Playing Hearts Read online

  Playing

  Hearts

  W.R. Gingell

  With many thanks to Lewis Carroll, whose Alice inspired—and continues to inspire—me.

  It started the way it usually starts: with a card. It was on my pillow that morning when I woke, its red pips showing up clearly against the whiteness of the pillow-slip. The Jack of Hearts. I knew exactly who’d left it, and what would be on the back of it; but I turned it over anyway. It had been such a long time since I’d seen one. It said: You’re invited. It’s a very important date. Don’t be late.

  Only if I’m honest, that’s probably not really where it started. Underland: that’s where it started. Underland. Once you know, it’s like leaping worlds every time you step over a puddle. In a way, it is leaping worlds. It’s not just puddles, either: Alice got in through a looking-glass, and I’ve heard of a boy who gets in through windows. I’ve always liked puddles, though. Splashy and bright and exciting– and at first that’s how Underland seems. It feels like anything is possible. Mind you, Underland is only my name for it. Other people know it by other names: Mirror World; Wonderland; Looking Glass World. It’s all the same in the end. The same Underland. A whole, upside down world under the puddles.

  I don’t remember much about my first journey to Underland. I was three at the time, and until I was seven I was convinced it was all a dream. I was by myself in the hedge, hiding from the other children because it was there and I could, and because it was fun to watch people passing the foster home in which I lived. They never saw me.

  But this time, someone did. I was curled up on one of the branches, my bare feet scratched and brown, and the first I knew was an eye looking at me through a gap in the hedge.

  “You’re invited,” said the eye. It blinked, then disappeared. In its place a hand appeared, a card between its forefinger and middle finger. I took it without understanding what it was or what the voice meant by what it said. “It’s a very important date. Don’t be late.”

  I put the card in my already bulging pockets and forgot about it during the afternoon. And later I was too busy with milk and biscuits and getting out of brushing my teeth in the rush before bed to remember the card crumpled in my pocket.

  That night, she sent the card sharks after me. I didn’t know that’s what they were– well, I didn’t even know who she was. Not then. Midnight woke me, all silver and cool and snowy, and they were already by my bed, one on either side. Thin—no, flat—figures, inky black against the off-white walls, their flat, heavy feet shuffling against the carpet. They didn’t speak; they simply made a soft click-click of noise. I found out later that this was their sharp teeth snapping open and shut.

  “You’re not allowed in here,” I said, my voice very quiet against the clicking of pointed teeth. Mrs. Mack, my foster mother, was clear about men and bedrooms. If there was a man in the bedroom, I was supposed to scream. I wasn’t sure why, but I knew it was Very Important. If it came to that, I wasn’t exactly certain these were men, but I wanted them to know that I Wasn’t Afraid. I was stubbornly Not Afraid when they clicked their teeth at me without speaking and threw a velvet sack over my head. I yelled and fought, but the velvet muffled my cries, and when at last the sack was thrown down on something hard and cold, they left me to fight my own way out of it. I emerged, ruffled and panting, in an icily cold room that seemed to stretch vastly around and above me. My green socks showed up vibrantly against the white marble tile I stood on, and as I clutched the velvet sack about my shoulders for warmth I saw a confusion of angles in red and white all around me. There were too many corners and too many people. The confusion of angles bewildered my young mind, and I didn’t realise I was in a vast hall of mirrors until I saw that all of the people were me.

  No; not quite all of them. One set of them was taller than the set of reflections that was me. There was a boy standing next to me, watching with a kind of narrow-eyed curiosity as I gazed around me and finally grasped his presence. He was dressed in red velvet and gold lace, a thin, pale boy with a sharp, aristocratic nose and a pale gold fringe of hair swept to one side. He looked me up and down, lingering curiously on my bright green socks, and arched one light gold brow.

  He said: “You’re a funny looking little thing.”

  I gave him a perplexed look, but found it easier to look at him than the confusion of reflections. “I’m hungry,” I said.

  “Have some tarts,” he said, offering me a tray. I wasn’t sure where it had come from, but I had seen magicians on television before, after all.

