Dedication
In remembrance of lost angels. GM.
To Jill and John, and to a childhood friend. CM.
Contents
Cover
1. An Uncommon Boy
2. Princess Layla
3. Empty Places
4. A Bird in the Bag
5. A Fearless Friend
6. The Kingdom of Silk
7. The Naming Day Books
8. The Gift of Reading Hearts
9. The Flame of Courage
10. Homecoming
11. Naming Tishkin
Copyright
1. An Uncommon Boy
Griffin came into the Silk family after Scarlet, Indigo, Violet, Amber and Saffron. He came early in the morning on that uncommon day, the twenty-ninth of February. His father’s prediction, considering the date of Griffin’s birth, was that he would be an uncommon sort of boy.
Perhaps he was, thought Griffin ruefully. For the first time in his life, he wished he’d been born on the twenty-eighth day of February or even the first of March. Maybe then he would have been an ordinary boy instead. If he were an ordinary boy, maybe Mama wouldn’t have gone away. Maybe his secret thoughts wouldn’t have changed everything.
Griffin had never felt his uncommonness until today, the day he had started school, and then only because the other children had made him aware of it. Even then, he wouldn’t have minded being uncommon, if only he could have stayed at home to learn with Mama, like his older sisters had.
It wasn’t fair.
Mama had taught him well. Miss Beaumont, the teacher, said he was a grade ahead of other students his age and put him into a class where all the children were older than him. Some of them sniggered to each other behind cupped hands when the teacher introduced him.
‘Please welcome Griffin Silk,’ she said. ‘It’s Griffin’s first day and I want you all to make him feel welcome.’
And later on when he had correctly answered some of her questions, he heard loudly whispered comments about him being ‘teacher’s pet’, so he decided not to answer any more.
At lunchtime it was even worse.
‘So, is it Mister Griffin?’ asked one of the boys, with his face uncomfortably close to Griffin’s.
‘No, just Griffin. Daddy named me after the mythical beast.’
‘Oh, the mythical beast!’
The boy who had spoken first doubled over with laughter, holding his sides as though they hurt, and the others joined in.
When they tired of laughing at the explanation of his name, they pulled at the stiff new cloth of the grey school shorts and pale blue shirt that Nell had bought him. They stood on his elastic-sided boots, the gritty soles of their dirty sneakers grinding into the shiny leather of Griffin’s boots.
He felt someone tug his long hair. ‘Why don’t ya get a hair cut, ya girl?’
‘Leave it, you might catch nits off him,’ said the tallest boy, the one they called Scotty. Griffin stared into his lunch box and wished they would go away. But he felt the wooden slatted seat bow beneath him and from the corner of his eye he saw Scotty sit down close by.
‘So, Mister Griffin, I’ve heard there’s a whole tribe of you Silks live up on the hill. How come none of the others come to school here?’
‘We all learnt at home from Mama, till she got sick. My sisters go to high school on the bus now,’ Griffin explained. His eyes were fixed on the unopened sandwiches which Nell had made for him. ‘How many sisters ya got?’ ‘There’s Scarlet and Indigo and Violet and Amber and Saffron and … ’
‘Geez, what sorta names are they? Did ya Daddy name them all after some imaginary critters too, did he?’ The other boys laughed at Scotty’s cleverness.
‘Oh no, Daddy calls them his Rainbow Girls. You see, my grandma Nell’s favourite colour is scarlet and Mama’s favourite flowers are violets and … ’
‘So, you’re the baby, huh?’ interrupted Scotty rudely. ‘Little Mister Griffin, the bubby beast.’
‘No!’ Griffin had had enough. Recklessly he slammed the lid of his lunch box shut and stood up. He looked up at Scotty and his band of supporters. They stood on a forest of battered legs with scabby knees and filthy, unlaced sneakers, arms folded, waiting edgily for a sign, a word from their leader.
‘I’m not a baby. My name is Griffin Silk and I live with my Daddy and Nell and my five big sisters and soon Mama will come home and bring my little sister.’ Griffin shouted the information in one long breath at Scotty and his mates.
