We See the Stars Page 11

  The boxes changed, too, and sometimes when we came home from school there would be old ironing boards and boxes of toys out in the back room, and some of the new boxes would have gone into the spare, and after a while it was just Grandma’s room and there was nowhere else to put anything, and the boxes lined the edges of the walls so that you could hardly see the cupboards behind them. If it was quiet and I couldn’t sleep but I could hear Grandma’s snoring, I would sneak into her room and sit with my back flush against the wall, and I would stick my pinkie in the corner of a box and work my way in, and I would touch some of Grandpa’s old books or shirts or papers, and he would be there on the end of my finger, and I would let him soak in through my skin.

  ***

  Davey was playing football in the driveway, and every now and again Grandma would march out to the back porch to yell at him to keep it down.

  ‘Why don’t you go to the oval and practise there?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t like the oval,’ Davey said, and I heard his voice travel up the driveway and in through the window over the couch.

  Grandma sighed. ‘Davey, really.’ When she came back in and saw me sitting on the couch she rolled her eyes at me. ‘Get your brother out of the house, will you?’ she said, and she went back into the spare room and slammed the door.

  When Grandma moved in, Dad started taking more shifts at work, so we saw even less of him. Usually Dad would have taken Davey down to the ground on Saturday and either played kick-to-kick or watched one of the older boys’ games, and then Davey would come back all breathless and his cheeks cold from sitting outside too long and tell me all about the best goals and the best marks and the kicks that went so high over the oval’s fence that the umpire had to run across the road to get the ball back.

  I stood out on the porch and watched Davey, but he was only kicking the ball on his foot and back up into his hands, and when he saw me looking at him he shrugged his shoulders.

  ‘Can I borrow your comics?’ he asked, and I nodded. When I turned around Grandma was watching me from the kitchen. The air was fresh and cool on the back of my neck. I decided I’d go for a walk.

  ***

  On my second trip to Ms Hilcombe’s, I came down the street and next to the empty block, and by the time I was nearly up to the fence I realised Ms Hilcombe was in her front yard. Tink started barking when she saw me, and it meant that I couldn’t turn around and run back the other way. Ms Hilcombe was on her knees in the flower patch, and she looked up as soon as Tink barked. She smiled when she saw me, and waved me over to her.

  ‘Hello, stranger,’ she said, and she pulled off her garden gloves and brushed her hands over her pants so that they got dirty anyway. Tink came up and sniffed at my shoes, and I walked into Ms Hilcombe’s front yard but I didn’t really know what to do after that, so I knelt down next to Ms Hilcombe and looked at the hole she was digging.

  ‘Here, give me a hand,’ she said, and passed me a little shovel that was warm on the handle where she’d been holding it. ‘Dig here, will you? Just up to where you can drop one of these in.’ She held out a little dry onion.

  ‘It’s a flower,’ Ms Hilcombe explained, and I looked at her and then back at the onion. ‘Well, it will be. It’s a bulb.’

  I took it in my hand and felt it all dry and thin.

  ‘Go on,’ she said, ‘put it in the hole. It’ll grow, I promise.’

  ‘It’s dead,’ I said. It was light enough to float away all by itself.

  ‘It’s not,’ Ms Hilcombe said, and she took the bulb from me and put it into the hole, and then let me cover it back up with dirt. ‘Just wait a bit, and you’ll see.’

  I knelt down on the grass with her, and watched her dig more holes to put bulbs in, and Tink sat on the edge of the driveway and chewed at her leg and only stopped to look at us every now and then.

  ‘I heard about your grandpa,’ Ms Hilcombe said. Everyone had heard before we’d even had the funeral. Dad had paid for a notice in the paper, but by the time it came out it seemed like everyone had already been around to say goodbye. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘He’s in boxes in the spare room,’ I said.

  Ms Hilcombe looked at me, and she had the little shovel in one hand and a bulb in the other, and she kept looking at me for so long that the sun went down and the night sky came up and then again and again and again until whole centuries melted away with her just looking at me. Tink barked, and then she barked a little bit more, and then she started chewing at her leg again.

