As Stars Fall

by Christie Nieman

  The hallway is mostly taken up with a ladder. He climbs it to her room. The room is exactly as he saw it when she was face down on her doona on the floor, crying. And through the window he can see exactly where he was sitting on the street earlier, his pile of cigarette butts, and he can see the roof of the factory opposite, where he was when he was first here – before he knew that here was a real place to be.

  He looks around the room: a roll-top desk, a bookcase, on the wall a framed photo of a man and the girl in front of a beautiful landscape. There are other photos of that landscape, all different sizes, in frames everywhere around the room. Everywhere. And photos of her.

  But the first picture grabs his attention, he’s not sure why. The man and the girl. It’s obviously her, but younger. Her hair is even redder. He looks closer. Something else. There are hills in the background, blue with trees. The hills, they’re familiar. He feels like he’s seen pictures of them before. In the bush in the near background, there are wattles flowering. There is one prominent rock on the hills behind, its hard edges protruding out of the fuzz of the bush. It is at the very top of the tallest hill. It is a distinctive sentry, a hanging pinnacle of granite. He has seen it. He’s seen it from a different angle.

  Two things happen at once. The first is that he remembers the rock. He saw that rock hanging just above him when he was walking around two days ago, on his own street, and got lost and trapped and scared in the bush. He barely noticed it at the time, but with the photo it rears up in his memory, disorienting him for a moment.

  The second thing is that he sees another photo. Another photo of the rock. It is taken from a different angle, closer up. In this photo the rock looks three times bigger: it has been stripped of its shawl of grey-green scrub. The rock stands almost impossibly tall on bare red earth, flanked only by black and smoke-streaked trunks, the sides of the rock itself scorched to blackness.

  And the angle in this last picture is heartbreakingly familiar to him. He has seen it before, in photographs. His mother’s field-trip photographs. She had tried to show them to him, tenderly, carefully, holding them out like she was approaching a skittish horse with sugar. She had tried to invite him into her world, to share these places she’d seen – Birchip, Murramunda, Chiltern – to inspire him to care about what she cared about. He had been uninterested, had looked at one or two photographs – the hill with the rock, the backs of two kangaroos disappearing into scrub – and then he had escaped, cantered off out of her suffocating presence into his own world, leaving her in his dust.

  The rock is making him dizzy. The rock, scorched by fire – the same fire? Even in the photograph it feels as though the rock is hanging over his head like it did when he was lost. He feels it again, lost, trapped, scared. Something coming for him. Foxes and fires. The landscape and the girl. They are coming for him. They are pushing in on him from the walls. He sits suddenly. The springs of her bed squeak. He stands up again just as suddenly, lurches over to the photo wall. He crouches down and pulls a photo off the wall, first the one with the girl and the man and the hills and the tower of granite, and then the close up of the burnt-out rock. With the photos still in his hands he stands quickly and whacks his head on the sloping roof. He almost falls as he scrambles down the ladder. He yanks open the back door, stumbles out into the light of the backyard and charges through the gap in the fence and out onto the cobbled lane.

  Delia

  They are sitting next to each other. But only because there is nowhere else to sit. Mr Krietcher scratches out sentences on the board.

  Delia has been unable to glean anything about the folder from Robin’s face. She’s been unable to glean anything at all: Robin is distracted, distant, preoccupied. Delia knows when someone has decided she’s not worth the energy of friendship. She’s felt it before. She’s feeling it now. She should never have allowed herself to get this far, should never have given that piece of herself away, that heavy precious stone. She should never have expected that she might be able to share the weight of it all with somebody, or at least have somebody understand, to have somebody care.

  She is glad, now, that she didn’t put her name on it. It would have been worse still if somebody had understood, had understood perfectly, and still didn’t care. Let Robin be confused about it, if she even cares enough to be confused. Let it just be a mysterious thing that happened. Let it all just go.

  There is a scuffle across the aisle from them and Delia can hear Linda’s voice in a stage whisper.

  ‘Hey, Robin.’

