By the riverbank, platters of lemon slice, chocolate hedgehog and fairy cakes were laid out, with the ants already arriving. The women of Whittlesea thought it only good manners to bring a plate to any sort of gathering, even those held in the bush. Maddy approved of these manners and she took one perfect fairy cake.
Grace Wek couldn’t decide between the hedgehog and lemon slice.
“So, so lucky,” she was saying to herself over and over, studying the platters with feeling.
Deciding which cake, Grace’s face was full of a serious delight and she took so long, Maddy wondered if she’d ever choose. In the end, she took a piece of the hedgehog – and then right at the last moment, a piece of the lemon slice as well. Mrs Wek wagged her finger at Grace and wanted her daughter to put one back – but Nana said to let her eat.
“Not enough cake stop you growing,” she said and offered Grace the fairy cakes too.
They settled under a ragged manna gum spreading its limbs over the riverbank. There was nothing like eating cake in the bush. Maddy thought it was the perfect mix of sharp and sweet: in the nose, the sharp smell of the bush; in the mouth, the sweetness of icing. One made the other even better.
“Tell Maddy about the What, Mum,” Grace said, picking off lumps of each cake and then putting them into her mouth together.
“Oh, she doesn’t want to hear that,” said Mrs Wek.
“Mum tells us these stories. So we won’t forget,” Grace said. “Right, Mum?”
Mrs Wek looked at Grace with her face full of love and a certain distance.
“I wasn’t always a woman for these old stories,” she said to Maddy apologetically, like Maddy might think her childish. “But I changed when we left home.”
“But Maddy wants to hear,” said Grace, simply. And Maddy realised she really, really did.
She shifted closer to Mrs Wek, who seemed heartened by it.
“I’ve been thinking lately,” Mrs Wek said. “About how all that’s left of anything are stories. About how the What story reminds me. It reminds me about what’s important.”
Down by the river, three women planters had taken off their boots and were dipping their toes in the cool water. And close to Maddy, two more sat knock-kneed on a log, holding mugs of Nana’s even worse than terrible thermos tea. One of them had a pink bandaid strip across the bridge of her nose. Two men, one with long grey hair pulled back in a ponytail and one entirely bald, sat at the edge of the clearing. They were waiting for the story.
Mrs Wek smiled nervously at Maddy.
“When God made the first people,” she said, “he gave them a choice between two presents. The first choice was the cow. You know how cows give food and clothes? Everything from a cow can be used by people. It was a useful present.
“The second choice was a thing called the What.”
The two women on the log stopped eating. They muttered, “Pardon? Did she say What?”
“The first people asked God exactly like that,” said Mrs Wek, opening her eyes wide in mock surprise at Maddy. “They asked God, ‘But what is the What?’ God looked mysterious and wouldn’t say.”
Mrs Wek took a slow bite of her lemon slice, chewed it and swallowed.
“It could have been anything, you know,” she said. “Or it could have been nothing. Nobody knew. So the first people did the only sensible thing. They chose the cow.”
She put the rest of the slice in her mouth and chewed.
“Is that it?” asked the ponytail man and looked around like he’d missed something.
“Oh yes,” said Mrs Wek, wiping crumbs from her mouth. “That’s it.”
“But what was it?” asked the bald man, irritably.
The lady with the bandaid said, “Well, that’s the point, isn’t it, Derek? They didn’t know and God wasn’t saying. These first people had to choose for everybody, forever.”
“But what if the What was better than a cow?” insisted Derek.
“Surely,” the bandaid lady said with a tone developing, “it’s better to choose something you know than something you don’t.”
Mrs Wek was disturbed by the fuss the What had caused.
“Please don’t bother yourselves,” she said. “It’s only an old story.”
“Why is the What so important to your mum?” Maddy whispered to Grace but Mrs Wek overheard.
“It’s not the What itself,” she told Maddy. “I mean, it’s a good story but that’s not what makes it important. It’s important because there are so many stories in this country. You could get lost in them. This story’s important because it’s come a long way with me. We travelled together.
“It’s important,” said Mrs Wek. “Because it’s mine.”
“And mine?” Grace said.
“Yes,” said Mrs Wek. “I give it to you.” She popped her last crumb of lemon slice into Grace’s mouth.
There was quiet while tea was finished and then the planting party started moving off into the bush. The man called Derek kept muttering about the What, but nobody was listening any more. Mum and Nana went together, and they took Mrs Wek with them. The pink bandaid lady was the last to leave the clearing. Then only Maddy and Grace were left.
A kingfisher was perching on the limb of the manna, stretching out over the river. It was watching a loop of dragonflies swooping over the water. As the girls moved in under its tree, the kingfisher flashed its blue head full circle to watch them.
Grace took an orchid pot out of a box and tapped the base. She turned it upside down and shook it. A tiny bundle of stem and bark, trailing pea-size tubers and hair-like roots, dropped into her fingers.
Then Grace put the soft weight of it into Maddy’s hands.
