“Oh,” says the doll named Prim. She’s lying flat on her stomach now; she rests her elbows on Harriet’s crossed knees for a moment. “I wouldn’t feel too bad about it, Mother-of-Perdita. Didn’t you say the mercy leaf could only be taken in small doses when eaten raw? I think it’s safe to assume Simple Simon was being extra nice so Margot would make him more mercy-leaf gingerbread. She probably sensed the change in motive and was hating that more than she was hating him.”
“Hmmm . . . thank you, Prim,” Harriet says. They’re speaking very slowly, so that Perdita can understand. “A change in motive. I hadn’t considered it in that light. I think it was a mixture. He was definitely addicted. Definitely. At his most desperate he got . . . ah, he just troubled us. He’d emote. Pathos, wrath. It wasn’t acting. Acting isn’t coercive in that way, doesn’t probe or test your response, doesn’t cost you anything if you don’t believe it. This was more like lying, but with affect instead of words. There were these cascades of emotion we had to respond to at once, and it all looked and sounded like the end of his world and ours, until you caught this icy strategy in the way he fine-tuned his tone, working out what pitch to speak at. And it all fell apart once the objective had been reached. He’d stop mid-sob and stuff the gingerbread in. He wasn’t the only one. The things some of the Coopers tried! Margot overlooked most of that, but Dad . . . I was there . . . she’d wipe her hands after touching anything he’d touched. He’d look at me to see if I’d seen, and I’d run over and try to distract him. Arm wrestling, or ‘Guess What’s in My Pocket?’—usually nothing. Or if it was hot, I’d fan him with the straw fan. Otherwise I’d play hairdresser and style him until he looked a fright. He’d always let me, and then he’d style my hair too, and we’d go out and put on a sunset fashion show for the crickets and the cicadas. I swear they went quiet when we started parading up and down. I’m saying that whatever else was fake, the kindness and the wanting us to stay together wasn’t. I don’t know why you need to know that, but you do . . .”
“You were on Margot’s side, though,” says Prim.
“Was I?!”
“Unquestionably. All you’re demonstrating is that you know it was wrong to take sides, or that you feel bad for not taking his side.”
Perdita scrambles across the bed, grabs a notepad and pen, and writes at length. Her hieroglyphs are passed around for analysis, but nobody can read them.
Harriet says: “I think it was more like what Sago was saying about being a figment of someone else’s imagination. I thought I was part of her story and not part of his, and there didn’t seem to be anything I could do about it.”
Perdita jabs a finger at the notepad as if to say, That’s what I wrote. She has firsthand experience of this, having asked who her father is to no avail.
But Prim says: “Come off it—you liked Margot best. You can’t fool dolls, you know. Anyway, I probably won’t interrupt anymore.”
“Probably,” says Lollipop.
By the age of fourteen, Harriet Lee had become presentable enough to pin a few hopes on. Margot wrote a letter to Zahir Leveque. It was an “I know you’ve disowned me, but you might be interested to hear that I have a son” letter. Margot was an only child, and her father was indeed interested to hear that she’d had a son. He’d long been preoccupied with the question of an heir and was tormented by the notion of some unworthy person getting their hands on his money after his death. Zahir Leveque was the founder of a numbers game with cash prizes beyond most Druhástranians’ wildest dreams and rules nobody understood. You laid a wager not just on winning numbers but on a winning number of numbers. There could be three numbers, or there could be five, or seven. There were a few other numbers games in operation, but Zahir Leveque’s appealed to hard-working, law-abiding, but nonetheless impoverished stoics. Whether they won or not, the outcome of this game confirmed what they’d already suspected: The finer things in life aren’t earned by working around the clock and doing everything you can to uphold the law. We’re given to understand that such activities ought to be enough to do the trick, but they’re not. You’ve got to be lucky too. Really, really lucky. This lesson was all the numbers-game stoics ever got from their ticket purchases; the winner was always a company employee who returned 90 percent of the cash prize the day after being publicly awarded it. The only Druhástranian numbers game that operated with integrity was the one that hardly anyone played because the tickets cost twice as much as the ones for Zahir Leveque’s game. Plus newspapers and the other numbers-game magnates had decided to single out the honest game as the one that was rigged. This “rigged” game was fun to play, though—since the media wouldn’t run the winning numbers, the company had to use alternative methods to announce them; this meant that players had to seek out clues all around them. Any string of nine numbers written on a wall or a pavement could correspond to the ticket you were carrying around that week. From time to time the company hired a jet to write the numbers in the sky, so on Thursday, winning-number day, ticket holders always looked up at frequent intervals so as not to miss anything. The majority of players who won that “rigged” prize never found out that they had. Other players were winners for five minutes, twenty, however long it took to run or take the bus to the nearest claims office, where they’d find out they were two weeks too late or that the number that matched the ticket was somebody’s phone number and nothing to do with the prize at all. Yet the memory of that cartwheeling elation tended to permanently beglitter the players’ outlook. They took other chances. Those who dialed the phone numbers they’d thought were winning sequences found commiseration on the other end, or a work lead for a jobless friend of theirs, or some pressing dilemma the caller could only resolve by drawing on an almost forgotten ability of theirs . . . things like that. The players are so few and far apart that they seldom meet, but when they do, they ask each other who or what is really behind the “rigged” numbers game. Even the official winners don’t believe redistribution of cash is the game’s true purpose.
We’re sparing a lot more thought for the “rigged” game than Zahir Leveque did. He’d played it once, won big, and immediately disengaged from anything that didn’t help his money grow. This made him so rich he couldn’t believe how rich he was. He kept calling his bank and listening to the balances for all his accounts with a dreamy look on his face. Now if only he could share the joys of financial apotheosis with someone truly appreciative, someone who’d build on his accomplishments. Policymaking without popular mandate or even public awareness—that gave Z. L. a buzz, as did the certainty that any complaints made against him to the police would be mislaid, and that journalists might yap as much as they pleased but his name would never be mentioned in an unfavorable context in any law court in the country. His other favorite perk was the way the president rushed to return his calls if she missed them. All this would go to waste unless an appropriate heir could be found. He’d visited a lot of psychics back when he was just another lottery player, and most of their predictions clashed, but they’d all told him his lucky number was 1. This subliminally influenced his abandonment of any endeavor that wasn’t immediately embraced as a success. Belief that his fortune was guided by the number 1 was also a source, perhaps the source, of Zahir Leveque’s sneaking suspicion that all he did would die with him.
Mr. Leveque sent train fare and told Margot to bring her son over to the mansion so he could have a look. Margot assumed that her father would excuse her lie once grandfatherly feelings kicked in. Grandfatherly feelings didn’t kick in. Harriet Lee looked up, Zahir Leveque looked down, and Z. L. saw no heir. Harriet curtsied. An amusingly zealous greeting, a cross between a curtsy and a bow, really—he’d never seen anybody curtsy so that their forehead touched the ground. But that was how the girl curtsied, and then she prattled on topics her mother must have coached her on. She asked him if he had hobbies.
No. Do you?