Loop

by Brian Caswell

  In less than a second it was hovering there in the middle of the factory, hissing and gurgling like a pot of boiling porridge, while the boys just stood there watching it, like it was the most natural thing in the world to watch a spaceship appear out of thin air.

  Then the hatch slid open and Xzaltar stepped out.

  He was pretty impressive. Two hundred centimetres tall and dressed in a shimmering silver cloud.

  He gave Chad a wave. Chad waved back.

  ‘Óffleing œ›ëlhgl. Blick!’ said Xzaltar.

  And Chad replied, ‘Óffleing œ›ëlhgl. Schleck!’

  And I fell in through the window and banged my head on the floor.

  ‘It’s not as crazy as you think,’ Chad explained, as he helped me to my feet. I was a bit dazed, but I’m not entirely sure it was from the fall.

  ‘This is Xzaltar,’ he went on. ‘We saved him when his spaceship crashed on the oval while we were training. Mr Greenberg had left early, and there was no one there but us.’

  ‘Anyway, we hid him in Pete and Danny’s garden shed,’ Sam added, ‘until he could phone home and get a lift back to Hraltixtz.’

  ‘Which is where he’s from,’ Sunil put in, a little redundantly.

  ‘He was very grateful,’ Pete added.

  It was surreal. I was getting the whole story in small bite-sized pieces – and it still didn’t make any sense. I was too busy reprogramming my hard-drive so that I could process the idea of my brother and his team-mates starring in a Steven Spielberg re-make.

  ‘He promised to come back and reward us,’ Danny finished, as if he was recalling how they’d returned some old woman’s missing purse.

  ‘Sssnot ssrewardsss,’ Xzaltar cut in, sounding like a cross between a leaking kettle and the snake in the Disney version of Robin Hood. ‘Ssjustsss a sssthank yousss.’ Then he shook his head and fiddled with a knob on the side of it. ‘Stupid translator. It got shaken up in the crash and I haven’t had it fixed yet.’

  ‘The scientists on Hraltixtz are the most brilliant in this part of the universe,’ Chad went on. ‘Xzaltar told them about our problem, and they say they have the solution.’

  ‘What problem?’ I asked, still confused. Then I noticed that Sam was looking at me and frowning.

  ‘What are we going to do with her?’ he asked. ‘It was supposed to be a secret.’ He looked towards Xzaltar. ‘Don’t you have something you can zap her with, to make her forget the whole thing?’

  But Xzaltar shook his head.

  ‘We do, but I don’t think you’d want us to use it. It has some rather … unfortunate side-effects on carbon-based life-forms. I think we should take her with us.’ He paused and looked at me. His gaze was piercing, and I had the feeling that he was reading more than just my facial expression. ‘Perhaps she will learn enough to keep your secret.’

  I looked up at the spaceship.

  ‘Like you could keep me off!’ I said, stepping inside.

  The others followed.

  The thing about inter-dimensional travel is that it doesn’t take any time at all. One second Xzaltar was saying ‘sssHeresss sswe gosss’ and the very same second he was saying ‘sssHeresss sswe aresss’. Then the hatch was sliding open and we were stepping out onto the soil of Hraltixtz, which looked exactly like the soil on Earth, except that it was purple and the worms crawled along the surface. Two suns shone down from a beautiful violet sky.

  It was a little scary.

  But the boys weren’t scared. They were excited.

  ‘Why are they so excited?’ I asked, watching as Hraltixtzian scientists, dressed in white clouds, led them away.

  Xzaltar fiddled with the knob on his head again. ‘The scientists of Hraltixtz invented the auto-trainer especially for creatures with poor motor skills. In twenty-four Earth hours, it can turn a … how do you say it? a wimp, into … well, someone who can hold their head up with pride – in any company.’

  ‘Does it work for girls too?’ I asked.

  Xzaltar smiled. ‘Of course. Follow me.’

  The disappointing thing about the auto-trainer is that you don’t remember the training.

