Cicada Summer

by Kate Constable

  Maybe Mo would get used to it, too.

  The wheels hissed softly on the pine needle carpet as Eloise pushed the bike down the driveway. Glowing with sweat, she dropped the bike near the front door.

  The long grass at the back of the house must have been a lawn once, but now it was so high that the crisp blades brushed Eloise’s fingertips. Maybe there were snakes. The grass shifted and swayed in the hot, dry wind. Eloise looked up at the silent house with its blank, blind windows, but no ghostly face peered out at her.

  At the bottom of the slope she spied the shabby roof of a small pavilion, and the scaffolding of a diving board. A swimming pool! Eloise swished eagerly through the grass.

  The pool was screened from the house by a grove of trees and bushes. The pool was empty, of course, and littered with dead leaves. It wasn’t long, but it was deep, lined with tiny blue and green tiles, with bald patches where the tiles had flaked away.

  Beside the pool stood a hexagonal summerhouse with an arched doorway, its pillars wound around and overgrown with ivy. Eloise pushed aside a curtain of vines and stepped inside.

  Once, it had been painted white, but the paint had peeled from the walls. Inside the summerhouse was quiet and still, as if she’d stepped into another world. Eloise was enchanted. She ducked outside again, eyes screwed shut against the sun, and the noise of cicadas burst over her. They shrilled louder and louder, blotting out all other sounds, and then, abruptly, switched off. Eloise opened her eyes and blinked.

  The garden was transformed.

  The long dry grass had contracted to a shaggy green lawn, the tangled trees had shrunk and neatened, banks of flowering bushes had exploded into existence. A neat white fence ran between the pool and the screening trees. And beyond the trees, the house was bright and white and fresh. It sat up straight and alert, not sad and tilted any more.

  Eloise’s stomach jolted, like being in a plane when the ground drops away below. For a minute she was paralysed, frozen where she stood.

  Then slowly she turned her head and saw that the pool was filled with blue shimmering water.

  Eloise caught her breath. Could it be real? She knelt and dabbled her fingers in the water. It was clean and clear . . . She hesitated for a second, then stripped off to her underwear and slipped into the pool. The cold made her gasp. She shook her hair back and dived down as deep as she could, a needle through cool silk. The green and blue tiles shimmered and glowed; the pool was filled with light. Eloise brushed the bottom of the pool with her fingertips, the smooth lustrous tiles like the inside of a seashell, and kicked herself back up to the surface. Her head broke through and she pushed the wet hair from her eyes.

  Someone clapped their hands.

  Eloise’s heart jumped into her throat and she twisted around. A girl sat on the edge of the pool, dangling bare legs into the water. A broad-brimmed hat was pushed to the back of her head.

  ‘Hello,’ said the girl. ‘Where did you come from?’

  4

  Eloise said nothing. In confusion, she dived again, right to the bottom, half-hoping that the girl would be gone when she came up again.

  But she wasn’t; she was still sitting there, watching. Although it seemed she didn’t expect an answer to her question. Instead she crunched into an apple, and held another out to Eloise. ‘Want one?’

  Eloise swam over to the side of the pool and heaved herself out, dripping. Suddenly she was conscious of having wet underwear and no towel. The girl must have understood because she scrambled up, darted into the summerhouse and emerged with a slightly dusty dark-blue towel, which Eloise hastily wrapped around herself.

  ‘There are spare towels, and hats, and paranephalia like that in there,’ said the girl, sitting down again. ‘But I’ve told them, it’s my place. I don’t want their stuff all over it. It’s not fair.’

  Eloise wondered if she’d stepped into a dream. Everything was different. The air was cooler. There were clouds in the sky where none had been before. The garden was so neat. And the summerhouse looked different too. The ivy that had almost hidden it had shrunk back to reveal sturdy arches, and the curtain of vines that had hung over the doorway was gone.

  The other girl bit into her apple. ‘The summerhouse is just for me. Mumma and Dad said so. Come and see!’ She jumped up, and Eloise followed.

  The inside was transformed. A swathe of spangled blue cloth wound around the central pillar; odd patches of carpet were scattered on the floor. Someone had begun to daub fresh white paint on one wall and then got bored, or run out of paint. All the dead leaves had been swept away, and light poured in through the arched doorway.

