The Slightly True Story of Cedar B. Hartley

  Martine Murray was born in Melbourne and still lives there. She spent most of her time studying impractical things, like art, acrobatics and dance, and she started writing because she had a very nice dog that she wanted to write about. She is the author of two picture books, three novels and two picture storybooks.

  The Slightly True Story of Cedar B. Hartley (who planned to live an unusual life) was shortlisted for the 2003 Children’s Book Council of Australia’s (CBCA) Book of the Year Awards; shortlisted for the 2002 and 2003 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards and 2003 Patricia Wrightson Prize for Children’s Books; and included in The White Ravens 2003 annual selection of outstanding international children’s books by the International Youth Library (Associated Project of UNESCO).

  The Slightly Bruised Glory of Cedar B. Hartley (who can’t help flying high and falling in deep) won the 2006 Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards; was shortlisted for the 2006 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards; and was a Notable Book in the 2006 CBCA Book of the Year Awards.

  Also by Martine Murray

  The Slightly Bruised Glory of Cedar B. Hartley (who can’t help flying high and falling in deep)

  How to make a bird – shortlisted in the 2004 CBC of Australia awards for older readers – winner of the 2004 Queensland Premier’s Literary Award for the Young Adult Book Award

  Picture Books

  A Dog Called Bear

  A Moose Called Mouse

  Mannie and the long brave day

  Picture Storybooks

  Henrietta there’s no one better

  Henrietta the great go-getter

  Henrietta gets a letter

  Copyright © Text and illustrations Martine Murray, 2002

  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 10% 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 Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

  Allen & Unwin

  83 Alexander Street

  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

  Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

  Fax: (61 2) 9906 2218

  Email: info@allenandunwin.com

  Web: www.allenandunwin.com

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

  Murray, Martine, 1965– .

  The slightly true story of Cedar B. Hartley

  (who planned to live an unusual life).

  ISBN 9781865086231

  eISBN 9781741155716

  I. Title.

  A823.4

  Cover illustration by Martine Murray

  Cover and text design by Sandra Nobes

  For my brother Cam

  who is wayward and lovely,

  for my friend Nicole who is amazing,

  and for Nige who taught me

  to walk on my hands

  Warning

  Cedar B. Hartley would like to advise all readers against trying out the balance positions in this book, unless you have someone experienced to help. Otherwise you may bump your head or get a very sore bottom.

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 37

  AcroBRATS SAVE BAMBI

  There are only two places to muck around, where I live—in the street or down by Merri Creek. If you had a horse there would be absolutely nowhere to put it because, apart from the footy oval, which is shorn like a carpet, all the ground is taken up by streets with rows of houses on each side. Each house has a garden which it wears like its own particular hairstyle. The Bartons’ is very magnificent and correct, with box hedges, a shaved rectangle of lawn and a cement driveway full of clean cars. Ours is wild, yellowed and weedy, with NO JUNK MAIL written in black texta on the mailbox. Next door, Mrs Trinka’s is flouncy, with ornamentals and puffs of blue hydrangea. At the Motts’ house there’s a slope of grass that you can roll down, but it makes you itchy after a while. There are trees, of course, mainly paperbarks and plane trees, and two hedges, but nowhere to swim—not unless you make friends with Harold Barton who has a swimming pool out the back. But I wouldn’t want to do that. Harold has dirty magazines under his bed, and he sneers.

  Doesn’t matter, there’s still a lot you can do in our street. Everything happens after school and before dinner. That’s when you go out with your dog or your skateboard or your secret plan. There’s a spilling—kids come tumbling out of doors and fences, with blobs of jam on their chins and jumbled-up notions in their minds and a loosed-up flop in their strut. We pile onto the street and shoot out a riot of looks and hunches, we sniff about, hook up our notions, pace our minds up and down the street and wait for something to happen, because something always will. It’s like a chemical rule—mix up kids on a long slope of bitumen with bikes and boards and dogs and a lazy lurking need to mess with the lattice of rules that looms over you at school, and before long something happens.

  To be honest, Harold Barton wouldn’t make friends with me, anyway, because I’m not pretty enough. He only talks to the pretty girls. Sixteen-year-olds with shapes sticking out. Girls like Marnie Aitkin who wears hipsters and says, ‘Oh really?’ to absolutely anything you might say.

  ‘Hey Marnie, they say tonight the stars will fall out of the sky, and if you stick out your tongue one might land on it, and if you swallow it then you become a star yourself.’

  ‘Oh sure,’ she says, ‘very funny.’ That’s the other thing she says. ‘Oh sure’.

  It doesn’t always happen with a bang in our street. Sometimes things sizzle into action. Sometimes you just stumble onto a game, and if a game’s got legs you can play it again the next day and the next. Like the game we play in the carpark spaces at the train station; that’s a game where still, even now, someone will say, ‘Wanna go down the carpark on the bikes?’ And we might go.

