The Tender Moments of Saffron Silk

by Glenda Millard

  Joan of Arc had been laid to rest for months and Saffron was herself again. It was Sunday and she was dressed in a lumpy jumper knitted with Barney Blacksheep’s wool by Nell. The air at the Kingdom of Silk was syrupy with the scent of sunburnt fruit. It was apple-pie season. Nell and Annie had made pastry on Saturday and Ben lit the outdoor oven early Sunday morning. Scarlet was at work at the Colour Patch Café. Everyone else including Layla was in the kitchen peeling and slicing apples, grinding cinnamon and cloves or rolling out sheets of buttery pastry. Nell had orders. Apple-pie orders. A list as long as her arm was stuck to the refrigerator. On top of the list Perry had written Jenkins’ name with a fat red crayon so Nell couldn’t possibly miss it.

  Jenkins was Perry’s grown-up friend. He was nearly eighty. His favourite things were driving the ride-on mower at the Cameron’s Creek Cemetery, being Perry’s personal assistant at school, and Nell. Nell thought Jenkins only liked her because of the plum puddings she made for him at Christmas and the Barney Blacksheep socks she knitted him for winter. But Perry could tell that Jenkins loved Nell for herself, just as he did.

  Every year Mr Canning from the orchard down the road donated apples. The Silk family, and anyone else who cared to help, made the pies and Ben cooked them in his oven. The apple-pie money always went to a worthy cause. This year it was going to people in the state of Queensland whose homes had been washed away by floods. Perry’s job was to cut shapes from the leftover scraps of pastry to use as decorations on top of the pies. He used a special leaf-shaped cutter and pressed lines into the pastry with a fork to make them look like the veins in real leaves.

  Saffron was standing beside him, painting the tops of the pies with beaten egg then passing them to Layla, who sprinkled vanilla sugar over them. Saffron was very quiet but Perry didn’t mind. He was quiet too, especially when he was concentrating hard on important things like putting veins in leaves. When almost all the pastry was used, Perry made two heart shapes. One for Miss Cherry, his teacher at school, and the other for Jenkins because he loved them both. Pictures of hearts mean love. Scarlet taught him that.

  Perry was about to pass the hearts to Saffron, when her pastry brush fell to the floor with a clatter. She grabbed at the table as though to stop herself falling and her face was as pale as butcher’s paper.

  Annie and Nell helped Saffron to her room, felt her forehead, fussed and asked too many questions.

  ‘I need to lie down. Just leave me alone,’ Saffron whispered, sinking onto the bed. At last they closed the door, blocking out light and sound and the smell of apples and spices. Saffron tore everything off, dumping it on the floor: jumper, jeans, underpants, the elastic that held her ropey red curls. Everything but her most precious possession, the enamelled bluebird ring. From the bottom of her wardrobe she took the loose white martyr’s tunic and slipped it over her head. Her skin hurt. Her eyes hurt. Everything hurt. She would rather have worn nothing at all, but she hoped Joan of Arc might give her courage for what lay ahead.

  Saffron melted onto her bed and the lights came again. Little birds furiously beating fiery wings, darting in the darkness, burning a hot, tight halo around her head.

  The birds had flown by Monday, but Saffron couldn’t stand up without feeling dizzy. So she stayed in bed all day with the blinds pulled down and the lights switched off, a hot-water bottle on her feet and an ice-pack over her closed eyes. It wasn’t the first time she’d felt this way. But the headaches seemed to be getting stronger, lasting longer and coming more often. It hurt to bend, to breathe, to be.

  Saffron woke before sunrise on Tuesday, lifted the ice-pack, opened her eyes a crack and carefully turned her head sideways on the pillow. Annie was asleep in the wicker peacock chair beside her bed.

  ‘Mama,’ Saffron whispered and Annie woke in an instant. ‘I think I’m better today.’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  Saffron nodded, something she couldn’t do when she wasn’t well. Annie slipped into bed beside her and held her until Aurora trailed her golden robe across the sky.

  ‘How do you know, Saffron?’ Annie whispered, as though afraid words might wound her tender child. ‘Is there something that tells you the headache is coming? Is there a sign?’

