by Penni Russon
Olly rubs her temples.
SIBBI
AFTER THE WAITING and the boredom, getting on the plane is a relief. Sibbi is fascinated by the blankets and pillows on the seats; the drawstring bags containing eye masks, socks, toothpaste and toothbrushes; the televisions in the seat backs.
Oscar, Finn, Clancy and Dave sit in four seats in the middle of the plane. Sibbi, Mama and Else sit in a bank of three.
Mama gives Else the window seat. ‘Nice to see Sam?’ she asks Else, trying to make amends. Else grunts and looks out the window.
‘I don’t want Mama,’ says Sibbi. ‘I want Daddy.’
Mama leans over and calls to Daddy. They get up, and rearrange themselves. Daddy settles himself into the seat and does up his seatbelt.
‘Are we going to see Aunty May now?’ asks Sibbi.
‘No,’ says Daddy, with forced patience. ‘We’re on the plane. To England.’
‘But I want to see Aunty May.’
‘We talked about this. You said you didn’t want to go and see her again in the hospital because it was too sad.’
‘But I do want to. I change-ded my minds.’
‘We can’t, sweetie. It’s too late.’
‘It’s not too late. I want to see Aunty May. I want to see Aunty May now.’ Sibbi kicks her legs.
‘Don’t kick the back of the seat, sweetie,’ Daddy says.
‘I want Mama.’
‘Sibbi, this is ridiculous,’ says Daddy. ‘We’re not switching seats again.’
Sibbi draws a big breath.
‘Here we go,’ says Else.
‘Mama!’ Sibbi wails. ‘MAH-MA.’
Daddy and Mama switch seats again.
‘I’m going to have to ask you to put your seatbelt on,’ the flight attendant scolds Mama as Mama stuffs her bag back under the seat.
Finally, finally, the journey begins.
ELSE
THE PLANE RISES above the runway and the airport, over the green hills of the outer suburbs. The city, which I’ve mostly seen from the hills on the outskirts, always looking like something from a dark fairytale, tall towers poking sharply at the sky, looks completely different from up here in the air, small as matchsticks, like the dioramas we made in grade six.
I try to make out the route home, try to locate which green hill is – was – ours, but I cannot imagine belonging to that miniature world below. It’s as if it’s already a story of a place I once lived, and not the place itself at all.
Soon enough we fly up into a bank of clouds, and the city disappears altogether.
The flight attendants bring along an early dinner. Olly opens all the little packages for Sibbi, pasta with meat sauce, a bread roll, juice, biscuits and cheese. Sibbi has a bite of the bread roll and refuses everything else.
‘There’s nothing here I like,’ she whimpers.
‘Don’t be silly,’ says Olly. ‘You love pasta. Look, crackers with cheese. Yum yum.’
Sibbi pushes the tray away, almost upsetting everything onto Olly’s lap.
‘At least finish the bread. Has she eaten anything today?’ Olly asks me.
I roll my eyes. ‘How should I know?’
Typical, I think, of Olly not to notice what her children have or haven’t done.
And then I’m feeling a bit queasy myself. What will Olly and Dave say when they realise I’ve left a perfectly good, perfectly expensive violin in the van. And not by accident either. On purpose? What will Rick think when he finds it wedged under the back seat?
I send my tray back, almost untouched, with Sibbi’s.
SIBBI
HONG KONG IS colour and noise and smells. The steamy fragrance of noodle houses; the chemical floral of perfume; the sweetness of the French-Asian bakeries; the savoury tang of salty dried fish; plasticky wafts of pollution, and nasal humidity. Hong Kong is city skylines, sparkling harbour, distant jade hills, traffic-stained apartment buildings, bright shining commerce and stuffed, shabby stores, and people, so many people.
Mama wants to see the bird garden, but Clancy refuses. Else loses an argument to explore the city on her own. Sibbi refuses to go anywhere without Mama.
‘We’ll split up then,’ says Daddy. ‘I’ll take the boys, you take the girls.’
Mama urges Sibbi, who has been on a hunger strike since the plane, to eat. But Sibbi eyes fried yellow balls of pastry, dried fish, chicken feet hanging up on display, rambutan, loquats, and keeps her mouth closed. She shakes her head no at everything, even familiar food like yoghurt and bananas.
