We See the Stars Page 10

  I sat on the end of my bed and looked out at the backyard. Superman took his cape off and put it around my shoulders, and the warmth of it went into my blood and settled down the bees. I could hear Grandma and Dad in the back room, and even if I put my hands up over my ears the sound of it travelled along the air and in along the dust in the sunlight, so that the words got sucked in with my breath.

  ‘You really need to have a lie-down,’ Dad said.

  ‘I have to go back in a bit. I’ll rest after.’

  Superman put his hands on the window and watched the sweat on his fingers spread out along the glass.

  ‘Do you want me to come with you?’ Dad asked. ‘What do they need, anyway?’

  ‘I want to be there when they release the body,’ Grandma said, and then there wasn’t any sound for a long time, and you could see the little ridges in Superman’s fingerprints, right there on the glass in front of your eyes.

  ‘The hospital said they can help with the funeral,’ Grandma said. ‘They spoke to the chaplain this morning. Apparently it all just basically runs itself.’ The kettle started boiling, and the whistle of it shot out through the roof and bounced down the street. ‘I want to pick the hymns, though.’

  ‘No,’ Dad said. ‘No hymns.’ It sounded like a cup hitting the sink. Superman’s fingerprints spread out across the window and onto the wall beside it, and covered the wallpaper all the way up to the roof.

  ‘You know he asked after you?’ she said.

  ‘He didn’t even know who I bloody was in the end,’ Dad said.

  ‘He did sometimes. He wasn’t always like that. You’d know if you’d visited.’

  ‘What about the flowers?’ Dad asked. ‘And the notice in the paper?’

  ‘The woman’s coming over tomorrow to help pick out the flowers. I’ll sort it.’

  ‘If you need me to—’

  ‘I’ll sort it,’ Grandma said.

  I put my hand on the glass and spread my fingers wide like Superman’s. My hand wasn’t as big, but the shape was the same. For a long time, we just looked at each other through the glass. We stood there for ages, just Superman and me. If I stared at him long enough my eyes started to fuzz over, and his eyes and his mouth and his nose started to blur, and just before the ache started right back behind my eyes and I had to close them, for just a second with his face all blurred, you could see that he was different. He wouldn’t be Superman at all.

  ‘Do you think we have to go to school tomorrow?’ Davey said.

  I turned around. He’d finished his bath and was sitting on his bed reading one of my old comics. He was making little sniffling noises, and he wiped his nose along the top of his doona.

  ‘Do you still try to talk to Mum?’

  I faced the window again so that my back was to him, and I closed my eyes to try to get the sad out, and I heard Dad open the back door to have a cigarette, and I heard Grandma snoring on the couch, and I heard stars die and explode into darkness, and I heard the Earth groan and shudder, and stop.

  ***

  Davey and me didn’t go to school for the rest of the week, but we had to stay in the back room for most of it and Davey wasn’t allowed to have the TV on, because it meant Grandma couldn’t hear when she was on the phone. She was calling everyone to tell them about the funeral. She told Dad she was worried there wouldn’t be enough people if she didn’t ring around.

  There were enough people on the day that the front two rows were full, and Grandma was happy. After we got back from the funeral, Davey and me were on sandwich duty. Davey had to give everyone a little plate and a napkin, and I had to walk around with the big platters and make sure that everyone got something. A couple of the nurses from the hospital were there, even though Grandma had told us about how Grandpa would bite them sometimes or call them rude names. They had a couple of sandwiches but only one of them had a beer, and they left early to get ready for their next shift in the morning. Grandma said after they’d left that she was happy that they’d come, but she was glad when they’d gone. It meant she could get back on the booze properly, she said.

  After everyone had eaten I went and stood by Mum’s door. There were a couple of old people standing around and I wanted to make sure they didn’t bug her. In the end I sat down with my back to the wood and put my knees up under my chin. I thought about Grandpa alone in bed in the hospital, biting people and not knowing who anybody was. I thought about his papery skin and his dry, pink tongue thick and flat in his mouth.

  ‘Simon?’ Grandma said. She was standing right in front of me and I looked down at her toes. ‘Can you clear up the empties?’ she said. ‘Davey’s gone to have a lie-down.’

