Maxi and the Magical Money Tree

by Tiffiny Hall

  Stepping into the wardrobe, I search with my hands for a light switch. My fingers turn black with dust as I smooth them across the walls — definitely no switch. Dusting my hands off, I realise it could be light from outside filtering in somewhere, but the light isn’t shining down from the ceiling of the wardrobe but upwards from around my ankles. Shuffling my feet across the floor, I feel with my shoes for clues.

  ‘Ouch!’ I shout, then cup my mouth and listen. Did someone hear me scream? I reach down to hold my stubbed toe and feel a latch beneath it. My fingers find the torch in my pocket, then I follow the beam as it sparkles through the dust and lands on a trapdoor cut into the bottom of the wardrobe.

  My heart thumping with adventure, I pull up the trapdoor and it glides open easily, like the wardrobe did. I peer into the hole and spy a ladder leading down into some light. My heart races faster. Something tells me not to go down. Maybe I should come back later and bring Fleur. Maybe I should take some time to think this through. But my gut tells me not to tell Fleur about the small basement under the kitchen, the strange brick wall and now this trapdoor in the wardrobe that must lead down to whatever is poking through my floorboards. This is my secret.

  My feet are on the ladder before I can think my way out of it. I step down carefully, my nose facing the rungs, spinning around when my toes hit the floor. I sneeze. I’m in a vast dusty wine cellar that must reach back to beneath my bedroom. Racks of wine create a maze out of bottles. The shimmer radiates ahead.

  I follow the glow down a laneway of bottles, their glass distorting the view behind them, making the whole room seem foreign and multidimensional. The bottles fill with light, casting green and yellow patterns across my hands. I turn corners and weave through the racks. My heart is beating so loudly it feels like it could crack the glass. The glow intensifies and I have to squint to turn a corner, the last corner. The labyrinth finally opens up into a burst of light. I’m blinded by the brightness and shield my eyes. Then the feeling that I’m not alone returns. My skin prickles. Blinking through my hands, the light is still too brilliant to see anything. Slowly I peel my fingers away from my eyes, one at a time, then gasp.

  I stare up at the ceiling, my face basking in the pulsating light. I can’t blink away the awe. The tree reaches from the ground to the high ceiling, anchored by thick emerald roots disappearing into the dirt. The shape of the tree is similar to the silver birch we had in our old garden. The branches cascade down to the floor with notes of money running along their arms in pink, blue, orange, yellow and green ribbons. The notes sprout from small green buds hooked on brown twigs. They spike upwards towards my room, like fingers presenting cash. I study a branch. Some notes are coiled like roses with gold coin centres, not yet ripe; others unfurl in lavish leaves ready to be plucked.

  ‘A money tree,’ I whisper. The tree vibrates softly, the money throbbing with a strange light that transforms the darkness into a pastel grey mist. Holding my breath, I reach out and touch a five-dollar note dangling from a branch near my face. The tree lights up at my touch. The note feels like real money. Carefully I inch closer and touch a blue ten-dollar note. The tree grows even brighter.

  I should go and get Mum and Dad. I turn to run, but something stops me. I see all the kids on their tablets at school, Stacey Shovelton with her expensive schoolbag — I look down at my old jeans. The lump in my throat that chokes me when I’m doing the wrong thing begins to burn. Turning back towards the tree, I swallow the lump and step under the foliage to peer up into the tree’s brilliant branches. Within the tree’s embrace the notes are thicker; there are four or five notes sprouting from each bud.

  I know it’s wrong — it feels just as wrong as calling Stacey a bad word at school — but it’s as if the tree is summoning me. I watch the branches pulsate and reach towards the floorboards. I thank my lucky stars that I fought Fleur for the downstairs room. Someone must have tried to conceal the money tree behind that brick wall. How am I going to hide this?

  Without thinking, I reach out and pluck a green note. The note comes free with less struggle than pulling a hair from a head. Then I’m plucking all the notes on the branch: blue, yellow, green, orange, pink. The whole time I’m internally screaming at myself to stop, but I can’t and before I know it I have a wad of cash like I’ve seen in the movies. I slide the money brick into the pocket of my raincoat.

  I should tell Mum and Dad. I should tell Fleur. I know I should. But as I stand beside the tree, I can feel my lungs syncing with the breath of the branches and suddenly all the ‘shoulds’ in my life don’t seem that important.

