Alyzon Whitestarr (13 page)

Mr. Rackett had read to us about the Japanese samurai who believed that all tasks, however small, ought to be performed as perfectly and completely as possible. They would have approved of this old man, I thought.

He turned to look at me, and I saw from his expression that he had been aware of my gaze all along. I was not screening and I ought to have felt the pressure of his attention, but I felt only a continuation of the peace that watching him had brought me. In a way, it was like looking into Luke’s face. He tilted his head sideways and squinted, as if looking at me in bright light, then he said something. Of course, I didn’t understand, but he went on for quite a while, his voice gentle but insistent, the lemon-leaf smell of him intensifying. Then he stopped, a question in his expression. I shrugged and smiled. He nodded as if I had spoken and took one of the persimmons from his basket, offering it to me with a low bow. Not knowing what else to do, I took it and bowed back. The man smiled and apple blossom infused the tang of citrus leaf. Then he went inside his shop.

I lifted the persimmon to my nose and sniffed at its cool skin. Its fragrance made my mouth water, and as I bit into it I let myself take the flavor in with all of my extended sense of taste. The juice spurted into my mouth and a blissful laughter bubbled out of me. At the same moment, a bird poured a wonderful cascade of notes into the afternoon air. I caught sight of myself in a shop window greedily eating the persimmon and grinning like a village idiot, and it occurred to me that the changes in my senses had given me access to unusual joy as well as to mystery and darkness.

* * *

When I got home, Wombat was lying on the threshold of the kitchen door like a fat welcome mat. I stopped to stroke him, and his purr sputtered loudly to life like a little engine. He
gave out a nice leather smell, which told me that he had been waiting for me to come home and stroke him. It was interesting how strongly his scents connected to meaning. I told him aloud how glad I was to see him, too, wondering suddenly if I was giving off a scent that echoed my words.

He gave off a freshly laundered shirt smell, which was a request to be scratched under the chin. I obeyed and sensed his awareness of my contentment as a sweet smell that reminded me of Da’s caramelized sugar smell.
Is that how
my
contentment smells?
I wondered.

I was absolutely startled to smell the cheesy fragrance Wombat always used to tell me yes. My pulse began to race at the thought that the cat had actually understood my question far more clearly than he would have understood the words I said aloud. Was it possible that I could make my scent messages as specific as his?

Can you smell this?
I thought at him hard.

The cheesy smell! Then a burst of burnt toast.

Too … loud?
I guessed.

The cheese smell again. Wombat was now sitting up and staring at me expectantly. He twitched his long tail and began to give off a series of smells. I forced myself not to think about what they might mean, but just to take in the smells. Gradually, the meaning was clear. Wombat was telling me that before, my smell communications had been weak and unfocused like those of other humans, then after I had come back from being away, they had suddenly become painfully loud. Just now, they were as precise as any animal’s—although still too loud.

I thought at him gently and very calmly,
Pat me with your paw if this is better.

He patted at my knee at once, purring and giving off a strong fishy smell of approval. I grew hot with excitement and felt like cheering; maybe some bit of me did cheer, because Wombat hissed and sprang away. He would not be coaxed back, but sat by the fence twitching his tail in disapproval.

“Sorry,” I called and went inside, hardly able to wait to try communicating with other animals. For the first time I regretted our family aversion to owning animals. Wombat didn’t count, because he had just turned up on our doorstep as a full-grown cat and refused to leave.
He chose us
, Da always said.

I wanted to record what had just happened in my journal, but Mirandah was in the kitchen and she said dramatically, “You are not going to believe this! Jesse is writing!”

That got my attention. “Writing?”

She nodded. “Da says he has been at it on and off all this week, but today he didn’t even come down for a snack—and you know what a snacker he is. You don’t seem that surprised,” she complained. I didn’t have to respond, because the phone rang and she pounced on it.

I went up to my room, feeling excited at the thought of Jesse finally pouring his intense, bursting thoughts onto a page, and also smug because it had been my suggestion. I heard the
clack clack
of Mum’s old typewriter as I passed Jesse’s room and realized that it must have been him using it when I had heard it before.

Serenity was in our bedroom, sitting on the rug on my side of the room with Luke, who was plucking the strings of her cello. There was a delicate scent of violet in the air, and on impulse, I asked, “Why don’t you play anymore?”

“Music doesn’t seem relevant,” she said, sounding tired and flat.

I sat on my bed. “Relevant to what?”

“To … to my life now,” Serenity said.

“Relevant to the life you would have as Sybl?” I asked.

She flinched and grew rigid, the violet smell metamorphosing into licorice. “What do you mean?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “It just seems to me like you’re trying to make yourself into something but you don’t know what it means to be that thing, and when you do, it’ll be too late.”

She stood up with Luke in her arms. “I don’t have the faintest idea what you’re talking about.” Her voice was haughty, and aniseed began to infuse her smell. This was what I smelled whenever she was pretending to eat or sleep, and I thought of it as the scent of deception.

But what was she lying about?

Luke was laughing at me from her embrace, opening his mouth in a shape of joy that contrasted so sharply with the tight closed look on Serenity’s face that fear jabbed at me. Maybe my expression was too revealing, because abruptly she thrust Luke into my arms and left the room.

Luke gazed at me, and I let my screen fall and was instantly entranced by his smell. I had realized that its similarity to the smell of the house had something to do with how we all knitted together as a family around Luke. It was so delicious and compelling that it left no room for my concern about Serenity. Luke was like a flower opening its face widely to the sun and the rain and the wind. Utterly open, utterly absorbed, endlessly absorbing.

