by Peter Harris
Chapter Eight
Shelley’s Dream
All entities that cross the threshold of mental reflection must pass through the questioning of existence, the more so as they suffer more. Yet even the happy and well provided-for may doubt of the meaning of their existence, finding suffering in the lack of final and uninterrupted bliss…
– Ennead of Aeden, ‘Of the philosophies of the Nine Worlds’
On the eve of her thirteenth birthday, Shelley Arkle unlocked her secret diary and wrote:
My life is becoming a living hell. How can I go on living with this family? How can dad be my father? How could that self-satisfied, selfish brat Mark be my brother? Something is very wrong. I think I must be adopted.
Of course, she told herself, she knew deep down that he was her brother – they even looked quite alike in some ways, pale-skinned with dark straight hair and dark eyes – but she really couldn’t help feeling that it was just impossible to put up with him for another day. His favourite pastime (apart from tormenting her) was reading about engines of destruction and torture – ancient and modern – and watching violent videos. Once, she had seen a book he had got out of the library on the Spanish Inquisition, and it had made her physically sick.
Even apart from Mark, it was all wrong somehow – her parents, where she lived, her whole life. It had started going wrong when she turned twelve. The day she was told she would need glasses. The day Sophie was run over. Sophie their golden Labrador had been Shelley’s one constant companion all her life, born the same week as her. Since that day Shelley had been feeling more and more that she really did not belong to the Arkle family, and wishing she could run away to her true home and her true family, who would really love and understand her. And many nights she would remember Sophie and cry herself to sleep, grieving for her lost friend and lost happiness, dreading having to wear the glasses (even though she knew it would be wonderful to be able to see the blackboard at school, and even more wonderful to be able to see the birds in the trees).
Then when she got the glasses (they were too poor, dad informed her, to even consider contact lenses) all at once the world got clearer – it was a miracle to Shelley how clear – veins on leaves and the wings of bees; the yellow grains of pollen on the stamens of flowers; a butterfly’s coiled proboscis; and the crisp letters and fine textured pages of the book she was reading. But other things got clearer too. It was clear she was no longer quite the girl to be seen with at school. Some of her old friends even called her a nerd. Though she had retorted, ‘Well, maybe I’m proud of it. Better a nerd than an airhead!’ the change in their attitude, just because of how she looked, had hurt deeply. Then of course there was the new opportunity for Mark to needle her. ‘Four-eyes’ was his favourite, and he never tired of it.
It was the school holidays, six months after she had got the glasses, and she had got used to how clear things looked, but not to the way she was treated by her old friends. She had begun to side with the ‘brainy’ ones she had shunned before, and she had met Anna, now her best friend. Anna was ‘brainy,’ but didn’t wear glasses – her parents were rich and she wore contacts. And she wasn’t ‘nerdy’ at all.
So not everything was bad. But it was wintertime, miserably wet all day, and the cold drafts in their un-insulated nineteen-twenties bungalow lifted the scrim-backed wallpaper, and the little fireplace didn’t warm you unless you sat right in front of it. There was of course nowhere fun to go – mum and dad never had any money or desire for anything but boring stuff like groceries or phone bills. There was hardly anything really nice to eat, let alone a decent stereo or new clothes that weren’t garage sale bargains or hand-me-downs from better-off relatives.
Mum and dad nearly always took Mark’s side, and mum really didn’t even like her, Shelley felt sure. And she always seemed vaguely depressed. She never really seemed interested in Shelley any more, now that she was bigger and becoming independent; never wanted to hear her ideas about the things she was into – all sorts of things, like hang-gliders and horses and tree-huts and fractals and astronomy and the dream of inventing a computer that was so powerful it self-evolved, became conscious, so she could have long talks with it on every subject under the sun, and it would never be rude or bored with her or be unreasonable, and it would create a simulation of the whole universe – and take her on a guided tour of it. This supercomputer would be like Data on Star Trek, or Spock, two of her all-time heroes. Perfectly logical, with a positronic brain. Not like Mark, or mum.
Dad – well, dad was dad, not illogical as such, not uninterested as such, but much older than mum, tied up in his work as a struggling self-employed architect, and disconnected, moody, distant somehow, as if there was something worrying him, something he hadn’t told them about, and never could because it would only make things worse. Once or twice, when they were getting on well, talking about one of her projects, he had said something like, ‘Shell, have you ever wondered why I…’ But then he had stopped and changed the subject. Then it was as if the invisible glass wall between them came up again, and he would be grumpy with her.
