Plenty

by Ananda Braxton-Smith

  “Do you still like?” Nana asked again. “You love them so much before. When you a little thing.”

  “I’m not little any more,” said Maddy.

  “No,” said Nana, rubbing her temples and leaving points of dirt behind. “I forgot.”

  They finished watering the orchids and went back to the house. There they drank Nana’s strong tea and ate her stale lamingtons – and shared another long, long silence.

  Maddy looked at her watch.

  “What time is it?” asked Nana.

  “Five twenty-five,” Maddy said.

  Nana went to her bookcase. She took out a heavy book and opened it with a bang on the coffee table.

  “Come and see,” she said.

  Twilight was filling the sitting room, and a single white star-shaped flower glowed on the dark page of the book. Nana was right. It was like a fairy, but a fairy drained of colour, running for its life across the glossy page. It even had a little dark mouth open in a scream.

  “Is that an orchid?” Maddy asked, squinting.

  “It’s a spider orchid. Like I was saying,” Nana Mad said. “But see. It’s a fairy! You think so?”

  The next picture looked like a fairy helmet dropped in the grass. And the third like a fairy holding a lantern. On every page of the book orchid fairies skipped, flew, skated. Baby fairies burst off the stems of their nursery plants. Fairy dervishes spinning in tutus and pantaloons.

  “They indigenous, you know,” said Nana.

  “Indigenous,” repeated Maddy.

  “Yes,” said Nana. “That means they belong somewhere. It’s their–”

  “I know what it means,” Maddy cut her off.

  “–their home,” finished Nana, and she drew her feet together firmly and laid her hands in her lap.

  “Can I borrow it?” asked Maddy, flipping the pages.

  “Yes,” Nana said. “But only if you stop talking like that.”

  “Like what?” Maddy said.

  Nana stooped to pull a tough stem from Maddy’s sandal buckle.

  “Like it’s my fault,” she said quietly.

  “Like what’s your fault?” asked Maddy.

  “Moving,” Nana Mad said. “Listen. They never ask me when they go away. One day they just go. And then, now they just come back. They do what they want. Always.”

  Her face quickly hardened, and then quickly softened.

  “But this time I’m lucky.” Nana laughed, grabbing Maddy and hugging her until she was smeared with orchid dirt. “This time what they want is what I want!”

  Maddy Frank hugged her grandmother back. Nana Mad was right. David and Ellen did exactly what they wanted. They never, ever asked. She was still hugging when Nana let go.

  On the way home that night, Maddy asked her mother why.

  “Why did you stop bringing me to see Nana?” she said.

  Ellen Frank fixed her eyes hard on the dark road ahead.

  “She was angry with me for moving to Jermyn Street,” she said. “And she couldn’t stop being angry.”

  Chapter Nine

  Ex-Kakuma

  Wednesday was Where Do You Come From? day. Brian was wearing a T-shirt with a picture of an astronaut on the moon watching a blue Earth rise into black space. Underneath it said “Heart/Earth.” Today was Grace’s turn and she said she was going to tell them how she came to Plenty. The first part she didn’t remember, she said, so she would tell them what her mum told her.

  Grace Wek’s family was from South Sudan in Africa. They lived in a town called Malek, near the Sudd – that’s the swamps of the White Nile River where feathery papyrus grow like crops of tall green dusters, and crocodiles and hippos roll and wade. In the wet season, the grasses turn into water meadows. Tigerfish and catfish swim in the water, cranes dance in the papyrus, and people build their cooking fires on a floating world.

  Sudan had been fighting wars for so long that hardly anybody remembered the start. The old men said Sudan’s war was like weather – no matter where you went there it was. You couldn’t escape. The fields were destroyed and grew nothing but bitter weeds and cattle bones. Whole families packed up and became wanderers.

  The Weks and their sons were only five of thousands of people forced to wander. Actually they were six of thousands, because Grace was already wandering too. She was being carried along inside her mother’s body, but only Mrs Wek knew about that. She prayed to keep the child inside safe as they walked.

