The Distant Home

by Morphett, Tony

  She had had a very colourful life. She had worked on ships, she had been in a war once (she never said which one, but Sally had estimated her age and decided she had probably been in the services in World War Two, perhaps in the Navy which would also explain the ships). She had travelled a lot, she knew heaps about one of Sally’s favourite subjects, astronomy (though she sometimes called the constellations by very strange names) and she had more stories in her head than the whole school library had on its shelves.

  She was more like a friend than a grown-up. You could tell Mrs Webster things you could not tell other people, and she always seemed to understand. So Sally and Bobby were really looking forward to this night.

  Just as Mrs Webster came in, the phone rang and Jim picked it up. Maria saw his face change. A moment before he had been making faces for the camera, and posing with Maria as if they were models. Now his face got that kind of worried, sad look that it always did when Mr Flannery rang him.

  And of course it was indeed Mr Flannery. He was wanting to know where his speech was. Jim explained that he had left it on Mr Flannery’s desk, and Mr Flannery was saying that was no good, he had not gone back to his office after his golf game. He told Jim to collect the speech on his way to the dinner, and Jim said ‘Yes, Mr Flannery’, and hung up, and explained all this to Maria in a way that sounded as if he was ashamed of himself.

  The twins had never worked out why it should be like this. Their father was so brave with everyone else in the world, and such a wimp with Mr Flannery. When asked, he would always say ‘mortgage’ as if that explained everything, and perhaps it did. Whatever the reason, whenever Mr Flannery told him to jump he just said how high and did it.

  After Jim and Maria got away to the dinner, and the twins were fixing coffee for Mrs Webster the way she liked it—strong and without milk or sugar—Bobby put it into words. ‘How come Dad always jumps when Mr Flannery snaps his fingers?’

  ‘Rank hath its privileges,’ Mrs Webster answered, but said it with a flick of her mouth to say that she did not approve of it. And they settled down for their evening together.

  chapter eight

  Mrs Webster began, as she so often began, like this. ‘This,’ she said, as she sat on the sofa knitting while the twins sat on the floor before her, ‘this happened out on the Rim of the Galaxy, about seventy years after first contact with the Ursoids.’

  Sally smiled in anticipation. ‘When we were little kids,’ she said, ‘you used to call them dragons.’

  ‘Younger people understand dragons better than Ursoid invaders,’ replied Mrs Webster, taking another colour into her pattern.

  ‘Sally’s feeling kind of old because Cyril Flannery says he’s going to marry her,’ said Bobby, grinning and nudging his sister.

  Sally was indignant. ‘I wouldn’t marry Cyril Flannery! He looks like a Kavarsh.’

  Bobby looked at Mrs Webster, knowing the answer to the question he was about to ask, but wanting to hear the answer again. ‘What’s a Kavarsh again?’

  ‘Like a toad with fangs,’ Mrs Webster said, as Bobby laughed. ‘And Sally’s right. That boy does look as if he’s got Kavarsh blood somewhere. Now do you want this story or not?’

  ‘Yes!’ they chorussed. ‘We want the story.’

  ‘Okay then. Where was I? Oh yeah. All this happened about seventy years after first contact with the Ursoids.’

  ‘And the Empress of the Galaxy knew she was really going to have to kick some alien butt,’ chimed in Sally and Bobby, because they knew that this was how the story went on.

  ‘Darn right she did,’ Mrs Webster said.

  The story concerned the captain of a scout ship, caught in an Ursoid trap. Before they could destroy him, he contacted the Ursoids, and explained that he was just the advance guard, that a bigger ship was coming, a much more valuable prize than he was, and that if they destroyed him, they would warn the bigger ship to stay away.

  The Ursoids agreed not to destroy him, but to wait. The bigger Empire ship arrived, and this time the captain of this ship told the Ursoids that an even larger, more valuable ship was coming, but if there were any sign of danger, it would divert.

  Again, the Ursoids agreed to postpone battle. And then the big ship arrived. It was enormous. A battle cruiser the size of an asteroid, captained by the ruler of the Galactic Empire herself. Now the big ship, the middle sized ship and the little ship joined forces and destroyed the Ursoids.