  Robin waits until Mr Krietcher turns his back on them and then swivels in her chair to face Linda. Delia can sense her eagerness. Those are the friends she wants.

  Delia sneaks a look out of the side of her eyes. Linda is leaning in towards Robin, conspiratorial. Natasha is staring ahead, stony-faced, but Delia knows that she will be behind whatever is going on.

  Linda whispers hoarsely, ‘Hey, Robin, what did you say your name was again, the first time, last week?’

  Delia sees Robin’s back tense up. She can sense an ambush as well as anyone.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I just can’t remember, that’s all.’

  Robin looks flustered. ‘It wasn’t anything. It was nothing. It was just a tongue-trip.’

  Mr Krietcher turns from the board. ‘Girls, please. A bit of quiet. Robin, eyes front.’

  Robin swivels back so Delia can see the side of her face, and Linda waits until Mr Krietcher has turned again. ‘It’s just that I knew a girl with hair as red as yours, and people used to call her “Blue”. But you didn’t say “Blue”, did you? But it was something like that, something to do with your hair.’

  Robin has been injured. As she stares straight ahead, she seems to have no response to this inscrutable sideways attack. She begins to go red. Delia can’t stand to see it happen. She can’t stand to see Robin’s lively eagerness stamped out. The tension inside pulls tight. It draws her to her feet, it gets set to send an arrow hurtling through the air.

  Delia stands up and looks Linda in the eye. ‘It was “Flame”, alright? Flame.’

  Mr Krietcher turns around. Robin looks up at Delia. Linda looks confused, and Natasha smugly satisfied. But then Delia can’t stop. It starts pouring out. She doesn’t understand herself.

  ‘Obviously when she was a kid someone called her “Flame” because of her hair, someone close to her, someone she loved, and in the stress of standing up in front of a room full of people like you, a room full of bitches like you, she probably tried to think something comforting and she accidentally said it. It’s not something to make fun of.’

  ‘Delia.’ Mr Krietcher says her name quietly. But she can’t stop.

  ‘So she said her name was Flame, alright? Got that? It was Flame. As in candle. As in spark. As in fire.’

  The last word leaves her lips like a gunshot. It hangs there over the whole classroom, and suddenly, Delia can stop. Linda has gone deathly pale, Natasha stares down at her hands. Everyone in the class looks down at their desks, at their work. Everyone except Robin, who still looks confused, and Mr Krietcher, who puts down his chalk and walks over to her where she stands. Gently he ushers her out of the classroom with a quiet, ‘Come this way,’ and the minute she is outside the door her hands give in to a bizarre shaking, vibrating from her very core. Mr Krietcher sits her on a couch by a window in the corridor and beckons through the window in the classroom door to Robin.

  Robin comes into the corridor, stealing sideways glances at Delia.

  ‘Shut that door,’ Mr Krietcher says. ‘Robin, can you go and get the nurse? Tell her it’s Delia.’

  Delia doesn’t meet Robin’s eye as Robin says, ‘Sure.’ Doesn’t want to have to wonder what she sees, what she thinks. Just a freak. Just what everybody else sees. And now, sitting here, a shaking freak.

  When Robin is gone, Mr Krietcher makes her watch one of the treetops out of the window as it moves and dances in the wind. He asks her whether she is breathing in or out, an
d when she says ‘out’ he says, ‘How about now?’ and by the time Robin gets back with the nurse, Delia isn’t thinking about flames anymore, she is thinking about dancing treetops and her own breath, and is able to walk unsteadily down to sick bay where the nurse calls Seth to come and pick her up.

  Seth

  Seth has borrowed their dad’s car. When the nurse from Delia’s school had called him, it seemed natural to pretend to be their dad and say he’d send Seth to come and collect her. And for the tiniest moment before he took the car he considered that he was underage and driving without a licence, but he couldn’t find an actual reason to care: there seemed no important reason not to drive it.