Maddy took the orchid in open hands. It occurred to her that Nana had forgotten the labels – and now the whole planting party was out of sight. She didn’t know what sort of orchid this was.
And suddenly Maddy didn’t know what to do. Standing in the bush with her handful of life, under the eye of a kingfisher, made her heart tremble. She felt a duty to the orchid. It was small and soft, and the riverbank was nothing but clay and ants.
Her hands shook and a little soil fell from the roots.
“I don’t know how,” said Maddy Frank.
Now Maddy had never of her own free will not known how to do anything. She’d been the expert on Jermyn Street. The expert on fairies. The expert on stars and camping and Fitzroy trams. Until recently, she’d been the expert on her parents and herself.
Plenty had changed all that.
But Grace knew things Maddy didn’t. She took Maddy’s hands in her own and pointed to a soft, dark place among the manna roots. Into this, Maddy planted the orchid. She laid the new rootball down, patting it into the planting mix. All the time she was saying a sort of prayer under her breath.
Maddy’s prayer said, Please. Whatever sort you are, this is your new home. Please. Grow here: under these trees, by this river, in this place.
And that was how the first orchid was planted.
The kingfisher flashed like lightning over the water. Blue and orange, it was gone down the river. Following the dragonflies.
Nana Mad always said that with orchids, even if it was good in the greenhouse, everything could go bung with the replanting. Maddy didn’t want to think about all that now. For now she just wanted to kneel in the dirt and plant these orchids in this quiet, wild place.
Chapter Sixteen
Wild Places
It was the evening before her eleventh birthday and Maddy Frank was considering living down by the river forever. All afternoon she’d been building a lean-to on the flattest part of the riverbank. She’d found that the river ran slow and cool through the bush right behind her own fence line. The lean-to stood waiting for her now, a shelter between two trees, made of old iron and dropped branches and thick fern.
This part of the river, where she’d built the lean-to, was lined with white gums. In the evening, just before the dark settled, the trees gave off light
– for that last flash of the day the white bark glowed silver up and down the river. Maddy liked to be there for this. To watch the glow arrive. She always felt this was the best moment of the day.
And there was something else. On the riverbank there was one giant rivergum, dark and spreading and split with age. Underneath its ragged arms, spider orchids danced and its trunk was spotted with holes. It was here that in the glow just before the dark, Maddy thought she saw Bunjil the eagle.
It had been one evening not long after the planting party, when she first found the river. She’d thought she saw Bunjil perched still as wood at the top of the rivergum. He had fixed his eye on Maddy and there had been this moment when there was only the two of them in the world – and then he’d unfolded his great wings and flown. He was so big his wings made a wind.
Maddy had been less surprised than you’d think.
Maddy looked at her watch but she’d forgotten it.
It was almost night. The kookaburra pair were cackling tenderly. In its tree, the frogmouth ruffled and clicked. The mosquitos rose from the river, singing.
“Dad. Daaaad,” she called. “What time is it?”
“Almost seven thirty,” said Dad, coming out from the lean-to with a paintbrush and pot.
They’d be here any minute.
“Give it to me,” said Maddy. “Quick. Quick! Lift me up.”
Dad lifted her onto his shoulders and handed up the brush. She stretched to reach the board he’d nailed to the tree above the lean-to.
“Hurry up. You’re too big now,” he told her, wobbling. “I must be shrinking.”
Maddy gripped his hair to steady herself, and in huge white letters she daubed:
Plenty Sanctuary
– all living creetures welcome –
She’d just finished when she heard voices.
“They’re here,” she said and pulled her father’s hair in excitement. “Let me down. Let me down.”
Dad stooped and Maddy jumped. The voices were close in the trees now and she wanted to run and meet them. But she also wanted them to find her standing by her lean-to. Cool. Like it was nothing – something she threw together at the last moment. In the end she slipped around the giant rivergum just as Grace and Sophie-Rose appeared.
Sophie-Rose had grown a lot this year. On her first visit to The Deviation she’d measured up to the light switch in the kitchen. Now she measured way past it. She’d had her hair cut short and it looked brilliant. But nobody would ever, ever grow as tall as Grace Wek, thought Maddy. She just kept getting taller and taller and her legs longer and longer. Stepping through the tall yellow grass in the patchy light, she resembled a giraffe.
“Hi,” called Maddy. “Hi! Hi!”
She couldn’t think anything else to say. Her voice rose and broke as she ran towards them. It came out like a bird call.
Hi hi hi.
“Hi,” said Sophie-Rose as Maddy arrived. “This is so cool.”
“Wait till you see,” Maddy told her.
“Well,” said Dad, coming through the trees. “The mattress is blown up and the torches have batteries. You’re set.”
“Thanks, Dad,” said Maddy and hugged him quick and hard.
“Happy birthday, pumpkin,” he said. “Look after each other. Use the insect repellent. Don’t go swimming. Don’t light a fire. Use the torches instead–”
“Dad,” Maddy said quietly. “You promised.”
