“It’ll be fine,” said Mum. “I promise.”
“What about school?” Maddy whispered. The words came on icy breath.
“Trust us,” said Dad.
But Maddy Frank didn’t think she’d ever trust these people again.
Chapter Three
Karatgurk
That night Maddy Frank nearly cried but didn’t. Or rather, she wouldn’t. It felt better to be angry than sad. Being sad felt small and wrong; being angry felt strong and right. When she felt the tears coming she pressed her lips together and frowned instead. She fell asleep with the ache of tears in her throat and she dreamed the same dream over and over.
She dreamed she woke up in her own room. Everything looked real and ordinary. There was her ordinary table with the blue bookcase painted with white clouds. There was her part-open wardrobe. There was her ordinary wall covered in pictures of fairies. Again and again she woke up in this dream room in which everything looked and felt real – except for one thing.
In the dream, her birthday hadn’t happened. Her parents had never said they were moving. In the dream, she didn’t have to leave Fitzroy. Every time she woke, she woke up in the dream room. The ache in her throat would be unbearable – and then she’d realise. She didn’t actually have to do it. In the dream, she didn’t have to move.
Dream happiness would flood her body. Her throat would stop aching. It was like the whole dream house sighed and relaxed.
But then the dream fairies would come. Hundreds of them peeling off the fairy wall and flying about the dream ceiling. They slipped out of books like silverfish. They dropped from picture frames like pressed flowers. They even flew out of the dream wardrobe like seeds in a wind. And with shock, she would realise what was happening. They were leaving.
The fairies were leaving Jermyn Street.
They arranged themselves and took off in tiny squadrons, whirring to the windowsill and out into the summer night. Once airborne, all the squadrons followed one lead fairy, brighter than the others. Bright as a star. She could see them, black against the grey sky, flying in formation. Flying away from her.
“Come back,” she called and in the dream her voice was deep and broken. And as she watched the fairies leaving, an icy wind picked up in the dream room and snow began to fall.
Then she’d wake up in her ordinary room and it would all start again.
This went on until she was neither awake nor asleep but somewhere in between.
The last time she woke, Maddy was worn out but she could tell she was really awake because the ache in her throat didn’t go away. Her heart hung heavy as a sloth but her mind jumped like crickets. She tiptoed out into the backyard. The orb-weaver had spun its web high in the silky ti-tree and the tent was still set up from her birthday campout the night before with Sophie-Rose and the Emmas. Everything smelled of jasmine and compost.
It was such a brilliant smell.
Maddy lay by the pond and sighed.
The stars spread across the sky, each in their exact place. Each next to their exact right neighbour. Laid out almost exactly like the school project on astronomy she and Sophie-Rose had just finished.
Milky Way.
Southern Cross.
Taurus the Bull.
Maddy remembered lying out here with her Dad. Actually, she remembered lying out here on her Dad. He’d taught her about the stars. Human beings are made of stardust, he’d told her. And water, of course.
“You are just my little mess of stardust and water,” he’d said.
Dad had also taught her about the constellations – their names, their stories. They had plenty of names. Plenty of stories.
The six big stars in the north were called the Pleiades. It was a Greek word. And there were too many vowels in it in Maddy’s opinion, even for someone who loved spelling.
It was Mum who had showed her how to say it.
“Play-eee-dees,” she’d said, pulling her mouth into shapes that made Maddy laugh. “Now you say it.”
Play-eeee-deeeees.
The Pleiades were seven girls in Greek mythology. They were sisters who were turned into stars by a god. After thousands of years travelling together in the skies though, one of the stars disappeared and now there were only six. But at school Mrs Trang had said one of Melbourne’s first people called those same stars the Karatgurk – a name that had the regular amount of vowels. So that’s what Maddy called them.
Mrs Trang said these first people were called the Wurundjeri. It was a word Maddy liked to whisper to herself in the quiet. She lay whispering it now.
