Cicada Summer

by Kate Constable

  ‘Really?’ said Dad. ‘I thought it was a pretty good idea, myself . . . Oh? You need to be flexible, Lorelei. Go with the flow . . . Mm, it’s a shame you feel like that. But actually, I don’t think we’re going to need your money after all . . .’ He winked at Eloise and Mo and kept talking. ‘Have to run the figures, but factoring out the projected construction costs . . .’

  Mo stood up and laid a hand on Eloise’s shoulder. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Let’s leave him to it. You can give me a hand with dinner.’

  17

  It was a couple of weeks before Mo felt ready to walk to the big house, with Tommy on one side and Eloise on the other. Dad was going to pick them up later, so they only had to walk one way.

  Eloise had been back to the house with Dad, helping him to measure and take photos and make plans. But she hadn’t been there alone, so there’d been no chance to try to slip through into the other time. Eloise wondered if she could go through, even if she tried, and wondered what would be waiting if she did.

  They walked very slowly through the empty back streets. Mo couldn’t face the main road yet. But Tommy’s father said it probably wouldn’t be long. Three times a week he and Mo sat out in the garden and talked about things. ‘Clever man, your father,’ Mo told Tommy. ‘I always said so.’ And Eloise had started talking to him too, once a week, and even Dad had said he’d think about it.

  But today none of them talked much as they walked along through the summer morning, under the high blue sky.

  At last they arrived at the sagging gates and the tunnel of pines. When the house came into view, Mo stopped in the middle of the driveway and peered ahead, fanning herself with her battered straw hat.

  ‘Gloomy old pile, isn’t it,’ she said. ‘I’d forgotten how depressing it is. No wonder I ran away from it. Maybe this artists’ colony-retreat-whatsit isn’t such a good idea after all.’

  ‘No!’ cried Eloise. ‘It’s not depressing! It looks sad now, but when it’s fixed up, and the garden’s full of flowers, and those big windows are all clean, it’s lovely. It will be lovely, I mean,’ she corrected herself hastily. ‘You’ll see.’ She adjusted her sunhat and said softly, ‘I just wish Mum could see it. She would have loved it here.’

  Mo glanced down at Eloise. ‘She did see it, you know. She came here with your father, years ago, before you were born. She said it was a beautiful old house.’ Mo squeezed Eloise’s shoulder. ‘You’re right, she would have loved it.’

  Eloise put her hand on Mo’s and they stood in silence for a moment. It was funny, Eloise thought. She’d been afraid of talking about Mum, of even thinking about her. But now she realised that not thinking about her had hurt more than remembering ever could.

  Eloise smiled. ‘Wait till we paint it,’ she said. ‘It’ll be splendiferous.’

  Mo raised an eyebrow. ‘I must say, if you weren’t so sure of yourself, I’d be tempted to give up now.’

  ‘Giving up and running away isn’t our family failing any more, remember?’ said Eloise.

  ‘I suppose the new family failing is going to be the pursuit of foolish dreams,’ said Mo. ‘Though, come to think of it, there’s been some of that in the past, too.’

  ‘Come on,’ said Eloise firmly. ‘Come on, Tommy. I want to show you properly in the daylight.’

  As she steered them both round the biggest holes in the driveway, she thought, It’s because of Anna that I’m so sure. If she hadn’t shown me how beautiful this house could be, maybe I’d feel like giving up too. And she felt a wave of gratitude toward her summerhouse girl.

  Maybe it would be Eloise’s job now to stop Mo and Dad from giving up. She knew that running away was a hard habit to break, and they had both been doing it for a lot longer than she had. Well, she’d help them, and Tommy’s dad would help too. All the Durranis would help, just by being around; they were the kind of people who never gave up. Eloise hoped some of that would rub off on the McCredies.

  At the front steps, Mo stopped again and stared up at the house. Then she turned slowly around, took off her dark glasses, and gazed out at the garden. She breathed out a great big sigh.

  ‘There’s a terrible amount of work here,’ she complained. ‘I’m too old to start something like this.’

  ‘But I’m not.’ Tommy squeezed her arm. ‘Neither is Eloise. We’ll do all the work, won’t we, El? You just sit in a chair and order us around. You’re good at that.’

  He winked at Eloise, and Eloise smiled back. Tommy was helping already.

  ‘We-ell,’ said Mo. ‘I suppose so.’

  She cheered up slightly when they showed her the back of the house. ‘I thought all these shrubs would have died. But they just need a good prune. Oh, this is more like it. I suppose it is quite a pretty house. Underneath. It’s just so damn big.’

  ‘It’s too big for one person,’ said Eloise. ‘It wants to be full of people.’

  Mo squinted into the distance. ‘Is that . . . Where’s the summerhouse gone?’

  ‘Over here.’ Tommy pointed. ‘Next to the pool. The pool where I had my accident.’

  ‘Have to put a fence around that too, I suppose,’ grumbled Mo. ‘More expense. All right, lead on. Let’s see if it’s as bad as I remember.’

