Playing Hearts (3 page)

“CALUMNY!” yelled the
Hare, his voice more frenzied than before. “A HARE MAKES HIS OWN LUCK, MADAM!”

“Or is it a rabbit’s foot
for luck?” wondered the Queen. “Perhaps it was a hare’s foot for face powder.
Do you know, I’m almost certain that it
is
. Oh, hold him down Number Six!
I don’t care
where
you’re bleeding.”

“NEVER TOUCHED A GRAIN OF
POWDER IN MY LIFE!” bawled the Hare. “LIES! ALL LIES!”

I gripped Hatter’s
knocking knees harder, my confused brain trying to make sense of the Queen’s
subtleties and the Hare’s babble. They were doing an even more incomprehensible
version of the adult talk I heard at my ever-changing foster homes. I wriggled
myself down until I was clutching Hatter’s ankles instead of his knees, and
carefully peeked out beneath the hem of the tablecloth again. My eyes travelled
up her red pouf of a dress until I was staring unblinkingly at her right ear. I
didn’t quite dare to look at her face properly: part of me still remembered a
time when Jack had warned me against looking her in the eye, and I seemed to
remember a nightmare smile I’d once glimpsed.

Jack. What was Jack
doing? Why was he in the coach? Why wasn’t he helping poor Hatter and Hare? I
wriggled out a little further, the tablecloth draping around my head, and craned
my head to look around the Queen’s skirt at the coach. Jack was still there,
gazing out on the scene. His eyes were inattentive and even slightly bored, his
upper lip curled. He was playing with a ring that was big enough to see from
where I was. I considered waving at him, but I was too frightened of the Queen
to try it. Besides, how was I to know if he would be willing to help? He
certainly wasn’t doing anything at the moment. I glared at him from my hiding
place, and as if he felt my eyes on him, I saw Jack’s eyes rise from his ring,
slowly, slowly; panning from ring to window, then to grass, and from grass to–

He saw me. His eyes widened
slightly, his fingers curling suddenly over the scrollwork at the window. I
gripped the Hatter’s legs a little tighter: was Jack going to call out to his
mother? The Hatter’s hand, trembling slightly, appeared below the tablecloth
and passed me a small, iced cake. I took it in my own damp hand and insensibly
squashed it almost to dough, my eyes flying to the coach and Jack’s face again.
His index finger was up, and as I watched he lowered his finger slowly with his
eyes steadily on me.
Get back under the tablecloth
, said the gesture. I
wriggled back a little way but kept to my position despite Jack’s narrowed eyes.
All of him was narrower—older and narrower—and I didn’t think he looked as nice
as he had looked when he was younger. It seemed like he was still watching out
for me, though, and that made me feel better. Why wasn’t he watching out for
Hatter and Hare as well?

And
what
was the
Hatter saying? “Really weren’t expecting you,” I heard him reiterate sullenly.
“No room. Absolutely no room.”

Even to my seven-year-old
brain, that stuck out. They had both said it: Hatter and Hare.
Weren’t
expecting. No room. Not invited.
And so loudly. Almost...almost as if they
hoped
to be overheard. But overheard by whom?

“Don’t lose your heads,”
said the Queen pleasantly. “I’ve no interest in your poxy little tea party. The
only interest I have is making sure that you don’t import it to any other
tea-tables.”

“Don’t import tea,” said
the Hatter. “All Underland leaf, purple as it comes. Import biscuits sometimes.
Danish butter cookies.”

“Then I suppose our
interview is at an end. Before I go, however, I’d like to leave you both a
little reminder. Number Five, cut off the Hare’s forepaw.”

A scream, shrill and
inhuman, jolted me with such force that I jerked away from Hatter’s legs,
instinctively curling in a ball with my quivering arms wrapped around my knees.
There was a kind of fizzing in my ears, and my eyes, frozen open in shock, saw
the blossoming of wet redness on the Hare’s side of the tablecloth.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” said the
Queen, her voice softer than ever. It was hard to hear through the buzzing in
my ears. “Did I say
leave
? I meant
take
. Bring it with you,
Number Five.”

I heard the massive
rustling of her skirts as she swept away, heard the slap of the card sharks’
feet over the tabletop to follow her; but all I could understand was the
spreading patch of red with its liquid centre and quickly browning edges. The
coach must have rolled away again at some stage. I didn’t notice; but somewhere
in all the whimpering and blood and moaning, Hatter’s big hands pulled me from
beneath the table. When I came back to myself, shivering away my shock, I was
curled up on a large, spotted dinner plate with Hatter patting my head as if I
was a small dog instead of a small girl. Through the tears in my eyes I could
see a blurry grey and red figure across the table.

