by Tabitha Bird
‘Do you think the post office has delivered those boxes yet?’ I ask.
‘How would I know? We rang them and that’s all I can do. Now if you don’t mind …’ Katie stomps through my piles of things like it’s all junk washed up with the tide. She’s taking down gumboots from my shelf when something rolls out of a boot and onto the floor.
Katie picks it up. ‘An empty jam jar inside a pair of gumboots? Honestly, Willa – you can see what I mean about your collections. Why would anyone keep an old jar? I’m clearly going to need more packing boxes.’ She places it on the table beside me.
At the mention of packing, I flick open my notebook. Things I Am Sure of:
1. Post two Very Important Boxes on 1 June 2050.
2. Stay out of the nursing home.
3. Find Super Gumboots Willa.
‘No nursing home because I’m finding Willa!’ With my gumbooted foot, I push the edge of the boxes stacked on the coffee table. They all slippery-slide onto the floor.
Katie mumbles, ‘Probably a bit late at your age to find yourself.’
‘Never too late, Katie!’
She checks her wristphone that is apparently also a clock. ‘Can I leave you for a bit? I’m going to duck home, get more boxes and be right back.’
‘Ooh, you have ducks? Bring them, too.’
The door bangs behind her. Good riddance, although I should’ve asked for some breakfast. The closed door probably can’t help with that.
How can I get rid of the packing boxes while she is gone? There’s a lot of mess. All manner of furniture, with drawers pulled out under inspection. The stacked piles. Gumboot collections now separated. All this stuff that I’ve bullied into being here with me.
I look at the papers in my hand. Divorce papers. The realisation takes my breath again. I wonder if the woman I was in 1990 got her box yet? How old was I in 1990, anyway? I try to do the maths, but the numbers only add up to jam drops. That woman would be in the middle of Super Gumboots Willa and me. Middle Willa. That’s a good name for her.
I retie the string around the divorce papers, letters and post office slip, and let it all fall to the floor.
In my notebook, I scribble some more things while they are in my head:
4. Katie has been here today.
5. I divorced Sam.
6. Eli doesn’t talk to me.
Underneath, I write:
7. What happened to Sebastian?
I close the notebook and place it on my side table, so I can worry about everything, when I notice a yellow envelope. Did Katie collect one like this from the post office yesterday? I check my notebook; it doesn’t say. Without using my reading glasses, I can’t tell whom it’s addressed to, but certainly mail left in my house belongs to me.
Inside are two items, but the postcard with waves drawn on it falls out first. I almost drop the package when the second thing falls out. Glitter on my fingers gives away what it is.
Last time I wore these play glasses they had a name: Glittery-Best-Storytelling-Glasses. And they were amaze-a-loo. Super Gumboots Willa, these belong to her. They’re my pretend glasses, from when I was eight years old.
The postcard that fell out is mine, too. A new memory appears of a little boy, my Eli, waving the postcard in front of my face.
One ocean: plant in the backyard.
I stop.
There’s an ache inside that has something to do with the boys who rushed past me in town yesterday. An achy want. As I shove the glittery glasses and postcard back in the envelope, I notice a folded note inside. Upon reading-glasses inspection, it says:
An invitation:
Have you met Super Gumboots Willa?
Where: You decide
When: In your own time
The note is written in block letters and doesn’t look familiar. I consult my notebook: yes, it says I have to find her! That’s a very important Thing I Am Sure of, so I underline it.
Another memory creeps into my mind.
A woman stood on the front deck of a brick house. Eli had flippers and a snorkel on, a jar in one hand. He was about to walk down the stairs when he tripped. The woman caught him, but the jar smashed and the water trickled down the stairs. There was a girl watching the woman from the front fence.
That woman is me, isn’t it? The little girl, too?
In my notebook I write:
8. I am Super Gumboots Willa and …
What did I think to call the other Willa? The one in the middle? Oh, yes.
9. I am Middle Willa, too.
Can this all be true?
Sometimes I catch my reflection in a shop window. There’s this old lady pulling her face this way and that. Tugging the skin tighter towards her ears, searching for something. I didn’t know I was trying to see the me I once was.
