The next thing that happened, not counting music, which was fairly anonymous, was that everyone was outside, waiting to be picked up. Nory was out with a bunch of other kids, including Kira. Pamela came out and sat down nearby with a big sigh and slumped her backpack down, and everyone froze and went dead quiet. Pamela concentrated on doing a strange thing, which was: taking off her shoe and sock and checking on an orange Band Aid that was on her toe. That was such an unexpected thing for Pamela to do that all the girls started to laugh at her, and then Nory couldn’t help it and she laughed, too, although she felt it was mean. Jessica said to Nory, ‘Can you please get her to go away?’
‘Why should I?’ said Nory. ‘She’s happy there. No, I can’t get her to go away.’
Kira grabbed her arm and pulled her over and said, ‘Nory! The more on her side you are the less popular you’ll be.’
‘Kira, is that all you can think about in this school?’ said Nory. ‘If you’re my friend and Pamela’s my friend I’m just fine in the area of being popular.’
‘You’re not thinking!’ said Kira, in a whisper-shout, which is when you shout, but you do it in a whispering voice rather than a shouting voice.
‘Oh, puff,’ said Nory. She went to sit down next to Pamela and said, ‘Hi, Pamela.’ Pamela said ‘Hello,’ and kept checking away at her bandage, which had that old bandage look to it. Then she put her sock and shoe back on. Kira was waving to Nory very urgently, over and over, saying, ‘Nory! Come over here!’ with her mouth. Nory shook her head in refusion as if to mean ‘Pardon me, but I’m sitting with Pamela.’ To Pamela, she said, ‘You should tell the teacher about those girls.’
Pamela said, ‘Girls? The girls are the least of my problems, it’s the boys who are giving me a headache.’ She pointed over at some of the boys who were in a little group on the steps pointing at her and pretending to throw up at the sight of her. But you could tell that it hurt Pamela that the girls had laughed at her when she looked at her Band Aid, including Nory, because you could hear the same crying in her voice, unless that was just the way she talked when she was angry, with a little sort of trembling. She’d wanted to be near the girls but she knew they wouldn’t want her to be there, so she’d made up this idea of checking her Band Aid, maybe, which turned out to be so unexpected of a thing to do at that second that it worked out even less well than if she’d just walked over and said hello to everyone and nobody had answered. Pamela didn’t understand that the girls were just as bad as the boys, not in shoving her into the boxes, but in just going along with this whole Porkinson Banger of an idea that Pamela was for no convinceable reason a kid who should be put into a state of misery every born day she went to school. Or probably Pamela did understand it, but didn’t want to admit it, because obviously you don’t want to think that everyone dislikes you. Nory told herself, ‘Forget it, just forget it, don’t talk to her about the other kids, just talk to her about something totally separate from the meanness that’s going on, and show the other kids that Pamela is a kid like any other kid at the Junior School who can have a friend who will sit down next to her and talk to her normally.’ So Nory told her a joke she remembered from Garfield. Garfield was her favorite comic strip, because it was really hilarious and really well drawn. Garfield went up in a tree to catch a bird in a nest. He had it clutched in his hand and was just about to eat it, when a mother bird the size of an eagle came in the back yard and glared at him with a vicious glare. Garfield looked up, still squeezing the bird in his hand, and said, ‘Um—chirp? Chirp?’ The eagle pecked at him wildly and Garfield got down from the tree and was all touseled and ruffled and bruised from the eagle. He said, ‘Well, it was worth a try.’
Pamela nodded a little and managed a sad little grin of a smile. Then Nory asked her what books she was reading for Readathon. Pamela took a big breath and said, ‘Well, I’m reading The Call of the Wild.’ She started telling Nory the plot of the story, which was about a magnificent dog who gets stolen away, and then she hopped up and said, ‘I’ve got to go, I’ll miss my train.’ Then she said, ‘Thanks, Nory, bye,’ and nodded at Nory a little, which made Nory happier and made her stop feeling the guiltiness she had been feeling about being magnetized into laughing at her when Pamela had first taken off her sock. Pamela seemed definitely more cheered up by the time she dashed off. Then Nory sat back down on the wall and waited to be picked up by her mother or her father. Kira didn’t come over to sit next to her, but that wasn’t too surprising, only a little saddening.