  The Maid of Orleans saw visions. Some people said she was holy, others said she was mad. What would people say if she told them about the firebirds, Saffron wondered. Did other people see them too? How could she know without giving her secret away? Was she really as weird as the girls at school said she was? Saffron said nothing and rolled over into Annie’s arms.

  3. Saffron’s Other Brother

  By the time Saffron got out of bed, the house was quiet. Her sisters and Griffin were at school. Annie was in her studio painting and Ben had gone to collect some windows and doors from an old house that was being pulled down. He planned to use them to build an extension onto the house at the Kingdom of Silk. He left early so he could be back in time to take Saffron to her appointment with Doctor Larsson.

  Barney Blacksheep was pretending to be invisible. He didn’t usually come into the front room on a Tuesday, but Blue had been practising being a sheepdog, instead of just a regular dog. He was showing off to Saffron, who wasn’t usually at home on Tuesdays. He’d been rounding up Barney, and Barney, being a very obliging sort of sheep, had allowed himself to be herded into the living room, where he was so exhausted from being chased all over the Kingdom of Silk that he lay down on the pink carpet cabbage roses and refused to budge. Saffron lay on the floor with her head on Barney’s woolly middle and Blue crouched in front of them, nose to paws, looking pleased with himself.

  Perry Angel was there too; he was home-schooled by Nell and Annie on Tuesdays and Thursdays. He liked Tuesdays. He called them Choose-days because on that day of the week he was allowed to decide what he wanted to learn. On this particular Choose-day, he was having a knitting lesson with Nell. Everyone at the Kingdom of Silk knew how to knit. Nell said knitting was a necessary survival skill. Ben liked knitting teacosies, hot-water bottle covers with cherry tassels, and odd socks. No-one at the Kingdom of Silk ever wore matching socks. It took too much time to find their mates and besides it was boring wearing the same colour or pattern on both feet. So Ben kept up a steady supply of odd socks. Griffin liked cotton-reel knitting best. He wanted to make metres and metres of long woollen tubes, like knitted spaghetti, using small leftover pieces of wool in every colour of the rainbow. He planned to wind it up like a huge lollipop and stitch it together to make a floor rug for Nell’s birthday. Plan B, in case he didn’t make it long enough, was a beanie for Ben.

  Perry was knitting a scarf. Nell said that once he’d mastered the art of the scarf, she’d teach him to knit on four needles. Then he could make beanies for boiled breakfast eggs or vests for orphaned lambs. Perry had already decided he wanted to knit mittens for Worzel Gummidge. He felt sorry for the old scarecrow who stood in the vegetable patch all day and all night with his holey coat flapping. Especially in winter, when his straw fingers and carroty nose were covered in frost. A few stitches from Perry’s scarf had mysteriously gone astray but Nell said he was doing an excellent job and, anyway, she liked the spiderweb effect the dropped stitches made.

  Having Nell compare his scarf to a spider’s web was a great compliment to Perry. Both he and Nell loved spiderwebs. She’d shown Perry where to look for them and how to identify which variety of spider had made them. Perry’s favourite was Golden Orb. Golden was clever as well as beautiful. Often she spun a web like a fairy’s hammock between the veranda posts. By sunrise her larder would be well stocked with moths and insects that came to feed in the marigolds beside the steps. Early on misty mornings Perry and Nell would go walking to see the webs on barbed-wire fences sparkling with dewy diamonds, like necklaces fit for the Queen. Perry knew the Queen wore a diamond necklace, because there was a picture of her on Nell’s apron and her necklace sparkled when Nell danced the Spanish Fandango. He wondered if they had fence diamonds in England and if
the Queen had ever seen them when she was walking her dogs in the morning.

  There was another reason why Perry liked Choose-days. They reminded him of chosen. Chosen is good, Nell says. Chosen is when you get to say yes or no. Before Perry came to the Kingdom of Silk no-one had ever let him choose, not even on Choose-days. They never said the words, they never asked the question. They just telephoned Melody, the welfare lady, and she came and took him back to the children’s home after a few weeks. But on the Day of Cake and Thankfulness, Ben said, ‘We want you to stay with us, Perry. Is that what you want? Is it? Will you stay with us?’

