Callie

by Ruth Park

  He then went outside, looked at the newly shining cupola, shook his head wistfully, said once more, ‘Sure do’, then tore away in his van.

  ‘What was all that about, Pa?’ she asked at lunch.

  ‘Laurens is getting a wee spiral staircase made to order. Mm—mphm! It will be grand!’

  Mrs Beck nearly fell off her chair. A spiral staircase! She knew very well it would cost hundreds of dollars. And Laurens’s finances were already stretched almost to transparency by the many expenses of the new house. Where on earth was he getting the money?

  ‘He must be borrowing it,’ she said, horrified. ‘And he hates to borrow. To think he’d do such a thing for Callie, when she isn’t even his daughter.’

  ‘Ah, but she is,’ said Grandpa. ‘And better yet, he’s Callie’s father.’ He gave Mrs Beck’s hand a squeeze. ‘And I’m well content, lass, well content.’

  6

  When Callie first heard that Laurens was selling the old Cadillac so that he could buy a spiral stair for the cupola, she exclaimed, ‘Oh, Mum, he mustn’t. Don’t let him do it. He loves that old car so much.’

  ‘Yes, he really does,’ answered her mother. ‘But he wants to do this. It’s part of being a father, for him. Grandpa says we’re not to spoil it for Daddy by arguing about it. Promise?’

  But Callie still felt bad about it. Of course, the spiral staircase made the castle perfect, but it was dreadful to think of Dad sacrificing the veteran car for it.

  Laurens sketched the stair for them, a tendril of wrought-iron with a delicate handrail ornamented with grape-leaves. ‘In Denmark there are stone stairs like this,’ he said, ‘built into the thickness of the wall in castles and churches. The steps are all worn into hollows because of so many footsteps over the centuries. But our stair will last for ever, so strong will it be, even though it is small enough for nixeys.’

  Callie knew that nixeys were the elves of Danish folk tales.

  ‘Will I last for ever, Dad?’ asked Rolf.

  ‘A hundred years anyway,’ said Laurens, smiling at the child’s stout legs.

  While the stair was being made, Laurens painted the interior of the cupola, the window-frames, the inside of the linen-press, and the tall cupboard doors. Everything was white, as the stair would be. Then he decorated the cupboard doors with a design of ribbons and scrolls, in red, blue and green, to remind the children of the ornamented doors of Danish farmhouses.

  While he was working in the cupola, Callie tried to thank him for selling the car, but he said, ‘No, no, no talk now. Anyway, I am to benefit too, because my old lady brought more money than I hoped, and so, even after the stair is paid for, I shall have enough to make this year’s payment on the mortgage. No more overtime for a while. Am I not a lucky man?’

  Callie gave him a hug so sudden he got the brush back into the paint tin just in time. He laughed. ‘What was the old lady but a dream, anyway, eh? And a foolish dream, because I am stupid with tools. Yes, I am so. So no more talk now—except about your party, maybe.’

  ‘What party?’ asked Callie, amazed.

  ‘You surely will have a castle-warming? Perhaps more than one. The family at first, and maybe your nice Mrs Wheeler. And then, after the stair is put in place, Frances and the other girls from school?’

  It was days later that Callie asked, ‘Why are we to have the family party before the stair is put in?’

  ‘Because grown-ups are too big to climb such a small stair, silly one,’ said Dad. ‘Once the stair is built, the cupola is only for children.’

  He winked at Callie. Callie blushed brightly, raced up the ladder and said to Grandpa, ‘Dad has arranged it so that the castle really does have a moat!’

  ‘Aye,’ said Grandpa. ‘He’s crafty, your Dad.’

  Things were different from that time onwards. First of all, Callie bailed up Frances outside the school washroom. Instead of hinting and throwing out sentences in her direction, and hoping that Frances would pick them up, she said, ‘I wish we hadn’t fallen out. I’ve missed you a lot.’

  Frances fussed uneasily with her belt. ‘You said I was a fat heap.’

  ‘I know,’ said Callie. ‘It was awful. And a stupid lie, too. I’m very sorry, Frances.’

  Frances looked as though she didn’t know whether to giggle or cry. ‘Please be friends again,’ Callie urged. ‘I do want you to come and see my castle on Saturday, when the other girls do. Please, Frances.’