  At first they kept to the old cattle tracks and they slept in ditches or under bushes. They only walked in the dark.

  Once they heard soldiers ahead – and they walked off the tracks and into the bush and the desert. At last, one night they walked out of Sudan all together. They crossed the border into the neighbouring country without even knowing it. And in the morning, they found a huge camp in the desert.

  Kakuma Camp in the country of Kenya was crowded with people just like the Weks. They were called refugees, because they needed a refuge from the wars and starvation. There were weary grandparents and worried mothers and fathers. Silent babies in their wraps on the backs of serious sisters. And angry brothers playing the wars with stick guns.

  All homeless. All wandering. All lost, all together.

  Here in a dusty tent among strangers, Mrs Wek had her last baby. She called her daughter Grace because she was an amazing thing in the middle of the trouble. A peaceful baby girl, born smiling into that place.

  Amazing Grace.

  Grace Wek said Kakuma was laid out like a ruled page in the desert. Those were her exact words: a ruled page. The dirt streets crossed each other square, and huts and tents were set out like sums. The Weks were put in a ragged tent in one of the squares and weren’t allowed out of the camp.

  “Are we in prison?” the Wek boys asked their parents. “What did we do?”

  And in Kakuma there were dust storms. The desert sands were tidal. They rose in dust storms and fell later on the camp.

  Some of the dust came in dancing pillars, moving through the camp like charmed snakes. Grace and the other children chased them. Some drifted through in thin, sour clouds that left you spitting for days. But the worst ones broke over the camp and drowned everything under shifting swells of grit.

  Before these storms, the horizon swelled purple like it had been beaten. All night the bright moon would try to shine only to be slowly blotted. All day the sun glowered in a sad, dim ring. All the light was boiled down, yellow and thick as lentils.

  The dust of those storms got into everything. Everybody’s eyes were red and everybody’s throats, raw. Mrs Wek said they looked and sounded like a camp of devils.

  Grace Wek said her mother thanked God every day for bringing them to Australia. She thanked God none of her children were stolen to be soldiers. Or slaves. And that not one of them had died.

  When Grace Wek finished she calmly sat down and studied her hands. There was quiet in the class. Even Brian was silent. Everybody stared down at their desks or out the window. But Maddy Frank let her own gaze fall where Grace’s fell and she saw what Grace saw – a pair of hands.

  Ten perfect pink nail crescents and ten long fingers. The black skin on the back spotted with tiny silver scars. The Kakuma dust storms had left Grace’s body covered with constellations.

  Grace raised her eyes and saw Maddy looking again. She grinned and this time Maddy grinned back.

  Maddy thought refuge might be something like seeking sanctuary.

  Brian said Maddy and Grace would be partners on the indigenous project. Grace said that Maddy could come and work at her place. She said she would take Maddy to Whittlesea library. And then she said they should eat lunch together.

  Maddy had spent Monday and Tuesday lunchtimes on a long and empty bench at the fence, ignoring passing storms of curious eyes. The storms passed at a distance like summer rain, but she hadn’t been able to eat and by the end of each break she was worn out from ignoring them. They had been the longest lunchtimes of her life.


  So when Grace said they should eat lunch together, Maddy said all right.

  Since she’d seen Nana’s book yesterday, Maddy was in love with the indigenous orchids. She’d dreamed about them all last night. They were dancing in the bush in their curl-toed shoes, their brilliant hats and velvet suits. They’d slipped into her heart.

  In some way she couldn’t pin down, the whole project for school depended on them. She couldn’t imagine doing any other subject now. She could see how the project would look with not just drawings of the flowers creeping up and down the margins, but maybe some parts dried and glued into the pages. She could have sections for seeds, for leaves and for the flower parts too. It would be beautiful.

  Maddy downloaded pictures of the spider orchids and took them to her first lunchtime with Grace. She expected to have to argue for her choice, like she had to with Sophie-Rose but that’s not what happened.

  “Okay,” said Grace straightaway and close, then she peered at the pictures. “They look sort of like little people, don’t they?”

