Little Wing

by Joanne Horniman

  Having you with me makes me greedy for life – more greedy even than i used to be. i want Everything. Nothing less than Everything will be enough. Not just for now, but for the whole of my life.

  6

  Her mother rang.

  Charlotte took the call. She signalled to Emily, but Emily shook her head and went outside to get away from the conversation. It was very early spring, and the earth was still cool. Blossoms had struck out bravely, only to be withered by blasts of cold.

  Two little girls played in the garden next door. They had constructed a cubby with a blanket nailed to the fence. Emily peered surreptitiously through the palings. The children had tiny plastic plates filled with grass and flowers, and small cups of water. Four dolls sat obediently in a circle. Two pairs of small human hands ministered to them. Their voices floated through the fence, piping and childish.

  Then they noticed her watching them, and ran inside.

  Charlotte came out and hesitated under the clothesline. ‘I wish you’d spoken to her, Emily. She means well.’

  But Emily had slammed out of the garden, her feet pounding along the path.

  Martin took one look at her face and suggested that they go for a walk. Emily had come without dressing for the weather, so he found her a jacket. Again, she wore the wool scarf from the peg in the hall, and Cat’s rainbow hat, and Pete didn’t object this time. He was like a puppy, eager to be off.

  In the park Pete ran around and around in circles, his feet scattering pigeons. Martin chased him, veering off at one point to run over to where Emily leaned against a tree. He tried to pull her out to join them.

  ‘Bet you can’t catch me, Emmy!’ Pete yelled.

  Emily’s heart wasn’t in it (she had no heart), and her legs were heavy and reluctant. But by the time Martin and Pete had collapsed on the ground, and Emily came panting up to them, she was surprised to find a faint purring in her chest, a few bubbles of air that made her remember what her life had once been like.

  She waited on the grass while Martin and Pete went to the shop in the street opposite to buy iceblocks, and she and Martin sat on the grass to eat theirs while Pete went off to the sandpit to play. He sang to himself, and laughed. Emily noticed how many times in a day Pete laughed – he was always finding something to delight him. Grown-up people laughed very rarely. It was a long time since Emily herself had laughed at anything at all.

  ‘Can’t you talk to me, Emily?’ said Martin. ‘I might be able to help.’

  But she shook her head.

  ‘Smile, then.’

  Emily turned up the corners of her mouth.

  When Pete ran over and said, ‘Emily, what’s the most delicious icecream flavour you can think of?’, she replied with a show of energy, ‘Vegemite! What’s yours?’

  ‘Broccoli,’ he said, entering into the game. ‘Guess what flavour Cat would like?’

  She shrugged.

  ‘Sardine!’ he said, and ran away, laughing.

  It’s done! My parents know about you, and of course they say we’re too young. My mother (my father just sits there looking stunned and sad) thinks i should have you adopted.

  i will never let you go.

  7

  One day Emily stood in the doorway to the kitchen while Charlotte brewed up rosehip tea.

  ‘I’m adopted, aren’t I?’ she said accusingly.

  The lid of the small china teapot made a chinking sound.

  ‘Emily! Whatever makes you say that?’

  ‘I am, aren’t I?’

  Charlotte came over to her. She put both arms round Emily.

  ‘No. No you’re not. You’re definitely not adopted. I should know – I saw your mother when she was pregnant, and I was there just after you were born. Why on earth do you think that?’

  ‘Oh. Just because. Because she was so old when she had me. And because she didn’t have any other children.’

  Emily’s mother was years older than the other mothers of people her age. Sometimes she was mistaken for Emily’s grandmother. She and Charlotte had been at school together, but Charlotte’s children were all in their thirties, all with husbands or wives and good jobs, having countless children between them.

  ‘She wanted a child for years. And when you came along at last when she was well past forty, it seemed like a miracle. You’ve no idea how much you were wanted, Emily.’

