Cassandra

by Kathryn Gossow

  Patricia shrugs, looking both shy and triumphant. She grins and the girls lean in closer whispering something Cassie can’t hear. They fall into giggles and Trina notices Cassie.

  ‘What are you looking at?’ She frowns at Cassie and Cassie turns to the window, pretending she hasn’t heard, wasn’t looking, wasn’t eavesdropping.

  ‘Freak,’ Patricia sneers, and the two of them turn to the front of the bus and resume their whispers.

  Cassie sighs, yearning for a strapless dress and someone to go to the disco with. She had hoped that if the letter had come from Athena she could have gone with her. But here it was, Friday, and no word.

  Gumtrees and paddocks flash past. Cassie rests her head on the window. The bus rumbles and rattles through her temples. All week, Cassie has pushed past Alex to get off the bus and to the mailbox, an old milk pail painted green, before him. Each afternoon she peers into the mailbox and each afternoon she wonders if Athena has forgotten her altogether.

  The bus creaks to a stop at their driveway. Cassie slings her bag over her shoulder and wanders down the aisle. Let Alex get there first, she decides. Maybe it will change her luck. He is already at the mailbox when she steps off the bus.

  ‘There’s a parcel for you!’ Alex shouts and runs up and hands her the parcel wrapped in crinkling brown paper taped down with brown tape. Athena’s handwriting, a beautiful cursive, dances across the front. Cassie rips the parcel open and the letter flutters to the ground. She tucks the contents of the parcel, something like a book in a white paper bag, under her arm and picks up the letter, shaking off the dust. The letter is written on thick unlined paper, although Athena’s writing stays in perfect lines across the page.

  Dear Cassandra,

  Shush, pretend I am not here …

  I can see an old shed between your place and mine and this will be our secret rendezvous. Father is still thick and deep into planning and building his current piece, a sculpture for a new glass and steel skyscraper (the height of modern blah) and he doesn’t like to be disturbed. No visitors! Plus, you know I am not in school and I should be and we don’t need the attention. So like I said, shush, pretend I am not here and don’t tell anyone I even exist.

  Do you like your present? Father and I picked them from a store full of hippy paraphernalia—incense and pipes and saris. I got a book too, to teach you in case you need it. (You said it was your birthday soon but I can’t remember when, has it been already?)

  We will meet (if you can) on Sunday after lunch at the secret rendezvous (aka grey old falling down shed. What was it for? Why is it in disuse and such disrepair?)

  Remember, I am a secret. Shush.

  Your friend,

  Athena

  PS If you can’t make it (maybe you go to church on Sunday?) you can leave a note for me.

  Cassie peeks into the white paper bag. A book and … some cards?

  ‘What is it?’ Alex looks over her shoulder.

  ‘None of your beeswax.’ She closes the bag and embraces it.

  Alex grunts and falls in step beside her. They trudge up the rough laneway, the sun in their eyes.

  Alex kicks a rock and watches it skittle into the dry old grass. ‘Is it from Athena?’

  ‘Who’s Athena? I have no idea what you’re talking about.’

  ‘Yeah, right, you think I’m stupid or something.’ And he runs ahead, his bag bobbing up and down on his back.

  ‘Yes I do,’ she calls after him and he spins around, jogging backwards, and pokes out his tongue at her, then trips over his own legs and lands flat on his backside.

  Cassie hastens her next two steps, without even thinking.

  Alex lifts his hands out of the gravel and wipes away the stones embedded in them. He grins up at Cassie. ‘That was a good one!’

  Cassie slows down. ‘You’re so unco.’

  Alex heaves himself off the ground and turns towards the house, starts jogging again, stumbles over some thin air, making Cassie cringe, but rights himself and looking like a disaster in action, keeps running.

  In the privacy of her bedroom, a chair against the door (kept there especially in case Athena makes another surprise visit), she opens the frankincense-smelling bag.

  She caresses the smooth surface of the card pack, the vibrant ancient looking picture of a red-robed man holding a wand above his head. Rider-Waite Tarot. She flicks open the pack and the cards slip into her hands like water. Wands, kings, queens, golden cups, the faces pensive, calm. After studying every card, she lifts the pack to her nose, smells the varnish, feels the unblemished shine of them. She taps them into a tight pack and drops them back in their box and closes the lid. Inside the book, Fortune-Telling with Tarot, is another tidy note from Athena.

