We See the Stars Page 3

  Davey reached into his pocket and pulled out my puffer, and he sucked in a long breath. I picked up the deck and started shuffling the cards, and then I dealt out a new round. For a second Davey just watched me doing it, and I didn’t know if he was going to come over. I put the cards face down on the carpet in front of the cushion, and I waited until he sat down in front of me and picked his up before I picked up mine.

  ***

  Davey had only wanted to play one more round of cards, and as it got hotter in the back room he’d got more tired, and in the end he turned the radio on to listen to the cricket. Even with your ear pressed into the couch and a cushion over your head you could still hear it, and the sound of Davey yelling at the top of his lungs every time Australia got a run. Lying like that, with one arm tucked hard up under my side and with the other arm hanging down off the couch, and with the fingers on that hand digging around in the carpet, and with my ear pressed against the couch and a pillow dark and heavy on my forehead, I could feel all the little bits of grit and dust cramming in under my fingernails. All the little bits of chips Davey dropped there when Dad gave us a bag and told us not to tell Grandma. All the dirt Davey brought in on his footy boots after he’d played in the mud. All the tiny specks of mess, made up of little bits of dry skin and hard bones gone soft from years trapped down in the carpet.

  ‘He’s out for a duck!’ Davey yelled, and the floor bounced from where he pounded at it with his fists. ‘Thommo’s on fire.’ He settled back down on the carpet. ‘Reckon Lillee’s not even warmed up yet and he’s already got them up against the wall.’ When he talked about cricket little bits of Dad’s words fell into his sentences, so that just sometimes it’d be like he was in the room too.

  Every time Davey thumped the floor he’d make the Christmas tree wobble. It had gone brown from being left up too long, and sometimes a couple of needles would fall off and hit the top of Mum’s present, but mostly they just died on the ground.

  ‘Here, look at this,’ Davey said, and when I rolled over to look at him he was at the end of the couch, with some gold tinsel from the tree wrapped around his neck, and a bunch of scrunched-up Christmas paper in his hand.

  ‘Lillee’s been bowling faster than ever,’ he said, and the light from the windows caught his eyes so you could hardly make out the brown. ‘They reckon this year he’ll get player of the series, but Thommo’s starting strong.’ There were a couple of decorations on the floor where Davey had pulled the tinsel down, and even more needles.

  ‘Are you looking?’ Davey asked, and squeezed the paper in his hand into a ball. He turned on his heel and hopped down the corridor on his good leg, with his cast held up in the air, past the kitchen, then past Mum’s room, then up to the front door. ‘He comes up on them so quick!’ he yelled, loud enough that I could hear him through the kitchen, ‘and his run-up’s the longest going!’ Then the sound of Davey hopping faster, loud enough to make the floor shake, as he came fast down the hallway and into the back room, throwing the paper straight into the wall.

  I heard Grandma’s footsteps on the back porch, and then she was at the door with shopping bags in her hand.

  ‘Boys!’ she yelled. ‘What is all this bloody racket?’ She dropped the bags on the floor just inside the door so that a bottle of orange juice nearly smashed open on the carpet. I watched it roll away and bang up against the bottom of the couch. I felt the thud it made in the tips of my fingers and tight over the skin across my throat. ‘Help us with this lot, will you?’

  She went back outside and Davey hopped over to the fridge to start putting things away. Grandma always parked her car all the way down the driveway, right out the front of Dad’s shed, so that she could come around the back porch and straight to the back room into the kitchen and so that she didn’t have to carry any bags up the front steps. You have to watch your feet on those because Grandpa helped build them, and there’s a dip in the middle where a brick has mostly come away, and they get wet if it’s raining or there’s a frost up, and you need to keep your hand out to steady yourself if you start to feel like you’re going to fall.

  ‘Get the mince into the freezer, Davey, it’s bloody baking out here,’ Grandma said, and she dropped some more bags on the floor and then shut the door behind her, so that the heat stayed mostly outside. She blew air out of her mouth and straight upwards, so that it pushed up the hair on top of her head. ‘Steaming,’ she said.

  ‘Can I have an icy pole?’ Davey asked from the kitchen, and I leant down and picked up some bags to carry through to him at the fridge.

