Lenny's Book of Everything Read online

  ‘This bittersweet tale about heartbreak and healing has a sense of whimsy that never feels forced. Foxlee’s writing is brimming with perfectly constructed moments that merge into a truly sensational, heart-wrenching read. This is the kind of book that makes a reader feel grateful it exists.’

  —Australian Bookseller and Publisher (5 star review)

  ‘Lenny’s Book of Everything is a tough, tender and beautiful piece of work that left me aching.’

  —Glenda Millard, author of The Stars of Oktober Bend and A Small Free Kiss in the Dark

  ‘You come to care so deeply for the characters that you want to move into their little flat and look after them. They are so alive, so full of heart, curiosity and imagination, that even when tragedy comes to stay, their relationships are illuminated by joy. Told with the piercing honesty and clarity of a child, this story holds life lessons for everyone. W is for Wonderful, and that is Lenny’s Book. Unforgettable.’

  —Anna Fienberg, author of Tashi

  ‘Though I defy you to read it without tears, Lenny’s Book of Everything is warm, humorous, absolutely real and above all, uplifting. It’s also the best book I’ve read this year: Karen Foxlee, you’re a genius.’

  —Wendy Orr, author of Dragonfly Song

  This project has been assisted by the Queensland Writers Fellowships. The Queensland Writers Fellowships are presented by the State Library of Queensland and Arts Queensland in partnership with the Queensland Writers Centre.

  First published by Allen & Unwin in 2018

  Copyright © Karen Foxlee 2018

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or ten per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.

  Allen & Unwin

  83 Alexander Street

  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

  Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

  Email: [email protected]

  Web: www.allenandunwin.com

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of Australia

  ISBN 978 1 76052 944 4 (hardback)

  978 1 76052 870 6 (paperback)

  eISBN 978 1 76063 795 8

  For teaching resources, explore www.allenandunwin.com/resources/for-teachers

  Cover and text design by Sandy Cull, gogoGingko

  Cover art by Nicholas Jones

  Cover illustrations from The Golden Book Encyclopedia Vol. 1-20 edited by

  Bertha Morris Parker, copyright © Penguin Random House LLC. Used by

  permission of Golden Books, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a

  division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

  Back cover image by Shutterstock/Anton Kozyrev

  Endpaper image by istockphoto/chpaquette

  Set by Midland Typesetters, Australia

  www.karenfoxlee.com

  For Mum

  CONTENTS

  Perfectly Normal

  Swedes

  Advertisement

  A African Civets and the Abominable Snowman

  A Ants and Amphibians

  B Beetles and Birds

  C Canada

  C Coleopterist

  E Eagles

  The Magic Blanket

  The Night Bus

  G Giants

  The Search for The Sound of Music Spinks

  H Hungary

  Great-Aunt Em

  Horse People

  I Insects

  K Kyzylkum

  L Log Cabins

  Trouble Coming

  Spaghetti

  The Junior Sales Club of America

  Igneous Rock

  Merry Christmas, Mr. King

  Snow

  Destination Em

  Christmas Day

  O Oceans

  P Peregrine Falcons

  Pa Gensyn (Goodbye in Danish)

  Q Quicksand

  Searching

  Growing Pains

  Peter Lenard Spink

  Bed-Building

  Nanny Flora

  The Canada Goose

  WXYZ

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Perfectly Normal

  7lbs. 3

  20 inches

  1969

  Our mother had a dark heart feeling. It was as big as the sky kept inside a thimble. That’s how dark heart feelings are. They have great volume but can hide in small places. You can swallow them with a blink and carry them inside you so no one will know.

  “Something’s not right,” she said, when she brought baby Davey home from the hospital.

  She rubbed her fingers over her chest and looked at him sleeping in the crook of her arm.

  “I have a feeling,” she said.

