The Colors of Madeleine 01: Corner of White (18 page)

Of course.

The person who knew Belle best was Jack.

Madeleine typed her third answer.

She paused for a moment, then added:

Obeying herself, she did. She IMed Jack, asking him to come over to her place later that day so they could talk.

She watched him blink as her message flashed onto his screen, then his hands reached to the keyboard, and his response appeared:

At that moment, Denny said, “You know what? We’ve got time for one more spot task before lunch.”

“But I haven’t solved all my problems yet,” complained Jack.

“Fast as you can,” said Denny, ignoring him. “Fast as you can, tell me: Is it true? The story about the apple hitting Newton on the head? Is that true? Did it really happen?”

“What do you mean, is it true?” said Jack. “It’s
history
.”

Madeleine was typing into Google:
Did an apple really fall on Isaac Newton’s head?

I’ve heard that this is a myth
, said someone on Answers.com, and somebody else had added,
No, an apple didn’t fall on Isaac Newton’s head. He didn’t really like to be outside.

“This is how Isaac told it,” Denny began, and they looked away from their screens. “One day, he was out near the apple orchard and he saw an apple falling from a tree. It made him start thinking about gravity. Everybody knew about gravity already, of course — it wasn’t like he
invented
it — but he started thinking about how big it was, how far it went, the patterns to it, about
universal
gravitation.”

“So it didn’t fall on him?” said Belle. “You did that whole thing with dropping the apple on us for nothing? Thanks for that. I’ve still got the headache.”

“An apple falls,” continued Denny, “and Isaac sees it fall, and suddenly he thinks about the moon. He thinks: If an apple falls, then the moon is falling too. And if the moon is falling, why doesn’t it hit the ground like that apple just did? And Isaac thinks about how the
moon is flying through space but it’s falling at the same time. The fact that it’s flying forward is what stops it from hitting the ground. The fact that it’s falling towards the ground is what stops it from flying out into space. See? Without gravity, it would fly forever, flying away from us, away into the nowhere. Lost. So, you see …”

Denny had been packing his tools away as he talked. He leaned under the workbench and flicked a switch.

“So, you see,” he repeated, and this time he looked directly at Madeleine. “Sometimes it’s not really flying, it’s just being lost.”

There was a pause in the room, then Belle said, “Ah, it’s all bollocks. Isaac probably made up the story about even
seeing
an apple fall.”

Denny nodded slowly. “Why, yes,” he said. “He might have.”

“You never know when people might be making things up,” Belle continued, her tone so loaded that Jack turned and squinted at her, “making things up
about their lives
.”

On Belle’s screen, Madeleine saw, was a heading in huge, 24-point font: THREE PROBLEMS. And underneath, Belle had repeated the words,
three problems
, over and over. All the way down the page:
three problems, three problems, three problems
.

Belle shut down her computer and its low hissing noise abruptly stopped.

Later that day, Madeleine was sitting on the sloping roof of her attic flat.

Jack was beside her. It was evening, the sky still pale, but trees and buildings almost black.

There were two or three stars out, and Madeleine’s eyes swung from star to star. She felt that the stars were folding into her chest; those sharp, shining, agitated pieces of excitement in her chest: They were stars.

As soon as she’d left Denny’s place, she’d started taking action. The actions had tumbled one after the other, so simple and slick!

She had written the letter to her father and posted it. He travelled constantly, but letters were always forwarded to him from a central post-office address. It might take a while but it would find him.

Then she’d come back and mentioned to her mother that there was a strange pain in her side. Over the next couple of days she planned to keep talking about the pain in her side, until her mother insisted on taking her to the doctor’s. At the doctor’s, she would say, “Huh, actually,
I’m
better now, but listen, my
mother
…”

So that was the second problem practically solved.

Then, because she’d still had another couple of hours before Jack’s visit, she had run back to Denny’s and borrowed a computer. She’d lost all her email addresses with her iPad, but she still remembered Tinsels’s. It was [email protected].

