It doesn’t matter. All that does is that a veil no longer shrouds her. The world is clearer, colours brighter. She has a sense of possibilities again. Somehow, the world seems to have shifted to accommodate her.
Or she to it.
She has space inside her. Her blood beats surely in her veins. Her breath comes slowly and easily.
The cat knows she is different. In the mornings it butts its head into her hand and purrs.
She has started to eat breakfast at a regular, reasonably early hour. At night in bed she runs her hands over her ribs. They don’t stick out so much now.
If I don’t watch it I’ll get fat!
But she asks for seconds of dessert every night.
She pesters Charlotte to take her driving.
‘Not again!’
Charlotte laughs, as Emily grabs the keys and heads outside. She loves Charlotte’s little yellow car: it’s as bright and as shiny as a jellybean. The magnetic L-plates attach with a soft kissing sound. And it does everything she wants it to do. She makes Charlotte take her out in the worst weather: in torrential rain, and late at night. ‘You need to get used to all kinds of conditions,’ she tells her. ‘That’s what Dad used to say.’ On fine evenings she walks around the streets, catching the scent of flowers, savouring the night. She glances through lighted windows, and hears snatches of the lives within, no longer feeling apart from it all.
She walks past Martin and Pete’s house, still closed-up and dark, not expecting them to be at home. Earlier in the day she noticed that the sneaker still lay untouched in the same position on the verandah floor.
At the chain store Emily flicks through racks of tiny clothing. It will be Mahalia’s first birthday soon and she is looking for a present.
‘I feel okay about this,’ she tells herself (she is often amazed at how okay she feels). But somehow she can’t picture a real child, her child. It still seems so far away, somehow.
A woman walks down the aisle and stands beside her. She has a baby on her hip. The baby has wispy blonde hair and a high forehead. Emily glances at it and looks away.
‘Will you just look at this little dress?’ says the woman to no one in particular, so that Emily thinks that perhaps she must be talking to her. ‘This is just so cute!
’ ‘It is, isn’t it?’ mumbles Emily politely.
‘Yes, I think this would suit you right down to the ground,’ says the woman, and Emily realises with embarrassment that the woman has been talking to her baby, not to her.
Emily looks over at the baby, who stares back at her with a solemn expression on its face. She smiles at it, and the baby smiles back, looking bashful, tipping her head on one side and burrowing into her mother’s shoulder.
‘She’s being a real little girl,’ says the mother, and she really is speaking to Emily this time. ‘It’s that “Oh, don’t look at me” thing.’
‘How old is she?’ asks Emily, shyly.
‘Nine months,’ says the woman with pride.
Emily reaches out and touches the baby’s bare foot. It is plump and soft, with curled-up toes that wriggle around when Emily touches them. She is so real, so solid and actual. She has teeth, two at the top, and several at the bottom. She grinds her little teeth together and smiles at Emily again. She is such a patient, shy, cheerful baby.
‘And . . . what’s her name?’
‘Emily.’
‘Oh! That’s . . . pretty.’
The woman has stopped looking at clothes and is smiling down at baby Emily. ‘Isn’t it?’ she says with a smile. ‘Well, best get on.’ She takes the dress that she’d said would suit her baby right down to the ground and walks over to the checkout.
Emily feels tears running out of her eyes before she knows she is crying. She has no idea which dress would suit Mahalia. And she’s never even seen her at the age that baby is – nine months. She’s lost that, and can never get it back.
But she applies herself to examining the racks of clothes for one-year-olds. ‘This one,’ she thinks, finding a little white frock with red polka dots all over the sleeves and around the hem.
When she gets back to Charlotte’s that day she says, ‘I think it’s about time for me to go back.’ She looks at Charlotte with alarm. It seems such a scary thing to do.
‘Home,’ she explains, when Charlotte looks puzzled.
Wherever that is.
2
But first, she wants to get her driver’s licence.
And all the practice she’s done pays off. She comes home late one afternoon with a provisional licence in her purse and P-plates on the car. She pulls up in the driveway and smiles at Charlotte. ‘I’m going to ring my dad.’
