Callie

by Ruth Park

could scarcely do more than whisper ‘yes’ or ‘I think so’.

  ‘You have no idea,’ she reported to Frances the next day. ‘I nearly fell down. My knees went wonky.’

  ‘Isn’t love super?’ teased Frances.

  Callie giggled. ‘Oh, shut up, you nut.’

  She hurried on: ‘He speaks good English, and he sounds very grown-up, and he’s sending me a photo of himself and Dad and Rolf, and everyone.’

  ‘Did August Bok say anything?’

  ‘Oh, him,’ said Callie disdainfully. ‘Old Goose! Who cares about him?’

  Dad’s phone call made Callie long to know everything about Denmark, and Frances longed with her. When at the end of the week there was a revival of Hans Christian Andersen at the local movie theatre it seemed like magic. Frances’s mother took her little boys, and Callie and Frances went too. Gret was asked, but she didn’t want to go.

  ‘Silly old Danny Kaye making faces,’ she said rudely.

  ‘But you loved that film when we first saw it,’ said Mum.

  ‘I was only a kid then,’ said Gret scornfully. ‘I’d rather do my homework.’

  Heather groaned. She hoped Gret would soon change back to the frank confiding child she once had been. Then she smiled, for how could that ever happen? Gret was growing up, having her own troubles, even her own secrets. Though it was hard to think of what secrets a child of Gret’s age could have.

  One thing which made Gret sad was that Grandpa had not discovered the Secret for himself, and that he had died before she learned about it. She had not even told Rolf about it, though it was just the kind of thing the little boy liked.

  ‘No,’ said Gret sternly. ‘It’s mine.’

  The Secret belonged to the days when the Becks’ house in Neutral Bay was all one home and not two flats as it was now.

  Gret had made the discovery in a roundabout way. It was after Grandpa died. Mum and Dad were kind and comforting to Callie, but somehow never seemed to ask Gret if she, too, felt lost and woebegone.

  In fact, Gret once heard her mother say: ‘Gret seems to have got over it. That’s a good thing.’

  ‘Children forget so quickly,’ answered her father.

  Children don’t forget, thought Gret fiercely. Forget dear Grandpa’s gruff voice and warm hands and funny Scots jokes? Forget the taps he mended, the sticking windows he fixed to glide smoothly, the wonderful way he had made Callie a castle out of the old neglected cupola?

  Never! thought Gret.

  Her mother had a story of how, when she was a child, and her father a soldier overseas, she had written him a letter every night. Of course, those letters couldn’t be posted, as no one knew exactly where her dad was, so she hid them. She had a good hiding-place. She slept in a brass bed, and she had discovered that the fancy knob on one bedpost screwed off. There was a secret space in there. Who would guess that it contained little letters to a faraway soldier? In due course Mum’s dad came home, and the bed was sold, letters and all, so no one knew what had become of them. Gret and Callie and Dan all intended to discover that brass bed in an antique shop some day, and unscrew the brass knob and find their mother’s letters. Gret liked the story very much. She thought perhaps she could write a letter to Grandpa to tell him how much she missed him.

  Once the letter was written she felt quite a lot better. But where could she hide it?

  Callie had the cupola for her personal place. Dan had an old toy box which he was allowed to lock. But Gret had no place of her own. At that time Rolf still got into everything. He was like a rat, sniffing around in schoolbags and drawers and people’s pockets. Nothing was safe from him. He didn’t scribble on schoolbooks any more; he just flickered away with them, and when they were discovered the owner often found that Tad had chewed them.

  ‘I’ve got to have somewhere!’ Gret complained. ‘Why can’t I have Drac’s room?’

  4

  Drac’s room was the tiny boxroom at the end of the hall. When the Becks took over the Neutral Bay house the boxroom was crammed with prehistoric rubbish—dirty newspapers, burned saucepans, broken furniture, mouse droppings and dead cockroaches. Heather had christened it Dracula’s room, and shut the door on all the horrors. Little by little she and Laurens had cleaned it out. The younger Beck children thought all houses had a Drac’s room, and when they visited a friend, innocently inquired where theirs was and what it had in it.

