Outside the State Library, Harley leant his bike up against the base of the giant bronze statue of Joan of Arc on a horse. The building’s façade was illuminated with golden spotlights, but Harley didn’t spy any activity around the place other than a security guard checking that the front doors were locked. The guard’s eyes moved disinterestedly over Harley standing in the rain before the man disappeared out of view into the gloom of the vast public library.
The rain stopped as suddenly as it had begun. Harley waited and waited in Joan of Arc’s shadow, unsure what he was expecting to see, but expecting something. If you didn’t count the police team trying to take down his dad that time when he was five, this was the most exciting thing that had ever happened in his life.
It was a weeknight, and the passing trams and people had thinned out. Harley finally drifted away from Saint Joan and onto the footpath below the front stairs. From where he was standing at street level, at an angle to the brilliantly lit portico with its triangular roof and soaring columns, he could see the central dome of the reading room quite clearly above the rest of the building. The heart of the building was dark.
Maybe he’d been wrong about where the girl was headed. Maybe she was just … gone.
If he’d been her and somehow got stuck inside a manky old vase, he’d have wanted to make himself scarce the first chance he got, too.
Dispirited and completely sodden, Harley began walking back towards Saint Joan to retrieve his bike – and froze as he spotted a tiny but bright glow in one of the three small uppermost windows of the East Wing. One moment the windows had been dark and, the next, there it was. Just a faint, will-o’-the-wisp gleam moving from window to window before winking out.
Barely breathing, Harley moved backwards to where he could see the tops of both wings and the dome. And about five seconds later, he saw the same faint darting light in the three darkened uppermost windows of the West Wing.
It could be the security guard moving his torch about, Harley thought. But how could the security guard have gotten there so quickly? He couldn’t have run from the East Wing to the West Wing that fast even if he were an Olympic gold medallist on jet-powered rollerblades. Harley knew from a past school excursion that the building was absolutely enormous, with kilometres of passageways.
When, mere seconds later, the light started moving again against the glass-paned, octagonal dome of the vast reading room at the heart of the State Library – a dome at least five storeys high based on the number of the windows on the outside – Harley felt a thrill. He stood there, open-mouthed, as the light came and went, appearing at many of the multi-storeyed windows in the reading room edifice. Harley listened intently from where he was positioned outside the building, but no alarms were going off. There was just that tiny glow flitting from floor to floor, side to side, up and down, as if the laws of physics were a minor inconvenience to be disregarded.
She was looking for something.
Hours later, when the brilliant façade of the library and all the surrounding city buildings – the university, the train station, the big shopping complex – suddenly plunged into a moment of darkness so inky black it might have been the end of the world, right then and there, Harley just smiled.
When the lights of the buildings flashed back on within seconds, followed by sheet lightning so brilliant, and a crack of thunder so loud, that two passing students jumped and screamed, Harley climbed back on his bike and began retracing his journey.
He was still smiling when the rain came pelting down hard enough, it felt like, to take his skin off.
Delia had the front door open before he could even walk his bike back up the steps of the house. Before his mum had a chance to utter a word, Harley reminded her, ‘Great-grandpa did always say there were things of great mystery and power in the world.’
Delia nodded, quoting softly, ‘Just because you never see them, doesn’t mean they’re not there.’
Because Delia did remember the stories her family used to tell about ghosts and spirits and old gods, and because she’d pretty much seen everything and hardly ever lost her cool, her extreme relief at Harley’s safe return just before midnight manifested itself in the form of a gruff admonition. ‘She’s asleep on the couch in the dining room; got in just before you. Don’t you dare wake her. She looked exhausted.’
When Harley passed the dining room-slash-study on the way to a hot shower that he needed right down to his bones, he could only see the dim shape of the girl curled up under a spare blanket with her face turned to the back of the couch. She looked so small and defenceless it was hard to believe the busted old vase, the melted TV and the spooky night-time trip to the library had really happened.
