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‘Lami!’
With a start, Lami rouses from the storybook over which she’s been hunkered. She hadn’t realised that Rai was finally done with her detention, ready for an afternoon of play.
And some homework, but mainly play.
Lami grimaces at the pain shooting from her leg which had fallen asleep, being trapped under her for so long. It’ll soon pass, the numbness, but the slowly emerging pins and needles aren’t the nicest. Her neck and shoulders are also all stiff and sore, but that’ll disappear, as usual.
Sunlight dapples over the ground around her, and she realises the schoolyard is empty. Rai-Rai stands at the door, holding open the large door with its swirling patterns of white metal and light-grey stone.
‘Coming!’
Lami places the book in her rucksack, careful not to bend any pages or scuff the corners. She got it for her birthday last week and it is filled with the most wonderful pictures of witches and princesses and trees.
And all the colours! There are blue lakes and green forests and grey, towering mountains where purple dragons live, guarding glittering, golden treasures. It’s a beautiful book, and she’s so happy she could die.
Her bag slaps against her back in rhythm with her steps as she hurries over the yard, the white gravel shimmering in the afternoon sun.
She can’t wait to go home and continue reading her book!
It’s going to be fun to go to Rai’s home and play, she has so many toys and treasures that she sometimes even forgets about them and just says ‘Oh, I forgot about that,’ if Lami asks her about a doll she found underneath the little sofa in her play room.
But Lami has a new book and she can read almost a whole page now and she can’t wait to go home and read with mother. Or maybe Law can help her; there was a really difficult word that she didn’t know how to say or what it meant. Even Rai hadn’t known, and she knows everything because her nanny knows everything and will tell her everything she wants to know. And if her nanny doesn’t know, then her governess knows for sure, so Lami will learn a new word today!
But now she sees the way Rai is tapping her foot, the leather sole doing a little rap-tap-tap against the crunching gravel and she speeds up, knowing when her friend gets impatient.
‘Rai,’ she says as she catches up and catches her breath, ‘I have a question about a word.’
‘I already told you,’ Rai says with an impatient little moue, ‘I don’t know what “three-chair-us” means.’
‘No,’ says Lami around a cough, feeling the re-as-sur-ing weight of the book against her sweaty back. The dusty air tickles her throat as the girls slip out through the gate and start down the street towards Rai’s house. ‘I wrote that down. I’ll ask Law later, he’ll know.’ Rai’s eyes light up at the mention of her brother and Lami hurries on before they get stuck on talking about him when there’s so many more interesting things to talk about in the world. ‘I found a new word! En-chimp-ted.’
Rai’s frowns and she looks a lot like a serious hedgehog with her wild curls.
‘En-chimp-ted? Does it have something to do with monkeys?’
‘I don’t think so. I think it was…’ now it’s Lami’s turn to frown as she tries to remember the picture next to the weird word. There had been sparkles and a wand… ‘I think it had to do with magic? There was a witch and you know they are a witch because they had a broomstick, all made out from a wooden big stick and a lot of smaller sticks that were all brushy, and she also had a black cat, so she had to be a witch. But there were no monkeys.’
‘Because a chimp-an-zee is a monkey, so it could be a special monkey,’ Rai suggests, although she looks a bit uncertain. But then she loses interest and starts skipping over the cracks in the pavement because ‘that brings bad luck’.
Rai knows so much, but there were no monkeys in the picture. Lami was sure of that.
‘Maybe,’ she allows guardedly.
Rai is a month older than Lami and knows almost everything. She knows the closest islands and the names of all the Sisters in the church, and she even knows in which order those silly Germa-enemies should be named, and Lami just knows she learnt it so she could impress Law who is ob-ses-sed with those comics.
But now Rai is just another six-year old girl, skipping along the pavement, her grey school jumper dark against the white stones laid out in neat rows, one long, the next short, then long again, then short again. She jumps over the cracks between them like a ballerina and Lami knows she’s showing off a bit, because that’s what Rai is like sometimes, and that she learned to tip-toe like that at her dance lessons that only Rai and Esther and the twins Maria and Marina can go to, because they live all around the prettiest park in town.
Unlike the other parks, where all the trees and flowers are white, this park has green trees and green grass. The park close to Lami’s house just has boring stone statues and a fountain, but here the green trees are so pretty against the white, elegant houses surrounding the park.
Although many of the houses here aren’t really white-white, not like her house or the other houses in town. They are just painted white; many of the houses around the square are made of wood and the white paint doesn’t have the same shim-mer-ing sparkle that the stone houses the rest of them live in. To be honest, Lami thinks they look a bit boring. Maybe that’s why Rai and the others can go to dance lessons? Because they are sad that they don’t live in sparkly houses like the rest of their friends?
