If Hugo had noticed Jack’s pet raven, he’d have thought it was a statue or something and ignored it. Couldn’t ignore him now, flying from a perch by the south window to land on Jack’s desk by the east window. A raven. A real live black raven with a wingspan the length of Hugo’s leg.
“That’s a raven.” Hugo pointed at the bird. “Where’d that come from?”
“The sky,” Jack said, stroking Thurl’s glossy wings.
“A big beast, innit?” The shock must have shown in Hugo’s face.
“Oh, he’s just a baby. Well, a big baby. Thought you had ravens in London?”
“Got the Tower Ravens, but they don’t let us take ’em home. Always wanted to,” he admitted. “Couldn’t figure out how to hide a raven under my coat.”
“You can pet him. He’ll let you.”
Hugo had to pet the raven if only to tell Davey he’d done it.
Slowly he approached the bird, who seemed more than content to sit on Jack’s typewriter and peck at the keys. It looked up when Hugo approached, ebony eyes gleaming.
“All right, mate,” Hugo said as he slowly stroked the back of the bird’s sleek head once, then twice, and after that Hugo’s courage ran out. That beak looked sinister. But once he stopped, he wanted to do it again. He gave the wing a stroke and Thurl allowed it, didn’t even seem to mind. Maybe old Jack was mad, but he had good taste in strange pets.
“Found him half-dead in the woods after a windstorm. No mother in sight. Hand-reared him, so now he’s too tame to go back out into the big blue yonder.”
“He’s brilliant,” Hugo said, daring to stroke the bird’s glossy head again.
“Glad you like him. You two can be friends.”
Hugo was smiling and Jack had caught him. He didn’t like anyone to catch him smiling. Serious artists didn’t smile. They scowled.
He snatched his hand back, shoved it in his pocket.
“So how do we do this?” Hugo asked, getting down to business.
“You’ve read my books, yes?” Jack asked as he slid a fresh sheet of paper into his typewriter and started hammering away at the keys.
“Yeah. To my brother, Davey.” He had to raise his voice over the typewriter.
“And my editor or someone at Lion House explained the process yesterday?”
“The brass told me what to do and how to do it.” The art department at Lion House had given him a long lecture on the cover-making process. The Clock Island books were special, he was told, in that the covers were still painted as opposed to being computer designed. Jack’s preference （though the way they said “preference” made Hugo think it was more like a “demand”）。 The paintings would be displayed at book events and school visits, donated to children’s hospitals and family shelters. Then they gave him a list of requirements—medium, paint, dimensions. He might have walked out except they also told him how much he’d be paid per cover, which got him to sit down and pay attention. Peanuts compared to what Jack made per book, but it was more money than he or his mum had seen in a lifetime. So now here he was, in Maine talking to a madman with a raven for a co-writer.
“Then go on. Paint. Have fun.”
“I need a bit more help than ‘Have fun.’”
Jack kept typing and as he typed, he recited:
We are the music makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lone sea-breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams;—
World-losers and world-forsakers,
On whom the pale moon gleams:
Yet we are the movers and shakers
Of the world for ever, it seems.
Jack paused long enough to say, “First stanza. Ode by Arthur O’Shaughnessy. Always cite your sources.”
Then he returned to madly typing.
“Poetry doesn’t solve my problems,” Hugo said, almost shouting over the clacking of the keys.
Finally, Jack dropped his hands from the keys. The silence was heaven.
“Why would anyone have problems poetry couldn’t solve?” Jack demanded.
Did this man not understand the pressure Hugo was under? Jack’s publisher had said that each Clock Island book sold ten million or more copies, and there were forty of them so far. Ten million forty times over was a calculation even an artist could do in his head.
“You’re rich,” Hugo said. “I’m not about to say you should say you’re sorry about it,” though Hugo thought he probably should. “But that bag over there”—he pointed at his black duffel—“is about everything I own in this world. I can’t mess this up. You have to give me more to go on than ‘Have fun.’”
“Kid, this”—Jack pointed at the page in his typewriter—“is my art. That”—he pointed at a painting of Clock Island, tempera on paper, the one Hugo had entered into the contest—“is your art. You don’t tell me how to do my art. I don’t tell you how to do your art.”
“Jack?”
“Yes, Hugo?”
“Tell me how to do my art.”
Jack sat back in his industrial green swivel chair. The ancient wheels squeaked, sending Thurl flapping back to his perch.
“What’s the best gift anyone ever gave you?” Jack asked. “And don’t tell me something you think I want to hear like a teacher encouraged you and that was the best gift. I mean toys. Drum set. Bow and arrow. Something Santa brought or a maiden aunt with money and a grudge against your mother.”
“Batmobile,” Hugo said. He almost blushed to admit it, but he’d loved that thing too much to deny it. “Mum somehow scraped up the cash to buy me a radio-controlled Batmobile. It was used, I think. Maybe Mum found it in a charity shop, but it was still in the box, and it worked like a dream.”
“Did you play with it?”
“Course. I, uh…God…” Hugo chuckled at the memory of his younger self. “I played with it until the engine burned up and the wheels came off.”
“How do you think your mother would have felt if you’d never taken it out of the box? Just set it on a shelf and admired it from afar?”
Hugo remembered his mother laughing until she wheezed as the little black car careened off the table, around their flat, around her ankles, even while they were eating breakfast. She pretended to be cross about it, but her eyes were always laughing. He’d even heard her bragging about it to their neighbor Carol, how she’d found a toy for Hugo, and he hadn’t stopped playing with it for weeks.
“Would’ve broken her heart.”
“There,” Jack said as if he’d proven his point. What point?
“What’s there?”
“God—or whoever is in charge of this planet—got drunk on the job one day and decided to give me the gift of writing. The way I see it, I have two choices. I can set that gift on a high shelf so it won’t get dinged up and nobody can make fun of me for playing with it.” He smiled until the crinkles at the corners of his eyes were deep enough to hide state secrets. “Or I can have fun with it and play with the gift I was given until the engine burns out and the wheels come off. I decided to play. I suggest you do the same, young man. Go paint or draw or collage or whatever you want to do. Come back when there’s smoke coming off the canvas. And for God’s sake, go have some fun. Please?”