Puberty. I don’t like that word. It’s just icky. And slightly pushy. A word I like is luminous. It’s mysterious and leading somewhere, like the little silver paths that snails make. But, to tell you the truth, I’m not thinking about words or puberty, I’m thinking about Marsh because I’m going straight to the cloud platform to give her the food.
‘Let’s skip puberty. Puberty sounds freaky,’ I say.
‘Yeah—you wake up and your legs are longer than they used to be, which is sort of similar to how it must be when a snail wakes up after three years,’ says Digby.
Digby seems to have been in the gangly stage since he could walk, but I don’t mention this.
‘What about girls?’ I say.
‘Girls?’ Digby blinks blankly. Girls don’t interest him, unless they are queen bees or praying mantises. ‘I don’t know about girls,’ he says. ‘Though, get this, the female black widow spider’s venom is deadlier than a rattlesnake’s.’ Digby raises his brows and shoots me a deadly look, as if to say Watch out. But he doesn’t know anything about Marsh. And Marsh isn’t venomous. She’s fiery and strange, but not deadly. At least she doesn’t seem deadly. I consider trying to tell Digby about her again, but I just can’t imagine how he will take it. He may suspect I have a crush. And if he suggests that, I might blush or something, even if I’m not sure why I’m thinking a lot about Marsh.
I like the ways Digby is different from me. Our friendship is like a familiar room, something you can enter into, but Marsh feels like a doorway into a place I’ve never been. Which is why I’m going there by myself.
I say goodbye to Digby on the creek path. He is caught up examining algae. I tell him I have to keep going as Mum wants me home early to look after Opal, which is a lie. I feel a little bad about it as I haven’t ever actually told Digby a lie before. Maybe this is a sign of puberty. I check my legs, but they feel just like they always have. They feel like mine.
Legs are pretty important, it occurs to me right then, and I just take them for granted. Mum is always going on about all the things we take for granted, like clean water and a house. When I had chicken pox, I was glad afterwards for being free of chicken pox. Boy I was glad, I was even glad just to be feeling so glad. Sometimes you have to have something taken away before you realise what it means to you, which is a shame really. So maybe I should spend a day without legs so that I can be grateful for them the next day…
My thoughts speed along, because I am excited or nervous or possibly both. I swing by home. I take out my stash of food for Marsh and hide it at the front gate. Then then I go inside, dump my schoolbag, rough up Opal’s hair, say hi to Mum and tell her I’m going up the hill. I grab an apple and call for Black Betty. And then we are off, up the hill, sandwiches and all.
*
The cloud platform is quiet as we approach. I whistle to let Marsh know we are here. She comes to the side of the treehouse and looks down at us. She is wearing a white hat. It’s hard to tell, but I think I detect a smile, or just the tiniest sense of one.
‘You’ve come back,’ she declares.
‘Looks like it,’ I say.
She climbs down and pats Black Betty, talking to her tenderly. She is wearing a long, shabby, white lace dress, which makes her look like a dishevelled bride. When she finally remembers I am here too, she looks up and says, ‘Did you bring Nutella?’
‘No. We didn’t have any. I’ve got peanut-butter-and-honey sandwiches and a muffin. And some nuts.’
‘Okay.’
Just okay? How about thanks a lot, that’s really nice of you.
Marsh gives Black Betty another cuddle and then climbs back up the tree. I expect the meaning of this conversation is that she allows me to come onto her cloud platform and deliver her food. Marsh really needs to learn some manners.
I would have been happy with just a smile. I don’t ask for much.
When I get up there, Marsh is sitting cross-legged in the corner. If there wasn’t an impatient frown on her face, she would, in all her white, look almost mystical.
She waits silently for me to unload the food and then tucks into the muffin immediately, looking at me as if she is weighing something up. But she says nothing until she has finished every last crumb.
Then she lifts her hand and opens her mouth and sings a long, loud note. It rings like a golden bell. She finishes and nods at me as if it’s my turn.
I’m sitting opposite her, and between us is her world of small things. I shuffle a little awkwardly. This is strange. I wonder if Marsh is just too weird and if trying to make friends with her is like trying to make friends with someone who isn’t real.
