by Tiffiny Hall
Mum pokes her head up from where she is placing a folded wad of cardboard under the couch’s wobbly leg. ‘Shhh, listen,’ she says, waving us over to the TV. She sits down next to Dad.
‘Mystery millionaire deposits staggering amount of money in charity bins at Budget Buys,’ the newsreader announces.
Fleur glares at me.
Mum sighs. ‘What a saint,’ she says. ‘Helping others like that and asking nothing in return. I wish I had millions to give to others.’
Fleur mouths silently, ‘You did it!’
I stare back at her and bite my lip.
‘You’re already a saint, my dear, with all the volunteering you do,’ Dad says to Mum. ‘And learning braille to teach blind kids who can’t read? Amazing.’ He leans over and kisses her on the cheek.
‘Money doesn’t solve everything,’ I add.
‘But it doesn’t hurt,’ Dad says.
A cold sweat leaks down my back. I wish I could tell him money can hurt.
The doorbell rings. Terrific. Mum and Dad stand to answer the door. Fleur is still staring me down.
‘We’re toast unless you trust me right now,’ I whisper to her. ‘Things went down last night. Bad things. But no time to chitchat now.’
‘It’s for you, Maxi!’ Mum calls.
Fleur hears the ping of urgency in my voice because she agrees without questioning.
Walking to the front door, my shoes are cement boots. I can hear my parents fussing.
‘Come in for a hot drink. Maxi rarely has any of the girls over, so …’ Mum says.
‘Drop you home later?’ Dad adds.
Gosh, my parents’ eagerness only confirms they think I’m a complete tomboy loser with no girlfriends, only reptiles. I squeeze between Mum and Dad and the blood drains out of me.
‘Josie?’ Stacey’s toxic BFF stands on my doorstep, clutching her designer bag, looking bewildered. Her eyes dart around the house, taking in the decrepit blue walls with their peeling paint. One shiny shoe points to a massive hole in the verandah where a possum I named Clark now lives.
‘Thanks, but Mum’s waiting for me in the car — we have to get home for dinner. I just need to talk to Maxine quickly about some homework,’ Josie says with a crooked smile that shows off the overbite she’s correcting with headgear. Everyone talked about how ugly she looks in it after the girls had a sleepover. I wasn’t invited.
My parents are beaming. I glare at them. ‘Thought I was grounded,’ I mutter.
Dad purses his lips, then turns Mum by the shoulder and leads her away. Dad’s pretty soft; you only need to warm his slippers in the microwave and he forgets anything bad you did.
I close the door behind me. Josie stares at the hole in my T-shirt, then takes two steps back and rattles, her pockets full of Tic Tacs again.
‘So, can I see it?’ she asks.
‘Lizards?’
‘No one cares about your gross lizards. I’ve come to see the tree,’ she says.
I choke, then try to act blasé. ‘Don’t know what you’re talking about.’
Josie smiles. It’s the same evil smile worn by all of Stacey’s friends when they tease you about being fat at swimming, when they tell everyone you have pubes or when they con Channing into filling up a water gun with his pee to soak most of Year Five. I’ve seen that smile before, felt it, and cried over it.
‘Look, just show me the money tree and I’ll go home. I won’t tell anyone. We were playing Truth or Dare. I chose “dare” and Stacey dared me to come and see it.’
I’m raging on the inside.
‘Is it in your room?’ she asks, looking over my shoulder.
‘Honestly, I don’t know what Stacey’s on about. You think I’d live here if I had a money tree?’
Josie’s eyes twinkle. ‘Yes, if your parents didn’t know,’ she hisses.
‘You should go,’ I say.
She smiles again. ‘Thanks.’
‘For what?’
‘Confirming the truth. I thought the video was a fake, but your face says it all.’
The red lie is giving me away again. I try to control my body, but I’m practically shaking.
‘I want a branch too. We’ll come by after ballet tomorrow. Deal? Or we post that video.’ She skips down the steps with her rattling pockets out to her mum’s Mercedes waiting in our uneven driveway.
