Future Girl Read online

  This is a garden full of rooms, each with its own mood.

  And then there’s a house, a tiny cottage covered with clambering plants, only it’s turned inside out, with the kitchen on the deck. It’s impossibly old-fashioned, like stepping into a rendition of ‘Hansel and Gretel’, yet modern too: the roof is lined with solar panels, and a wind turbine pokes into the sky.

  I fall in LOVE.

  I want to stop, call everything into slow motion, pause in each garden-room to absorb all each one has to offer: the energy, the beauty. But Marley is oblivious, searching for his mum. He abandons the deck and leads me through yet more garden spaces: a pen full of chickens; a wall stacked with rabbit hutches.

  Who knew you could fit so much into one block? It’s like a compressed farm, with all the animals in miniature – rabbits instead of horses, chickens instead of cows. How peculiar that from the street it looks like just any ordinary house block, albeit a big one. I don’t think they carve up the land out here as much as they do in Northcote.

  Against a wall lined with metre-wide, open-fronted wooden cubicles that look full of random garden debris, there’s a person. I don’t notice her until she moves, because her green coat is camouflaged. She doesn’t look like Marley, but her smile exudes the same warmth. She’s small – smaller even than me – with quite heavily lined skin and brown-and-grey hair pulled messily off her face in a bun.

  I stand entranced as she and Marley flash their fingers at each other, hands a blur, faces strangely animated but unintelligible, lips moving but not in patterns I know.

  Ripped off! Marley said everyone could understand his mother! But I’m too exhilarated to care. My senses are overloaded. Even my hunger is forgotten.

  She turns to me and holds out her hand, withdraws it, wipes some dirt onto her jacket, then extends it again with a self-deprecating grin. I smile and shake it.

  She scans me, curious. Does Marley bring home strange girls all the time? What did he tell her about me? She points to her chest and makes shapes with her fingers. I glance at Marley. His cheeks are pink. He seems … slightly sheepish? Is he embarrassed to introduce me to his mum?

  ‘She’s fingerspelling,’ he says clearly. ‘She says her name’s Robbie.’

  I point to myself and match Marley’s clear way of speaking. ‘Piper.’

  Robbie doesn’t need Marley’s translation. She just nods, makes more shapes with her hands and lips, and this time I lipread her perfectly, though there is no sound: ‘Pleased to meet you.’ With the word you, she points at me.

  She gestures at the garden, and points to me again. She mimes planting a seed and a plant growing; stares at me expectantly.

  I nod and turn to Marley. ‘Can you tell her, Yes, I do want to learn to grow things.’

  ‘It’s all right, just talk directly to her, and if she doesn’t understand you, I’ll fill in the gaps.’

  I point to myself, copy her mime, and nod. Then I add with my voice: ‘But I don’t know anything about plants, or how they translate into food. Your garden is beautiful.’

  Marley’s fingers flash and Robbie smiles with pleasure, lifts her hand to her chin, and gestures towards me. ‘Thank you,’ I lipread simultaneously, though again there’s no sound.

  I commit the sign to memory. Thank you.

  Robbie indicates for us to follow her, and we’re having a tour. She fingers leaves, mimes chewing them, and I understand she’s telling me they’re edible, even though this time she’s not mouthing any words. She gestures to her body and gives me the thumbs up.

  Marley translates: ‘This one is particularly good for your eth.’

  Health.

  She snaps off a handful of larger leaves. She’s wearing a leather tool-belt apron thing over the top of her skirt, with a small garden fork hanging against her hip. There’s a wide pocket across the front, and she tucks the dark-green crinkled leaves inside.

  In the box-room, she points to a thicket of fine feathery plants, mimes uprooting them, and points to me. Uncertain, I look at Marley.

  ‘Pull them up.’

  He winks at me and I throw him a small smile. My confidence is growing: much of Robbie’s communication is about acting and mime, and I can read her.

  I grasp a plant, pull hard, and am astonished to see a carrot emerge from the earth. It’s dirty and a bit crooked, but unmistakably a carrot. I imagine sinking my teeth into it. My hunger is back. Robbie indicates for me to pull up some more.

