Came Back to Show You I Could Fly Read online

  ROBIN KLEIN is an award-winning author of more than seventy books for children and young adults, several of which have been adapted for television, stage and film.

  Robin was born in the small town of Kempsey in New South Wales in 1936, one of nine children. She went to Newcastle Girls’ High, left school at the age of fifteen and had her first story published at sixteen. She worked as a tea lady, a telephonist, a bookshop assistant, a photography teacher, a nurse, a library assistant, a painter, a potter and a copper enameller. She married and had four children.

  Robin’s first book, a verse picture book called The Giraffe in Pepperell Street, was published in 1978, and she became a full-time writer in 1981. In 1982, Thing won the CBCA Junior Fiction Book of the Year, and in 1983 Penny Pollard’s Diary was highly commended in the same award. Robin won her second CBCA award, for Came Back to Show You I Could Fly, in 1990. And All in the Blue Unclouded Weather, the first book in her Melling sisters trilogy, won the New South Wales State Literary Awards Children’s Book of the Year in 1992.

  Robin said of her writing process, ‘I can do up to about fifteen drafts. I start off making a master sheet of everything I want to say and a basic outline of the plot. Then I work straight onto the machine, not worrying particularly about typing mistakes or errors. I just want to get the ideas down before I’ve lost them. And after that, it’s just a process of going through and rewriting.’

  In 1991, Robin won the Dromkeen Medal for services to Australian children’s and young adult literature. Due to illness, she no longer writes.

  SIMMONE HOWELL has written three teen novels: Notes from the Teenage Underground, which won the 2007 Victorian Premier’s Prize for Young Adult Fiction and a Gold Inky; Everything Beautiful, which was shortlisted for the Melbourne Prize; and Girl Defective. Simmone lives in Melbourne.

  SELECT TITLES BY ROBIN KLEIN

  The Giraffe in Pepperell Street

  Thing

  Penny Pollard’s Diary

  People Might Hear You

  Hating Alison Ashley

  Halfway Across the Galaxy and Turn Left

  Boss of the Pool

  Don’t Tell Lucy

  Laurie Loved Me Best

  Honoured Guest

  All in the Blue Unclouded Weather

  Dresses of Red and Gold

  Seeing Things

  Turn Right for Zyrgon

  The Sky in Silver Lace

  The Listmaker

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  All the Bells Rang

  by Simmone Howell

  Came Back to Show You I Could Fly

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Postscript

  All the Bells Rang

  by Simmone Howell

  IN 1989, I was an eighteen-year-old hopeful writer. I kept a black-and-red notebook for storing ideas, character sketches and exotic and/or multisyllabic words. My literary pretensions led me to perform such rituals as reading a page of Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood every night, as if I could somehow absorb its greatness through contact. During this period I was forever trying to read books that were culty, obscure and important, but, if I’m honest, not a lot was getting through the gate. I think now that what was missing was heart—I had no connection to those books; I couldn’t relate to them. Ulysses, Milk Wood and the others were just so much word salad. Although I considered myself well past the age of young adult fiction, somehow I found my way to Came Back to Show You I Could Fly by Robin Klein. I was familiar with Klein’s oeuvre.1 Her books, published at regular intervals throughout the 1980s, had marked, even guided, my adolescence. Like Erica Yurken in Hating Alison Ashley, I could be stroppy and jealous; like Julia in Laurie Loved Me Best, I was sometimes deluded and desperate. Unlike Frances in People Might Hear You, I was spared life in a cult, but I understood the stultification of church halls, the sad fact of stale Marie biscuits, and the feeling that my beautiful future was taking way too long to arrive.

  Came Back to Show You I Could Fly might have been a gift, or I might have nicked it off someone else’s shelves, or borrowed it from the library. Maybe I bought it because the girl on the cover looked like Meg Ryan, or maybe my discovery came later when it was adapted into a sweet, quirky film by Richard Lowenstein.2 The point is, when I read it, I fell right in. All the bells rang. I realised that with the right book you don’t have to try for absorption. It just happens.