  Finally Drac’s room was clean and orderly, but it was still chilly and gloomy. Its window was as small as a teatowel. The Becks kept suitcases there, and scraps of carpet, and tools Laurens wasn’t using just then, and bits of bike that might come in handy some time. Laurens left the brittle green linoleum on the floor.

  ‘Oh, no, Gret,’ said Mum shuddering, ‘I hate that place. I always imagine that in the old days, they locked naughty kitchenmaids up in it and fed them on potato peelings. Besides, it’s dampish, and it doesn’t get enough air. Poor Gret,’ she said, gently putting her arms around her daughter, ‘you are beginning to feel the way Callie did before she got her castle. But one day the cupola will be yours, you know. Soon it will be Dan’s, and when he gets too big it will be yours.’

  ‘I’ll be dead before that happens,’ said Gret sulkily.

  ‘You can put your private things in my bottom drawer, if you like,’ offered Mum.

  So Gret did, but the bottom drawer wasn’t satisfactory. It was lent. It wasn’t really hers. And because Rolf could investigate it any time he wished, her treasures still wandered off and often were never seen again.

  But after she had written Grandpa’s letter and found she had nowhere to hide it, Gret remembered Drac’s room.

  Gret went along to the boxroom and had a good look at it. It was damp-smelling, and ratty-smelling too, from olden times, because no rats ever stayed where Tad lived. She examined the walls for cracks where she could ‘post’ her letter or ledges where it could lie and not be seen. But there were none.

  I’m just plain unlucky, thought Gret.

  Suddenly she felt something give a little under her feet. There was a phantom creak. Gret jumped, partly with surprise and partly with excitement. Maybe there was a loose board in the floor, one she could lever up! What a terrific hidey hole!

  The ugly green linoleum lay loose on the floor; it had never been fastened down. Gret slid it back. And she saw, not a loose board but a little trapdoor!

  All this had happened a long time before Dad and Rolf went to Denmark but Gret could still remember the thrill she had. She could remember every single thing she had done. First of all she sat down on the floor and just stared. She knew she had found something no one else knew about. Grandpa Cameron, when he went all over the house so carefully, looking for a place Callie could call her own…he hadn’t found it! That was because in those days Drac’s room had still been stuffed with rubbish.

  And when Mum and Dad cleared out the boxroom, they hadn’t thought of looking under the lino. They probably thought it was tacked down. Nobody had thought of that but Gret.

  What else had she done on that exciting day?

  A rusty little handle was sunk into the wood at one side of the trapdoor. Gret took hold of it and yanked. The trapdoor gave an ear-splitting groan. Fortunately everyone else was out in the garden at the time, and the people in the flat downstairs were batting a ball around on what had once been the old house’s front lawn, but now was their private part of the garden.

  Gret scurried into the kitchen and got the longest, strongest knife she could find.

  The crevice around the trapdoor was choked with dust, hard and thick as felt. The trapdoor had not been opened for many years. She levered gently all around it, lifting it just a little here and there. Once she heard Dan or someone clatter up the stairs and into the bathroom. But she wasn’t alarmed. People hardly ever went into Drac’s room. There was no reason to.

  She just couldn’t think where the trapdoor would lead. It was the most amazing thing she had ever seen.

  The words The Secr
et of Dracula’s Room floated into her mind. It was like the title of a fantastic creepy book. Her very own book! Only she didn’t know yet what the story was.

  At last the trapdoor slowly rose. The rusty hinges uttered a piercing yelp. A gust of warm, dusty air puffed out. Gret gulped with excitement. Below the trap she saw a dim space, a mysterious space, leading to darkness left and right. Most exciting of all, a stout wooden ladder led downwards; she couldn’t see where, because of the dimness.

  Gret had often jeered at Frances and the way she spoke—I felt like dropping dead, I fell off the chair, I nearly fainted, and other extravagant statements. But now she felt like doing all those at once. Her heart thumped, her mouth wouldn’t seem to shut. It was the most surprising thing that had happened to her in her whole life.

