Hello God (5 page)

Mum’s tum is growing. The baby kicks a lot. Dad goes goofy feeling it kick. He talks to Mum’s stomach and says things like, ‘Wait until you get out of there. We’ll have a lot of fun.’ Sometimes he sings songs to the baby. He doesn’t sing in tune, and I am sure the baby must put its tiny hands over its tiny ears. Mum gets a bit tired and sometimes her back aches. Both Mum and Dad kiss and hug me a lot, and my hiccups are getting better. They only come back when I feel really upset.

It’s strange being part of the
out
set at school. I miss cycling down side streets with Danielle and Stacey and practising netball together. Stephanie’s kind of quiet. Apart from swimming, she doesn’t like sport. She especially finds running hard she told me.

We get along fine though, because sport isn’t everything. Danielle and Stacey ignore us. They act as though we are bad smells. I ignore them, too. Adam’s become part of our group. He likes to tell jokes and does the most amazing magic tricks. He’s had special treatment on his birthmark and it’s beginning to fade. That’s what he told me, but the weird thing is, I’d stopped noticing it, so I didn’t realise he’d had treatment. Matt, the class hunk, sits with us at lunch sometimes. I’ve hiccupped a few times when he’s been around.

Stephanie invited me to her tree house today. Her parents built it for her. She has a rope ladder to climb up to it.

Well, God, it’s a very cool tree house. You can look out the open window and see hills covered with red tiled roofs and cars travelling along roads and the school. You can even see the waves rolling onto the beach. Because it’s up so high, you can
see birds’ nests in the branches above. Stephanie brought mushy fruit for the parrots that live on the top branches, and they came right into the tree house and stood near the open door, fighting each other for their dinner. They have their own little society. Like people in a way. Some birds were timid and stood back while the bigger birds ate first. Other birds just dug right in and gorged themselves and ignored the rough birds. Once they’d eaten they didn’t hang around though, which was good. When you made parrots, God, you should have made them quieter.

Stephanie’s tree house has little shelves in it
filled with books and games. She even has a shelf where she keeps biscuits and jelly babies and her mum gave us icy cold cans of lemonade to take up with us. In one corner there was a small, stiff broom. Stephanie swept all the leaves out of the door, and then we sat on cushions on the floor and played board games or just read. I never hiccup when I’m with Stephanie, God. I think this is a good sign.

‘This is my quiet place,’ Stephanie told me. ‘I sit here and make up stories about the bear and the pussycat. And I do my thinking here.’

So, God, I bit my lip, because I wasn’t sure what she’d think of me. I told her about you. About how I talk to you when I can last thing at night in whispers or in my mind.

I thought she might find it strange, but she just said to me, ‘Oh, that’s your quiet place.’

When we left the tree house, Stephanie’s legs hurt and she had some trouble getting down the rope ladder.

She must have fallen because I noticed some bruises on her legs. Her skin’s really pale, so the bruises stood out.

She said it was nothing, that the doctor said she’d had a bad dose of the flu that time when she was sick and stayed away from school.

I felt so bad when she said that. She’s had aching legs since she had that illness, which I wanted you to give her. That all seems a long time ago now, and we were stupid, weren’t we, God.

Seeing Stephanie’s tree house last weekend and where she writes her stories was inspiring. Today I went to the library to listen to Steph tell her story to the kids. In one part of Mum’s library they have a small room where there are brightly coloured beanbags and posters of story-book characters on the walls. Lots of little kids were sitting on the bags, looking around, waiting for Steph. I sat on a beanbag at the back, because I didn’t want to make her feel nervous.

But I needn’t have worried. She wasn’t nervous at all, God. She came into the room and the kids
cheered, and the boy next to me called out, ‘Stephy! Steph!’ She’s a celebrity at the library.

Steph sat on a dotted beanbag and wore a peaked silver hat, which Mum made for the storytellers. Mum introduced Stephanie to the excited kids and then left the room to do some other work.

