Cassandra Read online

  Her mother moves her aside and touches the spot. ‘Does it itch?’

  Poppy snatches a sandwich off the pile. ‘Only when I scratch it.’

  ‘He should see a doctor, right, Mum?’

  ‘Bloody doctors, don’t know which way is up.’ Poppy bites into his sandwich.

  Cassie’s mother turns to her, holding out the sandwiches. Cassie takes one and their eyes meet. Her mother nods at her, and Cassie knows her mother will call the doctor. Drive Poppy to town if she has to. And Cassie knows she has done a good thing. Better than knowing there will be no rain.

  ~ 11 ~

  Athena

  The sweet tickle of wattle flowers fills the air. Cassie balances the plate of jam drop biscuits on the fence post and opens the gate.

  ‘Going up the hill?’ Alex calls from the back veranda.

  ‘Yeah,’ she turns through the gate and picks up the plate of biscuits. The sun caresses her shoulders.

  ‘You should take a hat.’

  ‘What are you, my mother?’ she answers.

  She could go down the front drive onto the roadway to the old Schmidt house, but it would take three times longer. Instead she heads behind the house, through the back gate, past the wood pile, through the clump of bush that separates the house from the back paddock, and past the old shearing shed. The neat furrows ploughed the day before upset her even steps and she concentrates to keep the biscuits on the plate. Large clods of dirt disintegrate beneath her shoes. The paddock rises up the hill, crossed with contour banks like waves. At the top of the hill, she comes to a barbed-wire fence. She passes the biscuits through first and then, holding the middle strand of the fence down, she slides through the narrow gap.

  The teenage girl didn’t turn up at school, although Aunty Ida saw her in town with her bushy-bearded father. She existed.

  A crushed granite circular drive leads to the house; prickles spread across it like a disease. The garden in the middle of the drive grows only dead dandelions and dried up cobbler’s pegs. She climbs the wide sandstone steps, smooth and worn into dips where many feet have crossed them. The veranda is deep and cool, although one of the veranda railings has rotted and fallen into the garden bed below. The house exudes silence. Cassie stands tall, the plate of biscuits on her flat hand, and knocks.

  She breathes deeply from the exertion of her walk. The house remains quiet. She moves along the veranda to the French door and looks through a gap in the curtains. The room is inhabited only by furniture. A trickle of sweat slides down her spine. As it reaches the base of her back, a shiver ripples across her skin and she closes her eyes. When she opens them again, a woman with short red hair sits in a chair, her back to the door.

  The woman’s shoulders shudder with an intake of uneven breaths; she sobs, her tears quiet, her body fighting them. The woman shimmers and Cassie understands the figure is trying to return to the future. Is this how it is to see a ghost? Is a ghost merely a reflection of an event in the past or in the future? A silent bubble encases Cassie and the shimmering, sobbing woman. The hum of the sunshine is a force field, pulsing in time with Cassie’s heartbeat.

  The door opens.

  On the other side of the bubble is a girl, Cassie’s age, speaking words. Probably she is saying hello.

  Cassie can feel the crying woman, like a spider crawling onto her shoulder. The girl in front of her, with hair the colour of sun-soaked sorghum, will not become the crying woman. She shakes herself loose from the vision.

  ‘Hello. I’m Cassie.’

  ‘Oh oh!’ The girl claps her hands together with excitement. ‘You’re from the house down the hill. Father said there was girl living there. You brought biscuits. You are perfect. How did you know I just now needed biscuits?’ The girl looks past Cassie towards the machinery sheds by the house. ‘Father’s busy working. He doesn’t like to be disturbed.’ She turns to Cassie again and smiles. ‘Never mind, he probably won’t even notice you are here. Come inside. The biscuits will help me to unpack. Are they homemade? I know I should be unpacked by now, but it is such a pain. I do it so often it seems. Pack, unpack, pack. Did you walk all the way here? Weren’t you afraid of snakes? I can’t bear the idea of all that long grass hiding snakes.’

  ‘Yes … no.’ Cassie steps into the lounge room, the girl already halfway across the room, and crosses the faded red carpet to a wide hall made narrow by boxes and bits and pieces. Is that an actual elephant’s foot? Cassie looks back behind her and feels herself being pulled through a door.

