The Lucky Galah

by Tracy Sorensen

  Linda, who is drying dishes, gets snagged on the word soddy.

  ‘Oh, sod it!’ cries Linda, throwing down the tea towel. She puts milk into a saucepan for cocoa.

  Stella joins in: ‘Sod it! Sod it!’

  Evan patiently waits this out. His wife and younger daughter are so easily distracted. Their thoughts move messily all around their brains, brains in which work and play and geometry and tea towels merge and bleed into each other.

  Jo, on the other hand, has been listening carefully. She tunes her ears to her father’s voice. If they could swivel around to listen better, they would. She draws her soddy circles.

  He explains that within the gasket, you can draw more and more circles between and lightly touching the other circles, ‘but eventually, you do reach the end – you can’t draw any more circles.’

  Evan’s relief at this sparkles quietly in his eyes.

  ‘What about infinity?’ asks Jo.

  ‘What about it?’ asks Evan.

  Jo likes infinity. That is all. But it’s hard to explain. And she is wondering if, perhaps, you could draw more circles going infinitely small into infinity forever, only you’re stuck because of the width of the lead in your pencil.

  ‘No,’ says Evan firmly. ‘The Apollonian Gasket is finite. You have tiny, tiny circles but in the end, you get to a circle with a zero radius – which of course is not a circle, so just before that, you have the last circle.’

  All circles accounted for, even if only theoretically.

  Jo imagines drawing tinier and tinier circles within the outer soddy circle, drawing until she had drawn all possible circles and can put down her pencil and be satisfied.

  ‘Oh, sod it!’ cries Linda, for real this time, as the milk boils over and goes everywhere.

  Jo’s feet are leathery and tough. Her feet grow rapidly, big for her age. Out of school, she wears them bare or in rubber thongs. At the heel, the ball of the foot and the big toe, the rubber is beginning to wear down through the white upper layer to show the blue lower layer. She imagines her thongs in cross-section and thinks of sediment, of rock layers.

  She likes to peel things and lift things up. In the bathroom, she picks at the fish-themed Con-Tact wall and bench coverings Linda has laboured to apply smoothly, without trapping bubbles. She finds an edge and lifts it with a fingernail, knowing this will annoy but unable to resist.

  In this ninth year of her life – she will turn nine after the Moon Landing – her goal is to collect a complete Crazy Camel Train set, the various parts of which are to be found in cellophane packets in Kellogg’s Cornflakes boxes. At the supermarket, she tries to herd Linda towards the breakfast cereals, lingering there, looking at the boxes as if she could use X-ray vision to see the tiny toys inside.

  At impossibly long intervals, Linda buys a new box of cornflakes, usually while Jo is at school, when she has temporarily forgotten all about her project. Then one morning she will be surprised by a new box on the table, set in front of her place, waiting for her. At these times there will always be a small consolation prize for Stella, who has for the duration of the camel train era conceded cereal box rights to her sister. Stella might get a hairclip, or a five-cent piece, or even a tiny pink plastic pram for the tiniest pink baby doll. Jo will sit before the cereal box for a moment, as if in prayer, before opening it up. She uses a butter knife to cut around the top of the box, and then she is allowed to lift out the wax-paper bag containing the cornflakes – Linda can fit that back in later – and reach down to the bottom of the box, fingers closing over the cellophane. Everyone watches, interested, as she draws it out, eyes shut, holding it in the palm of her hand, then opening a screwed-up eye just a bit, a little bit more, to see.

  The complete camel train consists of an engine in front, running on camel pedal-power, followed by a first-class compartment in which a single monkey in a top hat sits on a single hump under a sumptuous fringed canopy, a sleeping car sporting a bed perched atop a sitting camel, and a four-humped economy-class camel bearing three lower-income monkeys. There is a signal box to be put off to one side of the track, next to a monkey holding two flags. Coming up the rear, there is the guard’s van, with a camel kneeling on a trunk no doubt full of interesting paraphernalia, if you could only move the camel, lift the lid (but you can’t, because they’re made of a single piece of moulded plastic).