Wuh-run-jer-ee.
In the Karatgurk story, the stars were girls too. They’d been the first to make fire and they carried it, in embers on the ends of their digging sticks. Then there was some trouble – something about a crow stealing the fire. Maddy could only remember that Bunjil the eagle put the Karatgurk in the sky, safe from the crow. Now their embers were the stars. The lost star was the youngest girl, always chasing the older ones.
Maddy liked to think of herself and the Emmas and Sophie-Rose, sailing the sky like the Karatgurk. Last night at the campout the conversation had turned to this favourite subject.
Maddy had said if they could be star queens, they could decide who to reward and who to punish. She would, for instance, scatter ice-star seeds in good people’s gardens and the seeds would grow into diamond trees. Also they’d only wear dresses made of the finest frost with snow crystal crowns.
Emma D, who worried about her freckles, said all star queens would have skin bathed in the light of the Milky Way. And Emma B, who worried that she wasn’t very important, said everybody would have to look up to them if they were star queens.
And Sophie-Rose had said, “Der! Where else would they look?”
Even Emma B had laughed. That was the thing about Sophie-Rose. She was sharp but she was funny.
Maddy lifted her hands and framed the stars in her fingers. She wished she could put this sky in a box and take it with her. She moved the frame across the sky, catching the whole Milky Way.
She moved the frame down into the backyard.
There was a dark shape standing by the shed.
“Pumpkin, pumpkin,” sighed Dad. “What are you doing out here by yourself?”
He was standing in his train pyjamas with a sad face.
“Nothing,” said Maddy, coldly.
Dad sat down next to her. She was too big to lie on him any more. Only a week ago he’d told her to get off. He’d said she was big as a planet and would squash him into a black hole. She’d thought it funny then. But now it was different. It was like he wanted everything to change. Like he was happy about it.
Venus was twinkling just behind his head, but Maddy would not look. The sky became morning and they didn’t say one word. She tipped her face back and her nose stood dark against the sky.
“You know,” said Dad at last. “Even the stars have to move.”
Chapter Four
Goodbye, House
In the back lane with her friends, Maddy looked at her watch.
It was 4.57 pm.
Sophie-Rose stood on one leg with her hands on her hips. She was in one of her moods. She’d come to say goodbye, but Maddy could see that now she was here she just wanted to go home again. There was some feeling she couldn’t pin down, fluttering inside Maddy’s chest when she looked at Sophie-Rose’s stony face. She crossed her arms to keep it inside.
The Franks were leaving at exactly five o’clock.
Maddy showed the Emmas the time, and for the first time since they’d learned to talk neither of them knew what to say. A tear slid down Maddy’s cheek. It was only one tiny tear, but it was enough for the Emmas. They clasped Maddy and sobbed loudly right in the middle of the lane. Sophie-Rose rolled her eyes.
“It’s going to be so terrible,” Maddy moaned. “There won’t be anybody.”
“You’ll forget us in about a minute,” muttered Sophie-Rose, looking at her feet.
“
No, I won’t!” said Maddy, horrified.
But actually she wasn’t sure. Her parents had said that she would remember what was important. They’d said that was all you ever remembered about anything.
But Maddy Frank couldn’t remember lots of important things. Everybody said that times tables were important and she couldn’t remember them. And capital cities, they were important too. But she could never remember Hobart. Maybe she would forget the campouts and the Karatgurk. The number 112 tram to Fitzroy Gardens. The fence line. And the dogs.
Maybe she would forget it all.
A door banged.
Her mother’s voice called her name.
The Emmas sagged against one another.
Sophie-Rose swiped at a fly and got it.
There was nothing left to do but walk to the car and get in and go.
Maddy followed Mum through the back garden. Under the flowering gum. Past the pond and the silky ti-tree. Past the shed and in the back door. It slammed with one big slam and two small ones. As she moved through the kitchen for the last time her fingers found the notches in the doorframe. Notches all the way up to nine. Her parents loved measuring her, but this year Maddy had refused to be measured.