  ‘Don’t want to!’ burst out Frances, and she ran off without another word.

  Callie was upset. Her joy evaporated. For a short while she tried to feel angry with Frances, who wouldn’t forgive even when a person had apologised.

  But she couldn’t stay angry. When she was posting the invitations, she sent the prettiest to Frances. Mrs Wheeler received hers in the most flattering way.

  ‘Well, thank goodness,’ she said. ‘I’ve been just yearning to be asked to see the cupola. Friday! Do I have to wait until then?’

  ‘You and Mum and Dad and Grandpa will be the last adults in the cupola for another hundred years,’ said Callie importantly.

  When Dan received his invitation, he was solemnly glad. Callie thought he’d been different since the siege. Perhaps he really hadn’t understood that the castle was Callie’s and hers alone. He was still only six, anyway, Callie thought forgivingly, even though he was so clever. And Rolf was already a pest to him. It was likely that Rolf would grow up exactly like Gret, as irresponsible as a mosquito, and just as much of a nuisance.

  ‘If he is,’ thought Callie cautiously, ‘I might let Dan take refuge in my castle now and then.’

  The first castle-warming was a great success, even though Grandpa wouldn’t attend. He said he was dead scared of ladies when they were all dressed up. He sat in the kitchen reading the newspaper and eating plain scones and tea rather than all the delicious things Mrs Beck and Callie had cooked for the party. But Callie knew that, really, the bottle-tops in Grandpa’s hip joints had moved to his back.

  ‘Maybe Daddy could finish the job,’ she said anxiously. ‘You don’t want to be going up and down ladders, Grandpa, with your back hurting so much.’

  ‘I’ll see it through,’ said Grandpa. ‘I’ve had a really happy time working here, Callie. Mm—mphm! This is my last big job, and I want to make a good thing of it.’

  Callie felt a strange pang. Grandpa looked so strong and durable, like an old tree. Could it truly be his last big job? Her sad feeling seemed to hover around all day. When the adults at last climbed slowly and rather clumsily down the loft ladder, they too seemed wistful.

  ‘Funny to think I’ll never see it again unless I climb in over the roof, and I can’t see myself doing that,’ said Mum.

  ‘It’s a bit like a last good-bye to your childhood,’ said Mrs Wheeler with a sigh. Callie, with a slight shock, realised for the first time that Mrs Wheeler was younger than Mum, really not much older than Frances’s elder sisters.

  The next morning the men came early to put in the spiral staircase. The ladder was taken away, the spiral staircase was fitted into the cupboard and attached to the trapdoor opening. The handrail came up into the cupola in the most charming curl. As the green light diffused through the dainty structure, one of the men said, ‘We’ve never made anything near as tiny as this. Pretty near fit it in a pumpkin-shell.’

  ‘You’ve got a beaut cubby,’ said the thin tradesman to Callie, who was breathlessly watching. ‘If I’d had one at your age I would have been a different boy, I can tell you that.’

  Meanwhile Grandpa was refitting the sky-blue window in its frame. He and the thin tradesman would have to go out that way, together with their tools and Grandpa’s bits and pieces.

  The thin tradesman took a last look at the castle, the new sheepskin rug, the books, the picture of the baby gorilla. He sighed. Then he eeled out the window and scuttled rapidly down the ladder.

  ‘That’s the way it takes you,’ said Grandpa. ‘Mm—mphm!’ He straightened up, and
his back cracked like a twig underfoot. ‘Well, that’s it, my lass. Now I’ll be off home.’

  ‘Oh, not yet, Grandpa! Oh, I wish you could live with us for always.’

  Grandpa ruffled her hair fleetingly. ‘You know very well I’m a peevish old tyke. No, better I leave things as they are. But I’ll be seeing you and the other children more often now. I’ve a fancy to get to know that young Dan. He’s a thrawn wee viper, but I like him well.’

  Grandpa squeezed with some difficulty through the window and climbed rather slowly down the ladder. A few words floated back.

  ‘Dod rat it, I caught my breeks on a nail!’

  A minute or two later, the ladder itself disappeared, and Callie was alone in her castle.

