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- Herausgeber: Pushkin Children's Books
- Kategorie: Für Kinder und Jugendliche
- Sprache: Englisch
A stirringly beautiful, heart-warming story of brotherly love and growing up, from the award-winning author of The Elephant 'There should be more books like this: gentle books that draw us slowly in and make us want to linger, books fashioned with kindness and family at their heart' Glenda Millard, author of The Naming of Tishin Silk Even on the dark days, birds still sing Luke and his big brother Ben spend the summer on the banks of Cabbage Tree Creek. Quiet Luke sketches birds, while Ben leaps off the Jumping Tree. The boys couldn't be more different, but they share a special bond. When a local competition to win a boat is announced, the brothers spring into action, dreaming of exploring the creek together. But then Ben starts high school, bringing unfamiliar changes into their lives. Slowly, the boys start to drift apart as the contest approaches. Can their unique friendship survive?
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
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For my brothers
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE
A Strange Feathered Thing
Last year, I found a dead bird on the road outside our house. A young magpie, grey and white. It lay flat with its head on the side, one wing stretched out and the other squashed under its own body. I crouched down, hugged my knees to my chest and stared. Wind tickled the tiny feathers on the bird’s breast, its legs stuck out like black twigs and the back of its neck glowed pink in the setting sun.
The bitumen warmed my feet, but my body shivered. Cold, but also scared: a bird had been thumped by a car, knocked out of the air, when all it had wanted to do was fly. Now it lay 2dead on the road and the only person around was me. I stretched my fingers towards it, but pulled back. My hand shook and I swallowed hard. I reached again and my fingers brushed its feathers. Then a dark shape was suddenly behind me, getting bigger, roaring closer.
I jumped too late and the car punched my side. Threw me off the road. I hit the ground and rolled, a mess of arms and legs across the dirt. I choked and coughed, trying to suck air back in. Somebody was on top of me, shaking me, screaming my name.
‘Luke!’
It wasn’t the car that hit me. It was Ben, tackling me out of the way. The car disappeared around the corner in the fading light.
‘Luke!’ Ben yelled into my face, shaking my shoulders. ‘What were you doing?’
I rolled out from under my brother and sat on the gutter until my breathing slowed down. I squinted and pointed at the magpie. It lay in the same position, unmoved by the rushing car. Ben walked onto the road. He bent down, gathered the bird in his shirt and held it close to his belly. But he didn’t just hold it. 3He cradled it, like he was nursing a bowl full of jelly that hadn’t set. I caught up to him as he headed home.
‘What are you gonna do?’ I said.
‘Find a box.’
‘To bury it?’
Ben stopped, his eyes dark and serious. ‘Could be alive.’ A streetlight flickered on, lighting the side of his face. ‘Trust me.’ He always said that.
We found a big cardboard box under the house and set it at the end of the verandah. Stuffed it with too many blankets and rags, and filled an old yoghurt cup with water. As Ben slid the magpie inside, I still didn’t know if we had made a nest or a coffin. But the next morning, we padded outside to find the magpie awake, huddled in a corner of the box, testing its voice with a soft gargly song.
‘Wonder what it’s saying.’ My voice cracked with sleep.
‘That you’ve got bad breath,’ said Ben, walking back inside.
The thrill of saving a bird’s life was over for Ben, but not for me. I sat with the magpie on 4the warm verandah, still in my pyjama shorts. I offered more water in a cup, then I whispered so that only the bird could hear. ‘You’d better be more careful crossing the road, buddy. Or at least fly a bit higher.’
It watched me with a chocolate-brown eye and tilted its head, as if it understood. We held the stare for a few seconds before a thought sailed into my mind. I ran to my room, grabbed a book from under my bed and returned to the verandah. I read the title to the magpie. ‘Field Guide to Australian Birds.’
Aunty Gem had given it to me a few weeks earlier, just after Dad left. I’d hardly touched it until now. Inside the front cover was a message in Gem’s looped handwriting.
Dear Luke,
Things don’t always work out the way we hope they will. But even on the dark days, birds still sing. So open a window and look outside, for when you open your eyes to birds, the world opens itself in return.
Love Gem.
5I didn’t really know what it meant, but I liked the way it sounded. I watched the magpie beside me and tried to open my eyes a bit more, like Gem had written. Its beak was sharpened to a dark point, thin feathery trousers grew halfway down its legs, and one scaly toe was bent. Then I found the page of magpies in the book. It was beautiful. I ran my fingers over the coloured illustrations and read words I’d never even heard before. Plumage. Underwings. Fledgling. Bird words, wonderful and strange. As the verandah boards grew hotter under my legs, I learnt everything there was to know about magpies.
