Cicada Summer

by Kate Constable

  Dad’s eyebrows shot upward. ‘Yeah, sure,’ he said after a minute. ‘I guess so. I thought you liked all my funny little nicknames.’

  ‘I like Eloise better,’ said Eloise firmly.

  Mo plumped down on the bed. ‘I want to hear more about Lorelei Swan.’

  ‘Nothing more to tell.’ Dad shrugged. ‘She’s gone, vamoosed, cleared out, skedaddled. We had a bit of a row last night, while we were out searching for this young lady. What was all that about, by the way?’

  ‘I just wanted to go for a ride,’ said Eloise. ‘I’m sorry everyone was so worried.’

  ‘Yes, well. So we bloody well were. All hell broke loose once we realised you were gone, and of course the storm had started by then and it was pitch dark. Were you sheltering in the house, or what?’

  ‘Mm,’ said Eloise uncomfortably. ‘It was raining.’ ‘And then young Tommy had his fall and you rushed off for help? I don’t know whether to be proud of you for that, or angry with you for taking off in the first place. Anyway, tempers were running quite high as you can imagine. Lorelei and I had words, and the upshot is, she’s gone.’ He ran his hand through his hair. ‘I’ve got a lot of sweet-talking to do. Thought I might start work on an email, so it’ll be waiting when she gets back to Melbourne.’

  Eloise and Mo exchanged a look. ‘You’re better off without her, if you ask me,’ said Mo. ‘Which I know you weren’t.’

  ‘No, I wasn’t. But it’s the money, Mo, I need her money. Simple as that.’

  Mo stood up. ‘Come on, Eloise. Get dressed. While your father starts on his sweet-talking, you and I are going to pay a visit next door.’

  Dad and Eloise gaped.

  ‘But Mo,’ said Dad, ‘you haven’t set foot out of this house for I don’t know how many years . . .’

  ‘And I think it’s time that changed, don’t you?’ said Mo crossly. ‘If Eloise can bring herself to talk again, I’m sure I can go for a little walk.’

  Mo was very brave. It took her quite a while to get ready; she had to arm herself with a hat and dark glasses and an umbrella to clutch in one hand while she held onto Eloise’s arm with the other. Then she stood in the doorway for a minute or two, breathing deeply.

  ‘Come on, Maureen Jean,’ she muttered to herself. ‘You can do it. Here we go. One step – there. No, no, not yet. Just a minute.’ She lurched back inside. ‘Just a minute.’

  ‘I’m with you, Mo,’ said Eloise. ‘I won’t let anything happen to you.’ Eloise was holding in her other hand the flowers that Dad had bought for Tommy’s mother.

  ‘How far do you reckon it is to next door?’ said Mo. ‘Twenty steps?’

  ‘Maybe only fifteen,’ Eloise assured her. She squeezed Mo’s hand. ‘We can make it.’

  Mo breathed again, wedged her dark glasses on her nose, and launched herself out of the house, counting firmly, ‘One, two, three, four . . .’

  It took them forty-nine steps to reach the Durranis’ front door. Mo leaned against the wall, breathing hard, while Eloise rang the doorbell.

  ‘That wasn’t too bad,’ said Mo, reaching up to touch her hat with a shaking hand. ‘Don’t know what all the fuss was about.’

  Tommy’s father answered the door. It was hard to say whether he was more surprised to see Mo standing on the step, or to hear Eloise say, ‘These are for you, and I’m very sorry about Tommy.’

  ‘Remember I told you if I wanted help, I’d ask for it?’ Mo said to him as they stepped inside. ‘Consider yourself asked.’

  Tommy’s mother was at work but Tommy’s father led them into the living room and offered them a cup of tea. Tommy was lying on the couch with his eyes closed and his arm in plaster. He struggled up at the sight of Eloise and her grandmother.

  ‘Stay there, Tommy, we won’t disturb you.’ Mo waved him down again. ‘I’d just as soon have my tea in the kitchen, if you don’t mind, Professor. I’m a little nervous, to tell you the truth, being inside someone else’s house.’

  ‘We’re honoured you chose our house to visit.’ Tommy’s dad made his little bow. ‘Tommy and I were about to start a game of chess; perhaps Eloise would take my place?’

  Eloise sat down hesitantly on the other side of a small table where a chessboard was set up, and eyed it with some trepidation. The adults moved down the hallway to the kitchen, still talking.

