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Latest story >>>The Magic Mansion (http://neuage.org/MM/ Maggie and Mabel's Magic Mansion will take them wherever they wish to go. The house used for this story is a model made by my father-in-law after visiting our house in Round Lake, New York and upon return to Australia he built this model based on his memory of our house. The page for this house is at http://neuage.org/house/ As of October 2015 there are three chapters and an introduction to these adventures.
It was
Friday afternoon.
The
last day of school, before the first day of the
holidays.
Leigh
McGee tried to walk into his room.
He couldn’t get very far.
There was no room to move.
He tossed his school books onto a very high pile of something somewhere
in the middle of the room and walked away.
It
was summer. Leigh put his bathers
on and threw his school clothes into his room. They landed somewhere in the
midst of another pile of something or other.
What
Leigh McGee did not know, probably because he didn’t look around his room,
except to follow a thin cleared path to his bed, was that his room was more than
just a place where he threw his things.
It
was a home. A home for a
hairy-nosed wombat.
illustraton - Aida
Pottinger 3-2001
The
wombat had made a complex tunnel system in Leigh McGee’ s
room.
Its
burrow was in the middle of a large pile of clothes in the corner of Leigh’s
room at the foot of the bed. The
main tunnel from the wombat’s home followed the walls around the room. It
wandered beneath the full length of the bed, behind an antique 18th century
cupboard, past the overflowing clothing hamper, past the desk – then
stopped. At the end of the tunnel
the wombat would peek about to see that the coast
was
clear, then hop up to Leigh’s desk to the window. Leigh had left the window open
the summer before and because it got stuck he never bothered to close it
again.
Leigh’s
desk had a huge pile of things on it.
Papers, books, toys, some baseballs, a football, basket ball and a
computer that had yet to be used, as well as food, clothing, dreams and
wishes.
The
only clearing in Leigh’s room was a narrow path to his
bed.
Leigh
McGee’s dad used to help him clean his room. Actually his dad did the cleaning by
himself in the “old” days while the
kids were at school. But since he
had started writing his latest novel, he just didn’t get to Leigh’s room any
more. Leigh’s dad worked in his office writing. He would get so involved with writing
that he would forget to do the things he used to do. He would leave his desk only to make
something to eat for the
children when he remembered. Once a
week or every other week, whenever he remembered, he would go into town and
purchase groceries, do laundry or buy clothes because the children could not
find their school uniforms or socks.
The
children didn’t mind. They knew it was just a phase. Though they thought it was
a very strange phase. His other
novels had sold well, so there was money enough to live on. It was easier to give the children money
to go and buy a new track-suit or sneakers, then it was to take the time to try
and find the lost sneaker, or the other odd sock, or a favourite jumper. It was often easier to order pizza or
Chinese take away than to make a meal. As their father often said. ‘We are
flying on automatic at the moment.’
The kids understood.
The
childrens’ parents had once lived together in the city. When their dad wanted
to
move
into their seaside holiday home after the separation, to write his novel, the
children went with him. They liked the seashore and they liked going to school
in the small nearby town. Mom liked
the city. The noise, the
activities, art galleries and museums.
The children liked the country.
They wanted to play outside, something they didn’t feel free to do in the
city. Most of all they wanted their
parents to live together and they knew that some day, someway, they would
succeed.
Their
mother was an artist and like their dad with his writing, she would get so
involved with a painting that she would forget everything for days, sometimes
weeks
and
months.
It
was the novel that Leigh’s dad was writing that was so strange. Its title was,
“The
Yellow-bellied
Sheath-tailed bat that scared Ned Kelly at Stringbark Creek in the Wombat Ranges
and the ecological effects on the world if it becomes
extinct”
The
children tried to tell their dad that the title was too long, and would anyone
really buy it when it was finished?
He didn’t pay any attention though.
To him it was going to be a masterpiece. Maybe even a major movie. At least, it would become a four part
television series.
After
three novels that were easy to write “They just came off the top of me head their
dad had said” “The Yellow-bellied Sheath-tailed bat that scared Ned Kelly at
Stringbark Creek in the Wombat Ranges and the ecological effects on the world if
it becomes extinct.” was the first story that he had to do research on. His office was almost as bad as Leigh
McGee’s room. Tables were filled
with books and papers.
And
there was always the lights on, music, television and even singing and
laughing.