  It was a tender moment and God was in it. Until then Perry thought God was in heaven. Heaven was far away, higher than a cumulonimbus. Perry would never forget Ben’s words, because he wanted so much to stay. The Kingdom of Silk was his home now. He had family. He was family. He was Saffron’s other brother. That’s how she introduced him to people he’d never met before.

  ‘And this is Perry, my other brother,’ she’d say, holding his hand and smiling at him like it gave her double happiness to have two brothers instead of one.

  Suddenly Perry wanted to be near Saffron because being family and making happy go both ways. He gathered up his knitting and lay down with his head beside hers on Barney’s woolly middle. They looked out the open door and watched Golden darning her web and red leaves raining quietly from the Cox’s Orange Pippin. They saw the letting go of the last of the wrinkled apples and heard the soft thud of them landing on the tin roof of Annie’s white-washed studio.

  Perry liked Saffron’s quietness. She let him hear things working. Important things, like the tick of the clock — home’s heart. A sheep asleep. And magpies gossiping cheerfully about the blueberry sky, the elephant clouds and the sweet green smell of wet in the distance. But there was something else too. Now he had learnt to read hearts, Perry Angel knew Saffron was frightened. So he nestled his hand in hers and, without saying a word, reminded her that a brother’s love is real and beautiful, and stronger than fear. It was a tiny tender moment; one that Saffron wanted to write like a bracelet of silver charms across her empty pages.

  4. Elephant Clouds and Afternoon Tea

  Nell was knitting socks for Jenkins, a matching pair, because Jenkins hadn’t been brought up to appreciate oddness. But she noticed the tender moment that happened in the silence between Saffron and her other brother, Perry Angel. She looked at the clock. Its insides still worked but one of the hands was broken. The big one, with the cherub swinging from it, was stuck on half past the hour. It seemed like the chubby cherub was weighing it down, trying to make time stand still. Nell stood up slowly; the coming wet was already in her bones. It heavied her legs and made the floorboards in the passage creak.

  When she reached the door where her favourite poem was painted, Nell stopped. She knew its words by heart but she read them again.

  A time to cry and a time to laugh,

  A time to be sad and a time to dance …

  Nell didn’t feel like dancing or laughing, but she didn’t exactly feel like crying or being sad either. She just felt as though she was carrying a heavy load inside herself and could find nothing in the poem that might help lighten it. She sighed, put some water in the kettle, set it on the stove and took the lid off her old brown teapot. Ben would be home soon and they’d share tea and pink jelly cakes and perhaps then the feeling might go away.

  While the red leaves rained and Perry held her hand, Saffron rested her Naming Day Book over her heart and breathed in its faint scent of mothballs and musk. She’d read it hundreds of times before, so many times she could almost see it with her eyes shut. But today she wanted to make sure that everything in it was imprinted in her mind so it would be with her even when she was sleeping, even if she was far, far away from the Kingdom of Silk. Even when the fiery halo burned above her brow. And even if she could never see the book again. She dozed until she heard Nell’s footsteps in the passageway and the familiar sound of Miss Amelie’s tea trolley.

  Miss Amelie was a good friend of Nell’s. But then she passed away and became a deep mystery, the way she was before she was an egg. There is no need for worldly goods when you become a deep mystery, so Nell bought Miss Amelie’s trolley at an auction. She sanded off the layers of dark brown varnish and painted it Captain Blue. The colour reminded her of the small wooden fishing boats on Miss Amelie’s postcards from places far away.

  Saffron opened her eyes when Nell wheeled the trolley into the room on its wonky casters. Scraps of tablecloth-lace lapped the edges like sea foam, forget-me-not teacups and saucers chattered to one another and steam spiralled lazily from Brown Betty’s cracked spout. There were two tiers on Miss Amelie’s tea trolley. On the bottom tier was a small cut-glass dish of sugar-coated aniseed rings, a plate of pink jelly cakes and a tattered copy of Anne of Green Gables.