  Tommy and Eloise sat in silence. The Durranis’ house was very neat, with not much furniture. A clock ticked slowly on the mantel above the gas heater. Eloise’s portrait of Tommy was propped beside it. Eloise hastily looked away.

  At last Tommy said, ‘So you’re talking now?’

  Eloise nodded.

  ‘You know how to play chess?’

  ‘No.’

  There was a pause.

  ‘Thanks for last night,’ said Tommy awkwardly. ‘Getting the ambulance and that.’

  ‘Sorry I made you fall in the pool,’ said Eloise.

  ‘You didn’t make me. I just didn’t see it. Should watch where I’m going, eh.’

  There was another pause. Eloise picked up a chess piece and twiddled it in her fingers.

  ‘So,’ said Tommy. ‘Where did you go?’

  Eloise dropped the chess piece abruptly and bent down to pick it up. ‘Um – I went to the house.’

  ‘I know that; I was following you, remember? I mean after that. You ran across the grass and you just . . . disappeared. Into the air. Like that.’ Tommy clicked his fingers.

  ‘Um,’ said Eloise, going pink. She remembered that this was the trouble with talking: people expected you to answer questions you didn’t want to answer.

  ‘I was watching you,’ said Tommy. ‘I know what I saw. So don’t make out you went in the little – what’s-it-called? That little round house. Or inside the big house. It wasn’t dark then, I saw you. You just went invisible.’ Tommy was scowling at her, but not, Eloise realised, in an angry way. He just really wanted to know.

  Without meaning to, Eloise heard herself say, ‘You won’t believe me.’

  ‘I might. If I promise to believe, will you tell me?’ ‘You can’t promise to believe.’

  ‘I’ll try. Come on, if you can’t tell me, who can you tell?’

  ‘Okay,’ said Eloise after a minute. ‘This is what happened. I don’t know how, but I think I went back in time.’ She shot a look at Tommy, but his face was still, listening politely. ‘I went back into the past to when the house was new, and I made friends with a girl called Anna. And . . .’ She took a deep breath. ‘Anna was my mother, when she was a little girl. She died two years ago,’ whispered Eloise. ‘But in the house, she was alive. We were friends. We did stuff together. She was a little girl.’

  For a moment Tommy didn’t say anything. Then he said carefully, ‘Are you sure the little girl was your mum, Eloise? Because Mo is your dad’s mother, right? And it was Mo’s house. Her family lived there.’

  Eloise stared at the chessboard.

  ‘It was your dad who grew up in Turner, wasn’t it? But he didn’t live in the big house either. He lived next door, here, with Mo.’

  ‘But Anna,’ faltered Eloise. ‘I met her. She was a little girl. I went into her time.’ But even as she spoke, she knew that Tommy was right. Her other grandparents had come from Hobart. Mum was from Hobart. Not Turner. Her throat thickened so that she could hardly swallow. She choked out, ‘You must think I’m so dumb.’

  ‘Hey,’ said Tommy. ‘You think that’s dumb, you should try falling into an empty swimming pool.’

  ‘But . . . she was called Anna. And I did go back in time, I must have. The house was all different and there were people living there. And the garden . . . We painted pictures in the summerhouse, and the pool was full of water, we swam in it. I saw it; I did, lots of times!’ Eloise angrily dashed tears from her cheeks.

  ‘Maybe it was a different Anna,’ suggested Tommy. ‘Not your mum, another Anna. Was there someone called Anna in Mo’s family maybe?’

  ‘But she looked like me!’ insiste
d Eloise. ‘I always looked like Mum, the only bit of me that looks like Dad’s family is my stupid hair! And then when I went to find her yesterday, it was all different. It was all gone. The house was gone. Everything was ruined . . . Maybe I’ll never find her again . . .’

  Tommy’s eyes widened, and he sat bolt upright. ‘I got it.’

  ‘Got what?’

  ‘You got a pen? I’ll show you. Never mind, there’s one here somewhere.’ Tommy scrabbled around under the coffee table with his good arm and surfaced with a pen and the back of an envelope. ‘Look, look. You say you went into the past, right?’

  ‘Right . . .’

  ‘Okay, well, just suppose you did travel in time, but you went the other way? What if you didn’t go back? What if you went forward?’ Tommy drew emphatic arrows on the envelope.

  Eloise stared. ‘You mean . . . into the future?’

  ‘Yeah, into the future.’

  ‘But the house was all new. There were builders there and fresh paint, and the garden was all neat and tidy . . .’

