HAMISH HAMILTON
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First published in Australia by Penguin Group (Australia) 2009
First published in Great Britain by Hamish Hamilton 2009
Copyright © Sonya Hartnett, 2009
The moral right of the author has been asserted
All rights reserved
Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book
ISBN: 978-0-241-14447-3
Also by Sonya Hartnett
Sleeping Dogs
All My Dangerous Friends
Stripes of the Sidestep Wolf
Thursday’s Child
Forest
Of a Boy
The Silver Donkey
Surrender
The Ghost’s Child
As Cameron S. Redfern
Landscape with Animals
For S.B.
Plum is soon to turn fourteen, and one evening she stands in front of a mirror with her school dress around her ankles, her body reflected naked and distressing in the glass. If her reflection is true then she has gone about in public like this – this thick black hair hugging her face like a sheenless scarf; these greasy cheeks with their evolving crop of scarlet lumps; this scurfy, hotly sunburned skin; these twin fleshy nubbins on her chest that are the worst things of all, worse than the downy hair that’s feathered between her legs, worse than the specks of blackness blocking her pores, worse even than the womanly hurdle that still awaits her, the prospect of which occurrence makes her seize into silence – and nobody has informed her of the fact that she is hideous. Her reflection is so troubling that her gaze veers, seeking comfort in the posters tacked to the walls. One shows glossy kittens, another is David Bowie. She breathes deeply and lets a moment pass before sliding her sights back to the mirror. This is she, Ariella Coyle, aged thirteen. Carefully she scans her face, her shoulders, her waist, grimaces at the sight of a meaty bottom and thighs. Her hands gather her hair in a dense ponytail, and her face, unshielded, looks round and inflamed, her eyes the tarred tips of poison darts. Her arms are strong, her neck utilitarian, not vulnerable at all: indeed, Plum’s entire body is somehow too much – too tall, too thriving, too there. Her stomach is the colour of uncooked dough, and feels, when poked, like dough. Ariella Coyle, aged nearly fourteen, way-laid monstrously on the path to being grown. ‘There is no God,’ she tells her reflection: as quickly as that, she knows it is true. ‘And even if there was a God,’ she adds vindictively, ‘He wouldn’t love you. Look at you. Nobody could love you.’
The words should be like pools of blood, but the idea of such forsakenness actually makes Plum smile. Of late she’s been attracted to all things ruthless and peculiar. She sometimes feels edgy and dangerous, like an animal with unblinking eyes. She’s starting to think there might be something supernatural about her. She can guess what people are about to say, and when the telephone will ring; once, she heard her name spoken loudly behind her, though nobody was standing there. And yet, despite her superiority, Plum can never quite make herself immune to human needs. She can’t quite make herself not care.
Her mother calls dinner from downstairs, and Plum hears the word like a dog hears walk. She catches herself – her greed is infuriating – and points a finger at the mirror. ‘You eat too much. Don’t eat so much. Try.’ Her thoughts, these days, waltz obsessively around the subject of food – how much she might get, how long until she’ll get more – and it’s an obsession that is exhausting. So much about being almost fourteen is, in fact, so wearying that for an instant Plum feels light-headed with all she must endure. She has older brothers whose duty it is to tease her – if the situation requires, they’ll find her taste in clothes and music and heart-throbs a source of crushing mirth. But lately Justin and Cydar have been keeping their opinions to themselves: and their silence rolls up Plum’s spine like a hearse.
Mums calls, ‘Dinner!’
Plum kicks her uniform aside and takes from beneath her pillow a pair of baby-blue, lace-trimmed pyjamas. Dressed, she checks the mirror, ensuring the worst is disguised. She hunches her shoulders, shakes out her hair, stoops her overgrown height. Her cheeks, in the summery dusk, in the anguished infancy of teenagerhood, are the pasty yellow of cereal left to float all day in milk.
