‘The most beautiful fairy I’ve ever seen.’
‘How many fairies have you seen?’ demanded Scarlett.
Jed laughed. This kid was no fool. The small head contained a seriously large intelligence. ‘I bet you’re the first. And I bet he’ll never see another as beautiful.’
‘Good,’ said Scarlett. ‘This is the best, best Christmas in my life!’
‘The best in mine too,’ agreed Jed. Suddenly she wondered how long this fairy’s life might be. Had she been born like this? Or was it a degenerative disease that would slowly worsen as she got older, or leave her vulnerable to infections that might kill, fast?
She would ask Nancy. Nancy would know, and would tell her, even if Matron Clancy would not.
‘You can open your Santa Claus presents now,’ Scarlett announced generously.
Jed pulled a parcel out and looked at it doubtfully. Had Santa Claus ever come to her, except at primary school Christmas parties? If he had, she couldn’t remember it. Nor had there been gifts on Christmas Day since Dad died, and maybe not even before that. Christmas gifts were restricted to the ones from girls at school, handkerchiefs and bath salts.
This parcel didn’t feel like either.
‘Go on,’ urged Scarlett.
Jed stared, stunned. Oh, wow. A dress. An Indian one, from Raincloud’s shop probably, red with blue embroidery, and sequins about the hem. How had anyone known she wanted one so badly? Not expensive, if those in the shop had been any guide, but the most perfect, beautiful dress she had ever owned.
‘Clothes,’ said Scarlett in disgust. ‘Anything interesting?’
Two pairs of pyjamas, two polka-dotted bras, large enough to contain and control The Beasts, and matching underpants that made her blush and push them under the pyjamas, but not before she saw Nicholas grin, another dress, a more conventional mini-skirted one with blue polka dots, a pair of jeans and two T-shirts. Things she needed, she thought, but from Santa Claus, so they weren’t charity. A pair of sandals with slightly high heels, another low-heeled pair and a pair of red thongs. Two pairs of nylon stockings.
Scarlett snorted. ‘Open the music box again,’ she ordered. ‘My stuff’s MUCH better than yours.’ Her voice held sympathy.
Jed shook her head. ‘I think Santa knows what we want best. Nicholas?’
He shrugged, and opened his first gift. A notebook, just plain, with ruled pages, but also difficult for a young man in a wheelchair to buy for himself. More notebooks, pens, a packet of typing paper, a bottle of correcting fluid . . .
He held up the paper. ‘I don’t have a typewriter.’
‘Perhaps Santa knows what all our presents will be, no matter who they’re from. Do you want a typewriter?’
He flushed. ‘I don’t know.’
‘How can you not know?’
‘I . . . I might. I’ve been scribbling stuff. Not much. But I don’t know how Nancy knows.’
‘It’s Santa Claus, not Nancy.’ Scarlett looked at them with too much perception. ‘Isn’t it?’
Jed was silent. Saying, ‘Look what Santa has brought,’ was misdirection. Saying, ‘No, Nancy didn’t get you these,’ would be a lie.
‘Santa’s the best explanation I can think of,’ said Nicholas.
Jed smiled at him. Exactly the right answer.
Nicholas’s fingers touched the typing paper. He looked more . . . there . . . than Jed had ever seen him.
Santa knew what he was doing.
Chapter 23
MICHAEL
One of the things that Michael loved most about his wife was that she didn’t care that breakfast at Overflow — the chaotic scrambling for cereal and toast, the open Vegemite jar, the instant coffee granules on the floor — was so different from mornings when she was a kid, or in the home where he’d grown up — the sedate rituals of porridge, then eggs and bacon or lamb’s fry and gravy, scrambled eggs or omelette, followed by toast in a silver rack, jam in cut-glass bowls, tea in the ‘breakfast pot’ in its tea cosy, with another pot of hot water to dilute it as the tea grew stronger cup by cup.
None of those rituals featured in his parents’ childhoods, he knew, except perhaps the teapot. But after more than half a century, silver toast racks and jam in the correct dishes were an intrinsic part of their lives.