Down the hall, past her room, onto the steps. The front door closed with one hollow clunk. Down the path, past the “Sold” sign and onto to the kerb. Mum turned around.
“Goodbye, house,” she said.
Maddy climbed into the car, placed her feet together, laid her hands in her lap.
“Don’t you want to say goodbye?” Mum said.
“No,” said Maddy Frank.
And the car pulled out.
It rolled down Jermyn Street.
Number thirteen.
Eleven.
Nine.
Seven.
Five.
Mumtaj.
Winston. Right at the last moment Maddy turned and looked back.
Sophie-Rose was running after them.
“Stop!” Maddy ordered, and Dad did, with a jolt.
Sophie-Rose reached the car.
“I forgot to give you this,” she said, panting.
She held out a bit of paper, crumpled at the edges.
It was a photo of the night sky over Jermyn Street. You could see the Karatgurk – there was a finger blur at the corner but most of the stars were clear. Maddy remembered Sophie-Rose taking it last year with her mum’s old instant camera. At the ninth birthday backyard campout before her ninth visit to the Fairies Tree.
Sophie-Rose leaned in the window and hugged Maddy until it hurt.
Maddy knew Sophie-Rose had lied about forgetting to give her the picture. She just hadn’t wanted the Emmas to see her say goodbye. They were only school friends. Maddy had been hers since they were born. They belonged to each other.
Maddy hugged her back.
And then the car was moving, and Sophie-Rose got smaller and smaller until she was only a dot in the street. Then they turned into the traffic and she was gone. The flutter in Maddy’s chest sank deep and nested.
Maddy sat stiffly in her seatbelt in the back seat. They could make her go but they couldn’t make her be happy about it. She closed her eyes and pictured Sophie-Rose’s face.
The streams of traffic surged until Maddy felt sick and then their car was suddenly in a river of cars flowing north. For a while she wondered if her birthday wish had come true and some old leftover fairy magic was keeping them in the city after all. It felt like they’d been driving on this road forever. But there was still nothing but housing estates and shopping strips and roadworks.
“Ellen?” she said in a thin voice to her mother.
Dad swapped a look with Mum. Mum bit her lip and shrugged. Maddy Frank called her parents by their first names only when she was very, very angry.
“Yes, Madeleine Jean?” she said.
“Where are the trees?” Maddy asked.
“We’re not there yet,” said her mother.
They drove and drove until the sun started setting. Her parents’ voices sounded like they were talking under water. Maddy’s head jerked. Her eyes rolled back in her head. She tried to stop them. Sleeping would be like surrender – like she was saying it was all right. She fixed her eyes ahead and pressed her mouth into a line, straight and white as the line down the middle of the highway.
When she woke it was dark.
There were no streetlights, no signs, no roadworks. No traffic. No houses. Their own headlights gave off two small tunnels of light, illuminating nothing. They were exactly in the middle of nowhere.
They passed a sign pointing away to the right. Mount Disappointment, it said.
Maddy Frank leaned forwards. She spoke in a clear, flat voice, addressing both parents equally. She pointed to the sign.
“See,” she said.
Chapter Five
The Deviation
In the morning, it was the quiet that woke Maddy. Their new house was on the low slopes of Mount Disappointment, up a dirt road called The Deviation and with no other house in sight. The quiet that first morning had a waiting feeling – like just before something bad happens in a movie. Maddy lay and listened.
Back in Jermyn Street, Mr Sorrenti would be calling for coffee and the Jack Russells begging for breakfast. Gunter would be purring at the cats and Franco singing in the kitchen. The back lanes would be rattling with bikes.
Here in Plenty, one huge black fly bumped against the window.
“Maddy!” called Mum from somewhere in the house. “Come and see the trees. The bush is right there!”
