Cydar says nothing, which is more disconcerting than words. Mums is standing to saw slices from the lumpy loaf. “And what do you want as a present?”
The miniature television in its globe of chrome flames like a star in Plum’s mind, blinding Cydar from sight. The television is, without question, the most desirable item she’s ever seen. None of her friends have a TV to themselves, let alone one so enviable. Nor, Plum suspects, will she, for its price tag had made her swing away, swallowing with disappointment. Her family isn’t poor, but some things are beyond the realm of reasonable expectation. Nevertheless she has cleared a space on top of her dresser, to prove that the object would fit. She has lain on her bed and imagined watching the pint-sized screen. “I don’t know,” she mumbles; to her horror, tears are close. She has seen herself unwrapping a television-sized box on the morning of her birthday; she’s accompanied herself to school, casually announced the new possession, reveled in the envious mewls of her friends. She’s constructed a new and entirely perfect life around something that is, in reality, as unattainable as Everest’s peak. It’s the kind of make-believe thing a child would do, as poignant as a broken heart. Indeed, Plum feels her heart is breaking over the loss of what never was. She dredges her voice past a clot of grief that has bulged inside her throat. “The only thing I want is something you won’t let me have. I won’t even bother telling you what it is, because I know I won’t get it.”
“Oh no,” Justin sighs. “Not another bloody pony?”
Tears, humiliated and humiliating, spurt from Plum’s eyes: she throws down her cutlery and struggles to her feet. “Shut up!” she wails. “You always laugh at me! I’m a person, I have feelings, I’m not a joke! Why can’t you all just leave me alone?”
And having clambered over the back of the pew Plum departs the table, pounding through the house like a rock down a cliffside, storming up the stairs like a centurion.
IN HER BEDROOM SHE DROPS TO HER KNEES, reaching into the darkness beneath her bed for the handle of an old briefcase, which she pulls into the light with such aggravated force that the case leaps like a seal into her lap. The latches snap open militarily, chock chock, and as Plum lifts the lid her breath comes out snotty and rasped. She gazes upon the case’s contents with an archaeologist’s eye: here lies her treasure, her most sacred things. She has lined the briefcase with lavender satin and provided several bags’ worth of cotton-ball cushioning so that each token sits within its own bulky cloud, untroubled by her manhandling of the case. Plum brushes the items with her palm, incanting as she does so a string of whispery words. The glass lamb. I belong. The Fanta yo-yo. Admire me. The jade pendant. Beauty fades. The Abba badge. You don’t touch me. The brown coin. I fear nothing. The dainty wristwatch. I am more than you see. Each object is as important as every other, but this last is the most daring, Plum can hardly bear to touch it — sometimes the mere sight of the watch makes the hair prickle up on her neck. Sometimes, to calm herself, Plum will fix her mind on a single item — usually the glass lamb, which is like staring through ice. Now, however, she plucks up the one thing that doesn’t belong among the others, and was never destined to remain. She closes the briefcase, fastens the latches and shoves the case under her bed. Then she crosses the room to the window and lifts the heavy sash.
Warm air wraps her as she forces the window higher; and birdsong, and the smell of mown grass, and the rusty calls of cicadas. Plum notices none of these. She has not opened the window with the aim of appreciating the summer evening, but so that she might lean a little closer, yearn a little more actively, toward the view that the high window allows. Spread out before her are rooftops in their scaly thousands; and church steeples, telephone poles, shopping centers, parkland. Beyond these, distance blurs suburbia into a fawn-and-green smudge; behind the smudge rises the purple backbone of a modest mountain range. Plum once visited these mountains with her Sunday-driving grandmother: they’d had Devonshire tea and walked through a rhododendron garden, and Plum had bought a leather bookmark in the shape of a flattened hound. A nice day, but recently she’s tried to blot from her memory the gingham curtains and crumbly scones and the innumerable mustard pots for sale in a streetful of arts and crafts, and pretends that the mountains are an unexplored shadowland, mysterious and promising. And there’s something mysterious, promising and deeply satisfying about leaning on a windowsill, baying for the hills.
