Extract: Wonderland, by Tracy Farr

Te Motu Kairangi Miramar Peninsula, Wellington 1912. Doctor Matti Loverock spends her days and nights bringing babies into the world, which means her daughters - seven-year-old triplets Ada, Oona and Hanna - have grown up at Wonderland, the once-thriving amusement park owned by their father, Charlie. Then a grieving woman arrives to stay from the other side of the world, in pain and incognito, fleeing scandal. She ignites the triplets' curiosity and brings work for Matti, diverting them all from what is really happening at Wonderland. In a bold reimagining, Marie Curie - famous for her work on radioactivity - comes to Aotearoa and discovers both solace and wonder.

Extract from Wonderland by Tracy Farr, The Cuba Press, $38.00 RRP. Here is a story. We can tell it to you. We saw it with our own six eyes. We heard it with our own six shell-like ears. We held it in our own six hands, so we can tell you (oh yes!).  

The start of this story is the day the Lady came. No, the start of this story is the start of us, and Wonderland. 

Our first memory is of the sea. Salt scent womb water, the  iron taste of birth. Our mother croons songs—birdlike,  incomprehensible—from her own mother’s faraway home, while Charlie, our father, drinks whisky and shouts his thanks to God. 

Our next first memory is of holding hands. We three, holding hands in the womb, all together. Then—whoosh! Into  the light! Ada goes first, as Ada always will, slithering into the world at a quarter to midnight on the eve of the new year.  Oona is next, forever in between, born on the middle stroke of midnight, as the old year cedes to the new. And Hanna, dear Johanna, is last of us to land, waiting for the new year, new day, a January baby. Our mother always says that we slipped out of her like broad beans from the pod, pop pop pop, slick as you like, unstoppable once we started. When our father first saw us, he made the sign of the cross—spectacles,  testicles, wallet and watch—whether in thanks at our safe delivery, or to ward off the witchery of our triple likeness, we cannot know (though we like to think it was thanks).

Our third first memory is of the scent of apples. We three lie in a wooden apple box lined with flannel and newspapers, there in all our newness, on the first day of the brand-new year. Our hands reach to connect, Ada’s thumb in Hanna’s mouth, Oona’s hand on Ada’s cheek, Hanna grasping Oona’s pointing finger in her fist. 

Mrs Reddy delivers us, and it is Mrs R who has the forethought to mark us as we make our appearance. ‘Three little girls, Saint Katie Sheppard help them.’ Mrs Wilma Reddy wears the suffrage colours (Votes for Women!) in a rosette at her breast, in support of her not yet-enfranchised British sisters. She unpins the ribbons to fix them to our ankles, green for Ada, white for Oona, violet for Hanna, fixing our colours for life. We have those scraps of ribbon still. Our mother, Matti, kept them. 

In the now of then, we look up towards the shape of our mother. We three are our own little selves, lying in our apple box, the space between us blurred. 

We cannot remember (how could we?) the womb. We cannot remember the apple box, or the incubators we were moved to that first day (the three of us, behind glass, as alike as little dolls), or any of our earliest days and years at Wonderland. And yet, we do. We do remember them, even if those memories are not entirely our own. We remember the apple box, the  incubators. We remember the scratch of the white linen masks that disguised our mother and Mrs R. We remember sucking gritty milk from rubber nipples on glass bottles. 

And we remember the world around us, and above us.  We remember Mr Halley’s great comet that shone in the  sky, and our father’s plan to sell gas masks to save us all from  its poison, and a word we heard then, perihelion, like the name of a flower. We remember (though perhaps it hasn’t happened  yet) the whale, beached at Lyall Bay, and the children playing  on it and around it (until it began to wobble and stink). We remember—though it happened before we were born—the day the hot air balloon landed with a crash, and we remember thinking that a hot air balloon, as it deflated, might look like the shape of a whale on a beach, or a teardrop on its side,  going nowhere. Like this: 

So, yes, we remember the events of our shared lives, and of lives before our own. Some are in softer focus, hazy, as in a  dream. Others we see with such crystal clarity—as if shone like coloured light shifting on a bare white wall—that we can summon and relive them in an instant. 

There could be no mother of tiny triplets better prepared for the care of us than our own dear mother, Matti, a graduate  of the medical school in Dunedin in the dying years of the old century. Despite her class-topping marks, the only position open to Dr Matilda Rumble (as our mother was then) was in the womanly field of obstetrics, and she took to it with the gusto she had applied to all her studies. That same gusto took her north and east, across the Pacific Ocean by ship, then across the great expanse of America by train, to New York City, to see for herself the startling new inventions she had read about—baby incubators saving the lives of tiny early borns, sealing them snug as bugs in glass cases, for lifesaving medical care. 

Matti arrived in New York with a letter of introduction to Dr Martin Couney. When hospitals had refused to risk his new technology in their conservative institutions (leaving  tiny too-soon babies to slip away, God’s will, amen), the  enterprising Dr Couney had taken a showman-like leap. He famously took his fabulous contraptions to the carnival sideshow instead—the miracle of life as amazing an attraction as any of the freaks and frights and sights on show—and used the entrance fees to fund the babies’ care. And so, Dr Matilda Rumble found herself assisting Dr Couney in the Living Infant Incubator at Coney Island, every day donning white coat, white stockings, white lace-up shoes, a white paper cap over her straight dark hair, busily tending babies behind the viewing glass, ignoring the punters who (ignoring the signs) rapped on the glass with their knuckles. Matti spent two years saving tiny lives under the rattle and scream of the Coney Island roller coaster, learning everything she could from Dr Couney and the very many babies in their joint care. Then she took the train west across the country, and then the ship south across the sea, all the way back to  New Zealand, with three glass incubators and all their fittings packed into wooden crates, a bag stuffed with papers and lists and treatment regimes, to set up her own model baby  hospital. Her challenge: to find an accommodating carnival of her own, back home. 

That’s how Dr Matilda Rumble first crossed paths with our father, Carnival Charlie Loverock, and he wooed her  with his big hands and loud voice, and his grand dreams of Wonderland amusement park, Miramar’s Mecca of Merry Souls. He promised a place for her Infant Incubators, and that was that. Before she knew it Matti had a bun in her own oven, and a ring on her finger, in that order. 

The bun was three buns, though she did not know it at first.  She grew bigger and bigger, as each day the grand opening of Wonderland—complete with Wonderland’s Wonderful Infant  Incubator, waiting empty, quiet and ready—grew closer. Her timing, as it happened, could not have been better. She popped us out, pop pop pop, while the paint was drying on the colourful façades and plywood hoardings of Wonderland’s  wonderful buildings and many attractions, and the stage was set for its official opening. 

And so we became Wonderland’s first residents, first act,  and first show. Wonderland (The Cuba Press) is available in bookstores now.