We See the Stars Read online

  ‘Look,’ Cassie said, and she hung her head out of the tree and leant right over, so that she was nearly falling out. ‘You can see the gate she put in, see?’

  I leant over but I couldn’t really see, and I didn’t want to lean any further, and the ground was quite far down and I hadn’t really noticed until right up to that moment.

  ‘Do you reckon she put it in for the dog?’ Cassie said. ‘It’s like a little rat thing, though. Seriously, it’s an actual rat with a collar. I don’t know why you’d actually want to keep it.’

  We could hear the dog barking from where we were sitting, and it sounded like the kind of dog that bites and also like it wasn’t very friendly, and I don’t like really big dogs and especially not when they bark and the noise goes up and inside your ears and there’s all teeth and black gums and ripples and ridges and sharpness and spit.

  Cassie jumped and landed in the grass, and looked up at me still sitting in the tree. She put her hands on her hips.

  ‘Jump down, Numpty,’ she said. ‘This is boring.’

  I stood up and tried to look back over the fence, and I could still hear the dog barking, and if I leant into the tree and kind of swivelled over to the right I could almost see the back fence and the big tree in Ms Hilcombe’s backyard, and the gate and the grass.

  I held on to a branch over my head while I dropped my legs over, then climbed down one step at a time. Cassie waited, but when I turned around she was smiling at me.

  ‘So you gonna invite me back to your place or what?’ she said, and she leant on the tree trunk and crossed her arms. I felt my tummy start to get real heavy, and I felt the prickles up and down my arm, and I tried to swallow but there wasn’t any spit. I thought about Mum lying in the dark, and I thought about wool right down to the skin.

  ‘Will you get in trouble?’ she asked.

  I nodded.

  ‘Never mind then, weirdo,’ Cassie said. ‘I gotta go before Mum gets home and loses her shit, anyway.’

  She left, and after I was sure she’d gone around the corner and definitely couldn’t see, I walked around to the front of Ms Hilcombe’s house before it got too dark. It was getting cold, and there was just enough light left to see my breath coming out of my mouth like smoke, and it was warm on the tip of my nose.

  Ms Hilcombe’s house was in the middle of her block so that she had a bit of a front yard, but there wasn’t anything much growing in it, and there was grass and one tree in the corner but the leaves were coming off for autumn and there were wet leaves in her guttering and all over the path, and the dog was still barking. I could see little paws in a gap under the gate, and it stopped barking when I walked down the driveway. I could hear it sniffing and whining when I got to the gate, and I felt its cold nose when I pushed my fingers between the wood and the concrete, and I felt the little tongue tickle my fingertips and it was wet and warm and it made me kind of laugh. I could hear its little paws on the concrete while it danced around on the spot.

  I stayed crouching for a while, with my hand under the gate and the little dog’s nose on my fingertips, and I would have stayed there forever except that I heard footsteps behind me and I froze on the spot, and I didn’t want to turn around and I didn’t want to move because I thought that maybe if I didn’t move I wouldn’t have to see that it was Ms Hilcombe, and that she was standing at the end of the driveway, and that she was looking right at me standing at her gate.

  ‘Simon?’ she said, and I stayed crouched but gave her a little wave. ‘What are you doing here?’

  I couldn’t think of anything, and when my heart started pounding it woke up some of the bees, and before I could take a breath they’d started swarming out of their honeycomb and out into my blood, and I could feel their stingers down my legs and into the palms of my hands.

  ‘Are you alright?’ Ms Hilcombe asked. She started coming towards me so I began to shuffle back, but I bumped into the gate a bit, which made it shudder, and the dog started barking again. It was right in my ear, and it gave me a fright so that I fell backwards, but when I put my arm out to break my fall I landed funny, and I felt the pain start in the elbow and shoot down into my fingers. I rolled over to look at it and I saw that my elbow was bleeding. For a second I didn’t really feel anything, but then there was heat behind my eyes and I felt the edges of my mouth wobbling. Ms Hilcombe’s mouth was in a big tight O when she came running down the driveway.

  ‘Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit,’ she said, and pulled me up onto my feet, which were still jelly from the fright.

