Plenty (11 page)

Maddy and Sophie-Rose and Grace sat with their feet in the dark river. They wriggled their toes down into its clattering white stones. They sat by the black water and wherever they turned their eyes, there were stars.

Overhead, the Milky Way flowed: a road, a river, a path in the sky. Over their feet, the black water flowed: a river of stars, reflecting.

The constellations sailed in the black water, twinkling between their bare toes. And in the north-east the Karatgurk had returned. They could see them through a gap in the rivergums, sailing over the ghostly paddocks. But there were definitely more than six now. Or even seven. There were so many star-sisters you couldn’t count them. Sophie-Rose couldn’t believe it.

But Maddy had grown used to the light in Plenty and these days she saw a lot of things. The mountain hanging over The Deviation was like a big comfortable friend. The new leaves on the burnt trunks grew thicker every day – their fresh green around the black trunks looked so good she wanted to eat it. And she’d known for ages now that you couldn’t count the number of stars in the Plenty skies. The more you looked, the more you saw.

After they’d eaten the slightly melted cake sent by Sophie-Rose’s mother – this year it was Titania Queen of the Fairies – Maddy, Sophie-Rose and Grace stretched out in the lean-to to talk.

“You know,” said Grace, “I’ve been thinking about the Karatgurk.”

“Maybe the youngest one isn’t lost,” she said. “Maybe she found a better place to live and is going there.”

“Yeah,” Maddy said, yawning with fullness. “And the older ones are following her.”

“But they’re going the wrong way for that,” Sophie-Rose pointed out. “The youngest one is
behind
them. And they’re all going one way.”

It was a good point. They lay and thought about it.

“Wait,” said Grace after a while. “Not if the older ones are really slow. Then they’re just way,
way
behind. You know. It’s a big circle.”

“Brilliant,” sighed Maddy Frank, Builder of Shelters and Dweller by the Water. Keeper of the Tree and Historian to Fairies.

Granddaughter to Mad.

Friend of Grace.

And she slept in the tent between her two best friends and dreamed of sailing.

Outside, nothing was still. The river kept flowing. The stars kept moving. They couldn’t stay still if they wanted to, and neither could Maddy and Sophie-Rose and Grace. Their bodies too were just a little stardust and water.

Moving. Travelling. Always.

On the news there are all these people without a place to call home, and most of them are children. They are crowded into camps and detention centres round the world. I wrote
Plenty
because I’d been watching the news and thinking about homes and homesickness.

I came to Australia from England with my parents fifty years ago. It was after a big war, so big it was called
World
War II. That war did what all wars do: use up all the money and food. Afterwards, there wasn’t enough for everybody, and lots of people left England to settle in other countries. My family was one of them.

Nobody asked me if I wanted to leave England. I had to go because I was three and that’s what my parents had decided was best. And it’s been a good life here (plenty of food and sunshine!) –
except
for this small, quiet, homesick part of me, which never stops thinking about England. Being so young when we left, you’d think I’d have forgotten. But I never did.

When I was little, that homesick part was a secret. I called it my
Inside England
. It was built in my mind from memory, and later from books and films. I spent lots of time in the England inside myself: walking in the snow, sitting under oak trees and tramping about moors in Wellington boots. Later I wrote the Secrets of Carrick books. The island of Carrick is actually my
Inside England
. Don’t tell anybody.

Now when I see the faces of the refugee children on the news, I think how they had no choice either. How nobody asked them. And I think of Sudan and Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia, and all the other beautiful countries they carry inside them in parts that will never quite stop hurting. And I remember. When I see their faces I think how homesickness feels the same to everybody.