There was a humongous sign in one of the halls that said ‘Bullies Are Banned’ in balloon writing. Balloon writing was a very, very thick kind of puffy writing.
39. Reading Tintin to Her Babies
That night, after Nory’s mother read to her and her father brought her up a glass of water, Nory bundled Cooch and Samantha together in bed with her, with a plan of reading some Tintin in Tibet to them, because they were just about ready for that level of book now, as long as you explained some of the words. The difficult thing about reading to any of her dolls, as you may imagine, was that it was hard to keep both children sitting up so that they could see the book. They tended to slide down or over, and then Nory would have to tilt the book so that if Samantha was staring off toward a corner of the ceiling she could still have the chance to see the pictures, as long as Nory held the book right down over her head, and the same thing with Coochie. In the case of Tintin books you really had to be able to see the pictures—in fact if you were the one reading you had to point to each person’s head in each square as you read what they said so that the person you were reading to would know who was talking. The pictures were very important to the story, because Herge was such a good drawer, especially of mountains and people climbing mountains wearing backpacks. His dreams were very realistic. Captain Haddock dozes off while he’s walking along and dreams a number of strange things that change from one picture to the next as he’s walking. Nory had only sleptwalked a few times. One time she sleptwalked into the closet in Littleguy’s room when she was eight and was under the general impression that it was the bathroom and so she peed carefully there, pulled up her pajama-bottoms, and went straight back to her bed.
The hard thing about holding the book so that Cooch and Samantha could see was that then it was not all that easy for Nory to see, and her arms and shoulders got so tired that they started to have a case of the sparklies, and couldn’t hold the book up for one more second. Luckily Cooch and Samantha both corked off in a very short time and she could relax the book and scoot down in her bed. Nory felt sleepy, too, but not quite enough to go to sleep herself. She didn’t feel that there was any major bad dream getting itself ready to bother her—probably the last bad dream had been bad enough that she might not have any more for a month or two. So she wasn’t bothered about that. But she wasn’t completely sleepy, and she didn’t want to start another Jill Murphy book about the Worst Witch, even though it was Readathon, because her brain was stuffed to the gizzard with reading for Readathon, and yes, by all means, leukemia was a horrible disease to strike a small innocent child but she would read more Jill Murphy books at another time, since they were very, very good books. Sometimes the problem with telling someone about a book was that the description you could make of it could just as easily be a description of a boring book. There’s no proof that you can give the person that it’s a really good book, unless they read it. But how are you going to convince them that they should read it unless they have a glint of what’s so great about it by reading a little of it?
It was a challenge, but worth it because it was much better when somebody else has read a book you’ve read and you can talk about it, unless they try and be cool by saying something like, ‘Oh sure, I read that ages ago, that was really easy and kind of stupid.’ Kira had read all four of the Worst Witch books and about a hundred books besides that and she said she liked them but she didn’t seem to want to talk about them too much, as usual. She sort of read a book, bzzzzzzz, as if she was
sawing through it, and then on to the next. Nory felt a little jealous of how fast she could read. It was nice to talk to Roger Sharpless about Tintin books because he had read them a lot and had them filed away in his brain, and you could play a game of describing a scene with five or six clues—say, falling out a trapdoor of an airplane into a wagon full of hay—and he would say, King Ottakar’s Scepter! because he was so fast at identifying which book had which scene. You could say just three words, ‘Acting the goat!’ and he knew that you were talking about Destination Moon.