  ‘Oh, come in, you’ll have to come in.’ And Ms Hilcombe put her hand between my shoulders and I instantly felt the burn of it, starting in the shape of her hand and then out into my arms, turning them all red and splotchy.

  We went in through the front door, where there was a pile of mail and a couple of chewed-up newspapers.

  ‘Go sit in the kitchen,’ Ms Hilcombe said, and she pointed to the back of the house. I went through her living room and stood by her kitchen table, which overlooked the backyard. There was a dog bed in the corner by the pantry, and I could see that the dog had followed me around so that it was right up against the back door and dancing around on the spot. It looked like it might have been cold. I reached out and opened the door and it came running in and jumped up at me, and then started sniffing at the tops of my socks.

  Ms Hilcombe came back with some Dettol and some bandaids, and the dog followed her right up to her ankles.

  ‘God, Simon, I’m so sorry,’ she said. ‘Do you want me to…?’

  I held out my elbow and she wiped it with the Dettol, and it stung so that my eyes started to water.

  ‘I know, it’s the pits,’ Ms Hilcombe said. She was leaning over me with her face right there. She put the bandaids on and patted them down gently. ‘There you go, all patched up.’

  I sniffed.

  ‘Do you want something to drink? Some water? Juice?’

  I nodded and she got up and went to the fridge.

  ‘I’m sorry about Tink,’ she said. ‘She just really likes people, and she doesn’t get out much because I’m at school all day.’

  Tink had jumped up on the couch and was chewing at her own foot. She stopped to look up at us for a second, and then went back to chewing.

  Ms Hilcombe came back with the juice and sat down again. ‘Tink is short for Tinkerbell, because she has a little bell on her collar,’ Ms Hilcombe explained. ‘She was so small as a puppy I could only find a cat collar for her, and it just kind of stuck, I guess. Funny thing is now she’ll sulk like anything if I try and take it off her…and who am I to give her an identity crisis?’

  I liked her kitchen. It was orange on the benches, and it had wood on the cupboard doors, and there was a big window that looked out into the garden, with lace curtains that reminded me of Grandma’s.

  ‘Sorry, I’m rambling. You’re actually my first guest.’

  Ms Hilcombe had done the washing-up but all her plates were still on the rack. On the fridge she had a photo of herself holding Tink, and there was a picture of a man, and another picture of Tink just by herself. Ms Hilcombe saw me looking at the pictures. She pointed to the one of the man.

  ‘That’s Matthew,’ she said. ‘He was my husband. He went to the war.’ She walked over to the fridge and bent down to look at it more closely. ‘Tink always loved him the most. I feel like she could take me or leave me, frankly. Pretty sure she’d make a break for it if the treats ever dried up.’

  Ms Hilcombe reached up to the top of the fridge and pulled down another photo. She held it up to look at it, then showed it to me over her shoulder. It was her and the man again, standing in front of a paddock fence with a line of gum trees along one side.

  ‘This was our place, before I moved here,’ she said. She stared at it for a long second. ‘Sometimes I still miss it.’ Then suddenly she snapped her head up, and she was smiling but still seemed like she was sad. ‘I’ve never actually shown that to anyone before,’ she said, an
d she looked at me.

  I felt heat on my cheeks and on the back of my neck, but even still it made me smile. She put the photo on top of the fridge, so that it was hidden and her husband was gone.

  I finished my juice and I put the glass back down on the table. I didn’t really know where to look so I stared at the glass for a while, and then when I looked up Ms Hilcombe was watching me, and her lips were all tight but she was trying to smile.

  ‘How’s your arm?’ Ms Hilcombe asked.

  I shook my head.

  She laughed a little, then stopped. ‘Simon, are you happy in my class? I worry that you find it boring, or that I should be looking after you more or something. I know you and Cassie are getting on well, and that’s great, but I feel like I should be doing more. Sorry, I’m talking too much. You don’t have to answer that question. Sorry.’