  She was good at knowing the wrongness of things, sadnesses and sicknesses, and, in the park, she could always find the pigeon with one leg. She knew when Mrs. Gaspar was coming down with a wheeze before she wheezed. She knew my thin hair was caused by some undiagnosed malady. Some days were more wrong than others. Whole days. From the moment she opened her eyes, “Something’s not right,” she said.

  “Does it hurt?” I asked her. I looked at my new baby brother and he was perfect as a walnut in its shell.

  “No, it doesn’t hurt,” she said and she took my three-year-old hand and put it to her heart. I could feel her ribs through her nightdress. “It’s not a hurting kind of feeling. Just a something-will-happen feeling.”

  “A good thing or a bad thing?” I asked.

  “It might be good or bad or somewhere in between,” she said. “We’ll have to wait and see.”

  Davey was born six days after Neil Armstrong took his famous step and everyone was still crazy with moon walk fever. Mother liked to tell the story if she was in a lying-on-the-sofa mood. An untying-her-hair mood. A tickle-my-feet-and-I’ll-tell-you mood. We knew all her stories by heart, word for word, so that we could have told them ourselves if we needed to. The story of the day her father died from a heart attack after blowing out his birthday candles. The story of her friend, Louis Martin, who was struck by lightning when he walked home from school in the rain. The story of the river and how she nearly drowned in it when she was seven, of the first dress she ever made, which her mother forbade her to wear because it was cherry red. The tale of the UFO she saw beside the highway when she ran away with Peter Lenard Spink.

  “It was a perfect summer day when you were born,” was always how the Davey story started.

  She must have noticed all the perfectness from the bus window because she couldn’t afford the cab fare: Second Street, glinting and shimmering in the heat, and ponderous summer clouds sweeping their shadows over the sunbaking cars, the marigolds growing in the park, children eating ice-creams.

  I was left behind with Mrs. Gaspar in number seventeen. She had two Pomeranians with marmalade-coloured coats named Karl and Karla. The apartment smelled of them, and also ashtrays, filled with white cigarette filters, each decorated with a ring of peach lipstick. Her apartment was a kaleidoscope of tan crocheted doilies and pumpkin-coloured throw rugs; even Mrs. Gaspar’s orange beehive, which sat a little askew on her head, matched the decor. Her hand-knitted clothes were unravelling and her pom-pom slip
pers had the dishevelled look of something she had fished out of a trash can. She liked to bless me when my mother wasn’t looking. She drew crosses on my tiny forehead and whispered in Hungarian.

  “Yes, it was a perfect summer day,” said Mother. “And I knew you were coming. I knew it and I hadn’t had a single contraction. Not one. But something told me I had to go to the hospital. Something said, Cynthia Spink, get to that hospital this instant.”

  “What was the something?” I asked.

  “Hush now,” she said.

  But I wanted to know. She was thin with worrying, our mother. She combed out her long fair hair with her fingers, closed her eyes. She was made almost entirely out of worries and magic.

  “Was it a voice?” If it was a voice, it would sound like dry leaves.

  “I said hush, Lenny, it’s my story. I took you across the hall to Mrs. Gaspar’s and then I caught the number twenty-four. The voice said, Get on that number twenty-four, Cynthia, because it doesn’t do the loop to Safeway. It goes all the way down Second with only five stops.”

  I tried to imagine a voice like whispering leaves saying all that. I rolled my eyes at Davey but he ignored me because he loved his sudden-arrival story.

  “You were a week late already. I sweated on that bus. I must have sweated a gallon. Then I stepped off that bus, down onto the sidewalk near that hospital and wouldn’t you know it, I get a contraction that bends me in half and then another one just a minute later. And I get two more and I haven’t even made it to the hospital front door, Davey. And there were people running from everywhere but I had you right there on the doorstep with everyone walking past.”

  “Holy Batman,” said Davey.

  But it wasn’t like we hadn’t heard the story before. He knew there was more to come.

