Elsewhere Girls

by Emily Gale

  ‘Can we listen to the song now?’ she says, and music swims into my ear. The girl is singing about love. It’s like poetry but all running together. She’s hurting because he’s left her. The words are silly, but still my eyes fill with tears for this poor girl. Or maybe not for her. Maybe for me. Because I’m in this bewildering place and I don’t know how I’ll ever get home. I sniff loudly and wipe my nose with my hand.

  Maisy looks across and frowns at me. ‘Are you crying, Cat?’

  ‘Just something in my eye,’ I say quickly.

  Outside I see a church I recognise—the Proddy church, not our Catholic one. It’s not far from the pub. I yank the white thing from my ear and leap up, ready to alight at the next stop.

  ‘What are you doing, Cat?’

  ‘I’ve just seen something. I need to get off.’

  ‘But we’re ages from home,’ she says.

  ‘Please,’ I say, in the voice that always wins Dewey over. It doesn’t quite sound the same in Cat’s voice, but it seems to work.

  Maisy sighs and reaches for her bag. I don’t wait for her. I start hurrying down the bus, pushing past people. How do I make it stop? The bus takes a corner and I’m flung to the side, bashing into a man who glares an angry face at me.

  I hear a ding. Like magic, the bus pulls in to the side of the road and I throw myself towards the doors, waiting for them to open. I hear a woman tutting at me like I’m badly behaved, but I don’t care. I need to find the pub.

  Finally the doors open and I leap out onto the street. I try to work out my bearings. I think the pub is right.

  Maisy hurries behind me. ‘What are you doing, Cat?’

  But I’m not up for conversation. She can either keep up or go home. I set off as fast as I can with these little legs. We pass a shop that seems to have displays of clothes for dogs. That can’t be right. But this shop is called Your Canine Friend. The longer I’m here in this odd future, the more confused I feel.

  We reach the end of the road and I look down the hill. I skipped across this street so many times on the way home from the baths, running late for dinner, or chores. My heart is starting to beat faster, like it does just before a race. I hope the pub is the same. That it’s my way back.

  Hurrying now I hear Maisy yell behind me. ‘You jaywalked!’ She catches up with me. ‘You’ll get run over!’

  Ignoring her, I keep walking towards the flower shop with its buckets of roses and carnations on display.

  I see the pub. But it’s not right. There are bright lights and ugly signs and the front is all slick and painted black. I rush to the door, desperate to go in, hoping to find my family, even if they have been scrubbed clean too.

  I make it up the steps. Maisy is yelling at me, but I push open the heavy door. Inside, there’s no rowdy scene, just awful screaming music. My shoes are sticky on the black carpet. There are rows of people sitting on stools staring at big boxes like cupboards that whir and light up. What is this place?

  ‘You can’t be in here, love!’ a man calls from behind the bar.

  I look for something familiar, but it’s all gone.

  ‘You can’t be here!’ He shouts this time.

  And I turn and flee, storming straight past Maisy.

  ‘Ca-at!’ she yells.

  I don’t stop. My family have vanished. There’s no evidence we ever existed. This place is ugly, and I want to go home.

  ‘Wait!’ Maisy grabs my arm and I pull away.

  ‘I want to go home!’ I tell her, knowing there is no way she can understand.

  ‘Do you think I want to be here? It smells,’ she says angrily.

  ‘Well I hate it more than you do!’ I yell.

  ‘Everything’s a competition with you, Cat!’ She sounds really upset and it makes me stop my stormy walk and pull her into a hug. It’s not her fault.

  ‘Whoa! What was that for, Cat?’

  ‘Nothing. Let’s just go. This was a mistake,’ I tell her.

  ‘Yeah, I’ll say!’ she replies.

  We walk down the street that I used to know so well. I’m trying to keep myself together while Maisy talks nonstop, distracting me. Mostly she’s going on about swimming and pathways and how happy it makes her dad when she begs to do extra training, and I wish I could tell her how lucky she is that her dad can watch her train when my Da never saw me swim.

  ‘Dad’s probably wondering where we are,’ says Maisy as she stops outside a shop. I realise this is where she lives. Where I live.

  I’m about to meet the man I hope will only be my temporary father. The thought makes me miss Da more than ever. Maisy disappears in through a door. It has a sign that says ‘Mini-Mart’. I follow her, patting down my hair and smoothing my skirt to prepare for my new family.