  ‘So why didn’t she want my baby?’ said Emily bitterly, shaking Charlotte away and going to the window where she started fiddling with the coloured glass bottles on the sill. She knocked against a deep blue one; it fell onto the floor and shattered.

  Emily walked immediately out of the house.

  She walked, unseeing, through the streets until she came to the edge of the town. It perched above a tossing sea of trees. Out there, the birds were held aloft at eye-level in the wind.

  She walked away from the lookout, her head down. But even in her anger and misery she noticed the yellow flowers. There was a scattering of them in the rocky patches near the cliffs, and in the back streets. They flourished in all the unpromising dry places where flowers oughtn’t to be. Emily bent to pick one, and then another. Some had yellow petals and maroon centres; she didn’t know what they were called. Others – also yellow, she recognised them as dandelions – were weeds. All the flowers she was picking were just weeds. In a damper patch she discovered a clump of buttercups.

  Soon her hands were full of bright yellow flowers, and Emily stood, uncertain of what to do with them. She kept walking and came to Martin’s house, where the front door stood ever open.

  She went up the front steps and left the bunch of flowers on the front doormat.

  So here we are among clouds. We live close to the sky, on a high hill. You won’t remember that some of the first months of your life (because even though you’re not yet born, i can feel you kicking) were spent in a small caravan close to the clouds and the stars. We are close to the weather here. We are the first to feel drops of rain. The moon lights up our bed at night. In the mornings the new sun slants through the open doorway, and the light is pink and gold.

  8

  ‘Someone left me flowers!’ said Martin.

  ‘They’re just weeds,’ said Emily, quietly.

  ‘But pretty ones. Calliopsis, and dandelions.’

  She’d trailed after him into the kitchen where the flowers stood on the kitchen table in a sky-blue vase.

  Martin never expressed surprise when Emily turned up. And he always smiled, as though pleased to see her.

  He was just kind, that was why. Emily couldn’t imagine that anyone would be happy to see her, but she was grateful for his kindness.

  ‘I’m having a party in a couple of weeks,’ he told her. ‘On Saturday. It’s my birthday and I’d love you to come. It’ll just be a few friends and their kids – nothing big.’

  He handed her a hand-made invitation. She looked at it, then folded it and put it into the pocket of her shirt.

  Some days, for Emily, were worse than others. Today she felt that she was wading through a river filled with silt.

  Martin made tea. Sometimes he made hot chocolate, but he preferred tea. It made him seem old to her, this passion for cups of tea. They took it into the back yard.

  The sky was filled with high cloud. Their tea steamed beside them on the path.

  ‘Who is here with us,’ said Martin, taking up his notebook and scribbling in it. A girl, rather sadder than usual today, with brown eyes and an upturned nose and a sprinkling of freckles across her face.

  He stopped, and looked around for more inspiration.

  ‘Two sun skinks,’ said Emily in a soft, low voice, astonished at how the words had come so suddenly into her mouth. ‘Chasing each other up a wall.’

  ‘One with the end of its tail missing,’ added Martin, writing it down.

  Emily looked searchingly at him. She wanted to ask him if he’d ever done anything he’d really regretted. But she couldn’t say the words out loud, and the moment p
assed.

  While Martin put on a stew to cook in the kitchen, she drifted to Pete’s room and lay down on his bed. She was pleased that Pete was at pre-school; she couldn’t have borne his scrutiny today. She closed her eyes and fell asleep.

  When she woke, Pete was crouched above her, staring intently into her face without blinking.

  ‘Quit it!’ she said, pushing him away.

  ‘We’ve got toast and strawberry jam!’ he said.

  ‘I’m not hungry.’

  He ran out of the room.

  She hauled herself into a sitting position. While she was still sitting there, Pete ran back into the room with a towel wrapped round his shoulders. ‘Do you want to watch me in the bath, Emily?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘But I’m not allowed in the bath by myself and Dad’s busy!’

  When she didn’t reply, he coaxed, ‘I could sing to you, and you could sit and think. You like sitting and doing nothing.’

