by Nick Earls
There is plenty to discuss out in the world, and for Ariel that is as good as anything. I could sleep where I stand, but I thread a few thoughts together and hold up my end of the conversation.
‘Look, a horse,’ she says. ‘A horse and carriage. Like for a princess.’ She’s only seen carriages in movies until now.
The driver is exactly as the movies promise, wearing a top hat and black frock coat, but the couple behind him on the plush red leather bench seat are tourists in their fifties in white tracksuits and Yankees’ baseball caps. Japanese or Korean, I’d guess. Not Anna and Elsa, or anyone else Disney has put in a carriage. Ariel stares at them, trying to work it out.
‘Here everyone gets a turn,’ I tell her. ‘Maybe we could come back and have a ride in a few days, if you feel up to it.’
It is a gift just to talk and to be here and not killing time on a moulded plastic chair with my eyes on hospital tiles or the clock, talking about treatments and prognoses and what just went beep.
I hear shrieks ahead of us, the happy shrieks of children. When we round a bend I see a fence, and a gate with a sign next to it.
‘It’s Johnson or Jackson.’
It’s meant to stay in my head as a thought, but I know it’s come out when Ariel says, ‘What? What is?’
‘The park. The playground. The one we’re looking for.’
Billy Johnson, the sign reads. We are here.
The gate groans as we swing it open, then clangs behind us. It’s a school day, so anyone playing here is small. Two nannies sit on a bench, talking over takeaway coffees. A tourist looks through photos on his camera while his two boys battle with sticks and shout at each other in French.
This is acceptable exposure for Ariel. It’s not a huddle of sick people. The slide, though, might be beyond her. It curves down from the top of a rise in the corner of the playground and the boy I can see flying down it stacks on the bend and comes off his cardboard. But there are swings and simple structures to climb on. It’s some way to have come not to slide, but I can’t see her making it down there herself.
‘It’s a good day, though, isn’t it,’ I say to her, ‘whatever we do here. It’s nice to be outside.’
She is watching the next slider, who takes the bend like a master, shoots off the end and lands on his feet, his cardboard flipping up behind him.
‘Well, if it ain’t the Fosters,’ someone says behind my shoulder.
It’s Smokey, in trackpants and a T-shirt.
‘I didn’t get no sleep neither,’ he says, pulling out his phone. His pants’ pocket inverts itself and flops from his hip like a dog’s ear. He still has his grills on and they sparkle like Christmas in the direct sunlight. ‘Here’s my girl.’ He shows me a photo. She has plump mauve lips and swirls of black hair. She’s swaddled and sleeping peacefully. ‘Still decidin’ the name. ’Spect I’ll lose on that one, too.’ Before I can mention any of the things a person’s supposed to about a photo of a newborn, he says, ‘It was us talking ’bout this place last night that made me come here today. My lady D’vonne’s getting some sleep. We just blowing off a little steam before my boy gets to go meet his sister.’ The stroller and back view of my tiny Batman arrive properly in his consciousness for the first time. ‘And, hey, who’s this?’
‘She’s…’
He steps around to see her before I can prepare him at all. She’s thinner than the wallpaper shot on my phone. He’s got his happy meeting-a-kid face stuck on and he’s fighting to hold it, to pretend for all our sakes that he’s not shocked.
‘Hey, honey,’ he says eventually, softly, cautiously, as he crouches down. ‘So good to meet you. I’m a friend of your daddy’s.’
He edges his hand forward to shake or high-five hers, but then settles for resting his forearm on his knee. Ariel sticks a hand out, in high-five pose. She is used to New Yorkers crouching, forcing a smile and a bright tone of voice, then talking through whatever grim thing they are planning to do to her to make her well.
Smokey looks up at me. ‘Is it cool?’ he says, pointing to her hand and his.
‘It is now. Unless you’ve got some disease I should know about.’
‘High-five,’ he says, and his big hand meets her much smaller one with a satisfying slap. The sun sparks on his grin. ‘No diseases other than sleep deprivation and a distinct lack of popularity with my lady, but we’ll get past that. Now, honey, what we gonna do? What is there in the Billy Johnson Playground that takes your fancy?’ He’s talking animatedly, keeping the grin on, keeping his spiel moving at a clip so that we can all pretend all’s well with our caped crusader. ‘I believe you have already noticed our excellent stone slide, soon to be written about in newspapers across Australia by a man well-known to you.’
I can’t stop myself picturing her bones, all her unprotected points, bumping on granite all the way down. She’s had weeks when only sheepskin was close to comfortable, though we’re past that now.