  But in the end it all depends on who’s out there and how the mix is made. Since the older ones (like Hoody Mott who can play French horn, and Roland Glumac, and Sarah with the legwarmers) go lurk in bedrooms and do homework, or smoke or talk on the telephone, you hardly see them much, and that leaves Harold Barton to decide who’s in and who’s not. That’s because he has the swimming pool and the biggest house. So he acts like he knows everything, and kids believe him because kids like swimming. What’s more, his parents let him do whatever he wants, so you can eat waffles and chocolate at his house, or wat
ch R-rated television, or play Powderfinger as loud as hell on the stereo. The main attraction at Harold’s is the back bungalow, because it’s a permanent parent-free zone. The Year Twelve girls, like Marnie Aitkin and Aileen Shelby, go there. Barnaby says they play Strip Jack Naked. Barnaby’s my older brother. Everyone liked him the most, but now he’s gone. He got sent away. That leaves Harold.

  Kids all have their own ways of grouping around and ganging-up and jiggling and tweaking and overhauling the ordinary state of things. Sometimes action surges down to the creek or trickles out across Westgarth Street or Hutton Street. Sometimes it scoops you up like an avalanche would if you were standing in the way. Sometimes it leaves behind small puddles, possibilities, promises . . . perhaps a new friend with a good bike.

  As for me, I avoid the main swell of street action and drift towards the puddles. A puddle isn’t just what’s left behind, although sometimes you may feel like it is. A puddle of people is full of rich deposits.

  Take my puddle, for example. There are normally three of us in it, though sometimes you could say four or five. First there’s me, and I’m exasperating and potentially infamous. My name is Lana Monroe. I have red hair and I’m twelve, almost thirteen, which means I’m not old enough to be invited to play in Harold’s bungalow but I’m too old for making water bombs or playing cumquat wars. That’s for kids.

  My name isn’t really Lana Monroe, I just like you to think it might be, since it has a famous kind of ring to it. My real name is Cedar B. Hartley; Cedar because it’s a type of tree and my mother was in a deep hippy phase when I was born. Hippies hinge a lot of their strong feelings on trees, and often give their children names like River and Marigold. Harold Barton screws up his nose at my name. ‘What kind of a name is that?’ he says. Harold suffers from a lack of imagination, says to my mother. She calls me Cedy when she’s in a good mood and Cedar when I’m in trouble.

  Then there’s my friend Caramella Zito who lives directly opposite me. She’s almost twelve, but not quite, so that makes me way older than her. There’s no lawn in her garden, just beds of beans and tomatoes and fennel, and also geraniums and an olive tree, and a real grape vine around the side. Caramella’s parents are very short and they don’t speak much English, but they give my mother bunches of grapes and sometimes a persimmon, which is the most spectacular fruit I have ever tried. Caramella is extremely shy, especially when she has pimples and Harold calls her Zito the Zit Face. She’s just a little bit chubby and wears a cross on a necklace. Caramella is a brilliant artist, though only I know that. Sometimes she doesn’t come outside into the street, so I go to her place.

  Then there’s Ricci. Ricci is about fifty or sixty, so that makes her by far the oldest. She lives next door to Caramella Zito’s and even though she’s really Yugoslavian she can speak Italian. So she’s chummy with Caramella’s parents. Sometimes, though, she swears about them. ‘Bloody Italians,’ she says. Ricci knows all kinds of things that other people don’t know. She can look at a rainbow and tell you what it thinks.

  ‘Ah look,’ she says, pointing at the rainbow, ‘a good season for berries and wine.’

  She lives with a fluffy white dog called Bambi, who’s about twice as big as a slipper. In her house there are a lot of flowers and stuffed animals and blown-up blurry photos of her in disco tights when she was young. Her hair is frizzy and blonde and she doesn’t like Australia, but she likes having a house. Her husband died a while ago so she has to take Valium, which makes her feel better and then worse again. Sometimes she works at the bakery, but mostly she walks about in the street talking to one person about another person and spreading sunflower seeds or cape gooseberry cuttings. Here’s what Ricci looks like:

  Sometimes in my puddle there’s also Hailey and her little brother Jean-Pierre, who mainly hoons around on a bike that’s way too big for him. They live on the corner in a house with a tall wood fence which is old with some bits missing, so you can peek through. Their father drives a Silvertop taxi. He’s huge and dark and he comes from Syria. Sometimes you can hear strange exultant music coming from their house. Once, I looked through the gap in the fence to see if there were people in turbans playing flutes and bongos, but it was just a ghetto blaster on a card table under a lemon tree, with the whole family, even a few grandmothers (in black head scarves, not turbans), sitting around eating McDonald’s. Hailey and Jean-Pierre don’t like Harold because he calls them Lebbos.

  But just about everyone else in the street seems to want to muck around with Harold. Even Barnaby once did.

  It was really because of Stinky that everything changed. What I really mean is everything started.