  I dragged the plastic bag around the back, and it was so heavy I couldn’t even put it over my shoulder. One of the old women had told me to use two bags because of the weight of all the glass, and when I dragged it across the concrete and ripped a hole in the first layer I was happy that I’d done it. The bins were down the side of the house, near the driveway, and as I came around the corner to go back inside, I saw Cassie at the letterbox. She gave me a little wave. The house was full of noise made out of old people and beer bottles left half open on the table. It smelt like stale bread and dusty carpet and my tummy seesawed when I thought about it. I waved back and walked out to the letterbox. Around her the air was cleaner.

  ‘Come for a walk, Numpty,’ Cassie said, and she pulled her jacket tight around her shoulders. ‘Keep me company, yeah?’

  It got dark quickly, but Cassie and me walked underneath the streetlights, which made our skin glow orange like we were on fire, and sometimes I’d look over at Cassie and she would be staring ahead at the road with her eyes wide open and her shoulders all the way back. She didn’t say much and her steps were louder than mine, and they bounced off the windows and front doors of the houses and made an echo that went all around us, and that kept us still and safe and tucked up in the sound. I didn’t know where we were going, but I just followed her footsteps.

  ‘Do you reckon you want to stay here when you finish school?’ Cassie asked.

  I didn’t answer. I didn’t really know where else there was to go.

  ‘I reckon we’ll go to high school, and then I want to move to the city and go to uni,’ Cassie said. ‘You can do whole courses just about dancing. You and me can live together, we’ll get a house in the city, and you can drive me back from the pub when I’m too pissed to see straight.’

  When we got to the cricket oval we saw there were already some boys hanging out there, so we doubled back and went to the kids’ playground. Cassie sat on a swing and I stood beside it. People had carved messages on the wooden frame and I traced my fingers over them and felt the ridges under my skin.

  ‘For a good time call Stephanie Baker,’ Cassie read, and snorted. ‘No-one’s calling that number in a fit.’ She looked over at me, and I hoped she couldn’t see how red my face was in the dark. ‘It’s a sex thing, don’t worry about it,’ she said.

  I felt my cheeks get even hotter, and I thought about how she sounded when she said the S word, and then I put my hands in my pockets and balled up my fists. Cassie was quiet for a while. I tried not to read any more graffiti.

  ‘D’ya know what used to be here, before they made it a cricket ground?’ Cassie asked. ‘It was where they put the dead animals after they gutted and skinned ’em. The meat factory or whatever was just there.’ She pointed to an old building half falling over just behind a line of trees.

  I looked down at my feet, at the ground where the grass was short and stamped on, and where only the rubber from my shoes kept it apart from my skin.

  ‘That’s why the grass grows so good—it’s all the fertiliser,’ Cassie said. She kicked her feet up so that she could swing higher, and the bottoms of her shoes were covered with little bits of bone and blood. ‘Was he a good bloke, your Grandpa?’ she asked.

  I felt the prickles all up and down my arms, and I felt a hole in my tummy open up and suck in my inside
s, and I felt it as I turned inside out right there in the playground, so that all my blood and all my nerves were out in the open air.

  ‘Yes, but then he forgot he was,’ I said.

  Cassie stopped swinging and stared at me.

  ‘Oi,’ she said, and she was grinning. ‘Is that your voice? It’s not what I thought it’d be.’ She laughed for a second, and then went serious again. ‘You should work on that, Numpty, you sound like a girl.’

  For a long time we didn’t say anything, and there was one light in the park that blacked out all the stars but still wasn’t strong enough for me to see any more of Cassie than her white skin and her hair.

  ‘I guess your dad must be extra sad, hey?’ Cassie said.

  I shrugged. If you stand at the bottom of the front porch where the steps go up, you can see into Mum’s bedroom. If the lights are on, you can see right through the curtains to the bed.

  ‘They made Grandpa take the bus when he got too bad at driving,’ I said. ‘But then once he went to get on and missed a step and fell over, and he hurt his knee on the metal and he couldn’t stand up, and the ambulance had to come and he was bleeding, and then he didn’t take the bus anymore after that.’