“All right,” he said. “I’m going.”
He took a few steps and stopped.
“And here’s my mobile,” he said, coming back and handing the phone to Maddy. “Just in case.”
As always, the river was busy. The bush in the night was full of cracks of twigs, whistles of winds, creaks of gums. The groans and sighs of possums. Flutters and flickers. Tiny motions everywhere.
Maddy and Sophie-Rose and Grace sat with their feet in the dark river. They wriggled their toes down into its clattering white stones. They sat by the black water and wherever they turned their eyes, there were stars.
Overhead, the Milky Way flowed: a road, a river, a path in the sky. Over their feet, the black water flowed: a river of stars, reflecting.
The constellations sailed in the black water, twinkling between their bare toes. And in the north-east the Karatgurk had returned. They could see them through a gap in the rivergums, sailing over the ghostly paddocks. But there were definitely more than six now. Or even seven. There were so many star-sisters you couldn’t count them. Sophie-Rose couldn’t believe it.
But Maddy had grown used to the light in Plenty and these days she saw a lot of things. The mountain hanging over The Deviation was like a big comfortable friend. The new leaves on the burnt trunks grew thicker every day – their fresh green around the black trunks looked so good she wanted to eat it. And she’d known for ages now that you couldn’t count the number of stars in the Plenty skies. The more you looked, the more you saw.
After they’d eaten the slightly melted cake sent by Sophie-Rose’s mother – this year it was Titania Queen of the Fairies – Maddy, Sophie-Rose and Grace stretched out in the lean-to to talk.
“You know,” said Grace, “I’ve been thinking about the Karatgurk.”
“Maybe the youngest one isn’t lost,” she said. “Maybe she found a better place to live and is going there.”
“Yeah,” Maddy said, yawning with fullness. “And the older ones are following her.”
“But they’re going the wrong way for that,” Sophie-Rose pointed out. “The youngest one is behind them. And they’re all going one way.”
It was a good point. They lay and thought about it.
“Wait,” said Grace after a while. “Not if the older ones are really slow. Then they’re just way, way behind. You know. It’s a big circle.”
“Brilliant,” sighed Maddy Frank, Builder of Shelters and Dweller by the Water. Keeper of the Tree and Historian to Fairies.
Granddaughter to Mad.
Friend of Grace.
And she slept in the tent between her two best friends and dreamed of sailing.
Outside, nothing was still. The river kept flowing. The stars kept moving. They couldn’t stay still if they wanted to, and neither could Maddy and Sophie-Rose and Grace. Their bodies too were just a little stardust and water.
Moving. Travelling. Always.
Author note
On the news there are all these people without a place to call home, and most of them are children. They are crowded into camps and detention centres round the world. I wrote Plenty because I’d been watching the news and thinking about homes and homesickness.
I came to Australia from England with my parents fifty years ago. It was after a big war, so big it was called World War II. That war did what all wars do: use up all the money and food. Afterwards, there wasn’t enough for everybody, and lots of people left England to settle in other countries. My family was one of them.
Nobody asked me if I wanted to leave England. I had to go because I was three and that’s what my parents had decided was best. And it’s been a good life here (plenty of food and sunshine!) – except for this small, quiet, homesick part of me, which never stops thinking about England. Being so young when we left, you’d think I’d have forgotten. But I never did.
When I was little, that homesick part was a secret. I called it my Inside England. It was built in my mind from memory, and later from books and films. I spent lots of time in the England inside myself: walking in the snow, sitting under oak trees and tramping about moors in Wellington boots. Later I wrote the Secrets of Carrick books. The island of Carrick is actually my Inside England. Don’t tell anybody.
Now when I see the faces of the refugee children on the news, I think how they had no choice either. How nobody asked them. And I think of Sudan and Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia, and all the other beautiful countries they carry inside them in parts that will never quite stop hurting. And I remember. When I see their faces I think how homesickness feels the sa
me to everybody.
First published in 2014
by Black Dog Books
an imprint of Walker Books Australia Pty Ltd
Locked Bag 22, Newtown
NSW 2042 Australia
www.walkerbooks.com.au
This ebook edition published in 2014
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
Text © 2014 Ananda Braxton-Smith
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means – electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise – without the prior written permission of the publisher.
National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:
Braxton-Smith, Ananda, author.
Plenty / Ananda Braxton-Smith.
For children.
Subjects: Home – Juvenile fiction.
Families – Juvenile fiction.
Moving, Household – Juvenile fiction.
A823.4
ISBN: 978-1-922077-78-3 (ePub)
ISBN: 978-1-742032-44-3 (e-PDF)
ISBN: 978-1-922077-79-0 (.PRC)
Cover image (girl) © iStockphoto.com/Kangah
Cover image (orchid branch) © Shutterstock.com/Pavels Arsenjans
Cover image (background) © Shutterstock.com/Sharon Day
For Willow, who helped right at the beginning – when it’s most helpful. And for all the children looking for home.
Plenty Page 7