Cassandra

by Kathryn Gossow

  When the stallion devoured Ida, Cassie remembers, he started with her little finger and moved up her wrist, up her arm, to her shoulder, finally biting off her head in one giant mouthful.

  There is no way out of school on Monday. Cassie scrapes her greasy hair into a ponytail. She will have to go see Athena this afternoon. That is, if she isn’t already here baking with her mother.

  She searches around her desk for a pen. Her hand finds something better. Hidden under her school books. A bag. Enough for ten, maybe twelve joints. Athena must have left it for her when she was sleeping. She smiles for the first time in days and immediately rolls her tidiest joint yet.

  She smokes a third of the tidy joint on her way to the bus. Her skin prickles with light. The bus floats towards her. Wheels an inch off the ground. She is the girl who vomited her guts into her hand. But these people are immaterial. Real flesh and blood. Unimportant. She is the special one. If they do not see it, then more fool them. She glides up the bus stairs, her head throbbing with glee.

  A few heads turn, eyes bleary with morning, stupidness.

  Cassie curtsies. ‘You’re welcome,’ she says loudly and more faces rise to see her.

  Alex nudges her in the back. ‘Hurry up.’

  Cassie takes her seat and absorbs the eyes.

  She records every vision in her notebook. Her fingers squeeze the pen. Squeeze out the ink. Her fingers ache with the squeezing.

  Nausea grows. The diesel fumes triggering memories.

  She stops writing and looks through the window. Sunlight flashes between the rushing trees. Every now and then she glimpses figures between the tree trunks. Frowning at her. Are they the Sisters? She cannot meet their eyes.

  * * *

  The days rush and meander into hours. The hours mush into days. Each day is thick with crinkled pages of writing. Athena skims through the pages.

  ‘Are you even reading it?’

  ‘There’s so much.’ Athena turns a page. The pages crunch disapproval.

  ‘I know.’ Cassie moves closer. ‘Read yesterday.’ She pushes the pages forward in time.

  ‘Your writing is bad.’ Athena turns the book sideways, scrutinising.

  ‘Take it home.’ Cassie cracks her knuckles. Crunch. Crunch. Crinkle.

  Athena winces. ‘Perhaps you should stop for a while. You need a break.’

  ‘Take it home.’ Cassie rises, paces to her dressing table, to the bed, and back to the dresser. A line of figurines look up at her. A woman in blue, an umbrella poised. A Dalmatian dog, spots on spots. A mother cat and her kittens, slant eyed. A small girl in petticoats and ribbons. She can’t be sure they are listening. But just in case. She turns them all to face the wall.

  The idea of praying comes to Cassie in the middle of her English class. She has discovered, in the ritual, if she blows smoke straight up in the air, it swirls like storm clouds and falls in a heavy shroud around her. A cocoon. A force field. With this protection she is impervious. Taunts become hollow and disappear into the air before their meaning can penetrate her mind. The teacher’s words come from the end of a long tunnel, a muffled noise like a fridge’s monotonous whir. Sometimes they shout at her and it is like the fridge’s motor kicking in. It doesn’t make her jump. Only God can reach her. Then she thinks, maybe he is the only one that can hear her too. Her mother certainly doesn’t. Cassie told her just last night that a storm was coming. To tie up all the horses. She just frowned and turned back to the sink. She said something. Something. She didn’t know what. Maybe she heard it, but she didn’t understand it. Her mother was whiter noise than the teachers.

  So she prays. Lord, God, father of heavenly things and king of the entire universe. Remember me? I used to go to church with my Aunty Ida. When I was little. I stopped going because … it was boring … no, no, never boring, Master (not like THE Master in Dr Who, no no). I stopped going because … my mother wouldn’t let me … that’s it. She said religion is the opiate of the masses. I think she read that somewhere. I heard her say it lots of times. And did you see? She has dyed her hair red. It happened, maybe a week ago. Or maybe a month ago. Red as red. Weird. I am worried about her. Do you think the devil has her? Oh Lord, Oh Lord, I have done bad things too. I read the cards. The tarot cards. And palms. I tried to be a prophet. But I know now. It is wrong. Help me resist temptations. Temptation. Temptation. Temptation.

