Cassandra Read online

  ‘What?’ She stops hoeing and looks at him.

  He nods at the baby bump of her stomach and she shrugs and looks at Aunty Ida.

  Aunty steps forward and throws weeds in the wheelbarrow. ‘Your mother carried milk pails to the front gate up until the morning you were born.’ She wheels the barrow to the next section of garden and disappears into the weeds again.

  Her mum leans on the hoe. ‘You’ve decided to look for the snake then?’

  Cassie pretends she is not interested, searching for worms and cake, but really her heart is jumping all around her chest.

  ‘Yeah, well I still say it’s a bit of imagination. A snake’ll move on with the warm weather anyhow.’

  Her dad heads towards the house and her mum follows him. He puts on long thick gloves. Cassie follows them at a distance. She knows how to be quiet. If she walks slowly and remembers not to speak any of her thoughts, her parents seem to forget she is there. Maybe she really does disappear. It doesn’t matter. The best place to hide would be the side of the house under the lily. She will be able to see her father from there.

  Aunt Ida won’t let the big lily flowers into the house. She says they are bad luck and should only be seen at funerals. Poppy’s wife (which means she is Cassie’s grandma) planted the lily. Her name was Lily and she is dead. So perhaps they are bad luck. Cassie hides among the long leaves and watches her father crawling under the house.

  He looks uncomfortable and squashed and keeps scraping his back on the floorboards above him. Is the lily really bad luck? Perhaps she should hide somewhere else. She crosses all her fingers to cancel out the lily. Dad disappears into the gloom under the house. She closes her eyes and remembers her snake. With her fingers tucked into her hair and her head bent she breathes deeply and lets her breath out slowly, for every breath making her wish. Breathe in deeply, don’t let him find it, breath out slowly, don’t let him find it. Her head fills with white air. The world rotates around her. In her mind the snake dances, flying through the sky, weaving like a kite, and then suddenly it stops dancing, falls to the ground and slides alongside the water tank.

  ‘I can’t find anything.’ Her father’s voice startles her. Her feet have so much energy she wants to run and run.

  ‘Are you sure?’ her mother asks. They are close by, on the stairs around the corner. She must not move.

  ‘It’s like I said, there’s nothing underneath there except old matchbox cars and rusting milk pails. No snake. Now, I’ve got work to do.’

  Her mother sighs, turns and walks down the stairs. ‘Cassie,’ she calls.

  Cassie keeps her body tucked up close and holds her breath. The snake is safe and she knows where he is. It felt like a dream, but sometimes dreams are real. Maybe even Aunty Ida’s dream with lollies falling out of the sky.

  ‘Cass,’ her mother calls again as she walks away across the lawn. ‘You had better not be ignoring me, Cassandra Shultz.’

  Cassie ignores her. She sneaks around the corner and runs from fence post to fence post so her dad, walking across the paddock to the tractor, won’t spy her.

  Puffing from her run, she kneels on the dry grass by the tank stand. The grass prickles her knees. The sunlight spreads across the top of her head, like a crown of heat. Above her a group of birds argue. She searches the nearby branches. They are grey birds with yellow circles around their eyes. Noisy miners. It is an easy name to remember. Poppy told her they are called miner birds because the circles around their eyes make them look like coal miners. She can tell where the noisy part of their name comes from.

  She hunches low and peers under the tank stand. Underneath it is dark and damp. Could he be under there? She can’t see deep enough. She can’t fit underneath. She sits up again and runs her hand over the spongy moss growing across the rippled wood. This is the only place she knows where moss grows. She has tried taking the soft, cool carpet to other places in the garden, but it always dries up and becomes stiff and grey. It likes to grow where it is cool and damp. She thinks about the snake hibernating over the winter. If he had not long woken up, he will be tired of the cold. He will want to be warm. She always wants the warm sun after she has been cold.