Just before Steph started her story, guess who came into the story room? I could hardly believe it. Stacey came in with her little sister. They curled up together on a beanbag and when Stacey saw me she gave me a smile. What do you think of that, God? Stacey coming to listen to Stephanie? Amazing.

Then Steph began to read. Her voice is soft, so you have to listen carefully, but she also uses her hands and her eyes grow big and fill her whole face. The story of the brown bear and the pussycat was just so beautiful. I was really concentrating, God, because I didn’t want to miss a word.

The pussycat became lost as a kitten, when she jumped out of a big logging truck on a highway
in Canada. A brown bear took her home and brought her up with her bear cubs. In the beginning the bear cubs teased her. They thought she was a very ugly-looking bear cub. In the summer she romped through the grassy hills with the mother bear and cubs. Every week, Steph tells the adventures the cat has with the cubs, and how she forms a special relationship with Sharmi, the smallest of the cubs. They share their food, and jump out from behind trees at one another and roll in the buttercups that fill the valley in summer.

But Winter comes, and with it snow and ice.

When Steph had finished, the children all cheered. Me too.

Stacey came over to me. ‘Stephanie tells a great story.’

‘She sure,
hic
, does.’

Does this mean Stacey and I are talking again? Maybe she and Danielle want me back in the
in
crowd? Hmmm.

I told Steph how smart she was and asked her to tell me what happens next.

‘I can’t tell you. I haven’t decided yet,’ she said. ‘I’ll go to my quiet place and do some thinking later today.’

So you see, God, life is full of surprises. I’ve been doing some thinking myself, about
in
crowds and
out
crowds, and it seems to me that there is no
in
crowd. It’s just being where you want to be.

Our class is going to a camp. Right by the river with canoes and walking tracks. We’re going to have a campfire at night, and study the bush by day. It’s supposed to be an environmental camp. Learning how to take care of the things you made, God, so you should be very happy that we’re thinking good thoughts.

The baby is growing. It’s starting to fill Mum’s tum and she’s looking better and better. Her hair is shining, her cheeks are like pink apples. She wears big, loose clothes, but not too loose. Mum’s
very proud of her baby bump and she pats it all the time.

How do I feel about the baby now? Watching the spare room, usually full of knick-knacks, being transformed into a canary yellow room with a bassinette and a cot, mobiles of zoo animals, fluffy toys and a baby wardrobe makes me feel like hiccupping.

I’m trying to remember that the baby is part of me too. It may even look like me. I can take it on walks, take it to the library to listen to Steph’s stories. But I won’t, no I won’t, God,
hic
, ever, ever, ever change its nappy.

One last thing: it rained today and the ants are really harmless insects. Can’t you teach them to swim? At least twenty died in the puddle in our driveway.

We’re here at camp. I don’t know how this happened, God, but Stacey and Danielle are in the same tent as Steph and me. It seems to me that’s a bit of a coincidence. Did you set this up? While we were putting up the tent, Stacey told Stephanie her sister liked her story at the library. Danielle was awfully quiet. Then I started to hiccup, and somehow that broke the ice. Everyone started to laugh. Me too. Then, maybe because there’d been all this bad stuff going on between us, we laughed so much that we rolled around and the tent fell
down and we had to stake it all over again. That made us laugh some more.

God, I think laughter is the best idea you had when you made us.

Tonight, we all sat around a roaring campfire and told stories. One person started the story with ‘It was a cold and windy night’ and the next person had to carry on. When we got to Steph, she added stuff that made the story so spooky everyone went, ‘Ooooooooh.’ She told us about ghosts running up corridors and clumsy ghosts bumping into ghost
walls, and baby ghosts that needed ghostly nappy changes.

Then Mrs Kettlesmith put golden syrup on newly baked damper and we gorged ourselves, letting the golden syrup squelch out the sides of the damper and drip through our fingers, and then we licked them clean.

Sitting there, my cheeks hot from the fire, with the big eye of the moon blinking down at me and my friends, and a trillion stars twinkling, well, God, it felt special.