  ‘Isn’t it splendufferous?’ The girl hugged herself in satisfaction. She was younger than Eloise had thought at first, younger than Eloise herself, though anyone who saw them together would probably think they were the same age. Her straight, dark, silky hair was tied back in a ponytail. She had fierce green eyes, and a small pointed chin. She was wearing a kind of pinafore dress, and her feet were bare. ‘My place,’ she repeated firmly, as if Eloise had contradicted her. ‘But I’ll share it with you if you like.’

  Eloise made a small movement with her head, meaning that she didn’t mind, the other girl didn’t have to share if she didn’t want to, but the girl seemed to take this as agreement, because she gave Eloise a sudden radiant smile.

  ‘Oh, good!’ she cried. ‘You can help me fix it up. Dad said he’d help me paint it but he’s too busy.’ She jerked her chin up the slope. ‘Busy with the big house.’ She pulled a face.

  Eloise thought of her own dad, and how, very soon, he would be busy with their house— But of course it was the same house . . . Wasn’t it? So that meant this was her summerhouse, too . . .

  The other girl seized Eloise’s arm. ‘There’s lots of stuff lying round, from the builders, wood and paint and everything. Do you like painting?’

  Eloise half-shrugged, half-nodded.

  ‘Good, ’cause I don’t. You can be in charge of painting. Come on, let’s get some.’

  Eloise grabbed her clothes and pulled them on, then the summerhouse girl dragged her through the garden, along twisting little hidden paths between bushes laden with purple flowers and starred with white blossom.

  ‘Come this way,’ she hissed in Eloise’s ear, so close it tickled. ‘So no one’ll see us. There’re always too many people.’ She pulled the same disdainful face as before. Suddenly her grip tightened on Eloise’s arm. ‘Ssh! Listen. Hear that?’

  The summerhouse girl and Eloise froze in the bushes, not far from the house. Above their heads, from an open window, music floated down: the same broken phrase of cello, over and over. Someone swore, and the music stopped abruptly. The summerhouse girl clapped her hand over her mouth to stop a giggle escaping, and Eloise smiled. A laugh was bubbling up inside Eloise, fizzing like lemonade. The feeling surprised her; she realised she hadn’t laughed for a long time. Not since she went quiet - maybe not since Mum . . . Mum was always laughing, always singing to herself. She’d sing silly words to make Eloise laugh too, and then she’d scoop her up and spin her round till they were both breathless with laughing . . .

  Eloise smacked that thought down hard.

  The summerhouse girl tugged her onward, squeezing between the bushes – deadly serious again, as if they were spies and their lives were at stake.

  They emerged from the garden on the far side of the house, the side Eloise hadn’t seen, near a cluster of sheds and garages and outbuildings. The summerhouse girl darted from one building to the next, beckoning Eloise to follow. Once, they heard voices, a slammed door, and had to freeze, pressing themselves desperately against the wall. The girl’s green eyes were wide with almost-real terror, and Eloise remembered something else from long ago that she’d nearly forgotten. She remembered what it was like to play, to believe in your own game so hard it choked you.

  The summerhouse girl grabbed her hand again, and together they darted into a shed fragrant with sawdust and crammed with carpe
nters’ rubbish, chunks of wood, curled shavings, plans and pencils. The summerhouse girl picked up a big tin dribbled all over with white paint. Eloise could see from the way she carried it that it was almost empty. ‘I’ve got brushes,’ the girl whispered. ‘Come on, let’s go.’

  They crashed back through the bushes, faster and more careless than before, and by the time they reached the safety of the summerhouse, the other girl was giggling out loud. She dropped her tin on the bench and collapsed with a gurgle of laughter. Eloise sat down, feeling much older and more sober. Her undies were still damp and uncomfortable, and whose paint had they taken? What if someone came looking for it?

  After a minute or two the summerhouse girl sat up, wiped her eyes, and tugged up a section of bench to reveal a storage place. She rummaged around and pulled out two big shaggy paintbrushes. Then she took a spoon and tried to pry off the paint lid, without success.

