But Whittlesea turned out to be nowhere near the ocean. And Nana’s place was neat as a Lego house in a Lego town. Her front lawn was a green rug and her roses folded like stiff red velvet. Busy stone gnomes crowded the front garden: hoeing, digging, planting. There was even one gnome reading a stone book on the doorstep.
When they pressed the doorbell, it chimed deep inside the house. There was a shuffling sound and an old woman limped up the hall towards them. She had perfectly white hair and was wearing a sarong, a pair of football socks and pink plastic clogs. She stopped and stared through the screen door. Mum put one hand flat on the mesh.
“Hello, Mum,” she said.
“So. You’re here,” said Nana.
They stood looking at one another a long time before Nana opened the door. Then they kissed: one kiss on each cheek. Nana hugged Dad, quick and rough, almost pushing him away afterwards.
“Ha! You bad man,” she said with her fists on her hips. “Back to Woop Woop, eh?”
Dad reddened. He rocked on his heels and held the back of his neck. If it hadn’t been her father, Maddy would have said he was unsure, even scared.
“And here my Madeleine,” said Nana then, holding out her hand to Maddy.
She said it in a singing, drawn-out way.
Mad-a-laaay–nah.
“Maddy, actually,” Maddy told this grandmother in a small hard voice. “Are you just plain Mad now?”
Mum made a choking sound and Dad took a small step back.
She didn’t exactly mean to be rude. The ice of her anger had been hardening inside Maddy for two months. It had formed points and daggers, and now it was needling every part. It hurt and was making her say things, do things, without thinking.
Nana’s eyes narrowed. She studied Maddy’s face. And then she decided to laugh. Maddy saw her decide.
“Bingo!” said Nana Mad. “Smartypants.”
They followed Nana into the house and into a dim sitting room. Maddy and her father sat far apart on two small chairs that creaked with every move. On the wall above the couch hung a large gold-framed black-and-white photograph: a picture of a dark man with black eyes looking straight into the camera. He had a big nose and a long grey moustache. The moustache curved fiercely around his tight smile. He looked angry. Furious, actually.
“Remember Popi Spyrou?” asked Maddy’s father.
“No,” said Maddy.
She only remembered that there had once been a Popi Spyrou. Mum and Dad mentioned his name sometimes. He had died. Ages ago.
The man in the picture had been her grandfather. She didn’t remember anything about him, not even his moustache that hung as thick as plaits on either side of his mouth. This started Maddy worrying again about forgetting Jermyn Street. There wasn’t much more important than a grandfather and she’d forgotten him. It seemed more and more likely that she would forget everything.
Maddy closed her eyes and remembered as hard as she could. Remembered everything she could about home. The golden evenings. Winston’s grumble. Sophie-Rose.
Nana and Mum had left the room together, whispering down a long hallway lined with flowered china horses. Now they could hear Mum making tea. And opening a tin. They could hear clinking plates. Then they came whispering back up the hall to the sitting room. The tea was dark brown and the lamingtons were stale.
Afterwards Nana took them into the backyard. Outside the back door were Nana’s vegetable beds, dried-out and run to seed. Beyond these beds a path led upwards, through banks of thorn trees and razor grass. Maddy hung back and let her parents go up the path alone. She looked around. The backyard was nothing but stalk and weed. There was no lawn, no chair, no paving.
There wasn’t really room for people.
“In Cyprus,” Nana Mad said, coming up behind. “My mother always plant food in the garden. Not flowers. Always food. Tomatoes, beans, fennel – right up to the front gate. She always say, ‘Remember, koukla, you can’t eat flowers’.”
“We eat flowers,” said Maddy. “We put nasturtium in the salad.”
She was trying to make up for the earlier unpleasantness. Nana smiled encouragingly. But Maddy couldn’t think of anything else to say.
“But also, another thing,” said Nana, “Mama always leave a part wild, right up the back. Where the wall was fall down.”
“Why?” asked Maddy.
“For fairies,” Nana said. “She say they got to have wild places. They got to live somewhere.”
Inside deep folds of skin, Nana Mad had eyes like Mum – brown with gold specks around the pupils. But in Nana’s eyes the brown was muddy and the white was pink. She looked not quite there, like she was doing a sum in the back of her mind while she was talking to you – a sum that wouldn’t add up.
“You got a place for fairies?” Nana asked. “Some place wild?”
There was something wonderful about Nana Mad’s smile. Something fresh and tender. It was a smile in which nothing was held back. Maddy felt some memory stir. Dry leaves on a breath of wind. Something about that smile.
“Madeleine,” said Nana, and she reached to stroke Maddy’s cheek. “I have miss you a long, long time.”
Maddy felt a tug at the corner of her lip. Like threads were pulling at her mouth. She couldn’t help it.
She smiled back.
That night Maddy took out Sophie-Rose’s photo.
Dad had told her the science of the stars, about the burning gas and the explosions. But Maddy had never seen them that way before. In Jermyn Street, the night sky had been like a picture in a book.