  “But the thing was,” she said, “when you were born, they told me you had a true knot in your cord. A true knot, pulled tight, and that’s why you came out so quick, because my body and your body knew you’d run out of air and blood if you didn’t.”

  Air and blood. I always repeated that part in my head. Air and Blood.

  “Gee,” said Davey.

  “You almost might have never been,” said Mother.

  “I’m glad you got the number twenty-four,” said Davey.

  “You were a beautiful baby,” said Mother.

  “Was I?” asked Davey.

  “So beautiful,” said Mother.

  But she didn’t mention the dark heart feeling to him, not ever, not once. That was always our secret. That was never in the story. She never told him how she asked Dr. Leopold if everything was fine.

  “Why, he’s a perfect bouncing baby boy,” said Dr. Leopold.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Why, he’s perfectly normal,” said Dr. Leopold on the perfect summer day.

  So she smiled and agreed.

  “Father’s name?” the doctor asked. He was filling out the birth certificate.

  “Peter Lenard Spink,” said Mother. “L. E. N. A.R.D.”

  “Will Mr. Spink be in tomorrow to see his boy?” asked the doctor.

  “Yes,” said Mother. “Yes, he will be.”

  When I was older I liked to say his name in bed. Peter Lenard Spink. Peter Lenard Spink. Peter Lenard Spink. His name rolled off my tongue like a punctured wheel. I said it until, in the darkness, Davey told me to be quiet. But it was a name that needed saying.

  He did not come that day or the next. Whole weeks passed. Davey slept and my mother worried and fussed over his sleepiness. She worried and fussed over his poor appetite. She worried and fussed over his boy-ness. She worried over the bills and how she would pay them and who would look after us when she went back to work.

  The weeks were sunshiny but sorrowful. Mrs. Gaspar came daily and tended to Davey and sang him mournful lullabies. Each afternoon thunderstorms came and washed the streets clean but they could not wash Peter Lenard Spink from our mother.

  Until one night the key turned in the lock and Peter Lenard Spink appeared. He stood very still, as though he wasn’t sure he was in the right place. He smiled his small whiskery smile. He’d been working. He’d had to take the work. He’d had to work construction a long way south. The reasons were offered up in various ways but Mother shook her head at all of them. She nodded to us.

  “Little Lenny,” he said, dipping his head to me.

  “And baby David,” said Mother.

  Still we waited for the thing to happen. Mother’s dark heart feeling did not go away. It found a tiny crack and climbed inside her. It took up residence. She carried it around with her, alongside Davey on her hip.

  “Something’s not right,” she said. Sometimes when she fed Davey his cereal. Once when she watched him crawling behind me squealing through the small nest of rooms that was our home, crawling so fast he skinned his baby knees. When he took his first perfectly normal steps.

  Sometimes it wasn’t mentioned for months.

  Sometimes ten times in one day.

  “Something isn’t right,” she said quietly.

  “What is it?” I asked. I put my hand on her heart the way she liked me to do. I knew it soothed her. I felt its beat beneath my fingertips.

  “I just don’t know,” she said.

  Peter Lenard Spink sat at the kitchen table turning the pages of the paper slowly.

  “You worry too much, has always been your problem,” he said. “There’s work in Pensacola. What about this? Immediate start. Meals provided.”

  He read out the newspaper advertisement. That’s the way his goodbyes began. I kept my hand on my mother’s chest. She smiled at me but beneath my fingertips her heartbeat quickened.

  Davey pulled himself up beside us using fistfuls of Mother’s skirt. He smiled and it made us smile in return, it couldn’t be helped. Baby Davey had the happiest smile in the world.

  Peter Lenard Spink went to Pensacola. He went to Tuscaloosa. He went to St. Louis. He went to St. Marks and St. Cloud. He went north and south. He went east and west. Sometimes we were allowed to look from our bedroom window down at the Greyhound bus station when he went. He would wave up at us, just a small raise of his hand.