  ‘This is my room.’ The girl plonks herself on the double bed laden with teetering boxes and takes the jam drops from Cassie’s outstretched hand. ‘Sit down. I’m Athena by the way. What did you say your name was?’

  ‘Cassie,’ she replies, pushing a box aside to make space to sit on the bed.

  ‘Cassie—as in Cassandra?’ Athena peels back the Gladwrap on the plate and chooses a biscuit. She offers the plate back to Cassandra.

  ‘Cassie, short for Cassandra,’ she says, taking a biscuit.

  ‘That’s funny—Cassandra and Athena.’ Athena points to Cassie and back to herself.

  ‘How is it funny?’

  ‘You know Cassandra and Athena—as in the fall of Troy.’

  ‘Who’s Troy?’

  ‘Troy the place, with the Trojan horse.’

  ‘Oh, the horse with the soldiers inside.’ Cassie finishes her jam drop and wipes her hands on her jeans. Athena still nibbles on hers.

  ‘Cassandra was a princess in Troy. She foretold that Troy would be penetrated and her father would be defeated. One of the enemy tried to rape her, or did rape her, I don’t remember which one, in the temple of Athena. Athena was a goddess. She was so mad she sent a storm after the victors and they never got home.’

  A balloon pops in Cassie’s chest. ‘Cassandra could tell the future?’

  ‘Apparently, in the story.’ Athena finishes the biscuit and springs up from the bed. ‘Hand me the books and I’ll put them away.’

  Cassie reaches into the nearest box. She hands the pile with The History of Astronomy on top to Athena. The moment swirls around Cassie like a carnival of possible rides. ‘Do you believe people can predict the future?’

  ‘Not really, I don’t think so. There is no evidence.’

  ‘No one calls me Cassandra. Just Cassie.’

  ‘Cassandra with a K?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Pity, that would be cool.’

  ‘What else did Cassandra do?’

  ‘I don’t know. Athena was the goddess of weaving and an inventor and stuff. It’s all pretty boring. Just stories. I tried weaving.’ She points to an orange and purple creation hanging on the wall above her head. ‘Weaving is really, really boring.’

  ‘I like the colours. It’s nice.’ Cassie picks at a loose thread on the patchwork quilt. ‘Did you make this too?’

  ‘Ages ago. Patchwork is less boring. Anyway, I believe we make our own future, so how could someone know what is going to be beforehand?’ Athena says, slotting the books into a bookshelf that covers an entire wall.

  ‘But what if they could? What if there were some things … like …’

  ‘Like what?’ Athena flips through the pages of glossy Impressionist paintings.

  ‘Like …’ Cassie’s heart smashes in her chest like crazy, sending blood to her face. ‘Like how I saved my Poppy’s life,’ she says, gushing the last words out fast.

  ‘Really?’ Athena slides the book into the shelf. ‘How?’

  ‘By telling his future.’

  Athena puts another book into the shelf; it clunks.

  Cassie draws her feet up on the bed and pulls them toward her. ‘I’ve never told anyone this before,’ she says quietly.

  Athena sits back on the bed and looks directly into Cassie’s eyes. ‘I won’t tell anyone. Not if you don’t want me t
o.’

  ‘I have visions sometimes. Or dreams that come true.’

  ‘Like about your … grandfather?’

  ‘He had a spot on his shoulder, a mole. It had cancer. The doctor said we got to it just in time.’

  ‘So you saw his mole in a dream?’

  ‘I was awake. Sort of. I saw a dead cow. I smelled a dead cow. It’s hard to explain.’

  ‘Obviously.’

  ‘You don’t believe me.’ Regret pulls Cassie down to earth. What had she been thinking? She barely knew this girl.

  ‘Mmmm, did you see that show on Nostradamus?’ Athena says.

  Cassie shakes her head.

  ‘There is a history of prophets through the ages. I guess it’s possible. Let me think about it.’ Athena’s face is as still as a statue, pensive, her skin shining ceramic.

  ‘Okay,’ Cassie says, pulling the box of books towards her, looking into it, not seeing it.