The Coyle house is big, and humiliating. The staircase down which Plum runs is gloomy with pastoral paintings, hazardous with piled books. Nothing in the house is new: indeed, the more elderly an object, the more Mums and Fa must possess it. On weekends they trawl antique shops, returning with chairs and statues and complicated wooden boxes. Before she’d known better, Plum had trawled with them; now she stays at home on weekends, curled on the couch watching science-fiction movies, and wishes she lived somewhere less mortifying. It’s unfair that she must endure timber and stone, when all her friends know the joy of plastic and smoked glass. The dinner table to which she’s been called is a lengthy slab of wood over which drunken friars might have drooled inside murky taverns. The seats are two ungiving pews salvaged from a church. It is embarrassing to ask a friend to dinner when they won’t have their own separate chair, rude to expect anyone to use ivory-handled cutlery to eat from crazed china plates at a table that should have been torched. Plum’s wildest dream is to have her bedroom carpeted in white shag – walls, ceiling, door, floor, all pristinely white and furry. The possession she craves more than anything is a miniature television – not one cased in wood, like the one in the den, but set inside a sphere of chrome, with three stumpy legs and a rapier-like aerial. She has seen such a thing in a shop, and it made her feel strangely like weeping.
Plum slides into place on a pew, skidding sideways to let Justin sit beside her. He pinches her arm as he sits down, and she pinches him back harder, her heart fattening with love. Rangy as a tall ship, handsome as a prince’s portrait, a power of aliveness radiates from Justin the way light beams away from the stars. To Plum he is without flaw, a kind of sun-king. He works behind the counter of a bottle shop, and has earned enough to buy a Holden as big as a barge. Occasionally he drives Plum to school in it, dropping her off by the side gate where the tough girls smoke before assembly. It is often the only moment of her day when Plum feels all is not lost. ‘Planet of the Apes tonight,’ she reminds him, but he shakes his head, says, ‘Can’t.’ She whines and screws her face up, but he just reaches for the water jug. ‘You’ve seen it before. You’ve seen it a hundred times. If you watch it again you’ll turn into an ape.’ Fa comes in from the den then, half-asleep and rubbing the ear that’s been compressed by the transistor, and Justin turns to him gladly. ‘What’s the score?’
‘Australia six for ninety at stumps. Border not out on forty.’
‘We’re going to lose.’
‘We’ll be cooked like a curry!’
‘What about Imran?’
Justin’s eyes flash toward Plum. Fa says, ‘Imran went out for nine.’
‘Plummy loves Imran.’
‘I don’t!’ Plum denies. ‘He’s just good.’
‘Where’s Cydar?’ asks Mums, passing out slabs of plate; and suddenly Cydar is there in the room, a hawk whistled down from the sky. He drops into his place opposite Plum like a sheet snapping on the wind. Cydar is the middle child, shy-eyed and secretive, a breeder of nightlife-coloured fish which he sells to men who don’t talk. He keeps himself and his aquariums in a weathered bungalow at the end of the garden, where he is visited by acquaintances as languid as the fish. He is studying at university something to do with microscopes, something that makes Plum proud but bored. She thinks he should be a rock star – he has that wastrel look. He should play Judas in Jesus Christ Superstar. Cydar has a girlfriend, Justin once claimed, about whom they must never speak. ‘Why not?’ Plum had asked; and Justin explained, ‘Because she has no reflection. Because her eyes are white. Because she can only eat what she’s killed with her bare hands. Don’t say her name! You’ll summon her.’
Cydar’s gaze had merely glided away, as if there was so much he could say in retaliation that it was most satisfying to say nothing. Now he says, ‘I thought you loved that other one. Pascoe.’
‘I don’t love any of them! Pascoe’s all right.’
‘Big bad Lenny,’ contemplates Fa.
‘A girl at school has his name all over her folder. Lenny Pascoe, Lenny Pascoe, about ten thousand times. I like his hair,’ Plum admits.
Mums sits down beside Cydar, polite distance between their elbows. ‘Hotpot,’ says Justin approvingly, lifting the lid from the casserole dish; he is not home for dinner often enough to notice the frequency with which his mother serves this meal, as if she’s discovered, running beneath the kitchen’s tiles, a seam of sausage and segmented pineapple. Plum, however, decides stoutly, ‘Mums, I don’t want that. I’m not eating hotpot ever again. It’s fattening. I’m fat.’