Maddy went to the window next to the fly. There was nothing to see but a clothes line in the middle of a paddock of long yellow grass. The grass spread to a fence line that traced pale through the shadow of a mountain. The mountain loomed over the house like a storm. And there was a smell. A bad smell. Sharp and rich, like a bloodied nose. She laid her forehead on the glass and breathed through her mouth.
“Mmm mmm,” said Mum, coming into her room. “What about that air?”
“It stinks,” said Maddy.
The new house was too big. In Jermyn Street, the rooms led sensibly off one hallway, with a red rug down to the kitchen. Here, the rooms split off each other at angles, like somebody had taken the roof off the house and thrown in walls. She found the kitchen right at the back.
Dad was saying to Mum, “You certainly get more house for your money out here.”
“There was enough house at home,” Maddy told him.
Her parents had been replaced by two people with huge eyes and smiles. They just kept smiling, no matter what.
“Well, now there’s even more. There’s plenty of house, eh?” said Dad. “Plenty of room.”
Maddy ignored his joke. She looked out the kitchen window and her mother was right – from this window the bush was exactly right there. It ran along the back fence line and away up the mountain as far as she could see. And it wasn’t like Yarra Bend or the other bits of bush in the city; that bush was full of clean silver light.
This bush was a dark smudge on the fence line. It didn’t pour light out; it sucked it in. The leaves weren’t green; they were grey. Further up the mountain the top half of the trees were black and bare from fire. The burnt stumps rose above the new leaves like another forest. A dead forest hanging over a live one.
All morning Maddy felt the mountain pressing, no matter where she was in the house. Every time she looked, those stumps seemed closer. And she heard creaks coming from inside the bush. Like the trees were trying to pull up their roots and walk.
Later they drove into town, which was called Wilam. Dad said it meant a shelter. They passed one car the whole way. There were two people in the main street. Most of the shops were deserted and their windows boarded over. Maddy peered through the boards, into an old garage. There was nothing inside but dust and nothing outside but graffiti. It was like a graphic novel in the teen section of the library and she was in it.
She looked at her watch. It was
2.50 pm.
They went to the milk bar and bought milkshakes.
Then at three o’clock everything changed. It was like a portal had been opened somewhere. Cars drove in from all directions. The main street filled with people. Parents and children crowded into the milk bar.
“I guess school’s out,” said Dad.
Maddy peered over her milkshake at a group of girls by the door. But they saw her and she had to drop her gaze to their feet. She noticed they all wore the same shapeless dusty workboots.
“They look like a nice bunch,” Mum said to Maddy.
She smiled her encouraging smile, the one she saved for sports days and vaccinations.
The girls kicked their boots off outside the shop. There was a mountain of them, all the same. Maddy wondered how they would know whose boots were whose.
“You’ll make new friends,” said Mum. And then she added like there was no arguing with it, “Making new friends is so great.”
Sophie-Rose’s face rose in Maddy’s mind, scowling and familiar.
Friends took ages to grow. A lifetime sometimes.
“It’s one of the best things about life,” Dad said.
Not for the first time, Maddy Frank wished her parents would stop using this move to teach her stuff about life. First it had been the love of family, then the remembering of what was important, and now the making of new friends.
She didn’t want new friends; she wanted her old ones, and David and Ellen knew it.
Not for the last time, Maddy Frank rolled her eyes.
And then after the milkshake, they went to Nana’s place.
Chapter Six
Whittlesea
Ellen had always said she called her daughter Madeleine because it was a three-times useful name. She could be Maddy as a little girl, Madeleine as a grown woman and plain Mad when she was an old lady. When Mum told this story, people laughed. They looked at Maddy with happy eyes like she’d done something clever just having a name. But now Mum said Maddy Frank was named after this Nana they were going to see.
Nana lived in a town called Whittlesea, which sounded promising to Maddy. She imagined Nana’s place full of shells and wet towels. A house hung with seaweed and buffeted by the wind. A grandmother who knew secret coves and had a row boat.
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