by Karen Foxlee
And sometimes there were so many people in those last few weeks that I couldn’t get near him, and I longed for our night-times, our solitude, when we would whisper to each other across the darkness in the bedroom. When we would sit with our chins resting on the sill and watch the buses arriving and departing.
“I had a dream,” said Mrs. Gaspar to Davey. She stroked his hair and I saw him smile.
“What?” he asked.
“There was a giant goose,” said Mrs. Gaspar.
“Oh,” said Davey, his eyes still closed. A quiet happy oh. “Was it a Canada goose?”
“Yes, it was this goose,” said Mrs. Gaspar. “Down it flew and landed on my windowsill. It shook the whole building.”
“Holy Batman,” said Davey softly.
“Inside it looked with its black eye. ‘Honk’, it says, ‘honk’.”
“Was it friendly?”
“Yes, this is a very friendly goose.”
“Then what happened?” His hand went up to his head. To some momentary hurt.
“You said, ‘I will climb on its back.’ I said, ‘Davey, you will do no such thing.’ But you only laughed at me.”
“Did I climb on its back?”
“Yes,” said Mrs. Gaspar. “I cannot believe it. Up you jump, out the window and onto the back of that Canada goose.”
“Holy Bat,” laughed Davey softly. He was too tired to say man.
“And it is waiting for this very thing. And it honks just so, and up it flies into the sky with you on its back, smiling.”
“Wow,” said Davey slowly, his words slurred. “I never thought I’d fly on a Canada goose.”
“No,” said Mrs. Gaspar, stroking his hair again, “I never thought you would either.”
In this time, we received the T and U and V issues. T contained tumour, one paragraph, as dry and devoid of emotion as the entry on death. A swelling or abnormal growth of the tissue. See cancer. See malignancy. See neoplasm. Instead I sat beside him and told him about trade winds. Tides. Mark Twain’s early life. Tarantulas, tweed, and Tutankhamen. Sometimes he smiled. Often he slept.
All the Uniteds. Utah: a visitor’s guide. Umbrellas and Uzbekistan.
Vacuums and vivisection. Vermont, Venezuela, the Vatican. Vital statistics: birth, marriage, divorce, sickness, and death.
At the time we may not have called them good days, but afterward we would. Those days contained a type of goodness for which there is no word. Looking back, I can only see those days in fragments. My mother sleeping beside her own mother. Mrs. Gaspar’s hand inside Davey’s hand. Sudden seizures that woke people from slumber. Clothes that someone else had folded and left in a basket on our table. The smell of diabetic urine. Of soap. Of sunlight. Of perfect summer days that passed by outside our windows.
Nanny Flora said, “Now, sit beside Mrs. Gaspar and me, Lenny, and tell us something.”
I told them about spiderlings that ballooned by attaching their spinneret to twigs and launching themselves into the wind. Hundreds of miles they flew. I told them of the Picasso beetle in Mozambique that glittered with every colour of the rainbow. I explained to them the differences between grasshoppers, crickets, and katydids, pausing to see if Nanny Flora could take it. She nodded to say she could.
“I think you should have your own book, Lenny,” said Nanny Flora. “Lenny’s Book of Everything. The things you know!”
I knew she was trying to help me. I tried to smile.
“Maybe,” I said.
“Pah, it would probably only have insects in it,” said Mrs. Gaspar.
I can’t get to the bottom of those days. Remembering them is like deep-sea diving. But there was goodness in those moments. Each of them was bright and deep. We swam in those moments.
It felt as though we had called a cease-fire with the world. Mother did not put on her pink uniform. She did not go out the door. She filled back up with some of her old magic. As Davey grew weaker, she told him stories and slept beside him, sometimes knelt on the floor, her head on the bed. She didn’t do housework. People came and did it for her. Once, I looked into the kitchen and saw the principal Mrs. Dalrymple washing dishes and Mrs. Oliver, the assistant, drying. I don’t know how they got in, but afterward, they sliced a cake and left it on the table and then disappeared just as quietly.
Waiting days, being days, ending days, staying days. Dr. Leopold came and told Mother that it was time for Davey to go to the hospital. It was afternoon and another long night stretched ahead. Things were going wrong. Davey’s heart was in trouble. “There’s oxygen at the hospital,” said Dr. Leopold. “And nurses all the time, twenty-four hours a day.”
“I don’t think it’s the right place for him,” said Mother.
Mrs. Bartholomew had said, “You are doing everything right. You are the best mother I’ve ever seen. Here is the place Davey should be.”
“He’d go …” Mother started. “I mean, he’d go to the hospital to die.”
“Yes, Mrs. Spink,” said Dr. Leopold.
She didn’t ask if he was going to die. She just knew it. The way a mother knows her baby is to be born. Like she knew all those years ago that she had to catch the number twenty-four bus.
“Well, I think that should happen here,” said Mother. I don’t think I ever heard my mother sound so strong.
