The Wish Pony (2 page)

‘Dad's got a special mug. Mum and I got it for him. It's a funny one, about him being an accountant, but I didn't get the joke at first.'

Mrs Wiseman smiled, nodded and kept on drinking her tea. I would just have to wash the cup very carefully and remove every last trace of lipstick. That would have to do.

‘Well,' I said, after some time had passed in silence and the tea was finished, ‘I guess you could go now, Mrs Wiseman. I mean, it was lovely of you to come over and look after me, but really I'm fine now by myself.' I didn't want to be marooned at the kitchen table forever. I could be playing on the computer or watching television or finishing my book. Instead I was sitting here watching the second hands of the clock tick over.

‘Leave you by yourself? Oh I don't think so, Ruby. Your mother asked me to look after you till your father gets home and that's what I'm going to do. She said there was some frozen food to heat up for dinner, so I'll get a move on with that in a little while. No rush. Your dad said he'd call on his mobile when he was leaving the hospital. What we did before mobiles were invented I simply can't remember. But, do you know, there was a time when not everyone had an ordinary telephone?'

I stared at Mrs Wiseman. She was quite ancient, then, even though her hair was a faded blonde and her lipstick was so red.

‘Oh yes,' she said, ‘the world was very different then. Of course, I embrace technology. I have my own mobile,' she said, and raking around a strange oversized basket, withdrew a large mobile phone which she held out to me, proudly.

‘It must be quite old,' I said. ‘It's huge!'

‘I don't like the small ones,' she said, ‘they get lost too easily.'

I knew that. Dad was always losing his.

‘So, Ruby,' she said after a short silence, ‘we should use this time to get to know each other better. I know – describe yourself in five words.'

‘What?'

‘You know, find five words to describe yourself. Honestly, mind, no fibbing.'

‘I don't know what you mean.'

‘All right,' she sighed, ‘I'll start. I'm vivacious, sharp, diverse (which some people might call scatter-brained), multi-talented and neighbourly.'

‘That's more than five words,' I pointed out.

‘No, the bit about some people calling me scatterbrained wasn't part of
my
five words. That was their five words – actually one word. It's hyphenated. Do you see now?'

‘Okay,' I said slowly, ‘well, I'm – what does vivacious mean?'

Mrs Wiseman looked at me with her head on one side. ‘Hmm,' she said, ‘bright, talkative, excitable. If vivacious was a colour it would be red or orange. The life of the party. If it was a piece of music, it might be a jig. Get it?'

‘I don't think I'm vivacious. I'm friendly,' I said. That was safe. It was hard to describe yourself, though. Wasn't that something you left to other people?

‘Tick for friendly,' Mrs Wiseman said encouragingly. ‘What about things you're good at?'

‘They'd take up more than five words,' I said.

‘Not if you do it properly. You just need to use your brains a bit. So, if you're good at reading, you could say I'm a reader. That would only be one word.'

‘Okay, I'm friendly, a reader,' I stopped. What else did people say about me? My teacher said my head was in the clouds and that I was off with the pixies. How could I reduce that to one word? ‘I'm a dreamer,' I said triumphantly.

‘Very good,' Mrs Wiseman said, approvingly. ‘I'd add smart to that list.'

‘But I'm not,' I said. ‘I can't do the maths sheets or tell the time.'

‘Time, maths,' Mrs Wiseman waved them away with one hand as though they didn't matter. ‘Smart is more than time and maths. Two more to go.'

Dad had said recently I was selfish, but I didn't want that going on my description. Sarah said I was a drama queen, but that wasn't fair either.

‘Drama queen,' I said hesitantly.

‘Melodramatic,' Mrs Wiseman nodded, ‘quite useful, really.'

Melodramatic sounded much better than a drama queen. ‘A good shopper,' I said, remembering Mum's tea cup.

As though she read my thoughts, Mrs Wiseman smiled, ‘Ah yes, as witnessed by the Royal Albert tea cup. Discriminating. Good list, Ruby. I think we will get on just fine. Now, favourite food?'

‘For dinner, afters or snack?' I was beginning to like Mrs Wiseman, even though she was pretty weird.

‘Oh, let's start with breakfast and work our way down through the day.'

Mrs Wiseman and I both liked pancakes. She didn't like peanut butter and Vegemite and thought wraps were silly.

‘Grilled cheese sandwich with a sprinkling of paprika and the cheese just bubbling.' she said.

We both liked roast chicken, lasagne and fish and chips. Mrs Wiseman liked Christmas pud best but I liked double choc ice-cream, though I hadn't thought of Christmas food but I didn't want to admit that, particularly now that I was smart.

‘Books?'

But the books I had read Mrs Wiseman hadn't even heard of and the books she loved were ones I didn't know – except for
Seven Little Australians
.

‘Did you cry when Judy died?'

‘Of course,' I said, ‘doesn't everybody?'

‘You'd think so,' Mrs Wiseman said. ‘I could lend you some books, if you like.
The Secret Garden
– you might enjoy that. I loved it.'

‘Oh, yes please!' Never turn down the opportunity to borrow a book. I was rapidly running out of reading material, what with Mum being so sick and Dad not realising the library opening hours so we always turned up twenty minutes after it closed.

Then it was time to heat up dinner and we agreed that if we did the biggest spaghetti sauce, Mrs Wiseman could stay, have dinner and meet Dad.