‘Poo,’ says her mother, which means many things, none of them being that Plum may not eat. She shifts the lid from a sarcophagus of rice, releasing a curse of steam. ‘Imran caught off Chappell for nine,’ Fa reflects dreamily; he comes alive to ask ‘How’s the car?’ of Justin, who’s been tinkering in the driveway all afternoon.
‘The starter motor is soon to be kaput.’
Fa frowns with sympathy or possibly confusion; Justin, reminded, waves beneath Plum’s nose a knuckle he has skinned with a spanner. ‘Get away!’ she squeals, swatting with her knife. ‘That’s revolting! Mums, Justin is being revolting! You’re revolting, Justin!’
‘Revolting!’ He’s pleased. Cydar, who this morning sold a glimmering finned creature for the fantastic sum of fifty dollars, who can feel the note and all its potential in the hip pocket of his jeans, who will never spend a single minute of his life labouring over a car, says, ‘You’re driving it tonight though, aren’t you? I don’t want to catch a taxi.’
‘Where are you going?’
‘Away from you.’
‘To the pub, I bet! When you could be watching Planet of the Apes…’
Fa has turned to Cydar now. ‘How are the fish doing?’
‘Swimmingly,’ says Cydar.
‘You know what I’d like to see?’ Justin elbows his sister. ‘A battle between the gorillas from Planet of the Apes and the skeleton warriors from Jason and the Argonauts.’
‘The gorillas would win. They’re stronger.’
‘But those skeletons are dodgy. And they’ve got spears.’
Fa asks, ‘How was school today, old Plummy?’
Plum answers offhandedly, ‘All right.’ School is an endurance test for her, a situation she faces like a brick wall every day, but she seldom answers anything but good. She knows precise things about her father – that he works with numbers, prefers his eggs cooked through, has a plate in an ankle from a boyhood broken bone – but there is an obscuring fog of softness around him that Plum is wary of disturbing with truths that aren’t good. Her father catches a tram at ten past eight each weekday morning, taking a seat where he can see the tram’s wide door slipped open and closed by the grade of the road. ‘Why do you watch the door?’ she’d asked once, expecting an answer about mathematics or time; instead Fa had replied, ‘It rests me.’ And the words had terrified Plum, because what they implied was terrifying; and she’d vowed never to expose, or expose herself to, such wistfulness again. For this same reason, Plum will never ask her mother what she thinks about when she’s alone in the house and it’s raining, those cold afternoons when Plum arrives home to find Elvis gazing up from record sleeves shuffled over the floor. It is one thing for Plum to exist on the edge of desolation: but the thought of anyone in her family being anything less than happy fills her head with the noise of an untuned radio. She longs to shout at Fa, You’ve got what you’re supposed to have! A job, a house, children, a wife. What else do you want? Sometimes she almost hates him for being the way he is.
Anyway, it is Plum’s growing conviction that a mother and a father have no right to feelings. A parent should be a person the way a door is a door, something like the robot in Lost in Space – loving and providing and cleaning, not distracted by wishes and needs. The only thing that really matters about a parent is the existence of the child. If Mums and Fa ever were fourteen, they’re well beyond it now; beyond the time when their lives are vital things. Even when they were fourteen, it’s unlikely that they had problems as grievous as Plum’s.
And now everyone is talking about something that doesn’t concern her, scooping out globes of fuzzy rice, shunting the water jug down the table. Justin and Cydar are deciding what time they should leave, and Justin thinks the car will need petrol; Fa is saying he’ll build shelves in the kitchen to accommodate Mums’s collection of jelly moulds. Mums has picked up a dropped cluster of rice and the sticky grains are clinging like grubs to her fingers, won’t be shaken onto her plate. ‘Trouble is,’ she’s saying, ‘you’re not a builder. Everything you build falls down…’ And all of it is so unworthy of being spoken at all.
‘Listen!’ Plum barks. ‘Everyone be quiet. I have something important to say. I’m not going to church anymore.’