‘Great! I’ll go out to the shed and leave you to it.’
Emily picks up the phone. Through the kitchen window she sees the light come on in Charlotte’s shed. She takes the cordless receiver and sits with it on the back step. The twilight in the garden is pink and gold like some great frangipani and Charlotte’s window at the back of the garden flames with light. Above the houses the sky is huge. With her knees pulled up to her chin Emily dials the number, hoping that her father will answer. He does.
‘Hello . . . Dad?’
‘Emmy! This is a nice surprise.’
Emily hurries on, surprised at how easy it is to talk to him. ‘Dad, guess what – I got my licence today.’
‘Oh, well done. First go?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good girl. I knew you would.’
‘And I wanted to thank you for all the lessons you gave me, before . . .’
‘Oh, that’s all right . . .’ He speaks awkwardly. He’s never known what to say when he is thanked for something.
‘Charlotte said that all she had to do was help me brush up a bit.’
‘Yes, well . . . well done!’ he says again. She hears him turning aside to speak to her mother. ‘It’s Emmy,’ she hears him say. ‘She has some news.’
Her mother comes on the line. ‘Hello darling.’
‘Hello Mum.’ Emily unconsciously presses her fingernails into her knees as she speaks.
‘What’s your news?’ asks her mother anxiously.
‘Oh, it’s just . . .’ says Emily faintly, ‘. . . just that I got my P plates today.’
‘Well! That is nice!’ Her mother pauses. ‘I thought you might be ringing to say that you were coming home.’
Emily pauses. ‘Oh. Well, that too, I suppose.’ The word home is a difficult one for her. ‘I do want to come back soon,’ she says, choosing her words carefully. ‘Can I stay with you?’
‘Of course,’ says her mother, and adds awkwardly, ‘after all, this is your home.’
After Emily has once more spoken to her father and promised to talk again soon, she puts the receiver down on the step beside her. She hugs her knees to her chest and stares out into the garden, watching the changing evening light. She looks at the silhouette of the leaves against the sky. Concentrating on things around her is a way of stopping herself from thinking. Then she allows herself to think about Matt, and Mahalia. She closes her eyes and remembers the scent of each of them: Matt after a day walking on the beach – salty and sharp, smelling of warmth and brown skin; Mahalia – new and clean, like fresh-cut grass.
3
The next morning, Emily goes out for a walk. It is unusual for her to be up quite so early, even now, but she feels invigorated after getting her licence. She walks past Martin’s place. She has avoided it lately, expecting somehow never to see them again.
But she notices that the sneaker on the verandah has been tidied away. There is some sort of tree with small orange fruits sitting beside the door in a big pot. Down the side of the house, she sees a green tent airing on the clothesline.
The front door is open.
Emily is surprised by how her heart flips over. At least, she thinks it must be her heart, though it is more like a giant fish leaping in her belly. But she can’t bring herself to walk up the veranda steps. She remember
s the last time she saw Martin, and the last time she saw Cat, and Pete. Although the cut on her hand has healed, she remembers her shame.
But she is a different person, now.
‘Can I borrow the car?’ she asks Charlotte the next morning. It will be her first drive on her own.
‘Of course,’ says Charlotte. ‘You may as well get some practice in. Are you planning on going far?’
‘No – just to visit someone. Martin, actually, and Pete. I think they’ve come back from holiday.’
The sense of her own capability gives Emily pleasure as she sets off in the car on her own. She is a different person from the one who’d wandered the streets aimlessly, turning up on Martin’s doorstep like a waif, but he won’t know that. When she pulls up in front of their house she feels nervous.
The front door is shut. But even if it were open she’d knock. There is no sound from the house so she knocks a second time, and nervously adjusts the brim of her hat (the purple crocheted hat, the one they’d given her). She hears running footsteps, and the door is wrenched open by Pete, who stands looking at her with his mouth open. ‘Emmy!’ he says, and hugs her round the hips. He seems to have grown older. He has shot up, and seems less chubby and child-like. How can children change so fast?
‘Did you have a great time at the beach?’ she says.