With a gluey chunk of twice-reheated pasta bake in his belly, Harley had slept like a log. But he was woken by the sound of his mum in the kitchen, turning up the radio for the hourly news bulletin. Warm, drowsy and confused, Harley didn’t immediately know what day it was, or make any move to spring out of bed, until he heard what the newsreader was saying.
And in breaking local news, the State Library has reported a puzzling break-in overnight that saw books primarily from the Linguistics, Australiana and China collections scattered throughout the galleries of the famed domed Reading Room. Thousands of volumes were taken off their shelves and left open by what is thought to have been a gang of well-read intruders, without security becoming aware of the activities until the early hours of the morning. A massive clean-up operation is underway. Nothing appears to have been taken, although security measures are under urgent review.
Harley stumbled through the kitchen door in his blue flannel alien pyjamas, with his black hair sticking up all one side of his head and pillow creases across his face. He recoiled when he saw the girl sitting at the table. Her intricately embroidered tunic, skirt and slippers were immaculate – showing no signs of having been slept in – and her hair fell in sleek wings across her collarbones. She studied Harley with an unfathomable expression over the rim of her glass before taking a sip.
Which reminded Harley of how thirsty he was. With a tongue like sandpaper, he croaked, ‘Water, please,’ as he sat down across the table from the girl.
‘That’s exactly what she’s been asking for,’ Delia said thoughtfully, filling a matching tall glass from the tap and handing it to her son before moving across to the toaster. ‘She hasn’t wanted anything but water.’
‘She’s been asking?’ Harley exclaimed, glass halfway to his lips.
‘We’ve been having a lovely chat,’ Delia said. ‘Haven’t we, pet?’
The girl actually nodded, and Harley choked.
‘She’s one of five,’ Delia continued, pushing a plate of toast across the table towards Harley. ‘You’re hard enough work for anyone. I never would have been able to cope with five.’
‘You’re making that up, Mum,’ Harley said through the toast in his mouth.
‘Show him,’ Delia told the girl, a touch smugly. ‘The way you showed me.’
Looking at Delia, the girl said, ‘Mā ma Delia,’ and held up her index finger to indicate the number one; she then used that same finger to point at Harley.
‘Mama Delia has one child.’ Delia beamed. ‘That’s right. I understood her straight away.’
Harley coughed a bit of chewed-up toast onto the table, and the girl wrinkled her nose in disgust. ‘She can talk now?’
‘No mā ma,’ the girl continued, pointing at herself. ‘Only bà ba.’
‘That’s the Chinese word for father,’ Delia said helpfully. ‘She’s saying she’s got a dad, which is nice.’
The girl repeated, ‘Bà ba,’ before holding up five fingers then producing the shard of pottery from somewhere in her voluminous clothing. She pushed it across the table towards Harley, tapping at the symbol for three inked on it.
Then she pointed at herself.
‘Maybe she’s saying she’s three years old,’ Harley snorted. ‘I mean, it’s not like she can say much. She might as
well be three.’
‘Harley,’ Delia admonished.
The girl gave Harley a dark look before retrieving something else from her tunic so quickly that Harley didn’t actually see her hands move.
She slid a piece of tattered paper across the table towards him and his mum.
They gasped.
‘Is that what I think it is?’ Delia said to the girl reproachfully over Harley’s head. ‘You can’t go around doing that to books. Especially not old library books that are supposed to be for everyone.’
‘I’m not even allowed to dog-ear any pages,’ Harley said, his eyes wide.
Somehow, in that vast dark library filled with millions of books, the girl had located the nineteenth-century Chinese–English phrasebook that they’d shown her on Delia’s phone the night before.
The Sparks stared down in astonishment at the very page – printed on brittle, falling-apart paper – that had Can you help me? wood-blocked across the top in a combination of spidery English script and neat but complicated-looking Chinese characters.