  From the corner of the house, almost to the fence, stands a trellis where Aunty Ida’s climbing geraniums grow. Large flat grey rocks line the garden’s edge. Sometimes it is Cassie’s job to pull the weeds from between the rocks. She sits on a rock and picks a geranium, one of her favourites, white with red edges. One day, when she can count to a thousand, she will count all the different geranium colours in the garden, and maybe write them all up in a book like Poppy does with his weather. She searches along the line of rocks, wondering where the snake might go to get warm. Some clover grows between the rocks. Aunty Ida doesn’t like clover. It is a weed, she says. There is no good luck in a four-leaf clover. The only good luck is used up in the finding. Cassie still counts the leaves before she pulls it and throws it onto the grass. The noisy miners argue above her. Silly birds. She finds more weeds further along. She leans across the rocks. Aunty Ida will be happy she has done this job without even being asked. She grabs the weed nice and tight and pulls.

  The snake rises from the ground and twists into an S shape. Orange spots. Cassie didn’t know it would have orange spots on its belly. It hisses, its mouth open, and she knows she should move but less than a second has passed although it feels like a day and the snake’s bite stings like a hot needle. Why is he angry with her? He is fast. He bites her so fast and disappears so fast if it were not for the pain she wouldn’t believe it has happened. Two drops of blood glisten on the back of her hand. She clutches her hand to her chest. Her head fills with sound: the noisy miners screaming, the cicadas, and the air swishing past her ears as she runs up the back stairs. Her head aches, each sound an explosion.

  At the top of the stairs she starts to wobble. She stumbles across the veranda. There is a wall of haze between her and the screen door. She has to reach through it to open the door, but the door handles multiply and she doesn’t know which one to reach for. She reaches for one, any one, and then another until she finds one solid and turns it. She stumbles into the kitchen. Her mother stands at the sink looking like many shimmering ghosts. She is going to be so mad. It would be better if Poppy was standing there.

  ‘Cassie.’ Her mother’s voice booms like a drum.

  Cassie holds out her hand. ‘The snake bit me.’ She thinks she says the words. But she can’t be sure. She tries to say them again, just in case, but her tongue swells fat and wet in her mouth and she can’t move it.

  ~ 4 ~

  Curse

  Her family is screaming. Poppy is telling her to lie down. He doesn’t have to shout at her like that. She is only just here. She did not know his voice could be so loud. It has never been so loud. Aunty Ida yells into the phone. She is calling an ambulance—is the line so bad? She is screeching and the noisy miners too. They are in her head echoing from ear to ear. Everyone is screaming. The walls shake with the noise. The house will fall down if they do not stop. They must be quiet. She is missing something important. Someone is trying to tell her something—someone is whispering in her ear. A whisper … and a smell. The smell is everywhere. What is it? It is sweet—sticky sweet, but not like sugar or toffee. It makes her feel sick. It is like the time she vomited all day and night. The time Mum and Aunt Ida brought her an ice-cream bucket in case she didn’t make it to the toilet. They wiped her face with a damp washer and it smelled like vomit and she’s hated washers ever since. They remind her of the sick feeling in her stomach and how it comes up her throat and out of her mouth. But this is not that smell. It is a different smell. A flower could smell like this, but you wouldn’t plant it in your garden because it would be bad luck. Worse than the lily plant.

  It is a boy whispering in her ear. A boy who lives in their house. There is no boy living in her house. It is a boy who is going to live in her ho
use. Soon? Yes, soon. The boy is living in her mother’s tummy now, but one day he will live in the house. He will sleep in a bed in the spare room. It won’t be spare anymore. What is he saying to her? They need to be quiet so she can hear him. Now it is too late. He has stopped whispering. He ignores her. He stands on the veranda holding Poppy’s hand. They both look at the clouds. Where is she? Why isn’t she standing with them? Is she dead? Is she a ghost, living in the house, watching her Poppy and her new brother?

  One, two, three, four, five, nine, twenty-two, twenty-one hundred … when did she learn to count so well? The numbers sprout like weeds, she can’t stop them. Fifty, fifty-one, fifty twenty … what is she counting? The rain drops. See them falling, dripping in slow motion, letting her count them. She has to count them. She has to know the number of raindrops. Her brother said how many raindrops there would be and she has to find out if he is right. He is always right, but she wants him to be wrong. If he is wrong, if there are more raindrops or less raindrops then she will be alive again. If he is right she will have to stay dead. When she is dead, Poppy will not talk to her anymore.