Lami is just a bit jeal-ous because she also wants to learn to dance like a ballerina. But she goes to art class when the others have dance, so she couldn’t go even if she was allowed to.
When Rai is a few jumps ahead, Lami also skips across a huge crack and lands perfectly in the middle of the opposite stone.
Her smile is wide as the street, as she runs after her friend.
The afternoon passes in a flurry of homework, although Rai’s governess helps them with the tricky questions on ge-og-ra-phy and tra-de rou-tes. Neither of them knew what tra-de rou-tes were, and the governess, a kindly lady called Emma, had huffed in justified indignation and muttered something about them being ‘too young for all that’.
But Lami and Rai aren’t too young for anything, they are almost seven!
And then there had been snacks, and a game, and now…
‘Rai?’
But as Lami had already guessed, Rai was fast asleep.
She looks peaceful, curled up like a kitten on the colourful rug in front of the fireplace in her room. Around her lies the spoils of her game; wooden blocks with letters on them, a half set-up game board that she had gotten bored of before they started the game, and a small horse that you could drag behind you on a string, rolling merrily along on small wheels that were so much lighter than any stone wheels Lami had at home.
She was always very happy when Rai invited her to play at her home.
Rai’s house is so unlike Lami’s it’s weird. There’s potted plants all around and everything smells like earth and water and growing greenery. There’s even a small court-yard with a pool, edged in grey slates of stone unlike anything Lami has seen before. There’s a whole forest surrounding the pool, with trees taller than even her father wearing a really tall hat, and all the doors are wooden and the windowsills are a deep, rich ca-ra-mel colour with little darker lines that Rai says are something called ‘growth rings’, but they aren’t rings, really, just lines in the wood.
And it’s so loud here. The floors creak and the doors slam and the windows rattle, unlike anything back at home, where the stone tiling is neat and usually hidden under thick rugs. At home, the doors are softened with felt around the frame so that the stone door doesn’t echo when it slams shut, and the windows aren’t really for opening. There’s ven-ti-la-tion ducks for that although Lami never understood where the ducks lived; to her, it only looked like a small round pipe connecting the outside to the inside. There was no room for a duck, but maybe a small pigeon or a sparrow.
It’s like being in one of her storybooks, with their endless forests and small houses that are made of wood and have thatched roofs. It’s not at all like Law’s stupid picture books, which just take place in the same sort of marine houses that they have here, squatting in the harbour. Law says that Sora goes all over the seas and that the story isn’t set in Flevance, and sometimes the heroes go to large, looming castles built on swimming Den Den Mushis to fight Germa 66. But all the marine houses have the same office where some captain is telling Sora ‘Well done!’ at the end of the chapter, so to Lami, they are all one and the same.
But Rai’s house is like a fairy tale, with velvet curtains and wooden benches and it smells really, really good.
She knows she should nap like Rai, that she’ll be too tired later if she doesn’t, but she just can’t give up the chance to explore a bit by herself. She’s been here many times before, but there’s always a new trinket from some faraway land to admire, or sometimes even an exotic animal, something never seen in Flevance before. She doesn’t really know what Rai’s parents do, except look el-eg-ant and imp-osing in their tallness and their fine jewels, but she thinks her mother is an explorer or adventurer of some sort. She’s gone every now and then, and when she gets back, she brings Rai presents and stories from the seas.
She can already feel the first touches of tiredness, but it comes every day and it’s not every day she’s at Rai’s house. So for today, she won’t nap, but instead she’ll be like Rai’s mother and explore.
In a side-room she finally finds what she’s been looking for.
Well, she hadn’t been looking for anything in particular, but it is something, and it is something Rai needs to see as well.
On a side-board in the side-room, stands a beautiful wooden box, carved and decorated with lighter woods that form flowing shapes and curled patterns. It has a little lock on, but when she just tries to see if it might be open, it does so without protest and a little ballerina jumps out on a tiny metal spring, accompanied by a false note.
Lami slams the lid shut.
But then curiosity takes over and she raises the lid again, carefully this time. The ballerina rises more slowly now, constrained by the lid, but when the lid opens fully she stands tall and proud in her thumb-high glory, with a little dress made of gossamer-like tulle that stands out to the sides.
There’s a key on the side of the box, and when Lami turns it, the box starts to sing, and that’s when she realises she has to show this to Rai.
When she closes the lid, she notices the paper underneath the box. It’s nothing special at first, just a map, but then she recognises the name of a street, and she realises it’s her city.