  Inside I gape at the walls. At the colour and the clutter. At the shelves jammed full of packets and bottles and cans. At labels I try to read. The shop is dark and quiet. In fact there is no one here except a man with very short cropped hair and a brightly coloured shirt with flowers on it standing behind the counter with a newspaper open in front of him. He’s smiling, and he looks like a…father.

  ‘Hello, girls. Good day?’

  What to call him? ‘Yes thank you, father.’

  He smiles and his eyes crinkle at the corners. ‘Father? That’s a bit formal, Cat!’

  ‘Sorry, Da!’

  This time he laughs and the sound is catchy. ‘What’s wrong with “Dad”?’

  I smile at him, and my glance drifts down to the display cabinet under the counter. There are boxes and boxes of what I think are sweets twinkling at me.

  ‘Father, do you have a bull’s eye? Or a brandy ball?’

  He laughs. ‘No, we have milk bottles, pineapples and raspberries. Jelly babies and snakes. You know all this, Cat.’

  ‘Oh, may I try some?’

  ‘I suppose you can have a couple, but only if you stop calling me Father!’

  He drops some brightly coloured sweets into my hand and they’re soft and squishy, not hard like the boiled ones we have on special days. I pop the yellow one in my mouth.

  ‘Delicious,’ I tell him. I cannot believe I live in a place where there are so many sweets. Dewey would simply melt at the thought.

  ‘You hate them!’ Maisy says stepping closer. ‘Gelatine! Remember!’

  I have no idea what she’s talking about. Cat is obviously a person with no taste.

  Maisy sighs like I’m being difficult. I look at all the packets of food. Ma would be beside herself. I’ve heard of food in cans, but never have we had anything like that. I pick up a blue can with little beans on the front—‘Baked Beans’. I wonder what they taste like. There’s another called tuna and something labelled spaghetti with a picture of what looks like worms. I’m not sure I want to try that.

  ‘Are you hungry, Cat?’

  The father is holding something round out to me. I take it and it’s warm in my hand. I bite the edge. It’s salty and crisp.

  ‘Try this, Maisy!’

  ‘I never eat potato scallops. You know that.’

  So that’s what it’s called. This treat made of potato. It’s like Ma’s fried potato only so much better. I’ll have to learn the secrets, so I can show her. Somehow, I will find a way back. I have to. The thought of never seeing my family again is too hard to bear.

  ‘Can I please have another?’ I ask.

  ‘Go and make a smoothie or something healthy,’ says Father.

  Obviously the potato scallops are precious and I can only have one. How very disappointing. Maisy opens a door and I see the staircase leading up. It’s not so different from the pub. I follow my new sister to my new home, still eating the salty scallop, and wondering what new world I am in.

  Maisy drops her bag down on the chair and tosses her music device on the bench before slouching into the kitchen and opening a shiny metal door. She leans in and sighs.

  ‘If I make the smoothie can you pack the dishwasher?’ she says.

  I d
on’t know what a smoothie is, but I make a guess about the rest. ‘Do you mean I have to wash up?’

  Maisy peers around the metal door and looks at me. ‘Yep! There’s only almond milk. Is that okay?’

  Almond milk? How do you milk an almond? I’m not going to risk asking, so instead I pick up the box she’s placed in front of me.

  ‘It’s cold!’

  ‘Yeah. It was in the fridge! Cat, why are you being so strange?’ Maisy turns away and opens the top of the metal door. A rush of steam pours out, like something magic. I come up close behind Maisy, who is foraging inside. I lean over and reach out. My fingers are met with icy coldness of the ‘steam’. How do they keep cold in?

  ‘Here they are!’ Maisy tosses a bag onto the bench. It says raspberries. I’m in the way and she looks cross, like Ma does when I stand in the kitchen in winter with my back to the stove.

  ‘Can you grab the bullet?’ Maisy says.

  ‘Bullet?’

  ‘Are you okay, Cat?’

  I nod, pulling a funny face like I would with Dewey.

  Maisy smiles. ‘Go and sit down!’ she says.

  But I can’t. All around me are machines. I can’t stop looking. A loud whirring noise startles me and I spin around to see Maisy shaking something vigorously.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I yell.

