Callie

by Ruth Park

  Table of Contents

  Cover Page

  Callie’s Castle

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  Callie’s Family

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  About the Author

  Other Children’s Books By Ruth Park

  Preview

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Callie’s Castle

  1

  As Callie came out of the school gate, she almost turned left along the way she used to walk to her old home. But when she heard Frances calling her, she ran off quickly in the right direction.

  Until a week ago, Frances and she had been best friends. What had they quarrelled about? It had been something so small, so silly, that Callie couldn’t remember it. She didn’t want to, either, for the fight had ended with her blurting out such cruel things that now her face scorched at the thought of them.

  To say such things to Frances! Callie nearly groaned aloud. And yet, as Frances came pounding along behind her, she turned in silence, putting on a hostile face.

  ‘Oh, it’s all right!’ bristled Frances. ‘I don’t want to talk to you. Mrs Wheeler said you were to give this to your mother.’

  Callie looked at the envelope, on which was written, Mrs Beck, per courtesy of Carol.

  ‘Take it yourself!’ she said.

  Frances glowered. ‘No, I won’t, you pig.’ She threw the letter on the ground and walked away.

  Callie waited until Frances had disappeared around the corner. Then she picked up the letter and dawdled down the hill. She was worried. What was Mrs Wheeler writing to her mother about?

  On the way home Callie had a daydream about pushing that letter down a stormwater drain and saying nothing about it. But Mrs Wheeler would be sure to ask about it. All right then, stand up and say boldly, ‘My mother says you’re a nutsy old lady. Teachers ought to stick to teaching and not write letters home about their pupils, my mother says.’

  Callie could just see Mrs Wheeler’s face going red as everyone roared. That would fix her.

  Fix her for what? thought Callie desolately.

  Only last term she had loved Mrs Wheeler generously, delighted when she was asked to do something special, proud when her mother and stepfather had laughed at those jokes and sayings of Mrs Wheeler’s that she had retold. Then, all of a sudden, like everything else, Mrs Wheeler had turned sour.

  Well, perhaps she could put the letter between the pages of her social studies book and forget about it.

  Callie stopped outside the hibiscus hedge of their new house and opened her school-case. Just as she took the letter from her pocket, her brother Dan wandered out of the gate. He was as thin and pale as a whitebait, with frail silvery hair blowing over his brainy skull.

  ‘Who’s the letter for?’ he asked.

  Callie scowled. Everything that could be the matter with a brother was wrong with Dan. Ever since he’d had virus flu he had been awful—weepy, mean, finicky, a shameless tale-teller. Yet Callie ached with love of him and had to take great pains to hide it.

  ‘Mind your own business!’ she snapped. She jammed the case shut. Might as well take the letter straight to Mum, she thought, now that Dan knew about it.

  Dan was looking pleased. ‘I know something awful,’ he said. ‘About you,’ he added.

  ‘What?’ asked Callie, with dread.

  ‘You’ll see when you get to your room,’ said Dan. ‘Gret and Rolf are up there,’ he added demurely, ‘playing with your things.’

  Callie shrieked with dismay and rage. She dropped her schoolbag and the letter, flew up the stairs and along the hall to her bedroom. The door was ominously shut.

  ‘I’ll kill them, I’ll kill them!’ Callie croaked. She hurled open the door. Dan arrived just in time to see, from behind her, their sister Gret and their baby brother Rolf, sitting on the floor, silent and absorbed in the disastrous mess they had made of Callie’s treasures. The bread-tin was still beside the chest of drawers. That was how they had climbed up to the top drawer, which was Callie’s special place. The drawer was open, and everything that had been in it was strewn about the floor; the loved old toys, the favourite books, the tangled beads, the troll dolls Aunt Mette had sent Callie from Copenhagen, the limp teddy bear known as the Gutless Wonder, which Callie had taken to bed until she was six,

  even Callie’s greatest treasure, a little glass turtle. Gret was busily worrying the sewn-on clothes from the trolls, and Rolf was squeezing tubes of paint on the torn-out pages of Callie’s diary.

