Scarecrow

On Sunday, the screen lit up, and there was a spoon.

Just a spoon. Filling the whole screen. Silver, slightly bent, very close, with something pale and soft on the end of it, and a small fierce voice behind it saying, ”Look. Lucas. Look. Are you looking?”

”I’m looking.”

”Are you looking properly?”

”Garnet, I can only see a spoon.”

The spoon went away. Garnet’s face replaced it, so close I could count her freckles, with a smear of something white across her chin and an expression of enormous, barely contained triumph.

”Ice cream,” she said.

It had taken her eleven days.

She told me all of it. All eleven days. In order. With no gaps. Genny tried to take the screen from her twice and was fought off both times.

It had started when I’d told them about Toby’s birthday. Weeks ago. The cake, and the candles, and Luna’s ice cream sitting in the middle of sixteen flames and not melting. Garnet had listened to the whole story with her mouth open, and at the end she’d asked one question.

What does it taste like?

And I’d tried to tell her. Cold, and sweet, and soft, and gone. And she’d listened, and nodded, and said hm.

And then, eleven days ago, Mr. Dunmore had brought up a tub of it from a shop on the ring street, as a treat. For no reason at all. Real ice cream. Vanilla. And Garnet had eaten a whole bowl of it, very slowly, with her eyes shut, the way she’d eaten her first strawberry in the field. And then she’d asked for another bowl. And eaten that one even slower.

”I wasn’t eating it,” she said. ”I was learning it.”

And the next morning, she’d gone into the kitchen with a cup of sand from the roof garden, and shut the door, and tried.

”The first one was terrible,” said Garnet happily. ”It was cold sand. Just cold. And sandy. Mr. Dunmore ate a bit to be polite and had to go and lie down.”

”Garnet,” said Genny, somewhere off the screen.

”The second one was sweet sand. The third one was wet. The fourth one was ice. Just ice, in a cup. Genny said that was progress.” She held up five fingers. ”The fifth one was milk. Frozen milk. Which isn’t ice cream, it turns out. It’s just cold milk that’s angry.”

I laughed. I couldn’t help it.

”And then I thought,” said Garnet, ”about what you said. About strawberries. How I don’t know what’s in them, but my hands know. And I thought, my hands only had two bowls. That’s not enough. So I asked Mr. Dunmore for more.” She looked very serious. ”He said I could have one bowl a day. For science.”

”Garnet ate ice cream every day for a week,” said Genny, off screen, in a voice of deep disapproval. ”For science.”

”I learned it,” said Garnet. ”My hands know it properly now.” She held the spoon up again. ”And on Friday, I took a cup of sand, and I held it, and I thought about the second bowl, the slow one, with my eyes shut. And I opened my hands. And it was this.”

She put the spoon in her mouth. She closed her eyes.

”It’s perfect,” she said, through the spoon. ”It’s perfect, Lucas. It’s better than the shop. Mr. Dunmore said so. He cried.”

”Mr. Dunmore cries at everything,” said Genny.

”He cried more,” said Garnet.

”And I want to send you some,” said Garnet.

She’d put the spoon down. She was sitting right in front of the screen, very close, with her elbows on the table and her chin in her hands, and she’d gone serious all at once, the way she did.

”You can’t,” I said gently. ”It’s sixty floors, and a ramp, and a lift, and a long corridor, and the cave’s warm. It’d melt before it got to the door.”

”I know,” said Garnet. ”I’ve thought about it.”

”You’ve thought about it.”

”I’ve thought about it for three days,” said Garnet. ”And I’ve made a plan. Genny helped.” She held up one finger. ”One. I make it on Monday night. In a tin. With a lid. Miss Pell has a tin. It used to have biscuits in it.” Two fingers. ”Two. Miss Pell gives it to the soldier who takes the post down to the cave on Tuesday mornings. She knows him. She says he owes her a favor.” Three fingers. ”Three. The soldier gives it to you.” She lowered her hand. ”And four.”

”Four?”

”Four,” said Garnet, ”Luna keeps it cold.”

I stared at the screen.