  She stops shaking and unscrews the end. I watch her pour thick pink milk into two glasses. She hands me one.

  ‘Thank you,’ I say, taking a sip from the glass. It’s freezing cold and sweet and it’s the best thing I’ve ever tasted. ‘It’s delicious,’ I say.

  I take a big slurp this time and my head freezes on the inside. I pull a face with the pain of it.

  ‘Ice-cream headache! Hit your head like Dad does,’ Maisy tells me.

  I bash the side of my head with my fist and she giggles. ‘Not like that, silly! Like this,’ she says. She taps the front of my forehead with her fingers. ‘Drink slower, Cat! I’m going to do homework. You’re even stranger than usual!’

  After Maisy goes, I open the top part of fridge again, and the steam swirls cold around me. If I’m stuck in this future for a little while I may as well try to learn something about it.

  Cat

  13

  Tea

  At dinner there are ten of us at the kitchen table. It’s gloomy up here now the sun’s gone down and I wish I knew what that gassy smell is, or maybe it’s better I don’t. There’s another floor above that Ma called ‘the guest beds’ so that’s how this is a hotel. But it’s not posh. I think the Duracks are scraping by. It looks like a lot of hard work, even more than my dad spending all hours in the shop and my mum serving passengers in the sky.

  We’re squashed together on long benches. The conversation is loud and overlapping so it’s hard to think straight. A man called John, who is Fan’s eldest brother, had a newspaper earlier and I checked the date: it’s 1908. When I saw that I felt like I’d taken a solo trip to the moon. How am I ever going to get home?

  I’ve worked out that Fan is the sixth child out of nine. No wonder Ma looks tired. Most of them are at the table, but they’ve mentioned someone called Thomas Junior who’s ‘on the road’, whatever that means. John looks like my maths teacher, cranky in a brown suit. Opposite me are Kathleen and Mary, both pretty and neat in long skirts and pinned-up brown hair. Then there’s Con, the barman with the nice arms, and Mick, who could be about twelve, and then little Frankie, the rat boy. And Dewey, who is sitting next to me, her arm pressed into mine. I’m bursting to tell her that I’m really Cat, and I’m thirteen, the same as her. I know her age because Ma told her off before dinner for ‘forgetting to put the dripping in the meat safe last night’ and said Dewey should know better at thirteen. The meat safe looks like a small rabbit hutch and it’s got cut-up bits of cow in it. It doesn’t feel cold like a fridge so I can’t believe this whole family hasn’t died of food poisoning.

  ‘You’re awful solemn tonight, Fan,’ says Mr Durack.

  ‘Oh, um, just tired, Mister—er, Da.’

  ‘Mister Da!’ laughs grubby little Mick down the other end of the table. ‘Fan’s cuckoo!’

  ‘Hush there, Mick,’ says Da, gruffly, and to me he says, ‘You’ll come first next race, I can feel it.’

  ‘Or she won’t,’ says Ma.

  ‘What d’ya mean, woman?’

  ‘All I’m saying, Tommy, is Fan’s given it a fair crack and if it’s not to be it’s not to be. I need her here, not gallivanting to Mr Wylie’s baths every five minutes. And as for the money to enter a race, well, honestly, we’ve got mouths to feed.’

  ‘Stop yarning. My customers were only too happy to put their hands in their pockets for our Fan to go to the swimming carnivals this season.’

  ‘Ha! They’re so drunk they don’t know what they’re doing half the time.’

  ‘Those men’d go down there and watch our girl swim every Saturday if they were allowed.’

  ‘I’ll bet they would,’ mutters Kathleen.

  ‘Out of the question,’ says John, sternly. ‘No men at ladies carnivals and that’s how it should stay.’ He seems like the grouch of the family.

  Kathleen and Mary roll their eyes at each other, and then they smile at me.

  It seems extreme that men aren’t allowed to go to swimming carnivals, but I’m too scared to say a word. Maybe coming here was a mistake, because all I’m thinking about is what they’ll do if they realise I’m not Fanny. I picture all ten of them crowding around, shoving me, shouting in their Irish voices: What have you done with Fan?

  ‘If Fanny isn’t eating her stew, can I have it?’ says Frankie.