  ‘Cassandra!’ His voice rocks her.

  God? He sounds so mad.

  ‘Cassandra! Get up, Cassandra Shultz.’

  God talked to her!

  A hand clutches her shoulder. She opens her eyes.

  Mr Shannon, his teeth gritted, stands over her. ‘Get up, girl! Go to the office and report to Mr Lance.’

  The laughter of the class pierces her force field. The girls laugh behind their hands. A boy behind her moves his hands as though casting a spell. ‘Temptation, temptation,’ he chants. She will have to watch out for him. Maybe he is a wizard.

  Her father picks her up from school.

  ‘What’s going on, Cassie?’ he says.

  ‘I have bad dreams,’ she says.

  ‘What about?’ he says.

  ‘Horses and shadows. Shadows on the garage wall.’

  ‘Maybe you should see someone,’ he says.

  ‘God?’ she asks.

  ‘No, not God,’ he says.

  And nothing more is said.

  * * *

  The smoke curls around her, a spiral opening her brain. She scribbles her every vision and dream until her hand aches. When the stone is gone she is flat and dull. The notebooks are a bible. A future bible. Every word as precious as gold. But when she closes the books, the words rearrange themselves. Code themselves. She can’t understand a word she has written.

  Athena: How much of this are you smoking?

  Cassie: Only the green bits. Laughs.

  Athena: My father will notice soon.

  Cassie: Zeus.

  Athena: Huh?

  Cassie: Zeus with the blazing fingers and flaming pubes. He waves his penis at every woman.

  Athena: You really should stop smoking so much, you know? You know what? You’re not having it.

  Cassie: Give it back.

  Athena: Ow, you scratched me.

  Cassie: Bleed.

  And Athena stops coming.

  The doctor says she is overstressed. Homework? he asks. Lots and lots of homework, Cassie says. Study study exams and stress. Sleeping tablets, the doctor suggests. Pushes. Pushes the paper across the desk. Her mother crosses her arms. Crosses her legs. Crosses her brow. Are you sure? It’ll help, the doctor says. His eyebrows crawling across his face. His nose bulging and pitted. And some time off school. I can give you a letter for the school. Half a tablet a night should do the trick.

  Half a tablet is not nearly enough. Cassie sneaks the second half. She discovers Ida’s tablets are the same as hers. In the mornings she can steal one. When no one is looking. When she really wants to sleep.

  The days blur into a hangover of bleariness.

  Stallion: Impatient, impatient.

  Cassie: For what?

  Stallion: My day. My day.

  Cassie: When will you come?

  Stallion: That’s for me to know and you to find out.

  ‘Cassie … Cassie …’

  Alex, his nose bright red, on the end of her bed.

  ‘Cassie.’

  ‘I’m a poet and I don’t even know it.’

  ‘Stop being stupid. We’ve got to talk.’

  ‘Walk and talk.’

  ‘If you want. Get up then.’

  ‘Up.’

  Alex pulls on her arm, whines, ‘Get up.’

  ‘Alexander, leave your sister alone.’

  ‘Alexander, leave your sister alone. Is there an echo in here?’
/>   And then the tablets run out.

  Ida’s tablets have been hidden. Somewhere.

  There is nothing to smoke. Nothing to slam her brain out of her head. Stop her thinking. Stop the dreaming.

  ‘No,’ her mother says.

  ‘But,’ her father says, ‘he’s a doctor.’

  ‘He’s an old quack that should have retired. If he was any good he’d have diagnosed Ida years ago. I’m not having my daughter turning into a zombie for another month.’

  ‘What are you going to do then? Let her scream in the night?’

  Her mother doesn’t say what she is going to do. Or if she does it is too quiet for Cassie to hear.