It’s a decision she’s hardly known she has made, coming upon her like the urge to burp. Immediately, however, she’s committed. Having released the words, she’s relieved. ‘All right?’
Across the table Mums’s mouth twists, as if her daughter is something bitter she’d expected to be sweet. ‘Plum.’
‘Justin doesn’t go. Cydar doesn’t. Fa never did. Why should I?’
‘You need to.’ Justin stabs a stump of sausage with a hundred-year-old fork. ‘You’re unholy. You’ve got horns on your head.’
Plum pauses – she’s seen people-beasts in movies with horns on their heads, and thinks the look charismatic. Horns would change her life. ‘Well,’ she says, ‘I’m not going. God’s never done anything for me. And I don’t believe in Him.’
Mums clicks her tongue. ‘Don’t say that at the table.’
‘Why not at the table?’ But Cydar is ignored.
‘You can’t make me.’ Plum is captured by strange determination. This is what she is supposed to do, now that she’s nearly fourteen and the docility of childhood is behind her. She is meant to start becoming what she wants to be. ‘If I don’t believe in God, it’s stupid to go to church. It’s hypothetical.’
‘It’s what?’ says Cydar.
Fa says, ‘What’s made you stop believing in God, Plummo?’
Plum’s head pivots. There is no overhead lamp and the table is lit only by what light vaults the kitchen counter, so Fa sits in shadows. ‘I never did. I’ve always thought it was silly.’ She speaks with certainty, although what she says isn’t strictly true. As a child, she’d believed: but believing is what children do. ‘Look at it sensibly. The whole thing doesn’t make sense. If God is real, where did He come from? And what about the dinosaurs – how come they weren’t in the Garden of Eden? And why do bad things happen, if God is so kind? And how come, if God made everything, everything can be explained by something that isn’t God, something that’s normal –’
Cydar says, ‘It’s called science.’
‘It’s common sense!’ shrills Plum. ‘Angels and Hell and Satan and Heaven – only a kid would believe that stuff! Only somebody who wasn’t brave, or wasn’t – educated – or wasn’t – modern! And I’m not a kid!’
‘You are,’ says Justin. ‘You’re a little goat. Those horns.’
‘I’ve grown up!’ Plum squawks; then quickly rounds her shoulders lest the ludicrous nubbins show and it’s assumed she’s referring to them. ‘I’m nearly fourteen!’
‘Are you going to have a party?’ asks Fa. ‘For your birthday?’
Plum glares at him, distracted. ‘What? I don’t know. I haven’t decided. I’m not talking about that –’
‘Parties are for kids,’ Cydar suggests.
‘No they’re not! That’s a stupid thing to say. Justin had a party when he was twenty-one.’ The occasion is one of Plum’s most satisfying memories, Justin’s crowds of fabulous friends and the noisy fuss they’d made of young Plum; the highlight had come when a female guest fainted, and Fa had tapped her face until she revived. ‘Everyone’s having slumber parties. Can I have one, Mums?’
Her mother looks tortured, which means her daughter may. The girl scrambles upright on the pew. ‘I want everything bought from the supermarket – nothing home-made. I want mini-pizzas and chicken wings, and cashews and macaroons. An ice-cream cake from a cake shop, not some horrible sponge. No balloons or streamers or games either. And punch instead of soft drink –’
‘And bags of lollies to take home?’
Plum’s lip hoists. ‘We’re fourteen, Justin. You don’t get bags of lollies at our age.’
‘Do you giggle about boys instead?’
It’s the kind of brotherly comment that makes Plum feel like a deer in a huntsmen’s forest. She glances past the casserole dish to where Cydar sits in dimness, wrists bent above his plate. She does not need light to know his eyes are still and cool on her. ‘None of your business. We’ll talk about whatever we want. You’re not invited, so you’ll never know.’
Cydar says nothing, which is more disconcerting than words. Mums is standing to saw slices from the lumpy loaf. ‘And what do you want as a present?’