‘Marsh,’ I say, ‘I’m not sure what you want me to do, but I can’t just sing like that. In fact, I don’t even want singing lessons. Could we…maybe… just talk.’
‘About what?’ She is reluctant, I can tell.
‘Well, for one thing, about why you are so hungry. Don’t your parents feed you? Do you even have parents?’
She frowns and looks down. Her black hair falls across her face. Her thumbs dance around each other. But when she looks up at me, she leans forward, her eyes ablaze. ‘My dad says the best place to build a house is where a plum tree grows.’
‘Why?’
‘So he can make sljivovica.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Sljivovica is a drink. We’re Serbian. Now I’ll show you who we have here. I have sung them down from Khazar. Little ones, and Mumija. Look how she keeps me safe.’ Marsh has picked up the acorn again. She glances at me to see if I will go along, if I will enter her world. I try to signal willingness. I try to be open. At least she is not expecting me to sing.
Marsh stands up. The white dress catches the breeze like a sail on a ship. She moves to the stool, closes her eyes and places her hands on her knees. Then she leans back and her face tilts upwards. Her shoulders twitch.
She begins to sing. Her eyes are closed, and it is as if she is singing to someone, singing of something very tender and sad. Her hand claps time on her thigh. She is swept away. I’m not sure where to look.
Then she stops. Her eyes open. She is looking at the small things. She picks up the tooth and places it with the circle of objects around the belt buckle. She points at the buckle.
‘That’s Nikolai. He is very distinguished. Whenever he chooses to speak, the others listen. Nikolai loves a pigeon, a white one, whose wing is injured. He cured her. He only has to call her and she will come. That’s why they respect him. But Charles, here, has knowledge. He knows how things work. He knows what the laws are, and he knows which battles were won.’
Charles is the tooth. Charles, along with the periwinkle, the bottle lid and the silver button, is apparently listening to Nikolai the belt buckle.
Marsh suddenly laughs, ‘Can you see them? You can’t, can you? Mumija says you can’t see them.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You need the eyes of a falcon. Falcons can see everything.’
She laughs again. She looks so stern most of the time, but when she laughs, her face shines with tiny pieces of light. I like her best when she laughs.
‘I don’t know what you want me to see.’
‘Close your eyes and look with your soul.’
I close my eyes. I hear the sounds that come off the hill: the cars thrumming on the distant highway, the birds chattering. How do I look with my soul?
Sunlight lands on my eyelids and diamonds of light wobble there. Marsh’s hand is on my arm. And then I hear her voice, that golden bell, loud and full. Her song climbs upwards. It floods the dark pools behind my eyes. There is a swirl of colour, as if the darkness will tear open, and I am straining to see what is behind the dark.
But the song has gone down. The dark rolls over and over and waves of laughter spread like the sea on the shore. It’s Marsh.
I open my eyes. She is Wild Girl. Wild like the ocean and as beautiful as the night.
‘Well, you wrecked it,’ I say. ‘I w
as just about to see something.’
I’m not sure this is true, but I’m also not sure it isn’t true. I say it mostly to disguise my sudden burst of admiration.
Marsh shrugs. ‘Either you see them or you don’t. Now you don’t, but soon you will.’
‘How do you know I will? How did you learn to see them?’ I ask. At least if I know what I’m meant to see, it might help me see it. I know she won’t tell me, just like she won’t tell me her name. So I’m not going to ask her. But I can’t work out if the small things come to life for her, or if they are just the symbols of something else she is ‘seeing’ in her mind.
She tilts her head and closes her eyes. She leans back on her stool again. ‘I’ll tell you their story. And then you might see them.’ She heaves a great sigh.
I sit patiently waiting for the story. I prefer listening to stories than being put to a seeing test.
‘Okay,’ she says, waving her arm theatrically. ‘There was a time when the Plains of Khazar and the Mountain of Tara were all one country. It was a very beautiful country ruled over by a king and a queen.’
‘Like all fairy tales,’ I interrupt.