  She helped Pete undo the buttons of his shirt, and climb out of his trousers. In the bath he whooshed up and down, pretending that he was a whale. Water sloshed all over the floor. Emily sat on the worn lino with her back against the edge of the doorway. The bathroom had two doors – one into the house, and one that led onto the verandah – so there was a leafy view.

  When Pete had had enough of being a whale, he sat and sucked on the facewasher. ‘You shouldn’t drink bathwater,’ Emily told him.

  ‘But I like it.’ His penis floated in the water like seaweed. He flipped at it, and laughed when it bounced around and bobbed back up to the surface of the water.

  ‘I thought you were going to sing to me.’

  ‘I was, but I forgot the words.’

  When Martin called down the hallway that it was time to get out, Pete ignored him.

  Emily picked up the towel. ‘Come on, Pete.’

  ‘Just a bit longer . . . Emmy – where was I before I was born?’

  Emily frowned. ‘You should ask Martin that.’

  She stood with the towel to lift him from the tub, and wrapped it round his warm, wet body. He put his arms round her neck, and she hauled him out. She closed her eyes for a moment and breathed in the scent of him, then put him down on the ground. But he wouldn’t let go.

  ‘You’re strangling me,’ she said. ‘Just stop it, okay?’

  Things i love about Matt:

  The way he smiles even in his sleep

  He is optimistic – always thinks things will turn out for the best

  He can cook! Damper in the ashes and pumpkin soup and egg jaffles

  are his best things

  The way he plays his guitar with a little thump a thumpa thump, just

  like a heartbeat

  He puts his hands on my belly when you kick, and the look on his

  face . . .

  When he soaps my back in the shower he always finishes by kissing

  this little mole on my shoulder

  He brings me tea in bed

  He’s part of you

  And too many other things to list but you will find out for yourself

  9

  ‘I wish I could introduce you to someone,’ said Charlotte one day. ‘Someone your own age.’

  Charlotte had introduced Emily to several people, but they weren’t the sort of people she meant. They were friends of Charlotte’s, women of her age, with an interest in books or art or gardening. They came to the house sometimes, where they made room on the table in her tiny kitchen for the endless pots of tea they brewed and the cakes they brought with them. They were noisy, cake-eating women, who laughed a lot and showed too much interest in Emily for her liking. After greeting them, Emily always crept out of the house and stayed away for the rest of the afternoon.

  ‘You need to see people,’ said Charlotte, worrying away at Emily’s lack of a social life.

  ‘I see people,’ said Emily defensively, immediately wishing she hadn’t spoken. She didn’t want to have to explain to Charlotte about Martin and Pete. Because what sort of friends were they? Martin wasn’t the friend of her own age that Charlotte envisaged for Emily. He was ten years older than she was. And what did she do at their place? Just sit about in the back yard, or sleep a lot, in Pete’s bed.

  But to stop Charlotte worrying so much she did tell her about them.

  She said that she’d met Martin and Pete one day in the park; it was only a small white lie. She explained that Cat was a nurse and Martin stayed at home to look after Pete. She didn’t say that she’d not met Cat yet, because despite Martin asking her to come over on the weekends when Cat was at home, she hadn’t wanted to go.

  She didn’t tell Charlotte about Martin’s birthday party, because she didn’t know whether she would go yet. Martin had said that it would be very casual, just a few friends with their children, but that seemed to Emily to be far too many people.

  She looked for a present for Martin anyway. What she found was a new notebook for him to write down all the creatures he shared the world with: he’d almost filled his current one. Emily covered the notebook with a scrap of golden silk from Thailand, which she’d found as a remnant in a fabric shop. She wrote on the first page, in large curly writing with a gold calligraphy pen she’d found in Charlotte’s shed:

  A NOTEBOOK TO HANG OUT IN

  To Martin, on his birthday,

  Luv, Emily

  She went to a shop that made chocolates. Emily had seen them in the window, but had never before gone inside. It was an old café, furnished with dark-stained timber counters and tables and chairs similarly sombre. Lamps with old shades threw pools of light upon the tables. The shop reminded her of a church: somewhere dim and holy and hushed.