They stared after him open-mouthed as he turned his back and walked away from them. His heart thumped in his chest, his cheeks burned and his legs shook, but he kept walking towards the cool, welcoming shade under the outstretched limbs of the elms near the playground.
Behind him he heard Scott McAllister’s voice, but it seemed less frightening now.
‘Geez, didn’t I say there was a tribe of ‘em? An’ there’s another one too! Another girl. No wonder he’s a sook with all them women in the family,’ he told his friends, pretending not to notice their admiration for the way Griffin had stood up to him. Then he called out after Griffin’s retreating figure, ‘Hey, Mate, your old man would’ve been runnin’ outa names for the last brat, wouldn’t he? Whatcha call the little one then? Eh?’
Griffin didn’t reply right away. He wasn’t being rude. It was just the way of things in the Silk household.
Daddy was a big fan of cogitation. Sometimes it took him three days to work out his best response. He said it was fine to cogitate if you didn’t know something straight off, that you got much better answers if you thought a bit before you spoke.
Griffin reached the comfort of the shade and sat down on the grass. He took off his stiff new boots and socks. He sniffed his socks and then tucked them into his boots. He opened his lunch box and took out his sandwich.
He lifted up the top piece of bread to see what was inside—honey and peanut butter—and then closed it. He took a bite and lay back on the grass in the dappled shade. The elm leaves jostled against each other in the lazy spring breeze, rustling like a lady’s taffeta dress.
‘Tishkin,’ he said quietly, and it was the first time he had said the name aloud, although he had heard it inside his head for a long, long time. ‘Tishkin, that’s what I call her.’ And he smiled at the sound of it as the elm leaves repeated after him, ‘Tishkin, Tishkin’.
2. Princess Layla
At the end of the day, Scotty McAllister and his gang left the locker room, trailing school-bags, shoelaces and laughter behind them into the bright afternoon light.
Griffin watched from the step outside the faded green door of Saint Benedict’s Primary School No. 7107. They rode their bikes down the powdery footpath, dinking their friends on the handlebars, skidding their wheels and sending up clouds of cocoa-coloured dust. Griffin dawdled down the path, hoping they wouldn’t turn and see him, but they were long gone by the time he reached the front gate.
The road that led to Griffin’s house was little used, except by the Silk family. No one remembered if it had a real name or not. Everyone in the district called it the Silk Road. It meandered between the paddocks; a generous ribbon of gravel with a mean smear of bitumen up the middle and dribbling off the edges. Clumps of blowfly grass and scaly grey lichens trespassed undisturbed on the road’s ragged borders. Rusty-headed rushes grew in the boggy ditches either side of the road and made a pleasant home for frogs and other moisture-loving creatures.
Griffin sat down in the shade of the feathery blue leaves of a Cootamundra wattle. He dangled his socks and his hot aching feet in the thin stream of water in the ditch. He wriggled his toes, teasing the tiny black tadpoles that swam in the clear ripples. If only he could
go barefoot to school like he did at home, but then the kids would laugh at him even more, he supposed.
He wished that he could tell Nell about the clothes she had bought him, without hurting her feelings. None of the other kids wore these kinds of clothes. Maybe Daddy and Nell wouldn’t send him back to school, once they found out what it was like.
He cheered up a little at that thought and fished his socks from the water and carefully turned them inside-out in case any tadpoles had swum inside. He wrung the water from them, tied them together at the toe ends and tucked them inside his shirt-collar to cool his neck. He remembered the remains of his lunchtime sandwich and took it out of his school-bag to eat.
Griffin’s heart jolted when he heard someone call out, ‘Hey, wait up!’ He shrank further back under the canopy of the tree, hoping whoever it was would pass by. He didn’t want any more trouble today.
‘I can still see you,’ the persistent voice came closer.
Griffin peered out from his hiding place and saw it was a girl. She was whip-thin, smaller than him. She knelt down when she reached the tree and looked under its fringe at Griffin.
