My dear son,
I am sorry I have not written for such a long, long time. I know you are waiting for a letter from me. Really I did write you a letter but it fell out the window. Then a seagull got it and flew away with it.
I wondered. Did they have seagulls in You-rope? Perhaps they didn’t. You-rope was full of forests and castles. Perhaps they didn’t even have beaches. I crossed out ‘seagull’ and wrote ‘owl’.
Then an owl got it and flew away with it.
What would I say next? I looked around the room. On the wall near the door was a framed picture of a lady on the back of a white horse, at the circus. That was in Paris, our teacher had told us. Now Paris belonged to the Germans.
Yesterday we went to the circus. There were lots of tigers and elephants and horses and other animals, I can’t remember them all. It was a sunny day and afterwards we went and ate ice-cream and cherries.
Next to me, Hilda had laid her head on the desk with her eyes closed. This is what she did when her brain was hurting, which was quite often. I looked back to my letter. I needed to finish quickly, before the teacher noticed what I was doing.
I hope you are having a happy time in Sydney. I will come and find you when I save up the money for a ticket on the boat. I looked at the map. It is a long way away to where you are. But I am saving hard and I have nearly enough so you won’t have to wait much more.
Make sure you do what your father says. And remember to brush your teeth.
I put that in, because that was what my mother always said at the end of her letters, when I went to stay sometimes with my auntie in Manly in the holidays.
Finally, in extra-large writing, as grown-up as I could make it, I finished it off:
Lots of love always,
Mother
I put down my pencil and reread the whole letter from beginning to end. There was a space at the bottom of the page, so I drew a picture of a circus tent and an ice-cream cone, and a round sun in the sky. I didn’t draw any people because I wasn’t good at drawing people.
The teacher had finished writing on the board. She sat down on her chair at the front of the room. The legs of the chair screeched. Very quietly, so not even Hilda could hear, I tore the page out of my exercise book. I folded it into four, and slipped it inside my pocket.
CHAPTER XIII.
WHEN school finished that day, Hilda rushed off immediately to the playground with her few remaining crumbling rock cakes, looking for customers.
I went down the stairs by myself and loitered at the doorway near the boys’ part of the school, where they came charging out each afternoon. I had a plan. I had noticed that Ellery’s father never came to collect him after school. Instead Ellery walked home by himself with his square suitcase, through the streets with the tall trees and heavy branches, and the ocean pounding like blood. I could follow him easily, without him seeing me. That way I would find out where he lived. Then I could put the letter I’d written in his letterbox.
The letter should be in an envelope, with a stamp from Europe on it, I knew that. But sometimes letters fell out of their envelopes and they still arrived. This had happened to my mother – a letter from her friend in Queensland had fallen out of its envelope, but the postman had still brought it to our house. He had looked at who it was for and put it in our letterbox. That’s what Ellery and his father would think had happened with this letter.
I leant up against the wall of the boys’ building, pushing my cheek onto the sandstone. It was hot from the sun like a brick oven and it warmed my whole body. I waited, making myself very thin behind a drainpipe. They came out at a great run – boy after boy, swearing, pushing each other over, kicking each other, red-faced, tired, hard-eyed, watchful.
Somewhere towards the end, but not quite the end, came Ellery, calm and clean with his thin white legs and arms. I watched him walk past, and I sidled out from my hiding place. Ellery had an odd way of walking. He never looked back or from side to side. He kept his face forward and his feet followed firmly and evenly one after the other, as though he was marching.
A couple of the other boys trailed alongside him, but he didn’t stop. Ellery was clever. He knew how to handle those boys. If he had stopped or spoken to them, they might have pulled his tie and pushed him over or thrown something at him. But it was as if he didn’t notice them at all, and they lost interest and straggled off.
I followed him through the playground and out the school gate. I was like a detective shadowing a suspect, following him down the serpentine harbourside streets, past the tall houses and the small houses, the blocks of flats and the hanging trees and crumbling mossy walls. He never turned around, not once. He walked straight and steady, as though he had lived on these rocky streets all his life.