  ~ 27 ~

  Awake

  Cassie sits on the garden seat, the one Poppy made for Grandma Lily with eucalyptus salvaged from the old shearing shed, back when they used to keep sheep here. Before her time. They gave up, Poppy said, because of the foxes. No matter what they did, the foxes got to the sheep. They had an orchard back then too. Lily’s orchard. Lily dreamed one day that it was gone and the next day she woke up and Poppy was bulldozing her orchard. How did she know that? They grew wheat there after that. Have done ever since. Awarding winning wheat in that first year. There was a newspaper clipping, her dad not much older than she is now, standing in the sea of black and white wheat, their house in the background, looking the same as it does today, except for the cars. There have never been that many people visit them in her lifetime. Hard to imagine.

  The seat beneath her is baked grey, fine cracks like wrinkles of time in the wood—smooth, warm and powdery. Grandma Lily skims past with cool, caressing fingertips. Cassie’s arms tingle with her touch. Maybe Lily told her the story of the orchard. In a dream, or sometime when she was awake and listening.

  She wishes she had a joint. Maybe then Lily would whisper to her again.

  The garden has been nestled into a pillow of shadows. It has slept, dormant, but has turned now, peeked at the clock, and thought about getting up soon.

  A bit like her. Awakening from some vagueness of the last few weeks … months. Another girl lived her life for a while and now that other girl clings to her skin. The sun helps to evaporate her, but it is probable that she will never rid herself of herself.

  A noisy miner crashes into a tree on the other side of the fence. It panics and shrieks and reminds her, as they always do, of the day the snake bit her. She wonders if the bird has spotted a snake, just there on the other side of the fence, going about its business. There was a little girl called Cassie who would have gone to look.

  Sometimes it feels as if the day of the bite was the day she was born.

  A fly skims across her face. She frowns and swats at it. It is trying to read her mind and she won’t allow it.

  Alex ambles towards her. He tries too hard to look relaxed, but he’s got gangly over the last year, she realises. Gawky, skinny legs he doesn’t know how to use. He sits on the grass in front of her, his knees bent like sharp triangles. Obtuse triangles? Athena would know. If Athena ever spoke to her again.

  ‘You’re up,’ Alex says.

  ‘You look white,’ Cassie says.

  Alex plucks a piece of grass from the ground. It makes a popping sound. He throws it down, his wrist bony and old looking. We have the same bony wrists, Cassie thinks.

  ‘Athena doesn’t come down anymore,’ he says.

  ‘We had a fight.’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘Just stuff,’ Cassie says, picking a splinter from the seat with her nail. Her nails have gone soft and papery.

  ‘Are you still having bad dreams?’

  Cassie shrugs.

  Alex clears his throat. ‘I …’ He stops there.

  The noisy miners spit another tirade at the grass beneath the tree. The tractor churns into life.

  Cassie turns in the direction of the shed. ‘What’s Dad doing?’

  ‘The top paddock.’

  ‘It’s going to rain soon?’

  Alex scrunches his shoulders so his head seems to disappear into his body. ‘I said it would.’

  ‘And will it?’

  ‘Yes,’ he sighs, dropping his shoulders.

  ‘Well, don’t sound so happy about it.’

  ‘There’s something else,’ he says.

  ‘Yeah.’ Cassie drops her head back and marvels at the blue of the sky. She wants to reach up and take a handful of it, feel it pulse in her hand.

  ‘You’re not listening,’ Alex says.

  ‘I’m listening,’ she says.

  ‘You’re not,’ Alex says.

  She looks back down at him, cross-legged on the grass, like a pale fairy. ‘What?’

  ‘I keep having the same dream,’ he says.

  A shadow draws a curtain over Cassie and she shivers. ‘I’ve finished with all that stuff.’

  ‘Finished how?’

  ‘Trying to figure out what dreams mean and how they will come true. It’s too hard and it makes my head hurt.’

  Alex chews on his nail. The skin around his nails is red and raw.

  ‘Don’t do that, you’ll make it bleed,’ Cassie says.

  He drops his hand from his mouth and almost immediately brings it back up again. He scrapes his tooth over his nail and groans before sitting on his hands.

  ‘It’s like you’ve been a bit crazy, the last little while,’ he says at last.

  ‘That’s what you wanted to talk about?’

  ‘Not really.’ He shuffles back and forth over his hands, and his forehead creases. ‘What do you think about Mum, her hair and stuff?’

