I Lost My Mobile At the Mall (8 page)

Everyone knows her boyfriend Eddie. He's a big hero here in Oldcastle – in the whole of Britannia, come to that. Tilly and Eddie were in the social pages of the
Britannia Bugle
last week at a charity night for the Prince John Hospital. Tilly looked like Princess Mary of Denmark and Eddie looked like Prince Frederick – only taller, darker and on steroids.

So I hear what Tilly says, but I can't help wondering what Sun Tzu would say about all this. I google
The Art
of War
again and come up with this:

• The difficulty of tactical manoeuvring consists in turning the devious into the direct, and misfortune into gain.
  
• On the field of battle the spoken word does not carry far enough: hence the institution of gongs and drums. Nor can ordinary objects be seen clearly enough: hence the institution of banners and flags.
  
• Gongs and drums, banners and flags, are means whereby the ears and eyes of the host may be focused on one particular point.
  
• Let your rapidity be that of the wind, your compactness that of the forest.
  
• In raiding and plundering be like fire, in immovability like a mountain.
  
• Let your plans be dark and impenetrable as night, and when you move, fall like a thunderbolt.
  

So, Tilly's right. I need to turn my misfortune around, and in a hurry. The gongs and drums? Well, as this Sun Tzu dude said back in 400 BC, the spoken word doesn't carry fast enough. As for the banners and flags? You can do all that on the net. My words will be as fast as the wind and they will fall like thunderbolts.

:-(0) MAKE MY DAY

My FacePlace site is locked and loaded! I'm looking at it one last time before I unleash its power.

Once I got started, it was like I couldn't stop. All the incriminating pics are there now – the stupid, cringeworthy ones of Will laughing with ginger beer coming out of his nose; Will falling over a railing wrestling with his wetsuit; Will playing the ukulele with his feet; Will with two dead starfish on his eyes.

I put them all in a slideshow and then backed it with that song from Rihanna – the one where she says the boy is only sorry 'cos he got caught and he'd better take off before she turns on the lawn sprinklers. Yeah!

I used to think these shots were
adorable –
that they showed Will's funny side. But now I can see what everyone else does – that underneath his 'cool' image, he's just an immature idiot. No wonder Jai thinks he's up himself.

The photos were just a few of the hundreds of snaps I had to choose from. In the ten months we were going together I took zillions of pics. I should erase them all I suppose, but it's not as satisfying as ripping up a real photo. There are a couple of pics of Will and me that I printed out and stuck on my corkboard. I'll get around to tearing them down later.

With Camilla winding herself around my ankles and settling down to sleep on my feet, I found a quote about 'lost love':

It is best to love wisely, no doubt; but to love foolishly is better than not to
be able to love at all.

William Makepeace Thackeray

I posted it and then I cried some more and Camilla looked up at me with two sweet round orange eyes like Jaffas. Just for her sake I stopped blubbering and got on with it. Like Tilly said, this is all about 'perception', AKA a pack of lies, because if I hadn't been so foolish and fallen in love with Will, I wouldn't be feeling so wretched. William Thackeray's wrong; I reckon it's safer not to love anyone, at all.

So I also added this:

The stupidest mistake in life is thinking the one who hurt you the most,
won't hurt you again.

Anonymous

And that's
totally
true!

BTW, it's interesting that this quote's anonymous. Even way back then people wrote stuff anonymously, so it's not just the net, Dad!

Then I got to work using my graphic design skills and made an animation – a hairy rodent with Will's head superimposed on it dancing across the page, wearing a T-shirt reading 'Love Rat'. It was a demented masterpiece.

Last I posted some shots of me by myself – all the best ones I could find. Me looking, as Tilly said, 'happy and independent'. I dunno about 'gorgeous', but in the ones I chose I'm smiling and the sun is out and yeah, I look like I don't have a care in the world. Maybe Will's right and everything in cyberspace is fake. Only I'm sure there was nothing fake in the photos of Will with Lily. It was all hideously authentic. And the pain I'm feeling is really, utterly real.

Now I see the page is ready and I send out an emergency bulletin informing my 105 friends (including the Prime Minister) that they should drop by my FacePlace and stare into the Mirror of Revenge!