‘Breakfast before presents!’ Nancy bent and kissed a thoroughly overexcited Scarlett on the way to the kitchen door, where she hugged her mother.
‘Merry Christmas, Mum. Oh, all right! Presents first then!’
Had she had any breakfast herself? Michael exchanged a look with his mother-in-law, another partner in the conspiracy to make sure Nancy ate an adequate amount. The whole district, he suspected, was in on it. He’d seen Mrs Anderson from the CWA wait patiently while Nancy held a sausage roll, reminding her to take another bite every time there was a break in the conversation.
It wasn’t that Nancy didn’t like food. She enjoyed tastes, would eat half a box of chocolates as long as you reminded her to put each one actually into her mouth. But her body’s signals that it needed food had been disrupted, and couldn’t be re-established.
Mrs Clancy moved to the toaster. A plate of Vegemite toast at Nancy’s side would do the trick, if she were given just a few quiet reminders. He followed the horde into the living room.
The Christmas tree leaned, the angel staring at the floor. She-oak needles were already thick on the polished boards. The decorations were all hand made, some by Nancy and Ben when they were young, others by other children who had been a brief bright part of their lives.
He looked at those in the room today. Nicholas, so much improved in the last half-year, sitting straight in his chair, though Moira said it would still be a few months before it was advisable for him to begin to learn to walk again with prosthetics. Scarlett, a small excited fairy — he wondered if they’d ever get her into other clothes. Jed, suddenly vivid in her new dress, so unlike the drab, much washed clothes she had arrived in. Her face had colour too.
Was this girl really his great-niece? He remembered Anna, Jed’s — possible — grandmother, closed faced and resentful of the second wife and family her father had chosen. She had sent him and Jim the same Christmas present every year — a box of chocolates, even during the war when the chocolates must have been black market, as if to say, ‘I can’t be bothered thinking about what presents you might like, or even telling you apart. But I have done my duty.’
Rose had been easier, and not just because she was almost the same age as he was. Tommy would take the three of them to the zoo in Melbourne; to the pictures or to eat ice cream along the boardwalk, watching the flat grey sea.
Rose had seemed vaguely puzzled by the obvious family rift, though not especially interested, neither in him and Jim nor in her grandfather, these bushies from beyond the black stump. But she’d chattered, and advised him on the best ice-cream sundae — double banana split with chocolate sauce — and they’d compared notes on who had the worst teachers. She’d won, with Miss — what was her name? Pringle? — who had checked the girls’ underwear every week to make sure there was no scrap of frivolous lace or colour.
Rose of course had lace enough at home.
And then the war and no more visits to Melbourne: stilted long-distance phone calls instead, booked through the operator in three-minute blocks, and only at birthdays and Christmas, made by his father, not by Anna or Rose. A letter arrived, not a phone call, to tell them that Rose had been married before her fiancé left Australia, and she would be leaving for America with so many other war brides. There was pain visible on his father’s face when he broke the news, for he and Mum could easily have managed to go to Melbourne for the wedding, if they’d been asked.
He remembered Anna’s funeral, only a few weeks after her leukaemia was diagnosed, too fast for Rose to make it back to see her mother. The church had been full of her friends, none of whom his father had ever met, and Michael had seen how much that had hurt his father too, not just the loss of h
is daughter, but knowing she had chosen to be a stranger, had died disapproving and unforgiving.
Rose had not been there; just a vast arrangement of white roses in her place. And from that time on there had been nothing from her, nor about her, not even Christmas chocolates, even though he dutifully inscribed a Christmas card to her each year, and knew that his parents sent presents.
He had seen his father refuse to accept that she was gone; had waved goodbye to him as he and his mother had even gone to the USA to talk to her husband, and, most likely, arrange for investigators there. Had hugged them when they came back, thinner, more fragile, his father blank with grief, not for the young woman he barely knew, but for the relationship that might have been, and now would never be.
