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CHAPTER TWO

Hayley was an orphan. All she knew of her parents was the wedding photograph in a silver frame that Grandma propped in the middle of Hayley’s bedroom mantelpiece and warned Hayley not to touch. Hayley naturally spent long hours standing on a chair carefully studying the photo. The two people in it looked so happy. Her mother had the same kind of fair good looks as Aunt Alice, except that she seemed more human than Aunt Alice, less perfect. She laughed, with her head thrown back and her veil flying, a lopsided, almost guilty laugh at Hayley’s father. He laughed proudly back, proud of Hayley’s mother, proud in himself. There was pride in the set of his curly black head, in his gleaming dark eyes and in the way his big brown hand clasped Hayley’s mother’s white one. He was the one Hayley had her obstinately curly hair and brown complexion from. But, since Hayley’s mother was so fair, Hayley’s hair had come out a sort of whitish brown and her eyes big and grey. She thought of herself as an exact mixture of both of them and wished with all her strength that they were alive so that she could know them.

Grandma and Grandpa lived in a large house on the edge of London, one of those houses that have a mass of dark shrubs back and front and stained glass in most of the windows, so that it was always rather dark. It had a kitchen part, where a cook and a maid lived. Hayley only ever saw this part when the latest maid took her for walks on the common and they came back in through the kitchen. She was forbidden to go there at any other time in case she disturbed the cook.

The rest of the large dark rooms were mostly devoted to Grandpa’s work. Hayley had no idea what Grandpa’s work was, except that it seemed to involve keeping up with the whole world. One entire room was devoted to newspapers and magazines in many languages – most of them the closely-printed, learned kind – and another room was full of maps; maps pinned to walls, piled on shelves in stacks or spread on sloping work benches ready to be studied. The big globe in the middle of this room always fascinated Hayley. The other rooms were crowded to the ceilings with books and strewn with papers, telephones and radios of all colours, except for the room in the basement that was full of computers. The only downstairs room Hayley was officially allowed into was the parlour – and then only if she washed first – where she was allowed to sit in one of its stiff chairs to watch programmes on television that Grandma thought were suitable.

Hayley did not go to school. Grandma gave her lessons upstairs in the schoolroom – which was where Hayley had her meals too – and those lessons were a trial to both of them. Just as Hayley’s feathery, flyaway curls continually escaped from Grandma’s careful combing and plaiting, so Hayley’s attempts to read, write, do sums and paint pictures were always sliding away from the standards Grandma thought correct. Grandma kept a heavy flat ruler on her side of the table with which she rapped Hayley’s knuckles whenever Hayley painted outside the lines in the painting book, or wrote something that made her laugh, or got the answer in bags of cheese instead of in money.

Hayley sighed a little as she sat in the Castle drawing-room beside the pretend cat. She had learnt very early on that she could never live up to Grandma’s standards. Grandma disapproved of running and shouting and laughing and singing as well as painting outside the lines. Her ideas took in the whole world and Hayley was always overflowing Grandma’s edges. It occurred to Hayley now, as she sat on the drawing room sofa, that Grandma must have had four daughters – no, six, if you counted Mother and the Aunt Ellie who was in Scotland – and she wondered how on earth they had all managed when they were girls.

Luckily, Grandpa was never this strict. Unless he was on a phone to someone important, like Uncle Jolyon or the Prime Minister, he never really minded Hayley sneaking into one of his work rooms. “Are your hands clean?” he would say, looking round from whatever he was doing. And Hayley would nod and smile, knowing this was Grandpa’s way of saying she could stay. She smiled now and patted the unreal cat, thinking of her grandfather, huge and bearded, with his round stomach tightly buttoned into a blue-check shirt, turning from his screens to point to a book he had found for her, or to put a cartoon up on another screen for her.

Grandpa was kind, although he never seemed to have much idea what was suitable for small girls. Hayley had several frustrated memories about this. Before she could read, Grandpa had given her a book full of grey drawings of prisons, thinking she would enjoy looking at it. Hayley had not enjoyed it at all. Nor, when she had only just learned to read, had she enjoyed the book called The Back of the North Wind which Grandpa had pushed into her hands. The print in it was close and tiny, and Hayley could not understand the story.

But Grandpa had given her many other books later that she did enjoy. And he often – and quite unpredictably – showed Hayley peculiar things on one or other of his computers. The first time he did this, Hayley was decidedly disappointed. She had been expecting another cartoon, and here Grandpa was, showing her a picture of a large rotating football. Light fell on it sideways as it spun and also fell on the golf ball that was whizzing energetically round the football, going from round to half-lighted to invisible as it whizzed.

“This isn’t Tom and Jerry,” Hayley said.

“No, it’s the earth and the moon,” Grandpa said. “It’s time you learnt what makes day and night.”

“But I know that,” Hayley objected. “Day is when the sun comes up.”

“And I suppose you think the sun goes round the earth?” Grandpa said.

Hayley thought about this. She knew from the globe in the map room that the earth was probably round – though she thought people might well be wrong about that – so it stood to reason that the sun had to circle round it or people in Australia would have night all the time. “Yes,” she said.

She was hugely indignant when Grandpa explained that the earth went round the sun, and rather inclined to think Grandpa had got it wrong. Even when Grandpa zoomed the football into the distance and showed her the sun, like a burning beach ball, and the earth circling it along with some peas and several tennis balls, Hayley was by no means convinced. When he told her that it was the earth spinning that made day and night, and the earth circling the sun that made winter and summer, Hayley still thought he might be wrong. Because it was just pictures on a screen, she suspected they were no more real than Donald Duck or Tom and Jerry. And when Grandpa told her that the peas and tennis balls were other planets – Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, Pluto – like Earth, and that the tiny things shooting around them in orbits the shape of safety pins were comets, Hayley felt indignant and jealous for Earth, for not being the only one. It took her months to accept that this was the way things were.

