Plenty (8 page)

So Maddy said all right.

They went into Wilam and past the school. Grace made straight for the milk bar, but just before they reached it, she turned. There was a lane hidden between the shops that was thick with blackberry. When Grace pulled the heavy canes aside though, Maddy stopped. The lane was more a track and would lead them out of Wilam. It would lead them away from the town and deep into the bush – deep into the grey scrub and dirty light. She couldn’t see or hear any creek. She didn’t want to go any further.

But Grace was holding back the blackberry and waiting. Her expectant face looked through the thorns. Maddy stepped through the gap and onto the track. The old sneakers curved like kayaks, and her feet slipped around inside them.

There was some low scrub. Then a few tall trees casting shadows. Then the white gums were swaying overhead and there was more shadow than light. And then all around them were she-oaks and red gums. The sharp smell was everywhere.

She was in the bush.

Straightaway Maddy thought of everything that might go wrong. The gums that might drop branches. The dry leaves that might catch and burn. The black stubs of Mount Disappointment. She stopped moving. Her legs felt rooted to the ground like she was one of the trees.

She really,
really
didn’t want to go any further.

But ahead, inside a ring of paperbarks, Grace was waiting for her again. The bark was hanging in strips, making rough curtains. Grace was parting the white strips and silver light was falling on her face, on the beads in her hair and on her ear hoops. She was glittering in the shadows – saying, “Come on!”

Maddy stepped into the ring.

“Ants,” said Grace, pointing.

There was an ants’ nest. It rose tall as Grace, a clay mountain in the middle of the paperbarks. The nest was swarming. The ants were moving in and out, tracking a single dark line into the scrub. They left the nest empty and came home loaded with beetles, seeds, small grasshoppers. A piece of worm. A corner of leaf. They were unstoppable, marching over whatever lay in their path.

“What is that?” Maddy said, kneeling to look closer at one ant. “Is that a
biscuit
?”

The ant was struggling under a crumb ten times its own size. And the following ants were doing the same. In fact, the ants themselves couldn’t be seen. Now there was only this line of crumbs emerging from the deep bush.

It was so hot. The air was thickening. The leaves were curling. Maddy considered the track. Imagined the creek. She took a couple of steps through the paperbark ring. A couple of steps more towards Grace.

And that’s when she saw the greenhoods.

There were so many. Glowing green in the blue shade. Poking fresh through dead leaves and dry moss. In the warm breeze their heavy hoods nodding and nodding.

In the week tending the greenhouse, it had never occurred to Maddy that she would see orchids growing wild like this. The way Nana talked, she’d thought that seeing an indigenous orchid would be something like seeing a griffin or a basilisk. But then she remembered. Greenhoods were not like some of the indigenous orchids. They were okay. They still survived.

Something about the new leaves and hoods made Maddy’s jaw ache and her eyes fill with tears. She kneeled in the dirt. She raked at the dead leaves around the orchid’s roots. But Grace touched her hand.

“I think we should leave them,” she said. “Remember what the orchid website said. About disturbing their habitats.”

Maddy lay eye level with the orchids, and Grace lay on the other side. They grinned at each other through the greenhoods. Maddy grinned because of the greenhoods. And Grace grinned because that’s what she always did.

And then Maddy felt it. Twitches and tics. Tiny fires all over.

“Ow,” said Maddy. “Ow, ow, ow!”

She jumped up, dancing, kicking at nothing. She kicked until her sneakers flew off. Her first thought was of fire. She looked up into the trees, expecting embers. But she just had lain across the ant trail.

Ants won’t change their trail for anything, even huge girls lying right across it. While Maddy lay by the greenhoods, they had been tracking thick over her legs and ankles. They’d filled the kayak sneakers, and now were stinging even between her toes.

And Grace was jumping too. She was skipping around the ring, half-dancing and flip-footed. Laughing. They were slapping their own legs and then each others’, screeching like cockatoos, sweating and panting.

When it was over the whole paperbark ring smelled of squashed ants.

There was no question of going back now. The end of this track meant the end of sweat rash and biting ants. It meant cool water.

The track led them down into a gully where the thick paperbarks flapped their white bark like sails. When Maddy looked, there were no houses to be seen. There was only the heat, the creak of the gums and the smell.

And the ants still trailing alongside, carrying the crumbs.

At last Grace said they were nearly there. Maddy said good. Then Grace asked if she could hear it.

And Maddy said yes.

She didn’t know how she hadn’t heard it before. The bush was filled with it: the sound of water washing over stone – the sound of coolness. And as the track opened on the creek, she smelled it too. The smell of fresh water and clean sand – the smell of coolness.

Then she saw the crowd on the sandbar. She hadn’t heard them and there was a reason. The crowd was silent.

Everybody was just standing there, still as the rivergums.

Everybody crowding in a curve, turning towards the creek.

There was a rope still swinging, empty, slow, over the water.

There was a pile of lamingtons being carried off by ants.

And there was Nana Mad in nothing but her slip, up to her knees in the creek.

Nana Mad was in the creek with her back to the sandbank. Her white hair glowed silver in the redgum shadows – and she was singing. As Maddy stood wondering what to do, Nana’s thin voice suddenly pierced the thick heat and warbled even above the birdsong. Her song was full of strange trills, swoops and drops. Some teenagers started to copy the sound of her song – and then everybody on the sandbank was laughing. When she heard them laughing, Nana stopped singing.

