Perry nodded his head. ‘Sam Sparrow is Sunday’s special friend. Can we go tomorrow?’
‘I know you’re missing Nell very much,’ said Annie. ‘We all are, but we have to wait until the doctor says she’s well enough for us to visit. Nell’s had a nasty knock to her head as well as breaking her hip and the doctors want her to sleep so she’ll get stronger. We’ll just have to be patient a little longer.’
‘How much longer?’
‘Maybe Daddy will know more when he rings tonight,’ said Annie.
But Ben did not know.
On Friday afternoon, the telephone rang again. It was just like the day before. Perry was alone in the kitchen. He looked at the telephone and wondered who was making it ring. He wished Annie was there in case it was Sunday again. He loved Sunday and he didn’t want her to worry if he accidentally cried again. Slowly he picked up the receiver.
‘Hello, this is Perry Angel Lee Silk speaking,’ he said.
‘Hello Perry, it’s Daddy. You answered the telephone very nicely.’
‘Nell taught me what to say.’ Perry looked up at the clock. ‘I didn’t think it would be you. I don’t think it’s seven thirty yet,’ he said.
‘No, it isn’t,’ said Ben, ‘but I couldn’t wait. I’ve got good news.’
‘Is Nell coming home?’
‘Not yet. She wants to. Every day she asks me when it will be. No-one knows yet, but the good news is that the doctors say Nell can have visitors!’
Nell’s bed at the hospital was high and hard, with levers, buttons, buzzers and wheels — not at all like her own bed at the Kingdom of Silk. There were no hills or hollows, no plump feathered quilt, floppy pillows or frilly pillowslips. No hot-water bottle, no goose-necked lamp for midnight reading, no peppermints in the drawer, no curling-up space for small boys and bigger girls. No midnight owl hooting outside her window.
Nell was sleeping when they arrived. It wasn’t often her family saw her that way. The nurses had brushed her hair until it shone as silver as a unicorn’s mane and fastened it high up on her head with a clasp like a butterfly. She was wearing a powder-blue bed jacket with ribbon ties and embroidered flowers on its collar and cuffs. The flowers were forget-me-nots.
Perry wondered if Nell had worn the jacket on purpose as a secret message to her visitors to remember her even when they were far apart. He knew he would never, ever forget her. Even when he was as grown-up as Ben. Even if he became a leg doctor or a pirate who sailed the seven seas or an astronaut who orbited the heavenlies, he would always come home again to Nell. But while he was away, he would not think of her lying in bed, wearing her forget-me-not bed jacket. He would imagine her wearing her elastic-sided boots, her red woollen socks, her primrose cardigan and her favourite apron. And in Perry’s mind, Nell would always and forever be dancing.
Propped against a drift of snowy pillows, Nell seemed to have shrunk. Though tiny and tired, she looked to Perry like a fairy queen, with her silken hair and her face as pale as a daytime moon. Perry looked sideways at Jenkins to make sure he was noticing how beautiful Nell looked.
Her legs, under the sheets, looked straight; the map of Africa was neatly stitched. But even so, Nell, pale and pillowed, seemed to Perry to be a different person from the one who stood firm and strong on the windy side of the hill at the Kingdom of Silk. The one who looked after them all. He wondered if Annie or one of the Rainbow Girls had thought to bring Nell’s magic wand and if they had, was there enough magic in it, or in the entire universe, to change Nell back to the way she used to be?
11. All That Was Wrong
Ben placed a chair close to the bed and offered it to Mr Jenkins while everyone took turns to tell Nell about the festival — being careful not to mention the dance.
Nell’s cheeks grew as pink as the roses on the carpet square at home and Perry wasn’t sure if it was because of Jenkins or because of the festival. From time to time, while everyone was talking, Nell’s eyes would close. The first time it happened, Perry pressed close to the bed and looked anxiously at Nell.
‘It’s all right,’ said Ben. ‘The nurses give Nell medicine so her leg won’t hurt so much and it makes her sleepy. But that’s a good thing, because sleep helps your body recover more quickly.’