I wake up to see the two crystal eyes of my pink pig staring at me accusingly, glittering in the moonlight. I
have
done the right thing trashing Will on the net, haven't I? Tilly's right, isn't she? Surely Sun Tzu knew what he was talking about?

It's pitch black in The Dungeon and doubt strikes me like a thunderbolt.

My computer
dinging
like crazy is the first sound I hear as I rub the sleep from my eyes. I see that already there are 13 new messages on my mirror. They seem to be mostly anonymous. (I left my mirror on lowest security so anyone could drop in and look. I reflect, in the cold light of morning, that maybe that wasn't the smartest thing to do.)

You go girlfriend!

This is a lesson for all boyz who cheat!

So Will's single? Xcellent.

Gotcha Will! Dumb seaweed head!

ROLF. Does this get any better?

Elly, I'd ask you out but now I'm s**t scared! LOL

Say 'cheese', Will, you RAT!!!

Jayden's revenge :-)

Can't wait till Monday morning.

Oooh Elly, you are a b**ch!

The Prime Minister is away from this site and will return on October 19. (Auto reply)

I miss you heaps. I hope you and Will get back together, Pookie XoXoXo
Now Elly's dumped on Willy,
She says it's payback time,
Willy's lookin foolish,
Elly's lookin fine.
The Phantom Rhymer

Oh my God! I feel like I've been whacked in the head again, repeatedly and really hard. Where do I start with all this? Looks like both me and Will have been flamed. I don't know what to feel. What was I expecting?

:+(

Then I hear my mum calling from the hall.

'Eleanor, come on sleepyhead! I want you to help me get this house sorted before we go to Nan's. There's a load of washing for you to hang out, then you can vacuum the lounge and do the vegetable crisper for me. It's like a wilderness area in the bottom of that fridge!'

I yell to Mum that I'll be there in a minute, stalling for time. She seems to have already forgotten that I am an emotional basket case and need extra care right now.

My hand is shaking as I go to my mailbox and see there are eye2eyes from both Carmelita and Bianca. I open the one from Carmelita first:

El,

I don't think this was a good idea. I know you're angry and upset, but shouldn't you go and work this out with Will in private? I've been thinking, something about this doesn't make sense. Have you actually asked Will what was going on in those pics?

Luv ya, Carmelita XOXOXO

'Come on, Elly!' Mum barges in the door and stands there with her hands on her hips. 'I want this house done. I'm not spending all my precious weekend cleaning up after everyone!'

I mumble that I'm coming and open the eye2eye from Bianca:

Hah!

U really nailed Smelly Willy!! He dezerves everything you dishing out. Jai v.v. happy and Jayden will punch his head in for U.

Bianca.

'ELLY, GET YOURSELF IN HERE RIGHT THIS MINUTE!' Mum screeches.

I wonder what Sun Tzu and his armies in 400 BC China would have done if they were confronted by a fire-breathing dragon? Run away and jump into the Yangtze River is my guess. Right now hanging out the washing and cleaning out the vegetable crisper sounds like as good a thing to do as any other.

The thought that I've made Jai 'v.v. happy' makes me feel like I'm going to throw up.

I'm piling yellow broccoli, bendy carrots and disgusting brown lettuce onto the kitchen counter and thinking that this vegetable crisper is like my life. All that was good and healthy just days ago has turned into rotten, mouldy mush.

Tilly walks into the kitchen in an old fraying pink silk kimono. She sees me, stretches her arms and smiles. She looks so innocent this morning. It's hard to believe that I'm up to my armpits in stinking compost because of her. Because, when I think about it, if she hadn't suggested I get back at Jai and then at Will on the net, I'd still be snapping fresh and full of wholesome goodness. As it is, I'm like this sad zucchini. You can poke your finger in me and what's underneath the skin is a rancid, gooey mess.

I watch as Tilly swigs from a carton of coffeefl avoured milk.

'So, how's the battle on the internet going, Els? Have we finished off the enemy once and for all?'

I just shove the clean crisper back in the fridge and brush past her. A couple of mouse clicks and she'll find out soon enough. Just like the rest of the world.