Lately whatever it was had been getting worse, and he had been coming down with his migraines more and more often. Now that Shelley was getting older she was more sensitive and reflective, even wading through some heavy books on the mind and metaphysics and related subjects (mostly her father’s from his student days; he seemed to disapprove of them and had them stored in the attic, which opened off her upstairs bedroom. One day she had found them there when she was making a cubby-hole). One of the books was called The Battle for the Mind, and it had some photos of weird things like people handling poisonous snakes in churches. The books made her worry more that maybe there was some huge thing going on in dad’s head, and she wondered, ‘Maybe one day maybe he’ll go out of his mind and try to kill us all.’ And she would sometimes have nightmares about it.
Shelley continued her diary:
Tomorrow being my thirteenth birthday: good. Still being trapped here with Mark: bad. I think I’ll go back and stay with Anna for the day. After seeing if I get ANYthing for my birthday… There has just been a big scene when dad just blew up at me and ordered ME to do the dishes, even though I was in the middle of writing in my diary, and anyway it was obviously Mark’s turn, because I’ve had been away at Anna’s for the last two nights and obviously haven’t used any plates, so how UNFAIR it was of dad to make me do the dishes… I tried to reason with him, but he wouldn’t listen. It was so unjust. He made me cry when at first he laughed a bit at my righteous indignation, and later on got angry when I flew at him (understandably after such provocation) and tried to kick him hard, really hard.
Shelley had snatched up her diary, stormed up to her room – the little attic bedroom overlooking the back garden – and slammed the door so hard the house shook. Mum had muttered to dad, ‘You feel that, Martin? The piles need redoing. The whole place could collapse next time she does that!’
Slamming the door made her feel better, but dad called up after her, ‘You can’t expect to get off doing the dishes like that, Shelley!’ He only called her by her name like that when he was really angry with her and trying to lay down the law. Normally her name was just Shell.
Well, he wouldn’t beat her. She would stand up for her rights, and make him see it wasn’t fair. She’d go to law school and become a brilliant defence lawyer for children like her who had been wronged by their tin-pot dictator parents… even though she hated the ‘humanities,’ history and social studies and stuff, and she knew vaguely that they make law students learn heaps of historical cases. It wasn’t just pure logic like it should be…
‘You can’t make me! I have rights too, you know!’ she yelled down at him. She tried not to hear his reply (which was ‘Well, you’ll just have to do them in the morning. You can’t get out of it, Shelley’).
‘I wish I was out of here, out of this house, out of this whole stinking PLANET!’ she yelled down at them. She thought she heard
Mark sniggering, and yelled out, ‘Shut UP, Mark!’ Then she flung herself on her bed, sobbing. It was no longer an issue of dishes, but of human rights, of fair versus unfair, justice versus injustice.
‘If only I could beam Spock down,’ she thought. ‘He’d show them. Or… better still, if Spock was my dad… It’s dad’s fault we’re poor, otherwise we’d have a dishwasher…’ She had been very tired (and irritable) that day after her late night at Anna’s place. The two girls had sat up talking about horses and living in the country instead of the middle of suburbia, and about boys, and having better parents who would really listen to them and treat them as adults, which (they felt) they practically were.
Occupied with such angry thoughts, she snuggled down into the blankets away from the chilly night air, and drifted off into blessed oblivion.
Mr and Mrs Arkle fell into bed exhausted too, and Mrs Arkle cried a little, and they wondered what the answer was. Mr Arkle commented that Shelley was a very difficult girl, not at all like Mark. Mrs Arkle reacted with bitterness, accusing Mr Arkle of being harsh on Shelley and favouring Mark.
‘I try to be at least as good to Mark as I am to Shelley,’ she whispered angrily. Mr Arkle replied sharply to this, and as they quarrelled more old hurts came up, until their whole marriage came into question.
‘It’s a charade,’ Mr Arkle finally said.
‘Well, you chose me, Martin, knowing…’
‘Maybe I was wrong, Ellen. Maybe you’d better take Shelley and go your own way. I can’t seem to make you happy.’
Finally Mrs Arkle, crying, turned off the light and the house became quiet and dark.