For the next few days, I sat beside the box and watched over the bird. It didn’t take any of the bugs and worms I offered, but it drank lots of water. Along the way, it woke up enough to perch on the box and bounce onto the railing. Sometimes I read pages from the bird guide out loud and the magpie turned its head at the sound of my voice.
One morning, Ben wandered from the kitchen, scooping cereal from a bowl.6
‘You still here?’ He laughed. I didn’t know if he was talking to me or the bird. Then his face softened when he saw mine. ‘What are you so happy about?’
I hadn’t felt the smile on my face, but I knew it had something to do with the magpie and Gem’s words – my eyes opening and the world opening up in return. I’d stopped thinking about Dad and had focused on the bird, this strange feathered thing reborn in a cardboard box on our verandah. I wanted to know more: all things about all birds.
Ben nodded at the magpie as it scratched under a wing with its beak. ‘You should give it a name.’
I smiled. Somehow I knew it was a girl. ‘It’s not that original, but … Maggie?’
Ben tipped his bowl and slurped the last bit of milk. ‘Cool.’
As soon as I’d named her, Maggie hopped from the box and landed on my shoulder. I ducked and laughed, then relaxed. I stroked the feathers on her chest and she tilted her head. I thought of her lying still on the road a few days before, and I re-read Gem’s message in the front 7of the book: Things don’t always work out. It was true. Parents don’t always stick around. Birds get knocked out of the sky. But this was my chance to make one of those things right.
‘I’ll stick with you,’ I said to Maggie. I wasn’t worried about Ben hearing me. ‘Trust me.’
As I said his favourite words, it felt like I was in charge of something. The kind of feeling Ben probably had all the time.
A moment later, Maggie leapt off my shoulder and landed on the railing. She shook her feathers and tested her wings with a few flightless beats. Then she flapped a wobbly path to a branch in the poinciana tree, right outside our bedroom. She threw back her head and sang a song to the bright summer sky. Happy, like me, to still be alive, thanks to my brother Ben.
CHAPTER 1
The Jumping Tree
We sat in the boat, facing each other. I gripped the side and a piece of white paint flaked off under my fingernail. Ben lay back, put his hands behind his head and closed his eyes. ‘This is it, Lukey. A life on the water.’
I lay back too and rested my head on the rough wooden edge. Water lapped nearby and Maggie sang from a tall tree. Nearly a year after we’d found her, she was still with us. Scratching around the verandah, keeping watch from the roof and singing outside our bedroom almost every morning.
‘Where should we go?’ Ben said. 10
I closed my eyes, just like him. Imagined the water rocking me along, taking me anywhere I wanted. ‘Let’s go and find that eagle’s nest.’
‘The big one?’
‘Yep. White-bellied sea eagle.’
We lay like that for a while. Ben whistled a lazy tune. A few swamphens honked to each other, far away.
Then Maggie squawked and Ben jolted up. ‘Quick! Someone’s coming.’
We grabbed our stuff – his shirt, my sketchbook – and jumped out of the boat, landing hard on the ground. We hadn’t really been on the water. It wasn’t even our boat. Just an old dinghy tied to a tree in someone’s backyard. A man’s voice yelled and we sprinted out of the yard, through the bush and down to the creek. Our feet slapped along the muddy bank. We dodged mangrove shoots and dipped under branches. Climbed over rocks, kicked through scrub and didn’t stop until we reached the Jumping Tree.
We collapsed on the ground and caught our breath. Ben’s feet were cut up and I had scratches all over my legs. He walked ankle-deep into 11the saltwater to soak his feet. We were both hurting and puffed, but my head tingled with the excitement of it all.
‘Who was that guy?’ I said. ‘Did you see him?’
‘Dunno.’ He lifted a foot to inspect the cuts. ‘Good job keeping up for once.’
‘Me? I was faster than you.’
He smiled. We both knew it wasn’t true.
I sat on the bank and brushed dirt off my hands. ‘Lucky we didn’t get caught, though.’ It was the last thing Mum needed, us getting in trouble. She was already working till dark and doing everything herself.
‘He was never gonna catch us,’ said Ben. ‘No-one knows the creek like us.’
‘You mean, no-one knows the edge of the creek like us.’
Everyone with a boat knew the rest of it: the deep channels and secret inlets. And even though we all called it a creek, it was much bigger. More like a cross between a river and a lake, a band of salty brown water that snaked behind the houses and breathed up and down with the tides. Some parts were narrow enough 12to throw a rock to the other side, but most of it was wide like the school oval.
