The boy drank from the glass and looked out over the landscape below. From the balcony where he was sitting, he could see the orange grove and the peach orchard, a line of cherry trees in blossom between them. The land around the house was almost always beautiful in spring, especially after the morning’s deluge had embarrassed it enough to blush out its full colours.
Two of the house’s monkeys were flying in a saucepan suspended from a hot air balloon. Pumping little plumes of heat out from the rusty machinery, they attempted to rise over the tree line in order to float out to the shores of the lake. Out on the Aegean-blue lake one of the older monkeys was putting the finishing touches to the underwater cathedral, the weather vane and the tip of the steeple just visible over the afternoon tide waters.
The boy laughed as he cast the divination sticks out over the table in front of him. They landed and bounced along the blue baize, spelling out the near future for the sake of spelling something. The sticks told the boy that the balloon would manage to fly over the grove quite successfully, only to land and burst on the tip of the steeple. The weather vane would be bent out of shape but nobody would fix it, the churchbuilder’s muse for such things having run dry at the incident. The balloon would be reparable and none of the monkeys would hurt anything besides their prides. It would be comic, but not tragic. This pleased the boy. It would be nice to be able to enjoy the amusement of the disaster as it occurred without having to worry about injury.
He was fond of his life in the big house by the sea, tending the fruit trees and watching the monkeys at play. He remembered how formal they had attempted to be when he first arrived and smiled at the memory of their comical passes at verbosity and etiquette. He wondered momentarily at their memories of his own attempts at social norms and pondered the strange impulse to conformity amongst strangers, the ritualised demarcations of access and passage that led finally to the abolition of pretence.
He finished the juice in the glass and set it down onto the tabletop, gathered up the divination sticks into a bundle and slipped them back into his infinite pockets. The balloon dipped down behind the tree line before rising up unsteadily and drifting towards the underwater cathedral. He was about to fish out his telescope for a better view of the impending fiasco when the great doorbell rang, announcing an unexpected guest. None of the house monkeys had mentioned anything about a visitor that day, and so it was with great curiosity that he left the balcony and entered the house to answer the door. Still unsure of the reality of the grand velvet staircase, he chose to descend to the ground floor in the dumb waiter. He climbed onto the cramped platform and lowered himself by means of pulling on the ropes and letting them slip gently through his hands. Upon reaching his destination, he climbed out and retrieved a monocle and cane walking stick from his pockets. Considering his earlier musings on formality and pretension, the gesture seemed absurd but he desired a cultivated entrance. After all, he had no clue as to the nature of his mysterious caller and politeness permitted no time for any magical enquiry. In a push, wizardry could always be substituted for by irrelevant practicalities. In many ways, they were often one as the other.
The interior of the house was cool by day. The French windows were splayed open in the library and a poppy-scented breeze was blowing across the herd of miniature elephants who had wandered into the hallway from their usual haunts around the statue garden. He walked around them carefully and stepped into the porch. The windows of the porch were stained ruby and red and the whole area was flooded with a mutineer’s glow, the porcelain wind chimes clinking like the nerves of a rake.
He opened the door without ceremony. And there she was.

She looked at the boy standing in the porch, marooned in the crimson light. He looked shorter than she had imagined, but the walking cane he brandished gave him height through flamboyance. His face was hard to see, what with the dazzle from the monocle, but she could tell that he was smiling. She had not expected that. In the gap between the man she had anticipated and the boy who now stood before her was a silence as sturdy as ten galleons.
The only thing that concurred with her expectations was the legendary coat that he wore. She knew it to be mostly white but it was coloured orange by the light of the stained glass, and fluffy as if angora. There was an ebony tinge of shadows around the two side pockets, the two little black holes stolen from the sky and sewn into the lining by the coat’s first owner, the first Thief of the Universe. As the stories told, each successor to the title inherited the coat through merit of stealing it from the back of its last owner, as it had been done so for a thousand years. The pockets were infinite, holding entire worlds of lost and misappropriated properties. To possess them was both the greatest joy and the greatest curse for none of the Thieves had possessed both the coat and true love simultaneously.
Her journey to the house had been difficult, as the boy had stolen the road that led to it and pocketed any map or memory of there ever having been one. The reality of the house was unassured and she knew it to be a most perilous place to travel to, but she had good reason and good enough sense about her. She could see, behind the boy, what appeared to be a grand and sweeping staircase whose foundations were cast entirely out of velvet, upon which a number of novelty-sized elephants were wandering. A few glass eyes drifted like bubbles around their heads before floating away on a breeze of jasmine. She was about to attempt her ready-made speech when the boy gasped at his pocket watch and held out a finger to silence her. She became aware of a severe tranquillity. His eyes and ears craned to the side slightly, listening out. She frowned, unwitted. Suddenly the peace was broken by a furious cacophony from behind the house. Saucepans clanged into steeples, balloons burst and monkeys started shrieking at each other. The boy dropped his finger, bowed and invited her inside for tea.