Chapter 26
On Saturday afternoon I find Fleur sitting in the cleared cellar, staring up at the money tree. The light leaking from it is jaundiced, sickly. The room looks trashed with piles of bubble wrap, empty boxes and bags, strewn tissue paper and ribbons. Sort of like a present crime scene. I exaggerate a sneeze. Fleur turns to me and her cheeks are wet.
‘What’s going on?’ she asks. ‘Where the heck is all my stuff?’
I sweep my arms around the emptied room. ‘It’s all gone to charity,’ I say, smiling and relieved.
‘Why?’
‘We don’t need it whilst other people really, really do and I had to stash the evidence.’ I explain finding Stacey wounded under the tree, Stacey taking the video on her phone and showing Josie. ‘They’re coming over tonight,’ I finish.
‘But I love our tree! Money isn’t all bad,’ Fleur says, throwing her arms around the trunk. She’s right. But it was more bad than good for us.
‘We lived without the tree fine before, so we won’t miss it once it’s gone. We have no other choice. We keep the tree and every kid at school will want a branch, Mum and Dad will find out, the media will turn up and it’ll be all over the news like the secret millionaire’s donations in the charity bins. We kill the tree and at least we don’t make Stacey Shovelton richer.’
Fleur rubs her eyes and looks at me like I’m visiting from the Ewoks’ planet. ‘I’m not giving it up!’ she says and for once her voice is an actual scream that hurts my ears. ‘I’ll lock them out, deny the video, I need this!’
‘Someone will hear you,’ I shush her.
She collapses on the floor, crying. ‘Don’t you see? Without money, we’re nothing!’
The words echo around the tree. I’ve felt the nothingness my whole life.
‘Being something and being nothing,’ I say. ‘Is it all about money? I mean, Dad hasn’t got a lot of money, but he loves what he teaches, so he’s something. Mum doesn’t have a lot of money, but she loves talking to people and people love meeting her, so she’s something. We have each other, we’re not nothing. We should never have taken advantage of the tree. Taking whatever you want is no fun. Admit it. Even you got bored.’ I squeeze her.
‘Being bored with having money is a lot less boring than being bored at the juice bar, having to earn it.’ Fleur sniffs. ‘I want to be rich.’
‘You are rich,’ I say. ‘You have a family who loves you. You’re beautiful and smart with a compact room.’ I smile. ‘Our time will come, but when it does, it has to be honest.’
Tyler barges in, holding his insect racket, and plays it like a guitar. When he receives no applause, he looks up. ‘Wowa, shazam!’ he says, checking out the cleared room. ‘What’s going on? And why’s the tree not blinking?’
We look up at the tree and the canopy appears thin. I hadn’t noticed but the branches are skeletal. I jump to my feet. ‘When was the last time anyone took any money off it?’ I ask.
Fleur shrugs. ‘I’ve been using the money pile.’
‘Me too,’ Tyler says.
‘I picked a few notes the other day for bills but nothing drastic.’ I think hard. ‘Then my theory is correct! I know how to kill the tree without chopping it down!’
Tyler is confused. ‘I must be deaf from Year Three violin. Did you say “kill the tree”?’
I rush over to Fleur, who is stroking the tree. She reaches up to pluck a note. ‘Don’t!’ I yell and smack her hand away. I unravel the scarf from her shoulders and take off the brooch. ‘Roses,’ I say. ‘Nanna’s roses! You prune a rose and it flourishes. You don’t prune a rose and it dies.’
They stare at me blankly.
‘We’ve been pruning the tree so it’s grown out of control,’ I explain. ‘The more we prune, the more it flourishes. If we don’t touch it for a while, the tree should die.’
Fleur sniffs again. ‘But why did it grow into your bedroom in the first place?’
‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘I think I plucked an old note that had been dormant for a while or when I was mopping I watered it somehow.’ I don’t tell them about the tears that fell between the floorboards.
Tyler isn’t listening to us. He is staring at his phone, his face ghostly. He looks like he did when the teacher performed a dissection on a mouse in science; he went the same colour as the stainless-steel bench. I snatch the phone out of his hand, look at the screen and feel that rollercoaster hurtling inside me again. If I could breathe enough to scream, I would, but a black hole of panic has stolen my sound and turned my skin inside out. Fleur catches the phone as I drop it, looks at the screen herself and falls to her knees. We stare at each other, mouths open, eyes glazed. In unison we turn our heads to the tree.
