Cicada Summer

by Kate Constable

  Eloise gave a nod.

  ‘Yes. I think you are good at listening too, and watching. It’s all in here, hmm?’ He gently tapped the side of his head. ‘This is what some people do not understand. They think if nothing comes out of the mouth, there is nothing in the mind. All hollow, like a shell. No one inside.’

  Eloise curled her fingers round the handlebars. Did he think there was nothing in her mind, because she never spoke? Was that what everyone thought?

  ‘Some people might think it’s easy to stop talking. You never have to choose, this or that; other people decide for you. The hollow shell floats on the waves, carried where the sea takes it.’ His dark eyes smiled at Eloise, and his voice was kind. ‘But the words are still there, like little fish, hiding inside. One day, when you need them, the fish will swim out.’

  He smiled again, then politely stepped backward. ‘Excuse me, Miss Eloise. I must continue with my weeding.’

  He knelt again by the flowerbed, moving one leg with his hands as if it were rusted stiff. Eloise watched for a second, then she pushed her bike round the back of the house.

  ‘So you’ve met Professor Durrani,’ said Mo over their dinner of tinned soup. ‘He’s a clever man, a psychologist. You know what that is?’

  Eloise knew. At her last school, when they finally worked out that she was always quiet, they’d sent her into a room with a psychologist, a woman in a blue jacket who’d asked lots of questions in a soothing voice and let them hang in the air while Eloise stared at the carpet.

  But term had finished before they could arrange another meeting, and Dad had screwed up the letter from the school, thrown it in the bin and announced they were moving to the country.

  Tommy’s father wasn’t like that woman. Everything about her had been fake: her careful voice, her artificial smile, the dye in her hair. But Tommy’s dad seemed real; Eloise liked him. She didn’t want him to think there was nothing in her mind, that she was empty and echoing like a seashell.

  She didn’t want Mo to think that either, or Anna, or Tommy.

  As she cleaned her teeth that night, she looked at her reflection in the mirror. Was there anyone there? Suddenly she felt frightened. She spat out the toothpaste, banged the toothbrush on the basin, and made as much noise as she could, to prove to herself that she was still real.

  Eloise dreamed she was swimming in the ocean, deep beneath the waves, in an emerald-lit landscape of flickering fish and towering coral. Far off in the distance, she saw a castle resting on the ocean floor – like a model in an aquarium. Tiny figures waved to her from the battlements and faint voices reached her through the water.

  She began to swim toward them, but as she swam, the water thickened around her. Eloise kicked and pushed with all her strength, but she couldn’t get any nearer to the castle. It wasn’t a castle any more, it was a sunken boat. Though she didn’t seem to get any closer, she could see the little figures more clearly. Their voices were fainter now; they were turning away. She saw Dad and Bree and Mo and Tommy, except Tommy had a beard. And there was Anna, with her hands on her hips and her chin jutting up. Behind Anna was a woman, a grown-up woman, and Eloise knew it was her mother. Her mother was moving away, a blur of red and gold backing into the shadows; she was almost gone, and Eloise swam and kicked so hard she thought her lungs would burst, and she opened her mouth to scream out, Mum! I’m coming, Mum! But Anna was gone, Mum was gone, they were all drifting away, and Eloise’s mouth filled with water, and she was choking, drowning, and no one could hear. She jerked awake into the dark, her heart pounding, and she couldn’t get back to sleep.

  The next morning was very hot. The radio said there were bushfires in the national park; the smoke gave the sky a bronze sheen. The radio also promised there’d be thunderstorms later, and hoped that rain would put out the fires. But Mo said it wouldn’t rain, it never rained any more.

  Even though she’d done it so often now, Eloise still held her breath as she stepped forward across the grass, eyes closed, into the mysterious silence that carried her into Anna’s time. She wondered what it must look like to Anna, or anyone else who might be watching: a girl stepping out of the air, shimmering into being? Or a ghostly image that became solid, hardening into shape, like a trickle of wax?

  In Anna’s time, the sky was clouded over, and the air was still. Eloise hurried to the summerhouse, still haunted by her dream. She was half-afraid that Anna wouldn’t be there, that she might have vanished away. But nothing could happen to Anna, she reminded herself; Anna’s future was already decided. She would grow up and marry Stephen McCredie and have one baby girl, and name her Eloise . . .

