Plenty (2 page)

Every night of her life Maddy had stood at her back door as the sun set, to see the fruit bats drop and the orb spider weave. To think about the day that was gone – and about all the days that were to come. And how good it was to be her own brilliant self in her own brilliant skin, in her very own perfect place right at this perfect and brilliant moment.

Tonight, however, she didn’t feel like watching the sky for fruit bats or seeing the orb-weaver start her web. She didn’t feel like thinking about the days in Jermyn Street. Tonight her skin felt tight. The backyard wasn’t hers any more and this was the most terrible rubbish moment she had ever had the misfortune to live.

Poor Maddy Frank, Ex-Owner of a Backyard. Ex-Mistress of a House.

Ex-Jermyn Street.

Every year, on the eve of their birthdays, Maddy and Sophie-Rose had a campout at the Franks’ place. And every year, on the afternoon of the birthday itself, Mum and Dad took Maddy to the Fairies Tree in Fitzroy Park. They took the 112 tram and had lunch at the Pavilion Cafe in the middle of the park. This year Maddy and Sophie-Rose were turning ten.

Maddy Frank had walked the broad shady avenues with the new confidence that comes from reaching double figures. Mum and Dad had strolled, talking behind her, like it was a normal day. They’d stopped to watch a little girl making a kebab of fallen oak leaves on a stick. They’d seen a man praying on a rug by the pools, and a bride in long red veils posing for photos by the Scar Tree. The Franks had given Maddy no warning. It had been the best day – and then they had told her.

By the Fairies Tree.

“
Moving
?” she repeated.

The word meant nothing. It was just a sound. Mum and Dad joined hands and smiled at her with all their teeth and most of their gums.

“But,” she said. And then, “But
where
?”

They had said it like it was good news but it wasn’t. It was bad. Even another cherry ripe slice at the Pavilion Cafe couldn’t change the badness of this news. Maddy raised her eyes to the top of the Fairies Tree where Bunjil the eagle perched. He spread his wooden wings over all the creatures carved into the trunk. But even he couldn’t save Maddy.

“We’re going to live in the country,” said Mum.

“What country?” asked Maddy.

“Not
what
country,” said Dad. “
The
country. Where Nana lives. Do you remember Nana?”

Maddy remembered something but wasn’t sure what it was.

“Well,” he said. “It doesn’t matter. You were only a toddler when you saw her.”

“It’s called Plenty,” Mum said dreamily. “Upper Plenty. Such a great name! It’s got mountains. And
trees
.”

“There are trees here,” Maddy pointed out.

Fitzroy Gardens was absolutely full of palms and oaks and other trees she didn’t know the names for. And Plenty didn’t even sound real. It sounded like the sort of place you’d put in a story. She looked at her new birthday watch. Silver with aquamarine. Purple leather band.

It was exactly 3.20.

“There’ll be farms,” said Dad.

Maddy concentrated hard on the Fairies Tree so she wouldn’t have to listen.

“And horses,” said Dad.

The timber of the Fairies Tree seemed to have turned to stone. She hadn’t noticed that before. The pixies’ eyes bulged from their wooden faces, and the tree’s carved frilled-necks and tree frogs looked shocked.

The Franks had always lived at number fifteen Jermyn Street.

Maddy couldn’t imagine living any other place. She felt like she was in a story. That story where the girl is told she has to go live with a beast.

“Why?” she asked at last.

“Because,” said Mum and she had tears in her eyes. “I want trees. I want trees for you.”

“But these trees are good, Mum,” Maddy told her straightaway, relief flooding her body. “Brilliant. Honest.”

Maddy thought Mum and Dad just wanted to give her more trees. She thought once they saw how she loved the Fitzroy trees, they would give up the moving idea with relief too.

“You’ve only seen these,” said Mum though. “You wait until you see the trees in Plenty.”

She saw they were determined to go. They’d decided without her. Maddy concentrated on the Fairies Tree again. She saw, like it was the first time, the fairies gathered in their knotholes. And then she wondered how a person might crawl into those knotholes and stay there.

“But I don’t want to,” she said, developing what Mum called a
tone
.

