by Tiffiny Hall
Fleur helps me to collect the remaining packaging and things I missed earlier, piling them into the last few garbage bags to take to charity. We can’t leave any evidence lying around. Then it’s time to say goodbye to our money tree.
Standing together, holding hands, we listen to the whisper of the humming leaves above us. Our faces splash with the colour of money, but our eyes remain firmly on each other. The world grows silent and my thoughts flatline until one thought sparks alive.
That’s the thing with money, I think. You can grow it on a tree and purchase possessions with it, but you can’t use it to grow us. I squeeze my sister’s hand. We grow with the magic you can’t buy: love.
Chapter 28
On Thursday I cross the road towards home, swerving between parked cars in unusual traffic. School has been a nightmare. Every kid knows about the money tree from Santa’s post. I spend all day defending myself and telling people they are crazy to believe in something that is so clearly digitally created on a computer. Still, the curiosity is humming.
‘Wait up!’ Tyler calls. His insect racket sticks out of his backpack. His red glasses sting my eyes as they catch the sun. He’s been trying to start rumours about a bubbling money river flowing in the woods to take the heat off the tree, but no one’s buying it.
‘Come over and see my babies. They’re so cute and have grown so much,’ I tell him. We turn the corner. I see the crowd of people and drop my schoolbag.
Fleur runs towards us. ‘What are we going to do?’
My vision blurs.
All the people mash into a cloud.
The cloud wraps around me; sound and air suck out.
Dark.
Cold hands. I wake up on the couch in the living room. Fleur and Tyler are by my side. There is knocking at the front door. Banging. Fleur and Tyler look petrified.
‘What’s going on?’ I ask. ‘All those people were … what?’
I sit up slowly and peer out the front window. I didn’t dream it. There’s a crowd of kids outside our house on bikes, skateboards and segways. I recognise some kids from our school. This is bad, bad, bad, bad.
‘It’s okay. They don’t know where it is. They think the tree is in the house. No one’s tried the hatch,’ Fleur says.
‘Mum and Dad will be home soon. How will we explain?’ I panic.
‘Facebook party?’ Tyler suggests. ‘Those things are out of control.’
‘We’re not even meant to be on Facebook,’ I say, rubbing my forehead. This fainting phenomenon has got to stop. I’m shortening my lifespan. ‘It’s too soon for the tree to have died. It hasn’t had enough time, surely.’
I jump off the couch, race to my bedroom and pull back the green rug. There are no branches sticking through the floorboards. Not a single note pokes through. ‘Okay, so this is good news,’ I say to the others as they join me, sweeping my hand across the smooth floorboards.
Fleur stands with her hands on her hips and tilts her head. ‘You have to go out there and tell everyone it was a hoax,’ she says. Tyler is nodding.
‘Why me?’ The thought of speaking to all those kids makes me feel like vomiting. I’m transported back to the time I stood up at assembly to present to the rest of the school a project on soil erosion.
‘Fatty,’ one kid called out. My heart shattered. I know I’m fat. I don’t need anyone to remind me. As I walked back to sit cross-legged on the floor, a boy leant over to me and whispered, ‘You’re so fat and ugly, when your mum dropped you off at school this morning, she was fined for littering.’ I couldn’t speak, I couldn’t even cry. I can still see his yellow pointy teeth now and smell his foul breath.
There’s no way I can address that crowd out there, stand in front of so many people. The old feelings rinse through me. ‘They will laugh at me,’ I say, meaning I feel like rubbish.
‘As if,’ Fleur says. ‘You’ll be fine. You were tagged in Santa’s post so it has to come from you.’
I look over at my lizards lazing in their enclosures. They are enjoying their new expensive diet of crickets and mealworms. Sibyl looks pregnant again! More mouths to feed.
Tyler watches me intensely. Maybe this is the time to prove to him I’m not a loser.
‘You’ve got this,’ he says.
‘Have I?’
A quick check in the mirror. Fleur gives me her violet velvet winter hat to wear with my jeans and T-shirt. I tie a jumper around my waist and stop myself from having second thoughts about the pair of pink plastic jellybean sandals I’m wearing. Sibyl sits on my shoulder for strength. It’s time.
Chapter 29
Walking down the corridor towards the front door is how I’d imagine a pirate to feel in their final steps on the plank above shark-infested waters. I see the fins through the front windows. The jaws that will swallow me up, tear my life apart, if I can’t be convincing. I pat Sibyl on my shoulder. ‘Deep breaths,’ I tell her.
