After the roast beef, and before the cake, Cassie opens her presents. Aunty Ida gives her a handbag, the same as she does every year. Poppy gives her a book, a boy’s adventure he liked when he was fourteen.
‘And this is from Dad, Alexander and me,’ her mother says, handing her a small present wrapped in rose-covered gift paper. Cassie opens the card first, the ‘polite way to do it,’ her mother has said since before she can remember. ‘A special daughter’ embossed in silver, and a girl floating on a swing. Inside, her mother’s tight neat writing. ‘Happy 14th birthday, Love Mum, Dad and Alexander.’
She picks at the sticky tape on the present, her excitement building. Would it be the gold charm bracelet she asked for? It is the right size and shape, slim and rectangular. She eases the blue box from the wrapping. Brooke and Angus Jewellery shining across the top of the plastic case, she smiles and snaps it open. Silver. Not gold. Silver.
‘Thanks, Mum,’ she says, taking the bracelet from the case and holding out her wrist so Poppy can latch it on.
‘There’s a heart, a four-leaf clover and a clown, but you can collect more charms. For different birthdays and Christmases.’
‘I like the clown,’ Cassie says, twirling the bracelet around her arm and fingering each charm.
‘The clover is engraved with your name,’ her mum continues, ‘in case you lose it somewhere. It was expensive.’
‘I thought you wanted a gold one,’ Alex says, looking over at the bracelet.
Cassie looks up at him with narrowed eyes. ‘I think I heard the car. Dad’s home. Can we do the cake?’
Aunty Ida rises from her chair and rattles open the middle drawer of the sideboard and comes back with a packet of twelve candles and matches. ‘Are there more candles somewhere? There’s only twelve in this packet.’ She struggles with the packet, trying to pick the plastic away from the cardboard. She can’t get a good hold with her fingernail. She can’t even seem to hold the packet still.
‘I’ll do it,’ offers Alex.
‘We’ve got to have fourteen candles,’ says Poppy. He takes Cassie’s hand and kisses it. ‘Sheisse! Growing up so fast.’
Her mother riffles through the middle drawer. ‘Found some,’ she says, bringing two half-burnt candles to the table. ‘Must be left over from Alexander’s birthday.’
Heavy work boots thud up the stairs followed by grunts and the sound of the boots being thrown on the back veranda. The screen door shrieks and clatters closed.
‘Happy birthday.’ Her dad leans over and kisses her with his yeasty beer breath. He hands her a wooden case. ‘I met that man down the pub. The one that’s moved up the hill. He made this. He was selling it. I thought you might like it.’
Cassie pushes her dinner plate away and lays the case on the table. Two gold clasps at the front open with a gentle click. Inside, nestled among blue velvety cloth, are carved game pieces, horses, castles and crowned men and women. ‘It’s a chess set!’
‘A chess set.’ Her mother looks up at her father. ‘Who is she going to play chess with? No one I know can play chess. Can you play chess?’ she asks him, everyone knowing the answer is no.
‘I can’t play chess. Never known anyone who knew how to play chess. Thought it might be the sort of intellectual thing you might go for.’ He takes his hat off his head and throws it on the table. ‘I see you ate without me.’ He turns towards the kitchen.
Cassie closes the lid of the chess set.
Athena.
Athena’s father made this.
Athena would know how to play chess. For sure.
~ 13 ~
Experiment
Poppy tweaks the dial to the left and leans into the radio, listens through the static, turns the dial a little to the right. Static still crackles through the voices. He rests back into the cane chair, puts his slippered feet on the footstool, and cracks open his tobacco tin.
‘Maybe we’ll get a storm tonight, what do you think Cassie?’
Cassie, feet pulled up on the seat, looks out past the veranda rail at the black clouds growing on the horizon. ‘Why are you asking me? How would I know?’
Poppy licks the cigarette paper and spins it in his fingers. His long tangled eyebrows lift as he pushes escaping strands of tobacco into the end. He lights the cigarette and reaches for his notebook, lifts the ribbon to open the book at a fresh page.
