Plenty (10 page)

Nana Mad and the planting party were meeting deep in a part of the bush where the only paths were fire trails. The orchids had to be planted where nobody would trample over them, or ride dirt bikes through them. Even people who only wanted to look could hurt them by accident. Orchids were not rare, just as Nana said, but they were sensitive. They had to be planted in the right places.

The almost-finished school project had a whole section on this:
Where the wild orchids grow has to be secret. Indigenous orchids need a safe place to grow. They need to be protected while they regenerate
…

“
Coooo-ee
!” called Nana. Her voice came from straight ahead.

“Are we nearly there?” Mum panted behind her.

“I can see them,” said Maddy.

Nana and the planting party were gathered by the river. Sunlight was bouncing off the water and rippling the underside of leaves. The men and women moved round each other in the clearing, orbiting inside these constellations of lights. They were unpacking the orchid pots.

Every pot held a new orchid. Every new stem shivered in the fresh air. Every new leaf and bud trembled. Watching, Maddy found she was holding her breath. They looked so soft. So breakable. But Nana had said, one orchid alone might be delicate, all together, they were a tough mob.

The project was clear on this point also:
Orchids can live in the soil, on rocks, up trees and even under ground. There is an orchid for every place on Earth
.

By the riverbank, platters of lemon slice, chocolate hedgehog and fairy cakes were laid out, with the ants already arriving. The women of Whittlesea thought it only good manners to bring a plate to any sort of gathering, even those held in the bush. Maddy approved of these manners and she took one perfect fairy cake.

Grace Wek couldn’t decide between the hedgehog and lemon slice.

“So,
so
lucky,” she was saying to herself over and over, studying the platters with feeling.

Deciding which cake, Grace’s face was full of a serious delight and she took so long, Maddy wondered if she’d ever choose. In the end, she took a piece of the hedgehog – and then right at the last moment, a piece of the lemon slice as well. Mrs Wek wagged her finger at Grace and wanted her daughter to put one back – but Nana said to let her eat.

“Not enough cake stop you growing,” she said and offered Grace the fairy cakes too.

They settled under a ragged manna gum spreading its limbs over the riverbank. There was nothing like eating cake in the bush. Maddy thought it was the perfect mix of sharp and sweet: in the nose, the sharp smell of the bush; in the mouth, the sweetness of icing. One made the other even better.

“Tell Maddy about the What, Mum,” Grace said, picking off lumps of each cake and then putting them into her mouth together.

“Oh, she doesn’t want to hear that,” said Mrs Wek.

“Mum tells us these stories. So we won’t forget,” Grace said. “Right, Mum?”

Mrs Wek looked at Grace with her face full of love and a certain distance.

“I wasn’t always a woman for these old stories,” she said to Maddy apologetically, like Maddy might think her childish. “But I changed when we left home.”

“But Maddy wants to hear,” said Grace, simply. And Maddy realised she really,
really
did.

She shifted closer to Mrs Wek, who seemed heartened by it.

“I’ve been thinking lately,” Mrs Wek said. “About how all that’s left of anything are stories. About how the What story reminds me. It reminds me about what’s important.”

Down by the river, three women planters had taken off their boots and were dipping their toes in the cool water. And close to Maddy, two more sat knock-kneed on a log, holding mugs of Nana’s even worse than terrible thermos tea. One of them had a pink bandaid strip across the bridge of her nose. Two men, one with long grey hair pulled back in a ponytail and one entirely bald, sat at the edge of the clearing. They were waiting for the story.

Mrs Wek smiled nervously at Maddy.

“When God made the first people,” she said, “he gave them a choice between two presents. The first choice was the cow. You know how cows give food and clothes? Everything from a cow can be used by people. It was a useful present.

“The second choice was a thing called the What.”

The two women on the log stopped eating. They muttered, “Pardon? Did she say What?”

“The first people asked God exactly like that,” said Mrs Wek, opening her eyes wide in mock surprise at Maddy. “They asked God, ‘But what is the
What
?’ God looked mysterious and wouldn’t say.”

Mrs Wek took a slow bite of her lemon slice, chewed it and swallowed.

“It could have been anything, you know,” she said. “Or it could have been nothing. Nobody knew. So the first people did the only sensible thing. They chose the cow.”

She put the rest of the slice in her mouth and chewed.

“Is that it?” asked the ponytail man and looked around like he’d missed something.

“Oh yes,” said Mrs Wek, wiping crumbs from her mouth. “That’s it.”

“But what
was
it?” asked the bald man, irritably.

The lady with the bandaid said, “Well, that’s the point, isn’t it, Derek? They didn’t know and God wasn’t saying. These first people had to choose for everybody, forever.”

“But what if the What was better than a cow?” insisted Derek.

“Surely,” the bandaid lady said with a tone developing, “it’s better to choose something you know than something you don’t.”

Mrs Wek was disturbed by the fuss the What had caused.

“Please don’t bother yourselves,” she said. “It’s only an old story.”

“Why is the What so important to your mum?” Maddy whispered to Grace but Mrs Wek overheard.

“It’s not the What itself,” she told Maddy. “I mean, it’s a good story but that’s not what makes it important. It’s important because there are so many stories in this country. You could get lost in them. This story’s important because it’s come a long way with me. We travelled together.

“It’s important,” said Mrs Wek. “Because it’s mine.”

“And mine?” Grace said.

“Yes,” said Mrs Wek. “I give it to you.” She popped her last crumb of lemon slice into Grace’s mouth.

There was quiet while tea was finished and then the planting party started moving off into the bush. The man called Derek kept muttering about the What, but nobody was listening any more. Mum and Nana went together, and they took Mrs Wek with them. The pink bandaid lady was the last to leave the clearing. Then only Maddy and Grace were left.