”She can,” said Garnet. ”You told me. On the cake. In the middle of the fire.” She looked at me with enormous patience, the way she looked at me when I was being slow. ”She just has to keep it cold for, like, a minute, once it’s got there. Until you eat it. That’s not hard. Not for Luna.” A pause. ”Is it?”

”No,” I said. ”That’s not hard for Luna.”

”Then that’s the plan,” said Garnet, with great satisfaction. ”Tell her Tuesday. Tell her it’s from me. Tell her,” she added, as an afterthought, ”she can have some.”

Mother came on next.

She was walking now without even a hand on the chair. She came across the big room behind the twins, slowly, steadily, and sat down in front of the screen by herself. Her hair was a little longer. She was wearing the blue cardigan again. There was color in her face. Not much. But some. More than there’d been in the field for a year.

”Marker,” said Genny, before Mother could say anything. ”Down one. Six weeks running. Dr. Halloway’s stopped saying probably nothing. She’s started saying we’ll see.” She looked at her notebook. ”That’s better. Statistically.”

”Thank you, Genevieve,” said Mother.

”You’re welcome,” said Genny.

Mother looked at me through the screen. For a long time. The way she always did. Checking.

”Hm,” she said.

”I’m fine.”

”I didn’t ask.”

”You were going to.”

”I was going to,” Mother agreed. She folded her hands on the table. ”Garnet, take your spoon and go and wash your face. Genny, I’ll call you in a minute.”

They went. Garnet complaining. Genny not.

And Mother looked at me again.

”Something you said,” she said. ”Before you looked.”

I stared at her.

”I’ve known you since before you were born, Lucas Dask,” said Mother. ”You have a face for things you’ve done, and a face for things that were done to you, and a face for things you said before you looked.” She tilted her head. ”Your father had the same one. It’s very particular. It’s in the left eyebrow.”

I didn’t say anything for a while.

Then I told her. Not everything. Not names. A boy who’d been trying. A sister who’d been hurt. A word I’d said in a corridor in front of forty people. Again.

Mother listened to all of it without moving.

”And he was telling the truth,” she said at the end.

”Yes.”

”And you’d seen him try. With your own eyes. And you said it anyway.”

”Yes.”

Mother was quiet for a moment.

”Your father did that once,” she said. ”Only once that I know of. In the war. He accused a man of something in front of the whole unit. Something terrible. He was so sure. He’d seen the bodies, and he’d added it up, and he was sure.” She looked at her hands. ”And he was wrong. And the man never forgave him. Not ever. Not even at the end.”

”What did Father do?”

”He went and said so,” said Mother. ”To the man’s face. With nobody else there. And then he didn’t say anything else at all. Not but. Not I thought. Not you have to understand.” She looked up at me. ”Just I was wrong. And then he left it. Because the rest was the other man’s to decide.”

”He didn’t forgive him.”

”No,” said Mother. ”But your father could live with that. What he couldn’t have lived with was not saying it.” She smiled, very slightly. ”That’s all you can do, Lucas. The rest isn’t yours.”

The corporal knocked on the frame. Once. Five minutes.

”Genny,” called Mother, over her shoulder. ”Quickly.”

Genny sat down in front of the screen with a pile of notebooks in her lap.

Father’s notebooks. I knew them the way you know your own hands. The brown cardboard covers, gone soft at the corners. The numbers on the spines in Father’s square writing. One to fourteen. The ones she’d swept off the shelf in the study on the last night in the field, while I stood at the window, and held on to all the way here, in the car, on the ramp, in the lift.

She had all fourteen. There were slips of paper sticking out of every one of them. Dozens. Little white tongues.

”I’ve finished,” she said.

”Finished what?”

”Reading them.” She put her hand flat on the pile. ”All of them. Twice. The second time with a dictionary. And Mr. Ashby, for the maths in eleven, which was hard.” She looked at me through the screen with her serious, narrow, nine-year-old face. ”I have questions.”

”How many?”

Genny looked down at the slips of paper.

”Two hundred and six,” she said. ”But I’ve only got three minutes, so I picked three.”