She wrote Tinsels an email.

She told her old friend about Cambridge and the attic flat. She made jokes about the beans, the damp, the winter cold, the rain, and how she and her mother had concussions from bumping their heads into the ceilings. She typed faster and faster. She said,
Sorry it’s been so long! It’s been totally BIZARRO!

She said,
But I’ve written to my dad so I should see you guys
REALLY SOON. She told Tinsels about home schooling, about Jack and Belle, about her mother
SEWING
for a living!!! The more she typed, the more she exclaimed and capitalised, the madder their life in Cambridge seemed and the better she felt. It was like she was shrink-wrapping Cambridge. Now here it was in the palm of her hands, and she knew, at last, what it was.

It was impossible!

Therefore, it could
not be true
!

Her euphoria paraded around the room.

Here she’d been thinking that this was their new life, but
they
were the ones who had run away! They’d locked themselves in a tower; they were playing at being trapped princesses, taking themselves at their own words.

They’d lost themselves in her mother’s charade!

Her real life was just a postage stamp, a Send button away!

It’s not EXACTLY a holiday
, she wrote to Tinsels.
It’s more like one of those Survival Adventures people go on to the Amazon, or whatever. (No, I don’t mean the Amazon where you buy books, lol.) Or maybe it’s like a reality TV show, only without cameras? Like where they find out just how much people can stand?

She wrote,
Can’t wait to see you guys again, especially Warlock! Are you seeing much of him? How is the little guy? He must be getting so big! Tell me EVERYTHING you’ve been doing. LOTS AND LOTS OF LOVE FOREVER.

She hit Send and ran back upstairs.

Her mother had gone out.

She stood on the couch, jumped to the floor, and then did it again. Her excitement had nowhere to go.

While she was waiting for her dad to come rescue them, she thought, she may as well embrace her time here. Now that Cambridge was just a quirk or a glitch, a curious patch in her story, rather than the story itself.

She would read about Isaac Newton! He wasn’t such an anti-flying monster after all, he was a problem solver! She’d read everything there was to know about him, and she’d make Federico happy by
becoming
him.

Her backpack was on the floor and the Isaac Newton book was still inside it. She flicked it open, and it fell at once to the envelope, the one she’d found in the parking meter, from the boy called Elliot Baranski.

Now she re-read it.

Ah, she thought, she might as well reply. It was some kid probably, a fantasy geek. He was lonely. Since he’d written his letter, he’d probably been back to that parking meter every day — whenever he could take a break from Call of Duty or whatever multiplayer computer game was big these days — hoping for a response.

When she’d first found the letter, it had seemed like part of the psycho-madness that was Cambridge. But now, well, it was just some
poor schmuck trying to be clever. She felt free to make fun of him, but she also felt free to be kind.

She wrote a reply. She was reasonably kind in her reply.

She ran out and slid it into the crack in the parking meter, leaving just a tinge of white — then she came home, and Jack arrived.

So, now, here she was with Jack on the roof.

The earlier chill had settled in and they both wore hoodies, hands in the pockets for warmth.

He was explaining about Belle.

“See,” he said, “it’s not about you. It’s about Belle and me — it’s something that goes back to when we were kids.”

Madeleine wasn’t really concentrating. Now that she had reconnected with her real life, it was all theoretical, the Belle problem. It was irrelevant. She kept turning to Jack as he talked and letting smiles spill from her mouth, and then assuming a solemn expression again. Jack smiled back at her each time she did, smiling through his serious words.

“The thing about Belle and me,” Jack was saying, “is that we fight about once a year. She always starts it. She gets sort of strange and suddenly she hates me. I can never figure out what I’ve done. I always try to ignore it but eventually it gets under my skin and I end up hating her back. Then we spend a week or so snapping like alligators, then we shout on a street corner and then we both cry. And make up.”