A Lifetime of Impossible Days

by Tabitha Bird

  ‘No. They are very lost.’ I make another note. 18. Find something.

  Eden peers over the top of my notebook. ‘Hmmm … perhaps it’s not too late to be a Viking.’

  ‘Eden, did you want to be a Viking?’

  She’s walking away now. Off to do things. Not important things, like making a crown out of newspaper. From the kitchen she’s talking about how Eli told her about breakthroughs in astronomy and understanding origins because of something called the James Webb Space Telescope the Fifth.

  ‘We can see the first galaxies of the universe. Millions of stars have already been mapped –’ Something else, she’s saying. Her words get mixed up with the kettle boiling.

  I think about stars. Giant dot-to-dot pictures in the sky. Are they counted and named also? That’s some kind of magic job. Star pictures with names all mapped out. Then I remember other things that happened that night with my father, things I will not think of, and my stomach forms a tight fist inside me.

  ‘I want to walk on the moon.’ I don’t think she hears me. ‘And name a star.’

  When the kettle has finished boiling, Eden says I can’t simply name a star. But surely anyone can name stars? If I discovered one, I would name it Lottie.

  I pull myself up by my walker handles and go hunting for newspaper. Never too old to go hunting.

  Someone’s banging around in the kitchen.

  ‘I once climbed the mango tree and wore a paper crown. Hear that, wall?’

  ‘Are you talking to me? Because we do need to talk,’ a woman says from the kitchen.

  ‘Oh, do let’s. People don’t talk enough these days. I like talking to the folk who live in faraway trees.’

  ‘Could we talk about nursing homes?’ A spoon stirs. A cup tinks.

  ‘No. All the boxes are in the ocean and I’m enjoying talking to the wall. Who are you again, dear?’

  ‘Eden, your daughter!’ she calls out from the kitchen.

  I curve a newspaper around my head. Should fit nicely.

  Eden walks into the room carrying a food tray. ‘You won’t talk about nursing homes. You will talk to the wall. Fantastic. Why are you talking to the wall?’

  ‘There are little girls in my tree and I have to find something.’

  ‘That withered mango thing that hasn’t produced fruit in years?’

  ‘Yes!’

  ‘I doubt anyone is in that tree.’ She places the tray on my side table and goes back into the kitchen.

  Eden asks strange questions, and I was busy doing something. Oh, scissors. I have a drawer full. Silver handled, plastic striped, coloured metal. Never met a pair of scissors I didn’t like. There’s a paper thing in my hand. A snip here, a clever cut there.

  Eden suppresses a giggle when she returns. She sets the milk jug on the tray. For some reason I think we once made Viking forts out of blankets. ‘What’s on your head now?’ she asks.

  ‘A crown. I knew a girl who made them. Do you wear one?’

  She rolls her eyes. ‘I’m a bit old for that now.’

  ‘How can you be too old for a crown? When I was a girl the Queen of England wore one.’

  She guides me back to my chair, handing me a plate.

  ‘Oh, no – I’ll be having jam drop biscuits for lunch today.’ I swipe at the plate and it crashes to the floor.

  Eden stands, hands on hips. ‘Honestly, Mum, what’s with you today? Looking for stars, eating biscuits for lunch. Not knowing who I am.’

  ‘Wearing crowns,’ I snap. ‘Being too old for wearing crowns.’

  She turns away, but I bet she’s rolling her eyes. I try to roll mine, too.

  Moments later she returns with another plate and a cup of mint tea. ‘Eat the tomatoes on toast while they’re warm.’

  ‘Food at last. I was getting hungry.’

  Eden begins the business of striding about, picking up armfuls of things. She’s not taking them away, though; I’m not going to let her. There’s a song about cleaning up time. Clean up, clean up, we’ve had fun today. Clean up, clean up, we’re glad you came to play. I don’t like that song.

  Finally, Eden pauses her striding. ‘May I have a closer look?’

  ‘At what, dear?’

  She untangles the play glasses from my hair. Glitter all over her fingers.

  ‘Where did they come from?’ I ask.

  ‘I don’t know. You had them on your head when I came in.’

  ‘Did I? Could you close some curtains? Someone opened them, and the light makes my nose itch.’