  Jo has so far collected part of the engine in green, the signal box in red and the four-humped economy class camel in orange. She needs the first-class camel and various accessories. Most of all, she needs the sleeping compartment camel and monkey, which come separately. The monkey is sitting up in bed wearing a nightcap, eating a banana. There is a hook on the bed for a tiny bedpan, and the bedpan itself. She imagines herself in bed atop the gently swaying hump of a camel, rolling on camel train tracks through the desert night, falling in and out of sleep. One would wake up to see the stars, then wake again to see the dawn.

  Jo opens her eyes and her face falls. She lets the small cellophane packet drop onto the placemat beside her Skippy milk cup.

  ‘What is it?’ asks Stella.

  ‘A signal box,’ says Jo.

  ‘Better luck next time,’ says Evan.

  Evan stands at the front of the house waiting for the minibus. He, too, is disappointed, for Jo and also for himself. He’d quite like to see the complete set.

  Back in the house, Jo’s fingers are itching to tear open the cellophane and start pressing the plastic pieces out of their plastic frame. She decides to keep the unopened packet for swapping.

  In her quest for camel train pieces, Jo eats two bowls of cornflakes every morning. The sooner the box empties, the sooner another box will be bought. She would eat even more, but Linda stops her.

  One day, in the toilet, she gets an idea. She doesn’t have to eat her way through the cornflakes. She can cut out the process in the middle, the passage of cornflakes down the alimentary canal and out into the world at the other end. She can pour cereal straight down the toilet and flush it away.

  If she pours too much down the toilet, it will be noticed. She must be careful. She thinks up a scheme to get rid of small amounts at a time: a Skippy cupful here, a handful there. She decides to get out of bed and sneak into the kitchen in the middle of the night. But she forgets all about her plan, and sleeps through the night.

  On their next run, the astronauts wear new extravehicular mobility units, or EMUs. The EMUs provide a complete life-support system, allowing astronauts to escape the umbilical cord of their spaceship.

  The EMUs are sewn together by a team led by Eleanor Foraker at her machine in Delaware, USA, using ordinary Singer sewing machines.

  They stitch together a Nomex comfort layer next to the skin, then a neoprene-coated nylon pressure bladder, a nylon restraint layer, seven layers of Beta/Kapton spacer laminate and an outer layer of Teflon-coated Beta fabric.

  The great danger lies in stray sewing pins. Just one pin accidentally left inside the suit could spell disaster, puncturing the layers and killing the astronaut inside. Eleanor Foraker must track and account for every pin used by her team.

  Under all the layers of his EMU, the astronaut is obliged to wear adult incontinence nappies, of the kind that can be bought from an ordinary supermarket.

  In Port Badminton, Western Australia, Marjorie Kelly gets to work on Linda’s Moon Ball gown. She is to be Artemis, sister of Apollo. It is a rather theatrical idea, but the first moon landing will only ever happen once. What about accoutrements – a bow and quiver? No, that would be silly. The date of the ball is set down for August, some weeks after the Moon Landing itself, so as not to distract.

  I was in my cage, staring at the back door, when Linda Johnson burst through it. She came past in a silver shimmer, a swirl of light that emerged on the dry grass of the backyard.

  Her hair is piled loosely on top of her head, threatenin
g to fall. Soft tendrils of escaping hair follow her head, wafting in the air about her face and neck. She twirls around in front of her audience of Mrs Kelly, Jo, Stella, various little Kelly girls, and me. Her arms and neck are long and of uniform colour – quite different to the Kellys’, which are shorter, freckled and prone to sunburn. Stella applauds, her open palms splatting together.

  ‘Of course, I won’t be wearing these silly sandals,’ says Linda, looking down at them.

  We all look at her feet: flat brown sandals, almost the same colour as her flesh.

  ‘What sort of shoes would set it off?’ asks Mrs Kelly.

  ‘I know!’ says Linda, holding out a foot. ‘I could go over these with silver paint.’

  ‘Silver paint!’ gasps a Kelly girl.