Mama tries to keep hold of Sibbi’s hand, but Sibbi squirms and protests, first running ahead, then dragging behind, stopping to look at a living wall of goldfish in inflated plastic bags and to touch flowers in a plastic bucket. Else strides ahead, ignoring Mama’s calls to wait.
The bird market is walled. They go through the moongate into the garden, divided by archways into courtyards. The sound of birds, clucking, fluttering, wittering, whistling, chirping and squawking fills the singing air and the city seems suddenly far away. Ornate bird cages hang from hooks above them and in each one is a single bird, little chests rising and falling.
There are stacked plastic crates and wire cages on the ground, overcrowded with birds. These ones are for sale. The single birds in the pretty cages are pets, out for the air, and for their owners to sit together, smoking and socialising.
It is a shock to Sibbi to see a pink and grey galah in a metal cage. It’s so familiar, a part of her everyday landscape, but belongs to the green hills of home/not-home.
Sibbi stops to look at tiny blue and silver bird in a bamboo cage on a stool, at her eye level. The elderly man who owns it shuffles up, hooks the cage on a long stick and hangs it high overhead.
Sibbi, who has been on the verge of angry tears all morning, howls with disappointment and rage. Mama tries to catch the eye of the man with the bird, wondering if she can somehow explain, convince him to bring it down again, but he shuffles away with surprising vigour.
Mama leads Sibbi away. Sibbi scratches and fights, then collapses on the ground, pressing her forehead to a stone bench, sobbing.
ELSE
IT’S ONLY WHEN Sibbi starts screaming that I notice, suddenly, what a male space the bird market is. There are women working in the stalls, but they are very much in the background, behind all the stacked plastic crates. The majority of people in the garden, sitting, hanging out with their pet birds, are men. I feel like the worst kind of tourist, ignorant, intruding on something I don’t understand.
‘I want to see the bird!’ wails Sibbi.
‘Can’t you control your children?’ I snap at Olly.
‘Hey, that’s not fair.’ Olly looks on the verge of tears herself.
‘Sibbi,’ I hiss. ‘Shut up. Stop screaming.’
‘Else, for goodness sake. You’re making it worse,’ says Olly.
‘How am I making it worse?’
‘Just let her cry it out. She’s tired and hungry.’
‘I’m not ti-i-ired.’
‘Why are we moving to England?’ I demand. ‘Dad’s the one who inherited the house. Why do we all have to go? Nobody asked me if I want to uproot my whole life.’
‘Do you really think this is the time?’
‘Yes, I do,’ I say, even though I know I am tired and hungry too. But the anger I’ve felt since leaving the violin in the van burns through my blood.
‘There’s lots of birds,’ Olly says to Sibbi. ‘So many birds. Lookit all the birds.’
‘I don’t want lotsa birds! I want that bird!’
‘I’ve had to give up everything. My friends. My boyfriend. My school. It’s too much to ask. It’s not fair.’
‘It’s too late. I can’t fix it,’ says Olly, but is she talking to me or to Sibbi? ‘Come on,’ she urges Sibbi. ‘Let’s go find another bird.’
‘No! No other bird!’
‘I think I’m old enough to have a say in my own life.’
‘Do you think I want to go to
England?’ Olly howls suddenly, spinning to face me. ‘I’m giving up stuff too. My friends. My uni. My work. Did you think about that?’
I falter. It hadn’t really occurred to me that Olly might not want to go to England. ‘Well, why are we going then?’
‘Because! We’re a family! And we love each other! All right?’
Olly swoops, scoops up Sibbi and hauls her screaming out of the gardens, not looking back to see if I’m following. I feel the gaze of the men and their birds, and though part of me wants to disappear forever into the noise and colour of Hong Kong, I rush to catch up with Olly.
Dave and the boys are lying on beds in the hotel room, flicking through manga comics. Dave looks shocked at the dishevelled mess of me, Olly and Sibbi as we collapse into the room.
Olly deposits Sibbi into Dave’s arms. ‘I’m going out,’ she says, and she does, the door slamming closed behind her.
Sibbi is inconsolable.
‘What on earth –?’ Dave asks me.
I shake my head. ‘Don’t even.’