When Nory closed her eyes she saw the little red and yellow and orange dots that spread out on the computer screen to show that you’ve crashed the plane in I.T. If you forgot that they were the sign of a massive crash, the dots were as pretty as a screensaver. She lay there for a while, thinking about little snibbets of the day, I.T., playing with the conkers with Kira, then Kira helping her clean off the bird leisure, which had been very nice of her, and her smelling her hand, also very nice. But she didn’t want to think about the day very much because in some ways it was such a dirty-clothes-heap of a day, all twisted around and garbled and wrinkled. She wanted to close her eyes peacefully and be told an unexpected story, but since she’d already been read to that wasn’t much of a possibility, so she picked up the small Chinese doll on her bedside and looked at its eyes. They were painted with different colors than they used to paint Barbie’s eyes, which are blue and purple. Then she imagined that maybe she could tell herself a story—maybe a short emotional story of the kind that Mariana, the girl who had been in the burning rain, would tell herself. So she did.
40. Amnezia and the Dragon
In ancient days, even before there were hot and cold faucets that can offer something of a problem in England because the hot comes storming out of one faucet and the cold comes freezing out of the other one that is about a foot and a half away from the hot, and they don’t mix, and the hot is screamingly hot, hot enough to boil tea, so that if you want to wash your hands you have to move back and forth very fast, hot-cold-hot-cold-hot-cold-hot-cold, to imitate the sensation that it’s warm water, which is by the way how the art of claymation works—you move one tiny pinch of clay and then walk over to the camera and take a picture and move another tiny movement, move-click-move-click-move-click—but long before there was any of that kind of advanced modern technology, there was a girl. Her name was Amnezia. Amnezia’s mother told her when she was only very little that the Dragon of the Fourth Continent would come. There were seven huge pieces of land in those days, and are now, distributed around the world, and the Fourth Continent was good old Asia. The Seventh Continent is Antarctica, which is a landmass with a huge thing floating underneath it called Magnetic South which is made up of magnets and tons and tons of anonymous rock.
So the Dragon of the Fourth Continent would come, Amnezia’s mother told her. ‘Only to very special people like yourself,’ whispered her mother, who was herself from the Western region of China a thousand miles from the Great Wall. This was when the child was two, one night, and she asked to be told a story. The story turned out to be true and about her own life in the future. ‘We’ll have to defeat the dragon,’ her mother said. ‘The dragon will try and come to get you. He will try and eat you. But you are strong, dear child, he cannot win.’
Then the mother whispered, even more quietly, ‘I have experienced it, just like your grandmother, and her mother and her grandmother, and back and back.’
But there was one thing that the mother did not know: that her daughter would have to meet the dragon two times.
Many years later, when the child was about eight, it happened. Now she was a very pretty child. Her black hair was shinier than ever, and very, very long. It could almost touch her ankles. The experience happened at nighttime. She was doing her studying, she was learning what is now known as botany. It was very late at night and there were no sounds at all except the rustle of the dried plants she was looking at through what is now known as a microscope, but then was known as a Chenker-Pah and made of jade and mother-of-pearl. (A grain of sand is an orphan-of-pearl, because think about it: a pearl is made from a grain of sand held in the loving home of an oyster, and if it never gets a loving home, it will never get the mucousy stuff to harden around it and will never become a pearl.) Amnezia was sitting on her bed, writing on the little table on which she kept her face towel and the equipment she used for her late night studying. She stopped to dip her pen in the ink, for this was long before the days of cartridges, but just as she was about to take it out of the ink, everything changed.
Her bedside table disappeared, her room vanished. Her house, everything. She was on a black ground with millions of people, including her own parents and her. A huge dragon was coming. She touched her shoulder and fell back on her bed. Then in a split second she realized it was coming. All these grownups had come to watch her defeat the dragon. They were all holding candles, beautiful caramel-colored candles. She looked at her mother with pure fear, but her mother smiled at her, as if to say, ‘Everything’s all right.’ It was then that she remembered the time when her mother said, ‘It will happen, the dragon will come, but you will defeat him.’