‘Sure did!’ He walks down the hallway in front of her.
‘Pete? Who is it?’ Martin’s voice comes from the bedroom. ‘It’s Emmy, Dad’ says Pete, disappearing into the room. Emily follows him. Martin lies under the bedclothes, and gives her a weak smile.
‘Dad’s sick,’ says Pete.
‘Just a flu bug,’ says Martin, closing his eyes.
‘Can I do anything?’
‘You could get me some water and a couple of Panadol.’ Emily finds the medicine cupboard, and after he takes the tablets, Martin settles back and closes his eyes.
She finds a pile of dirty laundry next to the machine and puts it on to wash. While she waits for it to finish, she and Pete make sandwiches for lunch. She sends Pete to see if Martin is awake, but he’s not.
After she hangs the washing out, Emily sits in the back yard and plays with Pete. She feels a great sense of satisfaction at the sheets flapping in the breeze. A sun skink runs across the path in front of the clothesline. Who is here with us, thinks Emily.
Pete has a pile of shells that he’s collected at the beach, and they sort them into different kinds. He also has a dead seahorse that he found washed up. ‘Poor seahorse,’ says Emily, holding it up between her fingers to look closer. It has a salty, rather rotten smell, not unpleasant, and such a serious little face.
‘Emmy,’ says Pete, arranging shells into a pattern on the ground, ‘do you ever think that you’re dreaming everything?’
‘I did think that once. But I think the world’s real, now.’
She remembers Pete asking this question before.
‘But what if it isn’t? What if this is a dream?’ Pete waves his arm around to encompass everything.
‘Dreams are weirder than this,’ says Emily. ‘More . . . special.’
‘But what if dreams are normal? What if in a dream you go to pre-school and make sandwiches, and in real life you can fly or something?’
‘Well, you might have a point there, Pete. Maybe this is a dream.’ Emily gets up and runs her hands over the sheets. She looks up at the blue sky, and as she moves away from the line sees only the fluttering of the white sheets. A black crow alights in the high branches of a tree next door and calls harshly. For a moment the world seems to slow down.
Then Pete calls, ‘Emmy, watch this!’ and before she can stop him he is running through the flapping sheets; blinded, he runs straight into the metal handle of the rotary clothesline. She hears the crack of his head against the metal, his scream of pain, and then his face seems all blood. She rushes to kneel in front of him, pulling a towel from the line to staunch it.
There is a lot of blood gushing from the cut in his head. Emily attempts to soak it up, but fresh blood floods out. Pete is silent and pale. His breath comes in small gasps. ‘How bad is it?’ he asks.
‘Not too bad,’ says Emily, panicking inside. To her, it looks very bad. ‘But I think you’re going to need stitches.’
She gets him to hold the towel against his head, and picks him up and carries him into the house where she seats him at the kitchen table. She goes to Martin’s room, but, amazingly, he is still asleep.
Emily makes a decision. She goes back to Pete and crouches in front of him. ‘Look, I’m going to take you to the hospital. Okay?’ Leaving a note for Martin on the table, she takes Pete out to the car.
At the hospital, after the nurse looks briefly at Pete’s head, they wait for ages at reception. Finally Emily gets up and goes over to another nurse who has come on duty. ‘How much longer is it going to be?’ she asks. ‘His head is still bleeding.’
‘It could be a while,’ says the woman sympathetically, coming over and looking at Pete but not bothering to examine his head. ‘Head wounds do bleed a lot.’
‘Look,’ says Emily, ‘I wonder if you could tell his mother? She works here, I think.’ She looks questioningly at Pete, who nods.
‘Her name is Cat . . .’
‘Cat Hetherington?’ prompts the nurse. ‘Are you Pete?’
‘Yes,’ whispers Pete, looking very pale.
‘I’ve heard about you!’ she says warmly. ‘Your mum won’t be very happy to see you like this. I’ll send her a message right now.’