“Blue blood!” whimpered
the Hare. “Father told me I was blue blood. Hatter, they took my blue blood and
pumped me full of red. I’ll never be royalty now.”

“Tea and cake,” said
Hatter, with terrifying calmness. “You’ll be as good as new.”

That made me sit up,
because I was very sure that tea and cake were not going to help something that
was bleeding as freely as the Hare’s stub of an arm was bleeding. “You have to
sew him up,” I said, pushing my tears away with the grass-stained heel of my
palm. “He’ll die, otherwise.”

“
Tea
and
cake
,”
Hatter said obstinately. He reached over me to the sausage warmer, and when he
lifted the lid I found that it wasn’t a sausage warmer but an iron stove-top.
Where was the rest of it? It certainly hadn’t been under the table when I hid
beneath it: I would have noticed that scorching heat.

“Back in the teapot,” the
Hatter said, and suited the action to the words by lifting me by the collar and
depositing me gently inside. He put the lid back on it, but cracked it open
again for a brief moment to add: “And don’t pop your top.”

I found myself sitting in
the herby dregs of cold tea, and shivered. Was he trying to send me back? I
didn’t think it worked that way. Outside my teapot someone screamed again,
sharp and short, and I hit my head on the teapot lid with a clang. Perhaps
that’s what Hatter meant by telling me not to pop my top. Regardless of the
warning, I shoved myself up and out of the teapot, my eyes blinking against the
sudden return of brightness.

“Hare?” I said, in a
tremulous voice. “Are you all right?”

“Nice little girls don’t
sit in the tea,” said Hare, his voice a rasp. He was still there across the
table, his eyes blacker and wilder than before, but his mutilated arm was
behind his back and there was a singed sort of smell to the air. One of them
had haphazardly piled teacups and saucers over the sticky red stain on the
tablecloth; and the sausage warmer, which seemed to exude the singed smell most
strongly, now had a cake perched on its lid.

“Nice little girls stay
in the teapot when they’re put there,” added Hatter reproachfully.

There didn’t seem to be
anything sensible to say to such contradictory statements, so I merely said:
“The tea was cold anyway,” and climbed back out.

Hare made a fastidious
moue
.
“Ugh. Cold tea.”

“If you ask the sun
nicely he’ll dry you out,” said Hatter.

“Oh. Won’t he do that
anyway?”

“Yes, but this way he
won’t sulk about it.”

I was almost certain that
Hatter was changing the subject, but I was feeling rather chilly, so I merely
held my damp skirt away from my underwear and said to the warm sky: “Please
will you dry my skirt?”

The sun became noticeably
warmer, a radiant, personal presence that dried the wet tea in no time and
somehow managed to warm the inner chilled feeling that had nothing to do with
the cold tea. As my skirt dried and stained slightly, I said to Hare: “How is
your hand?”

“Wouldn’t know,” said
Hare, shifting the stub a little further behind his back. “
She’s
got it.
She could be mistreating it, for all I know. Didn’t even get a chance to say
goodbye.”

I left my skirt to its
own mending in the sunshine and leaned over to kiss Hare’s wiry cheek by way of
consolation. “That’s not a medically proven remedy,” said Hare, but he seemed
pleased and the wildness in his eyes faded a little.

“Why is the Queen so
angry with you both?”

“She’s jealous of my
hat,” sighed Hatter.

I looked up at it, then
back at Hatter. “She has a crown. Why would she want your hat?”

“Can you see the past,
present and future in a crown? Of course not! All you see in a crown is a
reflection of yourself.”

“What do you see in your
hat, then?” I asked curiously.

“Your ears are still too
big,” said Hatter. “You should do something about that. Think of Underland as a
pool. No, think of it as a looking-glass– no! as a reflection.”

“Why?”

“Well, Underland isn’t
real. Well, it is, but it’s a different real to everyone: it depends on how you
see things. You come by water, but it’s contrariwise to those who come by
looking-glass. We’re a different reflection.”

“Oh,” I said
thoughtfully. I thought I might have the smallest inkling of what Hatter was
talking about. His top hat was sewn with myriad shiny pieces of reflective
material: a bunch of oddly-shimmering sequins here, a piece of mirror-like satin
there. There were even chips of glass in the tall, curving height of it, and I
was certain that the patch at the top was a small, rippling piece of water. Did
Hatter see Underland contrariwise, too?

