Molly and Pim and the Millions of Stars (13 page)

What she really wanted, Molly thought to herself, was to crawl into her mama's arms
and tell her how very hard all this was, and for her mama to tell her it would all
be all right.

CHAPTER 18

Dancing

Molly lay in her bed of branches. Maude was beside her, curled up with her head on
her paws. Molly wrapped herself around Maude, and even though Maude didn't particularly
like being cuddled, she put up with it.

‘I know you don't like it, Maude, but that's why I love you, because you let me do
it anyway.'

Maude raised her head and beat her tail briefly in response, but then sank back down
and seemed to fall instantly back to sleep.

‘Oh, Maudie,' said Molly with a long sigh
that slid through the night and blended
with the other quiet, gentle noises of leaves whispering and faraway owls hooting
and distant cars on some highway going somewhere. The world was never completely
still and quiet, but the night had a special sort of hushed activity. Things rustled
and seemed hidden within the blackness, and it was as if dreams bloomed like shadows
and escaped from their moorings and grew in momentous, invisible ways.

Molly listened to the night. What should I do now? she wondered. Wondering was very
different to thinking. Thinking always looked for answers. It was like folding the
question up and putting it in the box it fitted into best. But wondering was like
going for a walk without a destination in mind.

Could I dance around the tree like Pim said? Molly wondered. The tree was humming.
Was her mama humming to her, calming her? Molly pressed her ear to a branch. The
vibrations were smooth and syrupy. She curled herself around the
branch. Then she
sat on top of it and swung her legs. She was wide awake now. Around her Molly saw
the garden: the black, silent forms of the trees and, as she climbed higher, the
whole sloping valley of the town. The sky was a dark glowing blue with wisps of clouds,
a large white moon and one shining star.

‘Venus,' whispered Molly. Her mama always pointed it out. But tonight it was different,
because it was Molly who had seen it, and because she had seen it and said its name,
she felt she had introduced herself, and now she and Venus would forever know each
other. It was like this with everything around her. It was as if she was seeing it
all for the first time, seeing it with her very own self, taking the sense of it
inside her. The black shadowy tips of trees against the glow of light coming from
the houses, the dark-forever-and-ever sky, the cluster of homes in the valley, where
Molly imagined children snug in their beds, dogs flopped out tired on their rugs,
someone rising from a piano,
someone else sinking into a couch.

This cosy, golden light seeping out from windows made Molly feel she was watching
the very great drama of inside and outside. The wild, dark sky and the star and moon
and mountains and trees were all out of reach and beyond and wondrous and soaring
like dreams. And the houses with their small lights were the steady comforting bones
of life, set snugly, one next to the other, together and connected like beads on
a string. Yet inside wouldn't be inside without the wild, quiet roar of outside.

Somewhere out there, there was another child just like her, one who didn't live in
a house, who
didn't have a lamp on, who didn't have a mother or a father putting
her to bed and who didn't feel all right at all. Out there in the wide world, there
were hundreds of worries much, much worse than Molly's, maybe even thousands or millions
of them. Molly's problem was a tiny dot in the night. And if you joined up all those
dots it would make the big inexplicable shape of lives being lived.

Lives went in all ways. Life was a jagged dance of joys and sorrows, up and then
down and sometimes in knots or jolts or dizzying rushes over or round again. And
in Molly's town at that moment among all those houses that sat there in the valley,
there was Ellen Palmer's house, where everything was always snug. But Molly's best
friend was gravely ill in her own bed with the pink curtains and the dressing table
and everything as nice as you could wish for.

Molly closed her eyes and wished for Ellen. She clung on tightly to her branch as
if she and her mama were holding hands and both wishing for Ellen to get better.
And it seemed that the branch
clung back, just as it seemed that the sky swelled
a little to fit that wish in, and the stars shone more with the feel of it.

‘A million tiny stars,' said Molly to the night, ‘and one more now.' And they swirled
in her head and jiggled in her heart. She slid along her branch and made her way
down the tree, swinging from branch to branch easily, nimble as a monkey. Perhaps
it was magic, perhaps it was that she knew her mama wouldn't let her fall.

Imagine if you were never scared of falling, how much higher you might climb, she
thought. Or, if you weren't afraid of being clumsy and awkward, how much more gracefully
you might dance?

Molly jumped to the ground. The dark crept towards her, long black fingers of it.
She leaned into the tree's trunk. The sound of her breath echoed back from the tree.
She could break the dark's quiet. She could shake it all off her.

Molly stood so close to the tree the bark tickled her nose. She circled the trunk.
She stomped, she shook. Her mind gave way to the night. She cried
out. She flung
her arms and shook her hands. She leapt and crouched and sprang as wide as she could
and twisted and twirled till she was too tired to move anymore.

Then she stood very still and let her breath subside, but she watched the dark carefully.
Had she frightened it away?

The night was still. The Mama tree was still, but Molly could feel something within
it. It had a strange paleness, and it moved high in the branches. Molly rose on her
tiptoes and angled her head to get a better look. Something lifted high above the
tree and rose, spinning in the dark sky like a small spaceship. Then it fell, gliding
down to Molly's feet.

It was her mama's sunhat, with the red ribbon dangling a little over the brim. She
picked it up and clasped it to her chest. And then she climbed back up to her bed
and lay down again.

A shriek pierced the dark. It was, no doubt, Prudence Grimshaw, alert as a hyena,
attempting to scare a wallaby out of her garden. A chill crept along Molly's spine.
She cuddled Maude and held on tight to the sunhat.

CHAPTER 19

The Wrong Weed

The next morning Molly yanked Mama's sunhat out from beneath her, and tied the red
ribbon around her wrist. Because the Mama tree had sent the hat spinning down to
her, like a trophy, Molly knew she was a step closer to wherever she needed to be.

‘Well, Mama, I'm still here, and I'm not giving up either.' She patted the branch
reassuringly, and for a moment she felt as if she was the mother. She wasn't going
to give any attention to her loneliness today; she wasn't even going to think
about
it. She was going to think about someone else's loneliness. Ellen Palmer's. She was
going to do something about it too.

Molly got up quickly and picked herself some fruit from the Mama tree for breakfast.
The flavours had changed. The white flesh now tasted like coconut and the green was
like celery-and-potato soup. Then she swung herself down and hurried inside to feed
Claudine.

It was time to find the rest of the weeds for the green oil. Molly took Maude, and
they walked over the bridge to the woods where her mama had last collected herbs.
Molly carried her mama's basket, and she wore the sunhat, which was slightly too
big and the brim made it hard for her to see ahead. She stomped along, looking down
and crouching every now and then to pick some curled dock.

Molly and Maude walked for a while alongside the railway track where the path was
stony and the only weeds Molly found were plantain and some prickly lettuce, which
she didn't pick as she had forgotten to bring gloves.

Molly wished she could remember the exact recipe. She had a feeling there was nettle
in it and comfrey, which both grew in their vegetable garden. And she was certain
there was spurge and calendula and tansy. She needed strong herbs that could, for
instance, grow on a parched stony path. These would give the strength that Ellen
needed.

Once home again, Molly set about making the green oil. She took down from the shelf
some of the tinctures from her mama's collection, and the milky spurge sap that she
and Pim had squeezed, drop by drop, into a jar. She boiled up the fresh weeds and
mixed the strained water with the herb tinctures and some olive oil. She hoped
that
would do it.

She put the jar of sap with the bottled tinctures and read the names out loud to
make sure they all sounded as if they belonged. She closed her eyes and tried to
feel love; her mama said it was important. But all she felt was a strange tapping
at her heart as if someone was locked up in there and wanted to get out.