She turned and saw the people laughing. She tried to smile. Then she rocked on her knees and sat down hard in the water. Her eyes blinked around the crowd like a child who thought she might be in trouble.

And then she saw Maddy.

“
Koukla
,” she called, trying to get up. “Come here.”

There was something wrong with Nana. Her hands were gripping the air. They flapped at her sides like she’d forgotten what to do with them – forgotten how to get up. The people on the sandbank had stopped laughing and gone back to their normal day.

Maddy’s chest filled with an ache. The look on Nana’s face both scared and pulled at her heart. She didn’t know what to do. But Grace had gone ahead, splashing straight down into the water, so Maddy followed. Nana Mad was hers, not Grace’s.

They waded out into the middle of the creek, moving quickly from sunlight into the shadows. The creek bed grew slippery with silky mud and stones. In the middle, they held hands to keep steady, but they still fell and when one did the other did. Nana watched them come with her hands in her lap. When they reached her, she said
hello
like they’d come for tea.

Maddy and Grace tried to lift her from the creek bed, but each time they overbalanced. In the end, by burying their feet deep in the mud, gripping one elbow each and heaving, they got Nana first onto her knees, then onto her legs and then walking. Dripping and panting, they led her out of the creek and back onto the sandbar.

Her clothes were in a pile near the mess left by the ants.

“
Elenaki
,” Nana said, combing Maddy’s hair back from her face with her fingers. “Look at you. Brush your hair.”

She said the name with drawn-out vowels and a big roll at the back of her throat.
Kkhh-eh-lay-nah-khi
. That’s why Maddy didn’t understand at first.

“Who’s Elenaki?” she asked.

Nana laughed, covering her mouth with her hand, like it was some big joke.

Dressing Nana was like dressing a doll. Her arms bent too easily or not at all. She’d worn gumboots without socks and now one of her damp feet was stuck. Through the whole fuss all she wanted was to pet Maddy and call her Elenaki and
koukla
.

“Promise,” Nana Mad said, shaking Maddy’s arm. “You won’t go away.”

“No,” said Maddy. It seemed the right thing to say. “I won’t.”

At last Nana’s foot slid into the gumboot, and Maddy and Grace led her back along the Wilam track. Sometimes Nana wouldn’t lift her feet and seemed confused about what they were for. They had to clear the path of its thick bark ribbons or she just walked right into them and fell over.

When her parents had said that Nana was forgetting things lately, Maddy had thought they meant people’s names or where she put her purse – things like that. She had never imagined this kind of forgetting. She wondered if Nana would forget what other parts of her body were for. She wondered if Nana would forget to breathe.

She didn’t know what she would do if that happened.

But as they walked, Nana Mad turned to Maddy as though Maddy had the answers to all the questions she couldn’t remember. The trust in Nana’s face made Maddy proud somehow. She took Nana’s arm with a stronger grip and stood taller so her grandmother could lean heavier.

Like she’d seen Nana lean on Mum.

And then she realised.

“It’s
Ellen
,” she whispered to Grace. “
Elenaki
. It’s Ellen. She thinks I’m Mum.”

They went further. Nana grew quieter. She started eyeing Grace Wek. By the greenhoods she stopped. There was a cool wind stirring and the smell of rain. Nana stepped behind Maddy.

“Who are you?” she asked Grace with suspicion.

“It’s just Grace, Mrs Spyrou,” said Grace.

Lots of people would have been scared when Nana Mad went mad for real. Not Grace. Grace kept talking in this soft, light voice like she hadn’t noticed anything. Her hands moved as she talked, and sometimes her long fingers accidentally brushed against Nana’s hand. Nana was hypnotised by the soft voice and her eyes followed Grace’s circling hands like they were faraway birds – and then she let herself be led quietly home.

Nana had left her house wide open and the gas stove still burning. The kitchen ceiling was spotted with slow circling blowflies. Sometime in the morning she had got up and walked out.

Maddy turned off the gas and rang Mum. There was a pause and Mum said she’d be right there.

By now Nana was a bit better. She remembered Maddy, and knew her house.

But she was still confused about Grace. She stared.

“You’re a black one!” Nana said, peering into Grace’s face. “A dark horse, eh?”

Maddy felt herself flush to the soles of her feet. Her parents always said never –
never ever
– mention a person’s skin colour. It was
rude
and it was
never necessary
. Nana hadn’t heard that rule.

But Grace snorted like a horse, and it made Nana giggle.

“It’s just me,” Grace told her again.

“I have a horse in Cyprus,” Nana told Grace then, like it was important. “In the morning she put her face in my window. Like an alarm clock.”

“Lucky,” said Grace. “I’d love a horse.”

“I was lucky then,” Nana said. “Really, really. The horse was black. Her breath smell like apples. She come when I call, like a dog. Her mane was long, long. Down to the ground.”

Nana’s hair was stuck to her face like seaweed and she was wrestling her feet out of her gumboots.

“My feet,” she said and flopped back. She was almost crying.

“Here, Nana,” said Maddy and bent to tug off the sticky boots.

“The soldiers took her,” Nana whispered to Maddy.

Outside, there was a faint squeal of tyres and the sound of breaking gnomes. Moments later Maddy’s mother rushed in. Nana’s eyes snapped opened.

“I’m here, I’m here,” Maddy’s mother said and sat gently next to Nana.