  “I’m not allowed,” I said. That was another of Mrs. Mack’s rules. No sweet things between meals. “Why are you awake? You should be in bed.”

  “That’s no fun!” he said scornfully. “Why are you so small, little girl? I thought you’d be bigger.”

  “I’m only three,” I said. I felt slightly resentful. I couldn’t help being so small.

  The boy made an unconvinced noise. “I suppose there must be something to you, if she chose you. We’re to be engaged. Do you understand that?”

  I only blinked at him. I had no idea what he meant, but I did know that the boy’s lofty tones were annoying.

  “Are you afraid of needles?”

  “I’ve had my measles shot,” I said, but I felt my lip tremble. I very much disliked needles.

  “It’s all right,” he said, with a sigh. “I’ll hold your hand. You’re not to cry.”

  “I don’t cry,” I told him, but I let him take my hand anyway.

  He said coolly: “I’m Jack. They didn’t tell me your name.”

  “I’m Mabel. What– who were those men? They put me in a sack.”

  “They’re not men,” said Jack. He was just a little paler, and his voice had dropped to a whisper. “They’re card sharks. Stay away from them. They bite.”

  I opened my mouth to say that men didn’t bite, but the concentric reflections of myself were doing something interesting behind Jack’s back. They grew: or maybe I grew. I wasn’t sure. Soon my reflection was tall and quite grown up, with long hair and a wasp-waisted red gown. Beside it a single drop of red appeared in the mirror and grew rapidly. Jack looked over his shoulder and went a little paler, which interested me. I didn’t know it was possible for a boy to be that white. He turned his eyes back on the drop, which was now about the size of an arm-chair and had begun to look a little like a woman in a very big dress if I looked at it the right way.

  Jack’s fingers pinched mine. “Don’t speak to her,” he said in a whisper. “Just nod. And don’t look her in the eyes. She doesn’t like that. Hold out your hand when she asks for it, and don’t cry.”

  “I don’t cry,” I said again. Between his warning and the way the red blot was growing, I somehow wasn’t very surprised to see a woman eventually standing before us, her crimson skirts embroidered with jet and rubies in the shape of hearts, and a small, silver mirror hanging from a beautiful silver belt by the side of her bodice’s point. I didn’t dare to look any higher than that because Jack had become entirely silent, his back very straight and stiff. Still, I had the impression that this woman was wearing a sharp, vastly tall golden crown. Since the only person I knew with a crown was the Queen of England, it seemed obvious that this must be she. I would have asked her if she was, but I could feel Jack’s fingers curled around mine, warm and tight, and remembered that I wasn’t supposed to speak. I fixed my eyes on her belt buckle instead, and gripped Jack’s velvet sleeve with my free hand.

  “Hah!” said a voice as sharp as the crown. It came from somewhere behind us, and Jack and I spun together to find her standing there at our backs, trapping us between herself and her reflection. “Here it is at last! No, turn back around, you stupid child!”

  I was inclined to be sulky, but
Jack turned me back around with him, and I felt fingers grip my shoulders, red polish flashing in my peripheral. The Queen smelled of cold and roses. One of her hands left my shoulder to tilt up my chin, and I found myself gazing at a reflection that held only myself. It was the big version of myself that I’d seen earlier. I didn’t much like it, because my face was pinched and narrow, and not very nice.

  “Very good!” purred the Queen, releasing me, and the reflection went back to showing what it should have shown. Only it wasn’t quite right, because the reflection of the mirror hanging from the Queen’s belt showed something else. There was bigger me again; only I was in a green dress, with my hair tumbled around me and glass flying.

  “Oh!” I said, my eyes wide.

  “Don’t gape!” snapped the Queen, shocking me out of the sight. “Turn around, pinch-face!”

  Jack and I turned once more, our hands still clasped, and this time when I saw the mirror at the Queen’s belt, it showed nothing but real reflections. She said impatiently: “Give me your hand, child!”

