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from CHERRY RIPE
Chapter One
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Copyright © Carmel Bird 1985. All rights reserved
In a house in the country there lived a girl called Agnes. Queen Victoria died when Agnes was nearly eleven, and in Tasmania, on the edge of the Queen?s Empire, Agnes felt some of the ripple caused in the world by the queen?s death.
The island of Tasmania was a pink heart in the atlas; Agnes fancied her own face was also shaped like a heart. She thought about her own face, her own heart, about the shape of the land, and, in daydreams, she imagined herself as the world with the island as her heart. So when Queen Victoria (who seemed to Agnes to be the queen of all the world) was dead, Agnes wished she could do something, make something, to carry the memory of the death of the queen.
She made a doll.
Where the creek ran through the orchard Agnes sat that summer under a cherry tree sewing a doll which she named Sophie the Fairy Queen. And Sophie was beautiful; she was young and slender with long red hair. Her eyes were the colour of pale green apples, just on the edge where you bite them. They were sewn from a piece of satin that Agnes bought from the Afghan pedlar who wandered through the island. The pedlar was to Agnes a traveller from fairyland with his lace, ribbons, pins, silk flowers and soaps. He brought buttons and beads and threads of every colour. One of his front teeth was missing and he whistled through the gap, and hummed. From a piece of white lace which he sold to her Agnes cut Sophie?s wings.
Eighty-four years after the wings were cut from the lace, scientists cut a hole in the sky above the island. They could peer down at the little pink heart which gazed up with innocence into the space created in the sky.
Sophie was spangled, she was cobwebbed; she had on her white cloth breast a heart sewn in scarlet thread. To the edges of the heart Agnes added wings, fancying these wings would resemble those of a lacewing butterfly. Agnes had never seen such a butterfly, since she lived closer to the South Pole than to the Equator, but an engraving of the lacewing hung by the piano in the front parlour, and Agnes studied the insect carefully. Beneath the picture it said:
When the red lacewing butterfly dances in the sunshine the scarlet of its wings catches fire. The dark wing-edges glow a deep and lustrous purple.
Agnes, as a very little girl, had thought this was a prayer. the butterfly prayer. Holy Mother of the Butterflies, pray for us. Sacred Heart of the deep wing-edge, have mercy on us.
As she sewed the Fairy Queen, as she sat under the cherry tree, Agnes would prick her finger and stain the white cloth with blood. She imagined snow, of what it would be like to see blood on snow, blood on snow. She had never even seen snow at all, and neither had she seen the sea. Yet she could feel the chill of the snow in the wind, could hear the sea in her heart.
In her deep and lustrous heart Agnes longed to soar among the stars in the dark blue heavens, to swim with fish into the deepest oceans, to grow in the earth and know what it was like to be a tree. She would be a tree, a fish, a fairy, an angel. She imagined the creek by the cherry tree was a river of ice beneath which the fish and the mermaids were trapped. She imagined it was a river of blood in which she swam with her mother and her daughter and her daughter?s daughter. Then she saw them all flying above the orchard and disappearing among the stars.
On the map of the world, in the little pink heart in the Southern Ocean, Agnes swam in a river of blood, and then she rose from the river and flew.
When the red lacewing butterfly dances in the sunshine, the scarlet of its wings catches fire.
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