She raises her eyebrows, but ignores me. ‘But then the king had a new advisor, Charles, who convinced him that he should become more stately and authoritative and should stop wandering around the land and eating and dancing with the people. The queen, Mumija’—Marsh picks up the acorn—‘didn’t agree, but Charles warned the king that his beautiful country would be invaded if he did not show some strength and form an army and create laws and punish those who didn’t obey. The king was distressed. He felt he had no choice but to protect his land with an army and strict laws. The queen became unhappy with this and ran away. She hid on the Mountain of Tara, where the animals protected her, as they always had. The king fell into grief and drank too much sljivovica to escape his sadness. Since the king could not rule the land, Charles tried to take control, but there was fighting as others wanted to take control as well.’
‘You mean there was a war?’ I ask.
She frowns, as if my question has brought some grim reality to the story. ‘The queen, Mumija, lives on the mountain, surrounded by her nine grim lions, and Badjaneck, who is a young girl, brings her bread to eat.’ Marsh points to the silver button. ‘People can hear the queen singing.’
I am completely confused about whether this story is folklore, history, fairy tale or something Marsh has made up herself.
‘Marsh, are the Plains of Khazar in Serbia?’ I ask.
Marsh rolls her eyes. She seems perplexed and annoyed by my question. ‘The plains are up there. I’ve already told you. You can see them with your mind’s eye, your falcon eye. Serbia is far away, overseas.’
If you ask a straight question it’s because you want a straight answer, but I should have known not to expect that with Marsh. I persevere anyway. ‘Well, who is Nikolai, the one who loves the white dove?’ I ask.
‘He lives there too,’ she says. ‘On the plains. He also threatens the king, because the king doesn’t understand him. He isn’t like the rest of the people. Nikolai lives in a hotel; he has no wife or children. He can see things that other people can’t see. He sees the mysteries.’
Marsh puts the acorn down and places her hands one on top of the other in her lap. Her thumbs begin their frenzied dance around each other again. ‘You know, Joey, once a story has been written, it’s best to cross out the beginning and the ending. Because that’s where the lying happens.’
She states this as if it’s a piece of wisdom she is offering me and I should be grateful. She looks at me to see if I am impressed. I’m not easily impressed by things like this. My mum is a poet; she hands down wisdoms all the time. But Marsh keeps going.
‘It was a Russian who said that. His name was Chekhov. Mama always said it to me. So this story’—she waves her hand over the theatre of small players—‘there is no beginning and no ending. Up there, on the Plains of Khazar, everything keeps going. The bears won’t ever kill anyone. No one gets sick. No one dies.’
There is something spooky about all this. The Plains of Khazar don’t sound like the sort of place I would be keen to visit, especially since the lions are grim. Maybe I don’t want to see all this stuff.
‘A story has to have an ending.’ I say. I’m sick of Marsh calling all the shots. Already I am second-in-command here. There are things I know, too, and I’m not going to stay quiet. I know stories have endings, even if they are lies. Most stories are lies from start to finish. They’re just interesting lies.
Marsh is standing up. She shakes her head, grabs the acorn, curls her hand around it and presses it to her chest.
Her eyes close, her face tilts up and her song erupts from her. I recognise it now. That song haunts her. It carries her away, winding up to the Mountain of Tara, the Plains of Khazar, the skies and the circling doves. Marsh has gone there. She has closed everything else out, including me.
I climb down the tree trunk and whistle for Black Betty. We walk away from the peppercorn tree and the eerie song.
Suddenly home seems such a normal place. I think of our kitchen, with Opal on a stool, stirring pancake mixture, and Mum singing along to Neil Young and Dad brewing coffee and Black Betty in her basket nibbling at some itchy spot. The chicken scraps bucket, the notes on the fridge, the fruit bowl, the Weetbix box on top of the cupboard and the never-quite-cleared table with the bunch of wilting apricot roses that Opal picked. It’s comfortably lived in, and that’s what Marsh’s world isn’t. I don’t know what it is, but I do know that something isn’t right. It could be just my overactive sensitivities, but I have a feeling that Marsh needs help.