She only really accepted it when Grandpa began showing her other things. He showed her the slow growth of Earth from a bare ball of rock, through agelong changes of climate, during which the lands moved about on its surface like leaves floating on a pond, and rocks grew and turned to sand. He showed her dinosaurs and tiny creatures in the sea bed. Then he showed her atoms, molecules and germs – after which Hayley for a long time confused all three with planets going round the sun and, when Grandma insisted that you washed to get rid of germs, wondered if Grandma was trying to clean the universe off her.

Grandpa showed her the universe too, where the Milky Way was like a silver scarf of stars, and other stars floated in shapes that were supposed to be people, swans, animals, crosses and crowns. He also showed Hayley the table of elements, which seemed to her to be something small but heavy, fixed into the midst of all the other floating, spinning, shining strangeness. She thought the elements were probably little number-shaped tintacks that pegged the rest in place.

Grandma had a tendency to object to Grandpa showing Hayley such things. Grandma was liable to march in when Hayley was peacefully settled in front of a cartoon or a plan of the universe and snap the off-button, saying it was not suitable for Hayley to watch. She always went through the books Grandpa gave Hayley too, and took away things like Fanny Hill and The Rainbow and Where the Rainbow Ends and Pilgrim’s Progress. Hayley never understood quite why these were unsuitable. But the time when Grandma came close to banning all computer displays was when Grandpa showed Hayley the mythosphere.

This was an accident really. It was raining, so that Hayley could not go out for her usual afternoon walk on the common. Grandma went to have her rest. Grandpa had just come home that morning from one of his mysterious absences. Grandpa usually vanished two or three times a year. When Hayley asked where he was, Grandma looked forbidding and answered, “He’s gone to visit his other family. Don’t be nosy.” Grandpa never talked about this at all. When Hayley asked where he had been, he pretended not to hear. But she was always truly glad when he came back. The house felt very dreary without the background hum of the computers and the constant ringing or beeping of all the phones. So, as soon as Grandma’s bedroom door shut, Hayley raced softly downstairs to the computer room.

Grandpa was there, sitting massively in front of a screen, carefully following something on it with a light-pen. Hayley tiptoed up to look over his shoulder. It was a picture of Earth, slowly spinning in dark blue emptiness. She saw Africa rotating past as she arrived. But Africa was quite hard to see because it and the whole globe was swathed in a soft, multicoloured mist. The mist seemed to be made up of thousands of tiny pale threads, all of them moving and swirling outwards. Each thread shone as it moved, gentle and pearly, so the effect was as if Earth spun in a luminous rainbow veil. While Hayley watched, some of the threads wrapped themselves together into a shining skein and this grew on outwards, growing brighter and harder-looking as it grew, and then got thrown gently sideways with the turning of the world, so that it became a silver red spiral. There were dozens of these skeins, when Hayley looked closely, in dozens of silvery colours. But underneath these were thousands of other shining threads which busily drifted and wove and plaited close to Earth.

“That’s beautiful!” Hayley said. “What are they?”

“Are your hands clean?” Grandpa answered absently. His light-pen steadily picked out a gold gleaming set of threads underneath the spirals and followed it in and out, here and there, through the gauzy mass. He seemed to take it for granted that Hayley had washed her hands because he went on, “This is the mythosphere. It’s made up of all the stories, theories and beliefs, legends, myths and hopes, that are generated here on Earth. As you can see, it’s constantly growing and moving as people invent new tales to tell or find new things to believe. The older strands move out to become these spirals, where things tend to become quite crude and dangerous. They’ve hardened off, you see.”

“Are they real, the same as atoms and planets?” Hayley asked.

“Quite as real – even realler in some ways,” Grandpa replied.

Hayley said the name of it to herself, in order not to forget it. “The mythosphere. And what are you doing with it?”

“Tracing the golden apples,” Grandpa said. “Wondering why they’ve never become a spiral of their own. They mix into other strands all the time. Look.” He did something to the keyboard to make Earth turn about and spread itself into a flat plain with continents slowly twirling across it. Golden threads rose from India, from the flatness north of the mountains, from the Mediterranean and from Sweden, Norway and Britain. “See here.” Grandpa’s big hairy hand pointed the light-pen this way and that as the threads arose. “This thread mingles with three different dragon stories. And this…” the line of light moved southward “…mixes with two quite different stories here. This one’s the judgement of Paris and here we have Atalanta, the girl who was distracted from winning a race by some golden apples. And there are hundreds of folk tales…” The pen moved northwards to golden threads growing like grass over Europe and Asia. Grandpa shook his head. “Golden apples all over. They cause death and eternal life and danger and choices. They must be important. But none of them combine. None of them spiral and harden. I don’t know why.”

“If they’re real,” Hayley said, “can a person go and walk in them, or are they like germs and atoms and too small to see?”

“Oh, yes,” Grandpa said, frowning at the threads. “Only I don’t advocate walking in the spirals. Everything gets pretty fierce out there.”

“But nearer in. Do you walk or float?” Hayley wanted to know.

“You could take a boat if you want,” Grandpa said, “or even a car sometimes. But I prefer to walk myself. It’s—”

But here Grandma came storming in and seized Hayley by one arm. “Really! Honest to goodness, Tas!” she said, dragging Hayley away from the screen. “You ought to know better than to let Hayley in among this stuff!”

“It’s not doing her any harm!” Grandpa protested.

“On the contrary. It could do immense harm – to us and Hayley too, if Jolyon gets to hear of it!” Grandma retorted. She dragged Hayley out of the room and shut the door with a bang. “Hayley, you are not to have anything to do with the mythosphere ever again!” she said. “Forget you ever saw it!”