“All right, now. Calm down,” said Dad, taking charge because of the tone. “We’re moving because we want to. Mum and me. Melbourne’s crazy: it’s loud – and it costs a lot. I have to work all the time to afford it.”

Maddy never knew what to say when her parents talked about
costing
and
affording
so she watched the Fairies Tree and waited for something to make sense.

“And then there’s Nana,” said Dad. “She’s the main thing. She’s getting old.”

“But she’s always been old,” said Maddy, reasonably. “And we never had to move.”

“Not old like now,” Dad told her. “She forgets things and can’t walk so well.”

Dad was a quietly certain sort of person. He could never be sidetracked or wound-up like Mum. Now each of his quiet and certain words settled like frost inside Maddy Frank.

“Nana needs help,” said Mum. “And I want to do that.”

“Family is one of the most important things in life,” said Dad.

Maddy gripped the palings around the Fairies Tree. All around her, everything seemed to be flying away and apart. She read and re-read the plaque set in the ground before the Fairies Tree, spelling out each letter of each word one by one. Each word of every sentence over and over.

She was reading it for the third time when she realised exactly what it said.

She pointed at it, trembling.

“See!” she said.

“What?” asked Mum.

“Look! Ola Cohn says here that homes are
sacred
,” Maddy told her parents, who were the sorts of adults who thought a lot of writers and often quoted them. She thought Ola Cohn might change their minds. She traced the words and read aloud. “She says she carved this tree as a home for the fairies so they’d be safe. Because it’s necessary –
necessary
– for every living creature – to have a
sanctuary
. I’m a living creature, aren’t I?”

“You certainly are,” Mum said.

“You carry your sanctuary in here,” said Dad and touched Maddy’s chest. “And right now your home is wherever me and Mum are, pumpkin.”

And that’s when Maddy Frank knew it was no good. The argument was done. She was lost. When her parents started talking about the things she wanted being
inside
herself
there was nothing left to say. Her stomach dropped. Her throat ached. And in the once-warm and soft spaces of Maddy Frank the frost hardened.

Right at that moment of giving up Maddy wanted to reach out to the fairies and wish the biggest, strongest, deepest wish she had. She knew, of course, and had known for a long time that the fairy magic was gone. That it was only in stories now. But some part of her still hoped. Maybe there would be just enough magic left in the real world to stop this terrible day.

There wasn’t.

She looked at her watch.

It was 3.29

It had all happened in nine minutes.

“It’ll be fine,” said Mum. “I promise.”

“What about school?” Maddy whispered. The words came on icy breath.

“Trust us,” said Dad.

But Maddy Frank didn’t think she’d ever trust these people again.

That night Maddy Frank nearly cried but didn’t. Or rather, she wouldn’t. It felt better to be angry than sad. Being sad felt small and wrong; being angry felt strong and right. When she felt the tears coming she pressed her lips together and frowned instead. She fell asleep with the ache of tears in her throat and she dreamed the same dream over and over.

She dreamed she woke up in her own room. Everything looked real and ordinary. There was her ordinary table with the blue bookcase painted with white clouds. There was her part-open wardrobe. There was her ordinary wall covered in pictures of fairies. Again and again she woke up in this dream room in which everything looked and felt real – except for one thing.

In the dream, her birthday hadn’t happened. Her parents had never said they were moving. In the dream, she didn’t have to leave Fitzroy. Every time she woke, she woke up in the dream room. The ache in her throat would be unbearable – and then she’d realise. She didn’t actually have to do it. In the dream, she didn’t have to move.

Dream happiness would flood her body. Her throat would stop aching. It was like the whole dream house sighed and relaxed.

But then the dream fairies would come. Hundreds of them peeling off the fairy wall and flying about the dream ceiling. They slipped out of books like silverfish. They dropped from picture frames like pressed flowers. They even flew out of the dream wardrobe like seeds in a wind. And with shock, she would realise what was happening. They were leaving.

The fairies were leaving Jermyn Street.