  But other times Mother said, “No.”

  She said, “Don’t you dare look from that window.”

  Peter Lenard Spink left and the door clicked and Mother went and lay very still on her bed like a stone princess on top of a tomb.

  Peter Lenard Spink was a tan figure hunched over shoelaces. He was sideburns and a nervous smile. He was leaving sounds: rusty suitcase clasps and zippers. He was the belt-buckle jangle. He went to Marietta and Blacksburg and as far away as Buffalo, Wyoming. He gave me a sticker from there. I didn’t stick it anywhere. I kept it pristine and unstuck in my jewellery box and Davey coveted it for many years.

  Davey grew up. He tottered. He walked. He said his first word which was Dada and it made Peter Lenard Spink’s small whiskery smile quiver. First birthday, second birthday, third birthday, fourth. Nearly his fifth … Mother got dressed each day in her pink uniform. She tied up her fair hair in a fountain on her head. She went to work at the Golden Living Retirement Home. She deposited us with Mrs. Gaspar and Karl and Karla. Mrs. Gaspar said, “My little dumplings,” and took us in. My mother wore her happy Cindy Spink smile but we both still waited for the thing to happen.

  “He’ll come back,” Mother said each time Peter Lenard Spink left.

  “He’ll come back,” she pleaded with no one.

  The last time was no different from the others. The sound of him peeing, the faucet, a match strike, keys. A suitcase sound. A small cough. A belt-buckle tinkle. He whispered out of our lives at dawn, unlatched the door and clicked it behind him, and never came back again.

  Davey turned five the very next day. There was a small cake and a cowboy shirt and a blue toy tractor that he adored. At the end of the day he had a tantrum. He bellowed and stamped his feet and threw himself to the ground over nothing. Mother said everyone always cried on their
birthday when they were small, but it was a lie because I never did, not once. Davey bellowed for no reason and wore himself out to sleep and it was while he was sleeping that the thing happened. The thing we’d been waiting for. When Mother saw it in the morning, she made a noise like she had seen a ghost.

  “Davey,” she whispered.

  But then she sat down, plonk, on the sofa, as though she was glad it had finally arrived. She let out one long breath.

  “What’s happened to you?” she said.

  Swedes

  5 and a half years

  4’ 3”

  DECEMBER 1974

  Each morning Mother woke us early in the dark. She said goodbye to us as the sun was coming up, a pale wash of light lifting on the green walls. It rose, that light, before my eyes as we waited for Mrs. Gaspar to open her door.

  “What?” said Mrs. Gaspar in her shaggy tangerine bathrobe. “He is growing more?”

  “No, he’s just the same,” said Mother, laughing. “He’s just the same, Mrs. Gaspar.”

  But Davey was taller than me and I was a third-grader. Standing in the corridor, we could see his new pyjama pants were already knickerbockers again.

  “Cyn-thi-a,” said Mrs. Gaspar, each syllable registering her disappointment. “Mrs. Spink! He must go to the doctor. This is not normal!”

  “Oh, no,” said Mother, “he’s just big, there are big people in the family, my mama always said it, they came from Sweden.”

  Mrs. Gaspar shook her head. She patted Davey’s head where his hair surged upward like prairie grass. As soon as Mother was gone to work, she blessed us like a round orange pontiff, very solemnly, her beehive wobbling on her head. Mrs. Gaspar had a very large Jesus painting in a frame above the television. This smiling Jesus had red cheeks and wore robes the colour of a pastel Easter egg. Light beams shone from his fingertips. He looked friendly enough but was a little off-putting when we tried to watch cartoons. We ate our cornflakes beneath his benevolent gaze.

  We prayed with Mrs. Gaspar. She made us close our eyes and hold her hands, one hand for Davey and one for me. I didn’t like to close my eyes but she said, “No peeking, dumpling,” like we were about to do something fun. Her hands were puffy and cool and slightly damp.