  ‘Not until after dinner,’ Grandma said. Davey groaned. ‘And you can knock that off or you won’t get a scrap of either,’ Grandma added.

  I looked at her face. You could draw a straight line from one side of her mouth to the other, and all the way around to the back of her head.

  ‘What’s that round your neck?’ she asked Davey.

  ‘It’s Lillee’s chain,’ Davey said, but real soft and quick. ‘It’s a gold one. He’s famous for it.’

  Grandma turned to look at the Christmas tree, which had started to lean. ‘Take the rest of the tree down while you’re at it, Davey,’ she said.

  Davey shrugged. ‘Can’t now with this on, can I?’ he said, and he rubbed at the top of his cast just above the knee.

  ‘Here.’ Grandma put her hand in one of the bags and rummaged around.

  Davey thumped over to see what she had.

  ‘There’s new ones here for Simon,’ she said. ‘For school.’ She pulled out a shoebox and opened the lid so I could see. The shoes were black and shiny. ‘So now you can have his,’ Grandma said to Davey.

  Davey groaned again. ‘Why can’t I get my own shoes?’

  ‘Because they’re an arm and a leg and you don’t need them when you have Simon’s. Here, look at this.’ And Grandma went into our bedroom and came back with my shoes from last year. She held them out to Davey, who let out a big sigh but looked just the same. ‘See? Barely any tread on them. Good thing your brother never does anything, or else we’d be out two pairs.’

  I felt the bee fly out of its honeycomb, and a little drop of honey fall out into my blood. My hands got a little shaky from the sugar of it, but I swallowed down some of my spit and tried not to feel the wings as it flew out from my chest and down into my fingers and my toes.

  ‘He just doesn’t like to wear shoes much,’ Davey said.

  Grandma looked down at the shoe in her hand, and laughed to herself.

  ‘I don’t know why you’re complaining, Davey—you’ll only need one of them for a while anyway.’ She clapped him on the back and as she walked past us I could smell smoke on her clothes. I took a breath in but it got trapped in my chest, and I felt the skin start to catch under my ribcage when I sucked in another.

  ‘Here’, Davey said, and he passed me my puffer. I took a breath and got the taste of the Ventolin, hard and chemical on the back of my throat, and my eyes started watering from the burn of it. After a minute, though, I felt the squeeze in my chest release. I took another puff, just to be sure.

  Davey watched me, and when I gave him the puffer back he shoved it back in his pocket. ‘You’ll be right,’ he said. ‘Try some counting?’

  ***

  I lay on the couch with Davey’s cushion under my head.

  The sounds went like this:

  1. Grandma was in the kitchen chopping up an onion, and she kept sniffing because it was making her eyes water.

  1.1 She had to keep stopping to drop her cigarette ash in the sink.

  1.2 It sounded like she was crying but it was hard to tell if she really was or not just by listening.

  2. Dad got home and dropped his work boots on the back porch. He was dusty from the plant, and Grandma made him brush all the dust off in the garden before he came inside to take a proper shower.

  2.1 When he brushed his hands up and down his clothes it sounded like brushing your hands up and down a paperbark tree, with the rustle of it getting i
n under your skin and along your hands and up your arms to the back of your ears.

  3. Davey was sitting in the back room putting contact on his school books, and it sounded like skin stretching and growing over bones.

  3.1 He was listening to the cricket on the radio.

  3.2 Sometimes you could hear all the people yelling, and Davey would yell out to Dad that there’d been another six.

  3.2.1 Sometimes Dad yelled back over the sound of the shower.

  4. Mum was in the bedroom.

  4.1 It sounded empty if you didn’t listen hard enough.

  The words went like this:

  i. Grandma said: ‘Have you got all your books already, Davey?’

  ii. Davey said: ‘It’s just the binders and stuff, we get the rest of it on the first day.’

  iii. Grandma said: ‘Do you know what books you’ll be reading?’

  iv. Davey said: ‘No.’

  v. Grandma said: ‘What about you, Simon? Grade six soon.’

  a. The men on the radio talked about the cricket.

  b. Dad turned the water off and it was quiet for a second until he started snapping his towel.