‘Where did you go?’ demands Opal. She is running full pelt across the garden with a trowel in one hand.
‘Where are you going?’ I ask back.
She pulls herself to a stop. Her pink wings are shivering, her hands are dirty and her hair is sticking out. She seems to have landed mid-flight.
‘Me and Bossy are making cakes. I’m getting dirt,’ she says.
Bossy is an Isa Brown chicken. I can see that further up the garden Bossy is in the wheelbarrow.
‘Where were you?’ Opal asks again. It’s hard to distract Opal when she wants to find something out.
‘I went up the hill.’ I try to leave it at that. Bossy has taken advantage of being left alone to escape from the wheelbarrow, which means she will run straight for the vegetable garden, and Opal will get hell from Mum when Bossy tractors up the new seedlings.
‘What did you do there?’
‘Bossy’s out,’ I say, to give fair warning. But Opal shrugs. She can tell I’ve been up to something and she is prepared to risk the fallout from Bossy’s escape to uncover it.
‘Where were you?’ she repeats.
‘Top secret information. Sorry Ope.’
Opal drops her trowel. ‘Tell me,’ she stomps. ‘I won’t tell anyone.’
‘Cross your heart and hope to die?’
She crosses her heart in an instant and makes the oath.
‘Okay, I went up the hill with a book and I read a story.’
‘Is that all?’ Opal is appalled.
‘Well it was a strange story. It’s about a girl who lives in a tree and never goes to school. Actually she lives in two worlds, the world in the tree and then a world above the tree. She gets to that other world by singing. It’s called the Plains of Khazar.’
I figure that telling it as a story gets me out of telling the truth, while it also allows me to talk about something that’s kind of on my mind. Or someone who is on my mind.
Opal grins in delight. ‘Why don’t her parents make her go to school?’
I shrug. There are holes in the story, that’s for sure. ‘The book doesn’t talk about parents. Who wants to read a story about parents?’
‘What’s the other world like? Does it have a tin man?’ Opal has watched The Wizard of Oz too many times.
‘No. There is a man who m
ends the wings of a dove. And people with names in another language. Wars of course. And a queen hiding on the top of a mountain with nine grim lions protecting her, and a little girl who brings her food. There are bears, too.’
‘Real bears? Or pretend bears?’
That’s the question I keep turning over in my mind. Are the Plains of Khazar real or not? There is no doubt that Marsh is seeing something. Can people really go to another place without moving? I suppose you can when you sleep.
‘Dream bears,’ I say.
Opal ponders this a moment. She seems to like it. ‘Sounds like a cartoon,’ she yells, running back to her wheelbarrow. To her it’s all like a cartoon—dream bears, a tin man, a mud pie and somersaults.
I go and get my guitar. I sit on the front porch where Opal can’t see me and won’t bug me anymore. I like playing my guitar when I expect nothing from it. Sometimes I look for something—I want the guitar to sing me my song—but other times, it’s just like doodling. I can think over the top of it, it leads me to a sort of dream-think, a thinking that’s loose and wandering, with half an ear on the notes and half an eye on the thoughts.
I’m thinking about Opal and how she is enthusiastic for anything and then drops it as if nothing matters too much. She bubbles over like water. And this is exactly how Marsh isn’t.
Marsh is like an ocean wave, always coming forward. Whatever it is that matters to her, really matters, and it gets in her heart and takes over. When she sings that song, the one that takes her away, she is wholly herself, she isn’t trying to perform, or be someone who I might like or who the other kids might like. And she doesn’t care about opinions, because she isn’t even thinking, she is just alive to the very ends of her toes and fingers. And all of her is in the song. And the way she does that is beautiful in the way the ocean is beautiful. And when I hear her, it feels as if my little self comes out of hiding.
I am not sure what this is. All I know is that I am thinking about her a lot. And the thought of seeing her again sets my insides rollicking. It could just be it’s because I don’t know anyone else who could dream a world where nothing ends, where no one gets sick and maybe no one goes away and wholly believe it. Or it could be that this is what a crush feels like.
Marsh and Me Page 4