On the Other Side Read online

  ‘Sort of like a magic trick. Well, no. Not really. It’s quite a bit sweeter than that. You see, the wall is sentimental. It feeds off feelings and memories. So you need to give it something that has a strong connection between you and the person you’re trying to find. A word. An object. A song. A secret handshake. Anything. It’ll feed off that connection and line itself up with whoever it is you’re looking for.’

  Evie eyed the wall. It was just a wall. How could it take her back to a place in which she was dead and gone, buried six feet underground?

  ‘Are you sure a wall can do all of that? This isn’t a hoax, is it, Lieffe, some strange dream?’ As soon as she cast that shadow of doubt into the room, the wall’s hum jumped in volume. Eventually it resumed its gentler song, but it sounded slightly disgruntled, projecting the sounds of people whose flatmates had left their shoes on the stairs for the tenth time that week, or the people who had worn flip-flops that day only for it to rain unexpectedly on their way home.

  ‘Sorry,’ she whispered from the corner of her mouth. With a sigh, she said, ‘All right, Lieffe, what do I need to do?’ The urge to remove her hands from underneath her legs and start playing with the box was unbearable.

  ‘That box can conjure objects. You came here with no personal possessions, so it will allow you to retrieve the things you need to get you through the wall. If words or actions are your key, then you have no need for the box, but most people need something they left behind, and the Lost Box has volunteered its services.’ Lieffe looked proud of the box and what he’d discovered it could do.

  Evie eyed him from under her curls. ‘How do you know all of this?’ Her hands slipped out from under her thighs, but she placed them on her lap, still resisting the urge to touch the box. Lieffe shrugged, a little smile on his face that looked like it could turn into a childish giggle at any moment.

  ‘Trial and error!’ he said. Evie got the feeling there was a little more to it than that, but she didn’t want to pry, and there were far more pressing matters at hand.

  ‘So how do I work it? Is there an on switch? A magic word? One side makes me larger and the other makes me teeny-tiny?’ She held up her thumb and index finger to indicate how small she might become, and looked at him through the gap with one eye.

  ‘No.’ He walked to her and swatted her hand away playfully, then looked down into the box. ‘It’s a Peter Pan kind of deal.’

  ‘You mean, think happy thoughts?’

  ‘Bingo. You need to think of the connection you have to the person you’re trying to find, and what the significance of the object is to you both. What makes it so important that it will tether you between worlds?’

  A little knot had formed in Evie’s stomach, and now it grew tighter. She thought about her secrets and how much they’d weighed her down almost all her life and she knew that there were exactly three of them. Three rather large secrets. It wasn’t hard to figure that out when she’d spent years trying to hide them from the people she loved simply for that reason – because she loved them. Evie wanted to avoid any risk of hurting them. Three secrets, and three people she’d need to cross the wall to visit. Finding their keys was easy. The first required a song. The second required an action. And the third … well, the third required the box.

  ‘Is that it? I just think about it and it’ll appear?’

  ‘Yes, though the box is a little … excitable. Unlike the wall, it only needs the smallest amount of encouragement, so don’t think too hard or too loud. Just place your palms flat on either side of it and think about what you need and why you need it.’

  Evie closed her eyes and did as she was told.

  She thought of raven-black hair that curled at the ends and jade-green eyes that twinkled. She heard the sounds of soft violins and rickety rattling trains. She smelt burgers and salty fries. And her mouth watered at the taste of hard boiled sweets.

  ‘Evie,’ Lieffe said tentatively as his skin started to prickle, ‘you’re thinking too loudly.’

  The sides of the box pushed against Evie’s hands and then shrank in towards each other. To Lieffe it looked like the box was breathing, quickly at first and then the breaths started to get bigger. With each breath in, the sides of the box expanded a little further, and with each breath out the top edges of each side almost met in the middle. Evie was lost in an oblivion of thoughts. She’d not dared to let herself wallow in them for the longest time, but now she’d opened the floodgates and she wasn’t about to get out of her own head without a fight.

