by Penni Russon
‘It’s just a word,’ says Else. ‘Like any other word. Why are some words good and some words bad? It’s stupid.’
‘That sort of radical thinking might not go down too well at Ladypants High.’
‘Stupid is a bad word too,’ says Sibbi.
But Daddy and Else are lost in an argument of their own.
‘Why do you keep making comments like that?’ Else snaps. ‘What’s wrong with a girls school anyway? I’m a girl. Sibbi’s a girl. Other parents would be glad I want to broaden my horizons.’
‘Sure, but broaden your horizons at Kingsley. Take science. Join the chess club. But keep your options open. Don’t give up something you’ve worked at . . .’
‘What about you? You gave up being a lawyer to build fences. Nan and Pop thought that was crazy.’
‘That was different. I was never passionate about being a lawyer.’
‘But you didn’t like building fences either.’
Daddy shrugs. ‘I guess I’m still working out what I want to be when I grow up.’
‘But you are grown up, Daddy,’ Sibbi says.
‘So are you a lawyer again now?’ Else says.
‘I’m helping Mr Brompton and he’s paying me enough to tide us over while we wait for the estate to settle.’
‘And then what?’
Sibbi looks at Daddy and Daddy looks out the window. ‘I don’t know,’ he says quietly to Else. ‘Right now I’m just dealing with one thing at a time.’
ELSE
I’M NOT SURE what I’m expecting – Hogwarts perhaps – but in the end Lady Emily Hartington is just a school. Very clean, much cleaner than my old school. Nice white tiled halls, shiny science labs. Sparkling windows. But it still smells like any old school: pencil shavings and floor cleaner.
Anyway, it’s fine. The girls are all nice and boring in that way that people you don’t know always are. Some look catty, some look gloomy, some look kind, and that would be the same at any school. I’d thought because of the fancy uniforms and the money they’d all be different but somewhere in the school there’s probably a Kasey and an Audrey and a Tilly and a Camille, or girls just like them, one just like me even.
Ivy, the head girl, takes us around the school on a lightning-fast tour, flinging her arm in the direction of toilets and maths classrooms and food labs. She is brisk and long-faced, like an English girl from a TV show or a member of the royal family, like she’s playing the character of herself and she’s not a real person at all, and she doesn’t seem the least bit interested in us, despite my fascinating, fresh from Neighbours accent. Oddly Sibbi takes a liking to her, and holds her hand all around the school, clinging on a bit too long at the end, which is embarrassing for everyone, especially Ivy who has to prise herself free. Embarrassing for everyone, except for Sibbi who cries real angry tears and shows no shame.
SIBBI
SIBBI’S SCHOOL IS a three-storey building, dark and grim. Sibbi is not interested in the classrooms. Else and Daddy look silently at the tiny children sitting at desks, cutting pre-printed shapes out with scissors.
‘Does Sibbi even know how to use scissors?’ Daddy whispers to Else and she shrugs.
Sibbi shrinks away from the large lunch room, and even Else feels an unbearable loneliness enter her as she looks at the light streaming in the imposing arched windows, breathing in the almost suffocating smell of roast meat and jacket potatoes.
‘Are the children happy at school?’ Else asks Mrs Butterworth, the head teacher.
‘Oh yes,’ says Mrs Butterworth.
‘All of them?’ asks Else.
‘Very happy,’ says Mrs Butterworth, firmly.
‘Aren’t there any other schools?’ Else asks Daddy as they walk out the grim school gate. She pictures the playground at the old primary school they left behind. The big green oval, the monkey bars, the long slide, the gazebo, the netball courts, the permaculture garden, the fruit trees espaliered on the wire fence, the kookaburras, the lizards, and all the funny dips and crevasses and hiding places.
Daddy doesn’t like it much either. ‘What choice do we have?’ he says to Else. ‘We were lucky to get a spot here. And she has to go somewhere. It’s the law.’
Sibbi says nothing. She leans against Dave, bumping gently against him. The bus rocks from side to side, rocking her to sleep.
CLANCY
‘HAVE YOU NOTICED that Mum never wants to go anywhere?’ I ask Else, who’s reading in the lounge room.
