This is Not a Fairy Tale Read online

Once the girls had finished their homework, I proposed that, exceptionally, we all go out to dinner. Normally, we ate out but rarely as I didn’t have the money to waste on such extravagances, but between working all night and the telephone message informing me that I had lost almost all of my income, I really hadn’t had the time to go grocery shopping. And to be honest, I was scared I wouldn’t be able to keep the panic out of my voice if I was all alone with Grace and Lillia.

  As I was bustling them out the door, we saw Mrs. Brinkley hurrying down the hall, carrying a bag of groceries. She stopped short when she saw us and smiled, but there was a certain weariness in her eyes. The girls rushed over and gave her a hug.

  “Thank you again for the wonderful dinner the other night. We really appreciated your cooking and your company.”

  I gently removed the heavy grocery sack from her hand while she rattled around, looking for her keys.

  Lillia looked at me and I immediately knew she was thinking the same thing as me.

  “Mrs. Brinkley, would you care to join us for dinner this evening, my treat? We are not going far, and it would be our pleasure to have you with us.”

  Mrs. Brinkley brightened a little and nodded her head.

  “Thank you, my dears. That would be lovely. You’re very kind.”

  The girls helped her to stow her groceries and then we all walked together to the Chinese restaurant along the street.

  Despite the girls’ merry tales of their sleepover and school trip, I could see that Mrs. Brinkley was not her usual chirpy self. When the girls had gone off to look at the giant carp in the tank near the kitchen, I asked her if she was alright.

  “Oh yes, my dear, nothing for you to worry about. It’s just that I received notice on my apartment today, and I have to move out in a month. Only for six months, while the owners do some necessary renovations, but still. I’m afraid that no one is going to rent me an apartment nearby for the same price around here.”

  She took a sip of her green tea and I saw her hand trembling. Now that I had time to study her up close, I realized that she was much older than I’d initially thought, perhaps in her mid seventies.

  “It’s not that I haven’t been looking, my dear. I’ve been very assiduous but the only short-term rentals around here are so exorbitant that you’d have to be Croesus to afford them. And if I have to move away, I won’t be able to continue my charity work, and so many people depend on me…”

  I promised to help her look around, and swore that we’d find a solution, one way or another. She was such a sweet soul, and I felt a certain kinship with her since her kindness the night of my birthday.

  The next day, given that I had no work, I went to visit all of the local real estate agents but I met with the same negative reception every time. A couple of the agents even laughed at me when I told them that I wanted to rent an apartment for a short time, for my elderly mother.

  “Sure lady,” one guy wheezed at me. “I’ve got one for you.” He quoted me such a ridiculously high price that I wanted to kick him, and even more so when he informed me that he had a special bond he applied for old people “in case they die and stink up the place”. It was hopeless. Barring a miracle, I did not see how we were going to find a place for Mrs. Brinkley.

  When I had exhausted all of the agencies, I returned home to confront the problem of my lack of work. I certainly didn’t face eviction as I owned my apartment outright, but I desperately needed to work to pay for everything else or we weren’t going to survive. Food, utilities, insurance, car repairs, school fees, extra-curricular activities – this quietly static life we led was bleeding me dry. It seemed that every day, there was something else to pay, more money owed. I didn’t begrudge it – what goes around, comes around, after all. But it was the never-ending supply of demand that was hard to take.

 

  Just when I thought it couldn’t get any worse, one of my two remaining clients sent me an email to let me know that they were closing their business and that a check for my work to date was in the mail.

  I flopped down onto the keyboard. Chaos rules. I was losing a battle I couldn’t afford to fight. Just then, my inbox pinged and I raised my head, not even remotely ready for the next drama.

  As I clicked on the email to open it, I head the old man from the tattoo shop say very grumpily “angels are everywhere”. I jumped in fright and whipped around to see how he’d gotten into my apartment but there was nobody there. Great. Now I was hallucinating. I turned back to the email and sighed. It was nothing more than a missive from Ombeline, a girl I’d met in college and spend twenty years trying to avoid since.

  Well, perhaps that was a little harsh. She was a dear friend, an old friend, but Ombeline was the kind of girl who believed in everything. Street corner gypsies, newspaper horoscopes, and messages from the clouds – nothing was without valued and insightful advice in her fluffy little world. Don’t get me wrong, she is a good person, the kind who helps old ladies across the road, raises money for orphans, and so on. In fact, it was her very goodness that drove me insane. I had tried for so many years to let our friendship drift until it dissolved from lack of interest, but no matter how long I ignored her, she always found me. Mostly I was grateful but in my current state of bitterness, Ombeline’s sheer goodness was more than I could bear.

  I hadn’t heard from her in about six months, which was a long time to go without news from Ombeline. In my more clement moments, I missed her missives. She was always off saving the world somewhere – the last time I had heard from her, she was in Uganda, handing out worm medicine and hugs to baby warriors recently deprived of their machetes, machine guns, and often enough, limbs.