Red crosses dot the map, some with numbers above or beside them. It almost looks like a pirate’s map, but there’s not just one treasure spot marked with an X, but se-ve-ral. There’s one on the school, and one on the hospital, and one on the church, and soon she’s lost count of how many crosses there are.
She leaves the things be, and runs back to Rai’s room, through darkening hallways, too excited to quiet down, even though her steps make the floorboards sing.
When she’s finally back at Rai’s room she’s out of breath and the familiar tightness squeezes her chest for a moment. But then she’s shaking Rai, taking care not to jostle her too much.
‘Rai! Wake up, I have something amazing to show you!’
Rai blinks awake. Her voice is still drowsy from sleep as she sits up and stretches, the question heavy in her tone, ‘Lami?’
‘Come and see! I found a treasure!’
At the word treasure Rai shoots up and the girls are off, running back over singing floors and past panelled walls.
When they finally reach the little side-room, Lami shows her the side-table excitedly. ‘Look!’ She points to the map. ‘Do you know what sort of treasure this map is about? There’s a lot of crosses, so it must be a lot of treasure!’
‘I don’t know.’ Rai frowns in thought. ‘I think I saw mother and father talking about it the other day, before mother left for her latest trip.’ She falls silent. ‘I think it was the night before last,’ and then she shrugs, letting the mystery fall to the side, ‘but I wanted some milk before bed, so they put it away and gave me some cookies as well.’
‘You get cookies before bed?’ Lami is awed, and a bit jealous.
‘Mother and father usually never gives me any, because they can be mean, but sometimes they do.’
However much she wants to hear more about nighttime cookies, the map is still poking at Lami’s curiosity. ‘Do you know what sort of map this could be? There’s some numbers next to them, but I don’t know what that means.’
‘It says 80 here, and 55 and 64 over there…’
The girls fall silent, poring over the map. But nothing em-er-ges from the paper and finally patience runs thin.
‘This can’t be the treasure!’ Rai stands, arms akimbo and a frown on her face, annoyed at the lack of real treasure. ‘I know you wouldn’t use the T word for just a map.’
‘I almost forgot!’ In her excitement Lami completely forgot about the real treasure. ‘The map was so like a pirate map, but look at this,’ she continues, pointing at the wooden box on the side. It’s even prettier now that the lights are on, all soft red tones and the golden clasp shimmering.
‘What is it?’ Rai asks, all impatience vanishing and replaced with curiosity.
‘Look at what it can do!’ Lami is careful when she opens the lid so the little ballerina doesn’t spring up again. There’s still some life left in it from the last time, since a soft, tinkling melody fills the air as the ballerina begins to spin on her little stage, arms held aloft.
Rai gasps and leans in closer, eyes wide with wonder. ‘It’s just like when we dance in class! We spin just like that!’
‘Wow!’ Lami breathes, eyes riveted on the slowly spinning figurine. Maybe she needs to ask father again if she can join the dance group, because if she could dance like that…
The girls watch in fascinated silence as the little figure spins, her pirouette slowing down only when the key stops. But they wind her up again and again, just to hear the sweet music and see the little dancer pirouette on and on.
Then Rai decides to teach Lami to do a pirouette, and it goes reasonably well until she bumps into the table and almost sends the little box flying. The girls share an alarmed glance before righting the box and pile of papers it stood on and scampering out. But then they realise that there might be more treasures around, and they become treasure hunters.
An hour later, they have changed into explorers, mapping out unknown waters all around Flevance and beyond.
‘Let’s go to the Grand Line!’ Lami jumps from the sofa, arms waving as she tries to hoist the sail at the same time as she’s steering the ship. There’s a tightness in her chest, but that’s probably from climbing in her school uniform; it’s getting too small and she really has to be careful with it. Mother said it might rip, and Lami has been ignoring the small tearing sound she heard when she jumped up on the sofa in the first place.
Rai lowers the paper tube that she’s been using to keep an eye on the horizon for sea kings and marines. ‘Do we have to? Can’t we stay in the North Blue for once?’ Her voice turns wheedling and Lami just knows she’ll soon demand they change games. Probably to something with princesses and castles, and fine, Lami likes those games as well, but right now they are sailing the six seas! There’s no room for a princess on a pirate ship, everyone knows that!
‘Can we just go over Reverse Mountain?’ she tries. If she can just get Rai there, then they can combine the games with the princes and princesses of Alabasta. ‘We can see if we find our way to Dressrosa, or even all the way to Alabasta!’
Rai coughs a neat little cough, contained in the crook of her elbow just like their teachers tell them to, but Lami can see the interest shining in her eyes.
