.”

  “You can’t be serious. Are you quite drunk? Does it amuse you to pretend to a silly clod that Wonderland was a real place?”

  Alice blinks. She turns her head curiously to one side. “Does it amuse you to pretend that Neverland was not?”

  Did Gyre and Gimble in the Wabe

  The acts went by like leaves blowing across the stage. Three young girls in shifts called Elsie, Lacie, and Tillie did an ac
robatic routine, pantomiming any number of things that began with M: mouse-traps, and the moon, and memory, and muchness. Olive couldn’t imagine how a handful of gymnasts could act out memory or muchness, but when they froze in their tableaux, Olive knew just what they meant, and applauded wildly with everyone else. A pig in a baby-bonnet stood in a lonely spotlight and belted out one long, unbroken oink of agony that lasted nearly two full minutes before he fell to his knees, scream-snorted MOTHER WHY DON’T YOU LOVE ME while tears streamed down his porky jowls, then sprang up and bowed merrily while roses flew at him from all directions. A lovely turtle with sad eyes sang a song about soup. It seemed to be a sort of communal thing—anyone could whisper to the gorgeous butterfly master of ceremonies and take the stage, if they felt inclined. There was a bit of a queue forming in the wings. Olive shrank back as a monstrous thing crept onto the boards. He had claws like a great hairy dinosaur and eyes like headlamps and a tail that coiled down over the footlights, casting broken shadows over his violet-green scaled body. His dragon wings were so tall and wide he was obliged to bend and scrunch them to wedge under the half-moon shell of the stage. A couple of fawns pushed a little rickety pianoforte over to him with their dear spotted heads. The monster tinkled out a few experimental runs up and down the keys. Olive could hardly believe his horrid tarantula-talons could manage such graceful scales.

  “It’s only a Jabberwock, my dear. You needn’t clutch my hand quite so hard,” said the White Queen. Her face was so serene and crisply carved, like a jeweller had done it.

  “A Jabberwock! Like ’twas brillig and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe? Whiffling through the tulgey wood and that? The Jabberwock?”