  The air got heavy with the silence again, and it wrapped all around us and kept out the cold. I knew that Cassie was looking because I could feel the black of her eyeholes staring at me but I kept my eyes on the ground. I dug my shoes under the tanbark, so that little bits fell in the sides and underneath my socks. I kicked them out.

  ‘Do you reckon it’d be good to be a bus driver?’ Cassie asked. She held her hands up in front of her like she was holding a steering wheel. ‘You could see all the different towns and stuff,’ she said. ‘You could pretty much see everything.’

  ‘Davey used to have a doll called Baby,’ I said, and Cassie laughed.

  ‘What, like a baby doll?’ she said, and I nodded.

  ‘It actually used to be mine. I got it when Davey was born, but I never liked it.’

  ‘Those things give me the creeps,’ Cassie said.

  ‘Davey didn’t even really like it that much, but then Mum was going to have another baby, and he carried it around everywhere after that. He wouldn’t let it go. He even tried to take it to school, but he was in grade two and he wasn’t allowed to, and he chucked such a fit that he nearly lost his voice for a week. Dad took it off him and hid it in the cupboard, but he cried so much Mum gave it back, and then Dad got mad at Mum and yelled at her, and then I had an angry and pulled a bit of my hair out over my ear, and it took ages for it to grow back so I had a bare spot that got sore on cold mornings. Dad gave up trying to take Baby after that.’

  Cassie had stopped swinging again, and she was leaning over to listen to me, and I realised then that I was only speaking just a bit more than a whisper, but I couldn’t make my voice go any louder.

  ‘Grandpa came over one day and he took Baby from Davey, and the house was quiet except for Dad crying in the living room, and we went out and buried Baby under the plum tree, and Grandpa held my hand so tight I thought it would break.’

  I puffed out all my air and it was mist in front of my face, and it hung there in the light.

  ‘You cold, Numpty?’ Cassie said, and she clapped her hands together and rubbed them and the sound shot out from all around us and bounced off the trees and up and around the cricket oval so that you could hear it echo away. ‘You want to go?’

  I sucked in enough breath that I felt the skin catch up under my ribcage. I thought about our place all dark and quiet. I thought about Grandpa in hospital getting black splodges under his arms from the newspaper. I kept looking up at the sky but you couldn’t see the stars, and there was cold on my cheeks and on my hands, and the stone in my tummy shifted so that I thought I might be sick, and suddenly Cassie was all around me, and my face was on her shoulder and her neck and in her hair, and I didn’t know the howl was mine till the burn was in my throat.

  Thirteen

  I felt the squeeze in my chest before I’d even woken up properly, and for a second I heard the coughing before I felt it coming out of my mouth. It was so tight that I had to push the doona off to get rid of the weight of it, and I grabbed for the bedside lamp. Davey was already up and halfway to the wardrobe by the time I got the light on, and he pulled my puffer out of the pocket of his school pants and threw it to me. I could hear the rattle when I tried to take a breath in and the bones in my chest stretching with all the extra air. I couldn’t breathe out to get it to go down again. When I looked under my top my ribs were sticking out through the skin.

  ‘Dad!’ Davey yelled, but I could already hear his feet running down the corridor, and when he flicked the big light on both Davey and I winced from the brightness of it.

  ‘Shit,’ Dad said, and he was kneeling in front of me. I had a go on the puffer, but I couldn’t get it down far enough for all the air already trapped in my chest.

  ‘Just take it one go at a time,’ Dad said, and he put his hand on my stomach. ‘Into here, okay? Get the puffer into here.’

  I tried again, and the taste was metal and sharp on the back of my throat, and my eyes had started watering so that I couldn’t really see.

  ‘Go and get a wet face washer,’ Dad said, and Davey ran out of the room. ‘Make sure it’s cold!’ Dad yelled after him.

  I wheezed again and coughed hard, but I couldn’t get my chest to go down.

  ‘Shit,’ Dad said. ‘Should we try counting?’

  I had another suck on the puffer, and I felt it go a little bit further down into my throat. I was panting, and my legs kept squirming underneath me, and I kept pulling at my pyjama top to try to get some space under it.