  The time had come. She took the felt-tipped pen Dad had bought her for this occasion, and under the name of Captain Jas. Frazer she wrote: Carol Cameron.

  It was truly a good moment.

  ‘I’ll never, never forget it!’ said Callie to herself, and she thought of all those other people, writing their names so long ago, and never forgetting it either.

  ‘Callie, Callie!’ called Dan from outside the cupboard door. ‘There’s someone to see you, Callie.’

  ‘It’s Frances,’ shouted Gret.

  ‘We like Frances, don’t we, Gret?’ Rolf was saying.

  Callie was very pleased. As she moved towards the top of the stair, she heard Dan say, ‘Don’t go up until you’re asked, Frances. Callie will get mad. Don’t put your foot on the stair until you’re asked, Frances.’

  Frances paid no attention. Callie could hear her coming up, stump, stump, round and round, in typical Frances-style. She’d made up her mind to come up, and come up she would.

  What made Callie halt beside the stair was the tone of Dan’s voice. He sounded scared. He hadn’t understood things after all, as she had thought. He was just nervous of this new, grouchy Callie who flew into rages and whacked people over the head with cushions.

  She found herself thinking, just like an adult, ‘He’s only a child!’

  All this flashed through her mind in just a few seconds, and then Frances’s curly black head was level with her knees.

  ‘I came,’ said Frances.

  Callie nodded. Neither of them knew what to say, so after a moment Frances began to giggle.

  ‘Come and see the view,’ said Callie. ‘It’s really the best. You can see as far as Botany Bay.’

  Frances leaned out of the oval window as far as she could. A southerly was bowling up the coast and everything—gulls, yachts, leaves, pedestrians—bowled briskly before it. The smog which all week had bruised the sky above the city had blown away; the sky was the same bluebag-blue as the chilly sea. Smoke bannered from autumn chimneys. A little sailboat with a crimson spinnaker five times as big as itself skidded across Neutral Bay like a lost balloon.

  ‘I can hear swans going over at night,’ said Callie. ‘Last night I saw a satellite like a pink star. And see here, Frances, all the drawers Grandpa built under the bench, to keep my junk in.’

  Frances was enraptured. ‘You’re the luckiest, Callie!’

  Callie showed her the list of names and explained the stories the family had made up about them. All the time, like an undertone of static, she could hear Gret and Rolf trying to get past Dan and up the stairs. Dan’s shrill voice yammered at them. He sounded rather like a watchdog.

  ‘The other girls will be here soon,’ said Frances. ‘I thought I’d come early so that you could tell me to go away if you wanted to.’

  ‘What a nutsy,’ said Callie. ‘Mum said that if I have my homework done and all my house jobs finished, I can have some of the kids up here every week-end if I want to. I mean, it’s so private, Frances. Grown-ups can’t get up the stair. They’re too big!’

  Frances sighed. ‘It’s awful to think that one day you’ll be too big for that staircase as well. We’ll all be too big.’

  ‘No, I won’t,’ said Callie, dismayed.

  ‘News flash,’ said Frances. ‘You can’t stop growing.’

  Then the other girls arrived, and there was too much to talk and laugh about for Callie to do any thinking. And by the evening she was accustomed, though in a rebellious sort of way, to the new idea. Although she would never want to give up her castle, the castle would give her up.

  Had Dad meant that, when he first got the idea of the fairy stairway? Who could tell what was going on behind those gentle blue eyes?

  ‘I’ve a news flash for you, Dad,’ thought Callie. ‘It’ll be years yet. I’m sort of skinny.’

  She knew she could easily feel bad about it, so she remembered instead that Grandpa had said you get used to growing old. She supposed that you got used to growing up, too, in a painless, unnoticeable way. Everything changed; no one could do anything about it, so the best thing was to change with it and enjoy it for all you were worth.

  Soon she would have to go downstairs and set the table for dinner. Before closing the castle window, she leaned out into the cold air. She could hear birds babbling in the camphor-laurel tree as they settled in for the night. The rooftops shone with dew. The sparkling city reached with long fingers into the dark harbour. So great was its reflection that there was a ruby glow in the sky, even away out over the lightless ocean.