In Plenty, the stars were less like diamonds in a black velvet curtain and more like those huge balls of blazing gas Dad had told her about. There were kilometres of darkness above her; Maddy could feel it in her body – and through it the Plenty stars were burning and hurtling. It was far away. It twinkled. It glimmered. It made you think of jewels.
And out here she thought she could feel the Earth spinning, rushing round the sun, and she thought she could see the Milky Way pouring, white with stars across the sky. There were stars she’d never even seen in Jermyn Street.
But the Karatgurk still hung low in the north, still sailing, still together. Maddy was comforted by their presence. In this new, big, wild sky they were familiar.
She put her hands up and framed them.
The seven sisters.
Seven.
There was a new sister in the sky. Or at least, a lost sister found.
Chapter Seven
Wilam Community School
On Saturday morning Maddy dragged herself out onto the dusty ruts of The Deviation and stood listening to the quiet under the hanging mountain. The lack of sound made her feel small and dizzy. The pale track of The Deviation led straight up the mountain, into burnt stumps and silence. There were a few silent birds on the fence wire. And a feast of small grasshoppers on the verge.
One lizard in the ditch.
One wheel rim in the road.
And ants.
Thick black trails of ants on both sides of The Deviation.
She looked at her watch.
9.30.
For ages Maddy squatted in the dust and watched the ants. They tracked back and forth, crawling over each other – even crawling onto the backs of springing grasshoppers. It was so quiet, Maddy thought she could hear the ants’ feet in the grit. After what felt like hours, she straightened up.
She looked at her watch.
It was 9.45.
The rest of the weekend was like that.
Wilam Community School was one permanent red-brick building surrounded by a lot of portable classrooms balanced on bricks. The principal, Mrs Murphy, met Maddy and her mother at the office and then took Maddy to one of these classrooms. Maddy followed Mrs Murphy’s heels and saw that even she was wearing the shapeless Plenty boots.
Maddy was wearing her new purple sandals and a hat from Melbourne Zoo.
Mrs Murphy’s boots stepped up into the portable classroom. The steps shifted
and the classroom rocked. Maddy felt seasick and not at all ready.
“Here’s your new girl,” said Mrs Murphy and she steered Maddy into position in front of her.
And there they were. All the blank faces, staring. All the eyes, swapping looks she couldn’t read.
Her teacher’s name was Brian Woods Drinkwater. It said so on his desk. But he said to just call him Brian. Brian was very tall and very thin and he wore a T-shirt with a rainbow on it that said “Breathe”. He held his glasses with one hand and squinted at Maddy like she was a fuzzy television picture.
“Maddy Frank, Maddy Frank,” said Brian, cheerfully, and pointed to a table by the window. “Excellent. There’s a seat next to Grace Wek.”
Maddy hugged her bag and shuffled to the table. She slid into the empty seat and kept her eyes down, reading the graffiti on the desk to keep herself focused. It was only when everybody was busy that she looked up and around her new class.
There were seven girls and five boys.
There was one computer.
One cupboard with its door off.
Brian’s desk.
And Brian, telling them to copy the project he was writing on the board.
Grace Wek was humming under her breath and under the table she was jiggling her leg. She was copying the project and Maddy snuck a look at her hands as she wrote. She had never seen fingers so long and slim.
She had never seen anybody so black.
Both she and Sophie-Rose tanned in summer and at her old school Adiba had been dark, dark brown – but nothing like Grace. Her skin was black as the sky between the stars.
And she was tall.
Her neck alone looked as long as a ruler. She had to fold her legs up to fit them under the table. Her hair was braided against her skull and threaded with beads and crystals. She had pierced ears but instead of studs, she had dangling silver hoops. She was the most beautiful person Maddy Frank had ever, ever seen.
She raised her eyes and met Grace’s. And Grace was grinning. Like she knew what Maddy was thinking.
That the Wilam classroom made her seasick.
That the thing with the Plenty boots bugged her.
That she was sitting next to a beautiful giant.
She lowered her eyes straightaway.
“Don’t worry,” Grace whispered. “It gets better.”
Maddy turned away to the board. Grace’s soft, kind voice made her suddenly want to cry. But whatever she did on her first day in this strange school – she must not cry.
She held her breath and copied what Brian had written.
4/5 Project: due in four weeks
Choose a partner (or I will choose for you)
Choose an indigenous plant or animal to study
What is it called? Where does it live?
Is it common or endangered?
Show its habitat, life cycle and some of the challenges it faces
Suggestions for the presentation: make a model, create a PowerPoint, write a poem or song
Presentations early next term
HAVE FUN!
Fun?
Presentations already? And partners!
Partnerships were only for friends and presentations only for safe places. Sanctuaries. She wasn’t ready. She wasn’t ready for any of it. Her parents should have known this is how it would be.
Right now, in her old classroom around the corner from Jermyn Street, there were thirty students, five computers and a bank of cupboards with brass padlocks. The floor was carpeted with pale green wool. There was a craft pantry and a screened reading corner with two armchairs and a heavy bookshelf. Mrs Trang’s two desks sat out the front in an L-shape.
And Sophie-Rose was sitting next to an empty seat.
“David,” said Maddy to her father when she got home. “You and Ellen have ruined my education.”