  ‘We all have our crosses to bear, every one of us. You can’t start too early in life to learn what’s in store and people make a big mistake thinking everything should be fun.’

  So says Thelma, temporary host to eleven-year-old Seymour Kerley. Timid Seymour has been posted at Thelma’s in the inner city while his parents negotiate (or fail to negotiate) custody of him. Seymour knows he has no place at Thelma’s. He suspects he has no place anywhere. He is accustomed to things being temporary and he dreams of one day having a room of his own that he can fill with desirable objects—‘cheerful bedspreads, desks with maps painted on them, carved teak chests’. It’s the flagging end of school holidays and he’s under strict instructions not to leave the house, but he does, and it is on a botched excursion into the mean streets that Seymour comes across the magnetic Angie, a twenty-year-old op-shop queen living in a backyard bungalow (‘completely self-contained’). Though opposite personality types—Seymour rarely speaks and Angie has no filter—the pair form a fast and fragile friendship. Angie invites Seymour into her world, a magical melange of shopping sprees, dream-house-hunting, public singing, race days and bus rides to mysterious hospitals. She is a fabulous fabulist, a grunge Holly Golightly, and Seymour is smitten.

  Anyone who wore satin and silver lace and black nail polish, anyone who had a little flying horse tattooed on one shoulder, could reach heights undreamed of by other people.

  In Angie’s company, Seymour’s life expands. Doors that had been closed are opened—but the problem of open doors is that everything else flies in. Came Back to Show You I Could Fly is written from Seymour’s viewpoint, but additional text within the narrative helps to fill in the gaps of Angie’s story. Notes from Angie’s mother to her daughter’s old friend; notes from Angie to her doctor and to her boyfriend; lists and hopeful job applications gradually reveal that despite Angie’s confident exterior, she’s in a troubled state:

  In savings a/c $11.50

  In Jas’s a/c? (Musn’t touch!)

  Dole cheque due Tuesday

  Sickness benefit? Wangle it somehow?

  HARD TIMES!!!!!!!!!!!!!

  The nuances of Angie’s situation are drawn carefully and respectfully. We can’t fail to see Angie’s humanity and, by extension, the humanity of all society’s outliers. The story, which starts off as buddy comedy, then looks like it might be moving into a championing-the-underdog type of story becomes a real and vivid exploration of what it means to be young and powerless.

  Came Back to Show You I Could Fly was awarded both the CBCA Book of the Year and the Human Rights Award for Literature. The metaphor of flight and maybe-impossible dreams pervades the novel: it’s in the title,3 and Angie’s tattoo, and the pilot’s badge Seymour saves for her. These lines near the end of the novel sum up for me what everyone has to learn in the passage from child to adult:

  There would never be any winged horses plunging splendidly from the sky to land at your feet and carry you away from things not to be borne. That was something you had
to learn to do all by yourself.

  I think of Robin Klein’s novels as literary hymns to the nowhereness of adolescence. Seymour and Angie attempt to form a country of two, but the real world intrudes again and again. Other people matter and no one action exists without consequence.

  I don’t know where my copy of Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood ended up, but Came Back to Show You I Could Fly has travelled with me for all these years. I’m so happy see it in print again to be cherished by a new generation of readers. I find myself returning to it, not just for nostalgia but for inspiration at times when my own narratives are stuck or overcooked—when I’ve lost sight of what a coming-of-age novel should be. Klein reminds me that drama can be stealthy, that characters can be bigger than their stories, that they can live off the page and in your imagination, and you can love them and hope the world will be sweet to them.

  1 ‘Oeuvre’ was one of the words in my black-and-red notebook.