Else shrugs. ‘She’s busy writing her thesis.’
‘We’ve come all the way across the world, and we haven’t seen anything. Big Ben. Buckingham Palace. The Imperial War Museum. The British Library.’
Else turns the page of her book, but I bet if she’s honest with herself, she can’t remember what she’s read for the last ten pages. ‘You could go. You just have to catch the Tube. You could work it out by yourself.’
‘But you heard Mum. She’s not going to let us go wandering around England by ourselves. But she’d let me go if you came with me.’
‘All right,’ Else says. ‘Where would we go?’
‘The Natural History Museum,’ I say, not missing a beat.
Else flops back down. ‘No way. Go with Pippa.’
‘She’s been a million times. I want to go with you. I want to go today. Look.’ I show her the tourist map. ‘It’s right next to the Victoria & Albert Museum. And see, there’s the Albert Hall.’
Else studies the map. I watch her finger land on the map, a few blocks from the Museum of Natural History. I read over her shoulder: The Royal Academy of Music.
‘All right. You tell Mum.’
But when I go and tell Mum, Sibbi says, ‘I go too?’
I look at Mum.
‘Just Clancy and Else this time, love.’
‘No-oo!’ Since we moved to London, Sibbi has no orange light, I’ve noticed. She flips straight from green to red with no warning. She roars. ‘NO! No go-oo.’
Else comes in. ‘Oh, not again, Sibbi.’
Mum looks at Else. ‘Can’t you take Sibbi with you?’
‘No way,’ says Else.
‘Where are the twins?’ I ask.
‘Playing soccer at the park,’ Mum says.
‘Where’s Dad?’ says Else.
‘At Mr Brompton’s office.’
‘Again?’ I say.
‘Mr Brompton’s letting us save some money by sorting through the estate ourselves. It’s all in a bit of a mess. Dad’s got some experience with contract law from before Sibbi was born, but he’s not that familiar with the law in England.’
‘Save money? I don’t understand. If we’ve inherited this house . . .?’
‘It’s complicated. All the money’s tied up in things –the house, silverware, even the furniture. With taxes and the financial crisis and chasing paperwork around, we’re not even sure exactly what we’ve inherited yet. It’s hard to know what has value and what’s just rubbish.’
I shudder. ‘Ugh. Money, money, money. If this is what it’s like to be rich, I think I’d rather be poor.’
‘Can’t Sibbi go with you?’ Mum pleads. ‘I really need to get some writing done today.’
‘No,’ says Else. ‘She’s hard work. She’ll run off, she doesn’t listen. It’s not like Australia, people don’t want to put up with ratty kids here.’
‘I want to go on the Tube train,’ Sibbi gulps between sobs. ‘I want to go the museum. I want to go to Buckingham Palace. I want to see a queen . . . and a pussycat . . . and a Baby Prince George.’
‘We’re not going to Buckingham Palace anyway,’ says Else.
‘Sibbi, you stay here and be Mummy’s big helper,’ I say.
‘No! No big helper!’
‘Why don’t we all go?’ I say to Mum. ‘You come too. You can have one day off working, can’t you?’
But Mum takes gentle hold of Sibbi’s arms. ‘Just go. Have you got enough money? Do you have a map? Are you sure you’re going to be okay? Go, then. Go q
uickly. Be back by three. Ouch! Sibbi! You bit me!’
‘Sibbi!’ I can’t believe it. Sibbi has never bitten anyone. ‘Are you okay, Mum?’
‘Just go!’
Sibbi throws herself at us – even as the door is closing in her face – and screams. Mum struggles to hold her back.
‘I feel awful,’ I say to Else.
‘I don’t,’ says Else. ‘I feel nothing.’
ELSE
THE TUBE IS surprisingly easy to figure out – we get off at South Kensington, climb up to street level, and then we are right there. There’s a queue to get in; we join the queue. I notice that most of the families come in sets of twos: two parents, two kids. Language weaves around us, not everyone is speaking English.
Clancy nudges her, ‘Listen, they’re Australian.’
