Rachel waited in front of the museum bathroom for her daughter, Lucy, to come out. She yawned, throwing her hand to her face so quickly she accidentally hit herself in the mouth, causing throbbing pain to shoot through her jaw. Leaning against the wall behind her, she closed her eyes and let the pain subside.
“Mum, what are you doing?”
Rachel opened her eyes as Lucy stared at her, her eyebrow raised. “I’d change your tone, if I were you, young lady.”
“What? I didn’t do anything. You’re the one that was asleep,” Lucy complained, folding her arms.
“I wasn’t asleep. I was just resting my eyes.”
“You always say that.”
“And it’s always true.”
“Even when you’re snoring?”
“Especially then. Come on, the exhibits are waiting.” Rachel swung her arm and started to walk in the direction of the first room of the museum, ‘the History of Space Travel’.
Lucy followed, trying to keep up with her Mum who was walking so quickly she was almost ready to compete in the 100m Olympics race. “Wait, I’m coming.”
In the exhibit itself Rachel slowed down as she stared around, glassy-eyed and mentally drifting, but pretending to be interested in a large-scale model of the solar system. She needed to yawn again but quickly turned her head and kept her mouth shut so she could disguise it from her daughter.
Lucy scuffed her shoes on the ground and stared sadly down at the grey, plastic floor. “I didn’t mean it, you know?”
Rachel forced her eyes open and looked towards her daughter but felt mini-heartbeats throbbing in her eyelids. “Then why did you do it?”
“I thought—I thought it would help.”
“Help what?”
“You… and Dad.”
“How would charging the other children to enter the bathroom help us?”
Lucy looked up, still frowning, miserably. “I wasn’t charging them to enter. I was providing extra bathroom services… Like the girl at that party you took us to a few years ago.”
“Ms Hendricks told me you charged them for opening the door, and when they wouldn’t pay, you wouldn’t open the door.”
“Well, no one was willing to pay otherwise.”
“Lucy…”
“I know. I know. But I really was trying to help, I swear.”
“But how was that going to help us?”
“You know, Kimi needs new shoes.”
Rachel’s eyes got wider, not hiding her surprise. “She does? She never said anything.”
“I… I told her not to. I kind of told Jace not to say anything about his lost pencil case either.”
“Jace doesn’t have his pencil case? Then what’s he been using at school?”
“I gave him mine. I can borrow from Shiela.”
Rachel felt tears coming to her eyes and didn’t know if it was stress, lack of sleep, sadness or a mixture of all three. She guessed it was the latter. “Honey, you should have told us. We would have been able to fix it.”
“Would you, though? I know we don’t have enough money. Dad’s not had any acting jobs in ages. You spend all the time locked in your office and, I went in when you were asleep—You haven’t written anything… and neither of you would talk about it. So I made us all not bother you about anything.”
“Is that why you were trying to make money? Because you wanted to help your brother and sister?”
“I wanted to help all of us.” Lucy had turned her head to study a large portrait of astronauts on the opposite wall, embarrassed to say all this to her Mum and afraid of Rachel’s reaction.
Rachel didn’t know how to react. She stared silently at her 9 year old daughter wishing she could find something to say that wasn’t just the anger she was feeling towards herself. Her nine year old shouldn’t be thinking about this at her age. This kind of stress was her and her husbands responsibility. “Er… Come on, let’s go to the next exhibit. I heard they’ve got a new special one. My friend Carol said we’d probably enjoy it.”
They walked slower this time, Rachel continuing to stare at Lucy and Lucy looking anywhere but.
“Is that why we’re here?” Lucy asked. “I thought you’d take me home and lock me in my room or something.”
Rachel sighed, and then groaned as she realised she’d set her head spinning. She tried to focus on the door in front of them so she could avoid passing out on the floor or vomiting. “Truthfully?”
Lucy looked over at her Mum’s pale white face. “Yeah.”
“You’re right. I’ve been struggling for a while to write and right now… I’d rather be anywhere except home. I needed a break.”
“Oh,” Lucy said. “If you need some ideas, I’m sure Kimi, Jace and I can come up with something for you.”
“That’s sweet, honey, but the ideas have to be good enough to be published. I think that’s up to me.”
“Why does it have to be? You always told us that we have to look our for each other and help each other. Why can’t we do the same for you?”
Rachel didn’t have an answer again and cringed as she felt the pang of guilt ripping through her chest. She’d never felt more like a hypocrite. Lucy was right again. “Oh, well, we’re here.”
They walked into the next exhibit and Rachel had to stop herself getting dizzier by groaning again. All around there were illustrations, stills from films, old hardback books and props from Rachel’s favourite franchise: Edgar and Philly. It wasn’t bad enough she’d been forced to see the real them earlier in the week, she really now had to be confronted by every version of them in existence? Her legs wobbled and she walked to a close bench, crashing down onto the cold, metal surface.
“Mum, are you okay?” Lucy asked, following her, concerned.
“Oh, yeah, I’m fine, honey. Just needed to sit down for a second.”
Lucy sat down next to her and leant against her mother’s shoulder, putting her arm around her back to support her. They sat in silence for a few minutes, Rachel’s head resting in her hands and Lucy’s eyes darting around her.
“What is all this?” Lucy finally asked.
Rachel made the mistake of groaning again and her head span. “Er—it’s a book, from a long time ago. Some films too.”
“But… what is it?”
“Er—it’s called Philly and Edgar. No, sorry, Edgar and Philly. It’s an adventure series.”
“Who’s it by?” Lucy hadn’t stopped looking around her, in awe and confusion.
“Well, a mixture of writers. It’s been passed around a bit.”
“Well, who are they?”
“Just writers. It doesn’t really matter. Nobody writes them anymore.”