“You can see a different
reflection of Underland in your hat,” I said. I had an idea that was beyond my
understanding to grasp, and without being capable of voicing it, I finished
lamely: “It’s
different
.”

“It’s time for you to go
home,” Hatter said abruptly.

A little indignantly, I
demanded: “What did
I
do?”

“What
will
you
do?” countered Hatter, and swept me from the table in a flutter of tea-stained
skirt. “Don’t think I’ve haven’t seen the ripples
you
make in the
reflections!”

“I don’t make ripples,” I
said in confusion, as Hatter dragged me away across the grass and toward an
ornamental pool.

“DID SO TOO!” hollered
Hare, back at the table. “JUMPED RIGHT IN, DIDN’T YOU? BOTH FEET!”

“Yes, but that was
because I was jumping into water!”

“Exactly,” said Hatter,
hefting me up onto the pool’s rim. “What did I tell you? And ripples make
things hard to see.”

“Will I be coming back?”
I asked, anxious to stay. I was afraid for Hatter and Hare.

“Shouldn’t think we can
stop you,” said Hatter, and pushed me off the rim.

I made a tiny,
off-balanced bunny hop into the water. For a breathless moment I both felt the
splash of it around my ankles and the weight of it rushing over my head in
waves of pressure. Hatter’s anxious purple eyes followed me through the
rippling of water. I thought I could still see him when the splashing of water
around my ankles died away into ripples and I found myself ankle-deep in the
pond in the real world. I knew I was back in Australia because the sun here
wasn’t anywhere near as personal as Underland’s sun. It was just warm, muggy,
Australian summer.

I told myself that I would be better
prepared next time I found myself in Underland. I never really felt that I’d
quite gone away, if it came to that: the feeling of being watched that I’d had
ever since my first tumble into Underland only intensified after I left it for
the second time. I would have thought it was just my imagination if it weren’t
for the fact that I actually saw my watchers. Mirrors were particularly prone to
showing a flash of Underland: a flicker of red and gold here, a glimpse of Jack
and his black-flecked eyes there. At first it was mostly Jack, his thin,
arrogant face and perfectly pressed suits appearing and vanishing in windows
and mirrors everywhere I went. I made faces at him whenever he appeared in the
windows at school—which made him roll his eyes and sniff—and even a walk down
the street was enough to display running scenes of Underland in the passing
shop windows. I didn’t recognise all of it by sight, but there was that kind of
personal, friendly warmth to it that made me certain the sun there was alive,
and that it could only be Underland. I caught a glimpse of Hatter and Hare
quite often, but they were always so hard to see in the mirrors and windows.
The light fractured around them, splitting the glass into reflective shards,
and the only reason I knew Hatter’s face was because of his purple eyes.

I got a nasty shock once
or twice, though. One night I woke at midnight to see a pale, pale face in the
dressing mirror that was not my own, its crimson lips plump at the top and
sharp at the bottom, almost as if its mouth were a heart. The Queen’s eyes—for
it was certainly she—were searching the mirror, falling inevitably into a line
with my own. I closed my eyes with a gasp, fearful of meeting her gaze, and
when I dared to open them again, she was gone. Her face had burned itself in
the back of my eyes, however, and for many hours that night I lay awake with
her strong, cruel face etched in the place where sleep should have been.
Perhaps the most unsettling thing was that she looked so much like Jack. I
should have expected it, but somehow I hadn’t. There was a cruelness to Jack’s
face as well, and they both had that edge of madness to their eyes—though that,
I was beginning to think, was simply an
Underland
thing rather than a
familial thing—and the same pale gold hair.

I didn’t last long in the
foster home where I first saw the Queen. Maybe it was the sight of her, knowing
she could find me so easily; that she could
see
me. Maybe it was my silent,
prickly nature that made foster parents dislike me. Whatever it was, it saw me
out of two foster homes in quick succession, and when I caught sight of the Queen
in the next a few months later, I knew I wouldn’t be long there. I began
hanging clothes over the mirrors and twitching the curtains shut as soon as I
went into my bedroom. It meant that I saw less of Jack, but that wasn’t really
a bad thing.

