Martine Murray was born in Melbourne and still lives there. She spent most of her time studying impractical things, like art, acrobatics and dance, and she started writing because she had a very nice dog that she wanted to write about. She is the author of two picture books, three novels and two picture storybooks.
The Slightly True Story of Cedar B. Hartley (who planned to live an unusual life) was shortlisted for the 2003 Children’s Book Council of Australia’s (CBCA) Book of the Year Awards; shortlisted for the 2002 and 2003 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards and 2003 Patricia Wrightson Prize for Children’s Books; and included in The White Ravens 2003 annual selection of outstanding international children’s books by the International Youth Library (Associated Project of UNESCO).
The Slightly Bruised Glory of Cedar B. Hartley (who can’t help flying high and falling in deep) won the 2006 Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards; was shortlisted for the 2006 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards; and was a Notable Book in the 2006 CBCA Book of the Year Awards.
Also by Martine Murray
The Slightly Bruised Glory of Cedar B. Hartley (who can’t help flying high and falling in deep)
How to make a bird – shortlisted in the 2004 CBC of Australia awards for older readers – winner of the 2004 Queensland Premier’s Literary Award for the Young Adult Book Award
Picture Books
A Dog Called Bear
A Moose Called Mouse
Mannie and the long brave day
Picture Storybooks
Henrietta there’s no one better
Henrietta the great go-getter
Henrietta gets a letter
Copyright © Text and illustrations Martine Murray, 2002
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10% of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.
Allen & Unwin
83 Alexander Street
Crows Nest NSW 2065
Australia
Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100
Fax: (61 2) 9906 2218
Email: [email protected]
Web: www.allenandunwin.com
National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:
Murray, Martine, 1965– .
The slightly true story of Cedar B. Hartley
(who planned to live an unusual life).
ISBN 9781865086231
eISBN 9781741155716
I. Title.
A823.4
Cover illustration by Martine Murray
Cover and text design by Sandra Nobes
For my brother Cam
who is wayward and lovely,
for my friend Nicole who is amazing,
and for Nige who taught me
to walk on my hands
Warning
Cedar B. Hartley would like to advise all readers against trying out the balance positions in this book, unless you have someone experienced to help. Otherwise you may bump your head or get a very sore bottom.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
CHAPTER 36
CHAPTER 37
AcroBRATS SAVE BAMBI
There are only two places to muck around, where I live—in the street or down by Merri Creek. If you had a horse there would be absolutely nowhere to put it because, apart from the footy oval, which is shorn like a carpet, all the ground is taken up by streets with rows of houses on each side. Each house has a garden which it wears like its own particular hairstyle. The Bartons’ is very magnificent and correct, with box hedges, a shaved rectangle of lawn and a cement driveway full of clean cars. Ours is wild, yellowed and weedy, with NO JUNK MAIL written in black texta on the mailbox. Next door, Mrs Trinka’s is flouncy, with ornamentals and puffs of blue hydrangea. At the Motts’ house there’s a slope of grass that you can roll down, but it makes you itchy after a while. There are trees, of course, mainly paperbarks and plane trees, and two hedges, but nowhere to swim—not unless you make friends with Harold Barton who has a swimming pool out the back. But I wouldn’t want to do that. Harold has dirty magazines under his bed, and he sneers.
Doesn’t matter, there’s still a lot you can do in our street. Everything happens after school and before dinner. That’s when you go out with your dog or your skateboard or your secret plan. There’s a spilling—kids come tumbling out of doors and fences, with blobs of jam on their chins and jumbled-up notions in their minds and a loosed-up flop in their strut. We pile onto the street and shoot out a riot of looks and hunches, we sniff about, hook up our notions, pace our minds up and down the street and wait for something to happen, because something always will. It’s like a chemical rule—mix up kids on a long slope of bitumen with bikes and boards and dogs and a lazy lurking need to mess with the lattice of rules that looms over you at school, and before long something happens.
To be honest, Harold Barton wouldn’t make friends with me, anyway, because I’m not pretty enough. He only talks to the pretty girls. Sixteen-year-olds with shapes sticking out. Girls like Marnie Aitkin who wears hipsters and says, ‘Oh really?’ to absolutely anything you might say.
‘Hey Marnie, they say tonight the stars will fall out of the sky, and if you stick out your tongue one might land on it, and if you swallow it then you become a star yourself.’
‘Oh sure,’ she says, ‘very funny.’ That’s the other thing she says. ‘Oh sure’.
It doesn’t always happen with a bang in our street. Sometimes things sizzle into action. Sometimes you just stumble onto a game, and if a game’s got legs you can play it again the next day and the next. Like the game we play in the carpark spaces at the train station; that’s a game where still, even now, someone will say, ‘Wanna go down the carpark on the bikes?’ And we might go.