“Why not?”
“They don’t make money anymore. Nobody reads them.”
“Why?”
“I wish I knew the answer, honey, but I don’t know. Maybe because the last writer was so bad… the fans… the fans lost interest.” Rachel felt tears spring to her eyes and her voice wobbled.
“Who’s that one over there?”
Rachel looked up slowly, trying not to send her head spinning again. She looked over at the picture Lucy was pointing at. It was an illustration from one of the older books by Mark Tarazi. Rachel was surprised to see it there. It was a book even more unpopular than Rachel’s last book had been. “That’s Pippin. He was Philly’s nephew. Er… Philly’s the big guy in the striped shirt.”
“And he was a main character?” Lucy asked, not taking her eyes away from Pippin’s portrait. On it a twelve year old Pippin was wearing a green striped shirt that replicated Philly’s own and he was frowning miserably on a beach, though Rachel couldn’t quite remember the name of the beach. She’d been warned by her publisher to never bring up Pippin or the adventure he’d been on when writing her own books so she’d never had the chance to really remember much about him.
“Pippin? No. He was in a couple books but nobody liked him so he was written out of the series.”
“Why? He looks like he’d be fun.”
Rachel grinned slightly, amazed at the smile that had come across her daughter’s face. “Really? Why do you think he looks so fun?” One thing Rachel did remember about Pippin is the complaints from fans about how miserable and grumpy the preteen nephew had been.
“I don’t know. He just looks smart, you know? Like he knows something other people don’t. Or that he’s not happy with the life he’s got. Maybe his Mum dropped him on his Uncle because she didn’t want to deal with him? Or maybe he got kicked out of school so his Uncle was told to teach him? Or maybe his dog died or his parents gave it away? He just looks… interesting, I guess.”
Rachel found the gears in her brain suddenly start working again and she sat up straight. “Do you… Would you like to read the book he’s in? I can find it in my office for us when we get back home? Maybe you’d like to read it to me?”
Lucy turned sharply to her Mum, her eyes glowing with excitement. “Really?” she said happily. “You mean it?”
“I mean, you missed English today. It might be a good idea to enjoy a book and talk about it, eh?”
“Great. Can we go now?”
“Not quite yet. I’ve paid for the museum, let’s look around a bit first, eh?”
Lucy reluctantly agreed and the two of them sped around the rest of the museum as fast as possible, stopping occasionally whilst Rachel caught her breath and fought her dizzy head again.
—————————-
Grizabella Letosso practically skipped down the road as she headed home with a small, padded envelope in her hand. Multiple times she banged into people coming in the other direction but she never paused to apologise or ask if they were okay. She barely heard them in her excitement as they grumbled under their breath or shouted expletives back at her.
Once she knocked into a man carrying an ice-cream cone and, realising that he’d left a white, creamy patch on her black, limited edition Edgar and Philly shirt she stopped briefly to yell expletives back at him before moving on again. The man simply carried on, ignoring her and glaring at her angrily as he dropped his ice-cream into a nearby bin.
It took Grizabella 35 minutes to reach her small house on the edge of town and her keys jingled as she bounced up and down, opening the door. She ran through into the hallway, slammed the door shut and charged upstairs to the top floor. Instead of finding a bedroom, or an office, the top floor was filled with one large open-planned space filled from top to bottom with any kind of Edgar and Philly memorabilia she’d collected so far. There were shelves scatted around the room in a maze formation, not just resting against the walls but littered all over the centre and around every free space that could be found. The only free space was in a ½ metre pathway she’d left to be able to (just about) walk around and look through her collection.
She passed old props from films (including a large anchor that belonged to the film version of one of Edgar and Philly’s boats, which took up an area of the bookcase that could’ve held three shelves in total), multiple first drafts of scripts and stories, some poetry written by Richard Mycraft which predated his work on Edgar and Philly, letters from Ellen Bankroft to Studio Heads and back, and much more. If there was any piece of memorabilia made it could be found whilst she headed to the bookcase at the far side of the room.
She tore open the parcel and bounced on the tip of her toes as she felt the pendant in her hands. It was rusted now but you could just about see the fake, cracked blue gemstone underneath. Grizabella had been looking for this specific piece for years. Sure, she had plenty of different versions of ‘The Jewel of Terror’s Fall’ but this version was in a much better condition just because the jewel was mostly in one piece. Every other version she had was cracked so badly it barely resembled the jewel at all. She smiled as she laid her new acquisition next to the inferior copies on the bookcase. For minutes she just stared at them with pride. She’d been collecting for so long that she’d expected this feeling to have gone by now but somehow she felt the same way each time. She only wished it didn’t come with the itch four days later when she felt herself desperate to go out and find something new. Since Edgar and Philly had stopped being published or made into films there’d been very little new to find and collect.
“Oh, Edgar. Why does it have to be this way? Even the fanfiction boards have gone quiet in the last couple years. It can’t really be the end for you, can it?”
She heard a buzzing from around the corner and rolled her eyes. Did she leave her phone in here by accident again? Why did somebody have to ring right now and knock her out of her reverie? She wandered around to find her phone and found instead a blue book, glowing on the middle shelf. This was new. She didn’t realise she’d found a special edition. She reached up for it and disappeared to the sound of waves crashing heavily onto the shore.
As she crashed onto the deck of a boat, she heard a voice above her. The boat rocked fiercely as the waves grew bigger and bigger. She peeled herself off the floor and looked up at the mysterious voice, her ears ringing.
In front of her a man she recognized smiled his charming grin.
Grizabella frowned. “Edgar?” she yelled. “Wow. I thought your teeth would be whiter!”
Edgar’s smile disappeared as Philly laughed a deep booming laugh, watching with a still very sick David at the table.
The Literary Onion 