  ‘It’s hard when you lose someone,’ Ms Hilcombe said. ‘But sometimes it helps to think of all the things they did to make you happy. You can keep a list of things. To remember.’

  Superman had a bulb in one hand and a little shovel in the other, but he was having trouble getting the hole in the right spot, so he just put his hands into the ground and made a hole that way, but he felt funny when the dirt got in under his nails and pushed up against the skin. He made a face when he did it, and he thought about trying to wipe his hands on his cape.

  ‘Need a drink?’ Ms Hilcombe asked, and she was dusting off her knees and opening the front door for me before I’d even had a chance to reply.

  As I walked in I could hear the phone ringing, and she ran off to answer it. I went and sat down on the couch, and when I was sure she wasn’t watching I had a look around. On the table there was a magazine from February, and against the back wall there was a bookcase half full of books, with a couple of photos in frames on the top. In the corner there were a couple of pairs of shoes, and some of Tink’s toys, and a sock full of holes so that you could see where Tink had chewed on it.

  ‘No, I’m sorry, I don’t understand how that’s possible,’ Ms Hilcombe said from the kitchen, and her voice sounded higher than normal, and she was getting loud. ‘I haven’t lived there since the end of last year. I left just after Christmas. I called you then to tell you to take my name off the account.’

  Tink was following Ms Hilcombe around as she paced up and down in the kitchen, but the phone cord wasn’t very long so she could only go as far as the sink and back.

  ‘Well, how can I be liable for electricity when I don’t live there anymore? No, I don’t know why he won’t pay it. I don’t want to know.’

  There was a long silence, and I felt my tummy roll when she started speaking again, and it sounded like she might cry.

  ‘Listen, he’s not…he doesn’t…he doesn’t know where I am and he can’t know, either. If he’s not there, I don’t know where he is. I don’t really care, frankly.’

  I heard the sound of the phone slamming, and Ms Hilcombe came fast around the corner into the living room. I looked up at her from the couch and her eyes were red.

  ‘Oh shit, hang on,’ she said, and I heard her banging some cupboards in the kitchen.

  When she came back again she was carrying a juice for me and a glass of wine for her, and she took off her shoes and folded up her legs and sat down on the floor, and she rested her head on the chair behind her and stared up at the ceiling.

  ‘Sorry about that,’ she said. ‘You okay, little man?’

  A couple of bees flew out of the honeycomb, which had got so big it had spread out of my heart and had stuck itself to the inside of some of my ribs, and I felt some of the honey leak out and into my blood, and the sugar made me dizzy and a little bit sick. I thought that I might cry.

  ‘You’re not, are you? Is it your grandpa?’

  And I nodded, but then I shook my head, then shrugged, and then Tink started chewing on her leg and Ms Hilcombe yelled at her to stop and I nodded again.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘There’s not really much else anyone can say.’ The wallpaper had little blue and purple flowers with green stems, and they curled up and around each other so that they tangled together on the wall, and if you put your fingers up to touch them they’d shrink back into buds to get away from you and not come out again until they were sure that you’d gone.

  ‘I lost my d
ad a couple of years ago, and so for a while there it was just me and Matthew on the farm. I didn’t mind the quiet, but then I realised all I was doing was thinking about Dad. Matthew wasn’t the best with the quiet.’ Ms Hilcombe looked down at her toes and wiggled them in her socks. ‘He heard things in it,’ she said. ‘The farm was great, though. It’s actually only a few hours from here.’ She took a drink of her wine and I listened to her swallow it. It went down her neck and into her stomach, where it fizzled out into her blood and her bones. ‘I miss it, sometimes,’ she said.

  Out the front window you could see through to the garden and the little patches of dirt where we’d planted the bulbs. Superman was standing over them waiting for something to sprout up, and he shrugged his shoulders at me when he saw me looking. I thought about Grandpa all boxed up in the spare room. I thought about wool right down to the skin.