  I perused the book—I hope you don’t mind. It is a book and therefore I cannot resist. I am intrigued by the history of the cards and the connections with archetypes and ancient myths. I can’t imagine why I am surprised, they did not drop out of nowhere, but like everything are products of the stories people tell. Very interesting.

  You know, the Greeks had three sisters of Fate—the Moirai. Other traditions have them too; the Norse called them the Norns, I think. I saw a card in the book, the Tree of Cups, that reminds me of them. The first sister is the spinner, she spins the thread of life. I think she used to come to babies after they were born, or maybe in the ninth month of pregnancy. That might have been the Roman version. The second sister comes and measures the allotted life—like what you will get in your life, the good and the bad, and the last sister (scary and mighty!) comes and cuts the thread and there, you are dead. Even the Greek gods couldn’t control the Fates. You can’t change fate! That is, if you believe in it. Me, I am a believer in Free Will.

  See you soon, by the shade of (what is that tree?) by the decrepit old shed. I am looking forward to our discussions.

  Cassie’s English assignment knocks at her conscience—for about ten seconds. She searches through the pack for the Three of Cups and studies the three sisters toasting with their golden cups. When Alex calls her for dinner, she can barely bring herself to leave her bedroom. She studies the glossy cards and their companion book into the night, and when she finally rests her head on her pillow, her thoughts swirl with colour and the patterns and meanings of the cards.

  ~ 15 ~

  A Sense of Foreboding

  Instead of catching the bus home from school, Cassie must walk to the bank to meet her mum and dad. Cassie’s high school is in the next town, a bigger town, a hole of a town, she thinks, but bigger than their town. There is no purpose in walking down the street in their town—a school, a post office, a pub, and a corner store that sells milk and bread and hot pies. Nothing else to see.

  But in this town you could find a reason to walk down the street. She passes Larry’s with its long aisles of cheap toys and ornaments where she and Alex always buy their Mother’s Day gifts. Next door is the newsagents where they always get their school books. Next, the grocery store with dusty wooden floors. No one much uses it anymore because of the shiny new supermarket that opened on the edge of town, even though the old one has boys who carry your shopping to the car for you. Ida likes the old one better. The top pub, a two-storey building, where they eat counter lunches on shopping days, and where the cleaner locked Cassie in the toilet by mistake. And then the bakery where Aunty Ida always buys her a cream bun, then the butcher who has two missing fingers, one on each hand.

  She stops at the jewellery store and examines the charms. She likes the cute gold cat, but it doesn’t come in silver. The hairdresser and the barber, side by side like husband and wife, another pub—the bottom pub that they don’t go to so much—and then the bank—the bank with smooth white granite stairs and smooth black granite walls. She pushes open the heavy glass doors to the crisp inky bank smell. Her dad in his suit and tie and her mum in her new high heels sit in the waiting chairs
looking like rabbits caught in headlights. Cassie dumps her schoolbag on the floor and flops in a chair beside them.

  ‘Hello,’ her mother says and smiles an odd nervous grimace.

  Cassie smiles back.

  The teller looks at Cassie absentmindedly while she thumps her ink stamp on papers she is shuffling from tray to tray. The second teller speaks in a hushed voice to a lady with a walking stick, while the lady nods her head up and down as if it is on a spring.

  Her dad jerks up from his seat and paces to a closed door and back again, sits down and wipes his hands across his thighs. ‘Who the hell does he think he is making us wait? We should take our business elsewhere. Another bank …’

  The closed door opens, and a man with floppy loose cheeks steps over to them, hand outstretched. ‘Mr Shultz, Mrs Shultz.’ Her parents stand and shake the man’s hand. ‘Come into my office.’ He gestures towards the door.

  ‘Can I go over to the café?’ Cassie asks.

  Her mother opens her purse and gives her a two-dollar note. ‘Come straight back.’

  ‘Thanks, Mum.’