  ‘Are you going to help or not?’ she said, after some struggle, and frowned up at Eloise. She poked a long strand of hair behind her ear, where it immediately fell forward again.

  Eloise looked at her. She knew her own face was creased up with anxiety, a hard lump in her throat. Suddenly she felt dizzy, the ground spinning down and away. Where was this place? Who was this girl? What was she doing here?

  Eloise jumped up and ran out of the summerhouse into the blinding sunlight. There was an instant of silence while the world slid out of focus before Eloise’s eyes, and then the cicadas roared.

  Everything was back to the way it had been before. The pool was empty, the garden tangled, the grass high and yellow. The white fence had disappeared. Eloise turned and pushed back into the summerhouse, but the girl was gone, everything was gone. It was empty. Without looking, she knew that the house had gone dead too, blind and abandoned, slumped into the hill again.

  Eloise pressed her hands to her forehead, trying to understand. She’d seen a movie once about an enchanted garden. But that was just a story; things like this didn’t happen in her world.

  The sun had slid mysteriously down the sky. Eloise was ravenous and ragingly thirsty. What had happened? The garden was neglected, unkempt, unhealthy. And it was boiling hot again. She wasn’t imagining that. The cicadas shrieked in a steady din that filled her ears and wouldn’t let her think.

  A trickle of sweat ran down Eloise’s neck. She began to run. The long grass clutched her ankles. If the bike was gone . . .

  But the old bicycle was exactly where she’d left it, tipped over on the weed-strewn gravel. Eloise bent over and gasped for breath. Of course the bike was there. Where else would it be? She was fine. She was safe.

  But something had happened. And something had happened in the house yesterday, too. She’d seen two girls now. Or maybe it was the same girl . . . They could have been the same girl . . . But the summerhouse girl was no ghost. She’d grabbed Eloise’s hand; her breath had tickled her ear; she was real. So who was she? Where could she have come from?

  Trembling, Eloise climbed onto the saddle of the bike and pushed off with one foot, faster and faster, back down the shadowed tunnel of pines toward the outside world.

  5

  Mo lowered her glasses to the tip of her nose and glared at Eloise. ‘I don’t care what you get up to. I don’t care where you go. That’s not the point. I’m sure you can look after yourself, and the streets are safer than they ever were. But running off the way you did this morning was downright rude, and it will not happen again.’

  Eloise hung her head. She’d forgotten that she’d run away to avoid that Tommy boy.

  ‘He came over to invite us to dinner – don’t panic, I said no. Not for your benefit, I might add. I’d rather cut my hand off than go to dinner in someone else’s house. Don’t tell anyone I said that.’ Mo looked at her. ‘No, I don’t suppose you will. Where were you today, anyway? You’re covered in scratches. Did you go to the creek? Or the trickle, as we should call it these days, so they tell me.’

  Eloise shook her head.

  Mo stared at her hard. ‘But you’re all right. No traumatic experiences.’

  Eloise wondered if seeing ghosts, if that was what she’d done, or going into another world, counted as traumatic experiences. She thought for a second, then shook her head again.

  ‘Next time Tommy comes over I expect you to . . . well, shake his hand, at least.’ Eloise nodded, and Mo sighed. ‘You don’t make things easy for yourself, do you? All right, buzz off and let me get back to my sea voyages.’ She turned back to her computer and began to type.

  Eloise eased the study door closed. She took a packet of biscuits from the kitchen cupboard and retreated to her fold-out bed, still unmade from the morning. Eloise took her sketchbook and pencils out from under her pillow and began to draw the summerhouse.

  As the lines curled from the tip of her pencil, Eloise’s thoughts looped and snarled and slowly grew clearer. What had happened to her? She’d seen something. She’d gone somewhere. She must have gone back in time. She’d seen the house and the garden, the pool and the summerhouse as they used to be in the olden days, when they were new and lived in and cared for; when a family lived there, a little girl, someone who played the cello by an open window, a mother and a father who gave their daughter the summerhouse to play in.

  Somehow time had jumped backward, and dragged her back with it like a wave sucking at a beach. Then it had rushed forward and dumped her back in her own time again. She had walked through some kind of invisible wall into the past.

