Playing Hearts (7 page)

I looked suspiciously at
him. “What is the point, then?”

“I’ve got an idea,” said
Jack. “If I did it myself it would be against the rules, but it wouldn’t be
against the rules for you. And I have another idea that says you’ve probably
already started practising by yourself.”

“How did you know about
the ripples?”

“Call it intuition,” said
Jack. “Only not in front of anything that doesn’t ripple. Mother can only use
the flat reflective ones, so it should be safe enough.”

“You mean I can talk to
Hatter and Hare through the bathwater? I’ve never
heard
them before. And
I don’t
try
to see them; it always just sort of happens.”

“Which is why we’re
starting with the bathtub rather than the wash-basin,” said Jack. “Much easier
to work with. Oh, and also because of the vanity mirror over there.”

“You’ve put a towel over it,”
I said, after a wild, frightened look at it.

“Yes, and that reminds
me: stop making faces at me when I come to visit you.”

“Visit? You mean
spy!
”

Jack shrugged. “A rose by
any other name...”

“A rose by any other name
still has as many thorns,” I said. “How do I call up Hatter and Hare?”

“For a start, you don’t
call
them up
,” said Jack, propping himself against the bathroom wall slightly
behind and beside me. “It’s not calling, it’s seeing. They’re there all the
time, you just have to be able to see them. As for being able to hear them, so
long as you’re actively Seeing instead of passively seeing, there’s no reason
you shouldn’t hear them, too.”

“What do you mean,
actively?”

“I mean trying as opposed
to merely watching things as they stream,” said Jack. “Indolent little thing,
aren’t you, Mab? See them. Make the ripples do what you want them to do.”

“Hatter told me about Seeing,”
I said thoughtfully. “About Underland being a reflection of what we see– oh!”

“DORMY!” yelled a
familiarly frenzied voice. And then there they were, in the ripples: Hatter and
Hare in all their gloriously mad familiarity. Maybe Jack was right about me
being lazy. It hadn’t really taken much to see them.

I couldn’t help the glad
smile that spread across my face. “Hatter! Hare! I found you! It’s me!”

Hatter’s purple eyes were
wild and a little bit watchful, but he didn’t speak. It was left to Hare to
add, at a bellow: “WHAT BIG EARS YOU HAVE, DORMY!”

I looked back at Jack in confusion,
and found that he was looking exasperated. He mouthed at me:
They’re being
watched
. I mouthed back at him:
Can I be seen?

Jack shook his head while
Hatter and Hare waited. I would have liked to have asked him if I could be
heard by anyone watching them, but since he was already taking pains not to be
heard and Hatter and Hare were talking in riddles more than usual, the answer
was pretty obvious.

Carefully, I said: “I’ve
got a friend who’d like you to sew him a new, um, hat. He says you sew things
very well. Only he can’t leave home at the moment.”

“Hatters do not make
house calls,” said Hatter. “You’re thinking of a doctor.”

“Well, if you think a
doctor can sew better...” I let the sentence trail off, and saw Hare bristle.

“HATTER CAN SEW ANYTHING
FROM REPUTATIONS TO WITS,” he said loudly.

“No, you’re thinking of
owls,” I said, hoping that they would understand. “They’re the ones that make
to-whits and to-whos.”

“I can sew a hat for an
owl,” said Hatter, his eyes intent upon me and his pupils dilating. “Is it a
very big owl? White? Black? Red? I’ll need to bring the right thread, you
know.”

“White,” I said, dizzy
with relief. Hatter
had
understood. “And very big. He’s staying at a
little waystation outside the Heart Castle.”

“Good place for an owl,”
Hatter said, and I felt warm with approval even though his tone was aloofly
disinterested. “Lots of straw. Lots of mice.”

“He’s expecting you,” I
said.

I wanted to say so much
more. I wanted to tell Hatter that I’d seen them face the Jabberwock—that I’d
seen them escape—that I’d
helped
them escape. I wanted to tell them that
I missed them. I wanted to pass right through the ripples, and I had the
feeling that maybe I could do it if I went right now. I made a tiny, involuntary
movement forward, my fingers dipping toward the water, and then Jack’s hand was
on my shoulder, fingers sharp and prohibitive. If he had been trying to keep
out of sight, he’d just ruined it: Hatter and Hare must have seen him. They
didn’t blink, but they faded from sight almost immediately.

“Oh,” I said sadly,
feeling deflated. “They’re gone!”

“They are,” said Jack,
his hand still gripping my shoulder. “And it’s time that you were going, too,
Mab.”

He lunged for me so
quickly that I was too surprised to defend myself. In short order I found
myself bundled into an unwieldy ball of backpack, clothes, and limbs, held
firmly in Jack’s shirt-sleeved arms without being able to do so much as
wriggle.

“Oi!” I said. “Put me
down!”

“Anything to oblige,”
said Jack, and threw me in.