  If only there was some way to let her know how glad Eloise was to have found her, how precious this time was. If only there was some gift Eloise could give her.

  Anna came running out of the summerhouse, bouncing like an excited puppy.

  ‘I’ve had the most splendufferous idea!’ Her eyes shone, and she tugged at Eloise’s sleeve. ‘Dad said we could only use white paint on the outside of the summerhouse. But he didn’t say anything about the inside. Let’s make it jorgeous! I’ve got paints, all different colours, and brushes, and everything! Do you want to help?’

  Suddenly Eloise realised what her gift could be. She took a deep breath. Then she whispered, ‘Yes.’

  8

  Hooray!’ shouted Anna, though it wasn’t clear whether she was excited about the painting or about Eloise finding a voice; maybe it was both. She dragged Eloise inside the summerhouse and showed her a treasure trove of paint tins, brushes, trays and buckets.

  Eloise widened her eyes in a question.

  ‘My mumma’s,’ said Anna. ‘I snuck into her studio. She won’t mind. We always do painting together. When she’s here . . .’ Anna’s voice trailed off. ‘I told you she was away, didn’t I?’

  ‘Yes,’ whispered Eloise. Her voice was raspy with disuse.

  Anna jammed a knife under a paint lid and prised it up. ‘She’s gone away all summer. It’s a prize or something. She’s in America.’

  Eloise cleared her throat. ‘She’s . . . an artist?’ She’d never known her mother’s mother was an artist; that explained where her own love of drawing must come from. It gave Eloise a warm feeling of belonging, as if this unknown grandmother had reached out of the past and wrapped her arms around her.

  ‘I told you that already,’ said Anna impatiently. ‘Weren’t you listening? What about this colour, what do you think?’

  Eloise surveyed the array of paint pots. She whispered hesitantly, ‘Want to . . . paint a picture?’

  Anna’s face lit up. ‘Oh, yes! That’d be mangificent.’ She snatched up a brush and danced around the summerhouse. ‘Let’s paint something ginormous. Let’s paint something fierce!’

  ‘A storm?’ croaked Eloise.

  ‘Yes, yes, a big black dark thunderstorm!’ cried Anna, brandishing her brush like a weapon. ‘That’ll be fun!’ She lunged for a big tin of black paint and wrestled the lid off so it spun clattering across the floor. She plunged the biggest brush into the dark paint and swept a stripe of black across one of the six blank walls of the summerhouse. She turned triumphantly to Eloise. ‘Come on! You help too. You do the storm clouds.’ She thrust the brush into Eloise’s hand and seized another, smaller one, which she dipped into another paint pot. She streaked dark, bitter yellow down the neighbouring wall. ‘Lightning!’

  Eloise hung back as Anna swooped and darted, picking up a second brush and then a third, dragging swirls of brooding green and purple across the pale, blank wall. ‘Come on!’ cried Anna. ‘You do some too!’

  Eloise daubed some cautious black marks in a corner.

  ‘More! Bigger! Darker!’ Damp strands of hair clung to Anna’s neck and forehead.

  Eloise slapped on the black paint, thicker and darker, spreading black smudges of thundercloud across the walls. She swept her arm in wide arcs, bolder and bolder, slapping it over Anna’s flickers of yellow and purple and green, blotting out the
bright streaks with grim darkness.

  ‘Your turn for yellow.’ Anna thrust a dripping brush into Eloise’s hand and seized the black brush from her. Now Eloise was painting over the black cloud-shapes with yellow, jumping to spread the paint in jagged strokes as high as the ceiling, shooting up onto the underside of the roof. Eloise had never painted like this before, outside the lines, wild and fierce and reckless. Anna danced about, laughing and sweating, and Eloise felt the sweat slide down her own back as she stretched and swished.

  When they’d covered every bit of the two walls with paint, they stood back, panting for breath.

  Anna slowly tilted her head, gazing up. Her forehead crinkled. ‘It’s horrible!’ she wailed. ‘It’s dark, it’s ugly! I hate it!’

  She crumpled to the ground and buried her head in her arms. Awkwardly Eloise patted her shoulder. Then she put her arm around Anna and squeezed the small shaking figure. I’m hugging my mum, she told herself, and the black walls blurred as her own eyes filled with tears.