  ‘I made some lemonade yesterday—like they do in bad American movies. We’ve got a lemon tree with lemons on it. Do you want to try some? Come on.’ Athena leaps to her feet.

  Cassie follows Athena through the door. ‘Athena must have loved Cassandra—to send the storm like she did,’ Cassie says, thinking she has never seen a back so straight, a person step so lightly in the world. The word regal slips into her mind.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Athena replies. ‘I always got the impression she just didn’t like her temple being desecrated.’

  The bitter lemonade leaves a pleasant metallic tang on the roof of Cassie’s mouth. She and Athena are both thirteen but Athena’s birthday is not until next year—another whole nine months to wait, she says. But she seems older, is taller.

  ‘I’ll be fourteen in a few weeks—you should come to my party,’ Cassie says.

  ‘Ooo, I just love parties,’ Athena says.

  ‘Well,’ Cassie says, embarrassed, ‘not a real party, just dinner with my family. Boring really. But you could come. That would make it more fun.’

  ‘What would you have to eat? Will there be cake?’

  ‘My Aunty Ida’s cake. She makes the best cakes,’ Cassie replies.

  ‘Are you in grade eight?’ Cassie asks, pouring the last of her lemonade down the sink.

  ‘No,’ Athena replies, a cheeky grin on her face. ‘I don’t go to school.’

  ‘Rubbish.’ Cassie laughs.

  ‘Father doesn’t believe in it. He home schools me. “Curriculums are for dumb-dumbs”.’ Athena quotes her father in a sing-song voice.

  ‘You stay home all day?’

  ‘You mustn’t tell anyone. It’s barely legal. The authorities just love to make trouble.’

  ‘Don’t you miss having friends, not going to school?’

  ‘Do you miss not having friends? Living so far away from town, I mean.’

  Cassie looks into her empty glass. ‘I have friends.’ Sort of, sometimes, until her weirdness scares them away.

  Athena ‘never had a mother’, not even in photos, not that it matters, she claims. Cassie says she could have hers, and Athena laughs. Her laugh is deep, like it comes from the depths of a mysterious cave.

  ‘We have each other now anyway, to talk to and so on,’ Athena says.

  Later, Cassie tucks the empty plate under her arm and waves to Athena as she closes the door. The sunset reflects off the house walls and they glow red and fiery.

  It will be dark soon, so Cassie decides to take the road home. She passes the shed and the sound of welder hissing makes her turn her head towards the open door. A man, Athena’s father she guesses, bent over metal, his welding mask pulled over his face. Sparks surge in flashes of white light.

  Cassie swears she sees fire coming from the man’s fingertips.

  ~ 12 ~

  Birthday

  They hardly ever use the dining room. Only at Christmas time or when some distant relative comes for Sunday lunch. Cassie and Alex use it to play Monopoly if the mood takes them, and every January they spread their school books out over the smooth polished table before they cover them in brown paper and plastic.

  Cassie pushes on the window, punching the corner of the pane to get it out of the warped window frame. The sunlight oozes through the coloured glass, streaking Cassie’s arm with translucent red and green.

  Her mother comes into the room with knives, forks and plates. ‘Leave the windows, help me set the table.’

  Cassie picks up the chattering pile of cutlery. ‘Why can’t Athena come?’

  ‘I told you already, this is a family dinner.’

  ‘It’s my birthday. My fourteenth birthday. I should be allowed to have a friend. Besides, Poppy would like her to be here,’ Cassie argues.

  ‘Poppy has never met her.’

  ‘He has so.’

  ‘Don’t tell lies. None of us have met her. You only met her once.’

  ‘He did so meet her …’ But Cassie can’t finish her sentence. The event becomes vague and hard to pin down and she realises she has mixed up a dream with reality, the future and the past. ‘He wants to meet her.’

  ‘Athena.’ Her mother follows Cassie, straightening the knives and forks, setting a uniform distance between them and the plates. ‘Who would name their child Athena?’

  ‘She was a Greek goddess.’

  ‘I know who she was. God of war and wise counsel.’

  ‘I thought it was weaving.’

  ‘The Greeks could never make their minds up. Too many stories and too many gods. Can you get the glasses please?’

  ‘Can we use the special ones?’