  Cassie waits for the cattle truck to rumble past, wagging its familiar trail of smells and trapped animal noises. Across the road, she passes the electrical store. Maybe, after the bank, she could convince her dad to buy a video player. The Beta in the window is on special, but something tells her this is the wrong sort to get.

  A group of grade twelve kids tumbles out of Apollo’s café, their arms and hands a possessive tangle of relationships. Cassie glances back at the bank and with a deep bracing breath, steps into the café. A fluoro light flickers above her head, grease hangs thick in the sticky air. She considers the blackboard menu above the sizzling grill.

  ‘What can I get you?’ The woman leans her elbows on the counter.

  Cassie hands over her note. ‘A strawberry malted milkshake please.’

  ‘Have here?’ the woman asks, engaging the chunky till with clicks and rattles.

  The dark booths at the back of the café beckon to her like unexplored territory. Laughter and conversation seep out of the darkness.

  ‘Have here,’ she replies.

  Cassie leans against the drinks fridge. The woman scoops ice-cream into a cup and with practised hands builds her milkshake and puts it on the whirring machine. She takes it off, thunks it twice on the bench top and brings it back to the counter.

  ‘Here’s the straws,’ she says, nudging the cup of paper straws towards her.

  ‘Thanks.’ Cassie wraps her hands around the aluminium cup, the condensation wet on her hands, and moves towards the booths, her heart beating a steady wedding march inside her. She slips into the first vacant booth, the splits in the vinyl seat scratching her bare legs as she slides into the corner. She sucks on the straw, the bomb of sweet cold milk filling her mouth.

  Cassie hunkers down on the maroon vinyl seat, touches the tarnished chrome on the table edge. She glances at the ceiling smeared with greasy smoke stains. She tries to imagine Athena in the seat across from her, their heads bowed in conversation. She feels exposed here alone in a booth built for more people, for conversation and secrets. Boisterous laughter jars her. She recognises a note in the combined sound. She leans forward in her seat. In the booth diagonally across from her, Natalie, her lion mane of red hair now razor short at the back with the frizzy fringe hanging over one eye. The girl sitting next to Natalie catches Cassie looking.

  ‘Hey, you’re in my maths class, aren’t you?’ she says.

  Cassie nods and leans away, back into her sticky vinyl seat.

  The girl, Lisa, beckons her over with a wave of her hand.

  Cassie’s thighs are frozen in her seat, her heart thumps, her fingers tingle with the cold of the milkshake.

  ‘It’s Cassie, isn’t it?’ Lisa says, nodding, her welcoming fingers trying to pull her over.

  ‘Of course it’s Cassie. We were in primary school together.’ Natalie glances up between frizzy strands of hair. ‘Come on then, come and sit with us. We won’t bite. Move over,’ she says to the two boys sitting across from her.

  The boys scoot closer and Cassie squeezes in beside them.

  ‘Lisa,’ Natalie points to the beckoning girl, ‘Budgie, Paulo,’ she points to the boys beside Cassie, ‘and Mitch,’ she extends her finger towards the boy with his arm slung over her shoulder. The introductions are unnecessary. Everybody knows of these kids. Everyone wants to be with these kids. The boy beside Cassie, Paulo, drapes his long arm over the back of the seat and hovers above her looking down into her milkshake.

  ‘Cassie,’ Natalie finishes, pointing to Cassie.

  ‘Have some chips,’ Lisa offers, picking up a chip from the pile in the middle of the table.

  Cassie reaches into the communal pile and chooses the crunchy overcooked little chips, the ones she likes best.

  The boy next to Natalie, Mitch, grabs a handful and shoves them in his mouth, his hand flat against his face. He grins at her and she can see the chips being masticated in his mouth.

  ‘Mitch,’ Paulo says, ‘you’re so gross.’ He scoops up three long chips, leans across Cassie and dips them in her milkshake. ‘So you two know each other?’

  Natalie shrugs. ‘We went to primary school together. Hey,’ she points at Cassie, ‘remember when you said I’d break my arm and I really did?’

  Cassie nods. ‘You were angry at me.’