  There was just barely enough light outside to see the clouds, and they were thin streaks across pink and a bit of gold. From the kitchen window you could see the tree in Ms Hilcombe’s backyard, and the branches had lost their leaves just along the top of it. They made dark little fingers scratching roughly at the sky. I looked back at Ms Hilcombe, and I felt the warmth pinking up from the inside.

  ‘I like your class,’ I said, but quietly.

  Ms Hilcombe went still and she looked at me, and for a second her eyebrows were straight up and her mouth hung open so I could see her tongue.

  ‘Oh, Simon!’ she said, and her voice came out all in a rush of air. ‘Did you just…?’ And she smiled then, with all her teeth, and her eyes were shining and had started to go a bit red. ‘I hope you’re not just saying that,’ she said, and she was laughing. She leant over and put her hand on my good arm, and she looked right into my eyes to speak to me, but there wasn’t any burn in it and I looked right back.

  ‘And you know you can say anything to me?’ she asked.

  ‘I know,’ I said, and she smiled again.

  Tink jumped off the couch and started whining, and Ms Hilcombe got up and fed her a biscuit from a bag on the counter. Tink liked the biscuit very much, and as soon as she’d finished it she whined for another one.

  ‘I’m sorry, I’m crying,’ she said. ‘I’m not upset, I promise.’ ‘Mum says to count when I’m upset,’ I said.

  ‘Oh?’ Ms Hilcombe said, and she wiped at her eyes. ‘Count what?’

  ‘Colours, sometimes, and lights. The first time I ever had an angry I was real little and I didn’t know many numbers, so we used to count on her fingers until I got better at it.’

  ‘Clever lady,’ Ms Hilcombe said. ‘What else do you count?’

  I shrugged my shoulders, and she came and sat down beside me.

  ‘Do you ever count, I don’t know, umm…sounds? Or happy things? Or good thoughts?’

  I looked over my shoulder at Superman, but he just shrugged and shook his head.

  ‘Colours are good,’ Ms Hilcombe said. ‘Simple, easy to remember, it’s a good system.’

  ‘You have five orange cupboards and one orange bench,’ I said, and Ms Hilcombe laughed. I liked the sound of it, and I felt it wrap itself up and down my back so that I sat up straighter.

  ‘Simon, do you think about high school much?’ Ms Hilcombe asked. ‘Like, where you’ll go?’

  I looked at her, and I felt the pink go cold, and my tongue went heavy and stuck to the roof of my mouth.

  ‘Because there are some really good schools outside the district. Some that you can live in, too, so you could—well, you’d be with the other kids and make lots of friends because you’d be all together. And there are some schools for kids who need a bit of extra help…’ She stopped talking and looked at me then, her eyes real wide.

  I felt my tummy roll and I swallowed it down. I wondered what would happen if I vomited on her floor. I wondered if I’d be able to keep Tink away from it.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said. She’d started to go red. ‘You don’t have to,’ she said. ‘Go anywhere you don’t want to, I mean. Maybe you and me could get together on weekends when you go to high school, and we’ll just work our way through it together, hey?’

  Tink stuck her nose on my knee and I liked the cool of it. I put my hands down under the table and she licked the wool right off them.

  ‘In grade four we went in a bus to a museum and we got to see some old Morse code machines,’ I said. ‘They were all connected by a wire like a phone, but instead of a voice you could just hear dots and dashes. Like noise. They took out all the words and just left the punctuation.’ Ms Hilcombe wasn’t red anymore. ‘And sometimes people were so good at the code that you could have whole chats with them back and forth because they could basically just know what the other person was saying, and they hardly had to write it down at all.’

  ‘Goodness,’ said Ms Hilcombe. She watched me for a long while. The pink of the sky had gone grey behind her. You could hardly see the tree anymore.

  ‘Is Matthew dead?’ I asked.

  Ms Hilcombe looked back at the fridge where the photo used to be. She let out a long breath. ‘I’ve never been to that museum,’ Ms Hilcombe said. ‘Is it good?’

  I tapped out Y-E-S on her kitchen table.

  Ms Hilcombe laughed. ‘Was that the Morse code?’ she asked.

  I tapped out Y-E-S again. It echoed a little in the kitchen, and I felt it push at the air inside my ears.