  Fury burst out of Callie’s chest in a terrifying squawk. Rolf, who was three, dropped the paint and began to cry. But Gret, a rose-quartz beauty bursting with health and confidence, only giggled, half-scared and half-thrilled. She jumped up, dangling the troll by its orange hair, watching warily.

  Callie’s mother, hanging curtains in the kitchen, heard the commotion.

  A radiant Dan met her in the passage. ‘Come quick, Mum. Callie’s killing them!’

  Fascinated, he hovered in the doorway as his mother dragged Callie away from Gret, and plonked Rolf on the bed, where he rolled purple with over-excitement. Callie gave a cry of despair and began to sob.

  ‘I have absolutely had enough of you children!’ said Mrs Beck. She spoke sharply. ‘Gret, go and wash yourself. Dan, take Rolf to the toilet.’

  When the door had shut, she looked despairingly around the room.

  ‘Oh, Callie, you must have left the drawer unlocked. Why are you so careless?’

  ‘I didn’t know they could climb up and reach it,’ hiccupped Callie. ‘Why didn’t you keep an eye on them? And Dan, he…he KNEW, and he didn’t stop them. I hate him! I hate them all!’

  And she put her foot on the glass turtle and crunched it to glittering dust.

  ‘Callie, that’s a wicked thing to do!’ said her mother.

  But Callie was crying so hard it was useless to try to reason with her. Instead, Heather Beck tried to tidy the room.

  ‘That little wretch has paint all over the floor. Thank goodness we haven’t put the carpet down yet. Oh, Callie, he’s torn up this notebook, too.’

  She picked up a page and read in Callie’s large neat writing: I wish my real Dad hadn’t been killed when I was a baby. I wish my mother hadn’t married again ever.

  ‘That’s my diary!’ cried Callie, twitching the page from her mother’s hand. ‘It’s supposed to be private!’ She scrabbled up the pages, splodged with crimson-lake and gamboge and green, and screwed them into an untidy ball. ‘I don’t want it any more…all spoiled…I’ll burn it…not fair!’

  ‘Very well, Callie. Tidy up in here, as best you can,’ said her mother quietly. ‘I’ll keep Gret and Rolf out until you calm down. I’m sorry about it all, darling, really I am.’

  As she closed the bedroom door behind her, Dan said jauntily, ‘I’ve been waiting to give you this letter. I’ll bet it’s from Callie’s teacher.’ He had picked it up when Callie dropped it.

  Mrs Beck gave him a cold look. ‘Did you really know the children were playing with Callie’s things? You come into the kitchen, Dan. I want to speak to you.’

  By the time Laurens Beck came home, Gret and Rolf were their usual radiant selves, dimples on every corner. Callie was sullenly setting the table, and Dan was invisible.

  ‘I had to scold him about something,’ Mrs Beck told her husband. ‘And now he’s sick in the stomach. I sent him to bed.’

  ‘The boy’s a little upset with all the excitement of moving house,’ said Callie’s stepfather in his gentle Danish voice. He put his arm around her. ‘How’s my big girl? Callie likes our new old house, doesn’t sh
e?’

  ‘It’s a beautiful house,’ muttered Callie, keeping her face turned so that Dad wouldn’t see her puffy pink eyes.

  And that was true. The first time Callie had been taken to see the house she hadn’t believed that they could ever possibly live in it. Only a few streets from their own home, this house stood in half an acre of shadowy, overgrown garden, looking towards Sydney Harbour. The garden was walled in by a hibiscus hedge that had grown ten feet high for lack of pruning, and was spangled all over with huge red and yellow flowers. It was like the hedge that grew around the Sleeping Beauty’s palace. And the house wasn’t a bit new and bright; it was just peaceful and homely, a Victorian house with six big rooms downstairs and five upstairs, no proper cupboards, peeling wallpaper, and porches paved with gloomy Dutch tiles with Biblical pictures on them—not nice ones like Noah and the Ark, but horridly fascinating scenes of Pharaoh chopping the heads off slaves.