‘What are we going to do?’ Tyler whispers.
I lose my words for a few beats, then adrenalin floods in. ‘Okay, everybody stay calm. We don’t take a cent off this tree, hear me? Act like the tree doesn’t exist.’
Fleur doesn’t like it, but she nods. ‘How long will it take to kill the tree?’ she asks.
‘I don’t know,’ I say.
We go up to the basement and close the wardrobe door, shift the washing machine in front of it, then fortress the washing machine with boxes of junk. It’s the best we can do. I pick up the padlock I bought to secure the hatch. Tyler stuffs his insect racket down the back of his jeans and climbs up the ladder first, but freezes halfway.
‘Keep going,’ I say from behind him.
He looks down at me and shows me his teeth. ‘Problem,’ he says.
I pass the padlock to Fleur, then climb up and over him. Poking my head out of the hole, I see two pairs of ballet shoes staring at my forehead. I close my eyes for a moment. ‘You let Santa post the video?’ I say. Rain falls softly on the ballet shoes, spreading a rash of polka dots as I raise my eyes to see Stacey and Josie.
‘You were meant to give me a branch. Yesterday!’ Stacey says.
‘Shhh,’ I hush her, pulling myself up. Tyler and Fleur crawl out from behind me. Fleur closes the hatch and bangs on the padlock.
‘You can’t lock it. We have a deal,’ Stacey says.
I snort. ‘That’s rich coming from you. You said you weren’t going to post the video. You didn’t keep your end, so deal’s off.’
‘I didn’t post the video. Santa did,’ she says.
I roll my eyes and begin walking towards the street, but stop when I hear voices. Grown-up voices. The lights are on inside. There are heads bobbing above the windowsill, more heads than have ever been in our house.
I spin around. ‘You brought your parents?’
‘How else were we meant to get here? Walk en pointe?’ Josie says. ‘Show us the tree or we tell.’
Tyler and Fleur are standing next to the hatch, guarding it. The girls surround me. I smile thinly, but my tongue grows fur.
‘S’cuse me,’ Tyler says behind us.
The girls turn.
‘There’s plenty of money for everyone,’ he says.
I bulge my eyes at him. I look back at the parents in my house. I’m not fit enough for how hard my heart is pumping right now. I race over to Tyler. ‘What are you doing?’ I whisper.
‘Trust,’ he says, his voice edgeless and confident.
I can hear my dad calling my name. My heart is through the clouds.
‘Here’s the deal, ladies,’ Tyler says.
The girls start to shiver in their pink leotards, tights and ballet wraps. ‘Spit it out,’ Josie says.
Tyler opens his hands to the sky. ‘The tree is currently out of action,’ he says.
I can see my dad moving through the house, calling my name again.
‘Meaning what?’ Stacey asks.
‘Well, we’ve drained its resources and need to give it a few days to grow back. There’s no money there now,’ he says.
Stacey arches an eyebrow.
‘It’s true,’ Fleur whispers.
‘Don’t tell anybody. Spread the word that the video is a fake and come back in a week. You can each choose a branch then,’ Tyler says.
I hear the front door click and race around to the verandah. Dad stares at me, rain drenched with my hair sticking to my cheeks.
‘Honestly,’ he says. ‘Where’re the others?’
‘We’re just playing outside,’ I say. ‘We’ll be in soon.’
‘You always loved playing in the rain,’ he says, then laughs as he re-enters the house to join more laughter. Mum’s always a hit at gatherings. Those parents are charming him because they want good marks for their kids, I bet.
When I return to the group, the deal is done. Fleur hands me the key to the hatch. I have one week.
Chapter 27
That night I sneak down to the basement with Sibyl on my shoulder and stand before the tree. I reach out to touch a pink note, then snatch my hand away. My eyes follow the tangle of branches fingering their way between the floorboards to where all this mess started. Sibyl wriggles on my shoulder. A soft light burns through the coloured leaves. I cycle through so many emotions at once I can’t keep up with my moods: anger, fear, sadness, guilt, greed, guilt, guilt and more guilt.