  I looked at the email again. It looked like she had moved on from Africa, and I clicked on the body of the message to find out where she’d gone. Surely somewhere interesting, and even more surely, somewhere where she could do someone some good.

  “My dearest friend,

  I must apologize for the lack of radio contact, or indeed, any other. Life has been so very busy over the last few months and I really wasn’t able to write. And if I am to be honest, I am only writing now because I need your help.”

  I sat up. How unusual. Ombeline never hit me up for money. Sure, she’d asked me to sign the odd petition and once even to draft a couple of posters for a protest she was attending, but never once had she asked me for my “help” (and we all knew that in the charity business, help means “give me a large donation, it’s tax free”).

  I shoved my chair away from my desk and stalked off to the balcony in high dudgeon. How dare she ask me, a struggling single parent, for a damn cent? Hell, the way I got screwed over in my divorce, people should be giving me money. I took a furious puff on my now ever-present cigarette. I really didn’t need any more aggravation right now, and certainly not from any airy-fairy, do-good, would-be angels disguised as friends.

  Behind me a door slammed and the old man’s voice came though loud and clear.

  “Miracles are wasted on you people. And angels are everywhere!”

  I rushed into the living room, determined to find out how he had got into my apartment and make him shut up once and for all. As I stepped over the frame of the sliding door, I clipped my heel on the metal floor latch and went sprawling head first into my desk. I clumsily pulled myself up and slumped into my desk chair. The email was still in front of me on the screen. I went to grab the mouse to delete it but as I reached over, the word Ubud caught my eye. Ombeline was in Ubud? A week ago, I had never heard of the place, and now everyone was either coming from or going to Ubud.

  Tenderly rubbing the nasty lump of the side of my head, I settled back and began to finish reading the email.

  “I know how busy your life is, and I know how hard you must be working, trying to keep everything together. Even though I don’t have children, I understand the notion of responsibility.

  For the last year, I’ve been working in a little village just outside of Jinja in Uganda, setting up
schools for children who have escaped the war in the north. Some of the kids have lost their parents, others have lost their limbs or their health. But the ones I feel most responsible for – the ones I love the most – are the ones who have laid down the guns their were obliged to use from their earliest ages. These are the children who need us the most. These children are raised with and defined by hate, and all that can save them, and their generations to follow, is education and love.

  I have been working with a wonderful team of World Peace volunteers, to give these children life skills and a sense of their place in the world, to value themselves despite the horrific crimes they have committed. It’s never enough, of course, but it has been going so well. However, about a month ago, I came to Indonesia to give a speech at a UNESCO forum. A bomb went off outside our hotel, and two members of my team were killed. I was lucky; I survived. But the problem is that a piece of debris went into my spine and apparently severed my spinal column.”

  I gasped in horror and tears suddenly filled my eyes. What a terrible thing. Poor Ombeline, the girl who’d always worked so hard to save the world, now a victim of the world around her.

  I wiped my eyes and read on.

  “Right now, I’m recuperating at a friend’s house in Bali. Ubud, to be precise. I don’t now what I’m going to do next – working in the field and being in a wheelchair are not exactly compatible. But I’m more worried about what’s going to happen to my little school in Uganda. I lost my second in charge in the bombing, and there’s no one else available to keep everything on track.

  Which is why I am writing to you. I have to say that I’m not expecting a positive answer. I’m not even really sure why I am writing to you, except that there have been so many dreams and signs that I felt I had no choice but to contact you. So here goes: I need you to go to Uganda for two months, to oversee the school and keep things running until I can work something else out. I know already that you’re reading this and thinking that I’m just as crazy and impractical as I’ve always been, but do me a favor. Just sleep on the idea. I don’t know why, just do it for me. You’re an angel.

  Love always,

  Ombeline.”

  I sat back in my chair and closed my eyes. Ombeline in a wheelchair. Ombeline getting blown up whilst trying to save the world. It broke my heart to imagine that someone so incredibly kind hearted and honestly helpful could find herself in such a position. And I really would have loved to help her. But I couldn’t go to Uganda. I had a job – or at least, I had to get a job. I had children in school, and Uganda sounded dangerous. What kind of a mother would take her children to work in a, well yes, in a school, but a school in the middle of a dangerous, foreign place.

  On impulse, I looked up Uganda, and then Jinja. The first link I clicked on filled my screen with a smiling and dusty Ombeline, surrounded by children of all ages. She was holding a child on her knees who appeared to have lost both his legs and one arm, and when I looked closer, I saw that most of the children were disabled in some way or form.

  The article was called “Hope for Uganda’s Child Soldiers”, and it went on to discuss the problems of helping children who had lost everything but their souls become loved, and lovable, again. My eyes welled up when I read Ombeline’s quote in the interview – I could almost hear her talking.

  “There’s only so much food and medicine and housing to go around, but the one thing we have an abundance of is love. Showing these children true and accepting love is the only thing that heals them. They need our money and all that it can buy, but more than anything else, they need our love.”