  When he pulls up at the school gates the nurse hands Delia’s bag in through the window while Delia climbs into the passenger side. Delia can’t hold her own bag because she is shaking like she does after her nightmares. Seeing her like that makes him want to punch something. The nurse leans in the driver’s window and says to Seth, ‘She’s had a rough one, she needs looking after tonight,’ and then she does a kind of double-take at Seth, and at his bandaged hand, like she thinks he might need some looking after too.

  They drive with the windows down and Seth takes the back way home, through the cool leafy streets rather than the hot busy main roads. As he drives, he’s conscious of the photographs from the girl’s wall in his pocket. Taken from their frames and stuffed into his jeans as a talisman, as protection or defence – he’s not sure which, he’s not sure how it works – they send images to flick behind his eyes: red hair, a burnt rock face, something orange coming through the bush. Sometimes he can barely see the road.

  Delia doesn’t seem to notice. She stares out the window, looking pale and tiny.

  Seth keeps feeling like someone has opened a furnace door. The air coming into the car from outside is a little warm, but Seth feels blasted with heat. But still, he tries for who he used to be. He reaches over and tweaks Delia’s earlobe. ‘Shit day, Delly-Dee?’ he says. And Delia nods silently, her gaze still fixed on the window.

  When he pulls up in front of their house, before he turns the engine off, Seth feels suddenly the urgency of everything. Delia is in danger. He has to know what she knows, even if he can’t trust her. He says, ‘It’s her, isn’t it? That’s what happened today. It’s Flame. She was at your school.’

  Delia looks surprised. Startled. She says, ‘Did the nurse tell you about it on the phone? Did she tell you what I said?’

  Seth presses his lips together, rage growing torrid inside him. Of course she’s at Delia’s school. He hadn’t even thought of it. How could he have forgotten the matching uniforms in the parklands? He hadn’t thought it was real then, and so the detail slipped away. But that’s no excuse – he failed to notice something, something important.

  Delia goes on. ‘I don’t know what happened. She’s the new girl. They were picking on her. But I don’t know why I said all those things, it’s not like we’re even real friends,’ but Seth isn’t listening anymore. He turns the engine off and sits looking straight ahead.

  ‘It’ll be alright, Del. I’ll make sure of it. I promise.’

  He feels a rising wave of heat and anger. He told Delia to stay away from her. But it wasn’t enough. It wasn’t clear. She didn’t understand the danger. He hasn’t done enough to look after her.

  ‘Don’t go to school anymore, Del. I’ll fix it. I’ll fix it and then you won’t have to worry anymore. Okay? And then you can go back to school. Don’t you lie to me now. I’ll be angry if you go to school before I’ve fixed it.’

  Delia looks confused, and a bit wary. She says, ‘Seth? What’s wrong?’

  He reaches out quickly to hold her wrist and his sleeve falls back, showing his scabbed arms. She pulls back, but only a little, and says, ‘What did you do to your arms? Are you okay?’

  He ignores her, holding her wrist hard, and says, ‘I’ll fix it, Del. I’ll get her. She won’t be able to haunt you anymore. I promise. I won’t let her into your dreams. Okay? Do you believe me?’ He looks deep into her face and nods at her, nodding her agreement for her until she starts to nod with him, and he watches until he believes she understands and he can relax and let go.

  ‘Okay,’ he says.

  Robin

  Was Delia sick? On the train home, I kept remembering the nurse’s face when I went down to sick bay; when I said, ‘It’s Delia.’ It was clear that the fact it was Delia meant something to her. She stopped what she was doing, got an important look on her face and followed me back to the classroom. And the way everyone in the class had reacted when Delia stood up and talked like that – it was strange. They seemed more upset and ashamed than surprised and embarrassed. Mr Krietcher ordered me back into the classroom while the nurse took Delia away, so I didn’t get a chance to talk to her, didn’t get a chance to thank her for sticking up for me – again. And that was another thing I didn’t understand. Why did Delia keep standing up for me like that? It was almost like she didn’t care what anyone thought of her. Like something had happened that meant she was so far above all that. And I couldn’t help thinking again: Was Delia sick? Like, really sick? Sick enough not to care what Natasha and Linda thought of her? Mum would know. I’d ask her about it the minute I got home.