  The sun got lower, and it started to get dark, and Ms Hilcombe pulled her knees up and under her arms so that she was hugging them real close, and she didn’t say anything but just watched me, and the words fell out from around my tongue and behind my teeth and out into the air just between us.

  ‘Do you miss Matthew?’ I said.

  Ms Hilcombe looked down, and then she looked up at the ceiling, and when she leant back I could see her bra strap, which was black with white lace, and the black was so dark against the white of her skin. She let a big breath out, and the air came from behind her teeth so that it hissed like a tyre going flat, and for a long time she didn’t say anything. If you looked hard enough you could see that her eyes were still red, and that her face was all blotchy, and that she’d wiped off all her make-up until she was clean underneath.

  ‘Simon,’ she said, ‘that phone call—that was private, you know?’

  The bees swarmed out of the honeycomb, and their stingers made holes through my veins that meant the blood leaked out through my skin and got all over the floor.

  ‘Look, I’ll try to explain but can you keep it a secret?’ she said.

  All the flowers in the wallpaper were wide open, with their petals stretched out to hear as much as they could. My tongue felt heavy and wrong in my mouth.

  ‘I promise,’ I said.

  Fourteen

  That first day when Cassie wasn’t at school I figured that she was sick, and she was probably on the couch with a pillow and a blanket, finding out that there wasn’t much to do, and maybe her cough medicine was making her feel sleepy so that her eyes were all heavy and sore like she’d opened them in the bath. When you get sick sometimes it can be okay, if it means you don’t have to go to school, and if you can just stay in your bed, and if you can watch TV all day, and if you get a special Vegemite sandwich that Grandma’s made with the crusts cut off. If you get to spend the whole day with your head right underneath the doona so that all the light has to come in through the sheets and all the sounds get muffled away.

  She wasn’t there the next day either. Superman and I went to our spot, and even though it meant we could have the extra Vegemite Vita-Weats, I could tell that Superman was a bit worried. It was so quiet that when you were working you could hear everyone’s pencils making little scratches in the paper, and the sound of it when someone made a mistake and rubbed it out.

  Ms Hilcombe even noticed how quiet it was without Cassie, and after lunch she came up to my desk while everyone else was working.

  ‘I’m sure she’s fine,’ she said. ‘This time of year, there’s heaps of flu about.’

  I saw Nicole and Sarah looking over at us, and I blushed right up to the top of my ears. Ms Hilcombe waited but I wouldn’t look at her, and I could see Nicole and Sarah starting to whisper. I heard Ms Hilcombe’s bracelets bang together when she walked back to her desk.

  On the third day, Jeremy was waiting at the school gate and when he saw me he came running over.

  ‘Have you seen Cassie?’ he asked, and I shook my head. ‘She hasn’t called you or anything?’ Jeremy was taller than me, so I had to look up at him from under the woolly hat Grandma had made me wear to keep the cold out. He sort of danced up and down on the spot, and he rubbed his hands together to get them warm.

  ‘Shit,’ he said. ‘Look, the other day…Cassie and me, we’ve been sort of hanging out a bit because she walks home the same way I do until you cross the railway line. Anyway, the other day we were walking home from school together and her mum drove past and saw?’

  I thought about clean shirts hanging up over our heads at Cassie’s house, and a mop and bucket hitting the floor just inside the door, and Cassie slipping away into the dark of the corridor, and the bits of her hair that she couldn’t tuck behind her ear.

  ‘I mean, it wasn’t like we were doing anything…we were just walking home?’ Jeremy said, and when I looked at him I realised his hands weren’t just cold, they were shaking, and he couldn’t stand still for anything. ‘But Cassie’s mum went troppo. She pulled over and grabbed Cassie and made her get in the car. She was screaming the whole time. It was full on.’

  In my tummy I felt the stone shift onto its side and roll over, and when I swallowed I realised I could feel a smoothness to it, and that the top was actually smaller than the bottom, and that the whole time I’d thought it was a stone when it was actually an egg.

