Big magic, p.8
Big Magic, page 8
Her act is pretty simple, and she’s just using little magic, as far as I can tell. But she’s very razzledazzle, with a lot of wand waving and fancy hand gestures which the audiences seem to love. She’s brilliant at taking a watch from someone’s wrist and slipping it into their pocket without them knowing, then – a few minutes later – having them discover it there.
One evening, Vince comes to stand beside me as I watch through a hole in the curtains and says, ‘She’s a top-notch pickpocket, in case you didn’t know.’
‘You mean she steals things from people?’
He nods and passes me some pistachios.
After breakfast each day, when Sylvie is supposed to be helping me with my schoolwork, she and I slip away to a hidden spot by the river. A few times, I try to ask about the times she’s been to parallel universes, and the danger she supposedly put Mum in, but she cuts me off and tells me I need to focus on learning magic.
One day, she teaches me a simple moving spell. ‘You must say Swyn first. That’s the word for spell.’
‘Swyn. Symud y ffon honno,’ I repeat after her, pointing at a bent twig on the ground and imagining it lifting into the air.
I feel a rushing sensation up through the soles of my feet until every cell in my body is tingling. There’s a buzzing on my skin that feels like those tiny bubbles that burst on the surface of a fizzy drink.
The twig slowly, shakily, lifts into the air. ‘Yes!’ I shout. I feel a surge of delight and possibility. If I can do this today, what might I be able to do tomorrow, or next week? Surely anything is possible, including going to a parallel universe.
‘You must say the words of the spell clearly and loudly,’ says Sylvie as she plucks the twig from mid-air and drops it back to the ground. ‘You’re borrowing the power that lies in the actual sounds of the words. In that moment, you connect with all the times these same words have been spoken in the past.’ She tells me that an ancient version of Welsh was spoken back when magicians didn’t have to hide themselves. ‘Those early magicians were the healers and ceremony makers and village leaders,’ she says. ‘They lived long before the Romans invaded Britain and took over. When we speak in Welsh, we are reaching back through time to our foremothers.’
As she speaks, I feel my future crack open a little – a wondrous future where I can direct magic to do precisely what I want.
‘Can I say the spells in English?’ I ask.
‘I’ve only heard of one person who could make spells work in English. When you’re much more experienced, you’ll be able to say them in your head, but always in Welsh.’
‘Is there a spell I can say to hear Mum again?’ Every day, I’ve been listening for her until my ears ache. But, nothing. Not even a blast of cold like the first night Sylvie arrived.
Sylvie shakes her head. ‘No.’
‘I dreamt about her last night,’ I say.
‘Oh?’ Sylvie raises her eyebrows. ‘What was she doing?’
‘Sitting at a kitchen table with two women. Is that where she is?’ I’m full of hope – and desperate for reassurance that Mum is okay – but Sylvie just shrugs and looks away.
‘Maybe,’ she says. ‘Or maybe it was just a dream. Now, lift the twig again, but less shakily this time.’
Another day, she teaches me how to transform a round berry into a lolly. ‘You must direct the energy with not only the words, but your thoughts.’ She tells me to picture the berry turning into a lolly, and to imagine the smell and sugary taste. I feel the now-familiar surge of magic through my veins, and then an awful orange boiled lolly turns up in my hand. Which is how I learn that you must visualise very precisely what you want.
I know Mum sometimes transforms food – like a plain, cheap cheese into a fancy one. But she doesn’t do it too often in case our circus friends get suspicious. And it would be unfair if we had fancy food and didn’t share it.
Just as I succeed in transforming another berry into a Jaffa lolly, Vince appears. ‘What are you doing, Tulsi?’ he asks sternly.
‘Seven sevens are forty-nine,’ I say and pop the Jaffa into my mouth. ‘Eight sevens are fifty-six.’
Sylvie’s sitting on a blanket in the shade, smiling innocently up at him.
Vince takes me away to help him stick up posters in the nearby town where the circus is heading next. I put on a smiley face and chat about the nonexistent schoolwork Sylvie’s helping me with, but inside, I am far from smiley. It makes me feel sick lying to Vince.
