First published by Allen & Unwin in 2018
Copyright © Rebecca Lim, 2018
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or ten per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.
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Australia
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ISBN 978 1 76029 736 7
eISBN 978 1 76063 672 2
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Cover and text design by Sandra Nobes
Cover and chapter illustration by Geoff Kelly/Tou-Can Design
Other internal illustrations by Rebecca Lim
Set by Sandra Nobes
To Michael, Oscar, Leni and Yve – through thick and thin, and all the stuff in between.
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Harley Spark, thirteen years and twenty days old, had never stolen anything in his life. Although Harley’s dad, Ray, was a major (unconfirmed) underworld crime figure.
When Harley was five, police in full riot gear had stormed their house, looking for a collection of antique pistols Ray was supposed to have nicked from a museum in Belgium. Harley’s mum, Delia, had stopped having anything to do with Ray after that because, in her own words, she was very black and white on the whole lying and stealing thing.
Before then, Delia had been under the impression that Ray was a removalist.
‘Oh, he’s a removalist all right,’ the policemen had said darkly as they’d left the house, empty-handed.
Around Ray Spark, things had a tendency to go missing and then pop up somewhere else. Somewhere a very, very long way away. It was just that no one could ever prove it.
To Harley, though, his dad had always seemed like a perfectly normal dad. Harley and his mum lived across town from Ray now, but Harley still saw him at least once a month and on birthdays and alternate Christmases – alleged illegal activities permitting.
They did things like kick the footy around and go out for ice-cream and games of laser tag. They were like two peas in a pod except that Harley’s eyes were a light, almost golden brown whereas his dad’s were blue, and Harley’s hair was black like his mum’s while his dad’s was sandy. Harley had the same cowlick in his fringe that his dad did, and he wrinkled his nose the exact same way when he sneezed.
‘But other than that,’ Delia would say with great satisfaction, ‘you are one hundred and five per cent my decent, law-abiding boy.’
Except for today.
Today, Harley was having a moment. It was one of those moments he tried to shove down and not acknowledge; one of those moments when he seemed to take after his dad more than his mum.
There was this auction house, see, just two doors down from the skinny single-storey terrace Harley shared with his mother. Every Friday, Hammonds the Auctioneers would sell the old junk that people no longer wanted in their lives. All week, until Friday morning, the front windows of the auction house would grow progressively more crammed, from top to bottom, with bric-à-brac – otherwise known as lesser objets d’art, according to the huge sign in the window, which also invited people to consign ‘YOUR CURIOS AND BIBELOTS, PAID WITHIN FOURTEEN DAYS OF SETTLEMENT’.
People would spill out onto the footpath early on Fridays, raising their hands for things like porcelain cats, soup bowls resembling large cabbages and lampstands in the shape of sexy ladies, until the front windows of Hammonds the Auctioneers were empty and dusty. Then it would all start again the following Monday: people bringing in their sad, unwanted things until the Friday, when other people took those same things off their hands, forever.
Every time Ray dropped Harley home in front of the auction house (so that Delia wouldn’t spot him hanging around outside their terrace and begin to cry), Ray would note absently, ‘There is no cash – by definition, son – that is ever bad. It’s only ever good. Saying good cash is completely beside the point. It’s otiose. Useless.’
But today – a Thursday – Harley was feeling bad – Ray Spark-style bad – the way cash wasn’t, because Hammonds was crammed to the rafters with people’s junk except for this one dusty blue and white Chinese vase that was just sitting on the footpath outside.
Right in Harley’s way.
One of the big, hairy men who moved the bricà-brac, lesser objets d’art and all the other curios and bibelots around must have forgotten to take it inside the shop.
Harley was well known to be an inveterate collector of fossils, like fossilised dinosaur poo. He knew about old stuff – old stuff that mattered. Which is another way of saying that he normally wouldn’t be caught dead anywhere near old ornamental thingummies made for putting flowers in.
But somehow this particular old ornamental vase thingummy was different. He couldn’t take his eyes off it, even though it didn’t look like much.
Now, Harley was on his way home from school.
He was literally just metres from his house.
It was freezing cold outside, and he was also kind of busting to go to the toilet.
Harley reminded himself sharply that he was decent and law-abiding.
But something made him crouch down and study the vase more closely anyway.
Before he knew it, he had picked it up and was scrubbing at the dull, grimy surface, all over, with the sleeve of his blue school jumper.
The vase wasn’t very big or very heavy; it was maybe thirty centimetres high with one very long, azure-coloured Chinese dragon looped and coiled around and around the body and neck of the vase on a cracked white background.