And
there were several paths to the desk. No hairy-nosed wombat would settle in
his
office.
Of
course no one knew what was going on in Leigh’s room. It was too much of a mess to go
inside. Both children slept in
their father’s office. The children
liked to be near their dad and since he would sit typing until the middle of the
night they would bring their sleeping bags into the office and sleep on the
floor. They had made areas in
between books, papers, maps and the filing cabinets to sleep
in.
Sometimes,
actually a lot of times, when the children awoke the next morning, their father
would be asleep at his desk. The
children didn’t say too much about, “ The Yellow-bellied Sheath-tailed bat that
scared Ned Kelly at Stringbark Creek in the Wombat Ranges and the ecological
effects on the world if it becomes
extinct”.
They
wished that the book would become extinct too, so that they could go back to
living like a normal family again.
Maybe their mother would even come and live
with them. At other times they
talked about making the title into a cartoon series when they grew up. But they didn’t tell their father
that. They didn’t want to hurt his
feelings.
The
hairy-nosed wombat liked her new home.
She was from the Nullarbor Plain and had snuck onto a truck and had ended
up at a truck depot on the same block as Leigh McGee’s
house.
When
the wombat first walked around the block she wasn’t impressed. It was a lot different than the
Nullarbor Plains. She had never seen so
many houses. And all
so
close
together too.
There were cats and dogs in her new neighbourhood. The wombat stayed away from them. She
didn’t know whether they would be friendly toward her or not. She had watched a dog chase a cat up a
tree. It wasn’t a pretty
sight. She didn’t want to get
involved in rough housing like that.
No way. Leigh McGee’s house
was near a river that flowed into the sea, so there was plenty of exploring to
do and plenty of food left by plenty of tourists. The hairy-nosed
wombat
had
a pretty good life, except that there were no other wombats around to play
with.
The
wombat used to go out of the open window every night and walk over to the truck
depot that she had arrived at. She
hoped another wombat would arrive at the
truck
depot like she had. She had discovered the open window a year ago when a dog had
spotted her and began to give chase.
She quickly looked for a place to hide and that is when she spotted the
open window to Leigh McGee’s room.
She
had been hungry too. She found a
lot of food in the room. There were
a lot of new things to try. There was a half eaten peanut butter and
jelly sandwich next to the bed. It
was strange tasting to a wombat that had never had anything more than grass and
shrubs and herbs before.
There
were other things to eat too.
Biscuits, crackers, toast, potato chips, nuts and lollies. The wombat liked to try different
foods. But usually she settled for
the normal things growing in the front yard. The family hadn’t mowed their lawn for a
long time so there was tall grass and the shrubs were good. And because no one in the house seemed
to notice much of anything any more, they didn’t notice the partly eaten plants
in the front yard. The children
would play in a nearby park instead of their front yard. At least the nearby
park got mowed.
One
night the wombat was in the front yard chomping on a shrub when she heard a
commotion. A dog was barking
loudly. The wombat sat up and
looked over the tall grass. Running
in her direction was another wombat.
The two wombats spotted each other and both ran toward the house with the
dog loudly barking after them. The
two wombats quickly climbed through Leigh’s open window. The visiting wombat had
climbed aboard a road-train that had arrived at the nearby truck depot
too.
The
two wombats took up home in Leigh McGee’s room. Both wombats made their own burrows -
though they shared the tunnel to the window. They explored
together
and
no one knew that they were in Leigh’s room.
During
the summer more animals arrived at the truck depot. There were
marsupial
moles,
fat-tailed dunnarts, ring-tailed possums and a wide variety of small animals
that were looking for places to live.
Soon Leigh McGee’s room was more like a zoo than a child’s bedroom. It wasn’t possible to see at first
glance from the doorway to Leigh’s room, all that was going on in the
bedroom.
As
more things were thrown into the room and the piles of clothing, books and
whatever else Leigh didn’t know what to do with landed in the room, the animals
inside made more and more tunnels.
The
children’s father was finished with his current writing project. “The Yellow-
bellied Sheath-tailed bat that scared Ned Kelly at Stringbark Creek in the
Wombat Ranges and the ecological effects on the world if it
becomes extinct” was over two- thousand pages not counting additional maps,
photos, diagrams, and non-related items such as pictures of the kids when they
were young, a trip to Paris and a recipe for tofu
cheesecake:
|
Mix
in a blender then let it set in the refrigerator. Oh! cover with slices of mango
before putting in the fridge.