Finally, I pass the river test where I must resist Sylvie’s energy. I stand in the river and I am a tree, my roots anchored deep in the earth, the water almost seeming to part and flow around me. When Sylvie nods at me and says, ‘Well done,’ I can’t help punching both arms into the air, like an Olympic athlete who’s won a gold medal.
Sylvie takes me on a bushwalk and has me listen to each plant to figure out what their particular healing or transformative power is. ‘Chew a plantain leaf and put the green mush on a sting or itch,’ she says. ‘And use dandelion when you need to be grounded but adaptable.’
We brew a terrible tasting herbal tea that I must drink every morning. It includes leaves from the tulsi plant, after which I am named. She also sews me a little muslin pouch of herbs to wear on a ribbon under my T-shirt. This is all to help accelerate my learning. There are only two weeks left for me to rescue Mum. And there’s still the darkness test to come.
Every night, I help backstage and in the hoop act. After the show, Sylvie and I lie on a blanket outside, coated in mosquito repellent, and she tells me how to use the stars to find east. ‘Different spells require you to face different directions,’ she says. ‘Face east if you are not sure.’ Soon, I can find Alpha Centauri and the Southern Cross.
One evening, Dad finds us stargazing. ‘Come with me, Tulsi,’ he says gruffly.
We walk to the shower block, bats flapping overhead and the sound of laughter drifting from the campfire. Finally, he asks casually, ‘What were you and Sylvie doing just now?’
‘Looking at the stars,’ I say.
‘I see.’ He hands me my towel as we reach the door to the women’s bathroom. ‘I know I’ve been too busy to keep a proper eye on you, but I am trusting you to steer clear of magic.’
‘I know,’ I say. Which is true. I do know that he’s trusting me. I also know that it’s not exactly an honest response. In fact, it’s a slippery response.
I brush my teeth in front of the mottled old mirror and tell myself again that getting Mum back is more important than the awfulness of lying to Dad and Vince. I wish I could tell Dad everything. I want to spill it all out and for him to hug me and reassure me that things will be okay. But I know I’m the only one who can get Mum back and make things okay again.
That’s if I pass all the tests, including the big one that I know is coming. When will Sylvie give me the darkness test? What if I don’t pass it? What if I’m too scared?
Dad’s humming ‘Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah’ in the men’s bathroom next door. It’s the lullaby he sang to me as a baby, and still sings every so often. I try to hum along, but my throat is all jammed with tears.
One day, Sylvie gives me Mum’s battered old Welsh dictionary and sends me away to come up with my own simple spell, which – against her rules – I do with Kit. We decide that I’ll transform a bowl of river mud into a chocolate cake. On my first try, cake explodes all over the inside of Kit’s van, which leaves Li Lin deeply unimpressed, and which is rather hard to explain. After two hours of cleaning, we try again. This time, there’s a glorious bursting and blooming sensation in my chest and the spell works beautifully. Then Kit and I make ourselves sick eating cake.
Three weeks after Mum disappeared, Dad wakes me at dawn. It’s time to take down the big top; time for the circus to move on.
As the first sun slants through the fig trees, Kit and I join the line of people rolling up the red- and-yellow striped big top canvas. Claudie, wearing her red clown nose, buzzes around in the forklift, picking up the bundles of tent and slotting them into the truck.
I hear mutterings as we work. Some people want Sylvie to stay. Others want her to leave. There’s lots of discussion about the time – years ago – when Sylvie took over for a year while Mr Potts was sick, and she lost lots of the circus’s money. And people are confused about why Mum hasn’t come back. Everyone’s generally a bit snippy and short with each other.
A few hours later, all there is to show for our time here are big patches of dead, flattened grass. While Dad’s changing a tyre on the Land Rover, Sylvie says a quick spell and bangs a stick into the spot where Mum disappeared.