Cassie thumps her feet from the seat to the veranda floor. ‘God, this place is boring.’ She walked up to Athena’s house again that morning. They are never home.
‘Stop frowning girl, the wind’ll change and your face will stay like that. Have a cup of tea and a biscuit with me. Rose,’ Poppy calls, ‘Rose, any chance of a cup of tea?’
There is no answer. ‘Cassie, go and ask your mum to put a pot on for us, will you.’ He smooths the page and takes a pen from his shirt pocket.
Cassie flings herself out of the chair and pulls the screen door open. She tries to slam it behind her, but the gas hinge catches and it sounds like a baby snoring instead. ‘Damn it,’ she hisses through clenched teeth. She stomps to the kitchen door, where her mother peels potatoes, the radio on a talk station.
‘Poppy wants tea and a biscuit,’ Cassie says and bangs back down the hall. Alex sits in the lounge, the television showing an old black and white movie. ‘Oh my god, how can you watch that?’ She takes off down the hall again to her bedroom. This time the door slams and shakes the walls most satisfyingly. She lies on her unmade bed, her room a cave of familiarity in which to pass the dull pit of Sunday afternoon. Any promise the weekend may have held is dead, flattened by the prospect of Monday morning.
She stares at the ceiling panels. A daddy-long-legs sways in his web. ‘Run away and hide spider, before Mum sees you. She’ll have the bug spray on you before you can catch a fly.’
She closes her eyes and listens to her heartbeat, feels it thumpa thumpa thumpa, fast and dramatic. With a few deep breaths, long and slow, the beats lengthen, deepen, her head goes light and airy, floating inches off the pillow.
‘Cassandra.’ Her name comes from a distant place. She breathes deeply again, pushing aside Sunday afternoon disappointment, waiting for the vision she expects to follow.
‘Cassandra. Cassandra, it’s me, Athena.’ The call gushes through the window, a loud hissed whisper.
Athena! Cassie sits up, hears a rustle and a curse from outside.
‘Cassandra, are you there?’
The sounds are real, not a weirdness coming in or out of her head. Athena stands flat against the outside wall, grinning up at Cassie. Cassie the lifts sash window, propping the stick to keep it open.
‘We do have a front door, you know,’ Cassie giggles.
‘I know, I don’t want anyone to know I’m here,’ Athena whispers up at her. ‘Besides, this is a little fun.’
Cassie leans on the windowsill. ‘How did you know this was my room?’
‘I saw you on the veranda with the old man. Then you left and then there was this almighty crash. Do you normally slam doors like that?’
‘You’ve been watching me?’
‘Only for a little while. Are you going to help me in or what?’
‘How?’
Athena lifts her foot onto the protruding rim of the house stump. ‘Lean out.’
Cassie leans out the window and Athena springs up on the stump and Cassie catches her hands. They hang there laughing.
‘Shush, someone will hear,’ Cassie whispers, her hands slipping away. ‘This is never going to work.’
Athena drops back into the garden.
‘Careful of Aunty Ida’s seedlings.’
Athena lifts her feet off the crushed plants. ‘Oops.’
‘Wait there.’ Cassie leaves the room. The sound of Alex’s boring black and white movie fills the hall. In the kitchen her mother has graduated to frying onions.
‘Just borrowing the stool,’ Cassie says, scooping up the stool her mother uses to get into the high cupboards. She carries the stool back down the hall to her room and closes the door quietly behind her. She threads the stool through the window down to where Athena can reach it.
‘Cute,’ says Athena, folding out the steps that lead to the top of the vinyl seat. ‘It’s just like real stairs.’ From the top of the stool she pulls herself through the window and lands gracefully on her feet.
Cassie plonks herself on the bed; Athena leans against the bookshelf. They both laugh, their hands over their mouths, until Athena clears her throat and puts on a serious look.
‘So this is where the great psychic Cassandra sleeps at night. I braved venomous snakes and long grass to get here. Was it worth it?’ She turns and looks at the bookshelf, sliding her fingers over the spines. ‘Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood. Beauty and the Beast—what’s with all the fairy tales?’
