We See the Stars Page 6

  Grandma’s car is different to Dad’s. In Grandma’s car there’s a proper front seat, but in Dad’s there’s just one long bench seat. It’s the same in the back, too, so you can slide around if he goes too quickly around a corner, and Davey can push himself completely up against you and laugh because it’s just a game. You can stretch all the way out on the back seat, so that your head is at one end and your feet are pushed up against the door. You can lie with your head in your mum’s lap while you try so hard to breathe that you can feel the skin being sucked in under your ribs, while she sits with her hands in your hair and shows you the stars out the window, and Dad yells from the front that it’ll only be another fifteen minutes, so long as he doesn’t miss the turn.

  ‘Rohan gets to go to a camp in the holidays,’ Davey said.

  Grandma didn’t say anything, and Davey kept kicking the back of her seat, but so lightly that she wouldn’t be able to tell. ‘For ten whole days.’

  ‘Well that’s good for Rohan, isn’t it?’ Grandma said.

  ‘He wouldn’t play cricket with me anymore because he said the cast slowed me down. He said I was a nuff-nuff like Simon now.’

  ‘Davey, enough,’ Grandma said, and I felt thunder roll down my legs and out through the floor of the car.

  ‘And they have a colour TV,’ Davey said. ‘And when they want to go into the city, his dad has the day off and takes him and Jeremy in and they can buy whatever they want.’

  ‘They sound spoilt,’ Grandma said.

  ‘I want to be spoilt!’ Davey yelled.

  ‘Well you’re sounding like a brat now, so I’d say you’re halfway there,’ Grandma said, and she used the tone she uses when it’s not a good idea to keep arguing. Davey went quiet, and he turned to look out the window. The clouds were heavy, and low, and dark, and it looked like it might rain.

  After Ms Hilcombe had left the library, I went out to the front desk and Miss Sullivan got me to help put the books away. The first thing you do is put the numbers in a line so that they all go up slowly, and then you find the missing spots where they live on the shelves. I picked up the one on the top. It was called Teaching the Mildly Retarded Child. I put it back in order with the other books. I heard it start to whisper, but I decided not to listen.

  ‘I’d be happy never to go back to that hospital,’ Grandma said, but not to anybody in particular.

  Davey kept looking out the window, and I turned the air vent so that it blew right across my face. Superman sat in the back seat next to Davey, and the extra air made his cape blow out behind him and up against the back window. He liked it, though, because it felt like when he gets to fly.

  We drove past the graveyard, out by Mr Justfield’s cow in her paddock. There were a couple of crosses along the fence that you could see from the car. I held my breath so I didn’t let any souls in. Their bones settled into the dirt and went grey and mouldy when it rained.

  Eight

  Nick kept making machine-gun noises at the girls, which made them scream, and Jeremy laugh. Ms Hilcombe had to keep yelling at them to be quiet and get back to their project. We were doing posters that were going to go up on the walls in the classroom, and Ms Hilcombe said the best one might even go up in the corridor next to the front office. Sarah and Nicole were complaining because there wasn’t any glitter left, and Ms Hilcombe had to remind them it wasn’t about how pretty they made it, it was supposed to be about how war was bad.

  ‘Thanks for doing all the research, Numpty,’ Cassie said. Miss Sullivan had helped me write down some sentences from the newspaper articles, and I had them with me in my notebook. ‘You saved my bacon, for sure.’

  The posters were due the first week back in term two, which meant we were supposed to get them finished over the school holidays. Cassie had already said I could come over to hers because her mum worked during the day, but I was trying to work quickly so that I didn’t have to.

  ‘Did you see any good pictures?’ Cassie said. ‘Like, when people got shot and stuff?’

  There had been a photo of a man with a gun to his head, and I’d turned the page over the second I figured out what I was looking at. He had his eyes shut tight and his mouth all tense in a line. I kept writing out the sentences from the newspaper, while Cassie drew flowers and guns in the margin.

  It was hard to concentrate over the sound of Nick and Jeremy and the screaming girls. Superman made earplugs out of the leftover pipe cleaners on Sarah’s desk, but even then he couldn’t keep the noise out.

