Perry Angel’s Suitcase

by Glenda Millard

‘Yes, I told her.’ Griffin looked up at his mother. There was something he wanted to ask her.

  ‘What is it, Griffin?’ she asked.

  But the words wouldn’t come, instead he said, ‘She’s going to ask her daddy tonight.’ Annie knelt down in front of Griffin the way she did when she knew there was something he was hiding inside. She put her arms around him and drew him in close. His head fitted perfectly into the gentle hill of her shoulder and he wound her long hair around his fingers; golden hair, angel’s hair; hair like Tishkin’s. He closed his eyes tightly.

  ‘Mama,’ he breathed, not sure if he said the words aloud or if he was letting her read them straight from his heart, ‘Perry’s not coming because Tishkin’s gone away, is he?’ He felt Mama’s breath come out and out and out, as slow as winter honey from an upturned jar.

  ‘Oh Griff,’ she said at last, ‘no-one could ever replace Tishkin. We wouldn’t even try.’ Then she held him for a long time before she said, ‘There’s a special reason why we want to do this for Perry. I think Daddy might tell you all about it soon, but it has nothing to do with Tishkin.’ She stood up then and took his hand.

  ‘Come on or we’ll miss out on afternoon tea. Daddy should be home soon, too.’

  Griffin suddenly felt as light as air. There was nothing to worry about and it might even be fun to have another boy in the family.

  3. Christmas Beetles and Red Balloons

  Layla was a child of unquenchable curiosity. She knew this because it had once been written on her school report. Ben told her this meant she was a person who never stopped wanting to find out about things. Since then Layla had discovered something else about her unquenchable curiosity; at times it led her to ignore what other people told her and made her want to find out the truth for herself.

  And so, on the morning Perry was to arrive, Layla told herself that no-one, not even her mother, could possibly know what might happen when Perry came to the Kingdom of Silk. She pushed her worries into the corner of her mind, where they scratched away at the edges of her thoughts, like the legs of an upside-down Christmas beetle. But she refused to pay them any attention.

  Because it was Saturday and also because the Elliott’s house was on the same side of the street as the railway station, Layla was allowed to go by herself to meet the Silks and await Perry’s arrival. She took two gifts for Perry as she had decided to be extra nice to him. After all, she reasoned, he had been invited to come to the Kingdom of Silk and it wasn’t his fault if he had to share the sleep-out with Griffin. She took a red balloon on a piece of string and a toffee with hundreds and thousands on it. Mr Morgan from the bank had come to St Benedict’s school the day before yesterday and had given her the balloon in exchange for her deposit of two dollars and thirty-five cents worth of five-cent coins. Layla much preferred red balloons to five-cent coins. Some of the helium gas had leaked out of the balloon and it no longer tugged at the string trying to make its escape. Instead it bobbed along half-heartedly between the footpath and the pointy tops of the dark green fence pickets, a bit like the way Layla felt inside; not quite sad and not quite happy.

  Then she heard the Silk’s Bedford. She had learned to recognise the sound of its engine. She turned around and waited until it was close enough to see who was inside. Blue’s face appeared from around the back of the cabin. His ears were turned inside out in the breeze, but he beamed when he saw Layla. Ben steered the battered old truck in close to the curb and Layla stepped up onto the running board.

  ‘Hello,’ she said, sticking her head in the window. As well as Ben, Nell and Annie were inside. They all looked very fine. Ben’s hair was wet and Layla could see the wavy lines the comb had left behind, and he was wearing his red braces he kept for special occasions. Beautiful Annie had a straw hat on with three of Nell’s apricot roses pinned to the brim. Nell’s boots were as shiny as chestnuts and she had on her best apron; the one with the Queen of England on the front. Seeing how smart the Silks looked, Layla was glad she’d worn her angel wings and painted glitter on her toenails. ‘Where are Griffin and the girls?’ she asked.

  ‘They’re walking,’ said Nell. ‘There’s not enough room for everyone in the cabin and Sergeant Wilson isn’t keen on us riding in the back. They shouldn’t be too far away.’

  ‘Do you want to squeeze in with us?’ asked Annie. But Layla decided to wait for Griffin.

  She was glad she’d waited. Walking along the footpath with Griffin and his sisters, it was almost as though everything was back to normal. Each of the Silks had a small gift for Perry, and Layla was pleased she’d brought the balloon and the toffee.