‘Nothing, just from when I was a kid. I don’t read them anymore,’ Cassie lies. Fairy tales always end happily.
‘I bet you have all your old dolls too.’ Athena opens the wardrobe door.
‘Stop it.’ Cassie stands up, but Athena is already riffling through the mess of fallen and old clothes.
‘Hello dolly.’ She pulls out a Barbie doll, its hair tangled, and no pants. ‘Naughty dolly. Where’s your pants.’
Cassie snatches the doll from Athena and laughs. ‘I always hated that thing.’ She throws it into the bin with the screwed-up attempts at writing up her science homework.
‘Who painted this?’ Athena turns her attention to a landscape with blue hills, a barbed-wire fence and a sky of pinks and reds.
‘My brother, Alex. It was a present for my birthday one year.’
‘You have a brother? I hate brothers. Yours can paint a bit but. Hey, I recognise this.’ Athena opens the wooden box with the gold clasps. ‘My father made this.’
‘I know. My dad bought it off him at the pub.’
‘Cool.’ Athena spins the rooks in their velvet slots.
‘Can you teach me to play?’ Cassie asks.
‘God no, chess is so boring. I got something better.’
‘Better?’ Cassie moves aside and Athena joins her on the bed.
‘A scientific experiment.’
Cassie glances at her desk. ‘I really, really hate science,’ she says.
‘I really, really love science. Science is the pursuit of truth. Science is the answer to all the questions in the universe,’ Athena replies.
‘Sounds like fun,’ Cassie says with a flat voice.
‘Absolutely, and you Cassandra, the psychic princess, are the subject of this experiment.’
‘How?’ Cassie pulls her knees up to her chest.
‘We are going to prove, unequivocally, whether you can or cannot predict the future, and ergo perhaps whether it is possible for anyone to predict the future at all.’
Cassie’s smiles half-heartedly.
‘We start with a hypothesis. Do you know what a hypothesis is?’
Cassie nods. ‘We learnt it in science.’
‘Right, what is our hypothesis? No, I can’t ask you that. You’re the subject. A subject shouldn’t help develop the hypothesis. A subject shouldn’t even know the hypothesis.’
‘The subject?’
‘We need to collect data. Have you got a notebook? A new one.’
‘Not a new one.’
‘Well, just a spare one.’
Cassie opens the bottom drawer of her desk and finds a spiral notebook. ‘It’s from last year. It’s not used up,’ she says, flicking through it.
‘Good.’ Athena takes it from her and rips out the used pages, tossing them on the floor where they flutter about like dying butterflies. ‘What I have been thinking is we need to match your predictions with the event, when and if it happens. So I need you to write down all your predictions, and the event if it has already happened. I will be the unbiased observer. I will decide if the prediction matches the event or if it’s really just,’ she waves her hand in the air, ‘a random coincidence.’ She hands the book back to Cassie. ‘Where’s a pen?’
Cassie takes the notebook and holds it hovering over the bed space between them. ‘You want me to do it now?’
‘How long will it take? I can come back another day.’
Cassie’s arm falls to the bed, the notebook pages crunching together. ‘It’s not that easy.’
‘What do you mean?’ Athena rests her chin in her palm.
‘It’s like when I have a dream. I don’t know if it’s the future or it’s just a dream. Sometimes it’s only later I realise it was the future.’
‘Then you have to write down all your dreams.’
‘All of them?’
‘Why, how many do you have?’
‘I don’t know. Five or six in a night.’
‘And you remember all of them?’
‘Mostly.’
‘Wow, that’s significant. We need a broader sample. Find out how many dreams other people remember.’
‘You don’t remember your dreams?’
‘I don’t dream.’
‘Not at all?’
‘Not that I know of.’
‘Never, no dreams?’
‘No dreams. All right.’ Athena stands and leans against the bookshelf again, her arms across her chest. ‘This is not about me, so it doesn’t matter. How else do you predict the future? Dead cows? Do you have tarot cards? We should try tarot cards.’