‘Fine,’ she says with the remnants of a sulk edging her voice. ‘But once we get there, I want to go to Alabasta and be the princess!’
Lami has to make this really worth it, or Rai will be cross with her for the rest of the week.
‘Let’s go!’
And with that, the adventure is on.
Later, they are pushing their way through the lush jungle in the Torino Kingdom, which in this reality are the clothes in the clothes room off the entrance-hall, and they are looking for the big en-count-er: an undiscovered tribe!
Lami has been wondering about that, since surely the tribe knows where it is, so how can it be undiscovered? But Law told her to shut up and stop pestering him when he was doing his homework, so she never had the chance to ask about that.
Finding the barest of traces to follow in the closet (an overcoat with a bunch of fresh flowers in its pocket! A clue! Rai’s father must have a guest!), the girls continue their trek. The house is shrouded in darkness by now, but a sliver of light accompanied by the faintest of sounds catches their attention and they turn towards the dining room door.
Soft voices creep out through the open door crack as the girls tiptoe their way closer and closer, trying to pinpoint where the tribe (Rai’s father and his guests) are. Lami scrunches her nose at a small itch crawling across it, while she tries making herself as small and silent as possible to be able to creep as close as possible to their find.
‘—the increase in respiratory illnesses these last few months—’ Rai’s father says, and Lami doesn’t like the way his whole voice sounds sad and almost a bit afraid.
‘I’ve noticed the same,’ a familiar voice replies and Lami’s ears prick up. It’s her father’s voice!
But she and Rai raise their fingers to their lips as one and nod de-si-si-vley; they have a mission to find the lost tribe and they are not going to fail it.
‘I have to be honest; this is something completely new,’ Lami’s father says. But now Lami’s nose is really itching and she can feel it spreading to the top of her cheeks. Rai is shooting her alarmed looks and she just knows that she won’t be able to kill the sneeze. There’s a clink of glassware, like he’s just taken a drink of something, before he continues, ‘What I said represents our current knowledge, but the biggest problem is that we haven’t identified how it transmits.’
Rai’s father says a word that Lami knows Law got in trouble for, and she and Rai both clasp their hands to their mouths and look at each other, eyes wide in glee. ‘There’s going to be massive supply chain issues,’ Rai’s father continues and his voice is still weighed by that same sadness as before. ‘And I don’t know where we’ll find all the healthcare workers needed.’
Lami’s nose itches worse than ever, but she tries to ignore it as her father laughs and says, ‘Luckily we have understanding neighbours, I’m sure they’ll help us. And, besides—’
The itching becomes too much, and Lami suffocates the sneeze in the crook of her arm. But she wasn’t careful enough and the grown-up voices fall silent.
‘Ezoraichou?’ Rai’s fathers voice comes, and Rai winces at the use of her full name. But the girls both know the game is over, and they step into the room, giving the grown ups a proper bow.
‘Hello, Rai-chan,’ Lami’s father says, ‘Hello, Lami.’
The two men are standing at the large dining table that has played the part of both cavern, prison and ship’s hull in their previous games.
‘Out on an adventure?’ Lami’s father asks them good-naturedly. ‘Did you find anything interesting?’
When Lami’s father scoops her up for a quick hug, she sees the same map that she and Rai found before, with all the treasure-marking crosses on.
‘We almost found a lost tribe,’ Rai says proudly. She has climbed up on a chair and is peering down on the papers on the table as well. Lami follows suit, the chair’s cushioning soft beneath her feet. ‘And we found that treasure map!’
Rai points to the map of the town, the same one that Lami noticed.
Rai’s father picks up the papers, tidying them up and giving them to Lami’s father. ‘It’s not a treasure map, Rai, but what a good guess! It was the crosses, right?’
‘Yes! But then we started exploring for more treasure upstairs, and then—’ Rai launches into an explanation of their exploits as her father nods along, small smile barely visible beneath his bushy moustache.
‘Time to go home, darling,’ Lami’s father tells her softly, sliding the sheaf of papers into his leather bag and picking up his hat from the chair.
‘We’ll be off then,’ he says louder and nods to Rai’s father as the pair start making their way.
‘Are you sure you won’t reconsider?’ Rai’s father asks. ‘We could really do with a man of your calibre on the team.’
Lami’s father just laughs, clasping the other man’s shoulder as they say their goodbyes in the vestibule, other hand already gripping Lami’s backpack which Emma at some point brought down from Rai’s room. ‘I’m afraid you have my answer. Too much to do here, too little time.’