The dining room was flooded with water and they had to drift about in inflatable rings, waiting for the table to bob past them again. They ate vast amounts of fruit and drank lemonade from goblets that dipped and revolved in the regular waves, listening to the gurgling music on a drowning gramophone. They talked of nothing and enjoyed each other’s company in the evening sunset. When the feast was over, they dried off and changed into dressing gowns that had been warmed upon a glass radiator. She took his arm and led him out into the garden where they sat on armchairs and watched the northern lights. The dizzy turquoise fireclaps threw off sheets of colour, each more brilliant than the last. A moon boat sank down from the stars and settled amongst the corral in the bay to share its booty of dreams with the sleeping reef. The garden shuddered and sighed with the tremendous delirium of the day’s elastic dusk and the girl settled back into the chair, her hand lolling out into his. The boy felt a jolt of something pass between them but it thudded into a void where lavish feelings ought to live. Words without translation were encoded into her eyes and strung like feral beads throughout her hair. He could not tell what anything meant. Out on the lake a monkey was night fishing off the prow of the moon boat. He cast out the line and his hook landed where a bite ought to live, but his hands were denied even the hint of a tug.
The boy took a roll of undeveloped camera film from his pocket and turned it over in his fingers for a while. Eventually he spoke.

When, in the morning, he awoke, she was gone and she had taken the coat. He was no longer the Thief of the Universe, he knew it to his bones. The day was cold as he dressed and walked out into the orchard, the fresh dew crunching between his toes as the first autumnal frost drew in. She had stolen the summer before she left, as well as the remainder of spring, but as he inspected the fruitless orchard, this did not trouble him. He wondered how the new row of pear trees would bare the season’s sudden change and realised that the coat had contained all of his divinatory tools. The talking sticks, the rune stones, the marbles, the pocket mirror with it’s bound familiar, the un-sided dice, the I Ching. All were gone but this did not trouble him. He sat on the dewy armchair and thought back to their conversation of the night before to attempt a clue as to her nature and her current course, but she had stolen the words they had exchanged and the air about him was left thin and sparse. This did not trouble him.
Having worn the coat for an endless cycle, he had never known the burning scratch of love and was now pushed to recognise it, although it had consumed him. Some of the monkeys stirred, bleary in the dawn, and found their way out to the patio fountain to take their morning ablutions. They regarded him as he sat brooding and knew only too well what had happened. He would not be troubled by any loose trifle, nor even a pandemonium, for the girl had also stolen the one thing the coat had held beyond the boy’s range. She had stolen his heart.