  Sipping mint tea would be pleasant, except Eden doesn’t have a cup. One thing about cups of tea: they can be forlorn things if sipped alone. There’s a reason they say ‘tea for two’. It should state on the side of the packet, To be taken in company only. Best had on beach picnics with dunked biscuits.

  ‘Do you eat jam drops, Eden?’

  She’s searching for something. ‘What? Have you seen my bag?’

  ‘No, but people steal my things around here all the time.’

  I put my tea down. It will die cold because I won’t pick it up again. ‘Would you read to me?’

  Her kiss on my cheek is a flighty thing that doesn’t want to stay where it’s landed. She is going somewhere. I used to have places to go. Maybe I should start striding about, too. A walker probably isn’t helpful for striding. Muddling? I could muddle.

  ‘So, I’ll come by this evening. We’ll discuss nursing homes and have a shower, okay?’

  ‘Plastic-Sheet Homes,’ I mumble, then put my hand up.

  ‘Mum, it’s not school. What do you want to say?’

  Words are floating about inside me, uncaught. ‘Stay, tell stories and have biscuits with me?’ I don’t think those are the words I wanted to catch.

  Eden folds her arms, accentuating her hard angles. Clothes draped over shoulders as if from a coathanger. There are lines covering her face. Wrinkles on an incoming tide. The strangeness of your own child becoming old.

  ‘There are no biscuits.’ If she were little, she would have stamped her foot as she said it.

  A smile overcomes me.

  ‘No. Now listen,’ she says in mock seriousness, ‘I’ve left some more food in the fridge in case you get hungry. You always like pumpkin soup cold, so don’t use the oven. Definitely no cooking. Promise?’ She over-pronounces her speech in the last part, her mouth forming words as if she were conversing under water. I might pretend I can’t hear so I can watch her do these fish faces.

  I’m not going to promise about the cooking. Lamingtons, Anzac biscuits, jam drops: it’s not so hard. Eggs, flour … eggs. Chocolate to roll the lamington cake squares in and coconut to sprinkle on top. Oats for the Anzac biscuits, an Australian recipe dating back from war times. Surely it wasn’t so bad last time I cooked. Eden worries too much.

  ‘Pinkie promise.’ I raise my little finger.

  She sighs. ‘You need a hobby. Some friends. Wouldn’t you enjoy playing mahjong? Please, at least look at the nursing home brochures. Honestly, they are lovely places these days.’ She pulls the rug over my knees, straightens my crown and steps back to look at me.

  Would this be the right time to tell her that I have cut people shapes out of the nursing home papers? Cute people, too, all linking hands.

  ‘Don’t tuck me up. It makes me feel old, and I’m never going to be old. I can’t imagine it.’

  ‘Yes, I know,’ she says. ‘But someone has to.’

  When she leaves, I see she has purple boots on.

  ‘I like your boots. Where did you get them?’

  I’m trying to tell her about gumboots and how I wore them in the backyard when she closes the door.

  ‘Come back!’ I say to the empty room.

  How do I keep Eden in one place and why won’t she talk about Sebastian? Something is very wrong, but before I can think what it is Marta comes on the radio. Katie told me that the antique radio I once owned went the way of the dodo bird. Local broadcasts now do something called ‘streaming int
o the house’, and all we have to say is ‘Radio on’.

  Marta reads the for-sale notices in one breath. ‘Belted Galloways for sale, ranging in ages from ten to fifteen months, all in good health, can deliver for cost.’

  I wonder what Belted Galloways are. Marta says I’ll be very pleased when I call in to order one. They were raised on Mr Jayberry’s Farm.

  Marta also grows potatoes. She reads a recipe for potato-and-pumpkin soup. With a touch of umudike ginger, the name of some newfangled, genetically modified ginger, blah, blah – I wouldn’t cook with it. Maybe I’ll bake something. Jam drops? Was that what I needed to do?

  I look about the room for clues and a paper crown falls from the top of my head. Peacock feathers are necessary additions to crowns. Everyone knows this. Only, where would I find one? A kookaburra outside laughs. Of course. Outside. Where the peacocks are.

  I plod through the living room, the kitchen, across the deck, and by the ramp I pause. There’s sand everywhere. Honestly, who would leave that around for an old lady to slip on?

  When I reach the front door, it’s better. No sand, but there are steps. Only steps, but they stare at me, pure evil. If I went sideways, perhaps I would make it down. Hang on a minute. Where am I going?

  I grasp the doorjamb. The answer will come to me. Another minute. Another. No – nothing.

  When I was younger, powerlines crisscrossed from house to house, reaching from pole to pole and tin roof to tin roof up our hill. A brush-tailed possum got into the transistor once and blew it up. There was a blackout right through town. Good thing for possum-kind that power now comes from that nuclear-thingamy-fusion thing. What am I doing at the front door of my house?

  I clutch my walker and go back in. My belly rumbles. Eden said something about pumpkin soup. Was that today? What day is it today?

  I see the strawberry jam jar in the living room is empty, but I have this overwhelming urge to bake jam drops. Before things began changing and my Eden arrived, Katie said I made her bake them every Monday. But Katie’s gone now and something inside me says I must bake them, especially now I have Eden.

  I make jam drops without the jam. Little lumps of dough that I can’t get off my hands, so they stay there. My old oven is still here, bless its dinosaur soul, but the dial has numbers that all blend together. So I guess. About medium-high. The tray has lots of doughy lumps in rows. They know they won’t ever be biscuits, and we are all okay with that in my kitchen. I’m not supposed to cook, but jam drops aren’t really cooking. They’re more baking. Cooking is something my mother did with roast lamb and Yorkshire puddings and gravy made from meat drippings. Now that is cooking. Proper English style. Jam drops – now, anyone can make jam drops.

  The radio crackles. Jan. Short for Janet? Janice? She doesn’t say. It’s plain Jan. She probably reads the weather updates with rollers in her hair and an apron on.

  There’s something sticky all over my shirt that smells like cookie dough. What’s the stuff on my hands? I lick it. Tastes good. I recline in my chair. My bones creak with the floorboards. That’s good, I think, means I’m still making noise. Super Gumboots Willa loved jam drops. She should come over and we’ll do cooking.

  I grab the paper pad on my side table.

  Dear me,

  Come and bake with me. Please? Eden wants to send me to the Plastic-Sheet Home and I think I’ve lost someone.

  From me.

  Oh, that’s it. I haven’t lost something. I’ve lost someone. I read number nine on my list.

  9. I am Middle Willa, too. I left Sam. It happened at night.

  The mango tree. Super Gumboots Willa will find my letter there and maybe she can help me find Middle Willa so I can ask her.

  In my notebook, I cross out the first instance of Find something and write next to it, Find someone. I cannot leave this house now. People are missing.

  Number three says: Find Super Gumboots Willa.

  Beside that I add: Ask her to help me find Middle Willa. Something happened to Sebastian.

  A clock ticks on the living-room wall. Time is the sort of thing I’m becoming afraid of. It ticks and tocks and cuckoos, but it doesn’t tell me about myself. Time is thick and foggy, hiding memories of who I am and what I did.

  I put my notebook away and smell the air. There’s a waft of smoke, thin and tangling about the room. It can’t be, though. I’m not allowed to cook.

  Chapter Sixteen

  1965

  Willa Waters, aged 8

  ‘Lottie, this is the best thing ever!’ She went through the ocean-garden to someplace else and now Mummy can come through, too. I’ve thought a lot about pushing Daddy through the garden, but I don’t think us girls could manage it. There’s a lot of Daddy when he gets really mad. I decide that the ocean-garden will be a bit like a cubby hole. Somewhere we can run into and hide until all the steam in Daddy’s brains cools down.

  I hold Lottie’s hand and we jump about like mad bananas. She doesn’t even know why she’s jumping about, but that’s okay. I have a plan. A Wonderful-Best-Ocean-Garden-Plan.

  This afternoon is quiet after the woman and her little boys leave. I was scared to see her again, the same woman I saw earlier in the day when her boy almost tripped down the front steps of her house. We screamed when we saw each other this time, but then she ran out past the rocky edge of the garden.

  When everything goes quiet we creep down from the mango tree and build a sandcastle with six shells on top. Lottie digs a tunnel from one side and I dig from the other until our fingers touch in the middle. Frog digs holes, sand all through her fur, and I cover her in dry seaweed. My own sea creature. Lottie claps.

  The sky is washing away: that’s what Grammy says happens at the end of a day. A washing sky. The day doing its laundry. Changing sheets ready for night, ready for the garden to open. Frog Dog stands beside me at the bottom of the mango tree. Lottie squeezes my hand. I’m going to show her how the magic works. Then, when Daddy gets home from work, the garden will be all ready for us to escape.