  Next she has me snap off a fistful of a very fragrant plant with thin spiky leaves – some kind of herb – which she makes me rub between my fingers and inhale deeply. We saw off a round ball of leaves, which is apparently a cabbage.

  We dig around in the ground until we find some dirty knobs – potatoes! Then Robbie points to the leafless tree with the orange fruit. She makes a small theatre of this one: mimes cutting a fruit open, taking a bite, and discovering one is in heaven.

  ‘They’re pessimmys,’ Marley adds.

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘PER-SIM-MONS.’

  I have to ask for two repeats, because I’ve never heard of this fruit.

  Robbie touches Marley’s elbow, makes a gesture that looks like her right hand climbing her left arm, and points to Marley. Next she holds up three fingers.

  Obediently, he scales the tree, effortlessly swinging into its branches and hanging by one hand as he plucks each piece of fruit. He drops them into my palm one by one, and when we have three I hand them to Robbie, who tucks them into her leather pocket, now fat with food.

  She asks a question which I don’t get. Marley nudges me, his fingers warm against my skin. ‘What do you want to eat for dinner? Fish, chicken or rabbit?’

  I’m staying for dinner? My eyes widen. I thought we were picking all this food as a demonstration. I dared not think I’d get to taste it! Though suddenly I feel a little worried, too, because the only vegetables I’ve really found recognisable have been the carrots. I like potato chips, but how those brown knobbly stone things will turn into a plate of glistening gold strips is anybody’s guess. I haven’t seen a whole cabbage since I was a kid, and the fruit and herb are a total mystery to me.

  ‘Or are you fesadar?’ Marley asks.

  ‘Am I what?’

  ‘VEG-E-TAR-I-AN.’

  ‘Oh. Umm, no, it’s okay, I eat meat.’

  I flounder. I mean, I eat meat-flavoured recon but there’s no actual meat involved, which certainly helped Organicore get lots of animal rights and climate change activists on board. So, actually, I suddenly realise that I have kind of been vegetarian these last few years. Also, when Robbie said fish, chicken or rabbit, surely she didn’t mean …

  I think of the enormous white chickens in the pen we walked through, and the soft furry bunnies in their hutches, their red eyes fixed on me. Are we going to kill one? Is that part of the demonstration?

  ‘Fish,’ I say hastily, figuring that will have to be recon, since there are no fish left in the ocean.

  But Marley and Robbie lead me to the pond beneath the arbour, and when I kneel down and peer into dark water, I discover fish flicking through its murky depths! Marley and Robbie disappear, returning with a fishing net and a large rubber hammer.

  I eye the hammer in alarm, and Marley, seeing my wariness, points to himself, turns one hand into a wriggling fish, and brings the other hand down on it in a death blow. So, he will do the killing. Which doesn’t really settle my alarm at all.

  I point to myself and bury my face briefly in my hands. Robbie laughs, gives me the thumbs up, and we are all agreed. Marley will kill; I won’t be watching.

  Robbie puts the net into my hands and I scoop up two silver fish the size of my forearm, which are flipping around wildly. Marley reaches into the net, grabs one and tosses it back. I hand him the net, and my hunger turns to queasiness and then outright nausea as I turn my back. I don’t hide my face in my hands, though. I stare upwards, at the trees, at the sky, at the abundance of nature and plants
before me. I see a spider and some insects I can’t identify.

  Then it’s over, and we’re traipsing back to the inside-out kitchen with the dead fish and a leather apron full of vegetables.

  Robbie sets me in front of a basin of water with a stiff-bristled brush, and my job is to scrub the vegetables clean. I scrub and scrub, paranoid at the thought of eating dirt and dying from it, until eventually Robbie gets impatient and grabs the potatoes from me, slicing them up with a knife at remarkable speed. Marley’s disappeared.

  There’s a short square stack of blackened bricks, hollow in the middle, sitting atop a concrete bench. Robbie pokes twigs into an opening at the bottom and sets them on fire. When she places a large pan on top, over the hollow part, I understand that this is a stove.