‘Hello,’ she said. ‘I’ve been trying to catch up with you. My name’s Layla.’ She smiled at him and though she had more gaps than teeth, her whole face seemed to smile. Her eyes were the colour of forget-me-nots and her long straight hair was as shiny as a crow’s wing.
But it wasn’t Layla’s smile or her cheerful greeting or her blue, blue eyes or even her shiny black hair that made Griffin come out from under the tree. It was the daisy chain that she wore like a crown on her head.
When Griffin was very small, Mama and the girls used to push him up the hills in the old wicker pram. In springtime when the yellow cape weed bloomed and covered the hills like custard over steamed puddings, they would make daisy chains all afternoon. They made crowns for themselves and for Griffin, and when they put them on they would magically become queens or princesses and Griffin would always be the prince. Sometimes they would try to make chains long enough to reach all the way from the top of the hill to home again.
By the summer when Tishkin was born, Griffin’s fingers had grown nimble enough to carefully splice the sappy stems, to make the slits just big enough to thread the next flower stem through.
How well he remembered when he and Blue had been allowed to go to the hills by themselves. It was on that afternoon that he had gathered the first few daisies of the season and made a coronet, baby-sized, just perfect for Tishkin. He took it home and put it on the lid of his toy box. He knew that the flowers would close their petals and go to sleep when he did, but that when the sun streamed through the window in the morning they would open, like yellow eyelashes around dark eyes.
But when Griffin woke up the next morning he found that Mama and Tishkin had gone away, so he hid the crown of daisies in a special place.
It was still there.
So Griffin knew all about daisy chains. He understood right away, that a person who believed in the magic of daisies, a person skilled in the art of crown-making, was likely to be an uncommon kind of person.
That was why he came out from his hiding place to talk to Layla.
‘I’m pleased to meet you, Princess Layla,’ he said gravely, offering his hand to the Princess. ‘I’m Griffin Silk.’
The Princess answered, ‘I know. I heard you telling Scotty McAllister. That’s why I came. I want you to tell me about the beast. You know, the magical beast that your Daddy … ’
‘Mythical beast,’ Griffin corrected her. ‘It’s a sort of imaginary creature that people told stories about.’
‘You mean like a bunyip?’
‘Sort of. The griffin had the head and wings of an eagle and the body of a lion. If you came to my house, Daddy would tell you all about it. He’s got pictures of it in a book.’
Princess Layla’s forget-me-not eyes looked down at her feet. She kicked at the loose gravel with her pink sneaker and her crown slipped a little and was crooked on her forehead.
‘I don’t know. I’ll have to ask my mother first,’ she said, because even princesses have to ask their mothers some things. Then she looked up and brightened. ‘I’ll ask her tonight and tell you at school tomorrow.’
The thought of another day at school flicked darkly across Griffin’s mind, but it might not be so bad if Princess Layla was there.
‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Do you want some tadpoles?’
3. Empty Places
Blue was red with white freckles, or white with red freckles, depending on which way you looked at him. He was born under the fig tree outside Griffin’s bedroom window on the sixteenth day of the third spring of Griffin’s life.
The tree was in blossom and the blackbirds sang on the morning Blue was born. It was clear from the beginning that he was an uncommon sort of dog. His head was too big and his legs were too short and he couldn’t hear the blackbirds singing. And long after his brothers and sisters had gone to good homes, nobody seemed to want Blue, except Griffin. And that was very good, thought Griffin, because Blue was exactly the sort of dog that he wanted.
Blue waited all day by the strainer post in the front paddock for Griffin’s return. Nell understood the power of love and didn’t try to persuade him to come back to the house. Instead, she carried a bucket of water down the hill and put it in the shade for him. Blue lowered his ears in recognition of her kindness, but didn’t take his eyes from the road.