  With one final mighty inhalation, the box burst with a bang, knocking the chair over backwards with Evie still in it. Hundreds of individually wrapped hard boiled sweets of all different colours and flavours rained down over them. Evie sat up and plucked one out of her hair, ignoring the last few still tumbling down around her. She quickly unwrapped it and popped it into her mouth, sucking on it with relish. It tastes of hope, she thought.

  She looked around the room. There was no sign of Lieffe, and she thought he must have left in all the commotion, but then she caught a glimpse of his watch face in the corner of the room, reflecting the dim light, and realised he was huddling a little pathetically underneath the desk.

  ‘Oh stop it,’ she said teasingly. ‘A few sweets never hurt anyone!’

  ‘I did tell you not to think too hard. What if it was a family pet you were remembering? The poor creature would have been catapulted out of the box at high speed and might not have survived the journey!’

  ‘I’ll bear that in mind when I need to summon Horace, the family cat. For now, all I need are the sweets, though they’re for my third and final journey.’

  ‘You won’t be needing them now?’ asked Lieffe.

  ‘No,’ she said more sternly than she’d intended. ‘That’s something I’ll have to … erm … build up to.’

  ‘Saving the best till last?’ Lieffe asked hesitantly.

  ‘Something like that.’ The sadness reached Evie’s eyes before the half-hearted smile did. She started to collect the sweets, putting them into the box, with a few making their way into her pockets. Lieffe helped, the two of them moving round the room on their haunches in a heavy silence, wading through the inch-high carpet of crackling wrappers.

  ‘Evie?’ Lieffe held her name in his mouth as though it was made of thin glass that might break should he be too fierce or too loud. He sensed he needed to tread carefully here. There was something about a quiet, pensive Evie that made him uneasy.

  ‘Yes, Lieffe?’ But Evie knew exactly what was coming.

  ‘Why the sweets?’

  The Violinist and the Artist

  Her back aching from her awful desk chair and her head reeling from the constant hustle and bustle of office life, Evie sat on the train home, a book on her lap, staring contentedly out of the window, the hint of a smile playing at the edges of her lips. First days weren’t meant to be easy. They were filled with anticipation, nerves and stress. She had expected the worst, which meant she wasn’t the slightest bit disappointed when the worst had indeed shown up. In fact she’d welcomed it with open arms and an open heart.

  Evie’s big ambition was to be an animator for motion pictures. For now, at least, she had had to settle for drawing cartoons for a local newspaper that would end up wrapped round fish and chips. But that was OK, because she knew that all great artists started small, and it was certainly a step in the right direction. It also shut up her insufferable mother, who thought that her doodling daughter was nothing short of scandalous. No, it wasn’t right for a lady of her class to want to make silly little drawings dance and wobble about on a screen. Evie had to constantly fight off her mother’s nagging that she find a man to marry.

  Eleanor Snow’s lips had been pursed for so much of her life that her mouth now closely resembled a cat’s behind. She was tall and bony, her clothing always drab and horribly appropriate, and her stony eyes were absent of any colour or life. She didn’t walk; she scuttled like a centipede, sucking the fun and happiness
out of the world as she went. She was a severely old-fashioned lady who felt a woman hadn’t done her proper job as a female if she was unmarried and childless, so to have a daughter of twenty-seven who was both was life-threateningly embarrassing.

  Up till now, Evie hadn’t had a job, and had been kept hidden away inside the family’s rather large mansion, complete with tennis court, indoor swimming pool and six luxurious bathrooms. Being unemployed meant that Evie had been Eleanor’s secret embarrassment and the fewer people that interacted with her and knew her sad situation, the better. Although she wanted for nothing, Evie had become horribly bored with her life. She had a butler and a maid and a cook to bring her everything she could possibly desire, but she never used them. She wanted to do things for herself so that she could feel she was actually living, not just existing. And even though Jeremy the butler, Jane the maid and Isla the cook were wonderful friends, Evie was still awfully lonely and excruciatingly fed up.