  c. Davey stuck a pencil under his cast to try to scratch at the skin beneath it, and it sounded like when you run your fingers along a flyscreen door.

  vi. Davey said: ‘D’you reckon when I go to big school I can take the bus by myself?’

  vii. Grandma said: ‘Why would you do that, love? Simon’ll be on it, too.’

  viii. Davey said: ‘Oh yeah.’

  a. Grandma stopped cutting and dropped a bit more ash in the sink. It made a little hissing noise.

  ix. Davey said: ‘But what about if Simon’s not going to school that day?’

  x. Grandma said: ‘I dunno, Davey. Maybe, alright?’

  xi. Davey said: ‘Why only maybe?’

  xii. Grandma said: ‘Because who knows what’ll happen in the next two years?’

  xiii. Davey said: ‘Like what?’

  xiv. Grandma said: ‘Anything.’

  xv. Davey said: ‘Like maybe we won’t live here anymore?’

  xvi. Grandma said: ‘Maybe, Davey.’

  xvii. Davey said: ‘Like maybe you could drive us?’

  xviii. Grandma said: ‘Maybe that, too.’

  xix. Davey said: ‘Or maybe Grandpa could?’

  a. Grandma stopped chopping, and all the other noise went out of the room, like when you don’t tie up the end of a balloon after you’ve blown it all the way up.

  b. The pressure made it so I could hear my heartbeat in my ears.

  i. The bee found a friend in a new bit of the honeycomb, and they buzzed hello to each other, and it squeaked when they rubbed their feet together, and made little dents in the honey where it stuck to their legs.

  xx. Dad yelled: ‘What’s the score, Davey?’

  xxi. Davey yelled back: ‘We’re three for a hundred and forty-seven.’

  xxii. Grandma said: ‘Davey, I forgot to ask, how are the shoes?’

  xxiii. Davey said: ‘They’re too big still.’

  xxiv. Grandma said: ‘Rubbish, Simon’s feet aren’t that much bigger. Simon, show me your feet.’

  xxv. Davey said: ‘Well they’ve got holes in the bottom.’

  xxvi. Grandma said: ‘Davey, I didn’t see a single hole.’

  xxvii. Davey said: ‘And you can’t walk in puddles because of the holes.’

  xxviii. Grandma said: ‘Well don’t walk in puddles.’

  xxix. Davey said: ‘But what if it’s a rainy day?’

  xxx. Grandma said: ‘You’ll just have to walk quickly.’

  a. Davey’s footsteps on the carpet, heavy because he was walking on his cast, heading out of the kitchen and into the backyard.

  xxxi. Grandma yelled: ‘You’re not getting new ones till Simon outgrows his, so forget it!’

  a. The sound of the bones in my feet stretching, and the muscles around them creaking like a bedroom door in the night-time.

  xxxii. Grandma said: ‘Set the table will you, Simon?’

  a. My socks on the carpet, making little bits of electricity each time I took a step, and the bolts of it travelling up through my legs and my back and my tummy, and down along my arms to shoot little bolts of blue and white from my fingers.

  Four

  On the first day of school you get given your desk, and it’s yours for the rest of the year. Ms Hilcombe gave Cassie her own desk, the one behind mine, and we were the only two in the whole class who didn’t have to sit next to anybody.

  Cassie was famous because everyone was scared of her. In grade four she brought a huge dead lizard to school for show-and-tell, and when the teacher told her to take it outside and bury it she put it in Amanda Chan’s schoolbag and told everyone Amanda was going to take it home and make it into dim sims. At Athletics Day last summer, she was in the relay team and she was losing, so instead of sticking to her lane she ran into one of the other girl’s lanes and pulled her pants down in front of all the school and the parents. In grade five she didn’t come to school for three weeks, and it was because she called Mrs Starling a fat moll and got thrown out, or because she was caught stealing stuff from the stationery cupboard, or because she stabbed another kid in the back of the hand with a protractor, depending on who you asked.

  ‘Oi,’ I heard from behind me, but I didn’t turn around. ‘You’re that weirdo that doesn’t talk.’

  I felt like my neck was real hot, like when you put bread in the toaster and it glows red and electric and you can’t put your knife in it and the heat comes off onto your hands when it’s cold and dark in the mornings, and Davey isn’t even up yet.