  The upper storey was covered with silvery wooden shingles cut like fish scales. The chimneys were large and topped with twisted chimney-pots, all befouled with seagull droppings, and out of the roof stuck a queer little cupola with a weather-vane and windows of dirt-encrusted glass that Dad said he thought must be coloured.

  It was the sort of house any girl would think romantic, and Frances, who had accompanied them on one of their inspections, had said longingly, ‘Oh, please buy it, Mr Beck, so I can come and visit.’

  At first Laurens had thought he would never be able to afford to buy such a large house, even though it was rundown and shabby, for he was a painter and paperhanger, and found it hard to keep a family of six comfortable. But in the end it was his talent and industry as a house-painter that enabled him to buy the property.

  He fixed up the bottom floor as a large self-contained flat whose tenants could have the sole use of the front garden. He painted and papered it in pale sunny colours, and let it at a rental he was almost too bashful to ask.

  ‘It’s an average rent for Sydney today,’ said his wife. ‘And there’s the harbour view, and Neutral Bay shopping centre just up the hill, and schools close by. And although the flat is half a house, really, it’s as private as though we two families were fifty miles apart.’

  The rental very nearly paid the bank repayments on the house, and so with a happy heart Laurens began to fix up the top floor as a home for themselves. He was not handy except with paint, but he worked very hard in the evenings, and very soon he had the roomy back bedroom fitted up as a kitchen and family dining-room, the bathroom refitted, and everything painted and papered with great skill.

  When Callie first saw the bedroom she was to share with Gret, she thought she had never seen anything prettier than the ornate plaster ceiling, which Laurens had cleaned and repaired and painted soft blue, with all its garlands and ribbon bows in lily white. It was just like Mum’s Wedgwood bowl that she kept her earrings in.

  The two big front bedrooms, with their graceful bay windows, Dad had turned into the master bedroom and a big living-room. Both rooms overlooked the leafy hillside down to Neutral Bay. The house was so high that it overlooked the deck of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. At night Sydney itself was before them, glittering as a dream.

  In a roomy sandstone cavern under the house, which perhaps had once been used as storeroom or even as a coach-house, Laurens was overjoyed to find a space to keep his great treasure, a 1907 Cadillac Model K, a true veteran car. He had paid a farmer forty dollars to be allowed to disinter the car from an old plough-shed completely hidden in a grove of ten-foot-high bamboo. She was a wreck, but every part of her was there, and an enthusiast had already offered him five hundred dollars for her. But Laurens wanted, dearly he wanted, to restore her himself.

  He took dozens of colour-slides of the house for his sisters in Denmark, and he insisted on his wife and at least one child being in each one. He was proud of them all, and in a very special way of slender brown Callie Cameron, his stepdaughter.

  ‘And I always thought Callie loved him as much,’ Heather Beck thought as she tidied up the shining new kitchen after dinner was over that evening. She felt a pain in her chest as though treacherously and unexpectedly Callie had struck her. ‘Oh, I wish I hadn’t seen that page from her diary!’

  Laurens and the two little ones were watching television in the living-room before their bedtime, so she sat down wearily and once more read Mrs Wheeler’s letter.

  I’m quite disturbed over Carol’s attitude the last three weeks or so, and am wondering if the child is off-colour. She has dropped to thirtieth place in class, and seems hostile and uncooperative with both staff and classmates. This is so uncharacteristic of Carol, who is usually very lively and sensitive towards other people. No need to mention my concern to her, of course. I feel that a mother is the person to spot anything that may be bothering a child. Do ring me tomorrow for a chat…

  Callie’s mother sighed. She was a kind, loving woman, but perhaps she had become casual and absent-minded with her elder daughter. The younger ones, born so closely together, were such a handful, with Gret so strong and big and self-willed, and Rolf aiding and abetting her with increasing naughtiness. And Dan, since his ‘flu, was a rogue, wayward and irritable as an old hen.

  ‘I’ll have a talk with Callie,’ she thought. ‘Find out what it’s all about. But, oh, dear, I did think she loved dear kind Laurens as much as if he were her own father.’

  Callie lay in bed, stiff as a board and feeling slightly sick in her middle. She could hear Gret’s small purring snores, and knew that the child would look like an angel, rose-pink and placid.