The girl gently placed the broken piece from the vase on top of the paper and looked from mother to son with liquid eyes.
Delia’s expression softened. ‘I know it’s an emergency, but just don’t do that again to another book for as long as you live,’ she admonished. ‘And we will. We will help you.’
Amazingly, the girl nodded as if she understood.
‘Now you know that I’m Delia,’ Delia continued, placing her hands on Harley’s shoulders from behind. ‘And this shoddy-looking individual is called Harley.’
The girl looked at Harley gravely, then placed a hand on her chest and said, ‘Qing,’ in a low voice with a strange, but pleasant, resonance.
Then she tapped the red potter’s mark on the pottery shard.
‘You want us to help you find out who … made this?’ Harley frowned. ‘How would we do that? It’s heaps old. I wouldn’t know where to begin.’
Harley felt his mum’s hands go rigid on his shoulders, her fingers like claws, as if she’d suddenly thought of something quite dreadful.
‘Ow,’ he said, twisting his head around to look at his mum. ‘You’re hurting me!’
‘How old do you think that is?’ Delia whispered, staring straight ahead, as though gripped by an idea. ‘Do you think it’s … valuable?’
Harley snorted, and the girl watched them both intently over the glass of water she was draining. She held the glass out for more, and Delia turned like a zombie towards the sink with the glass as Harley said, ‘Was valuable, you mean. It’s in pieces in my wastepaper bin, remember?’
His mother handed the glass back to the girl, who drank thirstily from it again. ‘Anyway, it was on the footpath outside Hammonds the Auctioneers,’ Harley went on, feeling a stab of shame. ‘It didn’t look valuable. Someone had just left it there like they’d forgotten it.’
‘Harley Spark!’ Delia rounded on her son. ‘Don’t tell me you just helped yourself to that vase?’
‘It looked like it had just come out of a hole in the ground,’ Harley mumbled sheepishly. ‘Honestly! And where would we even begin to look for the person who made that – given that you know fewer than thirty of the three hundred most common Chinese words, Mum, let alone the, uh, fifty thousand others?’
His mother’s glazed eyes snapped back to the girl, who had placed her empty glass down between them on the table like a challenge.
Delia squeezed her eyes shut for a second at the thought of her ex-husband. ‘We begin with your father, Harley,’ she snapped. ‘Go get your special telephone. Hurry.’
When Ray Spark had given Harley the special telephone for his thirteenth birthday in the back room of one of Ray’s favourite pizza restaurants, he had instructed Harley, ‘This is only to be used for emergencies. If you can’t reach me on my normal number, I’ll always be reachable on this one.’ Ray had pointed to a special DAD icon on the screen which Harley didn’t really take in at the time because he was too busy stuffing his face with pizza. Compared to his fossil collection, Harley found phones kind of meh and usually forgot to carry his, charge it or even turn it on. What did he need another phone for?
Ray had squeezed Harley’s face between his hands so that Harley was forced to stop chewing for a moment to look at him. ‘No matter where I am in the world, you can get me on this phone. But you can’t just ring me on it to tell me what the football score is. There’s satellite technology involved here, and a network of at least a million favours. It’s got to be life and death, okay?’
Harley had laughed. ‘Like if I’m chained by my wrists above a shark pool? I can use it then?’
And Ray had smiled his charming, easy, eye-crinkling smile that made a dimple appear in his right cheek in the same place it did on Harley’s face when he smiled, and agreed, ‘The exact situation.’
Harley said to his mum now, ‘This isn’t life and death, Mum.’
‘For her it might be,’ Delia growled. ‘Get the phone. I want to see whether it does what Ray says it does. I could never even reach him to tell him the gas company was coming to turn off the gas – all those times they came to turn off the gas – because he’d forgotten to pay a bill and was “out of the country”. I want to know whether he’s making things up, as usual.’