  “Fairies, actually,” said Maddy Frank.

  Chapter Ten

  Greenhoods

  While the Franks carried on fixing up the new house, Maddy and Grace spent the week in Nana Mad’s greenhouse. Nana had lost the keys to her van so they took the bus every day after school.

  The quiet of The Deviation and its dusty path up the dark mountain scared Maddy and she was glad to go to Whittlesea instead of home. The greenhouse was quiet too – but it was a different quiet. It was a calm quiet full of things growing, not a lonely quiet full of nothing. Nana met them every day, waiting on her front lawn among the velvet roses. Her dress got odder every day and by Friday she looked like one of her gnomes.

  Among the sprouting orchids, wrapped in the calm quiet and the smell of earth, Maddy felt a bit better. The project kept her busy. While she was working she wasn’t so aware of the cold hardness inside her chest. Peaceful in the warm greenhouse, Maddy and Grace worked side by side. They noted and measured the parts of the greenhoods and drew pages of diagrams of their stems, leaves, buds and hoods.

  At home they dried the parts and stored them in plastic sandwich bags.

  At school they had browsed websites. The websites all said the same thing: orchids don’t like being moved.

  “Look at this,” Maddy said to Grace, pointing to a picture of a mound of dust. “That’s the seed!”

  “There must be millions,” said Grace. “Billions.” She clicked on the picture. A map of the world came up. The seas spread green and blue in between the land and little animated winds blew over the water.

  “The seeds can fly,” said Grace, reading. She looked up with delight. “They fly over whole seas. On the wind.”

  Maddy had already seen that page.

  “Yes,” she told Grace, feeling suddenly disheartened by the idea of all that tiny seed flying over huge oceans. “But it’s really hard for them when they land. They have to fall in the exact right place to grow. They have to fall in the exact right stuff.”

  “What stuff?” asked Grace.

  “Fungus,” said Maddy, glumly.

  Grace’s found this funny and repeated fungus a few times, giggling.

  But Maddy didn’t find it funny. She found it disturbing that without the exact right stuff, the exact right soil or air or even fungus, the orchids would not grow. In fact, they didn’t even have to fly over the sea to have trouble. One of the websites said that they could die when their habitat was just disturbed.

  Maddy printed this page out and stuffed it in her bag. She thought she would start making a new wall at the new house: a wall like her wall of fairies back in the bedroom at Jermyn Street. But this wall would be a wall of orchids. She would make it in the kitchen, she thought. Where David and Ellen would see. And she would put that page right at the top.

  When their habitat is disturbed, orchids can die.

  Nana’s greenhoods crowded the greenhouse benches, shivering whenever the door was opened. Maddy knew their tongues had started to form inside their bright hoods. To her eyes, they gave off a soft glow; sometimes she could see it reflecting on Grace’s cheek and brow.

  And all that week Maddy and Grace talked germination and habitat. They talked stem length and bud width, soil type and replanting. They talked about the project until there was nothing left to say. It wasn’t that Grace hadn’t tried to talk about other things. She’d asked questions. About Maddy’s old school. About her old house and her old friends. But Maddy wouldn’t say much.

  The thing was, all Maddy really wanted to talk about was how miserable she felt. About the move. About losing her home and her friends. But when she considered talking about these things to Grace Wek – well, she didn’t know where to start. Her move from Fitzroy had been so small compared to Grace’s move from Africa. She felt guilty to be still sad when Grace was so brave.

  But the guilt didn’t stop the sadness.

  All of Maddy’s thoughts that week led her back to Jermyn Street, and in these thoughts Fitzroy had changed. Instead of being a regular place with its share of both sun and rain, in her memory Fitzroy was now a place where the sun was always out. In this Fitzroy, the people were always smiling, and everything smelled of sugary coffee, warm dog and jasmine. In her homesick mind, the Fairies Tree reached a hundred metres tall, and the cherry ripe slice had trebled its chocolate and cherries. Maddy realised she was forgetting how it had all really been. They were bad times.