  I did as I was told, my gaze still on the silver mirror that showed things that weren’t in the room, and something sharp pierced my finger. I instinctively tried to pull my hand away but her fingers pinched harder than Jack’s, cruel and strong. I saw a huge drop of blood well up on the tip of my finger, as richly velvet as the Queen’s frock. Beside me, Jack offered one narrow, white hand without being told. I looked up once through my lashes, and saw the exulting, cruel smile on the Queen’s lips as she pricked his finger too. Jack took it without a sound and reached for my bloodied hand with his own, but the Queen’s smile made me feel odd and squishy in a way that the meeting of our bloodied hands didn’t.

  “Done!” said the Queen, in her harsh voice. “Bound by blood, in life as in death. Take your fiancée out to the garden, Jack: her thin little face irritates me. Send her back home when you’ve finished playing with her.” There was a heavy swirl of velvet and she vanished in a glitter of reflective glass.

  The tickle of something wet dripping down my injured hand reminded me of my wrongs, and I let go of Jack’s hand to study it. Now that the worst of the pain was over it was interesting to watch the trickles of blood as they made crimson channels down my hand.

  “Come along,” said Jack, tugging me out of contemplation by my uninjured hand. I was towed toward what at first seemed to be a pair of mirrors but eventually proved to be mirror-lined doors, outlined in impossible golden sunshine. Both of the doors had an elegant red-lacquered doorknob, but Jack didn’t touch them. Instead, he pushed them open with his injured hand, very deliberately leaving a bloody handprint on the glass.

  “She won’t like it,” he said, when he saw me looking at it; “But it’s not against the rules, so she can’t do anything about it.”

  I found myself walking out into a garden that was bathed in bright sunshine, my green socks picking up late autumn leaves as I trailed after Jack in the grass. “Why is the sun out? It’s night.”

  “Mother made him come out. He didn’t want to, but she’s Queen after all.”

  “Where’s the moon, then?”

  “She’s up there too, but she’s sulking. She doesn’t like it when the sun comes out during the night. She’s a feminist and she doesn’t believe in being eclipsed by a male. Sit down here.”

  Here was the brick side of a fountain. I did as I was told and Jack sat down beside me, scooping water in his gory hand. “Sorry about the blood,” he said. He washed my hand quickly and competently: I got the impression, young as I was, that he’d had to wash away blood many times before. “She likes the old rituals. It’ll heal quickly.”

  “Why did she prick me with a needle?”

  “Do you only ever ask questions?”

  I gazed at him silently until he gave a small sniff of laughter.

  “It’s meant to bind us together. It’s all very old-fashioned and pointless, and it amounts to the fact that we’re to be married.”

  “I’m too young to marry,” I said. “And I don’t have a nice dress.”

  Jack rinsed his own hand carelessly and flicked bloody drops of water on the grass. I didn’t understand the look in his eyes, but his voice sounded rather harsh when he said: “We won’t be married until I’m twenty-five. That’s sixteen years to buy nice clothes. Or to do an awful lot of running.”

  I don’t remember much else from that day. I remember Jack pointing out a sharp red building that rose from a sprawl of other buildings on the horizon—the Heart Castle, he called it—and telling me that we were outside the Queen’s Mirror Hall; but I must have fallen asleep at some stage, there in the sunlit night. When I woke the next day I found myself lying on top of all the bedcovers, my finger still sore. The tiny scar vanished in a day or two, and as young as I was, it wasn’t long before I came to believe that I had dreamed it all. But every now and then I was certain that I caught sight of a flash of red in my dressing table mirror, and once the pair of black-flecked eyes I saw gazing back at me from a window at preschool were not my own.

  I accidentally went back into Underland the year I turned seven. It was one of those hot, muggy summer days that crawl in under your collar and wriggle uncomfortably down your back. Not a breath of wind; and the pond in the park was so clear and reflective that I could see everything around me in its waters. I jumped in with both feet and a joyful splash, and slipped through into Underland almost before I was aware of it.

  This time I came out in a teapot, with my eyes wide open. It was a very big teapot, but it was still an odd place to come out. Someone said: “Dormy! Is that you?” and peered at me with dilated pupils that were deep purple, the teapot lid held aloft in one big hand.