She unwraps the MARS Bar with her practiced teeth, her head lodged against the window frame. The hot weather has softened the fudge so it’s bendy in her hand, the caramel bleeding lanky strings from the severed end. Plum should not be eating a MARS Bar, nor anything that will contribute to the clumpiness of her body and the festeriness of her face. Every bite is making her life more intolerable, and she should have the will to resist, the discipline to improve herself . . . yet she feeds the chocolate into her mouth dutifully, obeying an impulse as irresistible as a hypnotist’s command. Tears seep down her cheeks as she eats, and slip past her chocolated lips; she is making a dull, unbroken, grief-encouraging noise, “Brr, brr, brr.” The view of the ranges is blurred by her woe, which is a witch-brew of frustration and self-hate. Plum suspects she is special, and that she has a grand destiny: yet all her life she’s suffered more cruelly than others seem to do. She has always been more mocked, more misunderstood, more sidelined. Presumably it is her fate, to be persecuted until something — something foretold on parchments lying undiscovered in a cave, something that will occur when three dark stars align — makes her rise and spread her awesome wings; and then the whole world, gulping, will understand.
“Her, her, her,” she bawls, chewing heroically.
Her eyes are pinched closed, but when she hears her name spoken they flip open with surprise. The evening sky is marlin-blue and pink, extraordinarily beautiful; the breeze that fiddles in her hair is as jestful as a sprite. Her name flutters around her like the skeleton of a leaf — Plum, Plum, Plum — uttered in the hushed but unswerving voice of the Underworld. Plum is so startled that she stops both chewing and howling, the chocolate turning to clay in her mouth. For all she has daydreamed, she’s never believed, but suddenly she’s rigid with what’s true. There are no angels, but there are demons, and one of them has come for her. And suddenly Plum would rather be ordinary after all.
“Plum? Are you hurt?”
Her sights plunge toward the ground, over the fence and into the garden of the house next door, where their neighbor stands with her hands clutched together, peering up troubledly. “Can I help you? You’re so sad.”
Plum’s face scalds. The Coyle family is not on such personal terms with the people next door that the woman — whose name, Maureen Wilks, Plum knows, but little else, and nor does she want to — may take the liberty of intruding in this way. The Coyles have lived in this street forever, their Wilks neighbors for only a few years, qualifying Plum to regard them with the hoitiness of landed gentry. She tucks the MARS Bar out of sight, smears her eyes with the flat of a hand. “I’m fine,” she says, infusing each word with enough curtness and weight to impact into the earth. “I’m not — sad.”
Maureen Wilks considers her openly, so Plum feels her gaze like probing fingers. She would back into the darkness of her room, heave the window and pull the blind shudderingly, if only that would not appear rude the way this spying lady is rude, staring and listening and intruding. “You look like Rapunzel in her tower,” the woman says. “Standing up there, waiting for a prince to rescue you.”
Plum bridles: Rapunzel is her most-scorned distressed damsel. Those coils of moldery moth-eaten hair, the idiocy in never thinking of lowering herself to the ground, rather than waiting to be climbed. “Do I?” she answers uncivilly.
The neighbor steps forward, her shadow skimming the fence. Her head is tipped to see Rapunzel, and Plum can see down her cleavage. “Would you like to come to David’s party, Plum? We’re having a picnic. There’s plenty of food, and we’ve filled the pool, but there are no guests except
me.”
Plum’s window is high enough to overlook every corner of the neighboring garden, and she notices now, in the shade of a tree, the small boy lying on his stomach in a shallow wading pool. She’s seen him in the garden before, breaking twigs, investigating. Laid out on a rug at a safe distance from the pool are platters of food that say only childhood: triangles of bread dotted with hundreds-and-thousands, frankfurters pierced with wooden toothpicks, lemony cupcakes and bowls of Smarties, bottles of garish fizz. Every immature morsel Plum has banished from her own party; everything she’s loved, and still does. Though caramel yet clings to her teeth, her heart longs for cupcake, her heart demands fizz. “Is it David’s birthday?”
“Yes; he’s four. Please come. His father’s away, there’s only me. He would love to have a guest. Wouldn’t you, David?”
David, startled by inclusion, dips his face into the water. Plum hesitates, naturally antisocial: but her desire for the party food is like the tug of a clutching hand. She needs a frankfurter, she pines for sparkling drink. In the space of mere moments she could be sitting on a rug, being six years old again. And if her mother opens the door, she will find her daughter’s room deserted. Plum’s absence will first puzzle, then worry her family, and make them think back on how they’ve treated her. “I’ll come,” she says. “Wait a minute.”
