Published by Odyssey Books in 2017
Copyright © Kathryn Gossow 2017
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity, including internet search engines or retailers, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying (except under the statutory exceptions provisions of the Australian Copyright Act 1968), recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written permission of the publisher.
www.odysseybooks.com.au
A Cataloguing-in-Publication entry is available from the National Library of Australia
ISBN: 978-1-922200-78-5 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-922200-79-2 (ebook)
Cover design by Rachel Roberts
Always keep Ithaca in your mind.
To arrive there is your ultimate goal.
But do not hurry the voyage at all.
It is better to let it last for many years;
and to anchor at the island when you are old,
rich with all you have gained on the way,
not expecting that Ithaca will offer you riches.
Ithaca has given you the beautiful voyage.
Without her you would have never set out on the road.
She has nothing more to give you.
And if you find her poor, Ithaca has not deceived you.
Wise as you have become, with so much experience,
you must already have understood what Ithacas mean.
—Constantine P. Cavafy
~ 1 ~
Cassandra - 1973
The shape shouldn’t be there. It has never been there before.
From under the house, Cassie’s family might as well be a million miles away, their voices and footsteps muffled by floorboards and cobwebs. No one else is small enough to fit under the house. This is her place.
The shape hasn’t moved.
When she was little, she liked to jump from the top of the fence to the clothes line and hang heavy like a wet blanket. Poppy had said she was fearless—but the jumping did not seem a fearful thing. The shape seems something to fear.
She knows everything under the house. The way the dirt piles in lumps under the kitchen. The rain can make the dirt look different, but it hasn’t rained for ages. There are twenty wooden stumps. Poppy helped her count them. The stumps wear funny tin hats and hold up the house. Three old milk pails lie under her mum and dad’s room. There are spiders in those. There is a pile of four-by-twos under the back veranda and a dead rat over by the bathroom. The rat has been there a long time. It is like papier-mâché. The shape is new. It looks like a coiled up hose, but softer maybe.
She turns her back on it. The shape feels like pins pricking her shoulders. She scoops up a handful of fine dead dust. How long since it saw the sunshine? A thousand years? How old is their house? Poppy will know. She funnels her hand and watches the dust stream over her bare toes so they look like they’ve grown fur.
She flattens her hand into a bulldozer, her mouth grumbling and spluttering bulldozer sounds, and makes another road. Overhead, her mother’s heels clatter down the hall. She’s so loud. Cassie turns, but the shape is still. Her mother doesn’t know she’s under the house. Her mother thinks she’s playing with her new doll. She curves the new road in a wide circle, passing it over mounds, taking it nowhere in particular. Stupid doll, with its long skinny legs, can’t even stand up. It has clothes and you can take them off and put them back on again. It is hard, they are so tiny. Aunty Ida helps, though her hands aren’t what they used to be. That’s what she says. The clothes come off and on, but the doll doesn’t do anything. Perhaps the baby in Mummy’s tummy will do something. When it comes.
She lines up each of her dad’s old matchbox cars. She chooses the red one with no roof. In her mind it has a man and a lady. The lady has a baby in her belly. She drives it around her roads. Each of the eight cars travels around and over, each making its own car noises, each filled with people moving on to the place they are meant to be. It is important they end up in the right place, parked under a tree of gum leaves or rosemary stalks, or in the bare dirt far from any home.
The doll and her fifth birthday had come together with pink wrapping paper and pink icing. Under the house smells like an old cupboard; the wrapping paper smelled of shopping trips and newness. Five is special. Five means it is spring soon, and then summer and then school. She’s seen the other kids at school. They play together all the time. If she had a friend the cars wouldn’t have to wait so long for their turn. At school she’ll learn to count without Poppy’s help. Maybe she could count to a thousand even.
‘Where’s Cassie? Caasee.’ Her mum shouts from above her, from the lounge room probably. Aunt Ida says something back to her, but Cassie can’t hear what it is. Aunty Ida doesn’t know where she is, unless she guesses. Her dad is going to a big cattle sale in town and they are all supposed to go shopping.