“Well, then,” said Dad, and he lifted one eyebrow at her. “My job here is done.”
Like it was funny or something.
Chapter Eight
Greenhouse
David and Ellen Frank were busy fixing up the new house so next day after school Nana Mad picked up Maddy in her old van and took her back to Whittlesea. Grinding into gear, she pulled straight onto the road without indicating. All the cars behind braked and some honked their horns. Nana didn’t notice and she asked if Maddy remembered Plenty from when she was little.
Maddy held onto her seat and said, “No.”
“Well, you was little,” said Nana. “But maybe you remember something.”
Maddy said No again.
They drove in silence from Wilam to Whittlesea. Nana ran over the letterbox as she pulled into her driveway. She didn’t seem to notice this either.
“Ellen used to bring you,” she said, climbing out of the van. “Then she stopped. You were three I think. You remember?”
Maddy didn’t like to point out that Nana had already asked that, so she just said No again. But there were things about her grandmother that were setting off echoes inside Maddy. Little sparks of memory.
First there was Nana’s smile. Then there were her hands – something about the crooked smallest finger. And the way Nana stroked Maddy’s cheek with that finger. And when Nana had called her koukla, some little firework of an echo had gone off inside Maddy. But they couldn’t be called proper memories. So she didn’t mention them.
Nana opened the house and led Maddy straight out the back, and Maddy didn’t know what to do, so she followed. Her grandmother’s pink clogs shuffled ahead, leading through the thorn trees. Maddy stumped grimly behind, up the rough track and out on top of a rise overgrown with creeper and bindi-eyes. The creeper’s curling stems hooked through Maddy’s sandals and tangled around her toes. The bindi-eyes drew blood.
Next time, she thought.
Next time David made a Plenty joke, she’d look him right in the eye and say, “Yeah. There’s plenty, all right. Plenty of ants. Plenty of bindi-eyes.”
At the top of the rise was a little house made of wood and glass. The wood was split and the paint had peeled. The top half of the house was made of diamond-shaped windowpanes. There had been hundreds of the panes but most sagged and many had broken. Some were still glittering though, only held together by the creeper.
“Good, eh?” asked Nana.
“What is it?” said Maddy.
Nana looked disappointed.
“It’s my greenhouse,” she said, opening the door.
Inside, the greenhouse was lined with benches on which sat rows of black pots. Most of the pots held nothing but dirt and a stick.
Nana told Maddy to fill the watering-can. That first day, the plants she watered were only clusters of leaves lying flat on the dirt. But one had a stem rising, slim as a thread.
“Well, look,” Nana Mad sang to the stem. “There you are. There.”
She sang to it like it was a baby or a kitten.
“These my orchids,” she told Maddy when she’d finished.
Maddy nodded.
“People think they rare,” Nana went on. “But they not. They got thousands of sorts. These ones, they called greenhoods.”
Maddy wondered when she could go home.
“The best ones growing out there,” Nana said, waving her hand vaguely out the greenhouse door. “Wild ones you should see. Spider orchids. Now they really something. Spider orchid flowers just like fairies, Madeleine.”
All Maddy could see outside the greenhouse were the thick vines and thorn trees. She didn’t see any orchids that looked like fairies.
“Spiders won’t grow in pots,” said Nana, like she was telling herself. “Don’t like pots. They only grow out there, in the long paddock.”
Maddy didn’t know what the long paddock was.
“That means the bush,” Nana said.
Maddy nodded again. Her grandmother kept saying things that left her speechless. Things to which there was no easy response.
“Do you still like fairies?” Nana asked her.
N
ow if there was something Maddy knew about, it was fairies. Up until she was eight they’d been real to her. Real in the same way people were real – at least, she’d talked with them in just the same way and nobody stopped her. From these conversations she’d become a bit of an expert on their life and habits. Or as Sophie-Rose called it: a know-it-all.
The thing was, people had such strange ideas. For a start they thought that fairies were all the same. Maddy just had to tell everybody, “Fairies are different to one another, like us.”
She had told them fairies were not necessarily slim girls with butterfly wings. Some were boys. Some were grown-ups. Some were short and fat with bee fur and stubby wings. “And they are not all beautiful,” she would tell people over and over.
They were not all tall with blue eyes and yellow hair – lots had blue hair and yellow eyes. Some had feathers, a few had horns or eyes in the back of their heads. There were even rare fairies with a different face for every direction the wind blew.
Some could talk in rhyme. Or be mute and have to mime. Sometimes you met a fairy who sang everything. This was not as magical as it sounded. It depended on whether or not you liked opera.
And she had to insist that fairies were not all sweet. People didn’t like to hear it but fairies could be very, very mean. They could be angry or jealous. And they were often sad and liked to sing about it.
“There are as many sorts of fairies as there are people,” Maddy had told everybody. Sometimes when they hadn’t even asked.
The question of fairies was not simple any more though. She didn’t know what to tell Nana. It was true she still liked fairies – but she wasn’t so sure about the believing. Remembering her years of fairy conversations only made Maddy squirm now. She’d stopped talking to fairies after her eighth birthday.
And of course when you stopped talking to fairies they stopped talking to you.
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