‘I don’t know that she’s…’
Ariel cuts in and says, ‘Dad…I want to.’
‘Sure, honey, sure,’ Smokey says. ‘It’s your dad’s call but if he okays it, we can make it work. Because I have a plan.’ He moves directly in front of her and crouches again. ‘Some people call me Smokey, honey, but you can call me Eugene. My boy’s over there.’ He indicates the master slider, shooting down again, like a torpedo in a tube. ‘He’s Eugene, too, so we made that nice and easy. But we call him Junior, mostly. He’ll answer to either.’ Ariel is staring at his grills as the light dances from the gold. ‘You readin’ my teeth?’ He draws his lips back to give her a good look.
She laughs. ‘I can do letters.’
‘Maybe I best keep my mouth shut then.’
He folds his lips over his teeth in a comical, bulky way. He covers his mouth with his hand and pretends to go on with the conversation about the slide, making all kinds of nonsensical sounds, as though he’s giving a meticulous muffled outline of what he’s got in mind. His free hand is measuring, pointing, making all kinds of shapes, fingers running up steps, sliders on cardboard swooping around the curve, braking screechily or stacking, Wile E. Coyote-style. Ariel laughs so much the stroller shakes and takes a hop backwards.
‘Yes!’ she shouts, and her hands give an involuntary clap. ‘I want to.’
Smokey cranks his lips apart with his thumb and finger, making can-opener sounds, and says, ‘We got a plan. She’ll go down with Junior. Tandem. He’ll take all the knocks.’ He reaches into his other pants’ pocket. There’s a jangle of keys. ‘I’ll get him ready for it, too. D’vonne don’t let me out the door without my pockets full of this shit.’
He pulls out a bottle of green sanitiser, squirts it on his own hands and then calls Junior over and goes to lube his legs.
‘What?’ Junior takes half a step back and almost stumbles over his father’s hand.
‘Be cool, buddy.’ Smokey wipes another hand-ful of goo down one of Junior’s arms.
‘But…’
‘I ain’t makin’ you swallow it.’ He lifts Junior’s shirtfront and wipes a final squirt under there. ‘You goin’ tandem and we just playin’ it safe.’ He clips the empty bottle shut and slips it back into his pocket. ‘Now, you take Batman up there and you look after her like she’s a princess. A superhero princess. You come down together and you take all the bumps.’
Junior’s mouth opens—he is not a tandem rider, not here as a helper of princesses—but his father has a hand on his arm and is looking straight at him, willing him to just do it, no arguments, just this once. Junior reads the expression, and glances towards Ariel and back to his father. He knows something is up. He knows it is one of those times. He nods.
Ariel takes my hand to get out of the stroller, then Eugene Junior offers his and leads her towards the stone steps. He measures his speed against hers and holds back a branch of a bush so it doesn’t brush her arm. She waits on the second step while he retrieves his cardboard. He tucks it under one arm and takes her h
and again.
Inside the black suit, she is frail, but she is sick of lamb’s wool and complete safety and one DVD after another. She is four and must attend to a four-year-old’s business, and she must slide today, whatever the knocks. I am afraid for her, for all of us, Lindsey and me, too. There are more steps to the top of the slide than I realised. I have seen her x-rays and her scans and her worst days.
They wait their turn, still holding hands. Ariel studies the sliders ahead of her and every bit of their journeys. Eugene Junior looks over to his father to check that he’s getting it right. Smokey gives him a nod.
‘You taking pictures of this?’ he says to me. ‘You got an article to write, yeah? I think Batman’s about to slide.’
There’s just enough time for me to get my camera out. Every article is patched together this week, this month. I could have left this playground without a single image.
‘Here, let me,’ he says. ‘You just watch.’ He holds his hand out for the camera, clicking his fingers.
I need to watch, and he is giving me the chance. I need to live this, not be its recorder.
He fiddles with the settings, sets up the shot in a second. He knows what he’s doing.
Eugene Junior places his cardboard, then helps Ariel into a sitting position on it, one of his hands on the lip of the slide the whole time, one on her. He eases his legs around her. She keeps hers straight but his are bent a little, knees jutting out to take any knocks. He puts one arm around her waist and she grips it with both hands, like a rail on a rollercoaster. He takes his other hand from the slide’s granite edge and pushes it against the base, just behind where he’s sitting. They start to move. He gives another push.
They skid forward, building up speed. Ariel’s teeth are clenched, but she’s smiling. Her eyes are ahead on the slide, anticipating. The two of them swing into the bend, Eugene Junior managing their path perfectly.