  ‘You doing anything for the holidays?’ Cassie asked, and when she leant over to borrow one of my green pens she brushed up against my arm. ‘I’m going down the coast with Dad,’ she said.

  She reached up and tucked her hair behind her ear with the folded-in finger on her purple hand. She could move her finger enough that she could pin her hair with it, even though it was bent in and around towards her palm. She caught me looking, and she wiggled it a little for me, and I felt the heat along the top of my ears.

  ‘That’s bullshit, actually,’ Cassie said. ‘I’m not doing anything. Mum can’t get the time off, and even if she could we’d still do bugger-all.’

  Her voice was small in the noise of the classroom, and I had to turn my ear to her so that the waves she made in the air when she spoke got directly into my brain. Her breath smelt like toast and old milk.

  ‘Mum can be pretty strict,’ Cassie said. She drew another machine gun in the margins of the poster, and then some bright red blood in a puddle on the bottom of the page. ‘She doesn’t have many mates, except for the ladies at work and the ones she sees at church.’ Out of the corner of my eye I could see Cassie had gone still, but when I looked right at her she turned back to the poster. ‘School holidays are bullshit, anyway,’ she said. ‘You just start to relax and then it’s time to go back to school.’

  Nick leant over the back of Nicole’s desk and grabbed a glitter pen, and when she yelled, Ms Hilcombe told her off for making a racket. She flushed red and stuck her bottom lip out, and after Ms Hilcombe turned away again Nick pointed at her and laughed and made it look like he was sticking the pen up his bum.

  ‘Dad’s not around, but you can’t tell anyone, okay?’ Cassie said. Her eyes were brown except for the little red veins stretching out over the white.

  I nodded my head. She smiled.

  ‘He left his records, but,’ she said. ‘Some of them aren’t even that shit.’

  ‘Recess in ten minutes, everyone,’ Ms Hilcombe called from her desk.

  ‘Oi,’ Cassie said. ‘I wanted to give you this before.’ And she put her hands in her pocket and pulled out a Vita-Weat covered in Vegemite. ‘For the other day, okay?’

  The biscuit was dry except for the Vegemite—there wasn’t even any butter on it—but I only had celery sticks with peanut butter for playlunch and this was way better.

  ‘So we’re even, right, because I gave you yours back again,’ she said. ‘And also it means we’re mates now.’

  I felt my cheeks go red, and hot, and my head started nodding all by itself. Cassie smiled at me, and took out another Vita-Weat. We waited for the bell with our pockets full of biscuits. I thought about wool right down to the skin.

  ***

  When I was in grade four Mrs Freeman was my teacher for the first time, and that was also when Grandma wasn’t allowed to come over to our house. Grandpa had just started getting sick, so she was spending a lot of time at the hospital anyway, but Mum had said she couldn’t come over to be with me and Davey by ourselves anymore, and if she wanted to see us she had to do it with her or Dad there. That school holidays Davey and me spent the days mostly inside or out in the backyard, and Davey got real good at practising his handpassing against the side of the house, until Dad came home one night and saw all the marks he’d made on the white paint and told him not to do it again. That holidays Mum stood at the window in the living room with one hand over her belly and watched the cars go up and down the street, and when she saw one that l
ooked like Grandma’s she’d take a picture of it with Dad’s camera. Sometimes she wasn’t quick enough and she’d swear under her breath, and if you were sitting by her legs you could still hear her. Mum didn’t like it when you crept up on her, so I was always careful to make loud stomping noises when I came down the corridor, but then she’d tell me off for making it too hard to hear what was going on outside.

  The thing was that I’d already seen Grandma those school holidays, because Mrs Freeman had told me Grandma was coming to school to pick me up on the morning of the last day of term one, and we’d driven in Grandma’s car to the hospital. I’d thought we were going to see Grandpa, but then we turned right at the entrance instead of left, and went down a corridor I’d never seen before, with little offices leading off it.