  ‘Was I? I don’t remember.’ Natalie sits up straight. ‘Ooh! I have to tell you what happened in English—someone, I think it was that fat kid—what’s his name? Joseph? Kept doing these silent but deadly farts. The whole room stank. Peterson couldn’t stand it. Eventually he goes, “Who’s doing that?” Everyone cracked up. That fat kid went red. That’s why I reckon it was him. Peterson kept us in. I think he started to like the smell. He’s such a dickhead. I hate English.’

  ‘Bucket head,’ says Cassie and sucks some more milkshake into her mouth.

  The five of them look at her. Mitch stops midway through shoving chips in his mouth.

  ‘Bucket head. His head reminds me of a bucket.’ Cassie mimes a rectangle around her head.

  ‘That’s so true,’ screeches Natalie, slapping her hand on the table. ‘I can’t believe I never noticed before. His name is Buckethead from now on. It’s official.’

  ‘How come we haven’t seen you in here before?’ Lisa asks, twirling the gold sleepers in her ears.

  ‘I don’t live in town. I catch the bus home most days.’

  ‘Do you have horses?’ Lisa’s eyes brighten.

  ‘No—a million chickens and some cows. It sucks. I hate living there.’

  ‘Horses!’ Budgie’s high voice comes out of the corner of the booth. ‘Horses suck. Motorbikes are better.’

  Natalie throws a chip at him. ‘Shut up, Budgie.’ And he does.

  They finish the chips and Mitch screws up the greasy chip paper and throws it into the booth across from them, then he swarms over Natalie’s face and they lock mouths. Natalie slides lower in her seat and Mitch seems to push her further down.

  Lisa nudges Natalie with her shoulder. ‘Can’t you leave that for later?’ Without dislodging his lips from Natalie’s, Mitch swings his hand around to swipe at Lisa. She avoids him easily, crosses her arms, slouches back in her seat, and stares at the smoky ceiling.

  Cassie sucks on her milkshake. The last of the milk slurps up the straw, the noise competing with the wet noises from across the table.

  ‘My dad said he might buy me the carburettor I need for me bike, get it going again.’ Budgie tips a pile of sugar on the table, licks his finger and dips it.

  ‘Yeah?’ Paulo says, lifting his arm from behind Cassie and putting it on the seat beside them. ‘Reckon it’ll be ready for the holidays?’

  ‘Dunno. I need new brakes and the clutch is dodgy and I’m skint.’

&n
bsp; ‘We should nick some money.’ Mitch suddenly disengages himself and joins the conversation. Natalie pulls on his shirt, her mouth open and waiting, and he disappears into her again.

  ‘Man, it’d be cool if we had it for the holidays.’ Paulo dips his finger in the pile of sugar.

  Cassie feels Paulo’s fingers stroking her thigh. Tiny featherlike strokes send spasms down to her toes and her stomach tingles. He inches closer to her, his warm breath cascading over her neck as he covers her thigh with his hand and inches her skirt higher.

  ‘Paulo.’ A man with a deep accented voice stands at their table, his thick moustache twitching over his wet, red lips. ‘The soft drink orders arrived. I need help out the back.’

  ‘Okay, Papa.’ Paulo stands and Cassie turns in her seat to let him out. He leans on the table as he pushes past and the muscle in his bicep reveals itself like a smooth hilltop. He leaves through the swinging doors at the back of the cafe.

  Mitch and Natalie edge away from each other. ‘So busted,’ says Natalie, wiping her hand over her lips.

  ‘I bet there’s stacks of money in that till every night.’ Mitch nods in the direction of the counter.

  ‘I gotta go.’ Cassie stands, bumping her knees clumsily on the table.

  ‘Hey, maybe we’ll see you at school some time,’ Natalie says, distractedly dragging her fringe back over her eye.

  ‘Maybe,’ Cassie smiles.

  Budgie dips his finger in the pile of sugar. Mitch leans over the table towards him and gestures at the till again. ‘Well, what ya think?’

  Lisa waves and says, ‘See ya.’

  ‘Bye.’ Cassie waves back and walking away from the booth she feels their eyes on her back.

  Cassie floats over the road, light and optimistic. She arrives at the bank at the same time as her mum and dad walk down the stairs. Her dad whacks his hands together. ‘That went swimmingly.’ He grins. ‘Better than I thought.’