How hot it was! I wiped the sweat from where it was trickling from my hair into the corner of my eye. Ellery walked faster and I walked faster, my satchel banging on my back. There was a flash of silver water, then it was gone, then it was back again. I scuttled from tree to tree for a snatch of refuge from the sun. The air was washed with the scent of flowers. The heat made the earth smell so strongly, as though it was being cooked like toffee on the stove, sweet and swirling. It will never rain again, I thought, never ever again. All the plants will dry up and die, one by one.
Finally Ellery came to a stop at a block of flats of mulberry-coloured brick, with stone balconies that faced the water across a stretch of rough, sloping bush. I stood behind a gum tree, watching him. There was a double glass door at the entrance of the building and on either side of the door were stone flowers, built into the walls. There was a name above the door in golden letters: WALLARINGA. Ellery pushed the door open and vanished inside.
A horn sounded: a ferry from the city was coming into the wharf. Further out, galleons full of soldiers came and went to and from the war. I put my hand in my pocket and took out the letter and walked purposefully towards Wallaringa.
I pushed the door open. Inside it was quiet and cool. There were blue tiles on the walls, reaching down a long hallway. At the end I could see a window of stained glass, with crimson flowers and panels of thick stagnant green. There were tiles on the floor too, laid to make patterns of squares and triangles, like Roman mosaics. A stairway led upwards, with a metal banister twisted in the shapes of petals and leaves.
Against one wall was a mirror made of a special glass. I had seen this kind of glass before in one of the big shops in town. My mother had pointed it out to me – it was called bevelled glass. When you looked into it everything shattered into pieces, like a kaleidoscope. Next to the mirror was a row of sturdy wooden letterboxes, each with a number on them, up to eight. Some had labels with names – Winkler, Martin, Macintyre.
One of them was blank. That must be Ellery’s. There would be no name because they had only just arrived. I stepped in and tiptoed over and pushed the letter inside the nameless box.
Suddenly, at the top of the stairs, a door opened. I swung around. In the bevelled glass, my face broke into hundreds of pieces, staring out at me like the pale face of a drowned sailor in a wavy pool of green.
CHAPTER XIV.
It was Ellery’s father. Through the half-open door behind him, I could see a droop of a curtain, the edge of a marble shelf, the wooden back legs of a chair.
‘It is Columba, isn’t it?’ said Ellery’s father, coming down a couple of steps. ‘We met at the school.’
‘Yes,’ I said, because that’s all I could say.
My heart was beating very fast, pecking at me, like the sharp beak of a frightened bird. Had he seen me posting the letter? He came down a few more steps. His shoes clicked on the tiled floor.
‘Have you come to visit Ellery?’
I shook my head. I wanted to run out the door and get away as quickly as possible. But I couldn’t move.
‘Please, do come in,’ he said. ‘If you would like.’
I said nothing. Ellery’s father looked thoughtful.
‘If you would
rather not come in,’ he said, ‘perhaps you and Ellery can go for a walk together?’
He turned and went back up the stairs, in through the door of the flat. I heard him say something in a language I didn’t understand. But I knew it from the newsreels. It was German.
Ellery appeared. He was holding his book to his chest. When he saw me, his eyes looked merry. He and his father came downstairs together. Ellery took the steps carefully, as he did everything.
‘Columba,’ said Ellery’s father when they reached me. ‘I have explained to Ellery that you might go for a walk in the garden together, along the water. What do you think?’
I knew what he meant by the garden. We didn’t call it the garden though. Below the line of houses and flats there was a stretch of bush with tracks leading to the water. You could walk all the way, right along the edge of the ocean. I licked my lips and found my voice.
‘All right,’ I said.
Ellery’s father bent down and tapped the book Ellery was clutching.