Though Blue couldn’t hear, he had other gifts, which were especially powerful. He could feel the vibrations that people’s footsteps made on the earth, even over distances as great as that between the strainer post and Joe Canning’s dam. He could even tell which member of the Silk family made them. And though Griffin’s boots were in his school-bag on that hot afternoon, and his bare feet made very little sound, Blue’s tail began to thump on the ground with joy, before he could even see the crown of Griffin’s head rising up over the crest of the hill.
Griffin wrapped his arms around Blue’s neck and smelled the sunshine on his thick dappled coat and the sweet dry earth on the pads of his feet.
They lay there for a while, content in each other’s company, then walked together up the long red gravel driveway to the house. Blue stretched out on the veranda boards and went to sleep, exhausted by his long day of waiting.
The wire door slammed behind Griffin. The striped canvas blinds were pulled down all around the veranda to keep the house cool and he blinked at the soft, daytime dusk inside. His dusty feet left a ghostly trail behind him on the bare boards of the hallway. The house was full of quietness as though his ears were stuffed with cotton wool.
Griffin stopped to listen to the small sounds of the afternoon that mostly got lost amongst the busy living noises of his large family. It was so quiet that he could almost hear his heart beating. He unbuttoned his shirt and put his hand on his chest, over his heart. He remembered when Mama had let him press his face against her big soft belly, to feel the beginnings of Tishkin.
He walked into Daddy’s room and looked at the bed where Tishkin had been born. In the corner was Tishkin’s crib. Mama had painted it blue and yellow, the colours of summer. He dropped his school-bag on the floor, climbed up on to the bed and wriggled down into the saggy bit in the middle. He shut his eyes and tried to remember the smell of Mama. He turned his back to the empty crib.
He was still asleep when the school bus let the girls off at the bottom of the driveway. Their noisy chatter and the crunch of the gravel under their hard black school shoes drew Griffin out of his dreams, like a bubble floating upwards from the silent darkness of the ocean towards the glittering, sunlit surface above. The bubble burst and he opened his eyes and stretched, and his world changed from misty greys to sharp colour, restful silence to sound.
He came, pink-cheeked from sleep and unnoticed, into the kitchen and sat at Mama’s place at the table. The girls were trying to tell Nell about their day, all at the same time, like a flock of galahs.
/> Nell turned around from where she had been peeling potatoes in the sink and looked right at Griffin as though she had known all along that he was there behind her. She dried her hands on her apron as she came to him and cupped his chin in her warm palm. She studied his face over the top of her spectacles.
‘Tough day?’ she asked, and Griffin knew she had seen him sleeping. He nodded.
The girls had more questions, questions that he didn’t particularly want to answer, so he said, ‘I met a princess on the way home.’
‘Princess who?’ asked Scarlet.
‘Princess Layla.’
‘How did you know she was a princess?’ asked Indigo.
‘Well, she would have told him, wouldn’t she?’ said Violet. ‘Did she, Griff? Did she tell you?’
‘She said her name was Layla, but she didn’t have to tell me she was a princess. I knew as soon as I saw the crown.’
‘What sort of crown?’ Amber wanted to know.
‘You know, a daisy-chain crown of course!’ said Griffin. ‘They were only skinny little daisies, but she’d made a lovely crown and her hair was as black as Zeus’s feathers.’ Zeus was perched on the window-sill above the sink waiting for an opportunity to steal some of the meal Nell was preparing. He squawked in recognition of his name and leapt down on to the sink.
‘Get off there this minute, you wicked creature,’ said Nell sternly, but she didn’t seem to mind when he hopped on to her shoulder.
‘Maybe she was Zeus in disguise,’ said Saffron holding out her arm for Zeus to stand on.
‘Who was?’ asked Violet.
‘The princess,’ answered Saffron. Despite being the youngest of the Rainbow Girls, she knew almost everything there was to know about mythology. ‘The ancient Romans believed that Zeus was the ruler of heaven and could transform himself into all kinds of different things, like swans and showers of gold. Maybe our Zeus is really the ruler of heaven and he changed himself into a crow and then into the Princess Layla.’
The Naming of Tishkin Silk Page 1