  ‘You won’t tell your mum about our special trip, will you, love?’ Grandma asked. ‘Remember what we agreed?’ She opened her handbag to let me peek inside and I saw an Easter egg, the foil all shiny and colourful in the lights over our heads. Davey liked the blue ones best, but my favourites were the red ones with the golden spots. This one had stripes in yellow and purple, and the foil crackled when I touched it with my fingertip. ‘Good lad,’ Grandma said. When a nurse came in to take us through, she stood up so quick she nearly spilt everything in her handbag out onto the floor.

  When we got into the doctor’s office, he was standing at the end of a long desk. ‘Simon,’ the doctor said, ‘can we have a little chat?’

  On the wall behind him there was a mirror, and I could see my own reflection and the back of his head.

  ‘Do you have friends at school, Simon?’ he asked.

  There were bits on top of his head where the hair was thinner, and I could see red skin underneath. He pulled the chair out for me to sit at the desk, and it was high enough that I could only touch the ground with my tippy toes.

  ‘Look at these faces, Simon,’ the doctor said, and he pointed to a page in front of me with cartoons of people looking happy, and sad, and mad. ‘When you think about school, which one do you feel like the most?’

  I looked down at the faces, but you couldn’t see the bodies so it was hard to choose. I didn’t know which ones were wearing school uniforms, and which ones had brothers, and which ones got an angry when the chalk on the blackboard made a little snap when it broke.

  ‘None of them?’ the doctor said, and when he leant towards me I looked harder at the faces.

  ‘Can I have a pencil?’ I said, and the doctor smiled at me.

  ‘Of course,’ he said, and he started going through his pockets. ‘Ah! I only have a pen, though, is that alright?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘A pen is alright.’

  I looked down at the faces in the bottom row, where there was some room to draw underneath. One of them had a frown on, and another had his mouth going up and down in a squiggly line. I chose that one, and with the pen I drew a neck and some shoulders, then down a bit so that he had a bit of a chest. I drew raindrops over his head, and a storm cloud where his shoulders met his neck. For arms I just drew lightning bolts coming out of his chest and down to his fingers. I didn’t have enough room to draw his tummy, so I coloured his chest in with the pen, as heavy as I could make it without putting a hole through the page.

  ***

  It started raining after recess, and because most of the grass was dead it meant that the dirt became mud so quickly you could slip and fall over and get it all over your bum, and so there was an announcement that we had to have a wet-day lunch. Ms Hilcombe sent me down to the front office to bring back a couple of board games, which the principal kept in a locked cupboard in his office. You always wanted to get picked to go down to the office, because it meant you got to get out of class for a few minutes, and when it was my turn I liked to take the long way back down along the corridors, when I could have just gone up the stairs, because it meant you could hear your footsteps on the concrete bounce up against the windows, and if you peeked into the other classrooms you could see all the other kids sitting at their desks and talking, and they wouldn’t have any idea that you were there.

  When I got to the office the two ladies were there: the one who answered the phone and the one who had a typewriter on her desk. When she used it, it made a clicking noise that you could hear halfway up the corridor, and if the other lady was on the phone at the same time she’d have to speak up to be heard over the top of it. I stood by the door and waited, but they were so busy they didn’t see that I was there.

  ‘I just think it’s odd,’ the typewriter lady said. ‘It just doesn’t sit right, is all I’m saying.’

  ‘I think you’re being a bit mean,’ the other lady said. She wasn’t on the phone, but she was bent over the desk looking through some papers. When she turned her head, I saw she had a pencil stuck up straight in the back of her hair, and when she pulled it out to write on her paper, bits of hair fell around her face and into her eyes.

  ‘Don’t you think it’s strange? She hardly talks to anyone, and she’s nearly completely rewritten the curriculum,’ the typewriter lady said. ‘Like she thinks she knows better.’ The clicking noise kept putting little holes in the air, and she had to talk around them to get the words through. ‘I said to Gerald, if you’re going to rewrite the whole grade six curriculum, you had better make damn sure you know what you’re doing.’

  ‘The kids like her,’ the other lady said.