‘I’m afraid,’ he said, ‘that Ellery likes to take his book everywhere with him. Even walking.’
‘I don’t mind,’ I said.
The three of us moved together across the tiles, past the mirror and the row of letterboxes to the front door. Ellery’s father held it ajar for us.
‘Goodbye, children,’ he said. ‘I will see you soon.’
The door swung shut behind us. I looked at Ellery. His face was dappled with the sun through overhanging gums.
‘Hello,’ I said.
Ellery smiled.
A blackbird with glossy wings was standing on a patch of grass near a bending eucalypt, pecking at a stray piece of meat. It looked like something from a prehistoric time. Suddenly it took the whole piece of meat in its beak and flew away, to the tops of the tree above.
‘Come on,’ I said.
We headed down the path at the back of the row of houses. We walked slowly at first, but then I began walking faster and I could feel Ellery’s footsteps padding along behind me, up through the grass. We broke past the wall of bush and the water rose up before us. There lay the warships, silent and unearthly, as though they had sailed down from the sky from another planet and landed calmly on the top of the waves.
Below was a shelf of sandstone full of rock pools. I gestured at Ellery, and we scrambled together through gusts of wind down to the gathering of craters brimming with clear warm tidal water, coloured shells and silvery sand. I knelt next to one of the rock pools and dipped my fingers inside it. I pulled off one of the little shells that were stuck to the rock wall and put it into the middle of Ellery’s open palm.
‘It’s a periwinkle,’ I said.
It was a tiny cone, perfect and still, but something was alive inside it, a piece of life that clung to the edges of things while the waves washed over it day and night. It was patterned with rows of brown and grey and white rectangles that looked as if they had been drawn with ink. Ellery’s eyes widened.
‘If they’re big enough,’ I said, ‘you can eat them.’ I sighed. ‘But you have to get so many.’
Ellery let the periwinkle fall from his hand, back into the pool with a soft plash, the sound of a frog diving gently into a pond. Cautiously, he lowered his hand into the shallow water. His pale fingers in the seaweed looked like some rare sea-creature, tinged with the colour of algae.
I looked out across the harbour at the gathering of ships. One of them was a hospital ship, you could tell by the flags. That was where they made the sick soldiers stay. They weren’t allowed on shore, but had to lie in bunk beds looking out the portholes at the people walking up and down, living silent lives far from reach.
There were some sailors on the deck, leaning over the railings, smoking. Their skin was brown and their smiles were broad. When they saw us they waved.
‘Lascars,’ I said to Ellery, because that’s what everyone said they were, although I didn’t know what the word meant.
Ellery stood up. He put his book up high on the rock shelf, safe from the water. Above us the sky was intensely blue, like the jacaranda flowers in late spring that filled the streets, leaving bright purple-blue layers of fallen blooms all over the footpaths. It made me feel dizzy, like being swept up from the floor in someone’s arm and held, legs dangling, being spun around, swung in the air.
Ellery got on his tiptoes. He began waving back at the Lascars with both his arms, almost his whole body. It was as though he was stranded on a desert island, and was trying to make a passing ship stop and save him, pick him up and take him back home.
The Lascars laughed and waved back. The sun glanced against the wall of the ship and blazed as though someone was setting it alight with a match. For a moment they all vanished in the glare.
And then, out of the sky, came a great wailing, rising and falling. Everything, everyone stopped still.
CHAPTER XV.
I PUT my hands over my ears. I knew what the sound meant. It was the siren for the air raid practice.
I had forgotten all about it. It wasn’t a real air raid. It was just pretending, so that everybody could get used to what we were meant to do when the Japanese did come and drop their bombs.
‘It’s nothing,’ I said, shaking my head at Ellery. He was staring at me strangely. ‘Don’t be frightened. It’s not real bombs. It’s just a practice.’
I knew we had to go inside until it was over. That was the rule. It was too far to go all the way back to Ellery’s place. Where would we go?
