Nell's Festival of Crisp Winter Glories

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by Glenda Millard


  Scarlet didn’t write any poems in her book or on her arm that night. She didn’t ring the Colour Patch Café and ask to speak to Anik either. Indigo didn’t paint each of her fingernails a different colour or braid her hair into hundreds of skinny plaits and tie them with blue embroidery silk. Amber didn’t bake jam drops or chocolate brownies for next week’s lunches. And no-one talked about the Festival of Crisp Winter Glories. They just waited for the telephone to ring. Hoped Ben would call and tell them Nell could be repaired, that the doctors could make her as good as new again.

  After Perry and Saffron had locked the hens in their house for the night, Annie took a pack of cards from Nell’s ‘useful’ drawer and they all played Happy Families. But everyone kept forgetting things, like who they’d already asked for the Mr Plod the policeman card, or the one with Mrs Chip the carpenter’s wife on it, or who they suspected might be holding Mr Bacon’s little boy. The game seemed to go on forever. No-one cared who won. From time to time, the children sneaked a look at the telephone, willing it to ring. While he was waiting for his turn, Perry looked at Nell’s to-do list. He slowly read the first line and wondered who Henry was.

  ‘It might be very late when your daddy rings,’ Annie said after a while. ‘It takes at least two and a half hours to get to the city and then if the emergency department is busy, Nell and Ben will have to wait until a doctor can see them.’

  Indigo exploded into her familiar noisy self then.

  ‘But that’s not fair — Nell’s in pain!’ she shouted. ‘Daddy should tell them she needs to see a doctor straight away!’

  ‘I know it doesn’t seem fair, but there are probably a lot of other people waiting to see a doctor too,’ said Annie. ‘The nurses will see Nell gets something for the pain, but I’m afraid she’ll have to wait her turn like everyone else does. Why don’t you all go to bed now. There’s no sense in us all staying up. I’ll sit here by the stove and wait for the call.’

  Annie sat down in Nell’s rocking chair on the flattened blue cushion with tassels on the corners and propped her feet up on Barney’s woolly back. But none of the children moved. No-one wanted to leave Mama by herself.

  ‘I’ll keep you company,’ said Scarlet.

  ‘Me too,’ said Violet.

  ‘Let’s make a pot of tea,’ said Amber, filling the kettle.

  Annie looked at their faces and sighed.

  ‘Why don’t you get your sleeping bags,’ she said.

  Griffin and Perry made a cubby house under the table, with sheets for the walls, and put their sleeping bags and pillows inside. It wasn’t long before Blue padded in and made himself a cosy nest between them. After they’d had their tea, Annie turned the lights out and Griffin and the Rainbow Girls were soon sleeping, but Perry lay awake.

  He shone his Superman torch on the underneath of the table and tried to read all the words that were stencilled on the wood. Ben had made the table top from old fruit crates. He rubbed the top with sandpaper until it was smooth and shiny, but underneath you could read the labels that had once been on the outside of the boxes: oranges from Robinvale, apples from the Harcourt Valley, peaches from Shepparton and sultana grapes from Mildura. It was a fruit salad table.

  Ben could make anything out of wood. He was good at fixing things too. But you cannot fix people unless you are a doctor. Perry thought he might like to be a doctor when he grew up. He would be the sort of doctor who could fix legs and he wouldn’t have a long line of people waiting. He made his teeth into a cage again and said the I love you words for Ben and Nell.

  Then Perry started to feel thirsty from looking at the Robinvale orange box, so he opened the sheets of the cubby house a crack and shone his torch onto the sleeping Rainbow Girls. Then he shone it on the telephone. Annie had the door of the stove open. Coals glowed inside and shone a soft light into the room. Perry wriggled out of his sleeping bag and filled a glass with water from the tap. After he quenched his thirst, he quietly carried a chair over to the door, climbed up on it and unhooked Nell’s apron. When he took the chair back to the table, he saw Annie watching him. She looked lonely without Ben, so Perry went and sat on her lap for a while. When the big hand on the clock was on the twelve and the small hand was on the eleven, Annie kissed him and whispered, ‘Off to bed now.’