  The lady tells her to count too. The lady wears a dress made of gold threads. When she is finished counting the rain drops, she will count the threads in her dress. A gown, Aunty Ida would call it a gown, like the ones the grown-up ladies wear to the dances. Aunty Ida wants to help her count the threads, but her hands shake so much she can’t hold the gown still. The lady lives in a house made of books. Cassie wants to live with her. The lady has read all the books. She read each book and then used them as bricks to build her house. A man lives there too. Fire spurts from his fingers and sparks from his hair. He might set all the books on fire. The lady wants Cassie to read all the books too. But Cassie is too scared. There are terrible things in those books. Things that come alive. Worse than any of the things in the books her mum reads her at night.

  She can’t read. She hasn’t learnt to read yet. She will never learn to read because she can’t count all the raindrops. They are coming too fast. She will never know if her brother was right. She can’t count because it hurts. Her chest hurts. The tyre is crushing her chest. Dad wasn’t looking hard enough. He has driven over her. It is crushing her bones, crushing her, crushing her heart, she can’t breathe. She can’t breathe, she can’t count, she can’t read.

  The monster in the book is alive. Its face is close to hers. It breathes heavily, panting like he has been running. The air from his mouth blows on her face, it is hot. It smells hot like coal from a fire. A person can’t have hot coals in his mouth. She needs to tell her mother. Don’t read that book. She doesn’t want that book. She can’t find her anywhere. The monster has stolen her, squashed her into the pages of the book so he can have her for always. He has orange spots. Orange spots, her snake has orange spots. Why did he bite her? She would never hurt him. She didn’t mean to tell anyone he was under the house. She wished and wished for Dad never to find him. She wished and wished … and the lily … her grandma Lily … her face was white and … that smell … sickly sweet smell … like blood … the smell that is the smell … of how death would smell.

  ~ 5 ~

  Sight

  Cassie’s sweaty hand slips around the plastic handle of her new school port. The school building rises above them, the sun splayed across the peeling paint on the weather boards. They walk underneath the building, its tall stumps like the opening of a cool cave. The older kids zip in and out from the heat to the cool in a chaotic game.

  ‘Can I go play?’

  ‘Not yet.’ Her mother leads her towards a long set of stairs beneath the building. She pulls the plaits from Cassie’s shoulders and runs her hand along the trail they make down her back. ‘Your father and your poppy went to school here too.’

  ‘Poppy as well?’

  ‘Yes, when the school was new.’

  ‘What about you? Did you go here too?’

  ‘No, I didn’t grow up here,’ her mother replies.

  At the top of the stairs they turn onto a long veranda stretching the length of the building.

  The school office opens onto the veranda. A skinny man in long shorts, long socks and a shirt and tie steps out. There isn’t much hair on his head, only a long floppy piece combed over the shiny skin.

  ‘Mrs Shultz, nice to see you. How are you? How is Peter, and old Mr Shultz? Still watching the weather? I heard there was a new addition to the family. A boy? What did you call him?’

  ‘Everyone is well, the baby is Alexander.’

  ‘Good name, good name, and this must be Peter’s girl? Grade one?’

  ‘Yes, this is Cassandra—Cassie.’

  ‘Mrs Bryant has the grade ones, twos and threes.’ He points to the far end of the veranda. ‘You can go and settle her in.’

  They pass another classroom, a small room crammed with books, and finally Cassie’s classroom. In the doorway a blond boy, his arms wrapped tight around his mother’s neck, clings like a bush tick. Cassie decides he wouldn’t make a good friend. Not brave enough.

  ‘Ah, another girl at last.’ A woman in a tight brown dress with orange flowers puts out her cigarette and walks towards them. ‘Grade one, I hope.’

  Where the dress wraps around the teacher’s stomach the flowers stretch out bigger and look weird. Cassie doesn’t know what sort of flowers they are. Sunflowers? Yellow daisies?