  At this, I begin to screech. I screech blue murder. I have my claws wrapped around the ceiling of the cage, head pointing downwards. I throw my head back and forth, making myself dizzy.

  ‘Shoosh up, cocky,’ says Mrs Kelly. ‘What’s all that racket?’

  I’m jealous, simple as that. I have no mother, no siblings, no ball gown, no glittery button. I am lonely and stuck in a cage. I have never fledged or flown. I cannot even stretch out my wings. I will never get out of this wretched cage.

  I go silent, hanging upside down, looking down at my own droppings.

  Mrs Johnson goes back inside. Mrs Kelly and all the daughters trail her like courtiers.

  Later, Marj and her daughters discuss Linda’s beautiful dress and the beauty of Linda Johnson herself.

  ‘She doesn’t have blonde hair though,’ says the oldest Kelly girl. ‘Gentlemen prefer blondes.’

  ‘Well,’ says Marjorie firmly, ‘brunettes can be just as beautiful as blondes.’

  ‘Yes,’ agree most of the other Kelly girls.

  All the Kelly girls, like their father, have ginger hair, neither blonde nor brunette.

  Two American astronauts, along with their wives and a NASA public relations man, are guests of honour at the Port Badminton Tropical Festival. They are met by Crowie at the airport, along with the Northern Times reporter and the tracking station Cap Com. The guests are accommodated in sagging single beds at the Port Hotel and given fried tomatoes for breakfast. The tomatoes touch their bacon and eggs, tainting them.

  ‘A fried tomato is not something we’d have for breakfast in the States,’ says the PR man, to explain the lightly-touched food. The girl picking up their plates just shrugs.

  The hungry guests are invited to stand on the back of a flatbed truck for the festival parade. They’ll be able to hold on to the railing with one hand, and wave to the crowd with the other. The truck lurches suddenly into motion, making them all flail for the railing.

  They hold on tight with both hands, and therefore fail to wave. But they do flash big smiles with their straight white teeth. The townspeople of Port Badminton line the road in a straggle all the way from the seawall to the Pony Club. The truck is preceded by a self-important white ute which brakes unexpectedly from time to time, causing the guests to jostle one another. Small children are disappointed. They look like ordinary people. Where are their spacesuits?

  Behind the astronauts’ truck, there are four camels with studiedly bored-looking teenagers riding on their humps. Then there is the hospital’s float with a cross-eyed doctor wielding a giant scalpel and splashings of red paint all around, and then there are guitar-strumming Girl Guides among blue crepe-paper rosettes, mouths opening and shutting, their thin voices lost in the wind; and then a squad of Pony Club horses with their tails neatly plaited and one of them skittish, skipping sideways out of line. The fire brigade, the softball team, bales of wool, a boat decorated with fishing nets and captured cardboard prawns and alfoil fish glinting in the sun all glide by.

  The ute abruptly swings left off the bitumen, kicking up a cloud of dust that settles over the faces of the important visitors. Each feels the grit crunching between his or her teeth. The assault is so thorough and so sudden that they wonder, for an instant, if they are being deliberately insulted. Each eats his dust alone, staring fixedly ahead. The truck stops. The dust clears. They are at the Pony Club. In no hurry, the ute and truck drivers sit where they are. The visitors look at each other, their faces covered in dust, and laugh.

  They are treated to a civic dinner of lamb and mint sauce and a speech by the mayor.

  ‘Why do they call him Crowbar?’ asks the NASA public relations man.

  A town councillor swallows a mouthful of beer and explains: ‘He owns the pub, the Port Badminton Hotel. An Abo – an Aborigine – was kicking up a stink so he hit him with a piece of coax cable.’

  ‘Coax cable?’

  ‘You know – coaxial cable.’

  ‘Yes, I do know coaxial cable. So why do they call him Crowbar?’

  ‘Well, everyone thinks he used a crowbar, but I have a mate who was there that night and it was only a piece of coax cable.’

  The public relations man chews his lamb thoughtfully.

  ‘It was about yay long,’ says the town councillor, giving a gesture of measurement, the way people do when they are describing the length of a fish.