The miniature television in its globe of chrome flames like a star in Plum’s mind, blinding Cydar from sight. The television is, without question, the most desirable item she’s ever seen. None of her friends have a TV to themselves, let alone one so enviable. Nor, Plum suspects, will she, for its price-tag had made her swing away, swallowing with disappointment. Her family isn’t poor, but some things are beyond the realm of reasonable expectation. Nevertheless she has cleared a space on top of her dresser, to prove that the object would fit. She has lain on her bed and imagined watching the pint-sized screen. ‘I don’t know,’ she mumbles; to her horror, tears are close. She has seen herself unwrapping a television-sized box on the morning of her birthday; she’s accompanied herself to school, casually announced the new possession, revelled in the envious mewls of her friends. She’s constructed a new and entirely perfect life around something that is, in reality, as unattainable as Everest’s peak. It’s the kind of make-believe thing a child would do, as poignant as a broken heart. Indeed, Plum feels her heart is breaking over the loss of what never was. She dredges her voice past a clot of grief that has bulged inside her throat. ‘The only thing I want is something you won’t let me have. I won’t even bother telling you what it is, because I know I won’t get it.’
‘Oh no,’ Justin sighs. ‘Not another bloody pony?’
Tears, humiliated and humiliating, spurt from Plum’s eyes: she throws down her cutlery and struggles to her feet. ‘Shut up!’ she wails. ‘You always laugh at me! I’m a person, I have feelings, I’m not a joke ! Why can’t you all just leave me alone?’
And having clambered over the back of the pew Plum departs the table, pounding through the house like a rock down a cliffside, storming up the stairs like a centurion.
In her bedroom she drops to her knees, reaching into the darkness beneath her bed for the handle of an old briefcase, which she pulls into the light with such aggravated force that the case leaps like a seal into her lap. The latches snap open militarily, chock chock, and as Plum lifts the lid her breath comes out snotty and rasped. She gazes upon the case’s contents with an archaeologist’s eye: here lies her treasure, her most sacred things. She has lined the briefcase with lavender satin and provided several bags’ worth of cottonball cushioning so that each token sits within its own bulky cloud, untroubled by her manhandling of the case. Plum brushes the items with her palm, incanting as she does so a string of whispery words. The glass lamb. I belong. The Fanta yoyo. Admire me. The jade pendant. Beauty fades. The Abba badge. You don’t touch me. The brown coin. I fear nothing. The dainty wristwatch. I am more than you see. Each object is as important as every other, but this last is the most daring, Plum can hardly bear to touch it – sometimes the mere sight of the watch makes the hair prickle up on her neck. Sometimes, to calm herself, Plum will fix her mind on a single item – usually the glass lamb, which is like staring through ice. Now, however, she plucks up the one thing that doesn’t belong among the others, and was never destined to remain. She closes the briefcase, fastens the latches and shoves the case under her bed. Then she crosses the room to the window and lifts the heavy sash.
Warm air wraps her as she forces the window higher; and bird-song, and the smell of mown grass, and the rusty calls of cicadas. Plum notices none of these. She has not opened the window with the aim of appreciating the summer evening, but so that she might lean a little closer, yearn a little more actively, toward the view that the high window allows. Spread out before her are rooftops in their scaly thousands; and church steeples, telephone poles, shopping centres, parkland. Beyond these, distance blurs suburbia into a fawn-and-green smudge; behind the smudge rises the purple backbone of a modest mountain range. Plum once visited these mountains with her Sunday-driving grandmother: they’d had Devonshire tea and walked through a rhododendron garden, and Plum had bought a leather bookmark in the shape of a flattened hound. A nice day, but recently she’s tried to blot from her memory the gingham curtains and crumbly scones and the innumerable mustard pots for sale in a streetful of arts and crafts, and pretends that the mountains are an unexplored shadowland, mysterious and promising. And there’s something mysterious, promising and deeply satisfying about leaning on a windowsill, baying for the hills.