Once there was a knock at the door and there stood Mr. Petersburg. “For the boy,” he whispered and thrust a package into my hands. The package contained Junior Sales Club field glasses. I don’t know how he came by them, but I felt very sad, a plummeting type of sadness, but also the beginning of a new kind of rage, just a bud that had not yet bloomed. I was glad for his kindness, I was, but those glasses had come too late, and Davey could not see, and even that small time ago when he had stuck the flag in his cap seemed such a long time ago, a country we had left behind and could never return to.
“Mr. Petersburg came,” I whispered to Davey. He didn’t reply. “He gave you a gift.”
Nothing.
“The field glasses,” I held them in my hands. No response.
Just Davey’s breathing.
I took the caps from the back of the binoculars and lifted them to my eyes. I saw the walls up close, the light switch. I saw the decoration on the side of Mrs. Gaspar’s tea canister, which I had never really noticed before. It was a leaf pattern, a twisted vine and in the very middle the initials Z.G. I turned my head and examined up close the spines of the Burrell’s Build-It-at-Home Encyclopedia. I peered at Davey’s hands, the lines and furrows and cracked dry skin.
“Davey,” I whispered, my mouth to his ear. “Remember we didn’t run away? Well, maybe we still can. I think we should.”
I slipped my scrawny hand inside his own and I felt him squeeze.
“We’ll go up through the Dakotas, and into Canada. We’ll walk for weeks.”
He squeezed again.
“Davey, we’ll make it to Great Bear Lake. Timothy will meet us there. I know he’s there. The real one.”
I squeezed his hand. He squeezed mine back. We squeezed goodbye in Morse code.
WXYZ
Martha Brent hand-delivered the issues that remained. She had driven all the way from Indianapolis for Davey’s funeral. Mother had sent her a telegram. The telegram said: Davey passed away peacefully, Monday, July 17. RIP.
He was nearly eight.
Somehow, those issues made it upstairs after the funeral and into a small pile pushed into the corner of the living room. I tried not to look at them. Martha Brent did not wear a cloak. She didn’t swish anywhere. She was regular-sized and nondescript. She wore brown-framed glasses and she smiled at me sadly and burst into tears.
“It’s okay, Mrs. Brent,” I said.
I saw her looking at our encyclopedias which were on the bottom shelf of the china cabinet. I saw her eyes rest on the space where the F volume should have been. She smiled at me again and took her glasses off and wiped at her eyes furiously. I knew she wouldn’t replace it because she was s
mart like that. That volume went with Davey and she would leave things as they were meant to be. Mother came to Martha and talked, but I couldn’t hear what they were saying.
Our apartment was filled with people. There were teachers from school and the Bartholomew family. Nanny Flora was seated beside Mrs. Gaspar on the sofa holding hands. There was Mr. Engelmann who came and put his hand on my mother’s shoulder, and I saw her smile sadly at him. Our apartment was full, but very empty. That’s how it felt. I kept waiting for him to come in. To arrive. I kept waiting. Waiting was the feeling I had.
CJ touched me on the elbow. We went and sat on my bed and looked at the empty space where Davey’s bed had been. The pigeons cooed on the ledge: Frank and Roger and Martin. Charlie the stick insect swivelled his head slowly, watching us. The Greyhound buses arrived and departed and the whole world moved outside. The sky was blue, but there would be a storm.
I was waiting. That’s how I felt. My veins, my nerves, my everything was waiting. CJ didn’t say anything. She just sat with her hipbone pressed into mine. She slung her arm over my shoulder.
“Oh, I nearly forgot, Matthew Milford wanted you to have this.”
She took a matchbox from her cowboy shirt pocket
“What?” I opened it to find a tiny red ladybug with seven glossy black spots. “Coccinella septempunctata,” I said. “That’s kind.”
“One day you’re going to be a beetle expert,” said CJ.
One day. All the one days I got that Davey didn’t. That sadness rose up in me like a giant wave and I was going to be drowned. CJ kept her arm around my shoulder so I didn’t drown.
“I’ll discover a rare beetle and name it after him,” I whispered above the roar of that wave.
“I know,” said CJ. “You’re going to be the best beetle expert in the world.”
She held me and didn’t let go even when we went back to saying nothing, just sitting there waiting.
My feeling of waiting reminded me of when my mother felt something was about to happen all those years ago, when Davey was just a baby and my hand was tiny upon her heart. How she had told me we would have to wait to find out if it was something good or bad or in-between.
But now we knew. It was a good thing. All of Davey, in all his time upon the earth, was good.
WXYZ contained mostly W, which was a letter of wonders. Whales and Wales. Washington and wagons. Walkie-talkies. Warfare. Warsaw. Winnipeg. Watches, counting, counting, counting our seconds. Wind. The polar easterlies and the prevailing westerlies, and the trade winds. The chinook, the foehn, the sirocco, the simoom. I let these things fill me. This information fell down inside me like coins into a moneybox. Clink, clink, chink, chink. W was like swallowing the world in those first few days after he was gone.
X contained X-rays and St. Francis Xavier. Y contained yaks and the Yangtze and yellow fever. Yellow-jacket wasps, Yonkers and Yale and Yankee Doodle Dandy.
And then Z. The last letter.
