Chapter 4: The Invitation
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Saturday 31 August. Nai Nai's kitchen on Ellery Street, and then a corner on the way home.
"A tradition is not a set of rules. It is an argument that has been going on for a very long time between people who are dead."
— Nai Nai, on being asked why her grandmother never wrote anything down
The bus to Ellery Street took fifty-five minutes and used to take forty, and Lyra spent the first ten of them watching a thread between the driver and a woman in the third row, and the next thirty working out why she could not switch it off.
She could not switch it off. That was the new thing. For two years it had come and went — a bad week, a bad month, an afternoon in a corridor when everything was a wiring diagram and she had gone home and put her head under a pillow. But since the fifteenth it had settled in and taken up residence, and it was as though somebody had turned a dimmer up in a room she had not known was there.
At the last stop before her grandmother's, a man got on with a bicycle, and the whole length of the aisle between the door and the back filled up with lines, and Lyra sat with her hands in her lap and her eyes shut and let it wash over her, and it was — she had to be honest, sitting there with her eyes shut — restful. It was the only quiet she got.
That is the problem, she thought. I have found the thing that helps and it is the thing that is in my father's head.
Anmei Chen was eighty-one years old and lived in a house on Ellery Street, four streets from where Lyra and her father had lived before, and the reason for the street name was that both houses had belonged to the same family and had been given the family name, which in this family was not a family name so much as an administrative decision taken in about 1911.
Her grandmother was standing in the doorway with a dish towel over her shoulder.
"You are wearing your school coat to a grandmother's house in August."
"It's raining."
"It is not raining. It has not rained since Tuesday. You are wearing your school coat because you do not know what else to do with your hands." Anmei Chen turned around. "Bà Sáu made bánh tét. You will eat. You do not get an opinion about the pork, and you do not get an opinion about the second helping, and if you say you are not hungry I will telephone your father and tell him you said so."
"Nai Nai—"
"You will eat and then you will tell me about the letter, and then I will tell you about the school, and we will not have this conversation in a doorway like two women at a market."
Bánh tét was the cylindrical rice cake from her grandmother's province, wrapped in banana leaf and boiled for hours, and the first thing Lyra had ever made with her own hands that anybody had ever asked her for. She had been eleven. She had put too much filling into one corner and had been told about it for six years.
She ate two. Her grandmother watched her do it with the flat satisfaction of a woman whose plan was working.
"You have a question," Anmei Chen said, "and you have had it since you got on the bus, and it is the same question you asked me on your fifth birthday, which was how do you always know what I am thinking, and I told you then and I will tell you now, and you will like the answer less this time."
"You count my breaths."
"Your breaths go fast when you are lying and slow when you are frightened, and there is a third kind where you are holding something very still so that nobody will ask you about it." Her grandmother dipped a piece of cake into the tea and did not eat it. "You are frightened. And you are holding something. And you are also lying, but about something small, and I will let that go, because you will tell me when you are ready, and I have never yet known a person to be harmed by being allowed to arrive at a thing in their own time."
Lyra put her chopsticks down.
"Nai Nai. The letter came nine days ago and I found out on Friday and I have not told you because I did not want to be told things."
The dish towel came off the shoulder and went on the back of the chair, very deliberately, the way you put down something that is about to be needed.
"Sit back," said Anmei Chen.
The box was mother-of-pearl inlaid, and the pattern on the lid was a knot that Lyra had been looking at in dreams since she was small and had never been able to draw.
Inside, on faded blue silk, was a jade pendant.
Not large. About the size of a thumbnail, in a shape that was almost but not quite a disc, drilled at the top and worn on a cord that had been replaced at some point in a colour that did not match.
Anmei Chen did not lift it out. She put one finger on it and left it there.
"Whose is it?"
"Your mother's. It was her mother's, and her mother's mother's, and it came down the Ho line in the time when there was a line, which is to say that it went north out of Saigon in 1975 in the bottom of a tin, and then it came south again when your mother came to this country, and then it stopped with her." The finger did not move. "It is not jade of any great worth. It is not a treasure. It is a key, and it is a key to a thing that does not exist, and the reason it still works after four generations is that everyone who has ever held it wanted it to."
"What does it open?"
"Nothing." Anmei Chen finally looked up. "That is what I am about to tell you, and I have saved it for eighty-one years and once, so you will listen to the shape of it before the content."
She sat down.
"Your grandmother — my mother, whom you never met, who died in the winter of ninety-nine — used to be able to see two kinds of thing. She would tell you, if you asked, that she saw threads and currents, and if you were a stupid child you would write that down and think it was poetry. It is not poetry. It is one thing, seen from two ends."
"Explain."
"Threads are the individual. The line between a person and a person, a person and a place, a person and what they intend to do next. The oldest ones are old: a grandmother and a granddaughter, a house and the family that has lived in it, a teacher and the student she is going to fail. They are yours — you can see them, and in the old way you can touch them, and everything you do to a thread is a thing you have done to a person." Her grandmother's finger was still on the pendant. "Currents are the other end. They are what a place has been. They are not made of people; they are made of all the people who have ever been in a place and are not there any more. They are slower, they do not belong to anybody, and they are the only thing in this family that cannot be hurt by a person who means well."
