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 everybody 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.
42. The Lady Chapel
Littleguy called the morning the good-morning time, because that was what Nory had called the morning when she was Littleguy’s age, and Nory’s parents still did. Nory didn’t have the slightest memory of ever calling it that, though, because of how much you undoubtedly forget, she just knew about it from her grandmother telling it. One time their plane was cancelled and Nory and Nory’s mother and her grandmother were all in a hotel room near the airport. They got in bed very late and turned out the light. The two grownups had just finally closed their eyes and dozed away when Nory stood up in her crib and said brightly, ‘Dood morning!’ Little children say ‘dood’ instead of ‘good’ and ‘breaksiss’ instead of ‘breakfast’ because some sounds are not all that easy for them to make and sometimes they give up trying to teach their tongue to make, for instance, a ‘g’ sound and think to themselves, that’s dood enough for now. But later on they hear it so many times as ‘g’ they can’t help it and they finally say ‘good morning.’
A little kid calls it the good-morning time because you don’t have the slightest idea of what time of day it is then, but you do know that at a certain particular time of day people always say ‘Good morning’ to you, so sensibly it’s not just plain morning time, but good-morning time.
So in the next good-morning time Littleguy woke up very, very early, before Nory’s mother and father were up, and Nory and he closed the door to their mother and father’s bedroom and snuck into the Art Room together and closed that door. The Art Room was a true multipurpose room. It was actually a tiny extra kitchen in the upstairs of the house where there were markers, and a stapler, and Scotch tape and scissors and all kinds of supplies like that, including a sink where you could do water projects. You could play egg-beater games in there or make things with clay or just be by yourself and do anything. ‘Littleguy, what do you want to make?’ Nory whispered, because again today the idea of doing some kind of project was burning a hole in her pocket, and since Littleguy was there and wanted to be involved, well, she would make a project with Littleguy.
‘I want to make a auger driller,’ said Littleguy.
So they made one, together, extremely early in the morning, out of an empty cracker box and a small empty Legos box and some paper rolled into a tube. They decorated it with drawings of all four of them, and put it in a shopping bag and when Nory’s parents got up they said, ‘Here’s something for you.’ When you give your parents a present and they are very appreciating of what you’ve done and say that it’s the most beautiful thing they’ve ever seen, it can give you a undescribable feeling in your chest, a certain kind of opening feeling, as if your heart’s a clock in a furniture museum with little doors that open up and a clockwork princess twirls out for a short time. While Nory and Littleguy had been working on the auger driller Littleguy stopped once and said, ‘I’m sho happy!’ So she did get to do a project and it turned out well.
But that day was a Saturday, which meant — because this was something that was very different between England and America, at least at this school — it meant, school in the morning. So, put on shirt and skirt and tie, tuck tie in skirt, brush hair and teeth, oatmeal, rush to school. While they were walking there, the swans came up hunching their shoulders in a threatening way, and Nory’s mother asked, ‘How’s Pamela doing?’
‘Not exactly perfect,’ Nory said, and told some of the details. Her mother said Nory should tell the teacher that these bad things were going on, but just not use Pamela’s name since Pamela didn’t want to be mentioned. She could just say, ‘I have a friend who keeps getting treated badly by other kids, and she doesn’t want me to bring her up to you, but I really think someone has to know about it at the school because it’s bad, and what should I do?’
Nory said okay, maybe that was a solution. They got there almost on time, and first there was R.S., then history class. In R.S. they were given the assignment of designing a piece of stained glass for the Lady Chapel, in a drawing. Nory drew the Virgin Mary in a blue dress with puffy sleeves and the golden thing over her head, holding up two fingers, but the fingers were quite stubby because Nory did the drawing in a cartoony style, since when she did her very precise style she often made mistakes from trying to do it too perfectly, like the painters you see in the Fitzwilliam. When she used her realistic style a lot of times she got into trouble with the eyes, making one of them too bulging, or the nose too nostrilly. A cartoon style was a set style she knew how to do, and when she used it she was pretty sure that the face would turn out all right and have a loving look which you need for the Virgin Mary and not have one side that looked like an off-kilter monster face or hands that looked like chicken claws or something like that.