  Eloise hung back while Tommy and Mo picked their way through the long grass. It would be awful if she accidentally slipped into the other time while Mo and Tommy were there. She was sure now that if she did go through it would be Anna’s time again, not the horrible alternative time when the house was gone and everything was ruined. Eloise was sure that time would never come true now.

  She would have liked to see Anna again; she missed her. Except, if she and Tommy were right and Anna was her daughter, of course she would see her again . . . But that would be different. Eloise had a feeling that the time to be Anna’s friend was over and the time to be Anna’s mother wasn’t here yet. And that one summer, years and years and years from now, Anna would meet her own summerhouse girl, and not find out her name until the very end . . .

  Suddenly it struck Eloise that Anna must have known who she really was. When she found out Eloise’s name. Eloise wasn’t such a common name. She must have guessed, thought Eloise, or she would have said, Hey, that’s my mumma’s name . . . At the very end, she must have known.

  Then it really wouldn’t be right to see Anna now, with both of them knowing who they truly were, not even to say goodbye. Eloise’s goodbye would have to be the painting in the summerhouse, where the two girls held out their hands to one another across the garden, through the water, across the silence and the stream of time. The summerhouse girls.

  So Eloise didn’t walk over the grass with Mo and Tommy. Instead, she turned and made her way along the back terrace to the open door and slipped inside the big house.

  Last time she was here she’d felt uneasy, as if she didn’t belong. Not today. Sun streamed through the windows, dust motes danced in the air. The house was coming to life today; it knew it was wanted, it was preparing itself to be reborn. The house gathered Eloise in and embraced her, and she realised she was smiling.

  She ran up the curving stairs and along each of the corridors, flinging open the door to every room to let the sunshine pierce to the very heart of the house. The big windows blazed with light, and Eloise danced back to the curved window of the gallery and laughed, breathless, as she pressed her hands against the glass and peered down across the lawn to the quivering trees and the tip of the summerhouse roof. She banged on the window and shouted, and after a moment Tommy appeared and waved. He cupped his hands to his mouth and called something Eloise couldn’t hear, but she shouted back, ‘I’m coming!’

  She skimmed the tips of her fingers along the curve of the railing as she ran down the stairs, holding on to her hat with her other hand.

  And saw a flicker of movement at the bottom of the stairs.

  The back of Eloise’s neck went cold. She saw a girl in shorts and a blue T-shirt at the foot of the steps, gazing up wide-eyed w
ith terror, gazing at her. Stiffly, rigid with fear, the girl stepped back into the shadows of the foyer.

  Eloise reached the bottom of the stairs. She held herself still, not wanting to frighten her more, and then slowly, carefully, she turned her head and looked straight at the other girl.

  Their eyes met. The girl in the blue top backed away, one step, then another. And suddenly the foyer was empty. The girl was gone.

  Eloise stood still for a moment, her heart beating fast, looking at the place where the other girl, her younger self, had been.

  Then she walked out of the foyer, out of the back door, out into the summer day.

  Tommy came running up to meet her. ‘Hey, Mo wants to fill in the swimming pool! She can’t do that, it’s cool! Dangerous, hey, but cool.’

  ‘I won’t let her,’ said Eloise. ‘I love swimming. When we live here, I’m going to swim every day.’

  ‘You good at swimming?’ Tommy fell into step beside her. ‘You better get on the team at school; we need good swimmers. And did I tell you about the school paper? It’s online now. Mrs Mithen runs it. She’ll want you to put pictures in, I bet, cartoons and that. Man, she’s going to love you.’

  Eloise had almost forgotten that school was starting in a couple of weeks. She wondered if she would be good enough for the swimming team. At her other schools, she’d always been too scared to try out.

  ‘Put solar panels on the roof,’ Tommy was saying. ‘Water tanks, a wind turbine even. Man, you’re lucky! I love this place. There’s heaps of stuff we could do here.’ He stopped. ‘Heaps of stuff you could do, I mean,’ he said awkwardly. ‘If you want to. I don’t want to take over, you know?’

  ‘I know,’ said Eloise. ‘That’s okay.’

  Abruptly Tommy stopped, and scowled down at the grass. ‘Hey, Eloise.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Can you do me a favour? Can you draw me a picture?’

  ‘Sure. What of ?’

  ‘You?’

  ‘Okay,’ she said after a minute. ‘I guess so.’

  ‘Cool.’ Tommy scowled off into the distance, and without looking at Eloise he stuck out his strong brown hand. Eloise frowned but took it, and they ran like little kids toward the summerhouse, with the earth solid beneath their feet, the sun in their hair, and behind them the big white house where the rest of their lives were waiting.

  about

  the author

  Kate Constable was born in Melbourne.

  She spent some of her childhood in Papua

  New Guinea, without television but close to a

  library where she ‘inhaled’ stories. She studied

  Law at uni before realising this was a mistake,

  then worked in a record company when it was

  still fun. She left the music industry to write

  the Chanters of Tremaris series: The Singer of

  All Songs, The Waterless Sea and The Tenth Power,

  as well as a stand-alone Tremaris novel,

  The Taste of Lightning. She has also written

  two novels in the Girlfriend Fiction series,

  Always Mackenzie and Winter of Grace.

  Kate lives in Melbourne with her husband

  and two daughters.