I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t. I was thinking about myself at nine. In the field. With notebook one open on my knees, reading the words carbon and bond and lattice and not understanding any of them, and not asking, because I thought Father would think I was stupid. I hadn’t asked him a single question about the notebooks until I was eleven.

Genny had finished all fourteen at nine. Twice. With a dictionary.

”Go on,” I said.

”One,” said Genny.

She opened notebook three. A slip of paper marked the page. She turned it round to the screen, so I could see Father’s handwriting, small and square.

”Page one, notebook one, he says nothing comes from nothing,” said Genny. ”Conservation. You can change what a thing is, but you can’t make more of it. Or less. If you turn a kilo of iron into gold, you get a kilo of gold. Every time.” She tapped the page. ”He says it about forty times. In different notebooks. It’s the most important rule. He underlines it.”

”Yes.”

”So,” said Genny. ”The moon.”

I went very still.

”You put water on the moon,” said Genny. ”When you were four. A lot of water. Enough that everyone in the world could see it.” She looked at me. ”Water is two hydrogens and an oxygen. There’s oxygen on the moon. In the rocks. Lots. Father says so in notebook nine. But there’s no hydrogen. Hardly any. Not enough for a white spot you can see from here.” She put her finger on the page. ”So where did the hydrogen come from, Lucas?”

I opened my mouth.

I didn’t have anything to say.

I’d never thought about it. Not once. Not in eleven years. I’d been four, and sad about the moon, and I’d wanted it to have water, and I’d looked at it, and it had.

Nothing comes from nothing.

”I don’t know,” I said.

Genny nodded, as though she’d expected that. She wrote something on the slip of paper. Very small.

”Father didn’t know either,” she said. ”That’s notebook nine. Page sixty. He did the sum. Three times. And then he wrote L. — where from? And underlined it. And then nothing else. He never wrote about it again.” She closed the notebook. ”I think he was frightened of the answer.”

”Two,” said Genny.

Notebook twelve. She held it up. Then notebook thirteen beside it.

”Look at the writing,” she said.

I looked.

Twelve was Father’s writing. Small and square and careful. The way I knew it.

Thirteen was Father’s writing too. But smaller. Much smaller. So small you’d need a lens to read it properly. And the diagrams were different. In twelve, they were drawings of things. A leaf. A stone. A crystal. In thirteen, they were drawings of the things inside things. And inside those. And inside those. Down and down, page after page, smaller and smaller, as if he’d been looking through a window that kept getting wider.

”Notebook twelve stops in the spring,” said Genny. ”Notebook thirteen starts in the summer. Mother says that’s the year his eyes went black.” She put the two notebooks side by side. ”And after that, he could see smaller.”

I didn’t say anything.

”I don’t think the black was the bad part,” said Genny. ”I think the black was the part where he could see more.” She looked at me through the screen. At my eyes. At the ring, very thin, very dark, round the edge of the brown. ”Mother told me about the ring. I asked her. She didn’t want to tell me. I asked eleven times.”

”Genny—”

”I’m not frightened,” said Genny. Very firmly. Too firmly. ”I’m just writing it down. Question two: what did he see, that he hadn’t seen before? Notebook thirteen doesn’t say. It just draws.” She paused. ”It draws very well.”

”Three,” said Genny.

She glanced over her shoulder. Toward the door of the big room. Then back at the screen. And then, very deliberately, she put her pen behind her ear, and folded her hands on top of the pile of notebooks, and said, in a perfectly ordinary voice:

”Notebook nine. There’s a man in it with a bird’s name.”

I didn’t move.

”He comes to the porch,” said Genny. Ordinary. Conversational. As if she were telling me about the weather. ”Three times. In nine years. Father writes it down each time. The bird came to the porch. With the date. And after the first time, Said no. And after the second time, Said no. He asked about L. And after the third time—” She stopped.

”What?”

Genny looked at me. Very steadily. With Mother’s eyes.

”After the third time, Father didn’t write said no,” she said. ”He wrote He’s building something. For when I’m gone. For L.” A pause. ”That’s the last page of notebook nine. Notebook ten starts with the porch steps. How he fixed them. Nothing else.”

The corporal outside the booth knocked twice on the frame.

Genny didn’t move.