She shuts the window and quickly changes out of her pajamas, pulling on a T-shirt and a pair of toweling shorts. From a shelf she takes a picture book that has no place in her heart. Dear David, she writes on its opening page. Happy . . . She doesn’t know whether it’s forth or fourth. Dear David, Happy birthday. Love from your neighbor Miss Ariella “Plum” Coyle. Underneath this she adds the elaborate flourish she’s been practicing of late. Then she creeps downstairs, book under her arm, Roman sandals soundless on the uncarpeted stairs. She hears her parents and brothers talking at the dinner table — Plum would like to know if they’re discussing her, and pauses: then hearing laughter, complicated and conniving, hurries on as if shoveled. She feeds herself through the querulous screen door, then speeds across the summer-sharp lawn to the footpath, rounds the fence that divides her house from the next, and trots up the neighboring driveway. And it’s only now that Plum remembers all those naive little girls tempted into vans or past a front door, lured by lollies or the promise of a puppy, never to be seen again. The recollection slows her, rolls her eyes in her head. The evening seems unnaturally quiet, her home suddenly far away. Yet she cannot turn back, she’s committed herself now, and if Plum must vanish she’s already vanished, and her great destiny was only to become a legendary lost girl. “Hello?” She passes through the side gate with her heart like an anvil. “I’m here — hello?”
The little boy, David, has left the wading pool and is standing on the lawn with his arms held out, his body shining bluely with water. His mother is kneeling close to him, drying his back with a towel. At the sight of Plum, the boy twines his feet and smiles. His smile is oddly graceful, and makes Plum feel confused. Looking away, she sees that the garden is different to how it appears from the height of her window. There’s a flowery scent, and the coolness of damp, and the ticking of leaf against leaf; most weirdly, everything seems stretched skyward, making her think of fairies and of sleepy tumbles down rabbit holes. She looks past the fence to her bedroom window — how peculiar to think that, moments ago, she had been standing so forlornly at the sill. She wonders if Rapunzel, returned to the ground, looked up at her tower and realized it was not what she had believed. That she could have jumped.
“Here’s our guest!” The mother, Mrs. Wilks, rises, smiling at Plum. “You see, David, I told you someone would come. Now we can have a proper party!”
Plum hands over her gift. “Happy birthday, David. Sorry, I didn’t have wrapping paper.”
“Oh, a book! How kind! David, what do you say?”
David says, “I got a truck.”
Plum doesn’t consider herself good with children, nor does she find them endearing. She resents their chaos, their self-absorption, their compulsive stealing of the limelight. This child, however, is like a shy little calf, and glances away sweetly when Plum meets his eye. “What sort of truck?” she asks; and the boy heaves a sigh and says, “A Tonka truck.”
“A Tonka truck!” Plum plucks a tidbit from a past she wasn’t part of, wanting the boy to think well of her. “My brothers had Tonka trucks when they were little.”
“Did you hear that, David? Justin and Cydar had Tonka trucks too.”
It surprises the girl to hear her brothers’ names fall so familiarly from the woman’s mouth, but at once it is understandable: neighbors know the names of neighbors. Maureen Wilks had known Plum’s name, and Plum somehow knows hers. The whole world is joined, like a dot-to-dot, by someone knowing somebody else’s name. Her inclusion in this intricate web fills Plum with a warm sense of humanity’s oneness. The night is beautiful, the world is beautiful, and for all her imperfections Plum is included and wanted. For a moment, she is happier than she’s ever been.
They settle on the tartan rug, the platters laid out between them. Plum says loudly to the boy, “What a lot of food! Were you expecting a king?” The child looks at her blankly; Mrs. Wilks passes out paper plates. “Everyone help themselves,” she invites. David takes a frankfurter and a cupcake: “Frankfurter first,” his mother instructs. Plum blots tomato sauce onto her plate and selects a party pie. Mrs. Wilks fills three mugs with creamy soda — Plum can’t decide if there were always three cups, or if the lady fetched a third from the kitchen while Plum was changing out of her pajamas. Mosquitoes arrive and wobble about; Mrs. Wilks sprays her son’s arms and feet with repellent, and then, laughing, does the same for Plum. The smell of the food, the tingle of spray, the scratch of the rug, the taste of the toothpicks, the hiss of the soda which is like bubbly snake venom — all these mingle in the February dusk into something that is the essence of childhood, feels exactly as the best days of Plum’s childhood felt. And she’s stricken with sudden nostalgia for the life she’s been so eager to pack away, she wishes there was some way of being everything at once — grown and sure and clever, young and protected and new.