  Chapter 7

  The next day after school a bank teller stares at me and taps her fake nails on the desk. I slide five dollars through a hole in the glass window.

  ‘I believe my pocket money could be counterfeit,’ I say.

  She scratches her nose with a nail, trying to hide a smile, then swipes the fiver into her hand and studies it. ‘Back in a tick,’ she says.

  I look behind me. The guy next in line stretches out his calf muscle. I prepare myself for the bad news and swallow hard.

  The woman returns. ‘You’re alright, love. There’s nothing wrong with your pocket money.’

  I scrunch the money into a ball in my fist and my palms start leaking sweat. The money is real. My heart thumps. Real! That means the money tree is real — I wasn’t dreaming. I clutch more tightly my worn backpack straps.

  ‘A thousand dollars,’ I whisper to myself. I have one thousand real dollars!

  I pop my head into the chemist next door. Mum is at the front checkout next to Sonia, her checkout neighbour. She smiles down the back to the pharmacists in the white coats. Three people are lined up at her counter.

  ‘Fleur is coming to meet you, then you can walk home together,’ Mum says, spying me. She’ll be finishing her shift soon.

  I nod. ‘Laters.’

  Mum waves another customer through. ‘How’s everything, Ivan?’ she asks the old man. ‘Still struggling with the sciatica? How’s Mary?’

  Her line has six people in it now. Sonia’s — zero. Mum’s charisma always ensures her line is longer. Everyone wants to talk to her and they don’t mind waiting an extra ten minutes to have a chat and receive her commentary on their purchases.

  I head upstairs on the shopping-mall escalator, turning a corner until I find my destination. I unzip my backpack and plunge my hand inside. The wad of money is still there. I wipe my brow slowly. This feels wrong. So wrong. I close my backpack and park myself on a nearby bench bookended by large ferns. But spending this money is different, I tell myself. The money in my backpack is free money, as good as found.

  Being a Tuesday, the mall is quiet. A few girls parade in designer bags and patent brogues as if walking a runway, and some boys roll by wearing the sort of large shiny watches and expensive basketball shoes we thought were mere myths at my old school. I shuffle my thongs.

  ‘Then I said, “Whatever, I’m crushing on it too hard and must have it.” So Mum handed over her credit card.’

  I recognise the voice and duck behind a fern.

  ‘I’ll Instagram it later,’ the voice continues. Stacey walks past in a pair of black chiffon shorts, tall wedges, a crisp denim shirt and a boxy orange leather bag you only see actresses carry in Hollywood. She turns and looks directly at me. ‘You know, most of us change out of our pyjamas to leave the house,’ she hisses.

  I twist my fingers into my old T-shirt as I straighten up and harden my eyes. ‘Rather be in my pyjamas than look like you do,’ I say.

  Stacey scans me up and down under the rails of her satin eyebrows, then smiles widely. Her friends begin to giggle. ‘Shhh,’ she hushes them, almost laughing to herself, then takes a step closer towards me. We are eye to eye. ‘You don’t know how it works around here, do you?’

  ‘No, but I’m guessing you’re about to tell me,’ I say.

  ‘Here in Hatbridge, it doesn’t matter if you have a smart mouth. Money does the talking
.’ Stacey hitches that eyebrow again. The snobby twitch makes her look as though she’s about to have a seizure.

  ‘And what makes you think I haven’t got any money?’ I ask.

  ‘Cos you look like you fell out of a charity bin,’ she sneers.

  Her minions giggle again and their laughter snaps a plank of pride inside me. I rip open my backpack and pull out a handful of notes. ‘I have money, see?’ I squeal.

  Stacey’s eyes bulge, then go lunatic. She whips her head around until she spots a man in a black uniform, then shouts, ‘She’s stolen money! This girl!’ and points at me!

  My heart stops. I shove the money into my backpack and bolt. I run past all the glass windows with expensive mannequins, skip two steps at a time downstairs and race into the organic market at the lower level of the shopping centre where several people are browsing punnets of cherry tomatoes. I duck to look around and catch my breath by a barrel of avocados. No one has followed me. I look at the price of avocados. Ordinarily we could never afford to eat them out of season. Dad would say it was an act of abligurition (spending too much dough on food). So for that, I buy three.