  ‘Yes, this is Cassandra Shultz—Cassie.’ Her mother wipes the sweat from her hand and holds it out for the teacher to shake, but the teacher turns to Cassie.

  ‘Good oh, Cassandra. I am Mrs Bryant. Grade ones sit here at the front. There are seven of you so far, but you are only the second girl.’ She looks up at Cassie’s mother. ‘There must have been something in the water that year.’ She places her hand on Cassie’s shoulder and steers her to the front row. ‘This desk can be yours. Sit down and unpack your books. See there’s a slot underneath for you to put them in.’ Mrs Bryant bends over and pulls out the chair. The flowers disappear into the folds of her belly. ‘Now, let’s see if I can sort out this boy over there.’

  Cassie sits in the chair and runs her hand over the top of the smooth desk. Only one other girl is not many to play with. Will that be enough? She lifts her school port onto the desk and flicks open the latches, closes them, and opens them again, enjoying the snapping noise. Clunk, click, clunk, click.

  ‘Cass, stop that.’ Her mother lifts the lid and takes out a pile of books and hands them to Cassie. ‘Here, put them away like you were asked. I’ll help you.’

  The blond boy screams as Mrs Bryant tries to extract him from his mother. Her mother looks at the boy in the doorway and back at Cassandra.

  ‘You can go now, Mum. You should get home to Alex.’

  ‘He’ll be fine with Aunty Ida for a while longer.’

  Cassandra lifts more books from her port. They are perfect. Her mother had wrapped them in brown paper and plastic, glued on a picture from the Women’s Weekly and neatly printed Cassie’s name, school and grade. That was a good day.

  ‘Do you think I will learn to read or count today?’ Cassie asks.

  ‘It won’t happen that fast.’

  ‘How long?’

  ‘I don’t know. You can spend your whole life learning about something.’

  ‘Like Poppy and the weather?’

  ‘And me and being a mother.’

  Cassie laughs. ‘People don’t have to learn how to be mothers. How long will it take to learn to read?’

  ‘A year maybe. It depends how hard you try.’

  ‘A year! I wish it was a year already.’

  ‘Don’t wish your life away, Cassandra.’

  A bell rings. Mrs Bryant stands in the doorway holding the hand of the red-faced blond boy. ‘That’s the bell. Downstairs to the parade ground. Cassie, say goodbye to your mum now. There is nothing to worry about.’

  �
�Bye, Mum.’ Cassie stands and begins to walk out the door.

  ‘Don’t I get a kiss?’ Her mother bends down and Cassie kisses her check. Her mother pulls Cassie’s plait over her shoulder and fiddles with the fluffy ends. Cassie passes from one foot to the other, looking over her mother’s shoulder. ‘Be a good girl,’ her mother says, smiling at her and standing up.

  ‘Yes, Mum, can I go now?’

  Her mother nods and her eyes look wet like they will cry.

  ‘Don’t worry about me, Mum.’ Cassie hugs her mum’s thighs and then races off in the direction Mrs Bryant disappeared.

  Downstairs, Mrs Bryant shows the gathering grade ones how to stand in two lines—a line of boys and a line of girls. Two girls. Cassie stands in front, the other girl behind her. All the other classes line up too. The parade ground is blue bitumen and the heat rises in waves up Cassie’s bare legs.

  On the veranda above them, the skinny man speaks. ‘Welcome back to the new school year and welcome to all our new students. I trust you have all found which classroom you belong to. We will start by singing the National Anthem.’ He presses a button on a tape recorder but the music comes out of a speaker at the bottom of the veranda.

  ‘Turn around,’ Mrs Bryant whispers. Cassie turns and finds the rest of the school facing a flagpole at the back of the parade ground. A boy pulls a rope and a flag climbs the pole.

  ‘God Save Our Gracious Queen …’ Cassie doesn’t know the words. She mumbles and gazes at the messy hair in front of her. The messy haired girl turns and smiles at her.

  Cassie’s stomach turns like a Ferris wheel. She is going to have a friend.

  * * *