Gibber’s Creek Gazette, March 1972
Correction: Last Thursday’s ‘Sale of erotic shrubs at the Rectory in aid of Overseas Missions’ should have read ‘Sale of exotic shrubs’. The Gazette apologises to all concerned and congratulates the Ladies’ Guild on their success.
SCARLETT
Scarlett guided her wheelchair along the footpath towards River View. She was NOT crying.
A passer-by might think she was, but her face was twisted anyway. A waif’s face, a cramped cripple’s face, marked by fourteen years of fighting to sit up without cushions or a harness to help, to make her arms and hands move of her own volition, instead of being guided by a therapist, to be free to go to school on a motorised wheelchair built by the technicians at River View, where she had lived since she was a few months old, because why would parents want to keep a child who looked like a mutated elf?
But looking like a mutated elf wasn’t why she was the only girl in the class not to be invited to Barbie’s fourteenth birthday party. A girl in a wheelchair COULD go to a party, even if she couldn’t dance. She even had a purple mini skirt, which Jed had bought her in Canberra, and long purple boots with pink flowers that made her skinny legs look normal.
If being in a wheelchair had been the reason Barbie hadn’t invited her, Scarlett wouldn’t be crying. Not that she WAS crying.
Scarlett brushed the tears away, then pressed her wheelchair’s controls to go faster down the footpath. Old Matilda Thompson had bullied the council into concreting the path between town and River View the year before so the River View kids who were mobile enough could get to school by themselves.
Those kids had found friends, kids who liked the novelty of having a mate in a wheelchair, or could look beyond it to the person. But not her. And that was why she WASN’T crying. The dumb girls at high school didn’t like her because she was too intelligent, talked too much about things they didn’t KNOW about, like plate tectonics. Didn’t they even CARE that Australia was drifting north? That the mountains beyond these gold-grassed plains were slowly rising?
Barbie and her ‘barbarians’ didn’t like her because Scarlett saw too much, and said too much too. Like how Deirdre had her period twice as often as everyone else. But had Deirdre been GRATEFUL when Scarlett had told her to ask Dr McAlpine about it? NO!
Scarlett suddenly pressed the stop button of her wheelchair.
The footpath in front of her was blocked by a burst bag of flour, a bag of icing sugar and a half-empty bottle of cream. A strangely bulky girl kneeled next to the mess, trying to wrap what was left into the remains of the sodden grocery bag, which was mathematically IMPOSSIBLE when you calculated the mass of the shopping and what was left of the bag . . .
‘Do you want to borrow my basket?’
The girl looked up. A crooked face. Odd. But odd was interesting. Scarlett reached behind — still a triumph to have arms and hands that could reach, she’d be WHEELING HERSELF soon — and lifted her schoolbag out of the basket on the back of her wheelchair, then held out the basket.
The girl smiled. Her smile was crooked too, her big teeth erratically uneven. But it was still a good smile, and her hair was lovely, long, parted in the middle and blonde and decked with dried everlastings. She stood, took the basket, and began to pile the shopping into it.
‘I’m Scarlett O’Hara,’ offered Scarlett. She’d chosen the name years back, when she had assumed a new glamorous name each week. Scarlett waited for the girl to give her own name.
The girl picked up the bag of icing sugar, scooped up as much of the flour as she could, and the half-empty bottle of cream. She still didn’t speak. ‘What’s YOUR name?’ Scarlett demanded at last.
The girl reached into her shoulder bag and brought out a card. Scarlett read the single word on it: Leafsong. ‘Is that your name?’
The girl nodded.
Interesting. Had the girl chosen the name, as she had chosen Scarlett? Or had her parents been idiots? Because some parents WERE idiots. Like hers, Jed said, because they didn’t know the treasure they had lost when they signed a crippled daughter over to River View. And if Jed thought Scarlett was a treasure, then she WAS, because Jed always told the truth . . .
Scarlett inspected the girl. The almost flat face was odd. Not Down syndrome, but as if her face had once been slightly twisted by some giant hand. ‘Can’t you talk?’ Her voice was sharper than she meant it to be, the snubs of the afternoon still wriggling inside her like vicious worms.
A smile, a shake of the head. And the anger worms vanished. Scarlett smiled back, considering the many reasons this girl might not talk. Facial deformity, tumour of the larynx . . . she could just imagine Barbie’s face if she’d even MENTIONED tumours of the larynx. Impulsively Scarlett asked, ‘Did you have a tumour of the larynx?’
Leafsong grinned and shook her head.
Interesting. This girl knew what a tumour of the larynx was.
‘Problem with your palate? Tongue? Birth defect?’ Scarlett added hesitantly, ‘Brain injury?’
A headshake to all of them. And the grin. A grin that looked at her, not away. Scarlett said impulsively, ‘Do you want to come back to River View with me for a swim? We’ve got a swimming pool.’ Friends could use it too, after therapy sessions finished at four-thirty.