The doorknob turns slowly, my toes enter the light followed by my knees, then I’m through and standing on the verandah, facing the horde. Everything is white and glarey. The sun is high and intense, making me squint. There is a mob of more than one hundred people, some of them in school uniforms I don’t even recognise. Something I didn’t notice before: there are grown-ups here too. Parents! I absorb the ocean of faces.
‘Show us the tree!’ a boy shouts.
I lift my hands and the crowd silences. I go to speak, but my voice traps. ‘There’s nothing to see here,’ I choke.
‘What?’ someone screams from the back.
‘There’s nothing to see!’ I call out.
‘Money tree. Money tree. Money tree,’ two girls start chanting and soon the group has joined in.
‘It’s fake, it’s a hoax, just a stupid lie!’ I yell at them. ‘Go away!’
A parent with a large coffee in a fancy paper cup grabs my arm. Her grip burns. ‘Listen here. My kid won’t stop nagging me about some money tree, so I drove her all the way out here to see it. Where did you get it?’ Her eyes are daggers.
‘It’s not real,’ I say. The crowd continues to chant. Fleur and Tyler join me on the verandah. I feel the house shake from the noise. The neighbours wander out of their mansions, people are filling the street as the horde thickens and expands, and more cars pull up.
Don’t faint, I instruct myself. All the new shoes, lizard gear and drones don’t seem worth it now.
Fleur swears. I follow her expletive out to the mob and see our new car pull up. A metallic taste invades my mouth — fear. Mum and Dad are together. They slam the car doors and stride towards us. The chanting is so loud I can’t hear my heart clanging against my ribs, although I feel bruised from all the pounding.
‘They’ve stepped on my flowers!’ Mum shrieks. ‘What on earth is going on?’
Dad stares at the crowd, bewildered. ‘Where did all these people come from?’
My parents listen to the chanting. ‘It sounds like “mode de vie”,’ Dad says.
Mum looks at me, then at Fleur. She takes me by the shoulders. I can’t look up at her. She raises my chin with one finger. ‘Why are so many people screaming for a money tree?’ she asks.
Fleur bites her lip so hard it could bleed.
‘Go home, nothing to see here,’ Dad calls. He is shaking his head and waving his arms in the air.
Stacey is in the crowd, smiling. A shark’s grin.
‘She knows where it is!’ a boy shouts and points to Stacey. She levers a stiff arm up to her shoulder in three painfully long seconds. A gust of wind pulls her hair to the side. She smiles wider, all gums. The crowd follows her wrist and watches her index finger as she straightens it and points with a pink nail towards the hatch.
The mob swarms around to the side of the house. I elbow my way through the crowd, but by the time I reach the hatch, the lock has been smashed open with a tool from Dad’s shed and people are fighting each other down the hole. I push my way forward and slide down the ladder into the basement. People are sear
ching the room of junk for the tree. Relief. They won’t know it’s behind that wall.
‘In the wardrobe!’ Stacey yells from above. I glare up. My parents’ faces fill the sky beside her. Dad helps Mum down the ladder.
A parent swings open the wardrobe door and feels around inside. They discover the trapdoor and soon disappear downstairs with their kid in tow. I’m frozen. The house shakes with so many people crowded into the basement. I watch as my parents wade through the maze of boxes and awkwardly navigate around the washing machine. They step into the wardrobe and escape down the ladder. I can already hear yelling from below. I leapfrog over the washing machine and into the wardrobe, scoot down the ladder and land in a throng of people at the bottom, rushing through the labyrinth of bottles in the cellar.
The room is two or three shades darker than usual. It’s tough to see and I blink to allow my eyes to adjust to the deepening darkness, then push my way along the corridors of bottles, elbowing backs to get closer. But suddenly I’m touching stomachs and hips as parents and kids walk in the opposite direction to go back upstairs. Someone has turned a torch on up ahead and a few kids are using their mobile phones to light the way. Finally I squeeze myself down the crowded laneways of parents and kids and enter the space where my money tree lives.
All the air that’s in me releases in one ecstatic exhale. The tree spans the room and reaches to the ceiling without a dollar in sight. It worked. A torch beam rainbows across it, but instead of money as leaves, the branches are bushy with green and brown foliage.
‘It’s just a stupid normal tree,’ a little girl says to her mother. They turn away from it.
I hear Mum’s bracelets in the darkness and find my parents in the crowd.
‘So, imagine,’ Mum whispers, ‘if this was a real-life money tree.’ My parents laugh together. Mum sighs and it washes over me. I know Dad is holding her in the small of her back, like always.
‘Imagine,’ Dad says. ‘But with love no one is poor.’ His hand finds my shoulder. ‘Who knew this was hiding down here? How unusual to see a tree growing underground.’