  ‘And she’s the worst of them all,’ thought Callie. She remembered her glass turtle, that she’d had for so long, and punched the pillow in rage and regret. Next door Dan set up a faky croupy cough that woke Rolf and took her mother murmuring into the room. Far away was the lonely groaning of a bus as it turned into Neutral Bay village. A big moth banged furrily against the window, and the camphor-laurel tree scraped against the roof as the possums climbed into it for their nightly wander.

  Callie couldn’t go to sleep for ages after the house had fallen silent. She heard the wild swans going northward, very high in the moonlight, and thought of how the city must look from a swan’s-eye view, lagoons of light for miles and miles. But the swans were looking for lagoons of dark.

  At last, strung up and forlorn, she began to cry. Something was the matter, but what was it?

  Stealthily she got out of bed and took her father’s photograph from her drawer. By the light of the moon she looked once more at the dark-haired young man she couldn’t remember at all. He had brown eyes like Callie, and, she felt, the same kind of smile. Malcolm Cameron, his name had been, and he had been killed in a car accident when he was twenty-seven. Callie did wonder whether he would like her now that she was ten.

  ‘I don’t know why I feel miserable,’ she said. ‘There just seem to be too many people around.’

  All at once there flashed across her mind the picture of another face with brown eyes, and she remembered that elderly man, very broad and strong, with large warm hands that enfolded hers.

  ‘Ah, you’ve knocked a bit of bark off your knuckle, poor girl,’ he was saying, examining some tiny injury.

  ‘Look at all the bleed, Grandpa!’ wept that smaller Callie.

  Grandpa Cameron! Callie hadn’t seen him for a whole year. Recklessly she turned on the light and scrabbled once more in her drawer. Somewhere there was a Christmas card with a ship on it, and Grandpa’s new address on the back. Gret muttered resentfully but Callie took no notice. She found the card. Grandpa Cameron lived at Brookvale, an easy place to reach from Neutral Bay.

  2

  The next morning Gret jumped up with the sun as usual, bumbling about, dropping things and chirruping to herself. Usually Callie awoke sleepily resentful of this loud cheerful voice, but this time she lay and listened. Gret was checking over some incident of the day before.

  ‘Come out in front at once, Margrethe B
eck! she said. No, I won’t, ugerly old lady, I said.’

  ‘You didn’t really, Gret,’ said Callie.

  Gret frowned. ‘Didn’t I? I forget. Have I got my shoes on the right feet, Callie?’

  ‘Yes, for once,’ said Callie.

  Her mind was full of Grandpa Cameron. She longed to see him and she didn’t really know why. She only knew that seeing him would make her feel settled. She dressed for school with her

  father’s picture propped up on the windowsill, and the more she looked at his young face, the more she remembered Grandpa’s old one. Her plan completed she ate her breakfast, unaware of her mother’s troubled glances.

  Mrs Beck longed to have a free moment for a word with Callie. But Rolf was rowdier than usual, and getting Dan and Gret away to school was like getting Hannibal’s army over the Alps. Besides, Callie looked more cheerful. Mrs Beck’s spirits rose. Perhaps the child had got over whatever it was that had troubled her.

  Callie dived back into the kitchen just before eight. ‘I have to get to school early, Mum. Dan will have to take Gret. Bye for now!’

  Her feet clattered down the uncarpeted stairs.

  Gret said, ‘Callie had that picture out. She was looking at it and looking at it.’

  ‘What picture, Gret?’ inquired her mother.

  ‘That man,’ said Gret, slopping milk over her green school shift. She looked up sunnily. ‘Look what Dan done. Yuk!’

  Callie walked quickly up a side street to Neutral Bay village. She knew that if she stopped to think about what she was doing she might get timid or frightened, so she didn’t. She was not an outgoing girl, and hated speaking to strangers, but she went into a newspaper shop and asked the lady, ‘Please, how do I get to Brookvale?’

  ‘Any one of the northern beach buses will take you right through Brookie. There’s a Palm Beach—quick, run!’