‘You’ll have to leave from this exact spot when you go to get her,’ she explains. ‘Different places on the Earth’s surface relate to different parallel universes. I once tried to return to a universe I’d already been to, but I was careless and didn’t keep track of exactly where I left from the first time. So it didn’t work and I ended up somewhere completely different.’
‘Oh.’ My insides curl. What if I haven’t remembered exactly where Mum was standing when she disappeared?
‘Usually, I didn’t care where I ended up,’ she says. ‘There were always opportunities of some sort or another wherever I landed.’
‘Opportunities? You didn’t go for a disappearing act?’
‘No.’
‘Hang on!’ I say. ‘Who was the person to go and get you if something went wrong?’
‘Your mother, of course,’ Sylvie says smoothly.
What?! But of course. Why didn’t I realise this before? ‘How often did she go?’ What I don’t ask – because I know very well that she’ll snap at me – is whether that was when Mum encountered the terrible danger Vince and Dad have mentioned.
‘She went a fair few times,’ says Sylvie vaguely. ‘I’d pop over and see what opportunities there were, and she’d fetch me a couple of days later. Once I landed in an American town and spotted the version of me that lives there, and she looked super sporty, like a … I don’t know, a personal trainer or something.’ She laughs. ‘Who knows at what point my life branched off and led me there.’
My heart gives a stutter. ‘Wait! You met another version of yourself? Does that mean there’s another version of Mum over there, where I’m going?’
‘You didn’t realise that? It’s a parallel universe, Tulsi. Not a totally different planet. Much of what’s in this universe is likely to exist there, too. Including your mother. Or a version of her, anyway.’
What? Two mums? My brain is not computing that. TWO MUMS? You’ve never actually mentioned that, Sylvie! I think.
‘So when I get there,’ I say, ‘there will be Mum and … another Mum?’
She nods, as if that’s no big deal.
‘And will there be another me?’ I ask, feeling suddenly dizzy.
‘Maybe. The parallel Tulsi might be living a very similar life in that universe. Or you might not exist at all. It would depend on whether the Merry in that universe ever met the Dave in that universe, and whether they had you.’
‘Oh.’ I’m struggling to make sense of all this.
‘I tried to avoid the other versions of me. I once ran into one in a shop and she knew who I was, of course, and we told the shop owner we were twins.’ Sylvie smiles. ‘I was the more glamorous twin, naturally.’
She seems quite relaxed, so I decide to risk the question that’s been worming away at me. ‘Am I ready? To go get her.’
‘No.’ Her face is expressionless.
‘But I’m passing all the tests, aren’t I?’
‘There’s still one test to go. You know what it is.’
I do. Darkness like you have never known. My skin tingles with sudden goosebumps.
‘Tonight,’ she says.
‘The test is tonight?’ I ask.
But she’s already walking away. I watch her go, a ball of dread unravelling in my stomach.
After breakfast, I join Dad in the front truck, and he steers us over the cattle grid and out of the Millimba showground. I hate leaving the place where I last saw Mum.
‘I wonder if we are making a parallel universe now, by deciding to take the highway rather than Canmore Road?’ I say.
‘Maybe. Maybe not. We’ll never know.’ Dad leans into the steering wheel to turn us onto the narrow bridge across the river.
‘Well, what things have made parallel universes for us, do you think?’
‘Yeah, I’ve been thinking about that. You know, when I was twenty I planned to visit my cousin in Melbourne, but he got measles so I didn’t go. Next day, my friend gave me a ticket for Potts’s circus, and I fell in love with circus and got a job here and met your mum. If my cousin hadn’t got measles, you wouldn’t exist! And, another example … when I first met your mum – fifteen years ago – she was thinking about going travelling, to London and Paris. If she’d gone, she and I would never have fallen in love. And I guess that would have created a whole other parallel universe.’
I never knew Mum wanted to go overseas. I wonder what else I don’t know about her?
‘The problem is that now I don’t want to make any decisions or do anything that might send things off in a bad direction,’ I say. ‘Then I think maybe I should do things, in case they’ll stop bad things happening. Like I should have woken sooner and stopped Mum doing her spell.’