There had been police reports; a coronial inquest that decided, in the end, that there was no proof that Rose had died and some evidence — those missing funds — that she might indeed be alive. Michael had hoped, for his father’s sake, that she might have been declared dead. Instead they had years of wondering in a mix of anguish and guilty detective fascination, trying to work out where an almost unknown woman might have gone, years of hoping there might be a phone call. ‘Hi. This is Rose.’ But there’d been nothing.
Until now. Possibly. A tiny coffee cup of possibility that this might be his great-niece, sitting apart from the filled table that was his family’s life.
‘Jed! You haven’t opened mine yet!’ Scarlett jerked him from his memories.
Jed reached for a small packet, so badly wrapped that Michael knew Scarlett must have at least helped to wrap it. Jed opened it and held up a headband. ‘It’s beautiful!’
‘I made it! Well, Miss Sampson helped. Did you KNOW that ancient Greek wrestlers used to use headbands to keep their hair out of their eyes?’
Jed smiled, true happiness in her eyes. ‘No. It’s the most beautiful headband I’ve ever seen.’
‘I know,’ said Scarlett confidently as Jed tied it around her hair and forehead. ‘Who’s that present for?’ ‘That’ was the size of a sheep, if a sheep had decided to sit on its hind legs. It had taken him and Nancy almost an hour to wrap last night.
‘Better see what’s on the card.’
Jed pushed Scarlett’s wheelchair closer. The little girl peered to read. ‘It’s got my name on it!’
‘To Scarlett with love from Nancy and Michael,’ added Jed. ‘Will I unwrap it for you?’
Scarlett nodded. That too would not have been possible a year ago. Michael looked at his wife, who had worked so many miracles.
The next one slowly revealed itself as Jed tore off the paper. A motorised wheelchair, built of the miraculous — and extraordinarily expensive — metal titanium, strong enough to protect the child if it tipped over, light enough for the electric motor to propel her up ramps and even hills; far more manoeuvrable even than Nicholas’s model. The controls had been made especially for Scarlett’s size, strength and abilities.
The child looked at it with awe, terror and extraordinary hope. ‘Is it one that goes by itself?’
‘No,’ said Michael. ‘You have to press the big buttons to make it go. If you stop pressing, it stops too. And if you press this, it goes faster, and this turns it to the right and the one on the left arm makes it turn left. Will I put you in it?’
But Jed was already lifting her. Suddenly Michael knew that he wanted this girl to be his great-niece, his family; he knew that Nancy wanted it too. Surely a con woman would not tend a crippled child so lovingly. Unless of course it was part of a careful act, to make them accept her whatever was discovered about her claims.
The best investigators in the USA had already searched unsuccessfully for Rose. What if nothing more was ever found? Then the only way to prove Jed was not Rose’s daughter would be to prove she was someone else. And this girl was so very determined that her past not be found out.
‘Moira, darling, she’s trying it out now!’ Nancy ran to hug her sister-in-law, who had just arrived, elegantly unmatronly in a silk dress and, stone the flaming crows, high heels and stockings, on a day that would be ninety degrees Fahrenheit in the shade, whatever that was in this new-fangled Celsius.
Scarlett touched a button. The chair zoomed forwards and crashed into the tree, which toppled but was caught by Nicholas before it crashed to the floor, the angel flying free while Jed rescued the small fairy in her chair . . .
And Nancy, his darling Nancy, laughed with happiness amid it all.
Church, later, Nicholas staying behind, Jed and Moira shepherding Scarlett, who refused to relinquish either the fairy dress or the new wheelchair, even though it would be weeks or even months before she could safely guide it on her own, this child who had been pushed and dragged around by others all her life.
A hundred merry Christmases and prognostications about the weather, and ‘Did you know the river paddock fence is down?’; Jim and Iris and the boys down from Sydney and staying at Drinkwater, Jim back in his farmer’s clothes, and not a Sydney suit. Michael looked from his brother and nephews to Jed, trying to see a family resemblance.
But there was none, except perhaps the hair colour, shared by possibly half the population. Square noses to her longer one; brown eyes to her green. Sitting with the family in the back pew, she leaned over so Scarlett could read the hymn book too — or pretend to read it, for most of the words would be beyond her — while her other hand casually rubbed a strand of her own hair.