Hare and Hatter, on the
other hand, I began to see a great deal more of. Though it was hard to see them
in mirrors and windows, I saw them easily in anything curved and reflective;
and most clearly in water. Before long it was second nature for my eyes to
linger on the puddles that I passed—though I was careful not to jump in
them—and I spent most of my spare time reading beside whatever pond or creek
that happened to be near my current foster home. Through the ripples I learned
that though Hatter and Hare mostly remained by their tea table, they did a
remarkable amount of work. Exactly what that work was I was never quite sure:
visitors seemed to pop up at their table quite regularly. Much to my amusement,
their method of ‘popping up’ was most often similar to mine. That big teapot
saw a ridiculous amount of use, considering the pond close by. But sometimes
the Hatter did something quick and sneaky with his hat that made things very
difficult to see, even in the ripples. I watched and wondered: it seemed to me
that whenever Hatter gazed at his hat with his mad purple eyes and made
ripples, the Underland I saw in the ripples changed ever so slightly. I
remembered Hatter saying that how Underland appeared depended upon the person
doing the seeing, and on how they saw; and I wondered if Hatter was Seeing
Things in a Different Way. And maybe changing things, little by little, just by
Seeing them differently. I was too young to find the idea ridiculous, and I’d
seen too much both in and
of
Underland to find it ridiculous by
observation. I wanted to test it.

The next day after
school, I wandered down to the creek behind the highschool. I didn’t want the
twin boys I was sharing a foster home with to stumble over me, and since all of
the highschoolers smoked beneath the overpass during periods,
they
wouldn’t see me either. The creek ran shallow in a few sheltered spots where I
could water-gaze without being disturbed. I found one of the quieter ones
beneath the swaying fronds of a weeping willow, where the water eddied gently
in a curved cut-out of the bank, and crawled in beneath the fronds. I had already
been seeing flashes of Underland as I followed the stream, but when I settled
on my stomach to gaze into the water properly, Hatter and Hare appeared
immediately, sharp and clear. They weren’t at their tea table; they were in a
foresty part of Underland, dark and green and foreboding. Hatter and Hare
looked distinctly out of place in it. Hare, for some incomprehensible reason,
seemed to be carrying a crutch, and I saw Hatter’s top hat as he passed close
by my line of sight. In the ripply bit at the top of it I saw another view of
him and Hare- this one of them walking in the sunny glade close by their tea
table. They looked just the same but for their surroundings. I wondered if that
other picture was what the Queen saw when she looked at them, and if so,
how
?
What were they up to? They were talking to each other but I couldn’t hear what
they were saying. I never did hear through the ripples, and I wasn’t sure if
that was because it wasn’t possible, or if I just hadn’t learned the trick of
it yet. As I watched them they slipped silently into a darkened cave, heavy
with shadow and sinister with dark mossy bones. It didn’t look like a safe
place to be. My reflected view took me through with them into the bare interior
of the cave, where cobwebs soon began to drape from the walls and curved
ceiling. At least, I
thought
they were cobwebs, until Hatter and Hare
passed close by a particularly heavy patch and I discovered that they were
actually wool. It was everywhere, draped in the corners and nooks, dangling
from the ceiling in massive loops and tangles, forming giant dust-bunnies
around the floor of the cave. I gazed at it, fascinated, and wondered if a cave
hung with wool was any less frightening than a cave hung about with cobwebs, if
they both had bones out the front. I was inclined to think that it was. In
Underland you just didn’t know what sort of madness you would meet with, and
the kind of madness that had woollen cobwebs juxtaposed with human and animal
bones was perhaps even more terrifying than that which had cobwebs. At least
you expected cobwebs when it came to caves and bones.

The woollen cobwebs grew
in size and fluffiness the further Hatter and Hare went. Soon they didn’t even
look like cobwebs anymore: they looked exactly what they were, great mountains
of unwound wool heaped up toward the sides of the cave. I saw Hatter looking at
the piles, and he seemed satisfied with them; but Hare was nervous, twitching,
and inclined to tap against the cave floor with his powerful back legs as if he
was preparing to run. That left me to wonder exactly who lived in a cave,
apparently ate humans and animals alike, and had a passion for wool. Hatter and
Hare didn’t seem to concern themselves with the question: what I could read of
Hatter’s lips (Hare's were impossible to guess at) was merely the usual back
and forth I was used to with them. It meant nothing and something at the same
time.