‘Ah, that’s no way to live, sweetheart.’ He rubs my leg with a rough hand. ‘You can’t think about it too much. You’ll tie yourself in knots. All you can do is live your life and make your decisions based on what’s best for yourself, for others and for the planet.’
I offer him a jelly snake from the packet we keep in the glove box. ‘So that’s your version of the laws of magic?’
‘I guess so.’ He tucks a red snake behind one ear.
‘And if you do that, then everything will turn out well?’
‘Not always. But you can’t worry about that. Just be kind, be honest, be true to who you really are.’
I realise that’s how Dad lives. He’s not as flashy or clever as Mum but he’ll always offer to help you with something and he doesn’t gossip.
I’m not sure he’d like my version of being true to myself, though, given that it involves me going behind his back, learning magic and planning to take off to a parallel universe.
An hour later, we arrive in Canmore. The showground here is smaller than Millimba’s, and surrounded by wooden houses, most of them perched up on stilts to keep them above flood level. There are no mighty fig trees, just a ring of old camphor laurels with rough bark and those hard black berries that are so painful underfoot.
That night, the big top’s almost full. I’m backstage, watching through the curtain while Zanni balances Louie on one hand, but all I can think about is the darkness test later tonight. Darkest possible dark.
Kit helps Jerry with his new fire-breathing routine, which is awesome, though it makes the whole of backstage reek of kerosene. And Kit’s new bicycle highwire act with Walid goes off without a hitch. The evening’s show is a triumph.
I find Sylvie changing out of her sequined dress. ‘I’m ready,’ I say and force a smile.
As we walk towards the door, Dad calls to me. He has his toolbox in one hand. ‘Where are you going?’
‘To find Kit,’ I say, and walk purposefully away from Sylvie.
‘Dinner in an hour, Tulsi,’ he says, and there’s a note of a warning in his voice.
Sylvie and I meet around the back of the big top and walk in silence up Canmore’s main street. We cross the big bridge, the river glinting below us in the moonlight.
Despite my torch, the inky, dense darkness presses in on me. A car drives by and music drifts out its open windows. After it’s gone, the night seems blacker than ever and a nameless feeling shivers through me. I want to sprint back to the lights of town, but failing this test is not an option. Maybe it will be as simple as walking like this in the dark? Maybe this is the test?
On either side of the road are paddocks dotted with the dark shapes of cows that – predictably – amble towards me. I find the Southern Cross above and figure out that we are walking north-west.
‘Did you ever get a consequence for bringing the tree down?’ Sylvie asks.
‘Not that I know of,’ I say.
‘Me either.’ She sounds surprised. ‘Maybe because it was an accident.’
She turns up a dirt road. On one side is a field of tall sugar cane, where critters are scurrying about. ‘For goodness sake, Tulsi!’ she says, in an annoyed voice. ‘You’re like a magnet for animals. Surely you know how to contain your energy by now.’
‘Of course I do.’ I walk along imagining a clear bubble around me and even hold my arms in a circle, like she showed me. See, I can do it, I want to tell her. And I can do darkness. See?
She talks over her shoulder. ‘You know, darkness is nothing special. It’s just the absence of light. There is no energy in darkness. In fact, it will suck up your energy if you are afraid of it. And you must always have a good store of energy when you are a magician, especially if you are travelling to a parallel universe. You don’t want to land in the other universe drained of energy, because if – for instance – it’s dangerous, you will need to bounce straight back.’
What kind of danger is she imagining? A warzone? A place filled with disease? Is that what happened to Mum – did she land in danger?
We duck under a fence and enter a forest. Sylvie takes a winding, random path through the trees, and after a while I lose sense of which direction town is, especially because the stars keep disappearing behind clouds.
Finally, she stops and turns off her torch. ‘Yours, too,’ she says.
I flick it off and fear blooms in my chest.
The tree trunks are pale and very straight, and they look creepily like tall, motionless people watching us. They’re just trees.