They arranged themselves and took off in tiny squadrons, whirring to the windowsill and out into the summer night. Once airborne, all the squadrons followed one lead fairy, brighter than the others. Bright as a star. She could see them, black against the grey sky, flying in formation. Flying away from her.

“Come back,” she called and in the dream her voice was deep and broken. And as she watched the fairies leaving, an icy wind picked up in the dream room and snow began to fall.

Then she’d wake up in her ordinary room and it would all start again.

This went on until she was neither awake nor asleep but somewhere in between.

The last time she woke, Maddy was worn out but she could tell she was really awake because the ache in her throat didn’t go away. Her heart hung heavy as a sloth but her mind jumped like crickets. She tiptoed out into the backyard. The orb-weaver had spun its web high in the silky ti-tree and the tent was still set up from her birthday campout the night before with Sophie-Rose and the Emmas. Everything smelled of jasmine and compost.

It was such a brilliant smell.

Maddy lay by the pond and sighed.

The stars spread across the sky, each in their exact place. Each next to their exact right neighbour. Laid out almost exactly like the school project on astronomy she and Sophie-Rose had just finished.

Milky Way.

Southern Cross.

Taurus the Bull.

Maddy remembered lying out here with her Dad. Actually, she remembered lying out here
on
her Dad. He’d taught her about the stars. Human beings are made of stardust, he’d told her. And water, of course.

“You are just my little mess of stardust and water,” he’d said.

Dad had also taught her about the constellations – their names, their stories. They had plenty of names. Plenty of stories.

The six big stars in the north were called the
Pleiades
. It was a Greek word. And there were too many vowels in it in Maddy’s opinion, even for someone who loved spelling.

It was Mum who had showed her how to say it.

“
Play-eee-dees
,” she’d said, pulling her mouth into shapes that made Maddy laugh. “Now you say it.”

Play-eeee-deeeees
.

The Pleiades were seven girls in Greek mythology. They were sisters who were turned into stars by a god. After thousands of years travelling together in the skies though, one of the stars disappeared and now there were only six. But at school Mrs Trang had said one of Melbourne’s first people called those same stars the
Karatgurk
– a name that had the regular amount of vowels. So that’s what Maddy called them.

Mrs Trang said these first people were called the
Wurundjeri
. It was a word Maddy liked to whisper to herself in the quiet. She lay whispering it now.

Wuh-run-jer-ee
.

In the Karatgurk story, the stars were girls too. They’d been the first to make fire and they carried it, in embers on the ends of their digging sticks. Then there was some trouble – something about a crow stealing the fire. Maddy could only remember that Bunjil the eagle put the Karatgurk in the sky, safe from the crow. Now their embers were the stars. The lost star was the youngest girl, always chasing the older ones.

Maddy liked to think of herself and the Emmas and Sophie-Rose, sailing the sky like the Karatgurk. Last night at the campout the conversation had turned to this favourite subject.

Maddy had said if they could be star queens, they could decide who to reward and who to punish. She would, for instance, scatter ice-star seeds in good people’s gardens and the seeds would grow into diamond trees. Also they’d only wear dresses made of the finest frost with snow crystal crowns.

Emma D, who worried about her freckles, said all star queens would have skin bathed in the light of the Milky Way. And Emma B, who worried that she wasn’t very important, said everybody would have to look up to them if they were star queens.

And Sophie-Rose had said, “
Der
! Where else would they look?”

Even Emma B had laughed. That was the thing about Sophie-Rose. She was sharp but she was funny.

Maddy lifted her hands and framed the stars in her fingers. She wished she could put this sky in a box and take it with her. She moved the frame across the sky, catching the whole Milky Way.

She moved the frame down into the backyard.

There was a dark shape standing by the shed.

“Pumpkin, pumpkin,” sighed Dad. “What are you doing out here by yourself?”

He was standing in his train pyjamas with a sad face.

“Nothing,” said Maddy, coldly.

Dad sat down next to her. She was too big to lie on him any more. Only a week ago he’d told her to get off. He’d said she was big as a planet and would squash him into a black hole. She’d thought it funny then. But now it was different. It was like he
wanted
everything to change. Like he was happy about it.