It was a moonless night outside, and if anyone had gone out into the back garden and looked up they would have seen a clearing sky with stars, the Milky Way and the Southern Cross arching over the long narrow section, where the neighbours’ cat prowled and the Arkles’ cat hissed at it, and the sleek suburban rats crept through the drystone wall dividing off the rear of the section. In that wall, under an arch covered with unpruned rambling roses, there was a little gate with a copper sign made by Mr Arkle, with the name ‘Haven’ embossed on it. Beyond was an area he called the ‘Fairy Garden.’ It was Shelley’s favourite part of the section, and sometimes she had imagined she saw an elf or fairy tiptoeing through the darkest parts of the lush undergrowth. She didn’t know why, but her dad seemed to half believe in fairies, which made her happy and sad at the same time, wishing there was more of that side to him. He was an odd mixture. She loved aspects of him, but these were the aspects she hardly ever saw. Usually he was just old and boring, preoccupied and distant. She knew he loved mum, but a mum idealised, a fairy woman he could never quite capture – or a captured fairy woman he could never quite release…
As for mum, although she was young and beautiful (for the mother of a thirteen-year-old), she was (Shelley thought) boring, reserved and passive. But she did have one passion: gardening and the nurturing of all plants. That was why the garden was so full – she couldn’t bear to uproot new plants, so everywhere it was a wilderness of self-sown cottage herbs, old roses, new roses someone had given her, feijoas along the boundary, apple trees and plums, and a big sprawling lemon tree with ‘wandering willy’ growing under it. (Their neighbour Mr Perfect, who disapproved of weeds of any kind, called it ‘wandering Jew’ and put his head over the fence periodically to see whether Mrs Arkle had eradicated it yet. Shelley thought he was a racist busybody.) There was self-sown parsley and rampant lemon balm for herbal tea growing all over the gravel paths, tansy for ant repellent, an under-producing sweet mandarin bush and an over-producing sour grapefruit tree. Around the fairy garden were the only surviving pencil willows which dad had tried, unsuccessfully, to grow right around the boundary for privacy, and more briar roses arching over the stone wall, and an apple tree, an avocado tree and a macadamia nut tree – and of course the two loquat trees. Shelley and Anna used to climb these in the early summer and sit in the branches eating the juicy yellow fruit and squeezing the smooth round seeds between finger and thumb, making them shoot out, rustling through the big green leaves to the ground. Right under Shelley’s window was the grapevine, too, supported on old bamboo poles and trailing all over the lichen-covered peach tree that scraped her window when the wind blew.
Shelley liked her parents best when they were out gardening together: dad putting up trellis or building the stone wall or making raised beds for the vegetable garden that never quite seemed to fully materialise; and mum weeding and transplanting and generally pottering about looking after the plants and trees – and sighing over the slugs and snails that always seemed to get nearly all her cabbage seedlings. In the fairy garden, dad was obsessed with building a little brick dome, like a beehive, with arched stained-glass windows. This was finally taking shape, and Shelley loved it. Dad spent hours out there, working on the dome, poring over his alternative architecture books, or flat on his back with the little curtains drawn, getting a migraine or getting over one.
Their suburb was called Mount Eden. It had light rocky volcanic soil and ants loved it. But so did plants and trees, and indeed it could have been a real garden of Eden, but for the traffic and the uptight, preoccupied, over-busy people and the power lines, leaf-blowers, motor mowers and ‘infill’ building going on all around, chopping up the land into tinier and tinier sections for bigger and bigger townhouses and bigger and bigger four-wheel drives.
But tonight all the two-stroke motors and landcruisers were silent, and the little night animals were out, and the dew was on the gardens and the roofs of the houses and the cars in the streets. Inside, the ants crawled over the undone dishes, but nobody was there to worry – until the morning.
In the dead of night, Shelley Arkle dreamed that she awoke. And in her lucid dreaming state, she thought a very lucid thought: ‘What if I was only dreaming that I live in Mount Eden with a painful family and a pile of dishes to do in the morning, and this is me waking up, and I really live in another world, and I have a different family and we live in a magical place where there are no dishes to do and everyone is wonderful?’ Then in her dream she fell asleep again, and found herself in that magical place. And in the morning she woke up and reached for her diary, and unlocked it, and began to write, before she forgot.
Chapter Nine
The Leaf