The dragon was side-on, with its head tilted slightly towards him so that Harley could make out two golden, stag-like horns and two burning gold eyes with black centres ringed in a thin line of blue, which had such a lively, inquisitive expression that the painted dragon seemed almost alive. The dragon’s four legs ended in talons kind of like an eagle’s, though with five claws on each foot instead of four, and it had no wings. Its rippling, snakelike body had scales like a fish, and a large, almost translucent pearl was suspended beneath its jaws. Harley – staring hard at the coils of the beast – could have sworn that he saw them move, just for a moment, the way a wave at the beach might do on a sunny day.
The feeling – that he needed the vase, and the vase needed him back – exploded in Harley then. Maybe it was the kind of feeling Ray got when he saw something old and unique and impossible to own.
It was this feeling that he just had to have it.
Harley knew that the vase was calling out to him to be taken away. And in a hurry.
Now you and I and Harley know that stealing is wrong.
But something overcame him just then – like a rush of blood to the head – and he hoisted his schoolbag higher on his back, stuck the vas
e as far up under his school jumper as it would go, and sprinted the two doors home.
Harley’s mum was a senior nurse in the emergency room of a big city hospital. It was one of the afternoons where she hadn’t arrived home yet and, for once, Harley was glad to be on his own. It would be at least dinnertime before she made an appearance: plenty of time before that to put on the oven to heat up the pasta bake she’d left him, and come up with a decent hiding place for the vase.
Hot with a mix of shame and something suspiciously like excitement, possibly even outright joy, Harley reached his small bedroom at the rear of the house and pushed back the sprawl of books on fossils, fossil-related doodads (magnifying glasses, tweezers and the like) and actual fossils on his desk. Sinking into his swivelly desk chair, Harley put the dragon vase in the space he’d cleared, gobbling it up greedily with his eyes.
Now that Harley had rubbed the layer of dirt off the vase, the paint seemed so fresh that the dragon might have been painted yesterday. There were no words for a blue like the hue of the dragon which, when he stared harder, seemed to have veins of gold shot through it, too.
He turned the vase around in his hands, struggling to follow the many twisting loops and coils of the horned beast. It was strange, because every time he started at the head again, then worked his way down and around to the tail, the shape of the dragon seemed different, or the head appeared to be tilted a different way. One time, he imagined the dragon even closed one of its eyes briefly, as if it were winking at him.
Harley’s head began to feel quite fuzzy with the effort of studying the dragon. It was as if the dragon were a strong magnet and his eyeballs were made of iron filings. Harley couldn’t look away. He felt a small thrill of fear, and desperately wanted to put the vase down because he really was busting now. But he couldn’t do it, or even get out of his chair. It was as if there were strong glue all over his hands, and on the seat of his grey school trousers.
The light through Harley’s bedroom window began to fail. He’d lost track of how long he’d been there. When his mum, Delia, stuck her head of sleek black bobbed hair around the corner of the bedroom door, she was perturbed to find him sitting there, in the autumnal gloom, with no light on.
She’d been about to say crossly, ‘Weren’t you supposed to get tea started half an hour ago, Harls?’ But something about her son’s frozen figure made her say instead, ‘What have you got there?’
Harley didn’t answer, and he didn’t turn around. He continued to sit hunched over, his bent head and gaze focused intently on something in his hands.
Fear suddenly seized Delia tight, the way it had when Harley was five, and all the policemen in helmets and combat gear had stormed through the front and back doors simultaneously, screaming at them to Get down! Get down!
‘What have you done, Harley Spark?’
Delia wasn’t ordinarily a person to panic. As an emergency nurse she’d seen just about everything – living, breathing people with knives stuck in their heads or metal poles through their chests – but panic gripped her now. Harley sat on in the dark, facing away from her, as if he were made of stone.
She lunged forward across the room, spinning her son around in his chair.
Something in his sweaty, frozen face and glazed eyes made Delia scrabble and pull at the thing in his hands: a cracked, blue and white vase with some kind of snake-like creature on it with golden eyes.
But Harley hung on grimly as if his hands were made of something other than flesh and bone. Suddenly, they were like hands and fingers made of unbreakable diamond. No amount of yanking at the vase would make him release it.
‘Help me!’ Harley’s voice was a tiny wisp of itself, his mouth barely moving.
He was super ticklish, everyone knew that, but even Delia going for his armpits, then the skin under his chin, couldn’t produce a single reaction.
‘Mum!’ Harley’s fearful cry was even more frightening because it was so tiny and hard to hear.
Under her hands, she felt Harley’s skin start to go smooth and hard and rigid, as if he and the vase were somehow fusing together.
‘I don’t know how to help you!’ Delia wailed.
‘Break it.’ His voice was barely audible now in the darkened room. It was like the sound two leaves might make, rubbing together in a breeze. Delia might have imagined it.
But she didn’t hesitate. She picked up the giant fossilised Cleoniceras ammonite that Harley kept on a polished wooden stand on the right side of his desk – his most treasured possession apart from the special whizz-bang phone Ray had given him for his thirteenth birthday – and brought it down on the side of the vase in Harley’s hands.