  Five, four, three, two, one – BLAST OFF! The children’s arms are the fins of rocket ships. There is fairy floss at the festival, and displays of mangoes. The flat carriages that used to take wool out to the end of the One Mile Jetty have been brought here and laid out in a circle, within which ponies are jumped and put through their paces. Children run around and around atop the carriages, leaping over metal and wood, sometimes cutting their knees.

  There are also giant wooden cotton reels to play on: the reels that brought the coaxial cable into town. Children run backwards on the spot on them, making the reels roll forwards.

  Jo is a Brownie Guide. She has learned her Promise and gets through her Promise Ceremony without a hitch. She is careful to touch knees on both sides with her fellow Brownies when they go into powwow, so that their secrets can’t escape.

  At the end of each session, the entire pack faces its leaders, salutes and sings: ‘Goodnight, Brown Owl! Goodnight, Tawny Owl! Goodnight, Pack Leader and goodnight, everyone!’

  Still singing, they turn and start skipping towards the door. The pack emerges out of the front door of the weatherboard hall and disperses into the waiting cars of parents.

  At home, she tends the tadpoles she has collected from the ponds at the bottom of the levee banks. Linda boils cabbage leaves, allows them to cool, and helps Jo lower them down over the tadpoles. Their mouths are like tiny black rubber bands. They already have buds where their hind legs will grow.

  When Jo and Linda get home from Brownies one afternoon, they find Susan Kelly and Stella Johnson at the gate, their faces swollen from crying. A brief question-and-answer session establishes that Susan wants to be a Brownie too, but her mother has said No, and Stella wants to be a Brownie, but her mother, also, has said No.

  ‘When you’re older you can be a Brownie!’ says Linda to Stella. Susan’s exclusion is more complicated.

  Kevin Kelly has been off work with a bad back. He has been staying out late at the Port Hotel, coming home dead drunk, then lying around the house during the day, snoring and jerking suddenly awake. There is barely a cent to get food on the table, much less berets and gold badges and fawn socks and whatnot. It might be all right if it were just Susan, but if Susan goes, the others will want to go. This is not information Marjorie had intended to make public, at least not this bluntly, but Susan doesn’t care. She relays all of it, hiccupping and blowing her nose. Her disappointment at missing out on Brownies is beyond family loyalty, beyond shame.

  Jo, in her crisp but very hot Brownie uniform, watches this grovelling performance, slightly appalled. But Linda, remembering her own outcast childhood, is thinking up a scheme. The next afternoon, a Wednesday, she plays Brown Owl for a special Clam Street Brownie pack
made up of all the Kelly girls and Stella and Jo. Jo is not to wear her uniform for this: like the others, she must participate in civvies and wear paper badges.

  They all sit in a powwow and say the Brownie Guide promise. The little Kelly girls push each other to sit on either side of Linda.

  Linda knows her father, champion of the less fortunate, would be proud of her.

  Susan has fun in Linda’s pack but she still covets a real uniform, a real beret, a real pair of fawn socks. When she grows up, she would like to be rich.

  ELEVEN

  The Moon Landing

  It is just after four in the morning on Monday, 21 July 1969, Florida time.

  Three male human beings consume steak, scrambled eggs and toast. They drink orange juice and coffee.

  After breakfast, they walk down a long corridor to their change room. They strip naked. Their bodies have evolved from the first multi-celled organisms, the first organisms to propel themselves independently, the first organisms to grow spines and limbs, through the fish stage of a blue watery planet, through simian stages high in the branches of trees and thence down to the golden African plains, walking on two back legs, muscles rippling under almost hairless skin. And now they will leave the blue and green womb of the earth and set their feet down on other soil. This can only be done in the right clothes. Without the right clothes, their bodies will melt down or freeze over; they will be dead in seconds.

  In the change room, their naked bodies are wired up with medical sensors and communication equipment. Attendants move around them the way Afghan cameleers moved about the camels, hitching things up, adding things on. The layers sewn by Mrs Foraker and her industrious team are bundled over the bodies of the men, making them safe. They look like swaddled babies.