She clutched her shoulder even harder. She thought to herself hard, ‘Amnezia, gain up all your courage, just like your mother told you!’ Now she could feel dust and hot air brushing against her face from the steps of the monster, it blew in every direction, but all the adults didn’t seem to care one whiff. Now his hand was almost grabbing her. He grabbed tightly now, without her even being able to do as much as take a breath.
She was very smart. She decided she would scoot out from his hand. But it was not as easy as she thought it was. He clutched hard, and what would have been his thumb if he was a human had a very sharp nail. It was an inch away from her arm. She knew it would scrape her if she slithered down. But then she thought, ‘No, it’s better to be alive than not to have a long scrape across you.’
So she began to squirm. She bit the monster, she kicked and punched. But he did not move, he was looking around curiously at everyone else. And foolishly enough he was very preoccupied. She squirmed and squirmed. She managed to slither out. But now she started to turn this way and that. His thumb scraped her all the way down her chest to her hip. Finally only her head was caught in his hands. She pushed off his hands as hard as she could, and fell. It seemed like only five minutes that she fell, and then everything blacked out.
The next day, she woke up. Her mother came in. She spoke softly, just in the same voice she did when Amnezia was only two. ‘You did it, you did it, Amnezia,’ said her mother. She seemed very pleased. Amnezia was glad. She had been scared of that moment for ages.
Then she went off to a boarding school. She went there for five years. She came back when she was thirteen, a very learned girl now. She was ready to become what she had dreamed of for months, years, and what seemed like a decade to her. She was ready to be a professor. The day she came back, it happened again. She was thirteen now, and still just as pretty as she was when she was eight.
She stood taller than ever, her mother’s eyes shined when she came back. She had never seen her mother look so happy in all her life. That night, she was washing, helping her mother wash, when it happened again. The basket in her hand did not disappear this time. She found herself in the black place she had been in before, kneeling down on the same flat blue pillow, holding a basket of clothes. There was her bed, behind her. She sat back on it, scared. But not as scared as the first time. Now many people were there. Thousands of them, not all adults, but also children. There was a woman holding a baby. Holding her tight. Amnezia had a shock. ‘The baby is the only one here who is also supposed to defeat the dragon,’ she thought to herself. ‘The mother is scared. How could a baby do it?’
The mother set the baby down beside her and smiled at Amnezia. Then Amnezia thought, ‘I am only brought here to protect the baby. I was chosen to protect her.’ She looked around her. Now all the candles everyb
ody was holding were not caramel-colored but a baby blue. ‘It is a ceremony for an infant,’ she thought. So they used blue.
Then she felt the dust from the monster’s foot again. She put the baby behind her and lay with her body protecting her. She used all her chest-power to scream at the monster, ‘Don’t try and eat her, try and eat me. I am so much bigger than she is.’ The monster got a strange look on his face, as if he understood. He picked up Amnezia and took her away.
And no one ever saw her again, because now she is in heaven.
That was what Mariana told to herself, as she sat on the big cozy bed. She sang softly, ‘She’ll be coming round the mountain when she comes.’ She got up, picked up her two dolls Heleza and Releza, yawned and decided to read herself a book, the end.
41. In Real Life
‘It was only pretend,’ Nory said to reassure Samantha and Racooch when she was finished whispering herself the story—in case one of them had been only dozing lightly and caught some of it, or was only pretending to sleep, as Nory sometimes did herself, so she could hear a glimpse of things she wouldn’t normally hear. ‘In real life there are no dragons with long fingernails,’ she said to her dear babies. ‘There are, it is true, many terrible things in real life, but you two are young and you don’t need to know about all of them yet. There will be plenty of time for that. You just need to try to do your best to be as good as I know you can. I will cradle you away from anything that might harm you, because I love you very much, as you know.’ She kissed them in their sleep, and then it was unavoidably time for her to conk.