Foreign Correspondence by Geraldine Brooks Read Free Book Online Page B

a taste for musical extravaganzas.
    Her theatrical flair imbued every letter, turning the small businesses of childhood into high drama. She used punctuation decoratively, throwing in clusters of exclamation points like bouquets of flowers, to brighten things up. A trip down a storm-water drain became an epic trek to the heart of darkness: “Wewere half way through when a man through a bucket of water down!!! It’s pitch black the whole way but the good thing is, it’s IMPOSSIBLE to get stuck, suphercate (or however you spell it) drown or anything else.”
    A week at camp was transfigured into a series of near-death experiences of perilous hikes and buses careening down mountains. “One day we hiked for MILES to the beach and when we got there, it was closed! We also hiked for miles to Church, but of course, it was open.” Her world was full of experiences, ranging the streets in a clot of neighborhood kids, going to pajama parties—“boy! was it beaut! We talked ALL night (sorry, a bit of exajuration (or however you spell it) there we got to sleep at 1.30 AM !).”
    Even her handwriting was dramatic, changing from cuneiform spikes in one letter to flamboyant curvaceous scrawls the next. “For my birthday,” she wrote, “Sally gave me two divine garters. They’re black lace with colored ribbon.”
    For my birthday, I got The Student’s Book of Basic Biology— an illustrated tome I’d longed for. I racked my brains to make my letters as interesting as hers. My life had more to do with thinking than doing. It was solitary, full of books and the imaginary journeys they took me on. I had just discovered science fiction. I was devouring John Wyndham’s Day of the Triffids , Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 and C. S. Lewis’s Out of the Silent Planet as fast as the library could order them. I spent more time than ever staring at the stars from the sun-warmed roof of the back veranda, imagining the unseen planets out by Alpha Centauri.
    Sonny and I couldn’t have been more different. But somehow we eked out a correspondence of equal parts dreams and dailiness. When she wrote to me excitedly that she was to make her television debut, I rushed home from school in time to see her, decked out in a cloud of tulle, dancing the role of WhiteBird in an adaptation of an Aboriginal legend for an afternoon children’s program. To me, it might as well have been a lead role in a Broadway hit. Sonny was on her way!
    My progress toward my dream was more incremental. By then I was in better health and going to school regularly. My mother’s one-on-one tutorials proved more than compensation for the months of classes I missed. I found that rather than being left behind I was embarrassingly ahead in all but mathematics, in which I continued to show a distressing lack of aptitude for a would-be scientist.
    Sonny and I had one dream in common, and that was travel. It was the dream on which all the others depended. Sonny and I were members of the last generation of Australians who grew up knowing that one day we would have to go away. For those who had ambitions, Australia in the mid-1960s looked like a very small place. The Big Trip Elsewhere was a rite of passage and a test of nerve.
    Sonny and I both knew the ritual of the International Terminal where the big white liners left for overseas. We had been to the docks to see off our sisters’ friends, headed to England. The ships would carry hundreds at a time away from their country, and it seemed that thousands—the friends and families left behind—stood on the pier to say goodbye. We’d throw streamers to the travelers pressed against the railings of the departing ships. A riot of colored bands would loop from ship to shore, the travelers clutching one end, those remaining behind holding the other. Finally, the deep foghorn would groan and the ship would draw away. We sang “Auld Lang Syne” as the streamers pulled taut and finally snapped, wafting to rest for a moment, gaudy