  Suddenly I’m very interested indeed. There are some unused bricks behind the guesthouse at home. Could I build such a thing? There’s no mortar holding these bricks together; when one of the bricks gets nudged out of place, Robbie just pokes it back with a stick. But where would I find twigs to burn? There are those bushes along the river …

  I surreptitiously take a photo with my wristlet and Robbie springs me. I flush with embarrassment, but she doesn’t seem to mind. She disappears into the house and returns with a scrap of paper. Again – paper. She starts writing on it, at which point I realise with a jolt that she’s not wearing a wristlet, so has nothing to type into.

  It’s called a rocket stove. Clever design: channels the heat precisely, so uses very little fuel. Most people don’t know about these, but they’re easy to build.

  I point to myself, and mime building bricks in a similar pile, to tell her I will make one.

  She grins, gives me the thumbs up, and points to the opening at the bottom where the twigs go in, which is above the first layer of bricks. There’s a thin strip of wire mesh I hadn’t noticed before slotted horizontally between the bottom two bricks; the burning twigs rest on top of this metal.

  Very important. The wood sits on top, and oxygen flows underneath.

  Well, that’s a bit of a letdown because I have no idea where to get a bit of metal like that.

  Robbie starts cooking – with vegies, fish, sizzling butter and herbs – and I follow her instructions, all given through mime.

  Stir.

  Add twigs to the fire.

  Ease them in slowly so they won’t make too much smoke.

  It’s impressive how she can make herself so clear without a sound.

  With a mix of mime and lipreading and words scribbled on the paper, I ask where Marley’s gone, why he’s not helping, and Robbie explains that she grows and cooks the food and Marley does other stuff to contribute to the household – something about bread and bikes, though I’m not too sure how that fits into the scheme of things.

  Before I can clarify this, we have a bit of an emergency with the rocket stove when the flame gets too high and threatens to burn our dinner. The smell sets my mouth on fire, and I long to steal a taste from the pan but force myself to resist.

  Robbie whips the pan off the heat and adds a spoonful of thick golden honey from a glass jar. The smell is sweet and heady now. Once the food is back on the stove and the flame is safely low again, Robbie holds up the honey jar and indicates a path leading down the far side of the house.

  I shrug, not comprehending, and reluctantly peel myself away from the pan of food to follow her. We come to a box on legs with a steady stream of insects flying in and out, and suddenly I understand – they’re bees!

  Robbie and I serve up the food and carry the plates inside. The house isn’t exactly warm, but it’s snug after the biting cold outdoors. Robbie reaches for a light switch at the bottom of the stairs, flicking it on and off in quick succession. No light turns on so far as I can see, but next thing I know Marley appears. We settle at the table in front of our plates.

  And oh god, the FOOD! Our plates each hold a serve of fish, crumbed in something yellow called polenta and topped with that fragrant herb we picked; a pile of carrots drizzled with butter and honey; crumbly, crunchy pieces of potato, which aren’t shaped like chips but taste like them; and the cabbage and crinkly leaves fried up with butter, salt and honey, so that they’re sweet and delicious.

  Nothing could have prepared me for the exquisiteness of vegetables and fish cooked just right and flavoured with smoke from a rocket stove. I eat far too fast, even though it’s not polite, not caring that I could get food poisoning. I like to save the best for last when I eat, but I can’t decide which flavour is best.

  ‘Is it just you two,’ I ask Marley, ‘or do you have brothers and sisters? A dad?’

  Robbie squints at my face and I can tell she hasn’t understood. I’ve never seen my own facial expressions play out on someone else’s face before, especially someone as sophisticated as Robbie. ‘Can you translate?’ I ask Marley.

  ‘Actually, in the Ddeaf community we’d say interpret, not translate,’ he says.

  ‘What’s the difference?’

  ‘We say translate for writing; that’s fine. But for signing, translate is seen as simply exchanging the words of one language for another, while interpret means so much more than that. When you go from English to Auslan and vice versa, substituting signs for words often isn’t enough.’

  I frown. ‘Can you give me an example?’