The person who sent me the invitation thinks I might have seen Super Gumboots Willa.
I write in my notebook:
10. I saw Super Gumboots Willa in town.
Ten things are a lot to be sure of at my age; I’m rather proud.
The memory of Eli almost falling down the stairs surfaces in me again. I try to drag more puzzle pieces together, but all that comes is a kind of dread, a sense that I won’t be okay. I’m supposed to … something. There’s another memory. In it, I am panicked. The white tiles of a brick home where I lived when the boys were little have changed into the wooden floorboards of my childhood home. I realise I’ve been sent a most dangerous ocean that is beginning to change everything. Poor Middle Willa: she’s so very scared!
I take the postcard out of the envelope again. Hold it. Caress its wrinkles and torn edges. Trace the faded waves, no less frothing and wild with all the years that have passed.
Oceans that come in a box.
Boxes.
I’d like to throw all those boxes Katie brought here into the ocean. That’s it: that’s what I’ll do with the boxes. There’s something else bobbing about in my head, but I can’t think what. The most important point in my notebook, underlined, is to find Super Gumboots Willa.
Am I too old to plant the ocean again? No woman my age should pass up adventures, no matter how impossible.
In my backyard I know there is a mango tree where the ocean was planted when I was a child. Halfway up that mango tree is where Super Gumboots Willa would be, on her head a newspaper crown, and on the tip of her nose these glasses.
Then I do something I suppose I shouldn’t, but I must see if it helps bring back Super Gumboots Willa.
11. Plant the ocean.
It’s not easy to awaken bones at my age, but I strangle the handles on my walker and totter off to my kitchen. Jam jar, jam jar, where did I keep you? I open drawers and cupboards. There’s a new jar full of jam, but that won’t do. It has to be the same one. Where would I have kept it all these years? I can’t find it anywhere in the kitchen and almost forget what I’m doing when I get back to the living room. The jam jar is on the table beside me. That’s right, Katie found it in my gumboots. No wonder I kept that empty jar all these years.
I dribble tap water into the jar. That’s all.
The ramp at the back of my house long ago replaced the stairs. It still leads to the garden, or I suppose it does. I haven’t been out the back in years, I realise, as I begin my journey down.
At the bottom of the ramp I do the first real thing I’ve done in a long time. I put on the Glittery-Best-Storytelling-Glasses.
Juggling my grip on both the walker and the jam jar, I almost fall. At the last moment I catch myself heavily on the seat of the walker. A fall to the ground and that’s where Katie would find me. Then she’d fold me up, pack me in a box and ship me to one of those damned places. What are they called? The Plastic-Sheet Homes.
The jar slips from my hand onto the ramp and I hold myself rigid. I almost can’t look at the jar. Is it broken?
I steady myself with my walker and stand more upright. When I look down the jar is empty but not broken, water trickling to the ground
below.
My fingers begin to tingle. If I could skip I might whoop my way across the backyard. Instead I manage to pick up the jar and adopt a happy waddle towards the garden under the shrivelled mango tree. Small steps, because the grass is ratty and clumped. At the rocky edge of the garden around the tree, I stop and dribble the water onto the ground. There wasn’t that much water in the jar, but as it spreads across the ground it leaves a wake of sand and the mango tree changes. There’s a smell of ocean mixed with other herby scents. With my new eyes opened, I take everything in.
The ground glows blue.
‘An ocean-garden that won’t be squashed,’ I say to myself.
Suddenly, the garden around the tree is young again. Lavender and mint, rosemary and thyme. Sweet smells bringing back memories of drinking tea and eating jam drops. My mango tree becomes hued with sage and avocado, emerald and pine, jade and moss. More than simply green, she is vivid with colours, alive. The garden has wet beach-white sand in patches where the water from my jar reaches further than it should. The trunk is marked from feet that climb. I haven’t seen the tree this way since I was a child.
Up in the branches, there she is: Super Gumboots Willa with a paper crown on her head, glasses on her nose, and her sister standing at the bottom of the tree with plastic beads dripping around her neck. Two little girls, raw and fierce.
