Plenty (5 page)

First there was Nana’s smile. Then there were her hands – something about the crooked smallest finger. And the way Nana stroked Maddy’s cheek with that finger. And when Nana had called her
koukla
, some little firework of an echo had gone off inside Maddy. But they couldn’t be called proper memories. So she didn’t mention them.

Nana opened the house and led Maddy straight out the back, and Maddy didn’t know what to do, so she followed. Her grandmother’s pink clogs shuffled ahead, leading through the thorn trees. Maddy stumped grimly behind, up the rough track and out on top of a rise overgrown with creeper and bindi-eyes. The creeper’s curling stems hooked through Maddy’s sandals and tangled around her toes. The bindi-eyes drew blood.

Next time
, she thought.

Next time David made a Plenty joke, she’d look him right in the eye and say, “Yeah. There’s plenty, all right. Plenty of ants. Plenty of bindi-eyes.”

At the top of the rise was a little house made of wood and glass. The wood was split and the paint had peeled. The top half of the house was made of diamond-shaped windowpanes. There had been hundreds of the panes but most sagged and many had broken. Some were still glittering though, only held together by the creeper.

“Good, eh?” asked Nana.

“What is it?” said Maddy.

Nana looked disappointed.

“It’s my greenhouse,” she said, opening the door.

Inside, the greenhouse was lined with benches on which sat rows of black pots. Most of the pots held nothing but dirt and a stick.

Nana told Maddy to fill the watering-can. That first day, the plants she watered were only clusters of leaves lying flat on the dirt. But one had a stem rising, slim as a thread.

“Well, look,” Nana Mad sang to the stem. “There you are. There.”

She sang to it like it was a baby or a kitten.

“These my orchids,” she told Maddy when she’d finished.

Maddy nodded.

“People think they rare,” Nana went on. “But they not. They got thousands of sorts. These ones, they called greenhoods.”

Maddy wondered when she could go home.

“The best ones growing out there,” Nana said, waving her hand vaguely out the greenhouse door. “Wild ones you should see. Spider orchids. Now they really something. Spider orchid flowers just like fairies, Madeleine.”

All Maddy could see outside the greenhouse were the thick vines and thorn trees. She didn’t see any orchids that looked like fairies.

“Spiders won’t grow in pots,” said Nana, like she was telling herself. “Don’t like pots. They only grow out there, in the long paddock.”

Maddy didn’t know what the long paddock was.

“That means the bush,” Nana said.

Maddy nodded again. Her grandmother kept saying things that left her speechless. Things to which there was no easy response.

“Do you still like fairies?” Nana asked her.

Now if there was something Maddy knew about, it was fairies. Up until she was eight they’d been real to her. Real in the same way people were real – at least, she’d talked with them in just the same way and nobody stopped her. From these conversations she’d become a bit of an expert on their life and habits. Or as Sophie-Rose called it: a know-it-all.

The thing was, people had such strange ideas. For a start they thought that fairies were all the same. Maddy just had to tell everybody, “Fairies are different to one another, like us.”

She had told them fairies were not necessarily slim girls with butterfly wings. Some were boys. Some were grown-ups. Some were short and fat with bee fur and stubby wings. “And they are not all beautiful,” she would tell people over and over.

They were not all tall with blue eyes and yellow hair – lots had blue hair and yellow eyes. Some had feathers, a few had horns or eyes in the back of their heads. There were even rare fairies with a different face for every direction the wind blew.

Some could talk in rhyme. Or be mute and have to mime. Sometimes you met a fairy who sang everything. This was not as magical as it sounded. It depended on whether or not you liked opera.

And she had to insist that fairies were not all sweet. People didn’t like to hear it but fairies could be very,
very
mean. They could be angry or jealous. And they were often sad and liked to sing about it.

“There are as many sorts of fairies as there are people,” Maddy had told everybody. Sometimes when they hadn’t even asked.

The question of fairies was not simple any more though. She didn’t know what to tell Nana. It was true she still
liked
fairies – but she wasn’t so sure about the
believing
. Remembering her years of fairy conversations only made Maddy squirm now. She’d stopped talking to fairies after her eighth birthday.

And of course when you stopped talking to fairies they stopped talking to you.

“Do you still like?” Nana asked again. “You love them so much before. When you a little thing.”

“I’m not little any more,” said Maddy.

“No,” said Nana, rubbing her temples and leaving points of dirt behind. “I forgot.”

They finished watering the orchids and went back to the house. There they drank Nana’s strong tea and ate her stale lamingtons – and shared another long,
long
silence.

Maddy looked at her watch.

