Magic Lessons (15 page)

Someone with giant hands and sharp teeth covered in feathers was shaking him.
“Tom!”
“Nyahunh?” Tom said, trying to open his gluey eyes. “Don’hur’m’.”
“Tom, Tom, it’s just me. Wake up! Are you sick?” Tom felt a hand on his forehead. “You don’t feel hot.”
“Nahmk,” Tom said. In his head it had been,
No, I’m okay.
“Are you sick, Tom?”
“I’m okay,” he said, more clearly (he hoped). Through the gunk in his eyes everything was blurry.
“You’ve been asleep a whole day.”
Tom’s eyes opened. He wiped sleep away, sat up a little. There were no monstrous hands, no feral teeth, and no feathers. “Hey, Da.”
“Hey, yourself.” His dad leaned forward and sniffed his breath. “You weren’t drinking, were you?”
“Dad!” Tom sat up and glared at his father.
“Well, what am I supposed to think? I get back from getting the groceries yesterday at eleven in the morning and you’re out cold, and I keep checking on you throughout the day and you’re still off in the land of Nod. And it’s the next morning and you still haven’t woken up!”
“I have now.” Tom yawned. “Sort of.”
“You weren’t drinking? You didn’t take any other kind of—”
“Dad!!”
“You’re telling me you were just very tired. Twenty-fourhours-of-sleep tired?”
“It was a magic thing.”
His father’s mouth closed, his lips went thin, and he got that tight expression he always wore when Tom said the word
magic
.
“Well, come on, Da, what d’you reckon? I mean I only just slept this long once before—
exactly
like this—in New York. You’re the one who lied to Cath about it and told her I have . . . whatever illness it was. . . .”
“Thomas Sebastian Yarbro!” His father was looking at him with an expression Tom had never seen before, halfway between gobsmacked and killing rage. Right now Tom didn’t care, though he had a feeling he would later.
“How dense can you be, Da?” Tom had never spoken to his father like this before. He wasn’t sure what had gotten into him, except that he was really, really, really ropeable, and his dad’d accused him of being a drug addict, when what’d really happened was that he was . . . was that he, Tom Yarbro, was the drug. “Didn’t it occur to you to connect the two? Big sleep in New York, magic thing; big sleep a few days later in Sydney, possibly also a magic thing?”
The expression on his dad’s face faded. “There’s a stack of phone messages. Mostly Niki, Ron, and Scooter. You can’t just dump your old friends when you get new ones. You need to call them back. Oh, and Jessica Chan rang.”
“You what?”
“Something about another dress. Apparently it’s an emergency.”
“Da, you can’t not talk about—”
“Tom, I can’t.” His father stopped, took a deep breath, looked right at Tom, into his eyes, but as if he didn’t quite recognise him. “I just can’t. I don’t understand any of ”—he waved his arm in the general direction of Mere’s house—“
that
. I just don’t. All I know is that you were . . . you were becoming like your mother, and now you’re not. You’re happy—well, mostly—and Mere had a lot to do with it, and I’m grateful. But that stuff scares me. I guess I’d rather you
had
been drinking, because that I’d understand.”
Tom stared back at his father—his turn to be gobsmacked.
“I accept that it’s real, but it doesn’t mean that I
like
that it’s real. How am I supposed to deal with knowing that I’ll most likely outlive you? Or that the only way you can live much past forty is if you go mad like your mother?”
“Cheer up, maybe you’ll have an accident and die first.”
His dad sighed. “Very droll. Parents shouldn’t outlive their kids.”
“Actually, Lien says—”
“Your old history teacher?”
“Yeah. She says in the olden days parents mostly outlived their kids.”
“Indeed. Infant mortality’s still disgracefully high amongst Australia’s indigenous population.” Tom’s father taught sociology at Sydney Uni and had lots of books with tedious titles like
Archaeology of the Meaning of the City
or
The Idea of the Theory of Knowledge,
which were written by people with names like Habermas, who Tom privately thought of as Mighty Mouse, and Foucault, who Tom thought of as . . . well, something pretty rude.
“I don’t have anyone to talk about it with, Da.”
“What about Mere? Or her granddaughter? Or that American girl?”
“I just met them, Da, and Esmeralda’s . . .” Tom wanted to tell his dad what she’d done to him, but he didn’t know how. “They’re not family. I want to talk to
you
, to Cathy.”
“Cathy doesn’t know anything about—”
“I want to tell her.”
“Do you think that’s fair?” his father asked. It was not what Tom was expecting; usually his father stuck to repeating all Esmeralda’s arguments for secrecy.
“How d’you mean, ‘fair’?”
His father stood up, walked to Tom’s balcony, treading on the fabrics underfoot. Tom winced. His dad looked out at Esmeralda’s huge fig tree, Filomena. In the bright sunlight the leaves glowed. It was a cloudless day, but it didn’t feel as hot as the last few days. Tom wondered what time it was. He sat up, realised that he was still wearing his clothes from yesterday. No wonder Da’d thought he’d been drinking.
Tom’s father turned to him. “I think your sister’s better off not knowing. I wish
I
didn’t know.”
“I hate having secrets from her. It’s not fair to me or her.”
“How’s your sister going to feel when she discovers that you don’t have long—”
“If I had a disease that was killing me, would you keep it a secret from her?”
His father didn’t answer for a long time. “Okay, yes, I would tell her. But a disease is different. It’s within the bounds of what one can expect from life.
This
, this isn’t.”
“Cath’s suspicious, Dad. For the past year she’s felt left out. Is that fair? Every time I talk to her she begs me to tell her what’s going on, and I really, really, really want to. ’Cause it’s all scary and weird and I need to talk to someone.” Tom felt his eyes getting damp. He blinked. His dad looked away nervously.
“All right.”
“You mean I can tell her?”
“Yes, tell her.”