  Eloise flipped to a clear page and smoothed it with her hand. Then she began to draw the face of the summerhouse girl: her big fierce eyes, her pointed chin, the small beaked nose. When the drawing was almost done, Eloise faltered; she stared at the picture. Then she scrambled off the bed and up the hall to the bathroom. She craned to see her own face in the mirrored cabinet.

  It was true: the summerhouse girl’s face looked like her own reflection. The same big eyes, the same beaky nose.

  Mum used to call Eloise my little owl. And it was a little owl’s face that Eloise had drawn in her sketchbook.

  Eloise stood there for a long time, watching her own face in the mirror, as if the reflected girl might tell her something important. But she didn’t say a word.

  Next morning, before it got too hot, Eloise slipped from the house and pedalled the old bike toward the church on the hill. Today she was prepared. She’d found the helmet in the garage, and a pump to harden the tyres. She wore bathers under her dress. A dress was more old-fashioned than shorts, more suitable. As well as her sketchpad and pencils, she’d packed apples and biscuits and a bottle of water. Luckily Mo seemed to live mostly on biscuits; the cupboard was full of them.

  She’d run into Mo in the kitchen and half-expected to be questioned about where she was going, but Mo had just looked her up and down, observing Eloise’s hat, the water bottle, the backpack. ‘Good girl,’ she said. ‘You look ready for anything.’ Then she’d shuffled off to her study and closed the door.

  The house lay becalmed among the trees, mute and still. Eloise propped her bicycle (already she thought of it as her own) in the shade by the front steps and stood for a moment, listening. Her pulse raced.

  She couldn’t expect it to happen every time. She wasn’t sure if she wanted it to happen or not. And what was ‘it’ anyway? Time travel, magic, ghosts?

  Eloise walked slowly through the long grass. When she caught sight of the diving board, she closed her eyes and pictured the house as she’d seen it yesterday. She took one tentative step forward, then another. The dry grass crunched under her runners, and the sun was hot on the back of her neck.

  If she really wanted it, so badly it hurt in her chest, it wouldn’t happen. Things you wanted as badly as that never did. She had to pretend she didn’t care; she had to trick it into happening.

  One cicada began to shrill, then another and another. Eloise halted, her eyes still squeezed shut. It wasn’t going to work. She’d hoped too hard . . .

 
Then the cicadas stopped.

  Every sound switched off. Eloise’s eyes flew open.

  The garden was crowded with green and splashed with flowers, the lawn cropped roughly underfoot, the pool brimming with liquid light. Music floated down the slope from the house; this time someone was playing a piano.

  And the girl was leaning out of the summerhouse, beckoning frantically to Eloise. ‘Quick, quick, they’ll see you!’

  Eloise ran, and the summerhouse girl pulled her inside. ‘They mustn’t see you,’ she said earnestly. ‘You’re my comfidential friend.’ Eloise must have looked blank, because the girl added impatiently, ‘My secret friend. No one’s allowed to see you but me.’

  Eloise froze. She stepped back, so the girl’s hand fell from her arm. What would happen if she became trapped here, in the wrong time, if she could never get back? No one would ever know what had happened to her. No one could ever find her. What had seemed mysterious and exciting suddenly felt dangerous, threatening.

  Eloise flew to the doorway and hovered there like a trapped bird, staring out. What if she ran out of the garden? Where could she go? The house was full of people. Where was Dad? Probably he wasn’t born yet. Perhaps even Mo wasn’t born yet. And if Eloise couldn’t find her way out, she would never be born either. But if she was never born, she couldn’t be here in the first place, so . . . would she just snuff out, like a candle?

  Her head whirled; she felt giddy. She sank onto the bench and leaned her head against the wall.

  The summerhouse girl watched her. ‘Are you all right? You look sick. Do you want a drink of water?’

  Eloise had forgotten about her backpack. She tugged out her water bottle and gulped thankfully.

  ‘Don’t be sick,’ said the girl. ‘’Cause look . . . I got some more paint. You’re in charge of the painting, remember? Why didn’t you come yesterday? I cleaned the walls all by myself with a bucket, look.’ She pointed reproachfully to the walls, which were, indeed, much cleaner.