‘I did this for you,’ I tell Sibyl, but the words are fresh lies. I know I did this for myself. Salty tears come and I swallow them down. I hug the trunk of the tree, thinking back to the nights when Dad would pace around our old house, worrying, I’m sure, about money. The worry was a blanket that covered all of us. Mum carried her worry in the black bags under her eyes. It’s only recently that her eyes have regained their sparkle. I know my help with the bills has eased the stress and I’ve never seen them more excited than when the new car arrived, or the way they reacted to the secret millionaire on the news. But it was all lies. Dirty lies. I could show them the money tree and they would never have to worry about money again. Our lives would change forever. But then they’d know about the white lies, the red ones, all the deception, and Stacey would come with her entire ballet class wanting a branch, who knows how many greedy strangers would turn up, then the TV news reporters, and we’d never be left alone in peace. Tears reach my nose and I sniff them back. Kids didn’t even know my name until I had new shoes, electronics and the right schoolbag.
Tyler did, I remind myself. Tears fountain onto the bark of the tree. I rub my cheeks against its rough surface and the magic sap glues to my face. Wiping my tears, I walk over to an empty dusty wine bottle abandoned on the ground. I hold the mouth of the bottle up to the tree and let the sap drip into it. I replace the cork, then put the bottle up on the rack with the hundreds of others that life has forgotten.
We were a happy family before the money tree, and we’ll be happy after. I may have to take that paper round though. Sibyl nuzzles into my neck. How did I get here, sitting in the dark, wearing a lizard, and wishing I had no money? I breathe in the tree for the last time. My heart beats faster. It hurts to admit that you can’t buy friends, popularity or coolness.
‘Hey.’
I turn around and Fleur is standing in a kimono, a green leotard layered with chunky necklaces, a stiff miniskirt made out of silver scuba material and a straw beach hat. She is teetering on studded wedges teamed with knee-high socks. She looks like a confused pop star who is working with too many stylists. She stands next to me and reaches for my hand with a pair of fingerless red leather gold-encrusted gloves.
The tears bubble again. ‘I just wanted to be cool,’ I blurt.
Fleur squeezes my hand.
I kick the tree. ‘Couldn’t even do it with millions of bucks,’ I say. ‘I really suck.’
Fleur gives me a hug, then walks over to a small mound of
packaging and unearths a pile of hats from the wrapping debris. She tries on a fedora, stares up into the brim, sighs, then chucks it away. She puts on a pink beret with a butterfly clip, moving it from left to right, but feeling uncomfortable, she discards it like a Frisbee. Pacing, she arrives at a stack of shoe boxes I thought was rubbish. She tears through the first three boxes and empties the shoes onto the ground, shaking off her studded wedges to slide her feet into a pair of comfortable navy-blue velvet slippers with a vanilla crest on the toe. She shuffles in them for a moment, then kicks them off. Barefoot and exasperated, she retrieves her straw hat and pulls it firmly onto her head.
‘We’re doing the right thing,’ Fleur finally says. The money tree reflects in her eyes as she stares up into its branches. ‘I am bored,’ she admits.
I say nothing.
She looks at me then and we connect on that telepathic sister level. ‘I think we both know if people see the money tree, life will never be the same again,’ she says.
I run to her and throw my arms around her waist. ‘But you’ll have to go back to the juice bar,’ I say.
Fleur smiles down at me. ‘Blending berries is not so bad.’ She shrugs. ‘Plus, I’m allowed to eat unlimited fructose-gluten-salicylate-free gut-friendly protein balls,’ she adds sarcastically.
‘Delicious,’ I say.
We both laugh.
‘I’ll watch the key to the hatch with my life. Then after this is all over, go back to being just me,’ I say.
Fleur tosses her red gloves to the ground, then takes off her straw hat and plonks it down on my head. ‘Just you is more than enough,’ she says, then pauses. ‘Money makes no difference. You can wear the most expensive beach hat on the coast, but it doesn’t change who you are as a person. Deep down you realise that, yeah?’
I nod.
She removes a pear from her pocket and takes a bite. ‘Halvies?’ she asks, holding out the pear to me. I bite into it, feeling a little bit more whole now that we are on the same side. We chew in unison. Fleur is smiling but sort of sobbing too, all over the pear. She puts it back into her pocket. Then we swallow at the same time.