When it was time for them to leave, the Rainbow Girls kissed Nell, Mr Jenkins held her hand, and Ben hugged his mum tight but tender, like a bear hugging its cub. Ben was taking them back to Cameron’s Creek, but Annie, Griffin, Layla and Perry stayed.
When Mrs Elliott learnt Layla was invited to go with them and to stay with Sunday and Sam, she remembered how, only days before, she had wished she was more like Annie. But telling the truth is not always easy and it was Layla who spoke first. She was brave and honest, true and gentle with her mother.
‘It’s okay, Mum,’ she said. ‘I know people don’t last forever. Nell says that’s why it’s so important to spend time with the ones we love. But Nell’s going to get better. I know she is. Only I think she might be homesick and I want to be with her.’
Mrs Elliott was proud of her daughter and glad she had fallen in love with the most uncommon family in Cameron’s Creek.
When visiting hours were over, Sam Sparrow met Annie, Griffin, Layla and Perry at the hospital and drove them to the apartment, where Sunday was waiting. They dressed themselves in coats and hats, left their overnight bags and went walking. Past factories, warehouses, shops and apartment blocks, and on towards the shining sea.
In that strange and wonderful place, made tiny by towering cargo ships, they sat on the splintery dock, with the blustering wind in their hair and seagull songs ringing in their ears. They ate hot fish and chips from paper parcels, licked salt from their fingers and watched old men with long curved rods reel whiting and seaweed in from the deeps.
Sunday and Sam’s apartment was small. There was a fold-down couch for Annie to sleep on, and for Griffin, Perry and Layla, mattresses and pillows on the floor. In Sam and Sunday’s room, there was a bed and a cot and a picture on the wall. It was a painting of an old dog and a small boy wearing a Superman costume. Annie’s signature was in the corner. When Perry first went to live with the Silks, Nell made him a Superman costume to help him feel braver. Now Perry had learnt to be brave without the suit. He remembered Annie painting the picture and giving it to Sunday to take home with her, the first time she came to the Kingdom of Silk.
‘It’s you,’ said Sam, smiling at Perry’s smaller self on the wall, like he was glad he was there. Then he said, ‘Sunday wants to tell you something.’
Sunday’s face was shiny and round like it was bursting with happiness when she said, ‘Sam and I are going to have a baby.’
That night, when the others were sleeping, Perry thought about Nell and the dance, and about Ben and the girls and Jenkins so far away, and about the new baby that was growing in the quiet dark in Sunday’s belly.
After a while, he crept up on the couch beside Annie and her arms went around him, safe and strong. He remembered back to long ago when he was nobody’s child. Every day when he woke up he would tell himself this might be the day when someone would take him home and ask him to stay and never leave. He was glad Sam and Sunday’s baby would never have to do that.
After the Silks went home again, there were many more long trips to and from home and the hospital, and in between there was school and preparing for the festival. But all the while, the townsfolk of Cameron’s Creek made sure Nell had plenty of visitors.
Mr Jenkins went three times a week. Scarlet, Anik, Grandma Mosas and the aunties took care of the Colour Patch Café one weekend so Mr and Mrs Kadri and their curly-haired children could visit Nell. They took a box of home-made rose-flavoured Turkish Delight. And when Elsie-from-the-post-office and the preacher went, Elsie took the book with the kingfisher cover and the shimmering silver-edged pages.
Nell didn’t sleep so much any more and when she had visitors she asked the nurses to pull the lever that made the end of her bed tilt up,
so she could have meetings about the festival with her visitors, even though she was not strictly a committee member. When there were no visitors, physiotherapists took Nell to the hospital gymnasium, where she did special exercises to make her leg strong. Then they brought her a walking aid called The Intrepid. It was cherry red with wheels and brakes and a padded seat with a basket underneath. Nell lifted the seat and looked at the basket.
‘That will come in handy for putting vegetables in when I’m out in the garden,’ Nell told the physiotherapist. ‘And for library books when I’m visiting people at the old folk’s home.’