  ‘Which is just as well,’ Xzaltar explained twenty-four Earth hours later, as we were lining up ready to go home. ‘The machine stretches, separates and reconstitutes every fibre of every muscle in your entire body. If you weren’t asleep during training, the pain would make your eyes explode.’

  After that, no one asked any more questions about the technology.

  ‘Why can’t we stay for a while?’ I asked. ‘To look around.’

  ‘Inter-dimensional timing,’ Xzaltar replied. ‘If we leave now, we will get back at exactly the moment we left. If we delay, you will arrive home three hundred years in the future.’

  Which might make an important note for any future inter-dimensional edition of Lonely Planet.

  ‘Here we go,’ Xzaltar announced. ‘Here we are.’

  And the trip was over.

  After a few goodbyes Xzaltar returned to the ship.

  ‘Farewell, young people,’ he said, as the hatch slid shut. ‘And remember, be kind to them.’

  Game day

  Lijs éfBdç

  ioó?ku-_hv

  uhlhIA kh{z|}

  Zcv,bl/izdo-_

  A week later Sarah picks up Chad’s mobile, twists the stubby antenna three turns to the right, then two to the left, and presses the zero.

  The screen turns bright red, which makes her blink as she reads the message:

  GREETNGS EARTH FRIENDS

  GD FORTUNE IN

  TH GAME 2DAY

  RMEMBER

  B KIND

  XZALTAR

  ‘Be kind,’ she whispers. Then she smiles.

  ‘I’ve been working on a new game plan,’ Mr Greenberg explains.

  It is five minutes to kick-off, and Mr Greenberg begins scribbling lines and circles on his tiny blackboard to explain the moves, in the hope that it makes him look like a real coach.

  When he finishes, Sam puts an arm around him.

  ‘You’re a great coach, Dad,’ he says. ‘And I just want you to know that all the training is about to pay off’

  Mr Greenberg feels a prick of pride as he watches his players run onto the field. But he doesn’t hold out much hope. Most weeks, the game is over by half-time.

  By half-time, the game is over. The Branleigh Tigers, who have lost only one match in three years, are sitting on the field in shock, staring at the scoreboard – 66:4.

  After a few minutes of silent disbelief their coach approaches Mr Greenberg and asks if they can call the whole thing off. Mr Greenberg smiles and agrees and the Branleigh coach walks slowly back to his team.

  As he crosses the field, he looks across at the young girl who is standing where she stood after the last kick of the match – ten metres behind the goal line. She caught the ball from a kick, just as the referee blew his whistle for half-time.

  Then, while everyone else was watching the Stranglers celebrating, he saw her kick the ball.

  A perfect drop-kick that scored a field-goal – at the other end of the field.

  ‘So what happened?’ Mr Greenberg asks, still shocked.

  ‘It must have been the new tactics,’ Chad answers. ‘I always said you were a great coach, Mr G.’

  On the sideline the parents are singing ‘We Are the Champions’. Sarah pulls her brother aside. ‘How come you let them score that try?’ she whispers. ‘You could have stopped that winger easily.’

  But Chad just smiles.

  ‘Xzaltar’s message,’ he replies. ‘He said to be kind.’

  WNBA

  As Chad went to join in with the team, I stood for a moment staring at the goalposts at the other end of the field.

  What was it Xzaltar had said?

  ‘You can hold your head up with pride – in any company.’

  Maybe I should take up golf. Or I could become the first female formula one motor racing champion. Or maybe I could take up basketball
. The WNBA …

  I looked across at my mother. She was frowning, a puzzled look on her face.

  ‘You’ve got to stop squinting like that, Mum,’ I whispered to myself and smiled. ‘It’s totally unladylike.’

  JIGSAW

  As we acquire more knowledge, things do not become more comprehensible, but more mysterious.

  Albert Schweitzer

  I have to give it up. I have to.

  Each time, the impulse is more urgent, more demanding; and though I fight, and though I tell myself I’m stronger than the urge, somehow I know that the spell it weaves is binding me more tightly to it. Each time. Every time.