  ‘We wanted to have a welcome party,’ explained Saffron, ‘except Daddy and Nell though it might be better to let Perry get used to us first.’

  ‘Did you think we were scary when you first met us, Layla?’ asked Violet.

  ‘No, not scary,’ said Layla, remembering her first visit to the Kingdom of Silk and how wonderful she thought it must be to have lots of children in the family and a grandma who was a tiny bit magic and a daddy who did interesting things like cotton-reel knitting. Not that she thought her own daddy was boring, but some of his philosophising was a bit hard to understand and she didn’t like golf at all.

  ‘I think it’s only grown-ups who think we’re scary,’ said Indigo, and the others laughed.

  ‘Especially when one of us has Zeus sitting on our shoulder!’ said Saffron. Layla remembered the day Griffin took Zeus, Nell’s one-eyed crow, to school in his backpack. She hadn’t been in the classroom when Griffin let him out, but everyone talked about it for days afterwards. They said Miss Beaumont was terrified.

  ‘Do you think the welfare people will be scared?’ asked Layla.

  ‘They’ve already been to our place a few times,’ said Scarlet, ‘only they came while we were at school.’

  ‘See, what did I tell you? It must be us kids they’re scared of!’ Indigo stuck her tongue out and made herself go cross-eyed. Layla giggled.

  ‘They come on school days so they can speak to Mum and Dad in peace and quiet!’ said Scarlet in a way that made Layla wonder if you started to lose your sense of humour when you were almost fourteen.

  ‘Come on, let’s hurry,’ said Amber. ‘It’s nearly a quarter past ten. The train will be here soon!’

  Only one welfare woman came with Perry on the ten-thirty express. She didn’t look at all mean, as Layla had imagined she would. She was wearing jeans and a T-shirt, and her long brown hair was tied back in a ponytail. Her name was Melody and she had a tiny silver ring in her nose and smiled a lot.

  ‘Hi Ben! Hi Annie! How are you Nell?’ she said. Then she matched the Rainbow Girls with their names, even though she’d only ever seen them in a photograph. When she got to Griffin, she stuck her hand out for him to shake. ‘Hi Griffin,’ she said. Then something amazing happened. Melody looked at Layla, who was standing next to Blue, and she said, ‘And you must be Griffin’s best friend, Layla.’ Layla felt pleased and surprised at the same time.

  ‘Yes, I am,’ she answered, and she couldn’t stop her face from smiling. ‘I’ve brought a red balloon for Perry.’ Layla untied the string from her wrist and held it out to the small boy who was holding Melody’s hand and looking down at the dirty concrete platform. With the hand that wasn’t holding Melody’s, he gripped the handle of a small, shabby suitcase embossed with five golden letters. He looked up at Layla with eyes as dark as midnight. His mouth was pink as a pigeon’s toes, but he never spoke a word and he didn’t let go of Melody or the suitcase. So Layla tied the red balloon carefully to the handle of the suitcase.

  ‘What a lovely thought, Layla,’ said Melody, but Perry said nothing and Griffin and the Rainbow Girls weren’t sure what to do with the gifts they had brought.

  Then Ben said, ‘You and Perry must be tired after your trip, Melody. Why don’t we all go to the Colour Patch Café over the road? We could have an ice-cream or a drink or something before we take Perry home.’

  4. An
gel Wings and Raspberry Spiders

  Layla loved going to the Colour Patch Café. Some of Annie’s paintings were displayed on the walls and sometimes people bought them. The other thing she liked about the Colour Patch was the furniture. The seats were like the ones they had in trains in the olden days; a bit like church pews, except much softer, with high, padded backs and cushioned seats. They were arranged in twos, facing each other, with a table between them.

  Melody slid in next to the window, with Perry and his suitcase beside her and the red balloon floating lazily towards the ceiling.

  Layla was wondering if she should sit next to Perry when Melody said, ‘You can sit with us if you like, Layla.’ Layla took off her wings because she didn’t want them to get messed up, and also because she wanted to use the shiny brass parcel rack that was attached to the back of the seats to make you think you really were in a train.

  ‘Would you mind putting my wings back there please Ben?’ she asked.

