The Tender Moments of Saffron Silk

by Glenda Millard

  While Scarlet and Barney were at work, Annie and Indigo rode their bicycles to Lake Tom Thumb to sketch the sacred ibises. Indigo loved drawing these graceful fishing birds, but often got the letters of their name mixed up and wrote scared ibises, instead. Once, when Violet pointed out her mistake, Indigo said, ‘We can’t all be good at spelling, and anyway, I think I might be ambidextrous.’

  Violet explained that ambidextrous meant you could use either hand equally well.

  ‘Perhaps you mean dyslexic,’ she suggested kindly. Violet was almost always polite, even to her very loud twin sister. ‘That’s when your brain doesn’t …’

  ‘That’s not what I meant!’ said Indigo shoutily, realising her mistake. ‘I’m trying to improve my drawing by using my left hand. And anyway, the birds all fly away when we set up our easels, so we have to disguise ourselves as bushes till they come back, and I can tell you, it’s not very comfortable. So they are scared ibises, Miss Smarty Pants!’

  On Sunday, Annie and Indigo didn’t really care if they saw any ibises at all, scared or sacred. Neither of them told the other but each of them knew. Which proves it is possible for very loud, ambidextrous people to have the gift of reading hearts. So instead, Annie painted a picture of Indigo painting a pelican.

  While they were gone, Amber was in the kitchen baking. She almost always baked something for afternoon tea on weekends. But today she was making something she’d never made before. She would like to have practised at least once before Saffron went away, but the ingredients cost almost a full week’s pay from her newspaper delivery round so she couldn’t afford to.

  Perry Angel wanted to give something precious to Saffron. The most precious things he could think of were fence diamonds. But you cannot keep a dewdrop-diamond necklace forever or even until lunchtime, because dewdrops fall when the sun shines or the wind blows. So Perry began to think about things that helped him feel brave when he was frightened. Blue was his best thing. He had only to touch Blue’s warm freckled back or his triangle ears and he felt better. But he didn’t think Blue would be allowed in the hospital. Other than Blue, who wasn’t really Perry’s to give, and fence diamonds, which belong to everyone, Perry owned two precious things. He wished it was Choose-day so he could make up his mind which one to give his sister. Then he decided to give them both to Saffron. Double happiness from her other brother.

  In small towns like Cameron’s Creek, news travels fast. At 5:45pm Mr Kadri hung the closed sign on the door of the Colour Patch Café and took his wife and children to the station to wave goodbye to Little Petal. Scarlet and Anik went too, leading Barney on a pink plastic skipping rope. At five minutes to six, the small platform was almost filled with people who had come to wish Saffron goodbye. Doctor Larsson was there and Elsie-from-the-post-office, Anik’s grandma Mosas, Layla’s parents and her brother, Patrick. Miss Cherry came too, with her small scruffy dog.

  Anik was holding Saffron’s hand and Perry was holding Nell’s and wishing Jenkins would hold her other one, because hands have a special language of their own that you can use when you can’t find the right words to say. He touched Blue to get the power and felt it surge up his arm. There was just enough of it to keep him from crying when the train pulled out of the station, taking Ben and Annie and Saffron away. He hoped his sister would be pleased with her double happiness when she unpacked at the hospital.

  11. Double Happiness

  Ben’s luggage had gone missing. The railway people in the city said it was still at Cameron’s Creek and promised to deliver it first thing the next day. A taxi took Annie, Ben and Saffron to a hotel near the hospital. Saffron’s appointment was at nine o’clock the following morning.

  While Annie and Ben tried to sleep, Saffron jotted her thoughts down on a creamy page of hotel stationery:

  LOST!

  luggage

  and us lost

  without it

  nothing from home

  to hold on to

  nothing to comfort us.