Her mother’s shoes clank back down the hall like a one-horse race.
Cassie sits back on her haunches and turns towards the shape. Now or never. She chooses the red car with the man and the lady and drives it towards the shape. It is half buried, close to one of the grey stumps. She knows, really she knew all along, what it must be. A crackle of excitement pops in her belly. Like Coco-Pops when the milk first goes on.
The shape does not move. It could be dead. Hibernating. One of Poppy’s words. She says it quietly, testing it out on her tongue. Hibernating. Even in the dark it seems to shine. The light sneaks in from the world outside and sparkles on its skin. Snakes are more scared of you than you are of them. That is what Poppy said. Aunt Ida had nodded when he said that. She drops the red car. The passengers don’t matter. If she touches its tail, it won’t notice. Her hand creeps towards the tail. Don’t scare it Cassie, don’t scare it. Poppy’s voice says the thought in her head.
Her fingertips slither over the cool skin. It is smooth like her mum’s best silk dress. Is it lonely in the dark all winter?
‘Cassie!’
She falls on her backside and scrambles backwards. Poppy crouches at the edge of the house, peering in at her.
‘Cassie, get out from under there, your mother’s looking for you. Is that your new dress?’
Cassie has no time to look back. She stoops and makes her way to where Poppy waits. Outside the sun makes her squint.
‘Look at you. You look like you’ve been dragged through the bush backwards.’ Poppy isn’t smiling. When he smiles his face creases up. When he isn’t smiling the creases flatten out like white pencil lines on red paper. He tries to wipe the dirt off her skirt.
Her mother stomps down the stairs, her eyes like rat poison. ‘I never, never want to see you playing under the house again. You hear me. Never!’ She locks her hand around Cassie’s arm, squeezing it. ‘There could be anything under there. My god, spiders, snakes, anything. Don’t you know how dangerous it is?’ She lets go and pushes Cassie toward the stairs. ‘Look at your dress. You’ll have to change. Your father is waiting. We’re running late.’
Cassie walks down the hall. About here, she thinks, it is sleeping right under me. Her fingers still tingle with leftover smoothness.
~ 2 ~
Betrayal
The snake waits under Cassie’s bed. She can feel it tingling through her back, just like when she was under the house. When her mum and dad and Poppy go to sleep, the snake slides through the floor dust to the end of her bed. He lifts his head and tastes the air with his tongue. He curls himself around the bed leg, his strength rippling through his body. He rises up the leg and glides onto the bed base and in between the sheet
s. Cassie’s toes ache with anticipation, but the snake lingers and slithers, until at last, he tickles the soles of her feet. He turns and travels alongside her calf, her thigh, and onto her hip, across her stomach and her chest, finally resting his head in the snug space between her shoulder and her neck. Cassie dares not breathe in case she scares him. Her body is light—she thinks she might be floating. His breathing is slow. It is forever between each of the snake’s breaths. She breathes with him. His tongue licks her ear. She giggles.
‘You were giggling in your sleep last night.’ Her mother sits on her bed. Her weight pulls the sheet tight across Cassie’s body. Cassie wriggles, trying to get loose. ‘What was so funny in your dreams?’
Cassie’s eyes open. Through the window the sky glimmers a light blue, the colour that makes Cassie wonder what it might be like to fly. ‘It wasn’t a dream, Mummy,’ she says. ‘A snake was licking my ears. It made me giggle.’
Her mother makes her face with the deep lines between her eyes. When she makes this face she sometimes says, ‘You’re making me cross,’ even though the lines don’t make a cross. There seems no reason for her to be angry. Except of course, she doesn’t like snakes—or flies, or bugs, or frogs. Not even ladybirds, which are so pretty and lonely without their children.
‘It was a dream,’ her mother says, going to Cassie’s older clothes drawer. ‘Get up. Aunty Ida will be here soon.’ She hands her a pair of shorts and a t-shirt. ‘And don’t forget shoes and socks.’