‘Shall I go and look for Mum?’ Clancy asks.
‘She’ll be back soon,’ says Dave, hopefully. ‘Let’s just calm things down a notch.’
Calming things down a notch means finding American cartoons on the television.
Olly does come back. She has hot pho, dumplings, and a huge container of soft white rice for Sibbi, which Sibbi eats with her hands.
‘I was sad,’ Sibbi says.
‘Yes. You were sad,’ says Olly. ‘You were cross.’
‘I’m happy now!’ says Sibbi. ‘Are you cross, Mama?’
‘Nope,’ says Olly.
I am not cross either. I think of the little bird, the bird Sibbi broke her heart over. I think about the old man who didn’t want to share his bird, hanging the cage up high, so a little girl could no longer see it. I think about him walking home at the end of the day, carrying his bird in its narrow cage. And I think of him in one of those thousands of greasy windowed apartments in Mongkok, in the pollution-stained streets, eating his bowl of soupy noodles, all alone with his caged bird.
ALMOST ANNIE AND HARDLY ALICE
THE LONDON HOUSE has been shut up for weeks. The windows are flung open, the stale air of the house is replaced by a fresh, floral-scented spring breeze. Everything is dusted and vacuumed and scrubbed. Beds are made.
‘So many beds!’ says Almost Annie.
‘Antipodeans,’ sniffs Hardly Alice. ‘I heard one of the cleaners say so.’
‘Family,’ says Almost Annie. ‘The little nephew. I remember him. Such a funny, sweet boy.’
‘Was he?’
‘You never remember anything.’
‘He’ll be a grown-up man now, anyway.’
‘With children of his own.’
‘Hundreds, by the look of it. Colonials overrunning the house. What will become of us?’
‘The master bedroom,’ counts Almost Annie. ‘That will be the parents. Three beds upstairs, two in one room, one in the other. Two more on the middle floor.’
‘Both in the big room. Dorothy’s study is fit for neither man nor beast.’
‘But when?’ asks Almost Annie, thinking of all those made-up beds.
‘Soon,’ says Hardly Alice.
Soon, says an airy whistle through the house. Soon.
Soon, says a whisper, in the hidden room at the top of the house, a whisper like insect wings rasping together. Soon, says the thing that is made of darkness and forgetting, that is lost, so lost it is only the feeling of being lost. Soon.
ELSE
‘HOW MUCH LONGER, Mama?’ Sibbi asks.
‘Soon,’ says Olly. I listen to the constant hum of the plane, pulling us further away from Hong Kong, and even further away from home. I don’t know how long I’ve been drifting in and out of sleep – never quite asleep or quite awake – when the lights come back on again. Rays of rising sun stream through the windows and breakfast trays are handed out. The seatbelt lights come on. I wish the artificial twilight of the plane could last a bit longer. The plane descends through a bank of clouds and the English countryside sparkles below.
‘It’s so green!’ I say. The storybook world – Wind in the Willows, The Faraway Tree, Harry Potter, Peter Pan, Peter Rabbit, Watership Down, Jane Eyre, Pride and Prejudice – is laid out below. Dense, iridescent, improbable green. A different sort of beauty from the rumpled grey eucalyptus, red clay dirt and yellow-green grass we’ve left behind. This is a closely cultivated beauty, as if every square centimetre has been tended by human hands.
I feel an unexpected thrill as the city forms below me, an amazing clockwork of tight streets, rows of identical houses. Clancy clutches the armrests at the grinding sound of the landing gear preparing for touchdown. As the plane lands, I hear Oscar ask Dave, ‘So, when are we going back to Australia?’
Olly plays ‘Round and round the garden’ on Sibbi’s palm.
Clancy closes his eyes but I keep mine wide open.
‘Well, we’re here,’ says Dave as the runway rushes towards us. ‘Welcome to England.’
CLANCY
THE PUBLIC BUS from Heathrow to Gunnersby is full, but Mum tells us it goes straight past the house on Mortlake Road, so we pile on. The twins and I squeeze into a double seat. Else heads up the back to sit on her own.