The boy stood at the water’s edge and whistled for Bella the Night Fisher. Out of all the monkeys in the house, Bella was the greatest explorer. He sailed his boat to the moon and back every day, collecting dreams out of the haunted vault and conversing with the strange creatures he would meet. There were tufts of grey hair on either side of his head and he complemented the look with a pair of spectacles and a mechanical hat that lifted itself up whenever he greeted someone new. Unlike the rest of the monkeys, he was solitary and tended to stick to his boat in favour of the house. But the others did not mind. They knew how much he loved his ship. He would lie on the deck, cradled in its masts while it slept on the coral, cradled in turn by the living rocks and little plants.
The boy was cold without his coat, and the spry wind was marinated with ice and salt. He shivered in his flimsy paper shirt as Bella’s moon boat rose up from the reef and glided over to the sand. Bella leaned out of the cabin and frowned a heavy forehead of grey wrinkles “I am wondering why you are not wearing your coat.” he said.
“I thought you might ask me why it wasn’t spring any more.” The boy said, calling up to the ship as it descended onto the shore.
“What of the weather? I am thinking something bulky has happened. I do not think I have ever seen you without your coat.”
“A girl came to visit us last night. I don’t know how she found her way to the house and I don’t think I can remember who she was.”
“A girl.” Bella set his chin upon his hands and nodded “Ah.”
“She stole the coat, Bella.”
“Then she is now the Thief of the Universe.”
“That’s it.” The Boy sighed and sat down upon a giant liquorice ring that had been washed up by the horses in the tide.
“But I am thinking that this is not the end of it all. There is more to your tale.”
The Boy looked inside himself to the place where the spaces used to be. While he had worn the coat they had been empty and painless but now they were alive and filled with sorrow “She took something else with her. Something I didn’t think I had.”
“This is why you are whistling for Bella. You wish to travel after her.”
“Am I ill, Bella?”
“No, it is not an affliction of the body that ails you.”
“Then why am I in pain from the loss of something I never knew I owned?”
“Before my moon boat found me I was plagued with a hunger to it’s calling and I felt the same as you do now.” He threw a rope ladder overboard “Climb up if you are sure this is your only choice, but be knowing of this now that your quarry is not a simple catch.”
The Boy clambered up the ladder and stepped onto the deck. The boat was small and cluttered with a confusion of baskets and barrels; ropes hung down from the skeletal masts and anemones covered the floor. The sails were made of mirrors and a million suns basked in their reflections, groaning as the boat lifted up from the sand and ascended upwards. “She will not be easy to find.” Bella explained as he prepared a pot of tea and lemon “Now that she wears the coat with the infinite pockets she has the ability to steal anything from anywhere.”
“As I once did.” The Boy looked out over the side of the ship to watch the house shrink away behind them, the monkeys jumping and waving goodbye from the roof.
“She can steal places from other people’s dreams, too.” Bella continued “In the same way as you stole the house and the orchards and all of its inhabitants from sleeping children.”
The Boy peered at Bella. The old monkey was wiser than all the magic books in the library taken as one “I didn’t think that any of you knew…” he did not know what to say “I…”
“I have been fishing dreams from within this dream for a long time now, and I have heard many things. I know of the ones who wore the coat before you, and even a few of the future.”
“You-”
“Drinking tea is a nice thing.” Bella said, and that was an end to it.

They sailed through the morning clouds, passing islands ruled by jam jar goblins and penguin kings. The water ran from blue to yellow to pink and several colours at once. Some seas of the ocean were made of fire and others were made of glue. They travelled on through paper cuts and walking headaches in the place where minor accidents swam. They stopped for lunch on an island where the people meditated backwards and fasted on a diet of happiness and food. They climbed into the crow’s nest for a better view when they flew through a fog of low-lying Januaries. They saw a million things in a biscuit tin and a million things shrugged back at them. But no matter where they went, nor what they asked of the people there, they found no trace of the girl.
Bella enjoyed the way that the boy would describe her- he could talk on her for days and, though Bella had never seen her, he knew that she was beautiful. And, despite suffering the pain of her absence, the Boy seemed to enjoy the motion of the moon boat’s flight. He would dangle his feet and his hands over the edge, just to feel the air rush over them and tried not to giggle when passing fish would tickle him. The Boy had been happy in his life in the house, looking after the trees and watching the monkeys play, but Bella had never seen him take joy in his own adventures before. For the first time, he seemed able to enjoy something just for it’s own sake, just because he was doing it himself, because he was alive and because he could finally taste it. All the power of the coat had never achieved this and all his wizardry of predictions had never accentuated his existence. His strength and his abilities had enabled him to soften the years and shield himself from sorrow, but it was sorrow that was tying the full rainbow of feelings back to his being.

Eventually, dusky claws set into their endless day. Bella decided that it would be safer to moor up on some land for the night and so he dropped the boat down out of the clouds towards the first island they could see. A landing pier floated about a mile above the island, and a thick carpet led down in spirals to a little lighthouse on the rocks below. They sidled up to the jetty which appeared to have been specifically constructed for mooring moon boats in the sky, and dropped a slice of cake overboard as an anchor.
The Boy was about to climb ashore when Bella held up a hand to stay him. The old monkey fixed his face with serious eyes and whispered “Steal nothing. Neither here nor any elsewhere. You are the Thief no longer, and pilfering with enrich you only with strife.”
“Stealing is taboo?” the Boy asked.
“Now, yes. Very.” Bella stepped aside and allowed him to climb down.

TO BE CONTINUED

Copyright SteveCake 2005