He
sent the manuscript to several book publishers. The publishers had no idea what to do
with “The Yellow-bellied Sheath-tailed bat that scared Ned Kelly at Stringbark
Creek in the Wombat Ranges and the ecological effects on the world if it becomes
extinct”. One publisher even sent a letter saying it was the best book - that
made absolutely no sense - that she had ever read.
The
children’s father didn’t understand.
To him it made perfect sense.
If anything, he thought that maybe the book was too short. And so was the title. The title clearly had to be longer in
order to explain what was inside.
The children worried about their father. They tried to talk to their mother about
him, but she was very busy painting.
Their
mother was getting ready to do a major art show at the museum in the city. The children thought her paintings were
even more ridiculous than their father’s books.
Her
paintings were huge. They didn’t
look like anything that was describable.
The
closest
the children could come to describing her pictures was to say that they looked
as if someone had poured buckets of paint on the canvas then rolled across
it. It was difficult for the
children to believe that their
mother actually spent months on each picture.
The
children and their father drove to the opening of their mother’s art show. It was very crowded there. There were radio, television and
newspaper reporters at the show.
After
all, both parents were famous people. One for art and one for
novels.
The
children’s parents hadn’t seen each other for over a year and they were both
quite nervous about seeing one another again.
Their
dad brought along his finished novel and handed it to the children’s
mother.
The
children’s mother thought that the book had an excellent title and she sat down
in the middle of the museum and began to read, “The Yellow-bellied Sheath-tailed
bat that scared Ned Kelly at Stringbark Creek in the Wombat Ranges and the
ecological effects on the world if it becomes extinct”
The
children shook their heads and said, “ but mom, it is two-thousand pages
long. It will take weeks to read
it”. But she wanted to read it, then and there. Even when the gallery was
closing she was still reading. She
hadn’t noticed anyone else. She
just kept reading. And every once
in awhile she would say, “This is really good.”
Meanwhile
the children’s father was standing in front of one of the huge
paintings.
One
of the ones that looked like some people had rolled across the canvas after
spilling buckets of paint. He stood
there for hours, staring. Every
once in a while he would say, “This is really excellent.” Even when the gallery was closing,
he was still standing and staring at the painting.
The
children looked at each other. They
knew what to do. They managed to
get their mom and dad into their father’s car. They put their father’s book in with
their mom.
They
talked the security guards at the museum into taking down their mother’s
painting and had them tie it onto the top of their father’s
car.
Their
father drove to their seashore
home. All the while saying, “I didn’t know your art was so
wonderful. And the mother
said, “This book is great, I had forgotten what an imaginative writer you
were.”
It
took the children’s mother weeks to finish “ The Yellow-bellied Sheath-tailed
bat that scared Ned Kelly at Stringbark Creek in the Wombat Ranges and the
ecological effects on the world if it becomes extinct Then she wanted to read it
again. No publisher in the world
would publish it. But the
children’s mother loved it and to them that was what was important. The family
was back
together again and they were all away from the city.
The
huge painting was put up in the garage.
The children said that they would never go into the house again if the
painting was in the living room.
The parents were unhappy about putting it in the garage but they did
anyway.
They
hired a house cleaner and the family prepared to go away on
holiday.
Before
they left on holiday, the house cleaner came screaming out of Leigh’s room.
The
animals had been discovered.
Everyone in the family liked the animals so much that they fenced in the
front yard and let the animals live there.
When
they came back from their holiday, together, the house was incredibly
tidy.
The
children’s parents got jobs in a nearby town as shopkeepers. The father still worked on his writing,
but wrote stories for children instead of long novels that made no sense. He wrote children’s stories that made no
sense, but children loved them and they sold well.
Leigh’s
mother took up film making in her spare time and though the children thought
some of her movies were a bit strange, they were happy that she wasn’t rolling
around in paint or whatever it was that she did to do her
paintings.
Most
of all, the family was back together again, they didn’t live in the city any
more, and they had all the animals from the lost world in Leigh McGee’s
room. The animals even had a door
in the fence
where they could go in and out whenever they wanted to. But most of the animals chose to stay in
the yard all the time.
Terrell
Adsit-Neuage 1992 Victor Harbor South Australia
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