The gloves have jumped lightly down from the sill and independently they clamber across the strewn book covers. The pale, tapered fingers caress the titles as if, in this way, they can read.
“I imagine, Sally, that you’ve read lots of those books where people visit magical and mysterious lands. Where they explore. There are lots of books like that, and those are the best ones, aren’t they? That’s what it’ll be like when we go to the North Pole.”
“Are you Santa?” she asks levelly.
“I can be anyone. As you see, I have no face. Put on any you like, but we’re going to the North Pole nonetheless.”
Sally considers this. “Good,” she replies.
“When you grow up,” the gloves say thoughtfully, coming back together and steepling their fingers, “you don’t have to stop having adventures, going into those magical lands. But it’s more difficult. The magical lands are more…ambiguous. Do you know what that means?”
Sally shakes her head, sitting up now.
“It means complicated. They might be one thing or they might be another. You can’t be sure. The land you go into could be bizarrely magical or it could be completely ordinary. And these grown-ups find it harder to get there in order to decide. They have to depend on each other believing that the place they have found is special. If they were alone, as Alice was alone in Wonderland, then Wonderland might never have come about. It might have fallen to pieces in an instant.”
“It does fall to pieces,” Sally complains, “at the end of the story.”
“Exactly. When grown-ups are there, they need two of them and between them they sustain the illusion. Do you see what I mean?
“My story now is about Sam and Tony. They went into a land that might have been magical, it might have been quite ordinary. They never really found out. Before they both went in, their paths had never crossed before. They would never have known each other if they hadn’t set out to explore this particular place.
“This place was a park, like those old-fashioned Victorian parks that are ringed around by iron railings, crowded in by trees and sluggish streams that wend down gentle hills to seep into bronze lakes.
“When Sam and Tony went in, their hands came away from the heavy iron gates smudged with rust, like bloodstains or pollen. When they entered this enchanted parkland, it seemed to them like a wonderful child’s playground, inhabited only by the stillest objects. They went exploring.
“What looked from outside the railings like a perfectly ordinary old park, inside proved to be stuffed with wonders. As they passed, the flowerbeds shook out and displayed the most exotic hothouse flowers, densely whorled and brilliant heads which nodded and followed their progress. In the trees, gaudily painted banners were stretched out with slogans printed in archaic languages. Fireworks speared the sky and hung there all afternoon.
“A rickety wooden bridge, bright scarlet, led them to the blue castle in the centre of the park. From a distance it had looked like a castle, a monument, but as they entered through a head-high number six and climbed inside, up the staircase of moving clockwork parts, they saw it was really a giant alarm clock. Here within, the metal building shuddered with ticks like heartbeats, passing inexorably towards the moment the bells would ring, as if alert to intruders.
“From the top of the clock, sitting on top of the shiny gold domes of its twin bells, Tony and Sam looked down on the spread extent of their discovered land.
“It stretched in five vast directions: four branches of solid, intricate geography leading downwards from the clock in the centre, and one promontory to its north. This northern realm bore two limpid ponds, open to the sky. Tony left Sam for a while, climbed down the clockface, and headed off up to this realm.
“All that night he roamed labyrinths of golden brick, trying to find those lakes. The brick was real gold, oily and soft to the touch. Sometimes he would meet dead ends; occasionally he came to a small, neat garden where the flowers never looked quite real. They were drawn with the expert haste of a Chinese watercolour; the pink flowers a single broad stroke, branches a twist of black.
“At last Tony found one brown, oval lake. He shielded his eyes and looked to see if Sam was still watching from the safety of the alarm-clock monument, and she wasn’t. She had gone to discover things on her own. Quickly Tony undressed and slipped into the pool. It was cold but, as he swam, the viscous water began to warm and support him. It was like the Dead Sea, it kept him buoyant.
“Elsewhere Sam was leaving the clock at the centre and then she was running through a field of ornate, abandoned, pale blue statues. A horse twisted its marble wings back, rearing and defending itself against the onslaught of a frozen gryphon. Angels and saints watched solemnly from atop wonky pedestals; some lay crashed sideways in the dust. Tearing the length of this cemetery of icons, Sally realised none could harm her, but she never stopped for breath till she reached a kidney-shaped field of poppies.
“At the other side, drowsy and careless, she reached the orchard she had seen from afar. The air was rank with overripeness, but Sam loved the smell and the squash underfoot of the flesh of fallen, wasted peaches. In the shaded, autumnal alleyways the colours were high; she ate the fruit and smeared herself in juices. This kind of thing often goes on in these stories.
“In their separate ways, Tony and Sam had decided that they would both be happy to stay in this place. They roamed and ran wild