  ‘Oi!’ she said again, and I felt a kick on my leg and it made me jump.

  I looked over my shoulder, and she was smiling at me, and her melted hand was under the desk but I knew it was there.

  ‘So, can you not talk at all or do you just not want to?’ she asked.

  My tongue went dry and limp in my mouth. I felt heavy in my tummy. I didn’t say anything and I didn’t look around but then she kicked me again.

  ‘Don’t you know it’s rude not to answer a question?’

  I turned around and she was leaning over the desk and her face was close up to mine. I stared right past her head at the wall behind her, and I knew that it was rude, but her mouth turned down at the corners, and her pinkie finger was purple and curled into her palm.

  There were lots of stories about what happened to Cassie’s hand. Sarah and Nicole said that she’d got burnt when her dad threw petrol on her and her mum and set them on fire, then ran off to live with another woman in the city. Davey said he heard that she got caught in a bushfire. Nick said she got it from touching herself on the fanny too much.

  Ms Hilcombe cleared her throat from the front of the room and Cassie shot back into her seat and I turned back to look at my workbook, but the numbers didn’t make much sense anymore and I couldn’t put them in the right order, and also the two bees had started to add on more levels to the honeycomb, and every time they built a new bit they found another friend, so that by the time it had taken over my whole heart there was a swarm of them, and they buzzed up and down my spine when my heart pumped blood through and pushed them out of their beds.

  Cassie didn’t say anything else for the rest of the morning, but the back of my neck put up little goosebumps waiting to see if she would.

  ***

  At recess, Davey was getting heaps of attention because of his cast, and kids were asking if they could draw on it so that when it came off he could keep it and remember them. His face was bright and his eyes real big and he kept telling the story about how he’d nearly drowned and he’d seen the light at the end of the tunnel and everything. Rohan kept saying he pulled Davey from the bottom of the dam himself, and that they had to hold him upside down to get the water out, and by the end of recess he’d also given him mouth-to-mouth right there in the mud and the reeds.

  I went to my spot. Grandma had made Vegemite Vi
ta-Weats for me and if you squashed them together Vegemite worms came up through the little holes. That morning I wasn’t very hungry, and I kept thinking about Cassie kicking my leg from under her desk.

  In my spot you could sit with your back to the fence and hear the cars if they came down the road, and you could feel the fence pressing hard against your skin, and you could press your arms up against it, with your hands lying flat across the top, and when you took them away you could see the diamond patterns pressed into the pink, and run your fingertips in and on top of the dents it made.

  ‘Hey, Numpty,’ someone said, and when I looked up it was Cassie. I felt my stomach drop through to the dirt and the ground. ‘You hang out here, right?’ she said.

  I looked at her and thought about how it was my favourite spot and I didn’t want to go and find another one, so I shook my head.

  Cassie just looked at me for a long second. ‘Bullshit, I see you here all the time,’ she said, and I blushed because she swore and I was lying. She crossed her arms and looked at me with her eyes all narrow and her hair over one eye. ‘You scared of me or what?’ she said.

  My heart was going so fast that I worried it was going to use up all its beats and run out completely. She kept staring at me with her arms folded and I couldn’t swallow. I shook my head and I felt my ears kind of buzz, but I saw her start to smile.

  ‘You probably should be,’ she said. ‘All the other dipshits are.’

  I looked down and saw that my hands were shaking a little bit, and the Vegemite worms had stopped squirming and were now just looking up at me from the holes in the Vita-Weats, and my mouth was so dry that I didn’t think I’d even be able to chew, so I started wrapping them back up in their Glad Wrap to throw them out on the way back to class. There was a cough above me. I looked up at Cassie, who was watching my hands. I felt hot on my cheeks, and I nearly dropped the Vita-Weats as I unwrapped them again and held them out to her.

  ‘Serious?’ she said. The Vegemite looked pretty nice, and suddenly I was worried I might get hungry later, but I kept my hand out because I didn’t want to be rude and I didn’t want to take them back now that they were there in front of her, and after another second Cassie reached for them, her hand with the finger curling over and all red and purple and lumpy, and I didn’t flinch even when her fingers brushed mine.