  ‘Were the plants small or fully grown?’

  ‘Well . . . they were tall.’

  ‘The builders, the painters and that, they were fixing the place up!’ said Tommy excitedly. ‘Not building it, they were fixing it up again, see? But when you went yesterday to find her, this Anna girl and everything was all gone?’

  Eloise nodded.

  Tommy tapped the envelope. ‘So what happened yesterday to change the future?’

  ‘Dad,’ whispered Eloise. ‘Dad and Lorelei. They’re going to knock the house down.’

  ‘So when you went into the future last night, you went into a different future,’ said Tommy triumphantly. He scribbled wildly on the envelope and thrust it at Eloise. All she could see were arrows, looped and branching, tangled ribbons. ‘It’s an alternative reality, see?’

  Eloise looked at him blankly.

  ‘Okay,’ said Tommy patiently. ‘Maybe it’s like this. Maybe time is like a piece of string. But instead of being in a straight line, the string’s got looped; it’s crossing over itself. So when you travel in time, it’s the place where the string crosses itself, get it? Where the two points on the string touch.’

  ‘Ye-es,’ said Eloise uncertainly.

  ‘So yesterday, it was like the string frayed into two threads. What was the plan before your dad decided to knock the house down?’

  ‘We were going to live there. He was going to turn it into a hotel or something.’

  ‘Well, that’s one thread. Down that thread the house is a hotel or whatever. You live there and sometime Anna gets born, so she’s there when you meet her in the future. But down the other thread there’s no house, no hotel and you move away. There’s no Anna – she never gets born. You get it?’

  ‘Um,’ said Eloise, feeling slightly dizzy. ‘But then – if Anna’s not my mum . . .’ She swallowed. ‘If she’s in the future, who is she? Do you think she might be . . . She might be my daughter.’

  Tommy sucked in his breath. ‘Wow. Freaky.’

  ‘So, that would mean Anna’s father was my . . .’ Eloise went pink and changed the subject. ‘So you do believe that I switched times?’

  ‘I’m not saying I believe it.’ Tommy frowned. ‘It’s just a hypothesis, right? A theory. It might be true, it might not. But, you know, scientists talk about time travel and wormholes, cuts in the fabric of the universe, alternative worlds, stuff like that. Hey,’ he looked up at her suddenly. ‘Did you ever see Anna’s mum? Did you see if she was you?’

  ‘No. She was away. Anna was really missing her.’

  ‘Well, she got to see you anyway, didn’t she? That’s freaky. It’s as if she was calling you and you came.’

  But Eloise was thinking about something else. ‘But what’s happened to Anna? Where’s she gone?’

  Tommy shrugged. ‘Gone. Unless you can get the alternative reality back.’

  ‘But how can I do that?’

  Tommy looked at her as if she were an idiot. ‘That’s easy. You’ve just got to stop your dad knocking the house down.’

  Eloise stared at him for a minute, and then she jumped up. The chessboard crashed to the ground and Tommy started to pick up the pieces.

  ‘Don’t worry about that!’ cried Eloise. ‘Quick! We have to talk to Mo.’

  16

  They found Dad in the dining room, gloomily typing an apology to Lorelei Swan on his laptop.

  ‘Never been any good at grovelling,’ he said without looking up. ‘You’re a writer, Mo, want to give me a hand?’

  ‘I have better uses for my talents,’ said Mo. She pulled out a chair across the table, sat down and folded her hands in front of her. Eloise sat down beside Dad. They both stared at him intently until he looked up.

  ‘Hello!’ He gave an uneasy laugh. ‘What’s all this?’

  ‘A business proposal,’ said Eloise.

  Dad laughed and ruffled her hair. ‘Taking after the old man, are you? I hope you have better luck than I’ve had.’

  ‘We’re serious, Stephen,’ said Mo crossly. ‘Be quiet for once in your life and listen.’ She looked at Eloise. ‘Go on.’

  Eloise took a deep breath. ‘Dad.’

  ‘Yes, Ella Fitz— Yes, Eloise?’

  ‘You don’t have to knock down the house, do you?’

  ‘I meant what I said about the National Trust,’ warned Mo. ‘You demolish that house over my dead body.’

  ‘Won’t have to wait long then, will I?’

  ‘Very amusing.’

  ‘But come on, what else can I do with the place? I can’t convert it to a hotel, it’d cost a fortune. And Lorelei won’t fund it. She wants something new.’