  ‘It’s red now. It’s not anything. She just wanted a change.’

  ‘She always has red hair in my dream,’ Alex says.

  ‘So what?’

  ‘I mean,’ he says, ‘it was red in my dream before it was red. It was weird waking up one day and there she was with red hair. Just like that.’

  ‘Welcome to my world,’ Cassie says.

  ‘It’s like, I’ve been thinking, it’s like the weather,’ he says.

  ‘It’s nothing like the weather,’ she says.

  ‘I mean,’ he pulls a hand out and shakes it and tucks it back underneath him, ‘it’s like how you can study the weather, I mean like at university or whatever. It’s a science and people believe it, but the science only goes so far and then sometimes people have to make up the rest. Guess, I mean. But I can guess better than some people.’

  ‘Yeah, and?’ Cassie wishes he would just go back inside and try not to chew his nails somewhere else.

  ‘What you do, reading the tarot, people’s palms, writing down your dreams. It could be a science too, it’s just that people think … it’s like witchcraft or something, when really it is probably like a science, it’s just that no one believes it enough to study it.’

  ‘Like Athena wants to,’ Cassie says.

  ‘Athena’s weird,’ Alex says.

  Cassie laughs. ‘As compared to a ten-year-old boy who tells his father when to start sowing for rain and a girl who …’ She kicks a clump of grass out of the dirt.

  ‘Who what?’ Alex asks.

  ‘I don’t want to do it anymore. I’m sick of worrying about what’s going to happen. Whether it will be good or bad, whether I can stop it if it’s bad. I just want to … be,’ she says.

  ‘Me too,’ says Alex.

  ‘Right,’ she says, ‘then we don’t need to be having this conversation.’ She stands and turns towards the house.

  ‘Wait …’ Alex calls after her.

  Cassie stomps down the side of the house. The shadows fight along the garage wall. They have fought there on and off for years. Fists and kicks. Fighting in her dreams so often lately. Causing her to wake with screaming adrenalin. They’re not real, she thinks to herself. Just shadows. And for the first
time she ignores them.

  She finds an old fruit box and packs into it her notebooks filled with visions and dreams and nonsense. Athena knew all along it was nonsense. The fortune-telling books, magazines with articles on numerology, palm reading and horoscopes. Mere entertainment to sell a magazine to a bored housewife. Last of all she packs her tarot cards. Closes the flaps on the box. The end of it. She hoists the box onto her hip and takes it to the machinery shed. She stashes it high on a shelf piled with old car parts and oil filters. Craziness behind her.

  * * *

  They say she is well enough for school. That is what they say and there is no way out of it. The dread piles on top of the dread, a deep heaviness in her gut that wakes her in the night. The fingers prise at the cracks in the wall, and she hears laughter from inside the splinters. The Sisters enjoy her distress. They are not real, she tells herself. She wishes she would believe herself.

  ‘Can I go to your old school instead?’ she asks her mother. ‘I could board there.’

  Her mother spreads her hands in front of her, the nails gleaming scarlet. She wipes her finger along the edge of a nail. ‘Damn it. Cassie, pass me the nail polish remover.’

  Cassie passes the bottle and cotton balls across the table. ‘Mum? Can I?’

  ‘I’ll talk to your father. It depends if we can afford it.’

  Cassie jumps from her seat and kisses her mum on the cheek. She smells of a musky perfume.

  ‘You’ll still have to finish this term where you are,’ her mother says.

  ‘But …’

  ‘No buts. It’s only till the end of term.’

  She can handle till the end of term. If she keeps her head low and ignores the bitches, she can get through to the end of term.

  Natalie and Mitch are still together. A miracle as far as she can tell from the amount they fight. Paulo has hooked up with a girl called Trudi. They used to hang shit on her all the time. The mole on her left cheek she calls a beauty spot is just a mole and she is a mole. Cassie hopes Paulo catches some disease from her. Then she remembers him crying over his dying wife and her heart skips. But she is finished with all that. She has no reason to believe it will happen. The cards, the notebooks collecting dust in the spider-filled shed. She never wants to see them again.