His own gesture that Nancy laughed at and called his ‘I am not thinking of anything’ tug. But that was a coincidence, surely. Gestures couldn’t be inherited. His father did it too and he had copied him. Surely it must go like that . . .
He looked at Scarlett, the fairy child, and this stranger with her long straight hair, then at his wife, as they stood to sing the Christmas hymn. Please, God, he prayed, let those girls truly become our family too.
Chapter 24
JED
She could count the number of times she’d gone to church on her fingers, and it’d certainly never been in nylon stockings before, as well as the polka-dotted dress and heeled sandals, though there had been weekly Religious Instruction at school. Some of the women wore hats and gloves, Michael’s sister-in-law among them, but Nancy did not, so Jed felt comfortable without.
She stood when the others did and sang with them, Scarlett and her chair next to her, in the aisle at the back, a woman with a sleeping baby on the other side.
The woman had kissed her on the way in, for no reason it seemed except that she was with the Thompsons, or perhaps because it was Christmas.
Christmas. There had been books for her under the tree: Welcome to the Monkey House by Kurt Vonnegut, Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner in the package from Michael and Nancy; Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings in gorgeous hardback from Matron — she hadn’t even thought Matron would be there and had no present she could give her.
And from Nicholas The Goblin Reservation by Clifford D Simak, A Gift from Earth by Larry Niven, and Chocky, the latest book by John Wyndham.
She’d looked at the books and laughed.
‘What’s so funny? I thought you’d like them.’
‘I love them.’ She handed Nicholas the gift she had decided at the last minute to get him, whether or not he had something for her.
He tore the wrapping off. A Gift from Earth. He grinned and around them everyone smiled and laughed and rescued presents from the wild trajectory of Scarlett’s wheelchair.
‘Silent night, holy night . . .’
Beside her, Scarlett’s voice was high and surprisingly true. She had given everyone except Jed chocolates. How like Nancy, to make sure the little one had gifts to give, as well as receive. And for Nancy a card where someone had obviously guided the weak hand: To Nancy Merry Christmas love Scarlett.
But there had been no gift under the tree with the message: To Scarlett — or whatever name the child had been given at birth — from Mum and Dad. Not even a Christmas card. She had mentioned the lack to Nan
cy, on Christmas Eve. ‘Don’t they send her anything?’
Nancy had shaken her head. ‘They don’t even want progress reports. Some families feel it’s easier on the child and their other children, to make it a clean break if they have a child who needs to live in care.’
‘What do you think?’
Nancy looked her in the eyes. ‘I think abandoning a child is the worst crime a human can commit. I’d like to see every parent who has turned their back on their own child branded on the forehead so we know them for the monsters that they are.’
No one, looking at Nancy now, singing with the rest of the congregation, could guess so much anger lurked under the laughter and zest for life. But it had answered another question for Jed: no matter how much Nancy might seem to like her, she could never trust her with the secret of who — and what — she really was.
‘All is calm, all is bright
Round yon virgin, mother and child . . .’
Virgins, mothers, children . . . Guilt slashed through her. She hadn’t felt it for over a week now. Nor had she seen any ghosts. It was as if, growing real herself now among the butterflies of River View, the kids who faced the challenges of everyday life with so much fortitude, the ghosts could no longer be seen.
But church today was not real. Sitting as a family was not real. This life belonged to Tommy Thompson’s great-granddaughter, and if —
The baby beside her began to cry. Her mother lifted her over her shoulder, then exclaimed as a long burp left a trail of milky solids down her dress.
She offered the baby to Jed. ‘Would you mind?’ she whispered under the song.
Jed took the baby automatically, holding her awkwardly in both arms as the mother began to wipe the baby vomit from her dress. One chubby hand reached up and tugged her hair.
‘Sleep in heavenly peace . . .’
Nausea almost made her choke. She thrust the baby back at the startled mother, edged behind Scarlett’s chair, then ran out the door and over to the yard where the grey stones sat sombre in the sun. She bent over and began to retch. Cornflakes, toast, two cups of tea . . .
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