Harley went back into his bedroom and opened the middle drawer of his desk where he kept Ray’s special phone in an old biscuit tin. Harley hadn’t turned it on since he’d charged it almost two weeks ago because no actual life and death situations had eventuated. Maybe it was flat. Harley hoped it was. His dad might have been using a jokey tone of voice when he’d explained why the special telephone was special, but he hadn’t actually been joking. Harley knew him well enough to know when he was being deadly serious. This phone was not to be used lightly.
Harley walked back into the kitchen with it and said uncertainly, ‘Can’t we just try him on your phone first on his usual number?’
To which Delia snapped, ‘And get one of his giant goons like Ivan or Schumacher on the line and have to talk about the weather in Krakow or Bavaria when they last visited their mums? I don’t think so. Give me that.’ She held her hand out impatiently as Qing looked, wide-eyed, from mother to son, the faintest hint of amusement in her expression.
‘But it’s my special telephone,’ Harley whined.
Delia gave Harley a speaking look and swiped it out of his hand. She turned it over a few times, weighing it in her palm, much as Qing had done with Delia’s own phone the night before.
It was small and flat and silver and, from the back, looked like a polished business-card case from the 1920s. From the front, it looked like a normal phone except that it had no home button. It had no visible means of being switched on.
Delia looked across the table at Qing, who sat back slightly in her chair and crossed her arms, her bell-like sleeves at odds with her businesslike posture. ‘Ray bought me an air conditioner one birthday that turned out to have nothing inside it except sawdust,’ Delia said, shaking her head. ‘This could be from the same batch of special things.’
She handed the small silver phone back to her son, rolling her eyes. ‘It’s pretty, but there’s no way of turning it on. Good one, Ray.’
Harley shook his head. ‘Yes there is, Mum. It’s “special” because of this.’
He placed the phone in his left palm and pressed his right thumb into the centre of the screen, holding it there for exactly three seconds: one-cat- and-dog, two-cat-and-dog, three-cat-and-dog – the way Ray had told him to.
The phone lit up with the faintest whirr and click, vibrating gently in Harley’s hand to say that it was awake and ready.
A bright-red symbol appeared where his thumb had been. Delia and Qing bent closer to look at it.
‘Biometrics, Mum.’ It was Harley’s turn to sound smug. ‘It only turns on for me, Dad said. He had it made that way.’
Qing made a small noise that might have been a whistle, the whites of her eyes glowin
g just a little more gold than before.
The red symbol dissolved and the three of them bent their heads over the screen, which now had dozens of icons on it. Harley thought a lot of them had to represent maps – the icons had names under them like Venice, Jakarta, Mogadishu, and one he had no hope of pronouncing: Llanfairpwllgwyngyll.
Harley pointed at the bright red icon simply labelled with DAD. ‘As in red for a situation of imminent danger,’ he said dryly, looking around the Sparks’ shabby kitchen. ‘Just like this one.’
‘Don’t be smart,’ Delia retorted. ‘Does it take photos?’
Harley nodded, easily finding the camera icon.
Delia pushed the shard of pottery towards the edge of the kitchen table, and Harley zoomed in on it and took a good clear shot in the bright sunlight flooding in through the kitchen window. The potter’s mark and numeral three were easy to see because, just like Ray’s own logo, they were the bright red of fresh blood.
‘Send it to him,’ Delia said. ‘I want to see what happens; whether he gets back to us in three hours, or three years.’
Harley tucked the tip of his tongue into the corner of his mouth – which was what he did when he was really concentrating – pressed the Share icon and wrote:
Dad, we need to find out who made this or where it came from, URGENTLY (Mum says this qualifies as life and death, it was not my call). H
Then he sent the snap and message to Dad, the only contact in the contact list besides Mum, and placed the silver phone gently on the table.
‘Send me a message,’ Delia muttered. ‘I want to be able to reach you on your “special” phone.’
Harley hastily complied, then everyone waited with their breath held until they started seeing spots, but nothing happened.