  Stinky is my dog. Once he was mine and Barnaby’s, but now he’s just mine. He’s only a sweet shaggy old mutt but I love him like mad. This is what he looks like:

  Barnaby found him down by the creek last year and brought him home saying, ‘Phew, he’s sure a stinky old bastard isn’t he?’ Mum was frantic, wringing her hands and sighing because Stinky jumped up on the couch straightaway and left dirty paw prints everywhere. Dirt tends to make all mothers anxious.

  When Stinky lifted his little hairy leg on the clean washing pile, Mum actually groaned. She looked at Barnaby and said, ‘He’s not staying.’ But Barnaby talked her into it. He could do that, because he was the only male in the house so Mum loved him an awful lot.

  My mum works with accident victims and she doesn’t come home till dinner time, so it’s usually just me and Stinky at home together after school. I shovel down a bowl of Weet-Bix and then we go out, either to the street or down the creek.

  One day I got home from school and Stinky wasn’t there. No one wriggling, stomping, huffing or burning around to find a sock to put in his mouth, no one acting like he’d been waiting around all day for me to come home, no one pleased to see me, no one I was pleased to see. The house felt thuddingly empty and unnaturally still, like a tree that isn’t moving its leaves in the wind. It was all wrong, I could tell. I yelled at the sad grey old walls with the wobbly windows and the Bruegel picture of peasants working in a yellow field, but nothing happened. I wanted a warm wriggling and a shouting, like I hear coming from Caramella Zito’s house, and sizzle smells like I smell at Ricci’s house, or even Barnaby hollering out a song on his guitar.

  And then I was sad; not purely sad, more murkily so. I felt as if there was nothing to count on or touch, nothing except echoes and shadows and disappearances. Life had turned to quicksand and the faint yellow light in the kitchen spread out towards me like the ghostly breath of lives that had left. Definitely spooky. And all because Stinky wasn’t there. Which goes to show how much difference a little furry friend can make.

  Our kitchen slopes downwards. There are big holes in the floor where you can see the dirt underneath, and in the middle of the kitchen there’s a wooden table with one shonky sloping leg that you need to kick every now and then to make it straight. It’s a good kitchen, though, because the slope makes it like a boat, and there’s a chunk of outside coming in through the window. You can see a canopy of oak leaves whispering in the blue air while you eat your Weet-Bix, and you can hear a frenzied chorus of myna birds and parrots, arguing over the acorns. The kitchen joins another small room where there’s a fat old couch and a tellie. To get this room warm you have to light the oven in the kitchen and leave the door open, but since there was no one to feel snug or lazy or buzzy with, I couldn’t even be bothered lighting the oven. I slumped down on the couch and tugged out handfuls of the muddy grape-coloured stuffing which bulged out of the holes, and thought about how Barnaby had gone, and Granma, and how I didn’t have a dad and how my mum wasn’t home, and how even Stinky had run away. Boy I hate it when people leave. Maybe I’ll leave too, I thought. Get on a train and go interstate. Just to be the one who went. I didn’t, though, because strange murders are committed in Adelaide, and Sydney is for people who tan easily and every other state is too far away and too hot. I went and asked Ricci if she’d seen Stinky. Ricci knows
everything that’s going on.

  ‘No, I not see Stinky,’ she squawked, because Ricci always squawks. ‘You try the creek?’

  ‘Nope, not yet.’

  She slapped my shoulder and said, ‘You go look. I go ask the boys.’

  The boys are two greyish men who live together in the neatest whitest house in the street. They have opium poppies and iceberg roses in their front garden and a white path leading to their door.

  ‘Go, don’t worry,’ said Ricci, giving me a shove. She always gives orders and shoves. She doesn’t mean it badly, though. It’s just that she doesn’t bother with suggestions and reasons because it’s too much trouble to find all those words that reasons need. Ricci is very economical. She grows all her own vegetables, and makes soup out of weeds and turkey necks. Sometimes she comes over to my house with turkey soup, and sighs and puts her hands on her hips.

  ‘Where your mother?’ she says. ‘Cedar, here I wash these dishes and you dry.’

  And once she starts cleaning you can’t stop her. She even scrubs out the cupboards and wipes the stove. It drives me mad, but afterwards I feel relieved because the house can seem snarly when it’s grubby. Then it gets this sweet pure look, like a home on tellie, when the stove is clean.

  I went down to the creek and I yelled out ‘Stinky’ all the way. I saw Marnie Aitkin and Aileen Shelby, because they always go about in a pair.

  ‘What are you yelling that out for, Cedar? Did you do a fart?’ said Aileen, who always has a smart-ass thing to say. Marnie giggled into her well manicured hand. Aileen’s eyes, I noticed, were close together—they had the look of a snake.

  ‘I lost my dog Stinky. Have you seen him?’

  Aileen shook her head.

  ‘Oh really?’ said Marnie. ‘We’re going to Harold’s house.’

  ‘Well have fun,’ I said, but I don’t think I meant it. Those girls made me feel not quite right.