  A space shuttle

  with invisible walls

  rocketed

  fifteen floors up

  higher than a fairytale castle

  almost to the moon

  too high

  for escaping

  too high

  for a prince to climb

  or call

  Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your long hair

  no balcony

  no Romeo

  no way out

  fake windows

  no cobwebs in corners

  no spiders on sills

  no bird songs

  floating in

  no lace curtains

  dancing out

  emptiness is very neat

  tidy space is hard to fill

  with words

  in strange square places

  all night lights

  neon girls

  skipping over and over

  roofs and roads

  all night

  traffic

  with wheels

  or feet

  or rails

  rumbling

  no quiet sounds

  no sisters snoring

  no ticks

  no tocks

  no squeaking, sagging springs

  no old, broken, chipped, familiar, precious objects

  no stories on shelves

  portraits on walls

  creatures on couches

  poems on doors

  tender moments

  no Nell

  In the morning, a railway man came to the door with lost luggage, apologies, a smile and a family voucher to the aquarium. Ben walked to the lift with the kind railway man, who opened his wallet and showed Ben a photograph of a little boy. They stepped into the lift, the odd-job man from the country and the railway man from the city, and rode to the roof, where they talked about children and journeys and lost things. When they finished, Ben’s eyes were washed and wet, like the sky after rain. The two men shook hands like friends not like the strangers they had been.

  When Ben came back into the room, Annie looked at his face. He smiled and held her close. Saffron added a line to her list:

  Tender moments can be found in the most surprising places.

  Ben unzipped his duffle bag. Clean clothes and books spilt out. Underneath everything else he found what he was looking for and handed it to Saffron.

  It was a small and shabby suitcase. The corners were scuffed, the leather handle worn smooth, the stitching frayed and the five golden letters embossed on its lid were faded. Saffron sat on the bed, nursed the battered case on her knees and slowly traced its letters with her fingers.

  It belonged to her other brother. The suitcase in which he’d been abandoned. The people at the welfare home had invented a name to match the letters.

  Annie sat down and put her arm around Saffron’s shoulders. ‘There’s something inside it too,’ she said, quiet as a page turning.

  Saffron pushed the rusty latches sideways and opened the lid. Inside was an egg carved from olive wood.

  Perry Angel was the last to finish eating breakfast at the Kingdom of Silk. Soft-boiled egg with ten toast soldiers for dipping in the golden pond. Then it was his turn to help Nell with the dishes. He liked washing the dishes. It meant he got to wear the green dishwashing gloves with the red fingernails and stand on the chair with the kangaroos carved on the back and make soapsud clouds with the fairy’s mop. But this morning he didn’t make many clouds and he kept forgetting to mop the plates and cups because he was thinking about Saffron. He wondered if she had got the double happiness yet and if she understood why he’d given them to her.

  The suitcase was important to Perry. For a long time it was his only connection to his birth mother, Sunday Lee. Although she couldn’t keep him, she cared enough to want him to be safe. Maybe she hoped he would hold on to the one thing she had given him whenever he felt sad or afraid or alone. Perhaps she hoped he would take it with him on his lon
g journey to find a home. The suitcase had done its job now. Perry had found the Silks, who offered him a home forever and for always. A family who loved him enough to locate the girl who left him in the suitcase and bring them together again.

  When Perry read Saffron’s heart and knew she was afraid, he’d pulled the suitcase out from under his bed. He was much braver now and had learnt things he didn’t know before. He knew that being family and making happy go both ways. So he gave Saffron his suitcase and the wooden egg Ben had given him. Ben saw the egg in a broken olive tree and carved until he set it free. The preacher said the olive tree meant peace. Peace is what happens when someone loves you enough to give you a wooden egg to have and to hold.

  Saffron cried. Perry had given her his two most precious possessions. Something to help her find home and something to hold when she needed to be peaceful.

  Perry’s gifts were not the only ones Ben brought with him from the Kingdom of Silk. There was a paper-thin parcel wrapped in green tissue. Inside was a CD and a folded note that said, ‘To be given to the radiologist before testing commences.’

  The note wasn’t signed. It could have been instructions from Doctor Larsson. But Saffron recognised the handwriting. It was Nell’s.