  ‘Course she’s eating it, it’s her favourite,’ says Ma.

  But I’m just moving it around the plate because I don’t have the guts to say I’m vegetarian. The hunks of potatoes and carrots are floating in brown juice with stringy bits of meat. Last year I swore I’d never eat meat for as long as I lived. But now I’m so hungry I might faint. If I eat meat a hundred years before I was even born, does that count? Food might help me think straight.

  Da’s chair scrapes on the wooden floor. ‘Come on, Con, best get back downstairs to the mob.’

  Con reaches over to my plate, stabs a potato and shoves it in his mouth. He winks at me before he follows his dad.

  ‘Not like you letting him get away with that, Fan,’ says Kathleen.

  I laugh nervously, wanting to say ‘That’s because I’m not Fan!’ But I’ve dodged suspicion again—they’re already onto the next topic of conversation. I spear a piece of soft carrot, dripping in meaty juice and silently apologise to cows before I put it in my mouth.

  After tea, the chores keep coming for hours and hours. All I can do is follow the other girls but I’m always a step behind.

  Dewey and I are sent downstairs to sweep the sawdust from the floor of the pub while Da and Con close up. It’s revolting. I’d rather muck out a stable because at least horses deserve it. And I’m so tired—the only thing holding me up is this broom but now is my chance to ask questions. I need to sound casual.

  ‘So, Dewey, we had a good time at Wylie’s today. Didn’t we?’

  ‘I’m sure I did, Fan. But you stayed in the water awful long and when you got out it was as if you’d had a dose of something.’

  ‘Were you watching me the whole time I was swimming?’

  ‘Of course I was. Don’t nag at me, you sound like Ma.’

  ‘I’m not nagging, it’s just—you didn’t see anything strange? In the water?’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re asking me.’

  ‘Well, okay, how come you didn’t want to swim too?’

  ‘How come I…Fan, are you angry because I didn’t train with you? But what good would I be?’

  Dewey’s getting upset. This is going terribly.

  ‘I didn’t mean anything bad.’

  ‘You said you wanted me to time you, and time you I did.’ Her voice sounds like a squeaky wheel. ‘And now you’re say
ing I should have somehow kept time and swum against you at the same time!’

  How do I turn this around?

  At that moment Da walks across the wooden floor in his heavy boots. ‘Midnight, girls. Off to bed wit’ ya,’ he says.

  I follow Dewey back upstairs to a bedroom. I tell her I’m sorry for upsetting her and she forgives me instantly again. There are two large beds with iron frames and Kathleen and Mary are tucked up together in one of them. So I must be sharing with Dewey. This’ll be strange, but at least it’s Dewey.

  ‘I’ll do your hair, Fan,’ she says. ‘I need your brush, Mary.’ She takes a large brush of burnished metal and thick bristles from the chest of drawers.

  Mary tuts. ‘What about your own brush, Dew?’

  I freeze, wondering how Mary and Kathleen will react when Dewey tells them I threw the ivory brush so hard that it broke. They don’t have many nice things from what I’ve seen. At home I can hardly shut my wardrobe because it’s so full of clothes and random stuff.

  ‘I dropped it,’ says Dewey. ‘It broke.’

  ‘Oh, heavens!’ says Kathleen. ‘But that was your birthday present.’

  ‘These things happen. I’ll live.’

  I feel awful, even though I think that having something made of ivory is as bad as having a fur coat. Dewey’s a nice sister not to dob on me.

  Maisy pops into my head, because we’re always trying to get each other into trouble. I pop her out again before I get upset in front of everyone.

  The springs of the bed creak as Dewey and I sit on the edge. I’m used to having short hair so having my hair brushed is a strange sensation at first, but Dewey is gentle.

  While she’s plaiting it, I remember the coins in Fan’s carpetbag. I wonder how much an ivory hairbrush would cost.

  ‘Time for sleep, girls,’ says Mary. She blows out the candle suddenly. I get in under the sheet and quilt next to Dewey.

  ‘Cuddle up, Fan,’ she whispers.

  The moon is low and full, throwing a silver light on our bed. I feel stiff and strange, frightened to go to sleep in 1908.

  Then something worse strikes me. Why didn’t I think of this before now? I’ve got no choice but to ask Dewey, even if it threatens to blow my cover.