Before Cassie dresses she checks under the bed, in her cupboard, behind the door, but her snake is gone.
* * *
Sunshine sprinkles through the lace curtains at the kitchen window. It glitters over the kitchen sink and a little bit on the table too. Poppy has his weather notebook open, making his important observations. One time he let Cassie write in his book. She ran her hand over the bumpy pages. Every line of Poppy’s writing went from edge to edge. Writing is like lines up and down, and tiny circles joined together. She wrote something but she doesn’t know what. She wouldn’t know until they teach her writing at school. Then she can go back and read it.
‘Is it spring yet, Poppy?’ Cassie asks.
‘Well, let’s see. We have had one good rain. The wattle has finished flowering. The grevilleas are out. Have you checked the jasmine lately?’
‘Yes, it’s covered in flowers. Can’t you smell it?’ Cassie giggles and points to the trailing pink and white flowers in the middle of the table.
‘Well, I think that means spring is in the air.’
‘Spring starts on the first of September,’ her mother says, pouring a tea for Poppy. The teapot wears a tea cosy with an orange pompom on it. Aunty Ida made it. Great Aunty Ida. Not because she is wonderful, even though she is, but because she is Poppy’s sister and her dad’s aunty too.
‘Spring starts when it’s spring.’
Poppy knows more about flowers and seasons than her mum. She always plants her tomatoes too early. They get frosted every time.
‘Well, so long as we get some rain,’ her mother says.
Her mum gives her two pieces of toast with the Vegemite too thick. She skims it off with her finger and scrapes it onto the side of the plate. ‘Does spring mean the snakes wake up?’
‘No more about snakes.’ Mum clouds the kitchen with fly spray stink. Not good, because Aunty Ida arrives then.
‘Put that fly spray down, will you? You can’t be having breakfast with that stink all over the place,’ Ida says and kisses Cassie on her head.
Mum bangs the fly spray on the sink, but no one looks at her.
‘Will fly spray kill snakes too?’ Cassie asks.
‘What’s this about snakes?’ Poppy puts down his pen and slurps on his tea.
‘Cassie had a nightmare about a snake,’ her mother says, leaning back on the kitchen bench with her arms folded.
‘It wasn’t a nightmare,’ Cassie says.
‘A dream then,’ her mother says.
‘No, it was real.’ Cassie flattens the Vegemite on the side of her plate with her finger and licks it clean.
‘Stop making a mess and eat your toast.’ Her mother flicks a tea towel off the bench and turns to the sink.
‘Let the girl have her dreams.’ Poppy ruffles her hair and walks away with his tea. He sits in his chair on the back veranda and watches for the clouds that might come.
Aunty Ida pours herself some tea; the pompom flops on its side. ‘When I was little, I had a dream it was raining lollies. I wanted to go out and pick them up, but I wasn’t allowed. I was sure it was real. It is hard to tell dreams from what’s real when you are small. I can’t eat lollies now. My teeth just aren’t up to it.’
‘The snake was real. It was the same one I saw under the house.’ Cassie’s hands fling to her mouth, and she wishes she could take the words back.
Her mother’s voice rises high like a magpie. ‘There’s a snake under the house?’
Cassie takes her hands from her mouth and sits on them. ‘No. It was a dream.’
‘You tell me now, Cassie Shultz, was there a snake under the house?’
‘No.’
‘Oh god, Ida. I can’t go out in the garden today, not till Peter’s been and looked under the house.’
‘Nonsense, it’ll keep out of our way. Besides it’s probably long gone by now,’ Ida says, stirring sugar through her tea.
‘Can I go sit with Poppy?’ Cassie asks.
‘Take your toast.’ Her mother doesn’t look at her as she answers.
Cassie leaves the table, her tummy tight, like a full balloon is about to burst in there. If her mother makes Dad find her snake he will hit it with a shovel. Bang its head in! Chop it off!