‘Well, well,' he kept saying through dinner, ‘this is unexpected, Mrs Wiseman. Very nice. Good to meet your neighbours. Of course, this whole suburb has changed since Rita and I bought here. More professional couples, no children.' He spoke more loudly than he usually did, probably because he thought Mrs Wiseman was deaf. ‘Thank you so much for this, Mrs Wiseman. I do really appreciate it and so does Rita. She wouldn't have gone in if she hadn't been able to call on you.'

‘Do call me Magda,' Mrs Wiseman said suddenly, ‘both of you. It's silly this formal stuff, when we're neighbours.'

‘Magda,' Dad repeated, ‘interesting name.'

‘My late husband's name for me,' Magda said, ‘dear man.'

We were all silent. I couldn't imagine Mrs Wiseman with a husband. She seemed too much herself, somehow. Dad, without Mum, wasn't quite all there. Mum, when Dad went on his blokes camping ordeal, became different – let me stay up and watch chick flicks, eat too much popcorn and try on her clothes as though her married life slipped away from her, leaving her kind of younger.

‘Delicious,' Dad said, clearly not meaning Magda's husband, but the food. ‘Did he pass away recently?'

‘Some years ago. Long before I moved here. Of course, I miss him. I miss them all, but what can you do? Married three times – loved them all. He'd been in a home. It was high time he died, poor man. He didn't know who he was, half the time.'

‘Sad,' Dad agreed. ‘Ruby's grandmother was a little – you know – at the end. But cheerful. At least she was cheerful.'

‘Pop just keeled over,' I told Magda. ‘It was his heart. Now I have only one grandparent – Mum's dad who lives in North Queensland and doesn't come south because it's too cold.'

‘Eccentric,' Dad said, ‘totally eccentric.'

‘The best kind of people,' Magda helped herself to another serving of spaghetti.

After dinner we both saw Magda to the door. She wouldn't let Dad walk her home – ‘Across the road, I don't think so, Edward! Don't make me feel more ancient than I am! It is good to meet you both properly at last. I look forward to more conversations, Ruby.' She shook Dad's hand – which looked pretty funny – gave me a little wave and vanished into the night.

‘Interesting woman,' Dad said, following me inside. ‘Magda, eh? European name. Sounds exotic. I wonder what her background is. She talked a lot but didn't really say much about herself.'

‘I thought she said a lot. I mean, not everyone tells you they were married three times.'

‘That's true,' Dad said, ‘no real small talk.'

‘What's small talk?' I imagined all the letters coming out of Magda's mouth in very small print. I agreed with Dad, Magda's words were big! Then he explained it really meant polite conversation – which was kind of what I'd imagined and kind of not. But he was still right. Whatever it was, Magda didn't do it.

Magda was vivacious. If you had to choose a colour for her, it would be red, post office box red. Emergency red. The colour of her lipstick.

‘Vivacious,' I whispered to myself that night. I wished Mum was home so I could tell her how Magda had described the word. The house didn't feel the same without her in it. It felt as though it wasn't quite full. Dad and I weren't enough for it. Was she red, like Magda? Without her the house was just a little bit colder and a bit paler.

‘She'll be home tomorrow,' Dad said, bending to kiss me good night. ‘Don't you worry, Ruby, soon things will be back to normal.' But his voice sounded wobbly and uncertain in the dark and I knew he wasn't exactly sure of that.

 

 

It was midnight and Magda was cleaning, humming as she did. She was wildly out of tune. She dusted the three ornately framed portraits in the hallway, but stopped humming for the second one. George, her second husband, had never enjoyed her renditions of anything. Old stick in the mud. Still what do you expect from an opera buff? She polished his face silently but with affection.

Then she moved into the small lounge room where she dusted around the three little urns on the mantelpiece, taking care not to move the urns themselves. It would be quite upsetting if she mixed them up. Next, she turned her attention to the first of the display cabinets.

She removed everything carefully. There were the five little red glasses from Venice – a sixth had been smashed by the opera buff in a fit of pique. She put the wobbly clay penguin clearly made by a child gently down on the coffee table. Wouldn't do to break that! A curled marble cat with sharp ears followed, then a little horse with a rippled glass tail, a millefiori paperweight and a small music box. When she'd taken everything out, she cleaned the glass shelves and then replaced it all, patting each little ornament tenderly as she did.

It was nearly two before she finished the third display cabinet and had polished the little silver teaspoons which went with the tea service, also dusted, and very like Ruby's mother's tea cup. Not that Magda cared about the time. The only working clock in the house was the little one on her mobile phone. The grandfather clock had stopped, rather ominously, a day before poor George's death. The others had probably run out of batteries, like the kitchen clock, shaped as a tea pot, the bright blue hands stuck permanently on 10.30 – a perpetual invitation to morning tea.

At 2.30 the possum couple, surreptitiously fed bread and jam by Magda, galloped across her roof. But Magda didn't stir until 6.30 when the first kookaburra woke her instantly.

‘Well, well,' she murmured aloud, apparently addressing an old teddy bear propped up on the pillow next to her, ‘I wonder what today will bring us, hey?' Then she lay in bed as she did nearly every morning, her bright knitted patchwork blanket pulled cosily around her, and listened to the sounds of her small street waking up as the occupants began their different days.

In the first lesson, Sarah passed me a note. It read,
I'm Bree's best friend now
in big blue texta on the front and on the back, in pencil,
So you'll have to sit next to Sharnie.