A man appeared from the bush below, rubbing himself with a towel. He’d been swimming. The hairs on his chest were bleached and his skin was burnt orange. He looked like he spent his whole life lying on the beach.
‘Where can we go?’ I called out, running towards him.
‘Good question,’ said the man, shaking the water from his legs.
He did not seem very worried about it. He tied his towel in a knot around his neck.
‘You’d better get yourselves indoors, kids,’ he said loudly so I could hear him over the siren, which blared on and on, ‘or you’ll cop it from the ARP.’
The ARP were the people with helmets and notebooks, who checked that you did what you were told. They went around at night with torches, making sure you turned off all the lights. Now they would be making sure everyone was inside.
‘Why don’t you two just nick into the change rooms,’ said the man. ‘And wait for the All Clear.’
He kept on walking, but nodded his head at a stone hut halfway up the hill, hidden by trees. It was for people to change in and out of their swimsuits. I grabbed Ellery’s hand and tugged him. He came tripping after me. I knew the siren wasn’t real, but I felt a wave of fear rush through me. I pulled Ellery up the hill till we reached the change room and tumbled in. It was dark and square with damp sandstone walls and a low roof and short wooden splintery benches. It smelled of snails and old clothes.
We sat down on a bench and waited. The siren blared on. I stared at a trail of ants moving along the stone floor of the hut, upwards and onwards to some unknown goal, unimpressed by the noise. Perhaps ants don’t have ears, I thought.
I was sitting very close to Ellery in the darkness. I could feel the muscles of his arms and legs. I could hear him breathing. He seemed a strange mixture of frightened and calm, as though he was waiting for something, and would continue to wait until it happened. He had automatically opened the book on his lap. I looked down and saw the spiky letters glistening in the half-light. There was an illustration too, but the lines were so fine they ran together in a shadowy blur and it was impossible to see what it was.
Then the siren stopped. The world fell silent. We looked at each other in the darkness. It was so quiet, so very quiet, like being underwater, like holding your breath and swimming underwater for as long as you could, until your lungs felt they would burst.
I knew you were supposed to wait, not to move or go outside until another siren boomed, for the All Clear. But I couldn’t stay in that dank li
ttle room a moment longer.
‘Let’s go outside,’ I said to Ellery.
We crept out, the two of us, holding hands, on soft feet, into the blazing light of sunset. It was later than it should be, as though we had somehow lost the hours of the afternoon. The sun was red and sinking in the sky.
The foreshore was deserted. There was nobody there at all – everyone was inside, hidden from the phantom bombs. It was as though the whole world was ours. Somewhere above us, a dog was howling. It sounded so sad. I thought about the animals in the zoo on the hill and how frightened they would be by the siren. They wouldn’t understand it at all. The elephants, the lions, the bears. And the animals not in the zoo: the possums in the trees and the roofs, the foxes, the rats. The cats.
My bones became cold, like ice inside my skin. What if it wasn’t a practice after all and they were real bombs? What if the Japanese had really appeared out of the sky?
Then Ellery and I would die together. Each of us would be the last person on earth the other would see, trapped alone like a message in a bottle bobbing on the ocean, thrown by a soldier on a departing troop ship.
CHAPTER XVI.
‘THERE you are!’
High on the hill was the silhouette of a man. I saw the shape of his hat and coat.
‘Children!’ said Ellery’s father. ‘Children.’
Ellery let go of my hand and ran up the hill. When he reached his father he threw his arms around him, as if he were the trunk of a tree. I heard soft words in German. The book fell from Ellery’s arms. He bobbed down and picked it up and hugged his father again.
‘I’m so sorry,’ I said, coming slowly up. ‘I forgot about the air raid practice.’
‘So did I, Columba,’ said Ellery’s father. ‘Only when I heard the siren, then I remembered.’ He smacked his forehead. ‘So I came out at once to look for you.’
The Blue Cat Page 5