Author’s Note
Why did I write the story of Lenny and Davey? I always find the process of story creation quite mysterious. I have the embers of so many stories smouldering in my brain, and I’m never quite sure what makes one start to burn. The story of an encyclopedia set and a boy who kept growing had been in my head for many years, but it wasn’t until I was writing A Most Magical Girl that it flared to life. This Lenny and Davey story called to me incessantly like no other story. “Everything will be ok if you can just write me,” the story said. When I finally sat down to write it, Lenny was there waiting for me. I felt immediately comfortable in her voice. Lenny’s Book of Everything felt huge: Davey growing and growing and growing, all the knowledge in those encyclopedia pages, the big friendships and the big love. It felt like I was trying to fit the universe inside a shoebox, but Lenny’s voice kept me calm.
While story-writing is about creating a world, breathing characters to life, and enticing readers on a journey, it is also, for me, just as much about sorting stuff out in my head. While I wrote, I was thinking a lot about loss and grief, about ill-health, and about caring for someone who is dying, because I had experienced all these things in recent years. I was also thinking about love in all its forms: sibling love, motherly love, neighbourly love, the love between friends. I wanted to sort out in my head what it means to love someone who is different, how that feels, and the emotions that go along with that love. But mostly, through it all, I think I was really trying to shine a light on what a cracker of a miracle it is to be alive, and how everywhere, even in the darkest hours, there’s always hope. Writing this story certainly gave me hope in many ways.
Acknowledgements
My mother and father purchased an encyclopaedia set for our family when I was a young girl. It was a pivotal moment in the history of my childhood household and I’m so very thankful to my parents, both now gone, for instilling in us a love of knowledge and a great passion for “looking stuff up”.
Parts of the Merit Student Encyclopedia still remain on my bookshelf, spines bound in masking tape, because we quite literally loved those books to death as kids. When “looking stuff up” for this story, I turned to these pages, as well as the pages of the World Book Encyclopedia (1971), the Childcraft How and Why Library (1980), The Encyclopedia of the Animal World (1977), Arthur Mee’s The Childrens’ Encyclopedia, and the online Encyclopedia Britannica, to name just a few.
Regarding the medical detail in the story, I must stress that Davey’s condition, while based on pituitary gigantism, is one of my own making. I have used considerable artistic licence in creating a disease that baffled Davey’s medical team in the 1970s. I sincerely hope that in doing so I have not offended anyone. As a nurse, I have cared for people for nearly thirty years and I am thankful for all those hours and the many wonderful nurses I have worked alongside, all of which have taught me much and informed many of the pages in this story.
I’m grateful for all the help given to me in writing this story and there was much. My daughter Alice, who is so patient with my writing life. My sister, Sonia, for being first reader. Catherine Drayton, as always, for her invaluable insights and pep-talks. Erin Clarke for her detailed and wise consideration of my words and all her guidance. And much thanks to Anna McFarlane and Radhiah Chowdhury here at Allen & Unwin.
The writing of this book was also greatly assisted by the Queensland Writers Fellowship program, an initiative of the Queensland Government through the State Library of Queensland and Arts Queensland.
About the Author
Karen Foxlee is an Australian author who writes for both kids and grown-ups. Her first novel, The Anatomy of Wings, won numerous awards, including the Dobbie Literary Award and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book in 2008. Ophelia and the Marvellous Boy, Karen’s first novel for children, was published internationally to much acclaim, while her second novel for younger readers, A Most Magical Girl, won the Readings Children’s Fiction Prize in 2017 and was shortlisted by the Children’s Book Council of Australia in the same year.
Karen lives in South East Queensland with her daughter and several animals, including two wicked parrots who frequently eat parts of her laptop when she isn’t looking. Her passions are her daughter, writing, daydreaming, baking, running and swimming in the sea.
Table of Contents
COVER PAGE
PRAISE
TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT PAGE
DEDICATION
CONTENTS
PERFECTLY NORMAL
SWEDES
ADVERTISEMENT
A AFRICAN CIVETS AND THE ABOMINABLE SNOWMAN
A ANTS AND AMPHIBIANS
B BEETLES AND BIRDS
C CANADA
C COLEOPTERIST
E EAGLES
THE MAGIC BLANKET
THE NIGHT BUS
G GIANTS
THE SEARCH FOR THE SOUND OF MUSIC SPINKS
H HUNGARY
GREAT-AUNT EM
HORSE PEOPLE
I INSECTS
K KYZYLKUM
L LOG CABINS
TROUBLE COMING
SPAGHETTI
THE JUNIOR SALES CLUB OF AMERICA
IGNEOUS ROCK
MERRY CHRISTMAS, MR. KING
SNOW
DESTINATION EM
CHRISTMAS DAY
O OCEANS
P PEREGRINE FALCONS
PA GENSYN (GOODBYE IN DANISH)
Q QUICKSAND
SEARCHING
GROWING PAINS
PETER LENARD SPINK
BED-BUILDING
NANNY FLORA
THE CANADA GOOSE
WXYZ
AUTHOR’S NOTE
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