  ‘Don’t forget to get them afterwards,’ said Annie.

  ‘They’re beautiful wings, Layla,’ said Melody.

  ‘Yes, Annie and I made them,’ she said. ‘Nell let me collect the feathers from her chooks when they were moulting and we glued them onto some old stockings. Ben made the frames out of wire.’ The Silks had many uses for old stockings and wire coathangers.

  ‘How clever,’ said Melody, ‘they look exactly like real wings!’

  ‘We’ve all got wings at the Kingdom of Silk,’ said Layla. ‘We could make some for Perry too,’ she offered. ‘Couldn’t we Annie?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Annie, ‘we’ll start saving feathers again.’

  Nell sat opposite with Griffin and Ben and Annie. The Rainbow Girls got to have a table all to themselves. When she got herself settled, Nell took out the Vegemite jar in which she kept her egg money and put it on the table.

  ‘The Girls have been laying well,’ she said. ‘There should be enough in the emergency fund for ice-creams all round!’

  ‘Nell calls her chooks The Girls,’ Layla explained quietly to Perry, in case he thought Nell was talking about the Rainbow Girls. ‘She sells their eggs to Mr Kefalas in the fish and chip shop.’

  The weather was warm for late March so Nell ordered iced mint tea. The man who owned the Colour Patch Café was from a faraway land called Turkey and Nell said he was a mint tea expert. He served it in a glass that looked like a church window, with sugar frosting around the rim. A few rose petals tumbled from the brim of Annie’s hat into her ice-cream sundae and floated upside down in the chocolate sauce like miniature waterlilies. Layla had almost decided to have rocky road ice-cream in a waffle cone, but then Melody ordered raspberry spiders for herself and Perry, and Layla changed her mind and asked for a raspberry spider, too.

  Layla decided Melody must be the most unusual welfare woman in the entire universe. That was because she slurped when she got to the foamy pink ice-cream at the bottom of the glass. It was only a small, polite slurp, but it was definitely a slurp. Layla caught Griffin looking at Melody after she did it and they both almost giggled, so that proved she hadn’t imagined it. Layla was never allowed to slurp, not even at home. She made a mental note to tell her mother about Melody. Perry only drank half his spider and he didn’t slurp, because you can only slurp when you get to the bottom of the glass.

  While everyone, except Perry, was talking, Griffin was thinking about the five golden letters embossed on Perry’s suitcase. They were P M G d and A. Griffin noticed the d was in lower case while all the rest were in capital letters. There was a boy who went to school at St Benedict’s whose surname started with a little d. His name was d’Agostino. Griffin wondered if that was Perry’s last name too. He thought he might ask him, but not now, not in front of everyone else. Griffin felt a bit uncomfortable listening while the grown-ups tried to include Perry in their conversation, with Perry answering only by nodding or shaking his head. Anyone could tell Perry didn’t want to talk. Griffin himself wasn’t a boy who talked a lot; he did much more thinking than talking. Maybe Perry was a thinking kind of boy too, thought Griffin.

  At last Annie said they’d better be going home and Griffin breathed a sigh of relief. They could do things at home that didn’t need much talking. He could show Perry how to catch skinks for Zeus or go swimming in the dam or skim stones across its shiny skin. But all the same he wished Layla was coming with them; she had a knack for making people feel comfortable. He still remembered how much he had hated school when he first started and how the older boys had teased him. The memory of Layla coming to his rescue still burned brightly. She had been one of the smallest kids at St Benedict’s then, but that didn’t stop her from sticking up for him against the school’s biggest bully. Daddy used to say that Layla had been sent to comfort the Silks, like an arm about their shoulders or a candle in the dark, but Griffin thought of her as a shining star, bright as a new tin billy.

  When Melody learned the Silk children would be walking home, she offered to order a taxi bus.

  ‘We don’t mind walking,’ said Scarlet politely, although her eyes looked longingly across the road to the taxi rank.

  ‘I thought it might be fun if we all went in a taxi together,’ Melody said, and because Scarlet was almost fourteen she understood Melody secretly wanted them to go together because of Perry.

  ‘Yes, let’s!’ said Saffron, who had never been in a taxi.

  Ben fetched Layla’s angel wings from the parcel rack.

  Melody and Perry went outside and crossed the road to the taxi rank that was right outside the railway station. Ben held Layla’s wings out.