Poppy sits in his cane chair where he’ll stay until lunch time and then he will change to the front veranda, then at evening time he’ll come inside to watch the news and talk back to the weather report. He fiddles with his portable radio, trying to fix the signal better. The voices on his radio always have a bit of a crackle.
‘Ah, come to have breakfast with your old Pop, have you?’
Cassie climbs in the other cane chair and puts her toast on the table between them.
‘Looks like you had too much Vegemite on your toast.’
‘Mum always does that. I tell her all the time but I think she has cabbages growing in her ears. She never hears.’
Poppy laughs.
‘Snakes are good at hiding, aren’t they, Poppy?’
‘Snakes are the best at hiding,’ Poppy says.
‘Would a snake want to hide in a house or in a garden?’
‘Well,’ Poppy scratches his chin, serious, ‘what sort of snake are we talking about?’
Cassie thinks for a while, swinging her legs back and forth under the chair. ‘A soft snake,’ she says.
‘I don’t know too much about those soft snakes.’ Poppy pulls tufts of tobacco from his tobacco tin.
‘Will it rain soon?’ Cassie bites into her toast, crumbs sprinkling on her lap.
‘Well, I agree with the weather man on the radio, fine and sunny.’
‘No rain then?’
‘No rain.’ He nods as he spreads tobacco along the Tally-Ho paper.
‘Can I roll it?’ She talks with her mouth full, but Poppy never complains when she does this. Not like her mum.
Poppy glances towards the kitchen. ‘Your mother’ll have my hide. Maybe next time.’
‘Sunny weather?’ Cassie watches his fingers like fat sausages curl the paper around the tobacco.
‘Sunny spring weather,’ he says.
‘Sunny spring is time for snakes to wake up, isn’t it?’
‘Yes my girl.’ He reaches into his pocket for a box of matches. He strikes the match and holds it to his smoke. He shakes the flame away. The smoke streams from his mouth as he pick
s stray tobacco off his lip.
They both look out over the paint-chipped veranda rail. A blanket of silver dew glistens across the back yard. A breeze tickles Cassie’s feet. She has to find the snake before her dad does. Like a game of hide and seek.
~ 3 ~
The Hunt
The worm struggles in Cassie’s hand. It wants to burrow into her skin, hide from the sun. Are baby snakes a bit like worms? Would her snake have babies? Maybe it was a boy. It wasn’t easy to tell with snakes … or worms really. Did the snake go back under the house? There has been no chance to sneak under and look.
Maybe he is still in her room, hiding somewhere where she can’t find him.
‘Leave the worms alone, Cass.’
‘Yes Mum.’
The worm doesn’t know it is free. It sits on top of the dirt wiggling like stupid. Cassie drops a clod of dirt on it. ‘There you go, wormie. Go back to your family and tell them to watch out for the hoe.’
Her mother hoes, then stops and wipes her face, leaving a smear of dirt. Her mother doesn’t care about dirt when she gardens. Aunty Ida weeds around the sweet peas. Tiny buds peek from between their leaves.
Gardening days last all day. She will help Poppy at lunch time, and they will make corned beef sandwiches and hot tea. At the end of the day, her mum will be too tired to cook. Cassie will pick fresh parsley and they will have hot toast and scrambled eggs freckled with green leaves. Dad will drop Aunty Ida home and go to the pub for a beer. Then her mum will be too tired and they will sit together and watch TV. Gardening days are always the same. It is like knowing the future.
She picks up the clod of dirt. The worm is gone. ‘Good wormie.’ The clod is still firm. Cassie splits it apart and it breaks perfectly, like the cake her mum bakes. She calls it mud cake, but it has chocolate in it, not mud.
‘Save some cake for me,’ her dad says, crouching beside her in his dusty blue overalls. She giggles. How could he know what she was thinking? He picks up some of the dirt and breaks it apart with his fingers. It could be gold the way he looks at it. ‘It’s pretty good cake.’ He nods thoughtfully and stands, facing Cassie’s mum. ‘You sure you should be doing that?’ he asks.
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