Chapter Thirteen
1965
Willa Waters, aged 8
‘Get out of my tree, Lottie!’ I throw a mango at my sister. She ducks, trying to climb up anyway, with her doll under her arm. I gather more mangos. Ready, aim …
I want to be alone and think. Lottie has already moved some of the rocks from around the edge of the garden under the mango tree to make a pathway inside, like she owns the place. I have Frog Dog zipped up in my jacket with me, but of course there is Lottie. Always Lottie. It’s been a really long day already: I woke up to the old Queenslander then watered the ocean and ran past the rocky edge of the ocean-garden into someone else’s backyard.
‘Where have you beeeeeeen?’ Lottie cries from the bottom of the tree, forgetting about our new house and the beach around her feet that she thought was so amaze-a-loo when I got back moments ago. ‘I looked everywhere for you. The house was all different and you was gone. Mummy and Daddy don’t even remember the tin house!’ She stares up, big eyes dripping. Grammy says Lottie’s eyes are so big they look like cow’s eyes. They look like puddles right now.
‘That’s a good thing, Lottie. Who knows what they’d do if they thought I’d changed everything. I’m sorry I wasn’t here when you woke up, but you like the old Queenslander, don’t you?’
‘Yeah, I like it now I found you. It’s heaps-a-heaps better than the drippy-roof-banged-up house we had anyway.’ Lottie hugged the walls of our new home a lot when I got back from the brick house where the little boy almost fell – that was, after she stopped hitting me for leaving her.
‘Exactly – it’s two storeys, same as the beach house that day with Grammy, and now we have a little ocean-garden, too, with shells and sand and everything.’
‘I love it this much!’ Lottie holds her hands out wide. ‘But where did you go? You made me do worrying!’
I look down at her little face. ‘I don’t know where I was. In someone else’s yard. Now you gotta leave me alone.’ I throw another mango and Lottie ducks again. ‘I gotta do some thinking.’
‘Hey! Who are you?’ I say. There’s an old lady at the bottom of my tree. Lottie is frozen, looking at her too.
‘Oh. I’m only me. Carry on, dears.’ She peers up at me. ‘You were throwing mangos at your sister.’ The old lady moves to the side a bit. ‘When you’re done, could you help me throw some boxes into the ocean?’
Lottie tries to see where the lady is pointing out of the garden. ‘I don’t think we’re allowed.’
‘Are you lost from the nursing home?’ I say to the crinkly lady with grey, watery eyes.
‘No, I don’t like those Plastic-Sheet Homes. Go on, dear. You were saying something about a backyard that wasn’t yours?’
‘Yeah, the yard was different, all weedy, and the house was brick. There was a boy and he nearly fell down the stairs, but his mum saved him … and then she was yelling at me.’
‘Sounds horrible,’ says the old lady.
‘Was you lost? Was you scared?’ Lottie says, wiping her nose.
‘Kind of. I don’t know what happened, but as soon as I ran past the rocky edge of the ocean-garden the air got foggy and then I wasn’t in our backyard.’ Lottie pokes one of the rocks with her big toe like it might bite her. ‘I thought we’d lost our old Queenslander and I was so sad. But then I worked out that the street was different. The whole place was different. I’d gone somewhere else. There was a car with funny curved shapes and odd headlights. Like on The Jetsons, only they weren’t flying cars.’
Lottie stands still. ‘Woah. I wish they were flying. What did you do then?’
‘Yes. What did you do, dear?’ the old lady says.
‘I did the only thing I could think of. I wanted to come back here to our old Queenslander so I marched up a hill, put my gumboots on and stomped back into the ocean-garden I came out of.’
But I’m thinking something much bigger now. What if I’ve found a way to escape when Daddy is being mean? Mummy, Lottie and I could all run through the ocean-garden to somewhere else and be safe. But what if Lottie and Mummy can’t go through the ocean-garden? What if it’s only me and Frog Dog who can? I need more time without Lottie around to figure it out.
‘Then what happened?’ Lottie jumps up and down. The old lady is still beside her.