  It was Nell’s book. She’d had it since she was a young girl and had learnt a lot about being a better person by reading it, even though it was a mostly made-up story. From the moment her daughters were born, Nell read to them. It didn’t matter that they didn’t understand the words. Books are many things: lullabies for the weary, ointment for the wounded, armour for the fearful and nests for those in need of a home. When Ben came to live with Nell, she read to him too. Sometimes still, she and Ben would sit in the big comfy armchairs in the living room and read alternate chapters to one another. It was a leftover habit from when Ben was a boy. When he grew up and married, he and Nell took turns reading to the Rainbow Girls, Griffin and Layla, and to Perry Angel, who was not an orphan like Anne of Green Gables, but a foster child, like Ben.

  Nell was like a library of one book with her Anne of Green Gables. She was always loaning it to someone. She loaned it to the preacher once and suggested he read some of it to his congregation. Nell didn’t go to church very often, but she and the preacher were good friends. They enjoyed arguing, especially about books and other important things. But they agreed that L M Montgomery was a very fine writer and that God can sometimes be found in a pumpkin patch or the blanketing blue hills and is always present in a tender moment.

  After Perry came to stay, Nell loaned her Anne book to Sunday Lee, Perry’s birth mother, because she wanted Sunday to understand what a blessing Perry was to the Silks and what an unselfish thing she had done when she was sweet sixteen and couldn’t care for her baby boy. Books can do things like that.

  Saffron believed in the power of books but on that particular Tuesday she tried hard not to worry about what it would be like if you weren’t well enough to read. How could you be brave then, how could you be healed, where would the songs come from, how would you find home?

  The magpies had all flown away and the cloud elephants had grown gigantic, blocking out the blueberry sky and trumpeting so loudly that Blue hid under Nell’s rocking chair. But none of that distracted Perry from what he was thinking. He was wondering if anyone had ever read to Sunday Lee when she was small. If anyone had cuddled her on their lap with a book and told her stories and pointed to the words so they would become like old friends next time she saw them. Sunday was his other mother, the person who had grown him from an egg in the quiet dark inside her. Perry made up his mind that next time Sunday came to visit the Kingdom of Silk, he would read to her. Maybe the words would soothe the sadness she kept inside.

  Annie and Ben arrived just as the elephants began squirting fat drops into the sky. Nell poured the tea, then picked up her Anne book and began to read aloud. And Perry Angel felt suddenly happy because of his plan and because he was wearing his Cloud Appreciation Society badge and he knew that the elephants in the sky were called cumulonimbi and because the words Nell was reading were his old friends.

  Saffron felt happy too. The deep, delicious happiness that wraps itself around you when everything is safe and familiar. Brown Betty in her rainbow cosy, Miss Amelie’s fishing-boat-blue tea trolley, the book of Anne, Nell’s voice, Perry’s hand, the fat cherub, the tick and the tock, ap
ple-pie days … a tiny voice inside her head interrupted.

  ‘Can such a feeling last forever?’ it asked. ‘Even after you turn back into a deep mystery, like Miss Amelie and L M Montgomery?’

  But she, Saffron Silk, was suddenly Joan-of-Arc-brave and everything in the universe seemed to be in its right and proper place.

  5. Tools for Truth

  At lunchtime that day, Griffin couldn’t eat. Every day for a week he meant to tell Layla about Saffron. And every day he put it off. But now he had to tell her because she’d seen Saffron on Apple-Pie Sunday. Everyone had. They saw the way she’d held on to the table and how Nell and Annie had to help her walk to her bedroom. So Griffin told Layla what he knew: about the headaches, the dizziness and feeling ill.

  ‘I think it’s been happening for a few months now,’ he said. ‘It usually lasts for about a day and then she’s okay again.’

  ‘Has she been eating ice-cream?’

  ‘No, I don’t think so. At least, she wasn’t on Sunday.’

  Layla thought for a while. The only time she got a headache was when she’d been eating ice-cream too fast. She always got dizzy if she played blind man’s buff or when her daddy gave her too many whizzy dizzies in a row. And once she went on the Octopus ride at the Royal Agricultural Show and felt sick in the stomach and dizzy as well. But Saffron definitely wasn’t doing any of those things on Sunday.

  ‘Maybe it’s her ears,’ Layla said after a few moments. ‘My brother got an ear infection once. That made him lose his balance and feel sick. Doctor Larsson gave Patrick pills and it made him better in no time.’