  But sometimes, in the greenhouse with Grace, Maddy forgot to be sad. And then she’d remember her promise to the Emmas not to forget – never to forget. And she’d feel like she was the worst friend ever. The cold inside would spread out to her face and fingers, moving like glaciers through her veins.

  They were the worst times.

  Maddy knew Grace knew all about homesickness. Grace told her that in Kakuma everybody had been homesick for somewhere. Whenever they could, people would talk about home and cry. But when Grace’s parents and her brothers wept for the Sudd, she felt left out. Like she wasn’t really part of her family.

  Because Grace didn’t know the Sudd. She was born in Kakuma. So, in a way, she was already home and couldn’t really say she was homesick.

  But Maddy knew she was.

  Because Grace had this idea. This idea of a place called home. The idea was a place she could visit whenever she wanted.

  In Grace’s idea of home, people were always happy to see her and her smiling mother was always cooking. Her father always wore a clean white shirt and worked in an office. There was a school, with chairs and tables, and everybody in it had a whole pencil and a new notebook. Lastly, there was a green garden with a running river – a river of clean water flowing over white stones. In her idea of home, Grace could go anywhere in the garden.

  There were no guns. No guards. No wire.

  Grace told Maddy that what she had suffered from was homeless-sickness, which is as bad as homesickness and sometimes worse. At least when you’re homesick you know what you’re missing. When you have homeless-sickness you can spend a lifetime looking for your idea of home and never find it.

  And Grace said the worst kind of homesickness was the angry kind. She’d seen that anger stop people talking. They’d sit like their lips were sewn together. It stopped people moving. They’d stand in one place until somebody moved them. And it froze people’s tears so they could never cry again.

  “There were all these stones and pebbles around the camp,” said Grace. “I used to collect them. I had heaps.”

  “How old were you then?” asked Maddy.

  “Mum says I was three when I started,” Grace said. “I used to sort them and put them in matching piles. Round with round, flat with flat – like that. I remember the stones really well. Better than people. Better than anything.”

  “Weird,” said Maddy. By now she’d seen pictures online of Kakuma – and there were so many things you might remember from that terrible place other than playing with its
stones.

  Grace said she had made a circle of stones around her sleeping mat. She laid them in spirals around the floor. As she grew older, she built snaky paths leading from the Wek shelter out to the camp fences. They were her secret paths. Her own homeless-sickness only went away when she was playing with the stones.

  “Mum thought I was going crazy,” she told Maddy. “But Dad says I was just making myself at home. He says I’m good at it.”

  Maddy opened one of the bigger greenhoods and peered inside.

  “You should sleep over sometime,” Grace said. “We could get pizza.”

  “I don’t know,” said Maddy, carefully finding the tongue of the orchid and measuring it.

  “Well, what about the river?” Grace said.

  “What river?” said Maddy.

  She noted the length and colour in her neatest writing.

  “It’s out the back,” Grace said, surprised. “You can hear it.”

  “No, thanks,” said Maddy.

  “You might get to see some spider orchids,” said Nana from the door, where she was putting down the tea. “If you’re lucky.”

  “We plant these soon,” she said. “Out back. At the river. You want to come? You can make pictures. For that project. Pictures always good.”

  Maddy didn’t think it would be safe to follow Nana Mad into the bush. Her grandmother’s orchid friends were so old she couldn’t imagine a number for them. One or more of them came to the greenhouse most days, dropping off or picking up boxes of plant cuttings, bulbs and moss. They tripped over the creeper every time. One man came three times but still got lost on his way up the rise and had to be found by calling. Then there was Nana’s driving – the grinding gears, the honking horns, the letterbox.

  The truth was Nana Mad hadn’t actually lost her van keys. Maddy’s mother had taken them off her when she wasn’t looking. Maddy hadn’t told on Nana, but Mum had taken one look at the splinters of letterbox and then at Maddy’s face and just known somehow. Nana didn’t seem bothered. She’d forgotten about driving.