  When Benjamin Strachan looked out of that window, Sydney was lit with gaslight, Mrs Wheeler had said. It had been blurry and very small. Callie supposed she’d never learn much about Benjamin and all the others, but she liked thinking about them.

  ‘Even Isie, who was a bear and ended up in the Zoo,’ she thought.

  She had worked out what she’d say to Dan. ‘Just about the time you’re ready to have a place of your own away from the kids, I’ll be finished with the castle. Then it will be your turn to write your name on the wall. But, of course, before then I’ll often invite you and the kids up here, as long as you help keep Gret and Rolf in order, right?’

  She knew very well how Dan would look—lights all over him, like a Christmas-tree.

  She closed the window against the wind, and turned out the light.

  ‘I’m the luckiest,’ she said.

  Callie’s Family

  1

  Callie Cameron and her best friend Frances were sitting under the school willow trees eating each other’s lunch when Callie’s brother Dan ran past.

  As usual, Dan had gone home for lunch because he was supposed to be delicate. Earlier in the year he had caught mumps. As Dan always had complications, complications followed the mumps, and he spent more than six weeks away from school. So their mother was keen to build him up with nourishing food. Callie thought this a load of old boots and so did Frances.

  Dan looked like a stick of celery and made the most of it, for he was as smart as six monkeys. Though a lot younger than Callie he was only two grades below her.

  Sometimes Callie was proud of Dan. Other times she wanted to kill him.

  ‘There’s a letter at home,’ he informed Callie.

  ‘From Denmark.’

  ‘Is it for me?’ asked Callie eagerly.

  ‘Find out,’ said Dan, as he ran off.

  ‘Even for a brother, that kid is a creep,’ remarked Frances. ‘Oh, wow, Callie, maybe it’s from Marius!’

  Marius was Callie’s cousin. He was only a kind of cousin really. Callie had a stepfather, Laurens Beck, a quiet man whom she loved dearly. Laurens was Danish. Back in Denmark he had two sisters, an older one called Mette, and one close to his own age, named Borgny. Marius was Aunt Bor’s son, and he was fifteen and marvellous.

  Frances was romantic. She fell in love with everyone—football heroes, their class teacher Mr Anger (who was never angry), TV actors, boys she noticed in supermarkets. Her life was one long soap opera, full of drama that never happened. In her imagination she had Marius coming to Sydney. There he fell in love with Callie, and after a good deal of excitement fought his rival. Or shot him. Or himself. It didn’t matter, as long as he did something thrilling.

/>   ‘Idiot!’ scoffed Callie. ‘Danes aren’t like that. Anyway, he only writes to me to practise his English.’

  ‘That’s what he says,’ said Frances wisely. ‘Oh, please, Callie, tell me what’s in his letter! I’ll read between the lines. I’m fantastic at that.’

  ‘You certainly are, you nut,’ laughed Callie as they went into class. The truth was that she had a few dreams about handsome Marius herself. But she would have died rather than tell anyone, except Frances, now and then.

  When she went home, she found that the letter was not for her after all.

  ‘It’s for Dad,’ said her mother, ‘and from Aunt Mette. I can tell by the handwriting.’

  Aunt Mette had old-fashioned European writing, all loops and fancy tails. She made some capital letters quite differently from the Australian way. But Callie could now read Aunt Mette’s letters as easily as she could those from Marius. She had begun writing to both her Danish relatives when her Grandpa Cameron died. Laurens felt it might distract her from her sorrow, and so it had, a little. Remembering dear Grandpa now, she thought of the cupola which he had fixed up to be her own special place.

  She asked her mother: ‘May I go and do my homework now, Mum? I’ve still got that awful wheat project to finish.’

  ‘Well, don’t think I’m going to do your jobs!’ snapped her sister Gret. ‘You’re always sneaking away to that hidey hole of yours and dodging your work.’

  ‘Hold on, Gret,’ said their mother Heather briskly, ‘that’s not true, you know.’

  ‘It is so,’ yelped Gret, lashing out and accidentally kicking Rolf’s dog. Gret loved Rolf, her young brother, and she loved Tad too. There seemed nothing for her to do then but glare at Callie and her mother and barge off to her room before anyone had a chance to say a word. A moment later a distant door crashed shut.