Cassie picks up the notebook and throws it on the floor. ‘I don’t have tarot cards, and don’t make fun of me. This is serious. You should try knowing the future, sometimes not knowing if you know the future. It’s hard.’
The light in the room fades with the diminishing sun. Athena uncrosses her arms. ‘I have to go soon. It’s getting dark.’
‘You should go then.’ Cassie turns away, staring pointedly into the distance, biting the inside of her lip.
Athena comes back to the bed. ‘I’m sorry, Cassandra. I didn’t mean to upset you. We don’t have to do this. I just thought it might be interesting. You don’t come across people who say they can predict the future every day. Not unless you hang around with a lot of gypsies or something. I mean, who else do you know can predict the future? No one!’
There’s a knock on the door and they both spin around, Athena jumping up and hiding behind the door, laughing. Cassie puts her finger to her smiling lips.
‘Cassie, Mum says you’ve got to come help set the table. And hurry up.’ His footsteps disappear down the hall.
‘My brother,’ says Cassie.
‘I guessed that.’ Athena already has one leg swung out the window. ‘Should I pass the stool back up?’
‘My brother can predict too.’
‘Really?’ replies Athena in a high voice, swinging her leg back into the room.
‘The weather. He can predict the weather.’
‘The weather? Well there’s nothing special about that.’
Cassie smiles. ‘That’s what I think too.’
Athena’s leg swings back out the window. ‘You’ll write down your dreams this week?’
‘I’ll try. When are you home? I’ll bring them up to your place.’
‘No.’ Athena stops halfway down the stool stairs. ‘Father doesn’t like visitors when he’s working.’
‘Come here then, next weekend,’ Cassie says.
Athena crinkles her nose, passes the stool up to Cassie. ‘Your family … people … they might talk about me not going to school. We’ll find a place to meet. I’ll send you a letter.’
‘A letter?’ Cassie grips the stool and Athena pushes it up to the window where Cassie holds it across the windowsill.
‘Yes, a letter. I’ll put it in your mailb
ox. When we drive by.’ She waves up at Cassie, ‘Ciao,’ and she tiptoes through the seedlings before disappearing around the corner of the house, her hair flashing gold in the sun’s last gasp.
All of the seedlings are squashed and Aunty Ida says it is bad enough she has to give up all the bore water for the chickens and now Cassie’s squashed all the seedlings. Cassie says it wasn’t her, it was Athena, but Aunty Ida says Athena isn’t real and people who aren’t real can’t kill plants. Cassie says she is real and Ida says to go to the shed and get the gardening fork. In the shed, Cassie can’t find the gardening tools because the shed is full of Alex’s things. She sees a painting and she wants to steal it and take it to her room, but when she tries to pick it up it changes to a different painting and she doesn’t like it as much. It has a horse in it. Alex never paints horses. The horse is creepy, she doesn’t want to see it, it scares her. It isn’t fair that Alex gets to keep all his extra things in the shed. All Cassie gets is one room. Then she is at the tank stand by the geraniums and she hears a noise in the garden. She gets on her hands and knees and looks under the plants and it is like looking into a tunnel and then there is a table and chairs and a bed and it is like a house, but her snake lives there. Remember me? he says, and shows her his orange spots. You’re my snake, she says. Why did you bite me? You didn’t have to bite me. The snake comes out of his house and slides along her leg, making her shiver. He says biting is what he does.
Then he slides up her back and whispers in her ear.
Beware of my meddling sister.
~ 14 ~
Secret
Friday afternoon, the school bus stinks of hormone sweat and the excited buzz of the Blue Light Disco in town. The two girls sitting in front of Cassie describe the dresses they might wear and settle on both wearing strapless numbers they bought when they went shopping together.
‘We’ll match but look different,’ they agree. They sit facing each other, heads bowed together.
Patricia, her messy perm falling over her eyes, says, ‘Do you think Paulo will come?’
‘Yes!’ Trina exclaims, her hand spread across her chest in a dramatic soap opera gesture. ‘He said he was going to ask you to dance. He’ll be there.’
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