  ‘I’ve heard that story before,’ said Sally, ‘except it was about the Three Billy Goats Gruff.’

  ‘That’s a kids’ story,’ protested Bobby.

  ‘What’s it about?’ said Mrs Webster.

  ‘You must’ve heard it,’ said Sally. ‘Everyone knows it. Little Billy Goat Gruff comes to a bridge. There’s a troll, a kind of Kavarsh, living under the bridge—’

  ‘The troll’s called Cyril Flannery,’ said Bobby.

  ‘It’s going to eat the little goat. The little goat says his big brother’s coming and he’ll make better eating. When the middle sized goat comes, he says the same thing. The biggest goat’s coming and he’ll make even better eating. And when the biggest goat arrives, he destroys the troll.’

  ‘One story’s a kids’ story about talking goats and the other story’s a grown-ups’ story about space ships,’ protested Bobby.

  ‘Sally’s right. Same story,’ said Mrs Webster, ‘there’s versions of it all over the …’ and she hesitated as if she was about to use the wrong word, and then said, ‘… Earth. Never heard it about talking goats before.’

  ‘How can it be the same story?’ said Bobby.

  ‘Because it’s about delaying battle until you’ve got superiority of numbers,’ said Mrs Webster. ‘It’s a lesson that history keeps teaching us, so naturally it turns up in stories. It’s why stories are so important. Anyway this time, it really happened. And the Galactic Empire was saved from the Ursoid threat, the Queen sheathed her light sword …’

  ‘And turned her face toward her distant home,’ Bobby and Sally chimed in, finishing for her.

  Mrs Webster smiled and got on with her knitting. ‘Sure did,’ she said, her eyes far away, as if remembering.

  Sally looked at Mrs Webster intently. The answer seemed important to her. ‘Why do they always do that?’

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘At the end of your space stories why do people always turn their faces toward their distant home?’

  Mrs Webster shrugged, and pulled some more wool out of her bag. ‘Because that’s what grown people have to do.’

  Bobby frowned. ‘What if they’re already home?’

  Mrs Webster hesitated, then said, ‘The home you have when you’re a child isn’t the same as the home you have when you’re grown up.’

  The twins thought about that, then Sally nodded. ‘Sometimes growing up must be just that. Deciding where your real home is.’

  Mrs Webster glanced at Sally. She seemed pleased. ‘Good,’ she said, but did not explain why Sally’s answer pleased her. ‘Now it’s bed time.’

  ‘I might just spend a little time on my computer,’ Sally said. ‘The program I’m writing’s giving me a little trouble.’

  ‘No!’ said Bobby. ‘Spock Sally having trouble with an itsy bitsy little computer program?’

  ‘I don’t complain about the dork games you play on yours!’

  Mrs Webster thumped her walking cane on the carpet to stop the developing argument. ‘She does Spock programs, you do dork games, what’s wrong with that, eh?’

  They grinned sheepishly. ‘Nothing.’

  ‘It’s good the two of you are different. Having one birthday’s bad enough, you don’t have to have everything else the same. Now give me a Mrs Webster hug before you go.’

  And she opened both arms, and they fell on her. She wrapped her arms round them.

  ‘You’re always so strong!’ said Sally, her voice a bit muffled by the three-way hug.

  ‘You’d led my life, you’d be strong too,’ said
Mrs Webster. ‘Off now.’

  The twins moved off, leaving Mrs Webster alone. Click, click, click. The knitting needles sounded like a clock ticking.

  chapter nine

  Middle Street’s last night of being absolutely statistically normal passed quietly. Sally fixed the glitch in her computer program while Bobby killed some monsters and won a treasure hoard on his computer.

  Then they slept. At one point Mrs Webster checked on them, and found Bobby’s light still on, and in Sally’s room a coloured glow being cast from the computer screen on which a Mandelbrot Set was slowly evolving.

  Maria and Jim came home from the dinner, where they had been thankful to be ignored by Mrs Flannery while she tried to charm people far more important. At this stage Mrs Webster went home and anyone observing could have seen her doing some strange things with her kitchen appliances, things that did not seem to have much to do with baking cookies.