  It hangs there, blue and limp and lifeless, on the handle of the wardrobe door and I fool myself. I tell myself, out loud, ‘You can still do it. It’s mind over matter. It has no control over you …’

  But all the time I know I’m lying to myself. Somewhere deep inside, where the truth lives, I know that it’s too late. Perhaps it always was. Too late from the moment I saw it. From the moment I reached out and touched it …

  ‘Nikki, look at this jacket. It’ll go perfectly with the skirt you made last term.’

  She can hear her mother speaking in her op-shop stage-whisper across the counters of discarded sweaters and ten-years-out-of-fashion slacks, but she doesn’t turn around. Someone might see her.

  It isn’t that you can’t pick up good stuff in these places; some of her best gear is ‘pre-loved’, and not even ‘hawk-eye’ Hayley has picked it. It’s just that you’d die if anyone saw you actually trying something on.

  It’s become a self-preservation ritual. She picks through the stands of crappy, geriatric paperbacks, absorbed, oblivious to her mother’s hissing attempts at communication.

  ‘You can find some really great books in secondhand shops,’ she has confided to Wendy once or twice, carefully preparing her alibi against the inevitable day when someone who counts catches her out – or rather in.

  Of course, the fact that she never reads a book, except in a particularly woeful non-ratings period, doesn’t really enter into it. Somehow, to be caught with someone’s cast-off literature is far less damaging socially than to be seen trying on their cast-off jeans – even if they do fit like a glove and draw whistles from the drones at the bus-stop.

  But there always comes a point when you have to bow to the unavoidable.

  Just before her mother gives up on the semi-public-address mode and actually brings the garment in question over to the book-stand, to hold it up against her, testing its approximate fit and coordinating it out loud with half her existing wardrobe – in full view of the whole Mall – she bites the bullet, closing the gap between them and giving her verdict. She does it as quickly as humanly possible, being sure to carry with her one or two of the paperback alibis, just in case.

  The jacket is a fashion disaster – mid-eighties, with wide lapels, shoulder pads and fabric-covered buttons. Its colour is pretty, and it would probably match the skirt she laboured over in Textiles and Design – the one she never wears – but the cut is all wrong. She wrinkles her nose, shakes her head and reaches up to hang it on the nearest rack, in the space between the lime-green parka and the full-skirted blue dress.

  The back of her hand brushes the empty sleeve of the dress, and she feels a sudden light-headedness, a yawning emptiness beneath her feet. She hears, or so it seems, the hazy, unintelligible murmuring of voices – or is it her own blood, beating in her ears? It is vaguely and pleasantly dreamlike.

  And then the world swims back into focus. Her mother is speaking.

  ‘Oh, no, Nikki, I don’t think so. It’s too old for you. And you never look good in blue.’

  She looks down and finds that she is holding the dress up against her body. The books lie discarded and forgotten at her feet.

  Without trying it on, she knows that it will fit. And the material lends a tingling warmth to her hands as she holds it. She hears her own voice, as if she is standing apart from herself.

  ‘It’s not too old! Mum, I love it. How much is it?’

  The tag says seven dollars. She pays from her own purse and watches the grey-haired assistant bundle the dress into a plastic bag, without once glancing out of the store window to see if anyone is watching.

  Of course it was raining. Typical. Whenever I plan anything, something has to go wrong. We were all supposed to meet at the beach in the morning and make a day of it. So much for that!

  But I really didn’t mind. After all, there was so much still to find out, and the urgency had come on strongly again. When I woke up and the rain was streaming down my bedroom window, my first thought wasn’t one of disappointment, though it struck me that it should have been.

  It was more a feeling of relief. Like the drunk who has just found another excuse for a drink.

  From there, it was only a short step to rationalising.

  It is a perfect dress for an indoors kind of day. After all, no one’s going to the beach in this weather …

  As soon as she pulls the dress over her head, the feeling sweeps over her. Warmly. Hugely.

  It doesn’t always happen. Sometimes, she can wear it all day and feel nothing. When it happens, she always suffers a sense of let-down, an anticlimax that leaves her irritable and empty. In part because she has come to depend on the feeling, but more because she wants so desperately to find out. To know all that there is to know.