  Then she heard Tad sniffing at the boxroom door. Where Tad was, stickybeak Rolf was bound to be, sooner or later. She hastily shut the trapdoor, which gave another frightful groan she was terrified everyone would hear. But they didn’t. She scrabbled the lino into place, and checked that everything looked as it had before.

  Cautiously she peeped through the door. Only Tad! He was delighted to see her and jumped on her all the way along the hall to her bedroom.

  Somehow she sat down on her bed. Somehow she pretended to be colouring in her big picture book.

  It was weeks and weeks before Gret had another chance to look at the trapdoor and what it concealed. That was the trouble with families; they were always under a person’s feet. At last the opportunity came. Gret found a torch and the oilcan, and she oiled those rusty hinges until they moved as smooth as silk.

  Then she went through the trapdoor, and down the mysterious ladder.

  It was queer being in a place where maybe no one had been for many years. She was between the floor of the top storey of the house and the ceiling of the bottom storey. Fairly fresh air wafted around her. The space was high enough for her to stand up, but only just. She crept cautiously to the right, and found herself under her mother’s kitchen. She could hear the sink tap dripping. It was one of those disagreeable taps that drip no matter how often the washer is changed. It made a special kind of noise, pink-pink-blup, so she recognised it at once.

  A little light showed between her feet. She turned the beam of her torch upon this mystery light and saw that it filtered through a square of holes in a metal plate bolted to the upper side of the ceiling below. Gret thought this must be a ventilator. Most of the holes were plugged with dust, and something like a scrap of hard old leather lay across them. It was a mummified rat.

  Gret wasn’t scared of rats and certainly not of rats that had died before her parents were born. She began to understand that the area between the two floors of the house was not a secret passage or anything like that, but a ventilating space to keep dry rot and damp away. Grandpa had always said that the old house had been built ‘something grand’.

  As she poked about, Gret hoped she’d find something spooky, like a skull, or something terrific, like a jam-jar full of gold coins, but she didn’t. Later she was to find a shirt, fossilised into a scungy lump, and a newspaper dated 1911. But that first day she discovered nothing but a few disconnected gas and water pipes running along the space, and several more ventilators. One was close to the square of light under the lifted trapdoor that she was beginning to think of as her very own.

  She poked away the dust from one of the holes and put her eye to it. She could look right into the living room of the flat below! It was amazing, like watching television or something, for there was the old man who now rented the flat, sitting on the lounge with his cat. He was cutting his toenails. That wasn’t much to see, perhaps, but Gret was fascinated. Then the old man picked up the cat and kissed it on the nose.

  ‘You’re my girlfriend,’ said the old man to the cat, ‘and one of these days we’ll get married.’

  Gret almost laughed out loud. The things people did when they thought no one was looking!

  Under the upstairs bathroom there was another trapdoor leading into the bottom flat. It was weeks and weeks before Gret had a chance to oil the hinges and clean out the dust. She opened it carefully, even though the downstairs flat was between tenants and unoccupied. She couldn’t imagine why no one had noticed it from below. But it opened through the low ceiling of a big cupboard that had once, she thought, been a pantry in the house’s original kitchen. When they moved to Neutral Bay Gret had been too young to take any interest in Dad’s working out where things had once been situated in the Victorian house—the huge kitchen with its coal cooker, or the boiler room, or the meat store built of stone and lined with zinc.

  ‘Fancy no refrigerator in summer!’ Mum had said aghast.

  But Gret did remember that the old kitchen had been on the ground floor where the living room was now, and that there had been two or three walk-in pantries.

  With no trouble she climbed down the cupboard shelves. Once they had held homemade jams and sauces, but now nothing but two dusty cockroach baits.

  Gret longed to explore the downstairs flat. That would be sneaky and thrilling, almost like being a burglar. But the flat was dark and its emptiness was the loud kind, full of mysterious creaks. She heard a half-closed door bumping gently. Nervously, she scurried up the pantry shelves again and was relieved when she was back in Drac’s room.

  Because she had so few chances to explore further, little by little the Secret became one of the things Gret didn’t think about much.