'Eleanor? Hello? Did you do what I said, or what?' Her voice echoes down the hall after me.

I don't know what to say, or think. Why can't I just be like laughing Lily Cameron and string beads onto thread, make pretty bracelets and necklaces instead of having to wrestle with all these jumbled words and thoughts?

Another Sunday afternoon and a classic roast dinner with Nan. I only picked at a few of the edges of the crunchy potato (my fave bits). Thinking about everything that's happened, my stomach was still doing tumble turns. Thankfully, Mum and Dad decided to lay off nagging me to eat and went for a walk to St James Park to burn off their Yorkshire puddings.

I'm helping Nan with the washing up in her funny old kitchen. The dark green paint on the cupboards is cracked and peeling, the red paint on the wooden benchtops is faded and the walls are a soft old yellow. She's got a row of plain white plastic pots with blooming pink geraniums on the windowsill. I love this place, and as the spring sunshine lights up the room, I think there's no place on earth I'd rather be.

As long as I can remember, Nan's kitchen has been exactly the same as it is this afternoon. There's the chair with the carved kookaburra on the back. There's the old biscuit tin with pictures of wattle on the lid. There's the wooden dresser where the teacups all dangle in a row from their little metal hooks. I feel like I'm still a baby girl when I'm at Nan's and today I think it would be good to go back to being small enough to sit on her knee.

It's not like Nan's
really
old – she's not quite seventy yet. Grandpa Pickering is eighty-two! But Nan is proud of being old-fashioned. She's lived in the same house here in Port Britannia since after she was married. It's where Mum and Auntie Marg were raised. Dad thinks she might like to get away from the noise of the coalloading terminal and the hoot of the tugboats and go to a retirement village that has a pool and golf course. Nan says the silence would drive her mad! (And she's always hated golf.)

Her little house is perched at the top of the street and looks as if it might roll down the hill any moment. It's the same steep hill that Pop walked down to go to work on the docks for almost forty-five years. I wonder if Nan sometimes imagines that he might walk in the door one day, covered in coal dust and carrying a bag of prawns and oysters for tea.

It was Pop's lungs that gave out in the end. He would sit for hours on the front veranda, smoking and watching the supertankers being loaded at the dock, but he barely had breath to walk to the gate. I used to bring in the mail from the letterbox. Sometimes there were letters from his cousins back in Manchester, England, and I used to sit on the step and read them to him.

Nan and I are standing at the sink. She doesn't have a dishwasher, so I'm using her Royal Golden Jubilee memorial tea towel to do the drying up. She's had this tea towel for seven years. I don't know whether this means that Nan doesn't have that many dishes to dry, or that this is a very well made tea towel.

I'm slowly wiping a saucer with Queen Elizabeth II's nose when Nan pulls the plug on the soapy water and turns to me. The sun's shining through her silver perm and she looks like she's wearing a crown. Her name's Elizabeth too, after the Queen Mother. And that's funny, 'cos Nan's the mother of my mother who's named Elizabeth after our Queen! Her smiling face is on this tea towel that I'm now mashing into a bread and butter plate.

'I got a letter from the Queen at Buckingham Palace once,' says Nan. 'Would you like to see it?'

A letter from the Queen? The real Queen, herself? Nan's never mentioned this before.

I smooth out the tea towel and leave Her Majesty to dry on the front of the old gas cooker. I follow Nan up the narrow hallway to her bedroom. I don't often go in Nan's bedroom. The curtains are pulled shut and I can't see much, but I can smell mothballs and violet talcum powder. It's a fragrance I love, but it makes me sad 'cos it also reminds me that Pop's not here. If he was still with us I would also be able to smell the eucalyptus and Friar's Balsam that he used in the vaporiser on his bedside table.

MUSM

'Now, you're a lovely tall girl Eleanor, just like your sister Matilda,' says Nan. 'So be a dear and get the box down from the top of that shelf.'

I stand on a little stool with spindly legs and pull down the box covered in floral paper.

'Let's bring it out to the dining table where we can have a good dig around in it,' declares Nan. 'Lots of treasures in there – if the moths haven't got to them.'