  Perry slid off her lap, but he didn’t go to bed straight away. There was something important he needed to know.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ asked Annie.

  ‘Does Nell like Henry?’ said Perry.

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘Does Henry like Nell?’

  ‘I’m sure he does.’

  ‘More than Jenkins does?’

  Annie put her arms around Perry and cuddled him. Then she whispered, ‘Henry and Jenkins are the same person. Henry is his first name and Jenkins is his last and I am sure he loves Nell just as much as we do. Now, off to bed, my angel.’

  Nell’s apron had dribbles of dried cake batter on it and a few splotches of raspberry jam. But Perry didn’t mind. He licked the raspberry jam off, because Blue was asleep, and then he smoothed the apron over his pillow and lay his head on it. He stared at the orange box for a while and wondered if he should get up and look at Ben’s spinning-around map of the world to find out where Robinvale was. But he decided not to, in case he saw Africa by mistake. Then he went to sleep and he didn’t hear the telephone ring or Annie doing her soft talking.

  9. The Show Must Go On

  Griffin’s sleeping bag was empty when Perry woke next morning. He could see a pair of striped legs beside the table through the gap between the dinosaur sheets and the floor. Perry wished they were Nell’s legs, but they weren’t. The liquorice-all-sort legs went away for a while and when they came back Perry said to them, ‘Is it winter today?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Are there any crisp winter glories outside?’

  ‘You should get up and have a look.’

  There was a sound like fluttering wings on the table and a small white shower fell gently from above, sprinkling the floor and the feet like snow. It looked so beautiful it almost made Perry want to stop being a hibernating bear. Perhaps he could find some winter glories even without Nell there to help him.

  ‘What are you making?’ asked Perry.

  ‘Guess.’

  Perry usually liked guessing games, but he didn’t feel much like it today. The legs moved away again, leaving footprints in the pretend snow and after a while Perry peeled off his sleeping bag and crawled out of his cubby house. He brought Nell’s apron with him. Amber was standing at the stove on her lolly legs.

  Amber was usually an afternoon-tea sort of person. She made cakes — every sort you could imagine and then some. She made birthday cakes, Christmas cakes, thank-you cakes, sorry cakes and I-love-you cakes. But today Amber wasn’t making cakes. Perry looked at the golden brown circles inside the hot pan. They reminded him of pale winter suns. Amber was making pikelets just as Nell did when they needed to remember that even in winter there are small glories to be found. Perry held out Nell’s apron to his sister. Amber looked at the apron and she looked at Perry and just when he thought she wasn’t going to, Amber put it on over her pyjamas and then hugged him tight.

  ‘Where is everyone else?’ asked Perry, when he’d recovered from Amber’s squeeze.

  ‘Indigo and Violet are helping Mama milk the goats,’ said Amber. ‘Scarlet’s collecting the eggs, but I don’t know where Saffron and Griffin are. Maybe they’re getting dressed.’

  Perry looked at the telephone while Amber went back to her cooking. Finally he asked, ‘Did Ben make the telephone ring in the night?’

  ‘Yes. He talked to Mama.’

  ‘Did the doctor fix Nell’s leg yet?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Can she talk?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Is her head better?’

  ‘I don’t know anything, Perry. You’ll have to wait till Mama comes inside. She said she’d tell us a
ll what Ben said when she’s finished milking. Here, you can help me squeeze some lemons for the pikelets and then we’ll set the table.’

  Amber placed a heavy glass lemon juicer on Ben’s fruit salad table. Perry picked up a lemon half, pressed it down hard on the juicer and thought about oranges from Robinvale.

  ‘Do they grow oranges where Ben is?’ he asked and before Amber could answer he added, ‘Will Ben come home today?’

  Sometimes Amber found it hard to believe there was a time when Perry hardly spoke at all.

  Perry put plates and cups on the table. Amber told him to set four extra places.

  ‘Mr Jenkins and the Elliotts are coming,’ she explained before Perry could ask why. ‘Mama telephoned Mr Jenkins this morning to tell him about Nell. Then she invited him to breakfast, because he was upset. And Mr Elliott rang this morning to see if we had any news about Nell, so Mama asked him if he and Mrs Elliott and Layla would like to have breakfast with us. They’ll be driving here in their car and picking Mr Jenkins up on the way.’