  I got off the train; I was late because I had stayed back at school to look up the Australian Bird and Bat Banding Scheme website to see if the leg-tags Delia and I had seen on the Bush Stone-curlew were recorded anywhere. I wanted to see if I could get an idea of where the birds had come from. And I thought if I found anything out, then maybe I would tell Delia. Because even though it was personal to me, and reminded me of my dad, and felt painful, maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad thing to talk to someone about it. Maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad thing to talk to Delia about it. And she had been there, seen the curlew, heard the curlew: it was her thing too.

  And also, I really wanted to show her I wasn’t freaked out by the way she’d been, by the fact that she might be sick. I wanted to show her I wasn’t like the others.

  But I found nothing useful about the leg-tags and the curlews, except that the longest curlew flight recorded was one hundred and four kilometres. Our two birds were one hundred and fifty kilometres apart, so one of them must have flown further than was normal. Why would it do that? So then I looked up everything I could on Bush Stone-curlews and their range and habits, and tried to find out why a curlew might fly such a long way to get to a city park. And it seemed like Dad was right about the parklands being an unsuitable habitat – that curlew didn’t have the healthy look of a bird in its best environment. I looked for ages, but nothing explained why a curlew might fly all that way. And so I was quite late when I got home, and I was a bit worried about what Mum would say, especially considering that mother–daughter relations had been somewhat strained.

  I’d just got to the corner of my street and had to step over a neat little pile of cigarette stubs. Not such a little pile either. Great – now the view from my window, along with the stunning vista of a factory wall, also featured its own cigarette-butt geological feature, a little mountain of tar-stained filters. I’d have to get a brush-and-crumb tray – or, as my dad would say when he thought he was being funny, a ‘crush-and-bum tray’ – and come out and scoop them up. I wouldn’t be able to stand seeing them from my window, knowing what I did about where they ended up. But as I walked past the pile, I stopped. I had seen a neat pile like that. Yesterday. In the parklands, down by the creek. I stared at it for a moment. And then I went through the gate.

  As I let myself in the door, the phone was ringing.

  ‘Mum!’ I yelled down the hallway, but there was no reply.

  I dumped my stuff just inside the door and ran for the phone.

  ‘Hi, darling.’ Mum’s voice was breathless down the line. ‘I’m going to be late home, we’ve had a meeting go overtime, and Thomas thought we might grab some food at the Chinese around the corner.’

  ‘But, Mum, I really need to
talk to you. I –’

  ‘Robin, don’t be childish. Now, there’s a casserole in the freezer if you want to nuke it, or I can bring you home some Chinese if you can wait until –’

  I didn’t hear the end of what she had to say. I slammed the phone down. It was just like before. Never here. Always right. No bloody wonder Dad had finally got sick of it and – no, that wasn’t fair. Nothing was fair. I kicked a chair. And then I froze.

  The back door was standing wide open. Adrenalin prickled to the tips of my fingers. I felt like my ears were growing, trying to catch any tiny sound that might be in the house. I couldn’t hear anything. I crept to the door, closed it and locked it. My heart was pounding as I looked into every room and cupboard. It pounded with fear, but also with anger. How could Mum leave me here to deal with something like this? Not even any Pen-dog to lean comfortingly against my leg.

  As far as I could tell, nothing had been stolen. The TV and DVD player were still there. There was a twenty-dollar note still sitting in the fruit bowl. (Of course, didn’t everyone keep their money with their fruit, or was that just my mum?) It must have been Mum – she’d gone out the back that morning to get a shirt off the line and must have left the back door open. That didn’t make me any less pissed off with her. How could she be so suffocating that she barely let me leave the house, but then be so careless that she’d just leave the door open for anyone to waltz in and attack me while she’d left me on my own? I shut all the curtains and checked all the windows – she’d left the laundry window ajar too, but at least that looked too narrow for someone to squeeze through.