  I’d already started turning away, but Jeremy grabbed my arm and turned me back to face him. ‘Simon, I don’t think you should,’ he said, but I pulled my arm out of his grip, and I was halfway up the street before he stopped yelling for me to come back.

  ***

  I smelt the rotting lemons left on the ground, and I saw her driveway long and empty leading up to the house, and I thought about Cassie swinging on the clothesline with one leg behind her and the Hills hoist leaning too far over towards the right.

  Down in my tummy a little beak broke through the eggshell, and a couple of feathers poked out from the top. Cassie swung on the clothesline with one leg bent out behind her, and with her hair in the light. The beak pulled away at some more of the shell, and then there was a wing, and then another one. Cassie’s hand was purple and red, and I had cut her hair to be more even on both sides. I felt the feathers brush along the inside of my ribs. I felt the air move when it opened its eyes.

  That morning Dad had to leave for an early shift, and Grandma was packing up her house. We hadn’t had breakfast and my tummy was empty and a little bit grumbly, and the lemons had all rotted and turned back into the ground so that the trees just had leaves on and little spindly branches that tried to scratch at me as I walked past. When I got to the door I pressed my ear to it and listened for shouting. There wasn’t any, so I knocked. I heard footsteps coming, and Cassie opened the door just a little, and looked out to see who it was. I saw a blue and yellow bruise under her eye and a cut on top of her forehead, just above the eyebrow.

  ‘What’re you doing here?’ Cassie asked.

  She still didn’t open the door all the way, so that all I could see was the bruise beneath her eye and a little bit of hair. Inside, the house was dark.

  ‘You can’t come in, Numpty,’ she said. I saw her lips moving, but her eyes were all red.

  I looked down at the verandah and saw it was kind of dusty. When I sat down on it I thought about how my pants would probably get dirty but also that I didn’t really care. I heard Cassie breathing from behind the door, which was still open enough for me to see her toes. She sighed, and then she opened the door more.

  ‘You going to stay there all day?’ she asked, and she crossed her arms so that they covered her body.

  I shrugged.

  ‘You bring anything to eat?’

  I had my schoolbag but Dad had forgotten to give me lunch.

  Cassie let out a big bit of air through her nose. ‘Figures,’ she said. She went back into the house, and I heard noises coming from the kitchen, and my tummy growled a little bit.

  From where I was sitting I could almost see into the house across the road, except that there was a big tree in the front
yard which blocked some of the window. I could see that there were holes in all the curtains, and that there were bits of the brick fence that were falling over, and that the car in the front didn’t have any wheels. It was a bit like Dad’s because it was a station wagon and it was brown, but it looked pretty old and like it had been there for a while, and there were weeds growing up around the sides so that if you opened the door you’d take half the garden with it.

  Cassie came back carrying a sandwich, and she sat down just inside the door, and it looked good when she ate it.

  ‘Anyone asks, you were never here,’ she said. ‘And don’t come up the driveway next time, Numpty, come down the back where no-one will see you.’

  Cassie took a bite of her sandwich, but she winced a little bit when she had to move her face underneath the bruise.

  ‘It’s alright,’ she said, when she saw me looking. ‘I just bruise really easily. It looks worse than it is.’ She balanced the sandwich in her melted hand by holding it between two fingers, and the pinkie curved in towards her palm to keep it steady.

  Cassie looked at me for a long time, and as I looked back at her the light kept changing as the clouds moved across the sun, and every time it got darker the bruise got more purple, and swirled under and across her cheek. ‘It was open palm, okay?’ Cassie said, and she held her hand up to show me. ‘Not a punch, okay, Numpty?’

  The thing is that when you have a bird in your ribcage, if it starts to flap its wings too fast or too hard you feel them all up and down against your insides, and if it keeps flapping hard the feathers come off, and when the feathers come off it’s just bone on top of bone on top of bone. The other thing about it is that if the feathers all come off and it’s bone against bone, what can happen is that everything starts to get cracked and broken, and there are shards all down inside your belly, and they cut when you swallow and even when you breathe.