Free The Vanishing Act by Mette Jakobsen Page A

queen so much that she bought the whole island and had her portrait painted.’ Priest went into a deep back-bend, folding his hands awkwardly behind him, and added with a laboured voice, ‘And she always wore a crown.’
    Mama had found some of Priest’s origami paper in the pulpit and was enthusiastically folding away. ‘What a sad, lonely life. Sitting on a tiny islandreading philosophy in the middle of nowhere.’ Mama sent a crane that didn’t seem to have any wings crashing to the floor. She looked out over the pews. ‘This is like being at the wheel of a great big ship, isn’t it?’ she said.
    ‘God’s boat?’ said Priest and added a ‘wahh wahh uhh,’ before laughing. ‘I like that. It provides steady sailing through a stormy sea.’
    ‘Did you learn that exercise when you were in Japan?’ I asked.
    ‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘From Hoshami. I met him at the International Pretzel Competition in Tokyo. We shared second place. Hoshami could climb trees like a cat. I tried climbing the apple tree once, but I just ended up scaring the rabbits. And myself.’
    Priest had read Theodora’s journal, and knew everything there was to know about her.
    ‘There are many things to be learnt from Theodora’s experiences,’ he said. ‘She lived alone, yet she managed to build the church and the houses and stay warm in winter. And she read three whole chapters of philosophy every day without fail. She even wrote sermons and tried them out on her goat.’
    I looked at the stained glass window. ‘Why is she holding a paddle?’
    ‘She canoed down the Thames in a hailstorm,’ said Priest. ‘She also climbed the highest mountain in Norway. She was a remarkable woman.’
    Theodora and her goat were buried in the same grave. No one knew the exact circumstances of how they died, except that they had died together.
    Boxman thought that Theodora had attempted a magic trick and that it had gone terribly wrong. But Mama disagreed.
    ‘That woman had no imagination,’ she protested. ‘Just take a look at her. She was all reason and purpose.’
    ‘But what kind of trick?’ I asked.
    Boxman looked at me. ‘Some tricks are so dangerous, Minou, they are best not spoken about.’
    Papa thought that it was impossible to know what had happened to Theodora and her goat and therefore silly to speculate.
    But Priest told me in a matter-of-fact voice that Theodora’s goat had climbed the stairs to the unfinished church tower, leapt over the edge, and landed on Theodora, who was digging a well right next to the tower.
    They were buried at the very same spot when the delivery ship arrived a week later, pulling deep withfour hundred and thirty-six bricks for the unfinished wall.
    ‘Did the goat think it could fly?’ I asked Priest.
    ‘Perhaps,’ he said, ‘or maybe it just stumbled.’
    Theodora had noticed a change in her goat before the disaster. As she was not one to use big sentimental words, it was noteworthy, said Priest, that in her last journal entry she described her goat as staring out towards sea with a ‘peculiar otherworldly longing’.
    The boatmen wrote a note on the final page of her diary saying that Theodora still wore her crown when they found her and that they had taken payment for the bricks out of her money tin.
    I imagined the goat looking at the world from the church tower; at the ocean, the horizon and maybe the sunrise. I imagined how it might have thought
today is the day
and leapt, waving its little hooves around.
    I helped finish the lid to La Luna’s box. Boxman had taught me how to paint, and I liked the way it swished when I painted in straight soft strokes. Boxman decide to add gold stars around La Luna’s name. His hand moved steadily along the box,frequently dipping the tiny brush in the jar. After a while he stretched, and went to the apothecary’s desk to make some honey sandwiches. I sat down with No Name on a bale of hay, scratched his ears and in a whisper told him of the story I was