  ‘Oh yes, well, renowned for their grasp of modern pedagogy, the kids are,’ the typewriter lady said. ‘She doesn’t even talk to you young girls, does she?’

  ‘She does sometimes—like, if we’re all in the staffroom.’

  ‘But not outside of school? See, I told Gerald: she’s stuck up.’

  ‘Her husband died, though,’ the other lady said. She turned her back away from the door so I couldn’t see her face anymore, but the back of her neck was going red.

  ‘So?’

  ‘So, has your husband died?’

  ‘No such luck,’ the typewriter lady said, and she snorted when she laughed.

  ‘Yeah, so you don’t know, maybe it’s normal when your husband dies. Like, maybe you get sad and you don’t want to talk to people.’

  ‘But she doesn’t seem that sad much of the time.’

  There was a long pause, and I could hear the bees in my blood and my veins, and if they weren’t careful they could get each other with their stingers. The other lady stopped what she was doing then and stood up straight. Typewriter lady stopped typing, and the clicking finally went quiet.

  ‘I think maybe we need to talk about something else,’ the other lady said, and she went to put her pencil back in her hair, but her hair fell down and took the pencil with it, and she swore when she bent down to pick it up, because when she looked she saw me standing there.

  Nine

  Davey sat on the ground outside the milk bar with his sock rolled down and his bad leg stuck out in the sun. Every couple of minutes he’d run his hand over it and turn his leg around, and if the clouds came over he’d throw his head back and stare at them until it cleared and the sun got through again.

  ‘Does it still look weird?’ he asked me, and I shrugged my shoulders. The tiny hairs on his bad leg were darker than on his good one, and if the sun came out and hit it at the right angle they cast little shadows of themselves all up and down his skin. ‘It’s still so much whiter,’ he said. He leant back on his elbows, and I put my hands up to shield my eyes from the light.

  We’d been there for ages. Even though he said he would, Dad couldn’t get time off work for the holidays so it was mostly just me and Davey. Grandma came over in the mornings so long as Grandpa was doing okay, but she didn’t like to stay much past dinner, in case it got too dark to drive.

  On the Wednesday of the first week Grandma couldn’t get to us before lunchtime, and by the time she’d arrived Davey had already nearly set the kitchen on fire trying to make toast and he’d given up and just started eating peanut butter out of th
e jar with a spoon.

  ‘Why don’t you see what Rohan’s up to?’ Grandma suggested once she’d arrived and we’d got most of the peanut butter splodges up off the lino. ‘Maybe you can have a sleepover and Simon can come and stay the night with me.’

  I squeezed my fists up into tight little balls, so that all the wrinkles in my skin went white.

  ‘Nah,’ Davey said, and I felt my knuckles crackle. ‘Rohan’s still at camp but I can just hang out with Simon.’ I let my fists out. Most other school holidays Davey wasn’t at home that much.

  ‘Well, go for a walk, then,’ Grandma said. ‘The two of you inside all day, it’s getting on my nerves.’

  We’d walked in the opposite direction to school because it was still only a few days before we had to go back for term two, but it meant that we had to double back three streets over and cross the railway line where there wasn’t a crossing. Davey held my hand while we waited to make sure there wasn’t a train coming, and on the ground you could see the rocks and dirt between the wood beams, and the rusted bolts in them as big as your fist. As soon as we’d crossed he let my hand go, but I could feel the weight of it on my skin even afterwards.

  Davey bounced the football in the gutter. The sound of it echoed across the gravel and got caught up in the electricity wires strung up and over the shop roofs. Every time someone went into the milk bar he’d stare after them, and he’d bounce the ball harder to make more noise. It got cloudy and then sunny again, and there were little purple and blue burns on the inside of my eyes when I looked down at the concrete.

  ‘If I had heaps of money I’d get so many lollies,’ Davey said. ‘I’d go and get the musk sticks even, because they’re twenty-five cents for a bag of five, and even though Rohan reckons it’s a rip-off, if I had heaps of money I wouldn’t even care.’ A car came down the street and Davey stopped bouncing. It wasn’t anyone we knew.