She goes away, and soon they are taken to a room off a long corridor that appears to be a kind of storeroom. Pete lies on a high bed like a trolley, and Emily perches beside him, keeping the cloth pressed to his forehead. A nurse comes and takes his pulse. She explains that they have a lot of people in emergency and the doctor might be some time, and Emily must ring the buzzer if Pete starts vomiting or falling asleep.
After she has gone, Pete says, ‘Emmy, I need to go to the toilet.’
She looks into the corridor, sees a toilet across the hallway, and helps him to it, keeping the towel pressed to his head. Back in the room where they have been put to wait, Pete lies on the bed without complaining, but she can see how anxious he is.
She casts around the room for distraction. ‘I wonder what’s in those boxes?’ she asks, craning her neck to see what’s stacked on top of the high cupboards. ‘Tongue depressors,’ she reads out, noting the illustration on the side. ‘Like paddle-pop sticks, for when you open your mouth and say, “Ahh”.’
‘I know,’ she says. ‘Let’s play I spy with my little eye. Have you ever played that?’
Pete sighs. ‘Where’s my mum?’ he asks fretfully.
Another nurse arrives. She takes his pulse again and asks if he feels like vomiting at all. He doesn’t, and that satisfies her; she goes away. Pete closes his eyes. His eyelids are patterned with delicate veins, and Emily feels a great surge of tenderness towards him, as if he were her own. ‘Pete, you’d better not fall asleep on me, or they’ll think you’ve fallen into a coma.’
‘What’s a coma?’
‘It’s when you pass out. Sort of go to sleep without being really asleep.’
‘I think I know what you mean,’ says Pete uncertainly. ‘I won’t.’ After a while he says, ‘Emmy?’
‘Yes?’
‘Do you think we’re dreaming this?’
‘I think it’s real, Pete.’
‘Me too.’
She takes his hand.
Someone comes in. It’s Cat, looking very businesslike in a nurse’s uniform.
‘Mum!’ says Pete. His face brightens, and he drops Emily’s hand and sits up on one elbow to greet her.
‘Pete. What on earth have you done?’ She peels the towel away from Pete’s forehead and examines it.
‘Ran into the clothesline. Mum, where were you?’
‘I was helping with an operation, so I’ve only just heard you were here.
‘Where’s Martin?’ adds Cat, with an edge to her voice. She’s looking across at Emily, who without thinking has moved away from Pete’s side and is standing near the doorway, as though it might be handy if she needs to escape.
‘He’s sick,’ says Emily. ‘He was in bed asleep, so I left a note.’
‘How on earth did you let this happen?’
‘I couldn’t stop it. He just ran into the clothesline. It was an accident.’ Emily can feel herself speaking calmly and with dignity.
Cat doesn’t comment. And at that moment the room seems filled with people. Two women have arrived, one with a stethoscope slung round her neck, the other wheeling a trolley, and Emily feels she’s in the way, so she takes the opportunity to slip out the door.
Once she’d have removed herself from the scene, but now she stands outside in the corridor, leaning against the wall. She can feel it against the back of her head. She looks up at fluorescent lights lining the ceiling, and down at grey vinyl tiles on the floor. She waits.
When it seems she has been there an eternity, Cat emerges from the room. She hesitates, and then takes up a position facing Emily against the opposite wall. ‘I didn’t think you’d still be here.’
Emily asks, ‘How is he?’
‘He’ll be okay. They’re taping up the cut.’
Emily closes her eyes. She’d worried that it might have been worse. ‘That’s good,’ she says.
‘I just need to know,’ says Cat, ‘exactly how it happened.’
Her face, under the harsh lights, looks crumpled and exhausted.
Emily swallows. ‘Martin was ill and he fell asleep. I did a load of washing. And while we were out in the yard waiting for it to dry, Pete ran through one of the sheets and cracked his head on the pole. He must have hit some sharp part of the handle or something.’
She looks up at the ceiling again and relives it all happening, in slow motion.
‘It happened before I could do a thing.’
They both turn their heads as a figure appears at the end of the corridor. Together they watch Martin hurry towards them. Tall, dishevelled, feverish-looking, he hesitates as he comes close. ‘How’s Pete?’ His voice is urgent.
Little Wing Page 10