As the vase shattered into pieces, a bright, hot golden light filled the room, as did the sound of Harley’s and his mum’s terrified screams.
The light was so bright that Delia and Harley, their arms tight around each other in terror, couldn’t look into it. So they didn’t see how the outline of a girl seemed to form in the brilliant glare emanating from the shards of the broken vase as if she were coming back together from a place very far away. Even when the light abruptly vanished and the room was left in darkness, mother and son were so dazzled for a long moment that they did not realise they were no longer the only people in the room.
When their sight finally cleared, Delia and Harley both gave a startled yell that made the girl in the belted tunic and floor-sweeping skirt flinch back. They could just make her out in the moonlight now streaming into Harley’s bedroom. She was very much there – standing with the remains of the broken vase around her slippered feet – where she very much hadn’t been before.
Moving very, very slowly, so as not to startle their visitor, Harley Spark reached sideways and turned on the green-shaded banker’s lamp on his desk. The three of them stared at each other, wide-eyed.
The girl was thin, about the same height as Harley, and her straight black hair was severely parted down the centre, hanging to just below her narrow, bony shoulders. Her eyes were jet black apart from a thin ring of blue – the same azure blue of the vase – around each iris. And the whites of her eyes weren’t actually white; they seemed the faintest bit golden, but it could have been the warm glow of Harley’s desk lamp that made him think that. The girl’s finely boned, long-fingered hands were held up like blades, thumbs tucked in tight against her palms, in a protective stance that Harley – the veteran of exactly three weeks of tae kwon do lessons – vaguely recognised as a good defensive position.
She had a triangular face with high, pronounced cheekbones and her wide mouth was set in a straight and angry line under thunderously drawn-together brows. The tunic she wore – plain black but crawling with the looping bodies of six coiled dragons embroidered in silk threads of azure and gold, the left lapel crossed tightly over the right – was the most beautiful garment Delia had ever laid eyes on. It had fluid bell-like sleeves and the hem of it ended almost halfway down the girl’s A-line, floor-length skirt of gold. Even the girl’s flat-soled black cloth slippers were embroidered, each with three sinuous azure and gold dragons winding across it. The tightly knotted wide cloth sash that held the lapels of the collarless tunic closed were weighted down at the ends with two C-shaped dragons carved out of a vibrant blue stone.
‘I bet that’s lapis lazuli,’ Harley breathed, being an expert on cool old stuff that came out of the ground. He’d never seen the rare blue stone except inside a book.
Around her neck, on a simple ribbon, the girl wore a large, almost translucent pearl that rested in the hollow between her collarbones.
The girl shouted something at them then that Delia and Harley could never agree on, forever after. It was a phrase ending in a drawn-out hiss that immediately raised the fine hairs on the back of the Sparks’ necks. The girl’s words seemed to enter their eardrums almost painfully, the way the cold wind does on a winter’s day when you’re coasting down the hill towards home on your bike, and you’ve forgotten to wear a beanie.
W
hatever she’d said had seemed to resonate, even burn, inside their minds. Harley watched his mum shake her head from side to side, as if to dislodge the sound.
Delia, whose Chinese great-great-great-great-grandfather had come over to Australia in a nineteenth-century gold rush, wondered if it was Chinese the girl was speaking. Delia had done one year of Chinese at university a long, long time ago, failing it miserably. She hadn’t absorbed enough of it to remember, and she certainly couldn’t recall the language involving any hissing quite like that. But her tattered hardcover English to Chinese, Chinese to English dictionary was still somewhere in the house and it was time to put it to good use. She held out her hand to the girl in a frantic Wait here! gesture, then dragged Harley out of his bedroom with her, leaving the young stranger standing there, looking astonished.
‘Who is she?’ Delia hissed over her shoulder.
Harley shrugged in honest bewilderment.
‘Where is it? Where is it? Where is it?’ Delia cried as she rummaged through the sagging bookcase in the poky dining room that doubled as a study. The bookcase held tomes on flower arranging and novelty cake baking interspersed with medical textbooks filled with horrible pictures of burns, infectious diseases and wound care, with a special emphasis on gangrene prevention. Harley could never look inside those ones without feeling like he wanted to chuck.
Delia’s Chinese dictionary had been almost entirely useless to her because she’d bought a secondhand, early twentieth-century version that predated the mass simplification and standardisation of the entire written Chinese language. The characters inside the dictionary hadn’t remotely resembled any of the ones she’d been studying at university and she’d never got around to buying the right dictionary despite all the nagging from her grandma (which meant she never picked up much of the language, in the end).
‘But it could still be useful in this instance,’ Delia huffed, almost to herself. After all, there was something distinctly unmodern and unstandardised about the way the girl looked. ‘There it is.’