But in the end it all depends on who’s out there and how the mix is made. Since the older ones (like Hoody Mott who can play French horn, and Roland Glumac, and Sarah with the legwarmers) go lurk in bedrooms and do homework, or smoke or talk on the telephone, you hardly see them much, and that leaves Harold Barton to decide who’s in and who’s not. That’s because he has the swimming pool and the biggest house. So he acts like he knows everything, and kids believe him because kids like swimming. What’s more, his parents let him do whatever he wants, so you can eat waffles and chocolate at his house, or wat
ch R-rated television, or play Powderfinger as loud as hell on the stereo. The main attraction at Harold’s is the back bungalow, because it’s a permanent parent-free zone. The Year Twelve girls, like Marnie Aitkin and Aileen Shelby, go there. Barnaby says they play Strip Jack Naked. Barnaby’s my older brother. Everyone liked him the most, but now he’s gone. He got sent away. That leaves Harold.
Kids all have their own ways of grouping around and ganging-up and jiggling and tweaking and overhauling the ordinary state of things. Sometimes action surges down to the creek or trickles out across Westgarth Street or Hutton Street. Sometimes it scoops you up like an avalanche would if you were standing in the way. Sometimes it leaves behind small puddles, possibilities, promises . . . perhaps a new friend with a good bike.
As for me, I avoid the main swell of street action and drift towards the puddles. A puddle isn’t just what’s left behind, although sometimes you may feel like it is. A puddle of people is full of rich deposits.
Take my puddle, for example. There are normally three of us in it, though sometimes you could say four or five. First there’s me, and I’m exasperating and potentially infamous. My name is Lana Monroe. I have red hair and I’m twelve, almost thirteen, which means I’m not old enough to be invited to play in Harold’s bungalow but I’m too old for making water bombs or playing cumquat wars. That’s for kids.
My name isn’t really Lana Monroe, I just like you to think it might be, since it has a famous kind of ring to it. My real name is Cedar B. Hartley; Cedar because it’s a type of tree and my mother was in a deep hippy phase when I was born. Hippies hinge a lot of their strong feelings on trees, and often give their children names like River and Marigold. Harold Barton screws up his nose at my name. ‘What kind of a name is that?’ he says. Harold suffers from a lack of imagination, says to my mother. She calls me Cedy when she’s in a good mood and Cedar when I’m in trouble.
Then there’s my friend Caramella Zito who lives directly opposite me. She’s almost twelve, but not quite, so that makes me way older than her. There’s no lawn in her garden, just beds of beans and tomatoes and fennel, and also geraniums and an olive tree, and a real grape vine around the side. Caramella’s parents are very short and they don’t speak much English, but they give my mother bunches of grapes and sometimes a persimmon, which is the most spectacular fruit I have ever tried. Caramella is extremely shy, especially when she has pimples and Harold calls her Zito the Zit Face. She’s just a little bit chubby and wears a cross on a necklace. Caramella is a brilliant artist, though only I know that. Sometimes she doesn’t come outside into the street, so I go to her place.
Then there’s Ricci. Ricci is about fifty or sixty, so that makes her by far the oldest. She lives next door to Caramella Zito’s and even though she’s really Yugoslavian she can speak Italian. So she’s chummy with Caramella’s parents. Sometimes, though, she swears about them. ‘Bloody Italians,’ she says. Ricci knows all kinds of things that other people don’t know. She can look at a rainbow and tell you what it thinks.
‘Ah look,’ she says, pointing at the rainbow, ‘a good season for berries and wine.’
She lives with a fluffy white dog called Bambi, who’s about twice as big as a slipper. In her house there are a lot of flowers and stuffed animals and blown-up blurry photos of her in disco tights when she was young. Her hair is frizzy and blonde and she doesn’t like Australia, but she likes having a house. Her husband died a while ago so she has to take Valium, which makes her feel better and then worse again. Sometimes she works at the bakery, but mostly she walks about in the street talking to one person about another person and spreading sunflower seeds or cape gooseberry cuttings. Here’s what Ricci looks like:
Sometimes in my puddle there’s also Hailey and her little brother Jean-Pierre, who mainly hoons around on a bike that’s way too big for him. They live on the corner in a house with a tall wood fence which is old with some bits missing, so you can peek through. Their father drives a Silvertop taxi. He’s huge and dark and he comes from Syria. Sometimes you can hear strange exultant music coming from their house. Once, I looked through the gap in the fence to see if there were people in turbans playing flutes and bongos, but it was just a ghetto blaster on a card table under a lemon tree, with the whole family, even a few grandmothers (in black head scarves, not turbans), sitting around eating McDonald’s. Hailey and Jean-Pierre don’t like Harold because he calls them Lebbos.
But just about everyone else in the street seems to want to muck around with Harold. Even Barnaby once did.
It was really because of Stinky that everything changed. What I really mean is everything started.