Three girls, a few years older than me, are ahead of us in the queue. There’s a slow, easy way that they make their vowels and a huskiness to their voices that makes me suddenly, sharply homesick. I tune in instead to the family behind us, a girl in a headscarf trying to keep her younger siblings in the queue while her parents chat between themselves. I don’t need to understand the language to know what the older girl is saying.
The queue moves quickly. We get inside and realise we don’t need to pay anyone, though there are donation bins.
‘How much should we give?’ Clancy whispers. I understand his urge to whisper – the massive entrance with its grand staircases and vaulted ceilings, feels holy, like a church.
I reach into my pocket and pull out a few gold coins. The pounds look like Australian two-dollar coins – confusing. The two-pound coins are bigger, gold encircling a silver centre. I give one to Clancy and drop one in myself.
We wander through the exhibits.
‘Look.’ I draw Clancy’s attention to a picture of a woman called Mary Anning. ‘She discovered a whole dinosaur skeleton at the beach when she was eleven. What have you been doing with your life?’
‘Too late for me now,’ says Clancy.
‘We’ve wasted our youth,’ I agree. ‘Oh look!’ I say, turning a corner. ‘Dodos! Real live dead dodos!’
Clancy gazes silently at the dodos. We wander past the birds, including some familiar friends from home, all stuffed and arranged in the glass cases, telling the story, not just of the bird world, but of the human history of empire and expansion. We walk through to another gallery. I study the tiny skull of a Neanderthal baby. It was alive once, I say to myself, experimentally, trying to conjure up feeling, but I can’t make myself believe it. I’m starting to wonder if I’m emotionally dead inside.
SIBBI
THEY ARE FORGETTING me, Sibbi says to the mirror’s lonely eyes. They are always forgetting me.
In the attic, something is waking. Waking more every day, feeding on all that energy, all that chaos, the dark swirling dust devil of Sibbi’s resentment and sorrow and loneliness. It sends out its own cold, damp shadow made of years of abandonment and neglect, a cloud that drifts through the house and into Sibbi’s heart. When Sibbi looks at herself in the mirror, she sees its loneliness reflected back at her. She thinks it is her own loneliness she is seeing.
Sibbi goes into Great-Aunt Dorothy’s study, even though Daddy told her not to. The room is lined with bookshelves with double layers of books, and then more books higgledypiggledy, sideways, wedged in wherever they will fit. There are boxes and boxes of paper.
Sibbi opens the top drawer of the desk. In the drawer are lots of intriguing bits and pieces. Typewriter ribbons and a plastic container with a magnetic lid to which paperclips cling. There’s a box of ivory cards, an envelope filled with rubber bands of assorted colours and sizes, a stapler and a thick black permanent marker. She touches the permanent marker, it’s stubby thickness promising to destroy or create, but her hand keeps moving. She might come back for the permanent marker, but for now she chooses the big scissors.
She picks them up. They have heft to them. They are glitteringly sharp, proper grown-up scissors that will cut through anything.
She isn’t ready to use them. She doesn’t know what they are for. Not yet. She takes them back to her bedroom and hides them under the bed. For scissors are useful things, and all useful things have a purpose, if you wait and you listen and you see.
CLANCY
‘LET’S GO,’ I SAY.
‘You want to skip the rest of Human Evolution?’ Else asks.
I shake his head vigorously. ‘I want to leave.’
‘Leave? We’ve just got here. You know we’ll have to queue to get back in?’
‘I don’t want to get back in.’
Else shakes her head, mystified. ‘Okay. Let’s go.’ I follow her to an exit. ‘Was it the human skulls? I thought you liked nature.’
‘Nature? I love nature. But this is not a museum about nature! It’s a museum about humans ripping nature off. A museum of taking what doesn’t belong to you, just because, just to have. They aren’t even animals anymore, they’re just . . . objects. Ugh.’
‘But what were you expecting? You knew everything in here would be dead, right?’
I shake my head. ‘I don’t know.’
‘It’s raining again,’ Else says.
I’m slowly getting used to the grey drizzle that comes and goes most days. Every day the forecast is the same: sunshine and showers. Sunshine and showers.
‘Did you know,’ Else says, ‘that the Royal Academy of Music is just up that road?’