Nan shifts a Wedgwood serving plate sitting on a little lace doily and places the box on the dining room table. She lifts the lid and I can see it's crammed full of bundles of yellowing envelopes tied with red ribbons. And there are roses! The smell of roses is really strong.

'Oh, isn't that wonderful!' exclaims Nan. 'I can't believe I can still smell those divine red roses. That was the last bunch of flowers your pop gave me before he passed away. I dried them with a few tablespoons of orris root and popped them in here.'

Nan lifts a dry stem from a silky bag and papery petals crumble and fall. I see her eyes begin to mist with tears and I feel like crying myself. I lay my head on Nan's shoulder and she kisses my forehead. We are both remembering darling Poppy.

'Now,' Nan sniffs and straightens her back, 'where did I put that letter? It's got the royal seal on the back of the envelope.'

But I don't want see that yet. I'm dying to see what's in these bundles of letters tied with ribbons.

'Oh, those?' smiles Nan. 'They're love letters. From before your pop and I were married. He was away three years working on the Snowy Mountains Scheme as a labourer and wrote to me every week, without fail.'

I've heard of the Snowy Mountains Scheme in Australian history class at school. It was where they diverted the melted snow from the rivers into massive dams and then through turbines to make hydro-electricity.

'Your pop's family sailed out to Australia from Manchester in England in 1955 and settled in Britannia. I suppose the name made them feel at home,' Nan chuckles. 'When your grandfather turned eighteen a year later, he got a job in the Snowy Mountains. We were already engaged to be married and all his savings went into putting a deposit on this cottage. It was an old place, even back then, but we did love it so. The same rose bush is still climbing around the front door to this day.'

Nan and Pop were engaged when they were teenagers. Imagine if Tilly came home wearing an engagement ring. Mum and Dad would freak!

I ask Nan if I can read one of Pop's letters and she picks out one bundle and carefully unties the ribbon. She opens an envelope and hands me the stiff, coarse sheet of paper inside. The words are written very neatly in lead pencil.

My dearest Bet Bet,

I hope this letter finds you well, my darling girl!

This morning I went fishing along one of the beautiful ferny mountain creeks. What a sight to see the rainbow trout jumping right out of the water, chasing swarms of dragonflies in the sun!

It is a strange thing to think that all around will be under the depths of the mighty Eucumbene Dam some time soon.

The old town of Adaminaby will be drowned, so they're moving more than a hundred buildings to a site five miles away to the north-east. They are even dismantling an old stone church to re-build it in the new town. I met a man who had not long been married in that very church and he was most upset to see it so ruined.

It's sad and sorry work, Bet. Ten thousand people came here almost a century ago looking for gold and so much history will be lost. Many of the old-timers will be saying farewell to their family farms.

But I have to remind myself that it is all progress and when we are married we will turn on the electric lights in our home in Port Britannia and be jolly grateful to the army of people from all over the world who've come to work in the bush and build this New Country.

It's a grey Sunday afternoon and I've just seen a squirrel glider flash past the window of my hut. The scallywag had better find refuge soon. I can see the snow will be early this year!

Tonight the Italians are treating a few of the chaps to spageti and red wine. I am very much enjoying their food and company and perhaps I will teach you how to make spageti when I return home.

I miss you Bet and think of you always. You are never far from my heart my dearest love.

Your adoring fiancé,

Andy.

I stare at the words on the paper and can't quite believe that Pop wrote them more than half a century ago. Funny that he couldn't spell 'spaghetti', but Nan says no-one in Oldcastle had ever tasted spaghetti back then. And no-one had ever heard of pizza either! Pop was just a bit older than Tilly when he wrote this letter and it's hard to imagine her travelling all the way across the world by ship and going to work in the bush. (Although I sometimes wish she would! But where, oh where, would she plug in her hair straightener?)

'Your pop had a rickety old wooden table in the hut he shared with three German boys,' remembers Nan. 'It was hard to get the paper and pencils and sometimes the snow made it impossible for the post to get through for weeks at a time – but he always wrote to me, every Sunday.'

Looking closely at the paper I reckon I can see the grain of the wood table coming right through the lead pencil writing. As I look at this letter I can imagine Pop in the high country with the snow piled up against the window of his hut, far away from everything he knew and wondering what was happening in the outside world. I ask Nan how she could stand getting just one letter a week.