  ‘What’s on it?’ asked Saffron.

  ‘We haven’t listened to it,’ said Annie, ‘but Nell said you’ll understand when you hear it.’

  Indigo sent a necklace of tiny paper cranes made from her pelican painting and threaded on blue embroidery silk.

  Violet had made a miniature book. The pages were used postage stamps with short messages written on the backs of them, like old-fashioned telegrams or holiday postcards: ‘Missing you. Wish you were here. Have started the play. Patrick Elliott says hello. This stamp is from Paris. Elsie-from-the-post-office gave it to me.’

  Amber’s gift was wrapped in a tea towel. Three curled-up kittens. Lussekatter, made to the doctor’s wife’s recipe. They looked and smelt delicious but Saffron, Annie and Ben decided to save them until after the tests.

  Saffron sat on the bed with the wooden egg in her hand and the other gifts scattered around her. She thought of Griffin’s anger and the love that made him roar. Loud, impatient Indigo carefully folding birds, on the wings of each one a reminder of home; clear blue water, pelican plumes. Violet with a magnifying glass writing telegram messages on tiny pages. Amber spending her paper-run money on ingredients and her time on cooking. Scarlet babysitting Barney Blacksheep at the Colour Patch Café. Before the taxi came to take them to the hospital, Saffron added another line to her jottings:

  Love is real and it is everywhere.

  12. Science and Technology vs Tender Moments

  On the day of her return to the Kingdom of Silk, Saffron told her family everything, just as Griffin and Nell had wanted her to before she went away. She read the words she’d written at the hotel. Gave her family souvenirs: small soaps and shampoos; biscuits, tea and coffee in tiny packets; and hotel stationery. She showed them the aquarium voucher and talked about the MRI machine, explaining that the letters stood for magnetic resonance imaging and describing what had happened to her.

  ‘I lay on a small flat bed. The radiologist put a thing like a cage over my face, then he pressed a button and the bed slid into the tunnel part of the machine where the photos get taken. It’s very loud in there but they can play music to help block out the sound.’

  She smiled, remembering what she listened to through the earphones. Fifty minutes and hundreds of images of her brain later, the radiologist stopped the machine and helped her off the bed.

  Afterwards, Ben and Annie offered to take Saffron to the aquarium, but all she wanted was to go home to the Kingdom of Silk. They ate Amber’s Lussekatter on the way home, saving the raisin eyes till last, licking their sticky fingers.

  In the southern hemisphere the longest night of the year falls in June. But the eighteenth of May, two days after Saffron came home, was the longest, deepest, darkest night of the year at the Kingdom of Silk. Worry and wishfulness swirled like sleet while the Silks waited for morning. Wishful that morning would come soon or that Saint Lucy might come with candles to lighten the darkness. Waiting to hear the telephone ring. Waiting for the results of the MRI scan. Worried about what it might show.

  The telephone rang at seven o’clock the following morning. Annie had just finished milking the goats. While she put the milk in the refrigerator, Nell picked up the receiver.

  ‘Good morning,’ she said, then put her hand over the mouthpiece and handed it to Annie. ‘It’s Doctor Larsson.’ Her heart thudded under her primrose cardigan.

  Doctor Larsson would have made another house call to the Kingdom of Silk except he needed a special light to show the images of Saffron’s brain. So he sent the taxi-bus to fetch the Silks to his surgery. He opened the cherry door himself. It was too early for Colleen. All the Silks had come. It was Saffron’s wish. Perry Angel in his pyjamas, the hems of the pants still damp from his search for fence diamonds. Layla was there too. She had stayed overnight even though it was a school day.

  ‘Real friends love each other in good times and in bad, Mum,’ she reminded her mother. Mrs Elliott couldn’t argue with that and wished she’d had a friend like Layla when she was growing up.

  Mr Elliott said, ‘Even the Silks need the angels on their side at a time like this.’

  So Layla packed the wings Nell had made for her and put them on in the morning when the taxi-bus came.