Stinky is my dog. Once he was mine and Barnaby’s, but now he’s just mine. He’s only a sweet shaggy old mutt but I love him like mad. This is what he looks like:
Barnaby found him down by the creek last year and brought him home saying, ‘Phew, he’s sure a stinky old bastard isn’t he?’ Mum was frantic, wringing her hands and sighing because Stinky jumped up on the couch straightaway and left dirty paw prints everywhere. Dirt tends to make all mothers anxious.
When Stinky lifted his little hairy leg on the clean washing pile, Mum actually groaned. She looked at Barnaby and said, ‘He’s not staying.’ But Barnaby talked her into it. He could do that, because he was the only male in the house so Mum loved him an awful lot.
My mum works with accident victims and she doesn’t come home till dinner time, so it’s usually just me and Stinky at home together after school. I shovel down a bowl of Weet-Bix and then we go out, either to the street or down the creek.
One day I got home from school and Stinky wasn’t there. No one wriggling, stomping, huffing or burning around to find a sock to put in his mouth, no one acting like he’d been waiting around all day for me to come home, no one pleased to see me, no one I was pleased to see. The house felt thuddingly empty and unnaturally still, like a tree that isn’t moving its leaves in the wind. It was all wrong, I could tell. I yelled at the sad grey old walls with the wobbly windows and the Bruegel picture of peasants working in a yellow field, but nothing happened. I wanted a warm wriggling and a shouting, like I hear coming from Caramella Zito’s house, and sizzle smells like I smell at Ricci’s house, or even Barnaby hollering out a song on his guitar.
And then I was sad; not purely sad, more murkily so. I felt as if there was nothing to count on or touch, nothing except echoes and shadows and disappearances. Life had turned to quicksand and the faint yellow light in the kitchen spread out towards me like the ghostly breath of lives that had left. Definitely spooky. And all because Stinky wasn’t there. Which goes to show how much difference a little furry friend can make.
Our kitchen slopes downwards. There are big holes in the floor where you can see the dirt underneath, and in the middle of the kitchen there’s a wooden table with one shonky sloping leg that you need to kick every now and then to make it straight. It’s a good kitchen, though, because the slope makes it like a boat, and there’s a chunk of outside coming in through the window. You can see a canopy of oak leaves whispering in the blue air while you eat your Weet-Bix, and you can hear a frenzied chorus of myna birds and parrots, arguing over the acorns. The kitchen joins another small room where there’s a fat old couch and a tellie. To get this room warm you have to light the oven in the kitchen and leave the door open, but since there was no one to feel snug or lazy or buzzy with, I couldn’t even be bothered lighting the oven. I slumped down on the couch and tugged out handfuls of the muddy grape-coloured stuffing which bulged out of the holes, and thought about how Barnaby had gone, and Granma, and how I didn’t have a dad and how my mum wasn’t home, and how even Stinky had run away. Boy I hate it when people leave. Maybe I’ll leave too, I thought. Get on a train and go interstate. Just to be the one who went. I didn’t, though, because strange murders are committed in Adelaide, and Sydney is for people who tan easily and every other state is too far away and too hot. I went and asked Ricci if she’d seen Stinky. Ricci knows
everything that’s going on.
‘No, I not see Stinky,’ she squawked, because Ricci always squawks. ‘You try the creek?’
‘Nope, not yet.’
She slapped my shoulder and said, ‘You go look. I go ask the boys.’
The boys are two greyish men who live together in the neatest whitest house in the street. They have opium poppies and iceberg roses in their front garden and a white path leading to their door.
‘Go, don’t worry,’ said Ricci, giving me a shove. She always gives orders and shoves. She doesn’t mean it badly, though. It’s just that she doesn’t bother with suggestions and reasons because it’s too much trouble to find all those words that reasons need. Ricci is very economical. She grows all her own vegetables, and makes soup out of weeds and turkey necks. Sometimes she comes over to my house with turkey soup, and sighs and puts her hands on her hips.
‘Where your mother?’ she says. ‘Cedar, here I wash these dishes and you dry.’
And once she starts cleaning you can’t stop her. She even scrubs out the cupboards and wipes the stove. It drives me mad, but afterwards I feel relieved because the house can seem snarly when it’s grubby. Then it gets this sweet pure look, like a home on tellie, when the stove is clean.
I went down to the creek and I yelled out ‘Stinky’ all the way. I saw Marnie Aitkin and Aileen Shelby, because they always go about in a pair.
‘What are you yelling that out for, Cedar? Did you do a fart?’ said Aileen, who always has a smart-ass thing to say. Marnie giggled into her well manicured hand. Aileen’s eyes, I noticed, were close together—they had the look of a snake.
‘I lost my dog Stinky. Have you seen him?’
Aileen shook her head.
‘Oh really?’ said Marnie. ‘We’re going to Harold’s house.’
‘Well have fun,’ I said, but I don’t think I meant it. Those girls made me feel not quite right.
The Slightly True Story of Cedar B. Hartley Page 1