A kingfisher was perching on the limb of the manna, stretching out over the river. It was watching a loop of dragonflies swooping over the water. As the girls moved in under its tree, the kingfisher flashed its blue head full circle to watch them.

Grace took an orchid pot out of a box and tapped the base. She turned it upside down and shook it. A tiny bundle of stem and bark, trailing pea-size tubers and hair-like roots, dropped into her fingers.

Then Grace put the soft weight of it into Maddy’s hands.

Maddy took the orchid in open hands. It occurred to her that Nana had forgotten the labels – and now the whole planting party was out of sight. She didn’t know what sort of orchid this was.

And suddenly Maddy didn’t know what to do. Standing in the bush with her handful of life, under the eye of a kingfisher, made her heart tremble. She felt a duty to the orchid. It was small and soft, and the riverbank was nothing but clay and ants.

Her hands shook and a little soil fell from the roots.

“I don’t know how,” said Maddy Frank.

Now Maddy had never of her own free will
not known
how to do anything. She’d been the expert on Jermyn Street. The expert on fairies. The expert on stars and camping and Fitzroy trams. Until recently, she’d been the expert on her parents and herself.

Plenty had changed all that.

But Grace knew things Maddy didn’t. She took Maddy’s hands in her own and pointed to a soft, dark place among the manna roots. Into this, Maddy planted the orchid. She laid the new rootball down, patting it into the planting mix. All the time she was saying a sort of prayer under her breath.

Maddy’s prayer said,
Please. Whatever sort you are, this is your new home. Please. Grow here: under these trees, by this river, in this place
.

And that was how the first orchid was planted.

The kingfisher flashed like lightning over the water. Blue and orange, it was gone down the river. Following the dragonflies.

Nana Mad always said that with orchids, even if it was good in the greenhouse, everything could go bung with the replanting. Maddy didn’t want to think about all that now. For now she just wanted to kneel in the dirt and plant these orchids in this quiet, wild place.

It was the evening before her eleventh birthday and Maddy Frank was considering living down by the river forever. All afternoon she’d been building a lean-to on the flattest part of the riverbank. She’d found that the river ran slow and cool through the bush right behind her own fence line. The lean-to stood waiting for her now, a shelter between two trees, made of old iron and dropped branches and thick fern.

This part of the river, where she’d built the lean-to, was lined with white gums. In the evening, just before the dark settled, the trees gave off light – for that last flash of the day the white bark glowed silver up and down the river. Maddy liked to be there for this. To watch the glow arrive. She always felt this was the best moment of the day.

And there was something else. On the riverbank there was one giant rivergum, dark and spreading and split with age. Underneath its ragged arms, spider orchids danced and its trunk was spotted with holes. It was here that in the glow just before the dark, Maddy thought she saw Bunjil the eagle.

It had been one evening not long after the planting party, when she first found the river. She’d thought she saw Bunjil perched still as wood at the top of the rivergum. He had fixed his eye on Maddy and there had been this moment when there was only the two of them in the world – and then he’d unfolded his great wings and flown. He was so big his wings made a wind.

Maddy had been less surprised than you’d think.

Maddy looked at her watch but she’d forgotten it.

It was almost night. The kookaburra pair were cackling tenderly. In its tree, the frogmouth ruffled and clicked. The mosquitos rose from the river, singing.

“Dad.
Daaaad
,” she called. “What time is it?”

“Almost seven thirty,” said Dad, coming out from the lean-to with a paintbrush and pot.

They’d be here any minute.

“Give it to me,” said Maddy. “Quick. Quick! Lift me up.”

Dad lifted her onto his shoulders and handed up the brush. She stretched to reach the board he’d nailed to the tree above the lean-to.

“Hurry up. You’re too big now,” he told her, wobbling. “I must be shrinking.”

Maddy gripped his hair to steady herself, and in huge white letters she daubed:

Plenty Sanctuary
–
all living creetures welcome
–

She’d just finished when she heard voices.

“They’re here,” she said and pulled her father’s hair in excitement. “Let me down. Let me down.”

Dad stooped and Maddy jumped. The voices were close in the trees now and she wanted to run and meet them. But she also wanted them to find her standing by her lean-to. Cool. Like it was nothing – something she threw together at the last moment. In the end she slipped around the giant rivergum just as Grace and Sophie-Rose appeared.

Sophie-Rose had grown a lot this year. On her first visit to The Deviation she’d measured up to the light switch in the kitchen. Now she measured way past it. She’d had her hair cut short and it looked brilliant. But nobody would ever,
ever
grow as tall as Grace Wek, thought Maddy. She just kept getting taller and taller and her legs longer and longer. Stepping through the tall yellow grass in the patchy light, she resembled a giraffe.

“Hi,” called Maddy. “Hi! Hi!”

She couldn’t think anything else to say. Her voice rose and broke as she ran towards them. It came out like a bird call.

Hi hi hi
.

“Hi,” said Sophie-Rose as Maddy arrived. “This is so cool.”

“Wait till you see,” Maddy told her.

“Well,” said Dad, coming through the trees. “The mattress is blown up and the torches have batteries. You’re set.”

“Thanks, Dad,” said Maddy and hugged him quick and hard.

“Happy birthday, pumpkin,” he said. “Look after each other. Use the insect repellent. Don’t go swimming. Don’t light a fire. Use the torches instead–”

“Dad,” Maddy said quietly. “You promised.”

“All right,” he said. “I’m going.”

He took a few steps and stopped.

“And here’s my mobile,” he said, coming back and handing the phone to Maddy. “Just in case.”

As always, the river was busy. The bush in the night was full of cracks of twigs, whistles of winds, creaks of gums. The groans and sighs of possums. Flutters and flickers. Tiny motions everywhere.