Ada had seen Raff Cavallo. He was standing outside the theatre with his bike. He came back sometimes to visit his mother. She wasn’t going to even speak to him, but he saw her and said, ‘Hello, Ada.’ It was nice of him to say hello and to use her name too, because lots of the older kids just didn’t bother saying hello. So Ada stopped. She said hello. She couldn’t think what else to say and instead of speaking she pressed her finger into the steel ruts of the gate and wiped the dust. Eventually he asked her if she’d like a dink home.
Ada shook her head.
‘Are you scared?’
‘No.’ (Had he forgotten how she went down the hole already? She’d nearly died, and he didn’t even remember.)
‘Okay, then.’
He swung his leg over his bike. She might never see him again. And there were things she didn’t know that she wanted to know.
‘Is your father a gypsy?’ she said.
‘Apparently my great grandmother was a gypsy.’
‘Do you like Tilly?’
He grinned as if he thought it was a funny question. ‘Did she tell you to ask me that?’
‘No. I just asked by myself, because she likes you.’
‘Does she? She didn’t act like it.’ He didn’t look at Ada when he said that.
Ada realised she shouldn’t have told, and Tilly would kill her if she ever found out. She turned red and gave the smallest of nods. But then she stepped forward and frowned. ‘I hope you won’t give her heartbreak.’
‘Your sister gives out heartbreak too, you know.’
Ada shook her head. She wasn’t sure why.
‘Here, you have this,’ he fumbled about in his jean pocket and pulled out a stone that looked like honey gone hard and gave it to her. He rode off before Ada could ask him why she should have the honey stone. As far as she knew, Raff didn’t even know she collected stones.
That night she put it under her pillow along with her other special gifts from nature—the green feather, the dead Christmas beetle and the river stone. But she still couldn’t sleep. The window was open and bare. The curtain had fallen down and no one had bothered to put it back up because it always fell down again when you tried to pull it across. Ada was afraid that something bad was in the garden. The trees creaked. The night swam through the window and came into the room like a river. She got up and pulled the curtain off the floor and climbed on the desk and balanced it precariously across the top of the window. Then she rummaged in the drawer and found her diary and the torch and read:
After the fire I collected seeds for new trees in the bush. I have to wait for them to sprout and then I will plant them and make a new forest.
This is a promise to Ada, herself and to William Blake, who is a tree.
She added: I am awake in the night. The night is in the garden. Ada read it over. Even though she didn’t say everything, like Tilly did, all that was written was true and real and hers. When she read it, it made her feel that the things that happened couldn’t be forgotten now. If everything was forgotten, then what were you? Weren’t you all that had happened before? And if you didn’t remember it, then you lost part of you too. And instead you would only be patchwork pieces of you. Everything else behind her had blurred into floating impressions already. It was falling out of her, like stuffing falls out of an old pillow. She remembered when Tilly went to high school and stopped catching the bus with her, she had been so proud to get on the bus on her own. But now she didn’t feel like that.
Ada put her hands over her eyes. She was so tired but she couldn’t sleep.