Day by day, Nell practised her walking, until she and The Intrepid became a familiar sight in the corridors of the hospital, and at last the doctors, physiotherapists and nurses told Ben that Nell might soon be able to go home.
Towards the middle of July, two visitors arrived at the Kingdom of Silk. They wore neat suits and name tags and arrived in a shiny white car on a day when the weather was a stampede of elephants, rumbling, grey and wet.
Perry, Griffin and Layla were on the raft in the middle of the dam, dressed in yellow raincoats and gumboots and sheltering under a polka-dot umbrella. On the bank, Blue was rounding up Fred and Ginger’s fifteen summer goslings, trying to persuade them to go for a swim. Fred and Ginger hissed and honked, Barney Blacksheep bleated, Blue barked, the children shouted and they didn’t hear the visitors’ car.
The driver stopped at the bottom of the hill. The passenger stepped out, picked her way across the puddles, opened the gate and closed it again after the car drove through. When it pulled up next to the Bedford, the car was no longer shiny and white.
Barney bulleted around the corner of Ben’s shed, wearing Griffin’s red rain hat at a jaunty angle. He planted his hooves on the car door and peered in the passenger’s side, trying to see through the soupy film of mud dribbling down the window. Barney Blacksheep was a very large sheep and his winter coat was as thick as a duck-down mattress. The visitors sat in their car and beeped the horn.
There must have been something that upset the visitors. Perhaps they were not used to all the glories of winter. Or they might never have met a man who sometimes forgot his daughters had plaited his beard and tied it with ribbons and bows, and who greeted his guests with a one-eyed black crow perched on his shoulder. Maybe they had never been to a home where twin goats, born too soon, were being kept alive in a laundry basket in front of the stove. Or perhaps it was the billowing blue tarpaulin that provided a temporary roof for the unfinished extension at the back of the house.
Whatever had upset the visitors, the Silks would never know. Ben, Annie and the children spent a whole hour walking through the house, listening to the visitors tell them what was wrong with it. They shook their heads and tut-tutted and marked paper sheets on their clipboards with thick black crosses.
They said the carpet with the pink cabbage roses was worn out and dangerous and the floor had too many ups and downs in unexpected places. Animals should not be permitted inside. Both the old black stove, the rocking chair beside it and the deep, deep bath with the lion’s feet should be replaced, they said.
When it stopped raining, the visitors went outside. They didn’t like the way the stuffing was coming out of the red vinyl couch on the veranda and said winding gravel paths in the secret garden were not desirable. Straight and concrete and neatly trimmed were preferred. Amber had made fairy bread and cream kisses for afternoon tea, but the visitors politely refused.
‘No, thank you. We have a long drive back to the city,’ Daryl the driver said.
‘What about Nell?’ said Annie. ‘When can she come home?’
‘Our priority is the safety of the patient,’ said the woman with the Cynthia badge on her chest.
‘We’ll need to do a further inspection to ensure all our recommendations have been acted on, before we can make a decision.’
Annie held Ben’s hand. He looked as though his heart was broken. The children, who had gathered beside their parents, linked hands like a small and crooked picket fence, protecting the home they loved. They stared after the muddied car as it drove away.
12. The House That Love Built
Scarlet flounced into the kitchen after the visitors had left. She announced she was calling an extraordinary meeting of the festival committee and dialled the number of the Colour Patch Café.
‘Saffron, Perry, you’re coming with me,’ she said.
Perry didn’t feel like thinking about the festival and Saffron wanted to stay with her daddy, but when Scarlet was in a flouncing mood, no-one argued with her.
The wind howled, the blue tarpaulin flapped miserably and Ben disappeared into his shed. He sat in the Seat of Wisdom, pulled the lever that made the once-upon-a-time dentist’s chair recline, and stared up through the skylight, trying hard to see things that weren’t there. Things like the finished extension to the house. For months and months, he had been able to picture exactly the way it would look when it was finished. But today Ben could only see what the visitors had seen: a dripping blue tarpaulin over a timber frame — and he blamed himself. He should have finished by now. If he had, maybe the visitors wouldn’t have noticed all the things that weren’t quite right. Maybe they would have let Nell come home.