  ‘I hate it. I hate it,’ Anna sobbed. ‘We’ve ruined everything!’

  Eloise let out a hiccup of laughter.

  ‘Don’t laugh!’ Anna pulled fiercely away. ‘Don’t laugh at me. It’s not funny.’

  Eloise sobered. ‘We can fix it,’ she whispered.

  ‘How, how can we fix it? It’s a catstrophe.’

  ‘Paint . . . over it.’

  Anna sat up. She sniffed, and wiped her face on her arm, considering. ‘You think we can? Really?’

  Eloise lifted her shoulders and let them fall.

  And then all at once she was sitting among the dead leaves on the floor of the empty summerhouse. The sun was going down, and she was alone. She could smell smoke from the bushfires, and when she came out of the summerhouse, a smoky haze lay over the garden.

  There had been no rain; the concrete around the empty pool was dry. But as Eloise pedalled home she heard the distant rumble of thunder over the hills, and lightning flashed, a thin metallic thread between earth and sky. That’s how we should have painted it, thought Eloise, and she watched the horizon so intently that she almost wobbled off the road.

  ‘Those Durranis have left us dinner again. Rice and chicken something.’ Mo gave Eloise a sharp look. ‘Are you all right? Not sunstruck? Maybe you should stay home tomorrow. You shouldn’t be out exploring in all that smoke, anyway.’

  Eloise made an effort to straighten up, and she shook her head vigorously.

  ‘You are all right, aren’t you?’ said Mo. ‘Made some friends? Got things to do?’

  Eloise nodded firmly. The last thing she wanted was for Mo to forbid her to go out. And she did have a friend; she did have things to do.

  But she was so exhausted that she went to bed straight after dinner and fell asleep the moment her head touched the pillow. In her dreams she heard the phone ring on and on, and the grumble of Mo’s voice; then she dreamed someone touched her shoulder and murmured, ‘Are you awake? Your father’s on the phone.’

  But Eloise just rolled over and pushed herself further into sleep, and she thought she heard another voice, a deep kindly voice, explaining that sometimes there was nothing to say.

  The next day Mo was back at work on her book of sea voyages, tapping away in the study, and Eloise rode off again to the big house. The radio said the fires in the national park had been contained, but smoke haze still lingered over the town. Eloise could taste it in her throat.

  Smoke lay over the garden like a dirty mist, tinting the sunlight orange. Eloise squeezed her eyes shut and tiptoed toward the summerhouse, her mind full of that other world.

  As she came past the screen of trees and the raucous chorus of cicadas gave way to the buffer of silence, the smell of smoke lifted, replaced by the smell of fresh paint, and there was Anna, beaming, her clothes spattered with white.

  ‘I found a ginormous tin of white paint,’ she said at once. ‘And a roller, look.’ A huge paint roller, taller than Anna herself, was propped in one corner. Anna gave Eloise a little shove. ‘You didn’t come and help! You never come when it’s a really big job, I had to do it all myself.’

  Eloise peered around. ‘It’s gone.’ The walls were blank again, but faintly grey, where the black paint still showed through.

  ‘Why didn’t you come? You haven’t come for three whole days.’

  How could one day in her time stretch to three in Anna’s? ‘Sorry,’ said Eloise helplessly. ‘Can’t help it.’

  ‘Oh, never mind.’ Anna bounded around the summerhouse. ‘You’re here now. What are we going to paint today?’

  ‘A shipwreck,’ said Eloise without thinking.

  Anna clasped her hands. ‘Oh, yes! How will we do it?’

  Eloise stared around the summerhouse. The two walls where they’d painted the storm were still damp with white paint; better to use a different section. After a minute she sketched with her hands. ‘The sea – storm at the back – and the ship there – and in the front . . .’ She stopped.

  ‘People drowning,’ said Anna with relish. ‘Where’s your pencil? You better draw it on first.’

  Eloise dragged the pencil across the walls, tentatively at first, then with growing confidence as Anna cheered her on. ‘Um,’ she said. ‘Drowned people . . . next to a swimming pool?’

  Anna laughed. ‘I don’t care. No one’ll see it except us. This is my place. What’s that?’

  ‘Rocks,’ said Eloise. ‘To wreck the ship.’