  While that was going on, Jim and Maria got out the twins’ birthday presents and, as usual, put them on the living room floor, having found in earlier years that taking them into the twins’ bedrooms only caused certain people to wake up and refuse to go back to sleep.

  And then the last lights went out in Middle Street and everyone settled down to their statistically normal amount of sleep.

  Some hours later, the currawongs woke and began calling as first light crept into Middle Street, and then the sun eased its way up over an horizon made jagged by the roofs which lined it.

  As the sun’s first rays hit the Harrison house, Sally woke, then dressed and crept from her bedroom intending to wake Bobby, at the same time as Bobby was waking, dressing and creeping from his bedroom intending to wake Sally. This meant that they ran into each other in the hallway, ‘shssshed’ each other loudly, and then crept toward the living room where they knew they would find their presents.

  The ‘shssshing’ had woken Maria and Jim, who now lay there in their bed, knowing it was hopeless to try getting back to sleep again. The next thing they heard was the tearing of paper as the twins opened their presents. Jim and Maria looked at each other. They knew bed was over for the day, and they rolled out, and started putting on dressing gowns as they heard cries of ‘Wow!’ ‘Yeayyy!’ ‘Unreal!’ ‘Radical’ and ‘Street cred here I come!’

  ‘Sounds like a success,’ murmured Maria.

  ‘Your idea,’ said Jim.

  ‘It was not, it was your idea, and you can cope with the broken legs,’ said Maria, only half meaning it, as she led the way out of the bedroom.

  In the living room, the twins were sitting on the floor, lacing up brand new sets of rollerblades. Both looked up with wide smiles as their parents entered.

  ‘Great!’ said Bobby.

  ‘Radical!’ said Sally.

  ‘The wrist guards, the knee guards, the head guards …’ began Maria.

  ‘Are in the other boxes,’ finished Jim.

  The twins climbed to their feet, thumped across the room in their new rollerblades, and hugged their parents. ‘Thank you! Thank you!’

  ‘Just watch it, uh?’ Jim told them. ‘I’ve been made responsible for any mayhem you commit.’

  ‘Promise. No mayhem,’ Sally said, raising one hand.

  ‘Only on Kavarshes,’ added Bobby.

  Maria and Jim exchanged a look. ‘More Mrs Webster stories last night.’

  ‘We learned about delaying battle till you have superior numbers,’ Bobby told him, and made for the front door. Having pestered friends for short term loans of their rollerblades, he was already getting the hang of it.

  ‘I must try that on Mr Flannery some time,’ Jim said to Maria as Sally coasted past them. Because Sally did not believe in pestering friends for loans of their rollerblades, this was her first time on them, and she was more awkward than Bobby.

  ‘Stay on the footpath!’ yelled Maria. Then the front door slammed, ending the conversation.

  chapter ten

  A few hours later Sally and Bobby were whizzing up and down the footpath of Middle Street, both now more confident on their rollerblades. Maria and Jim were working in their front garden, but only partly because it needed work, the other reason being to keep an eye on Bobby and Sally as they got accustomed to their blades.

  Sometimes Sally and Bobby had to speak quite severely to Jim and Maria about their tendency to be over-protective. They always apologized and promised to be less protective next time, but somehow it never turned out that way.

  Mrs Webster made her appearance, coming out of her house with two gift-wrapped parcels and her special weeding device. No one in Middle Street had ever seen anything quite like this device, which in appearance was very like her walking cane, and no one had ever been able to buy one like it. Mrs Webster used to say she got it ‘where she used to live’ (and even Sally and Bobby had never been able to discover where that was, except that it was a long way away from Middle Street). When pressed, Mrs Webster would say that her weeder was so old they probably didn’t make them any more.

  At first, everyone thought it was a strange-looking poison wand, but that didn’t explain why the weeds gave off a little puff of smoke before they went black and died. Sally once suggested it was a kind of laser gun, but Bobby told her not to be silly—little old ladies who lived in Middle Street didn’t carry laser guns. Even he knew that much.

  Anyway, this morning, Mrs Webster came out with her gift-wrapped parcels and her weed zapper, put the parcels on the rocking chair on her front porch, and began dealing with the dandelions in her lawn.