  2 Say a Little Prayer (1993)

  3 A line from the song ‘From the Inside’ by Artie Wayne

  For Phoebe

  Came Back to Show You I Could Fly

  Chapter 1

  Seymour had been awake since sunrise and was watching the stumbling hands of the clock so he could legitimately get out of bed. Seven-fifteen to the exact second was when Thelma began her day, and she’d made it clear that his being there mustn’t interfere with her routine. She’d given him the back room, which wasn’t really a proper one, just a small fibro-cement extension tacked on to the kitchen. Summer clung like thick cellulose wrapping to its iron roof, and even at this early hour he was sweating. Yesterday’s stored heat undulated from the concrete yard outside, and he lay in clammy pyjamas and outstared the clock. At ten minutes past seven he sprang thankfully out of bed and went into the kitchen to make Thelma a morning cup of tea. He wasn’t being ingratiating—it was just something his mother had told him to do before she left, and Seymour had a quiet and biddable nature.

  ‘Thelma’s not young and she’s got that full-time job,’ his mother had said. ‘It’s very kind of her to help us out like this, so you mustn’t give her any cause to regret it. You be a big help round the house while you’re there, Seymour. There’s no need to tell you to watch your manners, I can say that for you. Take her a cup of tea first thing in the mornings, she’s never had anyone to do that for her. I’m sure she’d appreciate it.’

  He didn’t mind making anyone an early morning cup of tea, but it was a nerve-wracking business in this particular kitchen, where even inanimate objects like cannisters seemed capable of disapproval if you put them back in the wrong places. Here there was a place for everything and everything in its rightful place. The tea, for instance, was kept in a green plastic caddy with its own little measuring ladle, and you somehow didn’t dare use any other spoon. He took the cup of tea along the hall and knocked on Thelma’s bedroom door.

  ‘Come in, Seymour, and don’t bang so loud, you’ll have the plaster flaking off the walls.’

  Her voice sounded tart and rebuffing, but he knew it wasn’t aimed at him in particular. She spoke like that to everyone and, after two days of staying there, he was slowly learning not to duck his head with alarm every time she addressed him. She didn’t thank him for making the tea, just watched sharply as he set it down on the bedside table next to her reading glasses. The room was spotlessly tidy and so was Thelma, as though she’d slept perfectly flat on her back all night. Her hair was a neat steel-grey helmet, and there wasn’t one crease in the bedspread. Even her wrinkles looked regimented.

  Seymour didn’t quite know what to do while she was sipping the tea—whether to go, which seemed rude, or stay there, although Thelma wasn’t the type of person who went in for early morning banter. Or conversation of any kind at all, really. He hovered self-consciously at the end of the bed, running the sole of one foot on the calf of the other leg, aware of the trapped heat even in this room which the sun hadn’t yet reached. Thelma didn’t leave her windows open at night, despite the thickly meshed security screens.

  ‘You put a little too much milk in,’ she said, setting down the rose-patterned cup. ‘Milk’s very expensive now, Seymour. I don’t want you getting into the habit of drowning your breakfast cereal in it, either, like you did yesterday. Your father probably lets you get into spendthrift habits like that when you stay with him, but that’s beside the point. Oh, and your mattress, that’s another thing. It’s got to be turned every day without fail when you make your bed. I notice you didn’t do it yesterday. And that little mat by your bed—remember to shake it out every morning and hang it over the clothesline, but don’t go putting a peg in the middle where it’ll leave a mark.’

  Seymour nodded resignedly at each instruction and finally she reached for her dressing-gown, folded as stiffly as an ironing board across the end of her bed, and he was free to escape. Only you couldn’t really call it escape—there wasn’t really any private space in that tiny house. He had a quick shower, because three minutes was the time limit Thelma had stipulated, then put on a clean shirt, jeans and the hated leather sandals she was making him wear because she said gym shoes were unhygienic in the middle of summer. He attended to his bed and went outside to hang up the mat.

  Thelma’s back garden reflected the immaculate tidiness of the house. Even the grass blades on the patch of lawn seemed to grow slantwise in the same direction. A pebbled concrete path led to the gate in the alleyway fence, pointlessly, for the gate was never opened. It had strong bolts at the top and bottom, and also a padlock for extra security. Thelma wouldn’t dream of setting foot in the alleyway. Her house faced on to Victoria Road, which was respectable, but the houses on the far side of the alley belonged to Sparrow Street, which in her opinion definitely was not. There were no flower beds, just a line of papery hydrangeas, a pallid grey-blue like old school socks. The rubbish bin had Thelma’s house number stencilled on its side in big letters, like a threat of legal action if anyone dared steal it. Seymour felt depressed, looking around at the so-called garden.

