Playing Hearts (2 page)

I accidentally went back into Underland
the year I turned seven. It was one of those hot, muggy summer days that crawl
in under your collar and wriggle uncomfortably down your back. Not a breath of
wind; and the pond in the park was so clear and reflective that I could see
everything around me in its waters. I jumped in with both feet and a joyful
splash, and slipped through into Underland almost before I was aware of it.

This time I came out in a
teapot, with my eyes wide open. It was a very big teapot, but it was still an
odd place to come out. Someone said: “Dormy! Is that you?” and peered at me
with dilated pupils that were deep purple, the teapot lid held aloft in one big
hand.

“My name is Mabel,” I
told him.

“Mind your elbows, then.”

“WHO IS IT?” demanded another
voice. I looked across the table and found that a large grey hare was staring
fixedly at me. There was a hard, speculative look to its eyes.

“IT’S A MABEL!” bawled
the other, despite the fact that the hare could see me quite well for itself.

“WELL, TELL IT TO KEEP
ITS ELBOWS TO ITSELF!”

“My elbows are still in
the teapot,” I told them both.

“Oh,” said the
purple-eyed man, putting the teapot lid down on the tablecloth. He was a tall,
gangly thing with big hands and feet, and a syncopated blink that almost
amounted to a nervous twitch. A curving, oddly-proportioned top-hat with a
curling brim sat sideways on his spiky hair. “Mind you don’t block the spout,
then.”

“Actually, I was going to
climb out,” I said.

The purple-eyed man gave
me a fascinated look. “Were you, though? How do you manage that without legs?”

“I have legs!”

“WHAT’S THAT IT SAYS?”

“IT SAYS IT HAS LEGS!”

“YES, BUT HOW DO WE KNOW?
WERE WE GIVEN A VOTE?”

“
I
wasn’t,” I
said, jumping myself up on the teapot rim. “I just got them. I don’t see why
you should have had a vote.”

“WHY IS IT DOING THAT?”

The purple-eyed man
bawled: “I THINK IT’S TRYING TO CLIMB OUT!”

“HOW DOES IT MANAGE
WITHOUT LEGS?”

“
I have legs!
” I
yelled. The hare fixed its gaze upon me again just as I worked one leg out of
the teapot. I waggled my foot at it.

“What do you know,” said the
hare, in a much more moderate voice. “It has a leg. How fortunate for it! I
wish I had a leg.”

“You do,” I said. “You
have two.”

“Two is different than
one,” said the hare sternly. “You should be more precise, small child.”

“I have two legs as
well,” I said, in order to be more precise.

“As well as
what
,
exactly?”

I paused to think it
through carefully. “Well, two arms, I suppose.”

They both stared at me
for a long moment. At length, in a much friendlier voice, the purple-eyed man
said: “So you have.”

I smiled cautiously at
him and looked around me with fascinated eyes. My teapot was perched on a long,
narrow table that followed the verdant swell of a grassy hill and vanished over
the summit. Behind me was a forest with grass of a very different green to that
beneath the table, and when I looked back toward the summit of the hill, I
thought I saw a sharp, red building far away on the horizon. I shivered at the
sight of it. I’d had nightmares about something like that, I was sure; when I
was very young. I looked away from it and back at the tea-laden table. It was
shadowed by trees and dappled with sunlight, and the sunlight was oddly familiar,
too.

“I think I’ve been here
before,” I said, slowly.

“You can’t have been,”
said the purple-eyed man. “I would have noticed. So would Dormy. He usually
sleeps in there.”

I sat down on the
colourful, patched tablecloth and frowningly considered the world around me.
“The sun is all wrong.”

“Sssshh!” hissed the
Hare. “He’ll hear you! We’ve only just got him to stop sulking about the summer
storms.”

“And the moon is a lady,”
I said slowly, with a growing sense of
deja vu
.

“Well, I wouldn’t go so
far as to say
that
,” said the purple-eyed man. “She’s
female
.”

“Is it day or night?”

Perhaps the question
annoyed them: the Hare immediately went back to his deafening bellow.

“WHAT’S SHE ASKING?”

“SHE WANTS TO KNOW IF
IT’S DAY OR NIGHT!”

“IS SHE AN IMBECILE?”

“I
know
the sun is
out,” I said crossly. “But last time I was here he was out at night.”

That made one pair of purple
eyes flicker madly around my face in a series of rag-time blinks, and one pair
of black ones narrow intensely at me. “We don’t know any knights,” said the
Hare more calmly. “Nasty people, knights. The Queen owns all of them.”

“I didn’t meet you last
time,” I said, ignoring that remark as incomprehensible. “Who are you?”

“Alive,” said the
purple-eyed man.

“Moderately healthy,”
said the Hare.

“Happy–”

“Moderately–”

“
Who
are you, not
how
are you,” I said. I flicked a look between the two of them and said testingly:
“That was stretching a bit.”

Purple eyes slid sideways
and back. Black eyes regarded me slyly. “Her ears are bigger than Dormy’s
ears,” said the Hare.

“I did notice,” said the
other. To me, he said: “I’m the Hatter. You may have noticed.”

“Noticed–? Oh, the hat.
Yes. It’s very...
odd
.”

“Thank you!” said the
Hatter simply. “I made it ’specially! Do you know what skill and dexterity it
takes to make a hat with this kind of oddity? Facets from every realm of
probability and even a few from the realms of possibility!”

I didn’t understand that,
but from my position atop the tea-table I could see a coach fast approaching
over the crown of the hill, so I asked instead: “Who’s that? In that
old-fashioned coach? Are those horses?”