First his father made them both a huge fry-up breakfast. Sausages, eggs, onions, potatoes, tomatoes, cheese—even the bread was fried. All of it dripped grease and yumminess. Tom squeezed a tonne of oranges to make them as much juice as they needed to wash it all down. One of his few memories of his mother before she went crazy was that she only ever squeezed enough oranges to fill four small glasses. Tom was always left wanting more.

“It’s fantastic, Da,” he said, enjoying the not-quite-burnt onions. “Perfect.”
“Isn’t it?” said his dad. “Your mother would never let me make a real breakfast. She was against butter—too much cholesterol—and if you let anything get even vaguely brown, she’d get all upset about carcinogens.”
Tom had never heard his father say anything negative about his mother before. He wondered if he’d somehow put the thought in his head, remembering about the tiny glasses of orange juice.
“Was that before she went mad?”
“Sometimes, Tom, I think she was born crazy. I met your mother when we were fourteen, and she was
always
obsessed with something or other: eating right, her motorbike—”
“Mum had a motorbike!”
“Oh, yeah. She used to be wild, your mum.” His dad smiled softly, in a way that made Tom uncomfortable. He
really
hoped his dad wouldn’t tell him what he was remembering. “Very wild. Her craziness was mostly good. Fun. Until she
really
lost it.”
His father didn’t need to say anything else. Tom remembered vividly the day his mother had attacked him and Cathy. He would never forget it.
“So, how are you enjoying having two new girlfriends?”
Tom blushed hot and prickling from head to toe. “They’re not my girlfriends!”
His dad cracked up and Tom knew he’d been had.
“Bastard.”
His dad kept grinning. “They’re nice-looking girls.”
Tom was torn between hotly retorting that Reason was way better than “nice-looking” and trying to ignore him. “I hadn’t really noticed.”
His dad laughed again.
“Dad!”
“Though it must be good for you to have kids your own age who have the, ah . . .”
“Who are magic-wielders, too?”
“Uh, yeah.”
“It’s all right.” Tom thought about Jay-Tee dying, drinking magic from him; Reason off in New York City with tall, dark, handsome, and
very
poxy Danny. “Yeah, it’s great. After breakfast I’ll go over and see how they’re doing.”
“You’re not going to call your sister?”
“I think I need to talk to Esmeralda first.”
“Fair enough. Tell Mere hi from me.”
Tom half nodded. He had a lot he wanted to say to Esmeralda; none of it involved passing on greetings.

Tom decided to see Jay-Tee first. He climbed from his dad’s balcony to the front balcony of Esmeralda’s. First he pressed his face against the glass of Reason’s door, hoping she’d come home. But her room was empty, her bed unslept in.