  Thelma summoned him for breakfast and watched keenly while he poured milk over his Cornflakes. ‘Tonight I might be a bit late,’ she said. ‘I’ve got a chiropody appointment straight after work, so round about five-thirty you could make yourself useful. Peel some potatoes and put them on to simmer. You can make sandwiches for your lunch, there’s cheese and tomatoes in the fridge.’

  ‘Thanks, that’ll do fine,’ Seymour said, though he detested cheese and tomato sandwiches.

  ‘I hope you won’t just laze around all day. You should really spend the time catching up on your school work for when term starts again. That last report of yours wasn’t anything to be proud about, was it? Your mum showed it to me. I know it’s not altogether your fault, your father butting in and causing as much upset as he can, but there’s never any excuse for laziness. You want to knuckle down and make something of yourself. Your poor mother, what she’s been through these last two years, you don’t want to add to her troubles by bringing home bad school reports like that one, do you? All the sacrifices she’s made…’

  Seymour kept his eyes on his plate. He didn’t want to be reminded of all those sacrifices. It was as painful as listening to some creaky old tape played over and over, rewound when it reached the end and set in motion again.

  ‘She might call over to see you Friday night,’ Thelma said. ‘I don’t think it’s very wise, myself. You never know if he’s having her followed. I certainly wouldn’t put it past him. She should go to court and get the whole thing sorted out once and for all, proper rights of custody, that’s what she should apply for. If he finds out you’re staying here in Victoria Road, he can come in and take you away, and there’s not a thing I can do. I’m just a bystander, not even a relation.’

  Seymour thought of his weak-willed father engaged in a confrontation with Thelma, and knew very well who’d come off second-best. But he’d had eleven years of experience in the futility of arguing with adults or expe
cting his opinions to be listened to. He put the spoon neatly in the bowl and carried it to the sink.

  ‘I’d be so embarrassed if he turned up making a scene. Victoria Road’s a quiet, decent street and I’ve got a good name here. Remember you’re not to go anywhere out the front, and if there’s a ring at the door while I’m out, you’re not even to answer it. I just wouldn’t know what to say to your mother if he turned up here and made off with you again, when she’s relying on me to look after you for the school holidays. Oh, it’s such a worry…Mind you, I don’t want you thinking I feel put upon, even though that doctor up at the clinic said I should avoid stress with my blood pressure being the way it is. I’m not one to turn my back on people in need and I know your mum’s got no one else to turn to. You certainly couldn’t very well stay in the flat with her out at work all day and him knowing the address. Well now, I’m off to work myself, and you should find plenty to do with catching up on your studies. If you want to sit in the lounge room, make sure you wash your hands before you go in there, young man, and don’t touch the photo albums or anything in the china cabinet.’

  Seymour replaced the front door safety-chain as instructed, and watched through the stained-glass panel as Thelma walked briskly down the path. She clicked the iron gate shut behind her, glared at a stray dog that was lifting its leg against her privet hedge, and walked up to the corner of Victoria Road to catch the city tram. Seymour looked through all the stained-glass panels in turn, decided that even a rose-tinted Victoria Road was just as boring as amber or peacock blue, and wandered back to the kitchen. He washed all the breakfast things and put them away, peeled the potatoes to get that task over with and covered them with cold water in a saucepan. Then he went and sat on his bed, despairing, wondering how to fill the hours of the third long day. He’d already glanced through the stock of books in the living room, uninteresting books, most of them with old thick pages like blotting paper, unpleasant to the touch. There was a television set in there, but the controls were temperamental and he didn’t like to fiddle about with them and perhaps make the reception worse. Thelma was devoted to her ritual of evening viewing.