  “My name is Mabel,” I told him.

  “Mind your elbows, then.”

  “WHO IS IT?” demanded another voice. I looked across the table and found that a large grey hare was staring fixedly at me. There was a hard, speculative look to its eyes.

  “IT’S A MABEL!” bawled the other, despite the fact that the hare could see me quite well for itself.

  “WELL, TELL IT TO KEEP ITS ELBOWS TO ITSELF!”

  “My elbows are still in the teapot,” I told them both.

  “Oh,” said the purple-eyed man, putting the teapot lid down on the tablecloth. He was a tall, gangly thing with big hands and feet, and a syncopated blink that almost amounted to a nervous twitch. A curving, oddly-proportioned top-hat with a curling brim sat sideways on his spiky hair. “Mind you don’t block the spout, then.”

  “Actually, I was going to climb out,” I said.

  The purple-eyed man gave me a fascinated look. “Were you, though? How do you manage that without legs?”

  “I have legs!”

  “WHAT’S THAT IT SAYS?”

  “IT SAYS IT HAS LEGS!”

  “YES, BUT HOW DO WE KNOW? WERE WE GIVEN A VOTE?”

  “I wasn’t,” I said, jumping myself up on the teapot rim. “I just got them. I don’t see why you should have had a vote.”

  “WHY IS IT DOING THAT?”

  The purple-eyed man bawled: “I THINK IT’S TRYING TO CLIMB OUT!”

  “HOW DOES IT MANAGE WITHOUT LEGS?”

  “I have legs!” I yelled. The hare fixed its gaze upon me again just as I worked one leg out of the teapot. I waggled my foot at it.

  “What do you know,” said the hare, in a much more moderate voice. “It has a leg. How fortunate for it! I wish I had a leg.”

  “You do,” I said. “You have two.”

  “Two is different than one,” said the hare sternly. “You should be more precise, small child.”

  “I have two legs as well,” I said, in order to be more precise.

  “As well as what, exactly?”

  I paused to think it through carefully. “Well, two arms, I suppose.”

  They both stared at me for a long moment. At length, in a much friendlier voice, the purple-eyed man said: “So you have.”

  I smiled cautiously at him and looked ar
ound me with fascinated eyes. My teapot was perched on a long, narrow table that followed the verdant swell of a grassy hill and vanished over the summit. Behind me was a forest with grass of a very different green to that beneath the table, and when I looked back toward the summit of the hill, I thought I saw a sharp, red building far away on the horizon. I shivered at the sight of it. I’d had nightmares about something like that, I was sure; when I was very young. I looked away from it and back at the tea-laden table. It was shadowed by trees and dappled with sunlight, and the sunlight was oddly familiar, too.

  “I think I’ve been here before,” I said, slowly.

  “You can’t have been,” said the purple-eyed man. “I would have noticed. So would Dormy. He usually sleeps in there.”

  I sat down on the colourful, patched tablecloth and frowningly considered the world around me. “The sun is all wrong.”

  “Sssshh!” hissed the Hare. “He’ll hear you! We’ve only just got him to stop sulking about the summer storms.”

  “And the moon is a lady,” I said slowly, with a growing sense of deja vu.

  “Well, I wouldn’t go so far as to say that,” said the purple-eyed man. “She’s female.”

  “Is it day or night?”

  Perhaps the question annoyed them: the Hare immediately went back to his deafening bellow.

  “WHAT’S SHE ASKING?”

  “SHE WANTS TO KNOW IF IT’S DAY OR NIGHT!”

  “IS SHE AN IMBECILE?”

  “I know the sun is out,” I said crossly. “But last time I was here he was out at night.”

  That made one pair of purple eyes flicker madly around my face in a series of rag-time blinks, and one pair of black ones narrow intensely at me. “We don’t know any knights,” said the Hare more calmly. “Nasty people, knights. The Queen owns all of them.”

  “I didn’t meet you last time,” I said, ignoring that remark as incomprehensible. “Who are you?”

  “Alive,” said the purple-eyed man.

  “Moderately healthy,” said the Hare.