Jetlag makes everything look flat and sort of magical, like the figures and the houses are pictures cut out and stuck on a blue sky background. I try to work out what time it is in Australia, but I can’t remember if we are ten hours ahead or behind. Would I normally be in bed by now? Sitting down to dinner or breakfast?
I’ve seen London on TV, in movies and read about it in books so many times, that seeing it in real life feels like a dream I’ve had before but can barely recall. Insubstantial, strange and familiar, all at once.
Along the wide pavement, a young mother pushes a very elegant, old-fashioned pram that looks straight out of Mary Poppins.
‘Is that Princess Kate and Baby Prince George?’ Sibbi asks, pointing at the lady and the pram.
‘I don’t think so,’ says Dad, glancing up from the map on his phone. He is tracing our progress so we don’t miss the stop.
‘That pram would have cost more than our van back home,’ Mum says.
‘Is everyone in London rich?’ asks Sibbi.
‘I suppose not,’ says Mum, though she sounds doubtful. All the houses seem rather grand, the streets clean and leafy.
‘This is a fairly well-to-do area,’ says Dad.
‘Do you remember it at all?’ Mum asks him.
‘I wasn’t much older than Sibbi when I lived in London,’ says Dad. ‘I remember some things, like double-decker buses. And I think there’s a big park around here somewhere. I remember there were deer in it, just living wild.’
‘Deer?’ I ask, perking up.
‘Yes. Like mobs of kangaroos at home. Fairly tame I suppose. Urban deer.’
‘Urban deer!’ Finn snorts. ‘That sounds like they have beards and black-rimmed glasses and drink flat whites and upload selfies on Instagram.’
‘Huh?’ says Oscar, opening his eyes for a minute. ‘I don’t get it.’
‘Hipster deer,’ I say. Oscar shrugs and shakes his head, then closes his eyes again.
‘Did you live here, Mama?’ Sibbi asks.
Mum shakes her head. ‘No,’ she says. ‘I’ve never lived anywhere but Australia.’
‘Me either,’ says Sibbi.
The bus turns a corner and the houses get wider and grander, each one set apart from the next, with garden walls and large trees.
The street narrows a little and bends, and then Dad says, ‘Here we are,’ and presses the button to signal the bus to stop.
‘Come on,’ Mum says. She calls back to Else, ‘We’re getting off here.’
Mum lets Dad and Sibbi pass, then heaves the backpack on her back, and tugs the wheely case behind her. We move towards the door.
‘Look at all those children!’ I hear a wom
an announce to her companion in a too-loud voice, and in a rather nasty way, as if she were saying, Look at all those rodents!
Mum tugs the case, which is stuck. She swears, trying to pull it free. For a moment, she looks like she might cry. I help her lift it free. Everyone else sits and stares at us. No one offers to help.
ALMOST ANNIE AND HARDLY ALICE
ALMOST ANNIE STANDS at the window. She lifts her hand and waves.
‘The family have arrived,’ she says. ‘Come and look.’
Hardly Alice lies on her back, her hands by her side, palms turned upwards. It is a yoga position she learned from watching Aunt Dorothy, called the corpse pose. She finds it very relaxing.
‘Goody,’ she says. She does not look.
ELSE
‘THIS IS IT,’ says Dave. ‘Outhwaite House.’
We all gaze up at the enormous house – three or four storeys high, I’m too tired to count all the windows properly – looming over us.
Dave rummages in his backpack, looking for the set of keys from Mr Brompton.
The twins jostle each other in a tired, complaining sort of way, not a fight exactly and not exactly not a fight. Clancy sits on the garden wall. I perch beside him.
Dave checks his pockets again. ‘You must have them,’ he says to Olly.
‘I don’t have them. I never had them. Here, let me look.’ Olly steps up onto the veranda and takes the backpack.
‘Did Daddy lose the keys?’ asks Sibbi.
‘Hey!’ says Clancy suddenly. ‘Where’s your violin?’
‘Shh,’ I hiss.
‘Did you leave it on the plane?’
‘Be quiet! If you must know, I left it in the van.’
‘Well, that was stupid.’
I make a rude face.
‘Wait, did you do it on purpose?’
‘Are you going to tell on me? Because if you do . . .’
‘Don’t get your knickers in a knot. You know I never tell. But why on earth did you do it? Mum and Dad are going to kill you!’