Leafsong pointed to her groceries and shook her head. Then, slowly, she gestured to Scarlett, to herself, then made walking motions with her fingers, back to her own body.
‘You want me to come to your place?’
A nod. Leafsong pointed to the sun, then put up a single finger as if to say, ‘One.’
Scarlett LOVED puzzles. ‘You want me to come to your place tomorrow?’
Another nod. Leafsong held up four fingers to say, ‘Four o’clock.’
‘Where do you live?’
Leafsong pointed along the river, grinned and pantomimed playing a guitar.
‘The commune!’ It was a few kilometres out of town on the road that led to Dribble, where Jed lived and where Scarlett stayed whenever Jed was home from uni. The name ‘Dribble’ had been a joke — what else could you call a house between Drinkwater and Overflow?
Leafsong lifted her arms, twisted her body in a dance that clearly said, ‘Party,’ then pointed to the ground, then north. Impressive. None of the barbarians even KNEW where north was. Leafsong waved her hands in a wild explosion.
Scarlett laughed. Laughed at the ridiculousness, at the wonder of communicating by only expression and gesture, of having someone who might just want to be her friend.
‘You’re having an End of the World party? Groovy!’ That was one in the eye for Barbie, Scarlett thought gleefully. A proper grown-up party, not just schoolgirls and a record player.
And even groovier to be going to the party from Dribble, because Jed would be home tonight. Jed would let her borrow her eyeshadow and lipstick, which Matron Clancy never let her use even though EVERY girl in class used lipstick now.
But it would be mean to ask Jed to drive her to the party and not stay. NO ONE should be left out of a party.
‘Can I bring my sister?’
Leafsong nodded again.
Far out! Though one day soon Scarlett wanted Leafsong to see where she really lived most of the time. Not in a house with a mum and dad and three point five brothers and sisters, but in an institution, no matter how many butterflies it was decorated with.
But she had Jed, and Nancy and Michael as her adopted aunt and uncle, and the twins who let you cuddle them for ten seconds before they squirmed away, and Matilda, who was a cross between a grandma and the empress of Gibber’s Creek. Which might be BETTER than a normal family, though it was impossible to extrapolate any valid conclusion about that without a LOT more data . . .
A commune and River View had a lot in common, Scarlett thought, watching Leafsong pack the last of the groceries neatly in the basket. The kids had to share nearly everything at River View. Only their clothes and wheelchairs belonged to them alone, and a few things like books or the dream catcher Jed had given her to hang from her window in the dorm she shared with three much younger girls. Everyone at River View these days was younger than her, and . . .
. . . just like her. Cripples, in their chairs.
A car slowed down next to them, then stopped. A white car, dust free. Even the hubcaps were shining white. A man in a white suit looked out, smiling at Scarlett, ignoring Leafsong. A white-clad young woman sat next to him, smiling vaguely. Another in the back seat, asleep. ‘Do you need a hand?’ the man asked gently. His voice was warm and deep.
Leafsong put her hand on Scarlett’s shoulder and shook her head urgently. Why? thought Scarlett. The man was only trying to be kind.
‘We’re okay,’ said Scarlett. ‘Thanks anyway.’
‘Would you like a lift back to River View?’
Scarlett froze. She had never seen the man before. You got to know everyone at least by sight in Gibber’s Creek. How did he know she lived at River View? ‘No. Thank you,’ she said.
‘Are you sure? It would be no trouble. Your wheelchair would fit in the boot.’
‘I’m fine.’ She turned the wheelchair, so her back faced the car. ‘Can Jed and I bring anything to the party?’ she asked, making conversation till the car left. And then it did, its engine purring along the street, but not in the direction of River View.
Not an axe murderer trying to lure two girls into his car, and anyway, he already had two girls and neither of them had looked worried. Just one of those strangers who thought a crippled girl ALWAYS needed help, thought Scarlett, dismissing him from her thoughts.
‘See you tomorrow,’ she said to Leafsong.
Leafsong nodded, glanced at the basket and touched her heart and lips briefly in a way that somehow said, ‘Thanks,’ even more clearly than if she’d spoken the word. She walked a little way, then turned and waved at her.
Odd. Weird. But then Scarlett was weird too. And not a single one of her adopted almost-family was normal. Normal, decided Scarlett, with a rush of happiness and of pity for all the Barbies in the universe, was BORING.
And Jed would be there that afternoon. Impossibly wonderful Jed, who wasn’t quite a sister, aunt or mother, but was bits of all of them and better. Jed was NEVER boring.
And now, perhaps, thought Scarlett, shifting the speed button on her chair to maximum as she ALMOST whizzed down the footpath, feeling the hot wind upon her face, smelling of sunstruck lawns and wilting geraniums, I also have a friend.