He turned the door handle. Not locked. He opened the door slowly, peering through the door. No one there. He checked the bathroom and then tiptoed out into the hallway, pausing to listen for any movement. He didn’t want to see Esmeralda until he was ready. He heard only birds outside, a car driving by— nothing from within the house. No noise from the kitchen, no noise from the door.

Tom crept along the hallway to Jay-Tee’s room, stopped outside the door listening. Nothing. He knocked as quietly as he could. If Jay-Tee was there, he wanted her to hear, but not anyone (Esmeralda) downstairs.

He opened the door slowly, peeking his head around. JayTee was in bed. He crept closer. There was a giant bruise on her cheekbone.

He sat down on the bed beside her. “Jay-Tee?” She didn’t stir or do any of the things a sleeping person should be doing. Tom could feel his heart beating faster.

He stared at her eyes. Her eyelids didn’t even flicker. He held his hand up to her mouth. His hand shook; seconds went by. He felt nothing. He held his hand closer, bare millimetres away from her lips. This couldn’t be real. Why wasn’t she moving? Why wasn’t she breathing?

Then he felt it, the slightest featherweight of warm air. Her breath on his hand. She was alive. Unconscious but alive. What had happened to her? He could think of an explanation. He hoped he was wrong.

What had Esmeralda done to her?
Tom sped out of the room, took the stairs three at a time, jumping the last six so that he landed in the downstairs hallway with a thud, and ran into the kitchen. Esmeralda jumped up, dropping paper and pen to the floor. She looked like she’d never done anything wrong in her entire life. Her scrubbed, fresh-looking face, her young-girl ponytail. Even in a faded T-shirt and jeans, she looked good. Her looks were a lie.
“Tom! Are you all right? You startled me.”
Good
, thought Tom.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
As if you didn’t know!
Tom found that he was shaking too much to get his mouth open. The room was shifting as if he were viewing it through a kaleidoscope. He couldn’t see anything but true shapes: triangles, squares, hexagons, rhombuses, and trapezoids.
“What did you do to Jay-Tee?” he shouted at the mass of geometric shapes that had been Esmeralda. “Did you drink her dry? I know you lied to me, I know you drank from me. Have you done it to her now? Is Jay-Tee going to die today? I’ll kill you if she dies. I’ll kill you.” Tom’s voice was tight, as if his vocal cords were ready to snap.
“Tom, I—”
“Lied to me, lied to Jay-Tee, lied to Reason. Her mum was right to run away from you. You’re evil. You’re worse than Jason Blake. How could you do that to me? If you needed magic, I’d’ve given you some of mine. Like I did for Jay-Tee. Why’d you just
take
it from me?”
“I didn’t—”
“You know what? I don’t even know why I’m talking to you. What are you going to do? Tell me more lies? It’s pointless. I’m going to go upstairs and give Jay-Tee some more magic—”
“Tom!” Esmeralda took a step forward, reached out a hand to touch him with her trapezoidal fingers. Tom pulled the shapes towards him, twisting them into acute triangles, sharp and broken.
Esmeralda cascaded into a shower of jagged shapes. She screamed. “No!”
Tom fell, the kitchen falling apart as he descended. A dog’s breakfast of triangles, rhombuses, and trapezoids. When he hit the floor, his eyes snapped shut. Tom watched dodecahedrons form and crumble on the backs of his eyelids. Darkness threatened to draw him down, but he forced his eyes open and the shapes trickled away from him. The room lost its true shapes, became Esmeralda’s kitchen again.
“Tom,” Esmeralda said, leaning over him. “You lost your temper. You know you can’t ever lose—”
“I know.” It had felt so good, though. Like something his body had always wanted to do, needed to do. “What’s wrong with your hand?”
“You broke three of my fingers.”
“I hope it hurts.” Tom had never felt as calm as he did lying on the cool tiles of Esmeralda’s kitchen floor. “Did you drink from Jay-Tee?”
“No.”
“Then what happened to her?”
“Tom, sit up. We need to talk.”
“We
are
talking. I’m asking you questions. Why did you drink from me without asking?”
Esmeralda sat beside him, nursing her broken fingers: the index, middle, and ring fingers of her right hand. They were all bending the wrong way and swelling up into weird potato fingers.