“What time is it?” asked Nana.

“Five twenty-five,” Maddy said.

Nana went to her bookcase. She took out a heavy book and opened it with a bang on the coffee table.

“Come and see,” she said.

Twilight was filling the sitting room, and a single white star-shaped flower glowed on the dark page of the book. Nana was right. It was like a fairy, but a fairy drained of colour, running for its life across the glossy page. It even had a little dark mouth open in a scream.

“Is that an orchid?” Maddy asked, squinting.

“It’s a spider orchid. Like I was saying,” Nana Mad said. “But see. It’s a fairy! You think so?”

The next picture looked like a fairy helmet dropped in the grass. And the third like a fairy holding a lantern. On every page of the book orchid fairies skipped, flew, skated. Baby fairies burst off the stems of their nursery plants. Fairy dervishes spinning in tutus and pantaloons.

“They indigenous, you know,” said Nana.

“
Indigenous
,” repeated Maddy.

“Yes,” said Nana. “That means they belong somewhere. It’s their–”

“I know what it means,” Maddy cut her off.

“–their home,” finished Nana, and she drew her feet together firmly and laid her hands in her lap.

“Can I borrow it?” asked Maddy, flipping the pages.

“Yes,” Nana said. “But only if you stop talking like that.”

“Like what?” Maddy said.

Nana stooped to pull a tough stem from Maddy’s sandal buckle.

“Like it’s my fault,” she said quietly.

“Like what’s your fault?” asked Maddy.

“Moving,” Nana Mad said. “Listen. They never ask me when they go away. One day they just go. And then, now they just come back. They do what they want. Always.”

Her face quickly hardened, and then quickly softened.

“But this time I’m lucky.” Nana laughed, grabbing Maddy and hugging her until she was smeared with orchid dirt. “This time what they want is what I want!”

Maddy Frank hugged her grandmother back. Nana Mad was right. David and Ellen did exactly what they wanted. They never, ever asked. She was still hugging when Nana let go.

On the way home that night, Maddy asked her mother why.

“Why did you stop bringing me to see Nana?” she said.

Ellen Frank fixed her eyes hard on the dark road ahead.

“She was angry with me for moving to Jermyn Street,” she said. “And she couldn’t stop being angry.”

Wednesday was
Where Do You Come From?
day. Brian was wearing a T-shirt with a picture of an astronaut on the moon watching a blue Earth rise into black space. Underneath it said “Heart/Earth.” Today was Grace’s turn and she said she was going to tell them how she came to Plenty. The first part she didn’t remember, she said, so she would tell them what her mum told her.

Grace Wek’s family was from South Sudan in Africa. They lived in a town called Malek, near the Sudd – that’s the swamps of the White Nile River where feathery papyrus grow like crops of tall green dusters, and crocodiles and hippos roll and wade. In the wet season, the grasses turn into water meadows. Tigerfish and catfish swim in the water, cranes dance in the papyrus, and people build their cooking fires on a floating world.

Sudan had been fighting wars for so long that hardly anybody remembered the start. The old men said Sudan’s war was like weather – no matter where you went there it was. You couldn’t escape. The fields were destroyed and grew nothing but bitter weeds and cattle bones. Whole families packed up and became wanderers.

The Weks and their sons were only five of thousands of people forced to wander. Actually they were six of thousands, because Grace was already wandering too. She was being carried along inside her mother’s body, but only Mrs Wek knew about that. She prayed to keep the child inside safe as they walked.

At first they kept to the old cattle tracks and they slept in ditches or under bushes. They only walked in the dark.

Once they heard soldiers ahead – and they walked off the tracks and into the bush and the desert. At last, one night they walked out of Sudan all together. They crossed the border into the neighbouring country without even knowing it. And in the morning, they found a huge camp in the desert.

Kakuma Camp in the country of Kenya was crowded with people just like the Weks. They were called refugees, because they needed a refuge from the wars and starvation. There were weary grandparents and worried mothers and fathers. Silent babies in their wraps on the backs of serious sisters. And angry brothers playing the wars with stick guns.

All homeless. All wandering. All lost, all together.

Here in a dusty tent among strangers, Mrs Wek had her last baby. She called her daughter Grace because she was an amazing thing in the middle of the trouble. A peaceful baby girl, born smiling into that place.

Amazing Grace.

Grace Wek said Kakuma was laid out like a ruled page in the desert. Those were her exact words:
a ruled page
. The dirt streets crossed each other square, and huts and tents were set out like sums. The Weks were put in a ragged tent in one of the squares and weren’t allowed out of the camp.