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Jaide laid her cards down and turned them over one by one. Four of hers had become blank, too, but the fifth card still showed the wavy lines of a breeze supporting a bird caught in mid-flight.
‘How can they change?’ Jaide asked. ‘What’s going on?’
Grandma X swept up the cards in one smooth motion and clicked her fingers. The click echoed through the room, and with its echoes, Jaide and Jack felt the warmth of the hot chocolate rush through them again, and they forgot the card game completely.
‘Here we are, I’ve got the cards,’ said Grandma X. ‘Not the usual type. These are more fun. Before we play, who thinks they can flip a card into that bronze bowl in the corner?’
Jack took a card and was surprised by the weight and the fact they were metal, and by the strangest sensation that he had handled cards like this before.
‘I’ll try,’ he said, but when he flicked the card it missed by several inches.
They all had several goes. Grandma X missed most times. Jaide missed her first two attempts, but then got the knack of it. Four out of her last five went in with resounding clangs of metal on metal, and Kleo came to sit at her side, as if the cat was a prize that Jaide had won.
‘How are you doing that?’ asked Jack, growing frustrated. He had missed every time, and even managed to lose one of the cards in the process.
‘Oh, it’s easy,’ she boasted, and perhaps became a little overconfident, because her very next attempt ricocheted off the lip of the spittoon and whizzed about their heads like an excited hummingbird before finally embedding itself in the side of a loaf of bread. Kleo yowled and ran out of the room with her ears flat to her head.
‘All right, that will do.’ Grandma X picked up the cards and shifted the spittoon out from the wall. ‘Well done, Jaidith. Don’t look so glum, Jackaran. We’ll try something else you might be good at next. First, though, I’d like to find that missing card. Will you help me look? It must be in here somewhere.’
They turned the kitchen inside out, looking in all the obvious spots first, then opening drawers and even shifting the fridge to see behind it. There was no sign of the card anywhere.
‘Hmm,’ said Grandma X, putting her hands on her hips and staring at Jack as though he had lost the card deliberately. ‘Let’s see if you can find something else instead. Before I went to bed last night, I hid six coins in the lounge. Think of it as a treasure hunt. But remember, everything else has to go back in its place afterward. No permanent mess, please.’
‘Why?’ asked Jack, feeling uncharacteristically rebellious.
‘Why no mess? I had enough of that with your father —’
‘I mean, why find the coins? If it’s a game, it isn’t a very good one.’
‘How about if I say what you find, you keep?’ said Grandma X. ‘There’s a sweet shop on the main street. They make their own licorice and lollipops. I’ll take you there when it stops raining.’
Jaide and Jack exchanged another look. Homemade licorice and lollipops were not something they could get excited about. While Jack liked food, he didn’t have a sweet tooth, and Jaide didn’t have the patience for anything that took too long to eat. A lollipop would just annoy her.
Still, money always came in handy. They didn’t have to spend it on sweets. The twins loped off to search, riffling through books, upending cushions, and scrabbling around on the floor to see under the couches.
The coins were: (1) under the corner of the rug; (2) on the windowsill behind the velvet curtains; (3) behind an antique clock that had long lost its tick; (4) tucked out of sight beneath the easy chair; (5) sitting out in the open on the mantelpiece; and (6) between pages sixty-four and sixty-five of Travels, Travails and Toilets of Tibet, about a man and his pet pig who visited that country in the 1930s.
The twins returned with three coins each, somewhat reassured that the exercise hadn’t been a complete waste of time.
‘Look what turned up while you were distracted,’ said Grandma X, pointing.
Right out in the open, where the shadow of a chair cut an elongated line across the floor, lay the missing card.
‘How did we miss that?’ asked Jaide, amazed.
‘Good question. Can you guess the answer?’
Jack studied his grandmother closely, wondering if she had placed the card there herself in order to trick them. Why would she do something like that? He didn’t know, and the uneasy feeling grew stronger.
‘You’re testing us, aren’t you?’
‘Yes, but not in the way you think.’
Grandma X snapped her fingers again. The smell of chocolate was fading, and the effect it had on the twins was weakening with it, but Jack’s brow smoothed and he looked around, wondering momentarily what he was doing.
‘Here you go,’ he said, picking up the card and giving it back to his grandmother. ‘It should go with the others, shouldn’t it?’