‘It’s good that you’re making more friends and having them over,’ Mum adds with a wink, looking around at all the disappointed faces.
I walk over to the tree and touch the bark. The sap runs brown onto my finger. I stare at the tree for a long time, breathing in the new mushroomy smell of earth, thinking about our experience, and miss the room slowly emptying, until I’m all alone in the dark. The torch has been discarded on the ground and shines at my feet. The house is quiet again. Leaning my face in to the branches, I close my eyes. The distant smell of money is still there, but faint, like the cloud of a woman’s perfume when she leaves the room. I reach out and touch a leaf. Its veins glow dimly. Then something catches my eye in the corner of the room. Someone must have left another torch.
I step out from under the tree and walk over to a rack of wine. I lift down the glowing object. In my hands rests the wine bottle with the magic sap I kept. The sap shimmers with filaments of orange, yellow, pink, blue and green. At the bottom of the bottle I see a gold coin — a seed. I smile, then press in the cork, hard. I reach up and place the bottle back on the wine rack. I take off the jumper from around my waist and lay it over the bottle, then head towards the ladder.
I look back at the tree in the shadows. Then I hear Mum calling me for dinner and the smell of takeaway fish and chips finds my nostrils. We are back to where we started. Who’s got it better than we do? Nobody. But I guess now I know the difference. There are people who have money and then there are people like us, who are rich.
Acknowledgements
Thank you to my parents, Jeanette and Martin, who taught me that money does not grow on trees …
I would like to thank my wonderful literary agent, Clare Forster, for all your sage advice and encouragement. You loved this story when it was only a seed and helped me so much to grow it. I would also like to thank Eva Papastratis and Stephanie Thwaites at Curtis Brown UK.
To my publisher, Lisa Berryman, thank you for your support and glorious ideas. I loved cultivating the manuscript together and sharing the fruit of our labour.
To my editor, Kate Burnitt, you weave magic with your edits. Thank you for pulling out the weeds.
Thank you to the HarperCollins Children’s team for all your hard work and enthusiasm.
A big shout-out to all the sales reps, booksellers and librarians for helping my stories branch out to readers.
Hugs and kisses to the beautiful flowers in my life: Macey, Tippy and Bridget.
Grandpa, the constant gardener, I love you. And to your rose, Nanna, I miss you.
Lleyton Hall, little bro, thank you for answering all my reptile questions and sharing the intriguing life of lizards. I take it back, they are great pets.
To my husband, Ed, this is for you because it’s true: all you need is love.
About the Author
Fifth Dan Taekwondo black belt, athlete, trainer, award-nominated television personality and popular author, Tiffiny Hall fuses a love of health and fitness with a passion for children’s fiction. She has a Bachelor of Arts/Media and Communications and a Diploma of Modern Languages in French from the University of Melbourne. Tiffiny worked as a print journalist before writing her health books Weightloss Warrior, Fatloss for Good: The Secret Weapon, Tiffiny’s Lighten Up Cookbook and You Beauty! Her debut novel, White Ninja, was one of the ‘50 Books You Can’t Put Down’ in 2012 and endorsed by John Marsden. Red Samurai and Black Warrior completed the Roxy Ran trilogy. Whilst writing her next novel, Tiffiny works as a trainer on The Biggest Loser Australia.
www.tiffinyhall.com.au
Also by Tiffiny Hall
ROXY RAN TRILOGY
White Ninja
Red Samurai
Black Warrior
Have you discovered Roxy Ran?
Copyright
Angus&Robertson
An imprint of HarperCollinsChildren’sBooks, Australia
First published in Australia in 2015
This edition published in 2015
by HarperCollinsPublishers Australia Pty Limited
ABN 36 009 913 517
harpercollins.com.au
Copyright © Tiffiny Hall 2015
The right of Tiffiny Hall to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her under the Copyright Amendment (Moral Rights) Act 2000.
This work is copyright. Apart from any use as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced, copied, scanned, stored in a retrieval system, recorded, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
HarperCollinsPublishers
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National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication data:
Hall, Tiffiny, author.
Maxi and the magical money tree / Tiffiny Hall.
ISBN: 978 0 7322 9992 7 (pbk)
ISBN: 978 1 4607 0403 5 (epub)
For primary school age.
Trees—Mythology—Juvenile fiction.
Wealth—Moral and ethical aspects—Juvenile fiction.
A823.4
Cover design by HarperCollins Design Studio
Cover illustration by Matt Stanton, HarperCollins Design Studio
Author photograph by Marina Oliphant
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