‘I walked back into this ocean-garden, turned around and this time when I walked out our old Queenslander was right here and I heard you looking for me. Now, go away!’
‘But me and Chatty Cathy doll want to come up there with you.’ Lottie farts.
‘Well, you’re not coming up here now, stinky butt. Go play in the sand. You liked the beach a minute ago.’ I kick out from my branch above and throw more mangos. Frog nearly slips out of my jacket.
Lottie’s a whining thing now. ‘The sand is weeeet,’ she says, ‘and I only waaaant to hear your stories.’
‘Oh now, dears. Can’t you fight later? I like stories, too, and no one has time to tell them,’ the old lady says.
Lottie pats the old lady’s arm. ‘I like you. Can we keep you?’
‘She’s not a pet, Lottie.’ I glare at the old lady, then I notice her gumboots. Yellow. ‘Hey, I saw you in town yesterday!’
Frog is wagging her tail inside my sweater. ‘You know her, Froggie?’
All the old lady says is, ‘Do you have tea? I could do with a cup.’
Lottie hands her an imaginary cup of tea and a slice of sand cake. The old lady pretends to drink and eat.
I stare at the ground under the mango tree: the soft sand, shells. A crab pops its head out of a hole. ‘This ocean-garden takes you places. It might work, hey Froggie?’ She licks my face.
Lottie sits in the wet sand, looking up at me, as she always does. It makes me happy and itchy at the same time. She cries louder now.
Daddy yells from the upstairs window. ‘Shut your sister up, Willa! If I have to come down there –’
I scramble down and grab Lottie’s hand. ‘Okay, fine. Come up here. Bring Chatty Cathy doll. So Mummy and Daddy really don’t remember living in a different house? They don’t remember the tin one?’
Lottie climbs up and sits beside me on the branch. ‘No. They said I was been silly and we’ve always had this house.’
The old lady points to where Daddy’s voice was coming from. ‘Don’t let your father bother you. Tell your story. “Once upon a time …” Do go on, dear.’
Lottie squeezes my arm. Being a big sister is lots of work.
‘Well … Once, did you know, all children were born with wings?’
‘Really?’ Lottie’s eyes are big.
Ha! I have her c
aught now. ‘Oh, yes. Babies came out with fluffy things on their backs, like duckies. They couldn’t fly, not till they grew a bit, but mummies and daddies didn’t want them to fly. So, they snipped them off.’
‘Why’d they do that? I don’t like this story. Make them put the wings back on!’ Lottie cries.
‘That is sad.’ The old lady moves closer.
‘Why don’t we play Find the Platypus? I’ll tell more stories later. Promise.’
There’s no way Lottie is going to find a platypus. Those critters live in creeks, not ocean-gardens, and they’re shy. She climbs down with her doll, hunting under rosemary plants. I’ve only ever seen two of the odd little animals, and both times I’d nearly fallen asleep by the creek behind Boonah. They’re furry things, with webbed feet for swimming and a duck’s nose. Fairytale creatures.
‘I caught one! See, the bill, and here’s a little duck foot!’
Lottie holds up a floppy bit of seaweed. The old lady asks if we can help with some boxes again. ‘They’re inside, on the floor,’ she says.
Lottie runs past the rocky edge of the ocean-garden and I can’t see her anymore.
‘Where’d she go?’ I ask.
‘Into my house. Don’t worry, dear. She’ll be back.’ The old lady waits for her.
I peer through the mango leaves and can’t see anything but my backyard. I’m about to climb down when Lottie returns with a large flattened cardboard box and throws it on the wet sand.
‘Oh, good girl! Throw them right into the ocean.’ The old lady claps her hands.
‘Come and see, Willa – it’s a house just like ours, but old and stinky!’
‘Nah! You have fun.’
Lottie runs in and out of the ocean-garden under the mango tree. It’s a great game they’re playing, the Get the Boxes game. I can’t see where Lottie goes when she runs past the edge of our ocean-garden, but she comes back each time and at least she’s busy so I can think. The old lady encourages her to keep going until she has all the boxes. Maybe we’ll keep the old lady a bit longer.