I was still playing with him when Da poked his head in. He dropped to his hands and knees and began to snuffle at Luke like a bear trying to reach up a tree to get at him. Luke gave a squeal of joy and stuck his belly out, and we both laughed.

“He knows he’s seeing a Starr in the making,” I said slyly.

“I don’t know about a star,” Da said, “but the manager of the Green Room rang today and asked us if we’d like to play there regularly for a while.”

“How regularly?” I asked.

His smile became wry. “You’re a sharp one, Aly Cat. Once a fortnight, in fact. But it’s better than nothing. It’s straight pay rather than a cut of the door, and we can sell discs. Plus, it will save us from the phone bill that just arrived.”
For a moment ammonia tinged the coffee-grounds smell. “I just wish we had the money to do a proper recording and get the discs printed professionally, but that won’t happen without the backing of a company. The ones we have look homemade, and that puts people off.”

I was startled, because Da usually said that it was better to do your own discs rather than have them made by recording companies who only wanted to turn music into a product. But even as I opened my mouth to say that, Luke gave a sloppy blurt and we laughed again.

“You know Jesse’s writing?” Da asked after we had rolled around with Luke for a while.

I nodded.

Da shook his head. “It’s funny that you told him to write, and then he goes ahead and does it as if it was the answer he had never figured out. He won’t talk about what he’s writing, though.”

“I think it’s better not to talk about things that you’re going to write, because then you start thinking how other people will feel about them and that changes how you think,” I said.

Da looked impressed. “That’s pretty profound stuff.”

“It’s just how I feel when I have to write something for Mrs. Barker,” I said diffidently. “I just want to
do
it. I don’t want to
talk
about doing it.”

“You may be right,” Da said thoughtfully. “What I love about improvised music is that you don’t talk about it at all. It just evolves, and it’s a purely musical evolution. It’s like
jamming, but on a more serious and exploratory level.” He nodded. “OK, I’ll take your advice and leave Jesse to talk to the white page. I think you did a seriously good thing suggesting it. I’ve never seen him like this.”

Luke trilled with excitement as they went out.

* * *

Saturday morning I got up late and fooled around bathing Luke before I had to get ready and head off for school. I was trying to feel like a martyr for having to go in on the weekend, but it was a beautiful, crisp day, and it felt good to be out in it. I felt pretty well prepared for anything the tests could throw at me, and it was actually kind of nice to have something important to do on a weekend instead of just killing time. Plus, I was looking forward to the movies with Gilly afterward.

I went through the park, trying fruitlessly to send scent messages to birds and squirrels, and ended up coming through to the front of the school just as Mrs. Barker pulled up. I summoned up the screen as I came over to her car.

“You’re early,” she said, smiling as she got out. “The proctor won’t be here for another half hour.”

“It’s nice to be out,” I said, relieved that she was not annoyed at me for being inattentive in class the previous day.

“It’s certainly a beautiful day.” She rummaged for her keys and unlocked the front door of the school. I followed her down the corridor to the staff room, and hovered outside it.

“Come on in, Alyzon,” she called. “It’s not an official school day, so I think we can dispense with the usual formalities. Do you drink tea or coffee?”

“Coffee, if there’s any milk,” I said. I didn’t drink it often, but it seemed to go with sitting in the staff room.

“We even have a milk frother,” Mrs. Barker said, bustling about and making coffee with the same cheerful competence she always showed in the classroom. Instead of her usual knit suit, she was wearing black boots under expensive-looking jeans and a loose cotton jumper that slid off one shoulder and matched her scarlet lipstick. Her hair was out, too, instead of being tied back, and it made her look younger and more glamorous.

“What are you thinking?” she asked.

“You look different,” I said. “Younger … more …”

“More?”

“I don’t know. Just more,” I said.

She laughed, and I could smell something like wisteria as she shook her head. “You were always an original, Alyzon.”

I could see the warmth in her eyes and realized that the wisteria smell was connected to her liking for me, because she had also given it off in the hallway when she had told me about the tests.

“Now what are you thinking?” Mrs. Barker asked.

“You ask a lot of questions,” I countered.

She smiled. “I do. I guess I became a teacher because I like asking questions.”

“Questions?” I said. “I thought teachers were about having all the answers.”

“Only bad teachers,” Mrs. Barker said easily. “Good teachers are about asking questions and provoking them in students.” She hesitated, and then she said, “Alyzon, I hope
it won’t upset you if I say this, but … you’ve been very different since your accident.”

My heart lurched into a jerky trot.

“Your work in class has always been solid and occasionally very bright,” she continued. “But now there is something new in the things you turn in. A quality that … well, I’m not the only teacher to wonder at it. I can even tell you that initially some of my colleagues thought maybe your parents were doing your work for you.”

“Your colleagues?”

She understood what I meant. “Not me. The thoughts, though startling, still felt like your own. Also, I know that you and your father are not the sort of people to operate that way. But the suggestion didn’t hold water anyway, because the same quality was apparent in work completed during class.”

I don’t know how I looked, but Mrs. Barker frowned at whatever she saw in my face. “I didn’t mean to embarrass you. I really only wondered if you were aware of it.”

“I … I see things differently …,” I began. Then I stopped, because part of me was tempted to tell her the truth.

“That’s exactly it,” Mrs. Barker said, seeming not to notice that I had cut myself off. “It’s as if you are seeing things from some deeper perspective. I don’t mind telling you that I have seldom had so much pleasure in reading a student’s work.”

The proctor arrived then, to my relief and maybe to Mrs. Barker’s as well, because she jumped up at once and introduced us, then she made him coffee, too.