  Finding a husband had never been at the top of her list of priorities. Her mother and father set a poor example, as they hadn’t married for love – they had married for the sake of money and convenience. They were a terribly smart match according to their parents. Evie’s father, Edward Snow, was the son of Edward Snow Senior, of Snow and Summer Ltd, a terribly successful law firm built on the fortune of Evie’s great-grandfather, yet another Edward Snow. Great-Grandfather Snow had been ostracised from the family for reasons Evie had never been told and knew better than to ask about. Yet the family that had exiled him felt no qualms about using his money to set up a business of their own, and it made Evie sick to her stomach.

  Eleanor was the daughter of Elaine and Ewan White, another rich yet loveless couple, who’d known the Snows for generations. They made an undeniably airtight case to the young Edward Snow’s parents that their respective children would benefit from marrying when they were old enough, as Edward was set to take on the law firm after Edward Senior retired, and Eleanor was well prepared to bear children and had been trained to keep a household in shape. And so it was done.

  All that any of this taught Evie and her little brother Eddie (another Edward, of course) was how not to marry. Evie witnessed her parents’ cold stares and clipped conversations and their palpable lack of love and vowed never to end up in a relationship of that kind. It also turned her off the idea of looking for love at all.

  Although her mother was well aware of Evie’s aversion to marriage and men, she had made several attempts at pushing her daughter in the direction of young James Summer, of Snow and Summer. James was a few months older than Evie, and was apparently everything women looked for in a mate: wealthy, witty and gorgeous. Because their fathers were business partners and their families lived on the same street, Evie and James had been friends since infancy, and Evie knew a side of James he never dared to show his family and it was the side of him that liked to ‘make believe’. He would think up stories that Evie would in turn try to draw and together they created imaginary worlds that they’d live in, only to be snatched away by their disapproving mothers. But what had really sealed their friendship was the fact that Evie refused to address him as James. Even at eight years old, she had no time for absurd traditions, especially the one that meant that all the men in a family had the same name. It caused great confusion when she called for just one person, and several answered back. So to Evie he was Jim, which caused his cheeks to flush every single time she spoke to him.

  Eleanor Snow couldn’t have hoped for a better friendship to bloom between Evie and Jim. But even though Evie knew her mother wanted that friendship to grow into something more, and even though she knew what a wonderful husband Jim would make, she just couldn’t force herself to love him.

  Finally, after enduring years of Evie’s brilliantly planned, well-executed arguments, Eleanor compromised and told her that if she could get herself a job as an artist within the week, she would pay for an apartment close to work, but only for a year. If she hadn’t climbed any further in the field by the following November, then Evie was to leave the job to be married off to whomever her mother saw fit and do what women were supposed to do: bear children and run the house.

  Eleanor had not expected her to succeed in finding a job within the week, but Evie had never been more determined to achieve anything in her life. She’d snuck into her father’s study, flipped through his Rolodex and was thrilled when she found someone who worked for the local newspaper. She had an interview lined up by day two, and because of her portfolio full of years’ worth of drawings, which she’d hidden from her mother, by day five she had the job. She had been over the moon. A real job for a whole year. A proper adventure. Now, with her foot on the bottom rung, she needed to climb the ladder, maybe illustrate a book during the year, and then she wouldn’t be forced to marry her best friend, Jim.

  The train came to a stop at the end of the line and the driver announced, ‘All change, please!’ through the crackly tannoy. Evie hurriedly stuffed her book into her bag. As she stepped out of the train, she caught the right heel of her new shoes on the edge of the train and stumbled, her bag slipping from her shoulder and her book falling to the ground. It skittered down a passageway, disappearing amongst the hurrying feet of the evening commuters. Evie gathered herself and straightened up just in time to see a bustling businesswoman accidentally kick it out of sight.