  ‘Turn around, Princess Layla,’ he said. Layla gave a twirl like the ballerina in her music box and then stuck her arms out for Ben to put the wings on.

  She noticed Nell was about to empty her Vegemite jar on the counter and called out, ‘Thank you, Nell, I had a lovely time.’

  ‘Aren’t you coming with us?’ said Nell, looking puzzled, and Layla’s heart did a somersault inside her chest. Ben twirled her back again so he could look into her forget-me-not blue eyes.

  ‘Why aren’t you coming? Did we forget to ask you?’

  Layla nodded.

  ‘Oh Layla, Griffin, I’m so sorry,’ said Annie. ‘With so much else going on I didn’t even think to mention it. I assumed I didn’t need to; you must know how much we love to have you stay.’ The big yellow taxi bus did a U-turn and pulled up at the front of the Colour Patch Café. ‘Why don’t you hop into the taxi with the others. Ben, Nell and I will call in and make sure it’s okay with your mum and dad.’

  The taxi driver said he’d never had an angel for a passenger before. Then he asked Melody where she wanted to go.

  ‘The Kingdom of Silk,’ she said, and the taxi driver laughed.

  ‘For a minute, lady,’ he said, ‘I thought you were going to ask me to take you to the Kingdom of Heaven!’

  5. The Best Thing about Saturday

  For a wing-beat, Perry Angel’s hopes hovered above the Colour Patch Café. The taxi driver knew his name! He knew where heaven was! But then he heard them laughing and saw the barefoot girl called Layla dancing down the footpath with her wings wobbling behind her and Perry felt stupid.

  He thought he’d given up looking. Seven years was a long time to be trying to find something. That was why his suitcase was so shabby. Even the golden letters were getting worn out. They’d told him right from the beginning that his mother was in heaven. But then Melody came and she didn’t lie to him like The Others had.

  ‘To be honest,’ she said, ‘we’re not sure where your mum is, Perry.’ That was when he decided to give up looking for heaven. What was the point if his mother wasn’t there? But it was harder to stop looking than he thought.

  They lied about the golden letters too. They said they stood for Perry Maxwell, God’s Dearest Angel, and they called him Perry Angel, for short. He felt angry when he found out what the five golden letters really meant. Now he thought Perry Angel w
as a stupid name. Melody said she liked it and that The Others were only trying to be kind.

  One day Melody invented a word game. Perry liked word games. She wrote all five letters underneath each other and made lists of words beside each one. Beside the ‘P’ she wrote words beginning with the letter ‘P’ and next to the ‘M’ a list of ‘M’ words, ‘G’ words next to the ‘G’ and so on. Then they took turns choosing a word from each list and inventing new meanings for the letters on the suitcase. Some of the things they made up were funny and made Perry laugh, like, ‘Poor Melody’s Got Dizzy Armpits.’ Others he didn’t care for much, like, Perry’s Made of Guts, Determination and Anger. He told Melody she was cheating by using ‘of ’ and ‘and’. She said prepositions and conjunctions didn’t count. Perry didn’t know what prepositions and conjunctions were, but the real reason he wanted it crossed off the list was because of the Anger. While he wasn’t looking, Melody changed Anger to Atoms, even though it wasn’t on the list and he hadn’t told her to.

  Perry blinked away his thoughts when he saw the angel-girl looking at his golden letters. He hoped she didn’t guess what they really meant. He felt hot and wanted to turn the suitcase around so the writing was facing his leg. He concentrated on her feet so the hotness would go away and wondered if real angels had glitter on their toenails.

  Layla sat next to Griffin and perched on the edge of the seat so her wings wouldn’t get crushed. The seats in the yellow taxi bus faced each other like those in the Colour Patch Café, so she had an excellent view of Perry Angel and his suitcase.

  Layla would have liked a case like Perry’s even though it was a bit shabby. When she went to the Kingdom of Silk she usually took her things in her school backpack. It was pink and white and had two separate compartments with stars dangling off the zippers and a special place to put your mobile telephone if you had one. Layla usually put a banana in there. Her mother had printed her name neatly in black marker on the bottom of the bag. Layla liked the look of Perry’s shiny gold letters. She imagined them on the front pocket of her backpack, an L and an E.