  ‘Jenkins is Henry and Jenkins,’ said Perry proudly.

  ‘Yes, I know, but only Nell is allowed to call him Henry,’ said Amber.

  After he’d finished, Perry and Blue ran outside. Perry was going to run to the bottom of the drive and open the gate so Mr Elliott could drive straight through. But then he remembered what happened to Nell and decided to look for Griffin instead.

  Perry sat next to Jenkins and Annie sat in Ben’s chair at the end of the table.

  ‘Amber has cooked us a lovely breakfast and I want you all to eat some before I talk to you about Nell,’ said Annie firmly.

  Amber put two leaning towers of pikelets on the table with pretty cut-glass bowls of lemon juice, sugar and golden syrup. Then she and Annie made a pot of tea following Nell’s method, which they had learnt by heart. Amber said the words inside her head as she worked, as though it was a magic spell.

  First Amber warmed the teapot with hot water. Then she emptied it and added a tablespoon of tea leaves for each person and one for the pot. Annie took the pot to the kettle and poured boiling water onto the tea leaves. The pot was turned three times clockwise, then three times anti-clockwise. Then Amber put the cosy on it and left the tea to brew for five minutes.

  Perry watched his sister’s lips moving and wondered if she knew any spells for fixing legs.

  When everyone had eaten, Annie repeated what Ben had told her on the telephone the night before. Nell’s hip was broken. The doctors were going to put metal pins and wires inside Nell to help her bones mend properly. After the operation, she would have to stay in hospital while she learnt to do exercises that would make her strong and get her used to walking again. Perry almost interrupted to ask Annie if the people at the hospital would teach Nell to dance again, but Griffin spoke first.

  ‘How long will she have to stay?’ he asked.

  ‘Nobody knows yet,’ said Annie and went on to explain that once Nell was allowed to come home, she’d need to use a walking aid — a frame with wheels and handlebars — to make sure she didn’t fall again.

  When Annie finished speaking, silence filled the room like a fog. Seconds ticked by. There was much to think about.

  Mrs Elliott excused herself from the table. Soon the children would ask more questions. Annie would know how to answer them gently and honestly. Mrs Elliott wasn’t very good at dispersing fogs of silence from a room, but she was excellent at dislodging cobwebs, dust and dirt, so she went to find some housework to do. It would help Annie, she told herself.

  She loaded the washing machine with clothes and tipped in some soap powder. Then she went and plugged in the vacuum cleaner. She pushed it backwards and forwards in neat, straight lines over the pink cabbage roses in the front room and thought about her own mother, whose heart had lost its rhythm when Layla was only six years old.

  Mrs Elliott wished she could be as brave as Annie was when she explained to them all about Nell’s brokenness. She was still disappointed in herself for not telling Layla that when a heart loses its rhythm, it is sometimes not long before it stops beating altogether. But she could not and when her mother’s heart stopped, Mrs Elliott vacuumed the carpet and washed the tiles and scrubbed the shower and swept the paths outside to try to make the fog go away.

  Sometimes she took Layla to the playground in the park beside the Colour Patch Café and they laughed for a while. But when Layla looked at the photo album and asked questions about her nana, the fog always came back.

  While Mrs Elliott was pegging the wet washing on the clothesline on the windy side of the Kingdom of Silk, she turned her face to the folding blue hills and made a promise to herself. She promised she would take the photo album out of the bottom drawer when she got home and she would talk to Layla about her nana, no matter how hard it was.

  Inside the house, Perry Angel was thinking about the people he’d seen using walking aids, when he visited the old people’s home with Nell. Most of them moved very slowly. Was it only yesterday he’d imagined Nell spinning around like a music-box ballerina? Now he couldn’t imagine how anyone could dance while using a walking aid. Beside him, Jenkins took a slow, deep breath and let it go again in a rush. Then he said a most surprising thing.

  ‘The show must go on.’

  ‘Which show?’ Perry asked and all the others looked at Jenkins too.

  ‘That’s what they say in the acting business,’ said Saffron, who had some experience in school plays.

  ‘I mean the festival must go on,’ said Jenkins.