  ‘Let’s put Lorelei to one side for the moment,’ said Mo. ‘Eloise has an idea.’

  Eloise knew she had to get this right. Their whole lives, Anna’s very existence, depended on it. She clasped her hands together and tried to keep her voice steady. ‘I heard about this artist place. Where artists and writers and musicians can go to stay and work.’

  Dad looked startled. ‘You mean an artists’ retreat.’

  ‘Where did you hear about that, Eloise?’ asked Mo, with genuine curiosity.

  ‘Um, on TV. But I thought . . . couldn’t you make the house into one of those?’

  Dad rubbed his chin. ‘I don’t know . . .’

  ‘Artists might not mind things being a bit rough around the edges,’ put in Mo. ‘Sharing bathrooms and so on.’

  ‘As long as it was peaceful, and they could get on with their work,’ said Eloise.

  ‘Plenty of room, decent food,’ said Mo. ‘They’d like a bit of character to the place, all the old fittings. Adds to the charm.’

  ‘It’s not such a bad idea,’ admitted Dad. ‘Wouldn’t be able to charge as much money, mind you, but the overheads would be lower . . .’ Then he shook his head regretfully. ‘Lorelei would never go for it.’

  ‘Is money all you ever think about?’ said Mo.

  ‘No,’ said Dad. ‘But I do have to think about it. I’ve got a daughter to provide for, you know.’

  ‘I’m okay, Dad,’ said Eloise. ‘As long as I’ve got pencils and paper and paint, I’m happy. And a pool,’ she added.

  ‘If it would help,’ said Mo, ‘I could sell this place.’

  Dad stared. ‘Are you serious? But where would you live?’

  ‘She’d move in with us, of course,’ said Eloise happily. ‘In the big house.’

  ‘Don’t look at me like that,’ said Mo. ‘You’ll need help running the place if this scheme’s going to work, and you won’t have to pay me. And I’m a writer. Aren’t you going to have writers there? Maybe a change of scene is just what I need to get my damn book finished. I’m sick to death of it, to tell you the truth. And you can’t organise your way out of a paper bag, you’ll need me. You can do the talking part, that’s what you’re good at, and I can run the office, do the accounts and so on. Like I used to do for your father. Wouldn’t mind doing
that again.’

  ‘Mo . . . I don’t know what to say.’

  ‘Just say you’ll do it. I dare say I can even find you some clients. Lots of my friends are artists and writers and that sort.’

  ‘But Mo,’ said Eloise hesitantly, ‘I didn’t think you . . .’

  ‘You didn’t think I had any friends?’ Mo sniffed. ‘What an old-fashioned child you are. I’ve got hundred of friends online. Ever heard of blogs and chat rooms? You don’t think I spend all day slaving away at A Brief History of Sea Voyages, do you? A girl’s got to have some fun.’

  ‘Blow me down,’ said Dad blankly, then he jumped up and began to pace. ‘Basic structure’s pretty sound, just a few repairs – painting, obviously – maybe six rooms upstairs? Self-contained cabins in the grounds. All eco-friendly of course. Have to look into digging for bore water.’ He stopped suddenly and shook his head. ‘You really think we can do this?’

  ‘I know we can,’ cried Eloise. She snatched up the picture of the house she’d drawn for Dad and pushed it toward him. ‘Look! See how lovely it can be.’

  Dad took the drawing and stared at it. ‘Yes,’ he whispered. ‘Maybe you’re right . . .’ A dreamy look came over his face, a look that Eloise had seen many times before, as if he were peering into the future, as if he could see the writers and musicians and artists moving across the terrace, waving at him from the windows.

  ‘No one has conventions any more,’ said Mo. Eloise thought she looked crafty. ‘That’s all old hat. It’s all videoconferencing these days. No, no, you need to focus on the creative industries. They always do well when the economy gets a bit shaky.’

  ‘Hm,’ said Dad. ‘I guess so . . .’

  Suddenly his phone began to buzz, and they all jumped. Dad flipped it open.

  ‘Ah, Lorelei,’ he said. ‘I was going to call you.’

  Eloise and Mo looked at each other. The insect whine of Lorelei’s voice hummed from the phone.

  ‘Yes,’ said Dad. ‘Yes, but . . . the thing is, Lorelei, there’s been a change of plan. Mo and Eloise have come up with a new scheme – an artists’ retreat.’

  There was an explosion at the other end of the phone.