"And Mum?"
"Your mother had the whole of it." A pause. "Full-spectrum. Both ends, at once, and the connections between them, which is the third thing my mother could not do and your mother could do from about the age of eleven. When your mother looked at a room she was not seeing the room. She was seeing the room and everything that had ever happened in it, and she could not switch either off, and from fourteen she could not switch off the part where the two of them did not agree with each other."
"The currents didn't agree?"
"Never once. Not in eighty-one years." Anmei Chen picked up her tea. "That is the part your father cannot accept, and it is the part I would have you take to that school on Saturday. Your mother was not a woman with a beautiful gift. She was a woman with a contradiction in her, from the age of eleven, and she spent twenty-nine years learning to hold a contradiction without resolving it. There are three people alive who have ever seen that, and one of them is sitting in front of me eating my rice cake, and one of the others is a woman called Mei-Hua, who is your father's sister, and who works at the school you are going to on Saturday, and whom I have not spoken to in five years. The third is a man in Lyon who has never met your mother and who has read everything she published, and I have never told him any of this, and he does not know whether to believe me."
Lyra put her hand down.
"I don't have an aunt at that school."
"You have exactly one, and you have never met her, and I am going to explain that in about ten minutes and you are not going to like any part of it." Her grandmother drank. "Eat."
The explanation took eleven minutes and was worse than Lyra had been able to imagine.
"Your father is my son," Anmei Chen said. "Your mother was my daughter-in-law, and before that she was my student, from the age of six, because her mother and I were the kind of friends who leave their children with each other. Her mother was a Ho. My mother was a Ho. There are three of us living who can do the whole of it, and two of us are in this family, and the third is your mother's sister, and the fourth — the fourth was a woman called Lin Mei-Hua, who was born in nineteen twenty in Chợ Lớn and who did something in this quarter in the autumn of nineteen forty-three, and who was your great-grandmother on your mother's side, and who died in nineteen ninety-four, and whom I have known about since I was twenty-four years old, and whom I have told you about exactly once in my life and will not tell you again today."
"Four. And Mei-Hua is one."
"Mei-Hua is one, and she is your father's sister, and she is the one who taught your mother the things I could not teach her, because Mei-Hua is fast and I am correct, and your mother needed both, and there is a great deal of that in the two of them. I have one end where she has two, and that is the whole of the difference between us, and I have never once resented it, and I have resented it constantly." Anmei Chen's mouth moved. "And your father met your mother in nineteen ninety-six, at something neither of them thought was worth mentioning, and married her the next year, and that is how two families that had been arguing with each other across an ocean for forty years became one family with two surnames and one very tired grandmother."
"So when my father says—"
"Your father says we do not have a large family, and he says it in the tone of a man who has been saying it for sixteen years and has never once been contradicted, and he is aware that he is lying, and he has never worked out who he is lying to." She put the cup down. "Which brings us to the part you will actually want. Mei-Hua is the Registrar of that Academy. She has been for eleven years. She is the person who signed your file, and she is the person who did not answer one of the eleven questions I put to her in the spring of 2007, and she did not answer it because she was frightened, and I did not press her, because I was frightened too, and because I was a coward with a granddaughter in the room."
"What happened to her," Lyra said.
"What happened to her."
"She was going to speak to the Council. You told me. She came to you at night with a map and she said patterns of decay and institutional blindness, and the next night she was gone."
"She came here on the eleventh of September, five years ago, at about eleven at night, and she had been in the house for four hours and she had not unpacked, and she was not going to unpack." Anmei Chen's voice did not change. "She put a map on this table. It is a bad map — I have never seen the like of it, it is not a map of a place, it is a map of a quantity. And she said: it converges somewhere it has never been looked at, and the counting is a wall built by people who need a place to point at. And I said, Lin, who is coming with you, and she said, nobody is coming with me, that is the entire problem, and then she said a thing I have thought about every day for five years."
"What did she say?"
"She said: if I go alone, they will write it up as a woman alone, and it will be the correct reading, and in ten years there will be a girl who can do what I can do and she will go alone too, and it will be the correct reading again." Anmei Chen's hand had gone flat on the tablecloth. "And I said: then do not go alone. And she said: I have been alone for eight years, Bà. You are the only person I have not been alone with."
The kitchen was extremely quiet.
"And then what happened," Lyra said.
"She went out of this door at about half past one in the morning and she did not come back, and I sat at this table until the sky came up, and at eight o'clock I telephoned your father, and your father was the worst thing that ever happened to me, because he said I told you." Her grandmother's hands were not entirely steady, and she dealt with that by reaching for the teapot and pouring badly. "I have not forgiven him for it and he has not forgiven me for telephoning him and we have had five years of Sundays. He comes. He sits there. He reads. We do not talk about it. It is the most civilised household in this city and it is built on top of a thing nobody can say out loud."
She went to the other cabinet.