  Her mother shrugs. ‘If you’re careful. But don’t give one to Alex. You know what he’s like.’

  Cassie ambles to the sideboard, running her hand along the bumpy tongue and groove wall. She slides open the cabinet’s glass door. She smooths the dust off the gold rim of one of her Grandma Lily’s miniature teacups.

  ‘Don’t fiddle with those things,’ her mother says.

  ‘I won’t.’ She picks up the deep red glass christening cup, engraved ‘Eric, 1912’. A boy who died. He had his own special cup but he died. How did he die? Children died more easily in the olden days. Poppy said he was Grandma Lily’s cousin.

  ‘The glasses, Cassie,’ her mother urges.

  ‘I am, I am. Don’t hurry me.’ She puts the christening cup down and reaches for the glasses. A crystal wedding present for her mum and dad from someone Cassie never met. She counts out five glasses and places them on the floor beside her. Her mother’s footsteps bounce the floor boards behind Cassie as she hurries back into the kitchen. Cassie picks up the christening cup and traces the gold engraved name and date. Why did Grandma Lily get the cup? Were they favourite cousins? she asked Poppy once. He didn’t know.

  The past could be as unreadable as the future.

  Every year Aunty Ida makes a cake from the Birthday Cake Book.

  ‘Which cake do you want?’ Aunty Ida always asks and Cassie flicks through the pages, seeing cakes from previous years: the train with the mint choc biscuits for wheels, the ghost with red Lifesaver eyes. Each picture of a past cake like seeing a memory, the cakes not yet made, like memories yet to come. The future cakes.

  This year, Cassie had less enthusiasm when she looked through the shining pages, picking off old drops of dried up cake mix and icing. Still hoping Athena would be allowed to come, the cakes seemed childish.

  Aunty Ida looked expectantly at her from across the table. ‘How about one of the girl cakes this year?’

  ‘I’ll have this one,’ she decided: the swimming pool with green jelly for water and cocktail umbrellas as tiny beach umbrellas. Lifesavers floated on the surface of the jelly holding up babies bobbing in a sugary pool party.

  Aunty Ida’s hands shook trying to get the jelly babies into the rings. It was like watching a toddle
r try to thread a needle.

  ‘Here, do you want to do this part?’ she said to Cassie.

  Now, the cake stands in the centre of the dining room table with five crystal glasses and one run-of-the-mill glass for butter-fingered Alex. Droplets of condensation on the hard butter icing will disperse as the icing softens into a creamy sweet bombshell. Cassie scrapes her finger along the base of the cake, hoping for a decent finger full without leaving any tell-tale evidence.

  Her mother steps into the room with two plates of roast beef, baked potatoes and pumpkin, peas, corn and gravy. ‘Get your fingers out of the cake and go and get Poppy and Ida’s tea from the kitchen.’

  ‘Is Dad home?’ Cassie asks.

  ‘No, we aren’t waiting. Ida, Gus,’ her mother calls into the lounge, ‘tea’s ready.’

  Cassie picks up two plates of steaming food from the kitchen. The day they met, Athena said her favourite food was spaghetti bolognaise. Cassie is dying to taste it, but her mother said that even if she knew how to cook it, Poppy and her father and probably Aunty Ida wouldn’t eat it.

  Athena promised one day, when her father cooked a pot of pasta, Cassie could come for a dinner party. ‘Sometimes,’ she said, ‘Father lets me have a little red wine. I bet he’d let you have some too. We’ll drink it out of big goblets. Like Greek gods.’

  ‘And princesses,’ Cassie added.

  Alex comes to the table and pulls out a chair, screeching across the lino.

  ‘Mum, he’s wearing his pyjamas,’ Cassie complains.

  ‘I had a bath, what am I supposed to wear?’ Alex pulls at the truck printed cotton.

  Cassie thumps into her chair. ‘It’s a dinner party. My fourteenth birthday dinner party. Mum …’

  ‘I heard you, Cassie. Alexander, go and put on your dressing gown.’

  ‘Dressing gown? How will a dressing gown make a difference? He’s wearing his pyjamas.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter what he wears,’ Poppy says, smoothing his hand over her hair.

  Cassie pulls her head away. ‘It does to me.’