If I’d had any idea what
he was really doing, I would never have done it. But I was furious and
determined that if I was going to be sopping wet, so was he– in all his
carefully pressed glory. I seized his arm in one hand, clawing at his cravat in
the other, and pulled him into the water with me. I knew straight away that it
was the wrong thing to have done. Jack cannoned into me, his face for the first
time utterly and completely surprised, and we flew through a substance that
wasn’t water or air until we couldn’t breathe and our heads cleared the surface
of a swiftly running creek. I paddled for the bank, pleasantly surprised at how
easy it was to swim with my backpack. It was only when Jack boosted me up and
out of the water, and the full weight of it bore down on me, that I realised he
had been supporting me the whole time. That annoyed me, so I pointedly turned
to help him out of the water instead of leaving him to scrabble out in all the
mud as I would have preferred to do.

When we made it to the
grass, each of us as muddy as the other, Jack looked around at the grass, the
trees, and then the sky. “Ye gods, Mab!” he said. “What have you gotten me into
now
?”

Jack ended up staying with me for two
weeks. At first we tried to get him back into Underland by having him jump back
into the creek, but as much as that amused me, it did no practical good. At
last, Jack, sopping wet and icily annoyed, refused to try again. As he
explained it, him coming through to my world was very close to being Against
The Rules, and barely possible. When I protested that
I
had brought
him
there, he only said: “Yes, but even if it’s not against the rules, she can
still make things difficult for me. She’s obviously trying to teach me a
lesson.”

Fortunately, my foster
family at that time was a lovely one, and they were happy to invite Jack in
when we told them he was my cousin from Sydney. I did finally manage to send
him back into Underland through a particularly inviting puddle, but it was as
though a door that had been rusty and unwilling to budge was now oiled and
gradually widening. I saw Jack more often in mirrors and reflections, and even
his presence in puddles began to grow. I still made faces at him, but during
those two weeks we had become cautiously used to each other, even if we didn’t
particularly like each other; and if it hadn’t been for the Queen I would
probably have taken down all my mirror-covers except the bathroom one.

After that, Jack came back every birthday.
Sometimes it was just to toss a wrapped gift at me and vanish again. Sometimes
it was to pull me into Underland with him and show me somewhere I’d never seen
before. And sometimes it was to spend a week or two wherever I happened to be
living at the time. It always began the same way: a card on my pillow, no
matter where I happened to be living at the time, and then Jack pushing aside
the sheet, towel, or curtain that covered the most convenient reflective
surface. I got used to him, arrogant, selfish, and annoying as he was. I still
saw Hatter and Hare in the ripples and reflections quite often—could call them
up in any reflective surface now—and somehow the real world and Australia began
to feel less real, and my unreal world of Underland began to feel somehow
more
real. From my twelfth to my eighteenth birthday I spent more time in
Underland than out of it, my foster homes changing with such regularity that at
last they spoke of keeping me in the group home years earlier than normal. I
couldn’t blame them– they thought I was running away. Maybe I was. I don’t
know. All I knew was that, despite the darkness and the feeling of storms
gathering that grew thicker the older I became, Underland felt more like home
than anywhere I’d ever lived.

When I was with Hatter
and Hare, or Sir Blanc, we were always far away from the Queen. She was never
really far distant, though. There was always the feeling that she could appear
at any time, with her card sharks and casual violence, and cut off someone
else’s hand. When I was with Jack it was more complicated. The Queen was
technically closer—sometimes even on the same floor—but Jack was always a
buffer between us. I was never quite sure whether she knew I was there or not,
and I didn’t really want to know. I was afraid that she did know, and that it
was all a part of her plan for me to be there. And some days I was afraid she
didn’t know, and that when she found out she would kill me and stuff me and put
me in her curio room just like she had done with Sir Blanc’s wits. Me, stuffed
and under glass. Jack singing outside. It didn’t stop me going there, though:
nothing did. My file at the assessor’s office began to grow fat with reports
that said things like:
Mabel is bright but disengaged; Mabel does not
connect well with the people in her life;
and
Mabel’s continued truancy
at school and disinclination to interact with the other children is severely
hampering both her grades and her ability to settle into the school.
It
wasn’t long before they sent me to the school counsellor’s office; after that,
the state counsellor; and when that failed, a psychologist. I briefly
considered telling them about Underland—really give them something to take
notes about!—but I had the feeling that it would be much harder to sneak away
from a mental hospital and I didn’t like the idea of being locked up. They
probably wouldn’t let me put covers over the mirrors there, either.

I did try to be more
careful about how long I spent in Underland at a time. A day here, a weekend
there. I didn’t always visit Hatter and Hare, nor did I always wait for a card
on my pillow that meant I’d been invited. I simply packed my backpack—it was
pretty battered by now, but it still held all my stuff—and splashed through the
nearest puddle. Sometimes I found myself in a garden where the flowers were as
supercilious as they were beautiful, their charming tones a constant stream of
rude advice on how to do my hair and remarks on my desperate need for mascara.
Sometimes I was back in the Chessboard Woods, though I didn’t find Sir Blanc
there again– I got the impression he was up to Important Business, and perhaps
doing something rebellious. Hatter and Hare, when I visited them, wouldn’t talk
about him; and the one time that I met with him again he was far from his old,
cheerful, slightly silly self. It was stupid, of course: Sir Blanc with his
wits was
back
to his old self. But I hadn’t known him when he had his
wits—tired, sad, sharp-eyed and close-mouthed—and I was inclined to regret the
change. He wouldn’t talk about the Important Business, and the word ‘Rebellion’
never again crossed his lips, but I knew he was up to something, and Underland
itself was changing around me.