‘Let’s go and look! Aren’t you curious?’
Else grimaces. But I take off, knowing she’ll follow. She’s hardly going to leave me stranded in a London borough all on my own. ‘Come on. At least see what you’re missing out on.’
‘Let’s go back to the Tube station,’ Else says, a bit further up the road. ‘Let’s go and get a drink. I’m thirsty.’
‘You must be a little bit interested or you wouldn’t have told me it was here.’
‘I wish I’d never said anything. I don’t even have a violin anymore, remember? I couldn’t play even if I wanted to.’
‘Aha!’
‘Aha, what?’
‘Even if you wanted to.’
‘But I don’t want to.’
‘Then why do you want to go and look at the Royal Academy?’
‘I don’t.’
‘Well, then why do you not want to look at the Royal Academy? If you didn’t care, you’d just look at it anyway, wouldn’t you?’
‘Oh, stop trying to be so clever.’
‘Wait, is this it?’
We stand and stare up at the sculpture, great stone men staring out, and hunched beneath them, figures of men and women, bent towards the earth, looking like they’re calling something up.
‘Not music though,’ says Else. ‘Look, it’s the Royal School of Mines.’
‘Huh. Engineering, I suppose. The Music Academy must be a bit further up.’
‘I’ve seen enough,’ says Else. ‘I don’t want to see any more.’
‘But we’re nearly there.’
Else turns on her heel and marches off. I wait for a moment to see if she’ll come back for me, but she doesn’t.
‘Wait for me!’ I shout, but she doesn’t wait, and I have to run to keep up or be lost in London on my own.
ELSE
I COMPOSE EMAILS to Sam in my head, but I never get around to writing them down and sending them. Days pass and there never seems to be anything important enough to say. I sleep late into the morning. I snap at Sibbi, avoid the twins and Clancy and Pippa, pointedly ignore Olly and rarely see Dave. I wait until the house is quiet before I go downstairs. In a grudging concession towards Olly’s newfound paranoia, I leave vague scrawled notes: Going out. Back later. And then I just wander. Up Mortlake Road to High Street, sometimes down to the riverbank. But I prefer crowds. I like wandering the supermarket and looking at the weird food, or browsing stores like Top Shop and Marks & Spencer, though I don’t buy anything. I test the samples at Boots. I tell myself t
hat I’m mysterious, interesting, aloof. I watch myself walking up the street, as though I am Audience to my life rather than Actor.
Today Ren is playing solo outside the organic grocery store. I linger, watching him from across the street, his eyes half closed, listening intently to his own music. Ren is not the least bit interested in me, probably wouldn’t know me from a bar of soap, which gives me space to be interested in him. The couple who run the organic grocery shop are Ren’s parents. I can tell this because when they bring him cut-up fruit or a cup of tea, he looks annoyed rather than grateful. His playing is less technically accomplished than Adelaide’s, but his wrists are more relaxed. There’s a fluid pleasure in his playing and I enjoy listening to it.
Ren’s music follows people walking down the street. A group of children run past him, and his violin catches their happy shouts and tosses them wildly into the air. A mother tells off her small child. The violin scrapes, Why? and then a few quick notes reply: Because I said so. An elderly couple walks past, arm in arm. The violin begins a Victorian waltz, and the couple’s feet seem to keep the time.
‘Do you play?’ I turn to see Adelaide at my side. Damn. Sprung.
‘No. Why do you ask?’ I realise I am holding my hands as if I am holding an invisible violin. I drop my arms guiltily to my sides, then I resent Adelaide for making me feel guilty.
‘What do you think of Ren’s playing?’
‘It’s a nice violin. Big sound.’
Adelaide beams. ‘It’s brilliant! My grandfather made it.’
‘Made it? What do you mean?’
‘My grandad is a world-famous violin maker. He gave one to Princess Kate and Prince William for George when he was a baby.’
‘Couldn’t they afford to buy him one?’
‘It’s a big deal, actually. It was in all the major papers, and it’s going on a tour of the world soon. Grandad’s very well respected.’
‘Cool,’ I say, flatly, though it does sound pretty interesting.