She unwraps the Mars Bar with her practised teeth, her head lodged against the window frame. The hot weather has softened the fudge so it’s bendy in her hand, the caramel bleeding lanky strings from the severed end. Plum should not be eating a Mars Bar, nor anything that will contribute to the clumpiness of her body and the festeriness of her face. Every bite is making her life more intolerable, and she should have the will to resist, the discipline to improve herself… yet she feeds the chocolate into her mouth dutifully, obeying an impulse as irresistible as a hypnotist’s command. Tears seep down her cheeks as she eats, and slip past her chocolated lips; she is making a dull, unbroken, grief-encouraging noise, ‘Brr, brr, brr.’ The view of the ranges is blurred by her woe, which is a witch-brew of frustration and self-hate. Plum suspects she is special, and that she has a grand destiny: yet all her life she’s suffered more cruelly than others seem to do. She has always been more mocked, more misunderstood, more sidelined. Presumably it is her fate, to be persecuted until something – something foretold on parchments lying undiscovered in a cave, something that will occur when three dark stars align – makes her rise and spread her awesome wings; and then the whole world, gulping, will understand.
‘Her, her, her,’ she bawls, chewing heroically.
Her eyes are pinched closed, but when she hears her name spoken they flip open with surprise. The evening sky is marlin-blue and pink, extraordinarily beautiful; the breeze that fiddles in her hair is as jestful as a sprite. Her name flutters around her like the skeleton of a leaf – Plum, Plum, Plum – uttered in the hushed but unswerving voice of the Underworld. Plum is so startled that she stops both chewing and howling, the chocolate turning to clay in her mouth. For all she has daydreamed, she’s never believed, but suddenly she’s rigid with what’s true. There are no angels, but there are demons, and one of them has come for her. And suddenly Plum would rather be ordinary after all.
‘Plum? Are you hurt?’
Her sights plunge toward the ground, over the fence and into the garden of the house next door, where their neighbour stands with her hands clutched together, peering up troubledly. ‘Can I help you? You’re so sad.’
Plum’s face scalds. The Coyle family is not on such personal terms with the people next door that the woman – whose name, Maureen Wilks, Plum knows, but little else, and nor does she want to – may take the liberty of intruding in this way. The Coyles have lived in this street forever, their Wilks neighbours for only a few years, qualifying Plum to regard them with the hoitiness of landed gentry. She tucks the Mars Bar out of sight, smears her eyes with the flat of a hand. ‘I’m fine,’ she says, infusing each word with enough curtness and weight to impact into the earth. ‘I’m not – sad.’
Maureen Wilks considers her openly, so Plum feels her gaze like probing fingers. She would back into the darkness of her room, heave the window and pull the blind shudderingly, if only that would not appear rude the way this spying lady is rude, staring and listening and intruding. ‘You look like Rapunzel in her tower,’ the woman says. ‘Standing up there, waiting for a prince to rescue you.’
Plum bridles: Rapunzel is her most-scorned distressed damsel. Those coils of mouldery moth-eaten hair, the idiocy in never thinking of lowering herself to the ground, rather than waiting to be climbed. ‘Do I?’ she answers uncivilly.
The neighbour steps forward, her shadow skimming the fence. Her head is tipped to see Rapunzel, and Plum can see down her cleavage. ‘Would you like to come to David’s party, Plum? We’re having a picnic. There’s plenty of food, and we’ve filled the pool, but there are no guests except me.’
Plum’s window is high enough to overlook every corner of the neighbouring garden, and she notices now, in the shade of a tree, the small boy lying on his stomach in a shallow wading pool. She’s seen him in the garden before, breaking twigs, investigating. Laid out on a rug at a safe distance from the pool are platters of food that say only childhood: triangles of bread dotted with hundreds-and-thousands, frankfurts pierced with wooden toothpicks, lemony cupcakes and bowls of Smarties, bottles of garish fizz. Every immature morsel Plum has banished from her own party; everything she’s loved, and still does. Though caramel yet clings to her teeth, her heart longs for cupcake, her heart demands fizz. ‘Is it David’s birthday?’
‘Yes; he’s four. Please come. His father’s away, there’s only me. He would love to have a guest. Wouldn’t you, David?’