"Three sketchbooks. She left them in her studio and the police took nothing, because the studio was not evidence of anything, and I went and got them eleven days later, before your father had finished the search." Nai Nai put a leather satchel on the table, repaired at some point with a different colour of thread. "I have not opened them. I do not read the sight; I never had the full thing, only one end of it. But I have looked at her drawings every day for five years, and I have understood perhaps a tenth of what is on those pages, and that tenth is enough for me to know that she was not a woman who lost her way."
She went to a drawer, and took out a small mother-of-pearl box, and set it beside the satchel.
"That is yours as well. It is nothing. Silk, and a needle, and a woman in a shop in a Chinatown who looked at a boy of about nine drawing on a tablecloth and said, You have the hands for this. Do not let anybody sell you a better one."
Lyra looked at the two objects, and then at her grandmother.
"Why now?"
"Because on Monday morning you are going to get on a train, and because I have been sitting on this table for five years, and because you have just been to a hospital and been told that the thing about you is in your father, and there is a version of this in which I say nothing for another five years and you are twenty-one and you are still carrying a secret and you still have a second room behind your eyes that you have never told anybody about."
Lyra's head came up.
"How do you know about the—"
"Because I built it, child." Anmei Chen said it without any drama at all. "I put it there when you were six. I sat on this floor with you and I taught you to find the room behind the room, because that is where the currents are, and because the currents are the only thing that cannot be taken from you, and because I thought — " She stopped. She wiped her eyes with the towel, briskly, as if that were a thing you did afterwards. "Because I thought that if I gave you that, then whatever else I failed to give you, you would have a place to go that nobody could put in a school."
Lyra did not open the sketchbooks until she was on the bus.
She opened the first one on her knees, with the satchel on her lap and the window going grey past it, and turned the pages slowly, and it was worse than grief: it was a woman's mind, laid out flat, in order, with the dates on them.
Drawings of a single teacup, annotated across eleven months, with the colour and weight of the connection between the cup and the hand and the hand and the day and the day and the price of the tea, in a notation system that used a symbol she did not know and a small drawing of a wave. Notes in English, in Chinese, and in Vietnamese, sometimes in the same sentence, as though the ideas had not yet agreed on a language.
And then, in the third book, on a page she turned past and came back to, a map.
Not a map of anywhere. It was a diagram: a great many fine lines drawn in silver on a ground of silver, all of them running inward, meeting somewhere out past the right-hand edge of the paper, and it took her a full minute to work out that the thing at the right-hand edge was not a decoration. It was a place, drawn in ordinary cartographic lines, at a scale where a whole hemisphere was a thumbnail.
And a note beside it, in Lin's careful hand:
Not here. Everyone assumes here, because here is where the counting is done, and the counting is wrong. It converges somewhere it has never been looked at. There is an island in the Pacific that does not appear on most charts, and the charts that have it disagree with each other about its position. I have not been there. I have spoken to two people who claim to have seen the water there move in a way that water does not move, and neither of them could give me a date, and both of them were frightened of me by the end of the conversation.
Do not trust the counting. The counting is a wall built by people who need a place to point at.
B. — if this reaches you, and it will not reach you, because you will do what I did and go alone: the thing that is counting is not a place and it is not a person. It is a habit, and the habit is older than the school, and it is the reason they need the number.
Lyra read it four times. Then she closed the book and put it back in the satchel and looked out of the window at a wet industrial park going past in the dark, and felt, for the first time in her life, the specific vertigo of holding a piece of evidence she was completely certain was important and had absolutely no idea what to do with.
Then she got out her phone and typed out one message, and thought about it for a long time before she sent it.
To her father: I'm going to ask you something tonight and I want you to actually answer it. Have you ever read any of Mum's notebooks?
And then she did not send that either, because she was sixteen, and because she was on a bus, and because she had a second room behind her eyes that she had never once told anybody about, and because on Monday morning a man with a very good memory was going to square a sheaf of notes on a lectern in exactly the way her father squared a sheaf of notes on a kitchen table, and she was going to have to sit in a room and be sixteen at him, and she could not think about her father tonight.
The pendant was round her neck before she got to the corner. It was warm within a minute, and stayed warm, and did the thing it had done in the art room at school, once, for a split second, which was that the street got deeper, as though there were a second street behind the first one, and somebody in the second street put out a hand.
She put her own hand over it, on the cord, and said, out loud, on a wet corner in a city she had never thought about leaving, in a language that nobody within a thousand miles would have understood her saying:
"Mum. I'm going to be careful. I want you to know that. I'm going to be careful and I'm not going to do it for anybody."
The warmth did not change, and did not answer, and did not have to.
Thread Resonance Note: C-2214. Second guardian Anmei Chen (paternal household; silk-vision by instruction, not by blood) to be contacted through the seer and not directly. Instruct that no member of staff is to describe the family, correct the family, or characterise the family's practice to the seer as tradition, as folklore, or as data. Family materials released to the seer at guardian discretion. Note appended by R. Ekwueme (external): guardian has asked me to record that the referral to you was not the trigger for your letter of the twenty-second, and that this household has understood why, and would like it noted that it was not the trigger for the referral either. Note appended by E. Weaver: I am going to have to tell her, on Saturday, that her aunt is forty metres away and has been for eleven years. I have been putting it off for six.
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