  Because when the feeling comes, so does Rachael.

  Because when it happens, in a sense she is Nikki no longer. It is as if she has stepped outside of herself and into another life. Another lifetime.

  Rachael’s lifetime …

  It isn’t like watching TV or even standing by as a detached observer.

  When the dress is ‘working’ – she smiles at the expression, even as her mind frames it – she finds herself inside Rachael’s mind, reliving some incident, sharing the emotion, yet still retaining enough of herself to realise what is happening.

  Is the dress some kind of ‘channel’? A sort of doorway through which, at times, she is permitted to pass?

  In the months since she overrode her mother’s objections and paid out her hard-earned dollars to possess it, she has made the journey back more times than she likes to admit to herself. For to admit it is to acknowledge the obsession which has steadily grown inside her and threatens to consume her entirely.

  The obsession to know.

  Like memories, the incidents are random, sometimes vague, sometimes as clear as if she is there. But they have all built up a pattern.

  Rachael was sixteen. Rachael was pretty but not quite beautiful. She was in love. Hopelessly. Rachael was alive ten years ago.

  And Rachael loved the dress.

  She wore it practically everywhere. Not just because the vivid blue was an ideal match for her eyes or because her mother had made it such a perfect fit for her. It was more a feeling. It was the fact that whenever she wore it, whenever she felt the tingle of the material against her skin, she felt grown-up. Finally.

  People seemed to look at her in a different way, so that she no longer felt like a ‘late bloomer’ – her mother’s favourite phrase.

  Anyway, he said he liked it. Marc. Who loved her. Who told her so in private, but said so little in public …

  I hate him.

  Marc, the manipulator. He’s the worst kind of selfish, chauvinistic jerk.

  It’s funny how I think of him in the present tense. I mean, he must be twenty-six or twenty-seven by now – if some heartbroken ‘ex’ hasn’t justifiably blown him away with her brother’s hunting rifle. But everything about Rachael, including the rotten way he treated her, comes to me as if it’s happening now, instead of ten years ago.

  I sit there in her mind, listening to his line and watching her, feeling her, willing herself to believe it.

  Sometimes I want to scream out, to bring her to her senses, but I can’t. It’s all ancient history. Whatever she chose to believe, whatever he convince
d her to believe – to do – all happened when I was back in first grade, and though I can hate him I can’t change a single word, a single emotion. All I can do is look on. Helplessly.

  And then, suddenly, she has the key.

  Like a jigsaw, all the tiny elements of the life she feels so bound to slot slowly together; clues suddenly interlock to fill the blank and empty spaces in the picture that was Rachael.

  The glimpse of her face in a mirror, as she smooths a wrinkle from the dress. Dark-haired, soft-featured, fragile. Yet strong-willed.

  The picture of her house. Ordinary, comfortable. Nikki would know it instantly, if ever she passed by it, though she had no idea where it was. Until …

  In the end the vital clue, the corner-piece of the whole puzzle, is so mundane.

  As she slips the dress over her head, the voices begin inside her mind, even before she is completely ‘there’. It has happened before, and it is a little unbalancing. Caught between the two worlds, in the limbo between the now and the then, she can hear the voice – one forgotten triviality, captured from a whole lifetime of trivialities. Rachael’s mother, shouting from an upstairs bedroom.

  ‘… and would you check the mailbox, love? I’m expecting a cheque.’

  There is no cheque, but there is a letter. And an address.

  Rachael Conrad

  6 Henley Close

  Ashmont NSW 2523

  Rachael has a penfriend.

  With Rachael’s eyes, she scans the envelope. And the piece slips silently into place …

  I guess it had to be something that simple. I knew so much about her, how she looked, how she spoke, how she loved, how much she hated broccoli. But I didn’t know her full name or her address. Most people don’t really talk to themselves. I do, but Rachael didn’t.

  And even I don’t go round calling myself by my full name. They only do that in badly written novels.

  ‘Nicole Garvey, you’re acting like an idiot …’ No, normal people don’t do it.

  So, I didn’t know her surname.