David, startled by inclusion, dips his face into the water. Plum hesitates, naturally antisocial: but her desire for the party food is like the tug of a clutching hand. She needs a frankfurt, she pines for sparkling drink. In the space of mere moments she could be sitting on a rug, being six years old again. And if her mother opens the door, she will find her daughter’s room deserted. Plum’s absence will first puzzle, then worry her family, and make them think back on how they’ve treated her. ‘I’ll come,’ she says. ‘Wait a minute.’
She shuts the window and quickly changes out of her pyjamas, pulling on a t-shirt and a pair of towelling shorts. From a shelf she takes a picturebook that has no place in her heart. Dear David, she writes on its opening page. Happy… She doesn’t know whether it’s ‘forth’ or ‘fourth’. Dear David, Happy birthday. Love from your neighbour Miss Ariella ‘Plum’ Coyle. Underneath this she adds the elaborate flourish she’s been practising of late. Then she creeps downstairs, book under her arm, Roman sandals soundless on the uncarpeted stairs. She hears her parents and brothers talking at the dinner table – Plum would like to know if they’re discussing her, and pauses: then hearing laughter, complicated and conniving, hurries on as if shovelled. She feeds herself through the querulous screen door, then speeds across the summer-sharp lawn to the footpath, rounds the fence that divides her house from the next, and trots up the neighbouring driveway. And it’s only now that Plum remembers all those naïve little girls tempted into vans or past a front door, lured by lollies or the promise of a puppy, never to be seen again. The recollection slows her, rolls her eyes in her head. The evening seems unnaturally quiet, her home suddenly far away. Yet she cannot turn back, she’s committed herself now, and if Plum must vanish she’s already vanished, and her great destiny was only to become a legendary lost girl. ‘Hello?’ She passes through the side gate with her heart like an anvil. ‘I’m here – hello?’
The little boy, David, has left the wading pool and is standing on the lawn with his arms held out, his body shining bluely with water. His mother is kneeling close to him, drying his back with a towel. At the sight of Plum, the boy twines his feet and smiles. His smile is oddly graceful, and makes Plum feel confused. Looking away, she sees that the garden is different to how it appears from the height of her window. There’s a flowery scent, and the coolness of damp, and the ticking of leaf against leaf; most weirdly, everything seems stretched skyward, making her think of fairies and of sleepy tumbles down rabbit-holes. She looks past the fence to her bedroom window – how peculiar to think that, moments ago, she had been standing so forlornly at the sill. She wonders if Rapunzel, returned to the ground, looked up at her tower and realised it was not what she had believed. That she could have jumped.
‘Here’s our guest!’ The mother, Mrs Wilks, rises, smiling at Plum. ‘You see, David, I told you someone would come. Now we can have a proper party!’
Plum hands over her gift. ‘Happy birthday, David. Sorry, I didn’t have wrapping paper.’
‘Oh, a book! How kind! David, what do you say?’
David says, ‘I got a truck.’
Plum doesn’t consider herself good with children, nor does she find them endearing. She resents their chaos, their self-absorption, their compulsive stealing of the limelight. This child, however, is like a shy little calf, and glances away sweetly when Plum meets his eye. ‘What sort of truck?’ she asks; and the boy heaves a sigh and says, ‘A Tonka truck.’
‘A Tonka truck!’ Plum plucks a titbit from a past she wasn’t part of, wanting the boy to think well of her. ‘My brothers had Tonka trucks when they were little.’
‘Did you hear that, David? Justin and Cydar had Tonka trucks too.’
It surprises the girl to hear her brothers’ names fall so familiarly from the woman’s mouth, but at once it is understandable: neighbours know the names of neighbours. Maureen Wilks had known Plum’s name, and Plum somehow knows hers. The whole world is joined, like a dot-to-dot, by someone knowing somebody else’s name. Her inclusion in this intricate web fills Plum with a warm sense of humanity’s oneness. The night is beautiful, the world is beautiful, and for all her imperfections Plum is included and wanted. For a moment, she is happier than she’s ever been.