I did that,
thought Tom, satisfied. Her hands and arms were covered with tiny dots of blood. Like the creature had left on him and Jay-Tee.
“I was afraid.”
“Afraid that I’d say no if you’d asked me the real question?”
She nodded. “Afraid of dying.”
“I trusted you. You betrayed me.”
Esmeralda’s cheeks went red. “I did. I betrayed you. I lied to you. I took your magic without asking. There aren’t any excuses, but I was close to dying. I was afraid. I shouldn’t have done it. I should have asked you. It was wrong.”
“Very wrong.”
She nodded. “But I don’t need to anymore.”
“Don’t need to what?” Her fingers were so swollen they were like pumpkin fingers. The middle one was bleeding slowly from the fingernail.
“Take anyone else’s magic.”
“Then why did you take Jay-Tee’s?”
“Tom! I
gave
her magic—at least I tried to. I didn’t take it away.”
“Sure you did.” Tom didn’t believe her, but her lies weren’t making him angry anymore. He didn’t think he had any anger left in him. He would probably live the rest of his life (which he’d just made shorter) without ever losing his temper again. Not many people could say that.
“Look at my fingers, Tom.”
Tom laughed. “I
am
looking at your fingers.”
The middle finger moved, began to straighten. The blood on the fingernail dried; the swelling started to deflate, like a balloon slowly losing air. Then the index finger straightened and began to shrink, then lastly, the ring finger. They were unbroken. Slowly Esmeralda flexed each one. They moved as if they’d never been broken.
Tom sat up, stared at Esmeralda, who was looking back at him with the same brown eyes as Reason. “How?”
“I have magic, Tom. I don’t need to steal Jay-Tee’s.”
“But in New York . . .”
“Sit down at the table with me, Tom. Let me get you a cold drink.”
Tom stood up, feeling wobbly, walked to the table, pulled out a stool, sat down. How had she done that? Why was he doing what she told him to?
Esmeralda was looking at her right hand as if she didn’t believe it, either. “You know the old man? The one guarding the door? He did something to me. Put his magic inside me. He didn’t ask, either, just pushed it into me. I thought he was killing me, but he wasn’t. Now I’m full of it, Tom. I can feel his magic in every cell. I feel different. I’m stronger than I’ve ever been. I’m not dying anymore. Every time I do magic now I feel stronger, not weaker.”
“The old man?” Tom tried to take in what she had told him. He took in the tiny wounds all over her arms, looked at his own fingers. The dots there were dried, but they were still there. “When he sent that golem through, it was trying to give us magic?”
Esmeralda nodded. “I think so.”
“He’s trying to get through the door to
save
us?”
“I don’t know what he wants. I tried to give some of his magic to Jay-Tee, but . . . well, it didn’t work. It made her sick.”
Tom looked at Esmeralda, trying to read her face, but he didn’t have Jay-Tee’s ability. He had no idea whether she was lying or not.
“Her body couldn’t take his magic.”
“His magic isn’t like ours?”
“No, it’s something different.”
Tom tried to take this in. Mere had unbroken her fingers. He hadn’t even known something that complicated was possible. There were so many questions he wanted to ask her. “Why didn’t it work for Jay-Tee?”
“I don’t know.”
“Could you give it to me?
“We could try, but it was bad for Jay-Tee. She was convulsing. . . . I thought she was going to die. But I tried to give her a lot. Maybe if I only gave you a little . . .”
“Do you think she’ll be okay?”
“I do. Her cells . . . When I look at them they don’t seem any more damaged than they already were.”
“What do you mean?”
“What I tried to give her didn’t take, but I don’t think it damaged her. Her body fought it, expelled it.”
“So where did it go?”
“I don’t know. Into the air? Maybe it burned up in her fever. I think she’s okay, Tom.”
“But you’re not sure?”
“No.”
“If she wakes up okay, will she have enough magic to last a little while longer?”
“Yes. I’m just not sure how much longer. She has the magic you gave her and whatever skerrick she had herself.”
Tom nodded, satisfied with Esmeralda’s answer. “I’m going to go sit by her.”
“Yes,” Esmeralda said, as if she were giving him her permission. Tom was thankful that she made no move to follow him.