'Well, the world was so much bigger then, I suppose,' Nan smiles. 'We just didn't expect to hear from each other every day. I knew that I was always in his thoughts and he knew he was in mine, and that was enough for us. I spent hours daydreaming about your grandfather. It's not like you young people now who call and do those text things night and day. I suppose you're lucky to have one another on the end of the line – but the daydreaming was marvellous. Everything was bigger and brighter and better in my imagination.'

Nan takes out a few more of the letters for me to read and they are all so beautiful I feel like crying again. Nan must have more than a hundred letters here in this box and in every one Pop tells her he loves her madly. I especially adore the ones that she sent back to Pop in the Snowy Mountains – written in lovely loopy letters in ink on paper as fine as a butterfly wing. Pop saved every single one.

Then we find the letter from Buckingham Palace from when Nan was just eight years old. She embroidered a linen handkerchief with wattle and sent it to Princess Elizabeth (before she was crowned the Queen) as a wedding present. This letter is on stiff paper headed with a red coat of arms and written with a typewriter.

Miss Elizabeth Spencer
15 Tower Street,
Britannia,
New South Wales,
Australia

19th December 1947

Dear Elizabeth,

The Princess Elizabeth has asked me to pass on her sincere appreciation for the lovely present you sent on the recent occasion of her marriage.

The Princess is extremely fond of wattle and your embroidery is certainly very fine.

Your kind thought is much appreciated and the Princess thanks you for your best wishes for her and her husband Prince Phillip.

Yours sincerely, Lady Meg Egerton Lady-in-Waiting to Princess Elizabeth 'It was such a thrill to receive it,' says Nan, smiling. 'I remember taking that letter to read to the class at Britannia Public School. I was quite the celebrity there for a while and even got my picture in the
Britannia Bugle
! I have the clipping here somewhere . . .'

Nan shuffles through the box, and eventually holds up a tattered scrap of brown newsprint. We are both disappointed to see that the silverfish have gnawed a hole right through her face and we can see clear through to the geranium pots in the kitchen.

'Well, that's that!' declares Nan. 'I've been decapitated. I suppose that's one good thing about the technology now. I could have just googled my name and the story would have been saved forever, and in full colour. Do you know, I can even remember I was wearing a yellow ribbon in my hair the day that photographer from the
Bugle
came.'

I am amazed. How does Nan know about Google?

'Well dear, I do like to keep up with all that's going on in the world. It's not as if I'm in the middle of the Snowy Mountains in the 1950s. I've even been thinking about getting a personal computer. They have lessons at the library.'

I look at Nan. Astonished.

'And if I did get online we could talk to each other all the time on FacePlace. I'd like that, I really would.'

I tell Nan that I'd like it too. It would be great to have her online. I could ask Nan's advice, instead of consulting the Great Oracle Tilly or Sun Tzu – because what does some ancient Chinese warrior actually know about my life? I'm not sure that Nan wants to be walking through the battlefield that's FacePlace at the moment, although I could send her photos of the family (Mum's edited versions, anyway).

Nan carefully re-ties all the letters with ribbon.

'When I die, you can have these letters to pass onto your grandchildren, Eleanor. It will be a lovely way for you to remember me and hear my voice long after I'm gone.'

I don't want to think of Nan dying and this dear little wooden cottage empty. But at least I will have this box of letters. It will be a precious bit of family history that I'll always treasure.

Then I realise that I don't have
any
letters – at all! Not one. And definitely not one from royalty! I've kept some old birthday cards and party invitations, but that's about it. All the texts and emails from Will and my friends have vanished and they might as well be sitting in the drowned post office at the bottom of Lake Eucumbene.

I'm reminded that I really should get around to putting all the thousands of photos on my computer onto a disk for safekeeping. Imagine if our house was flooded . . . or burned in a bushfire? Just losing my phone was bad enough.

I read an old birthday card decorated with blue wrens that my Nan got on her twenty-first birthday from her mother. Here's my great-grandmother's greeting, right here in black ink!

Many happy returns for the day, dearest daughter. Your loving mother.