  For a little while, Bobby and Sally did not notice Mrs Webster working away quietly zapping weeds with her weeder, but when they did see her, they coasted up to her fence to show her their rollerblades.

  ‘Pretty cool, eh, Mrs Webster?’

  ‘Radical,’ said Mrs Webster. Mrs Webster liked to keep up with what she called ‘changes to the language’. She leaned over the fence and examined the blades on Sally and Bobby’s feet. ‘Why didn’t they come up with them sooner? The wheel may have been invented late, but it’s been around some time.’

  ‘I heard some ice hockey player had them made up for him so’s he could practise off-season,’ Sally said.

  ‘I didn’t know that,’ said Bobby. ‘How come you knew that?’

  ‘I read it somewhere,’ said Sally.

  ‘That’s cheating,’ said Bobby, his eyes devouring the gift-wrapped parcels on the rocking chair.

  ‘Oh, I nearly forgot,’ said Mrs Webster. ‘I must be losing my marbles.’

  ‘That’ll be the day,’ Bobby said to Sally as Mrs Webster strode over to her porch and picked up the parcels.

  ‘Sally … and Bobby,’ Mrs Webster said on her way back to them, a parcel held out to each of them.

  As they took the parcels Sally held hers up on the palm of one hand as if she were trying to guess its weight.

  ‘Don’t tell me, let me guess, it’s a book about a girl like me who has to go off on some quest and kind of grows up while she’s doing it.’

  ‘That’s what all proper books are about,’ said Mrs Webster.

  Bobby grinned. This was a game the three of them played every year. ‘And mine’s, ah … let me think. A computer game where the trick to winning is you have to sacrifice the thing you really want to keep.’

  ‘Sure thing,’ said Mrs Webster. ‘That’s what all proper games are about.’

  Bobby and Sally now chimed in together, beating Mrs Webster to it. ‘Because that’s what life’s about.’

  All three of them were laughing, Mrs Webster a little ruefully. ‘I must’ve said that a lot of times, uh?’ she said.

  Sally smiled. ‘A few thousand.’

  ‘Was your life about that?’ said Bobby.

  Mrs Webster looked at him indignantly. ‘“Was”? I’m dead? I’m pushing up daisies?’ She leaned in, glaring at him fiercely. ‘Let me tell you young man, that is precisely what my life’s about.’

  ‘Crusades? Tasks? Monsters?’ Sally’s questio
n was interested, not challenging the truth of what Mrs Webster was saying.

  Mrs Webster looked off across the fence to where Jim and Maria had stopped their work in order to listen, and when she spoke she seemed to be speaking to them as much as to Sally and Bobby. ‘Monsters aren’t all scales and fangs and green slime you know. They can be aching joints. Tasks can be as tough as getting up in the morning and baking cookies.’ Then she smiled directly at Sally and Bobby. ‘Now get on with you. You can leave those here if you like. Since you already know what they are.’

  ‘Thanks, Mrs Webster,’ chorussed Bobby and Sally and handed back the presents and coasted away.

  Afterwards, it was not possible to work out quite how it happened. The twins, as they often did, seemed to get the same idea at the same time, and now it was to rollerblade across the street to the footpath on the other side.

  They hit the concrete drive at the same moment, neither one leading, but when they started to cross the road, Bobby, with his greater experience on borrowed blades, drew ahead of Sally.

  Which is why the car hit her and not him.

  The car just seemed to materialize. No one heard it coming, it was just suddenly there, speeding round the corner, making no attempt to stop, a flash of blue paint, the blare of a horn, Sally turning in horror to see the car bearing down on her.

  Jim, Maria and Mrs Webster stood staring in numb shock. Bobby turned back, his eyes wide with horror. The moment stretched interminably.

  And all the while Mrs Webster was moving, vaulting the fence and running for Sally like a charging football player! It was impossible, an old lady could not have done it. But she had done it. She was moving for Sally, getting within centimetres, split seconds of snatching her to safety.

  The effort was superhuman. But it was not good enough.

  There was a terrible thud as the car struck Sally and tossed her aside and then it was speeding away again and Sally was lying broken on the road.