  ‘Can you teach me?’ she said.

  I nodded.

  ‘Okay, teach me my name.’ She held her knuckles up to the table ready to tap with them. I tapped out the letters and she tapped them back, then again, then again to make sure she had it. She tapped one last time and I tapped with her, and it was much louder with the two of us. The sound of it joined together and hit up against the window glass and the walls, and it echoed around and off the ceiling, and it filled the room like water, so that pretty soon it was up to our necks, and we kept tapping even though we had to hold our heads up, and there were letters all up to our noses, and we didn’t stop until we were under, until our lungs were full with the noise of it and all we breathed out was sound.

  ‘Oh, wow, it’s dark—you should probably go home,’ Ms Hilcombe said. ‘Don’t want to upset your dad.’

  Tink followed me to the door and I felt her sniffing at my toes again. I stepped carefully so that I wouldn’t kick her accidentally as I walked.

  ‘She’s taken a shine to you,’ Ms Hilcombe said, and she smiled at me. When she opened the door she had to hold Tink back with her foot until she’d followed me out and closed the flyscreen. She turned the porch light on for me, and I walked real slow down her path. It was colder and a lot darker than I’d realised, and even though the streetlights were on I could only just see the footpath right in front of me. When I got to her letterbox she called out to me, and I turned around to wave goodbye. A car came past and lit her up for a second, and she was pale and white against the wood.

  ‘Is this it?’ she asked, and she used the back of her knuckles to tap out the letters on her front door. She tapped out each letter, slow like she was still remembering.

  M-A-T-T-H-E-W.

  She got every letter right, all lined up in a row. When she’d finished I gave her the thumbs-up. I went home.

  Eleven and a half

  Here is a list of good sounds:

  1. When you lie down in the bath and the water is up over your ears and you can hear the chain on the plug tinkling and crinkling against the rim.

  2. When it’s autumn and windy and the dry leaves skittle down the road.

  3. When you wake up in the middle of the night and it’s so dark and you think you’re all alone and then you hear your brother snoring a little bit in the bed beside you.

  4. When you drink something fizzy out of a can and you can hear the little bubbles popping inside against the metal, and it sounds like little ants marching all up and down the sides.

  Here is a list of bad ones:

  1. When you hear the bed creak like someone is rolling over, but wh
en you stand in the doorway there’s just stillness, and orange light coming in through the curtains and making patterns on the wall.

  2. Glass when it breaks into little bits.

  3. When a dog shouldn’t be barking and it is.

  3.1 When a dog should be barking and it isn’t.

  4. The sound it makes when you’re too full of air, and you can’t let it out but you still have to get more in, and you can hear the skin catching on your ribcage when you suck it in through your mouth, and there’s cracks in your bones as they all get pushed out to the sides to make more room, and the rattle in your throat comes out the more you try to tell it not to, and there’s still fifteen minutes before you get there.

  Twelve

  The lounge room smelt like burnt toast, and you could hear that the TV was on. I got out of bed and pushed the bedroom door open, and the first thing I saw was Dad sitting on the couch. He was in his work gear, but he had his head dropped low and the steam from his coffee was going right into his face. He didn’t look up when I walked into the room, but I saw Grandma standing at the bench in the kitchen. She had the butter knife in her hand and the toast was sitting in the toaster. She was staring out the doors to the backyard. I took a step backwards, and bumped into Davey.

  ‘Dad’s still home!’ he said. The sound of it poked a little hole in the silence, and Grandma dropped the knife onto her plate.

  ‘No school today, boys,’ Dad said. He put the coffee cup on the floor and rubbed at his eyes with both hands. Grandma kept staring out the window. It would take ages before you couldn’t smell the burning anymore, and you could still remember it, even if you hardly tried.

  Grandma had been at the hospital all night and had driven back along the highway while the sun was still coming up. Dad kept telling her to go and lie down in the spare room but she wouldn’t. Davey wouldn’t eat anything and wouldn’t even have a drink of milk when Dad poured him one.

  ‘You need to keep your strength up,’ Dad said to him. Grandma ran him a bath, and he sat it in with the door closed for so long his skin went prune-y.