Wind buffets her suit. The drop is steep.
The hood blows back from her head, her messy blonde hair spills all around, the red clamp of her tube bobs next to her ear. She lets go of his arm and they wobble, but he corrects. She reaches up. I’m expecting her to grab the hood and pull it back into place, but she ignores it completely and thrusts her arms up in the air, keeping them there all the way down until she is standing in the dust and the ride is over.
‘Again,’ she says as Eugene lets go of her and bends down to pick up the cardboard. ‘Please.’
‘Let’s see here,’ Smokey says, flicking back to the early images as Ariel and his son make their way back towards the steps.
He’s found a setting that fired every fraction of a second. We track them from top to bottom, one picture at a time. The hood blows back, the tube appears and my first thought is it won’t be hard to photoshop it out. Smokey clicks to the next image, and the next, and then pauses on one.
The sunlight is falling across Ariel’s pale outstretched arms, lighting up her wispy hair. She is upright and fearless, and I hadn’t seen that. Her hands are bunched into small pale fists. She is flying for a moment. It is, after all, a city of superheroes, of caped crusaders and heroic deeds.
‘Look at your beautiful girl,’ Smokey says.
She is staring straight at the camera. She is, I think, willing it to take this picture, record this instant and all its glee and defiance. She wants us to have a good photo, her mother and me. She wants to give us a picture of a good time. Not every minute of our present is to be recorded as diabolical and hard, and something to be endured in the hope of better. She is in the present—this present, between the tube feed and today’s treatment—and she has made room for joy in it.
The tube will stay in the photo.
‘LyDell’s granddaddy,’ Smokey says, ‘he worked at Bloomingdale’s. He was an elevator guy. Had a uniform with a cap.’ He pauses. ‘This is just us talking, right? Just so you know. He died on the job one day. Heart attack. Just closed his eyes on his stool and he was gone. Bloomingdale’s looked after the family real good. LyDell’s momma ran wild even so. She was fourteen, or somethin’.’ He glances over to our kids, who are close to the top of the steps again. ‘LyDell’s sleepin’ somewhere with a smile on his face. I checked in with him around five and he was still talking ’bout those pants he didn’t buy. Those Alexander Wangs. That boy…He’s just a boy, and it’s so dangerous sometimes. I want to help him be a man, you know. We all do whatever to bring our kids up, yeah? Give them whatever. Whatever it takes.’
At the top of the slide, Eugene Junior sets the cardboard in place. Ariel takes her seat, flips her hood back and shakes her hair out. She braces herself to push.
1
GOTHAM
2
VENICE
3
VANCOUVER
4
JUNEAU
5
NOHO
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS In late 2013, I worked out that my five best and most compelling story ideas would need padding or some other kind of fakery to become novels and would lose something if I tried to trim them to short-story size. I had to write them and they had to be novellas.
Any author can do with a team of like-minded people on their side, and the author of a novella series needs them more than most. I needed people whose response was ‘Yes! Novellas!’ with the exclamation mark audible after each word—people who saw 20,000 words as a great size for the times and had great ideas about what to do with it. So, a big thank you to:
– Meredith Curnow and Chris Flynn for backing me from the start
– Pippa Masson at Curtis Brown for talking me into the idea rather than out, and making the idea even more ambitious
– Kim Wilkins and Bronwyn Lea, in their UQ roles, for their regular wise navigational advice for a new world
– Jane Stadler for the crash course in how to survive there upon landing and Isobelle Carmody for being the ideal fellow traveller
– the Griffith Review Novella Project III judges and editorial team for backing novellas in general and mine in particular
– Donna Ward and her team at Inkerman & Blunt for embracing a new approach to novellas with passion, imagination and editorial vigour
– Georgia Knox and the team at Audible for adding new dimensions to the project from their first email
– Will Entrekin at Exciting Press for being the ideal partner in the ebook world
And a particularly big thank you to Sarah and Patrick for tolerating me all those times when my brain stayed in the story rather than in our lives.
NICK EARLS is the author of more than twenty books for adults, teenagers and children, including novels such as Zigzag Street, Bachelor Kisses and Analogue Men. His work has won awards in the UK and Australia, among them a Betty Trask Award for Zigzag Street and a Children’s Book Council of Australia Book of the Year Award for 48 Shades of Brown. His books have appeared on bestseller lists in both those countries and in the Amazon Kindle Store. Two of his novels, Perfect Skin and 48 Shades of Brown, have been adapted into feature films and five have been adapted into stage plays.