  Saffron was wearing her Barney Blacksheep jumper over her nighty and holding the olive-wood egg in her hand. Nell had a dribble of pancake batter on the sleeve of her primrose cardigan. Annie still had her milking overalls and gumboots on and was holding hands with Ben, who had sawdust in his whiskers. But none of that mattered, nothing did, other than being there, squeezed in, packed tight, together.

  ‘Saffron Silk,’ said Doctor Larsson gently, ‘everything inside your head is as perfect as on the outside.’

  He illuminated the images of Saffron’s healthy brain.

  ‘The dizziness, feeling sick, blurred vision and even the lights you call firebirds are all symptoms of a type of headache called a migraine. A migraine won’t kill you and there are many things we can do to treat the condition.’

  The darkest night was over.

  The doctor suggested Saffron keep a diary so they could track any foods or activities or other things that might be responsible for starting the migraines. Then he handed her an envelope.

  ‘You left it at the hospital,’ he said. ‘The radiologist sent it back with the MRI images.’

  ‘Oh thank you,’ said Saffron looking inside. ‘It’s Nell’s recording.’

  Doctor Larsson looked puzzled. ‘The staff at the hospital were impressed by how calm you were,’ he said. ‘Fifty minutes is a long time for anyone to lie still in an MRI scanner. Some people, even adults, get quite upset by the noise it makes. Others say they feel trapped by the cage or frightened of being in small spaces, like the tunnel. Sometimes we have to stop the machine and bring them out before we’ve finished. We even have to put some people to sleep before they go into the machine. Was there anything … you didn’t …’ Doctor Larsson seemed to be having trouble saying what he meant.

  He continued, ‘This might seem a strange question, but you didn’t see anything … you didn’t see Saint Lucy, like Pia, did you?’

  ‘No,’ said Saffron, ‘it isn’t strange at all, but I didn’t see Saint Lucy.’

  Doctor Larsson sighed and his shoulders drooped as though he was disappointed. Then he turned to Nell. ‘I must confess, Nell, that I once overheard a comment you made and I’ve started to wonder if I’m missing something.’

  ‘What was it I said?’ asked Nell.

  ‘It was something like, “There are some things science and technology can’t explain; miracles are one of them and love is another.” At the time I didn’t think too much about it, but I’ve been thinking about Pia’s story and wondering if there are others l
ike it.’

  ‘And you thought Saffron might be able to help you?’

  ‘It was just a thought. The staff at the hospital say Saffron had no sedative, no music, but she was absolutely calm for the full fifty minutes. I thought, just for a moment …’

  Saffron interrupted.

  ‘I didn’t have medicine or music,’ she said, ‘but I had Nell. You see Nell told me a long time ago that she writes her tender moments down. So I decided to do the same. When the headaches started, I thought I might be going mad like the Maid of Orleans, or blind and I wouldn’t be able to read anymore. So I tried to learn my tender moments by heart, but I kept forgetting some. I didn’t know about Nell’s recording. I just gave the CD to the nurse, she put the headphones on me and I got such a surprise. The whole time I was in the scanner I was listening to Nell remind me of our tender moments. That’s why I wasn’t scared. I’m never scared when Nell is with me.’

  Doctor Larsson thanked Saffron very much for her explanation and said she had helped him more than she would ever know.

  He didn’t mention that Nell’s disc was faulty and the radiologist hadn’t used it or that he’d tried to play it himself to make absolutely sure. The Silks would only have told him that there are some things science and technology can’t explain. Like love, miracles and tender moments. And this time the doctor thought he might have to agree.

  13. An Invitation

  The following week, flyers started appearing around the small town of Cameron’s Creek. There was one in the window of the Colour Patch Café, another on the noticeboard at Doctor Larsson’s surgery, Elsie-from-the-post-office had one on her counter next to the parcel string, the preacher put one in the church newsletter and a copy was mailed to the lost property department of the railways. It was an invitation. This is what it said: