Millie and the Night Heron

by Catherine Bateson

  Sarah, Nate and I had to wait until all the announcements were made and then Ms Farn called us forward.

  ‘We were lucky enough to have a visit yesterday from our local member of parliament, Ms Connor, who was so impressed with the projects done by Ms O’Grady’s Grade 7.1 that she personally selected three of the students to receive awards for their work.

  Grade 7.1 did projects on “My Environment” and Ms Connor said of the work of these three students that it was—and I’m quoting from an email she sent this morning—“original, inspiring and thoughtful”. Congratulations to Millie Childes, Sarah Reed and Nate Redfern. Please step forward, students, to receive your generous book vouchers donated by Ms Connor herself.’

  We had to file on to the stage, one by one, shake Ms Farn’s hand, get an envelope and then go off the stage again. My knees were shaking but it was good, too.

  ‘Twenty-five dollars!’ Nate said, ripping open his envelope. ‘Gee, that’s more than I got for my birthday. Pretty good prize, eh?’

  I looked at Nate. It was interesting that a boy was so excited by a book voucher.

  ‘What will you get, Millie?’ he asked.

  ‘A book on photography,’ I said. ‘That’s what I’ll get. Tom gave me a camera last night, a camera of my very own. A Pentax 35mm.’

  ‘How come you got that?’

  ‘For answering a question about a bird,’ I said.

  ‘But I think I really got it because I’m interested in photography.’

  ‘You’re into birds, too, aren’t you?’

  ‘I like them. What are you into?’

  ‘Bashing around the bush. I do that a bit. Mum and I belong to a bushwalking club. I do a bit of fishing, too, sometimes. Mum and I like that. You have to be very quiet, but. We go camping, too. We read a lot.’

  ‘Sounds like the kind of thing my mum and I do,’ I said, ‘except we aren’t bushwalkers.’

  ‘Well, we’re not particularly serious bushwalkers. We don’t do overnight hikes. Although Mum reckons we could if we wanted. I like to get out, look around. You know.’

  I did know what he meant. It sounded like it could be fun. You could certainly take a camera on a bushwalk. I thought I might mention it to Tom.

  ‘Can anyone...’ I started to say, just as Nate said, ‘Maybe you’d like...’ and we both apologised.

  Then Tom came up and the moment got lost. But that was okay, too, because Nate wasn’t the kind of boy, I didn’t think, to let a moment go forever or become distracted by a mobile phone game. Someone who fished couldn’t afford to get easily distracted.

  That night I enlarged a photograph of Tom to give to Mum as a present. Then we picked a couple and made them sepia-coloured, rather than black and white, which made them look old.

  ‘What are you giving Mum?’ I asked Tom.

  ‘Do you think I should get her something?’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘she won’t expect it or anything. I’m just giving her the photo because ... well, it’s really the first time she’s been away by herself for simply ages. And I want to surprise her. That’s all.’

  ‘I’d like to, too. What do you reckon she’d like?’

  ‘Flowers are always good.’

  ‘No, if I’m going to get a present, I want a proper Kate present.’

  ‘Earrings, then. She loves earrings.’

  ‘Gee, I don’t know, Millie. Earrings are kind of difficult.’

  ‘You wanted a Kate-present.’

  ‘I did, but I didn’t expect earrings to be the answer.’

  ‘Well, she wears them all the time,’ I told him. ‘She loves them, and Patrick has been the only other man to ever give them to her.’

  Tom looked at me and rolled his eyes. ‘That’s supposed to inspire me with confidence?’

  I shrugged. ‘Patrick’s a scientist,’ I said, ‘and you’re a photographer. I would have thought earrings would have been more a photographer thing than a scientist thing, but Patrick managed.’

  ‘Okay, here’s the deal—you come shopping with me for Kate’s earrings tomorrow morning and you can come to the airport with me. What do you say?’

  ‘You’re on! And can we get a photography book with my voucher, too?’

  In the end I needed Tom’s help more than he needed mine. He found Kate-earrings really easily. I had a hard job deciding between the photographic books but Tom found the one he recommended to his students so I used the voucher to put it on lay-by. It was the first time I’d put anything on lay-by and I was a bit worried I might lose the docket, but the woman behind the counter said it would be fine even if I did, because they had their own record.

  ‘I’m taking my camera to the airport,’ I told Tom. ‘I want to get a photo of Mum when she sees us.’

  ‘That’s a good idea. I take a camera almost everywhere, Millie. You never know what you might see.’

  I think people at the airport thought Mum was some kind of celebrity. Tom and I both took photos of her as she came through the gate. I took more while she and Tom kissed, which they did for so long I had time to focus properly. I would have felt really embarrassed by them hugging and kissing without my camera. The camera made me think of things other than Oh-my-god-that’s-my-mum- kissing-The-Boyfriend-at-the- airport-with-everyone-watching- them-I-could-just-die. The camera made me think, Wow! I like it that I can’t really see their faces. Then they become just two people at the airport, rather than Mum and Tom. And, Ooh, now I can see a bit of Mum’s face over his shoulder and I like the way her hand is on his back like that.

  We had a snack at the airport, which turned out to be a good thing. When we got home the first thing we saw was a rainbow-coloured Kombi van parked outside our house. There was a bright wreath of plastic flowers hanging on the tow bar and the number plate read ‘So funky’, which was also painted on the side.

  ‘Oh my god!’ Mum practically shouted, ‘it’s Sheri!’

  There they were, Sheri and Mitchell, sitting on our front doorstep.

  ‘You look gorgeous,’ Sheri said to Mum. ‘You look fantastic. Life here must suit you. I’m thinking of moving. I looked the TAFE up on the Net. They actually teach Textile Design. I’m a textile artist,’ she explained to Tom, who was looking confused, ‘and I could just hang around and do some markets while I waited for an opening. No, Kate, don’t look alarmed. I won’t be moving in. Just hanging around. My heart’s broken, that shameless rotter, so there’s nothing left for us back in Graystone. We might as well move to where our real family is – that’s what we thought, wasn’t it, Mitchell?’

  ‘I didn’t ever want to leave you guys,’ Mitchell whispered to me. ‘I didn’t like the way Brendan smiled with all his teeth but his eyes never crinkled up, you know, the way they should.’

  ‘I’ll never look at another man,’ Sheri declared.

  ‘Go on, Sheri, just because Brendan Trotter was...’

  ‘A complete arsehole. Sorry kids, but that’s the truth. I’m focusing on my career now. I’m going to expand my range. Do you like the van? I got it cheap. Mitchell helped paint it. I’m going to take up screen printing. It’s amazing what you can do with screen-printed fabric. Kate, you and Millie can be my walking advertisements. I might even do some men’s shirts, very groovy subversive ones, screen-printed. Tom, how would you feel about wearing ‘So funky’s’ new line of shirts around town?’

  ‘I’d be honoured,’ Tom said, which was exactly the right thing to say and Mum, Sheri and I all beamed at him.

  ‘He’s a keeper,’ Sheri said, ‘unlike Brendan, who was a loser. And, Mitchell, I don’t mean that in the way you kids at school use the word. I mean he was someone I needed to lose. I think this deserves champagne. Now Kate, I know you’ve just got back from Sydney or wherever you were, so what I suggest is that we all toast to Life and Recovery from Twelve Step Programs and then Mitchell and I will s
tay here tonight with Millie and you and Tom can go off and be romantic at his place.’

  ‘Well,’ Mum said, looking helpless, ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘It’s a great idea,’ Tom said and got a further smile from Sheri.

  ‘I think this could be our kind of town,’ she said. ‘Not too far from Mitchell’s dad, a fresh start for us, but most importantly back with Kate and Millie, our family—oh, and Tom, too, of course.’

  ‘A toast to the families you make,’ Mum said. ‘And welcome home, Sheri.’

  After Mum and Tom left, Mitchell and I made up a bed for him in the study.

  ‘You’re lucky,’ Mitchell said, putting a pillowcase on the pillow, ‘Tom’s eyes really crinkle. Hey, do you know what Mum did to Pig’s Trotter? She went into his office, at home, you know, where he kept all his stuff – client reports and accounts and everything – and she pulled everything out and put it back all wrong.’

  ‘I rearranged things for him,’ Sheri said, appearing at the door. ‘It was a mean and horrible thing to do but he deserved it. I was particularly messy with his accounts. It will take him days to sort it all out and it’s GST time looming, which he hated anyway. I’m not normally into revenge, but honestly, Millie, he was such a lying user. I had to do something, otherwise my rage would have spilled over and on to the innocent.’

  ‘You just broke into his office?’

  ‘It wasn’t locked so I didn’t break in.’

  ‘Couldn’t he call in the police?’

  ‘What, and say that the woman he was living with and cheating on had rearranged all his personal files so he couldn’t find anything? He’d look too big a fool.’

  ‘She went around to the other woman’s house, too,’ Mitchell said. ‘She was awesome.’

  ‘She had to know,’ Sheri said calmly. ‘I just told her exactly what Brendan had been saying and promising to me. Turned out he’d been saying the same things to her. She didn’t take it too well, either.’

  ‘I wish I had seen you do it.’ I said.

  ‘Oh no, baby.’ Sheri hugged me. She smelled of roses and vanilla. She always did. It was a completely different scent to the one Mum wore but just as swoony. ‘I don’t think you want to see that kind of thing. Better that you see people loving and respectful of each other, the way your mum and Tom are together. That’s what you should be seeing, not the wild acts of wronged women.’

  ‘That’s such a cool thing to say, Sheri – it’s like poetry. The wild acts of wronged women. Do you mind if I write that down in my journal?’

  My brand new journal was very thick and had a great cover, red with bright polka spots all over it. Inside it Mum had drawn a funny picture of me and underneath it she had written:

  To Millie, hoping that the entries in this book are filled with joy and delight. Please note that I bought an unlined book, because I thought you might like to stick some photos in, too, now that you are a photographer.

  lots of love, Mum.

  I hadn’t thought of photographs, not in my journal. But I could see what she meant. It was a brand new book, waiting just for me.

  I both love and hate that moment when you begin to write in a new journal. This book felt almost too beautiful to write in. I found my best pen. It was an actual fountain pen Mum had used when she was around my age. It even had her name engraved along the side, in silver.

  I wanted to do something really special in my new journal, something that would make the person who read it in the future say to themselves, ‘What a girl that Millie must have been’.

  So on the first page I wrote a heading: ‘Things I’ve Learnt This Year’, and then I sucked the end of the pen for a little while thinking, before I started writing my most important list to date:

  It’s useful to see how a person smiles. Mitchell is right – all teeth and no eye-crinkles is shallow and phony.

  You do make families, and mine can only get bigger, just as it has this year with Tom and Helen-and-Sarah-and-Rachel, who might not all stay in it forever the way Sheri and Mum have but are there for the next little while anyway.

  You can get over your heart breaking.

  The wild acts of wronged women might help but...

  It still hurts like billyo – and it is better to be a kookaburra and mate for life, no matter what Tom says.

  I, Millie Childes, am an individual and although I get it wrong sometimes (see references to Rowan, previously known as in my earlier journal), I also get it right sometimes.

  When you look at the world from behind a camera lens you see it a little differently, as though it is already framed somehow and really pieces of light and shade ... which, when you think about it, might not be a bad way to look at the world.

  First published 2005 by University of Queensland Press

  PO Box 6042, St Lucia, Queensland 4067 Australia

  This digital edition published 2014

  www.uqp.com.au

  uqp@uqp.uq.edu.au

  © Catherine Bateson 2005

  This book is copyright. Except for private study, research, criticism or reviews, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written permission. Enquiries should be made to the publisher.

  Typeset by University of Queensland Press

  Printed in Australia by McPherson's Printing Group

  Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  National Library of Australia

  Bateson, Catherine.

  Millie and the Night Heron.

  For primary school students.

  I. Title.

  A823.4

  ISBN

  978 0 7022 3526 1 (pbk)

  978 0 7022 4176 5 (epdf)

  978 0 7022 4179 6 (epub)

  978 0 7022 4177 2 (Kindle)