“Horses are for courses,
not for coaches,” said the Hare disapprovingly. “Those are card sharks.”

I had a brief, unsettling
memory—or was it a dream?—of sharp teeth clicking at me, and the red velvet
darkness of a sack that I seemed to remember being thrown over me. “I’ve
been
here before,” I said again, with a squeak in my voice.

“Back! Back in the
teapot!” said the Hatter frantically, poking me in the stomach with his long
fingers in an attempt to overbalance me back into the teapot. “Mind your ears,
back in the pot!”

I fended off his fingers
and darted behind an oversized milk jug. “Ow! Stop it!”

“SHE WASN’T INVITED,”
said the Hare. I thought he meant me, but he was looking at the coach with
wide, wild eyes. I understood why as soon as a card shark sprang from the back
of the coach and opened the door. The first thing to emerge from the coach was
a vast balloon of red velvet punctured by a small, silver mirror, and one
pointed red shoe. The balloon grew in size until it was dimpled by a bodice in
white lace that had a front point as sharp as the shoe, then the Queen’s terrifyingly
straight back descended in a line exactly parallel to the slanted steps. It had
been four years since I’d seen her—four years of the real world being ground into
me by life in a series of foster homes—but it hadn’t been quite long enough to
purge the deeply buried nightmare memory of her. I was old enough this time to
know that she wasn’t the Queen of England, though I was still certain she was a
Queen. She wasn’t wearing a crown this time, but her head-dress was so wide
that it almost overtook her skirt in size. A cloud of white netting adorned it
and frothed behind her as she at last extricated herself from the coach: it was
the last of her ensemble to emerge from the door.

The Hatter, his big hands
white-knuckled around his tea-cup, mumbled to himself: “Wasn’t invited. No
room. No room at all. Wasn’t invited and shouldn’t be offered tea.”

The card shark closed the
coach door and put up the stairs again, but the coach wasn’t quite empty. Through
the window I could see a head of pale golden hair, slicked back and smooth,
above a collar of dark crimson. It turned slightly to the side, displaying an
arrogantly tilted chin and a narrow, aristocratic nose, and I felt the clutch
of my fingers in the fabric at my waist. My finger—the one that had been
pricked in that odd, childish dream so many years ago—was hurting.

“Jack,” I said, the name
falling rusty with disuse from my lips.

“What did I tell you?”
whispered the Hare, frantically soft. “Her ears are
huge
!”

As the Queen shook her
skirts out in massive stateliness, I dropped from the table to the grass,
scuttling between chair legs and tablecloth until I was safe beneath the table.
There were grass-stains on my clothes but I ignored them, wriggling vigorously
until I could see a sliver of the action from beneath the scalloped edge of
tablecloth. The Hatter’s legs were close and I hugged his skinny ankles,
pressing my cheek to the purple stockings and tattooing the buckle from his
knee-breeches on my left temple. It was by far the least comfortable position
I’d ever been in, but I wouldn’t have traded it for the most comfortable seat
at the tea table. Not when the Queen was sweeping toward it with fear before
her and danger in her wake. Behind her the coach window framed Jack, who didn’t
move– who didn’t even look toward the unfortunate two at the tea-table. Almost
as if he knew that things were about to become unpleasant for Hatter and Hare. Why
was the Queen so angry?

“I see you’re still at
tea,” she said. The card sharks had ranged behind her in something like a
v-formation, but as she drew closer to the table they spread out to surround us.
Three of them mounted chairs and then the table to cross over to the Hare’s
side. I heard their sharp, metallic footsteps on the table above my head, and
then the soft thunk of feet hitting grass behind me. I didn’t like them being
out of my sight but I preferred to keep my eyes on the Queen.

“I like to think that I’m
not a demanding monarch,” she was saying pleasantly. “However, I really do
expect my subjects to rise when I deign to approach them. Remove your hat,
man!”

I let go of the Hatter’s
ankles just in time. He scrambled to his feet, and the billowing of the
tablecloth suggested that he was bowing.

Across the table, the
Hare’s voice said: “WHAT’S THAT SHE SAYS? SHE WANTS TO REVIEW THE CAT?” and was
cut off in a grunt as something metallic went
schwik!
There was a thump
on the table-top– was the Hare dead? I felt my lower lip tremble, and heard
Jack’s younger voice saying again:
You’re not to cry.
I wasn’t crying. I
wasn’t
.

Above my head, the Queen’s
voice said: “I’d hate to think that you’re sharing your...
tea
...around
Underland. It’s not healthy.”

There was a garbled
mumble from the Hare that made me thankfully aware that he was still alive, and
Hatter sat down. I immediately seized his legs again, and though they were as
skinny as ever they weren’t as stiff. I had the feeling he was as glad for me
as I was for him.

“Not healthy for you, and
certainly not healthy for them,” said the Queen. I didn’t think she was really
talking about tea, but for the life of me I couldn’t figure out what she
was
talking about. “The type of tea you’re spreading about has a nasty habit of
poisoning the drinkers.”

“Poisoned tea is no use,”
said Hatter, his legs quivering. “All our guests would die. Dead guests are
so
hard
to entertain. Perhaps a little sip of Syrup of Poppies instead?”

“Number Six, restrain the
Hare,” said the Queen. Her voice was soft and plump, like a pillow. A pillow
pressed against my face so that I couldn’t breathe. “I’ve heard that a hare’s foot
is good luck.”

Above my head there was a
brief, violent struggle, the sound of smashing crockery and what sounded like
the Hare’s huge back feet beating against the tabletop.