  Feeling safe again, I head to my original shopping destination. As I enter the Apple store, I can’t believe how beautiful it is. The room is buzzing with benches adorned with laptops and tablets, the walls flush with screens. An army of i-helpers wearing blue T-shirts slouch over keyboards and thumb through devices.

  ‘Can I help you?’ a young guy asks me. He has an iPod hanging around his neck with the name ‘Grant’ engraved on it.

  ‘Mum sent me to buy an iPad for school,’ I say.

  ‘Which school?’

  ‘Hatbridge College,’ I say.

  The guy smiles. ‘I went there.’

  I pull out eight leaves of money. The box is mine. The feeling is better than Christmas because I would never, in my wildest dreams, ever receive something like this under our cardboard cut-out tree. Last year Mum saw an arty modern Christmas tree created from cardboard in an expensive shop and made one herself out of cardboard sheets. Ours looked like a school project; theirs looked like it belonged in a fancy gallery.

  I find Fleur standing in front of a clothes shop, staring longingly at a purple leather jacket.

  ‘Didn’t I see you running away from a security guard?’ she asks, not taking her eyes off the shop window.

  ‘A girl in my class is being an insecurity guard.’ I play it cool, but the truth is I feel more vulnerable than one of Socrates’s mealworms. When I’m around those girls, I feel like I’m about to be eaten alive.

  Fleur laughs, although you don’t hear it — her face scrunches, that’s how you know she’s giggling. If you met her for the first time, you’d assume she was thinking ugly thoughts with the tightness in her face, but really it’s just the band of laughter running through her.

  ‘No way!’ I say, looking past Fleur. Over her shoulder I can see a boy on rollerblades beeping objects with a price gun. ‘Oi!’ I call.

  Tyler Beverage looks up and flashes me a crooked-toothed smile. ‘Yo-hay!’ He rolls over to us.

  ‘Fleur,’ I say, ‘this is Tyler, and he’s in my class.’

  Fleur smiles down at him. He looks up at Fleur and I can tell what he’s thinking. How come Maxi doesn’t look like her?

  ‘Where’d you get that?’ I ask, pointing at the price gun.

  ‘Found it,’ he says. ‘Did you know that fern over there next to the rubbish bin cost over a hundred bucks?’

  Fleur and I look at each other, then I ask, ‘So what are you doing this afternoon? Besides price checks.’

  ‘Noth’n’,’ he says.

  ‘Wanna get a hot chocolate? Or better, a cappuccino for the froth? I found fifty bucks. My shout.’

  Fleur shoots me a suspicious look. Two fifty-dollar notes found in one week. I’m not good at lying, as demonstrated now by my cheeks turning flamingo pink. Fleur says nothing, but she will grill me later.

  ‘I’m in!’ Tyler beams.

  My eye stings suddenly. ‘I have something in my eye!’ I squeal, tilting my head up to the ceiling.

  Tyler peers into my eye, standing tall on his rollerblades. His iris blows up to a blue balloon through his glasses. I hold my stare as his big red lips descend in a pout towards my eyeball. I let it happen. He blows on my eye and I feel instant relief.

  ‘Make a wish,’ he says as the eyelash disappears. But all my wishes seem to be coming true already.

  We sit in a café inside the mall next to the market. It has long benches and industrial chairs scattered with pillows that have quotes on them. Tyler reads the quotes out loud in different voices.

  In the voice of Peppa Pig, ‘Keep calm and trust the barista.’

  In the voice of Darth Vader, ‘I love you to the moon and back.’

  In the voice of Homer Simpson, ‘You’ve cat to be kitten me right meow.’

  In the voice of Elmo, ‘Coffee made me doooo itttt!’

  ‘You’d have to kill me if I ever buy a novelty cushion, or a novelty anything,’ Fleur declares.

  ‘Say again?’ Tyler asks.

  Fleur repeats herself and he laughs. ‘You have the softest voice I ever did hear.’ He says it as if Fleur were six years old and she had just said something adorable. Then he adds, ‘Yeah, my mum thinks words on anything is tacky.’

  ‘Completely,’ Fleur agrees, pushing up her volume, but even then her voice sounds as fragile as honeycomb.

  ‘I need a rug,’ I say.