  But now, when she was older and upset about things, she remembered it.

  A few days after Dad’s call from Copenhagen, three airletters flipped into the Beck letterbox. There was one from Dad to Mum, another from Dad to the family, and one from Cousin Marius to Callie.

  ‘I don’t have to read it out to the others, do I, Mum?’ she appealed.

  ‘Of course not,’ said her mother. ‘I’m not going to read mine aloud, either. Private is private, I say.’

  Callie raced off to the cupola with her airletter. She hoped this one wouldn’t be one of her cousin’s interesting chats about college, or skiing and sailing, or how he and Gus had gone on a class adventure trip beyond the Arctic Circle and unlucky August had managed to get a frostbitten toe. Callie really liked hearing about all those things, but more and more these days she yearned to hear from Marius what he thought and felt about herself. She wanted to know whether she was a special friend. Even more special than The Goose.

  And this letter was different from the others, just as she hoped.

  It was so much pleasure, so much excitement (wrote Marius), meeting my Uncle Laurens, for I was child on knee when he emigrated and did not remember him. I asked him so much about you, and August Bok as well had many questions. Is this young boy Rolf like Callie, we said. How does she speak, is she tall or small girl? Your photograph does not show. I asked Uncle Laurens about the cupola, the coloured windows, the names on the wall. Also about the green dress you were given at Christmas, the one you love dearly and told me about, but Uncle could not remember, being man only.

  ‘Fancy Marius remembering about my dress!’ marvelled Callie.

  I was thinking that although you have brown eyes and dark hair and Rolf is fair like the rest of us, maybe he looks a little like you, and so I was glad. Because I was most disappointed you could not come with Uncle Laurens, and Gus also. We wanted to take you to all nice places, and maybe dance at the Tivoli Gardens. Because you are more our age and we want to know you better.

  Marius concluded his letter by saying he was sending two photographs—one of Rolf and Dad with the entire Beck family, and one of himself especially for Callie.

  I have become very tall and I am conceited about that (he ended), ‘so I want you to see and maybe write and tell me how well I have grown.

  Callie thought that was charming. You wouldn’t catch an Australian boy saying he was conceited, even though most of them were. She could not wait for that photograph.

  At last she floated down to th
e kitchen in a daze of joy. If the world had turned red before she hurled the pie-filling at Dan, now it was pink and cloudy.

  ‘Quiet!’ ordered her mother. ‘I’m going to read Dad’s letter aloud.’

  Callie tried to pay attention to Dad’s account of the flight; how he had lost Rolf when they changed planes at Bangkok and found him playing knucklebones with an old Thai lady; how he felt when his family met him at Copenhagen airport; how enormously fat Uncle Alf had become; how strange it was to hear everyone speaking Danish. He sounded in great spirits.

  ‘I have such a wonderful joke to tell about Marius,’ he concluded, ‘how you will laugh!’

  Rolf had printed a message on the end of Dad’s letter but no one could read it except Gret.

  ‘He says that Gus has a dead frog,’ she reported.

  ‘Fancy using up good airletter space on dead frogs,’ said Dan irritably. ‘He might have asked how we were getting on. We’re not having a holiday!’

  ‘Well, he’s only little,’ excused Heather.

  She herself was flushed and somewhat dreamy.

  ‘I bet Mum’s private letter was a love letter,’ whispered Callie to Gret. Gret turned crimson.

  ‘Oh, yuk!’ she said, and made sick noises.

  ‘Well, I think it’s really great to have a mother and father in love with each other,’ said Callie defiantly.

  ‘You would. You’re yuk too,’ snapped Gret.

  Callie could hardly wait to show her letter to Frances. And Frances went off the deep end. This proved it, she said. Marius was in love with Callie. It was one of those romantic long-distance things. He was probably desperate because she lived on the other side of the world. He was sad she was only twelve and wished she was nearly sixteen like himself.

  ‘But that doesn’t matter in the long run,’ raved on Frances, ‘because you’ll be sixteen in no time and he’ll only be twenty. Oh, it’s unreal, Callie. If I were you I’d simply drop dead.’