  ‘Damn,’ she said.

  Pushing her way through the crowds, despite her sore foot, Evie saw that the book had landed at the bottom of a downwards-moving escalator and was being pushed against the raised lip where the escalator disappeared under the floor, its pages creasing and crunching with every step that passed beneath it. Her heart gave a slight jolt at seeing it in that state, and she rushed to its rescue, being careful not to step on to the escalator herself. It was then, at the moment when she bent down to snatch her book from the clutches of the sliding metal stairs, that she heard it.

  It was very soft but definitely there, and her heart swelled at the sound: a violin being played by what sounded like an extremely talented violinist. Evie still hadn’t figured out the best route from work to her new flat, and she wanted nothing more than to soak her tired muscles in a hot bath and then curl up in her warm bed, but ignoring the ache in her back and her still reeling head and her sore heel, she abandoned thoughts of heading for her next train and stepped on to the up escalator.

  As she was carried higher and higher, the sound grew louder and more beautiful, and slowly the violinist came into view. She saw his scruffy raven-black hair and matching black coat with dark purple piping that was so dark you wouldn’t know it was purple unless you were really looking – and Evie was really looking. Very few people passed, and not one seemed to notice the talent standing before them. His wildly untamed eyebrows were knitted together so tightly that Evie wondered if they would ever come apart. Then, as the music softened, so did his face. His expression changed to one of contentment, and his eyebrows separated with ease and settled over his closed eyes.

  He was handsome in a funny sort of way. His nose had a notch in its bridge, presumably from where it had been broken, and the tip was large and rounded, the kind of nose Evie would give to her more adorable cartoon characters. His mildly curly hair hadn’t seen a brush in at least a week, and hunched as he was over his violin, she guessed that if he stood up straight, he’d be nearly a whole foot taller than her. But what she found most mesmerising was that he lived his music. If he played in a minor key on his black wooden violin, his face would be melancholy, scrunched or twisted. If the music was in a major key, his lips would twist into a smile and his whole expression lifted. If the notes moved, so did he. He didn’t exist in this world, only in the world he created with his fingers and his bow.

  Evie didn’t know or care how long she’d been watching him. She’d settled her back against the wall opposite where this man was busking and become transfixed. She noticed the violin case at his feet. Despite the passing people not taking much notice, he had
still made quite a bit of money today. She wished she had something to contribute, but she’d spent the last of her change on a bag of her favourite hard boiled sweets from the shop near where she worked. She took a handful of the coloured sweets from her pocket. They were individually wrapped in coloured plastic and each sweet was glassy with a few little bubbles inside. Evie picked out a green one, to match her coat. Then, hitching her bag firmly on to her shoulder, she walked over to his case and placed the sweet on top of the pile of coins.

  With his eyes still closed and his mind firmly in his music, he didn’t notice anyone was there. Evie looked at him one last time, swaying to the melody he twirled in his fingers, then left to find her platform. Coincidentally, the entrance happened to be right next to the violinist. It was almost as if he’d guided her there with his music.

  After a month, Evie’s job had settled into a routine. She adjusted her desk chair to the perfect height so that she never hunched over when she drew. If she got to the office at quarter to nine, rather than nine exactly, she could miss having an awkward elevator chat with her seedy boss. She learned that in her ten-minute mid-morning break she could make it to the nearest coffee shop and back if the queue wasn’t too long. And most importantly, in the evenings on the way home, the sound of that single violin would mellow her out. It flicked an off switch in her brain and sent her on her way completely unwound. A bad day at work was forgotten in a single note, and in return for the violinist’s unwitting musical help, she would drop a sweet into his violin case every time she passed him.

  One particular evening, Evie was walking past the violinist, a dark purple blackcurrant-flavoured sweet in her hand. She was about to drop it into his case as usual when a small piece of cardboard caught her eye. She looked up at the man, his eyes closed as always, and she bent down to read the note written there in a round and swirly hand.