All the Voices Cry by Alice Petersen

front door with her hair in disarray and her eyes red and puffed out. While his mother visited Poor Gladys, Norman waited in the garden. He made Baby Viebert eat leaves off the pepper bush hedge, and the heat on her tongue made Baby’s eyes water, which was good, because she was Norman’s prisoner, and it was right that she should know it. Above them the cabbage tree leaves cut slots in the sky with their cold dense blades.
    Not long after space men began to speak to Poor Gladys through the radiogram they came and took her away. Then Uncle Stewart began to say feeding flies for Tiny Freyberg. He said it with a pretend Texan accent that he had heard on the
radio. Feedin’ flahs fer Tahny Frahberg. Sometimes Uncle Stewart could not stop saying things.
    In 1951 General Freyberg became Baron Freyberg of Wellington and of Munstead in the County of Surrey. Nobody knew what became of Baby Viebert.
    Norman found himself staring at the woman knitting. Orange and yellow, purple and flamingo, she had a hundred colours. One side of her knitting bristled with strands that looped and twisted and hung untrimmed. She dropped one strand, picked up another, twisted it in, and knitted on, frowning over her work. Her silver bird’s nest of hair was held up by the sunglasses and a crab-like pincer high up at the back of her head. In her orange shirt, loose green trousers, sandals and a long loop of shells she looked at home in the tropical night.
    A flame-coloured ball of wool dropped from her lap, rolling out over the linoleum towards Norman’s foot. Without thinking he picked it up and wound it back towards her. The woman took the ball from him with a nod; her dense brown eyes studied him, without smiling. The humidity had made her hair start out in tendrils at her forehead. She finished her row and turned the knitting. Now he could see the hourglass pattern of inverted triangles forming and the diamonds in between.
    They were paging Norman. This is what you get if you pay extra to fly first class to the other side of the world. They care that you are aboard, in your seat, reducing the odds. The knitting woman looked up at him again and there was energy in her glance. She made a movement with her mouth as if
she were about to speak. Norman grimaced and looked away. He had made long preparations to escape this day. It was not a time for new acquaintances. He hurried away towards the gate, away from Monday, August 27th, towards Tuesday, August 28th. His shoes squeaked, resisting the linoleum.
    About the time that the plane crossed the dateline, a sudden jolt of turbulence shook Norman out of his half-sleep. Norman sat up and looked at the digital plane on the screen in front of him. He had done it. He had managed to evade all but three hours of Monday, August 27th, 2001. He was not feedin’ flies. All he had seen was a couple kissing in a tropical crush, all he had done was wind up a woman’s ball of wool.
    The lovers. The knitter. The figures collided in his head. All these years of waiting and he had failed to see what had been clear to Mrs Viebert both in her prime and in her grief. Now Norman struggled to reach Baby Viebert across the gap of sixty years, with her eyes so dark that the pupils were almost invisible, her hair long since turned to a mass of silvery tendrils like the pollen bearing innards of the roses that she used to pull apart. Had she not looked up when his name was paged? Baby Viebert had recognized him. No one forgets the person who first makes you eat the leaves of the pepper bush.
    Norman thought of the hourglass of time that had funnelled him towards Baby Viebert, and the empty years fanning out ahead of him, away from her. Ignoring the illuminated seatbelt sign, he began his search in the sky at once, stumbling over the folk slumbering under their fleecy shrouds, pushing past their sleeping knees; he would seek her forever
now. Headlong he rushed in his aeroplane through the freezing dark air,