They eat in silence for a time, the song of the cicadas rising, the sparrows hurrying to roost. Mrs. Wilks sweeps her palms through the grass, David spills soda on the rug. A fragile mosquito bogs itself in Plum’s tomato sauce — Maureen says, “Poor thing,” and picks it out with a fingernail. Plum notices that David is choosing from the platters the same morsels she chooses for herself, then studiously watches how she eats them — one bite, one sip, several ruminative chews — and eats the same way himself. She throws a Smartie into her mouth, gulps it down like a pelican; shyly, the boy tries the same. She juggles two Cheezels but he won’t attempt this, only gives her his cautious smile.
Mrs. Wilks says eventually, “I’ve eaten too much.” She leans on her hands and tilts her face to the sky, closing her eyes in a way that makes Plum a little embarrassed. “I love the last days of summer. There’s so much . . . poignancy in the air. As if summer were a living thing that’s drifting gently into death. Don’t you think so, Plum?”
Plum says, “I guess.”
“There’s an owl living in that big melaleuca near the fence — she’s quiet in winter, but she hoots through these mild nights. Do you ever hear her?”
“No,” says Plum; then, dissatisfied, changes it to, “Sometimes.”
“Look at the moon, David.” The lady’s eyes glide open, she raises a sculptured hand to the disc above their heads. “And that bright twinkling dot isn’t a star — it’s a planet. It’s Venus, I think — is it Venus, Plum?”
“Maybe.” Plum struggles.
“A huge mighty planet, tinier than an ant! Isn’t that amazing, David?”
“I have this idea.” Plum shuffles forward. “I think we should change the name of the planet Uranus. Nobody likes that name, so we should change it.”
“What should we change it to?”
“We should change it to Velvet —”
“Velvet! That’s perfect! Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Velvet, Neptune, Pluto. Much prettier!”
Plum grins. She feels welcome and pacified here, and wishes she’d brought a better book. But then Mrs. Wilks says quietly, “I hope you’re not still sad?” and Plum’s cheeks inflame. She would rather not speak of the spectacle she’d made of herself at the window. So often, of late, she finds herself ashamed to reflect on her behavior. It’s ridiculous that a miniature television could reduce her to sobs, regrettable that the subject of her birthday is now tainted with shouts and sulks. Yet Plum owes this woman something for her kindness, and makes herself reply, “I wasn’t sad — not really. Sometimes my family makes me angry, that’s all.”
Mrs. Wilks smiles. “I think that’s what families are supposed to do, Plum. My family used to make me so angry that I dreamed about burning the house down, with them inside it.”
Plum chuckles obligingly. “I don’t want to do that, ” she says. “I just wish they’d remember I’m not a baby anymore. I’m nearly fourteen. I’m having a party, too,” she adds. “Not like this one — a slumber party.”
“Did you hear that, David? Plum is having a party too, a grown-up party. The thing is, Plum, you are the baby — you’ll always be their baby, even when you’re old and married, even when you’re much older than fourteen.”
“Hmm.” Plum knows this, and privately finds it comforting. “It doesn’t mean they should treat me like a kid, though. They never take me seriously. They act like I don’t know what I’m talking about.”
Her neighbor nods, and Plum sees that she is thoughtfully considering the complaint, not laughing it aside as Plum’s mother would. Mrs. Wilks is quite a beautiful woman, in an Ali MacGraw, midday-movie kind of way. She is, perhaps, the same age as some of Plum’s teachers, which is oldish but not old. Her face has no creases, her skin is smooth. Her hair is long, lustrously dark and fashionably flicked. Her eyes, also dark, are also quite long, and heavy with green shadow. She wears a turquoise, ruffle-sleeved dress which has geometrical shapes printed across it. The material clings to her flat stomach and lean thighs. For some reason Plum thinks of a word she’s only heard used about the weather: sultry. “You think they don’t respect you,” Mrs. Wilks is saying. “They don’t respect your decisions.”
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