‘Yes, dear,’ she said, slipping it onto the pile. ‘All things have their place. Sometimes you just have to look a little harder to find it.’
Jaide was staring at the coins in her hand, wondering where they had come from.
‘Were we going outside somewhere?’ she asked.
‘I had hoped so,’ said Grandma X. ‘But the prospect of lollipops seems more remote than ever.’
One glance out the window confirmed that impression. What the clouds had threatened earlier had finally arrived in full force. The rain was falling in steady sheets.
Jaide’s spirits immediately fell, too. She liked bright, warm days, and hated winter. Jack was the opposite. He loved dim, cloudy weather and disliked the heat and glare of high summer. Jaide’s idea of a perfect afternoon was to be at the beach under a hot sun. Jack preferred the dusk of a cool evening, or a still night with just a sliver of a moon.
‘Still, there’s lots to do in here,’ their grandmother said. ‘Come into the drawing room. I’ve got a bunch of . . . interesting objects . . . in there that you might like to see.’
Puzzled, the twins followed her into the drawing room and watched as she unlocked the desk and rolled back the cover to reveal all manner of contraptions. There was a spark gap generator that sent a bright blue jolt of electricity shooting between two metal points, especially when Jaide pulled the trigger. An old compass spun wildly as they passed it from hand to hand, pointing every direction other than north. There was a small box that Grandma X assured them was an old camera, with no LED screen and a shutter that clicked solidly behind the lens’s glass eye. When Jack clicked the button, he saw people and places from long ago, but all Jaide saw was her brother in the drawing room, pulling faces.
Grandma X watched them as they played their way through the odd collection. Sometimes she wrote in a pink leather notebook she had produced from a drawer. Once she even took a magnifying glass out of her pocket and studied the top of Jack’s and Jaide’s scalps, as though looking for head lice, but she didn’t seem to find what she was looking for. She put the magnifying glass away and lit some old lanterns that stank of kerosene and cast a lovely warm glow over the room.
As the last lantern wick flared, Kleo returned, and her eyes caught and reflected the flame. She meowed and jumped up to sit like a sphinx on a straight-backed chair, as if waiting for something interesting to happen.
‘What’s this, Grandma?’ Jaide asked, pulling a strange contraption from behind the desk.
‘A pogo stick, dear. Have y
ou never seen one before?’
Both twins shook their heads, then gasped with surprise as Grandma X demonstrated it for them. The floor and the furniture shook as the elderly woman in her silver-tipped cowboy boots climbed onto the crossbars and took two spring-fuelled bounces across the drawing room. A cloud of dust rose up, Kleo fled again, and Grandma X climbed off and hurriedly opened the windows to let some fresh air in.
‘They were all the rage when I was a girl,’ she said, looking slightly pink in the face. ‘Why don’t you have a go?’
‘Really?’ asked Jack. ‘In here?’
‘Outside isn’t an option with all that rain coming down.’
‘All right.’ He took the device from her and pointed it spring down toward the floor, glancing around at all the fragile-looking things in the room. ‘Mum would never let us do this.’
‘Guess we’d better not tell her about it, then,’ said Grandma X with a wink. ‘Go on. Let’s see who can bounce the highest.’
That was all the encouragement the twins needed. Jaide took the pogo stick from her brother and immediately mastered it. She laughed and felt as light as a feather, bouncing around the room. Vases danced and books swayed on their shelves, but she bounced with total control and only reluctantly handed it back to let Jack have a go.
Jack lacked his sister’s easy grasp of the art of pogoing, and distantly, distractedly, he was sure this wasn’t the first time that day he had missed out on something fun, although he couldn’t quite remember what else there had been. He watched himself in the mirror above the mantelpiece in the drawing room trying to do everything Jaide had done, exactly as she had done it. The daylight from the window, although greyer than it normally would have been, cast a dazzling silver halo around him, and he bounced to his right in order to see himself better. But the moment he was away from the window it seemed that he faded into the heavy folds of the curtain and his reflection disappeared from the mirror entirely.
Suddenly disoriented by his lack of reflection, Jack mistimed his next bounce, careened into the desk, ricocheted off it, and fell over, smacking his temple on the cushioned front of a chair as he went down.