  ‘What for?’ Tyler asks over his coloured glasses — he’s so retro he’s ahead.

  ‘I have a cockroach problem,’ I lie. ‘It’ll stop them coming up through the floorboards.’ I can’t believe myself. I never lie and now lies are filling my mouth more thickly than saliva. I feel bad. Mum and Dad hate lies and there’s one thing we Edwards pride ourselves on — honesty.

  A cockroach problem implies we live in a dump, but Tyler is polite and doesn’t ask any questions.

  Six cappuccinos arrive, so frothy they could pass for soufflés. ‘Splashed out,’ I say.

  Fleur studies me as we sit in front of our very expensive swanky coffee. I avoid her gaze, sinking my eyes into my cappuccino. The white perky froth is so high it hugs the lip of the mug. Tyler forgets his spoon and bends down to sip the froth straight off the top through his teeth. I cradle my mug lightly and bring it up to my chin, then spoon the white heaven into my mouth. I don’t even care when my nose dips into it. Going out for coffee is a luxury we’re rarely afforded in my family. We’re more of the instant-coffee kind of people. Special drinks with bubbles or froth are never on our menu. I sip the froth until it’s gone and move on to the next mug.

  ‘Aren’t you going to drink the coffee?’ Tyler asks me.

  ‘I don’t drink coffee,’ I say.

  ‘You bought these just for the froth then? You’re crazy, kiddo,’ he says.

  ‘And for the chocolate powder,’ I add, feeling a smile brighten my cheeks. I like being crazy. No. Scratch that. I like being able to do this. My mind flutters back to the basement and what awaits me there. The fuzzy glow of the tree, that pulsating light, the colours pushing up into the ceiling …

  Fleur’s eyes are reptilian over her mug; she couldn’t be more suspicious. I fade out of the conversation and chew the minutes in my mind with thoughts about my secret. Can I trust Fleur? I cough and she pats me on my back. If she tells our parents, Dad would surely try to chop down the tree because he’d be all ethical and philosophical about it. He reckons you have to earn your money. My brain twists with dollar signs.

  ‘So,’ Tyler sits up straighter in his chair and looks at Fleur, ‘do you have a boyfriend?’

  ‘No, but there are many pros to being dumped. My dad says to allow the past to make you better, not bitter. He says I have more time now for me, to get to know the one person I’m stuck in a relationship with for the rest of my life,’ she whispers defensively.

  ‘Who?’ he asks.

  ‘Her
self,’ I interject. ‘She’s her own boyfriend, sort of. Get it?’

  ‘So there was a boyfriend,’ Tyler concludes, clearly not getting it. That someone was Robert Navy from our old school, a swim team captain and a real sweet-talker. He could find cheesy romance in anything, even algebra. They were goo-goo-gah-gah for each other, until he went goo-goo for Esther, then gah-gah for Sarah. I hug a slogan cushion and sigh.

  ‘I need to talk to you,’ Fleur whispers into my ear.

  My brain screams ‘uh-oh’. I turn and look at her.

  She frowns. ‘Not now. Home.’

  Only I can hear Fleur’s whispers. I’m like a canine in that respect.

  I steer the conversation away from Fleur’s love life and soon we’re talking about how zorb balls would make school life better, if that were our only mode of transport between classes.

  We finish our coffee froth and stop off at Palette of Threads on the way home. I choose a green rug called ‘wasabi mint’. Usually I hate green because Mum believes it’s an unlucky colour, but I can’t resist the name.

  ‘See ya!’ Tyler says as we leave the mall. ‘Thanks for the froth!’ He rolls off, price-checking a rubbish bin as he speeds away.

  Walking home, Fleur and I march one behind the other in matching step, wasabi mint roping us together. Bruised clouds follow us like kites on string. I feel the tension thickening. A nervous energy whips back and forth inside me. Fleur grips her end of the rug tightly. The sun falls across her shoulders, reminding me of a pink chiffon scarf. She stops abruptly and I crash into the back of her.

  She turns to me and the green rug reflects into her eyes. ‘I mean, shouting cappuccinos, finding fifty bucks twice, buying a new rug — it doesn’t add up! Where’d the money come from?’

  I shrug.

  ‘Open your backpack,’ she commands.

  I flinch away from her snatching hand. ‘No, it’s private,’ I say.