  ‘And the dance?’ asked Perry.

  ‘And the dance,’ said Jenkins.

  ‘But what’s the point?’ said Indigo. ‘We don’t even know if Nell will be able to come.’

  ‘If I know anything about Nell, she’ll try her best to come home as soon as she possibly can,’ said Annie. ‘But it won’t hurt to give her something else to look forward to.’

  It seemed to Perry they all needed something to look forward to.

  10. Forget-me-nots and the Fairy Queen

  In small towns like Cameron’s Creek, news travels fast. Especially when the news is about such a well-known and dearly loved lady as Nell Silk.

  By Monday morning, Elsie-from-the-post-office had placed a book on the counter, near the parcel string and the scales. It had a kingfisher on its cover and shimmering silver-edged pages. There was a pen attached to the counter with a length of string so people could write get-well messages to Nell. Elsie promised she would post it to the hospital when it was full.

  Mr Kadri organised a roster of volunteers to visit Nell. There was no shortage of people who wanted their names on the roster. But Nell was hurting all over and the doctors gave her medicine to make her sleep. Ben could stay, they said, but no-one else until Nell was feeling better.

  ‘Until then,’ Annie told her children, ‘we should take Mr Jenkins’ advice and keep working on the festival.’

  But it is difficult to be excited about a festival when someone you love has a broken hip and a map of Africa on her head.

  During the day, Annie, the Rainbow Girls, Griffin and Perry tried hard to find winter glories to cheer their worried hearts. But each evening seemed to come sooner and darker and colder, and the Silk family waited in the kitchen for their telephone to ring. They did their homework there, ate their meals there and waited for 7:30, when the phone would finally sound.

  They longed for the day when Ben would tell them Nell was well enough to see them all. Mostly Ben seemed cheerful, but sometimes when it was Perry’s turn to speak on the telephone, he imagined Ben’s chin wobbling and his eyes like rock pools, all glimmery and green, the way they were when Nell was lying on the hard red stones, twisted and broken and bleeding.

  The telephone rang on Thursday afternoon, when Perry was making peanut butter sandwiches. It wasn’t often Perry answered the telephone. Usually Nell or someone else was there to do it. But on this day Annie was feeding the goats and the Rainbow Girls were still on the sc
hool bus. Layla had come to play, but she and Griffin were in the tree house waiting to haul Perry’s peanut butter sandwiches up in a bucket.

  Perry looked at the clock on the wall and then at the telephone. It kept ringing and the sound of it was very loud in a kitchen so empty. Perry licked the peanut butter off his fingers, then cautiously picked up the receiver and put it to his ear.

  ‘Hello, this is Perry Angel Lee Silk speaking,’ he said.

  There was a small pause at the other end of the telephone.

  ‘Hello, Perry. It’s Sunday.’

  ‘Sunday,’ he said slowly and he wondered why his other mother was making their telephone ring.

  ‘Sunday Lee,’ said the voice in the telephone.

  ‘Yes, I know. I thought you might be Daddy,’ said Perry, ‘except it isn’t the proper time.’

  ‘I rang about the invitation,’ said Sunday. ‘You know, the invitation to the festival,’ she reminded Perry. ‘Is Nell there? Can you talk about the dance?’

  ‘Nell’s in hospital. Daddy’s there too,’ Perry felt tears slide down his cheeks. He didn’t know why they were coming now, why his insides were suddenly so sad, but he couldn’t stop the feeling.

  ‘Oh Perry, I’m so sorry. What’s happened? What’s wrong? Is Annie there?’

  The back door slapped shut and Annie came into the kitchen. She looked at Perry’s face and quickly scooped him into her arms and took the telephone from him.

  ‘Hello? … Yes, this is Annie speaking … Sunday, oh Sunday, it’s you! … Yes, no, it’s Nell who’s the patient.’

  After Annie explained everything to Sunday, she put the telephone back in its cradle and helped Perry finish the peanut butter sandwiches.

  ‘Sunday said we can stay with her in her apartment when we visit Nell,’ she said. ‘It’s not far from the hospital. She shares it with her friend, Sam. I told you about Sam — do you remember?’

 

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