”That’s three,” she said. ”I’ve got two hundred and three more. I’ll send you a list.”

”Genny—”

”Time’s up,” said Genny. ”I know. Mother says I’m to say goodbye properly.” She looked at me for a moment longer through the screen. And something went across her serious little face that wasn’t serious at all. ”Goodbye properly, Lucas. Eat Garnet’s ice cream. Ask Luna about the hydrogen. She’ll like that question.”

The screen went dark.

I sat in the booth that didn’t quite close for a long time.

He’s building something. For when I’m gone. For L.

Eleven years.

My nine-year-old sister had found it in a notebook, on her own, with a dictionary. Before I had.

The tin came on Tuesday.

A corporal I didn’t know brought it to the mess at breakfast. A round biscuit tin, dented, with a picture of a castle on the lid that had mostly worn away. Wrapped in about six towels. He put it down in front of me and said, ”From a Miss Pell, sixtieth floor. She says I’m to tell you that I owe her nothing further,” and went away looking relieved.

I unwrapped the towels.

The tin was cold. Not as cold as it had been. But cold. Somebody, somewhere between the sixtieth floor and here, had kept it cold. A soldier with ice in his pack, maybe. Or just a lot of towels and a very fast walk.

I took it to the end of the Windsors’ table.

Luna looked up from her porridge. At me. At the tin. At the faded castle on the lid.

”From my sister,” I said. ”Garnet. She made it. From sand. By touch. It took her eleven days.” I put it down in front of her. ”She says you’re to keep it cold. She says you can have some.”

Luna Windsor looked at the tin for a long time.

Then she put one hand flat on the lid.

And the tin went white with frost, all at once, all the way round, and a thin mist came off it and curled away across the table.

”Tell your sister,” said Luna, very seriously, ”that I accept.”

We ate it on the gallery that night. All five of us. Under the little window, with the city below. Six spoons from the mess, because Liam had stolen one too many and wouldn’t say why.

It was perfect.

Garnet was right. It was better than the shop. Cold and sweet and soft, and then gone. It tasted of vanilla, and of something else under the vanilla that I couldn’t name. Something warm, in the middle of all that cold. Like a kitchen. Like a kitchen in a field, a long time ago, with a stove going and somebody singing.

Liam ate four spoonfuls and then lay on his back on the gallery floor and said it was the best thing that had ever happened to him, which was apparently this now. Toby ate his very slowly, with his eyes shut, the way Garnet would have. Seraphina said it was fine and ate more than anyone. Luna kept the tin cold with one hand on the lid the whole time, and ate with the other, and didn’t say anything.

There was some left.

Not much. A few spoonfuls, at the bottom of the tin, in the corner.

I looked at it for a long time. Then at the sixth spoon, Liam’s stolen one, which nobody had used.

Luna watched me look.

”Go on,” she said quietly.

I left it at the fern.

At four in the morning, on my way to the empty gym. In a tin cup from the mess, with the stolen spoon in it, on the floor beside the metal stand. Where somebody always put their right hand down when they sat.

Luna had frozen the cup for me before I went. Not hard. Just enough. It’ll hold till five, she’d said. Not much after.

I didn’t leave a note. I didn’t know what to write that wouldn’t break her father’s letter. I just left the cup, and the spoon, and went to the gym, and stood in the dark for an hour, watching for sparks that didn’t come.

At five, I went back.

The cup was there. On the floor by the stand.

It was empty. Washed, even. Clean and dry. The spoon laid across the top of it, very neatly.

And on the floor beside it, on the rock, where nobody else would notice it, there was a mark. Small. The size of a thumbnail. A little scorched place on the stone, fine and branching.

Like a fern.

I sat down against the wall, and looked at it for a long time, and gave the fern its water.

Day 140.

Garnet made ice cream. Eleven days. For science.

Genny: where did the hydrogen come from? Father didn’t know. L. — where from?

Notebook thirteen: after his eyes went black, he could see smaller.

The bird came to the porch three times. ”He’s building something. For when I’m gone. For L.”

Mother: say ”I was wrong.” To his face. With nobody else there. Then leave it.

The cup was empty. She left a mark.