But like everything else he’d made, Ben wanted this building to be special. Each piece of material had to have meaning. Nothing was shop-bought. He had found the pieces, waited for them, bargained for them, worked for them. His shed was cluttered with the precious objects he had collected: panelled doors, slate shingles, church windows and chandeliers. And in the feed shed was a truckload of straw bales for the walls. But the slate shingles were the last thing Ben had found and without a roof to shelter them from the weather, straw bales cannot be laid. He closed his eyes to block out the greyness.
Ben might not have finished the extension, he might have been blinded by disappointment that afternoon, but he need not have been. Slowly but surely the elephants were moving on. There was a streak of sunlight on the Silk Road, an echo of hope in the hills. Ben’s children had learnt from him to see things other people could not.
On Saturday morning, the rain had stopped and Jack Frost cloaked the paddocks with glisten and glimmer. Visitors arrived at seven o’clock. But this time they came in a bus towing a trailer, driven by Mr Davis. They brought picks, shovels, hammers, nails, paint, brushes, ladders, a cement mixer and a portable barbecue.
Uncle Tansil and his sisters, Shim and Janda, were in charge of breakfast. Mr Fairchild supplied sausages and bacon, Nell’s girls provided eggs and Annie had made the bread. By morning-tea time, Annie had painted a large blue square on the floor in the front room. After lunch, she added painted pink cabbage roses and a knotted cream fringe around the border. It was an amazing un-trip-over-able carpet square.
Grandma Mosas, whose husband had been a shoemaker, brought a cobbler’s awl and long thin strips of leather and she mended the tear in the red vinyl couch, so the stuffing could no longer escape.
Teddy Wilson and the preacher made a concrete path. Indigo arranged chips of pretty china spelling ‘secret garden’ in the wet concrete and Griffin, Perry and Layla decorated it with handprints and patterns made with pebbles. Annie thought the handprints were such a good idea she asked everyone to do the same.
The path was plenty wide enough for The Intrepid, but the men had been under strict instructions not to make it straight. It meandered like a stream, beside the rhubarb patch, past the marigolds, under the honeysuckle arbour, around the lilac tree, next to the butterfly bush and through the gate, to the orchard.
By sunset, the roof of the extension had been slated and guttered, the window frames, downpipes and doors had been fixed in place. Mr Elliott, his son, Patrick, and Uncle Tansil had wheelbarrowed all the straw bales from the feed shed and stacked them in the middle of the room, ready for fitting into the wall spaces, and the frame was completely enclosed by the blue tarpaulin. The thing that only Ben had been able to imagin
e for so long was now becoming visible to everyone.
Scarlet had made another roster. Now there were three. The festival roster, the visiting Nell roster and the building roster. The following morning, the bus arrived again. This time with a different group of passengers. And so it went on. The bus only came on weekends, which was when most people had time to spare, but on weekdays there were other people who came in ones or twos or threes in cars or on bicycles or motor scooters. Every time someone visited Nell, she would tell them how much she wanted to come home. But Ben had made them promise not to tell her about the unwelcome visitors and what they had said.
Then came inspection day. Barney was locked in the feed shed, which he didn’t mind at all. Blue was wearing his best bow-tie and Annie had reminded Ben to comb his whiskers. The Silk family waited outside. Zeus perched on the shed, like a weather vane, and squawked when he heard the distant hum of a vehicle turning off the main road.
Saffron ran down the hill. The puddles were drying up. She opened the gate and climbed up on the strainer post. When the vehicle got as far as the dip in the road near Canning’s orchard, she could see its roof. She jumped down and ran back to the others.
‘It doesn’t look like the car they came in the first time,’ she said.
‘It doesn’t sound like a car either,’ said Griffin.
Then they saw it — Mr Davis’ bus — chugging slowly towards the gate and up the hill. The door swung open and the passengers disembarked.
‘We thought you might like company,’ grinned Teddy Wilson, looking very impressive in his policeman’s uniform.
Nell's Festival of Crisp Winter Glories Page 5