  Every day, the news is filled with tragedy, death, murder and mayhem. Only recently, at the hairdresser, I was reading a trashy magazine (I know, no one ever buys the damn things but we all seem to read them), desperate to discover if Brad and Angelina had given birth, when I turned the page to see a photo of a dead baby girl in a gutter somewhere in China. Literally a whole glossy page of a dead baby, in a sewer filled gutter. Horrifying but much less interesting than the extravagant proportions of a Russian oligarch’s new mega-yacht, or whether a certain rock star heart throb was really was sleeping with a teenager.

  The problem is that horror surrounds us. It’s insurmountable, there’s simply nothing that we can do so we zone it out. But when it’s a close friend, actually getting her hands dirty, not to mention getting blown up, it gives the horror a more personal dimension. I looked at the children in the photo on the website, and saw how much they appeared to adore her. Each and every one of them was somehow leaning in towards her, as if just touching her made them feel better.

  After looking at a few more website about Uganda and child soldiers, I clicked on the email to close it, and closed the web pages too. Although Uganda was apparently safe enough to be a cool tourist destination, there was still absolutely no way I could uproot our lives and go rushing off to Africa. I would have to find a good way to tell her that it was just impossible. Maybe I’d send a check too, if I got another job sometime in the near future.

  Glancing at the clock in the hall, I realized that the girls would be home from school in half an hour, and I still had job applications to fill out. Scrolling though the business writer forums and copywriter sites cost me another half a pack of cigarettes, and by the time Lillia and Grace walked through the door, I’d sent out more than sixty copies of my CV, as well as a number of emails to past clients and, hopefully, potential ones. Who knew, if I got a decent job, maybe I’d be able to really help that little school in Uganda.

  After the girls had finished their homework, I set about making dinner while they organized their clothes and school bags for the following day. For some reason – strange, given the afternoon’s events – I was extremely upbeat and dancing around the kitchen like a lunatic to Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believing”, when Grace walked in.

  “Air guitar, Mum? At your age?” she asked, with all the condescension of a matron. I quickly put down the wooden spoon that was doubling as my microphone, and turned the music down to a reasonable level.

  “Yes, my child? What is so important that you feel the need to interrupt my concert?”

  I smirked at her but she was clearly not in the mood to be smirked at.

  “Mum, this is serious.”

  She pushed her hair behind her ear, and handed me a flyer.

  “We’re doing a school project on Africa. It’s really scary, because there are so many bad things happening to the people and animals there. And the children don’t have food or water or even toys.”

  She paused to let the full horror of this notion penetrate.

  I looked at the flyer. Apparently each child had to pick a region and study it. In addition to the usual focus on history and politics and natural resources, the project had to include an essay – at least two hundred words – on how to fix the problems in the selected region.

  I thought briefly of Ombeline, and how, had I not received the email today, I would have asked her to give my Grace a helping hand. But this was a school project, for children, not a real life horror story for my protected little girl.

  “Goodness darling, that’s quite a project. Shall we go and get the atlas and find a region that interests you? I’ve got about ten minutes before the pasta is ready…”

  “No thanks, Mum. I already picked a place to study. And I got some books from the library.”

  I took a deep breath. It wasn’t that I didn’t believe in coincidence, it’s just it was the overwhelming theme of my life right now.

  “OK, where did you choose?”

  She smiled at me and somewhere in my head I heard Ombeline laughing – at me or with me, I have no idea.

  “Uganda. It’s really cool. There are heaps of really beautiful places and stuff, but there’s also a war and a whole lot of mean people who kidnap children from school and make them fight and even kill people.”

  She shuddered.

  “It actually makes me like the idea of school.”

&nb
sp; “So how can I help?” I asked, stirring the pasta so that it didn’t boil over and trying to ignore the manic beating of my heart.

  Grace drew herself up and smiled her best, perfect daughter smile.

  “I want to go there and give the children my toys. All of them.”

  I almost dropped my spoon.

  “All of your toys? Even your Nintendo DS? Even your Barbie computer?”

  She nodded at me and the steely glint in her eye made me realize that she was serious.

  “Grace, that’s very admirable. But Africa is a long way away, and it’s expensive to go, and dirty and not always very safe. And while giving your toys away is a very kind idea – very kind – it would cost a fortune to post them and I think there are probably other things that the children need more than toys…”

  Grace cut me off with the seasoned skill of a practiced negotiator.

  “Yes Mummy, I know that they need lots of other things, like houses and food and doctors. But they also need toys to play with.”

  She raised her eyebrows at me.

  “Otherwise, how will they know they are kids and not adults who have to kill other adults?”

  I sank down into a chair and looked at her. Strangely enough, she was making a lot of sense. At least, the last part did. The timer pinged and I stood up to drain the pasta.

  “OK, dinner is ready. Go wash your hands, my little piglet pie, and we’ll talk more at dinner.

  8

  Africa, Africa, everywhere