The older man smiled an understanding little smile as he lifted Rai up in his arms, letting her grab at his lapel pins. ‘You could get all the time and resources you need as our research director, you know.’
Lami’s stomach grumbled its reminder and she started tugging at her fathers hand. He sent her a small patience-whispering smile from high above but then the fathers shook hands and they were finally on their way home.
The door shut behind them, leaving them alone in the calm evening, painted gold by the setting sun.
Lami skips along, hand in her father’s much larger one. He carried her backpack when she told him, with the most serious face she could muster, that she was so tired, and she had no energy left at all, and her hands were all too numb to carry the bag, he knows how they get in the evening, and now he’s listening to her tell all about what she and Rai had done during the day.
The sun is setting, painting all the white stone buildings a warm golden yellow edged with the first brushes of indigo. The mi-ne-rals in the polished stone sparkle and shimmer like fairy dust with every step they take and Lami does a little twirl, just to take in all the beautiful houses and streets all around.
A cough tickles its way out from beneath her rib cage and her father stops to let her catch her breath.
‘Rai’s house smells so good! And the air feels much warmer and lighter than at home.’ She looks up at her father with the face she uses when she wants ice cream before dinner; the one she knows will make him laugh and give in. ‘Can we also live in a house with wooden floors and a garden with a pond?’
Her father just laughs and ruffles her hair, even though he knows how much she dislikes it. He ignores her pout as she tries to straighten out her pigtails. ‘I think you’ll have to find new parents, with a lot more in salary to afford a wooden house.’
‘Is it like when you said I couldn’t get a new dress just because Esther got one and then Maria and Marina got dresses that were even prettier and matching, and they asked what sort of dress I would get?’
Her father smiles a smile tinged with the golden light of a perfect Flevish sunset. ‘Something like that.’
‘Can you get a bigger sa-la-ry?’ Lami asks, trying out the new word for size. It’s funny with its three syllables, almost like salad, but with some rye bread on the side. ‘Then we could live in a house like Rai’s.’
Her father hums, taking her hand as they walk down the street. ‘We’ll see, once this recent wave of sick people eases up. But don’t get your hopes up; me and your mother both like our jobs, and we are comfortable as is.’
‘Even if we could live in a wooden house, you wouldn’t want to leave the hospital?’
‘Even then.’
Lami falls silent, thinking about the count-less in-jus-tic-es in the world. Like that she can’t live in a nice-smelling house with floors that sing like nightingales.
But then she sees the small hill and the neat terraced houses lining it, and soon she’ll be home and can tell Law all about her adventures today. And maybe mother too, but Law has to hear about the new island they found in Rai’s wardrobe, all ice and with real trees but frozen!
The tiredness which has been creeping up on her the whole day, as it usually does, finally reaches her head and so Lami stretches up her arms in silent supplication and says, in the smallest voice she can muster, ‘Dad?’
He just huffs a good-natured huff, mutters something about his lazy children, hoists her bag onto his own back and picks her up.
Lami wraps her arms around his neck and leans against his shoulder. It’s slightly uncomfortable, as it moves up and down as he walks, but it’s fine, really.
The world is slightly different from up here. The ground is further away and more of the things in the shuttered shop windows are visible. They stroll past the bookshop, with its abundance of brightly coloured folders on display, and her father gives a wave to the owner of the milliners next door, who is just locking up, hiding away her fabrics and ribbons. The marketplace is silent, not even the slightest speck of old vegetables left and Lami feels a flash of pride at the neatness of Flevance; the place where everything is so clean and white and beautiful, where even the messy marketplace gets scrubbed up after the trading is done.
But one day.
Lami watches the world stroll by, one huge step at a time. The streets get narrower and her father huffs and puffs a bit when he climbs the small hill up to the quarters where they live, just next to the hospital where both he and mother work, and she clings to him a bit tighter in the setting sun so as not to fall.
One day she will live in a house like Rai’s. With wooden floors and wooden doors. She’ll have proper stone walls, of course, because they sparkle and are much nicer to look at than whitewash, and even though Rai has carpets and curtains her house always feels a bit more draughty than Lami’s.
But it’s still warm in a way hers isn’t. She can’t pinpoint what it is, but there’s something almost alive in Rai’s house that hers doesn’t have. A lingering warmth from the sun that once kissed the trees, maybe.
Then they are at home and mother is standing framed by the kitchen window, busy pointing something out to Law in a book Lami just knows he has propped up on the kitchen table, even though she can’t see over the windowsill and they all know that he shouldn’t read there.
When she runs in front of her father, laughing through a small cough, she knows that one day, she’ll live in a house with wood.
And warmth.