  Emily approached the counter cautiously; apart from buying the silk, it was a long time since she’d been in a shop that wasn’t a chain store, where you had to ask for what you wanted. But it gave her a kind of pleasure to select, one at a time, enough chocolates to fill a small box.

  ‘Is it a gift?’ asked the assistant, and Emily looked up at her, startled.

  ‘I mean, do you want it gift-wrapped?’

  ‘Oh. Yes, please.’

  On the day of the party she was still undecided about whether she would go, but at the last moment she had a quick shower and put on a clean tracksuit. She had thought of looking into her suitcase for a dress, but that would have taken the kind of energy she didn’t have.

  Several cars were parked in the street outside Martin’s house, and a cluster of balloons hung from the railing of the verandah. Voices spilled out from the back yard. The front door was open.

  Clutching her presents, Emily made her way slowly down the hallway. A young woman with a baby on her hip was fetching a tray of fruit drinks from the kitchen table; she smiled at Emily in a perky, friendly way before going back out to the garden where the party seemed to be taking place.

  Emily stood at the back door and chewed her bottom lip. Instead of stepping out of the house to join the party she went into the laundry, through a door at the back of the kitchen. It was a long, low lean-to at the rear of the building, with another door leading into the back yard – a dark, old place, with concrete tubs and spiderwebs in the corners of the room. Emily peered from the dusty window that was smeared with splashes of soap.

  Martin knelt on a rug, pulling the wrapping from a present. He pulled out a snow dome; laughing, he shook it, and kissed the person who’d given it to him in a dramatic and exaggerated way. He had a pair of fairy wings pinned to his back, and they made him look absurd, and emphasised his largeness.

  A woman Emily recognised from the photographs as Cat was standing with some other people at a trestle table, arranging plates and cutlery in piles. She had a confident, clever face, and dangly earrings. Her hair was pulled tightly away from her face and caught at the back of her head. She had an air of certainty; she sipped wine and joked with her friends like someone who was absolutely sure of her place in the world.

  Pete wrestled on the gras
s with a pile of other children; they tumbled about like a litter of puppies or kittens. Music came from a portable CD player. It was all noise and movement and laughter, but Emily felt remote from it. She looked down at her clothes. She hadn’t even bothered to dress up. In her heart, Emily had known all along that she wouldn’t go to the party.

  She couldn’t bring herself to go out and face all those strange people. She couldn’t even face Martin and Pete, who weren’t her Martin, her Pete. They had become different people, and belonged to the people they were with, not with Emily. She was the Emily who wept secret tears and slept for hours in Pete’s bed. She had no place at a party.

  She put the two gifts that she’d brought onto the sill of the laundry window, and crept out of the house.

  That night in bed, Emily thought about what had happened. How could she face people ever again? She couldn’t do that; she couldn’t walk into a crowd of people, with everyone staring at her, and her standing there unable to say anything.

  Emily got out of bed and dressed.

  The sky was huge, and the world loomed giant and unfriendly. Emily tucked her chin into her chest and began to walk. It was still early – she’d gone to bed soon after nine – and Charlotte, who was still sitting up listening to quiet music, hadn’t heard Emily let herself out the back door.

  The leaves on the trees shivered in the wind. Someone passed Emily on the path and said ‘Good evening’, but she didn’t look up, just stumbled a bit, and walked on a little faster. She paused at houses where she could see people through the windows. A woman sat alone holding a book, a reading light shining over her shoulder. Someone came in and put a cup down beside her; the woman looked up gratefully. At another house a child’s voice called out something unintelligible. A white cat sat at a darkened windowsill.

  The lights in Martin’s house were on and there was music coming from the front room. As Emily stood in the street watching, she saw Martin walk across in front of the window.