  Marley stares at the ceiling for a moment, chewing his lip. ‘Okay,’ he says finally, ‘if you say kill two birds with one stone and I translate that literally for Robbie, it will look like you are actually killing birds. So, I need to sign what you mean instead, which is that you are doing something a more efficient way.’

  ‘Okay, but … wouldn’t Robbie be familiar with expressions like that? If you translated it literally, wouldn’t she therefore understand what I’d meant by it?’

  ‘Maybe, sure. But Auslan is a very direct and literal language. If I did that, I wouldn’t be being authentic to Auslan. I’d be doing a bad job. And while Rob’s English is pretty good, lots of Ddeaf people don’t know English well at all. So, basically, to say that an interpreter is merely translating is actually an insult. It’s so much more than that.’

  ‘Okay. Sorry! I didn’t mean to insult you.’

  Marley waves my apology away and winks at me.

  ‘Why don’t lots of Ddeaf people know English well?’

  ‘Auslan is so different from English – the word order is different, the grammar and tenses are different … so if you’re born Ddeaf and can’t hear it, then it’s really difficult to learn it all manually. How come your English is so good?’

  I shrug. I’ve never thought my English is particularly good. ‘I didn’t go deaf until I was three, so I guess I could speak it already. Plus my mum’s always on my case, correcting me.’

  ‘There you go. You weren’t born deaf.’

  I take a breath and try my original question again. ‘Can you interpret for me, please? Do you have brothers and sisters? A dad?’

  Marley signs the question, and there’s a moment of confusion as they both start to answer me at once. Robbie gestures for Marley to continue.

  ‘I’m an only child,’ he says while signing. ‘My other mum, Van, died when I was younger.’

  ‘Oh. That’s awful.’ I want to ask what happened, but that might be rude, so I stop. It feels like I keep putting my foot in it.

  We’re all silent for a little while.

  ‘So, how did you come to be so well set up?’ I ask eventually, thinking surely this topic cannot go awry, and Marley interprets again. On the floor under the table, his foot shifts to rest against mine. Did he do that deliberately?

  Marley voices Robbie’s signs. ‘There are lots of people who live like this. They just hide it, like we do, behind a high fence.’

  I’m concentrating on Marley’s face, but I catch Robbie’s hands moving in my peripheral vision, making the shape of a high wall.

  Marley says, speaking for himself this time, signing at the same time, ‘Robbie couldn’t
wait for the claps of sivissedation. She’s spent her life preparing for it, and now it’s here she’s thrilled.’

  Robbie swipes him, playful and indignant, and slams the side of her hand down on one palm.

  ‘For the what?’ I interrupt. Marley calls her Robbie, not Mum. Interesting.

  ‘Collapse of civilisation,’ he says, enunciating clearly.

  Robbie signs fast for Marley, lips not moving at all, then waves her hands at him, insisting that he tell me. ‘She says she always knew this day would come, but she hasn’t been looking forward to it.’ Robbie gestures to the outdoor kitchen, and Marley goes on: ‘And she misses bread. Life isn’t the same without bread.’

  It’s hard to keep my focus on Marley when I just want to watch Robbie sign – it’s magnetising. And yet I also want her to disappear, so that he and I can turn those foot touches into leg touches and hand touches and everything else.

  ‘We ran out of wheat,’ Marley explains, ‘and the farmer we buy it from has loads but can’t afford to drive it into the city.’

  ‘And the kitchen?’ I ask, because it’s definitely weird that Robbie and I cooked outside in the freezing cold, when I can now see there’s another kitchen inside. The downstairs part of their house is just one room, with a kitchen with two stoves at one end, a table in the middle, and a cosy arrangement of couches at the other. It’s not much bigger or warmer than the guesthouse, but it’s far more appealing. There are plants in pots by the windows, a handmade striped rug on the floor, bags and coats on hooks, and bookshelves! Mum sold all our books once visis came along.

  ‘The flue for the woodstove rusted through,’ Marley says, pointing, gesturing and making the shape of the flue with his hands as he speaks to help me understand his words. ‘If we light it, smoke fills the house. We ordered a new one, but it’s taking forever. So, till we sort this, we have to cook outside.’