  ‘How many red things?’ Dad said, but I was seeing little swimming lights in front of my eyes, and things were starting to get dark around the edges, and I shook my head at him.

  ‘It’s alright,’ Dad said, and as Davey ran back in with the wet face washer he slipped my top over my head and put the washer right up against my skin. ‘Breathe, Simon, just breathe,’ he said.

  ‘It’s so dusty,’ Davey said. ‘Dad, was it the dust?’

  ‘I don’t know, Davey—just stay quiet for a second, mate,’ Dad said.

  I had another go on the puffer, and I felt a little give in my chest that let me get some of the air out. Superman stood at the window and pointed up to the sky. I saw three stars lined up in a row. I felt the muscles relax under my throat. I started to remember. I closed my eyes.

  ***

  My head was in Mum’s lap and I was lying sideways across the backseat. Dad was in the front and he was driving so fast that the streetlights were going by in a blur. He’d barely had enough time to wake up Davey and take him to the neighbours since Davey was too young to be left alone. My wheeze was so hard and so loud that my eyes were watering. I couldn’t get enough breath, and when I sucked in air it burnt all the way down to my tummy. Mum had her head craned forward so she could look at me, and she kept asking Dad how long till we got to the hospital, and he kept telling her that it’d be another fifteen minutes at least, and every now and then he looked over his shoulder into my face and there was so much fear there that I had to squeeze my eyes tight against it.

  ‘How did you not know he’d lost his puffer?’ Dad asked Mum.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Mum said. ‘I just didn’t notice.’

  ‘We shouldn’t have trusted him with it,’ said Dad. ‘He’s only six—it’s too young.’

  ‘Well I thought we had the spare,’ Mum said, and she was pushing my arms down to my sides but I was pushing them upwards, and I didn’t mean to but my fingernails kept catching on the front seat.

  I kept wheezing, and I felt the rattle coming up my throat, and there were little pins of light in the corners of my eyes and up along the roof of the car, but they flew away if I tried to look dead on at them.

  Then Mum’s hands were in my hair, and I could hear her telling me that it was going to be alright and that I�
�d feel better, and I had to breathe so hard I could feel the skin getting sucked in underneath my ribs. I kept pushing my arms up against the back of the seat, and I kept seeing the little fizzing pins of light on the roof of the car, and Mum’s hands were on my head and in my hair, and I could smell her perfume when I sucked in enough, and even if I never got another breath, even if there was nothing else left in me, she’d put her lips on my head and give me little kisses, and that would be enough just to keep me alive.

  ‘Look, Simon, out the window,’ she said, and she pointed at the stars going past. ‘Do you see how bright they are?’

  She lifted my head up so that I could see, and I could feel the breath in my throat but it was softer, and the more I thought about the stars the more the squeeze let go in my chest.

  ‘Look at that one,’ Mum said, and pointed to three stars lined up in a row. ‘Is that the Big Dipper?’

  Dad hit a pothole and the whole car shuddered, and the jolt of it made me suck in a breath.

  ‘Jesus, sorry,’ he said from the front seat. ‘I thought I missed the turn.’

  I looked up at Mum, and she was still looking at the stars out the window, and there were little bits of grey fuzz dancing around in the corners of my eyes. I reached up and wrapped some of her hair around my finger. I coughed, and some spit came out of my mouth, but the breath came out too, and I could suck more in without it catching.

  ‘Sssh,’ Mum said. ‘Close your eyes, Simon. Close your eyes.’

  ***

  Each time Grandma came over she brought more of her things, and boxes of Grandpa’s things started showing up on the back porch. After a few weeks there were so many boxes in the lounge room that you had to pick your way over them to get through to the back door, and Davey could barely see the TV without sitting on the back of the couch and craning his neck. One morning Grandma came out of the spare room drying her hair off. Dad, who was sitting at the kitchen table, didn’t seem all that surprised that she’d slept over, and when Davey and me peeked into the spare room before school all of her things were unpacked out of her suitcase, and you could see her make-up and her hairbrush on the dresser by the door.