I was so intent on trying
to read their lips that I didn’t notice the small thread of wool that seemed to
be moving until the piles of wool ended abruptly and the single, taut, moving
thread was the only skerrick of wool still to be seen against the darkness of
the cave. It stretched far back into the darkness, still moving at a good
speed, and as Hatter and Hare followed it, I began to see a vast glow of white
something in the further recesses of the cave. Was that—could it be?—a mountain
of
knitted wool
? And in front of it, a small white sheep, knitting. He
almost blended into the mountain of wool, so similar were their colours, and
although he looked quite sleepy, his hands manipulated his knitting needles so
quickly that they were a blur. Hare still looked nervous, and even Hatter
seemed watchful now, his purple eyes for once intent and focused. I curled my
fingers into fists, vainly trying to tell what was happening, but they were only
talking, and I couldn’t even guess at what they were saying because I was at
their backs. The sheep, whose face I
could
see, was impossible to read.
His mouth wasn’t formed for talking, and though the nonsense of Underland meant
that he could and
did
talk, it didn’t make it any easier to read his
lips.

The first idea I had of
something wrong was the sheep’s knitting needles. They had been a blur, but now
they stuttered and slowed. I saw Hare’s big feet tap the rocky cave bottom
twice, an unconscious twitch. His one good paw wrapped tightly around his crutch
as though he was preparing to hit something with it. Hatter, very slowly, took
off his hat. I found myself gripping handfuls of riverside grass, my fingers
dirt-and-grass-stained, as the sheep’s knitting needles slowed still more. I
still couldn’t tell what he was saying, but Hatter and Hare’s body language
said that when his knitting needles stopped completely, something very dreadful
was going to happen.

Then his needles did
stop. The little sheep slipped from his seat and stood upright, his knitting
dropping to the ground. When the knitting hit the floor Hatter and Hare were
already running, Hare bounding ahead on his powerful back legs and his crutch
waving madly, and Hatter legging it with his top hat gripped in one hand. And
then, from the mountain of knitting behind the sheep, something big and
dreadful began to stir. Something that uncoiled to display claws and fangs of
the sharpest...wool? This huge, fanged, clawed beast arising from the knitting
was
the knitting. Only it didn’t look soft and cuddly and stuffed. Its edges and
curves were all deadly sharp, and there was a wicked gleam in its mad, knitted
eyes. It wasn’t like anything I had ever seen before. It wasn’t dragon, or
basilisk, or wyvern, though it looked a little like each.

My point of view was
suddenly twitched around. Now I saw from the front as Hatter and Hare
desperately pelted for the front of the cave, behind them a monstrosity in
coloured wool leaping free of the white wool around it. Hatter’s mouth said
something like: “Jabberwock!” and in his eyes I saw deep, desperate fear. He
didn’t think they were going to make it.

“Run,” I said, in a small,
panting voice. They weren’t moving anywhere near fast enough. The Jabberwock
had fully uncoiled, and over their bobbing shoulders I saw it pounce forward, a
terror of gaping mouth and arm-long teeth. “
Run
!” I screamed again.
“Hatter, run!”

A painful show of light
flooded the ripples as Hatter and Hare burst from the cave, the Jabberwock breathing
hot over their shoulders. It threw the forest outside into high relief, and for
a moment I saw the forest fold over the ripples, a piece of it disappearing in
the fold. It depends, Hatter had said; it depends on how it’s Seen. I reached
out a shaking, grass-tattooed hand and pinched the forest between my fingers,
making the rest of the forest disappear, just for a moment. Underland
fractured, or drew together, or perhaps it really did fold. Hatter and Hare
stumbled from the forest and into green hills—I released my pinch of
Underland—the Jabberwock soundlessly howled its enraged disappointment to the
forest canopy—and they were somehow safe. I sat up, my pulse thundering in my
ears and my hand clasped to my chest, still dripping wet. Hatter and Hare, so
far away yet so easily reached, looked as though they had gone mad– or maybe
just madder. Hare was bounding in powerful, erratic circles, his legs kicking
in mid-air and his crutch waggling at the sun, and Hatter seemed to be beating
his top hat with one fist. I giggled as I watched them, and found that I was
also crying. I had actually thought they were going to die. I had saved them–
had
I saved them? Was that me? Had I really reached into Underland and altered
it? I looked from my hands to the water and back again, then at the water once
more. Hatter had stopped beating his hat and was poking it with his forefinger
instead. He dipped his finger curiously in the ripply bit at the top and
withdrew it slowly. Then he looked right at me, his purple eyes wide and wild
and almost pupil-less. Ashamed of my tears, I scrambled to my feet and away
through the weeping willow; but before Hatter quite vanished behind the sweeping
greenery, I saw him smile.