  ‘Can I do them?’ begged Anna, and without waiting for a reply, she grabbed a brush and began to dab the rocks into existence, filling Eloise’s pencilled outline with streaks and blobs of brown.

  Eloise painted the ship. It was a white ocean liner with red funnels, like the one in the movie Titanic. Eloise painted it up on end, poised at the moment before it slid beneath the icy waves. She used the finest brush, tipped with black paint, for the tiny figures that spilled over the sides and into the water. Jab, jab, jab, she sent dozens of passengers to their doom.

  ‘I can’t see them,’ complained Anna. ‘Do bigger ones, up the front.’

  Eloise sketched a face. Its mouth was open, its hair plastered to its skull, eyes squeezed shut. One hand clung to a rope that floated, useless, not attached to anything. The face could have belonged to a man or a woman; it was a blank face, a face of blind terror. Eloise’s stomach felt cold, looking at it. A dead person. Dead, like her mother.

  She looked across at Anna, busy dabbling green and blue to make the sea, her tongue sticking out of the corner of her mouth. It was impossible to believe that in Eloise’s time, Anna wasn’t alive, that there was no Anna.

  Anna looked up, frowning. ‘Don’t stop,’ she ordered. ‘There’s heaps to do yet.’

  ‘Not stopping,’ said Eloise.

  She took up a thicker brush and began to swirl black and grey and white across the sky for the storm. The colours massed and congealed along the top of the summerhouse walls. Eloise stepped back. All that black was too heavy, it crushed the whole picture.

  Eloise swapped to a thin brush and broke up the mass of darkness with the threads of white lightning she’d seen the night before. No, last night was in the future. She was in the past now. Safe in the past. Nothing could hurt her here, back here before she was born. This time was a safe place, the safest place there was . . .

  There was too much lightning now. Eloise started to paint out the zigzag strands.

  ‘No!’ cried Anna. ‘Leave it alone, you’ll wreck it again!’

  Eloise took a deep breath. Anna was right; fiddling always made things worse. She forced herself to dunk and wipe her brush. Anna needed help with all that sea.

  Eloise mixed green and black into a murky colour, and swept her brush up and across into wave-shapes. No, that looked all wrong – too smooth, too curvy, a friendly summer sea. She tried again. Choppy shapes, hard-edged, almost square. Much better. Now it was a scary sea, a sea you could easily drown in.

  ‘Ooh, that’s splendufferous!’
cried Anna. ‘How did you do that?’

  Eloise showed her how to paint the shapes, then, suddenly inspired, she tipped the waves with a hard white edge of foam that echoed the white strands of lightning. Yes. This sea was vast, and cold. It would slap you in the face, grab your ankles and suck you under. This was an angry sea, a ruthless sea. It was overwhelming. No lifeboat, no oars could save you from this sea; nothing could.

  Eloise lowered her brush and shivered. For a second she thought she might faint.

  Anna said, ‘You’ve stopped again.’

  Eloise dropped her brush into the bucket. ‘Don’t want to . . . paint any more.’

  ‘You’re a lazy slug,’ said Anna, but she looked tired too; there were dark rings under her eyes. Neither of them had remembered to eat all day.

  Anna rummaged in her pocket and pulled out a jelly snake, dusted with lint. She offered it to Eloise, who shook her head.

  They stood side by side in front of the picture they’d made together: the black slab of sky, the choppy blocks of sea, the rocks. The toy-like ship, seesawing in the air as the black dots of people rained down. The single pale ghost face, floating blind as a jellyfish, open-mouthed in the unfinished sea, clutching its hopeless loop of rope.

  ‘No,’ said Eloise. ‘No.’

  ‘I don’t like it either.’ Anna stuck one end of the snake in her mouth and chewed. ‘It’s respulsive.’ ‘Have to start again.’

  ‘Paint it all over again?’ Anna sagged. ‘Will you come back tomorrow? Do you promise?’

  Eloise said wretchedly, ‘I’ll try . . .’

  But she was speaking to empty air, and a blank set of walls. The wave of time had swept her up and dumped her back on her own shoreline again, and she was all alone.

  9

  Eloise slid the plug into the bath and turned on the shower. It was hard to believe that not long ago, she would have just let the water pour away down the drain, that she hadn’t known how precious water was. Bree used to have twenty-minute showers. Eloise could imagine how Mo would have thumped on the door and yelled at her.