  I tell Lottie to close her eyes, because that’s how it has to be. You can’t water the garden with your eyes open willy-nilly. At first, it’s all dry sand, herbs growing through, and lavender and Daddy’s mown-down grass outside the rocky edges. But I know something will happen. My mouth starts to water and there’s a hum in the air. I open the jam jar and I can hear the sound of the ocean.

  ‘What ya makin’ holes for?’ Lottie wipes the back of her hand across her nose.

  ‘Close your eyes.’

  ‘Why do you need a jam jar?’

  ‘Lottie, just close your eyes!’

  ‘We didn’t have to do this when the old lady came into the garden.’ She pouts.

  ‘Yeah, that’s ’cause she musta watered it already. Do you wanna see the ocean grow or not?’

  ‘How do you know it’s gonna grow anyways?’

  ‘’Cause I’m eight and you’re only four.’ I poke her in the tummy. ‘And because I just do.’

  She closes her eyes, but I know she’s peeking. Water dribbles from the jar and I step back.

  My fingers tingle again and I squeeze Lottie’s hand.

  ‘Shh!’

  Lottie’s not especially good at being shushed. Four-year-olds have noisy feet and ask too many questions. And I hear her wiping snot with the back of her hand.

  The cold air turns warm and smells like jam drops and mint tea.

  Lottie pulls at my cowboy pants. Frog Dog whines.

  ‘I can’t see nuffing!’

  ‘Wait then, silly-billy.’

  The mango tree stands taller, untwists her branches and flicks her leaves. Below us a bubbling sound comes from the ground. The ocean breaks through the surface in spurts. A slow trickle and then gentle waves that tickle our feet, but don’t wet us. Cloud-waves that only wet the sand.

  Lottie’s mouth drops open.

  ‘Amaze-a-loo,’ I whisper.

  ‘Amaze-a-loo,’ she copies. Her eyes so big.

 
White papers flutter down from the branches, and we watch bug-eyed as they fold themselves into paper boats sailing on the cloud-waves. For once, Lottie is quiet. No questions, only pointing fingers and a goofy look.

  The first paper boat stops in front of Lottie’s foot and pops, disappearing, leaving sparkles as if a unicorn did a fart in the air.

  ‘More, more!’ Lottie claps. Frog Dog runs after the boats, wagging her tail.

  Popping boats everywhere. We run through them, laughing. Below, crabs with blue bodies skitter about nipping each other, fish flip-flop through the cloud-waves, and lighthouses made of paper, with tiny glowing lights inside, hang like lanterns in the branches. Bird shapes appear in the tree, flapping and squawking. Seagulls hang out with pelicans. Chatting about the mermaid parties they’ve been to and what the lobster said to the sea snail. We take off our shoes and wiggle our toes in the wet sand.

  Lottie’s arms are out, she’s spinning around, until something moves underneath us.

  ‘Lottie, step back. Watch.’

  The ocean-garden grows. Tiny plants with blue leaves pop up. Coral with faces and seaweed that waves its hands in the air. Sea-snail trails in gold and silver, and water puddles. And us, laughing. We are having so much fun I don’t even rush off to get Mummy.

  I pluck a bottle of bubbles now growing on the tree and blow them in Lottie’s face. Her snapping hands eat them. She yells, ‘Frillies!’

  The garden is suddenly full of goannas and frilled-neck lizards. It’s funny seeing them run sideways through the sand leaving marks like crabs, but further apart. Lottie usually screams when the frills around their necks stand up. Tonight she skips after them in the sand, trying to pat their backs. They’re only lizards though, not eastern browns. Around Boonah the worst snakes are eastern browns. If you see one you should freeze and then back away slowly. No one tells you what to do if you live with one, though.

  I pretend my hand is a frilly. ‘If I catch you, I’ll eat you.’

  Lottie squeals. We tear through the garden, both silly nuts. Frog Dog wobbling after us with her belly swinging from side to side.

  ‘Run to the seaweed! You’ll be safe from frillies there.’ Giggling, I drop my snapping jaws. We roll and bumble, seaweed in our hair. Holding hands and puffing, a dot and a dash in the afternoon. I’m the dot, she’s the dash. We’re the little marks on the story page. I fill up the jam jar from the garden hose and water the garden again. Don’t want the sand drying out.